Owen Dalby to Bring String 4tet to Noe Music

Many readers probably know by now that violinist Owen Dalby is Co-Artistic Director of Noe Music. Next month he will also be a performer. He has arranged a string quartet in which he will be joined by violinist Alexi Kenney, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt on viola (founding violist of the Dover Quartet), and cellist Oliver Kenney.

Orlando di Lasso, artist unknown, from the International Museum and Library of Music, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The second half of the program will be devoted entirely to one of the best-known string quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven, his late-period Opus 130 quartet in B-flat major, which will be performed with the original final movement, now known as the “Grosse Fuge” (which translates as “great fugue”). The first half will offer particularly interesting diversity. It will begin with “Carrot Revolution,” composed by Gabriella Smith. The advance material I received describes this composition as “a patchwork of early music, bluegrass, jazz, rock and post-minimalism.” (Is the kitchen sink missing?) This will be followed by Alfred Schnittke’s third string quartet, which includes a phrase from Orlando di Lasso’s setting of the “Stabat Mater’” hymn to the Virgin Mary, Dmitri Shostakovich’s “DSCH” monogram, and the theme of the “Grosse Fuge.”

This will be a Sunday afternoon performance, beginning at 4 p.m. on November 1. As most readers probably know by now, the event with take place at the Noe Valley MinIstry, which is located (in Noe Valley, of course) at 1021 Sanchez Street. As of this writing, all Reserved Seating tickets have been sold; but General Admission tickets are still available for $45 with a $15 rate for students. A Web page has been created for online purchases.

Maazel’s Only 21st Century Recording

Composer John Adams (uploaded on January 5, 2008, by Macror from English Wikipedia, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

The last of the CDs of orchestral performances in the Lorin Maazel: The Complete Warner Edition provides the only account of music from the current century. “On the Transmigration of Souls” was composed by John Adams on a commission by the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center's Great Performers. The work was intended as a “musical response” to the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 (now known colloquially as 9/11). It was premiered in Avery Fisher Hall of Lincoln Center by the New York Philharmonic on September 19, 2002; and the CD is based on recordings of the performances that took place between September 19 and September 24.

The music has the richest instrumentation of all of the orchestral compositions in the Warner collection. The instrumental resources require piccolo, three flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), three oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, four percussionists, piano, celesta, “quarter-tone piano,” 2 harps, strings, and pre-recorded tape. There is only one vocal soloist, boy soprano Preben Antonsen, who is presumably a member of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, which is joined by the New York Choral Artists.

Those with even a smattering of music history know that, over many centuries, music has been composed as a “response” to the “call” of a historical event. The most familiar of those “responses” is probably Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 49, usually known as the “1812 Overture.” This was composed to celebrate a victory, which is very much the “flip side” of the event marked by “On the Transmigration of Souls.” That said, the Maazel recording was my “first contact” with Adams’ composition, leading me to wonder if I shall ever listen to it in Davies Symphony Hall!

Change in First Dynamite Guitars Recital

When I announced the coming Dynamite Guitars series for 2026–2027, I wrote that the season would begin this Saturday, October 17, in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church with a solo recital by Scottish-Indian classical guitarist Samrat Majumder. About 24 hours ago, I learned that the performance will take place at 7:30 p.m. and that it would still be a solo recital. However, there has been a change in the soloist!

Guitarist Hao Yang (from the Groupmuse event page for her recital this coming Saturday)

The performer will be classical guitarist Hao Yang. Her education includes studies at Yale University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the University of Denver. She has prepared a program of music composed between the mid-sixteenth century and the almost immediate present.

She will begin with a set of three “Fantasías” from Alonso Mudarra’s collection Tres libros de musica en cifras para vihuela (three books of music in numbers for vihuela). The other composers will be from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In order of their year of birth, their compositions will be as follows:

• Joaquín Turina: “Sevillana” (Opus 29)
• Lennox Berkeley: Sonatina (Opus 52, Number 1)
• Leo Brouwer: Sonata Number 5 (“Ars Combinatoria”)
• Jeremy Collins: Elegy
• Emmet Edwards: Kilimanjaro

For those that do not yet already know, the venue is located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street. Admission will be $25. However, Supermusers will be admitted for $18. Tickets may be purchased online through the Groupmuse event page for this performance.

Maazel’s 20th Century Preference for Ravel

In the CD collection Lorin Maazel: The Complete Warner Edition, conductor Maazel shows decidedly more interest in the nineteenth century than he does in the twentieth. (Some readers may recall that this site devoted an entire article to two symphonies by Anton Bruckner before going on to the other nineteenth-century composers in the collection: Johannes Brahms, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Antonín Dvořák.) Only five CDs account for the twentieth century, and three of them involve Maurice Ravel.

That said, there is much to be gained from listening to the Ravel CD that presents both of the composer’s piano concertos. The pianist is Jean-Philippe Collard, performing with the Orchestre National de France. Each of these concertos has its own rhetoric of sassiness and no shortage of moments that are downright outlandish. Ravel clearly had a sense of humor, and it is most evident in these concertos. To some extent that humor is also evident in at least some of his orchestrations of the movements Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition suite. Ironically, the CD for that suite has an “overture” track devoted to Claude Debussy’s “Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune” (prelude to the afternoon of a faun). Presumably, when that album was first released in 1962, someone, perhaps associated with the Philharmonia Orchestra, decided that Pictures needed an overture!

There is also a second Ravel CD with four familiar tracks. It is framed by “Boléro” at the beginning and “La valse” at the end. These serve as “bookends” for works originally composed for piano. The first of these is the orchestral version of “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” and it is followed by the “Alborada del gracioso” movement from the Miroirs suite.

The only other composer to receive more than one composition in this series is Richard Strauss. Most of his CD accounts for Also sprach Zarathustra. However, the seriousness of that tone poem is followed by “comic relief” with the performance of “Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks.”

The remaining CD accounts for two performances by pianist Sviatoslav Richter, each with a different orchestral ensemble. The CD begins with Béla Bartók’s second piano concerto with Maazel conducting the Orchestre de Paris. He then “crosses the Channel” (so to speak), leading the London Symphony Orchestra in Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 55, his last completed piano concerto.

Sergei Prokofiev (cropped from a family portrait, photographer unknown, public domain)

From a personal point of view, I was particularly glad to have another encounter with Richter. Some readers may recall that I wrote about him a little less than a week ago in my “19th Century (‘beyond’ Bruckner)” article. Bartók and Prokofiev had decidedly different approaches to the keyboard, but each of them had his own way of departing from Johannes Brahms, so to speak. Mind you, Brahms’ Opus 83 concerto was one of my earliest pocket score purchases; but, when I first became a radio announcer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in my freshman year, I quickly gravitated to Bartók for the program of twentieth-century music that I hosted.

