SFCO: 2025–2026 MainStage Season

Since August tends to be the month in which concert-goers finalize their subscription plans, it seems timely to offer a preview article for the 2025–26 season of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra (SFCO). Those familiar with this ensemble probably know that there is no charge for admission; and all that is required is an RSVP, which is conveniently achieved on a concert-by-concert basis through hyperlinks on the Web page for MainStage Concerts. However, as of this writing, the only hyperlinks that have been enabled are those for the first two of the four programs of the season. Specifics for all of those programs in San Francisco, which will begin at 7:30 p.m., are as follows:

 

Jory Fankuchen leading SFCO in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church (courtesy of SFCO) 

Friday, October 17, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, Celebrating Robin!: As might be expected, the soloist for this program will be Concertmaster Robin Sharp. She will be soloist in a performance of Max Bruch’s first violin concerto. The program will begin with Luwig van Beethoven's “Egmont” Overture. This will be followed by selections from Jennifer Higdon's Dance Card suite.

Tuesday, December 30, Herbst Theater, The Revolutionary Artist: As was the case last year, I am not quite sure how to “decode” the title of this program. It probably refers to the seventh symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven, but it could also apply to Niccolò Paganini. Violinist LIsa Saito will make her debut performing the first movement of his first violin concerto. The program will begin with the fourth movement of the third symphony by Louise Farrenc, who was probably regarded as “revolutionary” simply for composing symphonies!

Friday, February 27, Taube Atrium Theater, Seeing Double: I am not sure how to “decode” the title of this program. It will begin with “Scene Symphony,” composed for string orchestra by Jens Insen on a SFCO commission enabled through support from the National Endowment for the arts. Harpsichordist Jory Vinikour will be soloist in a performance of the concerto for harpsichord and orchestra by Philip Glass. The program will then conclude with Joseph Haydn's Hoboken I/49 symphony, given the title “La Passione.”

Friday, May 1,  Taube Atrium Theater, The Young Masters: This title refers to composers that got their start at an early age. It will included two “fifths,” the first the violin concerto by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (K. 219 in A major, known as the “Turkish”) and the fifth symphony of Franz Schubert (D. 485 in B-flat major).

For those that do not already know, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church is located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street, and the Taube Atrium Theater is located on the fourth (top) floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue.

 

Personal Memories of Tom Lehrer

1967 photograph of Tom Lehrer performing in Copenhagen (published in the booklet for the album The Remains of Tom Lehrer, from the Wikimedia Commons Web page for the Copenhagen photographs, public domain)

This morning I learned about the death of Tom Lehrer through my news feed from THE GUARDIAN. My first encounter had been through one of my fellow secondary school students, who introduced me to one of his albums. After the first track, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” I was hooked! Those irreverent lyrics were a breath of fresh air for me, reinforced by my learning that his “day job” involved teaching mathematics. In spite of the fact that a few of his songs made fun of Harvard University, I did not realize that, when I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we were both living in Cambridge. However, it turned out that, during my graduate student days, he was a friend of my landlord’s family.

As a happy coincidence, I was dating my landlord’s daughter from time to time. Her parents were separated, and she lived with her mother. It turned out that Lehrer was a “friend of the family;” so, when he paid a visit to her mother, I received an invitation to join the company. I suppose that the fact that I was a graduate student in Applied Mathematics may have had something to do with the meet-up, but I suspect that my familiarity with his albums had more to do with the invite. Somewhat to my surprise, the conversation went far more smoothly than I would have anticipated. However, what really interested Lehrer was my familiarity with Al Carmines. This was when the latter’s off-Broadway musical In Circles had become a smash hit. Given that the source of the texts was Gertrude Stein, the success of the musical was quite a surprise to many. As a result, I was as familiar with Carmines’ lyrics as I was with many of Lehrer’s most irreverent songs!

I do not know if Lehrer ever met Carmines; but I do know that Carmines was a very affable person, who probably would have enjoyed the encounter!

Center for New Music: August, 2025

As was the case this month, next month there will again only two performances at the Center for New Music. This time, however, one of them will be the monthly G|O|D|W|A|F|F|L|E|N|O|I|S|E|P|A|N|C|A|K|E|S. As most readers probably know by now, the venue is located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of the Golden Gate Theater, which is where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. Each of the below dates is hyperlinked to an event page through which tickets may be purchased as follows:

Saturday, August 2, 7 p.m.: The program will present music recorded pm The Garrote label. There will be three solo sets, performed, respectively, by bassoonist Gabi Vanek (who also plays contrabassoon), vocalist Aurielle Zeitler (who performs under the name Ghost Marrow, abetted by synthesizer), and electric guitarist Mat Ball. There will also be a final set in which the three musicians will collaborate. Between the sets, Joshua Ford, found of the label, will serve as DJ, playing tracks from the album Flagellant Songs. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members and students.

Poster design for this month’s pancake event (from its Web page)

Saturday, August 9, noon: This month’s G|O|D|W|A|F|F|L|E|N|O|I|S|E|P|A|N|C|A|K|E|S will be the usual opportunity to listen to “bleeding edge” music. As was the case last month, there will be five sets. This time all of the names will have “bleeding edge” eccentricities as follows:

• Xome (Sac)
• Article Collection
• Fognozzle
• Mystic Commandos
• Wilderman

Also as was the case last month, general admission will be $10 with a $6 rate for C4NM members and students. [added 8/6, 8:55 a.m.:

Saturday, August 23, 7:30 p.m.: The month will conclude with a gathering of five improvisers, all of whom will probably be familiar to those that have attended past C4Nm events. The performers will be Fred Frith (guitar), Thomas Dimuzio (electronics), Ben Goldberg (clarinet), Larry Ochs (saxophone), and Scott Amendola (drums and electronics). No further details have been provided as of this writing. Most likely, there will be both solo improvisations and a diversity of groups of different sizes.]

Reflecting on the Death of Gary Karr

Actually, the above-mentioned reflection may be the realization that I seem to be spending more time reading obituaries as I get older. I suspect that my awareness of those reflections was the key reason for my using an obituary for Lalo Schifrin, who died late last June, to trigger my fond memories of two of his albums from the last century The Dissection and Reconstruction of Music From the Past as Performed by the Inmates of Lalo Schifrin’s Demented Ensemble as a Tribute to the Memory of the Marquis de Sade and Return of the Marquis de Sade, which I classified as “serious fun” when I wrote about them after reading the Schifrin obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle. This afternoon, those reflections spread out from a composer to a virtuoso soloist.

