SFS Summer 2025: Limited Classical Offerings

Many readers probably know by now that this is the time to start planning for the Summer with the Symphony programs to be presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Most of the events fall into the “pops” category; but, as usual, there will be a few events that will appeal to those in search of “concert” events. As a result, this will be a “filtered” account of the summer season with recommendations for those that prefer to “sit still and listen” in Davies Symphony Hall. Specifics (with hyperlinks for purchasing tickets) are as follows:

Friday, July 11, 7:30 p.m.: Stephanie Childress will lead SFS in a program of favorite works by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Blake Pouliot will be the soloist in a performance of the Opus 35 violin concerto in D major. This will be preceded by excepts from Opus 66, the music composed for the three-act (with prologue) ballet The Sleeping Beauty. The second half of the program will present two favorite overtures. The first of these is the “Fantasy-Overture” “Romeo and Juliet.” The program will then conclude with a bang (so to speak) in the performance of the Opus 49 “1812 Overture.”

Saturday, July 12, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, July 13, 2 p.m.: This will be a debut recital by TwoSet Violin, the duo of violinists Brett Yang and Eddy Chen. They have established their reputation through the Internet with 4.3 million YouTube followers. The program they have prepared is entitled Sacrilegious Games. They will perform with SFS, whose conductor will be Sunny Xia. [updated 6/25, 11:35 a.m.: Both of these performances have been postponed.]

Time for Three musicians Ranaan Meyer, Charles Yang, and Nicholas Kendall (from the event page for next month’s performance)

Wednesday, July 23, 7:30 p.m.: The three musicians of Time for Three, violinists Nicolas Kendall and Charles Yang with Ranaan Meyer on bass, will return, having last performed in Davies in the summer of 2022. They will be the soloists in the performance of the triple concerto by Mason Bates entitled “Silicon Hymnal” and composed on an SFS commission. The program will begin with the first SFS performance of “Rainbow Body” by Christopher Theofanidis. The second half of the program will be devoted to Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances,” an orchestral suite based on music from the Broadway musical West Side Story.

Gershwin++ from Thibaudet and Feinstein

Michael Feinstein at his club Feinstein's/54 Below in 2017 (photograph by Lepestate taken on June 8, 2017, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Last night was one of those rare occasions when the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) performs in Davies Symphony Hall for a Great Performers Series program. The “great performers” were two pianists with highly different backgrounds. Jean-Yves Thibaudet first performed with SFS in 1994 and has been a frequent visitor to Davies since then. Michael Feinstein, on the other hand, has a nightclub at the Nikko Hotel called (what else?) Feinstein’s at the Nikko. He also often adds vocals to his piano work.

The title of last night’s program was Two Pianos: Who Could Ask for Anything More? Those recognizing the question as words from a song were probably not surprised that the second half of that program was devoted entirely to George Gershwin, who also occupied a generous portion of the first half. The other composers contributing to that portion were (in order of appearance), Richard Rogers, Leslie Bricusse, George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans, and Leonard Bernstein.

Both Thibaudet and Feinstein were well enough established in their reputations to deliver performances in which the music mattered more than the musicians. Their approaches to repertoire may have been different; but their delivery was consistently solid, whether it involved an arrangement of one of Gershwin’s piano preludes or an instrumental account of an affectionate standard, such as “The Man I Love.” Most importantly, while the program was more than abundant over the course of the entire evening, there was never the slightest feeling that things might be going on for a bit too long.

I must confess that, more often than not, I tend to shy away from the “pops” approach to many of the best selections of popular music from the twentieth century. Too many orchestral arrangements tend to overwhelm the spirit of music that required little more than a combo for backup. That said, Keith Lockhart’s approach to leading the SFS ensemble captured the spirit behind the many tunes that Thibaudet and Feinstein had selected.

In spite of the diversity of composers in the first half, last night’s program was very much a tribute to Gershwin and his legacy. Feinstein has been committed to keeping the flame of that legacy burning, and last night it was clear that Thibaudet was just as eager to keep that commitment. My guess is that anyone from my generation in the audience relished every moment; and, on the basis of audience response, there is some hope that at least one more generation will be willing to carry the torch.

“What a Swell Party This is!”

Photograph of Michael Tilson Thomas made during the filming of Keeping Score on September 1, 2008 (photograph by Jbitman, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

Tickets for last night’s San Francisco Symphony (SFS) performance in Davies Symphony Hall were sold out before I could write my monthly preview article on the April schedule at the end of last month. Many readers probably know by now that the program was a celebration of the 80th birthday of Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT). Those familiar with him will probably not be surprised that he appeared on the program as conductor, composer, and arranger. Nevertheless, he spent most of the evening sitting in a chair set up at the front of the stage, just to the right of the podium with Joshua Robison at his side.

His appearances as conductor served as “bookends” for the entire program. Both involved the full forces of the SFS ensemble. The program began with Benjamin Britten’s Opus 34 “The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra,” given the more formal subtitle “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell.” I have had a long-standing love affair with this music ever since I took a semester in Orchestration at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (The professor had known Britten before he moved to the United States.) The final selection was Ottorino Respighi’s “Feste Romane” (Roman festivals), the last of his three Roman symphonic poems, preceded by “Fontane de Roma” (fountains of Rome) and  “Pini di Roma” (pines of Rome).

