2021 saw a gradual shift from watching and listening to my computer monitor to visiting performance venues. For the most part, those venues were in the Civic Center. However, my wife and I made a few ventures into the Mission; and, thanks to a colleague, I had my first experience of the “music circus” (to evoke terminology introduced by John Cage) at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland. As a result, there is at least moderate diversity in my month-by-month accounts. As in the past, each of those occasions will be hyperlinked to the article I wrote about the performance. The twelve entries on my list, one for each month of the year, were selected as “journeys of discovery” as follows:
January: SFS Chamber Music. Due to pandemic conditions, what had originally been planned as a two-hour program performed by San Francisco Symphony (SFS) musicians was replaced by a one-hour offering without an intermission. Most of the time was devoted to the originally programmed D. 667 “Trout” quintet in A major by Franz Schubert. Pianist Yana Resnick was the “visiting artist,” performing with violinist David Chernyavsky, violist Yun Jie Liu, cellist Sébastien Gingras, and bassist Charles Chandler; and it embodied all the delights one could expect from sensitively-interpreted chamber music. The “overture” for this offering was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 423 duo in G major, performed by violinist Jessie Fellows and violist Katie Kadarauch; and it served as just the right “warm-up” to prepare the attentive listener to the larger-scale Schubert quintet.
February: Herbert Blomstedt Returns to Davies. This was a “full-length” program by SFS in Davies Symphony Hall. Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt began with Carl Nielsen’s Opus 29 (fourth) symphony, known as “The Inextinguishable.” The intermission was then followed with the Opus 67 (fifth) symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. Both works were equally intense, each in its own way; and, as I had expected, Blomstedt took Beethoven’s most recognizable symphony and managed to turn his interpretation into a journey of discovery.
March: Salonen’s Stimulating Stravinsky. Once again, SFS presented familiar music given another journey of discovery. This time it involved Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen leading a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “The Rite of Spring.” On the other side of the intermission, Leila Josefowicz served as soloist in Stravinsky’s violin concerto. The large ensemble required for the opening selection, Elizabeth Ogonek’s “Sleep & Remembrance,” perfectly set the tone for the complementary Stravinsky offerings that would follow.
April: Catalyst Quartet Plays Florence Price. The Catalyst Quartet concluded the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Uncovered series with a program devoted entirely to works by Florence Price. All of the selections were on one of their Azica Records UNCOVERED albums. Even for those familiar with the album, their freshness of interpretation lived up to the series theme of “uncovering” what had previously escaped notice.
May: Richard Goode Concludes SFP Season. This was Goode’s fourteenth appearance as an SFP artist. Once again, he knew how to establish a listening experience as an act of discovery. His selection of composers could not have been more familiar. Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert represented the First Viennese School. They will complemented by Robert Schumann and (perhaps a bit unexpected) Béla Bartók.
June: Chapel of the Chimes. The experience is a bit more like visiting an art gallery than attending a concert. Nevertheless, pianist Sarah Cahill prepared a “sit-down-and-listen” program which kept me in her performance space for the full duration. I had a similar encounter with the duo concert prepared by Paul Dresher and Joel Davel. Both of these offerings limited my wandering time, but I managed to track down a few additional venues that allowed me to linger.
July: In Locatelli’s Labyrinth. The American Bach Soloists Summer Bach Festival featured a dynamite performance by violinist YuEun Gemma Kim. She performed The Harmonic Labyrinth from Pietro Locatelli’s Opus 3 collection. The full title is “Il Laberinto Armonico, facilus aditus, difficilis exitus” (the harmonic labyrinth, easy to enter, difficult to leave); and, as I wrote at the time, “there is no shortage of finger-busting passages.” Nevertheless, Kim knew how to present an engaging listening experience, rather than a mere circus act!
August: Palestrina at Church of the Advent. Paul Ellison, Director of Music at the Church of the Advent of Christ the King, took a sabbatical during the pandemic. He then returned to reassemble his Schola Adventus choir for the annual Procession and High Mass for The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This included a setting of the text “Assumpta est Maria” to music composed by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, reminding me that there is no such thing as too much Palestrina.
September: Randall Goosby Debuts Price Concerto for SFS. Having given a violin recital for the SFS Spotlight Series in April, Goosby made his debut as soloist with SFS by playing Price’s violin concerto. This made for a highly absorbing journey of discovery. The only down-side was that this program was given only one performance.
October: Poulenc at the War Memorial Opera House. My personal assessment of the San Francisco Opera (SFO) fall season is that the most compelling offering was Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. SFO gave the first performance of this opera in the United States in the fall of 1957. However, on that occasion the French libretto by Georges Bernanos was sung in an English translation by Joseph Machlis. This season’s new production marked the first time SFO performed the opera in French. It is also worth noting that the libretto text is entirely in prose, meaning that the plot unfolds at an intense pace that is never interrupted by “reflective” solos or duets.
November: Danny Driver’s Debut. SFP concluded its fall season with four debut recitals. The first of these was performed by British pianist Danny Driver in what was probably his first West Coast appearance. Driver allowed no time for applause between his selections. He was as interested in the intertwining relationships among those compositions as he was in the internal logic of each of the works. The result could not have been more compelling, and I would be only to happy to experience this perspective in another recital.
December: A Piano Trio of Soloists. The other memorable SFP debut was that of the Junction Trio of violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao. All three of them began their careers as solo recitalists. Nevertheless, they gave a thoroughly memorable account of Charles Ives’ raucous approach to compositing a piano trio, which was followed, after the intermission, by the equally adventurous trio by Maurice Ravel. While these selections could not have been more different, they were both composed during the second decade of the twentieth century. This could not have been a more compelling journey of discovery.
No comments:
Post a Comment