Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), led by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, presented the first of (only) two performances of the program it prepared for this month’s California Festival: A Celebration of New Music. While that adjective “new” definitely pervaded much (but not all) of the program, much of that novelty arose in unexpected ways. Only one of the selections involved music being performed for the very first time by SFS.
That selection was “Breathing Forests,” composed by Gabriella Smith in 2021. James M. Keller’s note about this composition for the program book began with the following sentence: “A Bay Area native, Gabriella Smith has emerged as her generation’s most prominent environmentalist composer.” Smith is no stranger to Davies. This past March Salonen conducted her “Tumblebird Contrails,” which the SFS Youth Orchestra had performed in March of 2022. Her credentials are solid, with a composition degree from the Curtis Institute of Music followed by advanced composition study at Princeton University. However, her interest in environmentalism is far from superficial, including five years spent in a songbird research project at Point Reyes.
“Breathing Forests” is a three-movement organ concerto performed last night with James McVinnie (who gave the premiere performance with Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic) as organist. The score consists of three movements played without interruption: “Grow,” “Breathe,” and “Burn.” The pipes for the lowest pitches of the organ induced perception that was visceral as well as auditory. However, in spite of the program note by James M. Keller describing the piece as “traditional fast-slow-fast concerto form,” there was a disquieting uniformity across the movements with little attention to tempo or, for that matter, the movement titles. More absorbing was the way in which the organ provided a foundation for the thematic content of the other instruments. Nevertheless, the overall sense of sameness across the three movements tended to dull the acuity of listener perception.
Acuity was far sharper in the two compositions by Igor Stravinsky that flanked “Breathing Forests.” The program began with the octet scored for flute, clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets, trombone, and bass trombone. There was sufficient complexity in the music that Salonen definitely played a key role as conductor. Nevertheless, I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed that the eight instrumentalists were not identified by name in the program book. While one could appreciate the interpretation that Salonen brought to the performance, every “voice” in the score has its own “personality;” and there is no reason why that “personality” should be dissociated from the “person” responsible for the performance!
The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Steven Stucky’s 2005 orchestration of Stravinsky’s “Les noces” (the wedding). The original scoring included a full four-part chorus, vocal soloists in the ranges of soprano (Lauren Snouffer), mezzo (Kayleigh Decker), tenor (Paul Appleby), and bass (David Soar). Instrumentation consisted of four pianos, each of which was associated with a set of percussion instruments.
It would be fair to describe the structure of the score as “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” To the extent that there is a narrative, it involves introducing both the bride and the bridegroom, followed by the departure to the wedding service. The service itself is elided from the narrative, and the remainder of the structure is devoted to depicting the wedding feast.
What makes the overall structure fascinating is the way in which all of voices have no end of things to say, yet there are only a few moments when one character is talking to another willing to listen. As a result, there is almost never a libretto included in the program, since a printed text would not be able to capture the many simultaneous utterances. For that matter, Stravinsky’s phrasings of the vocal lines are often so bizarre that one can rarely make sense of the text, even when it is sung in English.
The good news is that Salonen delivered solid leadership with keen attention to both the vocal soloists and the SFS Chorus prepared by its Direction Jenny Wong. The bad news is that the orchestration that Stucky composed to replace the four pianos was pretty much inaudible between the percussionists, the full choral resources, and the intense deliveries by the vocal soloists. The fact is that Stravinsky himself knew how to approach the piano as a percussion instrument. When the music for the four pianos was replaced by orchestral instruments, those percussive qualities were lost; and, to be perfectly frank, I have to confess that I was only barely aware of what the strings, winds, and (even) brass were doing while the percussionists were going to town.
The “poster” for the SFS Web page for the performance being discussed
Mind you, focusing on the music was no easy matter. Animator Hillary Leben prepared a film that served as a down-and-dirty fight for attention between the visual and the auditory. As the above image shows, the “celebrants” for this wedding amounted to a bevy of insect-like creatures displaying all the revelry of Stravinsky’s wedding guests but situated in a sewer system. Leben clearly had her own ideas about narrative; and, with only a few exceptions, they rarely aligned with the words being sung, which (as already observed) deserve more attention than one usually expects of a vocal performance.
Personally, I feel that Stravinsky deliberately overloaded the narrative content of “Les noces;” and Leben’s contribution to the performance reminded me of the old joke about adding another window to the Taj Mahal.
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