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.

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!

Steve Jobs as a Subject for Opera

This afternoon at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera, San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the second of its six scheduled performances of the Bay Area premiere of “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” a one-act opera composed by Mason Bates. While this production was commissioned in conjunction with the Seattle Opera and the Santa Fe Opera, which presented the world premiere performance on July 22, 2017, the entire narrative of the libretto takes place at different venues in our own peninsula, primarily in Silicon Valley. One may thus say that the current run of performances counts as a “homecoming” for the overall narrative.

Most readers are probably familiar with the story of Jobs, which provided scripts for two different movies. So it is probably worth asking what an operatic treatment can add to that story. One answer is that music can add perspectives that words alone may not convey as convincingly. It is also important to note that the libretto that Mark Campbell prepared for Bates’ music dispenses with chronology. The opera consists of a single act (performed without interruption) consisting of eighteen scenes along with both a prologue and an epilogue. In Campbell’s libretto the “distortion of the time-line” brings new perspectives to the chronological accounts provided by the movies. Unfortunately, it can also undermine an understanding of the motivations behind the actions.

On the basis of a single viewing, I would say that the narrative of the libretto has, indeed, been undermined by that lack of chronological linearity. To be fair, anyone familiar with past accounts of Jobs life will probably have no trouble negotiating that non-linearity. Nevertheless, there remains the question of what librettist and composer were trying to communicate and why the subject matter of that communication is significant. Thus, while most of us know the basic narrative of Jobs’ biography, I would venture to say that the music never seems to make up its mind on what it wants to reveal to the audience about the roller-coaster ride of Jobs’ dispositions. The stage direction by Kevin Newbury seldom resolves this matter, nor does the delivery of Jobs’ character by baritone John Moore, who is making his SFO debut in this production.

Kōbun Chino Otogawa (Wei Wu) standing beside Steve Jobs (John Moore) at the Los Altos Zen Center (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

Indeed, the clearest account of motive seems to reside in the character of Jobs’ spiritual advisor, Kōbun Chino Otogawa, sung by bass Wei Wu (also making his SFO debut). In a context that is more often associated with Zen paradoxes, Campbell conceived Otogawa as a font of common sense. Indeed, in the midst of that non-linear time-line, Otogawa emerges as a sort-of still center of the universe. His presence becomes a consistent relief not only from Jobs stressful nature but also the behavior of those closest to him, particularly his wife Laurene Powell Jobs (mezzo Sasha Cooke) and his closest professional partner Steve Wozniak (tenor Billie Bruley, another SFO debut).

Nevertheless, we should remember that “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” is an opera, rather than a documentary. SFO emphasized this with a statement in the program book:

The R(e)volution of Steve Jobs is inspired by the life and creative spirit of Steve Jobs and does not purport to depict actual events as they occurred or statements, beliefs, or opinions of the persons depicted. It has not been authorized or endorsed by Apple Inc., the Estate or Family of Steve Jobs, or by any persons depicted.

So, in the absence of reportage, what does the opera depict? Personally, I would suggest that, if the opera has any message at all, it is a relatively simple one: “Life is messy.” In that context Otogawa’s “still center” confronts the turbulence of that messiness. Campbell’s libretto provides an informative account of that turbulence, which is given a relatively clear account through Newbury’s staging. This leaves the question of what the music brings to this party.

This is where things get disappointing. Before attending this afternoon’s performance, I had listened several times to the recording that was made in Santa Fe. As a result, I could follow the unfolding of the plot with reminders of which musical passages communicated which elements of the overall narrative. Nevertheless, I fear that the experience of listening to Bates’ music in performance never contributed very much to what was coming to me from the staged activities.

The fact is that, no matter how hard I tried to pay attention to the music, it had far less impact on the overall opera production than I would have expected.

Steve Jobs Opera is Coming to Opera House

Steve Jobs (Edward Parks) presenting the launch of one of his products (photograph by Ken Howard, from the Santa Fe Opera premiere performance of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs)

Following up on the season-opening performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore (the troubadour), the 2023–24 season of the San Francisco Opera (SFO) will continue with the Bay Area premiere of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, composed by Mason Bates. SFO commissioned this opera in conjunction with the Seattle Opera and the Santa Fe Opera, which presented the world premiere performance on July 22, 2017. A little less than a year later, PENTATONE released the “original cast recording” of the Santa Fe production.

