Los Angeles Guitar Quartet Visits Herbst Theatre

The members of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet (from their San Francisco Performances event page)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet made its fourteenth visit to San Francisco Performances. As usual the concert was presented in association with the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. According to my archives, the quartet last appeared a little less than six years ago, when the members were Scott Tennant, Matt Greif, John Dearman, and Bill Kanengiser. Since that time, Tennant has left the group, replaced by Douglas Lora. In addition, Kanengiser returned to Herbst for a solo recital in July of 2021.

Last night’s repertoire was a broad one, beginning with Johann Sebastian Bach (arranged by Tennant) at one end and Kanengiser at the other. The Bach selection was the final movement of BWV 1048, the third of the Brandenburg Concertos. Kanengiser reflected the spirit of this music with a work entitled “Air & Ground,” clearly focused more on music than on geology! The first half of the program concluded with a “synthesizes suite” of works by three different composers collected under the title Imagens do Brasil. The selections were Paulo Bellinati’s “A Furiosa,” Sergio Assad’s arrangement of “A Lenda do Caboclo,” composed for piano by Heitor Villa-Lobos, and “De Sábado pra Dominguinhos” by Hermeto Pascoal, arranged by Kanengiser.

The program was followed by two encores. The first acknowledged the bossa nova tradition of Sérgio Mendes with a performance of “Mas que nade,” his best-known song. This was followed by an energetic account of the “Hoe-Down” episode that concludes Aaron Copland’s score for the ballet “Rodeo.” These selections could not have been a better reflection on the overall diversity of the program that was prepared.

Trifonov Shifts Attention from Europe to Americas

Pianist Daniil Trifonov has been a regular visitor to San Francisco, both as concerto soloist and recitalist, over the course of several years. This coming February, he will return to Davies Symphony Hall as soloist in a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 18 (second) piano concerto in G minor with the San Francisco Symphony. In addition, this site has tried to keep up with his Deutsche Grammophon recordings, the most recent of which was Bach: The Art of Life, a “family portrait” that juxtaposed works by Johann Sebastian Bach with selections by four of his sons.

Daniil Trifonov on the cover of his latest album (courtesy of Crossover Media)

Trifonov’s latest album takes him across the Atlantic Ocean, so to speak. It is the first of two releases both under the title My American Story. The subtitle for that first release is North, and it offers an impressively diverse account of music composed in the United States. Taken as a whole, it amounts to an engaging account of how music was being made during the twentieth century.

The breadth of that diversity can be oriented around the two concerto selections on the album, each reflecting a different perspective across the two centuries. The first of these is George Gershwin’s “Concerto in F” (originally given the title “New York Concerto”). Following the success of “Rhapsody in Blue,” the conductor Walter Damrosch commissioned Gershwin to compose a full-scale piano concerto for his New York Symphony Orchestra. “Rhapsody in Blue” has been composed for solo piano and jazz band, but it was subsequently prepared for orchestral performance by Ferde Grofé. The concerto, on the other hand, is entirely a product of Gershwin’s own efforts.

A little less than a century later, Mason Bates composed his first piano concerto. It was written for Trifonov and given its first performance in January of 2022. It was co-commissioned by Trifonov and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with whom he played the work’s debut. The recording of that concerto on North was made with that same ensemble led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has been the ensemble’s music director since 2012.

I feel as if I have been following Bates’ work for almost as long as I have been writing on this site. Unless I am mistaken, that dates back to the spring of 2009, when Michael Tilson Thomas conducted Bates’ “The B-Sides” with the San Francisco Symphony. It took me a while to get used to him (which may be the same for any thoughts he may have had when reading what I wrote about him); but I came away from listening to his concerto with the sense that he had approached it with more security than Gershwin had brought to his “parallel” effort. Indeed, I can confess that my very first impression of Bates leaned towards “enfant terrible;” but the firm and secure hand he brought to composing for both piano and ensemble is a far cry from either of those words!

All the other selections on this first My American Story album are solo performances. I must confess that I was particularly taken with the tracks that involved arrangements of popular tunes by leading pianists from each half of the twentieth century. The earlier of these was one of the most influential musicians (who happened to play piano) of his time, Art Tatum. The second could be said the same for his time, the pianist being Bill Evans. In listening to these tracks, one can easily detect Trifonov’s appreciation of both of those jazz masters. That appreciation also extends to the final track on the album, which is “4’33”,” John Cage’s “silent” composition. On the other hand his approach to the more “serious” composers, such as Aaron Copland, John Adams, and John Corigliano, struck me as more dutiful than engaging; but that is probably just because I am not shy in voicing personal opinions!

Bay Area Rainbow Symphony Tonight!

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

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

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

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

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

An “American Spring” from Trinity Alps Festival

Last night the musicians of the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival, led by Founder and Director Ian Scarfe, took their work to San Francisco for the first of two performances of their latest program, American Spring. This was inspired by the decision to perform Aaron Copland’s music for Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring” using the original score for an ensemble of thirteen instruments. This involves only three winds, flute (Gina Gulyas), clarinet (Matthew Boyles), and bassoon (Dan MacNeill). The string section is basically a double quartet with two instruments for each “voice” as follows: first violin (Sam Weiser and Alicia Choi), second violin (Theo Espy and Stephanie Bibbo), viola (Stephen Fine and Ivo Bokulić), cello (Kendra Grittani and Joseph Howe). The remaining musician was Kody Thiessen on bass. Scarfe led from the piano.

Each of the performers had a separate stand. To the best of my ability to observe, there seemed to be passages in which each of the quartet “voices” was subdivided. The result is an elaborately woven texture, and there is much to be gained in approaching Copland’s score as “pure music” without giving much thought to Graham’s choreography. In fact, last night’s performance played the suite that Copland extracted from the full score. For the most part, the only significant excision is that of the preacher’s fire-and-brimstone sermon, originally danced by Merce Cunningham. Copland himself conducted the complete score with this original instrumentation for a Columbia album that is now included in the Sony Classical anthology released this past February.

