SFS Great Performers: 2026–2027

Having used this past weekend to prepare readers for San Francisco Symphony (SFS) performances of both its Chamber Music Series and the “special solo piano recital” by pianist Lang Lang, this seems to be a good time to prepare listeners for other events in Davies Symphony Hall that do not involve SFS. The Great Performers Series will present ten programs, most of which will be solo recitals. However, the season will begin with a piano trio followed by an orchestral performance.

All performances will take place in Davies Symphony Hall. Tickets will be available for purchase through the hyperlinks for the dates; as usual, tickets may also be acquired at the Box Office, which is at the entrance to Davies on the south side of Grove Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. Specifics are as follows:

Thursday, October 15, 7:30 p.m.: The series will begin with a piano trio, each of whose members is also a major solo recitalist. Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet will share the program with Lisa Batiashvili on violin and cellist Gautier Capuçon. The program will begin with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 8, his first piano trio, composed in the key of C minor and originally given the title “Poème.” This will be followed by Claude Debussy’s only piano trio. The second half of the program will be devoted entirely to Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 65, his third piano trio, in F minor.

Sunday, October 25, 2 p.m.: Rafael Payare will conduct the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal following his visit as a guest conductor for SFS in May of 2023. The first half of the program will be devoted entirely to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s only violin concerto, his Opus 35 composed in the key of D major. The second half of the program will shift to the key of E minor for Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 93, his tenth symphony.

Tuesday, November 10, 7:30 p.m.: The first solo piano recital in the Series will be performed by Hélène Grimaud. She has prepared a program of two “last” piano sonatas, each of which is a major undertaking unto itself. The first half will be devoted to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 111, composed in the key of C minor. The intermission will be followed by Franz Schubert’s D. 960, composed in the key of B-flat major. It is worth noting that Grimaud prepared a title for her program, which could not have been more informative: The Last Testament!

Monday, November 30, 7:30 p.m.: Violinist Hilary Hahn will be joined at the piano by Yekwon Sunwoo. They, in turn, will be joined by baritone Matthias Goerne for the world premiere of Wir, composed by Reena Esmail on a commission by SFS. The text weaves together German poems by Paul Celan with “interstitial verse by Rebecca Gayle Howell.” The program will begin with Sunwoo accompanying Hahn in a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 24 (fifth) sonata in F major, often known as the “Spring” sonata.

Sunday, January 10, 7:30 p.m.: Pianist Emanuel Ax will devote the second half of his program entirely to Frédéric Chopin. He will reflect on a diversity of genres, beginning with the Opus 61 Polonaise-Fantasy in A-flat major followed by the Opus 60 Barcarolle in F-sharp major. Ax will then “turn back the clock” for the two nocturnes in Opus 27 and the Opus 31 scherzo, the second piece in this genre, composed in the key of B-flat minor. The first half of the program will also have a “reverse chronology,” beginning with Robert Schumann’s very early (Opus 2) Papillons suite, followed by the four impromptus collected in Franz Schubert’s D. 899, composed towards the end of the year prior to his death.

Tuesday, January 19, 7:30 p.m.: The title of this event is An Evening with Itzhak Perlman. It was conceived by director Dan Sullivan as a multimedia program. Violinist Perlman will be accompanied at the piano by Rohan De Silva. However, under Sullivan’s direction, he will interweave storytelling with personal photographs, along with clips from the documentary film entitled Itzhak.

Monday, March 1, 7:30 p.m.: Each half of pianist Seong-Jin Cho’s solo recital will conclude with music by Sergei Prokofiev. The intermission will be preceded by a selection of ten of the movements in the score for the Romeo and Juliet ballet; and the program will conclude with Prokofiev’s Opus 84, his eighth piano sonata composed in the key of B-flat major. This will make for a more-than-generous abundance of notes, so the program will begin with Jörg Widmann’s “Sonatine facile.” The second half of the program will open with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 396, his second “Fantasia,” a fragment composed in the key of C minor and completed by Maximilian Stadler.

