Festival offered up dark, gritty soundtrack
Everyone likes sweetness and light in moderation, but there’s also an important place for the tart, the acerbic and the gritty. Music that rubs up against our expectations, or gives us something tough and gristly to chew over at length, has a bracing delight all its own.
If there was a common thread joining the disparate last two programs of San Francisco Performances’ probing fournight Pivot festival, titled “String Theory” — and I’m not going to lie, I’m stretching a bit here — it was a focus on work that didn’t go down easy. Abrasive textures, uncomfortable thoughts.
Or as the singer Theo Bleckmann summed it up in opening his program of Weimarera songs on Saturday, Jan. 25, “dark and beautiful music.”
Bleckmann’s performance in Herbst Theatre, accompanied by pianist Dan Tepfer and the Telegraph Quartet, favored piquancy as a way of contemplating the horrors of the interwar and wartime periods. On Sunday, Jan. 26, by contrast, a vigorous duo recital by
violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and cellist Jay Campbell adopted a more ferocious approach.
You might expect that two string instruments could find a vein of lyricism in their collaboration, and they did. But it was mediated through a veil of fierce sonorities and expressive intensity.
That was particularly true in the two big works that anchored the program, Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello and Kodály’s Duo, Op. 7. Both pieces consistently push against the bounds of polite behavior — Ravel with harmonic daring and explosive textures, Kodály with a tireless emphasis on dance rhythms. Yet both pieces also reach a sort of inner serenity, and Kopatchinskaja and Campbell’s performances embraced that duality perfectly.
The rest of the program was assembled out of short fragments, some of recent vintage and others reaching back centuries. The “Winchester Troper,” a collection of liturgical settings that dates back to the 11th century — in other words, well before the advent of anything like modern musical notation — was a beguilingly odd source to open with, but the music from it sounded unnervingly lovely. Kopatchinskaja and Campbell followed up later with sweettoned snippets from the Renaissance composers Orlando Gibbons and Guillaume de Machaut.
These alternated, like the threads in a tapestry, with equally brief offerings by Jörg Widmann, Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti — that last an epigrammatic and haunting homage to the Swedish composer Hilding Rosenberg. The Hungarian composer Márton Illés, meanwhile, was on hand for the second performance of his “Énkör III” (“ICircle”), a skittery, frenetic assortment of pizzicato explosions and aggressive giveandtake between the two instruments.
Nothing in Bleckmann’s program the previous night adopted that kind of sonic effrontery, but the undercurrent of unease throughout achieved something of the same effect. Nearly all the songs in this 90minute event featured texts by Bertolt Brecht — pitiless in their combination of moral seriousness and ironic detachment — set to music at times by Kurt Weill but more often by his longtime collaborator Hanns Eisler.
All of them benefited from Bleckmann’s distinctive delivery, a sort of cool, eventempered crooning that can suddenly rear up and bite. (With his bow tie and knockkneed, wideelbowed physical language, Bleckmann can sometimes resemble Pee Wee Herman auditioning for the role of the master of ceremonies in “Cabaret.”)
Some of the material — including Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny” or “Maskulinum-Femininum,” Mischa Spoliansky’s wonderful ode to gender fluidity — got relatively straightforward readings, with Bleckmann effecting smooth linguistic segues between English and German. But he also got more outlandish in Weill’s “Alabama Song” and used electric looping to deliver an exquisitely layered solo fantasia on the perennial hit “Lili Marlene.”
The evening was at once sobering and exhilarating, especially against the current political backdrop. As Brecht put it in his great poem “Motto,” which Bleckmann quoted in passing, “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.”