A Disappointing Guitar Recital in Herbst

Guitarist Miloš (photograph by Christoph Köstlin, courtesy of SFP)

Last night saw my first visit to Herbst Theatre in the New Year. The occasion was a solo guitar recital presented jointly by San Francisco Performances and the Dynamite Guitars series of programs presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The recitalist was Miloš Karadaglić, who performs under only his first name and (at least in last night’s program book) all in capital letters. Sadly, the quality of his performance never quite rose to the level of his imaginative presentation of self.

The title of his program was The Arts and the Hours. This was the title of interlude music for Les Boréades, the last of the five operas composed by Jean-Philippe Rameau. The program note by Scott Cmiel suggested of this music that “one could almost imagine Mahler writing in the late nineteenth century;” but he was probably looking at Rameau’s score, rather than listening to Miloš’ interpretation on guitar, which lacked any sense of dramatic flow that one tends to expect from an interlude.

Much of the program was devoted to Rameau’s contemporaries, including (in order of appearance), Sylvius Leopold Weiss, George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Domenico Scarlatti. The Handel selection was identified only as “Menuet” but was not particularly recognizable as a minuet, let alone one by Handel; and Miloš’ approach to the chaconne movement from Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor suggested that his understanding of Bach was no more secure. This concluded the first half of the program, while the entire program finished with “Amor Fati” by Mathias Duplessy, which was composed for a centenary recital for the guitar legend Andrés Segovia, based on his guitar arrangement of the BWV 1004 chaconne. Both accounts were equally disappointing, as was the Bach-inspired “Andante Religioso” movement from “La Catedral” composed by Agustín Barrios.

The one composer that “got some respect” from Miloš was Tōru Takemitsu, who had composed a set of transcriptions entitled 12 Songs for Guitar. His arrangement of Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” was the penultimate work on the program, while the encore selection was “Yesterday” composed for The Beatles by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. It is unclear how much Takemitsu knew about the guitar, but his knowledge of music was impressively diverse. Last night he emerged as the “saving grace” for an otherwise tedious encounter.

Samantha Cho at Old First Concerts

Screen shot of Samatha Cho at the piano keyboard in Old First Church

Last night I live-streamed the latest recital to be presented by Old First Concerts. The recitalist was pianist Samantha Cho, who is currently on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The second half of her program was devoted entirely to four-hand performances, for which she was joined by Alison Lee.

Her program began right off the bat with a world premiere performance. This was “Tether” by Monica Chew, currently based in Oakland. Sadly, as this piece wended its way, I could not shake the frequent reminders of my composition teacher to beware of “noodling.” If there was little sense of direction, then one could appreciate Cho’s failure to provide a particularly compelling account of the music. However, she muddled her way through the rest of the first half of the program with little to draw attention to composers that were definitely worthy of it: Toru Takemitsu, Edvard Grieg, and Earl Wild.

Things picked up a bit for the duo performances. These began with chorale preludes from two of Johann Sebastian Bach’s best-known cantatas, BWV 147, Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, and BWV 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. The chorales themselves came from the final movement of BWV 147 (“Jesus bleibet meine Freude”) and the middle movements of BWV 140 (“Zion hört die Wächer singen”). These are some of the most familiar excerpts from Bach’s sacred music, and they were both given perfectly satisfying accounts. Cho and Lee then concluded with music actually written for four hands, Claude Debussy’s Petite Suite, consistently catching the upbeat spirit of their selection.

Over the course of the evening, however, that spirit was a sometime thing, coming across more as an obligation to perform a recital, rather than an opportunity to engage with the audience.

SFP to Begin New Year with Guitar Recital

Guitarist Miloš (photograph by Christoph Köstlin, courtesy of SFP)

San Francisco Performances (SFP) will begin the New Year with the next program in its Guitar Series. Most readers probably know by now that these events are shared with the Dynamite Guitars concert season presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The year will begin with a solo recital by Miloš Karadaglić (who performs under only his first name).

Miloš has prepared a program entitled The Arts and the Hours. While the works on the program span music history from the Baroque period to the twentieth century, only two of the composers are guitarists. Agustín Barrios will be represented by the “Andante Religioso” movement from his suite La Catedral, and the program will conclude with “Amor Fati” by contemporary composer Mathias Duplessy. On the other hand, most of the program will dwell on composers from the Baroque period, including (in order of appearance) Sylvius Leopold Weiss, Jean-Philippe Rameau, George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Domenico Scarlatti. The program will also include “Asturias,” originally composed as a piano prelude by Isaac Albéniz and Toru Takemitsu’s guitar arrangement of Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow.”

This performance will begin, as usual, at 8 p.m. on Saturday, January 25. Also as usual, the venue will be Herbst Theatre, which is located at 401 Van Ness Avenue, on the southwest corner of McAllister Street and directly across Van Ness from City Hall. SFP has created its own Web page for online ticket purchases. Tickets for the Boxes and Orchestra range between $60 and $70. The remaining tickets are in the Dress Circle and the Balcony, with prices between $50 and $70.

Old First Concerts: January, 2025

The year may not yet be over, but plans for the next one are already in the works. Yesterday, I received my first notification from Old First Concerts. There will be only two concerts in January, and one has not yet been finalized. Nevertheless, the date and time information are sufficient for those that like to make their plans in advance.

It will continue to be the case that events will remain “hybrid,” allowing both live streaming and seating in the Old First Presbyterian Church at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue. However, there will be more variation in ticket prices than usual. Those interested in attending should consult the event pages (which include hyperlinks for streaming) for specific price information. At present a hyperlink is only available for the second concert of the month, but information about the first is likely to interest many readers:

Sunday, January 5, 2 p.m.: This will be the next piano recital by Sarah Cahill, who has not yet provided any further details. [added 9:55 a.m.: Cahill has now provided me with those details. Her program will be devoted to compositions by James Cleghorn, who was Music Librarian for the San Francisco Public Library. Her program will include his earliest composition, a set of variations, and his final work a Tarantella entitled “Fear and Trembling” from his treatise entitled Ludus Arbitralis.) Cleghorn’s son Peter will be attending the performance.]

Samantha Cho playing Debussy at Old First in January of 2021 (from the Old First Concerts Web page for her coming recital)

Friday, January 17, 8 p.m.: This will be another piano recital, this time by Samantha Cho, who is currently on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Full details have not yet provided, the program will have a “past and present” structure. The “past” will be represented by two significantly contrasting composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Claude Debussy. Serving somewhat as a “bridge” to the “immediate present” will be the Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu, who died in February of 1996. The contemporary composers will be Jean Ahn and Monika Chew, who is based in Oakland and will be contributing music for its world premiere.

