Has NYCB Forgotten “Metastaseis?”

Mira Nadon, principal with NYCB, preparing to perform “Pithoprakta” (from an article by Gia Kourlas for todays New York Times)

I see from a Web page for today’s New York Times that Suzanne Farrell is teaching the choreography for “Pithoprakta” to the current dancers in New York City Ballet (NYCB). The music, which has the same title, is by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis; and I first encountered it on an album that coupled it with another Xenakis composition, “Metastaseis.” George Balanchine created choreography for both pieces, beginning with “Metastaseis.” I remember seeing the performance of the two ballets in the original order, having already gotten to know the music through an album I had purchased.

Back in those days, I was a Balanchine fanatic. I particularly appreciated how he would create a ballet based on the music without necessarily introducing a narrative. In that context, both Xenakis ballets were about as abstract as could be imagined. This was no surprise, since I had come to know the composer’s book (in its English translation) Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition.

My guess is that Balanchine was never as well-versed in mathematics as Xenakis was. When it came to creating choreography for a composition like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 48, the four-movement “Serenade for Strings,” he knew how to reflect his listening experiences into choreography. However, listening to any composition by Xenakis is a far cry from listening to any composition by Tchaikovsky. Mind you, I am not saying that Balanchine needed to know more about mathematics in order to listen to Xenakis; but a command of techniques for listening to Tchaikovsky just could not be deployed for just about any composition in the Xenakis catalog.

At the risk of being too harsh, I find myself thinking about Xenakis’ efforts as, according to the old joke, “music of the future whose time has passed!” According to my archives, he has not surfaced on my site since a performance of his “Miika” at the Center for New Music in May of 2024! My own listening experiences go back even further, to the performance of his “Theraps” by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players early in December of 2022. The “bottom line” for that occasion was that the performance was neither convincing nor memorable!

What I found interesting about today’s article is that, as the text unfolded, I felt as if abstraction was giving way to personality. Thus, while Balanchine was the original choreographer, I suspect that the revival will deserve to be known as “Farrell’s ballet.” So much has changed since the ballet was created in 1968 that both performers and audience would do best by dwelling on the present, rather than the past. Furthermore, since Farrell herself is not much older than I am, I am all for her continuing to make engaging dance performances when both of us are now in our eighties!

Disappointing Encounters with SFCMP

Yesterday afternoon at The Lab, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) presented the third installation in its Sound Encounters series. This series involves a collaboration that brings SFCMP musicians together with composers (primarily students) currently working at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), based at the University of California at Berkeley. Due to my always-busy schedule, this was my first opportunity to experience the results of one of these programs.

All of the composers showcased in this installment were also performers. In “order of appearance,” they presented the following compositions:

• Eda Er: “Too Much of a Woman,” scored for solo voice, electronics, amplified objects, and video
• Kevin CK Lo: “The Audience Plays Itself,” scored for solo bass, electronics, cameras, and projection gear
• Aine Nakamura: “Kusottare!,” scored for solo voice and electronics

The program also featured one of the SFCMP musicians, bass player Richard Worn. In the spirit of the CNMAT students, he presented a composition of his own for bass and electronics (“Apocolectric”), as well as providing the bass part for Lo’s composition. He also played two solo works from the twentieth century. The program began with Hans Werner Henze’s “San Biagio 9 Agosto Ore.” Worn’s other selection was “Theraps,” composed by Iannis Xenakis, whose centennial is being celebrated throughout Europe but with almost no attention here in the United States.

In this heavily electronic setting, Worn emerged as the star of the show. His own composition cultivated the sweet spot where the natural sound of his instrument blended intimately with electronic synthesis. There was also a modest bit of theatrics with a lamp sitting on the floor only for the sake of its presence, since Worn performed his composition from memory. That presence had to do with the title of the last of the piece’s three movements, “Lights Out,” an event that signaled the end of the composition.

The other twentieth-century compositions did not hold up very well. However, in fairness to the memory of the composers, I feel it important to observe that the program book provided absolutely no information about their works being performed. Indeed, nothing more than a biographical sketch was provided; and that was sadly inadequate in preparing for the experience of listening to either of the two pieces on the program.

“Theraps” is a Greek word for healing, but relevance to the music is unclear. Xenakis, who taught at Indiana University, wrote a book, which was originally published in French and then translated into English as Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition for publication by the Indiana University Press. Sadly, the book is heavily focused on probability theory, with the occasional nod to abstract algebra and a few intimations of computer programming.

