Old First Concerts: November, 2024

After the relatively quiet months of September and October, Old First Concerts (O1C) programs will pick up a bit with four performances in the month of November. These will take place during the first half of the month before the onset of seasonal programming at the end of the year. For those that do not already know, these performances take place at Old First Presbyterian Church, which is located at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue.

All of the offerings will continue to be “hybrid,” meaning that live streaming will also be available. General admission tickets will be sold for $30, with reduced rates for seniors, students, and children age twelve and under. Hyperlinks to the event pages, which include information about all 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:

Sunday, November 3, 4 p.m.: Orphic Percussion is a quartet of percussionists all based in the Bay Area: Sean Clark, Michael Downing, Divesh Karamchandani, and Stuart Langsam. They have commissioned over 30 pieces to build up their repertoire. Five of those pieces will be included in this program:

1. “Muse of Fire” by Alexis Alrich
2. “Rendezvous I” by Gary Heaton-Smith
3. “Stress and Flow” by Alejandro Vinao
4. “Series of Accidents” by Shaun Tilburg
5. “Stuck in Loops” byu Kenneth Froelich

The program will also include Marc Mellits’ “Gravity” and “Donner” by David Skidmore.

Friday, November 8, 8 p.m.: Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) last visited Old First in September of last year. For this year’s visit, the only founding member to perform will be pianist Margaret Halbig. However, she will be joined by three diverse instrumentalists, Laura Reynolds alternating between cor anglais and oboe, violinist Lylia Guion, and Megan Chartier on cello. The program will include three world premiere performances; and three of the contributing composers, Mary Bianco, Vivian Fung, and Ursula Kwong-Brown will participate in a pre-concert talk moderated by Brennan Stokes.

Sunday, November 10, 4 p.m.: Pianist Lynn Schugren will present a solo recital entitled The Voice of the Piano. Her program will survey works from the previous and present centuries, beginning with one of Amy Beach’s last compositions, her Opus 148 Five Improvisations. The other two twentieth-century works will be sonatas by, respectively, Louse Talma (1943) and Miriam Gideon (1983). The earliest work from the current century will be Joan Tower’s “Ivory and Ebony,” completed in 2009. There will be two pieces by Frances Brouwer completed last year: “Flight” and “Fear of the Deep.” The program will conclude with a world premiere performance of “The Caryatids” by Alexis Alrich.

Kurt Erickson, Heidi Moss Erickson, and John Parr in the banner for this month’s LIEDER ALIVE! performance (from the O1C event page)

Sunday, November 17, 4 p.m.: As readers probably know by now, O1C is hosting all of the recitals in the thirteenth annual Liederabend Series presented by LIEDER ALIVE!  Soprano Heidi Moss Erickson, accompanied at the piano by John Parr, will give the West Coast Premiere of excerpts from Kurt Erickson’s Each Moment Radiant. This will celebrate Erickson’s ten years of service as Composer-in-Residence for LIEDER ALIVE! The program will also include selected works by Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, and Richard Strauss.

Box Set of a Conductor Who Deserved Better

Back cover of the box showing the original album sleeves of all of the recording in the collection being discussed (from the Amazon.com Web page)

The full title of the latest box set to be released by Sony Classical is Louis Lane Conducts the Cleveland Orchestra – The Complete Epic and Columbia Album Collection. Lane joined at Cleveland Orchestra as an apprentice conductor to George Szell in 1947. He then “went through the ranks” through a series of promotions: Assistant Conductor in 1955, Associate Conductor in 1960, and Resident Conductor in 1970. Many probably know the stories about how Szell could not tolerate the pianist Glenn Gould, so Lane conducted Gould’s performances in Cleveland.

Sadly, none of those performances were included in the new Sony Classical box set. Indeed, only the last four of the fourteen CDs in this collection cite Lane as conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. The other thirteen cite him as leading either The Cleveland Pops Orchestra or The Cleveland Sinfonietta. Mind you, there is more than a little substance in those last four CDs. One of them accounts for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 334 divertimento in D major, which extends to six movements in duration. Another is the complete ballet score for The Creatures of Prometheus, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 43. Where dance history is concerned, this is a bit of an outlier, with choreography that predated first the Italians and then the Russians. A more contemporary approach to ballet can be found in the album of suites from “The Wise Virgins” (arrangements of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach by William Walton) and “The Good-Humored Ladies” (Vincenzo Tommasini’s orchestrations of the keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti). Finally, there is an interesting “first symphonies” album, coupling Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 1 in C minor with Franz Schubert’s D. 82 (first completed) symphony in D major.