Sunday, April 18, 7:30 p.m.: This will be the first of two consecutive evenings of solo piano recitals. The soloist will be Yuja Wang, who has been visiting Davies almost as long as I have! As of this writing, she has not yet finalized her program.

Monday, April 19, 7:30 p.m.: The pianist for the second evening will be Evgeny Kissin. He has prepared an all-Beethoven program. The second half will be devoted entirely to one of the later compositions, the Opus 120 set of variations, usually known as the “Diabelli Variations.” The first half will begin “almost at the beginning” with the first of the three Opus 2 piano sonatas, composed in the key of F major. This will be followed by the first of the two Opus 27 sonatas, given the title “Quasi una fantasia” and composed in the key of E-flat major.

Alisa Weilerstein with her cello (from the Web page for this season’s Davies performance)

Sunday, May 16, 7:30 p.m.: Cellist Alisa Weilerstein will perform a duo recital with Inon Barnatan at the piano keyboard. Each half of the program will conclude with a sonata for cello, which is the only one written by its respective composer. The first of these will be Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 65 in G minor; and the evening (and series) will conclude with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 (which also happens to be in G minor). The program will begin with Suite populaire Espagnole, an arrangement of six of the songs from Manuel de Falla’s Siete canciones populares españolas (seven Spanish folksongs), which Falla arranged with the assistance of Paul Kochanski. Maurice Maréchal subsequently adapted this arrangement as a duo for cello and piano. The second half of the program will begin with selections from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 34, as set of short pieces given the title 24 Preludes. Those selections were arranged for cello and piano by Lera Auerbach.

E4TT Announces 2026/27 Season Plans

I see that it was almost exactly one year ago when I wrote about Ensemble for These Times’ (E4TT) plans for the 2025/26 season. Yesterday’s electronic mail brought me the announcement of the 2026/27 season. This will be the nineteenth Home Season, and it will launch a two-year initiative entitled The HOME Project, which will explore (in E4TT’s own words) “the meaning of home.”

The E4TT home page has now been updated with hyperlinks for the five concerts to be presented. Each of those Web pages provides a summary of the works to be performed, as well as hyperlinks for ticket purchases. All of the performances will also be live-streamed. Each of the programs in San Francisco has its own Web page including a hyperlink to the date-and-time summary as follows:

Sunday, October 18, 3:00 p.m., Community Music Center, Call for Scores: Solo Piano, Vol. 3: Thirteen composers were selected. Pianist Dale Tsang will perform their contributions as follows:

1. Jinjoo Choi: "Cogwork Rhapsody"
2. Gilad Cohen: "Pulse"
3. Michael Coleman: Seville Rag
4. Andrew Davis: "Album Leaves - III. Pulse Train"
5. Xinyuan Deng: "Autumn Landscape"
6. Isaiah Diaz-Lopez:"Magenta - The First to Dream
7. Arturo Fernandez: "Pedro's Come Home Suite - Conga en forma di Corrente"
8. Matthew Lam: "Fragments of Rain"
9. Joao Oliveira: "ff - I. Frozen Fred"
10. Luca Pasquini: "Dispositions - 1. Leggiero, flickering"
11. Josh Rodriguez: "LUZ ENTRE AGUAS - II. Estancia"
12. Louis Rosen: "ACT ONE SUITE - 1. Opening - The City" and "3. Traveling Music"
13. Brady Wolff: "Evoke Stardust"

For those that do not yet know, the venue is located in the Mission at 544 Capp Street. Tickets may be purchased for $30, $15, and $5. A Web page has been created for both tickets and livestream connection.

Poster design for the November concert (from its E4TT Web page)

Sunday, November 15, 4:00 p.m., Old First Concerts, Exile | Banishment | Home: The program will begin with selections for soprano and mezzo from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 79, From Jewish Folk Poetry. Vocalists will be sopranos Nanette McGuinness and Carina Kahane and mezzo Melinda Martinez Becker. There will also be two world premiere performances: a duo for cello and piano by Mary Bianco and “Skazka,” composed for narrator and piano ensemble by Alex Malinas. The second half of the program will begin with the cello solo “Armadura,” composed by Andrea Casarubbios. This will be followed by two further vocal compositions: David Garner’s “Unter dayne vayse Shtem” for soprano and piano and “Stories of My Mother,” composed by Stella G. Gitelman Willoughby for mezzo and piano. This is another familiar venue, located at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue. Tickets will be available for purchase through an Old First Concerts Web page.