None of this would inform the experience of listening to “Theraps.” Indeed, my own experience reflected on whether Xenakis wanted to compensate for the fact that Luciano Berio had not written a “Sequenza” composition for the bass. As to the Henze offering, presumably it was acknowledging a historical event; but, in the absence of any program notes, the attentive listener could only make educated guesses.

Sadly, the CNMAT offerings never rose to the level of Worn’s performances. More often than not, these seemed to have more to do with playing with technology, rather than harnessing that technology for the sake of making music. This was particularly the case with Lo’s composition, which encouraged the audience to move around, using those gestures to create the score that Worn was playing in real time.

Only in Nakamura’s “Kusottare!” was technology kept to a minimum, working just with video enhancement. My own impression of this composition was that it was a butoh realization of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in the “Scottish play” (Macbeth) by William Shakespeare. Nakamura made her first appearance an a costume that included lengthy sheets of paper with some arcane notation. She subsequently shredded those sheets, handing out the shreds to members of the audience as part of the exit process. Since I was one of the recipients of a shred, I can share it with the readers:

SFCMP to Host Next Partnership with CNMAT

Next month will begin with the third collaboration that will bring together the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) with composers currently working at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), based at the University of California at Berkeley. SFCMP has committed itself to providing a platform for presenting new electro-acoustic works by current CNMAT composers. The contributing composers for this program will be (in order of appearance) as follows:

1. Eda Er: “Too Much of a Woman,” scored for solo voice, electronics, amplified objects, and video
2. Kevin CK Lo: “The Audience Plays Itself,” scored for solo bass, electronics, cameras, and projection gear
3. Aine Nakamura: “Kusottare!,” scored for solo voice and electronics

These pieces will be interleaved with two works composed in the last quarter of the twentieth century and a premiere performance.

The premiere has been composed Richard Worn, who plays bass for SFCMP. The title of his new work is “Apocoletric;” and, following up on the CNMAT visitors, he has scored the piece for bass and electronics. He will also play the two twentieth-century selections, both composed for solo bass. The program will begin with Hans Werner Henze’s “San Biagio 9 Agosto Ore.” The other offering will be “Theraps,” composed by Iannis Xenakis.

The concert will begin at 3 p.m. on Sunday, December 4. The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street, a short walk from the corner of Mission Street, where there is a BART station and bus lines running along both Mission and 16th Streets. General admission will be $35 with $15 for students showing valid identification. City Box Office has created a Web page for purchase of both categories of tickets.

PIVOT Concludes with Dazzling Violin-Cello Music

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Jay Campbell (from the San Francisco Performances event page for last night’s concert)

Last night in Herbst Theatre the San Francisco Performances PIVOT series concluded, as it began, with a duo of string instruments. Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and cellist Jay Campbell prepared a program that, like the first program of the series, explored the contrasts between past and present. This time, however, the “present” was about as immediate as one could expect, with the second performance of a new composition by Hungarian composer Márton Illés. (The first performance had taken place the preceding evening in Santa Barbara.)

The composition was the third in Illés’ Én-kör series of short pieces scored for two or three instruments. The first was written for two trumpets and horn, and the second was a duo for saxophone and harp. This latest piece thus involved Illés’ first venture into bowed strings for his project. From an information-theoretic point of view, the composition ranked a high entropy score, meaning simply that Illés was throwing at the attentive listener far more than could be conceived as order over the course of a single brief listening experience. It was the sort of piece that would have benefitted from having a second playing immediately after the first, but it was clear that both Kopatchinskaja and Campbell deserved a rest from the intensity they had brought to their performance.

Taken as a whole, the program was a well-balanced mixture of the familiar with the unfamiliar. Thus, the Illés premiere was preceded by Maurice Ravel’s duo sonata. Composing this piece seems to have been a challenge for Ravel. While it consists of four relatively short movements, he worked on the piece between 1920 and 1922 and was uncertain about the results. The piece is usually given a sober reading that plays up the textures of the violin and cello lines weaving among each other.