Bassist Gary Karr showing how he would travel with his instrument (photograph by Grumman and Murtha Associates, from his New York Times obituary)

That soloist was Gary Karr, and he died of a brain aneurysm a little less than two weeks ago (July 16) at the age of 83. Karr was a virtuoso on the double bass. Some readers may recall that I evoked his name at the end of this past April after a San Francisco Symphony (SFS) chamber music program included a composition by Giovanni Bottesini. At that time I identified Bottesini as “one of the leading double bass players of the nineteenth century;” but, given that his skills extended from performing to composing, it would probably be fair to say that he was the leading bass player of the century. (As might be guessed, he was enough of a show-off to compose works so demanding that he knew that none of his contemporaries would be skilled enough to play them!)

In all the recitals I attended, Karr was never shy about providing each of his selections with verbal introduction. As I wrote in my account of that April performance, those introductions would include reflections on his instrument such as “You just want to hug it!” and “Think of it as chocolate!” Those reflections emerged from memory while listening to the April performance Bottesini’s “Passione amorosa,” originally composed for two basses and piano and transcribed for a quartet of bassists: Charles Chandler, Bowen Ha, Orion Miller, and Daniel G. Smith (SFS Associate Principal). (It would not surprise me to learn that the transcription was a group effort.)

Fortunately, Karr left a generous number of albums for posterity, available through a Web page on his Web site. I was a bit taken aback from his photograph at the “header” of his Web site. However, my encounters with his performances all date back to the Eighties. He was less than five years older than I am; but one of the things I liked about sitting in the audience for one of his recitals was a feeling that our spirits were “on the same page.” Sadly, once I left the greater New York area in 1985, I pretty much lost touch with his concert schedule.

Under his influence, I added two CDs to my collection. Sadly, he was not the soloist on either of them. Nevertheless, had it not been for my recital encounters, I probably would have allowed my interest in Bottesini to wane. Thus, while I have no “audio record” of his performances, they led me to recordings of three other equally imaginative bassists: Wolfgang Güttier and Klaus Stoll in Germany and Robert Oppelt in the United States.

The Bleeding Edge: 7/28/2025

One might say that this week on the Bleeding Edge will be both modest and busy. The only events within the San Francisco city limits will be taking place on Thursday, July 31; but there will be three of them! They are likely to overlap, but also likely is that each will appeal to different tastes. Start times and venues are as follows:

6 p.m., San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch: Unless my archives are mistaken, the last encounter with the Del Sol String Quartet was when the visited they San Francisco Conservatory of Music this past March. I found it more than a little perplexing that BayImproviser did not take the trouble to identify the individual members of this ensemble: violinists Benjamin Kreith and Hyeyung Sol Yoon, Charlton Lee on viola, and cellist Kathryn Bates. They will contribute to an event called Everybody’s Climate 2025 with a full-length performance of The Jingwei Bird. The program will consist entirely of new works by Asian-American composers with settings of bilingual poetry contributed by Genny Lim. For those that do not already know, the venue is located in the Civic Center at 100 Larkin Street; and, because this is a library, there will be no charge for admission!

Saxophonist JustKing Jones (from the BayImproviser Web page for his visit to San Francisco)

7 p.m., Black Cat Jazz Supper Club: Saxophonist JustKing Jones will lead a quartet, whose other members will be pianist Jordan Williams, Jason Clotter on bass, and drummer Malcom Charles. He has just returned from his GENESIS Tour of Europe, which took him to Paris, Dublin, London, and Newcastle. His style is based in modern jazz with both gospel and Caribbean influences. This evening will be the first of a three-night residency. The Black Cat Supper Club is located in the Tenderloin at 400 Eddy Street.

7:30 p.m., SF JAZZ Center: This will also be the beginning of residency, this time lasting four nights through Sunday. The Sun Ra Arkestra will present a program entitled (true to the spirit of its founder) We Travel the Spaceways. For those unfamiliar with Ra, that spirit blends big band swing with his spirit of “cosmic jazz” and “Afro-futurist pageantry.” Each night will present a different set, all led by saxophonist Knoel Scott. Those that like to “sit still and listen” to their jazz should be informed that, on the positive side, there will be a different set each night; but all four performances will be open dance-floor events! The Center is located at 201 Franklin Street on the northwest corner of Fell Street.

Voices of Music Reviews Recurring Bass Lines

The title of today’s offering in the Sunday Mornings at Ten video series, compiled by Voices of Music and now available through a YouTube Web page, was Ciaconna! The program explored the approaches of six different composers from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in inventing variations on a simple repeated bass line. For most of those compositions, the bass line was the “Folia,” whose Wikipedia page describes it as “one of the oldest remembered European musical themes.”

Screenshot of the full Voices of Music ensemble performing Geminiani’s arrangement of Corelli

One of those composers was Arcangelo Corelli; but, presumably for the sake of variety, he was not represented by the “Folia” theme. Rather, the program began with the Ciaconna movement from the last of the twelve sonate da camera trio sonatas collected in his Opus 2. Corelli was the first composer on the program, followed by Andrea Falconieri, Antonio Bertali, Maurizio Cazzati, Tarquinio Merula, and Francesco Geminiani. That last was the latest of the bunch, represented by his arrangement of Corelli’s approach to the “Folia” variations. This was performed at a “Christmas special” concert involving the largest ensemble of musicians represented by the entire video. I sometimes think that Geminiani’s personal motto was “More is better,” particularly since his arrangement of Corelli’s approach to the “Folia” involved 24 movements!

A Daily Dose of François Couperin

When I left Palo Alto to “officially” begin my retirement in San Francisco, I had to give up my Baldwin grand piano, which was totally unsuitable for a unit in Opera Plaza. Instead, I kept the Yamaha Clavinova, which I had purchased in Singapore prior to my move to Silicon Valley in 1995. Believe it or not, that instrument is still with me, as reliable as it had been when it was my only keyboard instrument in Singapore.

One of the things I Iiked about about the instrument was that, in addition to two “stops” for two different kinds of piano (concert grand and, presumably, spinet), it also had a harpsichord option. While this would not account for the full richness of sonorities of most models of that instrument, it gave me the opportunity to discipline myself away from leaning on a damper pedal. As a result, I decided to begin working my way through my two Dover volumes of the Complete Keyboard Works of François Couperin.

Olivier Baumont on the original cover of his Couperin box set

By that time I had acquired the 2018 Warner Music Group release of recordings of those complete works by harpsichordist Olivier Baumont. Ironically, this overlapped with an encounter with the American harpsichordist Mark Kroll, who had begun his own recording project of the same content with the first of the resulting eight CDs being released in November of 2016. As a result I now have two complete accounts of all of Couperin’s 27 ordres, along with the pedagogical L’Art de toucher le clavecin in the Baumont collection.

I have found that, for the most part, my piece-by-piece progress advances with one composition at a time. Every now and then, I encounter a trickier piece than usual; but I do not think I have ever needed to dwell on any selection for more than two weeks. Mind you, my results never rise to the standards of what one would expect to hear in a professional performance; but just getting to know the pieces with my fingers, rather than my CD player, has made for one of the ways that I now live from one day to the next!

I assume that this is the sort of thing that Couperin had in mind when he prepared these compositions for publication!