Friday, April 9, 7:30 p.m., San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), HOME: This will be E4TT’s seventh multimedia collaboration with the Conservatory. There will be four world premiere performances. One of them will present the winner of the E4TT/SFCM Composition Department multimedia student composition competition. The other three will be recent works commissioned by emerging composers Max Marcus, Max Tafoya, and Zoe Yost. Clarice Assad will contribute one of her works to the second half of the program, which will also see a visual montage for a setting of four “responses” to "America the Beautiful,” composed, respectively, by Tyson Gholston Davis, Reena Esmail, Jake Heggie, and Juri Seo. The specific SFCM venue has not yet been announced.

Saturday, May 15, 7:30 p.m., Center for New Music, Inspiración: Music by Women and Nonbinary Composers: The program will feature three works commissioned by Luna@10, marking the tenth anniversary of the Luna Composition Lab. Those works will be a piano trio by Ilaria Hawley, a string duo by Peyton Neleson, and a piano trio by Ebún Ogúntola. The remainder of the program will be devoted to chamber music by more familiar composers: Chen Yi, Gabriela Lena Frank, Edna Alejandra Longoria, Ann Thorvaldsdottir, and Gabriela Mari Esabel Valverde. Most readers probably know by now that the venue is located at 55 Taylor Street, just north of Market Street.

Plans for Other Minds Festival 30

The beginning of this month saw the release of the plans for the Other Minds Festival 30. It will again take place in October, somewhat earlier than last year. The venue will be the same, but the name has expanded to the Brava Theater for Women in the Arts. (It is still located in the Mission at 2781 24th Street. As was observed last year, the venue is a few blocks to the east of the Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery.) Concerts will again begin at 8 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, Friday, October 9, and Saturday, October 10, with a Sunday performance at 4 p.m. on October 11. Panel discussions will precede each performance, beginning an hour before the concert. City Box Office has created a single Web page for purchasing tickets for each of the events, as well as a single Festival Pass for all performances. The works to be performed will be as follows:

• October 8: This will be an evening-length multimedia performance created by Joseph Bohigian entitled I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment. The title refers to the Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov. Vocalist Khatchadour Khatchadourian will also play duduk with electronic accompaniment by Ensemble Decipher.
• October 9: This will be a three-set performance. Sylvie Courvoisier will begin the program with a solo piano set influenced by both European chamber music and American avant-garde jazz. Vocalist Mahsa Vahdat will perform original settings of Persian poetry, accompanied on the setar by Atabak Elyasi. The program will conclude with Friction Quartet performing works by Juri Seo.

Photograph of King Britt by Colin Kerrigan

• October 10: The three sets will present two duos and one solo. Elizabeth Gaver will alternate between Hardanger fiddle and rebec to accompany vocalist Kristin Nordeval, who will augment her performance with live electronics. In the second duo drummer John Diaz will perform with  guitarist Zachary James Watkins, who augments his performances with electronics. The title of the final set is “Blacktronika,” performed on live electronics by King Britt.
• October 11: The Festival will conclude with a solo performance by pianist Charlemagne Palestine.

The Bleeding Edge: 12/29/2025

The New Year will get off to a relatively quiet start, literally as well as figuratively. The first three days of January will see the next round of performances of 1000 Whispers From Our Future at Audium, which was first announced on this site at the beginning of this month. On the fourth day of the month, the Thingamajigs Performance Group will welcome the new year in its own way at Artists’ Television Access (ATA).