Those familiar with either (or both) of the films made about Jobs probably know that one of his product launches took place in the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. (An earlier launch was held across the street at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall.) This may be the first time that a performance has, as a setting, the venue in which the work itself is being performed.

Kevin Newbury, who directed the world premiere, will return to the Opera House to stage the SFO production. He is no stranger to the venue, having previously directed productions of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma and Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. He will, once again, work with conductor Michael Christie, who had conducted both the performances and the recording of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs.

The SFO Chorus will be led by Chorus Director John Keene. Two of the members of the cast will repeat the roles they had taken in Santa Fe. One of them, bass Wei Wu, will be making his SFO debut in the role of Jobs’ spiritual advisor Kōbun Chino Otogawa. In addition, the role of Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, will again be taken by mezzo Sasha Cooke, whose visits to the Opera House are definitely too numerous to mention! Baritone John Moore will make his SFO debut in the title role, and tenor Bille Bruley will sing the role of his colleague, Steve Wozniak, also making his SFO debut.

This opera will be sung in English with English supertitles. The running time will be approximately 90 minutes, and there will be no intermission. There will be six performances. Five of them will take place at 7:30 p.m. on September 22, 27, and 30 and October 3 and 7. The remaining performance will be the 2 p.m. matinee on September 24. Ticket prices range from $26 to $378. All tickets may be purchased in the outer lobby of the War Memorial Opera House at 301 Van Ness Avenue or by calling the Box Office at 415-864-3330. Box Office hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m. on Monday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday through Saturday. There is also a single Web page for online purchase of tickets to all six of the performances. In addition, there will be a livestream beginning at 7:30 p.m. on September 27. The charge will be $27.50, and it may be purchased through a separate Web page.

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.

Reinhardt’s SFS Debut Not Her Finest Hour

SFS Guest Conductor Ruth Reinhardt (photograph by Jessica Schaefer, courtesy of SFS)

This is the last of the five weeks of guest conductors visiting the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). This week’s conductor is German-born Ruth Reinhardt, who has visited a wide variety of ensembles in both Europe and the United States; and this was her SFS debut. The first half to the program was devoted entirely to two premieres of recent compositions. The intermission was then followed by Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 76 (fifth) symphony in F major, which was originally published in 1888 as his third.

That symphony provided the only opportunity to listen to how Reinhardt approached the nineteenth-century repertoire. She clearly appreciated the rich rhetoric that Dvořák brought to this relatively early symphony. Unfortunately, she had a tendency to go “over the top,” overstating the richness of that rhetoric, rather than giving it a more nuanced contour of the wide variety of dispositions that the composer had conceived as the threads of his overall fabric. Nevertheless, the SFS musicians seemed to appreciate the ways in which her intensity provided more than ample opportunities for every voice to establish its own content and context.

This is more than can be said of the new works on the first half of the program. The opening selection was the first SFS performance of “Om fotspår och ljus” (of footprints and light), written by Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski and given the subtitle “Helsinki Variations.” The score amounted to a landscape of instrumental sonorities and textures, with particular attention to a highly diverse percussion section. However, the ambiguity of the overall structure was punctuated with quotations from an unfinished opera by Ida Moberg entitled Asiens ljus (light of Asia). Thus, the effect was one of wandering through an unknown region and encountering landmarks that seemed familiar without actually being so. This made for a fascinating concept. However, even though the running time was about ten minutes; and listening experience felt like it went on forever.

Similarly, the West Coast premiere of the piano concerto that Mason Bates composed for pianist Daniil Trifonov overstayed its welcome sooner rather than later. This was a bit disappointing, since the overall architecture consisted of three movements, each reflecting the rhetoric of a different period in music history. Furthermore, there was a certain playfulness in Bates’ plan, holding off on any perceived sense of interplay between soloist and ensemble until the final movement. All of this looked very good on paper (and, for that matter, sounded promising in the pre-concert talk given by Sarah Cahill); but Bates never seemed to find the right pace for unfolding the flow of the concerto’s three disparate movements. Nevertheless, Trifonov certainly brought some impressive technical skills to his keyboard work, making it unfortunate that those skills were never put to particularly good use.

A Disappointing Encounter with SFSYO

This afternoon was my first post-pandemic encounter with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO), which began its first three-concert season in Davies Symphony Hall this past November. Daniel Stewart began his tenure as Wattis Foundation Music Director in October of 2019, meaning that this is his first complete season of three concerts. The first half of the program was devoted to two relatively short (roughly ten minutes) compositions by two composers with roots in the Bay Area. In “order of appearance” these were Gabriella Smith and Mason Bates. The intermission was followed by the full instrumental resources (along with off-stage female chorus) required for the performance of Gustav Holst’s suite The Planets.

