Alexander Kantorow’s Brahms and Schubert

This morning my efforts to catch up with recordings that have recently come to my attention led me to a BIS album, which, according to my Amazon.com Web page, was released at the end of last July. Entitled Brahms & Schubert, the album presents two major solo compositions by (in order of appearance) Johannes Brahms and Franz Schubert. These are separated by an “interlude” consisting of five of the many songs composed by Schubert that were transcribed (and, to be fair, embellished) for solo piano by Franz Liszt. The album begins with Brahms’ Opus 1, his first piano sonata, composed in 1853; and it concludes the Schubert’s D. 760 fantasy in C major, best known as the “Wanderer Fantasy.” Both of these works are structured in four movements.

The performer of these selections is Alexander Kantorow, winner of the 2024 Gilmore Award and the youngest recipient in the award’s history. He was also the first French pianist to receive the Gold Medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019. (He also received the Grand Prix, which had only been awarded three times over the competition’s past history.) In addition, he was chosen to perform at the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics (which, it turns out, required playing in the pouring rain).

I suppose what mattered most to me in listening to this album was the Brahms sonata. If my records are correct, I have not encountered it in performance since July of 2021, when Garrick Ohlsson selected it to begin the last performance in a four-concert cycle of Brahms piano music, prepared for San Francisco Performances (SFP) recitals in Herbst Theatre. To be fair, this is Brahms very early in his career; and there is a “show-off” factor in this music that cannot be denied. Fortunately, a pianist like Ohlsson could “tame the beast,” providing his audience with a more-than-satisfying listening experiences. Sadly, Kantorow was not as skilled a beast-tamer; and there were too many moments in his performance of this sonata that felt as if he had let the music run away from him. The good news (for Kantorow) is that his command of Schubert’s music was solid in D. 760. Where the Liszt transcriptions were performed, he could honor Liszt’s transcriptions without taking them “over the top.”

Pianist Alexander Kantorow on the cover of his Brahms & Schubert album (courtesy of Unison)

Taken as a whole, this album serves as a “portrait” of the first half of the nineteenth century; but, to continue with that metaphor, Kantorow’s “brush work” was inconsistent in doing justice to the selections he prepared for this album. Mind you, the photograph on the cover of the album (shown above) came across as more than enough make Spock raise both of his eyebrows. A bit less focus on overall physical deportment and a bit more focus on the music and its respective composers would probably be in order!

SFCMP to Continue 54th Season in About a Month

Eric Dudley conducting the SFCMP ensemble (from its City Box Office Web page)

Yesterday the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players finalized (as of now) plans for the second program in its 54th concert season. The title of the program, as announced this past summer, will be Tracing Paths. Selections for the first half were made in honor of Black History Month, while the second half will see the return of former Artistic Director Steven Schick in his capacity as percussionist.

The evening will begin with a work by Jonathan Bingham composed in 2015 and deliberately given the title “Untitled.” He composed this piece in tribute to a tradition of untitled works by visual artists from Pablo Picasso to Jean-Michel Basquiat, who eschewed titles to allow viewers to form their own interpretations. This will be coupled with “No More,” an anti-apartheid vocal work by Olly Wilson, with tenor Frederick A. Peterbark joining the SFCMP instrumentalists. The second half will begin with the return of percussionist Steven Schick performing the West Coast premiere of “Touch/Trace” by Zosha Di Castri. The program will then conclude with Thomas Adès’ Opus 2 chamber symphony, which will be given a side-by-side performance of SFCMP members performing with students of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM).

This performance will take place in the 50 Oak Street SFCM Building. It will begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 1. As usual, there will be a pre-performance panel discussion moderated by Artistic Director Eric Dudley. The participants will be Bingham, Di Castri, and Schick. Tickets will be $45 for general admission with an $18 rate for students. They may be purchased online through a City Box Office Web page, which also includes hyperlinks for the remaining concerts on April 12 and May 10.

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra: MainStage 2

Jory Fankuchen conducting the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra (from an SFCO Web page)

Last night the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra (SFCO), led by its Principal Conductor Jory Fankuchen, presented the second program in its MainStage Concerts series in the Taube Atrium Theatre on the top floor of the Veterans Building in the Civic Center. The title of the event was Celebration and Hope, which seemed appropriate for the season but had little, if anything, to do with the music being performed. Nevertheless, the program that had been prepared was both diverse and engaging.

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken I/103 (“Drumroll”) symphony in E-flat major. The first half broke with the “usual drill” by beginning with the concerto. Mind you, the music itself was somewhat of a departure from convention, since it was Grażyna Bacewicz’ “Concerto for String Orchestra.” As a result, the very idea of an “overture” was rejected; and the “concerto spirit” continued with two shorter selections for violin and orchestra by Camille Saint-Saëns. These were presented in reverse chronological order, beginning with the Opus 83 “Havanaise” in E major, followed by the Opus 28 “Introduction et rondo capriccioso” in the key of A minor. Both of these selections involved solo violin performances by Debut Artist Hiro Yoshimura. The evening concluded with an encore, which had been selected through a straw poll of the audience. This was the second (“Air”) movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1068 (third) orchestra suite in D major.

Following the retirement of Music Director Benjamin Simon on January 1, 2023, Fankuchen gave his first performance with SFCO the following May, following up on fifteen years of playing both violin and viola. That was my first encounter with his conducting efforts, and I could not have been more satisfied. That satisfaction sustained through last night’s performance.

I first encountered Bacewicz when I was building up my online writing chops. At that time I found myself accounting for a generous number of recordings of her music. However, by the time of my departure from Examiner.com, I realized that I had added little to the generous number of articles I had previously written. She only “returned to my radar” this past May, when the San Francisco Symphony performed her “Overture” under the baton of Gemma New. I quickly warmed up to the SFCO performance, finding this latest encounter to be a particularly refreshing one. Both Saint-Saëns selections, on the other hand, were “war horses;” but Yoshimura’s command of them definitely seized and maintained my attention. Haydn was, of course, in high spirits; and Fankuchen was never shy in letting those spirits take flight. The Bach encore, on the other hand, served as an affectionate bidding of adieu to the audience.

Two more programs remain in the MainStage series; and, with any luck, I shall be able to work at least one of them into my schedule for next year!

The Excitement Factor (previously August, 2008)

In reviewing Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir for The New York Review, Michael Dirda chose to dwell on the fact that McMurtry's first reading experiences were with "a box of cheap adventure fiction from the 1930s." Dirda reacted as follows:

In truth, what could have better suited a dreamy boy than just such wonderful trash? After all, real readers always read for excitement; only the nature of that excitement changes through life.

This line of reasoning is similar to that I had heard in a lecture by Harlan Ellison to the effect that reading comic books (regardless of whether or not they were "good" ones by whatever criteria one might have for "good") is better for kids than reading nothing at all. Excitement can be delivered in a variety of packages. The source of the excitement is less important than the skill we acquire in focusing our attention on that source.

