Iveta Apkalna, organist. Davies Hall. March 28, 2010

Iveta Apkalna is a young organist from Riga who made her US debut tonight, in a program of music that was mostly unheard in this country. She gave a charming speech at the start of the concert, saying she was glad to have such a large audience ("You must all be organists, or husbands of organists, or wives of organists!") and felt welcomed ("So many smiling eyes" -- her idioms not quite in place). She said she would be playing mostly music by composers from Latvia, her country, and didn't apologize for it. "If we don't play this music, who will?"

The first piece, I was disappointed to see, was the warhorse of warhorses, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565. If she was right about the audience, at least half of them have played this piece in their youth. Her rendition wasn't special, though her technique was fine. As many performers do, she play that last page of chords and arpeggios lickety-split. I don't see the point. If you're going to play this piece, you might as well do it in full-on Majestic. Go for gravitas; skip the kitsch.

Once that was dispensed with, the next piece was a Toccata on the Chorale Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr by Aivars Kalējs. A delightful piece, it's one long crescendo, which is always dramatically satisfying. This was followed by "Four Miniatures" by a composer whose name I didn't catch. (It was a last-minute substitution for some other piece, but apart from re-ordering the pieces on the program, I think she actually played everything that was listed. Much confusion. A piece had been dropped, we were told, because of some mechanical problem with the organ.)

These miniatures are for pedal solo. Hands-free organ pieces exist for two reasons, to show interesting sounds way down in the low register that you'd never hear otherwise, and to show off the organist's technique (more often the latter). These miniatures didn't seem miniature enough to me. I'm not a fan of technique alone. That is, if you realize that she's playing all that with her feet, why, it's dazzling. But if you close your eyes and just listen to the music, it's not so dazzling. Indeed, with a Pedal-to-Great coupler, you could play the whole piece with your hands. Now would the music sound so impressive? Right; didn't think so.

There are piano pieces for the left hand alone, and there are stories about pianists who played these pieces because they lost an arm in wartime, or in the famous case of Leon Fleischer, a peacetime injury to his hand that healed decades later. They are also good exercise pieces. After some shoulder surgery last summer, my right arm was out of commission for a while, and I dragged out Brahms' left-hand-only version of the Bach Chaconne and played that for weeks. Anyone who has ever heard Marc-André Hamelin play those incredible left-hand-only pieces in Godowsky's Studies on Chopin's Etudes knows that there can be great compositions in this format, music you'd love even with your eyes closed.

But pedal-only pieces aren't like that. They are more like transcriptions, which are sometimes fun to play but often strike me as bizarre. Years ago, I heard Eliot Fisk play Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas -- on the guitar, in his own transcriptions. Peerless technique, a great musician, but I kept thinking, did he run out of guitar pieces to play and had to borrow some elsewhere? The answer could well be yes; the guitar literature is tiny compared to that of the harpsichord. But at some point, it goes overboard.

This evening, we heard such a transcription, Jean Gillou's transcription of Liszt's Symphonic Poem No. 5, Prometheus. I don't think I've ever heard the orchestral version, and I probably wouldn't like it. (I didn't like his Tasso when the SF Symphony played it recently.) But even on a large organ like the Ruffatti, it's impossible to capture the big-orchestra bombast of Liszt. For one thing, this organ doesn't have cymbals. (Liszt for theater organ? That might fit.)

For another thing, Davies Hall is quite dry. Great swaths of the organ literature were written for big, echo-y churches, where you can hear that final, final chord still ringing when you're halfway out to the parking lot. Such pieces are much harder to play in a dry acoustic, because the performer can't use the hall. The advantage of dryness is that you get to hear details that get lost in the cathedral, so with music that's changing harmonies quickly, or is thickly textured in some other way, a dry hall can help. I like the Hindemith Sonatas for Organ. When I first took organ lessons at 15, struggling through the Bach chorales, I listened to another student who was learning Hindemith's First Sonata, and I thought it was the weirdest music I'd ever heard. A few years later, I worked on the First Sonata, and like the other two, it's filled with crisp harmonies, so strange that you really need to hear them clearly. Now Hindemith himself played them on the organ in Woolsey Hall, which has an enormous reverberation. (As a symphony critic once wrote, "Only organists like Woolsey Hall.") Of course, if you're playing softly, and the audience is sitting close to the stage, the sound is direct. Who knows? Maybe Hindemith liked the effect.

A piece that worked really well tonight was Evocation II by Thierry Esciach, a composer in Paris, where all the churches echo a lot. But this piece has a repeated eight-note going on in the pedal, while increasingly wild things happen above it on the manuals. I think this piece would get lost in a big church. Or perhaps it was such a success here because Apkalna's technique is so good; she probably had to play it faster than the composer does at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. That pedal pattern is obsessive and scary by the time the piece is done.

