Bruno Monteiro’s Franco-Belgian Discoveries

Cover of album being discussed (courtesy of ET'ETERA)

Readers may recall that, this past spring, violinist Bruno Monteiro released his 20th Century and Forward album of his duo performances with pianist João Paulo Santos. The “forward” composer was Ivan Moody, who had died this past January. This Friday will see the release of this duo’s second album of the year. The Franco-Belgian Album turns back the close to the late nineteenth century, presenting compositions by Henri Vieuxtemps, César Franck, Gabriel Fauré, and Camille Saint-Saëns. In then concludes with an arrangement composed by Eugéne Ysaÿe, reworking a Saint-Saëns piano étude (Opus 52, Number 6) into a violin-piano duo. As of this writing, the best site for pre-orders is an imusic Web page, which is based in Denmark but deals in United States currency!

The major work on the program is the four-movement “grand sonata” by Vieuxtemps. I must confess that my knowledge of this composer is very limited. The fact that I know anything about him at all can be attributed to Jascha Heifetz and Gidon Kremer. I have to confess that Monteiro’s account of that sonata was not particularly convincing, which left me wondering if even he was convinced.

The remaining selection on the album were also not particularly familiar to me through either recital encounters or recordings. However, I came away with the impression what both violinist and accompanist were on more familiar ground for these selections. Indeed, since most of my knowledge of Franck comes from his orchestral and organ music, I found myself particularly drawn to his duo tracks on the album.

As always, my thoughts are reflections of personal tastes; and I just hope that any of those that sail under my flag will be willing to skip over the opening four tracks if they are put off by Vieuxtemps, since there are more than enough gems in the remaining selections!

Chanticleer to Bring Xmas to St. Ignatius Church

Banner for the Web page with the details of Chanticleer’s annual tour for the holiday season

As always, this is the month when Chanticleer celebrates the holiday season with its A Chanticleer Christmas program. This year the tour will begin in New York, but all the other venues will be in California. Petaluma, Santa Clara, and Carmel will all enjoy two performances on the same day, while all the other venues, including San Francisco, will be limited to a single performance.

As the event page states, the program will present “beautifully sung music of all centuries, from classical to carols.” To be a bit more specific, the earliest works will be Guillaume Du Fay and Tomás Luis de Victoria; and, as usual, the overall journey will include “spirited carols and uplifting spirituals.” These will include arrangements by Chanticleer members Adam Brett Ward, Jared Graveley, and Tim Keeler; and, as always, the spirituals will be taken from Joseph Jennings’ raucous arrangements.

The San Francisco performance will begin at 8 p.m. on Sunday, December 22, and run for about two hours without interruption.  As in the past, the venue will be Saint Ignatius Church, located on the campus of the University of San Francisco at 650 Parker Avenue on the northeast corner of Fulton Street. Ticket prices will be $76 for Preferred seating, $63 for Reserved seating in the Balcony, and $45 for general admission seating in the side sections of the sanctuary. All tickets are being sold online by City Box Office. Tickets can also be purchased by calling City Box Office at 415-392-4400.

Sun Ra’s Own “Satellite” from 1978

Some readers may recall my delight towards the end of last month when IN+OUT Records released Lights On A Satellite. That album marked the 100th birthday of Marshall Allen, who took over leading Sun Ra’s band after his death. What I did not know at that time was that the title of this album was the same as another album that Ra himself had recorded in 1978. That album will be available on CD when it is released at the end of this week on Friday, December 6, under the full title Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank. As readers have probably come to expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for the two-CD release.

In many respects, this is a follow-up to Sun Ra at the Showcase: Live in Chicago, which was discussed on this site this past May. Both of these albums were produced by Zev Feldman. His co-producer was again Michael D. Anderson, who is Ra’s archivist, as well as one of the five percussionists on the new Left Bank album. Allen performs on this album as one of the two alto saxophonists, also playing flute and piccolo. I have to say that I tend to prefer these “live” releases for the spontaneity of the performers (which is sometimes vocal, rather than instrumental).

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Mind you, thanks to my own experiences, I am fully aware that even the best recording techniques will not capture the rich visual qualities of “being there” in the audience. Indeed, as can be only mildly suggested by the above cover photograph, Ra’s very appearance contributed to those visual qualities. Nevertheless, one can still appreciate the games that Ra could play with such “treasured standards” as “Cocktails for Two” (where I suspect that Allen was the saxophonist who went over the top with his improvisations) and Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight.” (Mind you, as I quickly learned from my visits to the Village Vanguard, Monk had his own repertoire of games to play!)

