Author: Michael McDonagh

Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Opera, San Francisco

APPOMATTOX: The War Within

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Human behavior’s funny. The more we try to change the more we don’t seem able to. Are we cursed to repeat the same mistakes in our private lives — with lovers, friends — as well as in our public ones? Are we genetically condemned to disjunction, discord, and war, like Sisyphus trying to keep that enormous rock from crushing him each day? Philip Glass’ SF Opera commission, APPOMATTOX, which world premiered 5 October, and which I caught 16 October, seems to accept these things as givens. Its ostensible subject is Robert E. Lee’s surrender to U.S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on 9 April 1865, and its subsequent impact. But its central question seems to be how can we change history if we can’t even change ourselves?   

These are weighty questions, and Glass’ music addresses them with seriousness and point. The opening figure for double basses and wind mixtures is immediately affecting. Then Julia Dent Grant (soprano Rhoslyn Jones) emerges from a backlit alcove in Riccardo Hernandez’s umbrous metal set, her posture contained, “The spring campaign ___  In four short years I have grown to dread those words … ”  She joins four other women — Mary Custis Lee (soprano Elza van den Heever), her daughter Julia Agnes (soprano Ji Young Yang), Mary Todd Lincoln (soprano Heidi Melton), and her black seamstress Elizabeth Keckley (mezzo Kendall Gladen) — in an almost Baroque lament on the sorrows of war — ” never before has so much blood been drained … Let this be the last time.. ” The women who stand behind their men and keep it all together are, of course, the unsung heroines of any war, and Glass’ immediate focus on them, signals this piece’s unwavering depth.

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by Michael McDonagh
Composers, Contemporary Classical

Music From the Heart

Americans like to sit on their hands. Even when they’re telling the truth you have to worry. Are you trying to take something from me, steal my identity, assault my assiduously guarded self-image? I may be feeling something, but you’ll have to read between the lines. God forbid I should tell you what and why, and if I do it will likely be too late. These curious thoughts came to mind when I caught Lebanese oud master-composer-singer Marcel Khalife and his ensemble for the second time — the first was at New York’s Town Hall in 2004 — at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater.

Why? Because Khalife’s music goes straight to the heart, and never holds back, much less apologize for what it feels. Which isn’t to downplay its appeal to the mind. But its principal goal is to connect with the heart, and hearts and minds and bodies were certainly reached in this concert. Artists are people, after all, and wouldn’t you rather spend time with someone who can express than with someone who can’t? 

The American media likes to portray Arabs as unlettered savages, but that’s hardly the truth. Arabic music, after all, is one of the oldest, richest traditions on the planet, and Khalife has devoted his life to expanding and deepening these traditions. With about 80 maqamat, or scale /modes, this music is complex, sophisticated, and highly expressive. Khalife drew on these riches in his latest nearly hour long ensemble piece, Taqasim, where he was joined by his son, Bachar, on Arabic percussion, and guest bassist Mark Helias. Taqasim means improvisation, and this three-part piece is an instrumental evocation of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work, which Khalife has set many times. It centers on the mid-lower range of the oud, and bass, with discreet, but colorful contributions from Arabic percussion like riqq ( tambourine ), and assorted drums. Lines coalesce and vanish, drones give way to unisons, the bass is sometimes played like a drum. The dream of Al-Andalus comes and goes.                   

Another, perhaps pan-Arabic, dream also seemed to be conjured, in further largely Darwish settings, which Khalife sang on the second half of the program — the primeval My Mother, with its wonderfully built contributions from Khalife’s other son, Rami, on piano, and the very famous Passport,  which had an even more brilliantly structured and stylistically varied solo from him. The nearly packed house was also big on audience participation — a Khalife concert specialty —  and yet another indication that Arabs aren’t wont to sit on their hands.  I Walk (lyric, Samih el-Qassim ), which is a kind of hymn of defiance and solidarity, got a call and response treatment from the balcony and main floor, while the closing O Fisherman, Haila, Haila ( lyrics by Khalife’s Al-Mayadine ensemble ), had a thick driving intensity from piano — hammered chords — Khalife pere, Helias, and Bachar Khalife’s Arabic bass drum.

We in the West like to think that music is principally melody and harmony, though its wellspring has always been rhythm, which is something that Arabic music has never forgotten. Western musicians — and especially American ones — can learn lots from this music. And it isn’t afraid to communicate, and touch the heart, on the deepest possible level. Khalife is the first Arab to ever win the UNESCO Artist For Peace Award, and it’s easy to see why.His San Francisco stop is but one of many on his Taqasim Tour. 

