“Bring your earplugs” is an unusual text to send a friend before a San Francisco Symphony performance. But then a SoundBox show is no ordinary event.
Concerts in this spinoff series take place kitty-corner from the red canopy of Davies Symphony Hall, in a concrete rehearsal studio named Zellerbach A — with too modest a capacity for the Symphony ever to turn a profit. The upside for the audience (ages 21 and older) is a relaxed environment and programming that is far more adventurous than that of the mainstage.
“Dream Awake,” curated by violinist Alexi Kenney, and performed on Friday, Feb. 6, just might be SoundBox’s most daring concert yet.
Take Iannis Xenakis, a 20th-century Greek composer revered — albeit often from a distance — for his complex, mathematically informed works. Sometimes, the stark rhythms of “Peaux” (from his 1979 drum sextet Pleiades) surge in roaring unisons. Then the patterns interlock so intricately that you can barely intuit the existence of a beat. Mostly, it’s loud. Still, for so many dry thuds (“Peaux,” which means “skins,” refers to the membranes of bongos, congas, and other drums), the piece’s subtleties came across remarkably well in this performance.
The Xenakis put the bang in the evening’s first set, which opened with Kenney and soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon’s dynamic performance of selections from György Kurtág’s expressionist song cycle Kafka Fragments. Later in the evening came a concerto by György Ligeti, another Hungarian composer associated with the 20th-century avant-garde. “That might have been a little intense,” Kenney said as he returned to the studio’s stage.
But there were friendly works, too — Gran Turismo, a virtuosic violin octet by Andrew Norman, and the Terry Riley classic Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector, here in a Kenney arrangement that adds a string orchestra to the original quartet. On Friday, as the modal undulations washed over the stage to projections of fiery mandalas and solar flares, you felt the added depth of the double basses, the extra emphasis of each upward swing.
At 32, Kenney, a Palo Alto native and San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra alumnus, has shown himself to be almost unnervingly good at everything he tries — leading orchestras, playing Schumann on gut strings, and now, curating. “Dream Awake” felt mostly cohesive and never confined. There was room to be surprised.
Among several works by rising composers, Nina Shekhar’s Above the Fray for string orchestra stood out for its tender deconstruction of the ubiquitous Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. Another highlight was Peter S. Shin’s Screaming Shapes, which bends a quartet of live instrumentalists around a bubbly pre-recorded track.
Kaija Saariaho’s “Parfum de l’instant,” from her 2016 orchestral song cycle Quatre Instants, was three-and-a-half minutes of pure bliss. Fitz Gibbon sang this sensuous music with utmost precision and wonderful sweep. Under conductor Radu Paponiu, the instrumentalists’ obsessive 32nd note figures, sky-high glissandi and tunneling scales melded together in blurry yet evocative shapes.
Most of the evening’s music flowed continuously, each piece seamlessly transitioning into the next. The performers glided among the audience. Kenney played the slow movement of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, with a simple yet profound beauty, from the overhead catwalk. There was always something interesting happening somewhere.
And yes, there were earplugs available, if you asked.
