Claire Chase’s SoundBox Program

Today the San Francisco Symphony launched its fifth SoundBox concert, which, like all of its predecessors, had a one-word title. The curator was flutist Claire Chase, one of Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Collaborative Partners; and the title of the program was Metamorphoses. The program is currently available for viewing through the SFSymphony+ Browse Web page.

Even before the performance began, Chase deserved recognition for providing a reasonably coherent and comprehensive account of the three works on the program. Given the amount of detail, a program book would have been preferable; but, unfortunately, the Bonus Downloads hyperlink brought up the program book for Salonen’s Nostalgia program. Chase herself performed in the first and last of the selections, Kaija Saariaho’s “Terrestre” and four movements from Marcos Balter’s “Pan.” Between these two pieces, a string trio was joined by bass and percussion for a performance of “Sanagi” (which refers to a cocoon state) by Pauchi Sasaki.

Taken as a whole, there was much to engage the attention in all three of these compositions. There was also a clear sense that “Pan” involved theater as much as music. Presumably, Steven Condiotti was responsible for the staging of the performance of this selection, as well as the video work for the entire program. In that latter category, however, his efforts were overly busy and seemed to lack an awareness of what was taking place on the score pages, an awareness that one comes to expect from the video direction work of Frank Zamacona. As a result, there was a tendency for the video to overwhelm the viewer in all three of the selections.

Claire Chase playing pan flute in her performance of “Pan” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Most interesting was the diversity of sonorities across all three compositions. This was most evident when Chase played pan flute, piccolo, flute, and bass flute in the “Pan” excerpts. However, I have to confess that I was particularly drawn to the imaginative and diverse percussion work encountered in both “Terrestre” and “Sanagi.” Both of these pieces included solo lines for violin and cello, and those instruments were joined by solo viola and bass parts in “Sanagi.” Nevertheless, even when limited to excerpts, there was a sense that the “Pan” movements went on for too long, while both Saariaho and Sasaki had a keener sense of how to negotiate the attention span of the listener.