Guitarist Ricardo Gallén Previews New Album

Ricardo Gallén making full use of both hands in performing one of Sergio Assad’s Colloquial Preludes (from the YouTube video of that performance)

Two days ago the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest video on a YouTube Web page. This was a solo guitar performance of Ricardo Gallén playing music by Sergio Assad. The music can be found on Gallén’s album Preludes and Dances from Brazil. The first twelve tracks on the album are from Assad’s Colloquial Preludes with each major key followed by its complementary minor. The remainder of the album is devoted by Heitor Villa-Lobos, beginning with the five W419 preludes followed by the six-movement Suite populaire bresilienne.

The video is only a little more than two minutes in duration. Gallén plays the penultimate of the Colloquial Preludes, composed in the key of E major. For a brief work, the video provides a rich account of Gallén’s command of a plethora of technical challenges. As might be expected, this account of the guitarist’s intricate technique and the sonorities emerging from it have piqued my curiosity for Assad’s composition. I am not sure when I shall have the opportunity to listen to the full canon of Assad’s preludes, but I suspect that Gallén’s album would be a good candidate for providing that opportunity.

Assad Farewell Tour Comes to Herbst Theatre

Sérgio Assad performing in Brazil in 2012 (photograph by Leonardo Beraido, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Last night Herbst Theatre hosted the latest program of classical guitar duos performed by Brazilian brothers Sérgio and Odair Assad. This was also the latest offering in the Dynamite Guitars concert season, presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. I first encountered Sérgio when he was teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Listening to both him and David Tanenbaum led to my interest in attending as many guitar recitals as my schedule would allow.

Three of the works on the program were composed by Sérgio. The first half of the evening concluded with One Week in Rio, a suite in seven (of course) movements beginning with Monday. In the second half there was a shorter three-movement suite entitled Dyens en trois temps. This was composed for classical guitarist Roland Dyens, who died in 2016. His name appears in each of the movements:

1. Roland au nord
2. La chanson et Roland
3. Roland au sud

Those familiar with very early literature will recognize the second movement as a nod to the Song of Roland, an eleventh-century French epic, which may be the oldest surviving work of French literature. One may describe the suite as a journey from north to south with an epic battle between the extremes. Assad concluded the program with “Tahhiyya li ossoulina,” an homage to his family life, which began in Lebanon and moved to Brazil by way of Portugal.

The program also included two of Assad’s contemporaries, Paulo Bellinati and Egberto Gismonti. The remainder of the program offered twentieth-century composers, the most familiar being Heitor Villa-Lobos and Astor Piazzolla. Each of them began the second and first halves of the program, respectively. The remaining two composers on the program were less familiar to me: Américo Jacomino and Radamés Gnattali. The encore wrapped up the evening with both of the brothers playing on a single instrument.

This program was prepared for the Assad’s North American farewell tour. It marks the conclusion of a 60-year career. I appreciate every opportunity I have had to listen to them, and it is hard to avoid disappointment that this was my final encounter.

New Century Chamber Orchestra in January

Having pretty much accounted for the “seasonal holiday” events, this site can begin to prepare readers for performances next month. Currently, the only performances that have come to my attention will not take place until late in January. Fortunately, they will be worth the wait!

Violinist Simone Porter (from her Opus3 Artists Web page)

The first of these will be the third of the four performances in San Francisco by the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) with its Music Director Daniel Hope. American violinist Simone Porter will serve as guest leader of a program entitled Enlighten Me, and the ensemble will be joined by students of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The repertoire will span music history from the twelfth century (with Hildegard von Bingen’s setting of the antiphon “O virtus sapientiae”) to “Cathedral of Light” by the contemporary composer Juhi Bansai. Other composers on the program will be Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Porter will also be the soloist in the performance of Bach’s BWV 1042 violin concerto in E major.

The San Francisco performance of this program will take place on Saturday, January 24, beginning at 7:30 p.m. The venue will be the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which is located 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the underground Muni station. Tickets may be purchased through a City Box Office Web page with prices between $35 and $80.

Pepe Romero’s Solo Guitar Recital at Herbst

Many readers probably know by now that last night in Herbst Theatre was originally scheduled to host a performance by the guitar quartet known as The Romeros, presented jointly by San Francisco Performances (SFP) and the OMNI Foundation for the Performing Arts. Unfortunately, the visit had to be cancelled due to a serious illness in the Romero family. As a result, last night hosted a solo performance by one of the quartet’s founding members, Pepe Romero.