Nadine Sierra’s Verdi at the Met

This morning I had the opportunity to catch up on a Great Performances at the Met program, which had first been broadcast by PBS on April 2, 2023. The offering was the first opera by Giuseppe Verdi that I came to know in its entirety, La Traviata. The encounter was due to the fact that I was preparing a series of programs for the campus radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devoted entirely to recordings of the conductor Arturo Toscanini. Before he moved to the United States, Toscanini had been Music Director at La Scala in Milan; so the recordings of Italian opera that he made in the United States could not have been informed by better experience.

One of the operas he recorded during his tenure as Music Director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra was La Traviata. When I first listened to that album, I was already familiar with tenor Jan Peerce and baritone Robert Merrill in the roles of Alfredo Germont and his father Giorgio, respectively. However, the “title role” of Violetta Valery provided me with my first encounter with soprano Licia Albanese. Now that I have the complete Arturo Toscanini Collection on CDs, Traviata remains one of the most-visited albums in the set.

Since my student days, I have had several opportunities to see this opera performed on the stage. Nevertheless, I wanted to view the PBS offering because the “title role” of Violetta Valery was sung by soprano Nadine Sierra. Like many of the “rising talent” that I encountered through San Francisco Opera, Nadine Sierra was an alumna of the Merola Opera Program, performing Adina in Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’ amore in the summer of 2010. She then became an Adler Fellow of the San Francisco Opera and was the beneficiary of an extended solo in the San Francisco Opera world premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’ Heart of a Soldier.

Nadine Sierra and Stephen Costello on one of Violetta and Alfredo’s more romantic moments (from the preview video on the PBS Great Performances Web page for this production)

It goes without saying that Traviata is a significant departure from the operas cited in that last paragraph. Nevertheless, the role of Violetta fit Sierra like a glove. Furthermore, the staging of her relationships with the Germont family could not have been better. This was particularly evident in how she handled her encounters with Giorgio (baritone Luca Salsi). Alfredo was sung by tenor Stephen Costello, who found just the right rhetorical devices for dealing with both Violetta and his father Giorgio.

Given that I have been both listening to and watching this opera since my undergraduate days, some might wonder why I have not had an “enough is enough” moment. The fact is that every director must choose his own approach to the personality traits for each of the three leading characters. Michael Mayer was particularly astute in establishing how Giorgio’s traits evolve as the plot unfolds. Each of the three principal characters has a “learning curve;” but, by the time the narrative is in its final stages, it is clear that Giorgio’s journey has the most to communicate to the audience! Salsi clearly seems to have appreciated this asset. We knew what to expect from Sierra and Costello, but Salsi’s interpretation of his role was the one that reverberated in memory!

Omni Video of Mēla Guitar Quartet at St. Mark’s

Mēla guitarists Matthew Robinson, George Tarlton, Michael Butten, and Zahrah Hutton (screenshot of the video being discussed)

Late this morning the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest Live form St. Mark’s video. This captured the entirely of the Dynamite Guitars program performed at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church this past March 8. The performers were the members of the Mēla Guitar Quartet: Matthew Robinson, George Tarlton, Zahrah Hutton, and Michael Butten.

Some readers may recall that they had previously appeared in an OMNI on-location video release at 10 a.m. this past March 3, serving somewhat as a preview for the performance taking place the following Saturday. The “preview video” was of the overture to Mikhail Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, which happened to be the final work before the intermission on the March 8 program. Glinka took five years to compose this opera, completing it in 1842; and these days it tends to be known for little more than that overture. Mind you, when it came to instrumentation, Glinka knew how to pull out all the stops, so to speak. Clearly, the Mēla sonorities were somewhat more limited; but they allowed for better appreciation of the thematic content!

Indeed, in the overall course of their St. Mark’s performance, Mēla never shied away from composers that were all too eager to show off rich instrumentation. The program included two further opera selections by Camille Saint-Saëns (the Opus 47 Samson and Delilah) and Englebert Humperdinck (Hansel and Gretel). The guitarists were just as deft in taking on French keyboard music by both Claude Debussy (the two “Arabesques” compositions) and Maurice Ravel (two movements from Ma mère l’Oye, the “Mother Goose” piano duet).

The fact is that only two of the composers in the program were guitarists creating music for their instrument. The first of these was Laura Snowden, whose “My Clock is Broken!” included percussive effects deftly provided by Hutton. The other was Phillip Houghton, whose Opals was a suite of three movements, each involving a different color of the mineral: black, water, and white.

The duration of the entire video was about 90 minutes. There were only a few moments of reflection on the audience in St. Mark’s for which Mēla was performing. Sadly, I was at another event in the Civic Center when this concert took place; so I am glad that Omni recruited Matthew Washburn to proved a “video capture” of the entire performance.

SFP Shenson Great Artists and Ensembles

Regular readers probably know that, in the coming 2025–26 season, the Shenson Foundation will continue to support the Spotlight Series of recitals presented by the San Francisco Symphony. In the past, it has also supported the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Chamber Series. However, in the second, third, and fourth months of next year, SFP will present The Shenson Great Artists and Ensembles Series. This will consist of three duo performances and one by a string quartet augmented with double bass.

As usual, all of the concerts will take place in Herbst Theatre, beginning on Friday evenings at 7:30 p.m. The entrance to Herbst is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. The specific dates and their related performers are as follows:

February 20: Violinist Jennifer Koh is a favorite of Bay Area audiences. During the pandemic she commissioned 39 short compositions (each less than six minutes in duration), each from a different composer, recording them all on the Cedille Records album Alone Together. For her return to SFP, she will present a new work by Tania Léon (one of the contributors to Alone Together). The other recent work will be “Tocar” by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died a little over two years ago. Each of these selections will be followed by a sonata by a more “traditional” French composer. The first half of the program will conclude with Maurice Ravel’s second violin and piano sonata, whose second movement was given the title “Blues.” The final work on the program will be Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 13, his first violin sonata in the key of A major. Koh will be accompanied at the piano by Thomas Sauer.

March 20: Violinist Augustin Hadelich has made several visits to Davies Symphony Hall, but this will be his SFP debut. His accompanist will be Francesco Piemontesi, who has prepared arrangements of two pre-classical compositions. One of these is “La Boucon” (the button), a keyboard composition by Jean-Philippe Rameau. The other is “Recit du Chant,” composed by the seventeenth-century French organist Nicolas de Grigny. The most recent work on the program will be György Kurtág’s Tre Pezzi (three pieces). Those pieces will be complemented by three duo sonatas by (in order of appearance) Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc, and César Franck.

March 27: The Dover Quartet, whose members are violinists Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violist Julianne Lee, and cellist Camden Shaw, last performed for SFP when the group launched the 2021–2022 season with the first concert in that season’s Shenson Chamber Series. For their return visit, they will be joined by double bass virtuoso and composer Edgar Meyer. They will perform a quintet composed by Meyer. The remainder of the program has not yet been announced.

