Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet in SF

We are recording our performances of Berlioz' Romeo et Juliette here in San Francisco this week, and it's a thrill to get to be a part of this project.  I'm excited for this weekend of concerts.  Being a former teenage orchestra-geek, I was madly in love with this piece when I was sawing away at my violin in youth orchestra, and desperately dreamt of getting to play it one day.  We could never have dreamed of playing it as teenagers, so it's a real joy to finally get to be a part of it, despite my violinist days being far behind me.

The folks at the SF Symphony filmed me and my amazing colleagues chatting about the piece during a rehearsal break, while we sipped some coffee in the park.  Check out some of our thoughts on the piece and our week here in San Francisco in the little video below:

I Argue You Thee That Love Is Life

One of the most insightful and wise people I know, as he encouraged me to follow my dreams to make recordings, once told me that rather than thinking of recordings as definitive documents of an interpretation of a piece, I should regard them as snapshots in time.  To think of them as a freeze frame of an artist in a particular moment.  When viewed this way, it alleviates one of the feeling of pressure to make the absolute and to create perfection.  It frees one up to hear a recording as one would look at a picture of oneself from many years past.  We see the beauty and innocence (and sometimes folly) of youth.  We see how we are still the same person, yet evolved and changed.

Sifting through the selection of videos of American songs recorded live at a salon performance presented by San Francisco Performances at the Hotel Rex in January of this year, I find myself looking at all of these songs through a slightly altered lens after the events of this past week.  I had originally planned these programs as part of an expression of patriotism and love of country as we walked through a transition to what we all naively thought would be a giant step forward for us as a nation.  Now, in the wake of the results of this past Tuesday's election, I find myself looking at some of this music with slightly different eyes.

One of these songs that I programmed back in January was an incredibly beautiful setting of a poem by the great American poet Emily Dickinson, written by Jake Heggie - a man whom I consider to be a good friend as well as a deeply heartfelt and thoughtful composer.  When we filmed our performance of this piece earlier this year in San Francisco, I had a much more personal take on this poem, thinking more of a romantic love of one person to another.  After witnessing the anger of the majority that voted for progress as many protest through the streets of America's biggest cities, I wonder if Emily Dickinson's words also resonate on a broader level.  Seeing the numerous accounts of the rising voice of bigotry and xenophobia that has seemingly felt legitimized by Tuesday's election results, I wonder if the love that Dickinson is talking about is perhaps a different, greater kind of love than just the love of one person.  Perhaps she is talking about an unconditional love for all our brothers and sisters?  And perhaps, at the end of the poem, when she says that she will have nothing but suffering if the object of her affections doubts her unconditional love, is she presciently touching on the feeling those of us who voted for progress feel right now?  For it is clear that so many of our brothers and sisters doubted our love for them this past Tuesday, and because of their choices which resulted from that doubt, we now have nothing to show but grief, anxiety and fear.

Whether she meant it that way or not, it is difficult for me not to see it through this new lens after all that has happened this week.  Regardless of her meaning, it is vitally important now, more than ever, that we remember Dickinson's argument that Love is indeed Life.

I will perform the song again live on WFMT on November 21st.  When we perform the piece that night, it may not sound incredibly different from this performance below recorded in January. But inside my heart, my feelings about it are not quite the same.

Jake Heggie
That I did always love from Newer Every Day

TEXT (Emily Dickinson)

That I did always love,
I bring thee proof:
That till I loved
I never lived enough.

That I shall love alway,
I argue thee
That love is life,
And life hath immortality.

This, dost thou doubt, sweet?
Then have I
Nothing to show
But Calvary.

CREDITS

Nicholas Phan, tenor

Robert Mollicone, piano

recorded LIVE at SF Performances Salons at the Rex, January 28, 2016

Executive Producers: Nicholas Phan, Philip Wilder

SOUND:

Producer / Recording Engineer: Lolly Lewis

Recording assistant: Emma Logan

Mastering / Mixing: Piper Payne, Coast Mastering

VIDEO:

Cinematography: Catharine Axley, Kristine Stolakis

Editor: Catharine Axley

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.

To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE 

donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:

https://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/fiscal/profile?id=10592

By Turning We Come Round Right

This being a presidential election season, I took up some American songs this past year, performing and curating American-themed programs in Chicago, Washington DC, Istanbul and San Francisco this past year.  The theme I chose for many of these concerts, specifically those in Chicago and San Francisco, was something I loosely titled, American Spirit, focusing in on the American pre-occupation with faith and spirituality.

When thinking about the United States’ beginnings, we often think of the Pilgrims, whose famous meal with the Native Americans they encountered upon landing here we attempt to recreate every year at Thanksgiving. These pilgrims represent the two basic principles upon which the United States’ foundation is based: the search for both economic and religious freedom.  Ever since, Americans have been pre-occupied with their relationship to a higher power - whether it be the New England Transcendentalists seeking God in Nature, Joseph Smith translating the golden plates of the angel Moroni and founding the Mormon Church, or the political rise of the religious right.  I, myself, in true San Franciscan 'spiritual' fashion own no fewer than three yoga mats.

