Venue and Dates Set for Other Minds Festival

The full plans for the Other Minds (OM) Festival 28 have not yet been finalized. However, since it will be taking place in September, which is the month in which most of the concert series are launched for the new season, it seems prudent to let readers know about the dates sooner rather than later. The venue will be the Brava Theater, located in the Mission at 2781 24th Street. (For those familiar with the area, it is a few blocks to the east of the Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery.) All concerts will begin at 8 p.m. with panel discussions beginning at 7 p.m.

Yarn/Wire musicians Russell Greenberg, Laura Berger, Julia Den Boer, and Sae Hashimoto (from the quartet’s Web site)

Specific information about ticketing has not yet been posted on the OM Web page for upcoming events. However, some of the programming has been made available to OM subscribers. Here is what is currently known:

• Wednesday, September 25, and Thursday, September 26: There will be two opportunities to listen to the world premiere performance of “The Cello Quartet” by Trimpin. His approach to composition is frequently algorithmic, often resulting in complex rhythmic counterpoint. However, he almost never uses electronic sounds, leaving it to instrumentalists to realize the results of his compositional efforts.
• Friday, September 27: This will probably be a three-set program. One of those sets will be taken by Annea Lockwood, who will perform with Nate Wooley. Another will be a solo set by Jan Martin Smørdal, whose primary instrument is the guitar. The final set will be taken by Yarn/Wire, a quartet consisting of two pianists (Laura Barger and Julia Den Boer) and two percussionists (Russell Greenberg and Sae Hashimoto).
• Saturday, September 28: The full program is still being finalized, but one of the sets will be a duo performances by percussionist Marshall Trammell and Hafez Modirzadeh on saxophone.

Further information will appear on this site as it is released!

Anna Gourari Links Schnittke to Hindemith

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Around the middle of this month, ECM New Series released its first album of pianist Anna Gourari performing with an orchestra. She had previously released three solo albums, so this new release offered a new perspective for those following her work. She performed two twentieth-century compositions with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Markus Poschner. As of this writing, the album is available for MP3 download from an Amazon.com Web page; and the Web page for the CD is taking pre-orders for a release date of August 2.

The album begins with the more recent of these works, Alfred Schnittke’s 1979 concerto for piano and string orchestra, a single track with a duration somewhat short of 25 minutes. It concludes with “The Four Temperaments,” a composition by Paul Hindemith given also the more abstract title “Theme and Four Variations.” The music was commissioned by George Balanchine, and the resulting ballet is known only by the “Four Temperaments” title. Between these two performances is an orchestral account of Hindemith’s “Symphony: Mathis der Maler.” The subtitle is that of an opera Hindemith had been planning about the painter Matthias Grünewald, and thematic material from the symphony eventually found its way into that opera.

There is an old joke about the monorail being an idea of the future whose time had passed. In his youth Hindemith was an adventurous (and occasionally raucous) composer. As might be guessed, the Nazis dismissed his work as “degenerate;” and he was wise enough to leave Germany before it was too late. He eventually found his way to the United States, where he became a member of the Music faculty at Yale University. By that time his interest in the past seemed to have taken the lead over his more adventurous side. However, that shift had already begun when he was working on his symphony in 1934 and was just as evident in the ballet score. (Where Balanchine was concerned, Hindemith’s music was a far cry from what Igor Stravinsky was providing him.)

In that context, anyone listening to this new album is likely to find the Hindemith selections to be a trip down memory lane. For my part, those are good memories; but I doubt that I shall visit them very frequently! Schnittke, on the other hand, first became an “item” during the last quarter of the last century, due primarily to a generous number of releases of his music by BIS. Most of these were ambitiously thorny, interspersed, occasionally, with ironic (if not sarcastic) reflections on the “old style.” If Noël Coward was best known for his “talent to amuse,” Schnittke seemed determined to establish a talent to provoke; and there is no shortage of provocations in his concerto. One might even think of the “Concerto for Piano vs. Orchestra;” but P. D. Q. Bach was definitely funnier!

Some readers may recall my fondness for the joke that the monorail was “an idea of the future whose time had passed;” and, while I cannot argue with the skilled techniques of the performers on this new album, I fear that both Hindemith and Schnittke have become targets of that joke.

Dynamite Guitars: 2024/2025 Programs

Those that visit the home page for the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts will see that the 2024/2025 schedule for the Dynamite Guitars concert season has now been finalized. Fourteen programs have been planned for this season. As in the past the five recitals in the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Guitar Series will be included in Dynamite Guitars. In addition, the full season will also include three recitals hosted by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). Two of these will take place in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, and the other will take place in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall in the new Bowes Center. Those events have not yet been added to the Performances Web page on the SFCM Web site, so it is unclear whether or not those performances will be live-streamed. My “educated guess” is that they will not!

All of the programs will be evening recitals beginning at 7:30 p.m. They will take place at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church (1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street), Herbst Theatre (on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue), and at the two SFCM locations, 50 Oak Street for the Concert Hall and 200 Van Ness Avenue for the Bowes Center. Programs have not yet been finalized, but the participating performers will be as follows:

Saturday, September 21, Herbst Theatre: This will be the fourth edition of DYNAMITE GUITARS. The duo of Olli Soikkeli and Cesar Garabini will present a fusion of Gypsy jazz and the Brazilian choro genre. They will share the program with Joe Robinson and Christie Lenée, both of whom are steel string guitar virtuosos.

Saturday, October 12, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: Italian guitarist Carlotta Dalia will make her San Francisco debut. [updated 7/11, 9:55 a.m.: Dalia’s performance has been indefinitely postponed; she will be replaced by Mexican guitarist Pablo Garibay, who is particularly known for his interpretations of Latin American music.]

Saturday, November 2, Herbst Theatre: The first program to be shared with SFP will present the return of the duo of Sérgio and Odair Assad.

Sunday, November 10, Hume Concert Hall: This will be a return solo recital by Brazilian Yamandu Costa, a master on the seven-string guitar, who made his last appearance in April of 2022.

Saturday, November 16, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: The next San Francisco debut will be by Russian virtuoso Artyom Dervoed, who has been described as the “Paganini of the guitar.”

Saturday, December 7, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: The next return solo recital will be by Polish virtuoso guitarist Mateusz Kowalski, who made his San Francisco debut in October of 2023.

Saturday, January 25, Herbst Theatre: The second program to be shared with SFP will be a solo recital by Miloš Karadaglić, who usually performs under only his first name.

Saturday, February 1, Bowes Center: Ukrainian classical guitarist Marko Topchii made two videos for Omni during the pandemic, both recorded at St. Mark’s and the more recent released at the end of October of 2022. Unless I am mistaken, next year will see his “physical” debut. This performance will be shared with SFCM.

Saturday, February 8, Hume Concert Hall: Xuefei Yang will return, following up on her third solo recital in March of 2023 and the release of her Guitar Favorites album about a month earlier.

