With Cage’s aid, concerto finds its way
John Cage didn’t provide much concrete guidance for performers of his Concert for Piano and Orchestra. The score is a quirky, ad hoc assemblage of musical notation, geometrical shapes and elaborate calligraphy, which is left to the musicians to interpret as they see fit.
So when a performance of the work — or let’s call it an incarnation — comes off as engagingly as the one offered on Friday, Jan. 17, by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, it may be the players themselves who deserve most of the credit.
Coming at the conclusion of a somewhat stodgy program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Cage’s piece landed with a welcome breath of freedom. An ensemble of about a dozen instrumentalists, drawn from among the Players and the student body of the Conservatory, traded riffs and squawks as conductor Eric Dudley marked time like a human clock. Dancer Antoine Hunter whirled around the stage, arms often extended in airplane mode, in an
execution of Merce Cunningham’s companion dance piece “Antic Meet.”
And at the center of the hubbub was pianist Kate Campbell, sitting in the (figurative) spotlight and demonstrating how much a creative soloist can do based on her own imagination.
The Concert for Piano and Orchestra is, just as you might suppose, a concerto in every significant way. (I’m sure there’s some philosophical or whimsical significance to the omission of that final “o,” but really, who cares?) The soloist gets all the best lines, and just as in Beethoven or Brahms, the ensemble serves — largely but not exclusively — as the backdrop against which the pianist operates.
Campbell, for neither the first nor the last time, proved herself to be an artist of remarkable commitment and insight. She burst out with explosive torrents of sound at one moment and singled out judiciously chosen clusters of notes the next. She erupted in big keyboard glissandos or forearm smashes; she dove into the innards of the instrument to pluck individual strings.
All of it was, in keeping with the Cageian esthetic, presumptively free of narrative logic. But the performance sparkled and shimmied with the readiness to entertain that is a welcome alternative, and the instrumentalists themselves — as if operating on the same subterranean wavelength — lobbed musical fragments back and forth with infectious glee.
Not much else on the program reached the same level of excitement, although there was certainly no resisting the undulating swell and fall of Gloria Justen’s “FlowingTurning Dance,” a beautiful and alltoobrief curtainraiser expertly played by cellist Hannah AddarioBerry.
David Coll’s “Caldera,” a stopandstart duet for bass clarinet and percussion, seemed unable to decide whether it wanted to be music or kinetic sculpture. “Steelworks,” an instrumental trio by Anna Clyne with tape and film, fell victim to technical glitches midway through that disrupted an already sketchy musical argument.
Perhaps most disappointing was the 1935 “Mosaic Quartet” (String Quartet No. 3) of Henry Cowell, a collection of five short movements that the performers can play and repeat in whatever order they choose. It’s the kind of innovation that sounds intriguing in theory, but the formal games do little to disguise the drabness of Cowell’s writing, and they felt mild and even timorous in comparison with Cage’s much wilder spirit.