Sadly, the Bartók-Prokofiev CD will be Richter’s last appearance in this Maazel collection.

Readers may recall that this collection has not yet been released. That said, Tower Records has created a Web page for it. The preorder release date is this coming November 6.

George Szell Before Cleveland

Photograph of George Szell on the cover of the album being discussed (presumably taken during his tenure in New York)

Through my connection to Naxos B2B, I have had the good fortune to receive announcements of recordings on other labels, some of which have appealed to me through historical interest. Earlier this month I learned of the SOMM Recordings release the first volume in a series of remastered performances of George Szell when he was in New York conducting the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra (as it was known at that time). Back in my student days, we used to joke about Szell’s skill at “playing” the Cleveland Orchestra (as if it were a massive pipe organ, rather than an ensemble). Prior to that leadership, he had made his debut with the St. Louis Symphony in October of 1939; and in New York he had performed with both the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic.

The first release in this series couples the late nineteenth century with the early twentieth. It presents two symphonies, the first of which is the only one composed by César Franck in the key of D minor. This is followed by Jean Sibelius’ Opus 43 (second) symphony. Both of these compositions drew a lot of attention during my years in both high school and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Szell’s interpretations of both of these symphonies were consistently engaging. One might almost say that the intensity of his relationship with the Philharmonic “foreshadowed” the more intense relationship he would cultivate in Cleveland.

Ironically, both of these symphonies seem to have faded into the past (or, at least, my personal past). I have not written about Franck’s symphony since my examiner.com days, when I recalled my recording of Arturo Toscanini playing this composition. More recently, I had last encountered the Sibelius symphony when it was included in the third BBC Legends volume released by ICA Classics. In other words, listening to this recording of performances by Szell that pre-dated his Cleveland days amounted to drawing upon a rather powerful time machine!

That said, this was my first encounter with a Szell recording that was not made in Cleveland. Personally, I enjoyed listening to his approach to the Philharmonic-Symphony. The ensemble seems to have felt the same way. He would perform with them over the course of 27 years!

Chez Hanny to Augment SF Music Day

About a week ago, InterMusic SF announced the date for this year’s SF Music Day. As in the past, this is an annual event that showcases a wide variety of music-making ensembles through a series of performances that begin at noon and continue through 6 p.m. on Sunday, October 25. All of those performances will take place in the Veterans Building of the San Francisco War Memorial at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. This venue affords three sites for performance: Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is on the ground floor, the Green Room on the second floor, and the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater on the fourth (top) floor. This year there will be no charge for admission, which means that those attending will be encouraged to make a recommended donation of $30.

Participating performers and groups will be as follows:

• Anne Sajdera Quintet
• Bululú
• Cornelius Boots
• Dutt Campbell Duo
• Ensemble Humanité
• Ian Carey and Wood Metal Plastic
• Jordan Glenn’s BEAK
• Marielle V Jakobsons
• Nippon Kobo
• Pawlik-Zwiebel Duo
• Quinteto Latino
• Raffi Garabedian Quartet
• Rova Saxophone Quartet
• San Francisco Chamber Orchestra
• SixEight: Maclauchlan & Quale
• Sundra Manning Organ Quartet
• The Sampaguitas
• Trillian Welch

The schedule of which performances take place where and when will be available upon entry. This year, however, SF Music Day will overlap with another event.

Wayne de la Cruz at the keyboard of his Hammond organ

That event will be the usual Sunday afternoon performance by Jazz Chez Hanny, the house concert hosted by Frank Hanny. This will be the second offering of the month, performed by the Wayne de la Cruz Trio, led by de la Cruz at the Hammond organ. Rhythm will be provided by guitarist Dave Bell and Mark Lee on drums. The show will begin at 4 p.m. on Sunday, October 25. Hanny’s house is located at 1300 Silver Avenue, and the performance takes place in the downstairs rumpus room. Admission will be $25 and checks will be accepted, as well as cash or Zelle. There will be two sets separated by a potluck break. As a result, all who plan to attend are encouraged to bring food and/or drink to share. Seating is first come, first served; and the doors will open at 3:30 p.m. Reservations are preferred and may be made by sending electronic mail to jazz@chezhanny.com.

The Bleeding Edge: 10/12/2026

Interior of Old First Church, the venue for Old First Concerts

This week the number of events that have already been reported outnumber the new ones. This is due primarily to the fact that The Lab will be busy this week with performances on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. This will also be the week of The Women of Note project at Old First Concerts on Friday evening and the Icelandic program at the Center for New Music on Saturday. If that is not enough, there are four new events to attend this week as follows:

Thursday, October 15, 8:30 p.m., The Rite Spot Cafe: Saxophonist Rent Romus will give a solo performance entitled Deep Space. This will take place about a month after the last account of a performance at this venue, suggesting that it may be a monthly offering. The venue is located at 2099 Folsom Street, on the northeast corner of 17th Street.

Friday, October 16, 7 p.m., Medicine for Nightmares: “Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinaire David Boyce” will again curate an Other Dimensions in Sound performance. The program will be a “double dose of sonic sustenance,” meaning that it will be a two-set program! The first set will be taken by Wandering Clouds, a quartet led by Jaroba on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet. He will be joined on the front line by Kersti Abrams alternating between alto saxophone and flute. Rhythm will be provided by drummer Mike Villarreal and Eli Pontecorvo on bass. The second set will be taken by the improvisation group Warm Spell. Specific performers have not yet been finalized; but the members of the group are Marina Lazzara (vocals and percussion), Brian Lucas (bass), Tammy Fortin (guitar), Farfisa (JLee) Kevin Van YserLoo (violin), and Richard Marriot (conch shell, flute, and trumpet). Once again, many (if not most) readers already know the drill: 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.

Friday, October 16, 7 p.m., Black Cat Jazz Supper Club: Pianist and composer Joe Block will bring his quintet to Black Cat. They will perform music from his debut album, There Is Always Hope. The other members of the quintet will be trumpeter Dylan Band, Sam Harris alternating between tenor and soprano saxophones, bassist Miguel Russel, and Christian McGee on drums. The club is located in the Civic Center at 400 Eddy Street.

Saturday, October 17, 7:30 p.m., Bird & Beckett Books and Records: Darren Johnston will lead his quartet in a performance of tracks from his latest CD release, Standard Issue. He is a trumpeter, but he is calling his instrument for this performance his “peace cannon.” The other members of the quartet will be Kai Lyons on guitar, bassist Marcus Shelby, and Lorca Hart on drums. As many (most?) readers know by now, admission will be a $20 cover charge at the door with a $10 student rate. Since the shop has limited space for a performance, reservations are advised and can be made by calling 415-586-3733. This is another familiar venue for readers, located at 653 Chenery Street, a short walk from the Glen Park station for both Muni and BART.

