Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented its third program in the 2022–23 Chamber Music Series. This was an offering of impressive diversity, reaching back to the eighteenth century of Joseph Haydn and advancing to a pandemic-inspired arrangement of music that Aaron Copland composed for the ballet “Rodeo” in 1942. All of that diversity was presented by an equally diverse assembly of SFS musicians.
The Copland arrangement was created by violist Katarzyna Bryla-Weiss. As she wrote for the program book, “I missed playing music with my friends [during the pandemic shutdown of 2020] and I started arranging easy pieces for a viola quartet and recording them by myself.” As she progressed in her arrangements, she took on more challenging “source texts.” Today’s offering drew upon the “Corral Nocturne” and “Hoedown” movements from the “Rodeo” score. It also advanced from recorded overdubbing to four violists. Bryla-Weiss was joined by three other members of the SFS viola section: Katie Kadarauch, Matthew Young, and Gina Cooper. They all took the stage with cowboy hats and boots; but, when it came to making music, they immediately got down to business.
Given the richness of Copland’s instrumentation techniques, one would think that four violas would not have much to offer. However, the performers showed so much spirit that attention to sonorities was easily diverted by the elaborate realization of the rhythmic polyphony. If there is a Heaven and if Copland was allowed entry, I suspect he would have looked down on the Davies stage with bemused enjoyment at both the ingenuity of Bryla-Weiss’ arrangement and the genuine spirit of all four of the violists.
Equally impressive was the more standard string quartet performing Florence Price’s “Negro Folksongs in Counterpoint.” Cooper was also the violist for this performance, joined by violinists Kelly Leon-Pearce and John Chisholm and cellist Barbara Bogatin. Over the course of her career, Price took a great interest in both spirituals and folksongs; and some readers may recall when this site noted that she had created an arrangement of “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” for Marian Anderson. The string quartet arrangements are not as faithful to the original sources, but the attentive listener should have no trouble teasing the “source themes” out of the arrangements.
It is also interesting to observe that, in spite of the title, the four movements basically embody the familiar structure of a string quartet. Thus, the collection is framed by two Allegro arrangements for “Go Down, Moses” and “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho.” The first Allegro is followed by an Adagio setting of “Somebody’s Knockin’ at Yo Do’,” followed by “Little David Play on Yo Harp,” which is presented as a Scherzo. As a result, the composition, taken as a whole, makes for a stimulating blend of classical architecture with indigenous thematic sources.
The Price quartet was preceded by a more conventional approach to string quartet composition. The Haydn selection was Hoboken III/78, the fourth of the Opus 76 collection. The performers were violinists Wyatt Underhill and Florin Parvulescu, violist David Gaudry, and cellist David Goldblatt. Sadly, the spirit of the interpretation never rose to the expressive engagement encountered in both the Price and the Copland selections. Those of us that enjoyed past performances by the New Esterházy Quartet know how much personality can be expressed in just about any string quartet that Haydn composed. Sadly, this afternoon’s participants never rose to that level of interpretation.
The intermission was followed by a single composition, the nonet in E-flat major that is the Opus 38 of French composer Louise Farrenc. I suspect that some may think that nine instruments amounts to a bit of a handful for chamber music. However, the attentive listener will quickly realize that these resources may be “parsed” into three groups, making for a more manageable number. In this afternoon’s layout, the rear was taken by a wind quintet of flute (Linda Lukas), oboe (James Button), clarinet (Jerome Simas), bassoon (Stephen Paulson), and horn (Bruce Roberts). The front was occupied by a string trio of violin (Yukiko Kurakata), viola (Christina King), and cello (Bogatin again). These three players formed a portion of a semicircle that completed by Mark Wright playing bass.
Farrenc’s score tends to honor this “division of resources” but is definitely not confined by them. Thus, over the course of the four-movement composition, the attentive listener will enjoy a highly satisfying diversity of sonorities. That diversity becomes most evident in the second of the four movements, which consists of variations on a theme. Thus, while this nonet was composed in 1849, the basic structure is still grounded in eighteenth-century classicism; but Farrenc’s management of the nine instruments guides the attentive listener through what may be called a rhetoric of instrumental coloration.
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