Much as I enjoy that album, I have to say that there was a lot to be gained in being able to see who was playing what. Since the music was originally performed in an orchestra pit to allow Graham and her dancers full use of the stage, last night made for a somewhat special experience, enhanced by the intimacy of the Monument space in SoMa. (There will be a second performance at 3 p.m. this afternoon at the Century Club of California, which should have about the same intimacy.)

By way of an “overture,” Scarfe began the program by playing two of the movements from Samuel Barber’s Excursions suite, which was composed around the same time that Copland composed his score for Graham. Barber had a somewhat aristocratic upbringing on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia, but his music often served up engagingly rough edges. Scarfe began with the opening movement, an ostinato that warps traditional boogie-woogie. He then moved on to the third movement, a mind-bending complex of polyrhythms weaving around the tune for “Streets of Laredo.”

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to a six-movement suite by Sam Reider entitled Hyampom. This is the name of a town in the Trinity Alps, which the composer had known from his childhood. The music thus amounted to a memoir, capturing six different aspects of his memories. (These were all enumerated in the notes he provided for the program sheet.) Reider also joined the ensemble, playing the part for accordion that he had composed.

The recent Columbia release also recorded excerpts of the composer rehearsing his “Appalachian Spring” score. He cautions his musicians about being too sentimental. Reider followed that same caution in composing Hyampom. His memories are genuine, but his rhetoric is never mawkish. One could say that both of the selections on the program could be classified as “Americana;” but the perspective is established through clarity, rather than sentimentality.

Vox Humana SF: The Debut in San Francisco

The logo for the new Vox Humana SF ensemble (from its home page)

This weekend saw the launch of Vox Humana SF, a new a cappella choir founded by its Artistic Director Don Scott Carpenter. The first performance took place this past Friday evening in Belvedere, but the program was repeated last night here in San Francisco at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. The title of the program was, appropriately enough, In the Beginning. The repertoire covered an extensive interval of time, from the early nineteenth century of Felix Mendelssohn to the very recent past of Reena Esmail.

The title of the program was also the title of the first selection after the intermission, Aaron Copland’s setting of the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis. Much of the structure involved call-and-response, with the “call” coming from the solo mezzo Meghan Crosby-Jolliffe and the “response” from the full ensemble. Those readers that recall my account of the Sony Classical anthology Copland Conducts Copland – The Complete Columbia Album Collection may or may not agree with me that the music of this champion of the twentieth century has not survived the test of time very well. “In the Beginning” was part of that anthology; and, even with the freshness of contemporary voices, the rhetoric of the music itself began to get tiresome well into the Third Day of the Creation.

Indeed, the selection by Mendelssohn, three selected movements from his setting of the Mass in the German language, was far fresher in its impact. This was probably due in part of the interplay of the four solo voices during the Gloria portion (“Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe”). The interleaving of soprano Morgan Balfour, alto Shauna Fallihee, tenor Sam Faustine, and bass Jefferson Packer with the ensemble revealed a technically elegant side of Mendelssohn’s expressiveness that is not encountered in his instrumental works. It also made for an engaging coupling with its much later predecessor on the program, the opening selection of “Alleluia,” composed in 1990 by Algirdas Martinaitis and featuring soprano Kelly Ballou as soloist.

The oldest composer on the program was followed by the youngest, Reena Esmail. Those that have followed this site for some time know that Esmail was one of the composers included in Sarah Cahill’s Future is Female performances, and her music was also featured at the 2021 International Piano Festival. However, I do not think I have encountered any of her music since May of 2022, when Earplay presented her “Nadiya.” Her choral offering, “Even after all this time…” included a clarinet solo performed by Kevin Tang, which made for a decided contrast to the vocal sonorities. While the text for this selection was brief (six lines of blank verse), I felt that the music had overstayed its welcome somewhere around its halfway mark. This was followed by “Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein reines Herz” (create in me a clean heart, O God), the second of the two Opus 29 five-part motets by Johannes Brahms, whose brevity (three sentences) came across with far greater impact.

The program concluded with a coupling of two contrasting works. “Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae,” composed by Jaako Mäntyjärvi in 1997, is a harrowing account of a shipwreck of a car ferry in the Baltic Sea. Solo passages were taken by soprano Cheryl Cain and precentor Jack Wilkins. The entire text (which is in Latin) is framed by citations of the “Lux æterna” portion of the Requiem Mass. That work was then followed by the full “Lux æterna” text arranged by John Cameron in a setting of the “Nimrod” music from Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.”

Taken as a whole, the evening was a thoroughly engaging account of the diversity of the a cappella repertoire, making for an absorbing journey of discovery and leaving at least some of us wondering about what will come next.

A Disappointing Aaron Copland Anthology

Cover of the box set being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

This coming Friday Sony Classical will release its latest anthology of recordings that now reside in its archives. The full title of the new release is Copland Conducts Copland – The Complete Columbia Album Collection. That second portion is critical, because Aaron Copland conducted performances for at least one other record label (Everest) during his lifetime. The collection consists of twenty CDs; and, to be fair about that title, it includes chamber music and art song with Copland playing piano, rather than conducting. This may not be a comprehensive account of the Copland catalog; but it is definitely a generous one, even when there are multiple performances of some of the selections. As is usually the case, Amazon.com has created a Web page for taking pre-orders.

In his day, Copland was a leading champion of twentieth-century modernism. One might almost go as far as to say that he gave the music of his time its own distinctive American voice. Unfortunately, it is no longer the twentieth century; and changing times have not been particularly kind to this composer.

When I was in secondary school, I could not get enough of Copland’s music. I had the Everest album of him conducting his third symphony, and I avidly followed every note in the score. When I launched a new program about twentieth-century music on the campus radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Copland was there on my very first broadcast. However, by the time I took the Twentieth-Century Music course in my Junior year, the bright lights of Copland’s reputation were beginning to dim. I remember seeing him as an old man when he visited Harvard University, and it was clear that he himself knew that his light was fading. Many years later, when I finally gave away all of my LPs due to a lack of space, there were no Copland albums in my CD collection.