American Bach Begins SF Season at St. Mark’s

Late yesterday afternoon St. Mark’s Lutheran Church hosted the opening Discovery Series program presented by American Bach. 2026–2027 will be its 38th season, and the Artistic Director continues to be Jeffrey Thomas. Ironically, the title of the first performance was Italian Panache; and no member of the Bach family was included on the program.

The Antonio Vivaldi monument at the Rooseveltplatz in Vienna (photograph by C.Stadler/Bwag, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 international license, from Wikimedia Commons)

There were seven works on the program accounting for six composers. The only composer to be represented twice was Antonio Vivaldi. This seemed appropriate since Vivaldi was a significant influence on Johann Sebastian Bach, who rearranged a generous number of Vivaldi concerti for both keyboard and other instruments. In that vein, only one of those concertos was included on the program, RV 531, composed in G minor with solos for two cellos. The other Vivaldi selection was a vocal setting of Psalm 112 with soprano Mary Wilson as the vocalist.

All of the other composers on the program were from Vivaldi’s period. In “order of appearance,” they were Domenico Scarlatti (Sinfonia in C major), Tomaso Albinoni (Sinfonia à 5 in C major), Antonio Caldera (Ciaccona in B-flat major), Alessandro Scarlatti (Sonata à Quattro in F major), and Arcangelo Corelli (Concerto Grosso in D major). The result was seven imaginative approaches to making music during the transition from the seventeenth to eighteenth century.

For this period I find that I have a soft spot for the cello. I was therefore delighted to encounter two cellists contributing to the program. One of them, Gretchen Claassen, I have encountered (and written about) pretty much since I began this writing gig. The other, Joseph Howe, was new to me but got me to sit up and take notice in his performance of the Alessandro Scarlatti sonata.

PARTCH Ensemble Releases Fourth Volume

The PARTCH Ensemble performing the diversity of instruments required for the tracks on the album being discussed

I have not written about the Bridge Records’ Music of Harry Partch series since June of 2019. That was when I wrote about the third volume in the series, Sonata Dementia. It was only at the beginning of this month that I learned that the fourth volume is now available. The full title of the album is The Wayward: First Complete Recording; and, as I write this, the best Web page for purchase can be found on the Bandcamp Web site.

The album has six tracks, each of which has a lengthy title worth repeating:

1. Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California (1941/54/68)
2. San Francisco: A Setting of the Cries of Two Newsboys on a Foggy Night in the Twenties (1943/55)
3. The Letter: a Depression Message from a Hobo Friend (1943/55)
4. U.S. Highball: A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip (1943/55)
5. Ulysses at the Edge: A Minor Adventure in Rhythm (1955/62)
6. Ulysses at the Edge: Improv Version

Personally, I was glad to receive this latest volume, even if I had to wait over seven years! The titles say all that the attentive listeners will need.

Old First Concerts: November, 2026

Next month there will be only two Old First Concerts (O1C) events taking place at Old First Presbyterian Church. Most readers probably know by now that this venue is located at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue. Each of the events is associated with a different organization: LIEDER ALIVE! and Ensemble for These Times (E4TT), respectively. As usual, tickets will be available for purchase through the hyperlinks attached to the dates, which are also available for live stream viewing. General admission is $30. with reduced rates for seniors, students, and children age twelve and under. Both performances will take place at 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoons as follows:

November 8: The LIEDER ALIVE! program will feature a debut performance by baritone Olivier Zerouali, who is currently an Adler Fellow with the San Francisco Opera. Details have not yet been finalized, but he will perform vocal selections composed by Franz Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Gabriel Fauré. He will be accompanied at the piano by Ji Youn Lee.

E4TT musicians Margaret Halbig, Megan Chartier, and Nanette McGuinness (photograph by Martyn Selman)

November 15: As at least some readers may already know, E4TT is the trio of soprano Nanette McGuinness, Megan Chartier on cello, and pianist Margaret Halbig. Grace Wahlen will conduct a larger ensemble with two additional vocalists: soprano Carina Kahane and mezzo Melinda Martinez Becker. In addition, Alex Malinas will contribute as narrator. There will be three other instrumentalists: Taylor Robinson alternating between flute and piccolo, clarinetist Zoe King, and Eddie Virtgaym on percussion. There will also be world premiere performances of a duo for cello and piano by Mary Bianco and Alex Malinas’ “Skazka.” The other contributing composers will be Andrea Casarrubios, David Garner, and Stella G. Gitelman Willoughby. The program will begin in the twentieth century with selections from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 79, From Jewish Folk Poetry. The entire event will be co-presented by KlezCalifornia.

DSO Live-Streams Americana Program

Yesterday evening, my wife and I settled down with dinner to watch the latest YouTube livestream of a performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The title of the program was Bernstein & Appalachian Spring, which accounted for about half of the selections. Most readers probably know that “Appalachian Spring” was composed by Aaron Copland for choreography by Martha Graham, and the “Bernstein” in the title was Leonard Bernstein. These icons of twentieth-century music were flanked on either side by the next generation of composers, beginning with Joan Tower and concluding with John Adams.

Paul Huang as soloist in the performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade” (screen shot from yesterday’s live-stream)

The conductor for this occasion was Peter Oundjian, and the soloist was violinist Paul Huang. The latter performed the Bernstein selection, “Serenade, after Plato’s ‘Symposium.’” This is often referred to as one of Plato’s dialogues, but it involves exchanges between Socrates and six other speakers, all presenting their personal praises of love. Bernstein divided those speakers across five movements as follows:

1. Phaedrus, Pausanias
2. Aristophanes
3. Eryximachus
4. Agathon
5. Socrates, Alcibiades

Sadly, the video for this performance provided no cues for the individual movements, which pretty much undermined the effort of any listener to negotiate the overall narrative of the music. Huang followed Bernstein with an encore performance of his own solo arrangement of a Taiwanese folk song.

Things were pretty much the same for “Appalachian Spring.” Graham’s choreography stands as a cornerstone for the early pioneer days in American history. The suite that Copland extracted eliminates much of the pioneer narrative, dwelling more on refreshing aspects of spring itself. That said, like the ballet, it concludes with a musical elaboration of the hymn “Simple Gifts;” and, in the suite, that music is anything but simple! Nevertheless, the music is familiar to many listeners; and Oundjian’s interpretation could not have been more engaging.

