SFCMP: A Disappointing Season Conclusion

Following up on an engaging variety of programs for its 53rd concert season, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) limped its way across the finish line last night in the Mission at the Brava Theater. The title of the program was RE;voicing 2: “Worlds Apart,” those last two words being the title of a new composition by Richard Festinger that filled the second half of the program. This was a major undertaking with two SFCMP instrumentalists joined by the sixteen vocalists of the Volti chamber choir and two soloists, soprano Winnie Nieh and baritone Daniel Cilli.

As might be expected, the How Music is Made preview discussion amounted to a conversation between Artistic Director (and conductor) Eric Dudley and Festinger. Sadly, this was of little benefit when listening to the three movements of “World Apart,” each setting text by a different poet: Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Crane, and Wendell Berry. Festinger seemed more inclined to talk about the experience of making the music, rather than providing the attentive listener with any sort of guide to the music itself.

To be fair, however, I wonder whether such a guide would have been possible. The performance seemed to amble its way through the score, almost on a note-by-note basis giving a syllable-by-syllable account of each of the three poems. It almost seemed as if the composer was focused entirely on situating each note in just the right place, without any clear sense of what “place” happened to be. The result was a gathering of talented musicians determined to bring sense-making to all the marks on their score pages without a clear grasp of just what “sense” was.

The program began with Elliott Carter’s “Asko Concerto,” written late in the composer’s life. When he was younger, many listeners came away from Carter’s works perplexed with the feeling that they had experienced “all theory and no practice.” As he grew older, Carter also grew away from earlier obsessions with theory; and his resulting subjectivity could often be downright cheerful. Such high spirits can be found in “Asko Concerto,” which was given its Bay Area premiere last night. Those spirits were clearly shared by both conductor and instrumentalists, getting things off to a decidedly good start.

Sadly, that start was not continued when Volti took the stage for the remainder of the first half. Jens Ibsen’s “De Profundis” setting was followed by “Effortlessly, Love Flows” by Aaron Jay Kernis. Sadly, the program book did not provide the texts for these selections. However, since the audience had to sit in pitch darkness, printed matter would have been of little value. Fortunately, I was familiar enough with the text to negotiate Ibsen’s composition and found the rhetorical stance to be suitably engaging. On the other hand, I had absolutely no idea what Kernis was trying to do with his setting, let alone what his source was!

Hopefully, 2024–25 will take a turn for the better.