Dirda's comment also reminded me of David Denby's book, Great Books. Given the benefit of a sabbatical from his work at The New York Times, Denby decided to exercise it by taking freshman courses at Columbia, basically reading the same "core" of "great books" that he had read in his own freshman year. He then wrote his book about how much more interesting the reading had been the second time. This is key to Dirda's point: Denby's life experiences had changed the nature of his excitement. To choose a personal example (which also happens to be part of the Great Books of the Western World collection), there was little about Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War that excited me during my freshman year, while these ancient insights into the tight coupling of politics and warfare now seem all too relevant in the context of our current Administration's military adventurism (which may be one reason why contemporary generals have been writing about Thucydides with such insight lately).

An important point that arises from such reasoning is that reading for excitement does not imply reading only "trash" (whatever that may mean and however wonderful it may be). Perhaps reading is a matter of choosing what one reads on the basis of that need for excitement, then supplemented by a faculty for finding excitement in what one happens to be reading. Thus, I found myself reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss because a variety of other reading sources (which happened to include both philosophy and anthropology) had cited this novel; and my curiosity over why such a diverse collection of writers should see so much value in this book tipped the balance of my "excitement scale." Once I made the commitment to start reading, new sources of excitement started leaping out of the pages of the book, until I found myself pushing ahead at a pace as maddening as the one that carried me through the final pages of One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (one of the authors who appears to have been a source of excitement for Dirda himself).

As a concluding thought I would like to observe that what Dirda says about "real" readers can also be said about "real" listeners where musical performance is concerned. Indeed, my music composition teacher, Ezra Sims, believed that both text and music had to pass a "first sentence test." At its most extreme, this test implies that, if the first sentence of a text does not excite you enough continue reading, then you may as well stop before you waste any further time. Similarly, your excitement is already heightened during the silence before the music makes its "first statement;" if that statement does not leave you excited about what happens next, then it is pretty likely that the mind will "tune out" long before the end of the composition. Peter Shaffer caught this in Scene 7 of Amadeus, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reproduces from memory the "March of Welcome" Antonio Salieri had written for his arrival in Vienna. Mozart reconstructs the beginning of the piece and then turns to Salieri to ask, "The rest is just the same, isn't it?" Centuries later Mozart continues to excite in ways that Salieri never could, but only at the hands of performers who can both perceive and convey that excitement. Listening for that excitement is no different from Dirda's concept of reading for excitement; and perhaps skill in one can facilitate the other, regardless of the direction in which the transfer may take place.

From Creator to Listener

Since I was born in 1946, roughly the first 54 years of my life took place during the second half of the twentieth century. Much of my time during that period was devoted to making music in one way or another. For the most part this involved playing clarinet and alto saxophone in various ensembles and singing in others (beginning as a second tenor and dropping into baritone as I grew older). I first began to venture into improvising after my parents bought a piano and I was never particularly interested in what I was given for piano lessons. It was only towards the end of my high school years that I encountered a community orchestra in which I played first clarinet, whose conductor encouraged my improvisation efforts, many of which then involved my working with the other clarinetist in the ensemble playing piano, rather than clarinet.

It was only after I began my graduate studies in mathematics (which eventually led to an early doctoral dissertation in computer science) that I shifted my attempts at creativity from musical instruments to tape recorders. My mentor was the composer Ezra Sims, who had no significant academic credentials. I met him as a result of the fact that I was spending more time reviewing dance performances than listening to (or trying to create) music. It was through Sims that I first worked up both the discipline and the competence to create something worthy of the attention of others. My efforts attracted the attention of choreographer Cliff Keuter, whom I then joined on a trip to Tel Aviv, when I created a tape composition for a piece that he created for the Bat-Dor Dance Company entitled “Fall Gently on Thy Head.” At that time I had just finished writing my doctoral dissertation and was able to “take a break” while it was being typed prior to my giving my defense.

After that, computer science pretty much put any efforts in music into the background. My “professional life” began at the Technion in Haifa (which I had visited during my Bat-Dor gig), followed by a lengthier Assistant Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. After that, I made the move into research laboratory appointments, first in the private sector with General Research Corporation in Santa Barbara, followed by Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut (involving several engaging business trips to Europe), and then at the Information Sciences Institute, part of the University of Southern California, in Marina del Rey. After that, I joined the “Xerox family,” first at the newly-formed “outpost” for Fuji Xerox in Palo Alto and then at the better-known PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). During that entire span, I managed to inject a moderate number of publications in music theory among the more “professional” papers that I had published.

Nevertheless, my writing about music had more to do with “theory” than with “practice.” It was only after my retirement that I had both the time and the resources to satisfying my appetite for concerts and recitals. Indeed, once my wife and I moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco, we found ourselves living within a matter of a view blocks from the major Civic Center venues for performances. My own “turning point” took place in the spring of 2007 after a San Francisco Symphony performance of Finnish music, which I had attended one afternoon with a former PARC colleague. After reading Joshua Kosman’s column for the San Francisco Chronicle, I could not resist the urge to document an “alternative opinion,” which showed up on this site on April 1, 2007.

Umberto Eco (from a Tourist With a Typewriter Web page)

As Umberto Eco wrote about The Name of the Rose, he wrote the novel because “I wanted to kill a monk.” He then proceeded from that declaration to liken killing a monk to eating potato chips. Drawing upon a familiar advertising phrase, he observed, “You can’t kill just one.” So it was that responding to an opinion about the performance of music in the Chronicle turned out to be something I could not do only once. Since that time, the only thing that has changed is that I no longer write “responses.” For the most part, I experience a performance at the same time as my fellow critics; and I make it a point to document my own opinions before taking the time to read any others.

This April will mark the eighteenth anniversary of my first serious effort. (Eighteen happens to be a lucky number in Judaism, but atheists do not have lucky numbers!) In retrospect, I feel that I have enjoyed more satisfaction over that period than I did from any one my “professional” undertakings. Mind you, it was as a “professional” that I was able to create a “financial cushion” that would support the “retirement gig” that I created for myself; and, while I was working at each of those sites, the assets prevailed over the liabilities. Now, however, the only liability is sitting through a performance and feeling that I had rather be somewhere else; and, fortunately, those occasions have turned out to be pretty rare!

The Bleeding Edge: 12/30/2024

This week’s Bleeding Edge calendar is almost as spare as last week’s, which had only a single event. This week there will be all of two events, but one of them has already been reported. That is the first of the two January concerts to be presented by Old First Concerts, which will take place this coming Sunday, Sarah Cahill’s piano recital.

