Horszowski Trio to Return to Noe Music

Horszowski Trio members Jesse Mills, Rieko Aizawa, and Ole Akahoshi (from the ThunderTix Web page for purchasing tickets)

The founding members of the Horszowski Trio were the husband-and-wife duo Jesse Mills on violin and Rieko Aizawa on piano joined by cellist Raman Ramakrishnan. They last visited Noe Music in 2019, giving a sold-out performance. Since that time cellist Ole Akahoshi replaced Ramakrishnan, and the three of them will return to the Noe Valley Ministry and the end of next week. They have prepared a program that promises to be an engaging interplay of old and new.

The program will begin with the oldest selection, the Hoboken XV/12 piano trio in E minor by Joseph Haydn. The most recent offering will begin the second half of the program. This will be William Bolcom’s “Introduction and Rondo - ‘Haydn Go Seek,’” the piano trio he completed in 2008. The second selections for both halves will be particularly engaging. The Haydn trio will be followed by Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 19, a set of six “Little Pieces” for solo piano. Aizawa has arranged these pieces for piano trio. Finally, the program will conclude on the most familiar ground Antonín Dvořák's Opus 81 piano quintet. They will be joined by Owen Dalby playing second violin and violist Meena Bhasin.

As usual, the performance will take place at 4 p.m. on a Sunday, March 16. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. Open seating tickets may be purchased with prices of $45 for general admission and $15 for students. As in the past, there will be a limited number of reserved seats in the first few rows, which will be sold for $60. (Each price also has a modest handling fee.) All available tickets may be purchased through a single Web page.

SFCM to Present Alumni Song Recital

Readers may recall that, a little over a month ago, this site announced the first performances of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) Orchestra and the New Music Ensemble as the “highlights” for this month. However, yesterday morning I learned of a program in the Alumni Recital series that will take place this coming Friday. More specifically, the program will be performed by the husband-and-wife couple of pianist Brian Fitzsousa and soprano Carolyn Bacon, both of whom are alumni. (“For the record,” as they say, Bacon’s range extends beyond the usual soprano boundaries.)

They have prepared an impressively eclectic program of songs by American composers. These will be arranged in five sets as follows:

1. Charles Strouse (1928), Stephen Schwartz, (1948) Rags: “Blame it on a Summer Night” 
2. David Conte (1955), Anne Sexton (1928) Sexton Songs: “Her Kind” 
3. Kurt Weill (1900), Langston Hughes (1901) Street Scene: “Lonely House” 
4. Conte, Sexton Songs: “Riding the Elevator into the Sky”
*** 
5. Aaron Copland (1900), Emily Dickinson (1830) Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson: “The world feels dusty”
6. Copland, Dickinson Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson: “Heart, we will forget him”
7. Carmel Dean, Edna St. Vincent Milay (1892) Renascence: “Time Does Not Bring Relief”
8. Copland, Dickinson Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson: “When they come back”
9. Dean, Millay Renascence: “Elegy”
***
10. Tom Cippulo (1956), Lisel Mueller (1924) Of a Certain Age: Magnolia
11. Brian Fitzsousa (1992), William Butler Yeats (1865) “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
12. Ned Rorem (1923), Paul Goodman (1911) “The Lordly Hudson”
13. Adam Guettel (1964) Myths and Hymns: “Migaratory V”
***
14. William Bolcom (1938), Arnold Weinstein (1940) Cabaret Songs: “Waitin”
15. Stephen Sondheim (1930) Company: “Someone is Waiting”
16. John Bucchino (1952) “Sweet Dreams”
***
17. Marc Blitzstein (1905) Juno: “I Wish it So”
18. Ricky Ian Gordon (1956), Dickinson “Will There Really Be a Morning”
19. Guettel The Light in the Piazza: “The Light in the Piazza”

This performance will be held in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall on the top floor of the SFCM Bowes Center at 200 Van Ness Avenue, on the southeast corner of Hayes Street. It will begin at 7:30 p.m. on this coming Friday, September 15. According to the event page, there will be no livestream. Those planning to attend should make reservations through the hyperlink on that page. There will be no charge for admission.

