This year, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble is presenting what it’s calling a Winter Wandering Festival over two weekends in Berkeley and San Francisco. On Saturday, Jan. 25, LCCE and the chamber chorus Volti performed a concert titled “On the Threshold of Dreamland,” for which Volti Artistic Director Robert Geary and LCCE Artistic Director Matilda Hofman split conducting duties. The program at Berkeley’s First Church of Christ, Scientist, included two world premieres, a pair of slightly older 21st-century works, and a selection of folk-song settings by Benjamin Britten.
The concert opened with Huang Ruo’s Without Words (2002), which sets an elusive, autumnal poem by the 10th-century Chinese poet Li Hou Zhu. Written for eight-part chorus and four pairs of Tibetan finger cymbals, it’s a lovely work, about seven minutes long, varying from gentleness to fierceness in a clear arc. The cymbals punctuate the opening and the close, providing the framework within which the chorus sings. The many voice parts enable Ruo to vary the musical texture imaginatively between sparseness and richness, just as Without Words shifts from consonance to dissonance and back again.
The Britten folk-song settings that followed, for high voice and guitar, didn’t mesh well stylistically or textually with the rest of the program, even though they were musically updated from their original plainness. Nevertheless, soprano Nikki Einfeld worked her special magic with them, giving marvelously alert and subtle performances. In the jazzy “Sailor-boy,” the phrase “Thus, thus, thus” occurs twice, and Einfeld gave each repetition of the word its own weight and color. She approached all six songs in the set with the same care and imagination. Michael Goldberg ably played the varied guitar parts.
Laurie San Martin’s delightful and quirky Witches, composed for Volti and LCCE and premiered by the two ensembles in 2018, closed the first half of the program. There can’t be too many works for mixed chorus, two oboes, and cello. Lucy Corin’s text observes three little girls possibly playing at making magic, possibly not. The chorus sings in largely consonant phrases that are punctuated by dissonant interjections from the oboes and cello. But slowly, the chorus and instrumental sounds begin to meld and reflect each other. The effects are wondrous — the choral writing imaginative, the cello skittering, the oboes pungent.
The two world premieres came after intermission, starting with Todd Kitchen’s Soprasymmetry IV, “as west and east in all flat maps are one” for soprano, string quartet, and double bass. The work is about 25 minutes long and complex enough that it would amply repay repeated hearings.
In brief spoken remarks, Kitchen described his piece as “the remnants of dreams of the American West.” So the string players all wore 10-gallon cowboy hats during the performance, while Einfeld donned a silver lamé blouse and skirt, topped with silver antennae. According to Kitchen’s biography in the program, his Soprasymmetry compositions “draw parallels between elementary particles, [which are] the building blocks of atoms, and phonemes, the basis of language.” Perhaps Einfeld’s outfit was a nod to the Higgs boson (the Wikipedia article for which was excerpted in the program notes) or perhaps to the beings who drive flying saucers.
Soprasymmetry IV sets an excerpt from the essay “Lost Highway” by Brian Phillips, which treats mythic aspects of the American West: the desert, Area 51, Route 66, Los Angeles. Kitchen stretches the text over the entire length of Soprasymmetry IV, fracturing the words to the point where their strict meaning is impossible to comprehend. The words become abstract sounds while still carrying some significance.
What were the strings doing? This reviewer must confess to having concentrated so hard on the vocal line that she has no notes beyond “that was complicated.”
The concert closed with the world premiere of LJ White’s This Place for chorus, violin, cello, and double bass, which sets a beautiful text by Aiden K. Feltkamp. Both White and Feltkamp are transmasculine, and This Place explores the intersection of the physical and the spiritual, “the inward and outward versions of ourselves,” and “what it means … for queer and trans people to feel at home.”
The text opens with its narrator wandering “in a wild wood,” following a stream to a waterfall and contemplating how to join together the two parts of their being. “The horizon says: / Rest in the knowledge of your history / Delight in the promise of your future.” It all ends with a question: “Has anyone else found this place?”
This Place feels like a work in progress. White writes beautifully for chorus and strings, delineating the text carefully and shaping the work to a fine climax. But the piece peters out musically toward the end, wandering without settling. Perhaps that’s because of the closing question, but there’s no sense of musical closure. Still, This Place has great promise.
LCCE and Volti are set to repeat the program on Feb. 1 at Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco.
