ArtsSF

BERKELEY, CA—Minorities and timeless tales stepped up in the Berkeley Symphony’s program of June 4 concurrent with Black Music Month. The timely program featured no less than three salient women’s issues and two living composers, the latter in attendance to supplement the interpretations by Music Director Joseph Young. This orchestra has always been about relevance, going back to Kent Nagano’s podium leadership. Curiously, the two novel works from the past six years took varied approaches, but with parallel paths: Both…

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For the most memorable oratorio of the 20th century, I would propose Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” (1961), an extra-ordinary large-scale paean to those who served and never survived, now revived by the S.F. Symphony and Chorus. This is a work that leaves the listener profoundly moved on several levels, recalling those who fell in the world wars as well as the destruction of the hallowed Coventry, England Cathedral in the 1940 Blitzkrieg, then its reconstruction. It also provides us with…

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The self-driving orchestra, with vacant podium, has arrived at center stage. Credit local composer Brian Baumbusch, 35, along with a Covid quarantine, electronics and a touch of Indonesia. Yes, finally, one tiny benefit we gained from that scourge of a Covid virus, leading to some invention and dispersion of musical ideas. Marooned in a Djakarta quarantine last year, Baumbusch composed his “Polytempo Music” which was premiered here April 13 by the elite S.F. Contemporary Music Players. His inspiration relegated conductor…

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How can so much exuberance emanate from one of the most depressing large-scale symphonies ever written? Easy. You put a beloved ex-maestro like Michael Tilson Thomas back on the podium. Upon entry, the revered 78-year-old conductor got a standing ovation from the near-sell-out crowd. And at the end, the fired-up patrons accorded the S.F. Symphony and him an inordinately rare six-minute ovation. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) himself would never have believed it for the deeply aggrieved Sixth Symphony of 1904, which…

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ROHNERT PARK, CA—It’s a parttime orchestra, from a smaller city (Santa Rosa), having a conductor splitting his services with an out-of-state ensemble. So why the Santa Rosa Symphony, where you find yourself returning again and again, despite (in this case) a 90-minute drive to get there? Yes, the forward-looking SRS boasts varied programs regularly, including living composers along with the older masters. Its hall has not only fine acoustics but superb scenery—it’s among the loveliest concert halls of all if…

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When appearing at the piano, can anyone surpass the dazzling attire of the stellar Yuja Wang? Though a superstar in the classics, she and her attire comprised all the queries I got from men and women before the March 1 concert: What was her outfit this time around? Even an usher at Davies ventured to the subject with intrigue, “Well, we’ll soon see what she’s wearing, won’t we?” She dazzled, showing up in a gold-sequined bareback formal somewhere between haute…

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The timely world-premiere composition by Samuel Adams, which made an agreeable debut with the S.F. Symphony, calls for a detailed essay about the creative process, yet to be written. Because in trying to depict a sunset of our lingering pandemic, Adams revised and reworked his half-hour long opus “No Such Spring” numerous times, adding even a pianist in a prominent new concerto-like post down stage, as current events unfolded. His portrayal of the metamorphosis might be even more interesting to…

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ROHNERT PARK, CA—Get a Frenchman back on the podium, and the fans line up to hear Debussy’s “La mer” (The Sea). That exquisite century-old tone poem has you rocking in the swell and maybe reaching for a lifejacket. At seaside, you hear the waves crashing on rocks and sand, then receding having left just its sound and foam behind. Debussy denied vehemently that he was an impressionist. Fine. But more than any one, Debussy’s master illusion lay in eliminating clear-cut…

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Was Béla Bartók his own worst enemy? He composed his fiendishly difficult Piano Concerto No. 2, in which the world-premiere piano soloist was to be Béla Bartók himself. The net result established him not only as prime modernist/technician/theoretician, ahead of his time composing thus in 1930-31, but also as a paragon super keyboard soloist. It was a Béla Bartók weekend, with the S.F. Symphony in action under Esa-Pekka Salonen, and a block away at Herbst Theatre his chamber music as…

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The nonconformist composer Gabriel Kahane, 41, unreeled a powerful iconoclastic message in Davies Hall, where politics is normally taboo. His abrasive oratorio may have left the walls trembling from the bitterness of his counter-culture poetry. Kahane’s “emergency shelter intake form“ (sic) brought to mind other protest-movement works we’ve run into previously——-from Weill-&-Brecht musical theater, to the incendiary Berkeley rhetoric of the anti-establishment 1960s firebrand Mario Savio, to the gentler saga of John Adams’ “El Niño,” the Nativity story as seen…

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