SFP Announces Free Front Row Premium Series

Timo Andres playing Philip Glass’ sixth étude (screen shot from a preview video provided by San Francisco Performances)

Those that have been following this site since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic know that San Francisco Performances (SFP) has been streaming content through its Front Row Web site. Over the course of this month and the next, recordings of four premium handcrafted performances will be added to this site as part of a new Front Row Premium Series. SFP President Melanie Smith announced that the new series is “an exciting extension of our June Sanctuary series where the programming was created specifically by [the performing] artists.” Those artists will be pianists Timo Andres and Jonathan Biss and guitarist Jason Vieaux. Recordings will be uploaded to the Front Row site on Thursdays according to the following schedule:

February 11: Somewhat in the spirit of Simone Dinnerstein’s A Character of Quiet album, Andres will present a program juxtaposing compositions by Franz Schubert with études by Philip Glass. The “core” of the program will consists of the first of the four impromptu compositions from Schubert’s D. 935 (in F minor) and D. 899 (in C minor) collections. These will be “framed” by two Glass études, beginning with the sixth (which is one of the études on A Character of Quiet) and concluding with the twentieth.

February 25: Andres will present a second program of juxtapositions. In this case jazz compositions by Duke Ellington and Roland Hanna will be interleaved with the works of John Adams, Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, François Couperin, Alvin Singleton, and Francis Poulenc. Specific selections have not yet been announced.

March 4: Biss’ program will consist entirely of piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven, each written during a different period in the composer’s life. He will begin with the Opus 7 sonata in E-flat major. This will be followed by the Opus 78 in F-sharp major, given the nickname “à Thérèse” because it was written for the Hungarian Countess Therese Brunsvik. The program will conclude with the second of the “big three” final sonatas, Opus 110 in A-flat major.

March 18: Vieaux has not yet provided information about the program for his guitar recital.

The first three of these recitals have already been recorded last month; Vieaux will be making his recording later this month. Each recording will be uploaded to the Front Row Web site on its corresponding date. Those recordings will remain on the site indefinitely.