Saturday, February 22, Herbst Theatre: Sharon Isbin will give a duo recital. Readers may recall her Strings for Peace album of duos for guitar and sarod, all of which were composed by sarod master Amjad Ali Khan. Khan will join her for this performance, which will probably feature works that Khan composed for their latest album, Live in Aspen.

The members of the Mēla Guitar Quartet (from the Web page for their Omni recital)

Saturday, March 8, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: The Mēla Guitar Quartet, whose members are Matthew Robinson, George Tarlton, Zahrah Hutton, and Michael Butten, provided an OMNI on-Location video, which was screened at the beginning of last March; but, unless I am mistaken, this will be their “physical” debut in San Francisco.

Saturday, March 29, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: Lutenist Thomas Dunford will present a program of his own interpretations of music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Saturday, April 12, Herbst Theatre: Ana Vidović  gave her last Omni recital this past April, and she will return for her next performance in April of next year!

Saturday, May 3, Herbst Theatre: A solo performance by Cuban-American guitarist Manuel Barrueco will mark the conclusion of the season for both Omni and SFP.

Salonen Concludes SFS Season with Mahler

The frontispiece and title page of the third volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, whose imagery may have inspired Mahler’s settings of the texts (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany license, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in the final program of the current subscription season. That program consisted only of Gustav Mahler’s third symphony. This is the middle of a set of three symphonies often known as the “Wunderhorn” symphonies, because they all included movements setting texts of poems from the collection of German folk poems and songs compiled and edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, given the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (the boy’s magic horn).

The symphony is a long one, usually lasting about one hour and 40 minutes. It is divided into two “parts,” the first of which consists of only a single movement about 30 minutes in duration. The second part collects the remaining five movements. The penultimate movement is the “Wunderhorn” movement, setting a text that begins “Es sungen drei Engel einen süssen Gesang” (three angels sang a sweet song), an account of Peter’s entry into heaven after his sins were forgiven by Jesus. This is preceded by a more secular vocal movement, the “Midnight Song” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, delivered last night by mezzo Kelley O’Connor. These two relatively short vocal movements are followed by a lengthier slow movement that concludes the symphony. Those three movements tend to be performed with little interruption, suggesting that the work is actually a four-movement symphony with the final movement in three parts.

Salonen could not have done a better job in negotiating the complexities of this monster of a symphony. Mahler had a keen sense of instrumental coloration, and Salonen knew exactly how to elicit the full spectrum of those colors from his ensemble. When I have examined Mahler scores, I have often come across the tempo marking “Nicht schleppen;” and the tempo never lagged under Salonen’s command of the beat. What one can only appreciate in a concert setting (regardless of the high quality of any recording) is how the thematic material is widely distributed across an almost incredible number of different instrumental combinations. Whatever the tempo may be, there is always no end of “action” as phrases keep emerging from different sections in the ensemble. This is music is which sight informs the ear as much as the sounds do.

This was clearly an evening in which Salonen knew how to bring out the best from the SFS ensemble. Those of us that have followed his tenure closely can readily acknowledge how great an asset he has been. As always, I shall be looking forward to what he will bring to next season’s repertoire. My only regret is that the scope of looking forward will be limited to only one more season.

Noe Music: Benefit to Celebrate New Piano

Poster showing the three pianists that will perform on the new Noe Music instrument (from the Web page for online ticket purchasing)

This September, prior to the regular season, Noe Music will hold a special event to celebrate the upgrading of their piano. The Steinway Model B that has served this recital series for many years will be replaced by a Steinway Model D Concert Grand Piano. This upgrade will be featured by a special benefit concert, which will include performances by three pianists: Stephen Prutsman, Elizabeth Joy Roe, and Jeffrey LaDeur. Program specifics have not yet been announced. However, the selections will be sure to highlight the qualities of the new instrument, which include a wider tonal spectrum (due to fewer crossing strings), raw power (to sustain the vigor of any pianist), and the effortless singing quality that makes the instrument so special.

This event will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 19. It is expected to last about two hours. General admission will be $100 with a special $150 rate for reserved seating in the first few rows. The performance will be preceded by champagne, which will be served at 7 p.m. For those that do not already know, the venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located in Noe Valley (of course) at 1021 Sanchez Street, just south of 23rd Street. ThunderTix has created a Web page for online ticket purchasing.

LSO Live to Release Meyerbeer Opera

This coming Friday, LSO, the “house label” of the London Symphony Orchestra, will release its latest album. Like its most recent release this past February of Leoš Janáček’s opera Káťa Kabanová, the album is a “live” recording of a complete opera performance. This time Mark Elder conducts a complete performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète, and the recording was made during a performance at the Aix-en-Provence Festival on July 15, 2023. Based on a libretto in French by Eugène Scribe and Émile Deschamps, this is a five-act opera; and the physical recording, currently available for pre-order through an Amazon.com Web page, fills three CDs.

The coronation scene in the fourth act of Le Prophète (engraving published in L'Illustration on April 24, 1849, public domain, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

This opera was successful in its day. Meyerbeer was a leading figure at the time, and the opera’s popularity endured into the early twentieth century. Tenor Enrico Caruso sang the leading role of Jean de Leyde when the Metropolitan Opera revived it in 1918. However, by the time I was born in 1946, it was known for little more than the Coronation March, extracted from the second scene of the fourth act.

One might think from the title that this opera is set in Biblical times. It is not. It is set in the sixteenth century in what is now Germany. That leading role is based on John of Leiden, the leader of the Dutch Anabaptist movement. As his Wikipedia page observes, “he became a recognized prophet of a sect which would eventually take over the German town of Münster.” By the end of the opera’s final act, he has been denounced as a false prophet; and (as is often the case in these fictionalized historical narratives) everything goes up in smoke.

Personally, I have my doubts about sitting through a complete performance of this opera. (If it shows up as a San Francisco Opera production, I would give serious thought to wearing a T-shirt saying “I’d rather be watching Götterdämmerung!”) However, once the music is detached from the plot, I am willing to recognize Meyerbeer’s skills as a composer; and tenor John Osborn’s talents in singing the title role should not be overlooked. As a result, I shall probably return to this album, as long as I can listen to the individual acts one at a time!

First Merola Program Explores Song as Drama

The Song as Drama curators Nicholas Phan and Carrie-Ann Matheson (photograph by Kristen Loken, courtesy of the Merola Opera Program)

Last night the Merola Opera Program presented the first of its four public performances in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater. Artistic Director Carrie-Ann Matheson and tenor Nicholas Phan co-curated a program entitled The Song as Drama. Each of the eight selections on the program presented its own unique perspective on narrative qualities in song.

Accompaniment was kept to the scale of chamber music. The guitar, played by Mario To, served the first two works on the program. He provided the only accompaniment for Clarice Assad’s “Equanto a noite durar” (as long as the night lasts), which was preceded by Anahita Abbasi’s “Ahou,” which brought the guitar together with a pan flute played by Tod Brody and Jieyin Wu on harp. During the second half of the program, To returned to accompany soprano Alexa Frankian’s performance of Barbara Strozzi’s “L’Eraclito amoroso” (the amorous Heraclitus) on theorbo. All remaining selections were given piano-and-string accompaniment with performances by all of the current Merola pianists: Ji Youn Lee, Yedam, Kim, Sujin Choi, Hyemin Jeong, and Julian Garvue.