The Next Omni Video: Filippos Manoloudis

Title frame for the Filippos Manoloudis video (from its YouTube Web page)

The next OMNI on-Location video will be released by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts this coming Sunday. Unlike last Sunday’s release, which consisted of a single relatively short composition, this will be a program of three selections. That program will be performed by Filippos Manoloudis; and it was filmed in Frankfurt, Germany, at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main, which was founded in 1878 by the banker (and music patron) Dr. Joseph Hoch.

Manoloudis will begin his program with seven of the movements from 44 Children’s Pieces on Greek Melodies by Ioannis Constantinidis (who composed popular music under the name Kostas Giannidis), arranged for guitar by Fotis Koutsothodoros. This will be followed by the three guitar compositions by Tōru Takemitsu collected under the title Folios. The program will conclude with Valses poéticos, a collection of eight waltzes for piano, which Manoloudis arranged for himself. The entire video will run for about 35 minutes.

As usual, the performance will be streamed through the Omni Foundation’s YouTube channel. The specific YouTube Web page for this program has already been created. Those that visit this page now will see that it will become available for viewing at 11 a.m. on Sunday, March 24. 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.

SFCMP’s Rescheduled Flute-Harp Program

Last night at the Noe Valley Ministry, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) presented the rescheduled program entitled Fire and Water, Shadows and Dust. More precisely, the program was presented by two of the players, Meredith Clark on harp and Tod Brody alternating between flute and alto flute. The selections included both duo and solo performances.

Where the solos were concerned, the program provided an opportunity to listen to the first two of the compositions that Luciano Berio entitled “Sequenza.” Berio composed fourteen of these pieces, each requiring different solo “instrumentation” (scare quotes because the fourth composition was for female voice). The first of these pieces, composed in 1958 and revised in 1992, was for flute; and the second, composed in 1963, was composed for harp.

Berio created these pieces to explore the capacity of each the instruments for exploring a wide diversity of sonorities, many (if not most) of which involved sounds not usually associated with the instrument. Given the distance of five years between the first two “Sequenza” compositions, it is unlikely that Berio viewed them as a “matched set;” but, fortuitously enough, they happened to align with last night’s performers.

For those unfamiliar with these compositions, each was its own adventurous journey of discovery, as much for the listener as for the performer. Having one performed on either side of the intermission allowed those in the audience to reflect on the “sonorous scope” of the first as preparation for the same scope of diversity of the second. Taken together, the pieces celebrated the capacity of each of the instruments for “non-standard” performance techniques.

Clark presented two additional solo offerings. The first of these was Suzanne Farrin’s “Polvere et Ombra” (dust and shadow), a reflection on a sonnet by Petrarch. In the second half of the program, she performed a “micro-suite” entitled Three Lil Pretties, composed by Marcus Norris and receiving its world premiere. Both of these pieces followed up on Berio’s “mission,” exploring performance techniques for the harp that one was unlikely to encounter in a symphony orchestra performance. Brody’s other solo performance presented Jennifer Higdon’s “rapid.fire,” a reflection on inner-city crime composed in 1992.

Arnold Böcklin’s “Faun and whistling blackbird” (from the Wikipedia page of Böcklin’s paintings)

Among the duo selections, the most familiar to me was the final offering, the flute-harp version of Toru Takemitsu’s “Toward the Sea,” whose movement titles suggest an American perspective of the Atlantic Ocean (rather than a Japanese view of the Pacific). The program began with Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Fauno che fischia a un merlo” (faun, the whistling blackbird), the title of a painting completed by Arnold Böcklin in 1865. (It would not be out of the question to suggest that this canvas may have inspired Stéphane Mallarmé “L’Après-midi d’un faune” poem, the inspiration for Claude Debussy’s composition and the choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky.) The other duo performance presented three of the movements from Roberto Sierra’s Flower Pieces collection: “Lilacs,” “Forsythia’s,” and “Marigolds.”

Taking the entire experience as a whole, none of the selections overstayed its welcome; and the opportunity to experience a generous share of extended techniques for both instruments was thoroughly refreshing.

SFCMP: Cancelled Concert Rescheduled

Readers may recall that the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) program entitled Fire and Water, Shadows and Dust, originally scheduled for this past January, had to be cancelled. Due to weather conditions, The Lab, which is located in the Mission, sustained major water damage, making the site unsuitable for audiences. This morning SFCMP announced that the program has been rescheduled at a new venue.

Given how much time has elapsed since the selections for this program were first announced, readers will probably want to “review the bidding.” The program was designed to focus on the talents of two SFCMP musicians, Meredith Clark on harp and Tod Brody alternating between flute and alto flute. Here is how the program was described this past December:

This pairing plays an interesting role in the history of twentieth-century music. Between 1958 and 2002 (the year before his death) Luciano Berio composed fourteen compositions for solo instruments or voice under the collective title “Sequenza.” (sequence). The very first two of these pieces were written for flute (1958, revised in 1992) and harp (1963), respectively. Both of those works will be included in the SFCMP program, which will consist almost entirely of twentieth-century music. These will include “rapid fire,” composed by Jennifer Higdon for solo flute in 1992 and duo compositions by Salvatore Sciarrino, Toru Takemitsu, and Roberto Sierra. The solo harp compositions are more recent. The earlier of these is “Polvere et Ombra” (dust and shadow), composed by Suzanne Farrin in 2008. The other will be the world premiere performance of Marcus Norris’ “Three Lil Pretties,” winner of the SFCMP Search for Scores Commissioning Prize.

The new venue for this program will be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. The performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 24. General admission will be $35 with a $15 rate for students. Tickets may be purchased through a City Box Office Web page. The venue is a short walk from the corner of 24th Street and Church Street, with Muni transportation running along both of these streets. Any tickets that were previously purchased for the January performance will, of course, be honored.

SFCMP to Highlight Music for Flute and Harp

Readers may have noticed that, for the most part, the current San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) season has focused and solo and duo performances by individual members of the ensemble. Thus, the season began this past October with a focus on violinist Susan Freier and cellist Stephen Harrison, followed this month by solo bass compositions performed by Richard Worn. Next month will see the new year beginning with a program featuring Meredith Clark on harp and Tod Brody alternating between flute and alto flute entitled Fire and Water, Shadows and Dust.

This pairing plays an interesting role in the history of twentieth-century music. Between 1958 and 2002 (the year before his death) Luciano Berio composed fourteen compositions for solo instruments or voice under the collective title “Sequenza.” (sequence). The very first two of these pieces were written for flute (1958, revised in 1992) and harp (1963), respectively. Both of those works will be included in the SFCMP program, which will consist almost entirely of twentieth-century music. These will include “rapid fire,” composed by Jennifer Higdon for solo flute in 1992 and duo compositions by Salvatore Sciarrino, Toru Takemitsu, and Roberto Sierra. The solo harp compositions are more recent. The earlier of these is “Polvere et Ombra” (dust and shadow), composed by Suzanne Farrin in 2008. The other will be the world premiere performance of Marcus Norris’ “Three Lil Pretties,” winner of the SFCMP Search for Scores Commissioning Prize.