The program was richly diverse, accounting for ten different composers, one of whom returned for the encore selection. Two of them were founders of the quartet. The final work on the program was Celedonio Romero’s “Fantasia Cubana,” which required non-standard finger technique. Pepe contributed to the program with a piece entitled “Granadinas.” Celedino also provided two transcriptions of piano compositions. The first of these was the “Andaluza” movement from Enrique Granados’ Danzas Españolas. This was followed by “Granada,” the first of the eight movements in Isaac Albéniz Opus 47, the first of his Suite española compositions.

The first half of the program was shared by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Joaquín Turina. The first composer was represented by the five preludes he composed for solo guitar. The second was “Sevillana,” the first of only five works for solo guitar composed by Turina.

Francisco Tárrega (photographer unknown, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page, public domain)

The encore selection was taken from the works of Francisco Tárrega. It was his “Gran jota Aragonesa.” He had previously appeared near the end of the program with the performance of “Capricho árabe. Taken as a whole, the diversity of the evening was consistently engaging, with Romero providing just the right course through all of that diversity.

Los Angeles Guitar Quartet Visits Herbst Theatre

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

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

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

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

Manuel Barrueco Wraps Up Dynamite Guitars

Manuel Barrueco at his last visit to Herbst Theatre in October of 2019 (photograph by Brian McMillen taken on October 13, 2019, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Last night in Herbst Theatre the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts concluded its 2024/2025 Dynamite Guitars concert season in conjunction with the final recital in the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Guitar Series. This was the sixteenth SFP appearance of Manuel Barrueco, having made his debut in 1989. He prepared a program of guitar compositions by Manuel Ponce, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Joaquín Turina. He also began each half of the program with one of his own transcriptions.

The evening began with his arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1007 suite in D major, composed originally for solo cello. To begin the second half, he performed arrangements of the first three movements in the Tango-Études collection by Astor Piazzolla. The Bach suite was coupled with Manuel Ponce’s four-movement “Sonata Clásica, Hommage a Fernando Sor.” The remainder of the second half consisted of short works by Heitor Villa-Lobos followed by Joaquín Turina’s Opus 61 three-movement sonata. Barrueco took two encores. He described the first as a Venezuelan waltz, which was followed by an arrangement of one of the tunes of João Gilberto.

Addressing only a few remarks to the audience, Barrueco delivered a highly focused performance. Each of the five composers on the program had his own approach to rhetorical disposition, and Barrueco honored that approach in each of his selections. For example, Bach clearly had his own ideas about how his suite would reveal the breadth of those dispositions across a series of movements based on dance forms; and Barrueco delivered an account that honored the diversity of those dispositions. Piazzolla, on the other hand, examined the earthier qualities of the tango; and Barrueco was not shy in giving those qualities the attention they merited.

Most important, however, was the way in which Barrueco conceived his program as a journey through diversity in both time and rhetoric. His personal disposition was highly focused, determined to guide the attentive listener through the contrasting qualities encountered through that diversity. The result was an experience in which beginning-to-end attentive listening was highly rewarded.

Omni Releases Video of Norway Festival Winners

One week ago from today, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest video of classical guitar performances. The performers were the five prize winners of this year’s Tino Andersen International Guitar Festival, which took place in Bergen, Norway. Two of the guitarists were Greek and the other three were from the Ukraine, Croatia, and Germany, respectively. One of them, Ukrainian Marko Topchii, has performed here in San Francisco; and, in October of 2022, I released an article about a video he had recorded for the Live at St. Mark’s seres presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The other four guitarists were Ioanna Kazoglou and Filippos Manoloudis from Greece, Nikica Polegubic from Croatia, and Benno Panhans from Germany. According to my records, I have written twice about videos of Manoloudis over the course of this year, one an OMNI on-Location video recorded at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main and the other as part of the Emerging Stars of the Guitar video.

At the risk of revealing a personal bias, I have to say that I was particularly engaged by Topchii’s offering on this new video. He played the first movement (“Modéré”) of Maurice Ravel’s sonatina for solo piano. What struck me while listening is that his approach to arrangement made the music sound as if it had originally been written for guitar (without ever compromising the music’s underlying rhetoric)! Equally interesting was my first encounter with Polegubic. He performed the Sarabande movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1012 solo cello suite in D major in a manner that found an approach to phrasing that would be more appropriate for the guitar than for the cello.