The eight selections on the program may have honored “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” George A. Miller’s hypothesis of the capacity of our short-term memory; but, as always seems to be the case, the abundance in these Merola recitals provides more than most mere mortals can retain. Suffice it to say that each of the offerings was engaging during its own duration. Nevertheless, the impact of each succeeding performance was convincing enough to block out what had promised to be a vivid memory of its predecessor. The overall experience reminds me of how I usually have to listen to a record album several times before I have a good sense of the overall collection. Last night felt as if I could play the album once and only once!

Still, the succession flowed along at a smooth clip. Each “course of the meal” was engaging “in the moment.” I would not have wanted to miss any of the selections, but I would be just as happy to encounter any of them again in the future. Like the Fifties joke about Chinese banquets, I came away thoroughly satisfied; but, not long after, I found myself hungry to experience the affair again!

LIEDER ALIVE!’s 2024/25 Liederabend Series

Mosaic of this season’s LIEDER ALIVE! performers (from the LIEDER ALIVE! home page)

LIEDER ALIVE! now has a Web page that provides the dates for its thirteenth annual Liederabend Series, which will run from September of 2024 through May of 2025. As in the past, the recitals will take place on Sundays; but they will begin at 4 p.m., rather than 5 p.m. Furthermore, the first of these recitals has already been announced, since it is being produced in partnership with the San Francisco International Piano Festival.

What is most important is that, like the Festival, all of the Liederabend recitals will be taking place as part of the Old First Concerts (O1C) series at Old First Presbyterian Church (1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue). That means that hyperlinks for purchasing tickets will become available as they appear on O1C Web pages, which tend to get created about two months in advance. In that context, here is an account of what has been planned thus far:

September 1: This is the partnership with the San Francisco International Piano Festival, at which mezzo Kindra Scharich will perform Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 61 song cycle, La Bonne Chanson.

November 17: This will be a celebration of the tenth year of Kurt Erickson serving as Composer-in-Residence. Soprano Heidi Moss Erickson will sing his Each Moment Radiant cycle, accompanied at the piano by John Parr. She will also perform selected works by Fauré and Richard Strauss.

February 16: Parr will return as pianist. This time he will accompany soprano Charlotte Kelso and tenor Thomas Kinch. Program details have not yet been finalized; but the program will be organized around compositions by Karl Marx (the early twentieth-century German composer, not the author of Capital!), Strauss, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Giuseppe Verdi.

May 18: Peter Grünberg will be the pianist for the final program. He will be joined by cellist Oliver Herbert In a performance of Franz Schubert’s D. 934 fantasy in C major, originally composed for violin and piano. Soprano Esther Rayo will sing Schubert’s D. 741, “Sei mir gegrüsst,” also accompanied by Grünberg. The remainder of the program has not yet been finalized, but it will feature a plethora of Spanish composers!

Stella Chen Comes to Davies Symphony Hall

Stella Chen on the cover of her debut album

Violinist Stella Chen made her San Francisco debut in March of last year, when she performed a duo recital with pianist Henry Kramer for Chamber Music San Francisco. I had been prepared for this occasion, having just written about her debut album Stella x Schubert; and I came away from her recital as satisfied as I had been with her recording. Last night Chen returned to San Francisco (which happens to be her home town), accompanied this time by pianist George Li. The two of them presented the final program in this season’s Shenson Spotlight Series in Davies Symphony Hall.

Interestingly enough, Chen chose to begin her program with the opening track of her album, Franz Schubert’s D. 895 rondo in B minor. As one can tell by the catalog number, this is a comparatively late composition. The traditional rondo form involves a repeated theme with alternative episodes separating the repetitions. Schubert basically works with a few themes going through different patterns of repetition, taking the attentive listener on a moderately (at least) wild ride, due in part to turn-on-a-dime key changes when they are least expected. Chen’s recording of this music which deserves more attention has become one of my favorites, so I was more than delighted to encounter it at the beginning of last night’s recital. Her account with Li was as stimulating as my “first contact” experience.

The overall program was framed to begin with Schubert and conclude with Ludwig van Beethoven. The final selection was his Opus 47 sonata in A major, best known by the name “Kreutzer.” Beethoven did not write many violin sonatas, and some would say that the genre did not appeal to him very much. What I found interesting about the music was that the middle movement of variations on a theme (a genre that did interest in Beethoven) came across as rather weak in comparison to the bold strokes in the outer two movements. Neither Chen nor Li was shy about giving all of those bold strokes their necessary due, and the energy they brought to the concluding Presto made for a stimulating conclusion.

Between these two classical offerings, the duo performed Eleanor Alberga’s “No-Man’s-Land Lullaby.” I first encountered this music in November of 2020, when violinist Phyllis Kamrin and pianist Eric Zivian played it at a Left Coast Chamber Ensemble performance. The first part of the title evokes the carnage of World War I, which casts a dark shadow on references to the song that Johannes Brahms entitled simply “Wiegenlied” in his Opus 49 collection. My first listening experience left me thinking of William Shakespeare’s phrase in Macbeth about sleep being murdered, and those thoughts haunted me again in last night’s performance.

Since Chen decided to begin her program with the opening track on Stella x Schubert, I was not surprised to find that her encore was the album’s final track. This was “Ständchen,” the fourth song in Schubert’s D. 957 Schwanengesang (swan song) collection. This is one of those tunes that I have known from early piano lessons. However, it was only after I began to pay attention to the texts that Schubert was setting that my interest was really piqued. I can now appreciate why Chen selected it to conclude her album; and, by the same count, it made for a perfect farewell to her audience.

Art of the Piano 2024 Festival at SFCM

The Art of the Piano festival was founded by Awadagin Pratt in Cincinnati in 2011. The idea behind the event was to bring together the world’s most celebrated faculty instructors, a class of future master pianists, and audiences of music lovers for performances, classes, and a shared passion for the piano. The venue for this year’s festival is the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). It began this past Saturday, June 22; but, to my regret, I only learned about it late yesterday afternoon! It will continue through the evening of Sunday, July 7.

My intention will be to focus only on the recital performances. These will cover a rich diversity of repertoire with multiple pianists featured on each occasion. All performances will take place in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall, which is on the top (eleventh) floor of the Bowes Center at 200 Van Ness Avenue. Complete accounts of the program will be found through the hyperlinks attached to each date as follows:

Wednesday, June 26, 7 p.m.: This recital will present eight different pianists performing eleven different selections. The earliest work on the program will be by Joseph Haydn. The most recent (not to mention adventurous) composer will be Alexander Scriabin, who will be represented by three selections, each performed by a different pianist. As will be the case for all of the Young Artist Recitals, there will be no charge for admission.

