PIVOT Festival Concludes with “All Hands” Show

Last night in Herbst Theatre, the San Francisco Performances PIVOT Festival, curated by Gabriel Kahane, concluded with an “all hands” program. The semicircle of the eight Roomful of Teeth vocalists, who were featured on Thursday evening, now enclosed the four members of the Attacca Quartet, who performed on Wednesday. Kahane contributed to the program as composer, vocalist, and electric guitarist.

As was the case on Wednesday, the program involved the interleaving of the works being performed. Like the four movements of Maurice Ravel’s quartet on Wednesday, the four movements of Caroline Shaw’s four-movement partita, scored for eight singers, provided the “spinal cord” of the program with the movements alternating with string quartet arrangements of an “unmeasured prelude” by Louis Couperin followed by selections from the 27 suites (ordres) composed by his nephew, François Couperin, all of which were originally written for keyboard. Vocal selections composed and sung by Kahane opened the two halves of the program, and the entire program was wrapped up by Paul Simon’s “American Tune.” Kahane provided the arrangements for all of the selections other than the Shaw partita.

This was far from the first time I had encountered instrumental versions of music composed for keyboard. (Indeed, these were the sort of exercises I had to prepare when studying orchestration.) The “unmeasured prelude” was particularly interesting, since it included a fugue and a coda, making it as sort of “mini-suite.” All the titles from the suite movements were in French without any translations provided. However, the attentive listener could still appreciate the different “personal characteristics;” and Kahane’s arrangements suggested that any of the selections could have originally been composed as chamber music, rather than keyboard music.

Shaw’s selection of “partita” as a title suggested that her music would “rub shoulders” with the early eighteenth-century music of the Couperin family. Indeed, she even gave the movements titles that were consistent with other partitas from that period: Allemande, Sarabande, Courante, Passacaglia. Nevertheless, the music itself never gave the slightest impression of any of those four familiar genres. Indeed, the impression provided by the cycle, taken as a whole, was that eighteenth-century practices were best forgotten and needed a thorough overhaul. However, if that overhaul was to be a thorough one, why go to the trouble of keeping those “outmoded” titles! Particularly when interleaved with “the real thing,” the impressions provided by Shaw’s music ran the gamut from puzzling to annoying.

With the closing of the Simon tune, however, all was well again. Indeed, I could have sworn that, woven within that tune was a subtle suggestion of the music for the Passion hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” Was that Simon’s idea or Kahane’s arrangement? The answer does not matter. The concluding selection allowed the attentive listener to dwell on the best parts of all that had preceded.