NCCO Premieres Engaging Benavides Narrative

Last night Cowell Theatre saw the official launch in San Francisco of California Festival: A Celebration of New Music with the first of two performances of a program prepared and presented by the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO). The program, entitled Visitations, also marked the launch of NCCO’s 2023–2024 season. Most importantly, however, it presented the world premiere of “Doña Sebastiana” (Lady Death), scored for solo violin and string ensemble. This work was composed by Nicolás Lell Benavides on an NCCO commission provided explicitly for the Festival.

The music was a tone poem, somewhat in the spirit of how Richard Strauss handled the structure but compacted into a performance taking only about eight minutes. The narrative is a folk tale that Benavides most likely encountered while growing up in New Mexico. In introducing his work to the audience, he provided a verbal account of that narrative, which amounted to life and death among the poor. That introduction could be found in the program book; but it would have been much better served had it been given sentence-by-sentence projection above the performers, allowing the attentive listener to appreciate how each thematic phrase advanced the narrative. However, even without such attention to detail, NCCO presented an absorbing account of Benavides’ score, which definitely deserves further opportunities for performance in the near future.

Sadly, “Doña Sebastiana” was the only selection in the program that allowed for well-rewarded attentive listening. The rest of the evening wallowed in a hodgepodge of mostly short vocal and instrumental music, five selections of which were arranged by Paul Bateman to accommodate NCCO resources. Those arrangements included three art songs by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Peter Lieberson, and Franz Schubert, respectively, all sung by mezzo Kelley O’Connor. None of these were particularly compelling, nor was Bateman’s arrangement of Ariel Ramírez’ Misa Criolla, which included Gabriel Navia playing charango and eight vocalists (pairs of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass), prepared for the performance by David Xiques. The only satisfying arrangement was Paul Dukas’ tone poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” given the breath of life by percussionists Zubin Hathi, Divesh Karamchandani, and Elizabeth Hall. Fortunately, those vocalists provided a stunning a cappella introduction to the program with a selection from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil.

Most important, however, was that the Cowell Theatre was a thoroughly unsatisfactory setting for this program. To be fair, I have enjoyed several well-directed opera productions at this venue, all of which were more than properly accommodated by stage and backstage facilities. However, in the absence of any useful acoustic shell, the overall NCCO sound was practically dead. This was a performance that, in the words of one of my former academic colleagues put it, “served a well-needed gap!”