OFS to Finish “Storytelling” Season in February

Members of the OFS string section (from the One Found Sound Gallery Web page)

Those who follow this site regularly will know that, this coming Friday, at the beginning of what has shaped up to be a very busy weekend, One Found Sound (OFS) will present the second “chapter” in its season of three concerts organized around the overarching theme of storytelling. It therefore seems fair to let readers know sufficiently in advance that the season will wrap up at the beginning of February with the final “chapter,” which will be entitled Recollection. However, it will be just as fair to note that one of the “conflicts of interest” in February will be the same as that for this coming Friday, a San Francisco performance by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) taking place at exactly the same time.

Fortunately, the repertoire selections will be decidedly different. While PBO will be presenting its annual program about the transition from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, the OFS program will provide three selections from the twentieth century, each of which takes its own approach to “retrospection.” The least familiar of those selections will probably be Béla Bartók’s second orchestral suite, composed between 1905 and 1907 (and subsequently revised in 1943). Both suites were composed before Bartók joined Zoltán Kodály’s ethnomusicological pursuits, but they both reveal his early interest in indigenous folk songs.

The opening selection will be Maurice Ravel’s orchestral version of the “Pavane pour une infante défunte” (pavane for a dead infanta), which he originally composed for solo piano. The music itself does not draw explicitly on the sixteenth-century pavane genre. Instead, it serves more as a historical reflection of the setting of the Spanish court at that time. Since the orchestral version was created in 1910, its composition comes close to that of Bartók’s suite. The final work on the program will be Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 25 (“Classical”) symphony, whose references to eighteenth-century traditions are more explicit. Ironically, Prokofiev created this piece much later than the contributions by Bartók and Ravel, having completed it in September of 1917.

Like this Friday’s concert, the final concert in the season will take place at Heron Arts, beginning at 8 p.m. on Friday, February 8. Heron Arts is located in SoMa at 7 Heron Street on the block between 7th Street and 8th Street. All tickets are being sold for $25. They may be purchased online through an Eventbrite event page.