Both of the “local” compositions came across as overstaying their welcome after about five minutes. Smith’s “Tumblebird Contrails” was a reflection on the diverse environments that the composer encountered while backpacking in Point Reyes. The attentive listener could either follow those environments by reading Smith’s program note or just let his/her/their imagination run its course through past personal experiences. Either way, it was not difficult to appreciate Smith’s ability to turn those environmental impressions into instrumental themes and textures, but she exhausted her vocabulary and her capacity for elaboration roughly halfway through the duration of the score. That said, Stewart’s management of the SFSYO resources definitely facilitated the listening experience until that experience had run its course.

Mason Bates added his own electronica performance to the orchestral resources interpreting his “Mothership” score. Sadly, here, too, the overall execution left the impression that there was little to say and even less to be added by Bates’ contribution to the performance. The music was composed in 2011, during the time when Bates served as Mead Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra between 2010 and 2015. Personally, I found myself more drawn to “Alternative Energy,” also composed during that residency in 2011, possibly because the score was based on a more substantial underlying narrative.

The Planets is, of course, one of the best compositions to show off the rich diversity of a large orchestral ensemble. Holst had a particularly keen ear for “special effects.” Sadly, he was not as skilled in laying down a narrative foundation for the seven character studies, each of which associates one of the Ancient Roman gods with one of the planets. The durational scale of both the individual movements and the overall suite is far more demanding than either of the selections by Smith and Bates; but much of Holst’s capacity for duration derives from repetition, frequently where “again” simply means “but louder this time.”

There are, of course, conductors that have found ways to establish a narrative framework that maintains listener attention from beginning to end. Unfortunately, Stewart is not one of them. While the SFSYO musicians clearly followed his direction and the dispositions based in the score, the overall experience was far from satisfying, even during the mystical lure of the off-stage female voices in the final movement.

The final concert will take place at the end of this coming May. The major work, which will fill the second half of the program, will be Johannes Brahms’ Opus 73 (second) symphony in D major. Hopefully, Stewart will fare better in delivering an expressive account of this symphony.

Recent Videos of Cappella SF Singing Bates

Over the course of the last six weeks, Cappella SF, the a cappella chamber choir based here in San Francisco (as its name implies), conducted by Ragnar Bohlin, uploaded three short videos to YouTube. These accounted for three of the six-movements of a tone poem by Mason Bates entitled Sirens. While the entire composition was framed by excerpts from Homer’s Odyssey, each of the movements selected for video capture represented three “completely different” sources.

The first of these was a setting in German of Heinrich Heine’s poem about the Lorelei, who sings from a high perch above the Rhine river luring sailors to steer their boats into rocky reefs along the bank, where they drown in the wreckage. The second, the fourth song in the cycle, sets a Quechua ecstatic text about an encounter with a siren. This is followed by the fifth song, setting an English account of the New Testament episode in which Jesus invites Simon and Andrew to serve him as “fishers of men.”

The greatest disappointment of these videos is the lack of subtitles. Bates clearly put a lot of thought into selecting his texts and then finding polyphonic textures appropriate for each of them. Given that the entire tone poem was scored for twelve-part a cappella chorus, the opportunities for rich polyphony were legion. However, in the absence of titles, even those providing an English account of Heine’s German text, the listener is unlikely to appreciate the subtleties behind Bates’ polyphonic inventions.

Screen shot of the opening image for Bates’ setting of Heine’s Lorelei poem

To be fair, all three of these videos are probably products of good intentions. They were all shot from the same angle showing Bohlin leading the entire ensemble in very low light. Those shots are all fragments, which are interleaved with still photographs, many of which are panned across the array of individual vocalists. There are also “establishing photographs,” such as the fisherman casting his net for the fifth song and a photograph of the Lorelei statue overlooking the Rhine for the opening selection.

Whatever the shortcomings, each of these videos provides a visual interpretation to supplement an auditory experience. Nevertheless, viewers will probably benefit from a copy of the Delos album Mass Transmission: Choral Works by Mason Bates, which includes a recording of Cappella SF singing Sirens in its entirety. That album includes a booklet with useful background material and all of the song texts in their original languages, with English translations where necessary. Since Bates tends to be best known for his imaginative work with real-time electronica, Sirens presents his approaches to composition in an entirely different light; and the results are highly satisfying.

