Chamber Music San Francisco: Califax

Yesterday afternoon in Herbst Theatre, Chamber Music San Francisco began its 2025 season with the first of the ten programs to be performed in San Francisco. The season was the last one to be planned by Daniel Levenstein, who has passed the torch of Executive Director to Jeanette Wong. Wong provided some engaging remarks, but Levenstein's spirit clearly permeated the atmosphere.

Calefax musicians Jelte Althuis, Raaf Hekkema, Bart de Kater, Oliver Boekhoorn, and Alban Wesly (photograph by Sarah Wijzenbeek, from the Press Web page on the Calefax Web site)

The performers that Wong introduced were the members of the Calefax quintet. All of them played wind instruments; but this was not the standard wind quintet of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn. Instead, there was both a clarinet (Bart de Kater) and bass clarinet (Jelte Althuis), along with oboe (Oliver Boekhoorn), saxophone (Raaf Hekkema), and bassoon (Alban Wesly). The absence of flute and horn makes for a narrower spectrum of timbres. Personally, I came away feeling that the overall texture was far more muddled than that of the “standard” quintet. Sadly, much of the program involved transcriptions of meticulously conceived counterpoint by composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Domenico Scarlatti, all of which got lost in that muddle. For that matter, the capacity for arrangement could not even cope with the piano music of Claude Debussy, whose original conception of his Estampes suite was far richer in both coloration and rhetoric than anything Calefax could muster.

It has been quite some time since I have had to do all it took to resist squirming my way through two hours with no redeeming virtues, and I hope that the members of Calefax all belong to orchestras that are more likely to help them earn their livings.}