San Francisco Performances’ PIVOT Festival showcases innovative music that often crosses genres, expanding in new directions. Acclaimed singer, composer, and storyteller Gabriel Kahane has performed at the festival in several years past and will be curating it next week for the second time.
Kahane, who lives in Portland, Oregon, became the inaugural creative chair for the Oregon Symphony in 2019, a position he describes as “a combination of community engagement and advocacy for new music through the Open Music series which I curate.”
The PIVOT Festival has become another feather in his curatorial cap, and when asked how he chose the artists for this year’s concerts, Jan. 29–31 at Herbst Theatre, he explained his process. “San Francisco Performances historically is a chamber music and recital series, and I am interested, in a practical and philosophical sense, in the question of ‘What is chamber music now?’ And each of these three concerts answers that question in a slightly different way.”
The first night of the festival, Wednesday, Jan. 29, features the San Francisco premiere of 26 Little Deaths by composer, violinist, and singer Carla Kihlstedt, to be performed by her and a dozen-member ensemble, which includes Sandbox Percussion and San Francisco’s Del Sol Quartet.
“Carla is someone I’ve always admired,” said Kahane. “We met in 2016 at a festival in Moab, Utah, and I was just really struck by how complete her musicianship is. She has such an extraordinary ear for color and harmony. She’s a truly top-shelf violinist and also this beautiful singer with kind of a sweet and whiskey voice at the same time. And like me, she’s a songwriter who draws both from folk and popular traditions. Although 26 Little Deaths is a slightly larger work, it still feels in many ways like chamber music.”
Kahane is set to make his San Francisco conducting debut leading the piece. Inspired by the children’s alphabet book The Gashlycrumb Tinies by writer and illustrator Edward Gorey, 26 Little Deaths tells the tale of 26 children and their untimely deaths. Kihlstedt’s work was commissioned by Present Music, a Milwaukee-based new-music organization, for its 40th anniversary.
The composer, who describes herself as a natural-born collaborator, explains her process and inspiration for writing the piece.
“When COVID hit, all of a sudden I wasn’t playing with anyone and thought, ‘If I can’t play with other people, let’s go back to my roots again.’ I have had that book since my childhood and have loved it for a long time. There was something about the challenge of writing 26 songs [because] I was in isolation. And by the time I got to about [the letter] ‘G,’ the Present Music folks had reached out to me, and we started brainstorming about what I might do with them. And when you’re doing something with 26 parts, to make it interesting you really need a diversity of voices. So all of a sudden I was like, ‘Yes, now if I can add bass clarinet and flute and piano [and] percussion, then I could differentiate between all worlds.’”
The work turned out to be bigger than anything Kihlstedt had previously written, lasting around 60 minutes. Its 26 miniature movements range from 25 seconds to four minutes long.
The second night of the festival, Thursday, Jan. 30, features Filipino American singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx, along with the brass quartet The Westerlies, who have been touring with her. Kahane said he learned about Heynderickx from his good friend, mandolinist Chris Thile, who raved about her.
“Haley is just a spectacular singer and songwriter, and she is also just bitingly funny. I think that her stage banter is really something else,” said Kahane. “She has been working for a while with The Westerlies, who are folks I knew in New York [and] who are also blazing a trail for chamber music in the 21st century. They have a really broad view of what constitutes repertoire that interests them, whether it be transcribing Caroline Shaw string quartets for two trumpets and two trombones, covering Sufjan Stevens songs, [or] performing their own music and everything in between. So just on their own, I think they offer yet another answer to this question of ‘What is chamber music?’ And in their work with Haley, you get this other dimension of a songwriter meeting a brass quartet, which is a fairly unusual combination.”
On the third and final night, Friday, Jan. 31, Sandbox Percussion is slated to perform the San Francisco premiere of Seven Pillars, a piece that the group commissioned from friend, composer, and fellow percussionist Andy Akiho and that was nominated for two 2022 Grammy Awards. In redefining the role of percussion in musical compositions, Sandbox has also expanded the boundaries of contemporary chamber performance.
Kahane saw the ensemble play Seven Pillars several years ago at a sold-out show in Portland that felt like a rock concert, he said, calling it one of the most extraordinary performances he has ever seen. He later got to work with Sandbox on one of his own projects.
“One of the things I appreciate about them is that they are very conscious of trying to move beyond the percussion quartet as a spectacle on the rhythmic grid of ‘We are all in time together.’ And they are all really emotionally expressive,” said Kahane. “One thing that is really lovely about Andy’s piece is that it highlights the more traditionally understood aspects of virtuosity in a percussion quartet but also has moments of real lyricism and pathos.”
Ian Rosenbaum, one of the founders of Sandbox, which also includes Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, and Terry Sweeney, explained that Seven Pillars was in the making for several years and that Akiho was inspired by a trip to Rome. The piece consists of 11 interconnected movements written in a special notation, though ultimately performed from memory. The 80-minute work proceeds without any breaks and features a complicated lighting plot with hundreds of cues.
“The seven pillars [of the title] are quartet [movements] for the whole group, and then there are four solo movements, one for each person, that are interspersed among the quartets,” explained Rosenbaum. Each solo movement introduces a different instrument that is then integrated into the ensemble. “We have played lots of pieces together but have never done anything of this complexity or length.”
In addition to the music, there’s a lot happening visually onstage. “This piece is a cross between a chamber music concert and a theatrical show,” said Rosenbaum. “[We] worked on [it] with a stage director who has us moving all of the percussion instruments around in between the movements. And I do think it occupies the chamber music space in that there is so much listening and reacting that has to happen. The amount of trust that we have to have with each other to pull that off is really extreme. I don’t think we even look at each other all that much — we are just listening. We know the music so intimately now, we can react in a second, and that, I think, is really what chamber music is. It’s being onstage with people that you trust and being free to adapt, to [both] play the music the way you rehearsed it and also go in a different direction if [the music] needs to. We learned so much about playing chamber music by learning how to play this piece.”
Although there’s a lot of musical diversity in the three nights of this year’s PIVOT Festival, Kahane feels that it does all fit together.
“There’s a way in which these three concerts are at a great distance from each other and what they represent,” he said. “That’s what interests me — that you can find the Venn diagram, the little slivers that connect them, but they also represent three very different answers to the question of ‘What is chamber music now?’ It is the implicit question that so many of us are asking in this time of transition and tumult and churn: ‘How do arts institutions and artists meet this moment, and how do we simultaneously nurture and preserve traditions and also move things forward?’
“There are elements of tradition in all three of these concerts. They are all very accessible and inviting to audiences who aren’t steeped in the [classical] canon. And I think for folks who have an open mind, who are coming from a more canonic experience of chamber music or recital-going, they will find something to love in each of them [as well].”
