THE BYGONE
YEAR'S BEST IN SERIOUS MODERNS
The Cream of the New Music Crop in Northern California. and
Churchill's Bath
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By Paul Hertelendy
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
and dance
Week of Jan. 6-13, 2012
Vol. 14, No. 33
In an
economically challenged era, most orchestras and opera companies are
tightening
their belts, and doing less adventurous repertory. But in the Bay Area,
adventure and premieres still are treasured and celebrated.
The San
Francisco Opera took the biggest gamble, with the Theofanidis world
premiere
“Heart of a Soldier.” It’s a powerful dramatic saga of 9/11 telling the
story
of one of its great heroes has been converted to opera. When given its
world
premiere here on the eve of the tragedy’s 10th anniversary,
“Heart
of a Soldier” was accorded a five-minute ovation at the War Memorial
Opera
House by an audience that was respectful, even moved.
The full house was
caught up in the real-life drama of the Vietnam War soldier turned NYC
security
guard Rick Rescorla, who saved countless lives evacuating the Twin
Towers-----and gave up his own in the process.
In the Other Minds Festival in
March, the world premiere of David
Jaffe’s “The Space between Us” was a felicitous linkage of
acoustic/instrumental music with electronic---one of the most skilful
such blends ever.
The Israeli
composer Avner Dorman, 35, is a remarkable throwback composer creating
programmatic music that will offend no one’s ears. His latest
world-premiere
score at the S.F. Symphony (Jan. 26), “Uriah: The Man the King Wanted
Dead,”
follows the Old-Testament morality play of the military leader turned
sacrificial lamb when he stood in the way of King David’s sexual
appetite.
Dorman sees
his quarter-hour tone poem “Uriah” as an object lesson in the abuse of
power. He
was also featured at the Marin Symphony and Cabrillo Festival---a rare
one-year
trifecta.
The sort of
brilliance we expect from Berkeley’s
John Adams seems to hover routinely around the English composer Thomas
Adès
too. The 40-year-old Briton has shown imagination, prowess and wit in a
wide
variety of assignments, from solo piano to opera, and enjoys multiple
careers
as conductor and pianist as well.
Adès was
given a very warm reception at the San Francisco Symphony Sept. 29,
taking
reluctant bows for his latest (and most unorthodox) hit for film and
orchestra
called “Polaris: Voyage for Orchestra” (2010). He is hugely popular as
he now
audibly moves away from his highly austere, complex-rhythm style
to a
consonant area in tune with audiences.
Moral:
Consonance makes the heart grow fonder.
“Polaris” is
a shimmeringly beautiful 13-minute score, where once again Michael
Tilson
Thomas displays his adroit musician placement, deploying close to a
dozen brass
players---the essence of this opus---around the high terrace.
The
summer’s Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz County,
under Marin Alsop, provided the usual cornucopia of fascinating
contemporary
pieces, none better than “Within Her Arms” by
the British composer Anna Clyne, 31. Her work
for string orchestra breathed and sang, never rushing, in a somber mood
impinging on threnody. There were muted low strings in minor
keys, with
haunting pedal points in the basses, resulting in an easy ebb and flow,
reflective to the core. Its bundle of eloquent enigmas left us with
food for
thought as the strings were richly divided and subdivided, as if
reaching for
the subatomic particles in order to produce the richest harmonies. The
piece
right away brought to mind multi-voice music of Tallis,
A
vocal
excerpt from a larger work being composer by Lisa Prosek was the theatrical aria “Churchill in the Bath” rendered by
the
veteran tenor John Duykers, a master at opera-theater, with the S.F.
Composers Chamber
Orchestra. This offered a sardonic look at the world leader back in the
1940s,
harking back to a historic visit when he marveled at the luxuries
proferred by
his Soviet hosts. Composer Prosek created this for her
forthcoming opera,
“Night at the Kremlin”---with Duykers as Winston Churchill, of
course---which
involves an all-night drinking bout for the British prime minister with
Joseph
Stalin.
A
haunting,
meditative 20th-century American work by Morton Feldman,
“Rothko
Chapel,” will endure beyond our times. But the S.F. Symphony missed a
good bet
in not showing projections of the Rothko paintings in Houston, for
which the work was created.
Other newish pieces of more than
routine interest heard in the Bay Area was the devilishly difficult
Salonen
Violin Concerto as played immaculately by Leila Josefowicz (S.F.
Symphony); and
the 59-year-old Californian David Carlson’s song cycle (heard at the
Santa Rosa
Symphony), “The Promise of Time,” came in November, with the composer
in
attendance to take a bow. It’s part of an important “Magnum Opus”
commissioning
program shared by several Bay Area orchestras.
“The
Promise
of Time” evolves as an exuberant, quasi-operatic experience through
contrasting
moods, penned by a composer with a secure command of
gestures---particularly
orchestral ones.
And, in the season's nicest touch, the S.F. Contemporary
Music Players
presented a world premiere by Berkeley Professor and composer Olly
Wilson, 73,
who had bounced back from health problems to create an attractive new
opus.
©Paul Hertelendy 2011
#
Paul Hertelendy has been
covering
the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with
relish
-- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never
weakly)
will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with
forays
into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local
artists as well.
#
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