Telegraph Quartet to Return to Noe Valley

Telegraph Quartet members (clockwise from upper left) Eric Chin, Jeremiah Shaw, Pei-Ling Lin, and Joseph Maile (photograph by Lisa Marie Mazzucco, from the TicketSource Web page)

Some readers probably know already that I have been following the Telegraph Quartet since its inception in 2013 and continue to do my best to keep up with them. Indeed, I was delighted to declare, about half a month ago, my delight at the fact that all four of the performers are still the founders: violinists Joseph Maile and Eric Chin, Pei-Ling Lin on viola, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw. Currently, they are the Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Michigan; but their touring schedule will take them back to San Francisco early next month. They will be joined on that tour with five selected Michigan students.

That tour will take them back to San Francisco. More specifically, all nine performers will visit the Noe Valley Ministry to present a program of chamber music from the early twentieth century (almost). That parenthesis accounts for the fact that the final work on the program will be Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 4, “Verklärte Nacht” (transfigured night). Schoenberg completed it in 1899, but it was not given its first performance until March of 1902, This will be complemented at the beginning of the program with Anton’s Webern’s Opus 5 string quartet, given simply the title “Fünf Sätze” (five pieces). This piece, which is almost microscopic, will be followed by the lengthier three-movement string quartet, Béla Bartók’s Opus 27 (Sz. 67), the second of the six that he composed.

The performance will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located in Noe Valley at 1021 Sanchez Street, just south of 23rd Street. There will be no charge for admission, but reservations are advisable. TicketSource has a created a Web page for making those reservations. As of this writing, over 50 tickets are available.

SFS: Music from the First Two Quarters of 20C

Léon Bakst’s set design for the first part of Michel Fokine’s “Daphnis et Chloé” ballet, which complements the rhetoric of Ravel’s music (Houghton Library at Harvard University, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Yesterday afternoon, the German conductor Jun Märkl made his debut leading the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). He was born in February of 1959 the son of a Japanese pianist mother and a German violinist father. He was a pupil of Sergiu Celibidache and also studied under Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa.

He prepared a program with music from the first two quarters of the twentieth century. He began with Béla Bartók’s second violin concerto, composed in 1938. The soloist for this performance was violinist Leonidas Kavakos. The second half slipped back about a quarter of a century for music Maurice Ravel provided for the ballet choreographed by Michel Fokine, “Daphnis et Chloé.” The rhetorical contrast of these two selections was significant; but, with the intervention of an intermission, one could easily appreciate (if not enjoy) the more-than-evident distances.

The latter composition tends to be better known for the two orchestral suites that Ravel extracted (particularly the second). However, between the notes in the program book and the titles for the episodes in each of the three score Parts, one could enjoy the spirit of the narrative, if not the “flesh” of how the ballet was performed. It would be fair to say that much of Ravel’s expressiveness had its roots in his keen sense of instrumentation. As a result, it may be possible that observing how the music unfolds could be just as interesting as the story that Fokine’s choreography conveyed.

Thus, while the performance of the ballet filled about one hour, that duration was just as well spent watching how Märkl elicited every rhetorical significance from all of the SFS musicians. Those acts of signification were just as evident in the abstractions of Bartók’s concerto. Those familiar with the composer would probably enjoy how his musicological studies of Hungarian folk music provided what might be called a “rhetorical context.” One might say that the spirit was lurking in the background, but the flesh had its own approaches to expressiveness!

Kavakos was clearly in his element in presenting that expressiveness to his audience. Mind you, Bartók’s approaches to instrumentation were as inventive as Ravel’s. As a result, the orchestral passages in the concerto basically provided the soloist with a rhetorical setting. Kavakos could then explore the dispositions of that setting, while, at the same time, negotiating more than a few technically tricky passages for good measure!

Both of these selections were probably familiar to those that have been attending SFS performances for some time. Mind you, my wife and I have been making regular visits to Davies Symphony Hall ever since we moved from Singapore back to the United States in 1995. By the time we had arrived, we had already committed ourselves to ticket for both SFS and San Francisco Opera. I suppose one of the things that makes such commitment rewarding is the opportunity to experience how a given piece of music can be interpreted in a variety of different ways.

Märkl took on two different rhetorical settings and knew exactly how to elicit convincing interpretations, and that approach to conducting is what makes for a satisfying listening experience.

Attacca Quartet Begins its Own SFP Series

Attacca Quartet members (clockwise from upper left) Amy Schroeder, Nathan Schram, Andrew Yee, and  Domenic Salerni (photograph by David Goddard, courtesy of SFP)

Some readers may recall that, this past June, San Francisco Performances announced that this current season would have a new three-concert series devoted entirely to performances by the Attacca Quartet. The series was given the title Contemporary Chamber, with the “mission” that each of the three programs would include at least one contemporary offering. That series began last night, and the contemporary composer was David Lang, represented by his two-movement “daisy.” That was complemented, after the intermission, by a series of nocturnes that began with Frédéric Chopin and concluded with Radiohead. Sadly, the program provided no specifics for that journey.

That may have been just as well. While the arrangement of Chopin was engagingly effective, none of the following nocturnal selections came even close to the Polish composer’s demanding standards. The listening experience reminded me of Winston Churchill’s famous definition of history: “One damned thing after another!” When coupled with Lang’s contribution, the entire core of the program came across as disappointing.

