The San Francisco Symphony’s programming for next season — the orchestra’s first in recent memory without a music director — has been roundly criticized as bland. Walk a half block down from the main stage, though, and you’ll find a point of view at SoundBox.
The Symphony’s satellite series, which takes place in a gussied-up rehearsal space on Franklin Street, invites composer-curators to showcase their own music in addition to works by friends and mentors. Earlier this season, pianist Courtney Bryan mounted an ambitious survey of Afro-diasporic music. In the most recent SoundBox installment, which ran Friday–Saturday, April 11–12, percussionist Andy Akiho brought the sounds of New York — and beyond.
Before he ever composed, Akiho spent years studying steel pan drumming by ear. Now 46, he’s still searching for new instruments everywhere. He’ll save a good pair of chopsticks to use as percussion mallets or transform a piano by preparing its strings with coins and poster tack. He’s written a concerto for marimba and rice bowls and another for Ping-Pong players.
In this percussion-heavy program, which SF Classical Voice attended on Saturday, April 12, it was surprisingly three string works that stood out. With verdant harmonies and zooming glissandos, Michael Gordon’s Clouded Yellow adroitly orchestrates swarming butterflies for string quartet, here the magnificent lineup of Symphony violinists Jessie Fellows and Olivia Chen, violist Katie Kadarauch, and cellist Anne Richardson. Missy Mazzoli’s Baroque-tinged Beyond the Order of Things received a commanding solo performance from cellist Davis You.
And Julia Wolfe’s With a blue dress on was a highlight of the evening. The piece is a high-stakes hoedown for violin quintet — often sounding like a violent quintet, though this ensemble (Symphony musicians Alexander Barantschik, Jeein Kim, David Chernyavsky, Chen Zhao, and Yuna Lee) was perfectly at ease.
SoundBox does favor shorter works, and among so many movements, it was inevitable that some music — by David Lang and Paola Prestini, as well as a performance art piece by Paula Matthusen — got lost.
That’s not all that was missing. The program’s title, “Sculptures,” was taken from Akiho’s 2023 composition of the same name, inspired by the work of Omaha, Nebraska-based ceramicist Jun Kaneko. It was a shame there wasn’t more of his art at SoundBox.
Granted, the one massive form by Kaneko that the Symphony did bring out to the Bay Area from the Midwest was no doubt expensive to ship.
The artist’s 6-foot-tall bronze and steel head slowly descended onto the stage at the beginning of the program as the audience watched projections of Kaneko’s other works set to a loud prerecorded track. Heads turned the moment Akiho and principal percussion player Jacob Nissly struck the metal with their mallets in deafening crashes that dovetailed with reverberant tones bowed from the same surface. At one point in this rich and expansive duet, Nissly had to reach out to stop the head from literally spinning.
If Sculptures feels abstract in album form (Akiho and the Omaha Symphony recorded the suite two years ago), in person this music comes alive. Call it spectacle, call it sway — when Akiho is in front of you playing “Cylinders,” an exuberant movement for raku-glazed ceramic pieces, you can’t look away.
It was much the same with carTogRAPh, Akiho’s propulsive and physically punishing solo percussion piece, which saw a tour de force performance from Nissly on Saturday. The “TRAP” hiding in the title could refer to a trap set — an old term for a drum kit — as well as to trap music, a hip-hop subgenre that echoes in the piece’s pitch patterns. Maybe even to the performer’s peril, too. With so many hits to land on so many different instruments — bottles, chimes, a kick drum — one wrong move could throw off the groove. Then again, perhaps this music isn’t about anything so much as it is a dazzling array of sounds.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