Personally, I cannot be more pleased that this year endowed me with the generous supply of reminders of how much I enjoyed my past encounters with Ra through performances and recordings.

The Bleeding Edge: 12/2/2024

Things tend to get quiet towards the end of the year on the Bleeding Edge. There are only two remaining events at the Center for New Music that will take place this month. As the hyperlink shows, these will be the solo performance by vocalist Cruel Diagonals on Thursday and this month’s installment of G|O|D|W|A|F|F|L|E|N|O|I|S|E|P|A|N|C|A|K|E|S on Saturday. That leaves three new events for this week, all of which involve “usual suspects” in one way or another, as follows:

Thursday, December 5, Friday, December 6, and Saturday, December 7, Gray Area Art and Technology, 11 p.m.: Gray Area will present its Recombinant 2024 festival, given the subtitle Doors to Zero. These will involve live performances in the setting of a visual exhibit by Shigetashi Furutani. However, the first of the three programs will also include a reconstruction of “Plaything,” which was originally performed by Maryanne Amacher in 2016 for the Cynetart international competition in Germany. (For those unfamiliar with that name, Amacher, who died in 2009, can be taken as an “honorary godmother” of the new generation of “usual suspects.” Readers would do well to check out the above hyperlink to her Wikipedia page.) Gray Area is located in the Mission at 2665 Mission Street, between 22nd Street and 23rd Street. Admission will be $25.

Bruce Ackley with his soprano saxophone (from the BayImproviser event page for this week’s Other Dimension in Sound concert)

Friday, December 6, 7 p.m., Medicine for Nightmares: This will be the weekly Other Dimensions in Sound concert hosted by saxophonist David Boyce. The program will consist of two adventurous sets. The Dymaxion Trio is led by Bruce Ackley, who will alternate between soprano saxophone and clarinet. Rhythm will be provided by drummer Dave Brandt and Pete Schmitt on bass. (Note the referential hyperlink for those unfamiliar with the legacy of Buckminster Fuller.) They will be followed by the Ghost Dub quartet led by David Michalak, best known for his command of the skatch instruments invented by the late Tom Nunn. The front line will be shared by trumpeter Darren Johnston and Kersti Abrams on alto saxophone. Scott R. Looney will play both piano and electronic gear. As always, the venue is located in the Mission at 3036 24th Street, between Treat Avenue and Harrison Street. There is no charge for admission, presumably to encourage visitors to consider buying a book.

Saturday, December 7, 7:30 p.m., Stow Lake Boathouse: Those willing to explore Golden Gate Park after dark can seek out a trio performance led by vocalist Lorin Benedict. Guitarist Kai Lyons and David Ewell on bass will account for rhythm. The site is located on the north side of the park, just south of Fulton Street, and is best approached on foot. The best entrance is through Park Presidio Boulevard, which is between Funston Avenue and Fourteenth Avenue. There is no charge for admission.

SFS Chamber Music: Legion of Honor

Following up on the first chamber music recital of the season by San Francisco Symphony (SFS) musicians in Davies Symphony Hall last month, yesterday my wife and I had our first encounter with the other SFS chamber music series of performances at the Legion of Honor, the museum in Lincoln Park, which, in addition to its exhibits, houses the James A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Theater. The concerts at this venue are curated by SFS Concertmaster violinist Alexander Barantschik, who was joined yesterday afternoon by cellist Peter Wyrick (recently retired from SFS) and pianist Anton Nel. The program was devoted entirely to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven with two duo sonatas in the first half and the second of the two Opus 70 piano trios, composed in the key of E-flat major, filling the second half.

One of the manuscript pages from Beethoven’s Opus 70, No. 2, representative of his penmanship and frustration (from the IMSLP Web page of the entire manuscript, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License)

The full trio was, by far, the most engaging part of the program. Both of the sonatas had been composed before Beethoven reached the age of thirty. By the time he began work on his two Opus 70 trios, he had “hit his stride” (so to speak) with a solid command of technique, prodigious inventiveness, and (believe it or not) a sense of humor.

