ArtsSF

I’ll come clean and confess, having at last expected some mediocrity at the S.F. Symphony’s rare “one-of” “Fate” concert July 25, clearly a filler on the schedule featuring a couple of emerging solo artists. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Violinist Stella Chen, originally from the Bay Area, was cool and dazzling in Barber’s less-than-stellar “unplayable” concerto. And the Korean-Canadian guest conductor from the Boston Symphony staff Earl Lee brought hushed admiration in his leading that old “Fate” war-horse, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4….

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Few soloists of late have made an impact comparable to Pablo Sáinz-Villegas, who played Joaquín Rodrigo’s highly popular “Concierto de Aranjuez” with the SF Symphony at Davies Hall July 11. Much like Mozart in his piano concertos, he showed an inclination to adding ornamentation, taking the familiar Adagio to a new higher level. The all-Spanish program had its flaws, but the centerpiece was golden. The virtuoso master of the guitar brought the audience to its feet more than once in…

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Writing a symphony, composers are like architects designing a new city. But not Gustav Mahler. In his Symphony No. 3, he created a musical metropolis, @ 100 minutes running the length of two or three normal symphonies. The oversize 111-member orchestra, with doubled winds and harps, a paired set of timpani within a seven-member augmented percussion group, plus singers, add up to a bulging score more like four symphonies in one. The extravagance was unprecedented, with no regard for production…

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An enigmatic all-Russian program is winding down the S.F. Symphony season, raising provocative questions while posing as provocative protest pieces. All but a Tchaikovsky selection were written under the strict thought control of the Soviet Union in the 20th century. But, as musicians well knew, when neither literature, news media nor stage works permitted deviation from the party line, music was one viable dissent possibility if threaded skillfully. None fit this elusive mold more than the “Fairytale Poem” composed for…

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Paying a generous end-of-season dividend, the San Francisco Symphony provided the patrons with a triple bill: Orchestra, a colossal vocal drama and a modern dance troupe, all compressed into a single program. And the vocal part unleashed the most exciting operatic voice heard all year, Mary Elizabeth Williams, acting out the Arnold Schoenberg monodrama “Erwartung” (Expectation) in passionate, semi-coherent detail. Music director Esa-Pekka Salonen carried off this budget-busting cornucopia of musical treats in the last month of his penultimate season,…

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If you were riled by Shostakovich’s Stalinist anthem opening the S.F. Symphony program, the worries were balanced by a much bigger selection from Ukraine’s stellar product, Sergei Prokofiev, whose grand-scale Symphony No. 3 took up half the program and shook the rafters. So, the 9-minute Funeral March from the movie “Great Citizen” honoring the Stalinist patriot Kirov gets a pass this time, however bad the taste left in your mouth by its genuflections and fortissimos. Following on April 25 came…

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ROHNERT PARK, CA—-A petite figure from New Zealand brought down the house at the Santa Rosa Symphony, playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with an irresistible engaging spirit. Disavowing the powerhouse approach to this concerto, Geneva Lewis set out spinning themes in soft, poetic terms. Her silky play grew in momentum and force through the imposing first movement, ever more climactic, in her congenial collaboration with the orchestra and conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong. In a rare show of enthusiasm prior to the…

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Back in the 20th century, we acquired television. And in the 21st, we have now moved on to smellevision, fulfilling suppressed aspirations of 19th century composer Alexander Scriabin. It was a long time coming. Bathing in choreographed fragrances for the first time in memory, the S.F. Symphony treated its patrons to a multi-sensory extravaganza of Scriabin’s 20-minute “Prometheus: Poem of Fire” music, with brilliant colored lights, and pleasant smells on cue piped into Davies Hall. This was as much a…

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Charging out of the symphony starting gates was a tumultuous burlesque-theater from Stravinsky. Fasten seat belts NOW! The SF Symphony spotlighted a pair of composing bedfellows, separated by a canyon of musical evolution and comportment. Stravinsky, OK. But it was the veteran German soloist Julia Fischer in the great Brahms Violin Concerto that brought about the sold-out house. Our misfortune it is that she rarely ventures this far west from her home bailiwick. Stravinsky’s complete “Pulcinella” (1920), also rarely heard…

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     The end of an era, it was, but a very sweet one, with well-wishing from countless admirers and nosegays you could almost smell in an inordinately long round of plaudits.           This was a sendoff (at least from subscription concerts) for beloved maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor laureate, leading the San Francisco Symphony in a signature work, Gustav Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 5.            By the end, with the 6-minute standing ovation, there were not many dry eyes…

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