Thursday, June 27, 7 p.m.: Jeremy Jordon’s recital will include one of his own compositions, “Children’s Songs,” which he composed in 2020. He will also include transcriptions of vocal music by Sergei Rachmaninoff and three scenes from Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal. He will begin the program with his own arrangement of Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Étude en forme de valse.” In the latter half of the program, he will turn to popular tunes from the twentieth century by Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, and Duke Ellington. However, he will begin that set with a more recent offering, Wayne Shorter’s “Infant Eyes.” Tickets may be purchased through an SFCM event page, which also provides information for special rates for passes that account for multiple events.

Friday, June 28, 7 p.m.: The next Young Artist Recital will present nine pianists, three of whom will present “paired” selections; and again, the program will be free of charge.

Saturday, June 29, 3 p.m.: Alexander Korsantia will perform a transcription of Igor Stravinsky’ score for the one-act ballet “Petrouchka.” His keyboard work will be supplemented with a tambourine (which he will also play). The first half of the program will be devoted to sonatas by Franz Schubert (D. 894 in G major) and Joseph Haydn (Hoboken XVI/23). Tickets will again be available through an SFCM event page.

Wednesday, July 3, 7 p.m.: The program for Young Artists Recital for this date has not yet been announced; however, there will be the usual “drill” of a free admission.

Friday, July 5, 7 p.m.: Those familiar with Simone Dinnerstein probably know that her name free-associates with “adventurous.” The “core” of her program will couple Philip Glass’ “Mad Rush” with the third of the compositions given the title “Gnossienne” (whatever that may mean) by Eric Satie. This pairing will be framed by two finger-busting compositions by Robert Schumann. The first of these will be the Opus 18 “Arabesque;” and the Satie will be followed by the Opus 16 “Kreisleriana.” The program will begin with “Les barricades mistérieuses,” from Ordre 6 in the Second Livre collection of keyboard compositions by François Couperin. Tickets will again be available through an SFCM event page.

Saturday, July 6, 7 p.m.: Each half of Hie-Yon Choi’s recital will conclude with a piano sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven. (Did anyone think that he would be neglected by this event?) The first half will conclude with the second (in the key of D minor) of the Opus 31 sonatas; and the recital will include with one of the major “late” sonatas, Opus 101 in A major. The first half will begin with four selections from Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 19b, the first of the eight Songs Without Words volumes. The second half will open with a selection of four of Claude Debussy’s etudes. Tickets will again be available through an SFCM event page.

Jean-Jacques Caffieri’s 1760 bust of Jean-Philippe Rameau (from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 France license)

Sunday, July 7, 7 p.m.: Stephen Prutsman will conclude the festival with a program that many may take to be a marathon. The “spinal cord” of the program will consist of a generous diversity of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, with particular attention to Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Orbiting around this “spinal cord” will be selections by composers as early as Jean-Philippe Rameau and extending all the way into Prutsman’s own arrangements, which include not only traditional Rwandan and Uzbek music but also Charlier Parker’s “Ornithology.” Tickets will again be available through an SFCM event page.

Kulikova’s Fourth Omni Video in Los Angeles

Poster showing the full schedule for Irina Kulikova’s videos for The Romero Sessions

Tomorrow morning the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts will release its fourth video to be produced in association with The Romero Sessions presenting solo performances by guitarist Irina Kulikova. Once again, the performance was filmed at Pepe Romero’s The Guitar Shop in Los Angeles, where Kulikova played one of his instruments (Guitar No. 203). This week the selection will, again, be “short and sweet,” although I have noticed that different guitarists tend to play it at different tempos.

“Asturias” was originally composed for piano by Isaac Albéniz. It served as the prelude for a his three-movement suite Chants d'Espagne (songs of Spain). It was subsequently arranged for guitar are Francisco Tárrega and may well be one of the most frequently encountered selections on guitar recital programs (if not on the program itself, then as an encore)!

This video will be released tomorrow morning, Wednesday, June 26, at 10 a.m. The YouTube Web page has already been created. The video was captured by Gary and Jenny San Angel. Since this particular guitar is at Romero’s store, it is worth noting that it is available for purchase; and a Web page has been created for those interested.

The Bleeding Edge: 6/24/2024

Last week’s “busy week” will be followed by a decidedly quiet one. There is a perfect balance of two previously reported events with two new ones. The former category is accounted for as follows (with the obligatory hyperlinks):

1. Audium will present three more performances by the Red Clay Sound Haus collective on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
2. The Lab will host the next Brutal Sound Effects Festival.

The two unreported events both involve “usual suspects” as follows:

Thursday, June 27, 8 p.m., Adobe Books: Sult is a trio consisting of two Norwegians, Guro Skumsnes Moe on bass and Håvard Skaset on acoustic guitar, and one American, percussionist Jacob Felix Heule. Their approach to acoustic improvisation seems to be inspired by natural phenomena, such as storms, landslides, tectonic frictions, and lightning splitting tree forests. Those curious about the results may wish to check out their Always I Gnaw album, which has a Bandcamp Web page.

For those that do not yet know, Adobe Books is located at 3130 24th Street in the Mission between South Van Ness Avenue and Folsom Street. This is one of those venues where no one will be turned away for lack of funds. However, payment of $15 is the suggested donation; and all the money collected will go directly to the performing artists.

The album cover for Weird Excursions, showing the four members of the Tri-Cornered Ten Show (from its Bandcamp Web page)

Friday, June 28, 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., Medicine for Nightmares: This week Other Dimensions in Sound, curated by reed player David Boyce, will present a performance by the Tri-Cornered Tent Show. No background information has been provided; but the group’s latest album, Weird Excursions, was released at the end of this past February and now has its own Bandcamp Web page. Personnel listed on that album is as follows: Philip Everett (synthesizer(s), percussion, Electric Lapharp, and Xlarinet), Ray Schaeffer (electric bass, in several sizes, as well as audio engineering), Anthony Flores (percussion), and Valentina O (vocals sometimes with special effects). Once again, the venue is located in the Mission at 3036 24th Street, between Treat Avenue and Harrison Street. As always, there is no charge for admission, presumably to encourage visitors to consider buying a book.

A Rewarding Return to HWV 27

Those who read my account of the opening night of George Frideric Handel’s HWV 27 opera Partenope at the War Memorial Opera House know that I did not waste any in invoking the attribute “slapstick.” This staging by Christopher Alden was first presented by the San Francisco Opera in October of 2014, and I had no trouble describing it as a roller-coaster ride. That said, yesterday afternoon’s performance came across as wilder than the opening, perhaps because the cast was now familiar enough with the libretto and staging to throw in some new embellishments that may well have been spontaneous.

