ArtsSF

The New Century Chamber Orchestra scored twice over with a multi-media environmental musical package plus Palo-Alto-born guest leader named Alexi Kenney, who is a bona fide inspirational presence. In the Kenney format, forget the old-style spartan stage of such ensembles. His program adds naturalist projections covering every inch of wall and ceiling to supplement recent works by Gabriella Smith, Aaron Jay Kernis and Angelica Negron. The impact was formidable, a true eye-and-ear opener for chamber-orchestra patrons who are usually served…

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BURLINGAME, CA—It took a senior musician confined to the back rows to come up with something new and novel in his premiere. Meet composer Shinji Eshima, a bass player relegated to the back of orchestras, rarely getting solos or, even rarer, contrabass concertos. His notable first was the lineup for a quintet even rarer than Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet (which, yes, also has a string bass): Clarinet, piano, marimba, cello and bass. The night’s versatile cellist Emil Miland, who has been…

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SANTA FE, N.M.—Call it the battle of the sexes. A group of mostly female composers produced new works to be played by an all-male string quartet at the Santa Fe (N.M.) Chamber Music Festival. The first came equipped with pens and printers, the second with bows more eloquent than any archer’s weaponry. And music was in flux, matching the name of the ensemble. Happily, the outcome was harmonious, and the fest’s latest package of the new and latest evolved without…

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In keeping with a Black Lives Matter theme, a new SFCMP chamber-concert stream features leading black composers in lucid quality performances capped by a tribute to the late Olly Wilson. Wilson achieved a goal that music professors strive to emulate: as habile a teacher as a composer. Wilson is well remembered for his 22 years as composer on the UC Berkeley music faculty and his later strong support for the Young Musicians Program training underserved students in the S.F. Bay…

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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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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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BURLINGAME, CA—Historic violins spoke to us in song and left many in tears. A world premiere inspired by violins rescued from the Holocaust is as eloquent as it is disheartening. For the “Violins of Hope” instruments retrieved from the Nazis’ sites of their death-camp terror 75 years ago, librettist Gene Sheer and composer Jake Heggie have created a deeply moving song cycle with vivid imagery, in which the voices speaking to us were more from the surviving violins themselves than…

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How gratifying, that the musician in the back row can be the star of the performance, whether the percussionist, or the lady harpist, or the pianist. This time, it turned out to be the South-African-born guest pianist Anton Nel, unobtrusively hidden behind the row of S.F. Symphony string players in an all-French chamber program. Nel, who had been a Naumberg Award winner three decades ago, brings to the keyboard a deft and nimble touch, a thousand shadings of dynamics, and…

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BERKELEY—The composer got his fiendish revenge on star pianists, and the music world will never again be quite the same. Composers like Frenchman Ernest Chausson would labor weeks over a new piece, then be tucked away in the audience while the pianist/performer reaps plaudits and encores at center stage. He avenged the keyboardists with his piece de resistance, his Concert (sextet), Op. 21, for two soloists and string quartet. It relegates one seated soloist to be buried at the keyboard,…

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