Benjamin Appl’s Long Night’s Journey into Day

Baritone Benjamin Appl (photograph by Lars Borges, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) concluded its 2022–23 season with its final Art of Song recital. The vocalist was baritone Benjamin Appl, currently in the middle of his North American Concert Tour and making his San Francisco recital debut. He was accompanied at the piano by James Baillieu, last seen here this past April when he appeared with violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen at the annual SFP Subscriber and Member Concert.

Appl assigned the title Nocturne to his program. The preview article for this recital described that program as “a nighttime journey with selections arranged according to facets of the night – romance, the moon, stars, nightmares, fancies, insomnia, dreams, the darkest hour, and finally, morning.” The scope of the music itself covered almost the full breadth of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This made for an impressive structure, and spoken introductions by both Appl and Baillieu provided valuable assistance in negotiating that repertoire.

As might be guessed, Franz Schubert accounted for the largest number of selections on the program. However, only one of them, the D. 328 “Erlkönig” constituted war-horse familiarity. Indeed, the entire evening made for an engaging journey of new encounters in the vocal repertoire, the only other familiar selection providing the conclusion, Richard Strauss “Morgen,” the fourth song in his Opus 27 set, marking the beginning of a new day and the end of the  program’s nocturnal journey.

Unlike Tuesday evening’s program, this journey had an intermission. This provided a “gap,” which separated the two most intense episodes in the entire journey: “Nightmares” and “Phantasies.” These two episodes accounted for a surprising diversity of dispositions, with “Erlkönig” at one end of the spectrum and the black humor of William Bolcom’s “Song of Black Max” at the other. Presumably, the interval that separated these two extremes was as welcome to the performers as it was to the listeners!

The “Darkest Hours” episode was distinguished by two songs composed by Ilse Weber during her internment by the Nazis, first at Theresienstadt and then at the Auschwitz concentration camp. At that second venue she composed a lullaby for the children being held there. When those children were led to the gas chamber, Weber went with them, singing her lullaby to calm them. Appl’s account of that lullaby was decidedly the “darkest hour” before the dawn that would follow.

I must confess that I got lost struggling with the German title of Appl’s encore; but my “educated guess” is that he turned to one of the operettas of Oscar Straus, suggesting that the dawn that concluded his program led to a sunny day.

Benjamin Appl Debut to Conclude SFP Season

Baritone Benjamin Appl (photograph by Lars Borges, courtesy of SFP)

Next month in Herbst Theatre, the final program in the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Art of Song series will also mark the conclusion of the entire 2022–23 season. The vocalist will be baritone Benjamin Appl, performing with accompanist James Baillieu. They will begin a North American Concert Tour on May 2, culminating in a Carnegie Hall debut recital on May 20.

The program to be performed throughout that tour has been given the title Nocturne. The content of that program has been described as “a nighttime journey with selections arranged according to facets of the night – romance, the moon, stars, nightmares, fancies, insomnia, dreams, the darkest hour, and finally, morning.” The contributing composers will extend from the early nineteenth century of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann to living composers from Seattle (William Bolcom, born in 1938) and Scotland (James MacMillan, born in 1959). The conclusion of the journey at morning will be taken by that last of the four songs in Richard Strauss’ Opus 27, entitled, appropriately enough, “Morgen!”

This program will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 10. The entrance to Herbst is on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. This venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. All tickets are being sold for $65 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $55 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $45 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony, and they may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page. As available, single tickets will be sold at the door with a 50% discount for students and a 20% discount for seniors. Single tickets may also be purchased by calling 415-392-2545.

Jupiter String Quartet to Stream Concert Series

Jupiter String Quartet players (left-to-right) Daniel McDonough, Liz Freivogel, Nelson Lee, and Meg Freivogel (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

The Jupiter String Quartet is one of the more “familial” chamber ensembles. The violinists are Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel. The violist is Liz Freivogel, Meg’s older sister; and the cellist is Daniel McDonough, Meg’s husband (making him Liz’s brother-in-law). The members were appointed as artists-in-residence and faculty members at the College of Fine & Applied Arts of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne in 2012. Since that time they have performed regularly on campus at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at Illinois and directed chamber music programming.

