SFCMP Performs in Grace Cathedral

Last night in Grace Cathedral the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) began their 53rd concert season with a program presented in collaboration with this month’s California Festival: A Celebration of New Music. The selections included the Bay Area premiere of Raven Chacon’s “Voiceless Mass,” an instrumental composition given an impressive spatial performance. The instrumentation included a pipe organ, which was played by the Grace organist Christopher Keady.

As those familiar with church organ music may guess, Keady also began the program with music by Olivier Messiaen, the “Apparition de l'église éternelle” (apparition of the eternal church), which was his first composition for organ after his appointment as organist at the Sainte-Trinité church in Paris in 1931. (Messiaen would hold that post for 61 years.) The program also included “Luminous Spirals,” a trio for flute, guitar, and cello by Chinary Ung; and the second half of the program was devoted entirely to George Crumb’s song cycle, Ancient Voices of Children.

The Grace organ is a decidedly impressive instrument with pipes at both the altar and the very rear of the cathedral. It was definitely suitable for the wide spectrum of sonorities that one associates with Messiaen. However, it also assumed its role as a member of the chamber ensemble required for “Voiceless Mass.” The other performers were Jessie Nucho (flute), Peter Josheff (clarinet), Roman Fukshansky (bass clarinet), William Winant (Percussion I, making his final appearance with SFCMP), Divesh Karamchandani (Percussion II), Kevin Rogers (first violin), Susan Freier (second violin), Christina Simpson (viola), Stephen Harrison (cello), Richard Worn (bass), and Forrest Balman (sine tone synthesizer).

What made this ensemble interesting was that it was distributed around the Grace space. This made “Voiceless Mass” as engaging for its spatial qualities as the Messiaen selection was with the spread of the organ pipes. I have to confess, however, that, while Chacon’s music drew my attention from beginning to end, I could not always keep up with the unfolding of the instrumental passages and how that unfolding emerged through spatial separation. As is often the case with premiere performances, my reaction at the conclusion was that I needed to listen to the music again. Sadly, there is no opportunity for such a return visit in the near future.

For that matter, I would certainly appreciate a second encounter with “Luminous Spirals.” Nucho and Harrison again gave clear accounts of their parts in the trio, joined this time by David Tanenbaum on guitar. What I found interesting were the notes in the program book that each of those parts could be played by an Asian instrument. In other words Ung’s evocation of unfolding spirals seems to have transcended the sonorities themselves. All that mattered was that each instrument had its own unique repertoire of sonorities; and the “spiraling” involved the interplay of those distinctive sonorities.

As far as the second half of the program is concerned, my feelings about Crumb have been on-and-off, dating back to his hermit-like existence on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania when I was teaching computer science there back in the Seventies. The score was for another stripped-down chamber ensemble. However, this time there were three percussionists, with Jonathan Latta joining Winant and Karamchandani; and the other instruments were oboe (Kyle Bruckmann), mandolin (Tanenbaum again), harp (Jennifer Ellis), and piano doubling on toy piano (Kate Campbell). The principal vocalist was mezzo Tonia D’Amelio, joined towards the end of the composition by treble Katie Pelletier.

My primary guide in negotiating Crumb’s opacity has been his Makrokosmos piano compositions. These provided me with a foundational understanding of how he worked with motifs and how he could explore sonorities that included the interior of the piano as well as the keyboard. As his Wikipedia page observes, he was utterly shameless in appropriating snatches of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Schubert, Richard Strauss, and (believe it or not) Thelonious Monk. In Ancient Voices of Children the appropriation is performed on the toy piano; and the selection is Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s “Bist du bei mir” (if you are with me), best known for its appearance in the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. What that has to do with Crumb’s setting of texts by Federico García Lorca for the mezzo vocalist is still beyond the bounds of my own comprehension, but I have to confess that I have yet to encounter a Crumb appropriation that did not make me squirm!

Nevertheless, there was something intriguing in how the unabashed secular rhetoric of Crumb’s text setting managed to fit into Grace’s cavernous space.