Listen Up
Covering the musical waterfront
William Bolcom’s Sextet was commissioned jointly by three organizations, and by the time it arrived in Santa Fe it had already been performed by two of them; Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon, gave it twice in July and South Korea’s Great Mountain Music Festival programmed it in early August. Still, it had particular resonance when it arrived at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival during the midday concert of Aug. 16. The events of Charlottesville had taken place the preceding weekend, on Aug. 11 and 12. In the days immediately following, the nation erupted in outrage over the reprehensible display of racial prejudice. And then, in a coincidence that could not have been foreseen, Bolcom’s piece moved through the first four of its six movements and embarked on its fifth — a segment based on the melody “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” A cherished song of the civil rights movement, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written by two remarkable brothers, the poet James Weldon Johnson and the composer John Rosamond Johnson, and in 1919 was adopted by the NAACP as what was widely called “The Negro National Anthem.”
In a program note written for the July premiere, Bolcom explained that he initially planned his Sextet (scored for violin, cello, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, and piano) as a follow-up to a Summer Divertimento he had written in 1973 for Chamber Music Northwest (or, as it was then called, Portland Summer Concerts), but that he “could not summon up the carefree tone of the 1973 piece.” “Things are more fraught now. … The musical idiom is more dissonant; the mood is, understandably, quite dark; but toward the end of composing Sextet I felt the need for something spiritually positive for my own need as well as that of listeners. I could not get the wonderful hymn … ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ out of my head; I wish it were our national anthem. I hope its inclusion — musically bloodied but unbowed in the Variation and Theme — will resonate musically with you and not seem wholly unnatural. I’ve taken a chance here.”
The Sextet is indeed dark, though it is not depressing. It seems to honor various composers who have come before. The opening Pastorale may hark back to Stravinsky or, more directly, to Milhaud, who was one of Bolcom’s teachers. Next comes a March; it owes something to Kurt Weill. The Nocturne has a Franco-American flavor reminiscent of early Copland. None of the movements are mere imitation, though, and all of them are convincingly crafted. A gritty, sustained expanse titled Catastrophe serves as a portal to the Variation and Theme, which is not cheerful on the whole. The “Lift Every Voice” melody is worked tightly into the texture, and at one point it is intoned by the trumpet. The moment is reminiscent of a similar turn in the finale of Honegger’s Symphony No. 2, which was written in Paris in 1941, during the Nazi occupation. There a trumpet joins the anxious strings that surround it, sounding a chorale that gleams with resolution and proposes the possibility of triumph even against a background of despair. That was also its effect here. In a coda, Bolcom has the violin whisper what sounded like a phrase from “Rock-a-bye Baby.” Was it intended as that? Was it meant to suggest comfort? Or is it possible that Bolcom’s “taking a chance here” had to do with a more sinister treetop — with lynching? I hope we will have an opportunity to hear this piece again and see what emotions it inspires on a repeat visit.
Santa Fe Desert Chorale also offered programs with a political bent this summer. One I heard on Aug. 11, titled “Liberté” and conducted by Joshua Habermann, ranged through pieces said “to comfort the suffering and also to inspire resistance.” The ensemble’s programs characteristically comprise many short works that leap about in chronology and style. Here, the 19 items included two groups of pieces relating to self-determination in the Baltic countries during the waning years of the Soviet Union. The 25-member chorus did some of its best work in those segments, especially in a slowly unrolling “Da pacem Domine” by Arvo Pärt and a beautifully blended, richtoned rendition of the Estonian patriotic song “Mu isamaa on minu arm,” written by Gustav Ernesaks. Some challenging choral works by Poulenc (his cycle
Soir de neige and the “Liberté” movement from Figure
humaine) were brave undertakings that stretched the group to its technical limits. In a few of the numbers, singers emerged from the ensemble to uphold solo roles capably. Baritone David Farwig was the most compelling of them, offering an elegantly turned, dignified take on the spiritual “Motherless Child,” sung in an unidentified arrangement that had the choir hum in the background.
Let us return to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, though we must touch only lightly on their concerts, which piled up sometimes at two per day. We mentioned Weill as a possible inspiration for part of Bolcom’s Sextet. On Aug. 14, John Storgårds, the principal guest conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, did double duty as soloist and conductor in Weill’s
William Bolcom’s Sextet is indeed dark, though it is not depressing. It seems to honor various composers who have come before.
Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra. The ensemble played with admirable precision and expression, though sometimes too loudly, with the result that during the first movement one could see Storgårds fiddling vigorously without much hearing him. Elsewhere, one could only admire how he dispatched his dazzling part, nowhere more than in his extended cadenza. This early work of Weill’s (it dates from 1924) displays various modernist tendencies in play at the time. Especially in the prominent xylophone part, one glimpses bits of the “kinky dance-band” style that would become his signature sound a few years later. It is a tough nut of a piece, but Storgårds underscored its winning dynamism and even found lyrical contours lurking in its pages.