On the four successive Fridays of next month, the quartet will present a concert series entitled Reflection and Renewal. Each program will begin with a movement from a well-known string quartet from the nineteenth century. This will serve as a basis for comparison with a more recent composition; and, on one of the programs, it will also be contrasted with an earlier eighteenth-century work. All programs will last for at most half an hour and will be available for on-demand viewing beginning at 10 a.m. (Pacific Time) on the Friday of each week. Viewing opportunities will continue through March 5. The programs planned for each of the four weeks are as follows:

February 5: The nineteenth-century offering will be the final movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 95 (“Serioso”) in F minor; and it will be followed by “Imprimatur” by Canadian composer Kati Agócs, currently teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music.

February 12: The program will begin with the second (theme and variations) movement from Franz Schubert’s D. 810 string quartet in D minor. This is known as the “Death and the Maiden” quartet, since the theme is taken from the D. 531 song setting the poem by Matthias Claudius of the same title. This will be followed by the final two movements of Michi Wiancko’s To Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shores, “Follow the Water” and “Rise Up.”

February 19: The opening selection will be the first movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s final string quartet, Opus 80 in F minor. This will be coupled with the Largo cantabile e mesto movement from Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/79 quartet in D major. The program will then conclude with excerpts from Dan Visconti’s Ramshackle Songs.

February 26: Complementing the preceding program, the final offering will begin with the fourth movement of Mendelssohn’s first quartet, Opus 12 in E-flat major. This will be followed by George Walker’s first string quartet, entitled “Lyric for Strings” and written in memory of his grandmother on his mother’s side. The program will then conclude with one of the three rags the William Bolcom composed for string quartet, “Incineratorag.”

The Krannert Center has created a single Web page for the entire series. Graphic tokens have been created for each of the four programs. That token will provide the event link through which the concert may be viewed when on-demand viewing begins.

The Bleeding Edge: 9/28/2020

Darius Milhaud conducting (artist unknown, from the Web page for this year’s Darius Milhaud Concert)

There is only one event to report this week. Back in the pre-pandemic days, I had more than enough to keep me busy by confining my attention to the San Francisco city limits. These days, however, I feel that it makes sense to go after streaming opportunities, particularly when they capture the spontaneity of a “live” performance.

As a result this will be my second account of a forthcoming performance taking place under the auspices of Mills College. The previous account actually took place in Chicago; but it was presented by Mills, since it featured cellist Tomeka Reid, who currently holds the Mills Darius Milhaud Chair in Music Composition. This time the performance will actually be live-streamed from the Littlefield Concert Hall on the Mills campus, and it will be the annual Darius Milhaud Concert.

As might be expected, most of the music will be by Milhaud, who taught at Mills between 1947 and 1971. This will included a selection of his songs based on texts from an impressive variety of sources, all sung by soprano Melissa Givens accompanied by Genevieve Feiwen Lee at the piano. Lee will also play excerpts from the solo piano suite La muse ménagère (the household muse). There will be chamber music performances of the 1940 sonatina for two violins, played by Sarah Thornblade and Sara Parkins, and the 1953 sonatina for violin and cello, played by Sara and Maggie Parkins.

The program will also present a “before, during, and after” account of music related to Milhaud. The “before” will be provided by Givens singing Erik Satie’s “La Statue de Bronze,” again accompanied by Lee. Thornblade and Parkins will couple their sonatina performance with the 1920 sonatina that Arthur Honegger dedicated to Milhaud. Composers influenced by Milhaud will include Zeena Parkins (her “Sistere” for solo cello and electronics, played by Maggie Parkins), William Bolcom’s “The Song of Black Max,” and Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now,” both sung by Givens accompanied by Lee.

The concert will begin at 8 p.m. this coming Friday, October 2. There is no charge for this event, but registration will be required through an Eventbrite event page. Those registering can also include a donation prior to checkout. Once checkout has been completed, information about the streaming source will be provided. Full program details and notes can be found on the Darius Milhaud Concert Web page on the Mills Performing Arts Calendar Web site. The Web page for the concert also includes a hyperlink to the Eventbrite site to establish admission.

