Ian Scarfe to Return to Monument with Acrobatics

Poster design for the performance being discussed, with photographs of Kendra Grittani, Ian Scarfe, and Ainsley Fleming-Wood (from the Groupmuse event page)

The title of the next program that pianist Ian Scarfe has prepared for Monument SF is Suspended Harmony. This will have nothing to do with music theory. Rather, aerial dancer Ainsley Fleming-Wood will perform above the heads of Scarfe and cellist Kendra Grittani. With the exception of Scarfe’s solo performance of preludes and nocturnes by Frédéric Chopin, all of the composers on the program will be French.

The composer to receive the most attention will be Claude Debussy, whose sonata for cello and piano will conclude the program. Debussy will also begin the program with two movements from his L. 75 Suite bergamasque, the opening “Prélude” and the most familiar “Clair de lune.” These will be separated by the first of the two L. 66 compositions, given the title Two Arabesques. The second half of the program will have three selections by Gabriel Fauré: the Opus 16 “Berceuse,” originally scored for piano and violin, “Après un rêve,” the first of the three Opus 7 songs, and the one other work composed for cello and piano, the Opus 24 “Élégie.” The first half of the program will conclude with selections from two of Erik Satie’s three-piece sets, Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies.

Many readers probably know by now that the Monument event space is located in SoMa at 140 9th Street. This performance will begin at 7 p.m. on Friday, September 19. As in the past, ticketing is being managed by Groupmuse, which has created a Web page for reservations.

An Unexpected Visit From Xuefei Yang

At the beginning of this past February, guitarist Xuefei Yang’s performed her fourth solo recital presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. This was followed at the end of June with the release of her latest album, Chapeau Satie. I am not quite sure how I received word of her return to San Francisco last night for another solo recital, but the source seems to have involved electronic mail from Concerts in America this past June. That led to proving me with a pair of tickets for a performance at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church.

This was a “bare bones” affair, since no programs were provided. Fortunately, Yang announced each of her selections with perfectly audible clarity. For the most part, she said little, allowing the music to “do all the talking.” Attention was seized immediately with her deft command of the lightning-speed fingerwork required for the performance of Isaac Albéniz’ “Asturias” (first composed for piano, where the fingerwork was just as demanding). This was followed by two selections from Chapeau Satie: the third of the “Gnossienne” compositions and “La Diva de l’empire.” Both of these were composed for solo piano, presumably arranged by Yang for her own performance.

The monument to Tárrega in Castellón, Spain (photograph by Trewert, February 3, 2009, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The one reflection on the Far East was a medley of music from Xinjiang, which was probably the least familiar offering on the program. On the Spanish side, Francisco Tárrega was represented by the all-too-familiar “Recuerdos de la Alhambra,” which was coupled with a flamenco selection by Paco Peña. There was also a “set” of familiar American tunes, beginning with Erroll Garner’s “Misty,” followed by “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (Jerome Kern) and Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The program concluded with an encore, which, in the sanctuary’s cavernous space, was incoherently mumbled.

Yang has become one of my favorite guitarists. Her Omni performances led me to listening to her recordings, and I have been consistently impressed with the diversity of her repertoire.From an organizational point of view, however, last night felt more like one of those “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show” affairs inspired by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Hopefully, Yang will return for another recital produced by Omni, which always seems to give as much respect to the audience as to the performer.

Francis Poulenc as Composer and Performer

Cover of the album being discussed, with a reminder of the other “centenary” event (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Following up on last month’s “centenary tribute” album of recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, this coming Friday will see a release by SOMM Recordings of an album of piano performances by the French composer Francis Poulenc. The full title of the album is Poulenc plays Poulenc and Satie, and Poulenc plays piano on all 34 tracks. Twelve of the tracks are solo performances of Satie’s music. The solo performances of his own music are complemented by his two-piano concerto in D minor at the beginning, with Jacques Février on the other piano, and the “Aubade” for piano and eighteen instruments at the conclusion. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

During my high school days, when i would escape the suburbs to go to concerts in Philadelphia, the concept of modernism tended to be embodied by the six French composers that had been inspired by Erik Satie, known, appropriately enough, as Les Six. Poulenc was one of the best-known of this group, as was Darius Milhaud. Georges Auric was probably better known for film scores, Arthur Honegger was more talked-about than listened-to, Germaine Tailleferre was known primarily as the only female composer in the group, and these days Louis Durey is all but forgotten.

It was only as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that I first encountered a professor that was dismissive of Les Six in favor of the First Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Now I am in a new century; and, during his tenure as Music Director for the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas was never shy about his enthusiasm for the First Viennese School. On the other hand, my encounters with Les Six during the first quarter of this new century have been few and far between.

As a result, I found that I was approaching the new SOMM album as a trip down memory lane. That included Poulenc the pianist as well as Poulenc the composer. Indeed, the Columbia album I purchased of his sextet for piano and wind quintet had him performing with the first-chair wind players of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Amazon.com does not seem to know about this recording, but Discogs has a Web page from which four copies of the original vinyl are available for purchase.

Thus, when I approached Poulenc plays Poulenc and Satie, Poulenc was already quite familiar to me as both composer and performer. Indeed, over the course of my writing on this site, while neither of the composers has received a generous amount of “column space,” attention to Satie has been a little more than a third of attention to Poulenc. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that the attentiveness of the “disciple” to the “master” makes for a listening experience that deserves more attention than at least some of the more recent recording of Satie’s piano music. (Since I know nothing about Poulenc as a teacher, I have no idea whether his knowledge of Satie was passed on to his pupils.)

These days I am more attentive to Satie than I am to Poulenc. Nevertheless, I appreciate the extent to which the latter had been informed by the former, so to speak. The first day of this month marked another “centenary” event: Satie died on July 1, 1925. As of this writing, this Poulenc album has been my only encounter with that event. One would have thought that the anniversary would have prompted more interest.

Yang Honors Satie with Guitar Arrangements

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

Thanks to the Dynamite Guitars series, I have taken a great interest in guitarist Xuefei Yang. Her last visit took place this past February at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, following up on her visit in March of 2023, when she performed selections from her Guitar Favorites album. This past Friday saw the release of her latest album, Chapeau Satie; and, as might be guessed from the title, it consists entirely of arrangements of compositions by Erik Satie.

