Datebook Review: S.F. Symphony unveils an elliptical, tenuous treatment of women’s suffrage
Guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero returned to conduct the San Francisco Symphony in music by Julia Wolfe and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Joshua Kosman, May 26, 2023
The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, granting American women the right to vote at last, was a landmark event in the nation’s history. It was part of a continuous debate whose roots lay in the Revolutionary period and whose implications continue to reverberate to the present day.
There’s a vibrant account to be spun out of this ongoing struggle, but “Her Story,” the latest in a series of historical and sociological oratorios by the New York composer Julia Wolfe, winds up nibbling around its edges.
In its West Coast premiere in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, May 25, “Her Story” registered as a series of generalized gestures in the direction of its subject matter, circling the topic of women’s suffrage without ever really landing a punch.
Again and again, Wolfe leans on a handful of weighty words — most notably quotations from Abigail Adams and Sojourner Truth — to carry the argument forward, and each time those words fall flat.
“Her Story,” commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony in partnership with several other orchestras, had its premiere last year with the Nashville Symphony under Giancarlo Guerrero, that orchestra’s dynamic and resourceful music director. Guerrero’s return to San Francisco following his exciting Symphony debut last year was among Thursday evening’s happier aspects.
So, too, was the presence of the Lorelei Ensemble, the 10-member women’s chorus for whom “Her Story” was written. Under Artistic Director Beth Willer, these singers produced a bright, beautifully blended sound, their voices snaking through sections of vocal counterpoints and massing into sharply etched chords.
Yet, it was hard to discern a nation-shaking fight in Wolfe’s slantwise, elliptical approach, which divides the 40-minute oratorio into two movements.
The first is built around a few sentences of a letter from first lady Adams to her husband John, reminding him not to overlook the rightful claims of women in the new nation he and his pals are in the middle of creating. “Remember,” she remarks ominously, “all men would be tyrants if they could.”
It’s a potent beginning and a foreshadowing of things to come, but Wolfe never follows through on the promise. Adams’ letter gives way in the second movement to a few scattered scraps of text, including the caption of a political cartoon, that are presented without context or a sense of their import.
Wolfe has used similar techniques before, most notably in her magnificent 2014 work “Anthracite Fields,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In that piece, a portrait of the life and culture of Pennsylvania coal miners, verbal fragments — diary excerpts, speeches, even bare lists of names — take on a totemic aspect, conjuring up a world of danger and communal tenderness.
But the lack of linear structure in that work is a feature rather than a bug. Not so in “Her Story,” whose very title offers a broken promise of narrative.
The staging of director Anne Kauffman, a series of hieroglyphic poses and reconfigured stances, doesn’t do much to sharpen the focus. Nor does Wolfe’s thick orchestral score, in which the acerbic brilliance of “Anthracite Fields” gives way to noodling minor harmonies and soupy instrumental textures.
The absence of a narrative through-line felt particularly ironic in a concert that opened with one of the great musical tributes to the art of storytelling. Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” is packed with incident, with heroism, with swashbuckling romance, and Guerrero and the orchestra made every moment of it sizzle.
The hero was Associate Concertmaster Wyatt Underhill, who (in partnership with harpist Meredith Clark) gave the title character’s purling violin solos a sinuous charm. The rest of the orchestra rose to the occasion as well, from the blazing virtuosity of the brass players to the profusion of telling solo turns from the woodwinds.
Give them all a vote, I say.
Reach Joshua Kosman: jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @JoshuaKosman
Joshua Kosman
Joshua Kosman has covered classical music for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1988, reviewing and reporting on the wealth of orchestral, operatic, chamber and contemporary music throughout the Bay Area.
He is the co-constructor of the weekly cryptic crossword puzzle "Out of Left Field," and has repeatedly placed among the top 20 contestants at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
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