Songs and Schemas

I finally had a chance to attend an Other Minds concert: the first of a two-concert series devoted to the American composer Henry Cowell. Other Minds is one of the Bay Area’s great new music organizations, and for this concert they came down to the Peninsula. Henry Cowell was born and raised in Menlo Park, just a few miles from the Portola Valley concert venue.

The program covered chamber music from all eras of Cowell’s career: from the famous early piano pieces like The Tides of Manaunaun from 1912, through wonderful 1930s chamber works (Toccanta and the String Quartet No. 4 “United”), on to some late songs from the 1950s (Thou Art the Tree of Life and Spring Pools).

Sarah Cahill performed a set of six of Cowell’s solo piano pieces. This is Cowell’s best-known repertoire, and I knew many of these pieces from recordings, but I never had heard them live. What a treat to hear them in concert: the sensuality of the sound and the intricacy of the performance comes across so much better in a live performance.

As a singer, the absolute highlight of the program for me was the set of eight Cowell songs, superbly sung by mezzo-soprano Wendy Hillhouse with Josephine Gandolfi on piano. The set covered 5 decades worth of songs in a beautifully arranged sequence. It was great to hear how Ms. Hillhouse went to the Library of Congress with an early version of Finale loaded onto her PowerBook to transcribe 50 of Cowell’s 200+ songs from the manuscripts. She had been entranced by the music after singing some of the published songs at a Cabrillo Festival concert honoring Lou Harrison, but only a dozen or so of Cowell’s songs have been published. Harrison put her in touch with Cowell’s musical executor to access the unpublished songs during a year when she was singing with the opera in Washington, D.C.

The whole program was filled with great music in fine performances. Cowell fans in San Francisco can hear the second concert of the series on Friday at the Presidio Chapel. Thanks to Charles Amirkhanian and Other Minds for bringing Cowell’s music back home to the Peninsula!

After attending one of the San Francisco Symphony’s performances of the Mahler 8 last year, I posted: “If the magic of these performances makes it onto disc, this could be a Mahler 8 recording for the ages.”

Well, it did and it is. If you love Mahler you really want to get this recording. A piece as immense and physical as the Mahler 8 is particularly elusive to record. One problem is that if you get the impact of the extremes, you tend to flatten the details in the middle, or vice versa. I have heard several superb performances of large works that were being recorded for CD where somehow the recording lost an essential part of the performance magic. This disc meets the Mahler 8 challenge brilliantly.

The soloists are a dream team – the strongest group I have heard in this piece, sounding great both separately and together. They are topped off by the luxury casting of Laura Claycomb in the 2-line role of Mater gloriosa, way up in the stage right balcony. The chorus and orchestra sound exquisite. Part II in particular is amazing. In other performances it can be discursive and lose my interest at times. In this performance everything maintains a core energy and direction, and the time just flies by despite its length. This aspect of the performance really struck me both in the concert hall and in listening to the CD at home. Michael Tilson Thomas is extraordinary here.

The Adagio from Mahler’s 10th that starts the recording is another amazing performance. I wish I had been at one of the concerts where they recorded that, but you can’t hear them all.

Full disclosure: I have joined the Symphony Chorus for the 2009-2010 season, including a Mahler 2 with two of the same soloists. But last season I was just an audience member with some friends in the chorus.

When I started this blog, I was concerned that between work and gigs, I might not be able to update this as often as I would like. That was true enough – work has been very busy this past month. So here is a delayed version of my impressions of the 2009 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz.

The two opening concerts of the first weekend were outstanding. I have heard lots of great pieces and performances at Cabrillo over the years, but the performance of Osvaldo Golijov’s Azul on Friday, August 7 was an all-time highlight. I had heard Golijov’s Ayre when Dawn Upshaw and company performed it as Stanford a while back. I liked it, but it didn’t knock me out. This revised version of Azul knocked me out.

