The Most Versatile Composer of All?

The Most Versatile Composer of All?

“Hats off, gentlemen—a genius.” The deathless words spoken by Schumann on hearing the music of teenager Chopin could have been echoed in a later century on audition of Igor Stravinsky, surely the most versatile composer of modern times. Stravinsky, the ultimate chameleon of musical inventiveness, launched and triumphed in so many distinct styles, to find a comparison you’d have to turn to Picasso in visual art—and, in earlier eras, polymath geniuses like Hildegard von Bingen and Leonardo da Vinci. The…

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COMPOSER’S REVENGE ON PIANISTS

COMPOSER’S REVENGE ON PIANISTS

BERKELEY—The composer got his fiendish revenge on star pianists, and the music world will never again be quite the same. Composers like Frenchman Ernest Chausson would labor weeks over a new piece, then be tucked away in the audience while the pianist/performer reaps plaudits and encores at center stage. He avenged the keyboardists with his piece de resistance, his Concert (sextet), Op. 21, for two soloists and string quartet. It relegates one seated soloist to be buried at the keyboard,…

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Scaling the Himalayas of Piano Music

Scaling the Himalayas of Piano Music

Formidable artists are flooding the Bay Area scene these days, the second one this week being another pianist, Natasha Paremski. She bit off one of the most demanding programs imaginable, all tucked into her incendiary hour of earthquake magnitude linking both Ravel’s “Gaspard de la nuit” and Balakirev’s “Islamey,” a dual feat comparable to conquering both poles in the same week. All with supersonic speed and Olympic power. The tone-painting of Ravel’s opus is well-known, comprising a sea-sprite (Ondine, with…

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Dancers Overcoming Gravity

Dancers Overcoming Gravity

BERKELEY—The amazing Mark Morris dancers, 17 strong, are learning to veto the law of gravity as they glide almost weightlessly through a night of Mozart. Mark Morris, that master hybrid of ballet/modern dance and its middle ground, showed off his timeless evening-long “Mozart Dances” with sublime poetry and musical sensitivity. Is there any choreographer alive comparable? His light-footed ensemble of 17 dancers seemed to levitate and float through the air. Meantime his dance moves—sometimes modern ballet, sometimes innovative modern dance—explore…

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John Adams’ Fast-Stepping Premiere

John Adams’ Fast-Stepping Premiere

Of course John Adams comes forth with a winner of a premiere as curtain-raiser. Of course he’s at his most ebullient, pairing up with Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. Of course, at a youthful 72, he remains the Bay Area’s reigning composer star. His joyous world premiere “I Still Dance” unveiled Sept. 19 showed him at his most ebullient and harmonious, this time colorful and jazz-inflected, with fast triadic runs on woodwinds. It’s a sparkling, syncopated river of ideas at…

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WARSHIP’S UNJUST JUSTICE

WARSHIP’S UNJUST JUSTICE

The unlikeliest hit opera: an immense all-male cast of 75; setting aboard a warship at sea, without touching land or engaging in battle; no dance, no festivities; and a severe tragedy with the ingratiating title character executed because of insane wartime regulations. This is “Billy Budd” (1951), a searing bigger-than-life British drama (after Herman Melville’s virtually forgotten posthumous novella) which opened at the S.F. Opera Sept. 7. The neoclassical musical power of composer Benjamin Britten carries over past the voices…

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GALA MTT TRIBUTES OPEN SEASON

GALA MTT TRIBUTES OPEN SEASON

Never in the past century did the San Francisco Symphony pull off a greater celebration for its maestro than this week for Michael Tilson Thomas. Fanfares, a Standing O., countless rainbow lights, a video from Yo-Yo Ma, bouquets. It was a mass laudatory love-in for the guy on the podium these 25 seasons, ending with flowers offered by the mayor of the city, Governor Newsom, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other luminaries. He even got “25” jerseys matching every professional…

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Chamber Music: Masters’ Youth

Chamber Music: Masters’ Youth

SANTA FE, NM—For a month every summer, the Chamber Music Festival lights up the scene with 45 concerts by 87 musicians from all over the map, sometimes twice a day, mostly at the inviting fresco-festooned St. Francis Auditorium. There the small ensembles serve up the three B’s along with many other post-baroque figures, right down to living composers John Harbison and George Crumb, often as seen from an East Coast perspective. I sauntered in casually for the Aug. 15 noon…

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PASSION-WROUGHT ‘JENUFA;’ A HOT-AND-COLD ADULT FAIRY-TALE OPERA

PASSION-WROUGHT ‘JENUFA;’ A HOT-AND-COLD ADULT FAIRY-TALE OPERA

SANTA FE, NM—-With new leadership at the helm, the Opera here is making news this summer with two shows for very different reasons: One, an emotion-torn, gut-wrenching “Jenufa” that was the summer’s runaway hit drama, the other a world-premiere fairy-tale for big people. The human tragedy “Jenufa” is built around the village saga of two dramatic sopranos playing the title role and the stepmother respectively: Jenufa, jilted by the playboy Steva and faced with disgrace for her birth out of…

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Getting Wet with the Festival Orchestra

Getting Wet with the Festival Orchestra

SANTA CRUZ, CA—“Astonish us!” That was the clarion call from Serge Diaghilev, the great impresario of a century ago, to his creative team of composers, choreographers and designers. It could also be the motto of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and its fans, focusing on assimilating new music for its long-established orchestral concerts on this bucolic seaside site some 75 miles south of San Francisco. The astonishing piece Aug. 10 was the overachieving Tan Dun’s Chinese opus. His commission…

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