This will be the next program to be presented at The Lab. The performance will begin at 4 p.m. on Sunday, January 15. Doors will open early for viewing the art exhibition, beginning at 3:15 p.m. General admission will be $35 with a $15 rate for students. Tickets may be purchased through a City Box Office Web page. The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street, a short walk from the corner of Mission Street, where there is a BART station and bus lines running along both Mission and 16th Streets. Masks are required, and all attendees must be fully vaccinated to attend this event. Full vaccination is defined as completion of the two-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered two weeks or more in advance of the event, along with a vaccine booster.

Gidon Kremer on Warner: Twentieth Century

As was observed at the beginning of this month, the lion’s share of performances offered in the Warner Classics release Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection consists of works composed during the twentieth century. While this involves many of the “usual suspects,” such as Igor Stravinsky, Jean Sibelius, Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Alban Berg, and Benjamin Britten, Kremer was far more interested in using the recording studio to bring attention to composers that were less known when he was preparing programs for his albums. This was a bold move, because much of this music challenged listeners with its thorny rhetoric, while other selections came off as decidedly remote from concert hall settings.

Original album cover showing Gidon Kremer, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Yuri Bashmet (from the Amazon.com Web page)

The largest share of those thorny offerings came from the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke. Like many, I was unaware of the composer until the emergence of compact discs and the release of The Alfred Schnittke Edition by BIS Records, based in Sweden. As previously observed, Kremer’s performances of Schnittke’s music can also be found in his albums for the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings; but the Warner collection offers a far more extensive and diverse account of that composer’s catalog. There is even an element of “star power” in the CD that has Kremer playing two Schnittke selections with violist Yuri Bashmet and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

The other composer to receive generous attention is Astor Piazzolla. One might say that Rostropovich was responsible for bringing Piazzolla out of the Argentinian tango dance halls when the latter composed “Le Grand Tango” for the former. Rostropovich gave the work its first performance in 1990, and later in that decade Kremer would work with several arrangers to prepare “concert versions” of Piazzolla’s music.

Ironically, the most familiar of those undertakings, an arrangement by Leonid Desyatnikov best known as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, is not included in the Warner anthology. Instead, Kremer was involved in a project to record far less familiar music by Piazzolla, the tango operita (tango opera) “María de Buenos Aires,” which was first performed in Buenos Aires on May 8, 1968. Readers may recall that a recording of this one-act opera was discussed on this site in March of 2019. The instrumentation followed that of Piazzolla’s quintet for the tango halls: bandoneon, violin, piano, guitar, and bass. Desyatnikov’s arrangement keeps the bandoneon, violin, piano, and bass but then adds flute, viola, cello, and percussion. Sadly, neither a libretto nor a synopsis is provided; and the titles of the tableaux (cuadros) are given only in Spanish.

The entire opera fills two CDs. There is then a third CD of Piazzolla compositions provided by three different arrangers. Desyatnikov’s contribution is a transcription for violin and string orchestra of “Tango Ballet,” which Piazzolla originally composed for string quartet. This is followed by “Concierto del Angel,” transcribed by Rolf Gupta for violin, bandoneon, bass, piano, and string orchestra. As was the case with Four Seasons, this is a compilation of four individual Piazzolla compositions. The final transcription is by José Bragato, who arranged Four Seasons for piano trio. “Tres piezas para orquesta de camera,” scored for piano and string orchestra, is an arrangement of three short pieces for cello and piano, which were collected and published as Piazzolla’s Opus 4.

Desyatnikov’s original music can be found on an album entitled Le Cinema. The album, as a whole, includes both original compositions and arrangements. Kremer performs with pianist Oleg Maisenberg, along with Andrey Boreyko conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the orchestra originally founded in 1946 by American occupation forces. Piazzolla’s music can also be found on this album, along with two selections by Nino Rota (Federico Fellini’s preferred composer). This album also marks the only appearances of Dmitri Shostakovich, Darius Milhaud, and Toru Takemitsu.

The other “themed” album is entitled From my Home. “Home” refers not only to Latvia, where Kremer was born, but also to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania and Estonia. While Kremer would subsequently champion Arvo Pärt in recordings he released on ECM, this earlier album includes only the 1992 version of “Fratres,” scored for violin, string orchestra (the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie), and percussion. Pēteris Vasks (also Latvian) can be found on this album with his “Musica Dolorosa,” scored for string orchestra; but there is also an entire CD devoted to two Vasks compositions. This is the only CD in the collection in which Kremer is performing with his Kamerata Baltica.

Taken as a whole, this collection of twentieth-century music is a mixed bag. Some may find this frustrating for the unfamiliarity of much of the content.  Others will laud the opportunity to encounter unknown compositions by barely-known (if at all) composers. Such novelty is most accessible when useful background information has been provided, but the text of the accompanying booklet offers more information about Kremer than about his repertory choices. The good news is that there is much on the Internet to satisfy those more interested in the music itself.

American Themes from a Berlin Point of View

courtesy of PIAS

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

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

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

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

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

Takemitsu Solo Guitar Works and Transcriptions

courtesy of Naxos of America

A little more than a month ago, the Italian Stradivarius label released a single-CD album covering the complete works and transcriptions for solo guitar by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. Given current uncertainties about overseas shipping, Amazon.com is currently distributing this album only through MP3 download. As might be guessed, the guitar soloist on the album, Flavio Nati, is Italian.

My interest in Takemitsu’s music extends all the way back to my graduate student days, but my awareness of his guitar music was much more recent. Back when I found the offerings at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music more interesting, I frequently encountered performances of those guitar compositions by both faculty and students. Indeed, for a while it seemed as if I could not find a performance that did not include one of Takemitsu’s arrangements of a Beatles’ tune as an encore.