For better or worse, none of the preceding CDs in the collection are in my wheelhouse. I suspect that the collection of arrangements of tunes from Broadway shows is the most cringe-inducing, but I have no trouble with listeners that would take that CD to be their favorite! Also, there are opportunities to listen to the works of composers who are now pretty much forgotten, such as Arthur Foote, Morton Gould, and Walter Piston. Indeed, if I have any affection at all for the pops genre, it would be for Gould’s “American Salute,” which I played in high school!

Nevertheless, I do not see myself returning to this collection with much frequency!

LCCE to Celebrate Schoenberg’s 150th Birthday

Arnold Schoenberg at work (photograph provided courtesy of LCCE)

Arnold Schoenberg was born on September 13, 1874, meaning that his 150th birthday was celebrated last month. Jonathan Khuner marked the occasion with a Celebrating Schoenberg concert series, which included a performance by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) of a melodrama, whose full title is “Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds ‘Pierrot lunaire’” (three times seven poems from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire). Next month LCCE will begin its own 2024/25 season, and the title of the first program will be Fall Cabaret: Pierrot Lunaire.

The entire program was conceived to explore the extremes of drama and poetry within the intimate setting of chamber music. The texts for Schoenberg’s score will be delivered by soprano Nikki Einfeld, but they will not be sung in the conventional sense of the word. Rather, the texts are delivered in a style called Sprechstimme (spoken singing). Schoenberg wrote his own foreword for the published score, in which he tried to explain the vocal technique as follows:

The goal is certainly not at all a realistic, natural speech. On the contrary, the difference between ordinary speech and speech that collaborates in a musical form must be made plain. But it should not call singing to mind, either.

By way of disclaimer, I should make it clear that I am no stranger to this technique or to how it is performed. This was due primarily to the commitment of six students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, who prepared a performance for the end of the fall semester of 2009. Their performance of Schoenberg’s score was so successful that they remained as a group after graduating, calling themselves Nonsemble 6.

For next month’s performance, Einfeld will be joined by Stacey Pelinka on flute, Jerome Simas on clarinet, Anna Presler on violin, Tanya Tomkins on cello, and pianist Eric Zivian. Matilda Hofman will conduct. The second half of the program will offer two selections. The first of these will be Five Haiku, the LCCE 2022 Composition Contest Winner composed by Tomàs Peire-Serrate. The program will then conclude with “Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories,” scored for soprano and chamber orchestra by Maria Schneider with English translations of the texts by Mark Strand.

The San Francisco performance of Fall Cabaret will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 2. 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. General admission will be $35 with a $15 rate for students and $5 for those affiliated with Arts Access. All tickets may be purchased online through a single TIX Web page. They may also be dowloaded and printed at home at no extra charge.

Shoji Returns to Davies as Concerto Soloist

Violinist Sayaka Shoji (photograph by Laura Stevens, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Japanese-born violinist Sayaka Shoji first performed in Davies Symphony Hall in 2017. She was the concerto soloist when the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic presented their Great Performers Series concert. Last night she returned to Davies, this time making her debut as concerto soloist with the San Francisco Symphony under the baton of Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen.

This time there was again a “Russian flavor” to her appearance. Her concerto selection was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 99 in A minor. While this has been cataloged as his first violin concerto, it is actually a revision of an earlier effort, which had been cataloged as Opus 77. The fact is that Opus 77 was completed in 1948, but the music itself was not published until after it was performed in 1955. The soloist was David Oistrakh, who had a hand in revising the solo part.

To some extent the concerto can be described as “a long night’s journey into day.” One would have thought that 1948 would have been a time of relief over the conclusion of World War II, but Shostakovich could never shake the fear that Stalin and his cronies would be looking over his shoulder. Thus, the opening Nocturne movement is far bleaker in its rhetoric than any of the nocturnes we would associate with Frédéric Chopin or Claude Debussy. This is followed by a frenetic Scherzo movement with Shostakovich’s “autograph” motif DSCH (D, E-flat, C, B natural). The third movement is a dark reflection on a stately dance form that dates back to the early seventeenth century, the passacaglia. The concerto then concludes with an energetic Burlesque in A minor, which wraps up with a triumphant A major conclusion.

Salonen was right at home in delivering all of Shostakovich’s rhetorical twists and turns, and his chemistry with Shoji could not have been better. This was a seriously demanding concerto, but she was consistently responsive to all the challenges the composer had set for the soloist. As might be expected, she responded to the audience demand for an encore, turning to the “usual” source of violin encores, the Caprices for Solo Violin by Niccolò Paganini. To the best of my memory, her selection was the 21st, a lyrical account of multi-string bowing. [update 10/6, 6:25 a.m.: According to Steven Winn’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Paganini encore selection was “a variation and coda on a theme by Giovanni Paisiello.”]

