Recently heard

•Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question. •Darius Milhaud: La création du monde, op. 81. •Jean Sibelius: Luonnotar, op. 70. •Thomas Adès: In Seven Days.      Thomas Adès, San Francisco Symphony; Dawn Upshaw, soprano; Kirill Gerstein, piano; Tal Rosner, video artist      Heard March 6, 2015, in Davies Hall, San Francisco

Eastside Road, March 8, 2015—

ON PAPER, as the cliché goes, the concert program was very attractive, attractive enough to suggest a couple of hours driving to hear it. And in retrospect I'm glad we did: but in the event the evening could have profited from more expressive conducting. The conducting composer is one of the problems (by far not the biggest!) attending contemporary orchestral music. I can see why composers contribute to the problem: it's a living; undoubtedly a better one than composing. It's a sad fact that the creators of music are rarely rewarded as well as their interpreters. But a couple of recent experiences have led me to believe really fine conductors deserve their rewards; they bring something to the concert hall their part-time colleagues rarely seem able to supply.

The program in question was thematic: all four compositions address the concept spelled out in Milhaud's title, and suggested in Adès's: the creation of the world. That was an intriguing idea, particularly when expressed by two of my favorite pieces from the previous century and two more that I'm unfamiliar with. Ives;s The Unanswered Question is of course well known. It calls for a string ensemble, preferably unseen, which drones quietly away on slowly changing chords suggesting some kind of ethereal process. A solo trumpet plays a slow five-note call whose pitch contour and rhythm suggests

What - is the An-swer?

, repeating the call without variation a number of times; each time the call is answered by a quartet of flutes playing increasingly more discordant, strident responses. Ives had a program in mind: the strings represent "the silences of the Druids, who know, see, and hear nothing"; the trumpet repeats "the perennial question of existence"; the flutes are the "fighting answerers" who, as Jan Swafford writes in the useful book Charles Ives: a Life with Music,"for all their sound and fury, get nowhere." (The Ives quotes are from Swafford's book, where they are unattributed.)

In this performance the strings were backstage, conducted by Christian Baldini, and barely audible. The solo trumpet (uncredited in the program!) stood downstage center in the traditional soloist's position and played, commendably, from memory; Adès stood nearby to direct the flute ensemble, standing (good! not sitting!) upstage left. The performance was, I think, the most satisfying of the evening: Ives does nearly all the work with his score.

I would have thought La création du monde nearly as foolproof, but in spite of fine instrumental and ensemble playing this performance seemed dull. I don't think this is the necessary result of playing the piece in a big concert hall, though of course that doesn't help. Milhaud scored his haunting, poignant ballet score, commissioned by the Paris-based Ballets suédois, for an unusual combination: according to the useful article on Wikipedia, reduced winds including an alto saxophone, one French horn, two trumpets and one trombone, and four strings: two violins, a cello and a double-bass; with a large percussion section including tambourine, four drums, five timpani, piano, cymbal, anvil and wood block.

Milhaud's twenty-minute score is in six sections, with prominent solo roles for saxophone, clarinet, and double-bass. The music is heavily influenced by Milhaud's enthusiasm for the (mostly black) American jazz he'd heard in New York in 1920, and the instrumentation probably suggests the pick-up theater orchestras prevailing in that milieu and vaudeville. (Ives was similarly influenced; there's an interesting affinity between Ives and Milhaud, who both excel at integrating vernacular and "high-art" musical styles.)

While La création du monde is narrative and suggestive, clearly written for choreography, it is also contrapuntal and even oddly austere, a parallel I think to the sober browns and muted colors, the arbitrary and abstraction-oriented geometry of Braque and Picasso at the peak of Cubism. Its effect depends on the sonorities of its instrumental writing and the energy of its rhythms, but also on the structural, architectural quality of its construction, which must not be neglected in favor of surface color and "expressivity." I was concerned before the piece began, listening to the saxophonist warming up and pracising his vibrato, and alas I was right to have worried: the performance was like fine dancers being sacrificed to the novelty of their costumes.

