One Found Sound Will Start Early This Season

One Found Sound at Heron Arts (from the One Found Sound home page)

This year One Found Sound (OFS) will launch its sixth season in September, taking a rightful place alongside many of the other performing arts groups whose respective seasons will get under way next month. The season has been organized around the overarching theme of storytelling, and each of the three concerts to be performed will constitute of “chapter” of the overall “story.” Also, rather than managing as a “moveable feast” across different venues in San Francisco, the entire season, including the end-of-season gala, will take place at a single venue that has served past OFS performances very well during past seasons, Heron Arts in SoMa. All of the concerts will be evening events, beginning at 8 p.m.; and, as in the past, socializing among performers and audience is part of the overall experience. Specific dates are as follows:

Saturday, September 29: The title of “Chapter 1” is Kinship. That theme will be acknowledged most explicitly by the performance of Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres,” which translates as “brothers.” This is a set of variations on a six-measure theme for which no specific instrumentation was specified. The Wikipedia page for this composition has a generous list of instrumentations for “authorized versions,” many of which involve a solo instrument accompanied by strings and percussion. Most likely OFS will select one of these versions for its performance. “Fratres” will be preceded by the overture to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 492 opera The Marriage of Figaro, whose libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte (based on a play by Pierre Beaumarchais) involves the disclosure of unanticipated kinship relations. The remainder of the program will be devoted to the ten short pieces that Antonín Dvořák collected under the title Legends (Opus 59). These were originally composed for four hands at one piano keyboard and subsequently arranged for a reduced orchestra. Explicit stories are not associated with any of these pieces, but the expressiveness of the music seems explore different approaches to expressive storytelling.

Friday, December 7: The title of “Chapter 2: is Divergence, which may be interpreted as departure from usual expectations. The opening selection will be “Teen Murti” by American pianist and composer Reena Esmail. Following a “mainstream” education in music that led to teaching in the Precollege division of the Manhattan School of Music, Esmail has sought out ways to express her Indian roots through “interdisciplinary” approaches to composition. “Teen Murti” is named after the New Dehli residence of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. This piece will be followed by a decidedly non-standard concerto composed by Frank Martin for seven wind instruments, timpani, percussion, and string orchestra. The program will conclude with Mozart’s K. 183 symphony in G minor, often called the “little” G minor symphony when compared with K. 550. With its driving use of syncopation and wild melodic leaps, this symphony is a bold departure from conventions at the middle of the eighteenth century.

Friday, February 8: The title of “Chapter 3” is Recollection. Each of the three works on the program will present its own characteristic way of reflecting on a distant past. The opening selection will be the orchestral version of Maurice Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte” (pavane for a dead infanta), originally written for solo piano. The identification of the pavane genre reflects back on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the “subject choice” of an infanta suggests the setting of the Spanish court of that time. Ravel’s orchestral version was composed in 1910, roughly in the same time frame as the following work on the program, Béla Bartók’s Opus 4, his second orchestral suite, composed between 1905 and 1907 (and subsequently revised in 1943). This was a time when Bartók had been influenced by childhood experiences of folk songs sung to him my his nanny, Lidi Dósa (but before he began more scholarly ventures into ethnomusicology with his colleague Zoltán Kodály). The program will then conclude with Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 25 reflection on eighteenth-century traditions, his first symphony known as the “Classical.”

Friday, April 6: The annual Gala will wrap up the season with its own take on storytelling. Details have not yet been announced. However, the event will begin at 6:30 p.m.; and the concert will include the world premiere of a work commissioned from composer Sahba Aminikia. Details are expected to be announced this coming fall.

Heron Arts is located in SoMa at 7 Heron Street on the block between 7th Street and 8th Street. General admission tickets are being sold for $25. Tickets may be purchased online in advance through Eventbrite. Tickets are being sold only for individual concerts, and the hyperlinks on the above dates will lead to the appropriate event pages for ticket purchases.