"It's the Mark, Erling, and Lisa show," jokes composer-conductor Mark Alburger in our phoner about his 12-year-old baby the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, which will be giving its first of two concerts of its 2014-15 season this Saturday, Oct. 4, at San Francisco's Old First Church. "Erling Wold has been with it from ground zero, and so has Lisa Scola Prosek. Michael Cooke came out of the blue. And Rachel Condry, who plays clarinet and composes, took it upon herself to find Old First. The other part was forming the board of directors," Alburger says. "But basically, when I founded it, it was a solo endeavor and came out of a conversation I had with Erling at a Vietnamese restaurant in the city." As composer Alexis Alrich put it, "Mark, the composer's club is now the SFCCO."
"I also learned over the years," Alburger continues, "that there was a desire to found an orchestra for composers to get their work done. So I made an e-mail list of composers who also played instruments. I thought, 'If you put it on the Internet, they will come,' and there was a big response. We were able to put together an orchestra with up to three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, three bassoons, a string quintet, two trumpets, one French horn, one piano, and one percussionist."
Every orchestra needs a conductor/music director, and the SFCCO has three conductors: Alburger, John Kendall Bailey and Martha Stoddard. Of course, there's a story. "I was involved in the last John Cage piece, Ocean, in Berkeley, which Andrew Culver completed according to Cage's instructions. The Merce Cunningham dancers were on the floor, and the musicians were randomly assigned to platforms by using the I Ching. That's where I met Marty [Martha Stoddard], who's an out lesbian, though she remembers it a bit differently. I think we were on risers in the gym."
The orchestra has grown by leaps and bounds. Their ensemble work is solid, their solos expressive, and they sound fine even within the confines of Old First's high brick walls, which often manage to make the massed overtones in even clearly scored works sound congealed. And their repertoire? The band has performed pieces of nearly every compositional stripe, which isn't surprising, given the fact that the 12-note wall erected by Schoenberg and his disciples collapsed in the late 1980s. As Steve Reich wryly observed, "We're not in Vienna anymore," or as Virgil Thomson put it, "Write anything you want."
The first of the SFCCO's four rehearsals, which I caught last Thursday at the United Methodist Church on Geary, goes off without a hitch. When I enter the low-ceilinged room, a strenuous march is in progress. Michael B. Kimbell's "The First Line" is clear, bare, and definitely tragic, with Alburger offering quick, pointed suggestions to the troops in the trenches. Three excerpts from Lisa Scola Prosek's opera The Lariat, set to premiere at San Francisco's Thick House in January, is next, the orchestra slowly getting into its groove. Alburger's "abducted by aliens" piece, which he told me has a steal from Messaien's Turangilla Symphony, is vivid and full of surprises, and Stardust and Loren Jones' piece makes its points simply, and he's not above suggesting spur-of-the-moment changes to make it work, proposing shakers instead of maracas to Alburger, who acquiesces pronto.
It's inspiring to see a group as focused and collegial as the SFCCO giving their all. "Ego-less" teamwork is always the way. It's not who's on top, but who's pulling as one, and the SFCCO makes intense collaboration seem effortless, easy as pie.
Info: sfcco.org