ArtsSF

Even after 50 years, the unique Kronos Quartet is still plunging headlong into new music, with three world premieres June 20 to open its San Francisco weekend festival. After half a century, it’s safe to say no such ensemble has ever presented more contemporary pieces, with more than 1,000 (mostly living) composers featured. And so many of these are high-intensity virtuoso opuses, wherein the players threaten to saw right through their strings with the vigorous, eye-blurring bowings. No place for…

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STANFORD, CA—This open question was the foremost takeaway from the evening’s tour de force, a nonstop outpouring of intensity and virtuosity. Terry Riley’s west coast premiere piece “The Holy Liftoff” raised these questions when his work was performed here May 8. Sample pages of his score showed his elaborate illustrations full of imaginary figures and whimsy—-but including merely 100 or so musical notes written out for the 75-minute nonstop work played by flute, string quartet and multiple prerecorded tracks, devoid…

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BERKELEY—Striking enough were the unruly progressive touches in the Beethoven E Minor (“Razumovsky”) string quartet. On top of that came another four-movement string quartet, “Flow,” by Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama, 47, breaking traditional bounds and expanding sonic boundaries with her world premiere. All this was poured out by the veterans of the Takács Quartet before a sizable audience at Hertz Hall on the UC campus Nov. 12, with the premiere composer in attendance. Enigmatic music is the new composer’s hallmark, giving…

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BURLINGAME, CA—-Give an orchestra a physical exam, doctor, and it proves very revealing. An ensemble of San Francisco Symphony players, none of them plucked from the front rows, gave a strong program here at the Kohl Mansion notable for cohesion, dramatic fire, and unassailable tuning, thereby underlining the strong fiber embodied unobtrusively within the ranks of the SFS. Adding to their challenge March 6 was a slate of obscure pieces by, largely, unheralded composers, spotlighting two black women composers from…

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When most every one else has been forced to silence, count on the S.F. Contemporary Music Players to sound out, ranging from the listenable to the contemporary/experimental. Even VERY contemporary. The grand-daddy of our professional new music ensembles here just winding down its 50th season, it has jumped from the post-pandemic starting blocks with the streaming of “Voices in Reverberation” with a wide stylistic array of composers. Yea, living composers at that! The most recent piece is the SFCMP-commissioned world…

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If you think of Ludwig van Beethoven mostly as the Ninth Symphony and the dih-dih-dih-DAH Fifth, I propose your spending his epic 250th anniversary these days by looking at him as the audacious innovator, many decades ahead of his times, as reflected in his late string quartets. He had been many things to many people: a feminist (in “Fidelio”), a freedom fighter battling oppression (“Egmont”), a master reformulator of the piano, and an unprecedented purveyor of high drama in music…

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SAN RAFAEL, CA—As usual, the fast-flying Kronos Quartet was innovating mightily. Instead of the standard string quartet concert program, on May 4 they offered a 10-piece musical mosaic based on world music—a double-espresso of surprises, which is hardly the regular cup of tea for string quartets. Are you new to Kronos, our seemingly ageless ensemble? In a nutshell: The four string players are always amplified, giving a more assertive and metallic sound; living composers of both gendersalways dominate; music is…

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Daniel Hope’s Right Shoulder Provides the Downbeat The return of violinist Daniel Hope is one of the happiest events of the 2017 Bay Area music scene. If there was any doubt about his musical eloquence, the English maestro led the ensemble in an inspired rendition of the Tchaikovsky “Serenade for Strings” in the Sept. 21 season opener for the New Century Chamber Orchestra. The serenade itself of course is one of the most inspired pieces ever to come out of Russia:…

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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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