Up off the floor
Or, How Kosman Got His Groove Back
Last week’s cliffhanger episode concluded with our protagonist too immobilized by fear and anguish to transmute musical experience into words. It’s not as if anything has significantly improved since then — if anything, the news only grows more apocalyptic day by day — but as Samuel Beckett pitilessly reminds us, we have to keep going on nonetheless. (Call that going, call that on.)
I was helped out of my defensive crouch to some extent by the appearance of a beautiful column by my friend and former Chronicle colleague Lily Janiak (about which more below), and also by Friday’s Oakland Symphony performance of Two Black Churches, a powerful oratorio of grief and outrage by composer Shawn Okpebholo. This is, after all, what music and its artistic siblings can do for us — acknowledge the evil that’s been done in the world, help us mourn its victims, declare in no uncertain terms that this shit ain’t right. It doesn’t have quite the punch of a nationwide general strike or a one-way trip to the Hague, but it’s not nothing either.
The two churches of Okpebholo’s title are all too familiar to observers and victims of American racism over the past decades. One is the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where a 1963 bombing by members of the Ku Klux Klan left four Black girls dead. The other is the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine congregants in 2015.
For each part of his diptych, Okpebholo draws on a poem memorializing the specific lives lost to anti-Black hatred. Dudley Randall’s Ballad of Birmingham unfolds in a series of incantatory quatrains like something out of an English folk ballad, and Okpebholo sets it to music that draws on the harmonies and verse structure of African American spirituals. But that straightforward framework is overlaid and shot through with a wealth of rich and unpredictable variation — harmonic complications, inventive instrumental strokes, and melodic filigree that pops up everywhere like creeper vines overrunning a garden trellis. The vocal line, too, weaves and returns, making space within the fixed formal plan for sudden upwellings of pathos.
If the first movement is lush and mournful, the second, which sets a poem written for the occasion by Marcus Amaker, is bluntly ferocious. The angular writing, interrupted by a terrifying volley of gunshots from the percussion, rubs the listener’s face in the horrifying abruptness of the slaughter. Baritone Will Liverman, for whom the oratorio was written, gave a superb performance, blending a preacher’s oratorical eloquence with a singer’s tender attention to detail.
Kedrick Armstrong, the gifted and energetic young conductor who this season succeeded the late Michael Morgan as the orchestra’s music director, shaped the music superbly. In Zoom!, Okpebholo’s funky little curtain-raiser, and in Orff’s Carmina Burana after intermission, he brought energy and clarity to the orchestra’s sound. Armstrong is both a dynamic interpreter and a thoughtful programmer; each program this season combines a new or recent work by a Black composer with something from the standard classical repertoire, which strikes me as a perfect balance of priorities. It’s early days yet, but I suspect his appointment may turn out to have been just the right choice for this organization.
Finally, I want to bang the drum for Janiak’s column, referenced above. Yes, it includes some kind words about me, for which I’m grateful. But more importantly, it recaps some of the key points about the conflict between art and fascism in a way that’s clear and streamlined without being simplistic.
Of particular importance to me personally is the way Janiak includes criticism as part of the artistic endeavor. “Our storytelling is necessarily derivative, since we’re responding to works of someone else’s imagination,” she writes. “And yet in how we frame the plays and operas and films we write about, and whether we even write about them at all, we’re implicitly telling a story about what’s newsworthy and what isn’t.” Thanks, Lily; I needed to hear that.
Face, the music
A San Francisco composer I know is endearingly blunt about her distaste for the music of the British composer Thomas Adès. I think she has other complaints as well, but her most often expressed beef is Adès’ fondness for writing vocal lines that vault way up into the stratosphere and just stay there, as if issuing a challenge to the soprano: “How about you wail like a psychotic banshee but make it art?” I understand the complaint without sharing it. To me, Adès’ taste for Screechgesang is a close cousin to the virtuoso demands that Liszt and his followers, for example, make on pianists. The evidence that he’s not just cosplaying as an incompetent is that there are actually singers who can bring out the vividness and beauty in Adès’ extreme vocal writing.
I had hoped that my adamant chum would find her way to last week’s San Francisco Symphony program, because guest conductor Nicholas Collon led off his debut appearance with the Three-Piece Suite from Adès’ acerbic first opera, the 1995 masterpiece Powder Her Face. These orchestral excerpts provided a healthy dose of the composer’s inventive instrumental mastery without any singers at all — what’s not to love?
