SFCM: Two Compositions by David Garner

Last night in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall, the Faculty Artist Series of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) presented two relatively recent works by David Garner. The first of these was his second string quartet, which he completed in 2014. The second was a song cycle, Spoon River Songs, composed between 1987 and 2010.

Hyeyung Sol Yoon, Benjamin Kreith, Charlton Lee, and Kathryn Bates performing Garner’s second string quartet (screen shot from last night’s streamed performance)

The quartet was performed by the Del Sol Quartet performing with a new leader on first violin, Hyeyung Sol Yoon. The “veteran” members were Benjamin Kreith on second violin, violist Charlton Lee, and cellist Kathryn Bates. The four movements suggest a traditional structure, but there are any number of engaging ways in which Garner departs from both “classical” and “atonal” traditions. Bates using her cello as a percussion instrument was a relatively early sign that expectations of familiar structures would be thwarted.

The conventional Adagio for the second movement was expanded to “Adagio ed Ondulato” (slow and undulating). Those undulations distinctively depart from the traditions of a second-movement adagio, and that departure was further stretched with the addition of variations on a Chinese popular song. Similarly, the third movement presumes the tradition of a scherzo but then wanders into the rhetoric of a Venezuelan waltz. That Latin rhetoric then joins forces with some jazz harmonic progressions for the final movement, which picks up from the scherzo without a break. Del Sol has made it a point to explore repertoire that goes beyond string quartet conventions of past centuries, and Garner’s composition should fit into that repertoire both comfortably and engagingly.

Spoon River Songs reminded me of just how little I knew about Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Most of my knowledge dates back to my high school days, not only in English class but also by way of a television program that set about a dozen of the poems in an overall dramatic context. This amounts to a relatively small percentage of the 244 poems that Masters wrote for his collection.

However, if all of the texts were “first contact” experiences for me, they were as engaging as any of my past encounters with the characters that Masters created. (In the entire Anthology there are 212 of them.) What mattered most to me in Garner’s settings was how he knew how to handle the many sharp edges in the texts, most of which are “punch lines” for an entire poem.

Pianist Dale Tsang accompanying mezzo Christine Abraham (screen shot from last night’s streamed performance)

The vocalist last night was mezzo Christine Abraham (an SFCM alumna), accompanied at the piano by Dale Tsang. While she showed a comfortable familiarity with Garner’s score, I was seldom convinced that her delivery was doing justice to the poet. Granted, Garner took a subtle approach to establishing contexts for each of the poems. This was something I appreciated, given that past memories summoned up recitations that would deliver each punch line with a sledge hammer. However, I came away feeling that Abraham had not yet aligned her delivery to Garner’s subtleties.

Whatever the shortcomings may have been, however, the overall experience of last night was one of an engaging journey of discovery.