David Tanenbaum: As She Sings

David Tanenbaum has said that the defining moment when he decided to pursue music as a career was hearing an Andrés Segovia concert. Countless performance engagements and more than 30 recordings later, he is widely recognized as not only a guitarist of great renown, but also one of the instrument's stalwart champions of new guitar repertoire. In addition to his duties as Chair of the Guitar Department of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, he has collaborated with an impressive list of composers including Terry Reilly, Steve Reich, Hans Werner Henze, and Lou Harrison. As She Sings begins with the album's most recent piece "Shadows and Light," a work composed by SFCM colleague Sérgio Assad in 2016. Fans of Assad's work will recognize his trademark Brazilian rhythmic intensity in the middle of the piece, but both the outset and conclusion are quite unlike any of his previous compositions. Smith's 2007 work "Five Pieces for guitar with live electronics" features loops, recorded passages that are looped, and pre-recorded samples that intermingle with a variety of guitar techniques and resonances in different genres associated with the guitar. "Music for Guitar," the centerpiece of this recording in many ways, was written nearly 50 years ago by the artist's father, Elias Tanenbaum. The score appeared on David's music stand when he got home from school one day in 1972. Although programmed in live performance several times, this is the first recording of the piece. The album's penultimate work is "Games," a 2002 composition by another SFCM colleague Dusan Bogdanovic, which is based on a collection of poems written by Yugoslavian poet Vasko Pope in 1954. In addition to guitar, the piece features mezzo soprano, flute, bass, and ceramic gongs. The concluding title piece by John Anthony Lennon is the middle movement of a triptych of elegies called 'The Fortunels' written for Tanenbaum in 1999 and it serves as a moving, melancholic epilogue to a diverse and brilliantly performed program.

— David Pedrick, 6.02.2021

Music written specifically for the guitarist, in this case David Tanenbaum, also features on As She Sings, a CD showcasing works created for him during the past five decades (ReEntrant REN01 newfocusrecordings.com). Sérgio Assad’s Shadows and Light is followed by Ronald Bruce Smith’s fascinating Five Pieces for Guitar with live electronics, in which different playing styles combine with a range of electronic processing. Music for Guitar is an early piece by Tanenbaum’s father Elias Tanenbaum. Tanenbaum is joined by mezzo-soprano Wendy Hillhouse, flute, bass and ceramic gongs for Dušan Bogdanović’s Games, seven short settings of poetry by the Yugoslavian poet Vasko Popa. John Anthony Lennon’s elegiac title track completes an intriguing and sometimes challenging disc.

— Terry Robbins, 12.20.2021

David Tanenbaum’s new CD is filled with (mostly) new, absorbing, and sometimes challenging music. It begins with Shadows and Light, a new piece by Sérgio Assad. Tanenbaum has never been an artist who avoided thorny and initially abrasive new works. Assad told the guitarist that he wanted to write a piece “unlike anything he had written before,” as quoted in the online notes for this disc. Well, he has succeeded. There are few if any parts reminiscent of his earlier pieces. This is no Aquarelle, but rather employs a very overtly modernistic style. Repeated listening is necessary but leads to an appreciation for the composer’s intentions. It sounds quite difficult to play, but Mr. Tanenbaum easily passes muster.

Next up is a fascinating, and to make a long story short, very cool composition: Five Pieces for Guitar with Live Electronics by Ronald Bruce Smith. Sometimes music employing these hybrid resources makes me grab for the mute button, but this piece is constantly fascinating, even if you have not heard its like before. It ranges from genuinely exciting to weirdly beautiful, with many interesting stops along the way. The notes on the internet give a good bit of detail about how the sounds are generated, which I don’t have space to include. The guitarist plays it with virtuosity and total commitment, and trust me, it works!

Music for Guitar, which follows, was a gift from composer Elias Tanenbaum, father, to David Tanenbaum, son. It is an intriguing exploration of the guitar’s potential sound world creatively addressed in a work now almost fifty years old.

Now hold onto your seats for the next piece, Dušan Bogdanovic’s Games. It is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano (in this case) with guitar, flute, bass, and percussion. It is a wild and thoroughly engaging ride. It is based on surreal but insightful poems by Vasko Popa. I wish I had time to quote some of them to give a flavor of the work. Reading the texts (which are thoughtfully included in the notes) makes the point that the surreal sometimes offers as much wisdom as concrete reality. Wendy Hillhouse takes her voice on a trip from luscious conventional vocalism to dramatic parlando. An impressive performance.

The program concludes with its title work, As She Sings, by John Anthony Lennon (an artist forever committed to using his middle name). It is brief but impressive, sounding a bit like Couperin’s Mysterious Barricades, but in slow motion and with contemporary harmonic and melodic content. Congratulations to Mr. Tanenbaum and the composers who contributed to this fine release.

— Al Kunze, 1.01.2022