Nevertheless, he does show up from time to time on this site, and I felt he was significant enough to deserve his own label. During the COVID pandemic, when experiences in the concert hall had to give way to experiences in cyberspace, I turned to YouTube to write about the “original cast” film of Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring” with the Copland score that required only thirteen players. Copland made a recording of that version for Columbia in 1973, and it is the one CD in the collection that I value with all my heart. Copland later provided a full-orchestra version of that score, and Michael Tilson Thomas presented it on two different occasions with the San Francisco Symphony during his tenure as Music Director.

Since that time, my encounters with Copland have been sporadic. My greatest satisfaction seems to come from his art songs, and I was glad to encounter two different recordings of his Emily Dickinson settings in the Columbia anthology. As far as the rest of this collection, I fear that I would prefer that the past remain in the past!

Christmas Returns to NCCO Repertoire

Trumpet soloist Lucienne Renaudin Vary (courtesy of NCCO)

Unless I am mistaken, the New Century Chamber Orchestra has not presented a “seasonal” concert in December since the onset of the COVID pandemic, meaning that the last such program was presented in December of 2019. Next month the holiday spirit will return with Christmas Ornaments, a program of festive works and the United States debut of trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin Vary. The only departure from the celebratory will be the performance of Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City,” featuring cor anglais soloist Jesse Barrett; but the other “festivities” will be secular as well as sacred.

The most explicit holiday offering will be the eighth of the twelve concerti grossi that Arcangelo Corelli collected in his Opus 6, often referred to as the “Christmas concerto.” However, the festive spirit will be extended by coupling this concerto grosso with a trumpet concerto in E-flat major by the eighteenth-century Czech composer Johann Baptist Georg Neruda, the selection that will feature Vary as soloist. In addition, the program will conclude with a “Festive Christmas Medley” of familiar “holiday spirit” tunes arranged by Paul Bateman.

The Corelli concerto will be preceded by two compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, both “secular” but still in a “festive spirit.” The opening selection will be the BWV 1048 (third) “Brandenburg” concerto in G major, composed for an ensemble of solo strings. Music Director Daniel Hope will then perform as soloist in the BWV 1041 (first) violin concerto in A minor. The entire program will be performed without intermission.

The San Francisco performance of this offering will begin at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, December 17. The venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street. Ticket prices will be $70 for premium seating, $55, and $30 for General Admission in the rear. All tickets are being sold online through a City Box Office event page. In addition, $10 tickets are available for students with valid identification, and patrons under 35 can purchase single tickets at the door for $15.

BARS Announces Program for California Festival

This past Sunday the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (BARS) announced that it would be part of this month’s California Festival: A Celebration of New Music. More specifically, the orchestra will be the only LGBTQ organization participating in the Festival. The concert will be dedicated to the memory of the late Michael Morgan, the former Music Director of the Oakland Symphony, who had conducted BARS on three occasions.

Dawn Harms, Music Director of BARS

Before his death, Morgan had commissioned David Conte, Chair of the Composition Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, to write a cello concerto to be performed by soloist Emil Miland. That concerto will be given its first performance as part of the coming BARS program. Following usual practices, the program will begin with an overture, the “Mountain Festival Overture,” composed by Seth Grosshandler.

On the other hand, the second half of the program will not present the usual symphony offering. Instead, it will consist of suites from two major ballets choreographed during the first half of the twentieth century. The first of these will be based on Aaron Copland’s music for “Billy the Kid;” and it will be followed by one of the three suites that Igor Stravinsky extracted from his score for “The Firebird.” As usual, the orchestra will be conducted by Music Director Dawn Harms.

The performance will take place in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, which is in the 50 Oak Street building of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 18. All tickets are being sold for between $10 and $40. They may be purchased online through a Tix event page, which includes a “map” showing which seats are currently available.

SFCM to Present Alumni Song Recital

Readers may recall that, a little over a month ago, this site announced the first performances of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) Orchestra and the New Music Ensemble as the “highlights” for this month. However, yesterday morning I learned of a program in the Alumni Recital series that will take place this coming Friday. More specifically, the program will be performed by the husband-and-wife couple of pianist Brian Fitzsousa and soprano Carolyn Bacon, both of whom are alumni. (“For the record,” as they say, Bacon’s range extends beyond the usual soprano boundaries.)

They have prepared an impressively eclectic program of songs by American composers. These will be arranged in five sets as follows:

1. Charles Strouse (1928), Stephen Schwartz, (1948) Rags: “Blame it on a Summer Night” 
2. David Conte (1955), Anne Sexton (1928) Sexton Songs: “Her Kind” 
3. Kurt Weill (1900), Langston Hughes (1901) Street Scene: “Lonely House” 
4. Conte, Sexton Songs: “Riding the Elevator into the Sky”
*** 
5. Aaron Copland (1900), Emily Dickinson (1830) Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson: “The world feels dusty”
6. Copland, Dickinson Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson: “Heart, we will forget him”
7. Carmel Dean, Edna St. Vincent Milay (1892) Renascence: “Time Does Not Bring Relief”
8. Copland, Dickinson Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson: “When they come back”
9. Dean, Millay Renascence: “Elegy”
***
10. Tom Cippulo (1956), Lisel Mueller (1924) Of a Certain Age: Magnolia
11. Brian Fitzsousa (1992), William Butler Yeats (1865) “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
12. Ned Rorem (1923), Paul Goodman (1911) “The Lordly Hudson”
13. Adam Guettel (1964) Myths and Hymns: “Migaratory V”
***
14. William Bolcom (1938), Arnold Weinstein (1940) Cabaret Songs: “Waitin”
15. Stephen Sondheim (1930) Company: “Someone is Waiting”
16. John Bucchino (1952) “Sweet Dreams”
***
17. Marc Blitzstein (1905) Juno: “I Wish it So”
18. Ricky Ian Gordon (1956), Dickinson “Will There Really Be a Morning”
19. Guettel The Light in the Piazza: “The Light in the Piazza”

This performance will be held in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall on the top floor of the SFCM Bowes Center at 200 Van Ness Avenue, on the southeast corner of Hayes Street. It will begin at 7:30 p.m. on this coming Friday, September 15. According to the event page, there will be no livestream. Those planning to attend should make reservations through the hyperlink on that page. There will be no charge for admission.