The good news is that the rest of the program was framed by two composers, both of whom had a prodigious command of the talent for creating music for string quartet. Joseph Haydn has been called the “Father of the String Quartet;” and his command of that genre yielded 83 compositions (the last being incomplete), all accounted for in Volume III of the Hoboken catalog. Last night’s selection was Hoboken III:48, the fifth in the collection of the six Prussian Quartets (Opus 50). This began the program, which concluded with the fourth of Béla Bartók’s six string quartets. Bartók may not have been as prodigious as Haydn, but he definitely had his own prodigious techniques of invention!

Both of these compositions were given solid and thoroughly engaging accounts by the four Attacca performers: violinists Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni, Nathan Schram on viola, and cellist Andrew Yee. My only quibble was the too-smooth transition from Radiohead to Bartók. This undermined the intensity of Bartók’s opening gesture, but my guess is that there were enough members of the audience that were already familiar with that gesture! For my part, expectation was already beginning to mount while Attacca galumphed its way through that muddled sequence of nocturnes!

Nevertheless, Attacca’s approaches to both Haydn and Bartók were so well informed in technique and so expressive in execution that any shortcomings in the overall program could be easily overlooked!

SFP: Attacca Series to Begin Tomorrow Night

Attacca Quartet members Amy Schroeder, Domenic Salerni, Andrew Yee, and Nathan Schram (photograph by David Goddard, courtesy of SFP)

For those that recall the announcement of the full San Francisco Performances (SFP) series by the Attacca Quartet, this will serve simply as a reminder! Those familiar with past recitals by this group probably already know that its members are violinists Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni, Nathan Schram on viola, and cellist Andrew Yee. The title of the full series is Contemporary Chamber, and the remaining two programs will take place next year on February 27 and April 12.

Tomorrow’s program will focus on two composers, both of whom were prolific in the string quartet genre. As might be guessed, the earlier of these is Joseph Haydn, who will be represented by his Hoboken III:48 quartet in F major, the fifth of the six quartets in his Opus 50 “Prussian” collection. At the other end, the program will conclude with what is probably the most adventurous of the string quartets to be composed by Béla Bartók, his fourth string quartet. The intermission will be preceded by David Lang’s “daisy” in the quartet’s own arrangement of the original score.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 11 (tomorrow). The venue will be Herbst Theatre, whose entrance 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. Ticket prices are $65 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $55 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $45 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through an SFP event page.

LCCE’s “Tale” of Two Centuries

Banner design for the concert being discussed (from its LCCE Web page)

Last night the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) concluded its season with a program entitled Spring Contrasts. The performance took place at the Noe Valley Ministry, and only three members of the group performed. These were clarinetist Jeff Anderle, Liana Bérubé on violin, and pianist Allegra Chapman. The concept of “contrast” had less to do with the seasons and more with a judicious interleaving of compositions from the both the last century and the current one.

The title was also reflected in the final selection on the program. Béla Bartók’s “Contrasts” is a three-movement composition involving all three of the performers. Through his ethnomusicological studies, Bartók had cultivated a keen ear for sonorities. Bérubé played on two separate violins, presumably to allow for a richer palette of those sonorities by having more open-stringed pitches. There are also significant contrasts across the three movements themselves. The first one is playful, almost to the point of silliness. The second draws on the “night music” rhetoric found in so many of Bartók’s works. The last is downright raucous. One could almost imagine this as a soundtrack for a cartoon. However, it would never have fit into the style of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. If Bartók had any animated film in mind, it would have been one of the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes!

The one composer on the program to “bridge” the two centuries was Robert Sierra. Only the first movement from his sonata for violin and piano was performed. He completed this piece in 2010; and, on the program, it was both preceded and followed by movements from Cinco Bocetos, a set of five “character pieces” for solo clarinet. In other words, all of the musicians had an opportunity to play Sierra’s music; and the interleaving served as a somewhat engaging suite unto itself.

The only weak offering in the program took place during the first half of the program. While Chapman seems to have done her best to give an account of the music, Hannah Kendall’s “Processional” lacked any sense of determination that one associates with a procession. Far more satisfying were the works flanking this piece on either side in the first half of the program. The Suite en Trio by Mel Bonis was originally composed for flute, violin, and piano; but Anderle’s clarinet work seemed to capture all the rhetorical devices that Bonis had in mind. Similarly, Kevin Day’s “Unquiet Waters” was composed for saxophone and piano; but Anderle was definitely up to capturing the underlying rhetoric of turbulence.

The instrumentation for this recital was significantly reduced, but there was no questioning the richness of the music that was delivered!

LCCE Concluding Season by Welcoming

Jeff Anderle, Liana Bérubé, and Allegra Chapman (courtesy of LCCE)

The final program in the 32nd season of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) will take place at the beginning of next month. The title of the program is Spring Contrasts; and it will showcase the contrasting timbres of violin (Liana Bérubé), clarinet (Jeff Anderle), and piano (Allegra Chapman). The most familiar work to be performed will be Béla Bartók’s “Contrasts,” whose clarinet part was first performed by Benny Goodman (who also commissioned the work). This will be preceded by two compositions by Roberto Sierra, excerpts from his Cinco Bocetos: Cancion de la Montana & Cancion del Campo and the first movement of his sonata for violin and piano. The other works on the program will be “Processional” by Hannah Kendall, Mel Bonis’ Opus 59, “Suite en Trio,”  and “Unquiet Waters” by Kevin Day.

The performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, June 9. As usual, 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. There is also a special “Arts Access” rate of $5. Tickets may be purchased online through a Tix Web page.