Takemitsu seems to have enjoyed enjoyed Beatles recordings, since he arranged four of their tracks: “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Michelle,” “Hey Jude,” and “Yesterday.” All four of these were clearly created around the sonorities of the guitar and the affordances of the performing techniques, which pretty much transcend any recollections of the Fab Four’s vocal deliveries. One can also appreciate that Takemitsu preferred the more intimate side of the Beatles canon, shying away from more assertive tunes like “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

All four of the tunes were included in a collection of twelve arrangements, which was published in 1977. Like the Beatles arrangements, the other transcriptions tend to an introspective rhetoric. This makes for intriguing interpretations of familiar songs such as George Gershwin’s “Summertime” (from his opera Porgy and Bess) and Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” (from the film The Wizard of Oz). Takemitsu’s quietude also serves well Charles Crozat Converse’s setting of the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” On the other hand, one is likely to have a what-was-he-thinking approach when listening to his transcription of “The Internationale!” The set of twelve arrangements is then followed by one last transcription, made in 1983, drawing upon “The Last Waltz,” the balled by Barry Mason and Les Reed best known through Engelbert Humperdinck’s hit single.

The arrangements are preceded by only five solo compositions. Three of these are collections: All in Twilight, four pieces composed in 1987, the three Folios pieces from 1974, and the three short tone poems in the In the Woods collection of 1995. Local readers are likely to appreciate that the last of those tone poems was inspired by Muir Woods. The pieces in both All in Twilight and Folios, on the other hand, have no “subject matter” and are identified only by tempo markings. There are also two single-movement compositions. “A Piece for Guitar” was composed in 1991 to honor the 60th birthday of composer Sylvano Bussotti. The five-minute “Equinox” was composed in 1993.

My initial impressions of Takemitsu came from recordings of ensemble compositions, many of which involved considerable resources and frequently adventurous forays into dissonances determined by both pitch classes and timbres. This album makes it clear that Takemitsu’s approach to large resources is a pendulum-swing away from his techniques for solo guitar composition. Many listeners may find this more intimate side to be a bit too sugar-coated, but there is always an underlying inventiveness that will definitely occupy the attention of the serious listener.

Peter Serkin on Sony: Twentieth Century

from the Amazon.com Web page for the collection being discussed

The repertoire that most distinguishes pianist Peter Serkin from his pianist father Rudolf is his interest in the twentieth-century repertoire. Indeed, in the 35-CD anthology The Complete RCA Album Collection, the twentieth-century category receives the largest number of CDs (twelve). Readers may recall that the preceding three categories consisted of Johann Sebastian Bach (six CDs), the First Viennese School represented by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven (eleven CDs), and the nineteenth century (seven CDs). (Yes, the total number comes to 36; but one of the CDs is shared by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.)

Serkin’s interests in the twentieth-century repertoire were somewhat idiosyncratic. The composer that receives the most attention is Olivier Messiaen. Four CDs are allocated to him, three for solo piano compositions and one for the “Quatuor pour la fin du temps” (quartet for the end of time). This was recorded by the Tashi Quartet, whose other members are violinist Ida Kavafian, cellist Fred Sherry, and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. Indeed, Tashi was founded in 1973 explicitly to perform the Messiaen quartet, and the music was recorded over a series of sessions in Tokyo in the second half of 1975.

The only other composer to receive generous attention is Toru Takemitsu. Indeed, the only recordings of Anton Webern occupy half of an album (performed by Tashi), the other half devoted to solo piano music by Takemitsu. Berg is represented only by his “Kammerkonzert” (chamber concerto), recorded about a dozen years after Serkin had recorded the piece during the 1971 Marlboro Music Festival with Leon Kirchner conducting. To be fair, however, the recording in the anthology is part of an Isaac Stern album, coupling the “Kammerkonzert” with the violin concerto; and, as expected, there is no trace of Serkin in that concerto performance. The Arnold Schoenberg album, on the other hand, is devoted entirely to Serkin in three different settings, the five Opus 23 pieces for solo piano, the Opus 47 “Phantasy” for violin (Arnold Steinhardt) and piano, and the Opus 42 concerto, performed with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Serkin also joins forces with Ozawa and the Chicago for an album of the first and third piano concertos by Béla Bartók.

In contrast there is only a single CD devoted to Igor Stravinsky, and that is another Tashi album. Serkin performs on most of the tracks, but Stoltzman’s account of the three solo clarinet pieces is the most compelling of the selections. The one other composer that appears more than once in the collection is Peter Lieberson. He is first encountered on an album entitled …in real time, consisting entirely of world premiere recordings of compositions written for Serkin. His music accounts for sixteen of the 24 tracks (three of which are by Takemitsu). The other is a Sony album consisting entirely of Lieberson’s King Gesar, a cantata for narrator and chamber ensemble based on an epic about a Tibetan warrior-king. (Lieberson was a student of the Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa.)

Taken as a whole, this portion of the collection accounts for a generous amount of breadth; but that breadth is not necessary complemented by much depth. Sadly, I only heard Serkin in recital once; and that was a poor representation of how performing for an audience differs from making a recording. My encounter took place in Herbst Theatre in November of 2006, not long after my wife and I had made the move from Palo Alto to San Francisco. Serkin had prepared an all-Takemitsu program with two Bach compositions serving as “bookends.” Sadly, most of the audience was uncomfortable with the stillness of Takemitsu’s music; and Serkin had to contend with an ongoing volley of coughs and sneezes.

As a result, I value the Takemitsu recordings for providing the opportunity to listen to the composer, rather than the audience! Most of the selections were “first encounters;” and all of them were enthusiastically welcome. On the other hand I cannot say that there was much about any of the Lieberson compositions that drew my attention, and his cantata ran the gamut from pretentious to just plain annoying. Most disappointing, however, was none of the many selections from the first half of the twentieth century made for particularly compelling listening. Most of those tracks left me thinking about far more satisfying encounters, either on recording or at a concert program.

Esfahani’s Adventurous Harpsichord Repertoire

Near the end of last month Hyperion Records released its latest solo album of harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani. The title of the album is Musique?; and the title recalls some of the writings of John Cage in which he tried to take on a favorite criticism of his work: “But is it music?” The title also reflects the final composition on the album, “Programme commun ‘Musique socialiste?,’” composed by Luc Ferrari in 1972.

Esfahani may be familiar to many local readers, particularly those that follow the concerts produced by San Francisco Performances (SFP). Esfahani was the very first recital artist to appear in a new concert series entitled PIVOT: New Adventures in the Performing Arts. The recital took place on October 8, 2016. He then returned to San Francisco this past January for another PIVOT recital, this time sharing the stage with violinist Stefan Jackiw.

What had particularly piqued my curiosity at his 2016 debut was Esfahani’s decision to include Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” on his program. This was a bold move on his part. “Piano Phase” is now over 50 years old; but, for many (if not most) listeners, it remains as provocative as it was when it was first performed. Indeed, when Esfahani had previously played the piece in Germany, it sparked a riot. Nevertheless, in his San Francisco performance it was clear that he appreciated Reich’s “phase” technique; and I am pretty sure that I was not the only one in the audience that was drawn into his command of the composition.