SFIPF: Tanya Gabrielian Solo Recital

Last night the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) got off to a rocky start, at least for those of us that opted for a livestream of the performance. The performance took place in the Old First Presbyterian Church, presented by the Old First Concerts (O1C) series. O1C has been one of the best sources of live-streamed content, the result of an impressively rapid learning curve to compensate for pandemic conditions. Unfortunately, neither SFIPF Founder and Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur nor opening night solo recitalist Tanya Gabrielian seemed to know “the drill” when using a microphone for the benefit of both the immediate audience and the remote one. Presumably, those in the “physical” audience were satisfied; but those of us in cyberspace heard nothing but garbled text.

Fortunately, there were no faults at all when it came to listening to Gabrielian’s piano performance. This was good, since there was much to attract and hold the attention of the serious listener. Indeed, considerable imaginative thought seems to have gone into preparing the program.

The first half of the program consisted of eight relatively brief selections, all of which were transcriptions for solo piano by Alexander Siloti. The very idea of such transcriptions can be traced back at least as far as Franz Liszt (who, more often than not, added generous embellishments to the music being transcribed). Siloti may well have been as prodigious as Liszt in preparing transcriptions. These days, however, he is recalled for only one of them, Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 855a, the prelude from the E minor prelude-fugue coupling in the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 855).

Gabrielian seems to have sympathized with those of us that feel we have had enough of that transcription in encore selections. Instead, she chose for her Bach selection the BWV 565 coupling of a toccata and fugue in the key of D minor. This was her opening selection, which proved to be effective for seizing the attention of the serious listener. Nevertheless, eight Siloti transcriptions tended to strain the attention of even the most serious and dedicated listener, sometimes because the music simply did not lend itself to transcription (Maurice Ravel’s setting of the Hebrew Kaddish text for solo vocalist) or because we have already heard it too many times (the last of Niccolò Paganini’s caprices, originally composed for solo violin). That was the final transcription that Gabrielian played, and I would have preferred her to wrap things up a bit sooner.

The second half of the program made for a diverse but somewhat odd collection. Gabrielian began with a short piece by Aaron Copland entitled “Three Moods,” which made for an engaging departure from what we usually expect of Copland. This was followed by the “Meditation for the Left Hand” by Leopold Godowsky, which provided Gabrielian with an opportunity to present the strength of her left hand. Nevertheless, the overall duration was too long and repetitive to sustain serious attention. The program then concluded with Carl Maria von Weber’s Opus 39 sonata in D minor, which overstayed its welcome even more exhaustively than Godowsky’s “Meditation” did.

This made for a long evening, but Gabrielian still had the energy for an encore (but not, apparently, any need to introduce it to the audience).

Delightful SFS Chamber Music at Davies

Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented its third program in the 2022–23 Chamber Music Series. This was an offering of impressive diversity, reaching back to the eighteenth century of Joseph Haydn and advancing to a pandemic-inspired arrangement of music that Aaron Copland composed for the ballet “Rodeo” in 1942. All of that diversity was presented by an equally diverse assembly of SFS musicians.

The Copland arrangement was created by violist Katarzyna Bryla-Weiss. As she wrote for the program book, “I missed playing music with my friends [during the pandemic shutdown of 2020] and I started arranging easy pieces for a viola quartet and recording them by myself.” As she progressed in her arrangements, she took on more challenging “source texts.” Today’s offering drew upon the “Corral Nocturne” and “Hoedown” movements from the “Rodeo” score. It also advanced from recorded overdubbing to four violists. Bryla-Weiss was joined by three other members of the SFS viola section: Katie Kadarauch, Matthew Young, and Gina Cooper. They all took the stage with cowboy hats and boots; but, when it came to making music, they immediately got down to business.

Given the richness of Copland’s instrumentation techniques, one would think that four violas would not have much to offer. However, the performers showed so much spirit that attention to sonorities was easily diverted by the elaborate realization of the rhythmic polyphony. If there is a Heaven and if Copland was allowed entry, I suspect he would have looked down on the Davies stage with bemused enjoyment at both the ingenuity of Bryla-Weiss’ arrangement and the genuine spirit of all four of the violists.

Equally impressive was the more standard string quartet performing Florence Price’s “Negro Folksongs in Counterpoint.” Cooper was also the violist for this performance, joined by violinists Kelly Leon-Pearce and John Chisholm and cellist Barbara Bogatin. Over the course of her career, Price took a great interest in both spirituals and folksongs; and some readers may recall when this site noted that she had created an arrangement of “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” for Marian Anderson. The string quartet arrangements are not as faithful to the original sources, but the attentive listener should have no trouble teasing the “source themes” out of the arrangements.

It is also interesting to observe that, in spite of the title, the four movements basically embody the familiar structure of a string quartet. Thus, the collection is framed by two Allegro arrangements for “Go Down, Moses” and “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho.” The first Allegro is followed by an Adagio setting of “Somebody’s Knockin’ at Yo Do’,” followed by “Little David Play on Yo Harp,” which is presented as a Scherzo. As a result, the composition, taken as a whole, makes for a stimulating blend of classical architecture with indigenous thematic sources.

The Price quartet was preceded by a more conventional approach to string quartet composition. The Haydn selection was Hoboken III/78, the fourth of the Opus 76 collection. The performers were violinists Wyatt Underhill and Florin Parvulescu, violist David Gaudry, and cellist David Goldblatt. Sadly, the spirit of the interpretation never rose to the expressive engagement encountered in both the Price and the Copland selections. Those of us that enjoyed past performances by the New Esterházy Quartet know how much personality can be expressed in just about any string quartet that Haydn composed. Sadly, this afternoon’s participants never rose to that level of interpretation.

The intermission was followed by a single composition, the nonet in E-flat major that is the Opus 38 of French composer Louise Farrenc. I suspect that some may think that nine instruments amounts to a bit of a handful for chamber music. However, the attentive listener will quickly realize that these resources may be “parsed” into three groups, making for a more manageable number. In this afternoon’s layout, the rear was taken by a wind quintet of flute (Linda Lukas), oboe (James Button), clarinet (Jerome Simas), bassoon (Stephen Paulson), and horn (Bruce Roberts). The front was occupied by a string trio of violin (Yukiko Kurakata), viola (Christina King), and cello (Bogatin again). These three players formed a portion of a semicircle that completed by Mark Wright playing bass.