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Johannes Brahms’ Opus 98 symphony in E minor. This was the last of his four symphonies, and it is particularly distinctive. In the context of last night’s program, a key distinction was the passacaglia structure of the final movement. However, this is less of a stately dance and more of a defiant challenge to fate (nodding, perhaps, at Ludwig van Beethoven). Each embellishment of the basic theme (little more than a chord progression) develops its own unique dark twist. Indeed, the overall disposition could almost be taken as a reflection on Shostakovich’s concerto through one of those warped fun-house mirrors. Salonen knew exactly how to evoke that disposition in all four of the movements, allowing the music to unfold its full intensity all the way up to the final cadence.

This was very much an evening that will be long remembered.

American Bach: Remainder of 36th Season

Following up on the annual American Bach Summer Festival this past July, it is now time to review what has been planned for the remainder of the season. This will consist of three concerts in the Discovery Series, for which listeners can take advantage of subscription rates, and three “seasonal” concerts to account for both Christmas and New Year’s Eve. As in the past, all Discovery Series concerts will take place in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church at 1111 O’Farrell Street, on the southwest corner of Franklin Street, beginning at 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoons. The Christmas concerts will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Grace Cathedral, which is located at the top of Nob Hill at 1100 California Street. The New Year’s Eve offering will begin at 4 p.m. in Herbst Theatre, which is entered on the ground floor of the Veterans Building of the San Francisco War Memorial at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Jeffrey Thomas will conduct all performances; and the specific dates, in chronological order, are as follows:

Sunday, October 27: The Discovery Series begins with a program entitled Baroque Extravagance. The “extravagance” will involve five imaginative works, each by a different composer. The program will begin with an early example of program music by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, “Die musikalische Fechtschul” (that last noun meaning “fencing school”). This will be followed by Georg Philipp Telemann’s TWV 55:G2, an eight-movement “Ouverture-Suite” entitled La Bizarre. The next selection will be a more conventional violin concerto in A minor by Giuseppe Tartini. This will be followed by the more dramatic “Battalia à 10” by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, supposedly reflecting the composer’s reactions to the Thirty Years’ War. Finally, the ensemble’s namesake will be honored with a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1064R concerto for three violins in D major.

Thursday, December 12: Christmas festivities will begin with a program that couples the first part of Bach’s BWV 248 Christmas Oratorio with the Christmas portion of George Frideric Handel’s HWV 56 oratorio Messiah.

Friday, December 13: This will be the one and only performance of HWV 56 in its entirety, and it tends sell out long in advance of the event itself.

Tuesday, December 31: As in the past, this will be a program that couples overtures with Baroque opera arias and duets. This year the vocalists will be soprano Maya Kherani and countertenor Eric Jurenas. Most of the selections will be taken from Handel operas … seven of them! There will also be selections from three operas by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Finally, there will be one excerpt from Cesare e Cleopatra, the three-act opera composed by Carl Heinrich Graun in 1742.

Sunday, February 23: This will be a concert performance of Handel’s HWV 49 opera Acis and Galatea. The title roles will be sung by tenor James Reese and soprano Hélène Brunet. The other characters in the opera are Polyphemus (bass Mischa Bouvier) and Damon (tenor Michael Jankosky).

The ABS “vision” of Bach’s “paradise” (from the Web page for this concert)

Sunday, April 6: The season will conclude with a program entitled Bach’s Paradise, consisting entirely of compositions by you-know-who! The focus will be on three cantatas involving solo vocalists: BWV 4, 106, and 182. Those performers will be soprano Elijah McCormack, countertenor Kyle Tingzon, tenor Steven Soph, and baritone David McFerrin. The program will then conclude with BWV 1051, the sixth (and last) of the “Brandenburg” concertos.

Delightful Donizetti from Royal Opera House

Cover design for the DVD being discussed (from its Presto Music Web page)

Some readers may recall that, about a month ago, I wrote my “Appreciation of Nadine Sierra” article, in which I wrote about the Metropolitan Opera telecast of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, in which she sang the title role. Yesterday afternoon lightning struck my television set again, this time while viewing a Royal Opera House DVD of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. This was a production staged by Laurent Pelly with Sierra in the role of Adina. Hopelessly-in-love-with-her Nemorino was sung by tenor Liparit Avetisyan. Nemorino’s rival is the sergeant Belcore (baritone Boris Pinkhasovich). The title character (as such) is Dr. Dulcamara (bass Bryn Terfel) looking, for all the world like Zero Mostel (which would be entirely consistent with Mostel’s role in The Producers). Led by conductor Sesto Quatrini, all four of them had a solid command of the score, as did soprano Sarah Dufresne in the role of Giannetta, Adina’s “sidekick.”

