Laying Out a Smorgasboard For Percussion

Some people are born to pound their way through life. Take Loren Mach, for example. In an extended phone chat about his plans for the second installment of San Francisco Chamber Orchestra’s “Classical at the Freight Percussion Fest” (details here), the percussionist with both the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra (SFCO) and the Adorno Ensemble revealed that “As a kid, I was tapping and beating on everything, from my high chair at the dinner table to coffee cans in the basement.”

Mach will tap on far more than cans at the concert. After Steve Reich’s immensely popular, energizing Drumming Part I (1971), in a special arrangement for the bongo trio of Mach, Christopher Froh, and Daniel Kennedy, he performs Jennifer Stasack’s marimba solo, Six Elegies Dancing (1988). For the concert closer, he resurfaces on a West African djembe to join Froh and Kennedy in Iannis Xenakis’ Okho (1989).

In between, Kennedy, who along with Froh performs with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, takes up the tabla to perform a solo with electronic looping. The entire informal, low-priced concert will last an hour, or perhaps longer if the series’ loyal attendees are filled with wonder in the informal Q&A discussion, and take their time answering the monthly trivia contest.

“Benjamin Simon, concert host and conductor of the SFCO, has built up quite an audience for traditional classical chamber music,” says Froh. “While this is new music, and we’re the loud drummers in orchestras, there’s a little bit of everything in the concert. The djembe trio is very accessible, the Reich is a crowd pleaser, and the beautiful marimba solo brims with lyrical elegance. The only new piece is [performed] on an ancient, ancient instrument, and the only amplification will be for the looping station and tabla in Dan’s solo. We had a lot of kids and families at our first installment in April, so I planned it to be an age-friendly as well as pretty accessible hour.”

Simon would certainly agree that the “Percussion Fest” fits right into SFCO’s monthly, three-year-old “Classical at the Freight” (& Salvage, to refresh your memory) series. “One of the missions of the SFCO is to build new audiences for chamber music,” he explained over the phone. “We moved to the Freight to have a fun venue and attract some nontraditional listeners, and I think we’re succeeding. We don’t even produce a printed program. People love the informality of the concert, and being up close and personal to some of the best musicians in the Bay Area performing some of their favorite chamber music. We’re unstuffifying classical music.”