A Whitman-Inspired Recording from Richmond

courtesy of Naxos of America

Last month Reference Recordings released a new album of two compositions performed by the Richmond Symphony led by conductor Steven Smith. As can be seen from the above image of the cover, the entire album was inspired by the American poet Walt Whitman. The “program” of the album provides two perspectives on this particularly innovative nineteenth-century poet, one from the twentieth century by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and the other a world premiere recording of the music of contemporary American composer Mason Bates. Both are choral compositions featuring the Richmond Symphony Chorus, prepared by Director Erin R. Freeman. Vocal solos are taken by soprano Michelle Areyzaga and bass-baritone Kevin Deas.

The canon of Whitman’s poetry is pervaded by two major topics: himself and the American Civil War. The Vaughan Williams selection, his cantata Dona nobis pacem (grant us peace), was composed in 1936 and deals with the latter category. From a British perspective, the music looks back on World War I; but, by 1936, it was clear that World War I could no longer be regarded as “the war to end all wars.” Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and was already flexing his military muscles as a proxy in the Spanish Civil War.

In that context one can appreciate Vaughan Williams’ incorporation of American Civil War poems by Whitman, such as “Beat! beat! drums!” and “Dirge for Two Veterans.” He also followed that latter poem with one by another poet, “The Angel of Death” by John Bright. Most readers will recognize the cantata title as the final words of the Mass text, and they are interjected over the course of the cantata by soloist Areyzaga.

The Bates cantata, Children of Adam, begins the album with far more upbeat rhetoric. While much of the text involves Whitman reveling in his own creativity, the cantata as a whole constitutes a more general, but still exuberant, celebration of creation, drawing upon the Old Testament, a traditional text of the Mataponi Indians of Virginia, and two twentieth-century poems by Carl Sandburg. While Bates is probably best known for his skill in seamlessly integrating electronic sounds into instrumental compositions, his choral repertoire seems to suggest a departure from that technique. Thus, one of his most successful efforts, “Mass Transmission,” uses electronics very subtly and primarily to provide “sound effects” to clarify the descriptive text; and the Cappella SF recording of that composition couples it with Bates’ “Sirens,” composed only for an a cappella ensemble. Children of Adam, in turn, draws more heavily on an imaginatively diverse approach to the percussion section and may well depart entirely from electronica.

As a result, those familiar with Bates’ past work are likely to be pleasantly surprised by the new directions he is taking in dealing with sonority. Indeed, where “sound effects” are concerned, the drums and brass in “Beat! beat! drums!” probably provide more explicit associative impressions than do the corresponding dramatic elements in Bates’ libretto settings. Thus, the album, as a whole, makes for a highly satisfying juxtaposition of recent techniques from those roughly a century in the past.

Delos Releases Fourth Cappella SF Album

courtesy of Naxos of America

This past Friday Delos released its fourth recording of Cappella SF, the a cappella chamber choir based in San Francisco (as its name implies), conducted by Ragnar Bohlin. The full title of the new album is Mass Transmission: Choral Works by Mason Bates. As a resident of the Bay Area, Bates has had a long and impressive relationship with Bohlin, first involving the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Chorus and later Cappella SF.

The title of the album comes from a composition that SFS commissioned for performance during its centennial season. More specifically, it was written to be performed as part of the American Mavericks Festival held during March of 2012. The piece was scored for full chorus accompanied only by pipe organ (played by Paul Jacobs at the premiere) and electronica, which Bates himself performed at the keyboard of his laptop. The conductor at the premiere performance was Donato Cabrera.

By now Bates has established himself for his skill in integrating the “virtual” sonorities synthesized by his computer with the “physical” sounds of musical instruments sharing the stage with him. However, just as important has been the way in which he has built up a repertoire in a new and unlikely genre: the history of technology. The best example of this genre is probably “Alternative Energy,” which has been recorded by both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and SFS. “Mass Transmission” is basically about an elaborate wireless radio link that the Dutch built early in the twentieth century to enable communication between Dutch youth working as pages for government officials in Java and their parents back in the Netherlands. The libretto includes a transcript of one of those conversations, along with personal memories of that time and place.