Cover of the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Blood Sugar Sex Magik (from the Wikipedia page for “Under the Bridge”)

Once again, the new event for the week will be the next Other Dimensions in Sound series hosted by reed player David Boyce. Every now and then, Boyce can be a bit cryptic about the programs he prepares. As far as I can tell, this week’s offering will consist of two sets. One of those sets will be a solo clarinet performance by Nikita Manin. The other is identified as “Under the Bridge.” Google has not been a particularly helpful search tool; but my “educated guess” is that this is a “tribute combo” inspired by Red Hot Chili Peppers.

As always, Other Dimensions in Sound is hosted by the Medicine for Nightmares bookstore, which is located in the Mission at 3036 24th Street, between Treat Avenue and Harrison Street.

Omni Releases Video of Norway Festival Winners

One week ago from today, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest video of classical guitar performances. The performers were the five prize winners of this year’s Tino Andersen International Guitar Festival, which took place in Bergen, Norway. Two of the guitarists were Greek and the other three were from the Ukraine, Croatia, and Germany, respectively. One of them, Ukrainian Marko Topchii, has performed here in San Francisco; and, in October of 2022, I released an article about a video he had recorded for the Live at St. Mark’s seres presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The other four guitarists were Ioanna Kazoglou and Filippos Manoloudis from Greece, Nikica Polegubic from Croatia, and Benno Panhans from Germany. According to my records, I have written twice about videos of Manoloudis over the course of this year, one an OMNI on-Location video recorded at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main and the other as part of the Emerging Stars of the Guitar video.

At the risk of revealing a personal bias, I have to say that I was particularly engaged by Topchii’s offering on this new video. He played the first movement (“Modéré”) of Maurice Ravel’s sonatina for solo piano. What struck me while listening is that his approach to arrangement made the music sound as if it had originally been written for guitar (without ever compromising the music’s underlying rhetoric)! Equally interesting was my first encounter with Polegubic. He performed the Sarabande movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1012 solo cello suite in D major in a manner that found an approach to phrasing that would be more appropriate for the guitar than for the cello.

I was also glad to encounter an “old friend” in the form of the “Invierno Porteño” movement from Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteños. Whether this was Sérgio Assad’s arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s music, which he made on a commission by Albert Augustine, Inc. and New Albion Records, or an original arrangement by the performer, German Benno Panhans, I cannot tell! In any event, this music was an “old friend” for me; and I definitely enjoyed the encounter. The other arrangement that I particularly enjoyed was that of a prelude-fugue-prelude composition by Louis Couperin, in which the prelude was composed without a metric signature.

Ioanna Kazoglou playing the Villa-Lobos study at the beginning of the video being discussed

Finally, it is worth noting that the only music actually composed for the guitar was the first selection. This was the last of the 12 Studies for Guitar composed by Heitor Villa-Lobos in 1953. The performance by Kazoglou definitely got the entire video off the a stimulating start.

SFS in February: Yuja Wang Changing Repertoire

Pianist Yuja Wang (photograph by ©Julia Wesely, courtesy of SFS)

In about six week’s time pianist Yuja Wang will make her next visit to Davies Symphony Hall. She will be the soloist for the series of concerts that will be conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The original plan was that she would perform two of Igor Stravinsky’s compositions for piano and orchestra, the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments and “Movements for Piano and Orchestra.” Instead, she will present the first San Francisco Symphony (SFS) performances of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Opus 45, his first piano concerto. This will be coupled with a more familiar work from the twentieth century, Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

These works will be framed by the three orchestral compositions by Claude Debussy given the collective title Images pour orchestre. The program will begin with “Gigues” and “Rondes de printemps.” Both of these are single-movement compositions. The final selection will be the three-movement “Ibéria.”

This program will be given four performances at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 13, Friday, February 14, and Saturday, February 15, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, February 16. For those that do not yet already know, Davies Symphony Hall is located at 201 Van Ness Avenue and fills an entire city block. The other boundaries are Grove Street (north), Hayes Street (south), and Franklin Street (west). The main entrance (which is also the entrance to the Box Office) is on Grove Street, roughly halfway down the block. Each of the above hyperlinks will provide concert ticket prices for the respective programs. Tickets may be purchased online or by calling 415-503-5351. A single Web page has been created for online purchases, and readers should be informed that availability is limited for all four performances. In addition, the Box Office in the Davies lobby is open for selling tickets.

Returning to Alfred Schnittke with “Fresh Ears”

Alfred Schnittke (photograph taken in Moscow on April 6, 1989 by © Dmitri N. Smirnov, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

This morning, after refreshing my recollections of the violin sonatas of Sergei Prokofiev while preparing to write about a forthcoming performance of his Opus 94a (second) violin sonata in D major at the San Francisco Conservatory, I realized that, in my Gidon Kremer anthology of chamber music, the all-Prokofiev CD was followed by one which began with a string trio by Alfred Schnittke. I honestly do not remember when I first encountered Schnittke, but it was definitely a “shock to the system.” Indeed, the shock was so strong that, when I was living in Singapore during the first half of the Nineties, I tended to keep my Schnittke CDs “under wraps.” Nevertheless, when I attended Mstislav Rostropovich’s recital in Singapore, I took comfort in the fact that his program included Schnittke’s “Suite in the Old Style” (in an arrangement for cello and piano).

Schnittke had a particular knack for taking the rhetoric of nostalgia and transforming it from the sentimental to the sarcastic. My guess is that most of those in the Singapore audience gave little thought to those rhetorical undercurrents. Rostropovich’s appearance was an “event;” and that was all that mattered. Mind you, while I was there, I had a friend (American) who clearly knew more about music than I did; but we tended to avoid any “deep end” discussions. He had his work as a teacher, and I had mine as an information technology researcher. I did not want to overstep my bounds, and I doubt that he wanted to either.

Now that I live in San Francisco, I can listen to as much Schnittke as I wish without worrying about the “context of my situation.” Ironically, it has been over a decade since I was able to attend a concert performance of his music. According to my archives, that would have been in May of 2011, back when Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was Music Director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra (and when I was writing for Examiner.com). She was bold enough to couple his “Moz-Art á la Haydn” with Edward Elgar’s Opus 47, the allegro movement preceded by an introduction scored for full string ensemble and a string quartet of soloists. If any cobwebs had collected in my mind due to too much “conventional” listening, they were definitely blown away by the Schnittke offering!

This morning I had a similar experience with that string trio, which Schnittke had composed in 1985. By that time, his music was beginning to receive worldwide attention, thanks not only to Kremer but also to cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky. However, what struck me the most was not just the attentiveness to that trio by Kremer performing with violist Tabea Zimmermann and Heinrich Schiff on cello. Rather, it was how the three of them could sound like a full string ensemble. This probably was due to a richness in multi-string bowing, suggesting that all the resulting notes had to come from more than three players!

