Kronos to Present Tenth Festival in Two Weeks

The annual music festival presented by the Kronos Quartet will begin much earlier than it did last year. Leader David Harrington on first violin and cellist Paul Wiancko will by joined by two new members, Gabriela Díaz on second violin and violist Ayane Kozasa. This will be the first Festival to take place under the leadership of Ann-Marie Daniels, the new Managing Director of the Kronos Performing Arts Association.

Poster design for this year’s festival

Once again, there will be three concert performances taking place at the SFJAZZ Center. The title for this season will be Good Medicine, and the programs will include five world premieres. There will also be arrangements by Jacob Garchik of Nina Simone’s delivery of the song “For All We Know” by J. Fred Coots and Sun Ra’s “Outer Spaceways, Inc.” The recitals will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 25, and Saturday, April 26, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 27. In addition, during the Festival Ellen Reid’s free SOUNDWALK installation will return to Golden Gate Park.

Ticketing will again be handled by the SFJAZZ Center on a performance-by-performance basis. There will be reserved seating for all three of the evening concerts with prices ranging from $20 to $65. Tickets may also be purchased by calling 866-920-5299 or by visiting the Box Office on the ground floor of the SFJAZZ Center. The SFJAZZ Center is located at 201 Franklin Street, on the northwest corner of Fell Street.

Verve Reissues 1985 Nina Simone Album

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Crossover Media)

Nina’s Back is an album that Nina Simone released in 1985, after taking some “break time” living first in Barbados and then in Liberia. Verve Records recently reissued the album, which is now available on both CD and vinyl through an Amazon.com Web page. While some of the tracks reflect back on the 1982 Fodder On My Wings album, the 1985 session involved a larger instrumental ensemble that included both horns and backup vocals by The Waters Family. In other words, the production team was determined to keep up with the changing times! Simone was responsible for all of the arrangements; and, as in the past, she sang while accompanying herself at the piano.

Where my own tastes are concerned, I have a relatively strong preference for the earlier recordings. With the piano as the primary instrument, Simone could be far more expressive than she was on the later release, where that richer accompaniment is simply not to my own personal tastes. Even if she was in charge of the arrangements, there was just too much of the banal, if not the insipid. Nevertheless, I certainly appreciate the context in which this album was created and its historical context. So I am willing to take what I get!

A “Post-Bach” Finale for SFIPF

Yesterday afternoon in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music hosted the Fifth Anniversary Season Finale of the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF). The title of the program was A Well-Tempered Legacy. This amounted to a series of reflections on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach without any of that composer’s works included on the program until the final selection. Another possible title might have been Bach Reflected and Refracted, with fugues providing the basis for both reflection and refraction.

The first composer on the program was Dmitri Shostakovich, whose catalog includes a generous number of preludes and fugues. Indeed, that coupling accounts for the first two movements of his Opus 57 piano quintet in G minor. SFIPF Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur took the piano part, joined by the members of the Telegraph Quartet: violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw.

While there are no further reflections on Bach in the remaining three movements, the entire quintet presents Shostakovich’s rhetoric at its most intense. The score was completed in September on 1940, and there is a certain irony to the foreboding darkness of that rhetoric: Less than a year later, in June of 1941, Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union. Even without that historical context, yesterday’s performance provided a thoroughly engaging account of the diversity of dark shadows that Shostakovich summoned in composing this quintet.

Indeed, the impact of this quintet is so strong that it is usually programmed as a final selection. Performing it at the beginning of a program is likely to leave the attentive listener wondering what could possibly follow it. LaDeur seems to have based his plan on the principle that one good fugue deserves another. As a result, the program concluded with Parker Van Ostrand, currently an SFCM student, playing the final movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 106 (“Hammerklavier”) piano sonata in B-flat major. That movement couples an extended introduction (prelude) with a ferociously aggressive fugue which is about as remote from any fugue Bach composed than one could hope to get. Yesterday’s performance did not overlook a single trick as Beethoven turned the fugue theme into those pieces of colored glass that you see reflected in a kaleidoscope. That coupling of Shostakovich and Beethoven probably left the audience thankful for then being allowed an intermission.

Fortunately, the remainder of the program was less intense. LaDeur returned to play four fugues based on Beatles tunes that had been composed by Tom Sivak. The movements he selected were “All My Lovin’,” “Penny Lane,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Hey Jude,” all of which were being given West Coast premiere performances. After the intensity of the first half of the program these offerings came across a bit like parlor tricks, but they were more than moderately engaging.