Two of the other pieces on that 2016 program have been included on the new Musique? recording: Toru Takemitsu’s “Rain Dreaming” and Kaija Saariaho’s “Le Jardin Secret II,” both composed in 1986. The former was definitely a surprise, since I had not previously known that Takemitsu composed for harpsichord. Nevertheless, his approach to thematic units was familiar; and the harpsichord sonorities emerged as well-suited to the two connotations of the title, rain and dreaming.

The Saariaho composition, on the other hand, supplemented the harpsichord part with tape accompaniment. At the San Francisco performance the tape was given quadrophonic projection with the loudspeakers at the four corners of the audience area. (“Le Jardin Secret I” was strictly electronic.) My own impression was that the synthesized sonorities could be taken as suggesting orgasm, but the booklet notes by John Fallas never mention that perspective. More important was Esfahani’s ability to interleave the harpsichord part with the electronics without one side overwhelming the other. That said, I suspect that the spatial qualities of this music will always be better appreciated in performance, rather than on recording.

Anahita Abbasi and Mahan Esfahani working on “Intertwined distances” in San Diego (screen shot from a video by Tony Minaskanian posted on Facebook by the International Contemporary Ensemble)

The Saariaho selection is one of three on the album involving electronics. The most recent of these, “Intertwined distances,” was composed by Anahita Abbasi and completed in 2018. Abbasi wrote the following about the use of synthesized sounds:

The electronic component comes out of a close collaboration between Mahan Esfahani and the composer. The sounds are solely harpsichord sounds, specially recorded for this piece. In association with various filters and processes, the material developed further and gained other colours and qualities.

What is interesting is the way in which Abbasi begins with a passage for solo harpsichord, almost as if she decided to establish a palette of “natural” sonorities before bringing her electronics into the mix. Nevertheless, the quarter-hour duration of this composition tends to overstay its welcome. This is one of those pieces in which the listener is likely to “get the point” long before the conclusion is “in sight.”

The remaining electronic selection is the Ferrari composition that inspired the title of the album. Ferrari was one of the founding members of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, working with resources provided by Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, the national French network for both television and radio. The composition’s title suggests that it is the most “political” offering on the album. However, it is difficult to grasp either connotations or denotations of political ideologies over the course of the work’s twenty-minute duration. (If there is anything political about the piece, it is the tendency to take too long to make a point.) Those interested in a synthesis of music and politics would probably do better to explore the music of Cornelius Cardew, but I do not think that Cardew ever composed for harpsichord.

The other two pieces on the album are harpsichord solo compositions. Gavin Bryars’ “After Handel’s ‘Vesper’” runs the risk of having a back-story (which can be found in the accompanying booklet) that is more interesting than the music itself. Henry Cowell’s Set of four is more likely to engage. This is a suite that was commissioned in 1960 by the American harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who was just as interested in building a repertoire of new compositions as he was in performing pre-Classical compositions.

Cowell is better known for his solo piano compositions, particularly those in which he explored the percussive qualities of tone clusters. Such tone clusters are also encountered in Set of four; but, as Monty Python liked to put it, they are “something completely different.” The difference probably involves the lack of sustained resonance provided by the very structure of a grand piano, meaning that there are decidedly sharper edges to the harpsichord clusters, which are likely both to provoke and to fascinate at the same time.

Black Cedar Duo to Return to Noontime Concerts

The Black Cedar Duo of Kris Palmer and Steve Lin (from their Noontime Concerts event page)

Next week Black Cedar will make a return visit to the Noontime Concerts series at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral. This group first formed as the duo of guitarist Steve Lin and Kris Palmer playing a variety of instruments from the flute family. Since their formation, they have expanded to a trio by adding a cellist to their ranks; but next week’s recital will be given by just Lin and Palmer.

These performances often involve solos as well as duets. Thus, Palmer’s contribution will include Georg Philipp Telemann’s TWV 40:13 Fantasie for unaccompanied flute. However, they also perform compositions written explicitly for their combination of instruments; and next week’s program will include the suite Toward the Sea, which Toru Takemitsu scored for alto flute and guitar. There will also be two selections composed by Joe Hisaishi for Studio Ghibli animation projects, settings of American folk songs by Robert Beaser, and excerpts from Béla Bartók’s settings of Romanian dances, originally composed for solo piano. Bartók himself arranged this music for both orchestral and chamber music settings, but the version that Black Cedar plays is probably their own arrangement.

This performance will begin at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 13. Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral is located at 660 California Street, on the northeast corner of Grant Street. There is no charge for admission, but this concert series relies heavily on donations to continue offering its weekly programs.

Salonen’s European Preferences for “New Music”

I have now advanced to the fourth of the five categories I identified in planning my listening experiences for Sony Classical’s 61-CD box set of recordings made by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. I identified this category as “Post-Schoenberg” as a way to identify how things changed after the mid-point of the twentieth century for those who chose not to return to tonality (or who never departed in the first place). The first thing that struck me about how this category had been instantiated was the absence of any composers born in the United States. Indeed, the only such composer in the entire collection is John Corigliano; and I have already observed that his film score for The Red Violin did not give him “a particularly fair shake.”

On a more positive side, this category serves up a rather interesting geographic distribution. Three of the composers are French (Olivier Messiaen, Henri Tomasi, and André Jolivet), three are Finnish (Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, and Salonen himself), two are Eastern European, (Witold Lutosławski from Poland, and György Ligeti from Hungary), and one is Japanese (Toru Takemitsu). Where specific compositions are concerned, I have to say that I have several pangs of dissatisfaction. Whether these had to do with Salonen, the record producers with whom he worked, or some combination of the two is unknown to me; but I am relatively confident that most, if not all, of my quibbles would not likely mean very much to anyone whose priority had to do with marketing!

The most significant of those missed opportunities involves the ondes Martenot. Messiaen took a great interest in this instrument; and it figures significantly in the performance of his “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” which is given an impressive account by the recording in this collection. One of the first virtuoso performers on this instrument was Jeanne Loriod, Messiaen’s sister-in-law; and, according to her obituary in The New York Times, she estimated that fifteen concertos had been written for the instrument. These are not enumerated on the instrument’s Wikipedia page; but I know that, in my personal history of collecting recordings, I only encountered one of those concertos, which was composed by André Jolivet, who happens to be the only concerto composer named explicitly on that Wikipedia page.

A 1975 model ondes Martenot (photograph by an unidentified Japanese Wikipedia user, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

I suspect that anyone curious about this instrument would have benefitted from the opportunity to “compare and contrast” Messiaen’s approach to this instrument with Jolivet’s. Alas, Jolivet only appears on a recording of trumpet concertos featuring Wynton Marsalis as soloist, where it is coupled with a concerto by Henri Tomasi. The good news is that the concertos on the vinyl album I had collected are now available in CD form on a release by disques Adès. The other good news is that the other Messiaen selections that Salonen recorded are as impressive as “Turangalîla,” particularly when there is solo piano work being performed by Paul Crossley.