This is a diverse ensemble, which brings together the expanded cinema apparatus of Keith Evans, percussion, Jurassic electronics, and projection by Suki O'Kane, glass, shō, hijiriki, and electric guitar by Edward Schocker, and voice and objects from Rae Diamond. Admission will be by donations, which may be paid in advance through an every.org Web page. The goal is to achieve $15,000; and, as of this writing, over $11,000 has been raised. Donors will be able to use their receipts to gain entry. However, payments at the door will also be accepted; and no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

The Artists’ Television Access venue in the Mission (from its every.org Web page)

The performance will begin at 7 p.m. on Sunday, January 4; and the venue is in the Mission at 992 Valencia Street.

Tickets on Sale for Other Minds Festival 27

I saw my first notification of this year’s Other Minds (OM) Festival about a month and a half ago, at which time tickets had not yet gone on sale. Now that City Box Office has created a Web page for both a Festival Pass to all four of the concerts and ticket sales for individual concerts, the time seems right to get out the word about the Festival itself. Most important is that, following up on the performance of OM Festival 26 at the Great Star Theater in Chinatown, the Festival will return to the Civic Center.

This year’s venue will be the Taube Atrium Theater. Furthermore, while Festival 26 consisted of three performances on consecutive evenings, Festival 27 will present four performances on Wednesday through Saturday, November 15, 16, 17, and 18. As in the past, all concerts will begin at 8 p.m. preceded by a panel discussion at 7 p.m. The Wednesday and Thursday programs will both present two sets, while the remaining two “weekend” programs will have three sets. Current information about the performances is as follows: [added 9/29, 4 p.m.: two programs have been added to the Festival, making it begin one day earlier and conclude one day later; the first program of the Festival is now as follows:

Tuesday, November 14: This will not be a performance. Instead, the Festival will begin with a screening of the “official bio-documentary” of composer Morton Subotnick. The film was directed by Robert Fantinatto. The screening will be followed by a discussion, which will include Subotnick and Other Minds Executive and Aritstic Director Charles Amirkhanian.˘]

Wednesday, November 15: The first set will be a duo performance by Swedish sound artist and composer Ellen Arkbro and Australian drummer Will Guthrie. They will present the United States premiere of a work scored for electronics, gongs, and tam-tams. The second set will be an improvisation by American pianist and composer Craig Taborn.

Thursday: November 16: For the first set Canadian-American composer Linda Bouchard will bring the international Ensemble TriOcular+ to San Francisco to perform music from her Live Structures project. The pieces themselves use real-time graphics to explore different ways of interpreting data into music notation. Electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick will then present his composition “As I Live and Breathe.” The performance will involve a live interaction with a hybrid Buchla 200e/Ableton synthesizer combined with electronic patches and analog recordings. He will be joined by German video artist Lillevan, who will provide live video animation. 

Friday, November 17: Mary Kouyoumdjian will present the first live performance of “They Will Take My Island.” She will collaborate with Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan to present a musical documentary hybrid based on themes of family and immigration. The second set will be taken by the debut of Artur Avanesov, who is the leading composer of his generation in Armenia. He will present the world premiere of his solo piano composition “Tezeta,” followed by the American premiere of his piano quintet “Quasi Harena Maris.” The final set will be a performance of works by American composer Carl Stone. He will perform some of these, while others will be presented by Sarah Cahill, Paul Dresher, and Ned Rothenberg.

Saturday, November 18: The first set will be a performance of Neil Rolnick's monumental “Lockdown Fantasies,” a work for piano and electronics performed by Geoffrey Burleson. Bora Yoon will perform “( (( PHONATION )) ),” a multimedia set for live electronics, voice, and violin, with visual collaborator Joshue Ott. The Friction Quartet of violinists Otis Harriel and Kevin Rogers (sharing first chair), violist Mitso Floor, and cellist Doug Machiz will take the final set. They will present the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by Norwegian composer Eivind Buene, along with another of his compositions, “Grid.” [added 9/29. 4:05 p.m.:

Sunday, November 19: This will be the world premiere performance of Re:gendo, an evening-length multimedia work by Carl Stone. The music involves both computer-based electronics and field recordings of the urban soundscape in Tokyo. The performance will include the Japanese singer Akaihirume.]

