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Author: Paul Hertelendy

A YOUTH CHORUS TO OPEN YOUR EARS, WIDE

A YOUTH CHORUS TO OPEN YOUR EARS, WIDE

NEW YORK CITY—It’s as if none of us had ever heard a youth chorus before—Hundreds of youngsters, age 9 on up, on stage singing, gyrating, dancing, all on pitch, despite flying about as if in a Broadway musical. It left one battle-hardened music critic nearby captivated, driven to pounding on a thigh in time to the swelling rhythms. The whole show was enough to move this writer to tears of sheer joy rarely shed. This was the prize-winning multi-racial, multi-cultural…

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A Concerto for the Spirit of Today

A Concerto for the Spirit of Today

Among today’s mid-career violinists, the Southern Californian Leila Josefowicz proves herself a true tigress. The more challenging the score, the more she relishes bringing it to life. Where others might cringe, she revels. Composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen wrote his violin concerto in 2009, and she’s virtually owned it ever since. Thorny, prickly, super-speed, clashing, call her violin role what you will. No concerto gives the soloist a more preponderant perpetuum-mobilerole and none I venture make greater demands on the soloist. I…

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SYMPHONY’S CANNONS AND CANONS

SYMPHONY’S CANNONS AND CANONS

The preview act of the music-director-to-be Salonen showed him to be refreshingly self-effacing, constantly putting the music at the forefront in place of the maestro or the podium. And that put a damper on any possible waves of public adulation and wonderment. He led off his guest stint with the S.F. Symphony with cannons and canons, but of a deeply grieving funereal sort, and went from the bang to the whimper, finishing with the underwhelming impact of Ravel’s fragile “Mother…

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BALLET’S BRAIN-TEASERS, HEAD-SCRATCHERS

BALLET’S BRAIN-TEASERS, HEAD-SCRATCHERS

Ballet and philosophy rarely converge. But there we were, with not one but two such examples of theorizing and thought-provoking choreography, venturing to convey concepts through movement. Good luck! Trey McIntyre’s world premiere “Big Hunger” explains it all (at least in the printed notes): The big hunger in humanity is the yearning for meaning, an existential clue to purpose. The scenic design’s massive structure (Thomas Mika) was a further clue: A prominently illuminated EXIT door on stage. This could symbolize…

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BE MY VALENTINE, MACBETH!

BE MY VALENTINE, MACBETH!

PALO ALTO, CA—The romance of Valentine’s Day came face to face with ghoulish rituals and murder most foul by that usurper Macbeth. Disastrous? Hardly. The plucky little opera company virtually sold out the house February 14th, emulating the mouse that roared. And it brought on high drama on its opening night, overcoming almost all adversity. This was that jinxed operatic “Macbeth,” by Verdi, out of Shakespeare—an unsettling tale so fearsome that theaters everywhere still leave one light burning on stage…

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MATT BROWNE’S PRICELESS SUBTLETY

MATT BROWNE’S PRICELESS SUBTLETY

ROHNERT PARK, CA—Composer Matt Browne will hate me for this, but I’m lavishing all my superlatives on his “Ephemera” finale of his new Symphony No. 1. His deft segment portraying the aftermath and total abandonment of a collapsed empire is a testament of total tranquility, tickling the ear tantalizingly with pearly droplets: a strum on a harp, a discreet lozenge from the piano, select notes on a vibraphone, and the viola section (so often taken for granted) waxing from the…

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Women Conquering Berkeley

Women Conquering Berkeley

BERKELEY,CA—The highlight of the Berkeley Symphony program the other night was, astonishingly, the surprise vocal encore running close to 10 minutes in length: The S.F. Girls Chorus singing a near-a-cappella work with mezzo obbligata,”Only in Sleep” by the Australian Eriks Esenvalds. If ever there was proof of the emergence of the creative female, it was in this mellifluous chorus for the girls as led by the SFGC director, Valérie Sainte-Agathe. How apt, the distaff triumph in this hot-and-cold evening focusing…

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Unfamiliar Sounds from Poland

Unfamiliar Sounds from Poland

STANFORD, CA—Could anyone doubt that classical music is the world’s true lingua franca today, drawing together four continents? Consider a Polish orchestra coming here on tour with a South Korean violin soloist who had studied at the Juilliard School, NYC, and Nicaraguan conductor with an Italian name. Playing music from Germany and the Czech Republic from different centuries. The Polish NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic made a rare swing through Northern California and played two home-grown specials plus the Brahms First. This…

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DIVERSITY ON MANY LEVELS

DIVERSITY ON MANY LEVELS

Please don’t say avant garde. The PIVOT concert series is defined as “Our adventures in chamber music,” per the program director Melanie Smith. With it, San Francisco Performances mixes the old with the contemporary and experimental. On Jan. 24 it also entailed solos and duets that were partly or fully improvisational, drawing a sizable audience. Despite resplendent performances by the trio, most of the audience remained gratuitously in the dark. The printed program ended up so scrambled, by the end…

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Taking Chances on the Unpredictable Stage

Taking Chances on the Unpredictable Stage

A lively reprise of chance music that was in vogue six decades ago proved a surprisingly effective diversion in the Contemporary Music Players concert Jan. 17. In (aleatoric) chance music, players can make many musical decisions normally mandated by composers. This can mean selecting, on the spot, the sequence of spelled-out segments and movements, as in the score of Henry Cowell’s “Mosaic Quartet.” Or the players can gain wider latitude, getting graphs and sketches to interpret instead of musical scores,…

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