Most of Satie’s music was composed for solo piano. Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc were all influenced by his efforts, while his earliest champion in the United States was probably John Cage. Ironically, my most recent encounter with his music in performance had nothing to do with keyboard instruments. Rather, it took place during lutenist Thomas Dunford’s recital at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church this past March, when he included arrangements of selections from both the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes series.

This coming Tuesday, July 1, will mark the centennial of Satie’s death. Yang recorded Chapeau Satie to honor that occasion. The album offers a rich diversity of not only Satie’s piano works but also a generous serving of his art songs. The vocalist for those selections is soprano Héloise Werner. There are also arrangements of the three Gymnopédies compositions for guitar and flute, transcribed jointly by Yang and flutist Sharon Bezaly.

Ironically, if my archives are correct, I have not encountered a solo piano performance of Satie’s music since Hélène Grimaud’s visit to Davies Symphony Hall in January of 2022. Mind you, all of my “academic” encounters with Satie (graduate and well as undergraduate) involved professors whose opinions ran the gamut from perplexed to dismissive. If Satie’s ghost hovered over any of those classrooms, I suspect that he would have responded to that treatment with a sly grin.

One might almost suggest that Satie was more concerned with being French than with being acknowledged as a composer. Ironically, when I think about his personality, I am reminded of one of my favorite passages from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Yang’s approaches to Satie seem to acknowledge those “multitudes” while finding a way to present them without overwhelming the attentive listener.

Thomas Dunford’s Lute Recital at St. Mark’s

Thomas Dunford in a French setting (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night St. Mark’s Lutheran Church hosted the latest recital presented jointly by San Francisco Performances and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts Dynamite Guitars concert season. The recitalist was Thomas Dunford; but his instrument was a lute, rather than a guitar. Because some of the selections on the program were composed as songs, he also added vocal work where appropriate.

The program began with a set of English works, including songs, by John Dowland and concluded in Italy with one selection each by Girolamo Kapsberger and Joan Ambrosio Dalza. All of the other selections were arrangements by Dunford. The most ambitious of these was the entirety of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1007 suite for solo cello in the key of G major, which Dunford transposed into the key of C major to accommodate his instrument. This was preceded by two works each by Erik Satie (the first selections in both the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes series) and Marin Marais (“Les voix humaines” and “L’américaine,” movements from suites originally composed for viol). The encore selection was “Blackbird,” composed jointly by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

The entire journey was short enough to be played without intermission. Dunford’s delivery was engaging and affable, interjected by commentary when he thought it was necessary. Every now and then, he would offer a bit of witticism. The most obvious gesture came when he injected Lennon’s “Imagine” as a “coda” to the Satie “Gymnopédie.” Nevertheless, his focus was almost entirely on the music for its own sake. He offered his audience an ambitious journey; but, by the time the recital completed, there seemed to be almost unanimous agreement that it had been a journey worth taking.

Next Omni “Guitar Recital” to Feature Lute

Thomas Dunford with his lute (from the SFP Web page for his recital)

The next recital in the Guitar Series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) and the Dynamite Guitars concert season, presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, will shift attention to another member of the plucked-string family. Lutenist Thomas Dunford will make his SFP debut. He will begin the program with six compositions by John Dowland, and he will conclude with two selections from Il libro di intavolature per liuto. The first of these is a toccata (the sixth) by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger, from the first book in the collection, followed by the “Calata alla Spagnola” (based on a popular tune) by Joan Ambrosio Dalza, included in the fourth book. Between these “bookends” will be a series of arrangements by Dunford of compositions by Erik Satie, Marin Marais, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. one week from tomorrow on Saturday, March 29. The venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, which is at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street. Admission will be $65 for all available seating. Those wishing to purchase tickets online should be informed that the hyperlink on the Omni event page leads to the SFP event page.

The Last Omni Videos of the Year

As was announced this past Thursday, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts has launched two OMNI on-Location videos to close out the calendar year. Both of them present solo performances by the Greek classical guitarist and D’Addario Artist Dimitri Soukaras. The videos were made in different settings, each providing a reflection on the nature of the music itself.

The richer video provided an account of the performance of the “Fuoco” movement from Roland Dyens’ “Libra Sonatine.” As might be expected, this is a highly virtuosic selection whose energy may reflect the hustle and bustle of urban life. As a result, the performance was filmed on the roof of a building in Athens, perhaps the building where Soukaras himself lives. The lighting (which appears to be natural) suggests the end of the day, with thoughts of dynamic night life that is soon to come.

Greek classical guitarist Dimitris Soukaras in the video of his performance of the music of Roland Dyens

The other video presents Soukaras performing his own arrangement of the first of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie” compositions. Those familiar with Satie’s life and works know that he was a pioneer of minimalism before that word became a part of familiar vocabulary. There is a “bare bones” quality to both the thematic line and its accompaniment; and even the harmonic accompaniment is “minimal” to the extent that it never arrives at a strong cadence. In this case Soukaras worked with his videographer Pano Andrianos to provide a “minimal” visual setting to match Satie’s aesthetic.

A “minimal” video account of the music of Erik Satie

Both of these videos are less than five minutes in duration, but each has its own way of taking an adventurous approach to minimalism.

Omni to Conclude Year with Two New Videos

Greek classical guitarist Dimitris Soukaras (photograph courtesy of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)

The Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts will close out the year with two OMNI on-Location videos. As was the case yesterday, the videos will be relatively short. Both will feature performances by the Greek classical guitarist and D’Addario Artist Dimitri Soukaras.

On the first video Soukaras will perform his own arrangement of the first of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie” compositions. That video will be released at 11 a.m. tomorrow (Friday). It will be followed on Saturday (December 30) with a video of the “Fuoco” movement from Roland Dyens’ “Libra Sonatine.” That release will take place at 10 a.m.

Both performances will be streamed through the Omni Foundation’s YouTube channel. The YouTube Web pages for viewing both the Friday and Saturday releases have already been created. There is no charge for admission, which means that these performances are made possible only by the viewers’ donations. A Web page has been created for processing contributions, and any visits made prior to the streaming itself will be most welcome.

