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Author: Paul Hertelendy

Berlioz’s Requiem: A Rafter-Shaking Experience

Berlioz’s Requiem: A Rafter-Shaking Experience

One of the greatest assemblies of musicians and singers ever at Davies Hall came together this week for Hector Berlioz’ grand, grand Requiem mass of 1837, performed  with immense reverence.  It’s an Olympic-sized budget-breaker that shakes the rafters on an awe-inspiring scale, making all the other hundreds of requiems in the repertory seem like mere chamber music. The Frenchman Berlioz is duly credited with great orchestration skills, greatly broadening the known sonic spectrum a mere decade or so after Schubert…

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A RELUCTANT SYMPHONY, AND THAT FRESH VIOLIN SPIRIT

A RELUCTANT SYMPHONY, AND THAT FRESH VIOLIN SPIRIT

BOSTON, MA—If you doubted what a great unifying force in the world classical music can be, the recent Boston Symphony concert could be a restoring force. There was music by a Japanese composer commemorating a Russian film-maker, with a violin soloist from Germany and a music director from Latvia—before an American audience shouting loud, healthy Italian bravos. It’s s if a whole world of interaction and, perhaps, human harmony, was opening up before us. The BSO and its Symphony Hall…

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Majel Connery
VISITING LINCHPIN POWERS SUPERB MODERNIST MUSIC-THEATER

VISITING LINCHPIN POWERS SUPERB MODERNIST MUSIC-THEATER

STANFORD—Arguably the most dazzling world premiere of the season took place before an audience of only 100 in a basement studio space hosting a solo music-theater opus. The unorthodox double-barreled staging for singer and string quartet made for a stellar  performance vehicle for East Coast soprano Majel Connery—part singer, part half-crazed actress, part keyboardist. Going barefoot, she writhed about the floor raving and attacked a variety of apples hanging all around her runway stage, with patrons just three feet away…

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LOU HARRISON: VERSATILE CHAMELEON AMONG COMPOSERS

LOU HARRISON: VERSATILE CHAMELEON AMONG COMPOSERS

There have been game efforts by various Bay Area groups to mark the centennial of composer Lou Harrison via performances of his music, but they fall short. Harrison’s  large portfolio either involves exotic instruments, ranging from gamelans to improvised to radically retuned ones, or they are large-scale pieces such as his four symphonies for orchestra. But there’s hope, at least if you can wait till the May 20 all-Harrison concert featuring the large American (made) gamelan, to be given in…

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CAPTURING THE ELUSIVE CONCERT AUDIENCE

CAPTURING THE ELUSIVE CONCERT AUDIENCE

As concert sets go, SoundBox is an eclectic hybrid drawing new audience by the carload. An innovative offshoot of the San Francisco Symphony, it is part concert, part light show, part video art, part sonic experience, part schmoozing time, part date night and part night club. The intimate evenings remain one of the hottest tickets of all, regularly selling out all the tickets within 10 minutes of sales launch on the web. For the SFS musicians who spend most of…

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DID BEETHOVEN MEET DEBUSSY IN A TIME WARP??

DID BEETHOVEN MEET DEBUSSY IN A TIME WARP??

Those fire-eaters from Southern Cal known as the Calder Quartet played some bristling contemporary works, plus one of Beethoven’s most whimsical efforts. The four mid-career men—identically dressed in dark suits, with matching ties—show an uncanny rhythmic bent able to decipher and render the most complex metric signatures that only modern composers like Thomas  Adès and Boulez dare to call for and to dabble in. Seven beats to the measure, 11, 13, even 25 (or almost any prime number you might…

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CONFLICT AND RECONCILIATION IN ARRESTING NEW BALLET

CONFLICT AND RECONCILIATION IN ARRESTING NEW BALLET

San Francisco’s own Myles Thatcher has created a new genre of conflict ballet with his world premiere, “Ghost in the Machine,” stealing the attention at the San Francisco Ballet. Thatcher, a young dancer in the SFB corps de ballet—the legion of overlooked spear-carriers in the stratified ranks of a huge troupe—has produced yet another highly effective choreographic opus combining modern (non-balletic) techniques, toe-shoes conventions, and a considerable story line. Much of his expanded ballet vocabulary draws from modern-dance traditions, where…

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EXCEPT FOR A SLIP, BALLET PERFECTION

EXCEPT FOR A SLIP, BALLET PERFECTION

After nearly three acts dancing the Swan-Queen double role in near-perfect technical proficiency, Yuan Yuan Tan slipped and fell at the most effusive moment of “Swan Lake.” Does that prove she’ll fallible? No. Only that she’s human. She deftly picked herself up April 6 and finished her challenging night, in—of course——near-perfect technical proficiency. In the process, she showed what a thorough professional she is, and has been, through an amazing S.F. Ballet career now at 22 years on stage, and…

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DUSTING OFF MAHLER’S FIRST, TENTH

DUSTING OFF MAHLER’S FIRST, TENTH

Drawing on the first and last, the San Francisco Symphony perused the bookend Mahler symphonies. It was alpha and omega, A and Z, inaugural and swan song—all in one evening. In the process, the SFS played the warhorse in the bunch, the Symphony No. 1, and made it seem fresh as a spring poppy, washing away all the usual starchiness. Credit the resourceful leadership of Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, with countless nuances of dynamics and rubato (brief variants in…

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OBSCURE OLD VIENNESE SYMPHONY REVIVED

OBSCURE OLD VIENNESE SYMPHONY REVIVED

A skillful orchestrator, the Viennese composer Franz Schreker has vanished from the radar a century later, alas, now revived by the S.F. Symphony via his Chamber Symphony of 1916. Indeed, the only trace of him I’ve run across before on the West Coast was a 2010 Los Angeles Opera revival of his “Die Gezeichneten” (The Designated Ones). His nebulous, ear-tingling sounds, closer to Debussy or Charles Koechlin than to any  than any of his Germanic cohorts, produce remarkable, memorable effects…

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