Last night’s reading, on the other hand, was anything but sober. The give-and-take between the violin and cello parts was attacked vigorously by both players with bowing techniques that bordered on the frighteningly violent. Yet the violence (if you can call it that) was more of a cartoonish nature; and, as the music progressed, the listener was drawn into the Looney Tunes world of Bugs Bunny consistently outwitting Elmer Fudd, except that each instrument got to alternate in taking the roles of Bugs and Elmer. As a result, the attentive listener could definitely appreciate the intricacy of all the technique behind Ravel’s score; but it was the off-the-wall rhetoric of the approach that Kopatchinskaja and Campbell took to their execution that made the experience both absorbing and hysterically funny in equal measure.

Much of the program involved contrasts between the distant past and more recent compositions. Thus, two of the pieces from the 24 duos that Jörg Widmann composed for violin and cello were framed between transcriptions of early two-part counterpoint documented in the eleventh-century Winchester Troper and a fantasia by Orlando Gibbons. (When was the last time that two different Widmann compositions were played in Herbst and Davies Symphony Hall, respectively, within days of each other?) Widmann’s capacity for wit may well have inspired the approach that Kopatchinskaja and Campbell brought to their Ravel performance (which immediately followed the Gibbons selection); and, as a result, there was very much a sense of contrast between the wild abandon of the recent past with the far more sobering rhetoric of the early compositions.

In the second half of the program, a transcription of a chanson by Guillaume de Machaut was framed by very early compositions by Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti. Both of these pieces were short and drew upon folk sources, Greek and Hungarian, respectively. Thus, both of them tended to undermine the usual expectations that one brings to listening to either of these adventurous composers. However, Ligeti’s Hungarian “folk spirit” provided a retrospective reflection when the program concluded with Zoltán Kodály’s Opus 7 duo for violin and cello. Consequently, the entire program emerged as an intricate journey in which both past and present and contrasting emotional dispositions were elegantly interleaved.

The encore selection was taken from the keyboard music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Kopatchinskaja was not more specific; and, as many know, “Bach-the-son” composed a lot of keyboard music. The entire selection was played at a barely audible pizzicato, almost as if the performers decided to poke fun at the very convention of playing encores. (For that matter, there seemed to be no need to identify which of the many Gibbons fantasias was the one played during the first half of the program. Perhaps Kopatchinskaja and Campbell were being just as prankish about the very nature of a recital as they were in their approaches to performance.)

SFCMP to Conclude Season with 4-Concert Weekend

Pauline Oliveros and Steven Schick (courtesy of SFCMP)

As was announced at the beginning of the season, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) will conclude its 2017–18 season with a series of four concerts over the course of a single weekend. These concerts will celebrate two landmark occasions: the 85th anniversary of the birth of composer Pauline Oliveros and the conclusion of Steven Schick’s tenure as SFCMP’s Artistic Director. Presented as part of the at the CROSSROADS series, the offerings for each of the concerts will be as follows:

Concert #1: The featured work will be the world premiere of “Cold mountains, one belt, heartbreak green,” composed by Carolyn Chen for bass flute, violin, cello, and percussion under an SFCMP commission. The program will also present two “legacy” compositions, Galina Ustvolskaya’s “grand” duet for piano and cello (composed in 1957) and Luciano Berio’s 1964 Folk Songs collection. There will also be a performance of Xavier Beteta’s “La Catedrale Abandonata,” composed in 2015.

Concert #2: Oliveros will be honored with a performance of “The Witness,” a one-hour composition created in 1980. The program will also include world-premiere performances of three pieces inspired by Oliveros, all written by Bay Area composers under the age of 30. These will be Danny Clay’s “Playbook,” John Ivers’ “Bellow, Cycle,” and Nathan Chamberlain’s “Dawn Chorus.”

Concert #3: Schick will give a solo recital at which he will perform the world premiere of a new work by Celeste Oram. Other percussion pieces will include Vinko Globokar’s “?Corporel” and Iannis Xenakis’ “Psappha.” He will also perform selections from Kurt Schwitters’ four-movement “Ursonate.”

Concert #4: The final offerings will be a performance of Morton Feldman’s 90-minute “Crippled Symmetry,” scored for flute, percussion, and keyboardist alternating between piano and celesta.