Considering the technical infrastructure, the performance is expressively lush. However, it captures the spirit of nostalgia for those pioneering times with a clear-sighted account of how a new technology established the vanguard of a series of changes that have had (and continue to have) lasting effect. Bates never tries to romanticize, but he also knows how to tap into listening as an emotional experience.

The new album begins with a composition strictly for a cappella chorus without any electronic supplements. Sirens is a six-movement tone poem that presents reflections on those tempting figures from mythology drawn from five different sources. Homer’s Odyssey provides the framework with an excerpt sung in Homeric Greek at the beginning and in English at the end. Other sources come from literature (including the New Testament) and Quechua folklore. Bates is clearly comfortable setting texts in a variety of different languages, and Sirens makes for a fascinating mood piece. The album also concludes with a “bonus track” dedicated to Bohlin entitled “Rag of Ragnar.”

Chanticleer to Continue Season Next Month

The members of Chanticleer (photograph by Lisa Kohler, courtesy of Brenden Guy Media)

Following a highly successful eleven-concert European tour across eight countries, Chanticleer will return home to present the next concert in its subscription season. Entitled Spacious Skies, the program will showcase a vast panorama of American choral repertoire spanning three centuries. The composers to be represented will reach back to colonial times with William Billings and extend forward to include living composers such as Ned Rorem, Steven Stucky, Steven Sametz, Richard Hageman, Matthew Brown, and Mason Bates. The second half of the program will shift to “pops” arrangements of popular, jazz, and gospel offerings.

The San Francisco performances of Spacious Skies will take place at 7:30 p.m on Saturday, March 16. The venue will be the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The building is located at 50 Oak Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station.Ticket prices will be $60 for Premiere seating, $50 for Preferred seating, and $20 for General Admission. All tickets are being sold online through a City Box Office event page.

61st GRAMMY Awards Less Satisfying that 60th

Last year, when I reviewed the winners of the 60th annual GRAMMY awards, I found only one point of agreement between my preferences and those of the GRAMMY judges. This year at least there were two albums about which I had good thoughts that turned out to be winners; but in both cases I thought that there were better albums in the category. Let me be more specific.

The Best Jazz Instrumental Album went to Wayne Shorter’s Emanon album. This was, indeed, an impressive undertaking; but it was impressive because the jazz was only one component of a far richer structure that, on the musical side, included the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and, on the packaging side, included a graphic novel inspired by the music. Much as I like Emanon, I felt that the award should have gone to an album of “jazz for its own sake;” and my preference among the nominees was the Live in Europe album of the Fred Hersch Trio.

courtesy of Naxos of America

On the other hand, when it came to Best Opera Recording, things got a bit more delicate. Those who follow this site know that my reaction to Mason Bates’ The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs was mixed, concluding with my deciding to allow the jury to continue to debate until I had the opportunity to see the opera in performance. In other words the recording did not go very far in encouraging my interest in the opera itself. By way of contrast, while I have a habit of turning away from yet another recording of an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, I have to say that the Rigoletto nominee was more deserving of the award, particularly for the stunning performance of Nadine Sierra in the role of Gilda. If anyone deserved credit for the Jobs opera, it was Elizabeth Ostrow for producing the album on the basis of live recordings made during the Santa Fe performances.

Steve Jobs: The Opera

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the middle of last month, PENTATONE released the world premiere recording of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs as part of that label’s AMERICAN OPERAS series. The opera was given its world premiere during last summer’s Santa Fe Opera season; and the PENTATONE album, consisting of two CDs, is an “original cast recording.” The libretto was by Mark Campbell, set to music by Mason Bates. The conductor was Michael Christie, who has championed commissions by leading and emerging composers. The title role was sung by Edward Parks, and Sasha Cooke sang the role of Laurene Powell Jobs, mother of Jobs’ daughter Lisa, after whom his game-changing computer may or may not have been named. (By way of local context, Christie conducted the San Francisco Opera’s world premiere performance of Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, in which Cooke sang the leading role. Any similarities between Steve Jobs and the Magdalene are likely to be no more than perverse flights of fancy.)

Given that Jobs was the subject of two movies, neither of which fared very well at the box office, it is probably a good idea to sort out matters of the libretto from those of the music. Like the scripts of both films, Campbell’s text is not diachronic. The overall flow is based on several key events, and the temporal context for those events emerges as the opera unfolds. My guess is that this does not have a major impact on how those in an audience are likely to receive the result. One is not going to attend this opera for the sake of learning about Jobs’ biography, just as one would not go to Doctor Atomic to learn about the history of the Manhattan Project.