But then Sibelius's Luonnotar ! What a marvelous piece! Composed in 1913 (halfway between The Unanswered Question and La création du monde ) and scored for full orchestra (winds in pairs, normal brass, but two sets of timpani and two harps), it is a demanding scène dramatique or concert aria for solo soprano, to a text from the Finnish epic the Kalevala, again addressing the creation of the world. Luonnotar is — again I rely on Wikipedia — "the Spirit of Nature and Mother of the Seas," a virgin daughter of Air who after seven centuries' ceaseless swimming in Ocean gives birth, by charitably offering rest to a similarly restlessly flying teal, to heaven, moon, and stars.

Sibelius "portrays" all this through his characteristically restless rhythms containing hard-edged, brittle themes, with the surging power of lower strings and winds and the bright icy sparkle of high winds and percussion. And against this, always, the soprano, whose very difficult role involves every corner of a two-octave tessitura, a command of Finnish consonants (and vowels, of course), and the ability to maintain presence within a full orchestra even while singing quietly.

This was the best performance of the evening, completely persuasive, largely because of Dawn Upshaw's glowing power and unflappable presence. The orchestra played well, with contained strength and focus, and Adès shaped and controlled the flow of the music carefully and expressively.

After the intermission we heard Adès's piano concerto, In Seven Days, composed in 2008, a century after the Ives. In seven connected sections the piece addresses the traditional Judeo-Christian seven-day Creation myth, less persuasively, I think, than Milhaud's "primitive" version or Sibelius's exotic pagan one. On the one hearing, in the back of the balcony seating, I had a hard time hearing either sonic details or structural units. The piano clattered away; the orchestra played smoothly and without much articulation; at the back of the orchestra, cartoonlike images played with a nine-section grid, suggesting Walt Disney collaborating with Pong. Sea and Sky emerged from Chaos, I read din the program; Land, Grass and Trees appeared, likewise Stars, Sun, and Moon; a couple of fugues accompanied the appearance of animal life; and the piece ended in Contemplation, as the concert had begun. Like Ives's flutes, Adès's forces seemed to me to get nowhere.

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•Charles Amirkhanian: Dumbok Bookache; Ka Himeni Hehena; Marathon. •Errollyn Wallen: The Errollyn Wallen Songbook. •Pauline Oliveros: Twins Peeking at Koto. •Don Byron: pieces for his ensemble.      The composers, with the Del Sol String Quartet; Frode Haltli, accordion; Miya Masaoka, koto; and the Don Byron ensemble      Heard March 7, 2015, at the Other Minds Festival; San Francisco Jazz Center

THAT WAS A RICH night in the vicinity of Davies Hall: Sarah Cahill was, unknown to us, playing music by Terry Riley on the same block; Other Minds was opening its 20th annual festival down the street. We returned the next evening to hear the second Other Minds concert. Other Minds is an annual assembly of internationally prominent (or in some cases not so prominent) composers who gather for a few days of conversation and show-and-tell, then attend a series of concerts in which each presents music to a generally young and attentive audience (including, of course, the composers themselves). (I should mention here that I was one of the group in 1996, in the third annual OM festival.)

Other Minds is directed by the Bay Area composer and factotum Charles Amirkhanian, who, because he turns 70 this year, chose this year to include his own music on each of the festival's three evenings. This is not as arrogant an act as it may seem: his work is modest, humorous, and unpretentious, and serves well as an opening act. The three selections last night were "text-sound" pieces for speaking voice (Amirkhanian), spoken live over a pre-recorded background of other spoken lines (still Amirkhanian) and percussion.

The source is Ernst Toch's Dada Fuge aus der Geographie, composed for speaking chorus in 1930 or so, and the source is not far except in years. I think Amirkhanian's sound-text pieces would gain from greater diversity of voice: the composer's baritone is clear and pleasant, but grows wooly when redoubled and -tripled electronically.

