SFP to Conclude Season with “Discovered” Pianist

Pianist Francesco Piemontesi (from the SFP event page for this performance)

The final program of the San Francisco Performances (SFP) 2018–2019 season will also conclude the three-concert Discovery Series. This series was conceived to provide audiences to discover some of the world’s fast-rising talent on the SFP stage. For this performance that talent will be Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi, who will be making his San Francisco recital debut.

A former student of Alfred Brendel, Piemontesi has prepared an imaginatively diverse program. The first half of his program will be devoted entirely to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, but most of the selections will be arrangements by pianists that reflected the prevailing aesthetics of the first half of the twentieth century. Ferruccio Busoni will receive the most attention. The entire first half of the program will be framed by his arrangement of the BWV 552 prelude and fugue that serve as the “bookends” of Bach’s third Clavier-Übung (keyboard practice) pedagogical volume, the only volume in the series collecting music for organ. The prelude will be followed by two Busoni arrangements of chorale preludes, the first (BWV 659) of “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland” (now come, Savior of the heathens) from the collection of the eighteen “Leipzig” chorales and the second taken from the chorale movement from the BWV 140 cantata “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” (awake, calls the voice to us). Piemontesi will also play Wilhelm Kempff’s arrangement of the Siciliano movement from the BWV 1031 flute sonata in E-flat major. The one keyboard selection that Piemontesi will play directly from a Bach source will be the BWV 552 “Italian” concerto in F major, which was included in the Clavier-Übung II volume.

The second half of the program will be shared by two works, both of which were composed during the first half of the twentieth century. The first selection will be the three pieces that Claude Debussy collected in his second book entitled Images. This will be followed by Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 36, his second piano sonata in B-flat minor.

This concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 21. It will take place in Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. All tickets are being sold for $45. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a City Box Office event page.