Volti, the Bay Area a capella choral group dedicated to new music, held an open rehearsal Wednesday evening at the Center for New Music in the Tenderloin. Though the neighborhood seems grittier every time I visit, the Center itself is going gangbusters with performances almost every evening. Check out the best-designed arts website around by clicking here to see what's going on.
The 32-year-old, Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based composer Ted Hearne above has been given a commission by Volti and a Philadelphia counterpart, The Crossing, and the result is a 35-minute cantata for chamber chorus, two electric guitars and percussion. The composer writes: "Sound From the Bench is a reaction to Jena Osman’s incredible book Corporate Relations, a collection of poems that follows the historical trajectory of corporate personhood in the United States. The five movements combine language taken from landmark Supreme Court Cases with words from ventriloquism textbooks."
The contrast between the sound of (left to right above) Brooklyn drummer Ron Wiltrout and guitarists Taylor Levin and James Moore with the more ethereal noise of the chorus was thrilling, complex and shot through with direct hits of percussive energy.
Hearne was an exacting taskmaster at the rehearsal, having music director Robert Geary below repeat sections over and over until they sounded right, which often required either the chorus to be quicker in their tempos or for Hearne to say, "forget it, that effect doesn't work, let's drop it," and change the score's markings on the fly.
It was a fascinating 90 minutes of exploration, and though we only heard two out of the five movements, I was entranced. This is fiendishly difficult but accessible, exciting music. I still have a few earworms from the rehearsal two days later, unusual for new music. Hearne has just been named a "New Voices Composer" for next season at the San Francisco Symphony, and it should be fun getting to know his music.
After a break, the chorus started rehearsing The Oath of Allegiance by the Australian-born, recently naturalized American, Melissa Dunphy above.
We didn't stay much longer because it was getting late and the gentle piece was overshadowed by the memory of the wild Sound from the Bench. You can hear both works this Saturday at St. Marks Lutheran Church at 8PM or Sunday at The Marsh in Berkeley at 4PM. Recommended.
For the last couple of days, at the corner of Vallejo and Van Ness, an official traffic alert sign has been sending an outrageously alarming message to drivers going south on San Francisco Highway 101. "TURN BACK," it says. Fifteen seconds later the illuminated message changes to "GODZILLA ATTACK!"
A friend who saw it driving up Van Ness this morning thought that it must have been the work of a hacker playing a practical joke, but it's been up for a couple of days, so it looks more like some SF City and County Department taking money from a publicist to create a weirdly dangerous promotional stunt for the upcoming Hollywood remake of the original Godzilla movie. What about some tourist who takes them literally and does a sudden U-Turn in the middle of traffic? This is a municipal liability lawsuit just asking to be filed.
Update: Today the sign alternated between "CITY CLOSED / IT'S TOO DAMN HOT" so it is a prankster after all. Click here for a KRON story. What's telling is that no city authorities bothered to do anything about it for three days on one of the busiest roadways in San Francisco. It's good to know they are paying attention.
In the 1970s, when I was a not-so-innocent young thing, I attended a lovely, expensive, mostly gay party in a Berkeley Hills home with jaw-dropping vistas of San Francisco Bay. Even more impressive was the wooden living room with its floor to ceiling shelves of books and records. The two items that piqued my interest even though I knew nothing about them were a set of Jane Austen's complete works and a set of Haydn's approximately 70 string quartets, so I asked the elderly host why they were so prominent on his wall. "Oh, Jane Austen? I'll find I want to look up a line from one of her books and then end up reading the whole damned set again. She's that good. And Haydn's String Quartets? They're the best: sane, beautiful, funny, intelligent, you name it."
Last Saturday at the SFJAZZ Center, the Cypress String Quartet above (from left to right Cecily Ward and Tom Stone on violin, Jennifer Kloetzel on cello, and Ethan Filner on viola) started their final Salon Series with a late Haydn Quartet, Opus 76, No. 5, and that unknown host's remark popped into my brain, prompted by their very good performance.
They continued with an early Schulhoff Divertimento from 1914, introduced by cellist Jennifer Kloetzel. Erwin Schulhoff (his photo is at the top next to the Haydn set) seems to be the "discovery" flavor of the moment these days. Every presenter goes into long detail about his tragic life as an ardent Czech Jewish Communist who died in a Nazi concentration camp, but his music doesn't need any special pleading. Everything I have heard over the last couple of years has been lively, accessible, and pleasurable. As a jazz enthusiast who adored dancing, Schulhoff also believed in fun and you can hear it in his music, including the Divertimento which had traces of pre-WWI French cabaret about it. Now somebody needs to perform his 1932 oratorio based on The Communist Manifesto, or his 1935 jazz oratorio H.M.S. Royal Oak, which according to Wikipedia tells the story of a naval mutiny against a superior who prohibits jazz on board ship.
After intermission, the quartet played the mid-period Dvorak String Quartet in E-flat Major, Opus 51. The violin playing by Cecily Ward was a bit astringent for my taste but it was more than balanced out by the deeply warm sound of cellist Kloetzel and violist Filner above.
The four play together so seamlessly that it is sometimes hard to tell who is playing what, which is high praise. (Violinists Cecily Ward and Tom Stone are pictured above.)