Sadly, Schnittke’s music did not fill an entire CD in Kremer’s anthology. The CD was roughly divided between Schnittke and Carl Maria von Weber. Mind you, that collection was released decades after Schnittke had died; and I have no idea how much say Kremer had in how the it was produced. Nevertheless, given Schnittke’s prankish reflections on “the old style” (which were originally scored for viola d’amore, harpsichord, and a fair amount of percussion … enough for two performers), I suspect that his spirit would have been amused by the partnership!

SFCM Highlights: February, 2025

Following the only highlighted event at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) this month for the conclusion of the fall term, those performances will not resume until February. There will be three of them at SFCM. However, SFCM students will also participate in a performance at Davies Symphony Hall when Joshua Bell and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF) visit for a San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Great Performers Series concert. Here is the summary of all four events, all of which will begin at 7:30 p.m., with the necessary hyperlinks for date and time:

Tuesday, February 11: The guest artist for the first Chamber Music Tuesday of the spring season will be violinist Stefan Jackiw. According to my records, my last encounter with him took place almost exactly two years ago, when he contributed to the San Francisco Performances debut of the Junction Trio, whose other members were cellist Jay Campbell and pianist Conrad Tao. He will be featured in a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 94a (second) violin sonata in D major. The program will begin with the Opus 10 serenade in C major by Ernst von Dohnányi and conclude with Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 87 string quintet in B-flat major. This performance will take place in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall on the eleventh floor of the Bowes Center at 200 Van Ness Avenue.

Saturday, February 15: Edwin Outwater will conduct the first performance of the spring term by the SFCM Orchestra. The guest soloist will be vocalist Meow Meow in a performance of Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins. This was conceived as a satirical ballet chanté in seven scenes with a German libretto by Bertolt Brecht. It was originally sung by Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, and the choreography for the first performance was by George Balanchine. The program will begin with the overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, which will be coupled with Paul Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. This performance will take place in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall at 50 Oak Street, and it will be available for livestream viewing.

Friday, February 21, and Saturday, February 22: The SFCM Musical Theatre will give two performances of Triumph of Love. This is based on an eighteenth-century French comedy of the same name with contemporary music by Jeffrey Stock setting lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. As usual, the production will be directed by Michael Mohammed; and the conductor will be Michael Horsely. Casting will be added to the Web pages once details have been finalized. These performances will again take place in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall.

Joshua Bell (photograph by ©Shervin Lainez, courtesy of SFS)

Wednesday, February 26: The second half of this program will be Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Opus 35 symphonic suite Scheherazade. SFCM students will perform side-by-side with the ASMF musicians. In addition SFCM violin student Fiona Cunninghame-Murray will be soloist with Bell to begin the program with Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1043 concerto for two violins in D minor. This will be followed by ASMF performing Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken I/29 symphony in E major. This will be the event taking place in Davies Symphony Hall at 201 Van Ness Avenue.

The Lab: February, 2025

Since this is a relatively quiet period, it is as good a time as any to start thinking about February in the wake of making plans for January. While things may not “get back in action” at The Lab until the final two weeks of January, February will be decidedly busier from the beginning to the end of that month. For those not yet familiar with the venue, The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street. This is particularly convenient for those using public transportation, since it is a short walk to the corner of 16th Street and Mission Street. Busses stop at that corner for both north-south and east-west travel, and downstairs there is a station for the BART line running under Mission Street. As of this writing, there will be five performances in February. Doors open half an hour in advance of the performance; and specific information for each event, including a hyperlink to the Web page that provides both background material and hyperlinks for ticket purchases, is as follows:

Friday, February 7, 7:30 p.m.: Mayuko Hino is a former member of the Japanese noise group C.C.C.C.; and she will give a solo performance at The Lab in which she will continue to push the boundaries of sound, blending harsh noise with elements of industrial and psychedelic music. Lucas “Granpa” Abela will perform a solo set with a bell-less saxophone with sounds subsequently transformed by electronic gear. The remaining set will be taken by Rubber (() Cement, working with a diversity of experimental sounds including computer processing of genetic algorithms.

Saturday, February 8, 8:30 p.m.: For those seeking a more familiar repertoire, guitarist Shane Parish will give a solo performance of arrangements of a wide diversity of sources including works by John Cage, adventurous jazz by Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and Alice Coltrane, and selections by Aphex Twin and Kraftwerk.

Sunday, February 16, 8:30 p.m.: Mundanas VII–XI is a collection of recordings made by John McCowen in Iceland. It involved the synthesis of his own recordings on wind instruments based on circular breathing with the natural sounds of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions near his home in Reykjavik. All the content was recorded in his basement studio. There will also be a set taken by the oakland reductionist orchestra, which is the “house band” for the West Oakland Sound Series presented by sfSound.The performance is acoustic, but the sounds tend to come across as electronic.

Lia Kohl (photograph by Leah Wendzinski, from the event page for her performance)

Thursday, February 20, 8:30 p.m.: This will be a solo performance by cellist, composer, and sound artist Lia Kohl. She recently recorded a solo album entitled Normal Sounds on Moonglyph Records. She will present a live rendition of the tracks on that album.

Thursday, February 27, 8:30 p.m.: The month will conclude with a collaboration with the Noise Pop Festival 2025. The program will begin with a set taken by Thomas Dimuzio, giving a solo performance involving a Buchla 200e modular synthesizer, live looping, real-time processing, and field recordings. This will be followed by Translucents, an expanded immersive, multi-channel audio configuration conceived by Byron Westbrook. This amounts to a series of “audio scenes,” each inspired by a color panel created by the abstract painter Blinky Palerma.

Hough to Return to SFP for Solo Recital

Stephen Hough at the piano (photograph by Sim Canetty-Clarke, courtesy of SFP)

Pianist Stephen Hough (now Sir Stephen Hough) is no stranger to San Francisco. Indeed, when I was just beginning to exercise my writing chops, I remember having the opportunity to observe one of his master classes at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Nevertheless, I have to confess that my thoughts about him have run both hot and cold over the course of his past visits. According to my records, his last visit took place this past March, when he shared the stage with the Esmé Quartet for a San Francisco Performances (SFP) recital. The “main attraction” of that program was Johannes Brahms’ Opus 34 piano quintet in F minor, when I wrote the following about his performance of that music:

Hough’s face was constantly buried in his tablet, almost entirely as if he was unaware of his four colleagues; and, sadly, those colleagues tended to fumble their way through the intricacies of Brahms’ counterpoint.

Hough will return to SFP at the beginning of this coming February. This time he will be a solo recitalist, meaning that “playing well with others” will not longer be a factor. Each of half of his program will conclude with a major piano sonata. The intermission will be preceded by Franz Liszt’s S. 178, his only piano sonata, composed as a single movement, whose duration is usually about half an hour. The final work on the program will be another sonata in B minor, this time Frédéric Chopin’s four-movement Opus 58, the last of the three sonatas he composed (the first having been published posthumously).