Soloists included two mezzos with many past experiences with MTT. Sasha Cooke sang “Immer wieder” from his Meditations on Rilke, which she had previously performed for its world premiere. She was also joined at the piano by John Wilson for a performance of his song “Grace.” She sang his duet “Not Everyone Thinks That I’m Beautiful” with Frederica von Stade in an orchestration of MTT’s score provided by Bruce Coughlin. Wilson also accompanied von Stade in a performance of “La flûte de Pan” from Claude Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis. Tenor Ben Jones sang two MTT songs, “Drift Off to Sleep” and “Answered Prayers,” in orchestrations by MTT working with Bruce Coughlin. Finally, on the more “pops” side, there were two performances by vocalist Jessica Vosk. She sang MTT’s “Sentimental Again,” which he orchestrated in partnership with Larry Moore. This was preceded by one of the funnier songs Frank Loesser wrote for Guys and Dolls, “Take Back Your Mink,” for which she was joined by members of the SFS Chorus prepared by Director Jenny Wong. The Chorus also performed the Finale from Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

MTT shared the podium with Teddy Abrams and Edwin Outwater, who, in turn, divided the selections on the program roughly equally. Abrams led the one remaining work that did not involve vocal performance. This was the overture to Khantshe in Amerike, a Yiddish musical by Joseph Rumshinsky. MTT originally arranged that overture for The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater, which he first performed in Carnegie Hall in 2005.

As might be expected, there was an encore. All four of the vocal soloists were joined by the chorus and orchestra in another Bernstein selection. This one was “Some other time” from the musical On the Town with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. After Respighi’s roaring thunder, this provided just the right calming influence for leaving Davies in a good mood.

Naama Liany’s Old First Concerts Recital

The cover of Naama Liany’s Daydream album, which includes most of the selections she performed (from The Origin Music Group Web page for the album)

Late this afternoon, mezzo Naama Liany finally (after a month’s delay) brought her Daydream program to Old First Presbyterian Church for the final Old First Concerts program of the month. She performed works by five twentieth-century composers setting texts in four languages. The program began with Francis Poulenc’s Banalités, drawing upon five poems by Guillaume Apollinaire. This was followed by “Heimlich zur Nacht,” taken from the radio opera The Piano Blue composed by Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska. The first half of the program then concluded with the first and last songs from the collection Combat del somni (dream combat) by Federico Mompou.

The second half of the program was “all American.” It began with the five songs in Samuel Barber’s Opus 41 Despite and Still. This was followed by the wittier I Hate Music! by Leonard Bernstein. Liany then took two encores, neither of which were announced. I drew a blank on the first one, but she wrapped things up by going back to Bernstein with his operetta Candide. He wrote his own lyrics for the song “I Am Easily Assimilated,” given tango treatment.

Liany’s delivery was consistently solid. She knew just how to tune her disposition to the semantics behind each of her selections. She kept any talk to a minimum, allowing the full panoply of her selections to speak for themselves. Mind you, not all of her selections were my personal favorites. Nevertheless, for all of my misgivings about Bernstein, I was more than a little impressed by how she nailed her sense of pitch during the “I Hate Music!” song. I was also amused to hear the voice of her pianist Christopher Koelzer, covering for the chorus response (so to speak) in “I Am Easily Assimilated.”

Sundays have been consistently busy for me over the course of this new year, but I was glad to settle down in front of my television late this afternoon to view the Old First Concerts livestream.

Thomas Wilkins Brings Americana to SFS

Conductor Thomas Wilkins (photograph by Bill Sitzmann, courtesy of SFS)

Conductor Thomas Wilkins made his San Francisco Symphony (SFS) debut in December of 2019; and his last appearance took place at the beginning of May of last year, when the concert soloist was saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Last night he led an “all-American” program featuring two compositions by George Gershwin, both enabled through a “second party.” His “Rhapsody in Blue,” originally composed for jazz ensemble, was presented in its orchestration by Ferde Grofé (a composer in his own right best known for his Grand Canyon Suite). The music from his opera Porgy and Bess was presented as the “Symphonic Picture” arranged by Robert Russell Bennett.

The other selections on the program were the first SFS performance of William Grant Still’s Wood Notes suite, and the suite arranged by Charlie Harmon of music composed by Leonard Bernstein for the musical Candide. The soloist for “Rhapsody in Blue” was Michelle Cann; and her encore was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s prelude in C-sharp minor, the second of the five piano pieces in his Opus 3 collection entitled Morceaux de fantaisie. However, Cann did not “stick to the score” very long, serving up her own plate of jazzy embellishments, possibly inspired by Charlie Parker’s appropriation of the theme in his introduction to “All the Things You Are.”

Taken as a whole, the evening was not particularly stimulating. Cann brought a fair amount of expressiveness to her Gershwin interpretation, but her jazz take on Rachmaninoff never quite registered. Wilkins’ leadership, on the other hand, tended to come across as little more than routine; and there was absolutely no sense of spirit in his take on the Candide arrangement. (Mind you, the fault here was probably that of Harmon; but, if Wilkins wanted to lead off his program with energetic Bernstein, he could have made a much better choice.)

By all rights, the Still offering should have been the high point of the evening, since it was an SFS debut. However, Wilkins seems to have had his head only in the “notes” without bringing much expressiveness to the four different evocations of woodland settings. What could have been an engaging journey through musical reflections on a sequence of natural resources (Grand Canyon Suite, anyone?) emerged as little more than a slog through one movement after another. Since this was far from my first encounter with Still’s music, my only conclusion would be that he deserved a better conductor.

This was potentially a program with an engaging diversity of “American perspectives;” but there was nothing in Wilkins’ conducting to engage the attentive listener.

SFIPF: A Disappointing Program of Transcriptions

Late yesterday afternoon at Old First Presbyterian Church, the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) continued with its second program, a solo recital by Asiya Korepanova entitled Transformations. That title was selected by Korepanova because all seven of the works she played were transcriptions of her own design. This would have been an impressive undertaking had it been successful. Sadly, Korepanova’s overly aggressive keyboard technique tended to undermine any suggestion of expressiveness in either the music itself or its realization through transcription.

Asiya Korepanova playing Chopin at SFIPF (screen shot from the video of the performance)

The program itself was framed by music for cello and piano. Korepanova began by coupling Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 3, a “Polonaise brillante,” with an extended introduction, with Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 24 “Élégie.” At “the other end” the program concluded with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 sonata for cello and piano. All three of these offerings were overwhelmed with aggressive technique, which, in the case of Opus 19, obliterated any sense of coherent phrasing.