The prices for single tickets will be $50, $30, and $15. The prices for the Festival Pass will be $160, $100, and $50. The run time for each of the concerts is expected to be two and one-half hours. Seating will be general admission within the constraints of the specific ticket prices. All tickets may be purchased through the aforementioned City Box Office Web page. For those unfamiliar with the venue, it occupies the top floor of the Veterans Building, which is located on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and McAllister Street. This makes the venue convenient for both north-south and east-west Muni bus stations.

Difficult Listening from Seth Parker Woods

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

Around the middle of this month, Cedille Records released the latest cello solo album of Seth Parker Woods, whose first album, asinglewordisnotenough, was released by Confront Recordings in London in November of 2016. The title of the new album, his Cedille debut, is Difficult Grace, which had previously been the title of a full-evening multimedia concert. In that performance Woods served as narrator as well as cellist.

Much of the album serves to document world premiere performances of compositions by Monty Adkins, Frederick Gifford, Ted Hearne, and Nathalie Jackson. Earlier works by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson and Alvin Singleton are woven among the premiere tracks. In a staged multimedia setting there may have been enough imaginative content to draw (if not sustain) the attention of a sympathetic audience. However, the experience of listening to this recording left me (in the immortal words of Fred Astaire) “cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes,” with Hearne’s scatology prompting the only raised eyebrows.

One might say that, taken as a whole, the album serves up far too much “difficult” along with no convincing signs of “grace.”

Opera Parallèle Announces Plans for 2023

During the coming year, Opera Parallèle will present two contemporary operas, each involving innovative approaches to presentation. The first of these will be Everest: An Immersive Experience, composed by Joby Talbot, working with a libretto by Gene Scheer. The second will be a new production and orchestration of Paul Moravec’s opera The Shining, setting a libretto by Mark Campbell based on the novel by Stephen King.

Scheer’s libretto accounts for an ill-fated 1996 effort to ascend to the peak of Mount Everest. Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel has conceived a staging that fuses the vivid imagery of graphic novels with the visceral power of the operatic voice, both of which inhabit a multi-sensory environment. This will be the first production of its kind in which the audience will experience 360-degree animated visuals and surround sound. The immersive staging will begin with an expansive interactive lobby installation, which will lead individuals to their seats after navigating a snowy tundra. All of the participating vocalists will be pre-recorded. They will include Sasha Cooke, Nathan Granner, Kevin Burdette, Hadleigh Adams, Charlotte Fanvu, Matt Boehler, Shawnette Sulker, Whitney Steele, and Kevin Gino. Scheer’s English libretto will be projected as subtitles.

This production will be given nine performances. The opening will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, February 3; and admission will be by invitation only. The remaining performances will take place at [added 1/18, 2:40 p.m.: 5 p.m. and] 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, February 4, Wednesday, February 8, Thursday, February 9, and Saturday, February 11, and at [added 2/1; 8:30 a.m.: 7 p.m. and] 9:30 p.m. on Friday, February 10, with a 3 p.m. matinee on Sunday, February 5, a 2 p.m. matinee on Wednesday, February 8, [added 2/9, 8:45 a.m.: matinees at 1:30 p.m. (no mask required) and 4 p.m. (mask required) on Saturday, February 11,] and a 1 p.m. matinee on Sunday, February 12. The venue will be Z Space, on the outer edge of the Mission at 450 Florida Street. Nicole Paiement will conduct all performances. A single Web page has been created for all ticket purchases. General admission will be $50, with a $20 rate for students with valid identification and a “Pay-It-Forward” charge of $75. [added 2/1, 8:35 a.m.: Masks will be required for performances at 5 p.m. on February 4, 2 p.m. on February 8, and 7 p.m. on February 10.]

