For its 40th Anniversary Season, San Francisco Performances (SFP) will present a Guitar Series with six concerts, rather than the usual five. As in the past, these concerts will be presented in association with the OMNI Foundation for the Performing Arts. Four of the programs will be solo recitals, one will be a guitar quartet, and one will include the Alexander String Quartet (violinists Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz, violist Paul Yarbrough, and cellist Sandy Wilson), which has been the SFP Ensemble-in-Residence since 1989.
The first concert in the series will begin at 7 p.m. on a Sunday evening, and all remaining events will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday evenings. One event will take place at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, which is located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street. All others will take place at 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 specific dates and their related performers are as follows:
October 13, Herbst Theatre: A former Artist-in-Residence, Manuel Barrueco has had a long and close relationship with SFP. He was born in Cuba and immigrated with his family to the United States in 1967 as political refugees. As a result, he has extended his repertoire beyond the usual Spanish sources to include those from the New World, particularly Cuba. His program will feature Cuban composers such as Ignacio Cervantes (whose teachers included Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Héctor (Manuel) Angulo (Rodríguez), who is probably best known for having taught the music of the Guajira Guantanamera to Pete Seeger. In a related vein Barrueco will play an arrangement of Enrique Granados’ Opus 36 set of two pieces for piano entitled A la Cubana. The program will begin with Renaissance selections by Luis de Narváez, and the other Spanish selections on the program will be piano music by Isaac Albéniz and Francisco Tárrega’s transcriptions for guitar.
October 26, Herbst Theatre: Jason Vieaux will premiere a new suite written for him by Pat Metheny. He will also play two Baroque selections, his own arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1001 solo violin sonata in G minor and Leo Brouwer’s arrangement of Domenico Scarlatti’s K. 208 keyboard sonata in A major. The program will also include Mauro Giuliani’s Opus 107 set of variations on a theme by George Frideric Handel and the Suite del Recuerdo by José Luis Merlin.
November 23, Herbst Theatre: The quartet concert will be by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, whose members are Scott Tennant, Matt Greif, John Dearman, and Bill Kanengiser. They are calling their program American Guitar Masterworks, although most of the selections will probably be arrangements for quartet, if not for the guitar itself. As a result there will be compositions by both John Philip Sousa and Aaron Copland, bluegrass created by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs for The Foggy Mountain Boys, and “Sixties Revolutionaries,” such as Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa.
December 7, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: Born in China and now living in the United Kingdom, Xuefei Yang was the first internationally recognized Chinese guitarist on the world stage. She has attracted the attention of many composers, including Chen Yi, the first female student at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing to receive a Master of Arts degree. Yang will play several of the pieces that Chen wrote for her. Her program will begin with an arrangement of piano music by Claude Debussy followed by the “Homenaje” (homage) that Manuel de Falla wrote following Debussy’s death. There will also be selections by Granados, Joaquín Rodrigo, Paco de Lucía, and Paco Peña. She will conclude the program with arrangements of traditional Chinese music.
March 7, Herbst Theatre: Kanengiser will return to Herbst, this time to perform with the Alexander String Quartet. The title of the program will be British Invasion; and it will feature the United States premiere of Prism, arrangements of six songs by Sting prepared by Dušan Bogdanović. The “pop” spirit of the program will continue with Leo Brouwer’s arrangements of seven Beatles songs, after which the group will play “Labyrinth,” composed by Ian Krouse and based on a theme by Led Zeppelin. Earlier British music will be represented by Krouse’s “Music in Four Sharps,” based on John Dowland’s “Frog” galliard. Kanengiser will also give solo performances of several of Dowland’s songs.
March 21, Herbst Theatre: David Russell will return with another imaginative program of arrangements and originals. His arrangements tend to focus on the Baroque period. Handel will be represented by HWV 432 in G minor, the seventh of the so-called “eight great” keyboard suites, whose final movement is a passacaglia that inspired an arrangement for violin and viola by Johan Halvorsen. Bach, on the other hand, will be represented by two familiar chorale preludes. The first of these is BWV 645, the first of the “Schübler” chorales for organ, “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” (awake, calls the voice to us); and the second, “Jesu bleibet meine Freude” (Jesus joy of man’s desiring) comes from the BWV 147 cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (heart and mouth and deed and life). Russell will also play “Phyllis’ Portrait,” composed by another guitarist familiar to SFP audiences, Sérgio Assad. Russell gave the world premiere of this piece in New York this past April.
Subscriptions are now on sale for $335 for premium seating, $280, and $245. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through a City Box Office event page, which includes information about the locations associated with each of the price levels. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Single tickets will go on sale on Monday, August 19 and will also be sold by City Box Office. Once available, they may be purchased through the hyperlinks attached to each of the above dates.
No comments:
Post a Comment