As I continue to prepare readers for the 2025–26 season of San Francisco Performances (SFP), I shall now turn my attention to the coming Chamber Series. For the past several years, each of the programs in this recital series will feature a different visiting string quartet. This season will be no exception, and all of these events will take place at 7:30 p.m. on three 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, November 14: The series will begin with the return of the Modigliani Quartet, which last visited SFP at the beginning of April of 2023. On that occasion they performed works by (in order of appearance) Giacomo Puccini, Felix Mendelssohn, Antonín Dvořák. This time they will shift their attention to the First Viennese School. Joseph Haydn will take the “center” of the program with a performance of the second quartet, in F major, in the Opus 77 “Lobkowitz” collection. The intermission will be followed by the first of the three “Razumovsky” quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven, Opus 59, Number 1, in F major. The program will begin with György Kurtág’s Opus 1, his first string quartet, composed in 1959. There has been no change in the membership of this ensemble: first violinist Amaury Coeytaux, second violinist Loïc Rio, violist Laurent Marfaing, and cellist François Kieffer.
Brentano String Quartet members Serena Canin, Mischa Amory, Nina Lee, and Mark Steinberg (from the SFP Web page for their recital in March)
Thursday, March 26: The Brentano String Quartet last visited SFP during its 40th anniversary season. They led off the Great Artists and Ensembles Series at the beginning of December of 2019. This is another ensemble with “staying power,” since the members are violinists Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin, violist Misha Amory, and cellist Nina Lee. They will devote their entire program to Haydn, but specifics have not yet been finalized.
Tuesday, April 14: The last time that the Danish String Quartet visited SFP, their program in October of 2022 included (as I put it) “one of those rare encounters with the string quartets of Robert Schumann.” This time the seldom-encountered composer with be Alfred Schnittke with a performance of his second string quartet. Schnittke is known for his “sharp edges;” and there is no shortage of them in this composition. Fortunately, the ensemble will “warm up” the audience with Igor Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, a suite of episodes extracted from his score for the “Pulcinella” ballet. (One of the reasons this music is affable is that the thematic material originated in the eighteenth-century compositions by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi.) For the remainder of the program, the ensemble will perform their own arrangements of traditional Nordic music. The members of the quartet have not changed since their last visit: violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, who share the leadership chair, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin.
Thursday, April 16: The series will conclude two days later with the return of the Ébène Quartet (Quatuor Ébène). This is the one ensemble with a change in personnel with the arrival of cellist Yuya Okamoto. The other members have not changed: violinists Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure and Marie Chilemme on viola. They have framed their program with “second quartets” from two of the “Three Bs” composers. The program will begin with the second of the six Opus 18 quartets, composed by Beethoven in the key of G major. It will conclude with the second of the two Opus 51 quartets by Johannes Brahms, composed in the key of A minor. The “middle” work on the program will be Claude Debussy’s only string quartet, composed in 1893 in the key of G minor.
Subscriptions are now on sale for $300 for premium seating in the Orchestra, the Side Boxes, and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $260 for the center rear of the Dress Circle and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $220 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment