With an exemplary concert of works by four living women composers, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) emphatically dispensed with many of the myths around music and gender. The ensemble’s program on Sunday, Nov. 24, at Brava Theater was titled “Myths and Muses” and featured memorable recent compositions updating long-established female archetypes in the arts.
Beyond the Fates, the Furies, and damsels in distress, the concert also had an urgent impact thanks to the remarkable world premiere of a powerfully conceived song cycle by local composer Emma Logan.
Throughout, SFCMP’s musicians played as if their lives depended on it, demolishing any misapprehensions one might have about new music being too academic. These were colorful pieces that astonished not only ears and eyes but our sense of human capabilities.
For example, in the West Coast premiere of Augusta Read Thomas’s Terpsichore’s Box of Dreams (2023), the ensemble, under Artistic Director Eric Dudley, played precisely, confidently, and with a range emotions, delighting in the micro-rhythms and micro-melodies of Thomas’s pointillistic tour-de-force. Danceable and flowing lines emerged, with surprises at every turn. I could call out literally every member of the ensemble in this concerto for 13 virtuosos, a showpiece as dazzling as any in the repertoire.
SFCMP’s alert acrobatics were also essential in realizing Laura Schwendinger’s The Artist’s Muse (2017), a melange of short musical portraits based on iconic paintings of women by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Paul Cézanne. As an ironic commentary on the male gaze, the series of miniatures came together thanks to SFCMP’s expressive confidence, notably Haruka Fujii’s finely graded percussion playing, which was deftly woven into the other instrumental sonorities. The music was vividly gilt for Gustav Klimt, angular for Picasso — a head-spinning, sense-saturating experience as good as walking through the galleries of the de Young Museum.
In passion-drenched contrast, Mary Kouyoumdjian’s 2010 trio Moerae (The Fates) burst into eloquence through lyrical solos. Violinist Kevin Rogers, cellist Doug Machiz, and pianist Kate Campbell brought the spontaneity of a combustible jam session to the performance — but also sustained concentration and disciplined partnership.
These riveting virtuosic exploits complemented Logan’s inspiring Mother Eve — music with contemporary resonance that feels as if our lives depend on it. Mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich sang the perspective of the biblical Eve with beauty, control, range, and precisely modulated moods of numbness, intensity, innocence, and wariness. She brought to life the myriad implications of Logan’s 30-minute cycle of eight songs, together a contemplation on creativity and legacy.
Logan is not the first composer to successfully contemporize in song the maternal ancestor of all ancestors: Gabriel Fauré, Ezra Laderman, and (quite recently) Jake Heggie have given their progressively feminist takes on this ultimate female archetype. However, Logan and librettist Patrick Smith evoke an even more searing universality appropriate to our times.
Mother Eve is disturbingly graphic, an ambiguously dark poetry of realities, embraced in music that is ethereal, harmonious, and dissonance-tinged. Logan floats lyricism amid delicate textures, brilliantly refusing to commit. The music keeps us clinging to the possibility that people can recover their senses before cataclysms extinguish all. Call it the composer’s dilemma: No creation lives without the will of performers — a microcosm of Eve’s universal dilemma.
This song cycle, partly funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission, urgently deserves widespread performances. Mother Eve is incendiary in sustaining a profound instability between music and words, inspiration and disillusionment, creativity and legacy. Audiences burdened by this changing world will want to take a bite of the sweet fruit of Logan and Smith’s collaboration.
