The Seasons in Pacific Heights

The San Francisco Choral Society sang Franz Joseph Haydn's last, monumental oratorio, Die Jahreszeiten (The Seasons), in two performances this weekend at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Pacific Heights. The results were beautiful, magnificent and fun. (The above photo is of the performers in a glass-enclosed warmup room viewed from an outdoor garden at the church.)



The libretto to the three-hour oratorio from 1799 was based on poems by the Scottish poet James Thomson about the annual cycle of seasons from Spring to Winter as experienced by rural peasants. These were then loosely translated by Haydn's wealthy patron/librettist Gottfried von Swieten in Vienna after they successfully collaborated on The Creation.



Though the piece ends with praise for God Almighty, the spirit of the oratorio is almost entirely pagan, with paeans to young love, the fertility of nature, hunting, drinking wine, and the pleasures of community. Even the final Winter section, which threatens to turn gloomy when a traveler in the icy cold confronts his own mortality, has a happy ending when he comes across a cottage with a "glimmer of a light nearby." The moment is like an "up" Winterreise.



The San Francisco Choral Society is composed of amateurs, in that they don't get paid for their efforts, but in every other respect they are astonishingly professional. In the last year I have seen them perform Orff's Carmina Burana in Davies Hall, David Lang's battle hymns in Kezar Pavilion, and Haydn's Die Jahreszeiten. Three more different pieces of choral music would be hard to imagine, but they sang all of them with stylistic grace and beautiful sound. The acoustics in Calvary Presbyterian, by the way, are bright, warm and clear, though the sightlines from most of the pews leave a lot to be desired.



The oratorio featured the three soloists above as individual peasants Hanne (soprano Marcelle Dronkers), Lukas (tenor Brian Thorsett), and Simon (bass-baritone Eugene Brancoveanu). Dronkers was a fine musical performer, but I didn't particularly care for the timbre of her voice which is completely subjective on my part. Brancoveanu has a huge, ringing baritone that can be lovely, but on Sunday he was pushing his voice and oversinging in the small church, which didn't suit Haydn at all. Brian Thorsett, on the other hand, was exquisite, modulating his volume depending on the moment, and his German diction was so good that it felt as if you could understand every word whether you spoke the language or not. Thorsett has been specializing and excelling in performances of Benjamin Britten recently, and it was a joy to hear him sound this good in different music.



In the wrong hands, Haydn can quickly become a bore, but Artistic Director Robert Geary above turned out to be a wonderful conductor for this music, keeping the long piece lively, textured, and full of humor. The orchestral accompaniment by the professional California Chamber Symphony was superb, highlighted by solos for almost every instrumentalist.

The Choral Society's next concert is at the huge St. Ignatius Church in November where they will be performing Rachmaninoff's Vespers. If the recent past is any indication, the concerts are not to be missed.

A Tale of Two Chamber Ensembles

San Francisco is in a golden age for contemporary music. Its current ecostructure of composers, performers, funders, writers, venues, and adventurous audiences is probably unrivaled in the world right now. Many of the artists live and work in the East Bay and Marin, though not so much the Peninsula where the major focus seems to be acquiring wealth while creating the sci-fi future that is bleeding into the present.



These thoughts were prompted by two different concerts on Monday and Tuesday at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. When the school moved from 19th Avenue into Civic Center in 2006, the institution initially seemed frightened of the neighborhood, but they have relaxed and become an integral piece of the Performing Arts Center that now stretches from their campus at Market and Van Ness to the Opera House five blocks north.



The recent closing of the Veterans Building and its Herbst Theatre for retrofitting has been something of a blessing, forcing musical groups to venture further afield in the neighborhood. The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (including left to right above Anna Presler, Kurt Rohde, Tanya Tomkins, and Leighton Fong) has long played in the second-story Green Room at the Veterans Building, which is a great site for a party but terrible for music due to the crappy acoustics. On Monday evening, they presented one of their mixed concerts of contemporary music with 19th century classics in the small (approximately 130 seats) Recital Hall downstairs at the Conservatory, and it was a delight.