Bridges and Owens Bring “Hope” to Herbst

Ulysses Owens Jr. with a reduced drum kit (photograph by Rayon Richards, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, mezzo J’Nai Bridges made her San Francisco Performances (SFP) debut with a program entitled Notes on Hope. This was a project she developed in partnership with percussionist Ulysses Owens Jr., who is currently SFP Jazz Artist-in-Residence; and last night marked his first main-stage SFP performance. He led a “backup” combo for Bridges, which amounted to a rather unique quintet whose members were David Rosenthal on guitar, Reuben Rogers on bass, Ted Rosenthal on piano, Carol Robbins on harp, and Jalen Baker on vibraphone.

The program, which was performed without intermission, was divided into three parts reflecting the overall title: “Divine Hope,” “The Crux of Hope,” and “Hope Fulfilled.” Each section was organized around (but not confined to) a different genre. The first section was framed by traditional religious songs, “The Lord’s Prayer” and “There is a Balm in Gilead,” flanking Duke Ellington’s “Heaven,” one of the movements in his Second Sacred Concert.

The second began with an instrumental account of Geri Allen’s “Skin,” followed by combo arrangements of art songs by Erik Satie (“Je te veux”), Ted Rosenthal (“Always Believe,” from his Dear Eric opera), and Valdemar Henrique (“Boi Bumba”). The final section offered two compositions by Florence Price, the song “Hold Fast to Dreams,” composed for Marian Anderson, and an instrumental combo arrangement of “Adoration.” The program then wrapped up with “It’s Good to Have You Near Again,” which André Previn composed for Leontyne Price. For the one encore selection, the combo backed up Bridges for a jazzy account of “L'amour est un oiseau rebelle,” the habanera from the first act of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, sung by the title character.

Presumably, Owen was responsible for all of the combo arrangements. He could not have done a better job, and it was impressive how the group could find its “comfort zone” in Satie and Price as easily as it could in the only Ellington selection. Bridges, on the other hand, seemed to be still finding her way through a terrain that distanced itself from the recital hall and the opera stage.

As a result, the seriousness she brought to Satie overlooked the composer’s wry sense of humor; and her delivery of “Boi Bumba” came across as too operatic. In fairness, however, she may have still been adjusting to working in a jazz combo setting. Her Carmen encore was clearly more in her comfort zone, even in an arrangement of unconventional instrumentation!

Hopefully, Bridges will find her comfort zone sooner, rather than later, because the very idea of her singing with a jazz combo had the potential of a treasure trove of stylistic possibilities.

Orange Mountain to Release New Dinnerstein

This coming Friday, Orange Mountain Music, which describes itself on its home page as “a record company created to serve the fans, aficionados and academics studying the music of Philip Glass,” will release the latest solo album of pianist Simone Dinnerstein. The title of the album is Undersong; and Dinnerstein justifies her selection of that word as follows: “Undersong is an archaic term for a song with a refrain, and to me it also suggests a hidden text. Glass, Schumann, Couperin and Satie all seem to be attempting to find what they want to say through repetition, as though their constant change and recycling will focus the ear and the mind.” As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders of this new release.

The single score page for Erik Satie’s “Vexations” (uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Sonia y natalia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

I would say that situating Glass to rub shoulders with the likes of Erik Satie, Robert Schumann, and François Couperin is a bold move. Of the three, Satie is probably the one that comes closest to Glass in exploring provocative approaches to repetition. Even before Glass was born, Satie had set a very high bar with “Vexations.” This piece is based on a thirteen-beat theme presented in two different voicing arrangements, along with text instructions that those 26 beats are to be played 840 times without interruption. Glass never went to such an extreme (even if some of his early compositions feel that way)! Both Schumann and Couperin also knew how to work with a refrain-based structure, but neither of them pushed repetition to Glass-level limits.

What strikes me as interesting is that, as I become more familiar with Glass’ approaches to expressiveness, I find myself less interested in “repetition in the small” and more in the idea of an overall rhetorical framework. Dinnerstein’s selection on this album is “Mad Rush;” and it involves a strict alternation between an almost motionless quietude and the “mad rush” motif. Since both of these sections are repeated, it would be unfair to call one the “refrain” and the other a “stanza.” It might even be preferable to call “Mad Rush” a musical realization of the dialectical method!

Nevertheless, whether or not there is any agenda to this album, I have to say that I am almost always drawn to the focused precision of Dinnerstein’s keyboard technique. Readers may recall that, in December of 2020, I was blown away by a streamed performance in the Live from Columbia concert series during which, through skilled camera work, my attention was divided between detailed views of the keyboard technique and broader images that included the Hudson River skyline featuring both Riverside Church and Grant’s Tomb. Would Undersong benefit from a similarly richly-streamed account of both the music and the music-making venue?

Hélène Grimaud’s Provocative Piano Recital

Pianist Hélène Grimaud (from the event page for last night’s recital)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony presented the second program in its Great Performers Series, which features (usually) one-night-only concerts by recitalists and ensembles. For this particular offering the program was a solo piano recital by Hélène Grimaud. The first half of that program consisted of interleaving relatively short compositions by (in order of appearance) Valentin Silvestrov, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Frédéric Chopin, separated by short pauses without giving the audience a chance to applaud. The second half was then devoted entirely to Robert Schumann’s Opus 16 Kreisleriana.

This was not the first time that Davies hosted a program in which an “extended composition” was “synthesized” by stringing together music originally intended to be performed in isolation. Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter with this technique also took place during a Great Performers Series piano recital, the one presented at the end of October of 2017 by Daniil Trifonov. Grimaud’s “synthesis” was far more ambitious, weaving a much more elaborate fabric from a provocative diversity of threads.

Most provocative was her decision to begin with the first of the thirteen bagatelles for solo piano that Valentin Silvestrov composed in 2005. Half of Grimaud’s latest Deutsche Grammophon album was devoted to Silvestrov’s music, but only one of the tracks was a solo performance. The bagatelles, on the other hand, are exercise in extreme miniaturist style, reflecting what the composer calls “naïve music.” The stillness of the first of those bagatelles seized audience attention through an intimacy established through simplicity and brevity.

Sadly, the almost mystical stillness of that bagatelle was quickly shattered by what can only be described as a brutalist approach to Debussy, Satie, and Chopin. One can probably make a case that this approach was scrupulously calculated, since each of the composers seemed to have been given his own controversial interpretation. In many respects the Satie performances were the most ironic, since Satie’s scores frequently involve text remarks to the performer that tend of be provocative but both amusing and disturbing at the same time. However, Grimaud  made it clear that she had her own way of doing things, hammering out every note on the score page that suggested that every instant of the performance was isolated from every other. If she had opted to go for disturbing, rather than amusing, then the extent of her success was almost frightening.