The remainder of the program was taken by Tammy Lynn Hall, preceded by a film of Nina Simone. The film was made at the 1987 Montreux Jazz Festival; and Simone was playing one of her favorite tunes, Walter Donaldson’s “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” However, this particular account was clearly introduced in the context of the gigue that was one of Bach’s favorite musical dance forms. Hall then took the keyboard to explore similar approaches to four familiar tunes, all of which had been in Simone’s “book,” “Little Girl Blue,” “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” “Good Bait,” and “Love Me or Leave Me.” She then closed out her set (and the entire program) with the C major prelude (BWV 846) that begins Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.

This made for a rather casual wrapping-up of this summer’s SFIPF; but, given the intensity of the first half of the program, that calmer disposition was decidedly welcome.

Julia Bullock Curates Second Streamed SoundBox

This morning streaming began for the second SoundBox program to be presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) through its SFSymphony+ service. Soprano Julia Bullock presented Lineage, a program she was originally scheduled to curate in April of last year. Under current conditions she was able to turn the necessity for distancing from a liability into an asset. At the same time the repertoire she selected spanned a “distance” of almost 900 years. Those circumstances then reflected back on Bullock’s choice of a title, which, as she put it, constituted “an audio and visual snapshot of how lineage can inform, influence, impact, and express itself in a musical context.”

The “temporal distance” of the program was framed by the twelfth-century German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen at one end and living composers at the other. On several occasions in the program, the span of distance was “bridged” by segue techniques that allowed for smooth progressions from one century to another. Thus, Hildegarde’s “O frondes virga” (O blooming branch, D 155r), sung by the San Francisco Girls Chorus conducted by Susan McMane, proceeded without interruption into Bullock singing Nina Simone’s “Images,” a setting of the poem “No Images” by the Harlem Renaissance poet William Waring Cuney. While Hildegarde’s text lauds the brach as standing “upright in your nobility,” the protagonist of Cuney’s poem has lost both beauty and nobility through the poverty of urban life that she must endure.

Nina Simone’s “shift into Bach” at the conclusion of “Love Me or Leave Me” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Simone was also “bridged” to Johann Sebastian Bach. The first musical offering showed her playing the piano in a film of her performance on The Ed Sullivan Show while singing “Love Me or Leave Me.” As she concluded the lyrics, her piano work took over with a rapid-fire two-part invention, which then transitioned smoothly into Sarah Cahill playing one of Bach’s two-part inventions, BWV 784 in A minor. I have to confess that I have had a long-standing interest in Simone and her uncompromising approaches to both music and ideology. As a result, watching that Ed Sullivan clip turned out to be far more informative than I anticipated; and the smooth segue into Cahill playing Bach was the icing on the cake!

That said, I should also observe that, as the performing ensembles grew in size, the viewing became more frustrating. On too many occasions the camera work directed by Steve Condiotti tended to frustrate what the eye wanted to see by looking somewhere else. All of the offerings on the program were on the scale of chamber music, meaning that, for the most part, every performer had some claim on the foreground at some time during the execution of the performance. Such foreground-background relationships often tend to involve how the performers go about interpreting the respective parts of the score. Sadly, Condiotti did not appear to have much awareness of any of the scores for the works being performed, suggesting that he was “winging it” on the basis of his own ears, which were not always the best source of information.

Fortunately, all of the offerings on the program were relatively short in nature. Furthermore, much of the time one could simply enjoy the treasures of Bullock’s voice and the facility with which she could move from one stylistic genre to another. Given how much content she assembled for this offering, the video is definitely worth a second (and probably a third) look.

An Imaginative Duo Album that Misses the Mark

Stick&Bow performers Juan Sebastian Delgado and Krystina Marcoux (photograph by Annie Éthier, from the News Web page on the Web site for Shira Gilbert PR)

At the beginning of last month, the Canadian label Leaf Music released a new album entitled Resonance. This was the debut album for a duo called Stick&Bow, so called because it brings Canadian marimba player Krystina Marcoux together with Argentinian cellist Juan Sebastian Delgado. As might be guessed, almost all of the selections on the album were arranged by the performers. The most notable exception was a piece composed for them by Jason Noble. His contribution was the seven-movement Folk Suite, based on sources from Newfoundland and Labrador, the two districts that constitute the easternmost province of Canada, where the composer was born. In addition, for the final track, an arrangement of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android,” Stick&Bow joined forces with Ben Duinker, currently based in Montreal, where he is pursuing a PhD in Music Theory at McGill University.

This is one of those projects that probably looked better in theory than it turned out in practice. San Francisco is a first-rate city for listening to quality percussion performances. I have had no end of enjoyable experiences listening to marimba performances at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and in following some of the graduates into recital settings. Through those experiences I have come to recognize that a good marimba player can present chamber music with just about any other instrument or group of instruments.

