Nico Muhly at the organ with SFS musicians performing his arrangement of Meredith Monk’s “Fat Stream” (courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)
This morning the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) launched its sixth (and penultimate) video-streamed SoundBox concert for 2021. Once again, the program title consisted of a single word, Focus. The curator was composer Nico Muhly, who also served as conductor. The program is now available for viewing through the SFSymphony+ Browse Web page. Of the five compositions on the program, Muhly was responsible for the first three; but the first two involved arranging the music of other composers, Orlando Gibbons from the English Renaissance and contemporary composer Meredith Monk, who has been active for about half a century. The remainder of the program consisted of “Inbhir” by inti figgis-vizueta, whose background is both Andean and Irish, and the world premiere performance of “Flux” by Czech composer Lukáš Janata, which was created under an SFS commission.
In the context of its five predecessors, this particular SoundBox offering was more disappointing than one would have expected. The beginning of the program suffered from a series of “reload pauses,” which may have been the result of high demand but also could have been attributed to less technical skill than the previous offerings enjoyed. However, poor video quality was less problematic than the video direction, most of which was by Clyde Scott. As had been the case with Steven Condiotti’s direction of Clare Chase’s SoundBox program, Scott lacked any sense of how video content could enhance the viewer’s perception of the music; and, as a result, the visual center of attention almost always had nothing to do with the performance of the musicians and, more often than not, undermined the experience of listening to those musicians.
Mind you the musical content did little to engage listener attention, even if the listener chose to concentrate by closing his/her eyes. Muhly’s one original composition, “Motion,” involved transforming an anthem by Gibbons entitled “See, See the Word is Incarnate” into (in the composer’s words) “a matrix of ostinatos and little repetitive patterns.” This was the sort of device that the attentive listener could “get” in a minute or so but was then stuck wondering if anything else would emerge from the score. A better sense of structure emerged in Muhly’s orchestration of another Gibbons anthem, “This is the Record of John,” which managed quite well with instrumentation replacing verses from the first chapter of the Gospel According to John. Between these two pieces was Muhly’s chamber ensemble arrangement of music by Meredith Monk at its most minimal.
The music of Muhly’s “invited composers” did not fare much better than Muhly’s own music did. The figgis-vizueta composition, whose title translates as “many waters,” imposed major demands on solo cellist David Goldblatt. There was no questioning the skill he brought to interpreting her score. However, even the most generous listener would have been hard pressed to experience this performance in terms of beginning, middle, and end. All that seemed to matter was that “things happened;” but at least Goldblatt did his best to establish the clarity of what those “things” were. “Flux,” on the other hand, seemed to have less to do with what the members of the chamber orchestra were playing and more to do with choreography danced by Emma Lanier. Sadly, that choreography rarely rose above the level of tedium; and, in the absence of capable camera work, this time directed by Condiotti, one had no sense of any interplay among the dancing, the projections, and the earnest efforts of the musicians to do justice to Janata’s score.
To be fair, I was much more than a little impressed when I saw the video recording of the Metropolitan Opera performance of Muhly’s Marnie. However, curating a program is not the same as composing a full evening of music. Hopefully, Muhly’s experience with SoundBox will encourage him to ascend another learning curve before taking on another curatorial task.
No comments:
Post a Comment