concert review: California Symphony

I bought a 3-concert series this year with the California Symphony, a small-scale professional orchestra that plays at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek in the outer East Bay. I missed the concert I was most eager to attend because it was at the height of the omicron wave, but I was at today's, the last in my set. They seem pathetically grateful to their subscribers; taped to my seat I found a personalized thank-you card from the principal trombonist, and it looks like others had similarly.

The California Symphony has a composer-in-residence program that lasts three years per composer, who premieres one new work in the spring each year. The composer for 2018-20 was Katherine Balch, but guess what: her third work, for March 2020, was postponed, and didn't get its premiere until this weekend's concerts.

But it almost got kicked in the pants again. With unnervingly good timing, just as the music had finished and the applause was breaking out, a fire alarm went off in the theater. So instead of the scheduled intermission, we all - audience and performers alike - spent 45 minutes out on the sidewalk in the cool dusk as the firefighters inspected the building.

The premiere work, designated a song cycle but more an amorphous vocal thing, was titled Illuminate and sets a farrago of poetry by Arthur Rimbaud, Adrienne Rich, and various others for three female singers, whose voices leap and cascade over each other, entangling and merging, as if playing leapfrog in the murky pond of the poetry. Balch warned in the pre-concert talk that we wouldn't be able to make out most of the words. Indeed, despite the stunning excellence of the singing, even with the lyrics in front of me I couldn't usually tell where we were, which puts paid to the composer's notion that the music reflects the meaning of the words even if you can't discern them. Not that the instrumental parts seemed to vary: it was insistent fragmented industrial, often squealing and squawking to a momentary stop. Balch studied with David Lang, and it shows in her vocal work, the high piping quality of which also curiously reminded me of the Masque in Michael Nyman's Prospero's Books.

It was preceded by an orchestral work, Three Studies from Couperin by Thomas Adès. This was more of the same: fragmented, hollowed out arrangements of the Couperin pieces leaving nothing familiar or detectable inside.

The main work after the extended intermission was Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye, which was played in a cautious crystalline fashion as if this is what the previous works would have sounded like before someone broke the glass and left it all littering the floor.