The first two concerts will take place on Friday, March 23, followed by the second two on Saturday, March 24. On both evenings the first concert will begin at 7 p.m. followed by the second at 9 p.m. All events will take place in Z Space, located in NEMIZ (NorthEast Mission Industrial Zone) at 450 Florida Street. All of these events will be free to those who subscribed to the full season, and members will be entitled to a 20% discount. Tickets for a single concert will be $25 with a $14 rate for students. Tickets for any two concerts will be $40 with a $24 rate for students. A pass for the entire weekend will be $65 with at $38 rate for students.

That pass will also include a Farewell Reception and Toast to honor Schick. If purchased separately, a ticket for the reception will be $25. That reception will take place prior to Schick’s recital on Saturday, beginning at 5:30 p.m. The first concert on Friday will be preceded by the final How Music is Made event of the season. There will be an open rehearsal of Chen’s composition at 5:30 p.m., and Schick will engage in conversation with Chen for half an hour beginning at 6 p.m. There will be no charge for either of these events. Z Space has created a single event page for all advance purchase of tickets online.

Who's Afraid of Arnold Schoenberg?

I was stuck by the fact that the music review in today's San Francisco Chronicle managed to account for just about everything that happened at last Thursday's matinee concert and the SoundBox event that same evening except for the performance of Arnold Schoenberg's Opus 9b chamber symphony in its orchestral version. Given that John Adams' chamber symphony (on the same matinee program) was a product of the composer trying to learn the Schoenberg piece well enough to conduct it, this struck me as at least a little bit negligent. Nevertheless, I have to confess that any of the versions of the Schoenberg (including Eduard Steuermann's solo piano transcription) remain more opaque to me than any of the hypertrophied abstractions of Iannis Xenakis. In fact, yesterday was the first day I could detect one of Schoenberg's motif's lurking in Adams' score. So, if Virgil Thomson believed that we should write about music in order to explain, I have to confess that this particular Schoenberg piece is still beyond my capacity for explanation. Still, I once gave advice to a high school student that could be distilled into a single sentence: Write what you remember. At least memory served me with the ability to detect one instance of the presence of the Schoenberg in the Adams, even if I have no idea if any more exist. That meant that I could not allow myself to ignore either Schoenberg's music or its impact on Adams' music!

Adventures in the Archives

Where serious listening is concerned, EMI has one of the most interesting collections of archives that one is likely to encounter. I first appreciated this back when I was living in Singapore and accumulated, one by one, the three volumes (each with three CDs) of The Elgar Edition, which is the best (only?) recorded document of Edward Elgar as conductor of his own music. Amazon.com lists all of these as "Currently unavailable," which is too bad from a historical point of view but understandable in the context of the limitations of recording technology. Recently I have used my Examiner.com pulpit to wax enthusiastic over the more recent releases of the complete recordings that Pablo Casals made for EMI, with particular emphasis on the documents of his trio performances with Alfred Cortot and Jacques Thibaud, and the even more exhaustive Mstislav Rostropovich collection, which includes not only all of his EMI sessions but also the recordings he brought with him when he left the Soviet Union. Both the Casals and Rostropovich boxes are still available; and serious listeners have much to learn from both of them, particularly in comparing their respective approaches to the Johann Sebastian Bach suites for unaccompanied cello.

More recently, EMI has been putting out 2-CD sets for those with an interest in archives but a more limited budget. Thus, the Casals recordings of the Bach suites are available as a separate package, which is also the case for the Rostropovich recordings. Similarly, the first two CDs in The Walton Edition, which feature William Walton conducting his violin and viola concertos (both with Yehudi Menuhin as soloist), his first symphony, and "Belshazzar's Feast," are available separately. More interesting, however, is the 2-CD collection of the music of Arnold Schoenberg as interpreted by three conductors with three different points of view, John Barbirolli, Daniel Barenboim, and Simon Rattle.

