Adam Tendler's Inheritances

Charles Amirkhanian is moving his Other Minds music festival to the Brava Theater in the Mission District this September. On Wednesday he introduced a pre-festival tryout of the space with a new music concert by pianist Adam Tendler.

Amirkhanian, looking out at a nearly sold out Brava Theater audience, marveled that "Adam Tendler doesn't even have a publicist but he's gotten an amazing amount of publicity for this concert." It's true. There were three extensive, entertaining articles online by Marke B. at 48 Hills (click here), Andrew Gilbert at Mission Local (click here), and Jim Provenzano at the Bay Area Reporter (click here).

Briefly, the story is that Adam Tendler had a disengaged relationship with his father who had divorced his mother, the man died five years ago, and he left his son a small bundle of cash that his stepmother delived to Adam in a Denny's parking lot. Wondering whether to pay bills, go on a vacation, or something else, Adam decided to commission composers he admired for new piano pieces with the instruction that the theme should be "Inheritances." In the helpful program book, beautifully designed by Dom Cooper, either Adam or one of the 16 composers provided some context for each piece.

The happy news is that the hour-long result was wonderful. Like any omnibus program, there were highs and lows, with some pieces blurring together in memory, but it was nicely structured, starting with an AI-assisted piece by Laurie Anderson called Remember, I Created You. The work included the follwing instructions: "For one minute, play something you've never played before" and "For one minute, play something your father would hate" and finally, "For one minute, play something your father would love."

Other highlights for me in the first half were Missy Mazzoli's pulsing Forgiveness Machine, Angélica Negrón's rhythmically Latin You Were My Age, Timo Andres's sweet An Open Book, and Ted Hearne's halting, quiet and jagged Inheritance.

The program became more intense with inti figgis-vizueta's hushing, where Adam pounded angrily on the piano while childhood home movies played on the screen behind him, even standing up occasionally and cocking his arm as if he wanted to punch the keyboard. Pamela Z collected samples of Tendler's voice in interviews throughout the internet and created an amusing piano and looping found sound composition called Thank You So Much. Darian Donavan Thomas's We don't need to tend this garden. They're wildflowers is framed as a therapy session with musical underpinnings, the closest to the confessional that the program came, and very successful on its own terms with Tendler at times crooning some of the responses in a lovely baritone. The finale was Devonté Hynes's Morning Piece, one of the longest and most gorgeous of the new works, fading the program out perfectly.

It was impossible not to think about one's own father-child relationships while meditating through this music. I was also reminded of another kind of inheritances taking place at the concert. Most of the classical new music audiences and composers are older, and it was interesting to watch a tradition being passed on to a new generation of performers like Tendler and his composing colleagues.