A ‘FROM THE TOP’ FAREWELL
In his gala farewell, credit conductor Steven Schick with both audacity and high performance standards.
Schick was a good 30 seconds into Caroline Chen’s ultra-soft, ethereal piece “Cold Mountains, One Belt, Heartbreak Green” when he stopped the music, as the players were a bit out of sync with each other. He apologized to his public and started all over again, citing the need for a good recording for the composer’s collection.
How many dare to stop rather than plow ahead, come what may? Schick is too much of a perfectionist for that. And so on leaving the Contemporary Music Players after seven years as artistic director, the versatile percussionist-director-conductor resolutely aimed for the summit experience and showed his mettle to both audience and attending composer Chen.
This was the opening of a four-concert set of the CMP, conceived as a grand tribute to him. In my view he is a better percussionist than a conductor, given his no-baton technique with angular, flailing arms producing more body English out front than anything else. Yet he revitalized the group, the largest of all the Bay Area new-music ensembles (with a regular roster of 20), became a presence in the community, articulating a music than many avoid out of trepidation. He consciously made selections that might attract the curious rather than just repel the casual concertgoer.
The hits of the program were the Folk Songs of Luciano Berio (1925-2003) which he refined while in residence at Oakland’s Mills College. The impeccable interpreter was the animated mezzo Silvie Jensen, delving into Armenian, Azeri, Sardinian, French and other languages/dialects with articulate pronunciation. You came away wishing that she’d give master classes for emerging opera singers.
Clearly programmatic, “The Abandoned Cathedral” by the Guatemalan composer Xavier Beteta provided spaces and silences to represent the deserted church, with the interior’s reverberation caught by the piano’s depressed sustaining pedal.
Born not long after the Bolshevik Revolution, Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) was equally revolutionary in her “Grand Duet” for cello and piano, exploiting and contrasting the very top and bottom of the instruments’ range, with a certain amount of vehement pummeling. She reverted to a lullaby at the peak of the cello’s range, well-rendered by Stephen Harrison and his effortless (?) double-stop technique.
The radical Ustvolskaya spent most of her life in Leningrad, yet she both was born in and died in St. Petersburg, Russia. You figure!
The SF-based CMP is nearing the end of its 47th season, one of the oldest such groups in the state. Eric Dudley is the New Artistic Director, whose programs will start with the 2018-19 Season.
S.F. Contemporary Music Players with four programs March 23-24 at Z Space, 450 Florida, S.F. For CMP info, go online.