Guarneri in the 20th Century: a Modest Proposal

As most readers will probably expect by now, my journey through the 49 CDs in the Sony Masterworks box set Guarneri Quartet: The Complete Recordings 1965–2005 concludes in the twentieth century. I must confess that I was more than a little disappointed at how modest this repertoire was. There are only four CDs, three of which are devoted to Hungarian composers. The one “outlier” is the French album, which consists of the usual coupling of the only quartets composed by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, respectively. These are satisfying accounts, but it would be fair to say that they do not rise above the many past listening experiences I have devoted to both of these French quartets.

Photograph of Ernst von Dohnányi, probably taken around 1905 (photographer unknown, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

The Hungarian side accounts for all six of the quartets composed by Béla Bartók. The remaining CD is sort of a “sandwich.” Zoltán Kodály’s Opus 10 (second) quartet is situated between the last two of the string quartets by Ernst von Dohnányi: Opus 15 in D-flat major and Opus 33 in A minor. Now those readers that have been following this site for some time may recall that my association of the complete canon of the Bartók quartets with the Juilliard String Quartet goes all the way back to my freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a result, for better or worse, the three CDs in the Sony Classical anthology, Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings 1949–56, have long served as my “gold standard.”

Mind you, I fondly appreciated the opportunity to listen to music by both Kodály and Dohnányi, simply because I encounter their works so seldom. However, Columbia released two different albums of the Bartók quartets (the second in stereo, to “compensate” for the first monaural version); and I gave both of those interpretations a generous amount of attention during my campus radio station days. Now Sony is responsible for recordings that were first released by both Columbia and RCA, responsible for both Juilliard and Guarneri, respectively. So I have a generous number of opportunities to enjoy Bartók’s quartets (including the Complete Edition of the composer’s music on Hungaroton); and I have every intention of giving equal attention to all of these sources in future listening encounters!

Two “Stars” for Final SFCO Program

Violinist Pearl de la Mott and composer Nathaniel Heyder (photographs courtesy of SFCO)

Readers that recall the announcement of the 2024–25 MainStage Season of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra (SFCO) towards the end of last summer may probably know that the season will conclude one week from today. The title of the program is Rising Stars, and it has a double meaning. In “order of appearance,” the first of the two stars will be composer Nathaniel Heyder. “Phases of Ruin” is the product of an SFCO Commission, enabled with support from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Emerging Black Composers Project. The second star will be violist Pearl de la Mott, who won last year’s Klein Competition. She will be the soloist in a performance of Béla Bartók’s viola concerto. The program will begin with Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 26 concert overture, “The Hebrides.”

The San Francisco performance of this program will take place one week and one day after today, beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 25. The venue will be the Taube Atrium Theater, which is located on the fourth (top) floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue. There will be no charge for admission, but reservations are recommended. Seating may be reserved on the Eventbrite Web page for this concert.

New Pentatone Album from Tamara Stefanovich

Tamara Stefanovich on the cover of her latest album (from its Amazon.com Web page)

According to my records, my last encounter with Tamara Stefanovich took place in June of 2017 when I wrote about her contribution to the Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir album of music by György Kurtág. Her latest recording is a solo piano album entitled Organized Delirium. It will be released this coming Friday, but the preceding hyperlink can be used to place pre-orders through Amazon.com. It is a collection of five solo piano sonatas, each by a different composer. Only the last of those composers, Domenico Scarlatti, is not from the twentieth century. The “order of appearance” of the other four composers is:

• Pierre Boulez
• Hanns Eisler
• Béla Bartók
• Dmitri Shostakovich

Boulez is represented by his second piano sonata in four movements. A photograph in the booklet suggests that Stefanovich consulted him in preparing to make her recording. Boulez was, of course, a master of abstraction unto an extreme; but he was also a stickler for expressive performance. My guess is that he coached her in bringing expressiveness to her performance. Nevertheless, expression tends to be in the ear of the listener; and I suspect that many well-intentioned listeners may find themselves overwhelmed by the abstractions, rather than the expressiveness.

In that context, the other three twentieth-century selections will almost definitely come across as highly accessible. The one I know the best is the Bartók sonata, which I have often enjoyed in the past. My guess is that the final Scarlatti track was included as an “exclamation point” for the entire album, but the eleven tracks of “serious content” that precede it tend to undermine any suggestion of wit!

Stefanovich reminds me of Peter Schickele’s epithet about “holding a black belt in piano.” She approaches every track on the album with fearless dedication. Nevertheless, I would prefer listening to the compositions on this album individually, rather than undergoing a beginning-to-end journey!

Tessa Lark’s Shenson Spotlight Recital

Violinist Tessa Lark performing at the Irvine Barclay Theatre (photograph by Sewageboy, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, from Wikimedia Commons)

Last night Davies Symphony Hall saw the beginning of this year’s Shenson Spotlight Series presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). As was acknowledged on this site in January, this set of four recitals was conceived to provide a platform for “Ascendant artists in recital.” The first recitalist of this year was violinist Tessa Lark, who is actually rather well along the way on her “ascendant” path. Indeed, in 2020 she was a GRAMMY nominee for her recording of Michael Torke’s “Sky” violin concerto, which she recorded with the Albany Symphony conducted by David Alan Miller.

Nevertheless, last night was her SFS debut; and the “central core” of her program consisted of solo violin performances. These were flanked on either side by duos with pianist Jeremy Denk. Denk is no stranger to San Francisco; and, according to my records, his last appearance in Davies took place with SFS in October of 2021. The partnership was the result of a last-minute replacement; but the chemistry could not have been better.