The new version of The Shining is a co-production of Opera Parallèle with the Hawaii Opera Theater and the Portland Opera. The participating vocalists will be Edward Parks, Kearstin Piper Brown, Aubrey Allicock, David Walton, Nathan Granner, Timothy Murray, Eugene Brancoveanu, Christabel Nunoo, and Molly Mahoney. Once again, the production will be staged by Staufenbiel, and Paiement will conduct. The performance will take place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with performances on June 2, 3, and 4. Further information will be made available when tickets go on sale this coming January 9. A Web page has been created for hyperlinks, which will be added to provide that information.

Pamela Z to Present Results From Rome Prize

courtesy of Pamela Z

Some readers may recall that, at the end of August of 2019, this site reported on Pamela Z’s Other Rooms program, describing it as a “short-term farewell concert” prior to her beginning her residency at the American Academy in Rome as a winner of the 2019–20 Rome Prize. During the second full weekend of this month, Z will present a program based heavily on how she spent her time in Rome. The title of that program is Simultaneous.

Z describes the piece as “an intermedia performance work for voice & electronics, chamber ensemble, and video + multi-channel sound installation.” As might be anticipated, the work itself will explore many facets of the concept of simultaneity. It incorporates fragments of speech and stories taken from interviews recorded in Rome, woven together with melodies, textures, and pitched and rhythmic motifs largely generated by the speech material. The members of the chamber ensemble that will perform with Z are Kyle Bruckmann (oboe and cor anglais), Charlton Lee (viola), Theresa Wong (cello), and Kjell Nordeson (percussion).

Simultaneous will be given three performances, all beginning at 8 p.m. on Friday, December 9, Saturday, December 10, and Sunday, December 11. They will take place in SPACE 124, which is located in the Project Artaud building in the Mission at 401 Alabama Street. Eventbrite has created a Web page for purchasing all tickets. General Admission will be $25; however, those with the resources to purchase “Generous Admission” tickets for $40 will be greatly appreciated. Z currently has an artist residency at SPACE 124, and her work is supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission.

The Lab: June, 2022

Last month information about performances at The Lab was sufficiently sparse that I folded the content into two “busy weekend” articles. Things seem to be slightly picking up this month. The first event was folded into the “busy weekend” account for June 10–12. However, when I wrote that article, I was not (yet) aware that there would also be a performance on June 11. As of this writing, there now seem to be three events taking place this month; so I shall use this article to review them all.

For those unfamiliar with the venue, The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street, a short walk from the corner of Mission Street. The location is particularly good for those using public transportation, since that corner provides bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel as well as a BART station. Doors open half an hour before the concert is scheduled to begin; and, back before the pandemic, it was usually the case that a long line had accumulated prior to the opening. Specific information, including when the performance begins and a hyperlink to the event page that provides both background material and hyperlinks for ticket purchases, is as follows:

Friday, June 10, 9 p.m.: This is the event that was included in the aforementioned “busy weekend” article. It will be a solo recital by Japanese multi-instrumentalist Eiko Ishibashi. She has produced numerous albums as a singer-songwriter. Her instrumental compositions have been created for film, television, theater, and exhibitions; and she is also an improviser.

Yosuke Fujita with two of the organs he has built (from the event page for his visit to The Lab)

Saturday, June 11, 9 p.m.: Yosuke Fujita is a sound artist, organist, and composer based in Japan. He tends to perform under the name Fuji||||||||||ta. HIs primary interest is the exploration, manipulation and presentation of unheard sounds and noises commonly found within nature, including the use of air, water and even the echolocation of bats. As can be seen in the above photograph, he has also built his own pipe organs with a limited number of pipes and no keyboard. HIs design is  variation on a harmonium, which requires the player to pump the air supply while performing at the keyboard. More recently, he has been working with synthesized water sounds based on multiple aquariums.

Saturday, June 18, 9 p.m.: MV Carbon is also a sound artist. Her live performances encompass sound, film, sculpture, painting, and multimedia installations. Her compositions focus on sonic feedback, sound spatialization, sound morphology, and the transformative and deconstructive interrelationship among sound, image, space, and place.

