Today’s Sounds Streaming Today

Today’s Sounds Streaming Today

When most every one else has been forced to silence, count on the S.F. Contemporary Music Players to sound out, ranging from the listenable to the contemporary/experimental. Even VERY contemporary.

The grand-daddy of our professional new music ensembles here just winding down its 50th season, it has jumped from the post-pandemic starting blocks with the streaming of “Voices in Reverberation” with a wide stylistic array of composers. Yea, living composers at that!

The most recent piece is the SFCMP-commissioned world premiere, “Pine Tree,” by the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, who had won it as a 30-year-old grad student at Princeton. Although Shaw has written for many genres, vocal music has been her principal mode.

Her eight-minute opus for solo voice (Pamela Z.) and quartet is neither boundary-shattering or ear-shattering, but rather quite mellifluous in its softness as Pamela Z. sings poetic lines by Yone Nobuchi. The work is immediately appealing with its aphoristic accompaniment and unadorned vocal lines.

The most arresting work is a solo piece with mezzo Pamela Z. interacting with electronic feedback in her own work “Breathing.” Artfully caught on video, this feat of technology represents an intersection of singer, electronic responses and camera work, with the feeling of a duet as her voice returns in delays, triggered by sensors and hand motions. This may be impossible to set down on a printed score and may sound like improvisation (which it isn’t). The real star here is the resultant video (by videographer Zach Miley, with lighting by David Robertson), catching her fluttering hands in a subdued light.

On a much larger scale comes John Adams’ familiar, 25-minute-long “Son of Chamber Music” for some 16 musicians under CMP Director Eric Dudley’s baton. This is a work that can catch the broadest audience (and seemingly ideal for a ballet adaptation). The contrasting movements set off with brief notes and strokes, as strong a rhythmic emphasis as Stravinsky’s in its jaunty momentum.

That gives way to a lullaby. Finally, we get some patented John Adams music, with traits going as far back as his “Nixon in China,” even-tempered, with forward energy like a prairie express train in the night. Dudley’s conducting was able to catch the intricacies of rhythms as played by the well-versed CMP musicians, many of them from a core ensemble staying on year after year.

The CMP’s professional panache was sustained in the violin of Hrabba Atladottir performing the solo “Sabina” by Andrew Norman.

And, at the experimental extreme—for modernists only!—is Amadeus Regucera’s “Inexpressible” for trio, with a textbook array of avant garde techniques.

“Voices in Reverberation” with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in concert, presented streaming online through July 18, via sfcmp.org. For info, info@sfcmp.org.

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