This year the first series to launch the 2023–24 San Francisco Performances (SFP) season will be the Piano Series. While there were five events during the last season, this season there will be only four. Unless I am mistaken, all four will be return visits by leading pianists.
All four of these events will take place at 7:30 p.m. on different days of the week. As usual, all of the concerts will take place in Herbst Theatre. The entrance to Herbst 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. The specific dates and their related performers are as follows:
Friday, October 6: Isata Kanneh-Mason made her solo debut in Herbst on March 8, 2022. She had already made her Bay Area debut in December of 2019 in a duo performance with her brother, cellist Sheku, in a Cal Performances recital in Berkeley. The duo then went on to make their San Francisco debut in Davies Symphony Hall in April of 2022. Her return visit will begin with an imaginative coupling of centuries. Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XVI/50 sonata in C major will be followed by the “Easter Sonata,” composed by Fanny Mendelssohn. The second half of the program will remain in the nineteenth century, pairing Robert Schumann’s Opus 15 Kinderszenen with Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 58 (third) piano sonata in B minor.
Thursday, November 14: Stephen Hough has been presenting recitals for SFP for over three decades. I have not kept up with his repertoire over that period, but it would not surprise me to learn that this program will be the first time he presents one of this own compositions, a multi-movement work entitled simply Partita. (“Truth in advertising” always deserves credit.) This piece will be coupled to a series of compositions by Franz Liszt that conclude the second (Italian) “year” in his Années de pèlerinage collection. Those pieces will be settings for three sonnets by Petrarch (47, 104, and 123) and his “Fantasia Quasi Sonata,” given the title “Après une lecture de Dante” (after reading Dante). The first half of the program will examine three much more recent compositions, each with its own distinctive style. The first of these will be the Cants màgics (magic songs) collection by Federico Mompou. This will be followed by Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 53 (fifth) piano sonata, the first to consist of a single movement of contrasting episodes without any key specification in the title. (The work was published with a quatrain from the text of his Poem of Ecstasy preceding the opening measures.) The first half will then conclude with Debussy’s Estampes (prints) suite of three movements, each evoking a different geographical setting.
Wednesday, February 7: The last planned visit by Javier Perianes had to be cancelled due to the COVID pandemic. That means that his last appearance in Herbst was in May of 2017. The first half of that program was devoted entirely to Franz Schubert, while the second half surveyed works by Manuel de Falla, Claude Debussy, and Isaac Albéniz. For his return visit, he will play only one Spanish composition, Enrique Granados’ Opus 11 suite entitled Goyescas. The first three works on the program all have Germanic roots. Perianes will begin with Clara Schumann’s Opus 20 set of variations based on a theme by Robert Schumann. This will be followed by Robert’s variations on a theme by Clara, which served as the third movement of his Opus 14 piano sonata in F minor. The third work will then be another set of variations on one of Robert’s themes, which became Johannes Brahms’ Opus 9.
Tuesday, February 27, 7:30 p.m.: The final recitalist in this series will be Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who has not yet announced his program.
Subscriptions are now on sale for $280 for premium seating in the Orchestra, the Side Boxes, and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $240 for the center rear of the Dress Circle and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $200 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through an SFP Web page. 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. When single tickets go on sale, they may be purchased by visiting the specific event pages. The above dates provide hyperlinks to the appropriate Web pages.
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