Counterproductive Media Overload at SFJAZZ

Githinji Wa’Mbire, Omar Sosa, and Amaury Acosta taking a bow at the conclusion of Motherland Journey with Wa’Mbire’s “motherland” creation in the background (screen shot from video of last night’s performance)

Last night Cuban pianist Omar Sosa returned to the SFJAZZ Center, having presented there, three months earlier, the first public event since lockdown conditions were imposed in March of 2020. That earlier occasion was a solo concert. Last night, on the other hand, involved roughly two uninterrupted hours of Sosa at a diversity of keyboards (along with an African xylophone) accompanied only by percussionist Amaury Acosta, who had an electronic keyboard of his own.

However, this performance, entitled Motherland Journey, was not so much a concert as it was a multimedia happening, somewhat in the spirit of the happenings of the Sixties but with far richer technology. In the spirit of the Sixties, however, center stage was occupied by Kenyan-born visual artist Githinji Wa’Mbire, suggesting that the music was there primarily to establish an environment in which Wa’Mbire could “do his thing” (as we used to say in the Sixties). That “thing” was basically a bricolage assembled from the array of materials that Wa’Mbire had laid out in the center of the stage; and his acts of assembly were supposedly inspired by the music improvised by Sosa and Acosta.

Relatively early in the process, one realized that the shape of the object resembled that of the African continent (presumably the “motherland” of Sosa’s title). That shape began to emerge about half an hour into the performance with no suggestion that roughly 90 minutes remained until its completion. After about an hour I found myself sympathizing with Pope Julius II (at least as portrayed by Rex Harrison in The Agony and the Ecstasy), who commissioned the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and then spent at least half of the next three years nagging Michelangelo about when it would be finished.

Under better circumstances, an uninterrupted two hours of improvising by Sosa and Acosta might have been more appealing. However, that improvisation deserved attentive listening unimpeded by distractions from the breadth of inventions deployed by both musicians. Those distractions came not only from Wa’Mbire but also from the conversion of the Miner Auditorium into a venue for a monstrous light show. For those in the audience, this probably amounted to an “immersive environment,” which may have been intended as context for the three artists on stage.

My own vantage point, however, was through my computer screen. Over the course of two hours, I was able to establish a relatively thorough catalog of the many visual effects that were being experienced by those in the audience. Nevertheless, this was no easy matter, because the video direction for the live-stream was, at best, haphazard, meaning that, at its worst, it was little more than irritating distraction. Indeed, even efforts to appreciate what both Sosa and Acosta were doing with their respective instruments were undermined; and, if that were not enough, too much of the overall duration involved audio levels that made many of Acosta’s polyrhythms virtually inaudible.

I am sure that Sosa had the best of intentions in conceiving Motherland Journey. Indeed, there was something visibly joyous in how he executed his keyboard work. Unfortunately, little of that joy could permeate through the overloaded multimedia treatment. Should Sosa choose to revive this project for another performance, he might do well to dwell on the less-is-more precept.

The Bleeding Edge: 7/26/2021

Last week this site discussed two “bleeding edge” options, both taking place over the weekend and on different days. This week there are four events of interest, none of which have been previously reported. The first of them will take place tomorrow evening. Unfortunately, the remaining three will all take place this coming Saturday evening. The good news is that, thanks to streaming, readers will not have to agonize about choosing. Each will be available for viewing for at least two days. Specifics are as follows:

Tuesday, July 27, 8:30 p.m., Palace of Fine Arts: This one is a bit of a wild card. The BayImproviser Calendar has an event page for a duo performance by saxophonists Phillip Greenlief and Nora Stanley taking place at the Palace of the Fine Arts. Unfortunately, the earliest event to appear on that venue’s schedule of events is for September 9; and, as of this writing, it has been cancelled. Greenlief’s own calendar page currently does not list any upcoming performances. Readers should probably wait until tomorrow before deciding whether to make any plans!