Each of these formidable undertakings will be preceded by shorter offerings. The Liszt sonata will be preceded by three pieces by Cécile Chaminade, who happened to be born in 1857, the year when S. 178 was first performed. (This was after Liszt’s death in 1853.) The pieces that Hough has selected are “Automne,” “Autre Fois,” and “Les Sylvains.” The intermission will be followed by Hough’s own “Sonatina Nostalgica,” the final movement from his Partita and Sonatina Nostalgica.

This performance will begin on Tuesday, February 4, at 7:30 p.m., in Herbst Theatre, located at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Ticket prices are $85 (premium Orchestra and front and center Dress Circle), $75 (remainder of Orchestra, all Side Boxes, and center rear Dress Circle), and $65 (remaining Dress Circle and Balcony); and they may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page. Single tickets may also be purchased by calling 415-392-2545.

Voices of Music Releases Video for Christmas

Yesterday evening (also known as Christmas Eve), Voices of Music (VoM) released its latest video. As might be guessed, this was a “seasonal” offering: the eighth of the twelve concerti grossi in Arcangelo Corelli’s Opus 6 collection of twelve. The last time I reported VoM performing this music was on December 23, 2018, when I wrote “Corelli’s score for this particular concerto includes the inscription ‘Fatto per la notte de Natale’ (made for the night of Christmas); and it is popularly known as the ‘Christmas Concerto.” However, this was not the performance that was captured on video. That would have to wait until December of 2021, when the performance captured on video took place in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church; and the results are now available for viewing on YouTube.

The Voices of Music violinists performing Corelli: Elizabeth Blumenstock and Kati Kyme (front) with Isabelle Seula Lee, Linda Quan, Maxine Nemerovski, and Rachell Ellen Wong (rear) (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Because the music is a concerto grosso, it is scored for multiple soloists and ensemble. There this particular selection is concerned, the soloists are two violinists (Elizabeth Blumenstock and Kati Kyme) and a cellist (William Skeen). However, the camera work does not go out of its way to dwell on the soloists. This is very much an ensemble piece, and that is how it is presented to those viewing this new video.

Corelli extended the usual structure of four movements to six. However, there are two sections of different tempo in the first movement, Vivace followed by Grave. Similarly, the third movement is divided into Adagio-Allegro-Adagio. As a result, there are seven time cues in the text for the YouTube, one for the third movement and the other six for a single tempo.

Mind you, most viewers will find it sufficient to let the video “speak for itself,” particularly if they are already familiar with the music (as I have been for quite some time)!

Vincenzo Virgillito’s Diversity of Basses

Cover of the album being discussed

Precondition is a solo album of performances by bassist Vincenzo Virgillito. According to the advance material I received, it was scheduled for release on January 1; but, as those following the above hyperlink will see, all twelve of the tracks are currently available for MP3 download through an Amazon.com Web page. The description of Virgillito as a “bassist” might mislead some unfamiliar with his work. While he is a virtuoso performer on the double bass, for this album he also plays electric bass, fretless instruments with both five and four strings, and analog pedals.

Three of the tracks on the album are tributes. Most importantly (at least to me) is an acknowledgment to the most adventurous jazz bass player of his day, Charles Mingus, with a performance of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” I was glad to see that Virgillito’s interpretation was so imaginatively embellished that one could barely notice the tune that Mingus originally composed. The theme for “Danny Boy” is much more evident on the track that was conceived to honor the memory of Bill Evans. The other tribute is an original, “Word Drops,” which is given the subtitle “Jaco’s midnight,” presumably to acknowledge Jaco Pastorius. The remaining tracks are Virgillito originals, including five “Reset” tracks, which serve as “punctuation marks” over the course of the entire album.

Personally, I found the overall listening experience to be a mixed bag. Virgillito clearly had the capacity to evoke a wide variety of sonorities through his diversity of instruments and the supplementary technology. Nevertheless, for all of that diversity, I came away with an impression of rather bland navel-gazing. Perhaps his decision to take composers such as Mingus and Evans as points of departure raised my expectations too high. However, after listening to this album in its entirety, my first impression was to go back and listen to the “source of inspiration” on the Mingus Ah Um album.

Old First Concerts: February, 2025

Readers may recall that Old First Concerts will get the new year off to a relatively modest start with only two events. Fortunately, things will pick up in February with more than twice as many offerings. So now is as good a time as any to check the calendar to prepare for them!

As now seems consistently to be the case, the events will remain “hybrid,” allowing both live streaming and seating in the Old First Presbyterian Church at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue. Each of the event pages (which include hyperlinks for streaming) provides specific price information. The following dates and times provide hyperlinks to those event pages as follows:

Violinist Andrew Finn Magill (from his Old First Concerts Web page)

Sunday, February 2, 4 p.m.: The emergence of the groundhog will be celebrated with a program of original Brazilian choro and samba music. The performance will be by a trio called Canta, Violino! American violinist Andrew Finn Magill will perform with two Brazilians, percussionist Clarice Cast and Edinho Berber of seven-string guitar. Selections will be announced during the course of the performance.

Friday, February 14, 8 p.m.: The celebration of Groundhog Day will be followed by a performance on Valentine’s Day. It will be presented by the Shoreline Piano Trio, whose members are violinist Sui-mi Shin, cellist Katie Youn, and pianist Menghua Lin. The full title of their program will be Explorations of Love and Art: A Valentine’s Concert. All of the composers on this program will be women. The earliest of these will be Maria Theresia von Paradis, a contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who may have written his K. 456 B-flat major piano concerto for her. The nineteenth century will be represented at one end by Clara Schumann’s Opus 17 piano trio in G minor and at the other by Amy Beach’s Opus 34 violin sonata. The other selections will be by contemporary composers Caroline Shaw, Jessie Montgomery, and Jennifer Higdon.

Sunday, February 16, 4 p.m.: LIEDER ALIVE! will return for the third program in its thirteenth annual Liederabend Series. The pianist will be Peter Grünberg, accompanying soprano Charlotte Kelso. Program details have not yet been finalized; but the selections will be by Franz Schubert, Richard Wagner, Gustave Mahler, and Karl Marx (not to be confused with the philosopher).

Friday, February 21, 8 p.m.: This will be another vocal recital, this time by French-Israeli mezzo Naama Liany, who will be accompanied at the piano by Kevin Korth. She has prepared a program entitled Daydream, possibly inspired by the “keystone” at the center of the program, the cycle of five songs by Federico Mompou entitled Combat del somni. This will be preceded by two works by American composers, Samuel Barber’s Opus 41 cycle of five songs, Despite and still, and Leonard Bernstein’s “cycle of five kid songs” entitled I Hate Music. The final two selections on the program will be Das blaue Klavier, a cycle of three songs by Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska, which she called a “Rundfunkoper,” and Francis Poulenc’s FP107 settings of five poems by Guillaume Apollinaire entitled Banalités.