He also oversaw the musical forces (with some of the same players) for the Aug. 17 performance of
The Soldier’s Tale. The musicians played Stravinsky’s score splendidly, and one wished that it had been a concert pure and simple. In the event, the piece was presented as a staged work, in a production directed and designed by Doug Fitch, with lighting by Wouter Feldbusch and sound design by Bruce Odland. The work presents challenges, to be sure. Conceived near the end of World War I, it is a story (not a play) by the Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, meant to be rendered by a narrator, with actors portraying the characters of the soldier and the devil, and with a section danced by a ballerina — the whole being punctuated by 11 musical expanses by Stravinsky. It’s an unbalanced piece, and directors through the years have taken imaginative approaches to making it effective onstage. My most recent brush with it had been this past May in a production at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino fleshed out by dramaturg Kara McKechnie and directed by Alessandro Talevi. It was a brilliant conception that inserted several extra compositions (by Stravinsky and others), framed the whole thing as a meta-narrative of Stravinsky inventing The Soldier’s
Tale, and had the actors — different ones for the narrator, the devil, and the soldier (doubling Stravinsky) — and the dancer interact with detailed videos and with the costumed instrumentalists. In Fitch’s earthbound approach, the musicians sat off to the side in their own world, not integrated to the staging. Clunky projections (of paintings or photos) were cast onto a screen, behind which a violin occasionally glowed. There was no dancer. All of the words were crammed into the notebook of actor Wallace Shawn, who lacked the vocal or dramatic range to create distinct or welldefined characters out of them. A device that altered his voice into something crackly for the devil’s lines was surprisingly old-school for 2017. He wandered about with his script, apparently left adrift for want of stage direction that he might fairly have expected and from which he would doubtless have profited. The performance was plagued by misfires of sound and light cues, and it went on and on into the realm of irredeemable tedium.
The Dover Quartet played in several Chamber Music Festival concerts, beginning with a luminous rendition of Schumann’s Quartet No. 2 at midday on Aug. 16. The group used its signature sheen as a stepping-off point to an interpretation of wide-ranging expression, caressing the first movement affectionately, bursting with good humor in the third, and singing forth with broad extroversion in the finale. One admires these players’ unanimity of musical purpose, which they obviously achieve through long and attentive practice. But beyond that, they show imagination in discovering the possibilities of a piece and alertness to the breadth of options available to them. It is no surprise that they have so quickly secured a place in the front rank of string quartets. One appreciated this also in their performance of the Quartet No. 3 by Szymon Laks later that day. Laks (1901-1983) was an astonishing figure of Polish-Jewish origins who was living in Paris when he was arrested by the Nazis in 1941. He survived imprisonment in three different concentration camps — Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau— and then returned to Paris to pick up his career. His Third Quartet is shot through with Polish folk melodies. Most non-Polish listeners could not hope to identify or even recognize these tunes, but at least the folkish spirit is evident. In the theme of the finale, for example, modal notes are interpolated within a “normal” major scale. Sometimes Laks’ vocabulary veers toward neoclassical transparency, sometimes toward the salon, sometimes in the direction of jazz.
On Aug. 21, the Dovers offered Tchaikovsky’s Quartet No. 1, again displaying their broad but also beautiful sonic palette. They simmered passionately in the first movement without ever sacrificing their musical standards, and the muted second movement, the famous Andante cantabile, was an exercise in sweetness itself. This was a highly disciplined approach to Tchaikovsky interpretation, rather than the sort that slobbers all over the place. Also on that program was Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet, in which the Dovers were assisted by Inon Barnatan. It was a winning combination of musicians allied in technical acumen and ingenuity, capable of sustaining interest through the extended pondering of the second-movement fugue but also eager to leap into the high jinks of the scherzo and of the finale. It brought the Chamber Music Festival’s season to an estimable close. Barnatan had already distinguished himself in a fascinating noontime recital on Aug. 17: a virtuosic rendition of Bach’s Toccata in E minor (BWV 914), followed by a whirlwind of individual movements by Handel, Rameau, François Couperin, Ravel, Thomas Adès, and Barber — and, to conclude, Brahms’ monumental Variations on a Theme by Handel. Clarity of tone and conception ruled over this recital. I found Barnatan’s Brahms to be highly poetic — so long as we acknowledge that poetry can be powerful as well as lyrical.
Fine piano-playing also came from the team of Anderson & Roe, who on the evening of Aug. 17 conveyed a winning account of Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 1 for Two Pianos, mightily sonorous in the pealing bell tones of its Russian Easter finale, and proved captivating in three of their own Piazzolla arrangements for piano four-hands. In their Piazzolla settings, one player might damp strings “under the hood” of the piano while the other played from the keyboard, greatly expanding the possible timbres. A standout among other festival offerings was the performance (on Aug. 16) of Brahms’ String Sextet No. 1. A last-minute shift in personnel yielded this lineup: violinists Ida Kavafian and Storgårds, violists Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and Steven Tenenbom, and cellists Peter Wiley and Eric Kim. The entire work unrolled with a sense of sweeping generosity. I am doubtless not the only music-lover who looks forward especially to this work’s second movement, a magnificent theme-and-variations set. “What Brahms has done and the old pedants could not do,” wrote critic Edwin Evans (Senior) nearly a century ago, “is to make each variation represent the theme in a different mood.” Here, each variation was indeed played with a clearly defined character, befitting the composer’s precise representation. The fifth, which can sometimes be reduced to hurdy-gurdy whininess, was given a more innocent music-box character — tonally drawn back yet not nasal. From there, the cellos’ pivot into the pondering theme for its sixth variation was thrilling in its subterranean way. It was the sort of chamber playing that makes concert-going pleasurable and exciting.