E4TT’s Guernica Project Disappoints

Album cover showing a photograph of Guernica after it had been bombed (courtesy of Crossover Media)

On April 8, 2017, the San Francisco contemporary classical chamber group Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) gave its premiere performance of The Guernica Project at the Noe Valley Ministry. The program was conceived to mark the 80th anniversary of the completion of the monumental Guernica painting by Pablo Picasso in June of 1937. For those unfamiliar with the background, Picasso saw his work as a response to the bombing of the Basque village of the same name by Nazi German and Fascist Italian warplanes to provide support for Francisco Franco’s Nationalists.

This past summer E4TT released its fourth album, also entitled The Guernica Project, via Centaur Records. This album accounted for most, but not all, of the content of the program that was presented in 2017. Since five years have elapsed, this release marks the 85th anniversary of Picasso’s undertaking. The centerpiece of the album is the four-movement “Guernica” composed by Jeffrey Hoover and presented by the full complement of E4TT performers at that time: soprano Nanette McGuinness, violinist Ilana Blumberg, cellist Anne Lerner, and pianist Dale Tsang. The album also includes Hoover’s “Burning Giraffe,” composed a year prior to “Guernica” and scored for cello and piano.

The other major composer on the album is David Garner co-founder of E4TT and Senior Artistic Advisor. El Alma y la Memoria (soul and memory) is a song cycle of settings of four poems by Antonio Machado, one of the casualties of the Spanish Civil War, which was composed in 1995. This is preceded by two short piano compositions played by Tsang. The first of these is a ricercar, composed in 2017, based on an encryption of letters from parts of Picasso’s full name. This is followed by the “Albeniz” movement from Garner’s Cinq Hommages collection in its revised (1987) version. McGuinness also sings Mario Carro’s “Alta mar” (high seas) accompanied only by Lerner on cello. Finally, the album begins with Mercedes Zavala’s Colección de Haikus, brief Spanish texts, each serving as a “call” for a solo piano “response.”

This is clearly a major undertaking based on the best of intentions. However, the listening experience is not a particularly compelling one. Tsang’s piano work is dutiful; but she never seems to account for the intense narrative qualities of the compositions she performs. McGuinness’ performances are similarly weak, focusing almost entirely on text without accounting for the context that makes the words themselves so intense. Given the overwhelming significance of the Picasso canvas that inspired this album, one has to wonder whether the performers bit off more than they could chew.