The Schwabacher “Nocturnal” Vocal Recital

Last night the Taube Atrium Theater hosted the first of the four vocal recitals to be presented in the 37th season of the Schwabacher Recital Series. Organized around a nocturnal theme, the program featured two alumni of the 2019 Merola Opera Program, both with low-register voices. These were mezzo Alice Chung and baritone Laureano Quant, accompanied at the piano by Nicholas Roehler. Readers may recall that Chung delivered a commanding performance of Azucena in the excerpt from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore presented this past July in the Schwabacher Summer Concert.

Last night’s program saw Chung and Quant alternating over the course of an impressively diverse repertoire, coming together for duo performances in a few of the selections. However, what made this evening particularly memorable was that Quant sang one of his own compositions, settings of two poems by the nineteenth-century Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, collected under the title “Sombras” (shades). (Quant is, himself, Columbian.) This was music that captured both the semantics and the rhetoric of Silva’s texts, and Quant’s delivery provided engaging insights into the work of a poet probably unknown to most of the audience. For her part, Chung responded to the “call” of Quant’s offering with her own approach to the music of a Columbian composer, Luis Carlos Figueroa. She sang a lullaby that he composed setting his own text, a brief but engagingly affectionate offering.

Things were somewhat shakier when it came to selections by the better-known composers. The first half of the program concluded with Hector Berlioz’ Opus 7 collection Les nuits d’été (summer nights) with Quant and Chung each taking three of the songs. Berlioz is best known for his orchestral compositions; but Opus 7 was originally written for soloist and piano accompaniment, completed in 1841. He subsequently prepared orchestral versions between 1843 and 1856, and these tend to receive more attention in concert programming. One consequence is that those familiar with the piece find themselves being reminded of the orchestrations when the accompaniment is played at the piano.

In this respect one may say that Roehler did his best to play with a deck of cards that had been stacked against him. By the same count, those listening to Berlioz are more likely to associate him with instrumental bombast than with sensitive intimacy, but no bombast is to be found in the texts of the poems by Théophile Gautier that Berlioz set. Nevertheless, there was a sense that neither Quant nor Chung knew quite how to evoke the intimacy expressed through Gautier’s texts. The result was a dutiful account by both the soloists and their accompanist that never quite made for a compelling listening experience.

The first vocal selection in the second half of the program consisted of four of the five songs that Gustav Mahler collected under the title Rückert-Lieder. In this case (with one exception) Mahler prepared both orchestral and piano versions; and the first performance of four of the songs was given in the orchestral setting with Mahler conducting. (The remaining song was only orchestrated after Mahler’s death by Max Puttmann.)

Last night the song that was omitted was “Um Mitternacht” (at midnight hour). This was a wise decision, since it is one of the finest examples of imaginatively stunning sonorities in Mahler’s approach to instrumentation. Each of the songs performed last night had its own unique approach to intimacy that was well served by the piano accompaniment. Here, again, Quant and Chung shared the set, dividing the selections equally in half, each providing his/her own perceptive approaches to not only the music but also the turns of phrase in Friedrich Rückert’s texts.

The program ended on a more provocative note with six of the songs that William Bolcom had collected under the title Cabaret Songs. These are all settings of poems by Arnold Weinstein, each of which expressive its own distinctive perspective on New York City life. Two of the poems were sung as duets, given just the right amount of minimal staging to keep the words fresh in the ears of the listener. Bolcom gave each of these songs a light touch, but both Chung and Quant knew how to tease out the sharper edges of the prevailing rhetoric.

The Mahler songs were preceded by a solo offering by Roehler. He played the opening prelude movement from Claude Debussy’s Suite bergamasque. This collection is best known for its “Clair de lune” movement, although Vladimir Horowitz like to perform the minuet movement as an encore selection. The prelude is the most challenging of the suite’s four movements, and it suggests that Debussy may have been seeking out his own musical approach to stream-of-consciousness. The underlying emotional dispositions turn on a dime from one phrase to the next, and the closest one ever comes to resolution is the aggressive cadence that concludes the entire movement.

Sadly, Roehler did not seem to recognize the underlying turbulence of this music. He plugged his way dutifully from one measure to the next, making it clear that he knew how to account for all of the marks on the score pages. However, there was no sense of the underlying erratic rhetoric, meaning that the performance amounted little more than a parade of notes with little sense of order other than that of the underlying duration.