Michael McDonagh is a San Francisco-based poet and writer on the arts, whose poems have appeared in several places, including Stanford’s Mantis 3: Poetry and Performance, which ran 3 of the 6 poems Lisa Scola Prosek set as the song cycle, Miniature Portraits. He has done two poem-picture books with SF-based painter Gary Bukovnik, and has wriitten 2 pieces for the theatre — Touch and Go,and Sight Unseen.  McDonagh is a staff writer on the arts for the SF-based BAY AREA REPORTER. He is the sole writer for www.alexnorthmusic.com; and contributes to www.classical-music-review.org, www.21st-centurymusic.com; New Music Connoisseur; and www.sfcv.org.

by Michael McDonagh
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

The Intimate Side of Philip Glass

Turning 70 is a big deal for most people, and especially so for Philip Glass, whose birthday is being celebrated worldwide big time. He’s just been feted in New York by Music At The Anthology (MATA), and Groningen, Holland, is putting on a Glass Festival.  The composer and The Philip Glass Ensemble performed his massive compendium of minimalist moves, Music in 12 Parts (1971-74), this summer in the Hague and the San Francisco Bay Area pays its homage with the world premiere of his SF Opera commission, Appomattox, this coming Friday, October 5.  

Glass is such a big name, and  pervasive influence–I caught a chord progression in a dance mix lifted straight from him in a bar–that it’s almost hard to see the trees for the forest.  But Glass emerged clearly from that penumbral place in Philip Glass: An Evening of Chamber Music, which kicked off San Francisco Performances’ season at Herbst Theatre on Friday night.  And all the frenzied Zeitgeist schtick on Van Ness– couples out on first — will there be a second?– dates, bobbing heads on cell phones, opera patrons running to catch the curtain, and monster traffic–was happily left outside. 

Glass, mike in hand, (“is it me, or the machine?) began by announcing a program change. He’d begin with 4 sections of the 5-part  Metamorphosis (1988), for solo piano, and not play either of the 2 Etudes (1994) planned. Metamorphosis, though it uses material from the composer’s score to Errol Morris’ doc The Thin Blue Line (1988), takes its title from the Kafka short story of the same name, for which Glass wrote scores for concurrent theater productions in Brazil and the Netherlands. And though the music stands proudly on its own, its lines and harmonies suggest the haunted atmosphere of Kafka’s tale–Gregor Samsa’s alienation from the world, and his dogged journey to a kind of transcendence. 

And Glass, sitting erect at his Steinway concert grand Model D, brought its many beauties to light–the poignant hesitations in #1 struck the heart, he made the massive floating harmonies in #2 acutely affecting through discreet pedalling, his attacks gave the bell-like paralllel chords of #3 power, and his command of color gave #4 its dramatic weight. Glass has spoken of his drifting sense of meter, and this was certainly apparent throughout; pianists like Alec Karis and Michael Riesman would surely have been metronomically regular. Metamorphosis has sometimes been described as Satie-like, though the equally private worlds of Schubert’s Impromptus and Brahms’ Intermezzi, come strongly to mind. My first encounter with Metamorphosis live was when Glass played the entire set ,as Molissa Fenley danced, at The Unitarian Church, which is a little more than a stone’s throw from Herbst.  But what sticks most is how the music the composer has written in the intervening years has colored his gestures when he plays this piece now.  

Next came the West Coast premiere of Songs and Poems for Cello, which Glass wrote for NY-based new music star Wendy Sutter of Bang On A Can fame, who plays a wide range of works from uptown –actually West Village people like Elliott Carter–to downtown composers. This is a thoroughly demanding piece, which Sutter played from memory, and which, with its sense of duende–Lorca”s term for anything  springing from deep within– seemed to evoke music as various as Bach, bits of the Suites for Cello (BWV 1007-12), and Brandenburg 6 (1721), as well as Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello (1920-22), and Dohnanyi’s Cello Sonata (1899), which Martha Graham choreographed as Lamentation, without ever resembling any of  these.  Its seven sections–applause broke out in one–were mostly grave, intense, deeply sonorous, and completely lacking in easy effects.  Sutter negotiated its myriad technical–long sustained lines, double-stopping, pizzicati, and focus on different registers, usually sequentially–and expressive difficulties with almost superhuman ease.  