That said, I have to confess that, from a personal point of view, the high point of last night came at the middle with Lark’s account of the fourth of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Opus 27 solo violin sonatas, composed in the key of E minor. This was composed for the virtuoso violinist Fritz Kreisler; and, with movement titles such as “Allemande” and “Sarabande,” it reflects on Kreisler’s command of the solo violin sonatas composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Kreisler had a reputation as a bon vivant, which may have explained why Lark followed Ysaÿe’s sonata with two compositions of her own in that same spirit, “Ysaÿe Shuffle” and “Jig and Pop.”

Kreisler was also represented as a composer in his own right with two compositions, “Chanson Louis XIII and Pavane in the style of Louis Couperin” and “Syncopation.” The latter showed a further reflection on his capacity for high spirits (equaled only by his capacity for massive suppers) with an unabashed ragtime rhetoric. Those spirits were then sustained through the concluding performance of John Corigliano’s duo sonata, which may (or may not) have played a few of its own “quotation games.” However, what impressed me most was that the sonata concluded with cadenzas for both violin and piano.

The program was most traditional at the beginning with the Romanian Folk Dances suite by Béla Bartók. This was originally composed for solo piano, but was arranged for violin-piano duo by Zoltán Székely. He was responsible for cataloging Bartók’s works, which is why this piece is often identified as Sz. 56. I have known this music since my high school days. (The orchestral version has a wonderful clarinet solo in the second movement.) Lark’s account was the perfect “warm-up” for a thoroughly engaging recital.

Sunset Music and Arts: July, 2024

Violinist Nato (from his Sunset Music and Arts event page)

As of this writing, it appears that Sunset Music and Arts will be presenting only one recital during the month of July. This will be a solo performance by the Canadian-born violinist Nato, whose last appearance in San Francisco seems to have been in November of last year. That was when he gave an Old First Concerts recital presenting solo violin works by four twentieth-century composers. The program he has prepared for Sunset seems to have duplicated his Old First offering:

1. Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 115 solo violin sonata in D major
2. Béla Bartók’s solo violin sonata in G minor
3. The second of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Opus 27 solo violin sonatas, composed in the key of A minor
4. Grażyna Bacewicz’ second solo violin sonata

This performance will take place at 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 20. For those not familiar with this concert series, it takes place at the Incarnation Episcopal Church, which is located in the Sunset at 1750 29th Avenue. General admission is $25 with a $20 rate for students and seniors. Tickets may be purchased online through Eventbrite.

David Afkham Makes DSO Debut

Yesterday evening, my wife once again settled in over dinner with a Live from Orchestra Hall streamed performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). The ensemble was led by German conductor David Afkham, making his debut with the ensemble. He prepared a program consisting of a single composition on either side of the intermission and devoted, respectively, to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Screen shot from last night’s streamed performance of violin soloist Veronika Eberle with David Afkham conducting the DSO

The composer for the first half was Johannes Brahms, represented by his Opus 77 violin concerto in D major. The soloist was Veronika Eberle, and her command of both the “text” and the cadenzas could not have been more engaging. (No information was provided regarding the sources of those cadenzas.) Afkham brought a sure hand to balancing the rich sonorities of the ensemble against Eberle’s solo work. There are probably those that think that this is a concerto performed too many times, but Eberle brought a freshness to her perceptive command of detail. The music was familiar, but one still sat on the edge one’s seat wondering where her expressiveness would lead.

As might have been expected, the audience would not let Eberle leave without an encore. Rather than perform any of the usual solo fireworks, she played a duo with Concertmaster Robyn Bollinger. Sadly, the selection was not announced, leaving most of us in the dark with regard to both composer and title. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking that the performance was a dynamite account of a short piece clearly conceived for spectacle.

Having devoted the first half of the program to a virtuoso soloist, Afkham broadened the scope as wide as possible in the second half with a performance of the work that Béla Bartók called “Concerto for Orchestra.” This title was no mere conceit. Over the course of five movements, Bartók made it a point to allow every instrumental sonority to have its say at least once, if not more often.

As a result, this is music that allows the attentive listener an opportunity to appreciate the full scope of what all those instruments can do, either in solo or in differently combined groups. This is particularly evident in the second movement, which was given the title “Game of Pairs.” The theme consists of five “stanzas,” each of which is played by a different pair of instruments separated by a different interval. It is introduced by two bassoons in parallel minor sixths. They are followed by a pair of oboes in minor thirds, after which two clarinets pick up the theme in minor sevenths. The flutes then continue the theme in open fifths, followed by a radical shift to muted trumpets in major seconds.

By all rights, last night’s telecast should have been a visual feast as much as an auditory one. Sadly, the camera work for that “Game of Pairs” was disappointingly lax; and the full-brass chorale that followed all those pairs was distressingly neglected in the video. Going back to a tradition established by Jordan Whitelaw with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, this is a composition in which the camera work needs to follow the score as acutely as the musicians do. However, it is clear that no one in the video crew paid very much attention to the score, figuring that they would be able to “wing it” on the basis of familiarity with auditory cues.

The good news is that Afkham delivered a first-rate account of one of Bartók’s most imaginative undertakings; and there was more than enough to be engaged in attentive listening to compensate for the negligent video work.

Shenson Spotlight: Violinist Alexandra Conunova

Violinist Alexandra Conunova (photograph by Anoush Abrar, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, violinist Alexandra Conunova was the third recitalist in the third season of the Shenson Spotlight Series, presented by the San Francisco Symphony. Conunova is Moldovan, and she was accompanied at the piano by Tamila Salimdjanova, who was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The major work on the program, however, was Norwegian, Edvard Grieg’s Opus 45, the last of his three sonatas for violin and piano.