The concert featured cellists Leighton Fong and Tanya Tomkins above in various configurations, starting with three wild "decimations" by Kurt Rohde of Bach Chorales for "Odd String Quartet and Electronics," odd in this case meaning that the usual second violin is swapped out for an additional cello. The odd quartet, minus electronics, finished the concert with the 1894 String Quartet #2 by Anton Arensky, a disciple of Tchaikovsky and a teacher of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff. There was also a world premiere of a short piece by Matt Schumaker called Nocte Luz for Two Cellos, Bass and Electronics that started off well but didn't seem to go anywhere.



The highlight of the concert was violist Kurt Rohde playing his own composition, ...maestoso...misterioso...for Amplified Violin and Assorted Objects with Ana Presler above. The Assorted Objects were tuned gongs, harmonicas, Chinese paper accordions, along with the players' own voices. There were also moments of live electronic looping, which seemed fraught with danger since there was a lot of unintended feedback in the first of the Bach chorales, and the tech guy had to replug and reorient the microphones on Rohde and his viola before he started playing the piece. I was close to the stage and started laughing, at which point Rohde broke the fourth wall and said to the audience, "You have NO idea." Even with all the electronics and Assorted Objects, the 12-minute piece was mostly soft and delicate while sounding simultaneously rich and complex. Rohde strikes me as one of the best composers in the world right now, and his performance with Presler was fearless.



There were two late additions to the program from composer John Adam's students at Crowden School, including the sophisticated and funny Jazz Parody by Theo Haber above. When I asked him to write down his name on the program, he asked me to take a photo of "the first time I've ever been asked for my autograph."



The following evening at the larger, upstairs Concert Hall at the Conservatory, clarinetist Brendan Guy above and his new concert series called Curious Flights highlighting "rare and seldom-played music." Tuesday's program was devoted to the music of the late Benjamin Britten, who is having a birthday boy centenary.



The first group at the roster was the Valinor Winds sextet that included Brenden on clarinet, joined by Sasha Launer on flute, Jessie Huntsman on oboe, Jeannie Psomas on bass clarinet, Alexis Luque on bassoon, and Caitlyn Smith on horn. The piece was a bit of juvenalia from 1930 called Movement for Wind Sextet and though Britten was a freakishly precocious musical genius, he hadn't come into his own compositional voice quite yet.



The same could be said about the 1932 Phantasy in F Minor for String Quintet. However, the committed performance was so good by the Friction Quartet above (Kevin Rogers and Otis Harriel on violins, Pei-Ling Line on viola, and Doug Machiz on cello, joined by Jason Pyszkowski on viola) that it was a pleasure to hear.



A late replacement on the program was a mature piece by Britten from 1954, the Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain from a poem by Edith Sitwell about the Blitz in London during World War Two. Written for a trio of horn, piano (Ulysses Loken, above center), and tenor, it was originally performed by Britten's tenor lover, Peter Pears. The performance on Tuesday was so striking that it actually managed to efface the original recording by Pears, Britten, and Dennis Brain, a major accomplishment. Tenor Brian Thorsett above right and San Francisco Opera and Ballet Orchestra horn player Kevin Rivard above left beautifully performed Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with the New Century Chamber Orchestra three years ago. Thorsett, in particular, seems to have become even stronger in Britten's music and it was a great rendition, sad and poetic.



Rivard's accompaniment was so good that at times one wasn't sure where Thorsett's voice ended and the soft horn playing began. Here's a suggestion for San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley. Would you please stage Gloriana, Britten's Elizabeth II coronation opera from 1953? And while you're at it, put Mr. Rivard into an Elizabethan costume onstage and have him lead the horn fanfares with which Gloriana is filled. He will certainly steal the show.



After intermission, the stage was set up for a huge, 50-person ensemble to play Movements for a Clarinet Concerto (1941-42), a piece that started off as a commission for Benny Goodman but which was interrupted by World War Two and never completed. Britten's young assistant Colin Matthews has "Devised & Orchestrated" the first movement written by Britten and added two more movements via a pair of Britten's incidental pieces reorchestrated for clarinet and orchestra. Matthews created the piece in 2007 and this was the West Coast premiere, with artistic director Brendan Guy as clarinet soloist.