Anthony McGill with his clarinet (from the SFP Web page for his coming recital)

April 3: Clarinetist Anthony McGill’s last SFP appearance took place at the end of last year, when he performed with the Pacifica Quartet. This time he will give a duo recital, accompanied at the piano by Gloria Chien. Program specifics have not yet been announced.

Subscriptions are now on sale for $310 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $270 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $230 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through an SFP Web page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. When single tickets go on sale, they may be purchased by visiting the specific event pages. The above dates provide hyperlinks to the appropriate Web pages.

“Abandon All Logic, Ye Who Enter!”

It may strike some as frivolous to distort the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri to make a point about the recent broadcast of a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida in the Great Performances at the Met series. However, as I watched the narrative unfold, I found it hard to resist an often-invoked fable in which logic takes it on the chin. It involves an encounter between a frog and a scorpion trying to cross the Nile River. Ironically, one of the better versions of this tale was quoted by Shai Baitel in an article he wrote for The Jerusalem Post back in February of 2011. Here is his version of the text:

A frog and the scorpion, met one day on the bank of the River Nile, which they both wanted to cross. The frog offered to carry the scorpion over on his back provided the scorpion promised not to sting him. The scorpion agreed so long as the frog would promise not to drown him. They mutually agreed to the deal and started to cross the river. Half-way to the other bank the scorpion stung the frog with his venom. "Why did you do that?" gasped the frog, as it was dying. "Why?" replied the scorpion, "I couldn’t help it. This is the Middle East.”

Screen shot of Radamès leading his troops to report to the King of Egypt on their latest victory

Where Aida is concerned, one could modify this story with a punch line about grand opera, rather than the Middle East. With apologies to William Shakespeare, Aida (soprano Angel Blue) and Radamès (tenor Piotr Beczała) are “star-crossed lovers” from the very first scene of the very first act when Radamès sings “Celeste Aida” (heavenly Aida). After that, it is downhill for both of them, culminating in slow death in a sealed-up vault. However, one of the more interesting elements of the staging by Gary Halvorson is that Amneris (mezzo Judit Kutasi), daughter of the King of Egypt (who planned her marriage to Radamès), reconciles herself to the fate of her own wedding that would never happen.

To be fair, most opera-lovers go to Aida for the spectacle. In that context, Halvorson definitely knew how to dish it out to the fans. More often than not, the stage is filled with not only the principal characters but also a plethora of both dancers and choral singers. The good news is that, working with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Halvorson could establish just the right pace at which each episode would lead seamlessly into the next. As a result, what could have been a here-we-go-again performance emerged at a pace through which attention could be maintained without boredom ever overtaking it.

Would I save the video I recorded for future viewing? Probably not. Once is enough, but at least I was not overtaken by restlessness!

SFB: Plans for 2025–2026 Season

The grand pas de deux in the second act of Helgi Tomasson’s The Nutcracker performed by Jasmine Jimison and Fernando Carratalá Coloma (from the Web page for the coming SFB season)

Given that this site first announced the 2024–2025 season of San Francisco Ballet (SFB) in November of last year, some may think that this article is appearing significantly early than usual. Nevertheless, SFB released its plans for the new season at the end of April; and, since summer activities tend to be relatively quiet, now is as good a time as any to inform readers! As usual, most of December will be devoted to Helgi Tomasson’s staging of The Nutcracker; and the specific dates and times will be forthcoming to accommodate preparations for the holiday season.

The 93rd season will begin with the usual Opening Night Gala on January 21. Dates for the season performances next year have been set as follows:

• January 23–February 1: Resident Choreographer Yuri Possokhov’s interpretation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin will be given its world premiere.
• February 10–15: Balanchine: Father of American Ballet will present three of George Balanchine’s most iconic works: “Diamonds,” the third and final ballet in Jewels; “Serenade,” the first ballet created for American dancers; and “Stars and Stripes,” Balanchine’s most overt celebration of Americana.
• February 27–March 8: The Blake Works is a full evening ballet by William Forsythe, receiving its SFB premiere and setting the music of James Blake.
• March 19–29: The Don Quixote ballet created jointly by Helgi Tomasson and Yuri Possokhov will return to the War Memorial Opera House stage.
• April 10–16: La Sylphide, originally choreographed by Filippo Taglioni in 1832, is the tragic tale of a young Scottish farmer seduced by a mystical sylph.
• April 24–May 3: Mere Mortals was created by choreographer Aszure Barton to explore the implications of artificial intelligence.

A Web page has been created for the coming season. This includes a hyperlink created for subscription alternatives. Nutcracker tickets are currently available only to season subscribers. They will become available to the general public in late September.

New Omni Video of Castelnuovo-Tedesco

The latest OMNI on-Location video was released yesterday morning, but this morning provided my first opportunity to view it. This was a duo offering by guitarist Giovanni Masi with Raffaele Ficuciello on flute. The selection was by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, his Opus 205, a three movement sonatina composed in 1965.

Giovanni Masi and Raffaele Ficuciello performing the Castelnuovo-Tedesco sonata being discussed (from their YouTube video)

Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed two guitar concertos, the first, his Opus 99 in D major, dedicated to Andrés Segovia. However, he was particularly prolific in both solo guitar music and chamber music including the guitar. As might be guessed, the sonatina was relatively brief, about a quarter of an hour in duration. Each of the three movements “says its piece” with a limited rhetoric of brevity. Nevertheless, within that limited duration, the interplay between the two musicians was an engaging one, even if it seemed (as above) that each was intently focused on his own instrument.

I know Castelnuovo-Tedesco best through my recordings of guitarist Andrés Segovia. His chamber music includes the Opus 143 quintet for guitar and strings. My recording of this performance also includes instrumental excerpts from Platero y yo (Platero and I), scored for guitar and a narrator reciting poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez. In that context, Opus 205 is more in the “short and sweet” genre; but brevity did not detract from the engaging delivery of the composer’s music by Masi and Ficuciello.

SFP 2025–2026: Hear Now and Then Series

To the best of my knowledge, Hear Now and Then is a new series launched for the 2025–2026 season of San Francisco Performances (SFP). According to the booklet for the new season, the series was conceived to “explore music from one thousand years in the past to how the future of music might sound.” That sounds like an ambitious undertaking for only three performances. Nevertheless, I have every reason to believe that the performers, both vocalists and instrumentalists, will be up to the task.

All performances will be weekend events, all beginning at 7:30 p.m. The first will be on a Friday with the other two on Saturday. The Friday performance will take place at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church (1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street); and the other two will be in the Civic Center at Herbst Theatre (on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue).The specific dates and their related performers are as follows:

Friday, December 5: Trio Mediæval vocalists Linn Andreas Fuglseth, Anna Maria Friman, and Jorunn Lovise Husan will return to St. Mark’s having last performed there for SFP in April of 2023. They are an a cappella ensemble based in Norway. They have an impressively diverse repertoire; but, for their return to SFP, they will present a program devoted entirely to the music of Hildegard of Bingen.