Nevertheless, there remains the question of whether or not Jobs makes for a good subject for an opera. In many ways the course of his life is a bit like the way in which military historians approach the narrative of war: very long periods during which nothing much of import happens punctuated by bursts of intense (and highly violent) activity. One might almost conjecture that Jobs appreciated that framework and put all of his effort into ramping up the intensity as high as he could.

In many respects what made him revolutionary is that he took a culture in which “hacking” was an enjoyable pastime and turned it into a major cultural shift enabled by finding the sweet spot that accounted for both quality design and ruthless marketing. A skilled librettist like Arrigo Boito would probably not have know what to make of such a situation (even with a background that included acute perception of the nature of Venetian politics). So I cannot carp particularly harshly over the fact that Campbell never managed to fare any better in working with Jobs as his subject than either of the Jobs films did.

Speaking of Doctor Atomic, when it comes to the music, many passages seemed to suggest that Bates was having trouble finding his own voice in a setting in which so much musical context has been established by the “historical” operas of John Adams. This is not to suggest that Bates was not up for writing for voice. HIs “Mass Transmission” remains, in my mind, one of the most skillful approaches to working for both choral and solo resources in a setting in which Bates could exercise his particular talents for electronica; and, as the title suggests, those talents also include working with texts that address technology-based subjects. However, if “Mass Transmission” demonstrated how many things he could say about a few basic ideas over a comparatively short duration, it seems as if Bates could not figure out what he wanted his music to say about Campbell’s text or how the music would say it.

To be fair, there are operas in which the talents of both librettist and composer only begin to register when presented in conjunction with imaginatively-conceived staging. That modifier is particularly critical and may explain why I came away much more satisfied with the Metropolitan Opera production of Doctor Atomic (which I had experienced only through HD video) than I had been when I first saw the opera produced by San Francisco Opera with staging by Peter Sellars. The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs will be coming to San Francisco Opera in the not-too-distant future; and I may well react differently to the Santa Fe recording after having seen a staged performance.

Highlights of the SFCM Centennial Season

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) was founded in 1917. That means that the coming season will mark the centennial of the oldest institution of its kind on the West Coast of the United States. Several concerts and events have been planned specifically to mark this landmark occasion. Here are the key centennial-specific events currently planned:

A series of four performances will mark the beginning of the season with a Centennial Celebration Weekend. In order of presentation, these will be as follows:

• Saturday, September 16, 5:30 p.m., Recital Hall: Things will begin with a recital by the Pre-College students. This event is still in the planning stage, so program details have not yet been announced. Tickets will be free, but reservations will be required. Reservations may be requested by filling out a Google Forms Web page.
• Saturday, September 16, 7:30 p.m., Concert Hall: The major kick-off event will be the first concert of the season by the Conservatory Orchestra, conducted by Director Eric Dudley. He has selected two compositions, both of which were performed shortly after SFCM’s founding. One of these, Ottorino Respighi’s “Pines of Rome,” will serve as the grand finale, replete with unabashed spectacle. The other will be Igor Stravinsky’s far more austere “Symphonies of Wind Instruments.” The program will begin with “Icarian Rhapsody,” composed by faculty member Mason Bates. General admission for this concert will be $20 with a $15 rate for students. Tickets may be purchased through a Click4tix Web page, which includes a chart showing seat availability.
• Sunday, September 17, 2 p.m., Concert Hall: This will be a recital of both chamber music and solo piano music. Performers will include faculty, students, and Class of 2017 graduate, pianist Joanna Rozewska. The chamber music will feature the first movement of the first string quartet by Ernest Bloch, who served as SFCM Director between 1925 and 1930. The other chamber selections will be the second movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 493 piano quartet in E-flat major and the final movement of Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 15 (first) piano quartet in C minor. The piano works will include two pieces by Frédéric Chopin, the second (in A-flat major) of the Opus 50 mazurkas and the Opus 23 (first) ballade in G minor. The program will also feature Adolf Schulz-Evler’s Opus 12, his piano transcription of “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss II, which he called a set of “Arabesques.” Tickets will again be free with reservations required through a Google Forms Web page.
• Sunday, September 17, 7:30 p.m., Osher Salon: The final event will be a showcase of the works of students in the Technology and Applied Composition Department under the guidance of Executive Director MaryClare Brzytwa; no reservations will be required for this free concert.