I was also glad to encounter an “old friend” in the form of the “Invierno Porteño” movement from Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteños. Whether this was Sérgio Assad’s arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s music, which he made on a commission by Albert Augustine, Inc. and New Albion Records, or an original arrangement by the performer, German Benno Panhans, I cannot tell! In any event, this music was an “old friend” for me; and I definitely enjoyed the encounter. The other arrangement that I particularly enjoyed was that of a prelude-fugue-prelude composition by Louis Couperin, in which the prelude was composed without a metric signature.

Ioanna Kazoglou playing the Villa-Lobos study at the beginning of the video being discussed

Finally, it is worth noting that the only music actually composed for the guitar was the first selection. This was the last of the 12 Studies for Guitar composed by Heitor Villa-Lobos in 1953. The performance by Kazoglou definitely got the entire video off the a stimulating start.

Omni Foundation Hosts Debut of Artyom Dervoed

Last night St. Mark’s Lutheran Church hosted the second guitar recital of the month presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts in its DYNAMITE GUITARS series. Artyom Dervoed was the first Russian to win two of the most prestigious guitar contests, the Michele Pittaluga Guitar competition in Italy and the Her Royal Highness Princess Cristina Competition in Spain. In the United States his touring plans have taken him to Carnegie Hall in New York and Jordan Hall in Boston.

Manzanares el Real, one of the castles “portrayed” in Moreno Torroba’s Castillos de España (photograph by Ramón Durán, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

The major work that Dervoed presented last night was one of the most ambitious collections for guitar composed in the twentieth century. Castillos de España (castles of Spain) amounts of a catalog of relatively brief musical reflections on fourteen different venues, each a castle that had once dominated a particular region of the Iberian peninsula. The music was composed by Federico Moreno Torroba and published in two volumes in 1970 and 1978 respectively. The first volume accounts for eight of the pieces (and I know this because Andrés Segovia made his recording of them in December of 1969), leaving the remaining six for the second volume.

I must confess that ignorance of the “subject matter” probably impeded the extent of my listening capacity. Dervoed presented his own ordering of the individual movements, but each was a self-contained miniature. The venue that particularly seized my attention was “Redaba,” whose musical realization was engagingly cryptic. This occurred around the middle of Dervoed’s ordering, perhaps to serve as a prod to the listener’s attention!

There was a similar prod in the opening selection that preceded Castillos. This was the “Elogio de la Danza” composed by Leo Brouwer. This may have been one of his more prankish undertakings, since the respective rhetorics of elegy and dance seemed to be at cross-purposes! It certainly served to seize listener attention, presumably to prepare for the more extensive journey that was to follow. Another “prod” began the second half of the program, when Dervoed decided to play the two solo guitar preludes by Heitor Villa-Lobos in reverse numerical order! (Villa-Lobos was no slouch in composing for guitar, and that included preludes. This is one of those cases where a catalog number would have been helpful.)

If Moreno Torroba’s suite was not ambitious enough, the major undertaking in the second half of the program was a transcription of the third (and final) movement of Niccolò Paganini’s Opus 7, his second violin concerto in B minor. That movement is best known by its nickname, “La Campanella.” (Fun fact: Paganini’s instrumentation for this concerto included a serpent!) Dervoed delivered a thoroughly engaging account of this chestnut with the sort of panache that would probably have brought a smile to the composer’s face. He then concluded the program with a piece given the subtitle “Omaggio a Paganini,” the “Capriccio Diabolico” by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Dervoed introduced it as “a great piece to play in church,” and the audience definitely appreciated his sense of humor.

Indeed, they received him well at the conclusion of the program. As might be expected, he returned for an encore. Unfortunately, he did not introduce either the composer or the title. Nevertheless, his audience was still enthusiastic.

Pablo Garibay’s Omni Recital at St. Mark’s

Guitarist Pablo Garibay (photograph by Jesús Cornejo, from the artist’s Web site)

Last night the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts returned to St. Mark’s Lutheran Church for the second program in the 2024/2025 Dynamite Guitars season. The offering was a solo recital by guitarist Pablo Garibay. The program reached back to the early nineteenth century with its opening selection, the “Elegie” of  Johann Kaspar Mertz, and extended into the recent present with “L’Ultimo Caffé Insieme” by Simone Iannarelli.