The encore was an affectionate account of Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow.” Clearly, all three of the performers enjoyed presenting this song. It also made for a soothing gesture to soften all those sharp edges that had just revealed themselves in the Cabaret Songs selections.

NCCO’s 25th Anniversary Festival Gets Off to a Disconcerting Start

Last night in Herbst Theatre, the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) presented the first of three concerts for this week conceived to celebrate the ensemble’s 25th anniversary and to honor Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg on the conclusion of her tenure as Music Director. This occasion also marked a personal milestone of sorts, since one of my earliest pieces for Examiner.com reported on the final program presented in Salerno-Sonnenberg’s first season with NCCO, which took place in May of 2009. The title of last night’s program was New Creations, and it provided a retrospective view of eight of the composers that were commissioned to add to the NCCO repertoire through the group’s Featured Composer Program.

Eight years have elapsed since I wrote that first piece, and each season saw the world premiere of a work written under the Featured Composer Program. Accounting for each of those composers could have been an excellent way to survey Salerno-Sonnenberg’s legacy. However, that would have required revisiting each of the eight contributions to the repertoire, in part if not in whole. By all rights, this could have been a memory test for those of us who followed the Program closely over those eight seasons. How many of those eight new works tweaked memories of the premiere performance? How many felt like an encounter with an old friend?

Unfortunately, such a memory test was not to be. Only a few of the commissioned works found their way onto last night’s program, and many of them had little connection to NCCO. The result was thus less a matter of taking stock as to how NCCO had progressed over those eight seasons and more a matter of leafing through a photograph album in which only a few of the images actually pertained to NCCO itself.

Of the works that did reflect on NCCO’s past, the one that made the strongest impression was the one that enjoyed the benefit of sustained reinforcement. Clarice Assad’s Impressions suite had a certain pride of place by virtue of opening Together, the first recording that NCCO released under Salerno-Sonnenberg’s direction. Last night revisited the first movement of that suite, a set of variations given the title “Personas.” Each of the variations explored the “personality” of each of the ensemble’s five sections and was played by only that section, often with one-to-a-part writing. (This meant that the bass “section” was actually a solo; and Assad clearly took that qualification in mind.) Much of the NCCO membership has changed since this suite was first performed, but that quality of distinctively contrasting personalities still registered splendidly in last night’s performance.

The other memorable addition to the NCCO repertoire came from Derek Bermel’s “Murmurations,” given its West Coast premiere in May of 2015. Unfortunately, last night’s performance of the second movement of this piece, “Gliding over Algiers,” had little impact. The title of the entire piece refers to the patterns formed by a large flock of starlings in flight, and each movement situated that flock in a different geographic setting. The second movement marked the middle of a fast-slow-fast architecture; but the prevailing rhetoric seemed to have more to do with thick syrup than with imaginative flight patterns.

Indeed, much of the program labored under excess sentimentality. William Bolcom’s “The Graceful Ghost Rag,” one of three “Ghost Rags” that he wrote for piano, could not sustain rearrangement for strings. The recording of Bolcom playing this rag on his Heliotrope Bouquet album was my first contact with Bolcom’s music, and it was refreshingly delightful. Bolcom seemed to capture the subtle imagination of the great ragtime pianists from a past that significantly predated his birth, and the result was a perfect instance of artfulness in miniature. However, the subtleties of his piano technique were washed away by the thicker sweetness of an ensemble of strings; and any sense of that personality that Assad had been able to mine was all but totally lost. Even more disappointing, Mark O’Conor’s “Song of the Liberty Bell” was a painful reminder of the most insipid qualities of theme music composed for PBS.

The other great disappointment was the decision to interleave the survey of the eight Featured Composers with comments from a panel moderated by NCCO Executive Director Philip Wilder. It was hard to escape the impression that Salerno-Sonnenberg was the only member of the panel with a direct attachment to the composers represented by performance. To be fair panelist Alicia Lawyer has been instrumental in providing means for such new works to circulate among several chamber orchestras across the United States, thus maintaining “life after premiere.” However, both Lawyer and the remaining panelist Kate Sheeran (Dean and Provost of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music) seemed disconcertingly detached from the music being made; and it was up to Salerno-Sonnenberg to set the context for each of the pieces that NCCO performed.