Several other events specific to the Centennial Season have been planned. For the most part the details have not yet been announced, but it will probably be worth while to make note of the dates. Specifics are as follows:

• There will be a series of three Faculty Centennial Concerts that will feature both performances and compositions by faculty members; the dates for these recitals have been set for October 16, January 28, and April 9.
• There will be a special all-day event on January 21 that will offer a series of concerts all programmed in honor of SFCM’s Chamber Music Legacy.
• On January 31 the inaugural class of students in Roots, Jazz, and American Music will give a side-by-side performance with the members of the SFJAZZ Collective.
• Finally, there will be one special event that will be held in the Nourse Theater, rather than in any of the SFCM spaces, during the afternoon of February 25. Sunday with the Sopranos will be an afternoon of music and discussion. The performers will include Patricia Racette, Frederica von Stade, and faculty member Deborah Voigt. They will be joined by other guests, all with strong ties to SFCM.

For those who have not yet visited, SFCM is located at 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni Station. Tickets may also be purchased at the Box Office, which is in the building’s entrance lobby. The Box Office is open Monday through Friday in the morning between 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. and in the afternoon between 1:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. It is also open one hour prior to all performances for which tickets are required. The Box Office telephone number is 415-503-6275.

Gabriela Martinez’ Debut Album with Delos is Delightfully Diverse

Almost two weeks ago Delos released its first album featuring solo performances by Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez. The advance material (reproduced on the Amazon.com Web page) describes her as the “Brilliant young Venezuelan pianist,” which gives me a bit of pause, since my first encounter with her was in July of 2007. The occasion was one of the summer concerts offered by the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall, which SFS had designated as “bloggers’ night.” I was just beginning to write seriously about music, and this was an opportunity for not only free admission to an SFS concert but also the circulation of my writing among a new set of readers. The evening included both the concert itself and a question-and-answer session with Martinez after the concert had concluded.

Her selection that night was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 30 (third) piano concerto in D minor. To put this in historical perspective, the performance took place about ten years after the release of Shine, an account (disputed by some) of David Helfgott’s efforts to learn Opus 30 and the unfortunate aftermath of those efforts. This film was clearly on the mind of many of the bloggers that attended the Q&A session, which is why the question quickly came up as to how much time it had taken Martinez to prepare the concerto. When she replied that it took about two months, one could hear gasps across Davies punctuated by dropping jaws. I ended up writing a piece in which I used a little bit of elementary information theory to make the case that too many minds had been sadly addled by the Shine narrative.

Fortunately, Martinez’ new album is more about the diversity of her music-making skills than it is about debunking fictions fabricated in the name of entertainment. The title of the album is Amplified Soul, which is also the title of one of the tracks, a piece she commissioned from Dan Visconti, which is receiving its recording debut. Just short of five minutes in duration, this is music that appears to explore reverberations within the body of the piano and therefore requires what appears to be some rather detailed attention to which dampers are raised at which times. The title probably refers to the fact that, because the amplitudes of reverberating strings are much lower than those struck by the hammers, amplification is required to appreciate the full effect of the process. While the sorts of effects that Visconti appears to exploit are easily captured in the setting of a recording studio, there are likely to be technical challenges that will arise should Martinez decide to play this piece in recital.

Curiously, similar attention to reverberation also arises in the other recent work on the album, Mason Bates’ “White Lies for Lomax.” “Lomax” is, of course, Alan Lomax, the pioneering ethnomusicologist who devoted so much of his life to collecting and documenting the many different forms of folk music encountered across the continental United States. Bates describes the thematic material as “wisps of distant blues fragments,” adding that these fragments “are hardly honest recreations of the blues.” This explains the “Lies” part of the title. Bates does not say anything (at least in the booklet notes) about the “White” part. While this may have been his way of blunting the significance of his “dishonesty,” it is worth recognizing that Lomax was white, as is Bates, while the blues has its roots among African Americans living in the Deep South, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, there is some suggestion that Bates acknowledges distorting his source material and may even be calling out some of his predecessors, such as Aaron Copland or even George Gershwin, for doing the same, probably in the interest of appealing to what Amiri Baraka, back when he was writing as LeRoi Jones, called the middle-brow tastes of white critics.