Emilio (Alek Shrader on the ladder) creates his image of Partenope (soprano Julie Fuchs at the foot of the ladder) while Rosmira (mezzo Daniela Mack) observes, with Arsace (Carlo Vistoli) and Armindo (Nicholas Tamagna) to the left and Oromonte (Hadleigh Adams) on the right (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

I decided that this opera deserved a more informative subtitle. As a result, I scribbled into my program book, “Two Women and Four Men Behaving Badly.” An opera conceived for a classical setting has been relocated to Paris in the Roaring Twenties. The action could have been created by Charlie Chaplin, while the decor evokes any number of bold artists including Francis Picabia, René Clair, and Man Ray. Indeed, where the latter is concerned, Emilio (tenor Alek Shrader) spends much of the first two acts running around with his camera; and, in the final act, he assembles his large-than-life prints into an enormous image of Partenope (which might be described as “Playboy meets the Venus de Milo.” (See the above photograph.)

One way to approach this opera as a whole is that each act has its own “theme” that might be taken as a visual leitmotif. Emilio’s giant photograph provides the leitmotif for the final act. The opening, on the other hand, is established through an enormous spiral staircase, which provides the setting for no end of visual gags. (That staircase was included in the photograph for the opening night article.) Action in the second act, on the hand, revolves around a water closet (otherwise known as a bathroom, but this one really looked like a closet). All of these settings provide frameworks for no end of sight gags, regardless of how relevant they are to the plot.

Lest one think that the music itself was deprived of humor, Julie Fuchs, in the title role, rose to the occasion in the final act. Prior to the conclusion in which all the characters make up with each other, Partenope has a solo reflecting on all that has occurred. Fuchs sang this in front of a drawn curtain to allow for a set change; and, at just the right moment, she injected a phrase from Giuseppe Verdi’s “Sempre libera” aria of La Traviata, suggesting the Partenope and Violetta were not quite as different as one might assume (not that anyone would mistake Verdi for Handel)!

The good news is that there are two more chances to catch this show, tomorrow and on Friday!

Old First Concerts: August, 2024

Following up on next month’s three recitals in the Old First Concerts (O1C) series at Old First Presbyterian Church (1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue) will be a very busy August. This will be due to the San Francisco International Piano Festival concerts taking place at the venue, which will be preceded by the next round of three O1C programs. Given the abundance of activity, it seemed prudent to alert readers to this embarrassment of riches sooner, rather than later! (Note also that the Festival will “spill over” into the first day of September.) Hyperlinks to the event pages, which include information about ticket prices and hyperlinks for purchases, including live stream viewing, continue to be attached to the date and time of the performances in the following specifics:

Friday, August 2, 8 p.m.: This will be a debut performance by Duo Penseur, whose members are violinist Chantel Charis and pianist Alex Fang. They met as Master’s students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Both of them are now doctoral candidates, Charis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Fang at the University of Washington. Nevertheless, they will both return to San Francisco to prepare a program entitled Minding the Gap, which probably refers to their geographical challenges. The “chronological frame” for that program has Ludwig van Beethoven on one side with the second of his Opus 30 duo sonatas and Jessie Montgomery in the “immediate present” with “Peace.” Between these extremes is Clara Schumann from the early nineteenth century with three duo compositions identified as “Romances” and, from the twentieth century, William Grant Still’s suite for violin and piano.

Friday, August 16, 8 p.m.: The Zēlos Saxophone Quartet is based in the Bay Area. Each member plays an instrument of a different size: Jonah Cabral (soprano), David Baker (alto), Robin Lacey (tenor), Johnny Selmer (baritone). Their repertoire ranges from underrepresented contemporary works to transcriptions from the baroque, classical, and romantic eras. Program details have not yet been provided.

Simple Excesses Quartet members Matt Small, Jordan Glenn, Motoko Honda, and Cory Wright (from the O1C Web page)

Saturday, August 17, 8 p.m.: Pianist Motoko Honda leads the Simple Excesses Quartet, providing both original compositions and arrangements. The other performers are Cory Wright on woodwinds, bassist Matt Small, and Jordan Glenn on drums. The title of the program will be Uncharted Sonic Adventures: Jazz, Chamber, Avant-garde, and Beyond. It will consist (almost?) entirely of works composed and/or rearranged by Honda over the course of this year:

• Fragmented Redolence
• Murkwood
• Simpler Matters
• Serpentine Skips
• Ransom
• Jumping Moops

Friday, August 23, 8 p.m.: The remaining performances of the month will be presented by the seventh annual San Francisco International Piano Festival. The theme of this year’s Festival will be a celebration of French keyboard music across the centuries. Opening night will honor the centennial of the death of Gabriel Fauré. This will include his Opus 13 sonata for violin and piano in A major, for which the violinst has not yet been identified. There will also be a four-hand performance of movements from his Opus 56 Dolly suite, performed by Sarah Yuan and Munan Cheng. The program will also include the first of the three nocturnes, which Fauré collected as his Opus 33. This will be followed, appropriately enough, by his Opus 34, which is the third of his six impromptu compositions. The other work on the program will be the Opus 73 set of variations on a theme. The contributing solo pianists will be Gwendolyn Mok and Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur.

Sunday, August 25, 4 p.m.: The second Festival program will be a solo recital by Asiya Korepanova. The title of her program is Transformations, because all of the selections will be her own transcriptions. She appears to have an affinity with music for cello and piano. She will begin with Fauré’s Opus 24 “Élégie” and conclude with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 sonata for those same instruments. (Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 3, “Introduction et Polonaise brillante” also has that instrumentation.) There will also be arrangements of vocal compositions, including Modest Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death cycle.

Friday, August 30, 8 p.m.: The final weekend of the Festival will begin on Friday. Pianist Stephen Prutsman will perform with the members of the Telegraph String Quartet: violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, Pei-Ling Lin on viola, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw. The first half of the program will be devoted entirely to Robert Schumann’s Opus 44 piano quintet. The only other work on the program will be Prutsman’s original score to accompany Buster Keaton’s film, Sherlock Jr.

Sunday, September 1, 4 p.m.: The Festival extends beyond the end of August to conclude with a collaboration with LIEDER ALIVE! Mezzo Kindra Scharich will be the vocalist in a performance of Fauré’s Opus 61 song cycle, La Bonne Chanson. Mok and LaDeur will join forces for the selections on either side of this vocal offering. They will begin the program with the Épigraphe antiques cycle by Claude Debussy. I have had at least one encounter with this composition in which each movement was introduced with narrated text, so it is possible that Scharich will also serve as narrator. The Festival will conclude with a two-piano composition by Florent Schmitt, his Opus 53 collection of three rhapsodies.

A Second Indian-Influenced Album from Isbin

Those with long memories may recall that I have been writing about guitarist Sharon Isbin since October of 2018. I was aware of her before then; but, when I made my move from Silicon Valley to the San Francisco concert scene, I realized that I had never had the opportunity to experience her in performance. (Any recordings would have been heard on the radio.) Thus, my “first contact” came about at one of those recitals presented jointly by San Francisco Performances and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, when Isbin was joined by Brazilian guitarist Romero Lubambo. This was enough to get me hooked.