Davóne Tines (left) with members of Ruckus and some of their instruments (from the SFP Web page for his performance)

Saturday, February 7: Baritone Davóne Tines will explore the vocal repertoire from the Baroque period (George Frideric Handel) to the immediate present. He will be accompanied by Ruckus, declared by SF Classical Voice to be “the world’s only period-instrument rock band.” Further information about the contemporary composers is forthcoming; but the program will also include traditional hymns, songs, and reels.

Saturday, April 18: The series will conclude with a solo flute recital by Claire Chase. She was a San Francisco Symphony Collaborative Partner during the 2022–23 season, giving a solo recital in February. On that occasion, she performed Marcos Balter’s “Pan,” is a 70-minute piece scored for flute, live electronics, and an ensemble of community performers. This was part of a 24-year project to create a new body of flute music leading up to the 100th anniversary of composer Edgard Varese’s 1936 flute solo, “Density 21.5.” Having arrived at that anniversary year, she will present a program entitled Density 2036.

Subscriptions are now on sale for $190 for premium seating in the Orchestra, the Side Boxes, and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $170 for the center rear of the Dress Circle and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $150 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. (These prices include $65 for all seating in St. Mark’s.) Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through an SFP Web page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. When single tickets go on sale, they may be purchased by visiting the specific event pages. The above dates provide hyperlinks to the appropriate Web pages.

SFCMP Announces Plans for 55th Season

A little over a week ago, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) announced plans for its 2025–2026 Concert Season. It has been inspired by the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, and the title of the season will be American Reflections: Hear/Now. American Reflections will be the title of each of the four programs to be presented during this 55th concert season. Once again, the schedule will be a “movable feast” involving the alternation between two different venues. Dates, times, and venues, along with subtitles for each program, will be as follows:

John Adams, who will provide the “bookends” for the new SFCMP concert season (photograph by Deborah O’Grady)

Sunday, November 16, 4 p.m., Brava Theater, Exuberance: This will be the West Coast premiere of “First Work,” completed on a commission this year by Samuel Carl Adams. This will conclude the first half of the program, while the second half will conclude with “Chamber Symphony,” composed by John Adams (Sam’s father) in 1992. The Brava Theater is located in the Mission at 2781 24th Street.

Saturday, January 31, 8 p.m., Taube Atrium Theater, Fire & Lightening: “Mosaic,” composed by Elliott Carter for harp and ensemble, will received its West Coast premiere. The harp soloist will be Amy Ahn. The venue is located on the top floor of the Veterans Building, which is on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and McAllister Street.

Saturday, April 11, 7:30 p.m., Taube Atrium Theater, Steps Toward Ascent: The featured composer will be Steve Reich with the performance of his “Jacob’s Ladder,” composed in 2023.

Saturday, May 16, 7:30 p.m., Brava Theater, Full Circle: John Adams will return, providing the season with its “bookends.” Appropriately enough, his second offering will be “Son of Chamber Symphony.” This was completed in 2007, about fifteen years after “Chamber Symphony.”

The Web page for this season has already been created. This will provide a much more thorough account, along with options for both individual and season tickets. As in the past, seating will continue to be by general admission.

LPO Plays Four Compositions by Tania León

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of PIAS)

This Friday will see the latest release of an album produced by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO). It presents four compositions by the Cuban-born American composer Tania León, three of which are world premiere recordings. Two of them are conducted by Edward Gardner: “Raíces” (origins) and “Pasajes.” The other world premiere is of “Stride,” conducted by Dima Slobodeniouk. These are all preceded by “Horizons” conducted by Karina Canellakis. (From a “local point of view,” both Canellakis and Gardner will be returning to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony in the coming season, the first in early November and the second in mid-January.)

I have a vague memory that, when I moved to Connecticut in the fall of 1981, I had tried to touch base with León through what amounted to a classical music dating service. Nothing came of that effort, and my encounters with her music have been relatively sparse. Nevertheless, I wrote about her “Elegia a Paul Robeson” when it was performed by Ensemble for These Times in January of 2024 and “Pasajes” through a Live from Orchestra Hall Webcast of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in December of 2022.

The release of this new album has provided me with my first opportunity to give León the seriously attentive listening she deserves. The overall dynamic range is a wide one, which may require many listeners to “ride” the volume control as the intensity rises and diminishes. It would probably be fair to say that instrumentation is the tip of León’s spear. The problem is that even the best of recording technologies tend to blunt that spear. From the point of view of information theory, recording technology does not accommodate the “bit rate” that is experienced when one listens to all those instruments in a concert hall.

Nevertheless, I am glad that I have added this album to my “physical resources.” However, I am not sure how many will share my motivation. What is most important is that my interest in León has reawakened, invoking a desire to make sure that I shall be there to listen the next time a performance of her music takes place here in San Francisco. The tracks on this album should serve well to prepare me for that next experience, particularly the most recent of them, “Raíces,” which was composed only this past year.

The Bleeding Edge: 7/21/2025

This will be a relatively quiet week on the Bleeding Edge. All of the venues will probably be familiar to regular readers, and two of them will be giving two performances this week. One of them is the continuation of a previously reported event, the next two revival performances of Audium VI on the 176 loudspeakers at Audium on Friday, July 25, and Saturday, July 26, at 7:30 p.m. The other is the Center for New Music, which will conclude its programs for this month with performances on Saturday, July 26 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, July, 27, at 2 p.m. The other two events are as follows:

New York trumpeter Dave Scott, who will be visiting the Black Cat Supper Club (from his BayImproviser Web page)

Wednesday, July 23, 7 p.m., Black Cat Supper Club: Trumpeter Dave Scott will be visiting from New York. He will lead a quartet, whose other members are pianist Leonard Thompson, David Ambrosio on bass, and drummer Mark Ferber. The club is located at 400 Eddy Street on the northwest corner of Leavenworth Street. Doors will open at 6 p.m.

Friday, July 25, 7 p.m., Medicine for Nightmares: Angel is the performing name of guitarist and vocalist Angelo Idrovo. He is based in that part of the East Coast that used to be called Megalopolis. (According to Wikipedia, that is now a lower-case word; and the region is called the North East Corridor.) He has come to the Bay Area after a cross-country road trip. As most readers probably know by now, 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.

Another Round of Sunday Discoveries from VoM

I can only blame my busy schedule for the fact that I do not follow the Sunday Mornings at Ten videos released by Voices of Music (VoM) on a regular basis. My last encounter was a little less than two months ago at the end of this past May. While that program focused on eighteenth-century Amsterdam, today’s offering consisted of six relatively different works each by a different composer.