Four interconnecting episodes, or “Tissues”, from Godfrey Reggio’s third and final installment in the QATSI trilogy, Naqoyqatsi (2002), scored here for Glass, piano, Sutter, cello, and PGE percussionist Mick Rossi, followed. One was struck by the cello writing’s resemblance to that in Songs and Poems for Cello, the ultra soft sounds from the keyboard, and the floating sounds Rossi achieved on marimba and celeste. Naqoyqatsi never got the attention it deserved in its initial theatrical release, though Glass’ tour with his ensemble here last year–the film and score were performed by him and his PGE live at Davies–helped to right that wrong. 

Equally atmospheric were the last two offerings–The Orchard, a kind of slow sarabande from Glass’ score for JoAnne Akalitis’ 1991 theatre production of Genet’s The Screens, transcribed here for piano, cello, and percussion, from its original incarnation for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion and cello, and Closing, from Glass’ 1981 record debut on CBS, Glassworks, misunderstood as a pop/crossover piece then, and probably now as well, which Glass and his two fellow musicians played with both point and affection. “How can such a quiet person write such powerful music?” I said to my companion, who sat stock still, hands folded, throughout. Who knows?  But this concert proved beyond the slightest doubt that Glass has always been and remains a chamber musician intent on speaking to his listeners in the most intimate terms. Appomattox, which struck this listener as almost unbearably intimate, when he heard most of its first act at a Sitz-Probe 2 September, will likely fall into this exalted class

by Michael McDonagh
Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, San Francisco

An Italian in San Francisco

Italy has produced great pianists like Busoni, Michelangeli, and Pollini.  Its current pianist in the running for that distinction, Marino Formenti, even hails from Pollini’s hometown, Milan, where he was born in October 1965. Formenti has been dubbed ” a Glenn Gould for the 21st century ” by The LA TIMES’ Mark Swed, which probably refers to his Gould-like obsessive-compulsive absorption in the music he performs, as well as the widely divergent composers he programs.  These traits were certainly center stage in the last of 3 San Francisco Piano Trips programs — the first consisted of Kurtag and 17 other composers — he gave at the De Young Museum’s Koret Auditorium in Golden Gate Park. Would that the museum were beautiful, to say nothing of site specific. Instead its bland forbidding facade sits shopping mall generic — one half expects to see a banner saying “SALE” on it — and its interior has a funny model home smell as if nobody ever lived there or would want to.

Fortunately the Koret is another story entirely. It’s a commodious 269 capacity steeply raked theater, with seats that flip up snugly when you or your neighbor needs to get by. And even better news is that Formenti’s program there, Nothing Is Real — Music for The Present and The Future — was theatrical and worked.

Formenti entered as if from a trap door stage left, clad head to toe in avant garde black, then sat down at the Hamburg Steinway to play Matthias Pintscher’s Monumento — In Memoriam Arthur Rimbaud (1990). The 36 year-old German has apparently been embraced by both the musical right and left, and judged from the evidence of this piece alone, it’s not hard to see why. Here’s a sensitive artist who’s fashioned a work with a wide, though never showy, dynamic range, with beautiful, expressive harmonies, and a firm and probably uncalculated sense of space and line. Formenti’s performance was pellucid and powerful. Next came Music for Piano and Amplified Vessels (1991 ), by the American, Alvin Lucier ( 1931 — ), which sounded like a short, spare lament. This was followed by 2 offerings by Helmut Lachenmann (1935 –), Wiegenmusik (1963), and Guero (1970), which were far more extreme, but less interesting than the previous pieces, yet just as well played. Formenti made a strong case for Hommage a Ligeti, for two pianos, tuned a quarter-tone apart (1985), by Austrian Georg Friedrich Haas (1953-), which he played, arms outstretched, between 2 grands, as both hands went up and down the keyboard incrementally. Ligeti has rarely been a charrming composer, and Haas’ “hommage” lacked that quality in spades. But what it did have going for it was an obsessive focus on conjoined and opposed sonorities, though Glass has explored these things more fully and more interestingly in Music in Similar Motion (1969), and the seminal, rarely heard Music with Changing Parts (1970). Quarte-tones give Arabic music much of its expressive power, and some Western composers who’ve used them, like Alex North, in parts of his film scores like CLEOPATRA (1963), and UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984), have done so with wit and point.