Farrenc’s score tends to honor this “division of resources” but is definitely not confined by them. Thus, over the course of the four-movement composition, the attentive listener will enjoy a highly satisfying diversity of sonorities. That diversity becomes most evident in the second of the four movements, which consists of variations on a theme. Thus, while this nonet was composed in 1849, the basic structure is still grounded in eighteenth-century classicism; but Farrenc’s management of the nine instruments guides the attentive listener through what may be called a rhetoric of instrumental coloration.

LIEDER ALIVE! Launches 11th Season on Sunday

Composer Tarik O’Regan, soprano Heidi Moss Erickson, and pianist John Parr (courtesy of LIEDER ALIVE!)

Those that follow this site regularly probably already know that the Grand Opening of the Eleventh Annual Liederabend Season, presented by LIEDER ALIVE!, will take place this coming Sunday. Those readers will also know that the highlight of the program will be the world premiere of a new song cycle by Tarik O’Regan entitled Seen and Unseen, which will be performed by soprano Heidi Moss Erickson, accompanied at the piano by John Parr. I had hoped that, this close to the performance, specifics for the remainder of the program would have been finalized and released; but, sadly, that is not the case. The program will still offer settings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson composed by Aaron Copland, George Walker, and Lori Laitman, along with selected songs composed by Richard Strauss, Lili Boulanger, Anton Webern, and Kurt Erickson. What those songs will be may not be revealed until the program is printed! [added 9/30, 8:50 a.m.: The titles of the songs that will precede Seen and Unseen are as follows:

The Dickinson selections will be taken from Copland’s 12 poems of Emily Dickinson (“Going to Heaven” and “Heart, we will forget him”), Walker’s Emily Dickinson Songs (“I have no life but this”), and Laitman’s Four Dickinson Songs (“Im Nobody” and “If I… can stop one Heart from breaking”). Strauss will be represented by “An die Nacht” from his Brentano Lieder and “September” from his “last songs” collection. The Webern selection will be his Opus 4 set of five settings of poems by Stefan George. The Boulanger offering will consist of three songes from her Clairières dans le ciel (clearings in the sky) settings of pomes by Francis Jammes. Finally there will be three Erickson songs, each setting a text by a different poet: Friedrich Hebbel (“Ich und Du”), Josef von Eichendorf (“Mondnacht”), and Carl Sandberg (“Young Sea”).]

The performance will begin at 5 p.m. this Sunday, October 2. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry at 1021 Sanchez Street, located between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. Tickets are being handled through an Eventbrite event page; and, as of this writing, only the $80 reserved seats are available. While this is the first concert in the season, subscriptions are no longer being sold.

Koussevitzky 5: Mostly Twentieth Century

The last of the five two-CD albums in the Maestro Risoluto box set of recordings made by Serge Koussevitzky is somewhat of a mixed bag. Following up on the fourth album, most of the selections were composed in the twentieth century; but the first CD begins with Richard Strauss Opus 30 tone poem “Also sprach Zarathustra.” If that composition has any twentieth-century qualities, they are grounded in the use of that music in the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that did not appear until over fifteen years after Koussevitzky’s death!

The album also includes the only selection that is not performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This was the first recording made of Jean Sibelius’ Opus 105 (seventh) symphony in C major. The recording was made in Boston’s Symphony Hall, but the ensemble was the visiting BBC Symphony Orchestra.

The second CD presents three significant recordings of orchestral music composed by Koussevitzky’s American contemporaries. The first of these is Roy Harris’ third symphony. Koussevitzky conducted the world premiere of this tightly-knit composition with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on February 24, 1939. However, the recording was not made until November 8 of the same year. While it has been a long time since I listened to a recording of this symphony, during the middle of the twentieth century it was regarded by many as the quintessential American symphony.

The second symphony is Howard Hanson’s Opus 63 (third) in A minor. Back when I was writing for Examiner.com, my contact at Naxos provided me with recordings of Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony performing all of Hanson’s symphonies. Schwarz was very good at presenting the “grand sound” of each of those symphonies. I suspect the Koussevitzky took the same approach, but this is music that holds up better under “higher fidelity” technology.

The final selection on the Koussevitzky CD is the suite that Aaron Copland extracted from the score he had composed for Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring.” In spite of the reputation of the Harris third, this is probably the one selection that will resonate with familiarity to just about all listeners. Much as I like the suite, I like the choreography more. That was one of the reasons that, during pandemic conditions, I went out of my way to watch the “original cast” film of “Appalachian Spring” on YouTube and to use that viewing experience to explain all the factors that make both Copland’s score and Graham’s choreography significant. Koussevitzky’s interests, on the other hand, never seemed to venture beyond Copland’s suite. Nevertheless, his performance of that suite in 1945 was a premiere; and the recording on this album seems to have been made around the same time as that performance.

Bortolameolli’s “Strauss Pairing” at Davies

This week’s San Francisco Symphony (SFS) concert in the Summer with the Symphony series saw the debut performance of conductor Paolo Bortolameolli. This conductor’s activities span our two connected continents. Here in California he is Associate Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. To the south he is Music Director of Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional Esperanza Azteca in Mexico. On the other side of the Panama Canal he is Principal Guest Conductor of Filarmónica de Santiago in Chile.

Ironically, his only Pan American offering was the “overture” for last night’s concert in Davies Symphony Hall. The program began with Aaron Copland’s “El Salón México.” Copland’s roots were pure Brooklyn, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. However, through his friend and fellow composer Carlos Chávez, he developed a taste for “south of the border” music. That acquired taste would lead to the score of “El Salón México,” weaving fragments of indigenous sources into his own rhetorical style. He confessed to Chávez that he might get taken to task for venturing beyond his own roots, so to speak; but when the music was first performed by the Orquesta Sinfónica de México (conducted by Chavez), both the audience and the ensemble were delighted with the results.

