Intimate Sounds of Women’s Music at Forefront
The San Francisco Symphony’s latest aphoristic streaming program “Nostalgia” suggests more the dimensions of opera and Broadway theater than of mere chamber music. The focus is on three American women composers still on the way up, the best-known of them the pride of Brooklyn Missy Mazzoli, 40, and Pulitzer-Prize-winning Caroline Shaw, 38. And their deft music for strings is enhanced with elaborate lighting, split screens, and forest backgrounds, all of it in lighting so sparsely atmospheric you’re still not sure if Shaw’s piece is a septet or octet.
If in these unsettled times you like intimate soothing sounds—tonal and consonant—this is your meat and potatoes.
The three composers are young and contemporary, yet their harmonies are traditional, as easy on the mind and ear as pre-Debussy 19thcentury (thus the title “Nostalgia”). Each takes you into a calm space where you might encounter scurrying animals or figments of your imagination—sounds of the night lulling you off into their varied dream worlds.
More than ever, concert music has moved away from the dissonance-plagued mid-20thcentury toward music ever more congenial to the ear; even Stravinsky, Bartok and Prokofieff would be seen as wild-eyed radicals in this environment. Whether we’re undergoing a step forward or backward will be for a future decade to decide. What is undeniable is that we have whole programs of readily digested contemporary music, whether by Esa-Pekka Salonen’s SF Symphony players that produced this, or the Philip Glass Ensemble, or the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz.
If there’s a disappointment here, it’s that this SoundBox “Nostalgia” streamed program is only 30 minutes long, about one-third the length of a symphonic evening. Clearly the major emphasis went not into the volume of music but rather the surrounding visual effects and enhancements.
Mazzoli’s Vespers for Solo Violin is a brief but haunting piece I listened to again and again, with swoops, glissandos and slow sonorities, interspersed with tremolo-like outbursts, an interpretation at the hands of a newer SF Symphony player, Polina Sedukh, supplemented by a solo soprano obbligato.
Freya Waley-Cohen, the youngest at 31, offered “Conjure” for string quartet in four contrasting sections. The music, like the projections, bring on ethereal wooded glades at dusk. It is atmospheric and quite fascinating in spinning those close harmonies, often in the highest registers, ending in a wispy lullaby.
Music Director Salonen appeared and conducted the Shaw “Entr’acte,” an animated work full of rocking-bow broken chords and gorgeous sonorities. The multiple image overlays used very contemporary camera work in near-darkness, bringing to mind composer Richard Strauss a century ago sitting through an ever-darker rehearsal of a new opera and remarking acidly, “Nowadays, there are no lighting designers. Only darkening designers!”
“Nostalgia,” first of the season’s Sound Box programs being streamed by and with members of the San Francisco Symphony, available by subscription till August. For online-only access and future programs, consult sfsymphonyplus.org. For info, call 415-864-6000.
The SFS plus series will also launch a parallel intimate series to Sound Box entitled “Currents,” again emphasizing women’s creativity in music.
And you thought that there were no women composers? Think again.
