New Century, New Vibe

Have you seen Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg yet? If you read The San Francisco Chronicle, you probably have. She smiles out at you from full-page ads in the last several Sunday "Pink Sections," not to mention smaller, but still eye-catching ads in the occasional weekday edition (sometimes even in the first — that is, the national news — section, rather than the arts pages). The New Century Chamber Orchestra may have been late in announcing the name of its new violinist/director — the announcement was scheduled for a gala at the end of last November, but was actually made nearly two months afterward — but it has made up for lost time, in spades. The Chronicle advertising blitz is but part of a slew of public-relations and marketing initiatives ("made possible, in part, by a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation") attendant upon Salerno-Sonnenberg's assuming the post vacated two years ago by Krista Bennion Feeney. The NCCO's revamped Web site parades links to Salerno-Sonnenberg's video introductions to the season, its "featured composer," and individual programs on YouTube. And there's a “let's draw in the young” initiative: The orchestra offers half-price tickets (season or individual-concert) for anyone under 30. Is this an awful lot of hoopla for a small string orchestra playing four sets a year? Of course, but given the quality of the band that a few musicians launched 16 years ago (first headed by Stuart Canin), and the magnitude of the change Salerno-Sonnenberg's appointment represents, it's not a bit excessive. The new director has sweeping plans, and they include making the NCCO — which, despite a Grammy nomination in 1997, isn't well-known outside the Bay Area — a household word.

Upping the Ante

When I spoke to her early last month, Salerno-Sonnenberg was full of enthusiasm about the orchestra and her plans for it over the span of her initial three-season contract. "They're such fantastic musicians," she said. But they haven't, she argued, gotten anything like the exposure they deserve, and for that matter they don't seem to know themselves how exceptional the band is. She sees it as her mission to get NCCO the recognition it ought to have, but also to take the orchestra "to a whole new level."

Photo by Steve Jennings

Certainly the plan she's put in place can't be faulted for timidity. Besides inaugurating the featured composer program — this year's is the 30-year-old Brazilian pianist, singer, and composer Clarice Assad — and taking the orchestra into the recording studio for the first time in several years, Salerno-Sonnenberg envisions a West Coast tour in the 2009-2010 season and an East Coast one the following season. The release of the orchestra's first CD under her leadership, on her own NSS label, will be timed to coincide with the latter tour. The CD's contents are still up in the air, except that the Piazzolla Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, headlining this week's opening set and due to be recorded immediately afterward, will be on it. We talked about the relative smallness of the string orchestra repertoire. Salerno-Sonnenberg stressed that the main point of the featured composer program is to enrich that repertoire and to allow NCCO — as a direct inspiration to composers — to add to it. Assad's Impressions, receiving its first performances this week, draws on the composer's interactions with the orchestra last September, during Salerno-Sonnenberg's "audition" concerts. Individual lines were designed for the particular players who will perform them. (A second Assad commission, Dreamscape for violin and strings, will be premiered on the last program of this season.)

Assiduous Assad

Salerno-Sonnenberg seems to have run across Clarice Assad by virtue of performing with her father and uncle, the great Brazilian guitarists Sergio and Odair Assad. Clarice is a young composer with, as yet, a scanty orchestral catalog, though the scope of her musical activity (see her Web site for particulars) suggests a veritable musical dynamo. Her contribution to last fall's program — a violin-and-strings arrangement of Kreisler's Praeludium and Allegro — didn't provide much of a hint as to what her own music might be like, apart from revealing considerable skill in writing for strings and a taste for long, lyrical lines. (When they weren't there to be teased out of Kreisler's original piano accompaniment, she supplied them herself.)

The violin concerto she wrote for Salerno-Sonnenberg a few years ago (her first orchestral work, as it happens) adds to the picture. The piece is a terrific Salerno-Sonnenberg vehicle, crammed with all the stuff the soloist does best: soaring lyrical moments, and much flashy but not bone-crunchingly awkward passagework. If you had to place it temporally, you'd probably guess the middle of the last century. Samuel Barber's concerto (1939) is the nearest thing, maybe, in the standard repertoire, though certain places recall William Walton, too, and there is something ineluctably '50s-cinematic about the orchestration. (You can listen to the work online here.) Does Salerno-Sonnenberg plan to use the featured-composer program to introduce other young composers like Assad? That's not the point of the program, she tells me. Next year's composer, for example, is someone "very established" (she would not say more). The point is to enrich the repertoire and to give the players something new and raw to get their teeth into. Those last few words are mine, not Salerno-Sonnenberg's, but as I'm talking to her it's clear that she's eager to challenge this orchestra that, in taking her on, has proven itself eager to be challenged. When I suggest that her role will be one of "goosing" her players, she agrees enthusiastically. It's not just that they're better than they know, she stressed, but that they have no idea how much better they might be. Certainly she incited them to amazing heights in her "audition" concerts last September. And “incited” is indeed the word. The NCCO has never been less than polished in technical terms, but, generally speaking, it lets loose only when prodded. Salerno-Sonnenberg, last fall, was magnificent, goading the players into some of the most impassioned music-making I've heard them deliver.