If her intent was to disturb throughout the first half of her program, then she succeeded just as effectively with the Debussy and Chopin selections. These two composers embody radically different approaches to the keyboard repertoire. However, Grimaud reduced both of them to that same “hammered out” approach, situating Debussy and Chopin on the same “playing field” as Satie. It was as if her intention was to dispense with the radical differences among all three composers by undermining the very foundations of expressive interpretation. If Silvestrov’s aesthetic was based on a stillness that is incompatible with expressiveness, then Grimaud responded to his music by reducing the expressiveness of Debussy, Satie, and Chopin to absurdity, a technique that might have amused Satie but does no favors to either Debussy or Chopin.

The dispassionate nature of that technique returned after the intermission with her approach to Schumann. The title of the Opus 16 cycle was inspired by the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann about a fictitious conductor named Johannes Kreisler. The earliest of the novels also bore the title Kreisleriana. Here, again, there was a sense that Grimaud was hammering out the notes as if each one needed to be distinctly separated from the others. This may well have been an evocation of the provocative traits of Kreisler’s character, using Schumann’s music as a magnifying glass held up to those traits. The result was a radical thinking about how to approach Schumann’s approaches to “narrative” foundations; and Grimaud may have left her audience seriously reconsidering their thoughts about listening to the “tone poem” qualities of several of Schumann’s extended piano compositions.

Grimaud took three encores, playing each without introducing it to the audience. I could not easily identify any of them. My current “working hypothesis” is that they were all drawn from the rather generous supply of solo piano preludes composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff. [added 1/30, 6:15 a.m.: My hypothesis was almost correct. All three encores were composed by Rachmaninoff. However, they were not preludes but three of the movements from the Opus 33 Études-Tableaux collection: the second in C major, the third in C minor, and the last in C-sharp minor.]

Old First Concerts: February, 2021

As of this writing, Old First Concerts has scheduled only one concert for next month. This will be the return of three of the members of the Wooden Fish Ensemble: violinists Terri Baune and Ilana Blumberg and pianist Thomas Schultz. The two violinists will present the world premiere of Hyo-shin Na’s “Weaving Variations,” preceding it with a performance Na’s “The Sway of the Branch II.” They will also perform the world premiere of “Three Pieces and More” by Boudewijn Buckinx. Schultz will play Frederic Rzewski’s North American Ballads, followed by Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangements of two chorale preludes by Johann Sebastian Bach. There will also be duets for violin and piano by Erik Satie and Arvo Pärt.

As is currently the case, this concert will be live-streamed through YouTube. The specific link to the YouTube streaming will be found on the event page for this concert. The performance will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday, February 26; and a hyperlink to the program notes will be added to the event page a few hours before the beginning of the concert. There will be no charge for admission, but all are invited to choose an amount to donate through the hyperlink on the event page. As usual, any changes in current plans will be updated through the Web page you are currently reading and the Facebook shadow site for this series of articles.

Simone Dinnerstein Virtual Performances

Simone Dinnerstein (photograph by Tanya Braganti, courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein has announced plans for a series of six concerts between today and the beginning of next year, all of which will be presented in cyberspace. Three of those performances will be based on her Orange Mountain Music album A Character of Quiet, released this past September. This album consisted of a performance of Franz Schubert’s final piano sonata, D. 960 in B-flat major, preceded by three of the solo piano études composed by Philip Glass. One of other programs will present the world premiere of a composition by Richard Danielpour. Another will present a variety of perspectives on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach; and the last of the concerts will survey selections by Robert Schumann, Philip Glass, Erik Satie, and François Couperin. The full schedule, presented in chronological order (all times given in Pacific Time), is as follows:

Saturday, October 31, 11 a.m.: Dumbarton Oaks will stream the first performance based on A Character of Quiet. Dinnerstein was recorded playing these selections in the Music Room. The video will be accessible through 11 a.m. on Friday, November 6. Admission will be $20, processed through an Eventbrite event page. Once admission has been processed, electronic mail will be sent providing the hyperlink through which the performance may be attended.

Saturday, November 14, 6:30 p.m.: Dinnerstein is currently an Artistic Partner of the Boulder Philharmonic. This past September they performed a program entitled The Beauty of Bach in the Brungard Aviation hangar at Boulder Municipal Airport before an audience practicing social distancing precautions. The program will begin with an arrangement by Philip Lasser of the “Erbarme dich, mein Gott, um meiner Zähren Willen” (have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tenacity) aria from Bach’s BWV 244 setting of the Passion text from the Gospel of Matthew. Dinnerstein will then present the BWV 1067 orchestral suite in B minor. She will conduct the BWV 1052 piano concerto in D minor from the keyboard, followed by a performance of the BWV 1050 “Brandenburg” (fifth) concerto in D major, for which she will be joined by flutist Christina Jennings and violinist Charles Wetherbee. Admission will be $40, processed by the event page for this concert on the Boulder Philharmonic Web site. Presumably, ticket-holders will subsequently be provided with the hyperlink through which the performance may be attended.

Sunday, November 15, 11 a.m.: The second performance based on A Character of Quiet will be streamed live from the Union Arts Center in Sparkill, New York. The concert will be presented by ArtsRock, hosted by Dinnerstein’s longtime friend Robin Quivers, co-host of The Howard Stern Show. The video will be accessible through November 20. Tickets are being sold for $10, $20, and $50 per household and may be purchased through the event page on the ArtsRock Web site. Again, ticket-holders should expect to receive the hyperlink for attendance after the payment has been processed.

Sunday, December 6, 2 p.m.: Danielpour’s An American Mosaic will receive its world premiere under the auspices of the Oregon Bach Festival, which commissioned the composition. The work is a set of fifteen miniatures for solo piano, each of which commemorates segments of the American population that have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, including parents, caretakers and those who have lost their lives to the virus. As of this writing, specifics about admission and tickets have not yet been announced. Presumably they will be posted on the Festival’s event page in the near future.

Tuesday, December 15, 4 p.m.: Dinnerstein will return to New York City for the third and final performance based on A Character of Quiet. She will be filmed live, and the recording will then be streamed through the Live from Columbia concert series entitled Pop-Ups in the Lantern. The performance will take place at the Miller Theatre of Columbia University. The streaming of this offering will be presented free of charge and will be streamed through the Pop-Ups in the Lantern Web site.