However, the two most familiar composers on the program were major proponents of twentieth-century guitar music. The earlier of these was Mexican Manuel Ponce, who was represented by his three-movement “Sonatina Meridional.” The other was Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos with a performance of three of his guitar etudes. These were coupled with Roland Dyens’ “Hommage à Villa-Lobos,” given the subtitle “Tuhu.” (Dyens was generous to his contemporaries, having also composed an homage for Frank Zappa and an elegy for Leo Brouwer.) The second half of the program was devoted entirely to a four-movement sonata by Antonio Jose, who died in his mid-thirties early in the twentieth century. This was followed by an encore selection by Antonio Lauro, whose title was not named.

Throughout the entire evening, Garibay commanded a disciplined technique with consistent attention to the expressiveness of each selection. He offered only a few informative remarks for a straightforward “bread and butter” performance. Nevertheless, over the course of six compositions (along with an encore), he offered a journey through a diversity of rhetorical connotations in his choice of selections. That diversity clearly satisfied his audience of attentive listeners.

Omni Foundation Announces Garibay’s Program

Guitarist Pablo Garibay

Following the DYNAMITE GUITARS program that launched the 44th season of guitar performances presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, the next recital will take in a little over two week’s time. This will be the solo recital by Mexican guitarist Pablo Garibay, who was able to substitute for Italian guitarist Carlotta Dalia, whose visit had to be indefinitely postponed. Having already established his reputation in Germany, Garibay will now bring his talents to San Francisco.

The second half of the program will be devoted entirely to a four-movement guitar sonata by Antonio José Martínez Palacios, composed in 1933. He was known professionally as “Antonio José;” and, apparently, Maurice Ravel declared that “He will become the Spanish composer of our century.” Unfortunately, Ravel could not anticipate the turmoil leading to the Spanish Civil War; and, on October 11, 1936, Antonio José was executed by a Falangist firing squad. The first half of the program will survey a diversity of composers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Specifics are as follows:

• Johann Kasper Mertz: “Elegie”
• Heitor Villa-Lobos: three of the twelve solo guitar études (first, tenth, and eleventh)
• Roland Dyens: “Hommage à Villa-Lobos”
• Manuel Ponce: “Sonatina meridional”
• Simone Iannarelli: “L’Ultimo Caffè Inseime”
• Ernesto Cordero: the three pieces collected under the title Cantigas Negras

As usual, this will be an evening recital beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 12. The venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street. General admission will be $60, and tickets may be purchased through a City Box Office Web page.

Omni Video Showcases Alicante Guitar Students

While the videos released by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts usually serve as a platform for “seasoned professionals,” every now and then there is a release that looks to the future based on students headed for a promising career. The most extreme example of this latter case probably took place back in November of 2023, with the release of the final movement of Leo Brouwer’s first guitar sonata played by Xinyan Sun, a nine-year old guitar prodigy. The title of today’s new video is Emerging Stars of the Guitar. It was filmed at the Palau del Portalet in Alicante, Spain and featured three recipients of scholarships that were awarded by the D'Addario Foundation and the Fundación Alhambra Guitarras. Those scholarships supported their matriculating in the Master in Classical Guitar Performance program at the University of Alicante.

Title frame for the video being discussed showing photographs of Lucrezia Bonasia, Filippos Manoloudis, and Eduardo Sueiro (from the video’s YouTube Web page)

Over the course of about 35 minutes, each of the students performed two selections. The program began with Lucrezia Bonasia playing one of the best-known compositions by Agustín Barrios, his three-movement suite La Catedral. This was followed by Dionisio Aguado’s Opus 16, another three-movement composition entitled “Le Fandango.” Filippos Manoloudis began his set with “Les Graces” has own arrangement of music for harpsichord by Jacques Duphly. (Duphly published four volumes of harpsichord music during the middle of the eighteenth century.) He then played the second movement of Eduardo López-Chavarri’s second guitar sonata, composed in the key of D minor. The final guitarist, Ederaldo Sueiro, began with another suite, The Black Widow in three movements composed by Jaime Zenamon. He then concluded the video with the seventh of the twelve études that Heitor Villa-Lobos composed in 1928.

Taken as a whole, this could not be a better way to spend half an hour. The selections were impressive not only for their diversity but also for the breadth of the time-line in which they were situated. There should be much to expect from the future of these three students that will be supported by their scholarships!

