The final San Francisco Performances (SFP) subscription series to begin before the end of the year will be the Great Artists and Ensembles series. For the coming season there will be four programs, all of which will be duo recitals. One of them will involve a cellist accompanied by a pianist. The other three will be violin recitals, all with piano accompaniment.
As usual, all of the concerts will be held in Herbst Theatre, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the evening. The entrance to Herbst is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. The specific dates and their related performers are as follows:
Thursday, November 2: This will be the first recital for violin and piano. Both of the instrumentalists will be making their respective Bay Area debuts. Violinist Miranda Cuckson is no stranger to California, having performed at both the 2021 Ojai Festival and the virtual Tenth Anniversary of Philip Glass’ Days and Nights Festival earlier in that same year. However, this will probably be the first time that her accompanist at the piano, Blair McMillen, will be performing in San Francisco. As of this writing, the contributing composers have been named; but the specific selections have not yet been announced. Those composers will be (presumably in “order of appearance”) Leoš Janáček, Ludwig van Beethoven, Sergei Prokofiev, and Ross Lee Finney, one of the leading American composers of the twentieth century.
Wednesday, November 8: Cellist Jay Campbell is no stranger to SFP audiences. Indeed, as was announced this past Saturday, his duo recital with pianist Conor Hanick will be preceded by his performance with the JACK Quartet, which will take place about two weeks earlier at the end of October in this season’s Shenson Chamber Series. The second half of his recital will be devoted to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 sonata for cello and piano in G minor. The program will begin with “Gretchen am Spinnrade” by Eric Wubbels; and I am tempted to award a prize to anyone capable of detecting any resemblance to Franz Schubert’s D. 118 song of the same title. These two compositions frame works composed for the piano. “Real” Schubert will be found in two of his D. 899 impromptus, the third in G-flat major and the first in F minor. This will be followed by three of the études by György Ligeti, “Fanfares,” “Arc-en-ciel” (rainbow), and “L'escalier du diable” (the Devil’s staircase), the first two from his first book and the last from the second. Whether these selections will be arranged for cello and piano or performed as solos by Hanick remains to be seen.
Saturday, February 24: Violinist Leila Josefowicz is no stranger to Herbst Theatre, nor is her accompanist John Novacek. However, according to my records, this will be their first return to that venue since November of 2017, when they presented a program of adventurous twentieth-century music. She also has a strong connection to conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, having performed his violin concerto with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in February of 2020 when he was the ensemble’s Music Director Designate. More recently, she returned to perform Igor Stravinsky’s violin concerto with Salonen and SFS in March of 2022. Stravinsky will be included in the program she has prepared for her return to Herbst, which will conclude with the divertimento of music from the score for the one-act ballet “Le baiser de la fée” (the fairy’s kiss). The program will begin with Claude Debussy’s only violin sonata. This will be followed Karol Szymanowski’s Opus 30, a three-movement suite entitled Myths. The Stravinsky selection will be preceded by “Conversio,” a duo for violin and piano composed in 1994 by Erkki-Sven Tüür.
Friday, May 3: The final duo will bring violinist Pekka Kuusisto together with pianist Gabriel Kahane. They will present the world premiere of a collaboratively written song cycle. A title has not yet been assigned, but the two composers created it to explore the joys and griefs of life in the current century. The program will also include compositions by both Johann Sebastian Bach and Nico Muhly, along with Kuusisto’s selections of Scandinavian folk music and Kahane drawing upon his personal catalog. Further specifics will be forthcoming.
Subscriptions are now on sale for $265 for premium seating in the Orchestra, the Side Boxes, and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $225 for the center rear of the Dress Circle and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $185 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through an SFP Web page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. When single tickets go on sale, they may be purchased by visiting the specific event pages. The above dates provide hyperlinks to the appropriate Web pages.
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