It was thus more than a little disconcerting that, on the opening tracks, both of which were arrangements of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, the balance between marimba and cello was consistently muddled, primarily because Marcoux never brought clear articulation to her performance technique. (To be fair, that particular performance may have sounded better in concert, meaning that the problem had more to do with audio production than with the instrument itself. Nevertheless, one would like to assume that Marcoux had some say about what constituted an acceptable recording.)

On a more general level I fear that neither of the players showed much respect for any of the sources that they arranged. I appreciate that, when Nina Simone recorded Walter Donaldson’s “Love Me or Leave Me” for her debut album, her keyboard work for the middle instrumental section was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach; but the Stick&Bow track seems about as out of touch with Donaldson and Simone’s imaginative stylization as it is with Bach. On other tracks Delgado is best when writing music that was actually written for cello (such as the second movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 40 cello sonata in D major). However, as we now know from a recording of his own performance, Shostakovich endowed the piano part for that sonata with a rich diversity of rhetorical turns, none of which were given a particularly credible account on the marimba.

Finally, the decision to describe each piece in the accompanying booklet with text that segues between French and English may have seemed clever at the time; but for the reader with any interest in the music itself, those descriptions are just plain annoying!

Not Much Tempting in New Chamberland Album

courtesy of Play MPE

A little over a month ago, Evosound released the latest album of Canadian vocalist Chantal Chamberland. The advance material I received described Temptation as the result of “a rigorous search for new and oft-unconventional material.” I am not sure whether or not “I Put a Spell on You” and “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl” count as “unconventional” (oft or otherwise); but I am willing to grant that I do not encounter them very often.

One of the reasons is that these are songs that have more to do with the singer than with what is being sung. “I Put a Spell on You” was the product of Screamin' Jay Hawkins. It was all the rage at my campus radio station and would regularly get aired during the weekend request programs. However, its popularity had more to do with Hawkins’ outrageous vocalizing, particularly when “screamin’” out “I don’t care if you don’t want me, I’m yours!” For a long time I felt it was sacrilegious for anyone else to try to sing this song; but Nina Simone boldly went were angels would fear to tread. Her delivery had almost none of the Hawkins style, but it turned out to be compelling in just about every other way.

Ironically, Simone also put her own spin on another song that I felt was “owned” by its creator. “Need a Little Sugar in my Bowl” is one of the songs that Bessie Smith recorded for Columbia, accompanied only by Clarence Williams on piano. Williams wrote the song in conjunction with Tim Brymn and Danny C. Small. Simone picked it up for her Nina Simone Sings the Blues album, reworking it as “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl;” and, again, her version is right up there beside Smith’s.

I single out these two songs because they are bold choices. Sadly, there is little boldness in Chamberland’s treatment. Indeed, over the course of the entire album, the selections all come off as disappointingly bland.

I also have to confess annoyance with an advance team that comes up with a phrase like “stellar accompaniment of her carefully chosen cast of A-list players” and never bothers to identify those players. Perhaps they preferred to remain anonymous. The bland qualities of the vocal work seem to have invaded the instrumental accompaniment as well.

Lara Downes Previews her Latest Solo Album at Noontime Concerts

This Friday Sono Luminus will release pianist Lara Downes’ latest solo album. As is usually the case, Amazon.com is currently accepting pre-orders for those who can’t wait. The title of the album is America Again, which was taken from the poem “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1938 by Langston Hughes. While it is all too easy to associate the phrase with the current election-year climate (particularly since Hughes was never one to mince words on matters of politics and race), it is worth noting that America has long been a dominant theme in the recordings Downes has made. Thus, there is her American Ballads album, which dates back to 2001, and her far more recent A Billie Holiday Songbook, released in March of 2015. For that matter, almost all of the composers represented on her 2011 album 13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg are American; and many of the exiles in her Exiles’ Cafe album found their exile in the United States. In other words Downes has built up a recital repertoire through which she has become a champion of American composers, both those born here and those who made this country their second home. The title of her new album basically reassures us that she is still at it.

None of this is intended to dismiss the Hughes connection to this album. Over the course of twenty compositions, Downes’ album offers a perspective of the American dream that, like Hughes poetry, acknowledges its elusive qualities. As a result, most (but not all) of the composers included constitute departures from the mainstream at such a distance that most of us need to be reminded just who they were. Thus, the album includes Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s arrangement of “Deep River,” from a more extensive volume he compiled of solo piano arrangements of African American spirituals. Closer to the present is “Sueno Recurrente,” composed in 2002 by Angélica Negrón, born in Puerto Rico and now living in Brooklyn. Other female composers on the album include Amy Beach (“From Blackbird Hills”) and Florence Price (“Fantasie Negre”).