Friday, January 8, 5 p.m.: Dinnerstein will begin the New Year with a solo recital recorded in the Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts. This will be an “all new” program, since none of the selections were included in programs for the above events. Schumann will be featured with performances of his Opus 18 “Arabesque” in C major and the Opus 16 Kreisleriana cycle. There will also be a Glass selection earlier than his études, “Mad Rush.” A “French side” to the program will offer the third of Satie’s “Gnossienne” compositions and two pieces from Couperin’s Pièces de clavecin, “Les Barricades Mystérieuses” (the mysterious barricades) and “Le tic-toc-choc, ou Les maillotins” (the tapping or the hammers). $20 pays for a 24-hour rental of the video stream of the performances. For $25 the view has 48-hour access along with a question-and-answer session following the performances. A Web page has been set up for purchasing tickets, and the video feed will be available until 5 p.m. on January 10.

Riley Nicholson Live-Streams from C4NM

This afternoon D. Riley Nicholson, Project Manager at the Center for New Music (C4NM), presented a solo piano recital which was live-streamed through YouTube and is now available for subsequent viewing. The title of his program was Influences; and, true to that title, he surveyed the influences of four key composers. He then concluded with the world premiere of his recent solo composition, “Without,” suggesting that the short movements of this ten-minute piece reflected the influences of the compositions he had just played.

Those past influences constituted what statisticians would call a “bimodal distribution” along the time line. (They could also be called two “clustered pairs.”) The earliest influence came from Erik Satie from a set of four preludes composed between 1888 and 1892 and given the title Quatre prélude posthumes. The “posthumous” adjective was typical Satie humor, since the preludes were written long before his death in 1925. The last two were called preludes for the Nazarene, and Nicholson played the second of these. This was followed by “A pied” (on foot), the first of the ten short pieces in Francis Poulenc’s Promenades collection, composed in 1921 and probably reflecting the composer’s familiarity with Satie’s music. Nicholson’s influences then leap into the second half of the twentieth century with two selections from Hans Otte’s Das Buch der Klänge (the book of sounds), composed between 1979 and 1982. Otte shares this “cluster” with Meredith Monk, whose “Railroad (Travel Song)” was composed in 1981.

Each of these offerings had its own distinctive approach to quietude, what John Cage sometimes referred to as a calming of the mind. There was a certain deadpan quality to Nicholson’s interpretations, but this amounted to making good the intention of letting the voice of each piece speak for itself. The brevity of each of these offerings encouraged a focus of attention that dwelled more on the emerging sonorities than on any conventional wisdom about themes and harmonic progressions. That almost primal approach to listening then served Nicholson’s performance of “Without” as well as it had served the influences behind that new composition. The result was a thoroughly engaging program, which, when taken in its entirety, transcended many of the expectations one brings to a recital and most of the labels invoked to classify different genres of composition.

C4NM’s Riley Nicholson to Live-Stream Recital

Poster design for the program being announced (from the C4NM event page)

I seem to be moving into a “new normal” of announcing free live-streamed performances. Yesterday saw the announcement that Fred Hersch’s jazz theater piece My Coma Dreams will be coming to YouTube at the end of next week. Of more local interest, the Center for New Music (C4NM) will host the streaming of a one-hour solo piano recital towards the end of this month.

The recitalist will be C4NM Project Manager D. Riley Nicholson, composer, percussionist, pianist, and arts management professional. The title of his program will be Influences. His recital will survey his past influences through four key composers: Erik Satie (“Prélude du Nazaréen”), Francis Poulenc (“À pied,” the first piece in his Promenades collection), Meredith Monk (“Railroad (Travel Song)”), and selections from Hans Otte’s Das Buch der Klänge (the book of sounds). The program will then conclude with the world premiere of Nicholson’s recent solo composition, “Without.”

This performance will take place on Sunday, July 26, beginning at 2:30 p.m. The video will be streamed through both Facebook and YouTube. The C4NM event page for this concert will include hyperlinks to these Web pages shortly before the performance is scheduled to begin. Hyperlinks will also be added to the C4NM home pages on both Facebook and YouTube.

James Tenney’s Final Thoughts on Harmony

In the last three of the chapters in the James Tenney anthology From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the author continues to wrestle with the nature of harmony and the perception of pitch. What is interesting is how each of Tenney’s essays on these matters tries to approach the subject from a different point of view, meaning that, by the end of the collection, one is reminded of the problems that three blind men have in trying to describe an elephant. “The Several Dimensions of Pitch,” written in 1993 and revised in 2003, tried to grab this particular elephant by its physiology, beginning with several informative pages that take a deep dive into what is happening in the inner ear. Of greatest interest is the explanation of the difference between hearing a simultaneity of individual tones and hearing them as a single unified stimulus, suggesting that, from an ontological point of view, a “chord” resides in a different category than a single tone.

In itself this is a rather profound insight. The problem is that Tenney does not quite seem to know where to take it. Part of the problem has to do with the fact that he never really reconciles the difference between the mathematical precision of integer ratio with the “fudge factors” of tolerance that arise when listening to real instruments playing their tones. As a result, I come away from Tenney’s speculations reminded of the old joke that the mathematical constant π, a transcendental irrational number, is equal to the integer 3 for very large values of 3.

The following chapter, “On ‘Crystal Growth’ in Harmonic Space,” also written in 1993 and revised in 2003, is the most problematic in the collection. It serves up an abundance of diagrams that get progressively larger and perhaps may be interpreted as a metaphor for crystal growth. For the life of me, I could not make heads or tails out of how to read those diagrams or what Tenney intended them to signify. It is as if he was in search of yet another metaphor to elaborate his thoughts, but it is almost immediately clear that his knowledge of auditory physiology was on much sounder ground than anything involving crystal growth.

The final chapter discusses Tenney’s composition “Diapason” and can be taken, without too much of a stretch, as a summing-up of the entire volume. The composition was clearly intended to make concrete many of Tenney’s abstract speculations on how the concept of harmony could “evolve” to accommodate new concepts of consonance and dissonance in the atonal repertoire. The “punch line” of those speculations is as follows:

Before harmony can evolve, the role of music itself must evolve. Otherwise we will simply be replaying an earlier scenario with minor, “cosmetic” changes in the details.

