TRIBULATIONS IN AFGHANISTAN
                        Featuring Sellars-Crumb Music-Theater
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of June 19-26,  2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 110
           BERKELEY---Genius can be an uncomfortable hat to wear.
          Take Peter Sellars, the mercurial stage director and former boy wizard with the straight-up hair suggesting an electrifying closeup encounter with Godzilla. In his latest project he turned a 2004 George Crumb song cycle into an endless music-theater piece eliciting jaw-breaking yawns when given here at the Zellerbach Playhouse on the university campus.
            The new monodrama “Winds of Destiny” was built around the veteran lirico-spinto  soprano Dawn Upshaw, whose musical talents at this point greatly surpass her theatrical ones. Crumb had turned a clutch of Civil-War-era songs into a wrenching set of protests, with sparse but highly inventive punctuation by a percussion group. The familiar old songs about glory and hurrahs are transformed into wry dirges, inspired by post-traumatic stress, an allusion that may suggest 9/11, or else the warfare in the Middle East, or some combination thereof.
            A sparse and very subdued percussion accompaniment (by the group Red Fish Blue Fish) suggests fragments of a shattered world in disarray, punctuated here and there by the gunfire of drums. Sounds such as  viola bows drawn over cymbals are unfamiliar and otherworldly. The clearly traumatized singer is jolted by every drumbeat, shocked into a world of anguish and nervousness, writhing on the bed at center stage. The Iraq-Afghanistan reference becomes clear in the latter half, when the singer shows her US soldier’s attire.
            In an introduction, Sellars himself appeared voicing themes of concern for abused women in war (both Afghan and otherwise), and for the overstressed returning war veterans.
            So a whole array of familiar tunes came back: “Shenandoah,” “Go, Tell It on the Mountain,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.” But all of them twisted into laments. Upshaw rendered these with animation, linking with the young percussion group and veteran pianist Gilbert Kalish, who spent part of the 50 minutes’ duration making disorienting sounds  beneath the piano lid.
            Half of the concert June 18----totally unrelated to Crumb-Sellars------was traditional music of Afghanistan, sung in Pashto and Dari languages by a noted émigré singer, Ustad Farida Mawash. She is a rarity, as the respectful title of Ustad (master) is inevitably confined to male musicians. Music of the Middle East, regardless of nationality, is rooted in sources that are Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, enough so that to the west, Lebanese songs bear similarities to these,  while to the east the drumming technique of North India is equally reminiscent. Mawash sang seven selections in a true, attractive tone, within a compass of about one octave, in a tuning system notable different from the European one, culminating in “The Song of the Reed” (flute), to 13thomyoun SakhiHHoHo century Persian poetry of Rumi. Five musicians accompanied her, under leadership of the virtuosic Homayoun Sakhi. Sakhi  did a dazzling solo turn on his rubab, which is a distant cousin to the lute, boasting over a dozen sympathetic strings.
            This was the week of “Ojai North,” the Zellerbach Hall outlet for Ojai Festival presentations in Southern California. According to Cal Performances head Matías Tarnopolosky, this marks the start of an annual “Ojai North” package on the Berkeley campus. June 18 also marked the close of the rich, multi-faceted  Cal Performance season of touring attractions.
            AFGHAN ADDENDA---The Afghan musicians reside in Fremont, CA, in “Little Kabul,” having fled their homeland upon the repressive Taliban takeover.
            Crumb-Afghan program with the Sakhi Ensemble et al. Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, June 16, 18. For info: (510) 642-9988, or go online. 

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2011
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        D. Rane Danubian 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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