Grieg completed this sonata in 1887. It may be worth noting that, while the first two sonatas were composed in a matter of weeks, Opus 45 took him several months. It is a major undertaking with a rich thematic vocabulary and no end of technical challenges for the soloist. (Since Grieg’s primary instrument was the piano, the accompanist was probably already familiar with many of rhetorical turns.) Conunova gave a fierce account in rising to the many challenged presented to her in her score pages. By the time things had calmed down in the coda of the final movement, the attentive listener had journeyed with her through a vast landscape of themes and developments.

Ironically, Johan Dalene played this same sonata a little over a year ago, when he presented his Shenson Spotlight Series recital; and Randall Goosby played it at his Spotlight recital the preceding year! Equally interesting is that Stella Chen, who will be the final Shenson recitalist, played the Opus 13, second, sonata in her San Francisco debut with Chamber Music San Francisco almost exactly a year ago. Grieg’s chamber music seems to have fared well here in the Civic Center, if not elsewhere!

The Grieg sonata was preceded by the opening selection, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 261. This was an Adagio movement in E major composed for violin and orchestra. Its Wikipedia page claims that it may have been written to replace the slow movement in the K. 219 (fifth) violin concerto. Most likely, Conunova played the duo arrangement prepared by Paul Klengel in the early twentieth century. This was one of those joys-of-unfamiliar-Mozart selections, which made for an excellent opening gesture.

Conunova followed her Grieg performance with more familiar selections from the “war horse” category. The first of these was a dynamite account of Camille Saint-Saëns Opus 28, the Rondo capriccioso preceded by an Introduction. She played this without any score pages, possibly to avoid setting them on fire with her dynamic rhetoric. The program then concluded with Franz Waxman’s “Carmen Fantasie.” This music originated in Waxman’s score for the movie Humoresque. After seeing the film, Heifetz asked Waxman to expand his efforts into a piece he could include in his performances. It was originally composed for violin and orchestra, but Heifetz seems to have arranged it for piano accompaniment. Last night it served as the “punctuation mark” at the conclusion of the program!

The encore selection was Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances suite, six short movements originally composed for solo piano and given an abundance of arrangements, including one for small orchestra (which was given a separate number in András Szőllősy’s catalog). The offering allowed the performers to return to their Eastern European roots. The music was probably familiar to many (most?) in the audience, providing just the right spirits to send us all on our way home!

Davies Augmented with Innovative Lighting

Gustave Doré’s woodcut of Bluebeard and his wife (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Last night Lighting Designer Luke Kritzeck seemed to be in charge at Davies Symphony Hall, even if Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen was on the podium leading the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). He conceived an elaborate structure that hovered above the stage and provided a diversity of impressive visual settings for the two works on the program, “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” by Alexander Scriabin in the first half, followed by Béla Bartók’s one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle” in the second. In my own humble opinion, it was the second half that stole the show.

Mind you, I take pride in having a “track record” of past staged presentations of Bartók’s opera. My first encounter was in my student days (1967 to be specific), when the Opera Company of Boston coupled it with that composers pantomime ballet (also in one act), “The Miraculous Mandarin.” Decades later, I would enjoy watching and listening to Jessye Norman, when she sang the role of Judith at the Metropolitan Opera. Last night’s Judith was Michelle DeYoung (performing the role for the second time with SFS), joined by bass-baritone Gerald Finley in the title role. Breezy Leigh delivered the spoken “Prologue of the Bard.” (Unless I am mistaken, this was the first time I encountered a performance that included that prologue.)

Staging was limited in all three of the productions I have encountered. For the most part, the “action” is a dialogue between the two characters. Judith is Bluebeard’s latest wife. The “action” involves opening seven doors in the castle, the last of which reveals Bluebeard’s previous wives. In all of the productions that I have experienced, one never sees what is behind the doors (or, for that matter, the doors themselves), informed only by the verbal exchanges between the two characters. However, each of those doors is defined in terms of its own symbolic color; and that was where Kritzeck could take charge of things, establishing the “tone” of each of those colors to suit both the text and the music.

This was most evident in the “gleaming torrent” of white light when the fifth door is opened. Prior to that door, the lighting was as subdued as the disquietingly soft rhetoric of the orchestra. With the fifth door comes the shock of the loudest dynamics in the entire opera, reinforced by offstage brass; and “blazing” is the only way to describe the intensity of the light itself. This was the “magic moment” in which Kritzeck’s design was perfectly aligned with Salonen’s impeccable command of his full resources.

Sadly, that alignment was never really established during the first half of the program. Light had to contend with scent provided by perfumer Mathilde Laurent (although I have to confess that I never was able to follow the “Olfactory Score” provided in a booklet to supplement the program book and may not really have recognized any contributing scent during last night’s performance). Then, of course, there was the extremely rich instrumentation including the solo piano performed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the full SFS Chorus prepared by Director Jenny Wong.

Unfortunately, this amounted to much ado about not very much. The fact is that Scriabin was at his best when working with short durations (somewhat in the spirit of Frédéric Chopin). His later piano sonatas took on extended lengths. These tended to be exploratory, but they often fumbled around excessive repetition. “Prometheus” may have been conceived as one of the earliest “multimedia experiences;” but there was not much to follow as the music itself unfolded. One could not even appreciate any particular assets in Thibaudet’s contributions as a virtuoso soloist.

Fortunately, the many virtues of the Bartók production left most of us leaving Davies with the satisfaction of a stimulating experience (even if it meant going back into the rain)!

