Ensemble for These Times’ “Quest” at C4NM

Last night Ensemble for these Times (E4TT) brought the second of its three scheduled programs for this season to the Center for New Music (C4NM). The full title of the program was Quest: Music by Women and Nonbinary Composers; and it served to showcase ten of those composers, six before the intermission. The performers consisted only of the E4TT “core,” consisting of soprano Nanette McGuinness, Abigail Monroe on cello, and pianist Margaret Halbig, joined by violinist Jennifer Redondas, who is guest artist for the entire season.

All but two of the works were composed during the current century. The exceptions were the first two works on the program, “Elegia a Paul Robeson,” composed by Tania León in 1987, and “An April Day,” composed by Florence Price in 1949. From my own point of view, the entire program was a “first contact” experience.

I was particularly struck by the inclusion of Gabriella Smith on the program, since San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen brought her to audience attention in March of 2022, when he conducted SFS in a performance of her “Tumblebird Contrails.” He thought highly enough of the piece to include it in the program for last month’s Nobel Prize Concert. While I did not care much for the music on “first contact,” I would certainly defend Salonen’s right to transport the music from San Francisco to Stockholm! Smith’s contribution to last night’s program was “Imaginary Pancake,” another work whose title had a greater impact on me than the music did.

The good news was that almost all of the recent works were more engaging than “Imaginary Pancake.” Indeed, both my wife and I were struck by how many of those composers had an impressive capacity for wit. Tamara MacLeod even went as far as to title the first movement of her Spent suite “Farcically.” The titles of the following two movements were “Languishingly” and “Desolately;” and, taken has a whole, her “adverbial journey” was a total romp. A bit more explicit, but just as engaging, was the final work, “Forget Your Scarf in My Life” by Madeline Clara Cheng. Indeed, this came across as the final “punch line” after the imaginative (and often witty) rhetorical stances of the three predecessors in the second half of the program, “Fulgurance” (Jessica Mao), the second movement of Ringlorn (Isabelle Tseng), and “grace fall” (Sage Shurman).

I must confess that I tend to be cautious about attending programs that might leave me feeling besieged by new content. In this case, however, almost every composer left me with the impression of knowing when enough was enough. Perhaps the future of music is in better hands than my proclivity for skepticism would have me believe!

I would, however, pick one nit with the program book. The Earplay program books always seem to find the right balance between what to say about the composer and what to say about the music. E4TT, on the other hand, provided generous accounts about each of the composers without saying anything about the music being performed. When a program has so many offerings, it would be nice to have some written content to both prepare and recall the listening experience itself.