Baby talk
You know that feeling when a piece of music fills you with such rapture that it’s all you can do not to stand up in the concert hall and yell Play it again? Live music has its charms — it is, in fact, the best kind of music there is —but it also has the obvious drawback of lacking a repeat button. Sometimes you just want to hear those gorgeous sounds over and over and over, like a toddler rereading the same favorite story again and again until Mommy and Daddy tell you that, no fooling, it’s really time for bed now.
Anyway, that was me at the Brava Theater on Sunday when the central song of a new chamber song cycle by Samuel Adams came to a close. I couldn’t quite believe the transformative power of the music I’d just heard — its spare elegance, its unbearable tenderness. I couldn’t help feeling aggrieved that it was over. I couldn’t wait to hear it again.
“The First Word” sets a poem by Malachi Black, a terse, imagistic evocation of that baby rite of passage. (“Her breath swung open like a broken shell,” it begins.) Throughout, Adams matches Black’s delicacy with his own, supporting the poem on the thinnest possible tendrils from the piano, harp and marimba. The vocal line, sung with exquisite purity by soprano Winnie Nieh, is at once tentative and confident, like an infant sure of what she wants to say but still finding the tools to say it.
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Most affecting is the way Adams mirrors that breakthrough by building his entire song around a single motif — a melody of some four or five notes, an immediately recognizable harmonic cadence. It’s the musical analogue of baby’s first word, which is why it requires neither development nor variation. It’s a pristine pearl, meant to be marveled at and savored purely on its own terms. I couldn’t get enough.
There were other pleasures to be had during this concert by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players led by artistic director Eric Dudley, including music by Shulamit Ran, Terry Riley, and John Adams (the great Chamber Symphony). Obviously, though, they paled in comparison. I admired the rest of Adams’ cycle, which seems to be titled First Work unless that’s a typo for First Word (there was certainly a typo in the program somewhere). But it felt busy by contrast, and far too grown up. After the sublime simplicity of Babyland, I was not prepared for bursts of cosmology and adult angst.
Elsewhere:
George Papajohn, SFCV: “Love it or hate it for its brashness, kitsch, and eccentricity, [John Adams’ Chamber Symphony is a concert staple for good reason. SFCMP offered a crisp, wonderfully raucous interpretation of the energetic, cartoonish outer movements.”