The revelation was the playing by the pick-up Curious Flights Orchestra under conductor Alasdair Neale, with second violin principal Kevin Rogers grinning in the background. They gave a sensationally good performance of difficult music that often sounded like lost scenes from the opera Peter Grimes. Now, will one of our extraordinary Bay Area ensembles please perform Britten's Church Parables, such as Curlew River and Saint Nicholas and The Burning Fiery Furnace? I promise to play publicist for free.

Bach to Bach Weekend

San Francisco is blessed with a seemingly endless assortment of early music ensembles, including the California Bach Society, the American Bach Soloists , the San Francisco Bach Choir, and the Philharmonia Baroque. Most of these groups play with original instruments which takes some getting used to as a listener, but once you have done so, Bach and his contemporaries sound strange on modern instruments. Case in point: the performances by the San Francisco Symphony last weekend above under the Baroque and Renaissance music specialist Ton Koopman from The Netherlands, who is returning this week with another all-Bach program.



The Saturday evening concert started with the Orchestral Suite #4 by J.S. Bach in an energetic performance by a small ensemble, and was followed by the Cello Concerto in A Major by Johann Sebastian's third son, C.P.E. Bach, in a marvelous solo turn by Symphony cellist Peter Wyrick above.



After a jolly run through of C.P.E. Bach's swift little Symphony in G Major, the concert ended with one of J.S. Bach's most beautiful cantatas, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, featuring a soprano and trumpet soloist playing off of each other in the first and final movements. The soprano was the British Bach specialist Carolyn Sampson, who had my concert companion James Parr swooning in pleasure.



Mark Inouye, the Symphony's principal trumpet player above, was even more spectacular than usual. The sound of his modern instrument may have been inauthentic, but his playing was so fabulous and virtuosic that it didn't matter at all. Is there anything this guy can't do?



Also last weekend, there was a performance of J.S. Bach's monumental Mass in B Minor at the Calvary Presbyterian Church in Pacific Heights by the San Francisco Choral Society under conductor and artistic director Robert Geary. Sunday's matinee performance was not as good as expected from this ambitious and accomplished amateur chorus, as if they had bitten off more than they could chew.



The soloists (left to right above soprano Shauna Fallihee, alto Clifton Massey, tenor Brian Thorsett, and bass Nikolas Nackley) did not make much of an impression either, except for Thorsett whose beautiful high tenor is one of the reliable joys of local concerts. Maybe next time.

Britten Centennial Celebration at the SF Symphony

Last week the San Francisco Symphony continued its Britten Celebration with a performance of the composer's Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting and the British tenor Toby Spence and San Francisco horn player Robert Ward as soloists.



Most people loved the performance, but I found myself carping throughout. Spence's voice was beautiful but his diction was incomprehensible. Tilson Thomas led the strings on Saturday evening at an unvarying funeral procession pace, and Ward was too recessive for one of the more showy and poetic pieces ever written for his instrument. The real problem was that I heard an exciting and moving account of the Serenade four years ago, played by the New Century Chamber Orchestra with SF Opera Orchestra horn player Kevin Rivard and local tenor Brian Thorsett as soloists (click here for an account). I was crying throughout most of that performance and was steadfastly dry-eyed on Sunday.



Things picked up considerably when the full orchestra performed Shostakovich's 1971 Symphony No. 15, the last he ever wrote. It is one of the most profoundly eccentric compositions he ever created, meandering all over the place while quoting himself, Rossini (the Lone Ranger/William Tell theme) and Wagner. There were odd solos for just about every instrument in the huge ensemble, including Michael Grebanier on cello above, and the performance was completely absorbing. It seemed odd to program it during what is supposed to be a Britten festival, but at least the two composers knew each other and above all respected the others' music, which was the ultimate compliment because they were both musical geniuses and snobbishly dismissive of most of their other contemporaries.