There are dances underlying all of it, including tango and waltz rhythms, but it’s all rendered with a kind of fun-house mirror obliqueness that is both disorienting and hilarious. The tango passages move with drunken grace, like a Charlie Chaplin routine; in the central waltz movement, Adès keeps absent-mindedly adding and dropping beats, and expecting the implied dancers to keep up. One of my criticism students this week perfectly characterized the piece as music written by an alien who has only heard descriptions of tangoes and waltzes.
The Adès was the program’s main attraction for me, although I’m perfectly happy to hear Elgar’s Enigma Variations, which Collon led with assiduous smoothness. (Side note: Rainer Eudeikis, the orchestra’s terrific principal cellist, now has an equally terrific associate, Anne Richardson, who gave a gorgeous account of the cello solo in the B.G.N. variation. So things are going very well in that department.)
Conrad Tao, the multitalented pianist and composer who can do many things that are far more interesting, was the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and I realized very belatedly that the reason I came to Tchaikovsky’s music so late, and with such a chip on my shoulder, may well be because I started with this clunky, overwritten behemoth. It took a while, and a lot of repeated experiences of “Oh wait, Tchaikovsky is good actually, what was I thinking?” to finally see the light.
Elsewhere:
Simon Cohen, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “Tao is one of very few pianists working today who can bring the same interpretive insight to thorny and forbidding modernist compositions as to traditional fare like the Tchaikovsky concerto.”
Michael Strickland, Civic Center: “[Powder Her Face] was written for a small, jazzy chamber ensemble where the sour tangos and frenzied sexuality are more potent than in this large reorchestration, but it was a fun reminder of the original.”
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #241 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
A musical group performing in desert (7)
Last week’s clue:
Composer captivates modish Boston elite (8)
Solution: BRAHMINS
Composer: BRAHMS
captivates: goes around
modish: IN
Boston elite: definition
Coming up
• Natasha Paremski: This young Russian-American pianist, a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, has appeared locally only a handful of times. Sorry, I should rephrase that — I’ve only heard her a few times. But every one has been a doozy, marked by powerful keyboard technique and a broad, all-encompassing artistic imagination. Her upcoming recital for San Francisco Performances includes music of Chopin, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky, as well as an all-too-brief excerpt by the gifted young composer Quinn Mason. Nov. 13, Herbst Theatre. www.sfperformances.org.
• La Flora: There have been 437,132 operas composed and staged since 1600, but only seven that get performed regularly today (figures approximate). The terrific Baroque opera company Ars Minerva is devoted to resuscitating and championing the other ones. This season’s discovery is La Flora, a 1681 opera you’ve never heard of by Antonio Sartorio and Marc’Antonio Ziani, two composers you’ve never heard of. Will it turn out to be an undiscovered masterpiece? No. Will it be pretty entertaining? Almost certainly. Is this the only chance you’ll have to hear it in your lifetime? That’s a 100% guarantee. Nov. 15-17, ODC Theater. www.arsminerva.org.
• Volti: I already appreciate Volti’s dual focus on contemporary choral music, a blend we don’t hear enough of, and this week’s program adds a third flavor to the mix with the inclusion of electronic music. Led by artistic director Robert Geary, the chorus will offer two world premieres, one by Victoria Fraser and another (a commission) by Anne Hege, along with music by Angélica Negrón and Kaija Saariaho. The program also includes a preview of Guardians of Yggdrasil, composer Mark Winges’ Nordic choral drama that is due for a fully staged premiere in June. Nov. 16-18, Walnut Creek, Berkeley, and San Francisco. www.voltisf.org.
• Sonoma Bach: Candor compels me to admit that I have no first-hand familiarity with this organization’s work, but I’m impressed by the range of its activities, which include choral groups of different sizes and stylistic specialties, as well as a Baroque orchestra led by the reliable Elizabeth Blumenstock. This week, though, the draw is a choral program devoted to the music of Heinrich Schütz, the finest German composer of the 17th century and one whose work is still far too rarely heard. The program includes an array of his sacred music in Latin and German, as well as his beautiful collection of Italian madrigals. Nov. 16-17, Schroeder Hall, Green Music Center, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park. www.sonomabach.org.