Kowalski’s Video Premiere: Part Deux

Guitarist Mateusz Kowalski (courtesy of the Omni Foundation)

Almost exactly two months ago, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released a YouTube video of the first half of a recital performed by the young Polish virtuoso guitarist Mateusz Kowalski in October of last year. When I announced that release, I added that it would be followed by the remainder of the program one week later. That turned out to be a very long week!

The long-awaited conclusion of the recital with a second video will be fulfilled this coming Sunday. Readers may recall that one of the features of the first half of the program was a set of three of the five mazurkas from Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 7 collection, arranged by Jan Nepomucen Bobrowicz. The second half of the program included one more Bobrowicz arrangement, this time of the four mazurkas in Chopin’s Opus 6, his first set in this genre. In addition, the program concluded with an original Bobrowicz composition, his own set of variations on the “Là ci darem la mano” duet from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 527 opera Don Giovanni.

There is also another original composition by Marek Pasieczny, this one given the somewhat cryptic title “(szopen) re:membering.” The opening selections on this half of the program are likely to be more familiar. The program will begin with Roland Dyens’ arrangement of one of Maurice Ravel’s best known piano compositions, the “Pavane pour une infante défunte.” This will be followed by another arrangement of piano music, this time by Emre Sabuncuoğlu for the six short pieces in Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances collection.

As in the past, this performance will be streamed through the Omni Foundation’s YouTube channel. The video premiere will be live-streamed at 10 a.m. this coming Sunday, February 18. The YouTube Web page for viewing has already been created. There is no charge for admission, which means that these performances are made possible only by the viewers’ donations. A Web page has been created for processing contributions, and any visits made prior to the streaming itself will be most welcome.

Mateusz Kowalski’s San Francisco Debut

Last night in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the young Polish virtuoso guitarist Mateusz Kowalski made his San Francisco debut as the latest solo guitarist in the 2023/2024 Dynamite Guitars series of concerts, presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. Almost all of his program was devoted to Polish musicians serving as either composers or arrangers. The most interesting of these was probably Jan Nepomucen Bobrowicz, named by Franz Liszt as “the Chopin of guitar.”

That epithet was closer than one might expect, since Bobrowicz was a contemporary of Frédéric Chopin. He prepared guitar arrangements of Chopin’s piano music, apparently with the composer’s approval. Last night’s program included five of those arrangements, all based on the composer’s early mazurkas. In the first half of the program, Kowalski played the first, third, and fourth mazurkas from the Opus 7 set; and the second half of the program included the second and third mazurkas from the Opus 6 set. These mazurka arrangements may have fallen a bit short in the composer’s passionate rhetoric, but they still captured the underlying spirit of the dance.

Bobrowicz was also represented as a composer at the conclusion of the program with a performance of his Opus 6, “Grandes variations sur un duo de l’opéra ‘Don Juan.’” The opera was, of course, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 527 Don Giovanni; and the duo was “Là ci darem la mano,” which was also given a set of variations by Chopin. Because Kowalski had prepared such a rich and diverse program, I personally would have preferred this set of variations to precede the intermission, since there was much for the attentive listener to follow in the composer’s approach to rethinking a familiar theme.

Indeed, attention had to contend with novelty for almost all of the program that Kowalski had prepared. The other Polish composers included the guitarist Stanislaw Szczepanowski (a friend of Chopin), Marek Sokołowski, Felix Horetzky, and Marek Pasieczny, who contributed a three-movement suite as a memorial for Chopin. The second half of the program began with two more familiar composers. The first of these was Roland Dyens’ solo guitar arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte.” This was followed by Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances, arranged for solo guitar by Emre Sabuncuoğlu, a Turkish mathematician as well as guitarist, arranger, and composer. The other arrangement in the first half of the program was by K. Mianmi, setting the “Schafe können sicher weiden” (sheep may safely graze) aria from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 208 secular cantata Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd (the lively hunt is all my heart’s desire).

Taken as a whole, this was an abundant program. There were any number of opportunities to appreciate Kowalski’s technical skills, and his approach to repertoire introduced a rich offering of Polish compositions unfamiliar to most of the audience. I suspect that there is much more to learn from the repertoire he has cultivated, meaning that a return visit is probably in order!

Salonen Album Revisits Bartók Piano Concertos

courtesy of A440

One week from today Pentatone will release its first album of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) under the baton of its Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The album is devoted entirely to the three piano concertos composed by Béla Bartók. The soloist is Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and all of the recordings were made in conjunction with SFS subscription programs. Two of the concertos were performed in June of 2022, the first concerto in A major and the third in E major. Aimard then returned to account for the second concerto in G major this past February.

It is worth noting that Salonen has had a fair amount of history with these concertos. They were already released on a Sony Classical CD that was included in the 61-CD box set, which accounted for all of Salonen’s recordings on that label. Those recordings were made in 1993 and 1994 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing with pianist Yefim Bronfman. That makes for a gap of a little less than three decades, during which my exposures to performances of Bartók’s music were pretty scarce, the most memorable possibly being when Pablo Heras-Casado visited the podium of SFS in October of 2018, performing the third concerto with Spanish pianist Javier Perianes.

I have to confess that, during that wide interval of time, I seldom gave much thought to Bartók. As a result, Aimard’s performances with Salonen amounted to a serious jolt to my memory; but it was definitely a refreshing one. I find it particularly interesting that each concerto is associated with a different decade. The first concerto was completed in 1926, the second in 1931, and the third in 1945.

The first concerto is the most aggressive; and it is somewhat of an interesting coincidence that 1926 was also the year in which Bartók’s score for the grotesquely violent ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” was first performed, having been rejected for several years for its sexual content. The second concerto emerged between the fourth string quartet (considered by many to be the most intense of the six) and the dark rhetoric of the “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.” The third concerto was one of his last completed works. Knowing that he was dying, he wrote it in the hope that his wife Ditta would benefit from the income of performing it.