Indeed, while listening to the second (Allegretto) movement of the trio, I scribbled in my program book “Beethoven at his funniest.” In spite of the tempo, the movement begins with an almost dainty delicacy with brief short-long phrase couples that are playfully coy. These are then followed by a second section, which is foot-stomping at its heaviest. All three of the trio performers clearly appreciated the game that Beethoven was playing and knew exactly how to go along with it, following up on that rhetoric with the mood swings subsequently encountered in the Allegro Finale. The opening and scherzo movements were more sober in their composure, but the attentive listener had no trouble locating additional eccentricities from the composer.

Sadly, the first half of the program was less satisfying. In the violin sonata, Barantschik seemed to be having more trouble with intonation than one would have anticipated. However, this may have been due to too much heavy-handed banging at the keyboard on Nel’s part. As a result, none of the sonata’s three movements came across as convincing; and the entire work seemed to go on forever. Fortunately, things improved with much better intonation from Wyrick’s cello. For a two-movement sonata, this was a work of extended duration; but the chemistry between cello and piano made for a far more tolerable listening experience.

My past encounters with Gunn have been with Pocket Opera. The seating in Gunn is not particularly amenable to opera-length performances. It is not very well raked; and leg-room can be a problem for anyone with a height of six feet or more. Nevertheless, the “visuals” of opera production tend to compensate for such inconveniences. Chamber music faces a higher bar of challenge. Nevertheless, when a performance is seriously compelling, as was yesterday’s Opus 70 venture, one need not be distracted by the overall setting!

TLES to Perform with Storyteller Breedlove

The next program to be presented by The Living Earth Show (TLES), the duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and drummer Andy Meyerson, will add storytelling to their usual mix of acoustic punk and folk. They will perform with Lynnee Breedlove, one of the most influential living storytellers. His solo stage performance, One Freak Show, provided a platform for queer stories of love, grief, joy, and growth.

Trust Me vocalist Lynnee Breedlove (from the Eventbrite Web page for his performance at Roar Shack)

Breedlove’s father and stepmother were brutally murdered in their home by his stepbrother. His response to this unfathomable tragedy was to record his reaction in a studio with Living Earth in August of 2024. The resulting songs and stories will now be brought to performance before an audience. The trio will perform under the name Trust Me.

That performance will take place at the Roar Shack, which, as readers may recall, is now the “home base” for TLES. It will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 19, with doors opening at 6:40 p.m. Admission will be on a “Pay What You Can” basis within the “window” between $1 and $100. Eventbrite has created a Web page through which these payments can take place. For those that do not recall, the venue is located in the heart of the Mid-Market district at 34 Seventh Street.

B. B. King in France in 1977

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

At the beginning of this month, I learned about a new label produced by Zev Feldman, Deep Digs Music, which has a partnership in Spain with Elemental Music, produced by Jordi Soley and Carlos Agustin Calembert. I cite this European connection because this coming Friday Deep Digs will offer a B. B. King album of previously unreleased tracks. The full title of the album is In France: Live at the 1977 Nancy Jazz Pulsations Festival; and, as most readers may expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Ironically, I was once in the south of France at the same time as King. I was part of a committee that had organized a conference entitled Informatique/Culture ’83, at which papers were delivered about potentially useful encounters between the arts and information science. Following the conference, my wife and I meandered across the south of France before heading north back to Paris; and, as I recall, we were passing through Carcassonne when we learned that King would be performing there on the evening when we arrived. I am pretty sure that, by the time we were aware of this show, all the tickets had been sold!

As a result, this new album came to my attention to remind me that King brought his approach to the blues to audiences on an international scale. When one listens to the audience response following each track, it is easy to appreciate how well he was received! Those aware of his performances know that he supplemented his guitar work with vocals. However, I have always been more interested in the instrumental side of the blues tracks, particularly as it involves the plethora of improvised riffs that embellish the relatively straightforward harmonic progressions.

There is no shortage of those riffs on the In France album. These come not only from King but frequently from drummer Caleb Emphrey, Jr. and James Toney at the organ keyboard. The tracks include enough audience reaction to make it clear that this was an enthusiastic and joyous occasion. I should also confess that this is the first time that I have added one of his albums to my collection, even though I have been enjoying his music since my undergraduate years (influenced in part by his having visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during my freshman year)!