Errolyn Wallen was a new personality to me, but is apparently well enough known; born in Belize, she was moved to London at the age of two, and has developed a considerable career in the UK. She has a strong clear focussed soprano voice and considerable chops as a pianist — at one point, in one of the seven songs she presented, her piano technique suggested she'd be at home in Ives's Concord Sonata. Her songs occasionally brought his to mind, too, with their constant references to a vernacular, even commercial style, and the directness (not to say naïvety) of their verbal and musical content. When they're light-hearted, as in "What's Up Doc?," they're engaging; when they reach toward emotional seriousness they grow too sentimental for my taste. All of them were with only her own piano accompaniment except the last, "Daedalus," accompanied by piano and string quartet — here, the Del Sol Quartet, with a substitute for first violinist Kate Stenberg.

The concert shifted gears after intermission. Pauline Oliveros brought a new work, for two accordions and koto, perhaps twenty minutes long, full of surprising beauty, with silences, a great dynamic range, an enormous range of instrumental color, and the composer's characteristic good humor — a piece full of heart and invention, occasionally hearkening back to the avant-garde of the 1960s: I thought I heard Robert Erickson's sunny straightforward "experimentalism" channeled in a sudden upwelling near the center of the piece), and the totally accepting state of mind, eager to explore any kind of sound and allow it its place, confirmed Oliveros's place alongside that of John Cage.

Then the clarinetist Don Byron came on, with his ensemble: John Betsch, drums; Cameron Brown, bass; Aruán Ortiz, piano. Their improvisations, over charts, were supple, witty, resourceful, and engaging — a throwback in spirit, though stylistically more advanced I think, to the "third stream" music that tried to negotiate between chamber jazz and avant-garde concert music fifty years ago. (When Byron played his clarinet into the sounding-board of the open Steinway it was impossible not to think of Mort Subotnick back at Mills College in the 1960s.)

Where the first half of the concert had shown awareness, intelligence, and skill, this second half was all artfulness and vision. It closed a pair of musical evenings on a note of pure pleasure.

Music for the mind

Ojai North at UC Berkeley, June 13, 2012: Janáček: String Quartet 2, "Intimate Letters" Reinbert de Leeuw: Im wunderschönen Monat Mai Ives: Piano Sonata no. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860   Norwegian Chamber Orchestra;   Reinbert de Leeuw and Marc-André Hamelin, pianos;   Lucy Shelton, speaker

CAL PERFORMANCES, the performing-arts booker at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, engaged this summer to bring the Ojai Festival north from its annual May schedule in its bucolic setting in Ventura county, between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

There, for a number of decades now, contemporary and standard-rep music, for orchestra and chamber ensembles, has been performed in an outdoors shell in a park by the tennis courts which provide one of Ojai's other tourist attractions. Stravinsky performed here; I heard Boulez conduct here forty years ago; once I even performed, reading one of John Cage's lectures with violin and percussion collaborators.

I've always thought that events like these should tour. California's a big country, close to Italy in size; it's a shame to let the work of producing such festivals be spent all at one location only.

I'm not sure the second week of June is the best time to present such concerts in Berkeley, though. School's out; people are away; the weather's glorious; apparently most people have find even the superb acoustics of Hertz Hall less attractive than competing possibilities.

We too are staying away for the most part: the hundred-forty-mile round trip is just too much to repeat next day, and there's too much work to do at home to stay away for three whole days. But yesterday's double concert was too attractive to ignore.

I like the idea of the schedule: two short concerts, one at seven in the evening, the next at 9:30. And the programs! As Christopher Hailey's lucid, intelligent program note was headed, this is music "between then and there, here and now"; individual pieces which generate among themselves a musical conversation about things both personal and historical, conceived by composers of unusually deep and penetrating minds.

The Janáček quartet was played in an adaptation for string orchestra (6-5-4-4-2 in this configuration), with solo players occasionally bringing strategic moments further forward from the ensemble. From my seat centered in the last row — my favorite spot in this hall — the sound was marvelous, both full and focussed. The dynamic range was amazing: pianississimi barely audible, recalling Berg's frequent direction wie ein Hauch, "like a breath." (Except that such silences are breathless; they force you to suppress all activity in your total concentration on the moment.)