Back in my student days during the Sixties, Bartók’s music, including the three piano concertos, maintained a high status in academic courses about twentieth-century music. By the time Salonen made his first round of recordings, that status had pretty much deteriorated. The fact that he has now recorded the concerto cycle for the second time suggests that he views it as a torch that still deserves to be carried. I definitely agree with him, just as I was strongly impressed by Aimard’s interpretations of the piano parts.

I was also impressed to see that there will still be a place for Bartók in this season’s repertoire. Salonen will conduct a performance of the one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle,” featuring mezzo Michelle DeYoung and baritone Gerald Finley, who will be performing in the Orchestral Series for the first time. Salonen clearly appreciates Bartók’s “dark side;” and I have already locked in my commitment for his first performance of this enigmatic opera on this coming March 1!

A New Profil Anthology of Violinist Ivry Gitlis

courtesy of Naxos of America

According to my records, the last time I wrote about a Profil anthology was in October of 2022, when I discussed the six-CD collection entitled The Young Friedrich Gulda. Those that have been following up on my work for some time probably know that I never pass up an opportunity to write about that pianist and his strikingly diverse repertoire. This Friday Profil will release its latest collection; and, once again, repertoire was the reason for drawing my attention. Ivry Gitlis: The Legend is a four-CD collection of recordings by a violinist with a command of the standard repertoire that preferred to focus his attention on works composed in the twentieth century. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-orders for those wishing to be “first in line” to appreciate this violinist’s legacy.

This is one of those anthologies that has autobiographical significance. As a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, most of my extracurricular time was spend in the studios of the campus radio station (whose call letters then were WTBS), where I initiated a weekly program of music of the twentieth century. While the station had a moderately good library, I found that I could also draw upon the recordings in the Library building, which included an entire area for a Music Library (which happened to be almost adjacent to the building housing WTBS). It was through that Music Library that I first encountered Alban Berg’s violin concerto. There was only one recording, and the violinist on that recording was Ivry Gitlis.

A few years later I found myself dividing most of my spare time between WTBS and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, run by Marvin Minsky. Minsky had invited mathematician Seymour Papert to join his staff; and Papert, in turn, invited Gilbert Voyat, who had earned his doctorate at the University of Geneva and was working there as a research associate and instructor at the International Center for Genetic Epistemology. Because Voyat and I frequently talked about music, the Berg violin concerto showed up in our conversations sooner rather than later. When I mentioned that I knew of only one recording, I learned that Gitlis was one of Voyat’s friends!

In spite of my new “knowledge source,” I learned almost nothing about the scope of Gitlis’ repertoire. As a result, over half a century elapsed before I knew anything more about Gitlis or could listen to recordings to account for the rest of that repertoire. The scope of that repertoire in the Profil anthology is best approached by first identifying the selections that predate the twentieth century.

The most familiar of the “usual suspects” are included: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35 violin concerto in D major and Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 in E minor. There are also two short “encore” pieces by Henryk Wieniawski and the version of Ernest Chausson’s Opus 25 “Poème” for violin and piano. Finally, there is Giuseppe Tartini’s G minor violin sonata best known as the “Devil’s Trill Sonata.” However, the version that Gitlis recorded was an arrangement by Fritz Kreisler (which probably “liberated” the accompanist from dealing with figured bass) that included a cadenza of Kreisler’s own invention.

Where the twentieth century is concerned, there was a generous assortment of conductors that worked with Gitlis. The conductor for the Berg concerto was William Strickland, an American whose primary focus was on American composers. The European conductors, on the other hand, included Hans Rosbaud, Heinrich Hollreiser, Hans Swarowsky, and (of particular interest to me) Jascha Horenstein. (Some readers may recall that I discussed Horenstein’s Profil collection in June of 2020. That article referenced an additional recording of a twenty-minute conversation with Horenstein conducted by Alan Blyth.)

In the context of the entire Gitlis collection, however, the Berg concerto continues to register the lion’s share of my attention. Mind you, where “historical authority” is concerned, there will probably never be a substitute for the recording that Louis Krasner made on May 1, 1936 with Anton Webern conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. However, while Krasner clearly honored the spirit of Berg, I have been impressed over the years with the number of violinists I have encountered that have found their own approach to giving the concerto an expressive interpretation. Nevertheless, given how few of those recordings were available during the third quarter of the twentieth century, the significance of Gitlis’ recording cannot be denied.

Having listened to the entire Profil collection, I would say that such significance also applies to composers such as Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and Jean Sibelius; this new collection is definitely “one for the books.”

Salonen Returns with Bold 20th-Century Program

Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard (photograph by Julia Wesely, courtesy of SFS)

Last night San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to Davies Symphony Hall to conduct the first of a series of four subscription programs all highlighting the piano. Last night’s pianist was Pierre-Laurent Aimard performing Béla Bartók’s second piano concerto. Readers may recall that he had played Bartók’s first concerto this past June towards the end of the 2021–22 subscription season. Last night’s program sheet informed the audience that Aimard’s performance was being recorded for future release. Presumably, that release will account for all three Bartók piano concertos, meaning that we should look forward to next season to encounter the third concerto.