Bortolameolli could not have not a better job of capturing Copland’s spirit and delivering it to the Davies audience. He left no raucous stone unturned. Even for those familiar this music (present company included), he delivered one surprise after another, drawing upon the full spectrum of diverse sonorities coming from the SFS instrumentalists. This was a conductor who knew exactly how to draw audience attention from the very first gesture and maintain it all the way through to the final measure.

Those skills served him equally well in his “Strauss+Strauss” offering after the intermission. He began with the overture to the operetta Die Fledermaus (the bat) by Johann Strauss II. This was followed by a suite from Richard Strauss’ Opus 59 opera Der Rosenkavalier. There have been many suites extracted from this opera, and Bortolameolli chose to perform one prepared by Artur Rodziński, which he conducted with the New York Philharmonic in 1944.

Fledermaus is basically a comedy of infidelity, whose primary actions unfold in the context of a gala ball hosted by a decadent Eastern European prince. Most of the overture serves as a “warm-up” for the music one will hear during the ball scene. However it also reflects on the confusions that unfold as it emerges that everyone is being unfaithful to someone else. In other words, even when the music is at its most lyrical, there are always the sharp edges to those acts of infidelity; and the opera ends with a punchline that excuses all of those acts with the motto, “Blame it on the champagne.” Nevertheless, Strauss knew enough to keep this dark side out of his overture to lure the audience into his web, rather than scare them away from it; and Bortolameolli knew exactly how to keep the high spirits of all that champagne flowing through the entire musical introduction.

There is also no shortage of high spirits in Der Rosenkavalier, but the libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal is a far cry from the raucous turns of events in Fledermaus. There is a complexity in the fabric of the relationships across all of the members of the cast. One might say that the basic storyline involves the progress of a young man, who learns about sex from an older woman, eventually finds love with a younger one, and is now mature enough to lead her into marriage. While this is a rather positive account of progress, Hofmannsthal leaves us at the end of the opera speculating on the future of that older woman whose “boy toy” is no longer either boy or toy.

Rodziński’s suite of Strauss’ music amounts to an impressive effort to lead the listener through Hofmannsthal’s narrative. This was no easy effort, and the fact is that it was not much easier for the listener. Anyone familiar with the full opera (which has been given some thoroughly ravishing productions by San Francisco Opera) will find it easy to follow the suite through its account of the key episodes. Those that do not have the opera’s scenario as a point of reference may find themselves wondering how long the listening experience will be. Those that have read up to this sentence probably recognize my familiarity with the opera; and, with that familiarity in my knapsack, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed Bortolameolli’s interpretation of Rodziński’s score. However, I have to remind myself that Strauss’ music never really got to me until I had the opportunity to see the opera in a staged performance.

The only disappointment of the evening was the SFS premiere of Kevin Puts’ “Contact.” This was a triple concerto composed explicitly for the three musicians of Time for Three, violinists Nicolas Kendall and Charles Yang with Ranaan Meyer on bass. (All three of them also sing.) All of their instruments were amplified, which probably imposed serious challenges for any conductor if not also for the composer. Were it not for the fact that Puts deserves to be addressed as a serious composer (whose music has been performed in the past by SFS), I would suggest that, rather than “Contact,” the appropriate title for last night’s offering would have been “Hey, we’re playing with a symphony orchestra!”

Fortunately, the richness of the other three selections on the program easily erased any unpleasant memories of worrying about how much longer “Contact” would last; and, hopefully, Puts will be remembered for his more substantive achievements.

Erickson to Give World Premiere Performance

Heidi Moss Erickson and John Parr (from the Eventbrite event page)

Readers that follow LIEDER ALIVE! programs probably know that, at the end of this month, soprano Heidi Moss Erickson will be one of the four vocalists performing Johannes Brahms’ Opus 52 Liebeslieder Walzer. Next month she will return to the Noe Valley Ministry, appearing again with pianist John Parr. The original plan was that she would present a recital devoted entirely to the songs of Richard Strauss, as she did with Parr in June of 2019.

However, there has been a change in plans. Next month Erickson and Parr will present the world premiere of a new song cycle by Tarik O’Regan, who last year was appointed the first-ever Composer-in-Residence with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. The title of the new work is Seen and Unseen. The program will still include a selection of Strauss songs. However, there will also be settings of the poems of Emily Dickinson by Aaron Copland, George Walker, and Lori Laitman. Other composers contributing to the program will be Nadia Boulanger, Anton Webern, and Kurt Erickson.

This performance will begin at 5 p.m. on Sunday, July 10, with doors opening at 4:30 p.m. The venue will again be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. Single tickets for all concerts in this series are $75 for reserved seating, $35 for general admission, and $20 for students, seniors, and working artists. These may be purchased in advance through Eventbrite.

Sometimes Words Just Get in the Way

courtesy of Unison Media

One week from today Erato will release its latest album of performances by mezzo Joyce DiDonato. The title of the album is EDEN (caps part of the title); and it is the latest product of an artist seriously concerned with how to cope in the midst of a pandemic. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Those that have followed this site over the last two years know that I have encountered any number of performances, physical as well as virtual, by artists determined to cope with pandemic conditions by drawing upon their creative talents. The Amazon Web page includes the following quote from DiDonato:

EDEN is an invitation to return to our roots. It is an overture to engage with the sheer perfection of the world around us, to consider if we are connecting as profoundly as we can to the pure essence of our being. It is a clarion call to contemplate if our collective suffering isn't perhaps linked to the aching separation from something primal within and around us. This is a vivid musical exploration through the centuries to remember and to create a new EDEN from within.

I am afraid that I do not respond well to such verbiage. At my most irritable, I tend to refer to it as “granola logic” (which is probably unfair to granola, which at least has nutritional value). More fundamentally, however, I have come to belief that, in such uncertain times, the music that has the greatest impact tends not to be burdened down by words. Thus, while there is no denying that EDEN is a product of good intentions, we know the usual cautionary advice about such intentions.