I have been reflecting on this packaging because I have spent almost three months facing the prospect of writing an Examiner.com piece for the release of such a collection for Iannis Xenakis. This composer has been on my mind ever since I encountered a copy of Musiques Formelles in the library during my student days, which left me so perplexed that I wondered if the only way I would be able to get my head around it would be to translate it into English. I was far from alone in my puzzlement. Even George Balanchine, who probably encountered the same vinyl recording I had purchased (now in a CD version), seems to have decided that the only way to understand "Metastasis" and "Pithoprakta" would be to translate them into choreography. I never got beyond seeing that choreography in rehearsal, which left me with only two impressions. The first was that Balanchine seemed more influenced by the diagrams in Musiques Formelles than he had been by the music; and the second was intense sympathy for the rehearsal pianist trying to get a piano to play an approximation (possibly Balanchine's) of what Xenakis was demanding of a full orchestra. My procrastination in producing my own English version of Xenakis' texts was eventually rewarded by the efforts of Christopher Butchers, who took on the task with Xenakis' cooperation; and in 1971 Indiana University Press published (under the title Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, now available in a revised edition by Pendragon) an English version of the six essays in Musiques Formelles along with three more recent ones. By the time I purchased this volume I was teaching computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and found myself "volunteered" to prepare a seminar session on Xenakis. This turned out to be little more than an explanation of how Xenakis was using flow charts and what was lurking in the FORTRAN printouts contained in the book.

The fact is that this kind of algorithmic approach to formalism was very popular half a century ago. Pierre Boulez had indulged in experiments of his own, although, ironically, the task fell to György Ligeti to document the actual algorithms in Die Reihe. (Was he, too, "volunteered" for this task?) However, where Boulez was concerned, I could still address the nature of the listening experience without descending into all of the algorithmic detail; and I have yet to make such a claim about Xenakis. This is why, in this case, I really did volunteer to write about the recent EMI release. I know from having listened to the Harmonia Mundi CD of his Oresteïa that he can be a very visceral composer; but this composition may be an exception, because he was working with a dramatic narrative, rather than with formalism for its own sake. All I know for certain is that my current plan is to avoid any consultation of his writings while engaged in listening to the EMI CDs. I have no idea what will result, but I think I have finally reached the point where I am ready to undertake the adventure.

Symphonic Division of Labor

When Donald Francis Tovey wrote the entry on "Music" for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he floated the hypothesis that the history of music could be examined in terms of the efforts of composers to sustain listeners' attention over longer and longer periods of time. Tovey was probably not aware of Anton Webern's reversal of this trend, although the article does cite Paul Hindemith, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams and includes a rather dismissive paragraph about jazz. I have always felt this hypothesis bears considering for both its examples and counterexamples, and I think it provides an excellent lens through which to examine much of the late work of Franz Schubert. After all, for all of his reputation as a master of the small scale of the art song, his last years yielded works of symphonic proportion in unexpected settings, such as the piano sonata (particularly G major (D. 894) and B flat major (D. 960)), piano trio (E flat major (D. 929)), and the C major string quintet (D. 956). These were all experiments in extending the time scale of his compositions; but I use the word "experiments" because, for all the virtues of these pieces, they have their problems.

I first became aware of such problems when I was turning pages for Edward Auer at a performance of the D. 929 trio. Before the performance he sat down with me to review the cuts he had made in the final movement. My academic training had taught me that all cuts were sacrilegious; but Auer was a pragmatist who believe that there was only so much flat-out repetition that one could expect an audience to endure. With my own training having now receded further into the past, I am willing to admit that he had a point (regardless of any feeling I may have about Philip Glass).

When we move from the limited resources of a solo instrument or chamber ensemble to the full strength of a symphony orchestra, as is the case with the D. 944 "Great" C major symphony, however, there are different ways to be pragmatic. Schubert must have been aware of the ways in which the Mannheim school had cultivated innovative approaches to realizing a crescendo, just as his predecessors Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were; and, as a result, while there are extended passages of near-maddening repetition in the "Great," they are usually there to fuel the increasing strength of an extended crescendo, in the tradition of the "Mannheim Roller." This poses a major challenge to performing this symphony, particularly in its final movement, where Schubert applies the "Mannheim Roller" to an effect far more extended than that of the Mannheim days. If one cuts the passage, the crescendo loses its impact; if one does not cut, there is a real problem of the performers getting exhausted by the repetitions and the weakening of their ability to sustain the crescendo and deliver its final impact.

Last night I heard Michael Tilson Thomas approach this problem with an innovative solution that I have never previously heard. Rather than cut the excessive repetitions, he divided them among his musicians. If a passage was played twice, it was played by the second-chair performers at each stand in the string section the first time and then by the first-chair performers the second (or vice versa). This provided an interesting strategy for making sure that all the performers were properly managing their energy. In terms of the overall crescendos, the strategy seems to have worked very well. It also provided an interesting perspective for those of us close enough to the stage to see it: the idea of a back-and-forth trade-off, almost like a call-and-response, that was take place at each stand. Even if uniformity of sound across the entire section is an ideal of symphonic performance, one could detect at least a hint of two colors in slight contrast, which, through their alternation, made the shape of the overall crescendo all the more interesting.