The program was framed by two contemporary composers, beginning with a suite that Joan Tower extracted from her “Concerto for Orchestra.” This was one of those energetic scores that attends to every instrument in the ensemble. Unfortunately, the camera work could not keep up with Tower’s pace; and I found that I was much better off attending to listening while ignoring the viewing. Adams kept up with that pace in one of his more recent compositions: “Frenzy: a short symphony.” Personally, I wish it had been shorter!

Ars Minerva’s Latest “Forgotten” Opera

In a little less than a month’s time, Ars Minerva will present its latest production. As at least some readers may know by now, Director Céline Ricci has a mission of bringing forgotten operas from the past back to life. Indeed, in many cases, the composers of these operas have also been forgotten!

Soprano Aura Veruni, who will be singing the title role in Ziani’s Andromeda (from the Ars Minerva Web page for this production)

For most readers, that will be the case for this season’s composer, Marc’Antonio Ziani, who was very prolific in composing operas. The one to be performed by Ars Minerva will be the last of those operas, Andromeda, composed in 1714. The libretto by Pietro Pariati draws upon the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda. As in the past, the opera will be sung in the original Italian, most likely with translation projected above the stage.

Also as in the past, the production will be given three performances, beginning at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 6, and Saturday, November 7, with a 2 p.m. matinee performance on Sunday, November 8. The venue will be the Creativity Theater at Yerba Buena Gardens, located at 221 Fourth Street in SoMa. Tickets for all performances may be purchased online through a single Web page.

Canellakis Brings More Rachmaninoff to Davies

It was somewhat less than a year ago that Karina Canellakis made her last visit to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). On that occasion her concerto soloist was Alexandre Kantorow in a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 26 (third) piano concerto in C major. Yesterday evening Canellakis returned to Davies Symphony Hall to lead SFS in another Prokofiev concerto. This time the soloist was violinist Nicola Benedetti, playing Prokofiev’s Opus 83, his second violin concerto in G minor. “For the record,” as they say, my last account of her concerto work with SFS has been almost a decade. In March of 2017, she performed Max Bruch’s Opus 26 (first) violin concerto in G minor with then Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas on the podium.

Benedetti’s partnership with Canellakis could not have been better. This was, without a doubt, a “dynamite” account of the Prokofiev concerto. Each of the three movements had its own characteristic rhetorical stance, and Benedetti gave a clear and convincing account of each of those stances. Moreover, her relationship with the orchestra could not have been better. It was as if she was totally aware of every gesture in the orchestra score and complemented each of those gestures with her own rhetoric.

The Ashokan reservoir, which may have inspired Ungar’s music (photograph by Daniel Case, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, from Wikimedia Commons)

Audience reception demanded an encore, and Benedetti replied with American music that became familiar during the end of the last century. She gave a solo performance of Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell.” Those in the audience that recall the 1990 PBS documentary The Civil War would probably have felt a tinge of nostalgia. For my part, I could appreciate the music as a violin solo without any connotations of the Ghost of Television Past!

Prokofiev’s concerto was complemented, after the intermission, with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 45, given the title “Symphonic Dances.” While the middle of the three movements was clearly a waltz, there was little in the overall rhetoric to invoke any sense of a dance. On the other hand, there was more to enjoy in appreciating the rich instrumentation; and my vantage point provided an excellent view of all the activity in the percussion section! Opus 45 provided just the right opportunity for a full orchestral ensemble to “strut its stuff;” and, under Canellakis’ leadership, they certainly knew how to strut!

The “overture” for the program was “The Kingdom of Silence,” composed by Victoria Borisova-Ollas. This composer has as firm a command of instrumentation as Rachmaninoff did, but she never managed to apply it with the same skill. She seemed more interested in invoking “special effects” instead of establishing and exploring a rhetorical stance. Thus, while the performance lasted a bit less than a quarter of an hour, it felt like it went on forever. The instrumentation may have been ambitious, but this ambition required “sterner stuff.”

That said, Canellakis’ decision to present three unique Russian perspectives was definitely an interesting one, even if one of those perspectives did not live up to the standards of the other two!

Stanislav Kochanovsky Conducts Early Prokofiev

Conductor Stanislav Kochanovsky on the cover of the album being discussed

Exactly one week from today, harmonia mundi will release an album of very early compositions by Sergei Prokofiev. The last four tracks of the album will probably be familiar to most listeners. They account for the composer’s Opus 25 (first) symphony in D major, known to many (if not most) listeners as the “Classical” symphony. Stanislav Kochanovsky conducts the NDR Radiophilharmonie; and, familiar as this music is, he provided a convincing and engaging account that will easily stand on its own merits.

That said, what makes this album particularly interesting is the selection on the first nineteen tracks. This is Prokofiev’s Opus 21, “Chout,” given the subtitle “Complete ballet in six scenes after the tale by Alexander Afanasyev.” This was the first ballet score that Prokofiev completed for Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes. The ballet was first performed in Paris on May 17, 1921, at the Théâtre Municipal de la Gaîté with choreography by Fyodor Slavinsky. The title of the ballet seems a bit long for a one-act performance: “Tale of the Jester Who Outwits Seven Other Jesters.”

I would not be surprised if any readers had previous acquaintance with this ballet. The fact that it does not appear in Balanchine’s New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets pretty much “seals the deal” of obscurity. For that matter, it has also been overlooked by the “revised and enlarged edition” of The Dance Encyclopedia, compiled and edited by Anatole Chujoy and P. W. Manchester. In the absence of these significant primary sources, it looks like the only viable one is the Wikipedia page!

That said, the score for Opus 21 is decidedly sassier than the one for Opus 25. The music may be unfamiliar, but one adjusts to the intensity of Prokofiev’s rhetoric without too much difficulty. Those curious about the narrative will see that the accompanying booklet for the album provides the titles (in both French and English) of the six episodes (tableaux) in the score. Personally, I have enjoyed the listening experience, particularly in the ways that “Chout” is much sassier that Prokofiev’s first effort at a symphony!

Those interested in pre-ordering this album will probably find that the best Web page has been created by Presto Classical Limited.

San Francisco Opera: from Massenet to Mozart

Hopefully, there are at least a few readers aware that, in a little less than a week’s time, the next full-length San Francisco Opera (SFO) production will begin at the War Memorial Opera House. This will be the revival of Vincent Boussard’s staging of Jules Massenet’s Manon, which was last performed at the Opera House in 2017. As a result, this will probably be a good time to prepare readers for the opera that will follow Manon.