The “meat for the sandwich” consisted of four songs, each by a different composer of a different nationality. She began with Amy Beach’s setting of Victor Hugo”s “Extase,” the second of her three Opus 21 songs. This was followed by “Liebesode,” the sixth in Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs collection. She then moved on to César Franck’s “Le mariage des roses,” and concluded with the complete four-song cycle of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Songs and Dances of Death.” These are all selections that deserve more attention in the current vocal repertoire; but, sadly, Korepanova did little, if anything, to make a convincing case for them.

Nevertheless, her audience demanded an encore. They got “Maria,” probably the best known tune from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. She managed to inject just about every well-known Lisztian trope into her arrangement. Perhaps she was thinking of the West Side of Budapest!

LIEDER ALIVE!: Mezzo, Cello, Piano

LIEDER ALIVE! performers Kindra Scharich, Jeffrey LaDeur, and Jennifer Culp (from the LIEDER ALIVE! Web page for the 2023/24 season)

Early yesterday evening, LIEDER ALIVE! concluded its twelfth annual Liederabend season. The vocalist was mezzo Kindra Scharich, accompanied at the piano by Jeffrey LaDeur. However, for the most part, the program consisted of trio performances with the addition of cellist Jennifer Culp (who also gave two duo performances with LaDeur).

The first half of the program was framed by Franz Schubert (the D. 943 “Auf dem Strom”) and Johannes Brahms (the second of the two Opus 91 songs, “Geistliches Wiegenlied”). (The titles translate as “on the river” and “sacred cradle-song,” respectively.) Robert Schumann was represented by a cello-piano duo, the second of his Opus 94 pieces, entitled simply “Romanze.” These three leading figures were joined by Alexander Borodin’s three songs for piano, voice, and cello, which he composed in 1854.

The second half of the program took in a much wider extent. The earliest selections were by Hector Berlioz (“La Captive”) and César Franck (“Le Sylphe”). The most recent work on the program was “Dream with me,” one of the songs that Leonard Bernstein composed for the Peter Pan musical. Between these “bookends” were selections by Amy Beach (“Chanson d’amour”) and Edwin Greene (“Sing me to sleep”). The cello-piano duo for this half of the program was the third movement (Andante) from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 cello sonata.

The entire offering proceeded at a fair clip, providing just enough time for the attentive listener to appreciate each selection and then compare it with what would follow. All three of the performers accounted for their parts with engaging clarity, and Scharich always captured just the right dispositions to frame the texts she was singing. I have been listening to Culp’s performances pretty much for as long as I have been doing my writing, and I have never been dissatisfied!

Taken as a whole, the program put the cap on an engaging season, leaving attentive listeners to look forward to the next season, which will establish a new “home” in the Old First Concerts series.

SFS Showcases Brass Players (with Percussion)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the Great Performers Series of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) turned “inward.” The program presented SFS musicians primarily from the brass section. The ensemble consisted of six horn players, six trumpeters, four trombonists (one doubling on euphonium), and two tubaists. There were also three percussionists and one timpanist, but most of the works on the program involved only the brass instruments. The conductor was Brad Hogarth, who provided brief but informative introductions.

This is one of those situations in which it would be wise to begin at the end. Over the course of these brass concerts that I have attended, I have taken an interest in the compositions by Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins. Therefore, it was no surprise that the program concluded with a work that he finished writing in 2022, given the straightforward title “Concert Music for Brass, Percussion and Timpani.” The work consisted of two movements, the first a tribute to Dale Clevenger, the former Principal Horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), who had died on January 5, 2022. The second was a tribute to the entire CSO brass section on the occasion of their return to performing after the COVID pandemic. The first movement was particularly poignant, particularly with its wistful nod to “Beim Schlafengehen” from Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs during the coda.

The high point of the evening came with the performance of Magnus Lindberg’s “Ottoni.” I realized, with a bit of regret, that I had not encountered any of his music since Yuja Wang played his third piano concerto with SFS in October of 2022. Lindberg has appealed to me for quite some time, particularly for his successful efforts to push the pendulum away from minimalism; so I like to call him an “unabashed maximalist.” While listening, I jotted some notes about his textures being thicker than any composer I had encountered since Charles Ives while also exercising the spontaneity of Ives’ turn-on-a-dime rhetoric. “Ottoni” was the wildest ride I had encountered for quite some time, and I loved every minute of it.

The other seriously wild ride on the program came from Roger Harvey’s arrangement of Witold Lutosławski’s “Variations on a Theme by Paganini.” The theme (as many will probably guess), comes from the last of the 24 Caprices that Niccolò Paganini composed for solo violin, which was, itself, a set of variations on a relatively short theme. Among many it is best known for the rhapsody that Sergei Rachmaninoff composed for piano and orchestra. Lutosławski, on the other hand, used Paganini’s own variations as a “blueprint,” to which he added his own twists and turns, scoring the results for two pianos. The result was one of Lutosławski’s most prankish efforts, and the brass arrangement made his wild ride even wilder.

The program also included two composers whose works I had not encountered for quite some time. Gustav Holst was represented by Paul Welcomer’s arrangement of A Moorside Suite, which was originally scored for a full brass band. Welcomer’s introductory remarks about brass band traditions in England were particularly informative, making this offering more than a little sentimental. Alex Bedner, currently a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, prepared arrangements of four short pieces by the French organist Maurice Duruflé, which were described as “Motets on Gregorian themes.” Since my knowledge of plainchant is both distant and limited, none of the themes were familiar to me; but the listening experience was still an engaging one.

The weaker selections were the two “urban” offerings. The program opening with music from a suite that Leonard Bernstein compiled from the soundtrack he had composed for On the Waterfront. Between Elia Kazan’s directing and Marlon Brando’s acting, I have to confess that, after seeing this movie several times, I have no recollection of any of the music; and I fear that last night did little to refresh my memory! I was also left cold by Shulamit Ran’s “Chicago Skyline.” Perhaps I have lost my taste for tone poems inspired by urban life!