My own feeling is that there is too much to music to be crammed into a single context, let alone a “role” associated with that context. For my part, I would prefer to fall back on the “definition” that I think was attributed to Erik Satie by John Cage, which declares simply that music is what happens at concerts. I have now lived long enough to see the nature of the concert evolve in any number of imaginative ways, each with its own sense of context. Has music “evolved” along with the concert experience? From the Satie-Cage point of view, I suppose it has!

In the final paragraph of this chapter, Tenney turns his attention to the concept of form, which he declares should be treated “simply as another object of perception.” This takes me back to my own frequently-explored turf of the nature of mind as hypothesized by Gerald Edelman based on speculations by Friedrich Hayek. This involves the principle of “perceptual categorization,” which I discussed when writing about the “META Meta + Hodos” chapter in From Scratch. As I see it, what Tenney calls an “object of perception” is basically what Edelman calls a “perceptual category;” and, on the basis of what Edelman has written about the relationship between brain and perceptual categories, I am not yet convinced that the concept of form is one of those perceptual categories.

Opus Arte Begins its Ashton “Collection”

from the Amazon.com Web page

This past September I wrote about a video release by Opus Arte presenting a program of three ballets choreographed by Frederic Ashton. At the beginning of this year, that recording was packaged along with two others as a set entitled The Frederick Ashton Collection: Volume One. Once again, the content has been released in both Blu-ray and DVD formats.

Each of the discs is a document of a single program at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. The one that I had previously discussed took place on June 7, 2017 and consisted of three ballets, “The Dream,” “Symphonic Variations,” and “Marguerite and Armand.” This is the most recent performance in the collection. The earliest was recorded on February 21, 2013 and documented a program entitled Ashton Celebration. It began with “La Valse” and concluded with an earlier version of “Marguerite and Armand.” Between these bookends were several shorter pieces, a setting of the “Meditation” music from Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs, a choreographic interpretation of the waltz “Voices of Spring” by Johann Strauss II, originally created for the second act “entertainment” in a Royal Opera performance of Strauss’ operetta Die Fledermaus, and the two short ballets entitled “Monotones,” both setting orchestrations of piano music by Erik Satie. The remaining recording was made on January 28, 2016, beginning with “Rhapsody,” followed by the two-act The Two Pigeons.

I shall try not to repeat myself (at least not too much) where the 2017 recording is concerned; but I would like to approach the entire set in a slightly different manner, treating the narrative and abstract ballets as different categories. This is not to suggest that Ashton was better in one category than in the other. However, each of the two genres imposed different priorities; and Ashton clearly knew how to respect those priorities.

Where narrative is concerned, “The Dream” is definitely the leader of the pack, so to speak. Ashton clearly had a well-developed sense of literary technique; and, given that “The Dream” was created for a program to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare, Ashton’s understanding of what made A Midsummer Night’s Dream tick was as significant as the toolbox he brought to this particular project. The bottom line is that anyone who really knows this play will have no trouble hearing Shakespeare’s words echo in the mind when one observes many of the episodes that Ashton extracted to make this ballet. (Obviously, he did not try to account for every one of Shakespeare’s scenes.) For the record, the words that reverberate loudest in my own mind are those of Bottom after he awakes from the spell Puck has cast.

The other narrative selections are The Two Pigeons and “Marguerite and Armand.” While the latter is based on La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils, most viewers will think more about Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata than about Dumas’ book. Indeed, Ashton “parses” the narrative into the same sequence of four scenes that one finds in Verdi, along with a “prologue” scene that basically depicts what Verdi’s opening prologue does.

However good the “fit” to Verdi may be, I fear that the ballet never hits the mark quite as well. This is because Ashton created it in 1963 for Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. In other words the ballet was conceived as a “vanity piece” for the two Royal Ballet superstars of that time, who could probably sell out the house if they did nothing more than dance a Virginia reel. Furthermore, Ashton’s decision to set the ballet to Dudley Simpson’s orchestration of Franz Liszt B minor piano sonata basically took an overwrought narrative and “wrought” it even further with Liszt’s hypertrophied rhetoric. I have to confess that I was more shocked than surprised to discover that this ballet “made the cut” for the Ashton Celebration program; but that just made me less surprised to discover that it had been revived again in 2017!

The Two Pigeons, on the other hand, was a reworking of a nineteenth-century French ballet. The plot was conceived by choreographer Louis Mérante working with Henri de Régnier, and the music was composed by André Messager. The ballet was first performed at the Paris Opera on October 18, 1886.

The basic plot is that the aspiring artist Pépio leaves his fiancée (and primary model) Gourouli to run off with a band of gypsies, having been smitten by the voluptuous Djali. As might be guessed, he returns home sadder and wiser at the same time that two pigeons symbolically return to their nest. (I was a bit surprised, and definitely amused, to see real birds on the stage; and, as animals tend to do, they stole the final scene!) Clearly, this is not as “literary” as Shakespeare; but Ashton definitely finds ways to elevate his account of the scenario above the mundanity of it all.

Nevertheless, it is the abstract side of Ashton’s choreographic efforts that tend, more often than not, to hit the mark. I was particularly struck by how he was at his best when working with music that was structured in variations form. Most impressive was his treatment of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 43 “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” I have discovered that there is no shortage of wit that Rachmaninoff packed into this piece that now enjoys warhorse status, and I never fail to be satisfied when both conductor and piano soloist recognize how much wit there is and articulate all of it clearly. Ashton seems to have appreciated this often-ignored aspect of the music well enough to put his own stamp of wit on the choreography he created. His treatment of César Frank’s “Symphonic Variations” is a bit more on the serious side. Nevertheless, within the elegance of his many different approaches to symmetry, there are more than a few moments that elicit a justified giggle or two.

The real belly laughs, however, are to be found in “Voices of Spring,” right where they belong in the context of the absurd Fledermaus plot line. Granted, those who laugh the heartiest will be those who have endured the insufferable “Spring Waters” from the repertoire of the Bolshoi Ballet. There are any number of gestures in “Voices of Spring” to make it clear that Ashton is getting even with the Russians on a movement-by-movement basis. However, even for those who do not get all of the fine details, the ballet is still a hoot.

