SFCM: David Conte’s Faculty Artist Series Recital

David Conte’s second piano trio performed by Samuel Vargas, Kevin Korth, and Matthew Linaman (screenshot from livestream of last night’s performance)

Last night in the Sol Joseph Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), composer David Conte presented his Faculty Artist Series Recital. The program began and concluded with duo and trio chamber music compositions for violin (Samuel Vargas), viola (Zoe Yost), and piano trio (Vargas performing with cellist Matthew Linaman and Kevin Korth on piano). Pianist Paja Cajic accompanied both of the preceding duo performances. Between the those two pieces were excerpts from music composed for staged productions. The first of these was a one-act ballet based on the novel Brokeback Mountain, completed last year. This was followed by an aria from East of Eden, composed in 2022 and orchestrated in 2024. Both were performed by the SFCM Chamber Ensemble, conducted by Conte and Joseph Marcheso, respectively.

I have to confess that neither of those excerpts had much of an impact on my listening experience. Neither seemed to rest on a firm rhetorical foundation, particularly if one tried to associate the music with its literary sources. This was particularly evident where John Steinbeck’s novel was concerned. This amounts to a twentieth-century perspective on the early chapters of Genesis in which the “Eden” is the rich agricultural terrain in the middle of the state of California. Performed without context, it was hard to appreciate the nature of the aria text that Christian Purcell sang.

The instrumental selections were far more satisfying. Indeed, there were narrative qualities in the piano trio that were easier to apprehend and impressively rich in diversity. I was also struck by how the Passacaglia movement of the trio reflected on its “Bach ancestry” by extending the series of variations with a concluding fugue. Where the duos were concerned, both Vargas and Yost clearly grasped the expressiveness of the music, making for engaging listening experiences. All three of those selections were decidedly memorable, and it may be that the music composed for the stage fares better in a more dramatic setting.