SFP Concludes Summer Series as it Began

Jennifer Koh, Timo Andres, and Jay Campbell (from their SFP event page)

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances (SFP) presented the last of the programs it prepared for its twelve-concert Summer Music Sessions 2021 series. Whether or not by design, the music featured the same composer that had figured significantly in the opening recital, Leoš Janáček. The core of the program consisted of two of his duo compositions. The first of these was a suite of four pieces for cello (Jay Campbell) and piano (Timo Andres) entitled Pohádka (fairy tale). This was followed by his four-movement violin sonata played by Jennifer Koh, also accompanied by Andres. These offerings were framed by Andres’ own compositions. The evening began with solo pieces performed by both Koh and Campbell, and it concluded with Andres’ three-movement piano trio, composed in 2018.

Andres began the evening with a few remarks about Janáček. He observed that his thematic material could often be traced back to speech patterns; and my own reflection on that idea is that, where the chamber music is concerned, one can often recognize the extent to which individual instrumental parts tend to sound like narration. This is particularly evident in his first string quartet, which was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. Indeed, it does not take much of a stretch of the imagination to associate the four instruments with the four “voices” of the novella, the husband, the wife, the wife’s lover, and the narrator. Of course, given that Janáček composed eleven operas, he was no stranger to the musical potential of verbal content.

That said, I was more that a little concerned that what Andres could express verbally did not carry over into his performance of the two selections on the program. He seemed more fixed on the notes than on what the notes were trying to express. Thus, while Campbell and Koh had developed their own expressive interpretations of the music, they received little, if any, reinforcement from Andres’ accompaniment.

This shortcoming of expressiveness was even more apparent in Andres’ own compositions. Both of the solo pieces tended to unfold as abstract patterns of notes; but, in each case, both Koh and Campbell developed their own techniques to shape those notes into phrases with linguistic overtones. The trio was another matter. Unfortunately, the notes for the program book (written by Andres) never got around to mentioning that the trio consisted of three movements, each of which had a title:

1. Music Against Itself
2. Muscle Memory (Scherzo)
3. Coda (made of wood)

Mind you, there was an opacity to the music that would have benefitted very little from knowledge of these titles, making the journey through the entire composition more of an ordeal than an engaging listening experience. Both Campbell and Koh did their best to seek out their own strategies to benefit the listener, but the piano part was too overwhelming (not to mention percussive) for them to make any noticeable progress.