I was sufficiently blown away by this effect that, on the way out of Davies Symphony Hall, I seized the opportunity to ask one of the first violinists whether or not this was, indeed, a new thing. He told me that he had never played the symphony this way before and that he, at least, liked they way it worked. You could certainly see that all of the string players seemed to be enjoying themselves, rather than laboring under the sort of strain one usually expects from a Marine Drill Sergeant. Now, to be fair, I am not sure how much of this was all in my head. In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman wrote only about the "brisk, blazing finish" of the final movement, without saying anything about what made it blaze. However, I prefer to think of this experience as a demonstration that every performance should be approached in terms of problems that need to be solved and that even the old problems can admit of new solutions.

A similar strategy was also demonstrated at the beginning of last night's concert, which was a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's second orchestral suite (BWV 1067). This suite is almost more like a concerto due to its focus on a solo flute; but Thomas took this one step further, turning it into a sort of "Brandenburg Concerto," by assigning some of the string parts to first-desk-first-chair soloists. While the string section was radically reduced for this performance, this idea of engaging the flute soloists in "conversation" with other soloists, usually in the second iteration of a section of a binary-form movement, was highly effective. It also struck me as a good strategy for dealing with modern instruments, since the problem of balancing sound with such instruments is different than it would be with period instruments, just by virtue of the acoustic properties of those instruments. Of course the spotlight was on Acting Principal Flutist Tim Day, but for me what made this performance work was the way in which it came off as an extended conversation among all of the performers, as opposed to a dialog between soloists and accompanists.

The bulk of the Chronicle review focused on "À l'Île de Gorée," by Iannis Xenakis, a work composed in 1986 for amplified harpsichord and chamber ensemble. Thomas felt a need to preface the performance with some remarks that dwelled on Xenakis' training in mathematics and the impact of that training on a highly formalized approach to composition. This is the usual way that Xenakis is introduced to those unfamiliar with his work, but I think it is necessary to put his formalizations into perspective. Between 1955 and 1968 he wrote many essays about the "stochastic" approach he was taking to composition and even the use of the computer as a tool for pursuing this approach. These essays were translated into English and collected in the Indiana University Press book, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition. As the "token mathematician" in a seminar on post-WWII composition that I attended at the University of Pennsylvania, I had to prepare material about these essays. Alas, Xenakis was not big on writing skills (I checked out the original French for some of the essays) and his tendency towards a rather heavy-handed polemic tended to obscure the fact that the content of his essays ran the gamut from the naive to the embarrassing.

The good news, however, is that, once Xenakis got all of his theoretical ranting out of his system, he become more focused on composing music, rather than translating theory into music notation. I always felt that the best example of his break with his own theories was his Oresteïa, which translated Aeschylus into opera. There is nothing I would like more than an opportunity to see this opera. Just listening to the Salabert/Actuels CD left me with a more gut-wrenching sense of this particular Greek drama than any staging I have ever seen. According to my notes this large-scale work was first performed a year after "À l'Île de Gorée" was composed.

However, while this latter work is, to some extent, intended as a programmatic commentary on the slave trade (Gorea being the island off the coast of Senegal from which slave ships departed), the programmatic nature is far less transparent than that of Oresteïa. Thus, when faced with the inevitable how-did-you-like-it question at intermission, I could only fall back on an answer I have used before, "I really do not know, but do know that I would really like to hear it again." I was certainly impressed with Elisabeth Chojnacka's skills at negotiating an obviously complex harpsichord part; but, since the piece was written for her, I was more impressed at the rapport that she maintained with Thomas and the Symphony musicians he was conducting. I have to believe that her acknowledgement of the chamber ensemble while taking her bows was sincere. Any other impressions I have of this music, however, can only be a reflection of Harold Bloom's "agony of influence." I felt I was in some middle ground where many of the harpsichord gestures invoked memories of Francis Poulenc's Concert Champêtre, while there was an unmistakable flavor of Stravinsky (particularly his piano concertos) in the sonorities of the accompanying chamber ensemble. I know that there is more to this music than those superficial impression; but I shall need more listening opportunities to get at that "more!"