Fortunately, most of the tracks provide vocal works from different past periods of music history, with Giovanni Valentini (seventeenth century) at one end and Aaron Copland (twentieth century) at the other. However, the second track is a world premiere recording of “The First Morning of the World,” composed by Rachel Portman working with a text by Gene Scheer. When compared with all of the other tracks on the album, this is the one offering that feels as if it is going on forever; and I am not about to conjecture how much of the blame is due to words and how much to music. By the time I had hit the halfway mark in the text, I could think only of that series of albums released by Frank Zappa under the general title Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar!

The sad thing is that the album gets off to a splendid start. DiDonato’s accompanying ensemble, Il Pomo d’Oro, plays Charles Ives “The Unanswered Question.” However, the “inquisitive” trumpet part is taken over by DiDonato. Fortunately, she vocalizes with the same deadpan delivery that one encounters in the original score, in which the persistent neutrality of the trumpet “question” is met with annoyed frustration among an ensemble of flutes. In planning out the overall program of this new CD, DiDonato seems to have overlooked Ives’ point that the only “answer” to the trumpet’s question is a still silence.

NCCO to Present Matinee at Presidio Theatre

Next month the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) will shift its venue from the Civic Center to the Presidio. The title of the program will be Hope Leads Appalachian Spring; and, as that title implies, Music Director Daniel Hope will return to lead as Concertmaster. The title refers to the suite Aaron Copland distilled from the music he composed for Martha Graham’s pioneering (double meaning intended) work of modern dance, “Appalachian Spring.” Readers may recall that, a month ago, Michael Tilson Thomas led the San Francisco Symphony in the complete score for Graham’s choreography. While only thirteen players were involved in the Graham premiere, Copland later provided a full-orchestra account of that version, which is less known than the concert suite that was specifically scored for full orchestra. More recently, there have been efforts to perform that suite with the original thirteen-instrument resources, which was the case on the recent Transatlantic release by the Berlin Academy of American Music.

NCCO guest soprano Leah Hawkins (photograph by Dario Acosta, courtesy of NCCO)

The program will also present the NCCO debut of soprano Leah Hawkins, who will perform a collection of vocal music associated with the Harlem Renaissance. The selections will include two songs by Florence Price, “We Have Tomorrow” and “Hold Fast to Dream,” William Grant Still’s Songs of Separation, “Come Sunday,” which Duke Ellington originally composed for his Black, Brown and Beige suite, and “Chloe’s Aria” from Harry Lawrence Freeman’s opera Voodoo. Composed in 1928, this was the first opera by an African-American to be presented on Broadway. Hope will be soloist in another Price composition, “Adoration,” which she scored for violin and strings. He will also begin the program by leading the strings in a performance of David Diamond’s “Rounds.”

This performance will begin at 3 p.m. on Sunday, January 23. The Presidio Theatre is located on the grounds of the Presidio at 99 Moraga Avenue. Single tickets may be purchased through a City Box Office event page. Ticket prices are $30 (last five rear rows), $55 (far side seating and rows L through S), and $67.50 (prime central viewing).

American Themes from a Berlin Point of View

courtesy of PIAS

At the end of last month ONYX Classics released a new album entitled Transatlantic. That title reflects the selections on the album and how they were performed. The album marks the recording debut of the Berlin Academy of American Music, founded about a year ago by its Artistic Director and Conductor Garrett Keast. (Yes, this ensemble was formed in the midst of pandemic conditions.)

This is one of those groups that was created for the performance of a specific composition. In this case the work was “Lamentation,” created by the American composer Craig Urquhart and originally scored for flute and piano. The work was first performed in the summer of 2020 at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, where it was honored with the 2020 Leonard Bernstein Award. The following November Keast discussed with Urquhart and flutist Stathis Karapanos, who had given the premiere performance, the possibility of recording a new, orchestrated version. Recruiting an ensemble for that recording project resulted in the creation of the Berlin Academy. That project culminated in selecting and performing the repertoire for the Transatlantic album.

That said, the “American Music” modifier is likely to confound the usual expectations. The only other American-born composer on the album is Aaron Copland. The album begins with Igor Stravinsky’s E-flat chamber concerto given the title “Dumbarton Oaks,” which was first performed (at Dumbarton Oaks) in 1938. Stravinsky became a naturalized citizen of the United Stated, but not until December of 1945. Avner Dorman, who currently teaches Theory and Composition at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, maintains his Israeli citizenship. His contribution to the album is the song cycle Nofim, setting texts in Hebrew. Tōru Takemitsu, on the other hand, was born in Tokyo and died there; but his Toward the Sea suite was inspired by the American novel Moby Dick.

Copland is represented by “Appalachian Spring;” and it is a bit ironic and a bit more disappointing that I should be writing about this music so soon after having listened to Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) conduct the San Francisco Symphony in a full-orchestra arrangement of Copland’s complete score. The music was composed for a dance choreographed by Martha Graham and was scored for only thirteen players. I had previously written that instrumentation was probably determined by “limitations in both space and capital,” since Graham and her company of dancers first performed the work at the Library of Congress. Copland subsequently extracted a suite from the score to be played by a full orchestra. Keast decided to have the suite performed by the original thirteen-instrument resources. While this is a satisfactory solution for a chamber ensemble, it elides over the most visceral qualities of Copland’s score, resulting in a somewhat feeble account of the sentiment-laden rhetoric pouring out of a full orchestra in the suite version.

Taken as a whole, I must confess that I find the overall repertoire of the album a bit on the weak side. Stravinsky towers above all the other tracks on the album, not only through the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto but also In soprano Chen Reiss’  account of Anne Truelove’s aria at the conclusion of the first act of The Rake’s Progress. Indeed, both of these selections provide excellent examples of Stravinsky’s “neo-classical” approach to composition, since the concerto is a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach, while Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart overshadows Anne’s aria. In that context even Takemitsu comes across as somewhat diminished, and Copland definitely deserved better.

MTT Revisits the “Complete” “Appalachian Spring”

As was announced a week ago, last night at Davies Symphony Hall Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) shared the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) with Ludovic Morlot. MTT limited his performance to the final work on the program, Aaron Copland’s score for “Appalachian Spring,” a dance choreographed by Martha Graham, first performed at the Library of Congress on October 30, 1944.That premiere performance involved only thirteen players, due, probably, to limitations in both space and capital.