The program was framed by two of the most familiar composers of the Baroque period: Georg Philipp Telemann and Antonio Vivaldi. The performance began with the two-minuet (ABA form) movement from Telemann’s TWV 51:F1 recorder concerto in F major. The recorder also contributed to the Vivaldi concerto, joined by two solo violins, two oboes, mandolin, and harpsichord. Both of these were spirited performances, and the Vivaldi instrumentation made for a delightful journey of discovery.

As might be guessed, the program also included a take on a set of variations based on the “Folia” theme. To the best of my knowledge, this was my first contact with Andrea Falconieri. The performance was a little less than four minutes in duration, which made the full title a bit overly generous in expectations: “Folias echa para mi Senora Dona Tarolilla de Carallenos.” Hopefully, the dedicatee of this composition was pleased enough to make sure that the composer was well rewarded!

Another “first contact” was with Maddalena Sirmen. In the scope of music history, it is worth nothing that one of her violin concertos (perhaps the one performed on this video) made a deep positive impression on Leopold Mozart. Violinist Shelby Yamin definitely made this a memorable listening experience for me!

Screen shot of Amanda Forsythe’s performance of a song by John Dowland with Cristiano Contadin (one of the accompanists) in the background (from the YouTube video of this specific selection)

Finally, soprano Amanda Forsythe gave a ravishing account of John Dowland’s “Go crystal tears.” Accompaniment was provided by four Elizabethan viols performed by Elisabeth Reed, Farley Pearce, Cristiano Contadin, and WIlliam Skeen, joined by David Tayler on lute. This was followed by the first of the fifteen short sonatas by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, usually known collectively as the Rosary Sonatas. This is a cycle of sixteen pieces. The first fifteen are reflections on the New Testament, concluding with a secular passacaglia.

The entire journey lasted a little more than half an hour; but, as consistently seems to be the case with these VoM video offerings, there was never a dull moment.

The SFP 2025–2026 Chamber Series

As I continue to prepare readers for the 2025–26 season of San Francisco Performances (SFP), I shall now turn my attention to the coming Chamber Series. For the past several years, each of the programs in this recital series will feature a different visiting string quartet. This season will be no exception, and all of these events will take place at 7:30 p.m. on three different days of the week.

As usual, all of the concerts will take place in Herbst Theatre. The entrance to Herbst is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. The specific dates and their related performers are as follows:

Friday, November 14: The series will begin with the return of the Modigliani Quartet, which last visited SFP at the beginning of April of 2023. On that occasion they performed works by (in order of appearance) Giacomo Puccini, Felix Mendelssohn, Antonín Dvořák. This time they will shift their attention to the First Viennese School. Joseph Haydn will take the “center” of the program with a performance of the second quartet, in F major, in the Opus 77 “Lobkowitz” collection. The intermission will be followed by the first of the three “Razumovsky” quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven, Opus 59, Number 1, in F major. The program will begin with György Kurtág’s Opus 1, his first string quartet, composed in 1959. There has been no change in the membership of this ensemble: first violinist Amaury Coeytaux, second violinist Loïc Rio, violist Laurent Marfaing, and cellist François Kieffer.

Brentano String Quartet members Serena Canin, Mischa Amory, Nina Lee, and Mark Steinberg (from the SFP Web page for their recital in March)

Thursday, March 26: The Brentano String Quartet last visited SFP during its 40th anniversary season. They led off the Great Artists and Ensembles Series at the beginning of December of 2019. This is another ensemble with “staying power,” since the members are violinists Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin, violist Misha Amory, and cellist Nina Lee. They will devote their entire program to Haydn, but specifics have not yet been finalized.

Tuesday, April 14: The last time that the Danish String Quartet visited SFP, their program in October of 2022 included (as I put it) “one of those rare encounters with the string quartets of Robert Schumann.” This time the seldom-encountered composer with be Alfred Schnittke with a performance of his second string quartet. Schnittke is known for his “sharp edges;” and there is no shortage of them in this composition. Fortunately, the ensemble will “warm up” the audience with Igor Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, a suite of episodes extracted from his score for the “Pulcinella” ballet. (One of the reasons this music is affable is that the thematic material originated in the eighteenth-century compositions by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi.) For the remainder of the program, the ensemble will perform their own arrangements of traditional Nordic music. The members of the quartet have not changed since their last visit: violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, who share the leadership chair, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin.

Thursday, April 16: The series will conclude two days later with the return of the Ébène Quartet (Quatuor Ébène). This is the one ensemble with a change in personnel with the arrival of cellist Yuya Okamoto. The other members have not changed: violinists Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure and Marie Chilemme on viola. They have framed their program with “second quartets” from two of the “Three Bs” composers. The program will begin with the second of the six Opus 18 quartets, composed by Beethoven in the key of G major. It will conclude with the second of the two Opus 51 quartets by Johannes Brahms, composed in the key of A minor. The “middle” work on the program will be Claude Debussy’s only string quartet, composed in 1893 in the key of G minor.

Subscriptions are now on sale for $300 for premium seating in the Orchestra, the Side Boxes, and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $260 for the center rear of the Dress Circle and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $220 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through an SFP Web page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. When single tickets go on sale, they may be purchased by visiting the specific event pages. The above dates provide hyperlinks to the appropriate Web pages.

Another Eighteenth-Century Violin Virtuoso

The eighteenth century was a good period for violin virtuosos. These days the best known of them was Antonio Vivaldi, but he was one of too many to enumerate. This coming Friday Challenge Classics will release an album of music by one of the less familiar of those virtuosos. The Italian composer Francesco Maria Veracini is best known for publishing sets of violin sonatas. In his General History of Music (consisting of four volumes) Charles Burney acknowledged his “great share of whim and caprice” but then went on to write that “he built his freaks on a good foundation, being an excellent contrapuntist.” Given how music history has progressed since then, it is hard to think of Veracini as freakish, but there is no arguing with his virtuosity.

Violinist Eva Saladin on the cover of her Veracini album (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

This Friday Challenge Classics will release a new album, which will challenge (so to speak) the listener to decide how freakish Veracini’s music is to the contemporary ear. The fourteen tracks are all taken from the composer’s Opus 2, Sonate Accademische a Violino Solo e Basso. The violinist is Eva Saladin, with cellist Daniel Rosin accounting for the “Basso.” Continuo is provided by Johannes Keller at the harpsichord.

The tracks shuffle the movements selected from the twelve Opus 2 sonatas. This was apparently the result of Saladin following the composer’s own advice, published in the preface:

In view of the fact that each of these twelve sonatas consists of four or five movements, it is pointed out that this was done for the sake of the richness and ornamentation of the book, and also in order to offer amateurs and dilettantes of music greater pleasure. Otherwise two, or even three movements, chosen at one’s own discretion, are sufficient to form a sonata of appropriate length.

