This afternoon in the San Francisco Botanical Garden, I had the opportunity to listen to Riley Nicholson’s “Up” a second time. This afternoon Flower Piano scheduled a four-hour segment in the Celebration Garden to present its Duo Piano Program. This provided a platform for Sarah Cahill and Regina Myers to revisit four of the compositions they had performed this past Monday evening at Cahill’s Faculty Artist Series recital for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
That previous occasion marked the world premiere performance of “Up.” Nicholson provided a one-paragraph program note; and, as I previously observed, that program “almost flooded the attentive reader with a plethora of interpretations of that two-letter word, all of which had musical implications.” That richness of content filled 35 minutes of performance time; and, while I could appreciate the way in which Nicholson’s four movements, separated by punctuations that served as pauses between the exposition of all those interpretations of “up,” I knew full well that there was more to experience than what was perceived and recalled during “first contact.”
This being a Flower Piano occasion, finding a suitable visual point of view was not particularly easy; and there was a fair supply of “background sonorities” that are inevitable at any Flower Piano performance. Nevertheless, I found myself better equipped both to detect and to relish more of those “musical implications” than I had encountered during the premiere performance. Familiarity with overall structure entailed a richer appreciation of the details. On the other hand I found that, in the Flower Piano setting, I was more aware of “clock time,” probably because I knew that the entire afternoon segment was on a tight schedule. Still, memories of “first contact” enabled attention to seek out gestures and phrase structures that now had a ring of familiarity; and I would be only two happy to dig deeper into the composition if it is ever released on a recording.
In a similar context, listening to Errollyn Wallen’s “The Girl in My Alphabet” a second time had the benefit of knowing the punch line in advance and anticipating it. As I put it in writing about Monday’s performance, “That punch line amounted to a clear account of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ emerging out of thick and highly chromatic textures of repetitive motifs.” In this case the opening textures were as thick as those in “Up;” but, as the performance progressed, senses of themes began to emerge from those textures, culminating in a note-by-note “spelling out” of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s classic example of the bossa nova style. The music itself was scored for eight hands on two keyboards; and, once again, Cahill and Myers were joined by Monica Chew and Jerry Kuderna.
The other two-piano composition that was revisited was Meredith Monk’s “Ellis Island.” Once again, familiarity enhanced my overall perception of the composition. However, perhaps with the liberty that familiarity affords, my approach to listening sought out other aspects of the listening experience. Those aspects involved Monk’s skills as a vocalist, often accompanying herself with a modest keyboard instrument. Thus, as I listened to “Ellis Island,” my imagination would often recast some of the key phrases, hearing Monk singing them in my mind. Consequently, while Monk had conceived “Ellis Island” for two pianos, the “idea of Ellis Island,” so to speak, evoked a plethora of voices of those waiting to leave the island itself and begin the process of preparing for citizenship in the United States.
The program began by revisiting the “Dance of the Paper Umbrellas” by Elena Kats-Chernin. The composer created arrangements of this music for a wide variety of resources. On the one hand there was a duo for marimba and harp, but there was also a version for full orchestra. The four-hand version was engagingly upbeat, providing a rhetorical disposition to encourage listening to the remainder of the program.
I showed up at the Celebration Garden early enough to listen to the entire opening set for the afternoon, a duo performance by pianists Ian Scarfe and Elektra Schmidt. They began with a performance of the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 37 (third) piano concerto in C minor. Schmidt played the solo piano part, while Scarfe used his piano to account for the orchestral accompaniment. They then performed a capriccio for two pianos that Francis Poulenc created from thematic material in “La Bal masqué,” which he had composed for a low-voice soloist and chamber orchestra. The next offering was a four-hand arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s orchestral rhapsody in four movements, “Rapsodie espagnole.” The program then concluded with a two-piano arrangement of Carlos Guastavino’s “Romance.”
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