As might be expected, the audience refused to leave the house without an encore. The encore was the duel scene from the music that Sergei Prokofiev composed for the full-evening ballet Romeo and Juliet. An all-brass account of that scene worked quite successfully, allowing me to re-create the choreography I had seen so many times in my mind.

Cinematic Biographies

Over the course of the last few months, I have subjected myself to two cinematic biographies, both of which examined the life of a major twentieth-century figure. The first of these was Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (which I was encouraged to see in the IMAX version). Mind you, this was a narrative I had encountered several times on television (not to mention the number of Los Alamos scientists that I came to know during my undergraduate years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

The second was Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, whose title referred to the polymath Leonard Bernstein. This was a case in which my knowledge was limited to Bernstein himself. I never crossed paths with him, nor did I ever attend a concert that he conducted. However, thanks to his many television programs, I encountered him far more often than Oppenheimer (whom I knew only through different biographical accounts). Where Nolan was objectively detached for the sake of providing a narrative that was both accurate and engaging, Cooper came off as determined to provide a warts-and-all account of Bernstein, perhaps not realizing how many warts he would encounter as he advanced through the narrative.

From the viewpoint of a social network, my “path of links” to Oppenheimer was short. Where Bernstein was concerned, the paths were fewer, if not lengthier. They were also decidedly negative. One link led to a member of the faculty at the Juilliard School, who completed the path with a single sentence: (“Such a sweet boy; it’s a pity he’s incompetent!”). I also encountered a revue performed at the Plaza Hotel, which recorded a long patter song about the plans to create Lincoln Center. The only line I remember is the description of Bernstein: “The only man to perform both Creation and Messiah in an autobiographical style.”

As I began to follow the path down Cooper’s narrative, I felt sympathetic to his efforts to provide a warts-and-all account of Bernstein. Unfortunately, there were just too damned many warts. By the time I was about halfway through the film, I felt as if they had already overwhelmed me, leaving me to wonder just how much more-of-the-same I had to endure. I also felt frustrated at how few of the other members of the cast were clearly identified.

(I saw Oppenheimer with a former colleague, whose academic experience was similar to my own. After the film had ended, she asked if I had recognized Richard Feynman. I replied by asking if she saw Kurt Gödel! Feynman was easier to track, thanks to the photograph of him with a bongo drum in The Feynman Lectures on Physics. I was able to identify Gödel standing next to Albert Einstein, with his back to the camera, thanks to an anecdote passed down to me by one of the Bell Labs researchers. Yes, Gödel was a member of the cast; and anyone that checks the Full Cast & Crew IMDb Web page will find him there!)

I suppose that the difference between the two films amounted to the you-had-to-be-there experience. My guess is that Nolan wanted to account for as many Los Alamos personalities as he could manage. That endowed his narrative with a rich diversity in his “cast of characters,” even if the “social network distance” to any of those characters becomes longer for each new generation. Watching Bernstein made me thankful that music had always been a secondary area of study, meaning that I would never have had to deal with Bernstein’s conducting technique as a member of the New York Philharmonic!

Now, about Einstein going for long walks with Gödel …

BARS Pride Concert: Two Symphonies and More

Last night in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (BARS) presented its Pride Concert as a contribution to the San Francisco Pride Celebration. The entire program was structured around two symphonies, both by composers whose last names began with the letter “B.” The first half of the program presented Johannes Brahms Opus 73 in D major, the second of his four symphonies. The intermission was then followed by Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony, composed for orchestra and solo piano and given the title “The Age of Anxiety,” inspired by the poem of the same title by W. H. Auden. The “overture” for this occasion was “Soul of Remembrance,” the second of the five Movements in Color compositions by Mary Watkins. The conductor for the evening was Music Director Dawn Harms, who also served as the ensemble’s interlocutor.

BARS is a community orchestra, meaning that its members convene for the joy of making music, rather than for earning a viable salary. Usually a community is defined geographically; but, where BARS is concerned, it is one of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identified (LGBTQ+) musicians that share the goal of excellence in the performing arts. As performers, they take their music seriously; but that is not necessarily their highest priority.

It is important to bear this context in mind, because the Brahms Opus 73 is a rather challenging undertaking. Thus, last night’s fully attentive listener probably encountered shortcomings of intonation or the overall blend. Nevertheless, Harms clearly knows how to coax out the best that the group can manage, which amounts to no end of moments that will both engage and delight the attentive listener. Furthermore, last night there was a sense that every performer harbored an appreciation for what Brahms created that is realized through love, if not downright passion. This is an ensemble that clearly wanted to do right by Brahms, and it is hard to imagine his ghost being dissatisfied with the results.

The Bernstein symphony is a tougher nut to crack. In the first place, the poem that supposedly inspired it is definitely not for casual reading. It begins with four people in a bar, all wallowing in discontent. They then find themselves on a small island, pairing off to traverse it in different directions. How they get from the bar to the island is left as an exercise for the reader, but they then return to where one of the four of them lives, where there is (at least?) one erotic coupling.

Bernstein’s score is in two parts, each with labels of sections that (at least roughly) parallel the episodes in Auden’s poem. However, any rhetorical connection between poem and orchestra never seems to concern the composer. Of greater interest to him is a part for solo piano (performed last night by Sara Davis Buechner), which traverses a variety of styles in a manner similar to the traversal of the island in Auden’s poem. Most engaging is the moment in which the piano part lets loose with thoroughly down-and-dirty jazzy rhetoric, and Buechner was definitely at the top of her game during that episode. Thus, as the music drew to its conclusion, the attentive listener could feel some satisfaction with the journey, even if it was unclear just where that journey went.