Since that time, I have not been able to see Isbin again in performance. However, I have been following the releases of her Zoho albums. This began with her solo album Affinity, which surveyed contemporary composers Chris Brubeck, Leo Brouwer, Antonio Lauro, Tan Dun, and Richard Danielpour. This was followed by Strings for Peace, which presented four compositions by sarod master Amjad Ali Khan, scored as duos for guitar and sarod and specifically written for Isbin. They were joined by Khan’s two sons, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash, also playing sarod, and tabla accompaniment performed by Amit Kavthekar.

Cover of the album being discussed showing Isbin seated with Kahn on the left with his sons, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash, standing behind them

All five of those performers have again teamed up with Isbin for their latest album, Live in Aspen. As the title suggests, this recording captures a performance that took place at the Aspen Music Festival on August 6, 2022 in the Harris Concert Hall. Nine of the ten tracks account of compositions by Khan, one of which is based on one of the poetic songs of Rabindranath Tagore. The opening track serves to set context with a performance of Francisco Tárrega’s “Capricho árabe.” Personally, I am not sure that this selection prepares the listener for the Indian music that will follow; but it has a theme I happen to like!

My guess is that, among my readers, there will be two categories of listeners. There are those that will faithfully follow every album that Isbin releases. I suspect that they will be more than satisfied with the album, particularly since it captures a concert performance. The other category consists of those that felt that, after Strings for Peace, enough was enough! I must confess that, when I first began to listen to Live in Aspen, I was in that category. However, after revisiting the tracks several times, I find that the music is growing on me!

Rather than offer readers any further advice, I shall just fall back on the words of Joseph Campbell that seem appropriate: “Follow your bliss!”

Bay Area Rainbow Symphony Tonight!

The banner of the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (from its City Box Office Web page)

According to my records, the last time I wrote about the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony was in November of last year, and that involved their participation in California Festival: A Celebration of New Music. Late yesterday afternoon, I learned that Music Director Dawn Harms would be concluding her tenure with the performance taking place this evening, She will mark the occasion by leading the ensemble in a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 125, his ninth symphony in which orchestral resources are joined by vocalists (solo and choral) in the final movement’s setting of Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude,” usually known in English as the “Ode to Joy.”

The vocal soloists for this performance will be soprano Melody Moore, mezzo Nikola Printz, tenor Brian Thorsett, and baritone Hadleigh Adams. The choral resources will be provided by both the Berkeley Community Chorus, whose Music Director is Ming Luke, and the Masterworks Chorale, whose Artistic Director is Bryan Baker. Baker will provide the preparation for tonight’s performance.

The full program will put a twist on the usual overture-concerto-symphony structure. The overture will be by Ethel Smyth, composed for her one-act opera “The Boatswain’s Mate.” The “concerto,” on the other hand, will be for a narrator, rather than an instrumentalist. That narrator will be Curt Branom, reciting the text that Aaron Copland prepared for his “Lincoln Portrait.” This involves descriptive comments (presumably Copland’s) interleaved with Abraham Lincoln’s own words.

The performance of this program will take place tonight (June 22) at 7:30 p.m. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Tickets are still on sale through a City Box Office Web page. Including the necessary fee, General Admission tickets are sold for $44.75 with special rates of $34.75 for seniors aged 65 or older and $17.75 for students.

Salonen’s Engaging Command of Bruckner’s 4th

Last night Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony in the first of the three performances of the penultimate program for the current subscription season. The “lion’s share” of the program took place after the intermission with a performance of Anton Bruckner’s WAB 104, his fourth symphony in E-flat major. Bruckner himself endowed this symphony with a subtitle: “Romantic.” Those familiar with the Bruckner canon know that many of his compositions were revised and reworked, leading to multiple editions. Last night’s performance used Leopold Nowak’s edition based on the composer’s final version of the score, which he completed in 1880.

Salonen has a keen ear for the overall pace of a Bruckner symphony. For the most part, the conductor tended to shy away from rapidity. Nevertheless, when properly conducted, there is always a clear sense of moving forward, even if the pace is restrained. Salonen’s approach to that pace could not have been more satisfying, right up there with my past encounters with Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt (as well as Blomstedt’s recordings of all of the symphonies). That attention to pace allows the attentive listener to appreciate the many ways in which the thematic content twists and turns its way among the full palette of “instrumental colors.”

Listening to Bruckner is not like listening to the intricate interplay of the themes that one encounters in the orchestral music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. Bruckner’s subjects are more straightforward, but their unfolding emerges through instrumental coloration. One might say that there is not much variation in the building blocks, but you keep looking at them from different points of view. Those points of view unfold over the course of prolonged time frames, making the act of listening one of ongoing discovery.

According to my records, this was my second encounter with Salonen conducting Bruckner, the first having taken place in February of last year with the performance of WAB 106, the sixth symphony in A major. I would be only too happy to have him guide me through more of this composer’s symphonic repertoire. Given that his tenure will be concluding soon, I fear that future encounters are likely to be few, if any at all.

Pianist Yefim Bronfman (photograph by Dario Acosta, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony)

The first half of the program saw the return of pianist Yefim Bronfman as concerto soloist. The concerto was a familiar one: Robert Schumann’s Opus 54 in A minor. As usual, Bronfman was both energetic and expressive; and his chemistry with not only Salonen but also the members of the orchestra could not have been better. As expected, he returned with an encore that was probably familiar to many listeners, the fifth (in the key of G minor) of the ten preludes that Sergei Rachmaninoff collected for his Opus 23. Both concerto and encore provided just the right “warm-up” for the journey that would follow after the intermission.

Merola: Full-Length Opera to Begin August

 

Original playbill for the first performance of Don Giovanni

Following next month’s Schwabacher Summer Concert, which will present extended scenes from six operas, the Merola Opera Program will shift its attention to a fully staged production of a single opera. This year’s opera will be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 527 Don Giovanni, an opera that has engaged the attention of many author and philosophers. The production will be directed by soprano Patricia Racette, a Merola alumna from 1988, whose career as a soprano encompassed a prodigious number of operas in a challenging number of languages! Through those experiences, Racette is well aware of the interplay between music and narrative and should be well-equipped to do justice to both of those factors.

On the musical side she will work with conductor Stefano Sarzani. In addition, casting has now been announced. The title role will be taken by baritone Hyungjin Son; and his servant Leporello (obliged to get them out of the trouble he creates) will be sung by bass-baritone Donghoon Kang. The narrative is structured around three of Giovanni’s “conquests,” one from the past (Donna Elvira, sung by soprano Viviana Aurelia Goodwin), one in the present (Donna Anna, sung by soprano Lydia Grindatto), and one in the “anticipated future” (the peasant girl Zerlina, sung by soprano Moriah Berry). Additional characters account for two “complications.” The first is that the Don’s efforts to seduce Anna are thwarted by her father, the Commendatore (bass-baritone Benjamin R. Sokol). Giovanni slays the Commendatore in the first act but is then haunted by him in the second. The other “complication” is that Zerlina is about to marry Masetto (bass-baritone Justice Yates), who always seems to thwart the Don’s progress.