Last night should have left us with better memories of all that NCCO has achieved over the last eight seasons.

NCCO will Conclude 25th Anniversary Season with 3-Concert Festival

This month marks the conclusion of the 25th anniversary season of the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) and the final appearances of Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as Music Director. The occasion will be recognized through three concert performances, each with a different program, over the course of a single week. Each program, in turn, will have its own title that reflects on advances made by NCCO during Salerno-Sonnenberg’s tenure. Specifics are as follows:

Tuesday, May 16, New Century Creations: This program will be an homage to the Featured Composer Program. This was the process through which NCCO built up its repertoire by commissioning an impressive diversity of composers. The program will present two short works by both Jennifer Higdon and William Bolcom, excerpts from extended compositions by Lera Auerbach, Derek Bermel, and Clarice Assad, and individual works by Mark O’Connor, Ellen Taafe Zwilich, and Michael Daugherty. The Assad excerpt will be taken from Impressions, a five-movement suite that was selected for the opening tracks of Together, the first recording that NCCO released under Salerno-Sonnenberg’s direction.

Thursday, May 18, Farewell to Nadja: This concert will shift attention to Salerno-Sonnenberg herself. She will perform as soloist for the entirety of a “Vivaldi++” program. She will begin with the first four concertos published in Antonio Vivaldi’s Opus 8 collection of twelve entitled Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (the contest between harmony and invention). However, those four concertos are better known by the name assigned to them collectively, The Four Seasons.

This will be followed by the four pieces that Astor Piazzolla composed for his tango quintet (violin-viola, piano, electric guitar, bass, and bandoneon) between 1965 and 1970 and then collected under the title Estaciones Porteñas, which came to be known in English as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. Piazzolla never intended any connection to Vivaldi; nor, for that matter, did he view these pieces as a single suite. However, between 1996–1998 Leonid Desyatnikov established the “Vivaldi connection” by arranging them as four concertos for solo violin and string orchestra, keeping Piazzolla’s “seasonal” titles intact. This version was first performed by Gidon Kremer, for whom the arrangements were written; and it is also included on the NCCO Together album.

Saturday, May 20, Silver Jubilee Celebration: The “official celebration” of the NCCO anniversary will involve three guest soloists contributing to a program consisting entirely of the music of George Gershwin. Pianist Anne-Marie McDermott will join NCCO in a performance of “Rhapsody in Blue” in the 1926 “theater orchestra” setting orchestrated by Ferde Grofé. This will be followed by a series of selections of Gershwin’s contributions to the Great American Songbook collection. The vocalists for these selections will be soprano Melody Moore and baritone Efraín Solís. The program will then conclude with “An American in Paris.”

All three of these concerts will begin at 8 p.m. in Herbst Theatre at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Festival passes are now on sale for both two and three performances. The price for premium seating for the full series of three concerts is $155, with $125 and $74 for the other sections. The prices for only two concerts are $110, $88, and $52, respectively. It is also possible to purchase single tickets at reduced rates of $55, $44, and $26 when passes are purchased. Arrangements for the purchase of passes can be made online through a Google Forms Web site. In addition, City Box Office has created event pages for the three-concert pass and passes for the concerts on May 16 and 18, May 16 and 20, and May 18 and 20; but these do not include the special rate for additional single tickets.

The prices for single tickets will be $61, $49, and $29. City Box Office has created separate event pages for May 16, May 18, and May 20. All event pages (including those for passes) show the seating plan for Herbst Theatre to illustrate which sections are available for which prices. Finally, single tickets for students showing valid identification will be available at the Box Office for $15.

Program Change for Next Month’s Morrison Artist Series Recital

The sixth concert in the annual Morrison Artists Series, presented by the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University (SFSU), was originally planned for the San Francisco debut of the Van Kuijk Quartet, currently on the BBC New Generation Artists roster. Unfortunately, at the beginning of this month, Richard Festinger, Artistic Director of the series, was informed that this string quartet had cancelled their Spring 2017 tour of the United States. Fortunately, Festinger has found an ensemble to fill in for that date; and he did not have to look any further than San Francisco itself.