Guitarist Pepe Romero Returns to Herbst Theatre

Pepe Romero (photograph by Trace Haskins, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night Herbst Theatre hosted the latest guitar recital presented jointly by San Francisco Performances (SFP) and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The program was a solo performance by Pepe Romero. He introduced his program by saying that this would be the last recital given in his 80th year, since he will turn 80 this coming March 8. He then added that he was looking forward to further performances in his 90s.

Romero has been giving recitals for SFP since May of 1992, and this was his tenth solo appearance. His program provided a diverse account of music as early as the sixteenth century and as recent as the twentieth. Not all of the music was written explicitly for guitar, and Romero prepared his own arrangements of nineteenth-century piano compositions by Enrique Granados and Isaac Albéniz.

The major offering on the program was an account of all five of the preludes composed by Heitor Villa-Lobos. This was my first encounter with the complete set; but their strongest advocate was probably Julian Bream, who probably has the best recorded account. One often tends to think of preludes from a pedagogical point of view; but, following in the footsteps of Claude Debussy, each of these has a programmatic title. Fortunately, these were included in last night’s inset of program notes! The only contemporary composer on the program was Romero himself, who concluded with his own “Fantasia Cubana.” His encore was his own arrangement of one of the most popular Spanish songs, Sebastián Iradler’s “La Paloma.”

Much of the pleasure of last night came from Romero’s chemistry with the audience. He kept his remarks to a minimum, but they always deserved attention. When it seemed appropriate, he would reflect on some aspect of the music he was about to perform; but, for the most part, he let the composers speak for themselves.

Taken as a whole, this was very much an “old school” experience; but, regardless of the “vintage” of any of the selections on the program, Romero knew exactly how to endow it with the freshness of the immediate present.

Discovering a String Quartet Joining a Vocalist

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

It was only a little over a month ago that I first became aware of the Delgani String Quartet, whose members are violinists Anthea Kreston and Jannie Wei, Kimberlee Uwate on viola, and cellist Eric Alterman. The title of their latest album, released by Avie Records this past October 13, is Soul of Brazil; and it features, as a “guest artist,” vocalist and pianist Clarice Assad, who was born in Brazil. Since Assad is “at home” in both classical and jazz repertoires, this may be approached as a “crossover” album.

However, in my own classification techniques, I approached the new album as basically classical. It includes two compositions for string quartet. The earlier one is the sixth of the seventeen string quartets composed by Heitor Villa-Lobos. The other is a much more recent work by Assad entitled “Glitch,” whose structure is, in the composer’s words, “full of surprises.” These two pieces are framed on either side of the track-list by music arranged by Assad. The first four tracks are quartet arrangements of four songs by Antônio Carlos Jobim, and the final track is an arrangement of the Villa-Lobos song “Cair da tarde” (twilight song). I have to confess that all five of those songs were new to me, reminding me that, prior to this album, I had not encountered any art song composed by Villa-Lobos.

I also have to confess that, where songs are concerned, I always would like to have the texts at my disposal. Apparently, this was too much content to include in the booklet for this new album. For the most part, however, I found that I could often make “semantic conjectures” that had at least some viability on the basis of Assad’s vocal delivery of the words. On the more positive side, I found that I could enjoy the roller-coaster ride of “surprises” that Assad worked into her composition of “Glitch;” and I found the instrumental account by the Delgani players to ride right alongside Assad in their execution of her music.

Hopefully, I shall be able to learn more about the Delgani repertoire in the near future.

NCCO Premieres Engaging Benavides Narrative

Last night Cowell Theatre saw the official launch in San Francisco of California Festival: A Celebration of New Music with the first of two performances of a program prepared and presented by the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO). The program, entitled Visitations, also marked the launch of NCCO’s 2023–2024 season. Most importantly, however, it presented the world premiere of “Doña Sebastiana” (Lady Death), scored for solo violin and string ensemble. This work was composed by Nicolás Lell Benavides on an NCCO commission provided explicitly for the Festival.