Taken as a whole, this is basically a lighthearted boy-finally-gets-the-girl-he-loves narrative. However, Terfel was decidedly the scene-stealer in this production; and there was never a dull moment when he was on stage. Thus, however familiar the story may have been, there was a freshness to the action throughout the entire production that encouraged the attentive viewer to just sit back and enjoy the ride. This may be little more than lighter-than-air entertainment, but I shall definitely take it before any opera seria by Donizetti any day!

Ian Scarfe to Kick Off New Groupmuse Series

Ian Scarfe at the keyboard (from the Groupmuse Web page for this month’s Centuries of Sound recital)

Readers may recall that, this past April, the Century Club of California hosted a Groupmuse performance by pianist Ian Scarfe and his colleagues from the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival that featured the suite that Aaron Copland extracted from the music he composed for Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring.” This marked the end of a series of Groupmuse concerts for the season, and the new season will begin towards the end of this month. The title of the series will be Centuries of Sound, and the first performance will be a solo recital by Scarfe.

The first half of the program will be structured around Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, and their close friend Johannes Brahms. Scarfe will begin with Schumann’s Opus 18 “Arabeske” in C major. This will be followed by the F major “Notturno” from Clara’s Soirées musicales collection. The first half of the program will conclude with two movements from Brahms’ Opus 116 collection of seven Fantasies. These will be the fourth and fifth pieces, both entitled “Intermezzo” in the keys of E major and E minor, respectively.

The second half of the program will explore a variety of approaches to virtuosity by five different composers. Scarfe will begin with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G-sharp minor, the penultimate selection in the Opus 32 collection of thirteen preludes. This will be followed by Alexander Scriabin’s prelude in G-flat major, presumably from his Opus 11 collection of 24 preludes in all major and minor keys. (He later wrote another prelude in the same key for his shorter Opus 16 collection.) The next selection will be the “Notturno” from Ottorino Respighi’s Sei pezzi per pianoforte (six pieces for piano) collection. Somewhat more familiar, at least to some, will be Franz Liszt’s “Un Sospiro,” the last in his three Concert Études collection. Scarfe will then conclude the program with a selection of études by Philip Glass.

The Century Club of California is located at 1355 Franklin Street, between Post Street and Sutter Street. However, all arrangements must be made through a Groupmuse Web page. Ticket prices begin at $25, with $5 to hold a reservation. Doors will open at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, October 27; and the performance should begin around 2:15 p.m. Drinks will be provided (both with and without alcohol); and this is being presented as a “kid-friendly event.” However, the club itself is not wheelchair accessible.

Retrospective Rodrigo from Giulio Tampalini

Giulio Tampalini on the altar of the Church of Santa Giulia (from the penultimate Midweek Melodies video)

September was a busy month (which was no surprise); and, as a result, I was “otherwise engaged” when the sixth of the eight videos in the Midweek Melodies series of performances released by OMNI on-Location became available. However, today saw the release of the seventh video, which is also the penultimate offering in the series. For those that do not recall, this series began with a performance of “Fandango,” the first piece in Joaquín Rodrigo’s Tres Piezas Españolas (three Spanish pieces), which he dedicated to Andrés Segovia, followed by the performance of “En los trigales,” released almost exactly a month ago. Today guitarist Giulio Tampalini continued his “Rodrigo cycle” with a performance of a third piece, entitled, once again, after a dance form, “Passacaglia.”

Many readers probably know that, while the passacaglia was a stately dance, the music was structured around a basic theme that would be repeated with more and more elaborate variations. (This is particularly evident in what is probably the best known composition in this structure, the BWV 582, composed in the key of C minor by Johann Sebastian Bach and structured  as a set of variations, which then climax with an extended fugue.) One has to wonder if Rodrigo had been inspired by Bach, because his own variations are just as intricately developed. Nevertheless, Tampalini’s performance never flags in rising to the challenge imposed by each variation. Indeed, given my long-time acquaintance with BWV 582, both the music and the performance had me on the edge of my seat as Tampalini negotiated the stream of elaborate complexities.