The duration of the entire album is a little over an hour and five minutes. This is a far cry from “a sonata of appropriate length,” leading this listener to wonder just how the album should be approached. Personally, given the current affordances of technology, I would have preferred to have all of the Opus 2 movements at my disposal, from which I could then exercise my “own discretion” without any limitations imposed!

Voices of Music Announces 2025–2026 Season

Once again, Voices of Music has announced four concerts for its 2025–2026 season. The first two will take place in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music building at 50 Oak Street. The remaining two will then move to the Old First Presbyterian Church at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue. Subscriptions for the entire season are currently on sale for prices between $220 and $140. A single Web page has been created for processing both subscriptions and individual events. General admission for individual concerts will be between $63 and $10. Program details have not yet been finalized; but dates, venues, and program titles for the four concerts are as follows:

Saturday, November 8, 7:30 p.m.: The title of this program will be The Voice of the Viol, but it will honor the Italian printer Ottaviano Petrucci. While Petrucci is often misidentified as the first publisher of sheet music with movable type, he was the first publisher of polyphonic music. The program will feature familiar composers published by Petrucci, such as Josquin des Prez and Heinrich Isaac. Vocalist Danielle Reutter-Harrah will perform with an ensemble that will demonstrate their new set of early Renaissance viols.

Saturday, December 20, 7:30 p.m.: This year mark’s the 300th anniversary of the publication of Antonio Vivaldi’s Opus 8, Il Cimento dell’armonia de dell’inventione. For those unfamiliar with the title, the first four concertos have a title of their own, which is far more familiar: The Four Seasons! The program will also include one of the composer’s concertos for four violins. Participating violinists will be Elizabeth Blumenstock, YuEun Kim, Isabelle Seula Lee, and Augusta McKay Lodge.

Soprano Amanda Forsythe (from the Web page for the 2025–2026 season for Voices of Music)

Saturday, February 14, 7:30 p.m.: Valentine’s Day will be celebrated with a program entitled Love Songs from the 17th Century. The composers will be from England and Italy. The vocalist will be soprano Amanda Forsythe.

Saturday, April 18, 7:30 p.m.: The title of the final program will be The Secret Garden. These were built for relaxation and escape from urban line. Selections have not been finalized, but there will be a world premiere of a new work along with selections from the baroque and pre-baroque periods. Soprano Molly Netter will join the ensemble as vocalist.

Pocket Opera to Conclude Season with Offenbach

The Swedish Baron de Gondremarck (baritone Jonathan Spencer, right) with his baroness wife (soprano Madison Hatten, left) and Raoul de Gardefeu (Andrew Metzger, center)

Pocket Opera will wrap up its season with an opéra bouffe. As might be expected, the season will go out with raucous comedy. The music of Jacques Offenbach will support this comedy of Parisian life based on a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy. It involves the efforts of the Parisian dandy Raoul de Gardefeu (tenor Andrew Metzger) to seduce a baroness, more specifically La Baronne de Gondremarck (soprano Madison Hatten).

As usual, the performance will take place in the Gunn Theater at the Legion of Honor. It will begin at 2 p.m. on Sunday, July 27. As many readers probably know by now, the Legion of Honor is a component of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It is located at 100 34th Avenue, which is basically right in the center of Lincoln Park. General admission will be $89. Those age 30 and under may purchase tickets for $35. A Web page has been created for online purchases. Those visiting that page will quickly notice that not many seats remain available for purchase.

Miró Quartet Surveys Ginastera Quartets

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

It seems as if this year my encounters with the PENTATONE label seem to involve anniversaries. Almost exactly three months ago, I wrote about the Quatuor Diotima album devoted entirely to the “Livre pour quatuor” composed by Pierre Boulez, released a few weeks after the composer’s birth on March 26, 1925. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the Miró Quartet, which was founded by four students at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. One week from today, that occasion will be celebrated with the release of their latest album, devoted entirely to the complete (three) quartets composed by Alberto Ginastera. As most readers will probably expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for pre-orders.

Ironically, the booklet for his album never mentions the membership of this ensemble. According to their Wikipedia page, those members are violinists Daniel Ching and William Fedkenheuer, John Largess on viola, and Joshua Gindele on cello. Four of the five movements of the last quartet involves vocal settings of texts by Juan Ramón-Jiménez and Federico García Lorca). The vocalist for these tracks is soprano Kiera Duffy.

Ginastera was born on April 11, 1916 and died at the age of 67 on June 25, 1983. During my student days, his name received more attention than any opportunities to listen to his music, whether in performance or on recordings. There was a tendency to view his music as a Latin perspective on the Second Viennese School. While the advance material I received associated him with Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky, I found myself thinking more about Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite.”

The dates of the three quartets cover a generous span of the composer’s life: 1948, 1958 (revised in 1968), and 1973. That period covers the time I spent as a student at the campus radio station of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, I have to confess that, over that rather generous span on time, I do not think I ever encountered any of Ginastera’s music. I am pretty sure that none of my teachers had anything to say about him, meaning that, if I had encountered his name at all, it probably would have been through Time magazine!

That said, I have listened to this new quartet album several times. The ensemble had an Artist Residency at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), which included a recital in January of 2017; but I was unable to attend the performance. However, looking back about a decade earlier, I discovered I had encountered Ginastera’s second quartet there in November of 2008 as part of the String and Piano Chamber Music series of concerts. On the basis of what I wrote at that time, I would say that it reinforced the “Bartók connection,” which was further reinforced by the fact that Ginastera published an article entitled "Homage to Béla Bartók" in 1981! Those familiar with Bartók's fifth string quartet (number 102 in András Szöllősy's chronological Sz. numbers) are likely to agree with that reinforcement!

SFCS to Bring Brahms “Requiem” to Davies

Readers familiar with the music of Johannes Brahms will probably appreciate the above scare quotes. The Wikipedia page for A German Requiem found the right way to describe this music. It is “sacred but non-liturgical.” This means that each of the eight movements is a setting of text from the German Luther Bible. All of these texts are explicitly identified in the Wikipedia Web page for this composition.

Robert Geary conducting SFCS and a full orchestra in Davies Symphony Hall (photograph by Kristen Loken)

This will be the fourth year of the Summer Festival Chorus presented by the San Francisco Choral Society (SFCS). As readers might guess, this year (as was the case last year) the program will be devoted to a single composition, which will be A German Requiem. As in the past, instrumental accompaniment will be provided by the California Chamber Symphony. Readers familiar with the music know that there are solo passages for only two vocalists. For this performance they will be soprano Cara Gabrielson and baritone Andrew Pardini. Artistic Director Robert Geary will conduct.

There will be only one performance, which will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, August 16, in Davies Symphony Hall, on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and Grove Street. Tickets prices are $49, $65, and $80; and they may be purchased through a City Box Office Web page. As usual, that Web page includes a “map” showing which tickets are available in which sections. $20 Rush Tickets will be available at the door for those with a college student ID.