We also heard a Toccata by Marie-Alphonse-Nicholas-Joseph Jongen (what were his parents thinking?), and a Fantasia, written for and dedicated to Miss Apkalna by Ēriks Ešenvalds. In announcing this piece, she said, "It is his first piece for organ, and as far as I know, his last." That drew chuckles from the audience. She explained that the composer is busily writing in other forms, e.g., an opera, but we got the hint that this might not be terribly well-suited for the organ. Actually, I thought it worked quite well. For one thing, it was nice to hear some slow, quiet music (much of the program was fast and loud), and the voices were often major sevenths apart as they ambled around. The middle section was a little rough: big, crunchy chords, the sort where you can't tell whether the performer is playing the right notes at all. But it ended in the style with which it began. A success.

The Liszt transcription was the last piece on the program, but happily for us, Apkalna played an encore, a transcription, also by Jean Gillou, of Prokofiev's Toccata in D Minor, Op. 11. Now this transcription really worked, probably because the piece was originally written for piano. It's very fast, incredibly difficult, and when it reaches its grandest, craziest moments, Apkalna's hands and feet were flying everywhere. When it ended, a breathtaking 4 minutes later, the crowd roared, but she just smiled and bowed. No big deal. Right.

I enjoy hearing music for the first time, and I'll probably never get to Latvia, so this was a perfect concert for me. Apkalna said several times that she hoped that the young composers would be invited to play in San Francisco. I hope just hope we get to hear her again.

Jarrett's complaint turns into a fiasco

Keith Jarrett played a solo concert at Davies Hall tonight, or started to, anyway. He wrecked it by chastising the audience about coughing, with speeches that grew longer and longer. He abandoned two pieces in the first half, and spoke about our "inability to concentrate." Things went from bad to worse in the second half. Well into a lovely, quiet song, played with dazzling technique, a few more coughs caused him to stop the piece. He then stood at the microphone and complained more, lamenting "I flew my engineer from Switzerland to record this concert." After several minutes of this hectoring, someone in the audience yelled, "Just play!" That did it. Jarrett got angrier, the audience got angrier, at him and each other, and more yelling ensued. Some audience members tried to be realistic ("If you gotta cough, you gotta cough." "Yeah, what if you've got a cold?"), but others agreed that silence is golden ("If you've got a cold, stay home!"), while others got really rude ("Shut up and play!"). Finally, someone yelled out an expletive. In all my years of concert-going, I've never heard an audience member call the performer an a-hole before.

Pandemonium followed. Jarrett retorted that he couldn't play his music, or possibly any music. "What do you want me to play?" he asked, testily. The audience missed the sarcasm and started calling out names of songs and groups. ("The Cure!") Several people called out "Summertime." Finally, Jarrett sat down at the keyboard and started playing fast and loud. A minute later, the tune emerged: Summertime. There was a collective sigh from the audience, although it seemed clear to me that he was doing this in anger (You want "Summertime"? All right, I'll show you "Summertime"!) I was reminded of jazz joints in the French Quarter, where you pay to have the band play a tune, but you have to pay extra to get them to play "When the Saints Go Marching In," again.)

Things cooled off a bit after that, and Jarrett spun out the song nicely. At the end, he acknowledged that it might have been a good idea. ("I didn't think of that.") He played a third piece, and finished with a quick, fourth piece that echoed the opening number. Done. Short second half.

The audience was still of many minds. Some applauded loudly, while others sat silently, perhaps waiting for the house lights to come on so they could get the hell out of there. Jarrett returned and played an encore: Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It's a sweet, sad version; when he played it as an encore on the Tokyo recording, it sounded charming and intimate. I thought he might have chosen it as a nice gesture; not an apology, but maybe a way of calming tempers, mending hurt feelings. But when tonight's audience recognized the tune, they laughed. Have an audience and a performer ever been less in sync?

A second encore followed, and a third, both loud and jazzy. The fourth encore was a song-like piece. It may have been the most successful piece of the evening, either because the coughers had already left the hall (much of the audience was gone by then, some fleeing during the shouting match), or because Jarrett was in a better mood. A fifth and final encore, and then it was really, finally over.

I'm a true believer that silence is golden, and I don't understand why people cough loudly, why they don't muffle themselves with handkerchiefs. But in a group of 2,743 people (the concert was sold out), the odds are excellent that someone will cough. By going off the deep end about it, Jarrett made this the focus of the concert, sensitizing the audience to the point where, when someone inevitably coughed, we flinched.

So, enough about the fiasco of flaring tempers. What about the music?

The opening piece was pretty strange: flying fingers, much crossing of hands, no chords, no key. A flurry of notes, then silence. Hummingbird music. It seemed to be a warm-up piece, in both senses. It returned as the last piece on the program, by which time it at least was familiar.

The second piece was a long meditation on the natural minor scale ("no sharps"). The third piece was a stomping, 4/4 blues number, interesting until to the point where he landed back at the home chord and decided never to leave home again, which I found taxing. The stomping was real: Jarrett played standing or crouching, no pedal, and eventually stomping on every beat. He also started his characteristic "singing," which is somewhere between moaning and just wildly off-pitch vocalizing. I cannot be the only person struck by the irony of an anti-coughing zealot who obscures his own music by singing along, out of tune. I didn't like it with Glenn Gould or Emmanuel Ax, either.