On the more serious side, the Thaïs scene is pleasantly serene, if not deeply profound. The real challenge, however, arises in the two “Monotones” ballets. These demand the strictest possible attention to the different kinds of symmetry (as opposed to “Symphonic Variations,” in which the mere suggestion of symmetry is enough to breathe life into the choreography). Even the costuming for “Monotones” suggests that the dancers have been abstracted to machines with a limited number of movements that, in spite of those limitations, are intricately coordinated. If the symmetries are not precise, then almost all of the impact of the choreography is lost; and, unfortunately, precision did not seem to be a priority when this ballet was revived for that Ashton Celebration program.

Taken as a whole, this first volume is a generally satisfying profile of Ashton’s creativity as a choreographer. It leaves me wondering what will show up when the second volume is compiled. I have to confess that my curiosity is at its greatest for Cinderella. This was the ballet that New Yorker critic Winthrop Sargeant described as the story of two very droll old maids that happen to have a beautiful stepsister, who goes off and marries a prince. In the original version, Ashton himself was one of those droll old maids. (The other was Robert Helpmann.) I could do with being reminded of just how funny that ballet was!

Nicholas Phan’s SFP Recital will Include Preview

SFP Vocal Artist-in-Residence Nicholas Phan (courtesy of SFP)

Next month the San Francisco Performances (SFP) 2017–2018 Vocal Series will conclude with a recital by the current Vocal Artist-in-Residence, tenor Nicholas Phan. This will be Phan’s first Vocal Series concert, having already appeared twice in past Salon Series offerings, the most recent of which was almost exactly a year ago. His accompanist will be pianist Myra Huang, who will be making her SFP debut this coming Saturday, when she accompanies Lawrence Brownlee’s Vocal Series recital.

The title of Phan’s program will be La Bonne Chanson—Songs of the Parisian Belle Époque. The period of the Belle Époque (beautiful era) is usually set between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the beginning of World War I in 1914. This was a time when Paris saw the emergence and flourishing of several significant composers, including Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Erik Satie. This was also the time of the short-lived Lili Boulanger and one of the more innovative composers of art song, Reynaldo Hahn.

All of these composers will be included in Phan’s program. Indeed, the Fauré selection will be La Bonne Chanson, his Opus 61 cycle of nine poems from a volume with the same title by Paul Verlaine. Fauré composed this collection between 1892 and 1894, followed by a version for voice, piano, and string quartet, which he created in 1898. The Debussy selection will also present Verlaine poems, six of which he collected for his Ariettes oubliées (forgotten songs), which he completed in 1887. The Satie cycle will be Ludions (probably best rendered in English as “let us play”), a setting of five texts by Léon-Paul Fargue with provocative titles such as “The American Frog” and “Rat’s Tune.” The program will also include selections from the two volumes that Boulanger published under the title Clairières dans le ciel (clearings in the sky). The program will begin with Hahn’s setting of Théophile de Viau’s poem “À Chloris.”

This recital will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 12. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. Tickets prices are $65 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $55 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $40 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a City Box Office event page.

In addition, SFP will present a “prequel” to Phan’s recital, a lecture/performance entitled French Song and the Belle Époque. The lecture will be delivered by SFP Music Historian-in-Residence Robert Greenberg. On the performance side Phan will share the stage with vocalist colleagues Rhoslyn Jones (soprano) and Renée Rapier (mezzo). In addition, pianist Robert Mollicone will be joined by the members of the Alexander String Quartet, violinists Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz, violist Paul Yarbrough, and cellist Sandy Wilson. Presumably, this will provide an opportunity to listen to how Fauré reworked some of his Opus 61 songs for voice, piano, and string quartet. The other composer whose music will be performed will be Debussy.

This event will also take place in Herbst Theater at 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 7. Regular readers probably know that the entire weekend will be a busy one, but this afternoon event will conflict with only a few of the alternatives previously summarized. Ticket prices will be the same as those for the April 12 recital. Tickets may again be purchased in advance online through a City Box Office event page.

Bobo Stenson Trio Returns to ECM

Bobo Stenson at the keyboard in 2006 (photograph by Richard Kaby, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson has been leading a trio with bass player Anders Jormin for more than 30 years. Over that time they have worked with a series of drummers, including Rune Carlsson, Jon Christensen, and Paul Motian. When Motian departed in 2007, he was replaced by Jon Fält, who is still with the group. The trio has been making recordings for ECM since Christensen’s tenure, the first album, Reflections, having been released in 1993.

The group’s latest album, Contra la indecisión, will be released this coming Friday. As is usually expected, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders. The album is named after its first track, a song written by the Cuban singer Silvio Rodríguez, who has sometimes been called “Cuba’s John Lennon.” Stenson himself is solely responsible for only one track, “Alice,” while Jormin is the composer of three: “Doubt Thou The Stars,” “Three Shades Of A House,” “Oktoberhavet,” and “Stilla.” “Kalimba Impressions” is the joint product of the entire trio.

What makes Stenson particularly interesting, however, is his ability to appropriate source material from “external” (sometimes unlikely) sources and then work it into his trio’s style of performance. Stenson calls such adaptation “respectful transformation.” That includes identifying the possibilities for improvising departures from the source; but it may also entail taking a different point of view, so to speak. For example, his adaptation of a wedding song from the Slovakian village of Poniky is based on music originally collected by Béla Bartók during his ethnomusicological research of eastern European regions. Under Stenson’s hands the music barely sounds anything like a “folk form,” let alone how Bartók appropriated it for his own purposes. Yet the substance of the original song is still there and is brought into a new light by virtue of Stenson’s own individual keyboard style.

A more direct appropriation can be found in Erik Satie’s “Élégie,” the second of a set of three songs he composed in 1886. This track begins with a relatively clear account of both the piano part and the vocal line. (It also may have been inspired by the album Mélodie passagère, recorded by the Italian singer Alice, probably the “subject” of the track on this album of the same name.) Once that “groundwork” has been established, Stenson exercises his own brand of freedom to weave his improvisations.

Taken as a whole, the prevailing rhetoric of this album is one of quietude. However, that quietude provides a setting for some imaginative approach to reflection. Those who do not always want their jazz to be hard-driving will find much to discover in how this trio can tease out different possibilities for improvising once they have established their source material.