The 3 succeeding pieces by Galina Ustwolskaya (1919 –), Sonatas # 5 (1986), and 6 (1988), and Perduto in una Citta D’Acque  (Lost in a City of Water) ” (1991), by the newly famous Salvatore Sciarrino (1947 –) , were colorful, and Ustwolskaya’s # 5 even seemed to quote Bartok’s 1936  Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Formenti also played Cage’s 1958 Music Walk, and his setting and resetting of radios of vastly different sizes, makes, and hues, was amusing, and focussed the ear on sounds we wouldn’t normally give full attention to. Sciarrino was represented again by Notturno Crudele No. 2 (Cruel Nocturne) (2000) , a stylisitc and coloristic tour de force, and Lucier, once more, by Nothing Is Real (Strawberry Fields Forever) (2000), which was lyric quiet personified. It also brought into very sharp focus the sometimes ahistorical nature of the school stemming from Cage, where everything, as in American life as a whole, has to be now, or next, while the European pieces Formenti played here showed how our neighbors across the pond are as preoccupied as ever with the weight of their histories.

Formenti, who looks like an Italian character actor, has a strong presence, formidable technique — both conventional and extended — and some pieces required him to use his fists, the flat of his hand, or his forearms. His fierce devotion to whatever enters his musical orbit impressed big time. Musicians, and especially pianists, with this breadth, and passion are rare. His audience here listened hard, and responded with grateful applause.

by Michael McDonagh
Contemporary Classical

Spring Forward San Francisco

Everybody likes to grouse about the weather, and East Coasters, who’ve moved to California, may expect sun 24/7. And though that’s never the case here in San Francisco, the climate, and especially the cultural climate on both coasts, does have one very definite thing in common — the dearth of welcome homes for new music, plus a congenial band to spread the word.

New York has the long-running American Composers Orchestra, the S.E.M. Ensemble, and Bang On A Can, and the Bay Area, the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, which has been in operation for three years. Its March 10th concert at San Francisco’s Old First Church showed it going from strength to strength. A Springtime Romance fairly blossomed under music director and co-founder Mark Alburger’s careful, and for him, very relaxed guidance.

Katie Wreede’s 4 poem suite, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Childrens’ Garden, began its life as a viola / soprano duo for the composer, and Lisa Scola Prosek, and joining them here was pianist Alexis Alrich as the third member of their Serafina Trio. Wreede’s settings suggested a kind of childrens’ candor, which Scola Prosek made irresistibly charming with her superlative diction and strong projection; Wreede and Alrich added their simple, flowing parts to the whole. Scola Prosek was represented with another section, Wedding Scene, from her to be performed at San Francisco’s Thick House opera, Belfagor, based on Machiavelli’s comic novella of the same name. SFCCO presented its overture, which features a big bass clarinet solo for Rachel Condry, last December; Condry beguiled with her tone as well as her mastery of her part’s manifold challenges.

The challenge for any theatre or film composer is to make whatever world they enter come alive convincingly as sound, and Scola Prosek’s instincts seem right on the money, whether that world is Periclean Athens, Imperial Rome, or Renaissance Italy, which she conjured “simply” yet effectively with rich sustained harmonies for her vocal quintet — sopranos Maria Mikheyenko and Eliza O’Malley; alto Gar Wai Lee; tenor Aurelio Viscarra; and bass bartone Micah Epps — and her orchestra, which launched the scene with a bright snappy fanfare. Loren Jones’ Dancing On The Brink of the World, San Francisco — 1600 to The Present–was effective–he obviously knows how deliver standard styles — but much less imaginative, while the middle, slow movement, of Alexis Alrich’s Marimba Concerto, which soloist Matthew Cannon played with polish and point, though not baldly eclectic, lacked an overriding sense of personal style.

Chris Carrasco’s The Mind Suite fortunately had one, though its Glassian homages, especially in the inner part writing for strings, were easy to spot and not that interesting, though he may develop — he’s very young — in surprising ways. The big surprise in fact was Erling Wold’s way tongue in cheek Baron Ochs, which despite a veritable melange of styles, still seemed to hang together, unlike his opera Sub Pontio Pilato, which stylewise seemed like a mad dash out the door in mismatched socks. He also seems to have gotten the knack of how to orchestrate effectively for every choir. The two seats I sat in — “stage left” aisle 6 — and the first row of the Old First’s balcony — seemed to offer the same sonic picture: warm music/ audience friendly balances when the scoring was chamber refined, and harsh congealed climaxes when it wasn’t.