At the other end of the range, full-throated fortissimi, almost taking the instruments beyond the range of musical sound into that of noise. Janáček's quartet is "about" his illicit love for a much younger woman, an obsession that found its final musical outlet in this late piece. He was 74 when he wrote it, in the last year of his life: it is in many ways a valedictory. Themes and instrumental assignments are identified quite directly with himself, his ardor, and the young woman; but the piece is also "about" larger, more general matters than personal experience: life and death; age and youth; release and control.

And beyond these matters, which can be individuated within the score and its performance, there is the uniquely musical component, perhaps most easily identified in the transitions — from solo to ensemble, soft to loud (or the reverse), note to phrase, phrase to section. Janáček was famously concerned with finding musical equivalents of speech, specifically the urgent rhythms and crisp consonants of his native Czech language (born in Hukvaldy, near the Polish border, he was Moravian); and his melodic style is given to short thematic outbursts, repeated motives, nervous pacing, all now and then contributing to a longer, fuller statement. Listening to Janáček, you can't help thinking his music is telling you something; and frequently he — and his performers — seem as frustrated as you at the fact you can't tell exactly what it is.

You could tell exactly what it is Reinbert de Leeuw was "talking" about in Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, his cycle of twenty-one (three sets of seven) mediations on well-known Lieder by Schubert and Schumann, setting poems by Heine, Müller, Goerthe Eichendorff, and Ludwig Rellstab. He was telling us what these marvelous songs mean — to him, to us, to the world; and what they meant at the ardent time of their first hearing, when both poem and setting were dashed off, apparently so quickly and unsuppressibly.

And so once again we were confronting age and youth; but now the age of our present postmodern condition and the youth of German Romanticism. On the one hand, by pushing the material of these songs to dramatic extremes, de Leeuw almost succeeds in making what T.S. Eliot would have called a contemporary "objective correlative" of them, not only restoring the youthful, almost adolescent freshness of the original songs through the heightening of their musical expression, but also creating a new, contemporary equivalent of them, by linking Schubert and Schumann (and thereby Heine and Goethe, who after all have lost, for most of us, the surprising immediacy and presence they must have had for their contemporaries) to the long arc of musical and poetic culture their work generated, nearly two hundred years ago.

So de Leeuw not only suggests Mahler and Brecht-Weill and Schoenberg; he also suggests — especially through his technical means — the world of cabaret and rock opera. The American soprano Lucy Shelton, billed on the program as "speaker," certainly speaks some of these lines: but she also sings, and shrieks, and "sprechstimmes" in the manner of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (which she performed two weeks ago in Glasgow), always using a body microphone, alternately standing, turning her back to the audience, facing one or another of the instrumentalists, sitting dejectedly, or stalking about the stage, wearing a black vaguely Biedermeier sheath with a dramatic gold wrap, boldly decorated with what seem to be abstract Klimtian roses or pomegranates, thrown over her back and shoulders. She was ingratiating, seductive, sorrowful, boisterous, reflective, defeated, exhausting, magnificent.

De Leeuw played piano, occasionally beating time or indicating entrances, upstage center, six wind players (flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn) at his left in an open arc toward downstage left; six strings (two each violins and celli, viola and double bass) symmetrically disposed to the right of the harpist who sat on his own right. Fourteen musicians; thrice seven texts.

De Leeuw is of course Dutch, born in 1938 in Amsterdam where in 1974 he founded the Schönberg Ensemble, and since then seems to have been more active as pianist and conductor than as composer. According to Wikipedia his last composition was written for them in 1985; "Since then he has only made adaptations and instrumentations." But if Im wunderschönen Monat Mai is any indication these "adaptations" are full-fledged new compositions in their own right, and this one a particularly significant one, endlessly rewarding and persuasive for its strictly musical content, and meaningful and provocative for what it has to say about the philosophy of music and history.