Red Poppy Art House: January, 2018

As readers may have observed yesterday, it is not too soon to start thinking about concerts taking place at the beginning of the New Year. The Upcoming Events list on the Web site for the Red Poppy Art House already has two events scheduled for January. My guess is that many more will follow. However, the events that have already been posted are interesting enough to deserve this advanced heads-up notification. This page can then be updated as subsequent announcements arise; and the “shadow” Facebook site will be used to announce updates when they appear.

The Red Poppy is located in the Mission at 2698 Folsom Street on the southwest corner of 23rd Street. Tickets will be available only at the door. Both of the January shows listed thus far will begin at 7:30 p.m. Those who have not previously been to the Poppy need to know that it is a small space. It is almost always a good idea to be there when the doors open one half-hour before the performance is scheduled to begin. Here are the specifics for those two events:

[added 12/18, 9:10 a.m.: Four new items have been added to the Upcoming Events list, which are being inserted to maintain chronological order, all of them also beginning at 7:30 p.m.:

Friday, January 5: This will be a two-set evening. The major set will be the second at which Ren Geisick will present songs from her new CD, Ren, Love Song, along with new original music and jazz-meets-country arrangements. She will perform with a quartet, whose members are Jon Dryden (piano), Danny Gerz (bass), Bob Welsh (guitar), and Jim Kassis (drums). The opening set will present another vocalist Adira Shark, who will accompany herself on guitar. Admission will be on a sliding scale between $15 and $20.]

Members of The Project: Sarah Michael, Daniel Berkman, Gary Haggerty, Peter Maund, and Diana Rowan (courtesy of the Red Poppy Art House)

Saturday, January 6: The Project is a quintet that explores Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Eastern European, Celtic, Medieval, and West African music. The title of their program will be Stringed Instruments from Around the World. The performers are Daniel Berkman (percussion and 21-plucked-string West African kora), Gary Haggerty (oud and tarhu, both lute-like instruments), Peter Maund (percussion), Sarah Michael (tarhu and the zither-like qanun), and Diana Rowan (harps). Taking indigenous music as a point of departure, the group explores both unexpected approaches to instrumentation and original compositions. Admission will be on a sliding scale between $20 and $25.

[added 1/2, 1:20 p.m.:

Friday, January 12: Karavan Sarai is the duo of dancer Schirin Chams-Diba (who also provides percussion) and vocalist Narayan Sijan. Sijan also plays electric version of both the oud and the saz and is also responsible for programming digital control of those instruments. The title of their program will be Mystic Melodies, Electronic Grooves & Dance from the Silk Road, which probably does not require further elaboration! Admission will be on a sliding scale between $15 and $20.]

Saturday, January 13: The following week will see a more conventional jazz quartet consisting of Darren Johnston on trumpet and Matt Renzi on woodwinds, with rhythm provided by Adam Shulman on piano and Eric Vogler on bass. The program, on the other hand, will be anything but conventional. Its title is Bye Bye Bartok – Reimagining Great Symphonic & Chamber Themes. The quartet will take themes by Johann Sebastian Bach, Béla Bartók, Erik Satie, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and others. There will then be a second set of original compositions by the quartet members. This is likely to be an evening for those subscribing to my mantra that jazz is chamber music by other means. Admission will be on a sliding scale between $15 and $20.

[added 1/2, 1:25 p.m.:

Sunday, January 14: This will be another CD-based program. Songwriter Rob Flax will perform music from his debut solo record, Distractible Boy, accompanying himself on the violin. He will be preceded by an opening set taken by pianist Katy Stephan, who will be singing new material that will be appearing on her upcoming album, Our Trespasses. Admission will be on a sliding scale between $15 and $20.]

[added 1/5, 10:05 a.m.:

Friday, January 19: This will be a program entitled Bay Area's Women in Jazz. It was conceived to bring together some of our best female jazz musicians for a single program. Genres will include straight-ahead jazz, blues, swing, bebop, gospel, soul, and a grand finale of Brazilian tunes featuring a batucada percussion jam. Admission will be on a sliding scale between $20 and $25, and information about advance purchase of tickets will be made available at a later date. Participating performers will be vocalists Adriana Morrero, Kimiko Joy, and Valerie Trout, Madeline Duran on saxophone, Chloe Jane Scott on flute, Gaea Schell alternating between flute and piano, and rhythm provided by pianist Tammy Hall, bassists Caroline Chung and Ruth Davis, and Amy Molinelli on percussion. Samba Mob will lead the batucada jam. This concert will begin one half hour later than usual a 8 p.m.]

[added 12/18, 9:30 a.m.:

Saturday, January 20: This will be another two-set evening. The first set will be taken by Sisu BrassLand, which consists of five brass players and one percussionist. (Names have not yet been provided.) The group will perform original music composed by leader Aaron Priskorn. The second set will be taken by the Mughal Muesli trio, whose members are Xavier Del Castillo (tenor saxophone), Mat Muntz (bass), and Vicente Hansen (drums). They will present tunes from their debut album, Imperial Cereal, whose tracks are as cross-cultural as the group's name. Admission will be on a sliding scale between $15 and $20.]

[added 1/5, 10:15 a.m.:

Sunday, January 21: Bay Area's Women in Jazz will be followed by a "sequel" program. With the exception of Chung, this will involve an entirely new round of personnel. Vocalists will be Jenna Mannina, Emily Aften Moldenhauer, Rennea Couttenye, Helen Palma, and Hanna Glass, the last doubling on violin. Other rhythm players will be guitarist Carmen Getit, pianists Helen Orzel and Richelle Scales, the latter also providing vocals, and drummers Katrine Spang-Hannsen and Jae Jacksdon. Admission will be on a sliding scale between $15 and $20.]

[added 12/18, 9:30 a.m.]

Friday, January 26: Derek Lassiter will return to the Poppy to offer a selection of songs from his past recordings, along with some new ones. Backup will be provided by Tammy L. Hall (piano), Art Khu (bass and guitar), and Ruth Price (drums). Admission will be $20. Information about advance purchase of tickets will be made available at a later date.

Saturday, January 27: Jazz guitarist Howard Alden has been working with violinist Kit Eakle on a project called DjangoSphere. As the project's name implies, the program will consist of music inspired by both Django Reinhart and Thelonious Sphere Monk. Selections will include both original compositions and treatments of standards inspired by these two jazz icons. Rhythm will be provided by Rory Judge on drums and Don Bennett on bass. Admission will be $25, and this is another concert for which information about advance purchase will be made available at a later date.]