Friday, October 22, 2021

Nico Muhly’s “Ghost Story” of Immigration

As has already been observed, the overall theme of the current PIVOT Festival presented by San Francisco Performances is Ghost Stories. At the opening concert this past Wednesday, that theme emerged through the title song of Theo Bleckmann’s program, “Elegy,” which he described as speaking to “a yearning for those I have lost.” At last night’s program the ghosts were more abundant as the haunting spirits behind the West Coast premiere of Nico Muhly’s song cycle Stranger.

Drawing upon prose texts that provide different aspects of the immigrant experience, the seven songs evoke the spirits of those that moved to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on an emerging Chinese population. Between documents of the past and, in one case, a transcript of an oral history, Muhly’s texts revealed a darker side of immigration history that had previously been hidden by dint of what might be called the “mythology of the melting pot.”

Of course the genre of the song cycle was not intended to serve as a political tract. If Muhly began his project by selecting his texts, then he imposed on himself a major challenge in composing vocal lines to deliver those texts. For the most part, both the denotations and the connotations emerged clearly through his musical settings, probably due in part to the informed interpretation of those vocal lines by tenor Nicholas Phan. (As was observed during the Q&A following the performance, moderated by Sarah Cahill, Phan’s personal history has his own take on immigration.)

The accompaniment for the vocal lines was composed for string quartet, specifically for the Brooklyn Rider ensemble of violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen (sharing leadership over the course of the evening’s program), violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Michael Nicolas. The instrumental textures were not quite “background music;” but they tended to establish context, rather than adding alternative perspectives to the vocal writing. Nevertheless, the overall experience was decidedly rich in content, suggesting that this is the sort of music likely to benefit from multiple listening encounters, rather than one of those “premiere experiences” that dissolves into the background of memory after it has completed.

Ironically, Stranger was preceded by a song whose composer had her own immigrant experience. Rebecca Clarke was born in London to an American father and a German mother in 1886. Clarke made frequent visits to the United States after her studies at the Royal Academy of Music, which terminated in 1905; and she eventually settled here in 1916. She lived in Massachusetts, where her neighbor was Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. She completed “Daybreak,” a setting of the first stanza of a love poem by John Donne, in 1941. The music amounts to a distillation of a rich text source, and Phan knew how to mine all of that richness for the benefit of an audience that was probably encountering this music for the first time.

“Daybreak” was preceded by the opening selection, Thomas Campion’s setting of his own poem, “Never weather-beaten sail.” This was also a relatively brief offering. Most interesting was Brooklyn Rider’s attention to intonation, capturing the natural harmonic intervals of the 3:2 (perfect fifth) and 5:4 (major third) ratios. This allowed Phan to adjust his own intonation to follow the lead of the instrumentalists.

The only real disappointment of the evening came after Phan left the company of the Brooklyn Rider quartet. They remained to perform Franz Schubert’s D. 810 (‘Death and the Maiden”) quartet in D minor. This is highly dramatic music that unfolds over an interval of time considered lengthy in its day (close to 40 minutes). Sadly, Brooklyn Rider played this highly dramatic music as if the only connotations involved extreme intensity. As a result, Pierre Boulez’ metaphor of a landscape involving peaks of different heights was rather brutally undermined during the opening movement and never recovered during the remaining three movements.

Apparently, Brooklyn Rider is more comfortable (and satisfying) when working in shorter durations.

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