This, of course, gets at one of the most important functions that live performances can serve. Yes, it is always good to hear the familiar in a new light (to mix metaphors). However, it is also good to be exposed to the totally unfamiliar. "À l'Île de Gorée" provided Thomas with the opportunity to expose us to a new kind of unfamiliarity, so to speak; and I was delighted to be there for his doing it.

Bringing Mahler to Michael's House

When Queen Elizabeth invoked the phrase "Annus Horribilis" to describe the year 1992 in her speech at Guildhall to mark the 40th anniversary of her Accession, she was speaking from an intensely personal point of view. However, there are so many ways in which the phrase may be applied to 2007 from a global point of view that the last thing I want out of end-of-year journalism is that inevitable flood of retrospective impressions. For this reason the only page I felt was worth reading in the "Datebook" section of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle was the weekly full-page advertisement placed by the San Francisco Symphony to announce the coming events at Davies Symphony Hall. Looking forward to something is the only way to drive off the mean reds that are an inevitable part of this year's retrospection.

January promises to be a truly fascinating month at Davies. Much of the reputation of Michael Tilson Thomas here has been made by his performances of the Mahler canon, so it might almost be an act of chutzpah for any other conductor to bring Mahler into "Michael's house" (as they would say, or used to say, in the National Basketball Association). Nevertheless, this will happen twice during the month of January; and I suspect that I am far from the only "good listener" (as Stravinsky had put it) anxiously anticipating both events. The more ambitious is the second one: Mariss Jansons conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam in the fifth symphony.

Ironically, the last time I heard the Concertgebouw was also for Mahler. It was about 25 years ago, back when Bernard Haitink was "running the shop." My own story actually began on a business trip to Den Hague, at which my host expressed surprise that I would travel all the way to Holland and not try to visit the Concertgebouw. We consulted the newspaper and saw that Haitink was conducting the Mahler seventh symphony. He then had his assistant arrange a ticket for me with absolutely no success: the demand for Haitink's Mahler performances was far too high. The following season, however, the Concertgebouw Orchestra visited Carnegie Hall to give that same concert, thus fulfilling Edward Albee's proposition that "the American Dream" is all about getting a second chance. This time I ordered a ticket as soon as I could and was awe-struck for the entirety of this work that is notoriously unwieldy in just about every imaginable way. In comparison the fifth symphony is a far more orderly composition, but it deploys its orchestral resources in such abundance that it is another one of those works that will never submit to the limitations of recording technology. Thomas recently demonstrated this with the San Francisco Symphony, and now Jansons is bringing the Concertgebouw Orchestra here is establish another point of view of that same mass of orchestral complexity. My only frustration is that the performance will not take place until January 28!

There is another irony in the concert that Jansons has prepared for the preceding night. He will be conducting Hector Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique a little more than a month after the San Francisco Symphony performance under Thomas. Once again, as I have written, this is a work for which there is no substitute for a live performance. It also demands a radically different approach than any composition by Mahler does, so San Francisco will be getting an excellent opportunity to survey a broad scope of Jansons' capabilities.

Nevertheless, it is one thing to come into Michael's house with your own orchestra and another to conduct his orchestra. This is what Myung-Whun Chung will be doing during the days immediately preceding the Concertgebouw visit. He will be conducting the San Francisco Symphony in his interpretation of the Mahler first; and, just to make the entire program a bit more interesting, he will precede the symphony by Olivier Messiaen's "L'Ascension." For sound alone this should be raising all sorts of challenges for the Symphony, and it will certainly be interesting to hear how Chung leads them through all of those challenges. As a reader of William Blake, I have to wonder whether or not this evening will turn into a marriage of the heaven of Messiaen's mystical pieties and the hell of Mahler's stark worldly realities.

Fortunately, I do not think we need fear that Thomas will be upstaged this coming month. The week before Chung brings out the Messiaen, Thomas will be conducting Iannis Xenakis' "À l'ile de Gorée;" and the preceding week I shall finally get my opportunity to hear Deborah Voigt perform with the Symphony doing the "Four Last Songs" of Richard Strauss. If we add to all these other events the visit that Robert Mann will be paying to the San Francisco Conservatory at the end of January, then this may be an opportunity to enjoy an extensive music education all crammed into the temporal interval of 31 days!