Like the Schwabacher Concert, this production will be given two performances. They will be on Thursday, August 1, at 7:30 p.m. and on Saturday, August 3, at 2 p.m. They will both take place in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music at 50 Oak Street, a short walk north of the Van Ness Muni station. Once again Merola will be offering tickets to those 25 and under for only $10. In addition, there will also be a $10 rate for those seeing their first Merola production, using the code MEROLANEW during the purchase. All other ticket prices will be either $35 or $65. As of this writing, the Web page for purchasing tickets is not available. Tickets may be purchased by calling the San Francisco Opera Box Office at 415-864-3330. Box Office Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday through Saturday. The Box Office itself is in the War Memorial Opera House on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and Grove Street. On Saturday the Box Office can be reached only by telephone. Those hours also apply to Group Sales.

Bowden’s Contemporary Trumpet Concerto Album

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Shuman Public Relations)

One week from today will see the release of Storyteller: Contemporary Concertos for Trumpet featuring Mary Elizabeth Bowden as the soloist. For those that cannot wait, Amazon.com (as usual) has created a Web page for processing pre-orders. As might be guessed, this is an “album with an agenda,” confronting the “male-dominated field” (the latter quote from the liner notes for Vivian Fung’s trumpet concerto). Indeed, Fung is one of four female composers on the album, the others being Clarice Assad, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Reena Esmail. The other composers included are Tyson Gholston Davis and James M. Stephenson, the latter providing the first and last tracks.

To be fair, here in “enlightened” San Francisco (scare quotes intended!), Snider’s music will be played by pianist Adam Tendler in a little less than a month, when he will present his Inheritances recital. Those that have been following this site for some time may recall that articles about Assad date all the way back to May of 2017, when the New Century Chamber Orchestra performance of her Impressions suite was one of the high points of the evening. The following month the Kronos Quartet performed Esmail’s arrangement of a raga composed by the Indian violinist N. Rajam. If any of the composers on the album are “strangers in this town,” it is Stephenson!

Where the music is concerned, Bowden performs with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Allen Tinkham. The compositions by Stephenson, Assad, Fung, Davis, and Esmail are all receiving world premiere recordings, while the Snider selection, “Caritas,” is a new arrangement of music originally composed for mezzo, string quartet, and harp. (The program book includes the text that was sung in that version.) Sadly, for all that originality, there was very little on the album that prompted me to sit up and take notice; and I am sorry to confess that the very first track, Stephenson’s “The Storyteller” (which inspired the title of the album) included a reference to Igor Stravinsky that I found positively cringe-inducing.

I suspect that my familiarity with Assad’s work was the album’s greatest asset. “Bohemian Queen” amounts to a synthesis of the concerto and tone poem genres. The first two movements are inspired by paintings by Chicago-based Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977), who was known as “the queen of the bohemian artists.” The final movement, “Hyde Park Jam” recalls how Abercrombie would throw parties for major jazz performers and then play piano with them! Taken as a whole, this was a “concerto with character,” which distinguished it significantly from the other tracks.

Mind you, those other tracks served up many engaging sonorities and rhetorical turns; but none of the other selections (all of which were shorter than Assad’s concerto) offered much to sustain attentive listening. Bowden, of course, maintained a solid command of her technical dexterity. Nevertheless, it was hard for me to avoid wishing that she had been better served by the composers she had selected. There was no shortage of points for trying, but they can take the attentive listener only so far!

Kupiński Duo Plays Chopin and Sor

The Kupiński Guitar Duo of Dariusz Kupiński and Ewa Jabłczyńska (screenshot from the Omni Foundation YouTube video)

As was announced this past Tuesday, this morning saw the release of a second video from the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. This one presented the Kupiński Guitar Duo, whose members are Dariusz Kupiński and Ewa Jabłczyńska. (Readers may recall that they were joined by Marcin Dylla in a three-guitar arrangement of the “Concierto de Aranjuez” by the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo.) The major work on their new program was Fernando Sor’s Opus 54b, a fantasy duet for two guitars composed in 1833.

While this composition was new to me, I must confess that I was far more interested in the works that preceded it. All of them were arrangements of solo piano music by Frédéric Chopin: three waltzes and one mazurka. The mazurka was the last in the Opus 17 collection of four. This is a particularly ambiguous mazurka. There are no sharps or flats in the key signature, and there is a middle section in A major. However, the piece never really settles into A minor until near the conclusion. However, while a single A (440) is dying off, there is an ambiguous progression, which concludes with an F major chord in first inversion. This, for me, was the high point of the video for the intensity of its expressiveness.

The waltzes, on the other hand, were far less unsettling. Their respective keys were C-sharp minor (the second in the Opus 64 set), B minor (the second in the Opus 69 set), and E-flat major (the Opus 18 “Grande Valse Brillante,” which was Chopin’s first published waltz). What I found particularly interesting was the back-and-forth arrangement in which each of the two guitarists accounted for the expressiveness of the respective themes. Considerable attention to sharing the thematic material (if not a certain amount of haggling) made for a visual experience that reinforced the auditory experience, even with the occasional splashes of wit!

Hopefully, these two guitarists will eventually find their way to performing a recital here in San Francisco!

SFJAZZ: July, 2024

Ticket sales are definitely picking up for the Joe Henderson Lab concerts at the SFJAZZ Center. As I am writing this, the very first event in that series has already sold out! Fortunately, tickets are still available for the second set on that evening; but this means that those interested in the artist should make arrangements sooner, rather than later! For those that do not already know, the Center is located at 201 Franklin Street, on the northwest corner of Fell Street, where the main entrance doors are located. Performance dates, times, and hyperlinks for purchasing tickets are as follows:

Thursday, July 11, 8:30 p.m.: This will be Cuban Music Week, and the artist that seems to have already been attracting attention is pianist Jorge Luis Pacheco. This should not be surprising, given that his solo piano debut at Lincoln Center in 2015 was sold out. This will be his SFJAZZ debut; and it is very likely that any remaining tickets will be gone sooner, rather than later.

Friday, July 12, and Saturday, July 13, 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.: All of the Henderson events during Cuban Music Week will be solo piano performances. The second pianist will be Aldo López-Gavilán, who was born in Havana. He is a “double threat” to the extent that he is as well-versed in the classical piano repertoire as he is in the Afro-Cuban jazz tradition. (He performed Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 26, third, piano concerto in C major with the National Symphony of Cuba at the age of seventeen.)

Thursday, July 18, and Friday, July 19, 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.: The theme of the following week will be Organ & Keys. Chester Thompson has been commanding the Hammond organ for over four decades, having performed with popular bands from the Sixties such as Tower of Power and Santana. He formed a quartet for his 1971 debut album Powerhouse, and his more recent release is Mixology.

Saturday, July 20, 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.: The second Organ & Keys program will be a solo performance by Brandon Coleman. He was a major performer in Kamasi Washington’s powerhouse band, and it was Washington who gave him the name “Professor Boogie.” Washington grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where his primary influences were Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Compared to other keyboardists, he was somewhat of a “late bloomer,” having begun playing piano at the age of sixteen.