That opera will be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. By way of disclaimer, I should note that this may be the first “full-length” opera I ever saw. This was back in the Fifties when NBC would televise opera; and I used scare quotes because, while the performance accounted for all all four of the acts, the production would be abridged to make room for commercials (and was usually sung in English)! Many of those cuts probably involved recitative passages; so, for the most part, Mozart’s music suffered little damage!

The “Americanization” of Cavanagh’s staging of Mozart’s Figaro (photograph of Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

SFO will present a revival of the production created by Canadian director Michael Cavanagh in 2019. The opera was composed in 1786, which aligns with Cavanagh setting the performance at a time after the American Revolutionary War, with the venue being a somewhat sumptuous manor house. In other words, the country had won its independence from the British; but “class distinction” was about the same in the “new world” as it had been on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean!

In this production the “upper class” is personified by the Count Almaviva, who will be sung by baritone Thomas Mole, making his role debut. Having won the hand of Rosina (soprano Olivia Smith) in The Barber of Seville, the count’s attention has been drawn to the countess’ maid Susanna (soprano Slávka Zámečníková). The problem is that the Count has given permission to his personal valet, Figaro (bass Peter Kellner, making his SFO debut), to marry Suzanna! The overall narrative comes across as one complication after another; but, in spite of the difficulties between Almaviva and his wife, the opera concludes with Figaro’s wedding to Susanna.

This production will be given ten performances in the Opera House. The first of these will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 31; and the other evening performances will take place at the same time on Tuesday, November 3, Saturday, November 7, Tuesday, November 10, Friday, November 13, Wednesday, November 18, and Friday, November 27. There will also be two Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. on November 18 and 29 (the final performance). A single Web page has been created for purchasing tickets for all ten of these events.

Brooklyn Rider Launches New SFP Season

Yesterday evening saw the launch of the new San Francisco Performances season with the first performance in the Chamber Series. The program was presented by the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, whose performers remain violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Michael Nicolas. This was their fourth appearance, the most recent having taking place in March of 2022.

Count Andreas Razumovsky, who commissioned Beethoven’s Opus 59 string quartets (painting by Johann Baptist von Lampi the Younger, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The program was framed by two of the composers in the First Viennese School, beginning with Joseph Haydn and concluding with Ludwig van Beethoven. The opening selection was Haydn’s Hoboken III:35, the fifth of the six Opus 20 compositions known as the Sun Quartets. The program concluded in Beethoven’s middle period with the last of the three Opus 59 quartets dedicated to Count Andreas Razumovsky.

The Haydn quartet was in the key of F minor, always an adventurous mode for the composer. The structures of the middle movements, Menuet and Adagio, were particularly elaborate. That said, there is also much to engage the attentive listener in all of the Razumovsky quartets, and this particular selection served up a more than generous supply of engaging twists and turns.

All of the other composers between these “bookends” were American. They were, in order of appearance, Don Byron (third string quartet), Angélica Negrón (“Our Children Speak Spanish and English”), Ted Hearne (“We are Working Tirelessly for a Ceasefire”), and Bob Dylan, whose “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was arranged for the quartet by Jacobsen. Sadly, the last of those offerings was also the most disappointing, even with Jacobsen and Nicolas singing the words, leading me to wonder if the new generation finds Dylan passé (if they listen to him at all).

Negrón’s composition was augmented with pre-recorded electronics. I could appreciate her good intentions. Nevertheless, I was never really drawn into the performance, reminding me of the down-side of a road “paved with good intentions!” Hearne’s “political” approach was, for me at least, more convincing. His driving rhythms clearly accounted for the “tirelessly” in his title, and the overall diversity of his sonorities was prodigious. However, what really “sealed the deal” was the way in which he deployed driving rhythms leading up to what was clearly a coda for the dead.

In that context, Byron’s quartet was a lighter introduction for what would follow. The first of the three movements may well have been inspired by Loony Toons cartoons. The second movement was the only one with a title: “Russian March.” This was clearly playful, since the music was all pizzicato and the rhythms were ankle-twisting! The final movement reminded me of Lalo Schifrin, who had released two albums leading his “Demented Ensemble.”

Taken as a whole, the evening was sometimes uneven; but the performers had a consistently solid command of the wide diversity of the offerings.

Maazel’s 19th Century (“beyond” Bruckner)

Having given special attention to Anton Bruckner in writing about the CDs collected in Lorin Maazel: The Complete Warner Edition, I can now shift attention to nineteenth-century composers more familiar to many (if not most) readers. The composer that receives the most attention is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky with Emil Gilels as soloist in all three of that composer’s piano concertos. The CD with the last of those concertos, Opus 75 in E-flat major, also includes the Opus 35 violin concerto in D major with soloist Frank Peter Zimmermann. On that CD he also performs Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 19 (first) violin concerto in D major.

1882 photograph of Antonín Dvořák (photographer unknown, from the Gallica Digital Library, public domain)

The other concerto in this set is Johannes Brahms’ Opus 83 (second) piano concerto in B-flat major. This is an “international” performance with Sviatoslav Richter at the keyboard and Maazel conducting the Orchestre de Paris. The only other CD in this category involves the Berliner Philharmoniker playing all of the Slavonic Dances compositions by Antonín Dvořák, Opus 46 and Opus 72, both consisting of eight of the dances.

I have to confess that the Slavonic Dances are some of the earliest works that I encountered in childhood. It was only much later that I learned about the four-hand version; and I had the good fortune to work through all of them with a colleague. As a result, listening to the orchestral version brought back many pleasant memories! That said, I was most impressed by the thoroughness of repertoire when it came to the Tchaikovsky concertos. Such thoroughness is not as present for any of the other composers in this collection!

Center for New Music: October, 2026

This will be a relatively quiet month at the Center for New Music (C4NM). There will be only three performances, one of which will be the monthly G|O|D|W|A|F|F|L|E|N|O|I|S|E|P|A|N|C|A|K|E|S event. As usual, the venue is located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of the Golden Gate Theater, which is where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. Each of the below dates is hyperlinked to an event page through which tickets may be purchased as follows:

Saturday, October 17, 7:30 p.m.: Visual and sound artist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson will be visiting C4NM on a trip from Iceland. As of this writing, it appears that his will be one of four sets for the evening. At least some of the other three are likely to be familiar to readers: Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase, Mystic Commandos, and The American Flag. General admission will be $17.85 with a discounted rate of $12.51 for students and C4NM members.