Buechner then returned for an encore. She played “Do, Do, Do,” which George Gershwin composed for the musical Oh, Kay! Most likely she used the solo piano arrangement in George Gershwin’s Songbook. However, I am pretty certain that, for all of the florid embellishments found in that piano version, Buechner had a few of her own to add to the mix. The high spirits of that encore effectively complemented the darkness of “Soul of Remembrance,” which opened the program, making for a fully satisfying journey of dispositions over the course of the evening.

BARS Pride Concert at SFCM this Saturday

Poster design for this year’s Pride Celebration (from the Celebration’s home page)

This Saturday, as one of the preliminary events taking place prior to the San Francisco Pride Celebration on June 24 and 25, the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (BARS) will present its Pride Concert. The program will be framed by two “second symphonies.” The opening selection will be Johannes Brahms Opus 73 in D major, the second of his four symphonies. The conclusion will be the second symphony of Leonard Bernstein, composed for orchestra and solo piano and given the title “The Age of Anxiety,” inspired by the poem of the same title by W. H. Auden.

The pianist for the Bernstein symphony will be Sara Davis Buechner. Between these two large-scale compositions, there will be a performance of “Soul of Remembrance,” the second of the five Movements in Color by Mary Watkins. (Readers may recall that this music will also be performed at the inaugural concert by the International Pride Orchestra this coming June 22.) 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. this Saturday, June 10. 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.

International Pride Orchestra to Debut in SF

Next month will see the inaugural performance by the International Pride Orchestra (IPO). This ensemble was conceived to bring together LGBTQ+ musicians from around the world, not only to present concerts but also to celebrate community and raise funds for LGBTQ+ causes. True to its name, the ensemble has drawn upon applicants from over 30 states in the United States, as well as musicians from countries such as New Zealand and Peru.

The program prepared for the ensemble’s debut will offer a generous diversity of genres. On the traditional side the second half of the concert will be devoted entirely to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 36 (fourth) symphony in F minor. At the other end (so to speak), the program will begin with the world premiere performance of “Loud,” composed by Jimmy López Bellido on a joint commission by IPO, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), and the Seattle Youth Symphony.

The featured soloist will be soprano Breanna Sinclairé, who will perform three stylistically different selections. She will begin with “Elle a fui, la tourterelle” (she fled, the dove), which opens the “Antonia” act from Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. This will be followed by “O mio babbino caro” (oh, my dear papa) from the more upbeat one-act opera, “Gianni Schicchi,” by Giacomo Puccini. Finally, these French and Italian selections will be followed by “Somewhere,” from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. The first half will then conclude with “Soul of Remembrance,” the second of the five Movements in Color by Mary Watkins.

 

Michael Roest, IPO Found and one of the conductors for the program being discussed (courtesy of IPO)

IPO Founder and Director Michael Roest will be one of the three conductors for this program. The other two will be Robert Moody, Music Director of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and Arizona Musicfest, and Christine Brandes, who has led West Edge Opera and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and will be making her conducting debut with the Seattle Opera during the 2023/24 season. Drag legend Peaches Christ will host the entire program, which, in turn, will be hosted by SFCM.

The performance will take place in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, which is in the 50 Oak Street SFCM building. The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 22. All tickets are being sold for $25 and may be purchased online through an Eventbrite event page. Those visiting this site will also be invited to make a donation to LYRIC, which is one of the first and largest LGBTQ+ youth centers in the United States. Its mission is to build community and inspire positive social change through education enhancement, career trainings, health promotion, and leadership development. The plan for the future is to choose a different city each year to host an IPO concert, establishing new partnerships with LGBTQ+ organizations.

Wilkins and Marsalis: Two Returns to Davies

This afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented the first of its three programs featuring highly jazz-informed programming performed, for the most part, with symphonic, rather than jazz-band, resources. The conductor was Thomas Wilkins, who made his SFS debut in December of 2019; and the soloist was Branford Marsalis on alto saxophone, who made his SFS debut in March of 1994. As might be expected, this was not the usual overture-concerto-symphony program. Instead, there was an opening based on three excerpts from Leonard Bernstein’s score for the musical On the Town, two works featuring the saxophone, and “Harlem,” which may be the closest Duke Ellington ever came to composing a tone poem.

Bass player Stephen Tramontozzi (from his Faculty Web page on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Web site)

Two of the works involved arrangements that deserve attention. The first of these was Marsalis’ first selection, originally conceived by Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff as a sonata for alto saxophone and piano, given the title “Hot-Sonate.” However, this afternoon the piece was played as a concerto in an arrangement by Richard Rodney Bennett. Among the Europeans, Schulhoff had one of the keenest ears for jazz rhetoric; and Bennett seems to have made it a point to make sure that his arrangement would not short-change any of the original version’s jazzy qualities.

It is also worth noting that Marsalis was part of a trio of soloists, reflecting a combo of saxophone, bass(Stephen Tramontozzi), and drum kit (Jacob Nissly). Most important, however, was that Bennett knew how to make sure that he never short-changed the flood of “hot” gestures found in the original score. This selection was being performed by SFS for the very first time.

The other arrangement involved “Harlem,” which was originally commissioned by the NBC Symphony. However, it was first performed by the Ellington band in 1951. The symphonic version was orchestrated by Luther Henderson; but, when Maurice Peress recorded the work with the American Composers Orchestra, he provided his own orchestration. Since both names are included in the program book, it is likely that Wilkins chose which portions of the score would receive orchestration by which composer. Regardless of its “pedigree,” this selection presented just as much impact as one could expect from a program-concluding symphony, complete with some wild percussion works that even spilled over onto Edward Stephan’s timpani.

The other two works on the program had their “roots” in narrative. The opening selection was composed by Leonard Bernstein, drawing upon the score he had originally created for the musical On the Town. From that score he distilled a symphonic suite of sorts, called simply “Three Dance Episodes.” These days On the Town is better known for the 1949 film, which was directed by Gene Kelley (who was also a leading member of the cast). Those familiar with the film would probably recall the scenes from which Bernstein extracted his episodes, but my own opinion is that the music has far more impact in its original narrative setting.