The fourth piece, like the fourth encore, was a gorgeous song. I think this is Jarrett at his best. A beautiful line, later paired with a second, lower voice, surrounded by rich harmonies, completely tonal, giving our Western ears a comfortable sense of structure. There were two more pieces before intermission, each in a different texture; Jarrett's stylistic palette has many colors.

The second half opened with another quiet song, in B flat, I think. Shimmering with trills and repeated notes, exploring in new and interesting directions, this seemed likely to be a contender for the best piece of the night, only to be cut short, any happy feelings immediately overwhelmed in the fight that followed.

I saw Jarrett play here in 1994. His program then seemed more improvisatory than this one (which comes on the heels of performances in Chicago and Los Angeles), but I thought the muse was not with him that evening. He seemed to struggle, and eventually settled down into some nice, comfortable, straightforward jazz, which no one plays better. I remember that he had his issues with coughing back then, too, ridiculing someone who coughed by mimicking them with chords to match their coughs. After a six-year hiatus, my hopes were high for this evening.

Jarrett is still a brilliant musician and pianist. Live performances, however, may no longer be the right thing for him. Perhaps he finds inspiration before an audience that he doesn't find in a recording studio. It's risky, and tonight we saw it go south.

San Francisco Symphony. March 5, 2010

They were 1 for 4 tonight. Three mediocre pieces and one winner. All four were played well, of course. The concert opened with the world premiere of Post-scriptum by Victor Kissine. Wet ink: the piece is dated 2010. I applauded the composer when he came out to take a bow, but only because I think all composers should be applauded, at least the ones that get this far. I didn’t enjoy the piece, however. It sounded like movie music, but there are far better composers in Hollywood. I recently heard Jim Svejda interview Hans Zimmer, who wrote the score for Sherlock Holmes. Banjo versus orchestra. I’d much rather have heard 15 minutes of that. The Kissine piece had all sorts of musical effects, and there was nothing offensive about it. It cites The Unanswered Question, by Charles Ives, building up strange chords from always-strange Ives. But even that sounded ... familiar. I told Chris it sounded like movie music. "Yes," he replied, "from a horror movie." Exactly.

Then Christian Tetzlaff came out and played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, every note of which is well-known to audiences, except the whole middle movement, which is quiet, lovely, and deserves to be remembered. What I liked most was that Tetzlaff, who’s 44, has played this piece for a long time, so what came out was the music, not just all those terrifying notes. How many times have we seen teenage prodigies tackle this piece and wow the crowd with technique? That’s fun, too, but this was better. Risk the notes for the song.

Musical imprinting story: I’m sure I heard this piece when I was in high school, but the first performance I remember was when I was in college or grad school, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg played this piece with the New Haven Symphony. She was the new star on the musical scene. She strode out onto the stage in Woolsey Hall, wearing a gold dress with "big shoes." (Platform heels? I don’t know from shoes.) All nervous energy. A tigress. She held her violin by the neck and paced back and forth waiting for her entrance, which is several bars into the piece. I thought she was going to whack the conductor with her violin if he didn’t speed it up. The audience was all tittering at the costume, the pacing, and those shoes! Who was this person? And then she put bow to string ... and the tittering stopped. OMG, she can Really Play. The first movement has a big-bang ending, and the crowd went wild. Me, too. I totally forgot that it was just the first movement.

Back to tonight. After the intermission we heard Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, which didn’t grab me. I kept wishing for La Valse. The program finished with Liszt’s Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo. Wow. I didn’t know Liszt could write such bad music. There were some big-brass chords straight out of Les Preludes, note for note, I’ll bet. But the piece wanders through a jungle of diminished-seventh chords and so-called Tristan chords, made famous by his son-in-law Richard Wagner. When it finally lands somewhere, there was so much percussion that it drowned out the chord. Indeed, the cymbal crashes come early and often. There’s a big tune in the middle, repeated at the end (presumably the trionfo), and I was shocked at the clumsy harmonic progressions. Was he breaking new ground, or just breaking first-year music-theory rules that are there for a reason? Whatever he was trying, it didn’t catch on.

Michael Tilson Thomas conducted both of these last two pieces a year ago. I guess he liked them well enough to bring them out again. Or perhaps he just wanted an easier week: one wet-ink piece to work on, one warhorse to review, and two B-list pieces from recent memory. I expect never to hear the Kissine piece again. I hope never to hear the Ravel or Liszt again. (OK, the Ravel, on the radio, while working.)

Our usual group of 6 had dinner at Absinthe beforehand. I love the roasted beets appetizer. I’m sorry to see Citizen Cake go. I hope some equally worthy restaurant opens in its place, if only to have an alternative to Absinthe (often noisy and crowded) and Jardiniere ($$$). Actually, my friends would get bored, but I’d be happy to have all my pre-Symphony dinners in the Wattis Room.