by Michael McDonagh
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Opera

Young Caesar in Lust

Any musical work which has a long. complex, and– dare I say it? –troubled history — can’t help but raise a red flag.  Is the artist wrestling with something alive and kicking, or is he or she merely tinkering? Lou Harrsion’s “gay opera” Young Caesar, which began as a 1969 commission from the group Encounters, was first staged as a puppet opera for vocalists and 5 instrumentalists.  A subsequent version, for 11 instrumentalists, onstage singers, and full chorus, followed, and this one, performed by the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus in 1988, was roundly criticized, though the performers, some of whom were “coming out” for the first time in it, embraced the work wholeheartedly. A further revised version for the Lincoln Center Festival, to be directed by Mark Morris, and conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, fell through Yet Harrison ( 1917- 2003 ) persisted — “I’m going to get that work right before I die ” — and French Canadian conductor Nicole Paiement, who premiered  “the final cut”, or Urtext, if you will, in San Francisco in mid-February was an avid midwife in the process. But what are we to make of the final product? Was it worth the wait, or is it too little and too late? A little bit of both, but more of the latter.

What went wrong? Well, judged from what saw or didn’t see — timidity on all sides, as well as narration, recitatives, and spoken texts ad infinitum, which made it sound like a largely 2 hour 41 minute lecture instead of a live theatrical event, which is incredible given the fact that Young Caesar purports to show how the man who’d one day rule the world, started to become that person.  But Robert Gordon’s book fails to deliver the goods, and if the spine of a piece isn’t strong how can it stand up and move, and if the subject, forget style, doesn’t catch fire, all the revisions in the world amount to nothing but window dressing. That’s sad because Harrison has been the important, influential — on Paul Dresher and many others — and sometimes great composer of pieces like Mass to St. Anthony (1939), Varied Trio (1987), Piano Concerto with Selected Orchestra (1985), and the groundbreaking, with Cage, Double Music (1941).

But Harrison’s instrumental writing here for a 17 member pit band, including 5 percussionists, failed to drive the piece forward. Sure, you could argue that this composer isn’t interested in verismo melodramatics, and that he’s all for an Asian-inflected timelessness, and you’de be right, but the music as music, and the drama as  drama, failed to hold the attention. 
                                                                                                    And so we’re stuck with a talky “drama” which covers the coming of age ceremony at 16 of Caesar (tenor Eleazar Rodriguez), the political machinations of his Aunt Julia (mezzo Wendy Hillhouse), his departure for Bithynia — a kingdom bordering the Black Sea in what’s now Turkey — to get ships for General Themus (baritone William O’Neill ), where he meets King Nicomedes IV, Philopater (baritone Eugene Brancoveanu ), has his first and possibly only gay affair — historians, though not Gordon are divided on this — and departs for Rome at age 19, a changed man, poised to conquer the world. But we didn’t see, much less feel that here in director Brian Staufenbiel’s version. Instead we saw a Caesar in an unbecoming white tunic — the ugly, baldly amateurish costumes were by Richard Battle — a Nicomedes who looked like Virginia Mayo’s Helena in Victor Saville’s pic The Silver Chalice  ( 1954 ), and a drag queen, outfitted in a rosy mesh top; a black-robed chorus, who held white masks like lorgnettes — was this supposed to be camp ? — and a Julia with a Bette Midler corona of shocking red republican curls.

The whole production played like an uneasy mix of the amateur and the thoroughly professional. The only real winners here were Branconveanu, who despite the cards being stacked against him, managed to negotiate his part’s high tessitura with skill and point, and project a stage presence which overpowered Rodriguez’s adequately sung though barely stage present one — perhaps his character’s supposed to be ” a work in progress” ? — Hillhouse’s amusing Julia, Ensemble Parallele’s 19-member male chorus, and Paiement’s expert orchestra, especially in the second act overture. Strong solo turns were delivered by Yvonne Fong Lai on tack piano and celesta, Jennifer Cass on harp, Katie Rife on marimba, Graeme Jennings, violin, and Katrina Weeks, viola. But the erotic charge this piece should have had was largely missng — Caesar and Nicomedes’  bedding looked accidental and no fun despite a glaring scarlet sheet — though a white thong dance between Lawrence Pech and Peter Brandenhoff — and a still as marble pose by Peter Brandenhoff  who seemed the very embodient of Apollo struck paydirt.  I’m sure the 1st century BCE was more interesting than what we got here.

Even Mankiewicz’s much maligned, Cleopatra (1963), despite its second half longueurs, is a lot more fun, and in every way more probing, even profound  — the phenomenal score’s by Alex North. Would that Young Caesar’s book, conception, and yes, music, ascended, even briefly, to its genuine heights.

Ensemble Parallle will perform Young Caesar again, on April 3rd, 2007 at The UCSC Recital Hall, University of California, Santa Cruz. ph.  831.459.2159. http://events.ucsc.edu.tickets/. 

by Michael McDonagh