De Leeuw is a fine pianist — his recordings of Satie are among the finest I know. We last heard him in November 2010, when he provided the music for Hans van Marien's ballet Without Words — playing the piano accompaniments to Hugo Wolf's Mignon songs, the dance alone providing the normally sung component. He played then, as he did last night, with taste, care, and restrained passion: he is a thoroughly admirable example of intelligent, artful restraint.

He is also the co-author (with J. Bernlef) of the important Dutch monograph Charles Ives (1969: De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam), where he writes of the Concord Sonata

In het kolossale stuk worden, misschien als in geen ander, de kwaliteiten van Ives' muziek verenigd. De schitterende paradoxen, de onverwachte associaties, de stilistische vrijheid worden samengevat in een geheel, waarin bij wijze van spreken een eeuw muziek wordt samengevat en daaraan tegelijk een niuewe inhoud geeft. (op. cit., p. 228)

(In this colossal piece, perhaps as in no other, the qualities of Ives's music are united. The stunning paradoxes, unexpected associations, stylistic freedoms are summarized in a single unity, in which in a manner of speaking a century of music is at once summarized and given a renewed meaning.)

Ives, in this great sonata — Lawrence Gilman, writing in the New York Herald Tribune after its 1939 premiere, called it "the greatest music composed by an American," and I could argue that it remains that — is inspired by his long and deep contemplation of the lives and work of four forces of the New England Enlightenment: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau.

He "depicts" these subjects, and the site-specificity of the Concord in which they lived, with musical concepts and procedures. This isn't tone-painting, at least not often; you won't hear sound-portraits of carriages or steam-trains (though Thoreau's flute is portrayed realistically, wafting in quietly from offstage during the final movement). Instead, cultural associations most of us have been led to form with known musical sources — patriotic songs, hymn-tunes, Beethoven's Fifth, ragtime — are woven into a texture whose nearest artistic equivalent, I think, may be Molly Bloom's very different stream-of-consciousness soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses.

De Leeuw quotes Lou Harrison (from the essay "On Quotation", published in Modern Music 23, Summer 1946) on this:

His aim is amazingly close to that of the best Chinese poetry (wherein observed fact is more expression than referred likeness) and of Chinese painting which is concerned with observation of nature, human nature as well as 'natural' nature." (Een opvatting die dicht staat bij de bekende uitspraak van John Cage: "to imitate nature in her manner of operation".) (op. cit., p. 145)

(A formula that recalls the well-known one of John Cage:)

The resulting sonata has the depth, luminosity, inevitable near-nostalgia of the great late Schubert sonatas, in which the huge Understanding of ineffable experiences and matters, so valiantly attempted by Beethoven in his own late sonatas and string quartets, manages to be expressed without the distraction of personal heroics or suffering. There have been other great piano surveys of huge vistas — those by Pierre Boulez come to mind — but no one else, that I know of, manages to train such explorations on specific (though panoramically specific) terrain. Perhaps only a man like Ives, between Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, and on the margin of the European art-music tradition, could have achieved it.

I thought Marc-André Hamelin's performance, while persuasive and fluent, lacked passion. It seemed, well, bloodless. This in spite of a marvelous dynamic range, a careful attention to such details as the barely-heard "wrong-note" overtones hanging out of chords and clusters, and what seemed a perfect command of the (memorized) score. I didn't have mine on my lap, so I can't swear to it, but he seemed to have played every page, with perfect authenticity, an achievement I've rarely heard (if ever) even from pianists who had the pages in front of them on the rack.

A French-Canadian, born in 1961, he has recorded Haydn, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Alkan, the Brahms, Shostakovich, Shchedrin, Reger and Strauss concerti, and his own cycle of études in the minor keys, as well as jazz-inflected music by Swiss and French composers… all suggesting that his interest in Ives is logical as well as personal: perhaps the half-full Hertz Hall, or the relatively late hour, had something to do with what seemed to me a softened edge to an otherwise commanding performance.