Northern Lights at SF Contemporary Music Players

Eric Dudley is a composer, conductor, vocalist, pianist, and for the last seven years the Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Last Saturday at the top-floor Taube Auditorium in the Veterans Building he presented a program of modern Scandinavian music in music that he obviously loved.

The first work was Swedish composer Jesper Nordin's 2008 Surfaces scintillantes. I couldn't make heads or tails out of the ten-minute work for seven musicians, but the succession of sounds was interesting.

A slightly larger ensemble arrived for Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's 1985 Lichtbogen for nine instruments and electronics, depicting the Northern Lights in sound. In an interesting appreciation at a defunct blog called Articulate Silences, tacet writes: "Although Saariaho would later explore even more mysterious sound-worlds in her larger scale orchestral works, Lichtbogen conjures a stunning array of iridescent, tactile textures with a relatively limited sound palette. The seductive mystique common to all of Saariaho’s music is ever-present throughout Lichtbogen: this music is dream-like and ephemeral, a spectral web of sound that is as evocative as it is elusive...Saariaho’s orchestration, as well as her subtle use of live electronics, perpetually blurs the lines between the individual instruments of the ensemble until they appear to melt into a single entity; independent voices are subsumed into the unified musical texture, coalescing into a sparkling cloud of sound."

After intermission, there was a commissioned piece by Swedish composer Mika Pelo, Working From a Postcard. He teaches up the road at UC Davis so was able to attend his own world premiere.

The ensemble was more or less the same as that of Saariaho and the work was a "remembering" of that 1980s classic while morphing into its own distinctive style.

The largest instrumental group, including bassoonist Jamael Smith above, assembled for the final piece, Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg's 2007 Jubilees.

It started out as a short birthday piano piece for Pierre Boulez's birthday in London in 2000, and then became a suite of six short movements in 2002, and Lindberg finally orchestrated it in 2007. My concert companion James Parr was in raptures at the end. "That music is so rich!"

The organization is to be congratulated for presenting such a challenging, interesting program. And even more congratulations are due Kevin Rogers, whose usual gig is as violinist for the brilliant Friction Quartet. It seems there was a last-minute cancellation by the viola player who was to perform in three of the works, so Kevin jumped from his violin chair in Surfaces scintillantes to the viola chair for the rest of the concert, which is some kind of genius versatility. The SF Contemporary Music Players have another concert scheduled for May 10 at the Brava Theater in the Mission, which is featuring contemporary Latin composers, and the Friction Quartet will start things off with a PRELUDE concert of Paul Mortilla's Paradiso: Rivers of Light. Click here for tickets.