The music was a tone poem, somewhat in the spirit of how Richard Strauss handled the structure but compacted into a performance taking only about eight minutes. The narrative is a folk tale that Benavides most likely encountered while growing up in New Mexico. In introducing his work to the audience, he provided a verbal account of that narrative, which amounted to life and death among the poor. That introduction could be found in the program book; but it would have been much better served had it been given sentence-by-sentence projection above the performers, allowing the attentive listener to appreciate how each thematic phrase advanced the narrative. However, even without such attention to detail, NCCO presented an absorbing account of Benavides’ score, which definitely deserves further opportunities for performance in the near future.

Sadly, “Doña Sebastiana” was the only selection in the program that allowed for well-rewarded attentive listening. The rest of the evening wallowed in a hodgepodge of mostly short vocal and instrumental music, five selections of which were arranged by Paul Bateman to accommodate NCCO resources. Those arrangements included three art songs by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Peter Lieberson, and Franz Schubert, respectively, all sung by mezzo Kelley O’Connor. None of these were particularly compelling, nor was Bateman’s arrangement of Ariel Ramírez’ Misa Criolla, which included Gabriel Navia playing charango and eight vocalists (pairs of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass), prepared for the performance by David Xiques. The only satisfying arrangement was Paul Dukas’ tone poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” given the breath of life by percussionists Zubin Hathi, Divesh Karamchandani, and Elizabeth Hall. Fortunately, those vocalists provided a stunning a cappella introduction to the program with a selection from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil.

Most important, however, was that the Cowell Theatre was a thoroughly unsatisfactory setting for this program. To be fair, I have enjoyed several well-directed opera productions at this venue, all of which were more than properly accommodated by stage and backstage facilities. However, in the absence of any useful acoustic shell, the overall NCCO sound was practically dead. This was a performance that, in the words of one of my former academic colleagues put it, “served a well-needed gap!”

NCCO to Launch California Festival in SF

Regular readers have probably encountered several references to the “California Festival.” The full name of the event is “California Festival: A Celebration of New Music;” and it is a joint effort by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Diego Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony, all represented by their respective Music Directors. The Festival is a two-week event, which will run from November 3 to November 19.

Here in San Francisco the Festival will begin with two performances by the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO), marking the beginning of its 2023–2024 season. The title of the program will be Visitations; and the “new music” for the occasion will be the world premiere of “Doña Sebastiana” (Lady Death), scored for solo violin and string ensemble. This work was composed by Nicolás Lell Benavides on an NCCO commission provided explicitly for the Festival. The result is decidedly “Californian,” given that Benavides is an alumnus of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The program will also feature mezzo Kelley O’Connor. She will begin the program will vocal works by Sergei Rachmaninoff,  Hildur Guðnadóttir, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Peter Lieberson, and Franz Schubert. The second half of the program will include Paul Dukas’ symphonic poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “Elegy: A Cry from the Grave” by Carlos Simon, Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” and Ariel Ramirez’ “Misa Criolla.”

This program will be performed in the Cowell Theatre on Friday, November 3, and Saturday, November 4, beginning at 7:30 p.m. It is part of the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture at 2 Marina Boulevard. Tickets range in price from $30 to $70; and they may be purchased through separate City Box Office Web pages for Friday and Saturday. Single tickets can also be purchased at the door for $10 for students with valid identification and for $15 for patrons under 35.

Heitor Villa-Lobos: Cello+Orchestra on Naxos

This coming Friday Naxos will release an album of concertante music for cello and orchestra by Heitor Villa-Lobos as the latest installment in its The Music of Brazil series. This accounts for two concertos, the first composed in 1915 and the second in 1954, along with a three-movement “Fantasia.” The 1915 concerto is also in three movements, played without interruptions. The 1953 concerto is in four movements with the last two played without interruption. As is usually the case, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Joaquín Roca Carrasco’s portrait of Villa-Lobos with his cello (from an online article from The Strad)

As a performer Villa-Lobos played both cello and classical guitar. This best-known work, the fifth of his “Bachianas Brasileiras” compositions, was scored for a cello orchestra with the leader taking solo passages to complement the solo performance by a soprano vocalist. However, those familiar with all nine of the compositions in that series are probably aware of his keen ear for instrumental coloration. Thus, all three of the works on this new release provide a rich diversity of sonorities to complement the virtuoso solo work composed for the cello.

