Rat­ing: 4.5 out of 5 stars

The San Fran­cisco Con­tem­po­rary Music Play­ers pre­sented their final con­cert of the 2009/2010 sea­son tonight, 26 Apr 2010, at the Herbst The­ater in down­town San Fran­cisco. On the pro­gram were pieces by Greek com­poser Mano­lis Manousakis, Amer­i­can Tan Dun, Chi­nese Guo Wen­jing, and French­man Philippe Hurel. This pro­gram was pre­sented coher­ently and engag­ingly, because proper atten­tion was paid not only to select­ing and prepar­ing the music, but also to light­ing, stag­ing, and tech­no­log­i­cal aspects—a rare achievement.

A major crit­i­cism I have of many new music con­certs is the pro­gram­ming. When an audi­ence is pre­sented with com­plex music, much of it often music they have never heard, it is cru­cially impor­tant to help the audi­ence find a path into the music. In my opin­ion, con­certs should be tran­scen­dent expe­ri­ences (as opposed to lis­ten­ing exams), in which the audi­ence hears some­thing in a new and sat­is­fy­ing way. Toward this end, how a piece is pre­sented in con­cert is often more impor­tant than what piece is presented.

The first piece on the pro­gram was Manousakis’s A Time to Break Silence, Speak­ing Truth to Power. This solo bas­soon piece was com­mis­sioned by Rufus Olivier, who played it tonight. Musi­cally, A Time to Break Silence is a suc­cess. It is chal­leng­ing and full of craft, but not at the expense of musi­cal­ity. What stands out is Manousakis’s beau­ti­ful phras­ing and a lyri­cism that is unex­pected in a piece con­sist­ing largely of mul­ti­phon­ics and quartertones.

The one area in which the piece falls short, how­ever, is its extra­mu­si­cal theme. Olivier had asked for a piece about the Amer­i­can civil rights movement—a theme that Greek com­poser Manousakis was clearly uncom­fort­able with. The per­for­mance was pre­ceded by a video col­lage about the civil rights, after which Olivier entered and began per­form­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, the con­trast of a giant, fre­netic video pro­jec­tion to a sub­tle, solo bas­soon piece was jar­ring. Manousakis may have tried to write a civil rights piece, but he didn’t—this is sim­ply a beau­ti­ful solo bas­soon piece and should be pre­sented that way, with­out the awk­ward video.

Next was one of Tan Dun’s more well-known pieces, Water Music, and from this point onward, the con­cert was com­pletely engag­ing. The four per­cus­sion­ists entered from the back of the hall, which had been dark­ened more than usual, play­ing as they walked. After reach­ing the stage, they set to work on their “water drums”: giant glass bowls full of water on pedestals. The hall stayed unusu­ally dark, but the bowls were illu­mi­nated with blue light, which placed the focus on the hands of the per­cus­sion­ists as they played with the water.

Addi­tion­ally, the piece was messy, with water fly­ing every­where; at one point a per­cus­sion­ist care­fully turned a soggy page of music, to comic effect. Tan Dun wrote Water Music so that nat­ural water sounds would weave in and out of more musi­cal struc­tures. Some­times it seemed like we were lis­ten­ing to water as we hear it every day; at other times, the sounds were dis­tinc­tively those of a per­cus­sion ensem­ble and it was easy to for­get that the instru­ment was in fact water.

A fan­tas­tic per­for­mance aside, what made the piece a suc­cess was the light­ing and stag­ing. Focus­ing our atten­tion on the water bowls helped to draw the audi­ence into Tan Dun’s musi­cal con­cept. Fur­ther­more, the dark­ened hall and focused beams of light allowed us to see not only the hands in the bowls, but the water splash­ing out. At times, the per­cus­sion­ists were so in tune with each other that water would fly out of all four bowls at once and land in uni­son on the stage, which was thrilling to watch.

Next on the pro­gram was Guo Wenjing’s Parade, writ­ten for six Chi­nese opera gongs and three per­cus­sion­ists. Guo Wen­jing uses com­plex chore­og­ra­phy and a mix­ture of sticks and mal­lets to build a var­ied and inter­est­ing per­cus­sion piece. How­ever, as inter­est­ing as it is to hear, it is even more inter­est­ing to see close up, due to the inter­twin­ing of the per­cus­sion­ists’ mal­lets. In another intel­li­gent pro­gram­ming deci­sion, SFCMP mounted a cam­era over the table hold­ing the gongs and pro­jected a live feed of the per­cus­sion­ists’ hands. This close-up per­spec­tive felt like an aug­men­ta­tion of the focused light­ing of the pre­vi­ous piece.

The last piece on the pro­gram was Hurel’s Fig­ure libres, con­ducted by Chris­t­ian Bal­dini. In this piece, Hurel shows clear har­monic influ­ences from Grisey and orches­tra­tional and for­mal ideas taken per­haps from Rihm. In any case, the result was a connoisseur’s piece. A cer­tain knowl­edge of the spec­tral reper­toire and a love of micro­tonal har­monies is required to fully appre­ci­ate Fig­ure libres’s colour­ful counterpoint.

How­ever, Fig­ure libres would not have worked with a light show or the­atrics. The the­atri­cal­ity of Fig­ure libres is in the vir­tu­osic trad­ing of themes between play­ers. Fig­ure libres is a chal­leng­ing tour de force for the con­duc­tor and ensem­ble, and Bal­dini was able to bring out the nuances in Hurel’s score and coor­di­nate the syn­co­pated coun­ter­point between the play­ers. Any­thing more than the music would have been dis­tract­ing in such an intri­cate piece.

Taken as a whole, His Own Space of Free­dom worked well as a pro­gram. Despite the fact that all four com­posers on the pro­gram come from very dif­fer­ent aes­thetic places, the con­cert felt uni­fied because SFCMP made an effort to present each piece in its best light—quite lit­er­ally. The effect was sim­i­lar to that of hav­ing four inter­est­ing peo­ple over for din­ner and get­ting to know each of them in turn, in their ele­ment. Too often new music con­certs feel more like drawn-out small talk. His Own Space of Free­dom was very sat­is­fy­ing as an event and I hope that it ends up serv­ing as a model for future con­certs at SFCMP and elsewhere.