ArtsSF

Come, leave stark reality behind and enter the ethereal, a fantasy world of caves, shadowy figures, dreams, apparitions, spooky forests, plus clouds floating over you making you lose your bearings. Such is the world that the San Francisco Symphony guest conductor James Gaffigan calls “the journey….from magic to human magic and emotions.” His program for this nebulous world, all music unveiled since 1900, was exemplary, and he managed it without playing a note of Claude Debussy. It was followed by…

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It was like returning to Earth, after 14 months in viral space, floating isolated in great voids between Mars and Jupiter. The reentry into a real concert hall, in person, with live musicians on stage—-Bliss!! The reduced Davies Hall crowd applauded enthusiastically for 20 seconds at the start, so moved by a cautious return to real musical life. It was far from normal. Some two dozen San Francisco Symphony string players were on stage, all masked and separated, devoid of…

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It’s hard to top the yen for adventure in Esa-Pekka Salonen. His latest effort for the San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox digressions-in-streaming is part concert, part music education, part alluring visuals, part dance, in part also recalling the famous Leonard Bernstein music lectures on TV of the 1960s, back when major commercial channels still had such cultural programs. This latest effort entitled, “Patterns,” is an imaginative foray into roots of minimalism spanning some 800 years of creativity, at times more an…

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In this pandemic era, it’s still feasible to produce ensemble music with eloquent messages, up to a point. For the S.F. Symphony’s latest aphoristic SoundBox set “Lineage” curated by mezzo Julia Bullock, a nonet performs under a conductor on a sound stage, assisted by a far-off chorus, with some musicians entering remotely via modern technology. With most of them well-spaced and masked. Welcome to the unique era of Covid and formats which will challenge many fans attempting to explain these…

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The San Francisco Symphony’s latest aphoristic streaming program “Nostalgia” suggests more the dimensions of opera and Broadway theater than of mere chamber music. The focus is on three American women composers still on the way up, the best-known of them the pride of Brooklyn Missy Mazzoli, 40, and Pulitzer-Prize-winning Caroline Shaw, 38. And their deft music for strings is enhanced with elaborate lighting, split screens, and forest backgrounds, all of it in lighting so sparsely atmospheric you’re still not sure…

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Care to play maestro? Want to assist your orchestra? Then help select a promising opening concert program. Right now you can step in and help your long-dormant local symphony conductor plan his/her Resumption Concert, likely the first one in a year. Not even world wars have been as successful as that detested virus in shutting down our vibrant nationwide concert activity. The programming for the Resumption will be tricky, with contrarian motivation. The maestro may well want to commemorate the…

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The new reality in classical music is virtual, with a totally new genre of concert: close-knit ensembles playing, even though they might never meet each other. The San Francisco Symphony tackled the mid-pandemic problem Nov. 14 with an elaborate, costly, hi-tech solution to bring forth an hour-long prerecorded program crackling with energy, talent, modernity and diversity, filmed in part “around the world,” per drum-beating press release. Featured with the classical players were contrasting figures rarely in the concert hall, like…

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Among today’s mid-career violinists, the Southern Californian Leila Josefowicz proves herself a true tigress. The more challenging the score, the more she relishes bringing it to life. Where others might cringe, she revels. Composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen wrote his violin concerto in 2009, and she’s virtually owned it ever since. Thorny, prickly, super-speed, clashing, call her violin role what you will. No concerto gives the soloist a more preponderant perpetuum-mobilerole and none I venture make greater demands on the soloist. I…

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The preview act of the music-director-to-be Salonen showed him to be refreshingly self-effacing, constantly putting the music at the forefront in place of the maestro or the podium. And that put a damper on any possible waves of public adulation and wonderment. He led off his guest stint with the S.F. Symphony with cannons and canons, but of a deeply grieving funereal sort, and went from the bang to the whimper, finishing with the underwhelming impact of Ravel’s fragile “Mother…

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ROHNERT PARK, CA—Composer Matt Browne will hate me for this, but I’m lavishing all my superlatives on his “Ephemera” finale of his new Symphony No. 1. His deft segment portraying the aftermath and total abandonment of a collapsed empire is a testament of total tranquility, tickling the ear tantalizingly with pearly droplets: a strum on a harp, a discreet lozenge from the piano, select notes on a vibraphone, and the viola section (so often taken for granted) waxing from the…

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