The other narrative came from the film Catch Me If You Can, whose score was composed by John Williams. I have to confess that I never saw this film. As a result, most of my own listening joy came from having a second opportunity to listen to Marsalis lead his trio with Tramontozzi and Nissly. Once again, this “dynamic trio” had a hand to giving the music its first SFS performance. Williams himself call his reworking of excerpts Escapades; and listening to the “escapades” of both the trio and the full orchestra behind them made for a rich sense of satisfaction that had nothing to do with any underling movie narrative! This offering was also given its first SFS appearance, and the music clearly has more than enough substance to justify returning in a future SFS program.

Anderson & Roe “Overlay” Familiar Classics

The piano duo of Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe presented one of the last performances in Herbst Theatre before the lockdown conditions were imposed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Their last recital for Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) took place on February 15, 2020. Last night they made their first “post-pandemic” CMSF appearance. As in the past, high spirits reigned over the course of the evening with their usual innovative twists on familiar repertoire selections.

Because those twists are anticipated by those that have attended past performances, they have given the technique a label. They assign the title “Overlay” to their imaginative techniques of embellishment. The two Overlay selections on last night’s program were applied to two of the pieces under Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances title. In “order of appearance,” those were the second (in E minor) from the Opus 72 collection and the fifth (in A major) from the Opus 46 collection. These made for a delightfully adventurous departure from the “original scores,” complete with each of the pianists adding some vocalizations.

These two selections were preceded by a “straight” account of “Silent Woods” the fifth composition in Dvořák’s Opus 68 collection, From the Bohemian Forest. A third Overlay provided the first encore of the evening, based on Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” The other “unembellished” selection on the program was the first, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 448 sonata for two pianos in D major.

Nevertheless, the program abounded with richly developed accounts of music from a variety of genres. More often than not, embellishment was a matter of “pulling out all the stops” (so to speak), as in rethinking the final movement of Mozart’s K. 331 piano sonata in A major into “Ragtime alla Turca.” Particularly impressive was their ability to command the rich orchestration of the “Daybreak” episode from Maurice Ravel’s score for the ballet “Daphnis et Chloé.” Ironically, the was the one piece on the program that involved an arranger other than Anderson and/or Roe. Vyacheslav Gryaznov took on Ravel’s score, but Anderson and Roe took on his transcription with jaw-dropping technique.

The duo could also deliver a subtle insight or two in their own arrangements. They closed out their program with four selections from Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story. However, they were not afraid to remind listeners that “Somewhere” was a product of not-so-subtle appropriation. For those that thought the music was Bernstein’s own invention, Anderson and Roe were helpful by providing an interjection of the passage from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 73 (fifth, know as “Emperor”) piano concerto in E-flat major that “inspired” that upward leap that began the “Somewhere” tune. (As Johannes Brahms said, “Das bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel!”)

The third Overlay was followed by two more encores. The first of these presented the duo at its most lyrical in their arrangement of “Mondnacht” (moon night), the fifth song in Robert Schumann’s Opus 39 Liederkreis song cycle. The was the calm before the stormy no-holds-barred account of the “Sabre Dance” movement from Aram Khachaturian’s score for the ballet Gayane.

Centuries of Sound to Return to Century Club

Centuries of Sound is a concert series affiliated with the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival and the visits made by Festival musicians to San Francisco. These events take place in the ballroom of the historic Century Club of California, which has just the right acoustics and intimate setting for chamber music performances. To my regret, I seem to have lost touch with these regular visits; but, thanks to Groupmuse, I can put out the word for when the next offering will take place.

Two Roads Trio members Karl Knapp, Jamie Rose Guarrine, and Ian Scarfe on the poster for the program being discussed (from a Groupmuse event page)

The performers for this offering call themselves the Two Roads Trio. The group is led by pianist Ian Scarfe, who is the Founder and Director of the Trinity Alps Festival. The other members are soprano Jamie Rose Guarrine and cellist Karl Knapp. The vocal selections will focus on settings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Those texts will form the basis for a cycle of commissioned songs entitled To Keep the Dark Away and composed by Scott Gendel. This will be the opening selection, and the program will conclude with “The Angel’s Serenade” by Gaetano Braga. Between these two “bookends,” there will be three more familiar composers, Leonard Bernstein (“Dream With Me”), Amy Beach (“Chanson d’Amour”), and Franz Schubert (D. 965, “Der hirt auf dem Felsen,” which translates as “the shepherd on the rock” and was composed for trio performance).

The Century Club is located at 1355 Franklin Street, between Post Street and Sutter Street. The performance will begin at 2 PM on Sunday, April 23. Payment is being managed by an RSVP hyperlink on the Eventbrite Web page created for this recital. A seat may be reserved for $5. For those that would prefer to pay at the door, admission will be $20. Groupmuse will provide free drinks. Note that masks will not be required, nor proof of either COVID vaccination or COVID testing. It goes without saying, however, that anyone feeling sick should stay at home.

Teddy Abrams Wraps up SFS Summer with Gusto

Conductor Teddy Abrams (from the event page for the concert being discussed)

Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, Teddy Abrams led the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in the final Summer with the Symphony program, which will be given a second performance this evening at 7:30 p.m. The first three of the four selections on the program were premieres in one way or another, all created by living and currently active composers. The program then concluded with Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story” suite, scored for large orchestra by Irwin Kostal and Sid Ramin.

The high point of the program was the San Francisco premiere of “Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra,” which composer Mason Bates completed in 2020. Bates delivered a first-rate account of what to expect prior to the performance, and it became almost immediately apparent that he had moved on from his electronica work to take on far richer media. He also had a sense of history, being prescient enough to cite Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” as a significant predecessor, also acknowledging the “introduction to the instruments” that begins Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

However, “Philharmonia Fantastique” is a far richer undertaking, because it involves the performance of a full symphony orchestra taking place with the screening of a highly imaginative animation, created by Jim Capobianco, that “illustrates” not only the performing instruments but also the qualities of the sounds they create. As might be expected, preparing something of so much complexity for performance did not come cheap. The making of the score involved a joint commission by not only SFS but also the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, the American Youth Symphony, the Sakana Foundation, and the John & Marcia Goldman Foundation.