SFS “Favorites in Focus” Next Year

Next month San Francisco Symphony (SFS) will begin a selection of four subscription concerts collected under the title Favorites in Focus and unabashedly described as an “ultimate playlist.” Each program will be led by a different conductor with Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen “taking the helm” to conclude the series. What struck me as interesting was that the entire repertoire across all four of the offerings was firmly grounded in the nineteenth century, suggesting that the overall title could have been “Favorites from the Good Old Days!” Furthermore, each program consists of only two selections on either side of the intermission. Here is a basic summary of the works to be performed and the conductors that will lead them:

SFS Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt (photograph by Martin Lengemann, courtesy of SFS)

January 30–February 1: As was first reported at the beginning of this month, the series will begin with Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt on the podium. He prepared a program of only two symphonies, each by a German composer and each at either end of the nineteenth century. The first half of the program will be devoted entirely to Franz Schubert’s D. 485 (fifth) symphony in B-flat major, which he completed on October 3, 1816. This will be complemented in the second half by Johannes Brahms’ Opus 68, his first symphony, composed over the course of 21 years and first performed on November 4, 1876.

February 28–March 2: The distance between the two composers in the second concert is somewhat wider. Pianist Francesco Piemontesi will be the soloist in the first half, performing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 58 (fourth) piano concerto in G major, which was completed in 1806. The second half advances a little more than a century to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 27 (second) symphony in E minor. The conductor will be Robin Ticciati.

March 13–15: Elim Chan will conduct a program of two works by the same composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In the first half she will lead a suite (possibly her own) of excerpts from the score for the ballet Swan Lake. The narrative for this ballet involves an evil sorcerer, whose spell is only broken by the apotheosis in the final act. If this is a journey from darkness to light, then the second half of the program, the Opus 74 (sixth) symphony descends in the opposite direction, with a final movement that is one of the bleakest in the nineteenth-century repertoire.

May 29–June 1: Beethoven gets a “second round” in Salonen’s presentation of the final concert of the series. The program itself will be another pairing of concerto and symphony. This time, however, the first half will be devoted to Beethoven’s Opus 60, his fourth symphony composed in the key of B-flat major. In the second half, violinist Hilary Hahn will be the soloist for the Opus 61 violin concerto in D major, making for a “back-to-back” approach to programming.

As usual, all programs will take place in Davies Symphony Hall, which is located at 201 Van Ness Avenue and fills an entire city block. The other boundaries are Grove Street (north), Hayes Street (south), and Franklin Street (west). The main entrance (which is also the entrance to the Box Office) is on Grove Street, roughly halfway down the block. Each of the above hyperlinks will provide concert ticket prices for the respective programs. Tickets may be purchased online or by calling 415-503-5351. In addition, the Box Office in the Davies lobby is open for selling tickets.

New Video Presents Regondi “On Location”

I first became aware of the Swiss-born composer Giulio Regondi when I wrote a preview for a recital by Scottish-born classical guitarist David Russell. It took place in Herbst Theatre in March of 2020, presented jointly by the Omni Foundation of the Performing Arts and the San Francisco Performances Guitar Series. I have come to believe that just about any guitar recital I attend will involve at least one “journey of discovery.” In this particular case I “discovered” the Swiss-born composer Giulio Regondi when Russell played his Opus 21, the first of two compositions given the title “Air varié.”

A brief departure from the guitar performance to show some of the elegant exterior of the church in which David Russell performed (from the YouTube video of the performance being discussed)

A little over a year later Russell recorded a performance of Regondi’s Opus 21, producing a video in partnership with Maria Jesus Rodriguez. The selected venue was the Church of Saint Martin of Tours in Frómista, which is located in Spain in the province of Palencia. For the most part, the video captures Russell playing on the altar, but there are a few brief shots of the intricate detail in the overall architecture (as can be seen above).

The music itself follows familiar nineteenth-century conventions. The theme is preceded by an extended introduction and followed by a moderate number of acceptably inventive variations. (The duration of the composition is about ten minutes.) As I have previously written, I have tried to follow Russell’s performances for almost as long as I have been writing about the performance of music; and I still find each encounter, even when it is on a video, a refreshing journey of discovery. Regondi may not receive much attention in music history books, but Russell definitely made a strong case for his imaginative inventiveness. The video production did well to focus in Russell’s performance technique, rather than the architecture in which he was playing!

The Bleeding Edge: 12/23/2024

As I observed almost exactly a year ago, not much happens on the Bleeding Edge during the “twelve days of Christmas.” However, this may be the first time that “not much” has boiled down to a single event. That event will be the weekly Other Dimensions in Sound series hosted by reed player David Boyce. This week Boyce will again be one of the performers, playing in a trio with guitarist David James (who is also a vocalist in a variety of different genres) and Warren Huegel on drums. Most readers probably know by now that Other Dimensions in Sound is hosted by the Medicine for Nightmares bookstore, which is located in the Mission at 3036 24th Street, between Treat Avenue and Harrison Street.

Porky Pig delivering his most familiar line (from the YouTube Web page for this video clip)

In the immortal words of Porky Pig: “Th-Th-The, Th-Th-The, Th-Th... That's all, folks!”

SFP: Plans for 2025 PIVOT Festival

The four Sandbox Percussion players (photograph by Kjell van Sice, courtesy of SFP)

January will once again be the month of the PIVOT Festival presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). This will be the tenth season; and, once again, it will be curated by Gabriel Kahane, who will also perform as both pianist and vocalist. As in the past, the Festival will consist of three programs, the first and last of which will feature the Sandbox Percussion quartet of Ian Rosenbaum, Jonny Allen, Terry Sweeney, and Victor Caccese. The second program will also feature a quartet, this time of brass players Riley Mulherkar and Chloe Rowlands on trumpet and Andy Clausen and Addison May-Saxon on trombone, who perform under the name The Westerlies.

As in the past, the Festival will consist of three programs, all beginning at 7:30 p.m., as follows:

1. Wednesday, January 29: This will be a full-evening performance of 26 Little Deaths, composed by Carla Kihlstedt. The music was inspired by Edward Gorey’s book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies. The performers will be pianist Sarah Cahill, the members of the Del Sol Quartet (violinists Hyeyung Sol Yoon and Benjamin Kreith, Charlton Lee on viola, and cellist Kathryn Bates), and Sandbox Percussion.
2. Thursday, January 30: The program has not been finalized; but The Westerlies will showcase new interpretations from the songbook of folk singer Haley Heynderickx, who will perform with them.
3. Friday, January 31: This will be another evening-length composition, this time of Seven Pillars by Andy Akiho, which will be performed by Sandbox Percussion.

