Taking Chances on the Unpredictable Stage

Taking Chances on the Unpredictable Stage

A lively reprise of chance music that was in vogue six decades ago proved a surprisingly effective diversion in the Contemporary Music Players concert Jan. 17. In (aleatoric) chance music, players can make many musical decisions normally mandated by composers. This can mean selecting, on the spot, the sequence of spelled-out segments and movements, as in the score of Henry Cowell’s “Mosaic Quartet.” Or the players can gain wider latitude, getting graphs and sketches to interpret instead of musical scores,…

Read More Read More

HOLOCAUST VIOLINS EVOKE MOVING PREMIERE

HOLOCAUST VIOLINS EVOKE MOVING PREMIERE

BURLINGAME, CA—Historic violins spoke to us in song and left many in tears. A world premiere inspired by violins rescued from the Holocaust is as eloquent as it is disheartening. For the “Violins of Hope” instruments retrieved from the Nazis’ sites of their death-camp terror 75 years ago, librettist Gene Sheer and composer Jake Heggie have created a deeply moving song cycle with vivid imagery, in which the voices speaking to us were more from the surviving violins themselves than…

Read More Read More

AX, WOLFE, MTT AT THE SYMPHONY

AX, WOLFE, MTT AT THE SYMPHONY

The bracing symphony concert lit up the night with inflammatory bookends, and sweet music in between. The meticulously planned S.F. Symphony concert featured a work from each of four centuries, as if to trace the evolution of classical music in the post-baroque era. The sweetest was the most famous musical birthday/Christmas gift of all time, Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” written for his wife’s dual celebration in 1870. It’s in pyramid form, starting and ending as if on cat feet, with a…

Read More Read More

RARE DUALITY IN A NEW SONG CYCLE

RARE DUALITY IN A NEW SONG CYCLE

At age 75, it was a colossal iron-man achievement. He conducted his own world premiere song cycle, added on the challenge of less familiar Mahler lieder and led a stirring program from start to finish. This task was approaching a musical version of a triathlon. Before it was out, you half expected him to join the Berlioz brass section, realign the chairs, or go dancing down the aisle in Ravel’s “La valse.” Yes, this is the outgoing leader Michael Tilson…

Read More Read More

SURPRISE BAROQUE THRILLS AND TRILLS

SURPRISE BAROQUE THRILLS AND TRILLS

Credit the Bach Soloists for filling the week’s vacuum around New Year’s with goodies, specifically by addressing that yawning concert void we have before and after the most celebrated Eve since, well, maybe Adam. On the year’s final afternoon they paraded forth a splendid cornucopia of baroque operatic arias with two imported vocalists, and even an authentic period-instruments orchestra of 27 playing as if Frederick the Great himself was in the boxes at Herbst Theatre, demanding the best. I’m delighted…

Read More Read More

TAPESTRIES, AND TEMPLE-TO-TANGO TRANSITIONS

TAPESTRIES, AND TEMPLE-TO-TANGO TRANSITIONS

PALO ALTO, CA—A touring chorus and a homeless orchestra combined for a highly innovative holiday program that, I hope, will inspire others to broaden out beyond humdrum traditional-standards-and-sing-alongs Christmas formats. What you had to like about the Choral Project is that it’s not one of the elite choruses vocally. Nonetheless it assembles stunning programs with varied forces leaving crowds talking animatedly well after the First United Methodist Church concert. High point was what you might call a new “United-Nations cantata,”…

Read More Read More

The Beethoven-Biss ‘Moonlight’ Approach

The Beethoven-Biss ‘Moonlight’ Approach

BERKELEY—Pianist Jonathan Biss must be winning grateful nods from the composer high above right about now. Biss meticulously adhered to all the score markings in his all-Beethoven recital, avoiding all flimflam, personal touches or effusive messages from the heart in getting down to brass tacks (as this observer verified, with score in lap as it firmly poured out its instructions in black and white). Consider Biss’ playing the “Moonlight” Sonata. Many interpreters will douse it in perfume, draw out the…

Read More Read More

NEW CONDUCTOR EARNING HIS SPURS FAST

NEW CONDUCTOR EARNING HIS SPURS FAST

ROHNERT PARK, CA—The unfinished Mozart Requiem got a refined performance, deserving of both the sellouts and the ensuing ovations. Clearly, in this first year leading the Santa Rosa Symphony, Francesco Lecce-Chong is fast earning his spurs as music director, exhibiting his finesse and his deft 18th-century styling. For once we avoided the excess romanticization encountered so often. The emphasis was clearly on clarity and articulation, achieved best with the instrumentalists. (The otherwise effective massed chorus of 75 or so singing…

Read More Read More

Nareh Arghamanyan
Music To Be Seen, Not Heard

Music To Be Seen, Not Heard

SAN JOSE—The composer Aram Khachaturian was in a quandary, which probably explains most of the shortcomings of his grandiose Piano Concerto. In the 1930s composing in the Soviet Union, he was very much under the thumb of the fearsome dictator Stalin, who unfortunately thought himself an outstanding music critic. The pressure to survive and not have to vegetate in the gulags forever led several Soviet composers at that time, including also Shostakovich, to write shallow, flashy music “of the people”…

Read More Read More

It’s All About the Pianist Upstage

It’s All About the Pianist Upstage

How gratifying, that the musician in the back row can be the star of the performance, whether the percussionist, or the lady harpist, or the pianist. This time, it turned out to be the South-African-born guest pianist Anton Nel, unobtrusively hidden behind the row of S.F. Symphony string players in an all-French chamber program. Nel, who had been a Naumberg Award winner three decades ago, brings to the keyboard a deft and nimble touch, a thousand shadings of dynamics, and…

Read More Read More