This is not to suggest that all of the tracks are likely to be unfamiliar to most listeners. Scott Joplin is there with his “Gladiolus Rag;” and the final track is Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow.” However, there are also some arrangements that definitely deserve special attention. “I Loves You Porgy” from George Gershwin’s only opera Porgy and Bess, is included but in an arrangement by Nina Simone. Similarly, Downes chose to play Art Tatum’s arrangement of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.” I have to confess that, as a listener, I cannot get enough of Tatum; but I feel the same way about Lou Harrison. So the inclusion of his set of three New York Waltzes was a personal delight.

This afternoon at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, Downes was the Noontime Concerts (“San Francisco’s Musical Lunch Break”) recitalist. She used the occasion to preview two of the tracks from America Again. The first of these was the “Deep River,” preceded by the explanation that Coleridge-Taylor was an English composer (without emphasizing the Creole side of his ancestry). Thus, his interest in African American spirituals could be compared with Béla Bartók seeking out folk music from Romania and other eastern European lands to add to the sources he had gathered from Hungary. Coleridge-Taylor’s style, however, is closer to Franz Liszt than to Bartók; and Downes’ account of his rich approach to embellishment and invention was highly absorbing.

By way of contrast, she then turned to the first track on her album, Morton Gould’s “American Caprice.” There was no mistaking the sassy “American” qualities of this music from a man who, in his day, was more frequently associated with music for programs broadcast on both radio and television. However, his roots go back to Tin Pan Alley and a versatility that enabled him to do just about anything to pick up wages during the Great Depression.

Downes then turned to Gould’s “elder,” George Gershwin. (As a conductor Gould became a great champion of Gershwin’s “serious” music.) She played the arrangement for solo piano that Gershwin himself made of his score for “Rhapsody in Blue.” This has a few departures from the original version, none of which mar the thoroughly American spirit of this music, which seems to be able to survive anything, even being mangled by United Airlines. This is also music that Downes recorded; and her “singles” release is still available for download from Amazon.com. She then remained with Gershwin for her encore, performing that Simone arrangement of “I Loves You Porgy.”

Finally, it is worth noting that Coleridge-Taylor’s somewhat Lisztian approach to “Deep River” was given an unabashedly nineteenth-century “overture.” Downes began her recital with four of the short pieces that Robert Schumann collected in his Opus 12 Fantasiestücke (fantasy pieces). These were given accounts that were appropriately expressive, thus setting the context for Coleridge-Taylor’s own rhetorical stance, while also “phasing in” the audience with a more familiar bill of fare.

Are You What you Listen To?

As if there were a shortage on inane criteria for comparing our presumptive Presidential nominees, the Entertainment desk for the BBC NEWS Web site has released this news flash:

Frank Sinatra is the only artist to feature among the top 10 favourite songs of both US presidential candidates, it has been revealed.

Democrat Barack Obama included You'd Be So Easy To Love and John McCain I've Got You Under My Skin in the lists compiled by US magazine Blender.

Abba are favoured by Republican Mr McCain with Dancing Queen at number one and Take a Chance On Me at three.

Obama's favourite song, meanwhile, is Fugees' 1996 hit Ready Or Not.

The rest of Obama's top five features older tracks with Marvin Gaye's What's Going On at number two and Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire at number three.

His top five is made up by Gimme Shelter by Rolling Stones and Nina Simone's Sinnerman.

Pro-Obama song

Mr McCain's second favourite song after Dancing Queen is Blue Bayou by Roy Orbison.

His fourth favourite track is 1973 country hit If We Make It Through December, by Merle Haggard, followed by As Time Goes, recorded in 1942 by Dooley Wilson.

The top 10 of 71-year-old Mr McCain is made up exclusively of older tracks.

But the choices of 46-year-old Mr Obama include rapper Kanye West's 2006 hit Touch the Sky at number six and Yes We Can by Will.i.am at number 10.

For the record, out of all of these selections, the only one I listen to with the slightest regularity is "Sinnerman;" and I know the words well enough to ask whether Obama has ever paid much attention to them! (So, if Obama were not running for the office of President of the United States and already counting his electoral votes, would "Sinnerman" have been displaced from his list by "Mississippi Goddam?" Enquiring minds want to know! Those are the words that still demand attention!) What interests me more is the dog-that-did-not-bark-in-the-night phenomenon: Note that "My Way" was not on either candidate's list! What does that say?