Saturday, October 24, noon: As was the case last month, this month’s G|O|D|W|A|F|F|L|E|N|O|I|S|E|P|A|N|C|A|K|E|S event will have five sets of performances, most of which will again be identified by what I have previously called “bleeding edge eccentricities.” Those sets will be as follows:

1. Kevin CK Lo
2. Auca/Elome
3. Mas Coad
4. Human De-Selection & Realization Nature Group
5. Fognozzle

The entrance fee will be $10 general admission with a service fee of $2.51 with a $6 rate for students and C4NM members with a service fee of $2.24. There will be no further charge for the gourmet pancakes being served.

Poster design for H. Carr’s C4NM performance

Sunday, October 25, 2 p.m.: Bassist H. Carr will be accompanied at the piano by Unpil Baek. He has prepared a diverse program with the earliest selections taken from the six volumes of Béla Bartók's Mikrokosmos. The most recent offering will be a performance of long forms based on an approach to chromaticism by David Liebman. General admission will be $10 with a discounted rate of $5 for students and C4NM members.

Cellist Queyras to Perform for SFP Gala

Jean-Guihen Queyras with his cello (photograph by Marco Borggreve, courtesy of SFP)

Once again, this will be the month when San Francisco Performances (SFP) presents its annual Gala, which will celebrate the beginning of its 47th season. For those interested only in the music, concert-only tickets are now available. The program will be a duo performance with cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras accompanied at the piano by Alexandre Tharaud. As was previously observed, the earliest composer on the program will be Marin Marais with selections from the second of the five books of Pièces de viole; and the most recent work on the program will be the Dialogo and Presto movements from Benjamin Britten’s duo sonata in C major. The cello will substitute for the arpeggione (which was basically a bowed guitar) in the Adagio movement from Franz Schubert’s D. 821 duo sonata. The program will conclude with an arrangement by both performers of three of the 21 Hungarian Dances, the WoO 1 collection composed by Johannes Brahms, originally composed for piano four hands. Another interesting substitution will be the performance of Alban Berg’s Opus 5, four pieces originally composed for clarinet and piano.

This performance will begin earlier than usual at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 29. As usual, the venue will be Herbst Theatre  at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The prices for concert-only tickets will be $85, $75, and $65. Tickets may purchased through a secure Web page managed by SFP or by calling 415-392-2545.

San Francisco Performances: November, 2026

As was observed this past Sunday, the first Saturday of next month will be shared by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) and San Francisco Performances (SFP) with the first performance in the afternoon and the second in the evening. That latter of those events will be a solo recital by Djiboutian-French artist Raphaël Feuillâtre, the second performer in the SFP Guitar Series. There will be only two more SFP events during the month, both of which will be performed in Herbst Theatre (401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street) beginning at 7:30 p.m. Program details are as follows:

Jan Lisiecki at the piano (photograph by Christoph Köstlin, courtesy of SFP)

Thursday, November 12: Jan Lisiecki will return as soloist in the Shenson Piano Series. The title of his program will be World of Dance. That program has not yet been finalized; but the contributing composers will be Bohuslav Martinů, Manuel de Falla, Karol Szymanowski, Franz Schubert, and Béla Bartók.

Saturday, November 14: Guitarist Antigoni Gori was previously an SFP Artist-in-Residence. She will return to Herbst as a member of the Volterra Project Trio, a guitar trio whose other members are Luca Isolani and Maarten Vandenbemden. The most intriguing work on the program will probably be “Pornografia,” composed by Manos Hatzidakis. This composer is probably best known for having won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, which he wrote for the film Never on Sunday. In a similar vein, the trio will perform selections composed by Leonard Bernstein for West Side Story. The more “classical” offerings will include the eight Valses poéticos, composed by Enrique Granados, incidental music by Edvard Grieg for the play Peer Gynt, and Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) suite.

The Bleeding Edge: 10/5/2026

The major event of this week has already been announced. That will be the Other Minds Festival 30 with concerts beginning at 8 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, Friday, October 9, and Saturday, October 10, and a Sunday performance at 4 p.m. on October 11. There will be three other events, one on the evening before the Festival and the other two taking place during the last two Festival days. Specifics for those events will be as follows:

Wednesday, October 7, 7 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: This will be a live performance of the album Traveling Shoes with music composed by Damani Rhodes. He will be joined by the vocalist VADIA and poet Tongo Eisen-Martin. The performance will take place inside the exhibition Dread Scott: The Body Politic. RSVP is recommended and available through a Web site. The performance will take place in the gallery, and there will be an open bar in the lobby. Most readers probably know that the venue is located at 701 Mission Street.

Poster design based on the LOOK set for Medicine for Nightmares

Friday, October 9, 7 p.m., Medicine for Nightmares: This week’s program has a special title: LOOK, LISTEN! - a Concert for Peace. It will be a two-set performance based on that title. The first set will be LISTEN, and there will be two instrumental groups. Dr Bob is the duo of Bob Marsh, alternating between cello and voice, and David Michalak, known for his skatchboxes. He will also play lap steel guitar. The second group is a trio called The Out Patients. Kersti Abrams will take the front line on alto saxophone. Rhythm will be provided by bassist Pete Schmitt and Cindy Webster, adding vocals to performances on both singing saw and hurdy gurdy. The second set will be LOOK and will present five films made by Michalak between 1999 and the present. This is another familiar venue, 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.

Sunday, October 11, 8 p.m., Great American Music Hall: The week will conclude with a special performance of the program entitled Divine Offering: Celebrating the Legacy of Alice Coltrane. The performance will be led by vocalist and composer Sita Michelle Coltrane. She will be joined by special guests to celebrate the music and legacy of Alice Coltrane. Doors will open at 7 p.m., and the venue is located at 859 O'Farrell Street.

Has NYCB Forgotten “Metastaseis?”

Mira Nadon, principal with NYCB, preparing to perform “Pithoprakta” (from an article by Gia Kourlas for todays New York Times)

I see from a Web page for today’s New York Times that Suzanne Farrell is teaching the choreography for “Pithoprakta” to the current dancers in New York City Ballet (NYCB). The music, which has the same title, is by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis; and I first encountered it on an album that coupled it with another Xenakis composition, “Metastaseis.” George Balanchine created choreography for both pieces, beginning with “Metastaseis.” I remember seeing the performance of the two ballets in the original order, having already gotten to know the music through an album I had purchased.

Back in those days, I was a Balanchine fanatic. I particularly appreciated how he would create a ballet based on the music without necessarily introducing a narrative. In that context, both Xenakis ballets were about as abstract as could be imagined. This was no surprise, since I had come to know the composer’s book (in its English translation) Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition.

My guess is that Balanchine was never as well-versed in mathematics as Xenakis was. When it came to creating choreography for a composition like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 48, the four-movement “Serenade for Strings,” he knew how to reflect his listening experiences into choreography. However, listening to any composition by Xenakis is a far cry from listening to any composition by Tchaikovsky. Mind you, I am not saying that Balanchine needed to know more about mathematics in order to listen to Xenakis; but a command of techniques for listening to Tchaikovsky just could not be deployed for just about any composition in the Xenakis catalog.

