OAKLAND, CA—-My professor taught a music course for non-majors and posed this very question, playing 3 or 4 recordings from concerts, each one fuzzier and less score-specific than the previous. I finally said no way to the last one, and now realize, years later, I was wrong, wrong, wrong. The 2022 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Raven Chacon, was inside the historic Mills College Concert Hall last week playing his own work entailing in part what he calls…
The indestructible Contemporary Music Players have a new lease on life with a new director, a play-in at a much improved hall, and sizable programs requiring close to two dozen musicians. Long the most venerable and biggest of the area’s modern-music specialists, the 47-year-old SFCMP unreeled a terrific season-opening concert Oct. 20 at the Taube Theater, with the main thrust being on Elliott Carter’s inventiveness. Among the marvels of the SFCMP miracle is a focused mature audience denying the old…
SANTA CRUZ, CA—Is conservative modern programming the new normal at the cheeky Cabrillo Festival? The audacious orchestral fest is turning away from its former infusions of rebellion and dissonance. This second season under Music Director Cristian Macelaru is setting sail on a more tranquil course, diverging from the bold tacks dating back to the 20th century, toward more consonant sounds. In addition, there’s a 2018 Cabrillo push toward programs and agendas in the music, whether it’s folk elements, migration, sleeplessness,…
SANTA CRUZ, CA—A crazy idea back in the 1960s, starting up a symphonic music festival studded with living composers not yet household names. But while many arts-center orchestras shy away from music less than a century old, the Cabrillo Festival has thrived on the unlikely formula, filling most of the 900 seats every August for contemporary fare. The ink of the scores may not have dried complete yet, but they offer the listener discovery—like a bracing swim in the chilly…
SANTA CRUZ, CA—The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, founded in 1963, continues strong here, with 16 of its (living!!) composers on hand in person over the two weekends. The opening concert featured new music emphasizing folk elements. The quartet of new pieces had Music Director Cristian Macelaru striving strenuously to bring off very unfamiliar works with an orchestra of some 65. The players impressed me the most, this youthful band in which less than 10 % showed any gray hair….
Let yourself go, depart from traffic-choked urban reality, and immerse yourself in a nebulous world of modern art and sound. It’s Audium, the Shaff family’s Other-Galaxy experience, going strong over nearly half a century, mostly 100 times a year. On the surface, Audium is an hour-long sonic foray into a latter-day musique concrète , first created by the Frenchman Pierre Schaeffer in the mid-20th century—a combination of found sounds and electronic ones. But it’s delivered in total darkness, with all smartphones switched off….
The Old First Church in San Francisco provides an intimate but intense concert series with low-price tickets, and some real surprises—like world premieres. On July 1 the timely new work was a hard-to-define, 23-minute multi-media opus, with music, theater, dance, narration, and pre-recorded percussion tracks having considerable political-historical significance. “Gateway—Stories from Angel Island” is the most unorthodox performance piece I’ve run across in years, cutting across many disciplines and cultures. It recalls the isle in S.F. Bay serving for decades…
Like a whirlwind out of the East, Lera Auerbach blew into San Francisco and took away many a breath with her piano recital. This was one of the most forceful, demonic outpourings of sheer energy since the millennium. The 44-year-old pianist-composer from the Russian-Siberian border area is a mystic, a poet, a formidable powerhouse-pianist and a composer. She introduced her own absolutely unique world premiere piece, “Labyrinth,” and preceded it with Mussorgsky’ “Pictures at an Exhibition.” If “Pictures” is a…
Of all the Lou Harrison centennial tributes, the Other Minds Festival produced one to beat the band. In addition to the sheer variety of works & instruments offered, Other Minds also created palpable environment of good vibrations. This was attributable too to a large crowd resonating with affection and admiration for the inventive and congenial composer who had spent his final half century in the region spanning sites from Santa Cruz to Oakland. The May 20 all-Harrison concert at Mission…
The essence of the “Scheherazade” tale is not sweeping romantic music, a la Rimsky-Korsakov; composer John Adams outlived that phase of his long ago. Here the essence is the gruesome fate of a heroine faced nightly with becoming murder-victim unless she is a master story-teller on every one of the 1,001 nights. So contends Adams, who introduced his bigger-than-life “Scheherazade.2” (2015) at the S.F. Symphony. This winter the SFS has offered multiple celebrations of his 70th birthday. Call it a…