Next month’s Morrison recital will now present the Delphi Trio, whose members are violinist Liana Bérubé, cellist Michelle Kwon, and pianist Jeffrey LaDeur. They formed their group while they were studying together in the Chamber Music Program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. They have performed at a variety of major venues in San Francisco, including a residency in the Old First Concerts series at Old First Church. For their performances they have developed a repertoire that balances recent (including commissioned) compositions with more familiar selections from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The program for next month has been organized around one of those commissions, William Bolcom’s first substantial piano trio, which he wrote for Delphi in 2014. This significant contribution to 21st-century chamber music will be coupled with Toru Takemitsu’s “Between Tides,” a piano trio that he composed in 1993. These two recent works will be framed by more traditional offerings. The program will begin with the second of Ludwig van Beethoven’s three Opus 1 piano trios, one of the composer’s earliest efforts supported by Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky, at whose house all three trios were first performed in 1793. The concluding selection will be Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 49 trio in D minor.

This concert will begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 7, in the McKenna Theatre in the Creative Arts Building at SFSU, a short walk from the SFSU Muni stop at the corner of 19th Avenue and Holloway Avenue. Tickets are free but advance registration is highly desirable. Reservations may be made through the event page for this concert. As usual, Festinger will give a pre-concert talk at 7 p.m.; and the four musicians will give a collective Master Class at 2 p.m. on the day of the concert. This two-hour session will take place in Knuth Hall, also in the Creative Arts Building, and will be open to the general public at no charge and with no requirements for tickets.

In Praise of Naumburg

I may have found a data point that runs contrary to my generally dismal view of music competitions and judges whose interests seem to conflict with what I have called "accountability to the music itself." The source of the data is the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation; and, because San Francisco Performances has an association with the Naumburg Foundation through which they present a recital by each year's Naumburg Competition winner, I have now been able to enjoy two thoroughly "music-based" performances. The first was in 2005 by soprano Sari Gruber; and the second was last night, when I heard 23-year-old cellist David Requiro at Herbst Theatre. I probably should not be surprised that I seem to enjoy Naumburg winners better than those who have won other prizes. Last night I learned that Robert Mann is the current Director of the Naumburg Foundation, the same Robert Mann whom I was extolling on Saturday for his communicative skills in a pedagogical setting. Most important among those skills is his ability to communicate about music, rather than just technique, assuming that technique can only be mastered once one understands the music to which it is being applied.

Requiro is a model example of an up-and-coming musician who appreciates the value of such understanding of the music he plays. Thus, while I often try to look for a unifying theme in a concert program, the primary asset of Requiro's selections was the breadth of repertoire over which he is willing to apply his understanding skills. On the historical time scale the program ranged from Ludwig can Beethoven in the past to William Bolcom in the present, with "stops along the way" for Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy, and Gaspar Cassadó. This scope also demonstrated an ability to work with a variety of time scales, from the relatively brief and distinct Beethoven WoO 46 variations (on the "Bei Männern" duet from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zauberflöte) and the comparatively short movements of Bolcom's capriccio through the "unified" three movements of the Debussy sonata to the symphonic-scale Brahms F major (Opus 99) sonata. In other words each of the works on the program required its own characteristic approach to execution. Not only did Requiro find that approach in each case; but also his rapport with his accompanist, Elizabeth DeMio, was so thorough that the results always constituted a well-conceived and shared vision.

I also appreciated that the program honored both "abstract" and "representational" approaches to composition. Thus, the symphonic plan of the Brahms sonata was nicely balanced by not only the explicit depictions of Cassadó and Bolcom but also the possibly "hidden program" of the Debussy sonata. (The program notes by Eric Bromberger neglected to mention that Debussy had considered titling this sonata "Pierrot fâché avec la lune" [Pierrot annoyed with the moon]. One has to wonder if this choice of title had anything to do with a reaction of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which had been composed about three years earlier. Debussy fâché avec Schoenberg?) Consequently, the wide diversity of performance challenges also made for an equally wide diversity of listening experiences. One could not ask for more of any concert program.