Those that follow this site regularly probably know by now that I seldom pass up an opportunity to listen to works by Villa-Lobos, whether in performance or on a recording. The breath of his “complete works” canon is extensive enough that many (if not most) of my encounters are journeys of discovery. That is definitely the case with this new release. I had previously encountered cellist Antonio Meneses as a member of the Beaux Arts Trio, but this was my first encounter with his work as a concerto soloist. On the other hand, I have been familiar with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra conducted by the Brazilian Isaac Karabtchevsky for some time, since they had previously recorded the complete symphonies of Villa-Lobos for Naxos.

As always, this new release reminded me that every Villa-Lobos composition provides its own opportunities for discovery.

Brazilian Music Beyond Heitor Villa-Lobos

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

A little over two weeks ago Navona Records released CHORINHO a duo album of music by Brazilian composers performed by violist Georgina Rossi and pianist Silvie Cheng. The title is the diminutive of the instrumental Brazilian popular music genre choro. The latter is probably best known as the title of fourteen numbered compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos; but it would be fair to say that those pieces are reflections on the genre, rather than instances of it. The same can be said of the seven compositions on the album, one of which is a waltz for solo piano by Villa-Lobos.

The only other composer on this album that I have previously encountered is Chiquinha Gonzaga, whose “Cananéa” waltz was included in the ten-CD anthology Three Centuries of Female Composers. On the new CHORINHO album, she claims the final track, which is “Lua branca” (white moon), an excerpt from her operetta O Forrobodó (the Forrobodó). Cheng and Rossi collaborated in arranging this music for viola with piano accompaniment. The album title is also the title of the opening track, a duo for viola and piano composed by João de Souza Lima. Only two other selections are duo performances, both three-movement works by Osvaldo Lacerda and Brenno Blauth.

The aforementioned waltz is Chang’s only solo turn. Rossi performs two works without accompaniment. The first of these is a three-movement suite by Ernani Aguair, the fifth in a series of compositions entitled Meloritmias. The other is a “little étude” (the Opus 78 “Pequeno Estudio”) by Lindembergue Cardoso. Taken as a whole, this amounts to a journey of discovery that lasts for about an hour and ten minutes.

Mind you, that makes for a generous amount of discovery. However, while one might find the full scope of these selections to be more than a little demanding in a recital setting, one can work one’s way through a recording by taking a piecemeal approach to the contents. For those that get their “portable music” through headphones (probably connected to a cell phone), one might acclimate to the repertoire simply by allowing it to serve as “background music.” While many may take that to be a heretical recommendation, the fact remains that one often begins to appreciate a “foreground experience” only after “background” sources have begun to register in memory. This is worth bearing in mind when one encounters works by six unfamiliar composers!

Le Due Muse Goes Latin

Yesterday afternoon, Le Due Muse, whose members are cellist Sarah Hong and pianist Makiko Ooka, returned to the Old First Presbyterian Church. According to my records, this was their first Old First Concerts recital since June of 2019, when they prepared a full evening of music by Franz Schubert. Once again, they presented a program based on an overall theme, this time featuring four Latin American composers.

The first half of the program was devoted entirely to music by Mexican composer Manuel Ponce. The duo began with what is probably his most familiar composition, “Estrellita,” originally written for solo piano. Some readers may recall that, this past May, this was the encore selection taken by cellist Oliver Herbert and pianist Carlos Ágreda, joined by soprano Esther Rayo. Hong and Ooka played the duo version transcribed by the Spanish cellist Gaspar Cassadó. This served as an “overture” for Ponce’s four-movement cello sonata.

I have to confess that, until yesterday afternoon, I tended to associate Ponce with short selections, more likely to be encountered as encores. While his catalog of chamber music is relatively limited when compared with other genres, it is clear that he was no stranger to working with longer durations. In that context the cello sonata is a highly spirited composition, and Hong definitely knew how to accommodate the full scope of those spirits. By the time I had reached the final movement (Allegro burlesco), I found myself curious as to why such an impressive undertaking should be overlooked by so many cellists.

The second half of the program was framed by the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos and the Argentine Astor Piazzolla. The duo began with “O canto do cisne negro” (the song of the black swan), which had also been performed by Herbert and Ágreda this past May. The same was true of the first (“Ária”) movement of the fifth of that composer’s nine Bachianas Brasileiras compositions. However, while the May recital involved a trio, Le Due Muse played a transcription by cellist Seymour Barab. Piazzolla closed out the program with “Le Grand Tango,” which he had composed for Mstislav Rostropovich. This was preceded by Kyoko Yamamoto’s arrangement of Piazzolla’s “Oblivion.” Villa-Lobos and Piazzolla were separated by Alberto Ginastera’s Opus 21, the second of his “Pampeana” compositions.