At the risk of being too harsh, I find myself thinking about Xenakis’ efforts as, according to the old joke, “music of the future whose time has passed!” According to my archives, he has not surfaced on my site since a performance of his “Miika” at the Center for New Music in May of 2024! My own listening experiences go back even further, to the performance of his “Theraps” by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players early in December of 2022. The “bottom line” for that occasion was that the performance was neither convincing nor memorable!

What I found interesting about today’s article is that, as the text unfolded, I felt as if abstraction was giving way to personality. Thus, while Balanchine was the original choreographer, I suspect that the revival will deserve to be known as “Farrell’s ballet.” So much has changed since the ballet was created in 1968 that both performers and audience would do best by dwelling on the present, rather than the past. Furthermore, since Farrell herself is not much older than I am, I am all for her continuing to make engaging dance performances when both of us are now in our eighties!

Word of What Day?

Apparently, as a regular user of the Dictionary.com Web site, every morning my Inbox gets a “Word of the Day” message. This morning’s “word” was “déjà vu.” I am waiting to see if it will turn up again tomorrow!

The Wide Expanse of Lang Lang’s Program

Photograph of Lang Lang by Xin Qiu (courtesy of San Francisco Symphony)

Last night saw the first solo piano recital of the season in Davies Symphony Hall. Lang Lang has been performing in Davies since October of 2020, when he made his San Francisco Symphony debut as a Shenson Young Artist. Since that time he has made regular appearances, including a contribution to the Gala concert for the Centennial Season. To be fair, he is not my favorite pianist; but I continue to be impressed by the diversity of his repertoire.

For all I know, I was the only one sitting in Davies who was not bubbling over with enthusiasm. From my more detached point of view, the occasion felt a bit like feeding time at the zoo! Nevertheless, I was impressed by Lang Lang’s approach to programming. The first half established a mature aspect of the First Viennese School, beginning with a relatively late composition by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the K. 485 rondo movement composed in the key of D major. This was followed by the “early” and “late” periods of Ludwig van Beethoven with two sonatas. The first was particularly familiar, the Opus 13 (eighth) sonata in the key of C minor, given the title “Pathétique.” The second was the penultimate sonata, Opus 110 in A-flat major.

The second half of the program was more “international.” It began in Spain with six of the movements from the Suite española composed by Isaac Albéniz. It then remained in Spain with one of the movements from Enrique Granados’ suite Goyescas, the movement title being “Quejas, o La Maja el ruiseñor” (the maiden and the nightingale). This was followed without pause by the second of Franz Liszt’s “Consolation” compositions, written in the key of E major. The “Liszt segment” then continued with the “Tarantella” movement from Venezia e Napoli, the “appendix” to the second “year” in the Années de pèlerinage cycle. Things then quieted down a bit with an encore performance of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” the third movement from his Suite bergamasque. There was a second encore with no announcement of title and far too many notes (particularly in light of the number of all the preceding notes during the evening)!

To be fair, I was impressed with the selection of every one of the compositions in the program; but, as in the past, I came away disappointed that the pianist seemed more interested in being a virtuoso pianist than he was in doing justice to each of those compositions.

Confronting Anton Bruckner Again

Lorin Maazel on the cover of the forthcoming box of his Complete Warner Edition

I usually do not write about recordings that will be released more than a week in the future. However, I have begun listening to the CDs collected in Lorin Maazel: The Complete Warner Edition; and I realized that the first two CDs sent me on a chase down past articles, not only on this site but also from my tenure with examiner.com. Both of those CDs contain a single symphony by Anton Bruckner: WAB 107 (the seventh in E major) and WAB 108 (the eighth in C minor). That chase had much to do with the fact that, during his tenure with the San Francisco Symphony, Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) was not shy in introducing Bruckner symphonies to the audience; and, as many might guess, there was a fair amount of different reactions!

To be fair, I put a lot of my own effort into the twenty CDs in the Profil release, Anton Bruckner: The Collection. I encountered that collection during my tenure with Examiner.com. At that time I knew I was constrained to keeping my article relatively brief, so I tried to restrict myself to “nuts and bolts.” The fact that Maazel limited his Bruckner albums (originally from EMI) to only two symphonies urged me to take a “deeper dive.”

That “dive” took me back to the days when MTT was responsible for my earliest efforts of “deep listening” to Bruckner symphonies. I wrote about his encounter with WAB 107 in November of 2016, when I wrote about a concert that previewed the selection to be performed at the concerts taking place during a tour of Asia. By that time I was able to write: “MTT’s Bruckner performances just keep getting better;” and these days I relish opportunities to listen WAB 107, both of the multiple recordings I have and those rare opportunities when the symphony shows up on a concert program.

Quite honestly, I wish I had a time machine that would enable me to compare MTT’s approach with Maazel’s. On the other hand, Maazel’s two recordings deserve to be experienced on their own terms, rather than through comparison. In that context, I shall probably return to both of the Warner CDs with generous frequency while continuing to maintain fond memories of MTT!

November 7 will be a Full Saturday

The first Saturday of next month will be shared by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) and San Francisco Performances (SFP). The good news, however, is that the performances will not overlap. The first will take place in the afternoon and the second in the evening. Specifics are as follows:

Saturday, November 7, 3 p.m., Davies Symphony Hall: As in the past, the month will begin with the annual Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration. This will open with an afternoon of festivities in the lobby followed by a concert. The SFS musicians will be joined by two musicians playing salterio, the Spanish version of a dulcimer. David Hernández will play the soprano instrument, joined by Claudio Israel Vázquez on tenor. There will also be a solo violin performance by Francisco Fullana. As in the past, SFS will share the stage with the Casa Círculo Cultural ensemble. The program will include two compositions by Carlos Chávez, beginning with 1947 toccata for orchestra, originally composed as incidental music for a staged version of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The other selection will be the “Zarabanda” movement from the score for the ballet “La hija de Cólquide” (the daughter of Colchis). As always seems to be the case, the program will include a performance of José Pablo Moncayo’s “Huapango.”

