This review appeared in the June 1983 issue of Record magazine:
Zappa Wields Heavy Baton; Varèse Weeps
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players;
Frank Zappa, conductor
War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco CA
February 9, 1983By Phil Lesh with David Gans
“How many of you are having trouble with the silence between the notes?” asked emcee Grace Slick midway through the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players’ program of works by avant-garde composers Edgard Varèse and Anton Webern. “Maybe some of you are waiting for something familiar instead of warming to the unfamiliar.”
It’s a safe assumption that this music was unfamiliar, to the majority of the 2000 or so who came to San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House to see a tuxedo-clad Frank Zappa conducting two compositions by Varèse, one of the heroes of Zappa’s musical youth. And judging from the way Zappa conducted himself on the podium, it’s also a safe assumption that his presence was more a matter of drawing power than was his conducting prowess.
As a fundraising event, it was probably a success. The largest segment of the audience clearly came to see Zappa and Slick first, the SFCMP second – but if Zappa hoped to turn his fans on to Varèse, he should have given them a more spirited, accessible performance. He and the orchestra were underrehearsed; Zappa never looked up from his score during his two pieces (which, in true Ed Sullivan Show style, were the first and last of the evening – ensuring that the audience remained for the non-celebrity portions) and swung his baton in a wooden, metronomic fashion.
Aside from their common birth year – l883 – there isn’t much linking Varèse and Webern. Both were composers whose work challenged established principles of tonality, rhythm and musical structure. Varèse’s Ionisation (the first of the two pieces conducted by Zappa), for instance, is performed by a 13-piece percussion ensemble consisting mostly of sirens, gongs and drums. The play of dynamics and tone colors is what it’s all about; its climax is the brief appearance of pitch – in the form of piano and bells – late in the piece. It’s a hard concept for rock- or classical-oriented audiences to grasp even when it’s played well, and whatever dynamics this rendition had were swallowed up in the poor acoustics of the Opera House.
The most successful piece of the evening, interestingly, wasn’t performed live. Varèse’s Poeme Electronique, a taped creation first presented in 1958, is almost totally free of conventional rhythm, pitch and timbre, but it tells a story, elicits chuckles and chills – in short, does all that music is supposed to do – while ignoring its rules and traditions. As Zappa wrote in a 1971 article reprinted in the program notes, “If. . . you think (Varèse’s) music might make groovy sound effects, listen again.”
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