Matt Haimovitz Takes on Schnittke Cello Concerto

My interest in Alfred Schnittke probably predates my commitment to serious writing about music. The earliest additions to my collection of recordings were the CDs released by BIS in the late eighties. These were, for the most part, provocative; but they never failed to pique my curiosity. The first time he appeared on this site was at the end of April of 2007, when my obituary for Mstislav Rostropovich cited his interest in the "Suite in the Old Style,” which I was fortunate enough to hear him perform when I was living in Singapore.

I was reminded of that occasion when I learned that the latest album of cellist Matt Haimovitz is devoted entirely to a performance of Schnittke’s first cello concerto. This was completed in 1986, followed by a second concerto in 1990 (which was dedicated the Rostropovich). While the “Suite” was readily accessible (if one could appreciate the many tongue-in-cheek gestures), most of the Schnittke repertoire is known for sharper edges punctuating a rhetoric of despair. As an exile from the Soviet Union (for touring with “foreign” orchestras), Rostropovich could appreciate that rhetoric.

The Haimovitz album was released at the end of last month. As of this writing, its Pentatone Web page supports only download or streaming with no word as yet of a “physical” release. From a personal point of view, I would not recommend streaming. Those that know a thing or two about information theory will quickly appreciate that Schnittke’s compositions require far more “information bits” than can be easily managed in “real time.” Put in more pedestrian terms, any Schnittke recording requires several listening experiences before one can get one’s head around what the music is doing.

Matt Haimovitz playing Schnittke’s first cello concerto with Dennis Russell Davies leading the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Jeffrianne Young, from the booklet for the album being discussed)

That said, there is more than a generous share of expressiveness in Haimovitz’ cello work to encourage listener attention. He performs with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra led by its Principal Conductor, Dennis Russell Davies. Even when composing a concerto, Schnittke could be very generous in letting all the different sonorities of the ensemble have a say in the matter. There is definitely no shortage of that diversity in his cello concerto!

It is almost two decades since I began to add Schnittke recordings to my collection, and I still look forward to encounters with new releases with enthusiasm!

Chez Hanny to Begin August with Another Trio

Martin Nevin, Julian Shore, and Allan Mednard (photograph by Luke Marantz, courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz)

As was the case this month, the first Jazz Chez Hanny concert for next month will be a trio performance. The trio will be led by pianist Julian Shore, performing with Martin Nevin on bass and drummer Allan Mednard. The performance will feature tracks from Shore’s latest album, Sub Rosa, which was released at the beginning of this past June.

As usual, the performance will be on a Sunday afternoon, August 3, beginning at 4 p.m. Admission remains $25 payable through cash or check. There is also a Zelle option of transferring the $25 to jazz@chezhanny.com. Donations will also be accepted, which are tax-deductible.

These events usually consist of two sets separated by a potluck break. As a result, all who plan to attend should bring food and/or drink to share. Seating is first come, first served; and, as a result, reservations are strongly recommended. Reservations are placed through electronic mail to jazz@ChezHanny.com with a Subject line mentioning “jazz,” “Chez Hanny,” or “concert” to avoid being mistaken for spam. Mail messages received after noon on the day of a performance are unlikely to be seen until after the show is over, and cancellations should be given at least 24 hours advance notice. Those attending should be vaccinated but are accepted on the honor system, and masks are optional. Finally, volunteer efforts for cleaning up after the show and moving furniture to accommodate both players and listeners are always appreciated.

The “house” for this house concert is located at 1300 Silver Avenue. This is best reached by public transportation by taking the Muni 44 bus going east from Glen Park Station. For those thinking of driving, parking tends to be available on Silver Avenue, Silliman Street, one block south of Silver, and Holyoke Street, which connects Silver and Silliman.

The Bleeding Edge: 7/15/2025

Now that the holiday weekend has passed, things will pick up again on the Bleeding Edge. This will be a relatively active week. Only two of the events have already been reported:

1. The next two revival performances of Audium VI on the 176 loudspeakers at Audium on Friday, July 18, and Saturday, July 19, at 7:30 p.m.
2. The monthly G|O|D|W|A|F|F|L|E|N|O|I|S|E|P|A|N|C|A|K|E|S event on Saturday, July 19, at noon

The remaining events at familiar venues are as follows:

Tuesday (today), July 15, 7 p.m., Make-Out Room: This month’s Jazz at the Make-Out Room will present three sets, two of which will be solos. The soloists will serve as “bookends” for the program. Keyboardist Andrew Barnes Jamieson will take the opening set, and Sung Kim will conclude with an electronic set. Between them, Jaroba will lead a combo of winds, electronics, and invented instruments, which calls itself Infinite Monkeys. (Those wondering about the name of the group should check out the Infinite monkey theorem Web page on Wikipedia!)

As regular readers probably know by now, the Make-Out Room is located in the Mission at 3225 22nd Street. Doors will open at 6 p.m. There is no cover charge, so donations will be accepted and appreciated.

Thursday, July 17, 7 p.m., Black Cat Supper Club: Composer and pianist Thomas Linger will visit from New York. He will lead a quartet, whose other members are Asa Yuria on saxophones, drummer Michael Shekwoaga on drums, and bassist Felix Moseholm. He is likely to draw upon his latest album, Out In It for selections. The club is located at 400 Eddy Street on the northwest corner of Leavenworth Street.

Friday, July 18, 7 p.m., Medicine for Nightmares: This week’s Other Dimensions in Sound program will present two sets. Curator David Boyce will bring his reed work and electronics to a duo performance with PC Munoz, who will play broomstick, electric cajon, and percussion. The two of them call their combo Red Fast Luck. The second set will be taken by the Deciphering Broken Rhythms collective, an ongoing musical project of flutist Scott Oshiro. No information has been provided about any of the other members of the collective. 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.

Cover of the Cosmicomics album (from its Bandcamp Web page)

Friday, July 18, 8:30 p.m., Bird & Beckett Books and Records: Some readers may recall that, in February of 2020, Queen Bee Records released the Cosmicomics album. The music was an eleven-movement suite composed by bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, inspired by the stories of Italo Calvino collected under the same title. The Lisa Mezzacappa Five will perform this suite in its entirety. The combo is a quintet, whose other members are Arron Bennet on tenor saxophone, vibraphonist Mark Clifford, Brett Carson on keyboards, and drummer Jordan Glenn. Bird & Beckett is located at 653 Chenery Street, a short walk from the Glen Park station for both Muni and BART. The collections of books and records are pretty impressive, so be prepared for the urge to buy something there!

Saturday, July 19, 7 p.m., Medicine for Nightmares: Boyce will return to this venue for a second performance on electronics and saxophones. This time he will lead a trio called Broun Fellinis, whose repertoire is described as “Afrofuturist vibes and Metabolicous music.” His partners in crime for this gig will be Kevin Carnes, alternating between samplers and drums, and bassist Kirk Peterson. Once again, there will be no charge for admission.