An Afternoon at Flower Piano

Yesterday I made my annual visit to the Flower Piano event at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. As in the past, this provided me with an opportunity to keep up with pianist Sarah Cahill’s adventurous repertoire. This year most of her program involved the two-piano, four-hand repertoire, which she performed with longtime colleague Regina Myers.

The program opened with Meredith Monk’s “Phantom Waltz.” I realized that I had been listening to Monk playing keyboard music (often with her own vocal accompaniment) since the late Sixties, when the American Dance Festival was still based in New London, Connecticut, on the campus of the Connecticut College for Women (which is now co-educational and called simply Connecticut College). “Phantom Waltz” is included on her Piano Songs album, which consists of both solo and duo compositions played by Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker. Those recordings were made in April of 2012.

The program continued with “The Decertified Highway of Dreams” by “Blue” Gene Tyranny (born Joseph Gantic), who taught at Mills College between 1971 and 1982. This was followed by the United States premiere of “Sprites in the Large Camphor Tree” by Mamoru Fujieda. I have been following his work since Cahill brought her Patterns of Plants album to my attention. He had developed his own technique for interpreting “natural” patters (such as those of leaves) into thematic material; and Cahill has been championing his work since she prepared the 32 brief selections on that album. This duo set then concluded with “Tonk,” which may well have originated as a spontaneous recording made when Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn shared a piano keyboard.

The program then concluded with “The Girl in My Alphabet” by Errollyn Wallen. This was given an eight-hand performance with Cahill and Myers sharing one of the two keyboards. The second was played by Monica Chew and Allegra Chapman. As one might guess, this composition involved some very thick textures.

Under better conditions (such as a concert hall stage), one might be able to parse at least some of the elements of this polyphonic undertaking. However, the Botanical Garden did not offer any acoustic support; and it was often difficult to sort out even the four-hand textures. Unless I am mistaken, Cahill revisited last year’s Flower Piano program with a recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; and “The Girl in My Alphabet” definitely deserves a more conducive environment.

This leads to deeper consideration of the whole Flower Piano idea. It would be fair to say that none of the sites where pianos have been placed could be called “conducive environments.” It is unclear what the founders of this event had in mind. Perhaps the entire space can be approached somewhat like one of those mobiles by Alexander Calder, where what you see is always changing. The problem is that all of the works on Cahill’s set really deserve focused attention, while the overall “social context” of the “Flower Piano experience” seems to be one of coming and going in ways that often have little to do with who is playing what and when they are playing it.

This became more of an issue during the set taken by Ronny Michael Greenberg. I last wrote about him this past February in covering the release of his Momenti album. Momenti is a trio formed by two vocalists and a pianist (Greenberg), all with connections to San Francisco Opera. The vocalists are soprano Leah Crocetto and bass-baritone Christian Pursell. Yesterday afternoon, on the other hand, provided my first opportunity to listen to Greenberg present a solo recital.

The closest he got to opera was Franz Liszt’s transcription of the final scene from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, best known as the “Liebestod.” He also played Alfred Grünfeld’s “Soirée de Vienne,” a concert paraphrase on waltz music from Die Fledermaus, the operetta by Johann Strauss II. On the other hand Greenberg established the tone for his set with more amicable material, beginning with “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and then moving on to the first of George Gershwin’s three piano preludes. On the more serious side he performed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 330 piano sonata in C major and a moderate share of selections by Claude Debussy. By way of an encore, he was joined by tenor Christopher Oglesby, an Adler Fellow of the San Francisco Opera in 2019, 2020, and 2021, singing “Nessun dorma” from the final action of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot.

This made for a thoroughly engaging set from beginning to end. Nevertheless, all of the selections deserved attentive listening, and attention does not fare particularly well in the Flower Piano setting. Nevertheless, Greenberg clearly had an appreciative audience; and, as was the case with Cahill’s program, I would be only too happy to revisit his program in a space that had been designed with the performance of music in mind.