Once again, the video was captured at the previous performance site for this series, L’Oratorio e la Chiesa dei Disciplini, which is located in the town of Orzivecchi in the Italian province of Brescia. Daniel Lama was responsible for both video and audio. The latter could not have been more satisfying. More to the point, however, the camera work provided a generous number of insights into the fingerwork required to achieve a satisfying account of Rodrigo’s score. Having been exposed to an engaging diversity of Rodrigo compositions, I have to say that this one commanded my attention from beginning to end, even if the overall duration was less than ten minutes!

Only one more video remains in this series, which will be released at 10 a.m. one week from today.

SFBC to Begin Season with Bach “Family Reunion”

Poster for this month’s SFBC concert (from the current SFBC home page)

This month will see the beginning of a new season of the San Francisco Bach Choir (SFBC), led by Artistic Director Magen Solomon. The title of the program will be Fruit from the Bach Family Tree. Many readers familiar with Johann Sebastian Bach probably already know that he was only one of many musicians in the family. Many of them were ancestors. However, two of his sons have found a secure place in many, if not most, music history texts. The younger of these, Wilhelm Friedemann established himself as an organist, first in Dresden and then in Halle. Better known tends to be Carl Philipp Emanuel, who first served Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia (later known as Frederick the Great) and then moved to the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, where he was able to maintain a successful career as a “free agent.”

Because SFBC has not yet announced the final program, it is not yet known how much of the family will be represented. However, for those trying to identify the names on the above poster, Johann Ambrosius Bach (located under the word “Fruit”) was Sebastian’s father. That said, Sebastian will probably account for most of the program, which will include solo works for organ (played by Arthur Omura) and cello (William Skeen), along with accompanied suites, sonatas, and partitas.

The performance will take place at Calvary Presbyterian Church, which is located at 2515 Fillmore Street, on the northwest corner of Jackson Street. It will begin at 4 p.m. on Sunday, October 20. General admission will be $40. Seniors aged 62 and older will be admitted for $35, while there will be a student rate of $15. Those under eighteen will be admitted without charge. Ticketstripe has created a Web page through which all levels of tickets may be purchased, along with an option for streamed video for $25. However, the video will be released two or three weeks later, after which it will be available for viewing through December 15. The Web page also includes an option for donations, which will be welcome and presumably tax-deductible.

Concerts at the Cadillac: Christie Aida

Christie Aida performing with the Free Press quartet (from the Free Press home page)

The next Concerts at the Cadillac program will feature vocalist Christie Aida, who has made a reputation through the extent of her vocal range. She will be accompanied by the Free Press quartet in which Alex Spoto will alternate between violin and guitar. Rhythm will be provided by Dave Michael on percussion, bassist Fernando Rodriguez, and Billy White on a variety of keyboards.

As usual, this show will begin at 1 p.m. on Friday, October 11. The Cadillac Hotel is located at 380 Eddy Street, on the northeast corner of Leavenworth Street. All Concerts at the Cadillac events are presented without charge. The purpose of the series is to provide high-quality music to the residents of the hotel and the Tenderloin District; but all are invited to visit the venue that calls itself “The House of Welcome Since 1907.”

Peter Bernstein’s New Quartet Album

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of DL Media)

My last encounter with guitarist Peter Bernstein was in March of 2022, when Smoke Sessions Records released Perpetual Pendulum, a trio album with Bernstein performing with Larry Goldings on organ and drummer Bill Stewart. I was particularly taken by the impact of the trio’s “cool disposition.” That disposition can now be encountered in a new Smoke Sessions release with Bernstein leading a quartet, whose other members are Brad Mehldau on piano, bassist Vicente Archer, and Al Foster on drums. The title of the album is Better Angels, which is also the title of one of the four tracks composed by Bernstein.

I suppose what draws me most to this album is the clarity with which Bernstein delivers his thematic lines, often through an interaction with Mehldau. As might be guessed, Mehldau is given ample opportunity to improvise; and his capacity for engagement is consistently enjoyable. Nevertheless, no attentive listener would accuse him of “upstaging” Bernstein. To the contrary, there are any number of give-and-take episodes that will sustain the attention of anyone interested in jazz improvisation.

I have been following Smoke Sessions releases for almost three years. I am glad that they “have my number,” because I am seldom (never?) disappointed. The production team for these albums seems to appreciate the needs of those dedicated to listening to jazz attentively; and there are no end of engaging turns for such attentive listening over the course of Perpetual Pendulum. It often seems as if those opportunities are getting increasingly rare when I go out to listen to jazz performances, so I am deeply indebted to a recording label that satisfies my needs so well. Now that I have had my second encounter with Bernstein on this label, I am looking forward to what will come next!