As in the past, these performances will take place in 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 venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. Tickets for each performance may be purchased through the above hyperlinks attached to the dates. Ticket prices are $65, $55, and $45. There is also a Web page for a subscription to the entire series with prices of $180, $150, and $120.

Annual Women and Nonbinary Series Continues

Banner for next month’s program of music by women and nonbinary composers (from the Eventbrite Web page for the concert)

Next month Ensemble for These Times will start the New Year with its annual program of music by women and nonbinary composers. This year the full title of the program will be Midnight Serenades: Music by Women and Nonbinary Composers. There will be two world premiere performances, both by alumnae of the Luna Compositions Lab: Madeline Clara Cheng (“The Fisherman’s Post”) and Lucy Chen (“Exhalation”). There will also be three works from this year’s Call for Scores, provided also by alumnae: Olivia Bennett (“Prelude to the Afterlife”), Gabriella Cariddo (“Because I Could Not Stop for Death”), and Devon Lee (“What I Know About Living”). The remaining works on the program have been composed over the last 30 years: “Manhattan Serenades” (Gabriela Lena Frank, 1995), “Sin Voz” from the opera Juana (Carla Lucero, 2019), “Twelve Chairs” (Jodi Goble, 2016), and “Midnight Snack” (Avril Tucker, 2019).

This program will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, January 25. The performance will take place at the Center for New Music (C4NM), located at 55 Taylor Street, just north of its intersection with Market Street. General admission will be $17.85 with a discounted $12.51 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased through an Eventbrite Web page. There will also be a free livestream, which will be made available at no charge with the selection of “Livestream” as a ticketing option. All sales will be available up to the date of the performance.

Left Coast Festival About a Month Away

Floral icon for the On the Threshold of Dreamland program (from the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble events calendar)

Hopefully, there are readers that will recall that the Winter Wandering Festival, presented by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, will begin at the end of next month. For those that do not recall, the hyperlink will serve as a memory aid; and the dates and time for the programs will be as follows:

• Friday, January, 31, 7:30 p.m.: Winterreise
• Saturday, February 1, 11:30 a.m.: A Dark Matter
• Saturday, February 1, 7:30 p.m.: On the Threshold of Dreamland
• Sunday, February 2, 4 p.m.: Franz Schubert and Luigi Nono

Tix is providing a Festival Pass for the entire series for $120 with a $60 rate for students. Single tickets will be available through the individual event pages. All four programs will take place at the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located in Noe Valley (of course) at 1021 Sanchez Street, just south of 23rd Street.

SFJAZZ: January, 2025

As of this writing, it appears that things will be quiet at the Joe Henderson Lab of the SFJAZZ Center for the first half of the New Year. However, it will resume activities with a weekend of free performances as compensation for the wait! For those that do not (yet?) know, the SFJAZZ Center is located at 201 Franklin Street, on the northwest corner of Fell Street, where the main entrance doors are located. Performance dates, times, and hyperlinks for purchasing tickets are as follows:

Friday, January 17, Saturday, January 18, and Sunday, January 19, 7 p.m.: These will be three concerts that celebrate Black music rooted in traditions such as gospel, blues, and jazz. The Dee Spencer Trio, led by pianist Spencer, will share the program will special guest vocalists Michelle Jacques and Clairdee. Other soloists will be drawn from the public; and, as of this writing, Spencer’s accompanists have not yet been named. Sadly, no further specifics are available at the present time; but the tickets for Saturday are almost sold out.

Thursday, January 23, 8:30 p.m.: The theme for this week will be Experimental Composers. It will begin with the Edward Simon Trio, whose leader is the SFJAZZ Collective Pianist. Unfortunately, the other two performers have not yet been identified. As of this writing, the second set is currently the only option.

Friday, January 24, 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.: Jamie Baum, is a flutist, composer, and bandleader. This will be her first performance at SFJAZZ with her working quartet. Once again, the other performers have not yet been identified.

Saturday, January 25, 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.: This will be a solo piano performance by Gloria Cheng. The title of her program will be ROOT PROGRESSIONS. She will play the results of commissions by Anthony Davis, Jon Jang, Linda May Han Oh, Arturo O’Farrill, and James Newton.

Sunday, January 26, 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.: Pianist Jeong Lim Yang will lead her trio in a performance of Zodiac Suite, which was composed by Mary Lou Williams in 1945. This trio arrangements was recorded on a Fresh Sound album in 2022 under the title Zodiac Suite: Reassured. Once again, information about the other members of the trio is not yet available.

Jazz singer Kat Edmonson (from the SFJAZZ event page for her performances this month)

Thursday, January 30, and Friday, January 31, 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.: The month will conclude with the first of two programs in a series entitled Music from the Movies. (The other two programs will begin the month of February.) Kat Edmonson is a vocalist that sings her own compositions. According to The New York Times, her genres include “jazz, cabaret and vintage cosmopolitanism pop.” The performances of her selections tend to interleave with humorous anecdotes, philosophical musings, and her love of film. As might be guessed, the program will interleave her own works with songs from familiar movie classics.

More “Noodling” from Sclavis-Moussay Duo

Louis Sclavis and Benjamin Moussay (© Stéphanie Griguer, courtesy of ECM records)

My last opportunity to write about a new ECM release was this past Saturday, when my “first contact” with Florian Weber’s Imaginary Cycle: Music for piano, brass ensemble and flute led to reflections on past encounters with “noodling” (basically meandering without any sense of direction) as the “cardinal sin” of composition. This morning brought me another new ECM offering, this time a duo performance by clarinetist Louis Sclavis with Benjamin Moussay at the piano. The album consists of nine tracks of original works, six by Moussay and three by Sclavis.

The advance material I received declared that all nine of these pieces drew “from a broad range of inspirations.” Those inspirations involved a rather extensive spectrum of sources, with the organ music of Olivier Messiaen rubbing shoulders with Jimmy Giuffre, one of the composers to contribute to the third stream genre that tried to merge the jazz and classical styles. Those who read my latest article about Andrew Hill probably already know that my opinion about third stream parallels an old joke about the monorail being an idea of the future whose time has passed; and that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter!

The title of the new Sclavis-Moussay album is Unfolding, but I am afraid it did not register much impact with me. There were few, if any, moments that could be taken as reflection on either Messiaen or Giuffre. For that matter, were I to take a “blind listening test,” I probably would not be able to distinguish the compositions by Moussay from those by Sclavis. Instead, there is an overall rhetoric of quietude, which, to be fair, may be just the right mood to soothe tensions after a stressful day of shopping for the holidays.