The festival finishes up in grand fashion this week with three performances of Britten's stirring, breakthrough opera of 1945, Peter Grimes, starring tenor Stuart Skelton and soprano Elza van den Heever who looks and sounds born to play Ellen Orford. The chorus is really the main character in this opera about a bleak English fishing village, and it should be thrilling to hear the Symphony Chorus have a crack at the music. The performances are on Thursday, Friday and Sunday afternoon, and there are $50 tickets available in the orchestra section (click here to check it out). There is also a special concert on Saturday evening involving the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, if you happen to hate operatic singing, that will be accompanied by a video installation by Tal Rosner. This is paired with a repeat of Britten's The Prince of The Pagoda Suite which was sensationally exciting music when the Symphony played it two weeks ago. Click here for tickets.

Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings at NCCO

The New Century Chamber Orchestra, under their energetic new music director, the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, gave a wonderful concert called "Serenades and Dances" that toured to four different spots around the Bay Area last week. Lisa Hirsch published an alert on Friday at the "Iron Tongue of Midnight" that the performance of Benjamin Britten's "Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings" was "stunningly great" so I snagged a pair of press tickets for the Saturday evening performance at Herbst Theatre. Happily, Lisa was right.



The first half of the concert was highlighted by that beautiful perennial staple of classical radio stations, Dvorak's 1875 "Serenade for Strings," which sounded less bland and pasteurized than usual because you could actually hear the various parts working with and against each other in the 20-member chamber orchestra.



Of all the composers with whom I've shared the planet on a contemporary basis, Benjamin Britten is definitely my favorite. (He died in 1976 at the age of 63.) Britten was one of those freaks of nature who were born musically gifted on the order of a Mozart. He grew up in middle-class England, became a pacifist in his youth while hanging out with best friends novelist Christopher Isherwood and poet W.H. Auden, and eventually coupled up romantically with a tenor who nobody though would amount to much named Peter Pears (pronounced "peers"). Britten and Pears ended up forming a creative partnership which has probably never been equaled in musical history, and fortunately for all of us the two of them recorded everything upon which they collaborated. There's a major role for Pears in all of Britten's great operas, from "Peter Grimes" to old Aschenbach in "Death in Venice" thirty years later. The two even collaborated on the reduction of Shakespeare for the opera "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which is a wonder.



In 1939, friends and roommates but not yet lovers, the two got on a boat for North America with World War Two looming in Europe, and they spent the next three years roaming America. The two fell in love and "consummated" the relationship in Grand Rapids, Michigan of all places (click here for a funny post on the subject with photo by the concert pianist Stephen Hough). However, they became homesick and heartsick, and returned to England in 1942, a homosexual pacifist couple in the middle of WWII.

They not only survived but thrived, and Britten wrote a pastoral song cycle to six English poems that focus on hunting horns, twilight, and death, with William Blake's "Elegy" to a dying rose as the sinister centerpiece. It's one of the most perfect pieces of music ever written, and reminds me of a quote from a letter Britten wrote to a friend after listening to "Das Lied von Erde" by Mahler. "It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love."



There are still too few performances of Britten's music, though it is aging brilliantly and more people with each decade are realizing how great a musician the world was given. For instance, I've never heard the "Serenade" before live, and the performance on Saturday night was overwhelming, with me dissolved into a teary mess about thirty seconds into the solo horn prologue. The local Kevin Rivard (above), who plays in the San Francisco Opera and Ballet Orchestras was the soloist, and he gave one of the greatest, most sensitive renditions imaginable. There were even a few glitches in all the perfection which paradoxically made the performance even better. The tenor Brian Thorsett wasn't in quite the same league, but he crooned beautifully in the high regions and worked together beautifully with Rivard in what is essentially a duet for horn and tenor. The third voice, the strings, were astonishing, and the sum of the parts created serious magic.



As an apertif, the orchestra played a few Romanian Folk Dances by Bartok, who is another 20th century composer whose music is sounding better with each passing year. There was a funny moment after the Maruntel movement when the audience couldn't contain themselves and started applauding between movements, though tentatively, and Nadja turned around and said, "It's okay. The piece is over," so the audience roared happily.