The animation has a protagonist, which Bates called the “sprite” in his introduction. The sprite is both a shape-shifter and a size-shifter, allowing him to present to the viewer the rich variety of instruments performing Bates’ score but also to explore them, often from the inside as well as the outside. Then, as the animation leads the eye through this rich diversity of objects, SFS presents to the ear the equally rich diversity of sonorities that these objects can summon. Thus, by the time the score goes barreling down its coda, the animation is tying all of the “contributing threads” of its imagery into a climax as rich to the eye as the instrumental ensemble is rich to the ear.

The impact of this experience could still be appreciated after the intervening intermission. That intermission was followed by the West Coast premiere of “Fractal Isles,” composed last year by Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón. While she never used the word in her program notes, her final paragraph compared her score to the visual experience of a kaleidoscope, with colored pieces of glass subjected to multiple reflections, as well as reflections of those reflections. However, because her objective appeared to be to evoke experiences of Puerto Rico, her instrumental score was augmented with field recordings taken from tropical rainforests with particular attention to a small singing frog known as a coqui. Thus, while Bates’ score introduced the listener to the diversity on instrumental sonorities, Negrón took the process “to the next level” by incorporating natural sounds.

These two “image-based” compositions were framed by two narrative ones. Abrams began the program with his own music, the overture he composed for The Greatest: Muhammad Ali, which he described as “a blend of rap-opera and oratorio.” The overture drew upon the thematic content of the music that would follow. However, the attentive listener would probably not have guessed that some of that music had been composed for a long rap section. For that matter, I doubt that many in the audience would have associated any of the music with any of Ali’s fights (assuming that they had any recollections of those fights). Nevertheless, Abrams found an energetic groove for his overture that did not necessarily depend on knowledge of either prize fights or rap sessions.

On the other hand, it is likely that much of the audience was familiar with most of the music from West Side Story. The music was given a complete concert performance in Davies Symphony Hall by SFS at the conclusion of its 2012–2013 season. Abrams gave a convincing account of the excerpts collected for the “Symphonic Dances;” but, to some extent, that account had a somewhat dated quality in the context of all three of the more recent compositions on the program.

Disappointing Jazz Vocals from Sally Terrell

courtesy of Play MPE

A few weeks ago jazz vocalist Sally Terrell released her second (apparently self-produced) album entitled Feel Alive. The album features arrangements by keyboardist John Di Martino, balancing a selection of standards with new songs. The advance material addresses that latter category as follows:

Combining themes both personal and public, this album channels the range of emotions so many of us have felt the past two years, ultimately calling us all to look ahead with genuine, if cautious, optimism.

The content of those selections is described as “stories ripped from the headlines along with intimate reflections of longing, love, division and change.”

These descriptions seem to raise a red flag, warning that the pandemic blues are best addressed through navel-gazing. From a personal point of view, this runs counter to my own philosophy, which is that we commit ourselves to quit moping about it all in favor of taking a more upbeat rhetorical stance. For that matter, the navel-gazing rhetoric of the originals on this new album tend to spill over into the standards. This is most evident in the final track, Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time,” which runs the risk of mushiness even in its original setting in On the Town. On this new release it bogs down even further in the combination of Di Martino’s arrangement and Terrell’s delivery.

Those interested in Di Martino’s talents as an arranger would be better off checking out the album he released about two years ago: Passion Flower: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, which is all music without any agenda.

Ian Robertson Bids Farewell to SFO

Last night in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater of the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the first of two performances by the SFO Chorus, led by Director Ian Robertson. Robertson is retiring from his position after the second of those performances this afternoon. In honor of his 35 years of service with SFO, the program was entitled, appropriately enough, Celebrating Ian Robertson.

Following two selections of sacred music by leading composers of the Baroque period, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Johann Sebastian Bach, the program traversed an extensive survey of selections from operas composed by George Frideric Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gaetano Donizetti, Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, Jacques Offenbach, Jennifer Higdon, Scott Joplin, and Leonard Bernstein. The second half of the program also presented a generous offering of secular music, much of which was sung a cappella. These included the world premiere performance of “Invitation to Love,” a setting of a text by Paul Laurence Dunbar composed by Cava Menzies on a commission by SFO in Robertson’s honor.

Other living composers on the program were Joan Szymko, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Kate Rusby. Their twentieth-century predecessors were Florence Price, Joseph Canteloube, and Maurice Ravel. All instrumental accompaniment was provided by Associate Chorus Master Fabrizio Corona at the piano.

Ian Robertson conducing an earlier performance by the San Francisco Opera Chorus in the Atrium Theatre with projected text (photograph by Matthew Washburn, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

Robertson preceded each offering with a brief verbal introduction, often establishing the significance of the selection. Rather than burden members of the audience with text sheets that could barely be read in darkness, all texts were projected on the Atrium wall behind the performers, always in English, regardless of the text being sung. Those familiar with the space know that it has no acoustics of its own. As a result, the performance owed as much to the Constellation® acoustic system provided by Meyer Sound. The controller of this technology appears to have had some difficulty early in the performance, but those problems were resolved quickly enough that most of the audience was probably unaware of any problems.

My guess is that almost all of the operatic selections were familiar to the audience, most of whom were probably SFO subscribers. The most notable exceptions would have been Joplin’s Treemonisha and HIgdon’s Cold Mountain. (Those encountering Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène for the first time would probably still have found some of the music familiar.) On the other hand those subscribers would also have been familiar with the instrumental accompaniment from the “source” operas; and there were several occasions when the piano could not provide the rhetorical support encountered in the original scores. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine the Atrium space being conducive to a large instrumental ensemble; and most of us were more than content to focus attention on the vocalists.