Indeed, this is the time of year when many of us could do with resorting to Alprazolam (better known under the brand name Xanax) while trying to get into the holiday spirit. Personally, I have better ways to cultivate that spirit. Readers that have followed this site over the course of the years know that I make it a point to attend the annual performance of George Frideric Handel’s HWV 56 oratorio (better known as Messiah); and this year I got my fun from Peaches Christ with the Holiday Gaiety program, both events involving the San Francisco Symphony performing in Davies Symphony Hall. Such offerings provided more than enough to soothe my tensions and raise my spirits, and I doubt that Unfolding will have anything to add to those spirits between now and my ringing in the New Year!

Noe Music to Begin New Year with Upbeat Piano

Aaron Diehl at his piano (courtesy of Noe Music)

The Noe Music Mainstage concert series will account for one of the first recitals in the new year. The recitalist will be pianist Aaron Diehl, and he has prepared a program entitled Stride & Ragtime. Through those two genres he will survey innovative compositions from the early twentieth century, which provided the seeds for the beginning of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. The program will include works by familiar (at least to me!) composers from that time, such as Scott Joplin (“Maple Leaf Rag”), Fats Waller (“Viper’s Drag”), and Eubie Blake (“Memories of You”). Other composers to be featured will be James P. Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, and the less familiar Jesse Pickett.

This will be one of the series’ Sunday programs, beginning at 4 p.m. on January 12. As usual, the performance will take place in the Noe Valley Ministry at 1021 Sanchez Street, just south of 23rd Street. A Web page currently available for purchasing tickets. General admission is $45 with a special $60 rate for the limited first few rows. Students will be admitted for $15.

Disappointing Jazz from Temple University

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of DL Media)

This is the time of year when, because my inbox is not as filled as usual, I try to compensate for albums that, for some reason or another, “fell through the cracks” at the time of their release. This was the case with the Labyrinth album, which I first learned about at the end of April and, according to its Bandcamp Web page, was released the following May 17. The title track is a composition for big band, rhythm section, and orchestra composed by Billy Childs on a commission by trumpeter Terell Stafford, alto saxophonist Dick Oatts, and Temple University. The Temple University Studio Orchestra is conducted by José Luis Domínguez with solo performances by both Stafford and Oatts.

These resources also contribute to the third (and final) track on the album, “Rainforests,” composed by Bill Cunliffe. They are joined by four additional soloists, Tim Warfield on tenor saxophone, pianist Bruce Barth, Mike Boone on bass, and drummer Justin Faulkner. These two works frame the second track, “Red Braid,” composed by Banks Sapnar and performed by the Temple University Jazz Band led by Stafford.

This was an ambitious undertaking; and, because I spent many years of my life in Philadelphia (including an Assistant Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania), I was particularly curious, in part because (at least during my tenure) the Music Department at Penn showed little interest in jazz as a topic worthy of study. As a result, the mere fact that Temple had undertaken this event was more than enough to attract my attention. Unfortunately, that was about all that was achieved. While the performances themselves could not be faulted, I came away feeling that there was just too much “noodling” (the “cardinal sin” bestowed by my composition teacher) in the music itself. Put another way, there was no faulting the spirit behind the two performing ensembles; but there was not much strength in the “flesh” of what they were performing.

Perhaps an academic setting is not the best place for such a spirit to thrive.

The Bleeding Edge: 12/17/2024

This week will be just as busy on the Bleeding Edge as last week was. Once again, the “usual suspects” will be contributing. Whether or not this involves a mad dash to do as much as possible before the seasonal holidays take precedence above all else will be left to the reader to decide! Specifics are as follows:

Tuesday (today), December 17, Make-Out Room, 7 p.m.: This month’s installment of Jazz at the Make-Out Room will consist of three sets, each consisting roughly of 45 minutes in duration. The program will begin with the Dymaxion trio of Bruce Ackley, doubling between soprano saxophone and clarinet, bassist Pete Schmitt, and Dave Brandt on percussion. They will be followed by a duo set taken by Velox Humm, pairing Scott Amendola on drums with guitarist Lenny Gonzalez. The final set will be taken by another trio, Key West, led by saxophonist Brian Pedersen, performing with Jay Korber on drums and cellist Randylee Sutherland. As usual, the Make-Out Room is located in the Mission at 3225 22nd Street. Doors will open at 6 p.m. There is no cover charge, so donations will be accepted and appreciated.

Wednesday, December 18, Luggage Store Gallery, 8 p.m.: The Luggage Store Creative Music Series will present two one-hour sets. The opening set will be taken by the Inkwells Trio, led by guitarist Lorenzo Arreguin performing with Elijah Pontecorvo on bass and drummer Christian Arriola. Saxophonist Rent Romus will then lead his Lords of Outland combo in a program entitled Ghost Moon. The other members of the combo will be Philip Everett on electronics, drummer Anthony Flores, and Ray Scheaffer on bass. They will be joined by saxophonist Zae Tinaza making a “special guest” appearance. As regular readers probably know by now, LSG is located at 1007 Market Street, just off the corner of Sixth Street and across from the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street. Admission is on a sliding scale between $10 and $20.

Thursday, December 19, Adobe Books, 8 p.m.: The first set will be taken by Malikah Wang, who will be on a brief visit from Taiwan. One of her performances during this visit will be only five minutes in duration. Regardless of length, this will involve voice and electronics accompanied by tap-dance percussion. The other set will be a quartet of performers from both Oakland and San Francisco singing and improvising under the title Newcomer Can’t Swim. Adobe Books is located in the Mission at 3130 24th Street. Doors will open at 7:30 p.m., and a $10 donation will be requested to support the performers.

Friday, December 20, Medicine for Nightmares, 7 p.m.: As usual, reed player David Boyce will host the weekly Other Dimensions in Sound series. This week the “sonic sustenance and musical medicina” will be provided by a solo gig performed by Amplifier. The venue is located in the Mission at 3036 24th Street, between Treat Avenue and Harrison Street. As always, there is no charge for admission, presumably to encourage visitors to consider buying a book.

Poster design for the performance by the Chris Trinidad Trio (from the BayImprovisor Web page for this event)

Saturday, December 21, Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 7:30 p.m.: Playing bass guitar and synth bass, Chris Trinidad will lead a trio performing with pianist Bob Crawford and Isaac Schwartz on his drum kit. They will perform selections from his Iridium Records releases including Common Themes, Certain Times, and Chant Triptych II. For those that do not already know, the venue is located in Glen Park at 653 Chenery Street, a short walk from the Glen Park station that serves both BART and Muni. Admission will be a cover charge of $25, payable by Venmo or in cash. Given the limited space of the venue, reservations are necessary and can be made by calling 415-586-3733. The phone will be answered during regular store hours, which are between noon and 6 p.m. on Tuesday through Sunday. This performance will also be live-streamed through hyperlinks to Facebook and YouTube on the Bird & Beckett Web page while the show is in progress.

Saturday, December 21, The Lab, 7 p.m.: As was reported this past Friday, The Lab will conclude the year with SEASONS, a program inspired by the winter solstice.