This music is probably best known through a concert suite for full orchestra that Copland himself prepared, which was given its premiere performance by the New York Philharmonic almost exactly a year later. It is unclear when Copland decided to provide the full-orchestra account of the original score, but that was one of MTT’s SFS offerings relatively early in his tenure. SFS performed that version for the first time under MTT’s baton in June of 1996. That is the version he revisited last night.

I have always had a preference for the original chamber version of the music; but, by the same count, I also harbor a great love for the film of Graham’s choreography performed by the original cast. I discovered that film on YouTube during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when, in the absence of concert performances, I broadened the scope of my writing by reaching out into cyberspace. When I wrote about that film, I drew upon a synopsis I had found on the dance’s Wikipedia page:

A young farm couple ruminate on their lives before getting married and setting up house in the wilderness. An itinerant preacher delivers a sermon. An older pioneer woman oversees the events with sympathy and wisdom. The newlyweds muse on their future as night falls. In the course of the dance, Graham reveals the inner lives of the four principal characters – Wife, Husbandman, Pioneer Woman and Preacher. She shows that the couple will face a future that will not be all sweetness and light, but she also draws out the private and shared emotional resources they will be able to bring to the challenges. Such is the power of Graham's images, however, that this very particular story broadens out to become a parable about Americans conquering a new land.

Graham herself danced the Wife, partnered by Erick Hawkins as the Husbandman. The Pioneer Woman was taken by May O’Donnell; but the real surprise was the opportunity to watch Merce Cunningham in the role of the Preacher. Cunningham’s agility served him excellently in his account of the hell-and-brimstone sermon that the Preacher delivers to music that Copland cut for the suite version. It is because of that historical context that I have always had a significant place in my heart for the original score, even when instrumentation was expanded to full orchestra.

The fact is that Copland could engage a keen sense of narrative when his work required him to do so. While the “Appalachian Spring” suite addresses the primary elements of character and plot, the cuts in the score disrupt the overall narrative flow. During that flow the Preacher’s sermon is abruptly interrupted by the common-sense Pioneer Woman; and the narrative shifts its attention to the Wife giving birth to her first child. As a result, when the music returns to a “final chorus” of “Simple Gifts” (the one theme that Copland appropriated from traditional sources), there is a sunny optimism that a new generation is emerging to make sure that the life initiated by the pioneers would continue and flourish. Thus, what was most important to my own listening last night was MTT’s clear understanding of those many narrative details and his skill in weaving them into the overall flow of the music more familiar from the suite.

SFS Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins reflecting on composing and performing (from the SFS event page for the concert being discussed)

In that context it was a little bit disappointing that this “historical” offering should overshadow a premiere performance. The major work on the first half of the program was the world premiere of a trombone concerto composed by SFS Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins and written with the support of an SFS commission. Like the Copland offering, this was very much a full-ensemble composition; and what may have been most impressive was the balance between the solo part, played by Higgins himself, and all the other instrumental resources (including a generous share of activity by the percussionists).

The music itself was in three movements entitled “Daybreak,” “Night Time,” and “Finale,” respectively. The entire score amounts to a meditation on the impact on the composer’s life that resulted from the birth of his first child. In other words the music was a highly personal reflection, which was then fleshed out through the act of performance and the subjective rhetoric of Higgins’ solo work. Reflecting back on the concert as a whole, I realized that there was an implicit bond between Higgins’ concerto and Copland’s score for Graham. One might say that, taken as a whole, the program provided life-goes-on perspectives in which a narrative based in the nineteenth century complemented one set in the present day.

Where the overall program was concerned, the opening selection, the orchestrated version of Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose) suite, was a bit of an outlier. Those familiar with the music know that it is based on fairy tales, rather than nursery rhymes. Fortunately, Peter Grunberg’s pre-concert talk clarified this matter, which was particularly useful, since the movements were not enumerated on the program sheet. For those familiar with the music, Morlot managed the orchestral resources in such a way as to bring life to the narrative behind each of the movements, all of which are surprisingly minimal in thematic content. Having established his rapport with the ensemble through Ravel, Morlot then went on to provide Higgins with all the support he needed to bring his new concerto to the SFS audience.

Ludovic Morlot to Share SFS Podium with MTT

SFS Guest Conductor Ludovic Morlot (photograph by Lisa Marie Mazzucco, courtesy of SFS)

Yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) announced that Ludovic Morlot would share the Davies Symphony Hall podium with Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) for this week’s subscription concerts. MTT released the following statement:

I’m happy to be in San Francisco, making music with my Symphony colleagues once again. I am feeling well, having returned to the stage in New York last week for the first time since my surgery. I now see that I have to conserve my energy as I continue to recover and have made the decision to focus next week on conducting Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

Morlot will conduct the first half of the program, which will feature the world premiere performance of a trombone concerto composed by Timothy Higgins, SFS Principal Trombone. However, the originally-planned SFS premiere of William Grant Still’s “Patterns” will be replaced by the orchestrated version of Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose) suite, originally composed as a piano duet. MTT announced that he is looking forward to bringing “Patterns” to SFS at a later date. All other plans for this week remain the same as follows:

This concert will be given three performances, all at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 18, Friday, November 19, and Saturday, November 20. A single Web page has been created with hyperlinks for purchasing tickets for each of those dates. There will be an Inside Music talk given by Peter Grunberg one hour prior to each concert. Doors will open fifteen minutes before the talk begins.

These performances will be preceded by the next Katherine Hanrahan Open Rehearsal of the season. This special behind-the-scenes experience begins at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 18, with coffee and complimentary doughnuts, followed by a half-hour introductory talk by Grunberg at 9 a.m. The rehearsal itself begins at 10 a.m.; and, of course, the pieces rehearsed are at the discretion of both conductors. General admission is $30 with $40 for reserved seats in the Premier Orchestra section, Rear Boxes and Side Boxes, and the Loge. Tickets may be purchased online through a separate event page.