Tackling Bach Head-On

Among the surprises of that program was a performance of Bach’s Violin Concerto in A Minor, in which the sometimes dubious extravagances of Salerno-Sonnenberg's solo playing were partnered with about the gutsiest and most idiomatic Baroque playing I'd ever witnessed from this orchestra. It's never been clear where the NCCO stands with regard to Baroque music. If there's a core string orchestra repertoire, an awful lot of it belongs to the 17th and 18th centuries — everything from Arcangelo Corelli's Concerti Grossi, Op. 6 (ca. 1690-1710), through the Handel Op. 6 concerti (1739), to the “Hamburg Sinfonias” of C.P.E. Bach (1773-76) and to Mozart's early string-ensemble divertimenti (mid-1770s). But in a Bay Area teeming with specialist Baroque ensembles, NCCO understandably hasn't made this music a mainstay of its programming. And when it has dipped into these waters, the results have been, to say no more, variable. But following Salerno-Sonnenberg’s lead in the Bach A-Minor, the NCCO played like good Baroque players — which is to say not prim, detached, and expressionless, but on the contrary rough, passionate, and gleefully, not to say wickedly, interventionist in their inflection. I asked Salerno-Sonnenberg about her attitude toward Baroque music generally. Was she planning to explore much 18th-century repertoire? It doesn't look like it. She holds out a recording of the Bach violin concertos with NCCO as a possibility, and this first season includes two of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, plus orchestral excerpts from Handel's Solomon, on the December program. But Salerno-Sonnenberg's repertoire-expansion plans mainly involve the other end of the timeline: new works and new transcriptions. If her inaugural season is anything to go by, Salerno-Sonnenberg's programming is going to feature many more transcriptions than has been usual in the ensemble's past. Beside Assad's transcriptions (of Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 on the first concert, and a variety of songs and carols on the second), we have Leonid Desyatnikov's of Piazzolla's Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (first program); Rudolf Barshai's of some of the Prokofiev Visions fugitives (third program); and Mats Lidstrom's of music from Johann Strauss Jr.'s Die Fledermaus (fourth program). That's on top of the Borodin Nocturne, expanded from its original string-quartet scoring, which is also on the fourth program. NCCO has frequently played expansions of string chamber works — that Grammy nomination was for a disc of Shostakovich quartets in Barshai's string-orchestra versions — but I can't recall a season so full of arrangements as this one.

Guest Artist Bonanza

Another departure is in the number of guest artists and other extra musicians. The holiday concert features a guest soprano (Melody Moore) and the chamber choir Schola Cantorum San Francisco. The March program brings in Salerno-Sonnenberg's longtime recital partner, pianist Anne-Marie McDermott. The December set also involves a handful of yet-to-be-named guests for its two Brandenburgs, and the March one promises a likewise yet-to-be-named trumpeter for the Shostakovich First Piano Concerto. Salerno-Sonnenberg told me that Erwin Stein’s chamber version of Mahler's Fourth Symphony (designed for Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in the early 1920s) is tentatively scheduled for next year, so, going forward, we can expect to see more guest singers and wind players. I'd be prepared, though, for changes in the orchestra's playing to overshadow those in the programming. There will be some differences in personnel, for starters. (Principal violist Linda Ghidossi-DeLuca is on sabbatical and her colleague Kurt Rohde is off enjoying the fruits of his recent Rome Prize, so the viola complement in particular is going to be different.) But it will be more than that. I don't know of many orchestras whose sounds vary so easily and so dramatically with their direction. I fear that if I liken the NCCO to tofu, the analogy will be misconstrued. But if ever I encountered a band whose savor varies according to the musical juices it's been steeping in, this is it. Better, perhaps, to say that it's an orchestra whose listening skills are so finely honed that it takes only a short encounter for its players to cohere — unanimously and joyously — around the vision of a charismatic leader. And that Salerno-Sonnenberg certainly is. The prospect of her borderline-unsustainable intensity fused somehow with the NCCO's ensemble chops is something to anticipate — with glee, or at least lively curiosity. As I wrote on hearing this partnership a year ago, The risks are obvious. But all the same, this could be fun.