Personally, I must confess that I was more impressed with the diversity of the selections that were not operatic. While I am have long been satisfied with my Decca Complete Edition collection of Ravel’s music, I must confess that my recording of the three a cappella choral songs he composed between 1914 and 1915 had slipped my mind. Each of these pieces was brief; and the second afforded an excellent opportunity to appreciate the solo voices of soprano Angela Moser, contralto Silvie Jensen, tenor Alan Cochran, and baritone Mitchell Jones. For that matter all of the a cappella offerings were thoroughly engaging “adventures of discovery,” with the premiere of Menzies’ “Invitation to Love” leading the way.

Robertson’s command of repertoire clearly extends far beyond the usual operatic bill of fare, and my mind is still processing the stimulating diversity of the program he prepared for his farewell concert.

Andrew Wan’s Latest Analekta Releases

Violinist Andrew Wan was named concertmaster of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in 2008. Since that time he has become a major property of the Canadian Analekta label, recording both concertos with the ensemble and its conductor Kent Nagano and chamber music with pianist Charles Richard-Hamelin. This past October Analekta released his two latest albums. The chamber music release consists of the three Opus 12 sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven, along with the Opus 24 (“Spring”) sonata in F major. The orchestral album presents concertante selections that receive relatively little attention, composed (in their order on the recording) by Alberto Ginastera, Leonard Bernstein, and Samy Moussa.

The Beethoven release is the second in what is probably a project to account for all ten of the sonatas. The project began with the release in September of 2018 of the three Opus 30 sonatas. It is important to bear in mind that the “full canon” of these sonatas amounts to relatively early work. The final sonata, Opus 96 in G major, was composed in 1812; and the other nine were written between 1798 and 1802. The other point I like to raise is that Beethoven described these as sonatas for piano and violin, perhaps setting his priorities on the assumption that he would be the keyboardist!

I have had the good fortune to encounter all ten of these sonatas both in performance and on several different recordings. The recordings are useful to establish familiarity with the thematic material; but the spontaneity of performance carries much more significance, particularly when it involves an encounter between a well-matched pair of virtuoso masters. In that context I am afraid that Wan’s second Beethoven sonata album did little to seize, let alone maintain, my attention over the course of its four sonata offerings.

A nineteenth-century imagining of Plato’s “Symposium” (painting by Anselm Feuerbach completed in 1874, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

On the orchestral album my only familiarity came from the middle selection, Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade after Plato’s ‘Symposium.’” The composer’s educational experiences at both Boston Latin School and Harvard University clearly exposed him to considerable instances of intellect. However, while Bernstein was clearly impressed by intellect, his efforts to rise to it did not fare particularly well. In the canon of Plato’s dialogues, “Symposium” is the one that is as much a character study as a philosophical examination of the nature of love. The movements of Bernstein’s “Serenade” attempt to capture the diversity of Plato’s characters; but his understanding of “Symposium” seems to be based more on whatever predecessor of CliffsNotes he had at his disposal to spare him the trouble of working through the text itself.

“Serenade” is preceded by Ginastera’s Opus 30 violin concerto. This composition involves an imaginatively elaborate architecture with six études at its core. Instrumentation is massive, including about fifty different instruments in the percussion section. However, while the plan for the concerto looks good on paper, its execution (at least as presented by Wan and Nagano) feels like a rather tedious slog from one episode to the next. The Moussa concerto, given its world premiere by Wan and Nagano, suffers from similar tedium; but Moussa at least seems to have had a better sense of working with a shorter overall duration.

Once again, however, it appears that Analekta products have been aimed at an audience that, to borrow a phrase that John Cage liked, is “not very fussy about music.”

Music to Inspire Voter Registration

Among the many events that commemorated the bicentennial of the United States of America, one of the less successful was the Broadway musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Leonard Bernstein provided the music for the book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, and both of them had more successes than can be easily enumerated. By 1976 Bernstein had established himself as a world-famous conductor and a composer that had excelled not only in the concert hall but also on Broadway. Lerner, in turn, was a leading figure in musicals, perhaps best known for My Fair Lady on Broadway and the film Gigi. Working together, the two of them should have been a “dynamic duo;” but, following thirteen preview performances, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on May 4, 1976 and closed the following May 8.

The idea was to survey the occupants of the White House (at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) between 1800 and 1900 with one actor (Ken Howard) playing all the presidents and one actress (Patricia Routledge) playing all the First Ladies. It begins with Thomas Jefferson moving in while his predecessor, John Adams and his wife Abigail sing to him the song “Take Care of This House.” We now find ourselves in a time when the occupancy of “This House” may be more contentious than any of us can recall, meaning that the results of the coming Election Day may be the most crucial that any of us have experienced.

This past Tuesday was Voter Registration Day, singled out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to recognize the need to “protect our health and our civil liberties at the same time, including our fundamental right to vote.” To this end the ACLU created a Web page with separate hyperlinks for each of the fifty states, providing information about the different ways in which a vote may be safely cast. To encourage visiting that Web page, pianist Lara Downes created a video of a performance of “Take Care of This House.”

Members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus singing from the windows of the White House (courtesy of Crossover Media)

In this video each performer appears in a window of the White House. First we encounter Downes playing in a window with cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the next window. Other instrumentalists include guitarist Conor Padmanabhan and another cellist, Ifetayo Ali-Landing. There is also an impressive number of contributing vocalists with line-by-line accounts taken by Thomas Hampson, Isabel Leonard, Ailyn Pérez, Lawrence Brownlee, Anthony Ross Costanzo, Julia Bullock, and J’Nai Bridges. Finally, all the windows are filled by the members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, after which Judy Collins provides a spoken epilog on why this musical journey was so important.

The resulting video makes for a refreshingly imaginative approach to media, but what matters the most is that we all react to the message behind the media!