Another instrumental soloist who endows this particular category with considerable life is Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen. He appears on each of the three CDs for each of the Finnish composers in the collection. All three of those composers are capable of taking rather thorny approaches to their emancipated dissonances, but there is so much energy and lyricism in Karttunen’s performing technique that one can take in the full scope of each of the compositions without things every feeling too prickly.

The other real delight in this category is the complete recording of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, which is basically a farce about how the end of the world did not happen. All of the vocalists brought excellent diction to the recording sessions, meaning that the absence of a libretto does not pose any serious difficulties. (The absence of some of the descriptions of what is happening on stage, on the other hand, is likely to disappoint those who know the opera.)

Where Lutosławski is concerned, I appreciate that Salonen took the trouble to record all four of his symphonies; but I must confess that I have yet to get my head around any of them. Personally, my most significant discovery in the Lutosławski repertoire was my first encounter with music that made it clear that he had a sense of humor. Fortunately, that side of him appears on one of the CDs with his song cycle Chantefleurs et Chantefables, which the track listing translates as “songflowers and songfables.” These are given a delightful account by soprano Dawn Upshaw, and these are the tracks that give me the most satisfaction.

On the other hand, just as the role of Jolivet seems to have been to support Marsalis, the Takemitsu album seems to have been conceived to promote guitarist John Williams. Yes, Takemitsu took a great interest in the guitar; and I definitely enjoy the inclusion of “Toward the Sea” on this disc, even if Salonen had no hand in it, since it is a duo for alto flute (Sebastian Bell) and guitar. On the other hand Takemitsu’s arrangements of popular songs for solo guitar tend to exceed my tolerance for sugar overload, even if they make for perfectly nice encore selections at a solo guitar recital.

From a historical point of view, all of the composers represented in this category have much to offer adventurous listeners. Unfortunately, market forces seem to have smoothed over many of the rough spots that make the listening so adventurous. There are definitely better selections that will give the seriously adventurous listener a better sense of what made the second half of the twentieth century such an adventurous time.

Two Albums from Guitarist Yuri Liberzon

Back when I was writing for Examiner.com, I was particularly impressed that the acoustics at the Old First Presbyterian Church were so conducive to solo guitar recitals, meaning that the soloist would not have to rely on electronic amplification. One of the guitarists that worked very well in this environment was Yuri Liberzon, and I was a bit disappointed to have lost touch with him after his second Old First Concerts recital in August of 2011. Recently, however, I was able to resume contact thanks to a colleague, who had just finished producing Liberzon’s second album, leading me to put both of his albums on my queue for serious listening. Both of these albums can be found on Amazon.com; but, as far as I can tell with the uninformative qualities of Amazon’s search engine, these albums are available for only download or streaming.

Yuri Liberzon’s first album (courtesy of the guitarist)

The earlier of the two albums, entitled Ascension, was released in 2015 and allowed me to revisit several of the compositions Liberzon had presented at his two Old First Concerts recitals. These included Sergei Rudnev’s folk arrangement “The Old Lime-Tree” (lipa vekovaia), Ernesto Lecuona’s “Danza Lucumi,” Toru Takemitsu’s arrangements of two Beatle’s songs, “Michelle” and “Yesterday,” and Liberzon’s own arrangement of Domenico Scarlatti’s K. 1 keyboard sonata in D minor. The album includes another of Liberzon’s Scarlatti arrangements, K. 27 in B minor; but most impressive is that he took on the entirety of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor. Guitar performances of the concluding Chaconne movement of this partita have been around at least since the days of Andrés Segovia, but I must confess to a personal interest in how much the “spirit of the dance” is evoked by those who choose to perform the four preceding movements. That spirit was most evident in Liberzon’s approach to the Courante, which was pleasantly surprising given how many performers only “find their feet” when they get to the Gigue movement.

However, the most unexpected track on the Ascension album was Manuel Barrueco’s transcription of the music from Keith Jarrett’s 1975 solo concert at the Opera House in Cologne. Presumably, Barrueco prepared this transcription by listening to the ECM album of this concert and limited his attention to the final track, “Part IIc.” This was the recital’s encore and was the only portion of the performance to draw upon a precomposed tune, making it the one track from the album that would lend itself to transcription. What is most interesting is how Barrueco managed to capture many of Jarrett’s embellishments, which are very much a matter of deft keyboard technique; but the transcription makes a convincing case that the music is susceptible to another genre of deft finger-work.

Yuri Liberzon’s latest album (courtesy of the guitarist)

The title of the newer album, which was released this past July, is ¡Acentuado! It consists of two compositions by Astor Piazzolla. The first of these is another Barrueco transcription, this time of the six pieces called “Tango-Études,” which were originally composed for solo flute. What is most interesting in these pieces is not only the extent to which the music is as much a technical study for guitar as it had originally been for flute but also Barrueco’s skill in adding notes that allow the guitarist to get beyond the monodic constraints of the flute line. One could almost believe that this music had originally been written for guitar, from which the flute version was subsequently “distilled.”

The remaining four tracks of the album are devoted to Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango suite, which was composed as a duet for flute and guitar. Liberzon had performed this in his second Old First Concerts program, playing the piece with local flutist Meerenai Shim. The flutist on the recording is Josué Casillas. The duo does an excellent job of playing up the stylistic characteristics that distinguish the four movements, each corresponding to a different period in the twentieth century, even if the “Piazzolla sound” is unmistakable over the course of all four of the movements.

Takemitsu Rises Above an Uneven Program of Earplay Premieres

Last night in the ODC Theater in the Mission, the Earplay ensemble presented the last of its three concerts in its 32nd Season. The title of the overall season was Air, Wind, Water with one noun assigned to each of the concerts. The season also had Toru Takemitsu as its focus composer, and each concert presented a Takemitsu concert involved with the element after which the concert was named. Thus, last night was the Water program; and the Takemitsu composition was his piano trio “Between Tides.”

As is usually the case, however, Earplay programming for the evening was devoted heavily to new and recent works. This included the world premiere of the group’s latest commission, Eric Moe’s cycle of four songs Tough Songs about Death, as a memorial for Earplay’s first conductor, J. Karla Lemon. There were also world premiere performances of Cindy Cox’ “Lift-up-over sounding” and Kyle Bruckmann’s “centripetals/centrifugals” and the West Coast premiere of John Liberatore’s “while I sleep.” The Liberatore performance was dedicated to Earplay violinist Terrie Baune and her husband Nick Marlowe. Baune was unable to play last night owing to the recent death of her husband, and the violinist for the evening was Joseph Edelberg.