While faith and religion have played a fundamental part in the evolution of American identity, American composers have developed a distinctly unique relationship with these topics in contrast with their European counterparts.

What we now generally define as ‘Classical Music’ has its roots in the religions of Europe. Its earliest forms were composed specifically to augment religious rites, and eventually evolved into integral parts of worship. When we think of the great European composers, much of the music that deals with the topics of faith and religion is composed in a religious context—the many masses, cantatas, magnificats, te deums, requiem and passion settings that we know and love today. While there are, of course, exceptions to this generalization (Handel’s oratorios, for instance, which were composed as a practical and more economic replacement for the London opera productions that were becoming increasingly too expensive for him to mount), most of these pieces were composed for specific religious services and intended to be performed as part of the worship service. 

In contrast, much of the music written by American classical composers that deals with faith and spirituality has been written in a distinctly secular context. Even Bernstein’s Mass is a theater piece, juxtaposing the formal ritual of the Mass with texts by Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz that challenge the religious teaching of the mass. The American composer generally only encounters this subject in the form of an artistic meditation on faith and belief, in a way that in recent years has become in fashion to call ‘spiritual’. These American Spirit programs explored some of these meditations.

The concept of what it is to be an American has loomed in my mind ever since having the honor to represent the United States at the BBC Singer of the World competition back in 2003.  The competition is a sort of vocal olympics, and walking into the lobby of my hotel in Cardiff, seeing the American flag hanging amongst the other flags of the other countries represented that year was the first time I really had ever considered what it was to be a representative of the United States and to be an American.  As the bi-racial child of an immigrant who grew up in the very white and black midwest, I had always felt a bit of an outsider in America.  Yet it was in that moment that I realized I am very much a part of the history of the great American cultural melting pot.  I've considered the many facets of what that means ever since, and performing these programs over the last year has been a wonderful deepening of that epiphany that I experienced so many years ago in Wales.

As we push through this final week of this wretched election cycle, I leave you with one of the songs we performed at the Hotel Rex for San Francisco Performances back in January: Aaron Copland's beautiful arrangement of the Shaker tune, Simple Gifts.  The words from the middle section of the song take on a different meaning for me now, after all the baseness and drama of the past few months of this fraught presidential contest: "To turn, turn will be our delight, and by turning, turning, we come round right." After all of the spinning we've been through as these campaigns have waged their wars against each other, I do hope that next Tuesday, we do actually come round right, so that we can, as the song says, "find ourselves in that place just right...to be in the valley of love and delight."

arranged by Aaron Copland
Simple Gifts from 'Old American Songs'

TEXT (Shaker Folk Song):

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free
'tis the gift to come down where you ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free
'tis the gift to come down where you ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

CREDITS

Nicholas Phan, tenor

Robert Mollicone, piano
recorded LIVE at SF Performances Salons at the Rex, January 28, 2016

Executive Producers: Nicholas Phan, Philip Wilder

SOUND:
Producer / Recording Engineer: Lolly Lewis
Recording assistant: Emma Logan
Mastering / Mixing: Piper Payne, Coast Mastering

VIDEO:
Cinematography: Catharine Axley, Kristine Stolakis
Editor: Catharine Axley

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.

To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE 
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/fiscal/profile?id=10592

The Things our Fathers Loved

One of the other recording projects I'm currently working on is producing art song and vocal chamber music content specifically for YouTube.  The initial material that was recorded for the first stage of this project is from a salon concert I gave as the resident artist for San Francisco Performances earlier this January.  As tonight's final presidential debate looms, the subject matter of the program we recorded feels very timely.  The program was built from CAIC's 2015 Collaborative Works Festival, which explored America's relationship to faith and spirituality through music.

That evening in January, we began the program with some songs by Charles Ives, a visionary composer whose music still sounds so fresh and current today, despite the fact that it was written 100 years ago.  A true patriot whose music is steeped in the history of New England and the United States, one of his signature techniques was his ability to conjure up nostalgia and memory by creating aural snapshots of the past.  He did this by employing a pastiche technique, incorporating quotes from a number of popular tunes and hymns, seamlessly weaving them together, creating something that sounds entirely new and remarkably unique and individual.

In his short, 105-second song, The Things our Fathers Loved (a setting of one of his own texts), there are countless numbers of popular American tunes and hymns quoted, including Battle Cry of Freedom, Dixie, and Come Thou Font of Every Blessing, just to name a few.  The song weaves all of these tunes together quite elegantly at first, creating a sense of wistfulness for a golden age past.  Gradually, though, the tunes begin to collide with one another, and the voice and piano start to drift in different directions tonally, creating a slight sense of chaos and cacophony.  It is as if the present moment, being the sum of all things past leading up to now, is a bit of a messy jumble, the simplicity of yesteryear a distant memory.  The song ends beautifully, but in a quite unresolved way.  The story is unfinished, the future is both uncertain and unwritten.

