ArtsSF

In the evening you poke through the Tenderloin, S.F.’s counterpart to NYC’s Bowery, past the homeless, jobless, hustlers, panhandlers and addicts. And encroaching couples clutch arms uncertainly, side-stepping litter on darkening sidewalks. Paying at the door, you get no ticket, nor printed program, and you enter the 30-seat hall. A flyer lists several composers (all female) and the night’s violinist (male). Wearing blue jeans, he walks in bearing his instrument, with no accompanist anywhere on the horizon; he might as…

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Many a violin recital with the usual touring-artist repertoire has all the excitement of hopping the 5:33 commute train to Burlingame. Then there’s the one by Simone Porter, 21, a gentle, delicate woman from Seattle with a bow arm as powerful as on a cricket bowler. And with a great love for works of conflagrations and narrations. Her program at the Conservatory was bristling with power and passion as she focused on music of narrative, flamboyance and dissent. Oh, my—I…

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BERKELEY—I’ve been fascinated by the California pianist Jeffrey Kahane ever since the 1981 Van Cliburn Competition. He didn’t win it (gold went to André-Michel Schub). But media reports established that, in the opinion of various finalists, though Kahane was unlikely to get the gold medal, he was considered the best keyboard performer of the lot. A rare accolade among high-echelon pianists! Happily, Kahane bounced back two years later, winning the Rubinstein International Competition. Although a successful symphony conductor over the…

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Is this the complete baroque opera mezzo we’ve been awaiting, carrying forward the long line of Horne, Hunt, Bartoli? BERKELEY— Joyce DiDonato has it all, the consummate artist, the seamless Kansan singer who is radically revising the recital medium in her latest concept “In War & Peace: Harmony through Music.” Her new concept, already booked into a 20-city international tour, involves a semi-staged performance of scenelets, equipped with mobile projections, elaborate lights, costumes, even a dancer. As well as a…

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Jennifer Koh Scores in Old-New Juxtapositions Beethoven and the Moderns—a new look. The San Francisco Performances concert series collaborated with stellar violinist Koh to create and perform a bold four-night ”Bridge to Beethoven” series. It’s Beethoven sonatas cum new and recent musical reflections on the latter, as created by active composers from both sides of the Atlantic. In recognition of this and other innovative recital enterprises, Chicagoan Koh was named the 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year by the publication Musical…

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“The Work at Hand,” an unusual song cycle by San Francisco composer Jake Heggie, shows him to be among the most sensitive and romantic creative artists of our time. The 20-minute work is unorthodox, sung by a mezzo with accompaniment on cello and piano. Extended passages for the instrumentalists separate the three poems dealing with end of life, but with consummate restraint and introspection. There is something hauntingly beautiful about the intermezzi, vacillating between minor and major modes, tender and…

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Cheng-Ades’ Two-Piano Tour de Force One of the masters of modern rhythmic complexity, Thomas Adès, paired up with Gloria Cheng for a 20th-century two-piano recital that still has my ears ringing. Their percussive repertory, delivered with muscular dispatch, offered more than 100,000 notes that may still be resonating through the facility, leading me to marvel at the dynamic pair’s sheer immunity to fatigue. None of their music is easy to play, or even to listen to. But the tour de…

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