Photograph of Agustín Barrios taken late in his life in the early 1940’s (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Saturday, November 7, 7:30 p.m., St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: Following the beginning of the SFP Guitar Series with the debut of guitarist Berta Rojas, the second Guitar Series program will be a solo recital by Djiboutian-French artist Raphaël Feuillâtre. His program will include his own arrangements of piano music composed by Isaac Albéniz, as well as an arrangement of Domenico Scarlatti’s K. 492 sonata in D major by Gérard Abiton, and Sergio Assad’s arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s “Invierno Porteño," the “winter” movement of Estaciones Porteñas (known in English as “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”). Assad will also contribute to the program with music composed for guitar, “Caterete,” the fourth movement in his Suite brasileira. Other composers of guitar music will include Francisco Tárrega, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Agustín Barrios.

SFP Guitar Series to Begin with Imaginative Duo

Berta Rojas with her guitar and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera (from the SFP Web page for their coming performance)

The first performance in the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Guitar Series will feature a debut. The guitarist will be Berta Rojas, who has performed extensively in the United States, as well as Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She has prepared an all-Latin duo program, joined by clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera.

This will begin with an original composition by Agustín Barrios Mangoré entitled “Un Sueño en la Floresta.” The other original work will be “Pajaro Chogui–Galopera,” composed jointly by Néstor Zavarce and Maricio Cardozo Ocampo. Ocampo has also provided arrangements of music by José Asunción Flores and Paquito D’Rivera, as well as Mangoré, whose final selection will be “Tribute to Dizz,” a set of improvisations on compositions by Dizzy Gillespie.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 24. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, which is located in the heart of the Civic Center at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Ticket prices are $95, $85, and $75; and a Web page has been created for online purchases. Because this is the first program, there is also a Web page for purchasing tickets for all four of the recitals in the series.

SFS: the Memorial Concert for MTT

2008 photograph of Michael Tilson Thomas by Jbitman (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

I find it somewhat interesting that both Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) and I made moves to the Bay Area around September of 1995. MTT had just concluded his tenure as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and became the eleventh Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). I had the less glamorous position of Group Leader for research in multimedia at the newly-formed Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory. Mind you, since 1991 I had been working on video classification research at the Institute for Systems Science in Singapore, meaning that both MTT and I had made “transnational” trips to the Bay Area!

In that context, I felt well-prepared for last night’s Special Event entitled A Concert for MTT. This involved a rich diversity of compositions, primarily from the twentieth century (the one exception being the world premiere performance of a composition by Mason Bates completed earlier this year). At the other end of the time-line, the earliest composer on the program was Charles Ives, represented by two of the movements from his 1913 New England Holidays symphony. The podium was shared by two conductors, both with close associations to MTT, Teddy Abrams and Edwin Outwater. Jenny Wong led the SFS Chorus; and four pianists contributed to the occasion (in order of appearance): Yuja Wang, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, John Wilson, and Jeremy Denk. (Abrams also performed four-hand with Wang for two movements from a sonata by Francis Poulenc.) There was also a selection of popular songs sung by Audra McDonald accompanied by Bruce Forman on guitar, but I am afraid that her command of pitch was not what it used to be in the MTT days. Far more satisfying was Renée Fleming’s account of Richard Strauss’ “Morgen!,” which she took as her encore with SFS this past Thursday afternoon.

In other words, the program for the evening unfolded as a "mixed bag.” Personally, my greatest frustration was the final offering (before the encore), the choral selection from Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land, entitled “The Promise of Living.” In the absence of any text titles, it was virtually impossible to grasp just what that “promise” was! Fortunately, Copland faired much better with that encore, which definitely is one of the twentieth-century war horses, the concluding “Hoe-Down” from Copland’s “Rodeo” ballet, composed for Agnes de Mille. On the other hand, I could not have been more delighted with the nod to John Cage, Lou Harrison’s orchestration of the last three of the five movements of Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano. The other memorable orchestral offering was the Andante moderato movement from Gustav Mahler’s sixth symphony in A minor, conducted by Outwater.

Finally, I found myself wondering whether last night was the first time Meredith Monk’s music was performed in Davies. The Chorus got to perform on its own to present “Panda Chant II.” This is one of the movements from one of Monk’s major works, The Games, which she composed in 1983. Monk has always had her own unique approach to composition; but, under Wong’s direction, the Chorus made this brief eccentricity a high point of the evening.

Old First Concerts: Only One Recital This Month

Cellist Jennifer Kloetzel and pianist Allegra Chapman (from the O1C Web page for their coming performance)

The only performance to be presented this month by Old First Concerts (O1C) will take place two weeks from today (which is basically the middle of the month). This will mark the beginning of the Women of Note multi-season project conceived by cellist Jennifer Kloetzel and pianist Allegra Chapman. Their objective is to celebrate music composed for cello and piano by women. As of this writing, specific selections have not yet been announced, but the contributing composers will be Hélène Liebmann, Luise Le Beau, Mel Bonis, and Leokadiya Kashperova.

Most readers probably know by now that O1C events take place at Old First Presbyterian Church. This is located at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue. The performance will begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, October 16. Tickets are available for purchase through the hyperlink attached to that date, and the performance will also be available for live-stream viewing. General admission will be $30 with reduced rates for seniors, students, and children age twelve and under. The O1C Web page includes the hyperlink for live-stream viewing, leading to a YouTube Web page, which, in turn, includes a hyperlink to encourage viewers to support O1C with a donation.

Two Orchestral Programs Prior to LINES Ballet

Unless I am mistaken, the last time the Alonzo King LINES Ballet performed with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) In Davies Symphony Hall, they provided King’s choreography for the performance of the one-act ballet version of Maurice Ravel’s suite Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose). They will return to Davies in the third week of next month, but the collaboration will be preceded by two Orchestral Series performances earlier in the month. Specifics for those two offerings will be as follows:

Mezzo Isabel Leonard (from the Web page for the SFS program on which she will be vocalist)

Friday, November 6, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, November 8, 2 p.m.: Mezzo Isabel Leonard will be the soloist in the performance of Maurice Ravel’s “ouverture de féerie,” given the title “Shéhérazade.” This will be followed by Vincent d’Indy’s Opus 42, a set of symphonic variations entitled “Istar.” The first half of the program will conclude with “Le jet d’eau,” the third movement in Claude Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire. Leonard will again be the vocalist. Following the “French half” of the program, the intermission will be followed by the first SFS performances of the symphonic fantasy that Richard Strauss composed based on music from his opera Die Frau ohne Schatten. Fabien Gabel will conduct the program.

Friday, November 13, and Saturday, November 14, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, November 15, 2 p.m.: Violinist Sayaka Shoji will be the soloist for a performance of Ottorino Respighi’s “Concerto gregoriano.” The “overture” for the program will be the first SFS performances of Augusta Holmès’ “Andromède.” The intermission will be followed by a selection of excerpts from the music that Sergei Prokofiev composed for his Romeo and Juliet ballet. The conductor will be Marie Jacquot.