ArtsSF

WALNUT CREEK, CA—-The Diablo Symphony has gone through its ups and downs over the years more often than the shifting tides. This process can strengthen a group long term. In its heyday of the late 20thcentury, it hosted prominent composers like Lou Harrison and unveiled new works. Understandably the recent year and a half long pandemic has hurt. The long-awaited resumption at the Lesher Center Nov. 20-21 showed initiative in the Diablo repertory as guest conductor Emily Senturia took to…

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You were sure that you hit the wrong concert on the wrong night, unless you caught the fine-print program insert. Neither the conductor nor the opening symphonic work matched the earlier billing, which had featured the recuperating Michael Tilson Thomas on the podium of the S.F. Symphony. But MTT, still curtailing commitments, had given way to emergency fill-in Ludovic Morlot, most recently music director of the Seattle Symphony. And as you learned in the late-hour fine-print, the French-born Morlot had…

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With a resplendent silvery half-moon radiating over the City, you knew this would be a very special concert. Apprehension had been palpable as the recently retired music director Michael Tilson Thomas, turning 77 next month, underwent brain surgery to remove a tumor. Forced to cancel guest engagements with four orchestras, he made it back despite all adversity—a mite shaky, a mite cautious, but as confident and verbose as ever conducting the San Francisco Symphony. The instant he came on stage…

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The Spanish touch emanated at the S.F. Symphony this week, without a note of Spanish music played. The highly polished program spotlighting works both old and new emanated from conductor Gustavo Gimeno and pianist Javier Perianes. Gimeno deftly walked a tightrope contrasting two short modern pieces with standards by Mozart and Mendelssohn. The SFS trend of including a living composer nearly every time brought on the Korean-German composer Unsuk Chin, 60, in her brief but tumultuous “subito con forza” composition….

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If Paganini were a contemporary composer, he might be writing a rocket-powered violin concerto similar to Bryce Dessner’s, heard at the S.F. Symphony. The great violin star Paganini once famously said to Berlioz, if I perform a new concerto, I have to be playing all the time. Dessner’s new opus has the soloist playing frantically at breath-taking tempo, nearly nonstop, through 26 minutes in a whirlwind part of as many as 9,000 notes. The orchestra’s string players venture a similar…

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Eureka, an orchestra changing its spots, reverting to earlier ones traced back to the 1880s! Symphony Silicon Valley is renaming itself the Symphony San Jose, just inches short of that oldest West Coast orchestra known as the San Jose Symphony. Loyalty to this orchestra is formidable. Today you still see many principals playing who were in the earlier SJS incarnation in the 1990s, among them concertmaster Robin Mayforth, percussionist Galen Lemmon, trumpeter James Dooley, clarinetist Michael Corner, bassoonist Deborah Kramer,…

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The San Francisco Symphony opener under new maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen was novel, modern, and unique, certainly unlike any in over half a century of this writer’s memory and attendance. He featured rousing and in part explosive music, none of it familiar, all from 1939 or later. And the performance earned several standing ovations. The patrons’ enthusiasm over the unencumbered reopening of Louise Davies Hall after a year and a half was palpable. Some spoil-sports will grouse about the lack of…

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One of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s boldest new additions to the S.F. Symphony has been the eight “collaborative partners,” a variety of contemporary solo musicians adding new musical dimensions in more intimate ensembles to the SFS palette. Among the most virtuosic of these is flutist Claire Chase, heard in a vibrant currently streaming audio-visual program “Sound Box: Metamorphoses.” These curiously magnetic adventures in sound and sight go miles beyond your standard symphonic fare of Haydn, Handel and the 3 B’s. Chase plays…

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