United States Various: Caroline Shaw (viola, vocals), Gabriel Kahane (piano, vocals). San Francisco Performances, Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, 14.11.2024. (HS)
Gabriele Kahane & Caroline Shaw – Hexagons (8 songs)
Kahane – ‘Winter Song’, ‘Baedeker’, ‘To Be American’
Shaw – ‘And So’, ‘In manus tuas’#
A collaboration between two of the most thoughtful and musically accessible contemporary composers, Hexagons uses vernacular musical genres and digital enhancements to build a cycle of eight original songs inspired by a 1939 short story by Argentine author José Luis Borgès.
While Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane have made significant impacts individually with their contemporary ‘serious’ music, they have also performed each other’s songs in more casual appearances together for more than a decade. This is their first large-scale project, co-commissioned by Oregon Symphony where Kahane is creative chair, and San Francisco Performances was among the first to present it.
With a penchant for magical realism, Borgès imagined a highly allegorical world in ‘The Library of Babel’. The eight-page story’s fantastical universe consists of interlocking towering hexagonal libraries that contain an almost infinite number of books, though randomly shelved. In their song cycle, Shaw and Kahane seem most absorbed by how such a torrent of knowledge might test the limits of human understanding. Their lyrics never mention the internet specifically, dwelling instead on emotional effects – joy, grief, bewilderment and more. Any allusions to society’s relationship to the internet today may well be intentional.
Three tables were arrayed in front of Kahane’s piano, each with a microphone, and the two outer ones with green-shade library lamps for spoken interludes. The middle table held Shaw’s viola, fitted with its own microphone, a small electronic keyboard and controls to bring in prerecorded instrumental harmonies and echoes. Shaw and Kahane sang their own lyrics, occasionally in harmony together.
One most magical musical moment mixed prerecorded electronics with their live voices in a warmly beautiful, extended example of close-harmony jazz.
On the surface, Kahane’s singing might strike a classical music listener as that of a pop balladeer with a resonant baritone, but his delivery can create an unexpected depth to the meaning of lyrics. Shaw sang in a soft, slightly breathy but pure timbre. All was amplified, and both artists enunciated words so well I seldom had to consult the printed libretto. With little if any vibrato, and a musician’s ear, their sounds harmonized seamlessly.
The piece began with a few harmonics on Shaw’s viola, creating a wistful atmosphere as the first song, ‘I Dreamed a Book’, painted a luminous picture (‘to teach the people to see their neighbor’), before turning to a menace (‘where long notes are the wrong notes’) and finally receding into an uneasy peace.
References to the music of Beethoven and Schubert wafted through the next song, ‘A Loaf of Bread’, setting a tone in which subsequent songs created their own worlds within a world. ‘My Grave Shall Be the Fathomless Air’ contemplated the limits of time, and ‘Let Heaven Exist’ contrasted annoyances with unexpected joy. ‘Cryptographs’ introduced the idea that an overwhelming tsunami of information can make us blind to so much of it.
It all led to the final and longest song. ‘The Blind Librarian’ sets restless music to phrases (such as ‘Oh, to be told that the total domain of our existence is not to exceed these six walls’) that finally arrived at a halting finish, on the upward motion of an incomplete phrase.
Kahane and Shaw opened the concert with a sort of sampler of their previous work, often joining voices on each other’s songs. Of the five they chose, standouts were Kahane’s ‘Baedeker’, an ode to an early twentieth-century map book of United States railroads, which rolled along with a sashaying swing, and Shaw’s ethereal ‘And so’, originally written for her voice and the Attacca Quartet.
But it was Hexagons that created a unique, fascinating and ultimately beautiful experience. The pair are on tour with it over the next several months, mapped as far afield as New York, London and Paris.
Harvey Steiman