The more traditional works on the album cover the period from the very end of the eighteenth century to the very beginning of the twentieth. The latest of these is Karol Szymanowski’s Opus 3, a set of twelve variations in B-flat minor that he composed for Artur Rubinstein. Somewhat earlier is the first (also in B-flat minor) of the set of six Moments musicaux (Opus 16), which Rachmaninoff composed in 1896. However, the album begins at the opposite extreme with the third (in D major) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 10 sonatas, which he composed in Vienna in 1798 at a time when his reputation was just beginning to rise.

Taken as a whole, this is an album in which each of the compositions has its own distinctive rhetorical stance. Martinez is clearly comfortable with finding and delivering that stance in each of her interpretations. She has definitely come a long way since my first encounter with her almost a decade ago. I might even acknowledge that the use of the adjective “brilliant” in that advance work is justified. However, given my personal sense of my own aging over these last ten years, I have to wonder how much longer she will be presented as “young!”

YouTube: No Way to Listen to a Concert

I had an ulterior motive behind wanting to watch the entire Carnegie Hall concert given by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra: Two of the works on the program were "previews," in a sense, of the concerts that Michael Tilson Thomas will be conducting with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall on May 20, 22, 23. One of these amounted to a "sneak peek" at an excerpt from Mason Bates' "The B-Sides," which will be receiving its world premiere at these concerts. The other was to hear Yuja Wang play the second movement of Sergei Prokofiev's Opus 16, his second piano concerto in G minor, which she would be playing entirely at these same concerts. So, when Alex Ross posted the links to the videos of the two portions of the concert on his The Rest is Noise blog, I felt obliged to view at least this material before writing any sort of preview piece for my Examiner.com gig; and, if I was going to watch those portions, why not watch the whole thing?

Why not, indeed? Well, it turns out that there is one perfectly good reason. YouTube technology was designed for the brief snippets that users are expected to upload, which usually do not last more than five minutes. At least that was the case before YouTube recently introduced full-length movies and television programs. Now my guess is that, even with this increase in both volume and duration of content, the snippets will probably continue to do well enough. So, for example, I had no problem watching the "Global Mash Up" of Tan Dun's first (of how many?) "Internet Symphony" (without which I might not have had as interesting a Chutzpah of the Week award). On the other hand the first half of the "concert video" from Carnegie Hall had a duration of 59:32, which is to say longer than the actual content of an hour-long television episode; and the second half ran 1:25:30, which puts it in the league of many feature films.

So what happens when YouTube tries to stream this kind of content to a home in San Francisco with a DSL modem? The answer is simple enough: It isn't pretty! To be more blunt, it no longer counts as music. You cannot listen to Brahms with frequent (almost periodic) interruptions for the player to catch up with the streamer. To paraphrase that old religious saying: the content is so large, and my buffer is so small! Efforts to pause and even back up a bit to give the buffer room for growth were to no avail. Now it would not surprise me if John Cage would have been pleased to hear a performance of his music interrupted by such silences determined entirely by chance, but I wonder how Bates would feel about large portions of cyberspace getting their first taste of his music in this manner!

To relate this to a more satisfying recent experience, the YouTube viewing environment is not the Digital Concert Hall created for the Berliner Philharmoniker. Most important is that the Digital Concert Hall allows you to select the quality of the signal you are receiving. Low quality works just fine for home use; and, if the image lacks the sharpness of full high-definition resolution (which I found very impressive when I had the bandwidth to receive it), at least the music is never interrupted. (Well … hardly ever, in the words of W. S. Gilbert!) YouTube tried to finesse the quality-of-service problem by keeping the durations (and usually the quality of the video signal) down. However, on the basis of the experiences I just had with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra content, I would say that none of the selections are likely to survive intact for most of the folks trying to watch the stuff.

So it turns out that, at least in the current technology domain, my fear of short-attention-span concerts may be even greater than I had anticipated. Even the festivity of the Carnegie Hall occasion itself, regardless of the music performances, could not be held up adequately by the existing YouTube platform. Put another way, what worked at least passably for the auditioning process turned out to be counterproductive for those who crossed the bridge from auditioning to performing. So, for better or worse, it seems that we have learned at least one thing from the YouTube Symphony Orchestra experiment; and I suspect that this lesson will be of great interest to folks like Marshall Marcus over at the Southbank Centre. Whether or not the lesson registers over in the YouTube division of Google will probably depend on whether viewers interested in seeing the pilot episode of Charlie's Angels (currently one of the "Spotlight Videos") have a similar experience to which they react in a similar way!