All of this made for considerable diversity and the promise of a stimulating journey of discovery. However, as I recently explained to a friend, the immediacy of the listening experience is sustained only by what is remembered (a phrase I happily appropriated from Alice B. Toklas); and, in that context, the Takemitsu composition, now over twenty years old, rose impressively over the rest of the program. To be fair, however, this may have been a problem of personal context. Regular readers probably know that yesterday I did some deep diving into the piano music of Olivier Messiaen; and, from the very beginning of his career, Takemitsu was drawn to the music of Messiaen, as well as that of his French predecessor Claude Debussy.

Indeed, the piano part of “Between Tides” owes much to Messiaen’s capacity for building up rich chords as piles of thirds and then endowing them with a rhythmic flow that gracefully weaves its way around any underlying metric pulse. Considering the “subject” matter of this composition, it is hardly surprising that Messiaen, who often seemed to value the world of nature more highly than that of human beings, would have established an implicit presence (if not an explicit one) in Takemitsu’s depiction of the advance and retreat of tidal flows. One might say that the piano part (artfully realized by Brenda Tom) embodies those flows, while the lines for violin and cello (played by Thalia Moore) seem to stand as observers on the shore, almost drawn into the hypnotic power of the visual experience.

Those who follow the chamber music scene, particularly with a preference for the recent, may have been at the Center for New Music last month when “Between Tides” was performed at a program cleverly entitled In Sea. This is music that definitely deserves such multiple exposures by different players. Indeed, it may make one of the best cases that the piano trio genre was still alive and well at the end of the previous century. Other piano trio groups should take note (so to speak).

Among the recent works “centripetals/centrifugals” had the greatest impact. Composer Bruckmann himself played English horn in this piece that definitely favored the lower registers. The other players were Tod Brody on alto flute, Peter Josheff on bass clarinet, Ellen Ruth Rose on viola, and Loren Mach on vibraphone. During the pre-concert conversation (led by Richard Festinger), Bruckmann talked about finding the right balance between improvising and working from notation.

In some respects “centripetals/centrifugals” may have been inspired by the way in which Terry Riley’s “In C” found that balance; but Bruckmann’s results occupied an entirely different space in the domain of attentive listening. Indeed, the distinctiveness of that space is captured by the piece’s title. The performance of “In C” is a process of “fanning out” from the notated score in a manner that could easily be called centrifugal. Bruckmann, on the other hand, pursues the interplay of that “centrifugal force” with a balanced “centripetal” one. The attentive listener is thus drawn into the balancing of dispersion and collection, an “ebb and flow” that, no doubt through sheer coincidence, made for an engaging complement to Takemitsu’s perspective on tides.

By all rights Moe’s commissioned song cycle should have been the high point of the evening. Indeed, much of his discussion during the pre-concert conversation involved his thoughts about the four poems by Dorianne Laux that he set and his appreciation of the distinction of what words can say and what words set to music can say differently. That occasion provided an opportunity to skim through Laux’ texts and appreciate how each poem had its own “semantic cell” that provided Moe with a point of departure.

Sadly, however, the music was performed in a darkened space in which following the text during the performance was impossible. This should not be taken as a criticism of soprano Christine Brandes, who delivered a solid and well-articulated delivery of melodic lines that ingeniously wrapped their way around Laux’ words. However, it felt as if the power of Moe’s approach owed much to the use of music to take its own unique stance on the relationship between the rhetoric of the words and the underlying semantics of the poems themselves.

These were poems that deserved to be seen and read. (Even line-by-line title projections would have undermined the reading experience, since the shapes on the page added another necessary dimension of signification.) The idea that concert listeners would be able to experience “all you need to know” through the “auditory channel” was nothing short of preposterous. The result was one of those sad cases in which negligent management of the space for both performers and audience undermined what could have been an intense musical experience.

The other participant in the pre-concert conversation was Cox. “Lift-up-over sounding” was clearly a product of the pursuit of some basic ideas that Cox shared with her poet husband John Campion. The ideas had to do with a perspective of the Amazon rain forest as a resonant space. Thus, Cox used the sostenuto pedal to keep the dampers of the lowest octave of the piano raised. This endowed the body of the piano with a “second rank” of resonant strings (the first being the highest strings, which have no dampers at all).

Unfortunately, resonance depends heavily of precise matchings of frequencies. At this particularly performance cellist Leighton Fong’s pitch frequently lacked the precision to align with the necessary reference pitches, even when at least one of those pitches was provided by the bass clarinet played by Josheff, who was sitting right next to Fong. Far more effective was Loren Mach’s work with an extended set of pitched drums, whose own distinctive frequency spectra provided a unique contribution to the resonances within the body of the piano. Furthermore, Cox’ score required those drums to be struck in a variety of different ways, meaning that the drums themselves were also endowed with a repertoire of different reverberant properties. Nevertheless, what was lacking was an overall sense that Josheff’s bass clarinet, Fong’s cello, Tom’s piano, and Mach’s drums were all contributing equally and synergistically to the definition of the sort of rich resonances that triggered Campion’s and Cox’ impressions of the Amazon rain forest.

That failure of performers coming together to make the whole more than the sum of its parts also undermined the impact of Liberatore’s opening duo. There was too much of a sense that both Edelberg and Rose were still finding their way through their individual parts. This meant that they did not yet have “cycles to spare” to address any issues of interacting as a duo. Liberatore’s piece was very brief and emerged out of only a few fragments of musical ideas. Nevertheless, it was clear that he was writing for a dynamic engagement of two players that never quite came into focus last night.

Earplay will Conclude 2017 Season with Four Premieres

Later this month Earplay will present the last of the three concerts in its 2017 season. Four of the five works on the program will be premieres; and, while the title of the entire season is Air, Wind, Water, the last of those premieres, written on an Earplay commission, will go beyond this “elemental” theme. Eric Moe was commissioned to compose Tough Songs About Death in response to Earplay’s request for a memorial for the ensemble’s first conductor, J. Karla Lemon, who was also a close friend of the composer. The result, which will be given its world premiere, is a song cycle setting four poems by Dorianne Laux, each of which addresses the burdens of survivors. The work was scored for the complete Earplay sextet of Tod Brody (flute), Peter Josheff (clarinet), Terrie Baune (violin), Ellen Ruth Rose (viola), Thalia Moore (cello), and Brenda Tom (piano), which will be joined by soprano Christine Brandes. For this performance the violin part will be taken by guest artist Joe Edelberg.