The second concerto is, by far, the brashest and gutsiest of the three. Not only does it keep the soloist busy with high-intensity themes based on forceful rhythms, but also the accompaniment is provided by a very large ensemble of richly diverse sonorities in the wind, brass, string, and percussion sections. As is often the case, the middle movement captures the many spooky qualities of Bartók’s “nocturnal” rhetoric. Lest some think that this is where the pianist gets a break, the movement is in ABA form with the Adagio “A” sections flanking a hyper-charged Presto in the middle. The overall result dialed the rhetoric up to eleven; and, while the audience may not have been as exhausted at the conclusion as the performers were, there was definitely a sense that considerable energy had been expended.

That intense energy returned after the audience was allowed to take a break for the intermission. The second half of the program consisted of eleven selections from Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 64 score for the ballet Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev himself had extracted several suites from that score, as well as selections arranged for chamber music. Last night, however, Salonen made his own choices, independent of any of the composer’s.

To some extent his eleven selections followed the narrative of William Shakespeare’s play. The “Balcony Scene” (listed in the program as “Romeo and Juliet”) appeared roughly in the center of the journey. As might be expected, much of the intensity reflected the bad blood between the Montagues and the Capulets; and that intensity was highest in the “Death of Tybalt” movement (which seems to have been designed to provide Lady Capulet with a broad playing field for overacting). Like the Bartók concerto, composed roughly half a decade earlier, Prokofiev’s score never misses an opportunity to pull out all the stops. Nevertheless, I prefer encountering that score while there is a ballet taking place on the stage; so I am less likely to accuse the composer of overplaying his hand.

The program began with the orchestral version of Maurice Ravel’s suite Le Tombeau de Couperin. This basically served as “the calm before the storm.” François Couperin is present only in the forms associated with the titles of the four movements. Everything else is pure Ravel with that composer’s impeccable sense of balance among the winds and strings (including a harp). (There are a few brief passages for trumpet.) Salonen found just the right spirit to reflect the intimacy of the music and the transparency of the individual instrumental lines.

Leonard Slatkin Returns to DSO Podium

Yesterday saw the return of Music Director Laureate Leonard Slatkin to the podium of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) for the latest Live from Orchestra Hall Webcast. He introduced the program to the audience as one that he had been meaning to perform for three years, acknowledging that the original planned performance had been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since I only learned about DSO Webcasts during the pandemic, I feel as if luck had a hand in my experiencing the program that Slatkin had in mind.

The first half was shared by twentieth-century composers Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók, both born in Europe and later citizens of the United States of America. Their respective compositions involved different subsets of the full DSO ensemble. The program began with Stravinsky’s “Symphonies of Wind Instruments,” originally scored for 24 separate parts in 1920 and revised for 23 separate parts in 1947. This was followed by Bartók’s four-movement “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta” (which includes a piano counting as a percussion instrument).

During the intermission interview, Slatkin talked about how these pieces were performed frequently in the Fifties and Sixties but then began to fall out of favor. One reason may have been the emergence of a new generation of composers. Then, in the last few decades, there has been an interest in prioritizing “minority” composers (by virtue of gender and/or race), leading to a fair amount of exclusion of “dead white European males.”

Since I was born about two years after Slatkin, I share his memories of how repertoire choices have changed over the decades. The Bartók selection was actually one of the first works I heard performed at a subscription concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, at the other end of the time line, I am not sure I ever heard the Stravinsky selection in concert until Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) returned to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony to conduct it this past November.

Screen shot from last night’s streamed performance

In writing about that performance, I explained that Stravinsky used the word “symphony” in its original Greek denotation of “sounding together.” The score consists of a series of short phrases, each of which involves a different combination of the individual wind players. The camera work for the Webcast was particularly helpful in this regard, providing a visual journey through those different instrumental combinations. The above screen shot shows an example of one of the camera angles.

Those unfamiliar with the Bartók selection may not know that it actually involves two string sections, facing each other from opposite sides of the stage. The celesta shares the center with the piano; and the timpani and battery have their usual places in the rear. Bartók serves up some of the richest polyphony in the twentieth-century repertoire, beginning with a ten-voice fugue presented by the opposing string sections. Those familiar with Bartók probably also know that, in his polyphony, there is never a thematic subject that does not appear in inversion at some time or another. While the fugue itself is darkly sober, one can still appreciate the occasional prankishness that Bartók brings to his counterpoint.

As might be expected, this was more than the camera crew could manage. Yes, there were times when the ear could be guided by the eye. Nevertheless, one could only really appreciate how Bartók deployed his resources with split-screen images; and those never figured in the video of last night’s performance. (I wonder if Slatkin has the some fond memories of Jordan Whitelaw’s video work for Evening at Symphony on PBS that I do. Whitelaw was a master of split-screen images of polyphony.) Fortunately, Slatkin’s command of this score meant that the ears could be escorted through the overall structure of this composition, both in the overall structures and in the detailed attention to the diversity of instrumental sonorities.

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Johannes Brahms’ Opus 15 (first) piano concerto in D minor with Garrick Ohlsson as soloist. Since Emanuel Ax had performed this concerto with MTT in the second of the two SFS programs he conducted this past November, I feel as if I have been getting my fill of that rather youthful effort. In Detroit Ohlsson gave the concerto as much attention as would be given to a more “mature” composition; and the camera work provided an excellent account of the focus that he brought to negotiating the plethora of notes, which, in the wrong hands, would come across as excessive. This clearly made for a sharp shift from the repertoire of the first half of the program, but both conductor and soloist turned that contrast into a thoroughly engaging listening experience.

Ohlsson returned to present his audience with an encore. He performed the first of Frédéric Chopin’s three Opus 15 nocturnes, composed in the key of F major. (Did Ohlsson decide that one good Opus 15 deserves another?) This was the perfect selection to provide the calm after the storm!