The music in the text

The title of the ninth season of the BluePrint new music project at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is Between the Lines;  and, in the words of the “Welcome” statement by Artistic Director Nicole Paiement, its theme is the exploration of “the intimate relationship between music and verse.”  The program for last night’s opening concert in the Conservatory Concert Hall offered a world premiere, a West Coast premiere, and a preview of a special event scheduled for February.  The world premiere was by David Conte, who teaches composition at the Conservatory and conducts the Conservatory Chorus.  The West Coast premiere was of a “Pocket” concerto, commissioned by the Miller Theater and composed for violinist Jennifer Koh by Laura Schwendinger.  The preview was for this season’s Ensemble Parallèle production of Philip Glass’ opera Orphée.

Conte entitled his new work Sexton Songs;  and it is a setting of five poems by Anne Sexton for soprano (sung by Marnie Breckenridge) and chamber orchestra (conducted by Paiement).  Before the music began the lights were lowered to total darkness, and in that darkness one heard a recording of Sexton herself reading “Us,” the last of the poems in Conte’s cycle.  It must have taken considerable confidence (if not a bit of chutzpah) for Conte to conceive this introduction.  Sexton’s voice was musical in itself, strong, warm, and incantatory, with inflections that would endow signification on words that might otherwise pass unnoticed.  She clearly appreciated that “intimate relationship between music and verse;”  and listening to her read was practically a concert experience unto itself.

Wisely, Conte chose not to try to imitate the music of Sexton’s voice in his own scoring.  Rather, he used his inventiveness to set an establishing context for Sexton’s poems.  He evoked a particular musical rhetoric of her time that camped out on the border between jazz and popular music.  Whether or not this was the sort of thing that was on Sexton’s radio when she was working on her poems is moot.  This kind of music was so pervasive in those days that it could not have escaped her consciousness, probably even during her stay in a mental institution.  Within this context the soprano unfolds straightforward melodic lines that are clearly distinct from this instrumental context but are just as distinct from Sexton’s own declamatory style.  This seems to have been Conte’s strategy for allowing the words to speak for themselves, and for the most part Breckenridge delivered her part with the necessary clarity to fulfill that strategy.  The result was a presentation of Sexton’s poems with the same meticulous attention to signification on both small and large scales that Sexton could command in her own readings.

This same attention to signification was also very much present in Keisuke Nakagoshi’s performance of four scenes from Philip Glass’ Orphée arranged for piano solo by Paul Barnes.  Glass’ opera is an adaptation of the 1950 film by Jean Cocteau and uses Cocteau’s script as its libretto.  That film is not so much a telling of the Greek myth as it is a surrealistic reflection on the themes of love and death raised by the myth.  Whether or not Glass chose to reflect on the musical legacy of this myth can only be resolved through a thorough examination of the score, but Nakagoshi’s performance began with a decidedly evocative gesture.  This was the Baroque-style melodic turn found at the beginning of the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and set against the same gently rocking accompaniment that Gluck had conceived.  Indeed, hearing this music played on piano proved to be a “double reflection” on not only Gluck’s source but also its arrangement for solo piano by Giovanni Sgambati.

Those familiar with Glass’ approach to “music with repetitive structures” (the description that Glass himself prefers to “minimalism”) can find many familiar harmonic progressions and rhetorical gestures in the four scenes that Nakagoshi selected.  However, by performing this music on a piano, rather than one of the electric keyboards that tend to be used in the Philip Glass Ensemble, Nakagoshi demonstrated that one can repeat without being repetitive.  This is where that attention to signification came into play.  If we think of a reflection as a distorted reproduction, then Nakagoshi sought out differentiating elements that elevated the performance above the frequently reproduced marks on the printed page.  Through such differentiating elements one could begin to grasp the moody qualities of Cocteau’s own “distorting reflection;”  and Nakagoshi’s performance was most effective in rousing curiosity about how this music will emerge in the context of a full opera.

Where signification seemed less evident, unfortunately, was in Schwendinger’s violin concerto, entitled “Chiaroscuro Azzurro.”  As might be suspected, the influence here comes from painting, rather than poetry, although the emphasis on azure coloration is about as unclear as the reference to Georges de La Tour in Schwendinger’s program notes.  If one thinks in terms of coloration, then the violin solo definitely explores a broad palette of sonorities;  but even more interesting in We He’s performance was his ability to integrate his own sonorities with those of the accompanying chamber orchestra, creating smoothly blended mixes of sound that would seem to contradict the sharp contrasts of the chiaroscuro style.  What was missing, however, was any sense of journey in this three-movement concerto.  Even the alternations in tempo were not particularly differentiated, and the result was a prevailing sense of uniformity that, while not repetitious, never carried any signification of movement.  Thus, while the music seems to have been blessed with a faithful execution, it remained unclear just what was being executed over the duration of the performance.