In addition, Kyle Bruckmann will join the ensemble for the world premiere of his “centripetals/centrifugals,” which he scored for alto flute, cor anglais, bass clarinet, viola, and percussion. The last of the world premieres will be “Lift-up-over sounding,” scored for bass clarinet, cello, percussion, and piano by Cindy Cox. Composed in 2015, the piece is a reworking of “World A Tuning Fork,” which she composed in 2001 for amplified soprano saxophone, double bass, percussion, piano, and fixed media. Taken together, these titles are a couplet from a poem by John Campion. The score uses the resonant properties of low pitches and the piano’s sostenuto pedal to evoke the sound world of the Amazon rainforest. In addition John Liberatore’s 2011 duo for violin and viola, “while I sleep,” will be given its West Coast premiere. The one work on the program not receiving a premiere will be Toru Takemitsu’s piano trio “Between Tides,” which he composed in 1993. Takemitsu was selected as the featured composer of the season because of his attention to all three of the elements named in the season’s title.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, May 15, in the ODC Theatre. The venue is located in the Mission at 3153 17th Street on the southwest corner of Shotwell Street. General admission will be $25 at the door and $10 for students. Tickets will be available at the box office before the performance. In addition, there will be a pre-concert talk that will begin at 6:45 p.m. and will be open to all ticket-holders; and a reception will follow the concert.

[added 5/13, 6:25 a.m.: Last night's news broadcast on ABC7 included Michael Finney's regular Finney's Friday Free Stuff feature. This week one of the options was free tickets to Earplay's final concert of the season. As always, Finney has set up a Web page for instructions for taking advantage of any of the free offers he announces.]

Dynamite Guitars will Host Ana Vidovic

Following its final partnership concert with the 2016–2017 Guitar Series presented by San Francisco Performances, which will take place this coming Saturday, the 2016–2017 Dynamite Guitars series of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts will conclude with a second solo guitar recital later this month. The recitalist will be Croatian classical guitar virtuoso Ana Vidovic. She has prepared a program of impressive diversity that will include both original music and transcriptions for solo guitar.

She will begin her program with her longest offering, Valter Despalj’s transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1007 solo cello suite in G major. Her Baroque repertoire will also be represented by two of Domenico Scarlatti’s single-movement sonatas, K. 322 in A major and K. 380 in E major. From the nineteenth century Vidovic will play Mauro Giuliani’s Opus 61, which he called a “grand” overture and Francisco Tárrega’s popular “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” (memories of the Alhambra). Her twentieth-century selections will be a sonatina by Spaniard Federico Moreno Torroba and selections by Paraguayan Agustín Barrios (known as Mangore). She will also perform Toru Takemitsu’s unlikely but highly effective transcription of the Beatles song “Yesterday.”

This concert will take place in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 22. The church is located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the southwest corner of Franklin Street. City Box Office has created an event page for online purchase. The price is $55 for Orchestra level and $45 for the Balcony, both general admission. Tickets may also be purchased by calling the Omni Foundation at 415-242-4500 or by calling City Box Office at 415-392-4400.

Intriguing Alternatives in Early April

April may have been the cruelest month for T. S. Eliot, but this year it will get off to a promising start for those who take their listening seriously. Thus far, three concerts have already been announced for the evening of Saturday, April 8, each with a unique and diverse approach to repertoire. Because these events overlap, the only way to facilitate making choices will be to weigh the specifics of each against the others. The alternatives are as follows:

7:30 p.m., Herbst Theatre: This will be the final concert in the 2016–2017 Guitar Series presented by San Francisco Performances in partnership with the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The recitalist will be the Chinese classical guitar virtuoso Xuefei Yang. Her program will begin in the eighteenth century with Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 995 lute suite in G minor. This will be followed by Niccolò Paganini’s “grand” solo guitar sonata in A major. She will then conclude the first half playing her own arrangements of Xu Changjun’s “Sword Dance.” Xu wrote this piece of liuqin, a four-stringed Chinese mandolin, in the Seventies, when he was still a student at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The second half of the program will be devoted entirely to music from Brazil with selections by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Dilermando Reis, and Anibal Garoto.

Herbst Theatre is located on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Single tickets are being sold for $55, $45, and $35. They may be purchased in advance through a City Box Office event page.

7:30 p.m., Noe Valley Ministry: Pablo Picasso completed his monumental Guernica painting in June of 1937. He created it in response to the bombing of the Basque village of the same name by Nazi German and Fascist Italian warplanes to provide support for Francisco Franco’s Nationalists. Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) will recognize the 80th anniversary of the completion of this major work of modern art with the world premiere of a work by Jeffrey Hoover commissioned to honor the occasion.

Hoover’s “Guernica” is in four movements scored for soprano, violin, cello, and piano, with the soprano singing in six languages: Basque, Spanish, German, Latin, Italian, and English. The program will also include Hoover’s “Burning Giraffe,” Derek Bermel’s “Death With Interruptions,” the “Albeniz” movement from the set of five “hommages” for solo piano by E4TT composer David Garner, and songs by Spanish composers Mario Carro and Mercedes Zavala, written in response to the E4TT 2016 Call for Scores. The E4TT performers are soprano Nanette McGuinness, pianist Dale Tsang, season guest cellist Anne Lerner-Wright, and guest violinist Dawn Harms. The event will also include an introductory talk by Hoover, traditional Basque dance performed by the Zazpiak Bat Dance Group, and projection of historical images provided by the Museo de la Paz.

The Noe Valley Ministry is located in Noe Valley at 1021 Sanchez Street. General admission will be $30 with a $20 charge for students. However, there is an Early Bird rate for tickets purchased up to and including April 5. The Early Bird rate for general admission is $25, and the student rate is $15. Tickets at both rates may be purchased in advance online from an Eventbrite event page.

8 p.m., Center for New Music (C4NM): In Sea will be a chamber music recital that explores the mysteries of the ocean through musical interpretations of tides, waves, and the voices of marine mammals. The performing ensemble consists of pianists Rachel Kim and Anne Rainwater, flutist Sasha Launer, violinist Agnieszka Peszko, and cellist Natalie Raney. The “tidal” composition will be Toru Takemitsu’s 1993 piano trio, which he titled “Between Tides.” Waves are captured in Kaija Saariaho’s “Prés,” which is the French preposition that translates as “near” or “beside.” Saariaho was apparently inspired by Paul Gaugin’s two paintings of the sea viewed from the edge of the land. (He did not use the prés preposition, however, calling both painting’s Bord de mer.) This entails an experience of the play of waves from a distance. Saariaho scored this piece for cello and electronics, with the cellist also controlling the electronic gear. The remaining work on the program will be George Crumb’s “Vox Balaenae” (voice of the whale), scored for piano, flute, and cello with amplification.

C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, about half a block north of where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Vendini event page.