Sunday, July 21, 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.: The final Organ & Keys performer will be pianist Gadi Lehavi. He was born in Tel Aviv but is now based in New York. Those that follow SFJAZZ performances may know him as the pianist for Ravi Coltrane’s Cosmic Music project. This concert will be his solo debut.

Thursday, July 25, 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.: The theme for the final week of the month will be Blues Week. The first performer will be guitarist and singer Mike Henderson, who was dubbed “the Blues Professor” by no less than John Lee Hooker. Henderson has had a rich history, not only in music but also through his involvement with the Civil Rights movement during the Sixties. His experiences with blatant racism and police harassment were first hand. Those credentials should give him, in the words of Ted Koehler, “a right to sing the blues!”

Friday, July 26, and Saturday, July 27, 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.: This will be a tribute concert to honor the legacy of James Cotton, the legendary blues singer, songwriter, and harmonica master who passed away in 2017 at the age of 81. Mark Hummel will sing and play harmonica with the members of Cotton’s band. These will be guitarists Steve Freund and Tom Holland, Cros Charles Mack on bass, and drummer June Core. Hummel has been hosting the Blues Harmonica Blowout at the SFJAZZ Center for several years. His own band is called the Blues Survivors.

Blues singer Tia Carroll (from her SFJAZZ event page)

Sunday, July 28, 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.: Blues Week will conclude with vocalist Tia Carroll, who is based here in San Francisco. As might be expected, her main influences include Tina Turner, Koko Taylor and Etta James. As also might be expected, she will punctuate her songs with her sassy style of storytelling.

Kulikova’s Third Omni Video in Los Angeles

This morning the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its third video to be produced in association with The Romero Sessions presenting solo performances by guitarist Irina Kulikova. Once again, the performance was filmed at Pepe Romero’s The Guitar Shop in Los Angeles, where Kulikova played one of his instruments (Guitar No. 259). The selection was, as they say, “short and sweet,” lasting less than three minutes.

Irina Kulikova playing Tárrega’s “Lágrima” (screenshot from the Omni Foundation YouTube video)

The composer was Francisco Tárrega, who is probably known to anyone familiar with the guitar repertoire. The title of the composition was “Lágrima,” which followed the usual ternary form consisting of the second theme both preceded by and followed by the first theme. (This is also known as “ABA” form for the obvious reason!) As the performance progressed, I was drawn to the sights of the bodies of “guitars in progress,” as well as piles of slabs of wood destined for future guitars! The creation of a quality guitar clearly demands patience unto an extreme, and it was easy to imagine the serenity of Tárrega’s music gently encouraging that patience.

The music may have been brief; but, in the setting of Romero’s workshop, it left (at least for me) an enduring memory.

A Third June Concert Coming to Chez Hanny

This month Chez Hanny performances are taking place on every other Sunday. Thus, the June 2 show was followed by one on June 16. That means there is “room for one more” gig on June 30, and plans for that performance were announced this past Sunday afternoon.

Loren Stillman during a recording session for Sunnyside Records in 2023 (from the YouTube video of that recording session)

The performers will be the members of the Loren Stillman Trio. Leader Stillman is a saxophonist, as well as a composer. His current base is in Brooklyn. He had previously visited Chez Hanny as the member of a sextet led jointly by David Ambrosio on bass and drummer Russ Meissner. On this occasion Ambrosio will return with Stillman to provide bass for his rhythm section. The other rhythm player will be drummer Tim Bulkley, living in Northern California after spending over a decade in Brooklyn.

As usual, the show will begin at Chez Hanny at 4 p.m. on Sunday, June 30. As always, the venue will be Hanny’s house at 1300 Silver Avenue, with the performance taking place in the downstairs rumpus room. Those planning to attend should think about making a donation. $25 is the preferred amount; and checks will be accepted, as well as cash. All of that money will go to the musicians. There will be two sets separated by a potluck break. As a result, all who plan to attend are encouraged to bring food and/or drink to share. Seating is first come, first served; and the doors will open at 3:30 p.m. Reservations are preferred and may be made by sending electronic mail to jazz@chezhanny.com.

SFGMC’s Love-Themed Program at Davies

Last night the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus (SFGMC) returned to Davies Symphony Hall to perform their third annual concert. A reduced ensemble of San Francisco Symphony performers was joined by pianist Danny Sullivan. The conductor was SFGMC Artistic Director Jacob Stensberg, also serving as Master of Ceremonies to introduce the works on the program, whose title was All We Need Is Love.

I was a bit surprised that the program did not include the selection with the name of the entire performance. However, there was so much rich content being performed that I could not quibble over such a minor factor. That diversity was reflected by the fact that only three of the composers on the program were familiar to me. Curiously, these were the first three selections on the program.

This began with the second movement from David Conte’s “Elegy for Matthew Shepard.” The text by John Stirling Walker reflected on the death of the 21-year old student at the University of Wyoming, who was beaten, tortured, and left to die for his sexual orientation. Text sheets were not included with the program, but the clarity of the vocal delivery could not have been better. (There were also American Sign Language interpreters at the front-right corner of the stage.) This was followed by the oldest work on the program, the cycle by Ralph Vaughan Williams entitled Five Mystical Songs. The last familiar composer was Michael Tilson Thomas (present for the occasion), whose “I’d Like to Learn” was given a choral arrangement by Nicolas Perez. In addition, the first half of the program concluded with the world premiere performance of “The Promise that Tomorrow Holds Today,” composed by Dominick DiOrio setting his own text.

The biggest surprise for me during the second half of the program was the discovery that “My Way,” best known by its 1969 recording by Frank Sinatra, was not an original tune. The music began as a ballad by French composer Jacques Revaux, who later reworked it with Claude François into “Comme d’habitude” (as usual), which made the top of the French pop chart in February of 1968. It was subsequently given an English version by Paul Anka with the title “My Way;” and the rest, as they say, is history. However, SFGMC turned back the clock to deliver a choral version of “Comme d’habitude” in an arrangement by Saunder Choi.

The members of The Lollipop Guild in an urban setting (from an SFGMC Web page)

The second half of the program also featured selections performed by two smaller ensembles of chorus members. The smaller of these was HomoPhonics, which presented “Elastic Heart,” the only work on the program with accompaniment from a beat box. Somewhat larger was The Lollipop Guild with Music Director Paul Saccone, which performed Aled Phillips’ arrangement of “Biblical,” a single recorded by Calum Scott that seems to have been composed by a committee.

The other high point of the second half was a partnership with the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company with semi-staged direction by Rodney Earl Jackson Jr. and choreography by Christine Chung. The music was “I, Too, Sing America,” composed by Othello Jefferson, whose own texts were combined with those of Langston Hughes. This was clearly the most elaborate undertaking of the evening, making the best of the limited space available for performance.

Taken as a whole, the program was an ambitious undertaking; but it was thoroughly engaging from beginning to end.