Taken as a whole, this program was as engaging as it was imaginative. Hong may have been “front and center;” but there was no ignoring Ooka’s keyboard skills and her consistent sense of balance with Hong. The duo also deserves credit for venturing into a repertoire that seems to be rising in attention and deservedly so.

Old First Concerts: July, 2023

Cellist Sarah Hong and pianist Makiko Ooka (from the event page for the recital they will be performing)

As of this writing, Old First Concerts (O1C) will be presenting only one concert this coming July. It will mark the return to Old First Presbyterian Church of Le Due Muse, a duo whose members are cellist Sarah Hong and pianist Makiko Ooka. This will be their first appearance since June of 2019, when they presented an imaginative program of the music by Franz Schubert.

The title of next month’s program will be An Evening of Music by Latin American Composers. The selections will account for four of those composers as follows:

1. Manuel Ponce will be represented by his cello sonata, preceded by an instrumental arrangement of his song “Estrellita.”
2. As many will have guessed, there will be an arrangement of the “Ária” movement from the fifth of the Bachianas Brasileiras compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos, preceded by the cello-piano arrangement of “O canto do cisne negro” (the song of the black swan), which was performed by cellist Oliver Herbert and pianist Carlos Ágreda at the end of last month.
3. There will be one selection by Alberto Ginastera, the second of his three “Pampeana” rhapsodies, which he scored for cello and piano.
4. The program will conclude with two familiar Astor Piazzolla compositions, “Oblivion” and “Le Grand Tango.”

The performance will begin at 4 p.m. on Sunday, July 23. O1C events will continue to be “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. All tickets are being sold for $25 (no reduced rate for seniors or students). Tickets may be purchased through this concert’s event page.

Oliver Herbert Highlights Heitor Villa-Lobos

Late yesterday afternoon LIEDER ALIVE! concluded its 2022/23 season with one of its occasional ventures into instrumental chamber music. The featured soloist was cellist Oliver Herbert, performing with pianist Carlos Ágreda; and the featured composer was Heitor Villa-Lobos. That composer also accounted for the one vocal work on the program, which may well be his best known effort.

Soprano Esther Rayo joined Herbert and Ágreda for the first (“Ária”) movement of the fifth of the nine Bachianas Brasileiras compositions. This work was originally scored for soprano and an orchestra of cellos. However, Ágreda prepared an arrangement for the “current available resources;” and there was no faulting the engaging interplay among the three performers.

That trio concluded the first half of the program. The second half began with “O canto do cisne negro” (the song of the black swan) in the version for cello and piano. The duo then continued with the composer’s six-movement Pequena suíte. Since Villa-Lobos was, himself, a cellist, he gave three of those movements their first performance. Each of the movements was engaging on its own, but the sequence of six of them tended to be on the long side.

The first half of the program also featured a suite, which turned out to be performed under tragic circumstances. The suite was Paul Desenne’s four-movement Jaguar Songs, scored for solo cello and composed in 2002. However, after yesterday’s program went to press, the news reported that Desenne had died in Boston on May 20. This was announced through an insert in the program, which also included his own description of his suite. Herbert gave an engaging account of the diversity of dispositions that cut across those four movements, making the occasion a celebration of the composer’s life.

The remainder of the program consisted of shorter pieces. Two of these were arrangements by Ágreda of songs by composers that were totally unknown to me: Francisco Canaro and Germán Darío Pérez. My guess is that most of the audience shared my ignorance, and some background material in the program book would have been helpful. Nevertheless, one could appreciate the engaging dispositions of both cellist and pianist in their performances of these works. More familiar was the opening selection, Astor Piazzolla’s “Oblivion,” presumably an arrangement of music originally written for his tango orchestra.

Rayo returned for the encore selection. This was music that took me back to my now-distant childhood. “Estrellita” was composed by Manuel Ponce in 1912; but it was still a consistent favorite among musicians of the Fifties. It provided just the right complement to the opening Piazzolla selection as it reemerged from its own “oblivion.”

Taken as a whole, the program was an engaging journey of discovery through relatively unfamiliar repertoire. Given his efforts as an arranger, I would suspect that Ágreda had conceived the journey. However, all three of the performers made the listening experience entirely worthwhile.