Alisa Weilerstein was a phenomenal cello soloist – one of those players where the sound-to-soul connection seems particular direct. Besides the orchestra, she was accompanied by a halo of concerto grosso-like soloists – Cyro Baptista and Jamey Haddad on percussion, and Michael Ward-Bergeman on hyper-accordion. The four soloists really shone as a quartet in the Transit movement, a cadenza that kicks the already-high energy level of the piece into yet another gear. I will definitely be searching out Weilerstein for future performances.

Golijov made some interesting introductory comments about how a lot of classical music has horse-driven rhythms, and a lot of minimalist and other more populist 20th/21st-century music has motorcycle-driven rhythms. In contrast, his own piece has bird-based rhythms. If you’re thinking Messiaen, not quite – the rhythms invoked are those of wings and flight rather than birdsong. It was the type of insight into a composer’s thought process that I wish was shared more frequently and candidly in either program notes or pre-performance talks.

Australian composer Brett Dean had two pieces performed at Cabrillo on opening weekend, and it was great to be introduced to such a fine composing talent. Moments of Bliss was the concluding work on Saturday’s program, an orchestral suite that was written as part of the process of composing the opera Bliss. The opera was completed just a few weeks before Cabrillo and will be premiered in Sydney next year. The orchestral suite was a compelling listen in its own right. But since none of this is vocal music transcribed for orchestra (unlike, for example, the Doctor Atomic Symphony by John Adams), it does not give much insight into what type of opera this will be. Amphitheatre, a shorter work by Dean, made for a serious curtain-raiser on opening night. Both pieces were full of imagination, personality, and prominent contrabass clarinet parts. I look forward to hearing more of Dean’s music in the future.

Another Australian composer, Matthew Hindson, had the interesting task of providing the curtain-raiser for the Grateful Dead Symphony on Sunday. Rave-Elation (Schindowski Mix) brings the time-honored tradition of classical music adapting popular dance music into the techno era. (Or so the composer claims: the dance influence is self-evident, but I am no expert on techno music.) It was a fun piece which whetted my appetite to hear more of Hindson’s music. A good place to start is his Violin Concerto, recorded by Lara St. John and coupled with works by Corigliano and Liszt. Matthew has been a long-time Recordare customer and supporter of the MusicXML format, so it was great to be able to finally meet him and hear his music live at the festival.

The other pieces the first weekend were enjoyable as well. David Heath’s Rise from the Dark is one of those pieces whose secrets are unraveled gradually over the course of the work. It made me want to hear the piece again once it’s done so I could hear it in the context of what comes afterwards as well as what comes before. Alas, there’s no chance of that for a piece this long, and this was its world premiere. Hopefully it makes its way further into the world and onto a recording. Avner Dorman’s Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! was a double-percussion concerto featuring wonderful playing by the orchestra’s own Steve Hearn and Galen Lemmon. Enrico Chapela’s ínguesu made for a fun curtain-raiser on Saturday. Lee Johnson’s Dead Symphony No. 6 was aimed at a different demographic than me, so I hesitate to judge it. I must confess though that I preferred hearing Elvis Costello and the Sugarcanes break out a suprising rendition of the Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” at the Mountain Winery a week later.

The Saturday concert on the second weekend did not quite maintain the first weekend’s level of exhilaration. The concert concluded strongly with Magnus Lindberg’s Seht die Sonne, a rare chance to hear a second performance of a new piece so soon after the first, which we heard at the San Francisco Symphony last year. The Symphony’s co-commissioning of the piece with the Berlin Philharmonic was oddly omitted from the Cabrillo program notes. The opening James MacMillan work, three interludes from his opera The Sacrifice, made for an interesting beginning. But in between those works was a disappointing trumpet concerto by Joby Talbot. You know you are in trouble when the most interesting music in a trumpet concerto is an oboe melody.

Overall, the programming of this year’s festival was wondrous. Marin Alsop and the Festival Orchestra sounded better than ever together. I look forward to hearing what they come up with next summer!