Looking ahead to this evening's debate and considering just how acrimonious, sensationalist and low-brow this whole presidential election cycle has been, Ives' song about the continuing clash of the conflicting forces of American history (the song begins with a quote from the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy and then quotes a popular Union tune just 12 measures later!) feels eerily prescient.  It's almost as if he understood the timeline and progress of American history and politics as one of continual conflict, with the hope for growth through some sort of resolution of these opposing forces.  The sense of panic and instability he creates at the song's climax where the piano and voice are in very different tonal worlds, with no seeming relation to each other and both at a dynamically loud peak, feels not unlike the mood right now when thinking about the dirty mud-slinging and ideological conflict that pervades American politics today, in which presidential candidates can't bring themselves to be good enough sports to, at the very least, shake hands at the beginning of a debate.

Charles Ives
The Things Our Fathers Loved

TEXT (Charles Ives)

I think there must be a place in the soul
all made of tunes, of tunes of long ago;
I hear the organ on the Main Street corner,
Aunt Sarah humming Gospels; Summer evenings,
The village cornet band, playing in the square.
The town's Red, White and Blue,
all Red, White and Blue; Now! Hear the words
But they sing in my soul of the things our Fathers loved.

CREDITS

Nicholas Phan, tenor

Robert Mollicone, piano

recorded LIVE at SF Performances Salons at the Rex, January 28, 2016

Executive Producers: Nicholas Phan, Philip Wilder

SOUND:
Producer / Recording Engineer: Lolly Lewis
Recording assistant: Emma Logan
Mastering / Mixing: Piper Payne, Coast Mastering

VIDEO:
Cinematography: Catharine Axley, Kristine Stolakis
Editor: Catharine Axley

This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE 
donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:
https://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/fiscal/profile?id=10592

Beginnings / Illuminations

So...I only logged in one solitary post here in 2014.

The main reason for this is that 2014 was quite simply an incredibly busy year.  I mean that in the sense that it was both incredible and it was busy.  That said, I've not totally abandoned this blogging thing in any way whatsoever.  I simply took a bit of a hiatus.  Hiatus over.

I've had the subject of beginnings floating around in my head as 2014 turned into 2015 - it's a topic that frequently occupies my mind around this time each year.  Perhaps that is a large part of why I feel compelled to end this holiday from the blogosphere (do people even call it that anymore?).  It's the time of year for fresh starts, I guess.

Rehearsal with the San Francisco Symphony this morning
photo credit: Lolly Lewis

Speaking of beginnings, I begin my string of 2015 performances tonight here in my new home of San Francisco (layers upon layers of beginnings!) with a set of performances of excerpts from Britten's Les Illuminations with the San Francisco Symphony in its new experimental performance space, Soundbox (yet another beginning).

Britten composed Les Illuminations in 1939, during a heady, tumultuous, and life-changing time in his life, as well as in the world at large. With the world descending into violence and upheaval around him, and Britain being pulled into World War II, it was during this time that he crossed the Atlantic for the first time, following W.H Auden and Christopher Isherwood to the US.  It was also during this time in America that Britten's relationship with Pears transformed from a professional friendship into the romantic partnership that would last until his death in 1976.  The seventh song of the cycle (which we're unfortunately not performing on this weekend's program), Being Beauteous, is even dedicated to Peter Pears.

Each time I return to a familiar piece in my repertoire (which Les Illuminations is, for me), I find new layers of meaning open up to me upon revisiting it.  This occurs for a variety of reasons, mostly ones that have to do with marinating, time, and age.  This time is no different.

Arthur Rimbaud

It's not difficult to see why Britten was attracted to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, who's poetry comprises the texts of Les Illuminations, during this time. Rimbaud's poetry reads much like an acid-trip - he views the seemingly mundane world around us through a haze of wonderment, insanity, and eccentricity.  Cities and the people and things which inhabit them are seen as the gods and supernatural creatures of Greek mythology - the world is a wild and divine place, and these things which we normally take for granted are suddenly fantastical, beautiful and monstrous.  With the home he knew in Great Britain and Europe seemingly falling into chaos as Hitler pushed towards another world war, and traveling around a foreign country far from home, it's understandable why he was drawn to these works.  His world was turned upside-down, surely almost feeling like a surreality rather than a reality.

Thinking about this context in which he composed these songs, it feels timely to be singing such pieces about the savage and beautiful world in which we live.  With the horrifying terrorist attacks in Paris these past few days all over the news, the world still seems like a savage and bewildering place.  On a more personal level, my new home city, San Francisco, is also a strangely beautiful place: singing these songs this time, I find myself thinking a bit about the sense of wonder that I experience every time I look out at the Bay and its bridges, or the savage parade of characters that one passes by in the Castro every day.  

There is one phrase that Britten was first drawn to when composing these songs, which repeats multiple times throughout the cycle:

J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage

"I, alone, hold the key to this savage parade"

This is a bold statement for Britten to fixate on, yet, again, an understandable one.  Here he was: a stranger in a strange land, a pacifist in a violent maelstrom, a gay man in a straight world...and an artist.  An artist looking in from an outside perspective.  In a way, it seems like Britten is making a declaration about himself as an artist here.  As if he is saying, from here on out, this is how I am going to define my work - this is the beginning of a new chapter in my music.  Listen up.

As beginnings go, I must say, it's an impressive and a beautiful one.  I'm really grateful to get to perform parts of it tonight.