Saturday, July 31, 6 p.m., Oaktown Jazz Workshops: On the evening of this past July 17, I was fortunate enough to be one of the invited guests at the video recording session for guitarist Karl Evangelista’s Apura!. The title is the Tagalog word for “very urgent;” and the music was conceived to explore the relationship between jazz-based improvisation and social transformation in an era of worldwide political upheaval. Its first realization took place in recording sessions on October 14 and 15 in 2018 at the Fish Factory Studios in London. Evangelista partnered with drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, the sole surviving member of the Blue Notes, a mixed-race group of South Africans exiled in London. They were joined by Alexander Hawkins on piano and Trevor Watts on saxophones; and the resulting recording now has a Bandcamp Web page.

However, only the opening track of that recording, also entitled “Apura!,” was performed at this month’s session, whose other performers were Francis Wong on saxophone and Lisa Mezzacappa on bass, with a special “guest appearance” by Andrew Cyrille on drums. The video will be available for screening for two days after its premiere. Admission will be $15 with a $10 student rate, managed through a Brown Paper Tickets event page. After the payment has been processed, Brown Paper Tickets will provide instructions for viewing the video.

Saturday, July 31, 7 p.m., Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): BAMPFA is hosting a residence by the Thingamajigs Performance Group, which will include a series of online performances. One of those performances will be by Ensemble PHASE, which will be streaming from Seoul in Korea. The group will perform excerpts from Edward Schocker’s Self_Less, which incorporates live musical performance along with projected and pre-recorded audio of stories of people who have unique neuropsychological experiences. The livestream of this performance will be available at no charge through a BAMPFA event page. Readers should be aware, however, that the platform will be Zoom, which, as far as I can tell, has not yet resolved its problems with security leaks.

Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Bird & Beckett Books and Records: This will be another event that will be available for both live performance and streaming. The music will be provided by the Darren Johnston Trio, led by Johnston on trumpet. The trio is more than a little out of the ordinary, since the other two members are Kasey Knudsen on saxophone and Jon Arkin on drums. However, as the event page for this concert says, these are “musicians well equipped to explore uncharted territory in the music.”

This performance is part of the jazz club series. There will be a cover charge of between $10 and $20, payable at the door, which will open at 7:20 p.m. Seating will be limited, so those planning to attend are advised to phone in a reservation at 415-586-3733. The live stream will be available for $10, payable through a Web page created for donations. Bird & Beckett will live-stream the performance through both its YouTube channel and its Facebook page. Any further information will be available on the Web page for this performance.

A Video Treatment of Gounod Chamber Music

Those that have been following this site for some time are probably well aware of how isolation from traditional concert-going experiences has led to an impressive diversity of inventive multimedia approaches to performance. As a 1924 popular song put it, “Everyone Wants to Get into the Act;” and, about half a week ago I learned of a new entrant from Fayetteville, Arkansas. That city is the home of the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas (SoNA), whose Executive Director is now D. Riley Nicholson, previously a familiar face here at the Center for New Music.

First oboist Theresa Delaplain in the “video accompaniment” for Gounod’s chamber music (from the Facebook Online Event page)

As part of its Reimagined Season, SoNA will release a digital performance of chamber music by Charles Gounod. The composition is his “Petite Symphonie,” scored for nine wind players and first performed in 1885. The participating performers will be Kristen Salinas (Flute), Theresa Delaplain (Oboe I), Kristin Weber (Oboe II), Richard Bobo (Bassoon I), Kay Brusca (Bassoon II), Bruce Schultz (Horn I), Jason Hofmeister (Horn II), Orlando Scalia (Clarinet II), and Trevor Stewart (Clarinet I). Their performance was recorded on green screen at the Crisp Recording Studio in Fayetteville, run by videographer and media artist Darren Crisp. Working with visual artist Romain Erkiletlian, Crisp created a real-time visual experience to “accompany” the musical performance. Those visuals will present creative renderings of landscape images of the city of Paris, which was the composer’s beloved home.

This multimedia digital performance will be given its premiere at 4:30 p.m. (Pacific time) on Friday, April 2. As of this writing, there appear to be three different Web platforms from which the performance may be viewed: the Facebook Online Event page, the video added to the YouTube SoNA home page, and the event page on the SoNA Web site. There will be no charge for viewing on any of these platforms.

Whose Narrative is it Anyway?

The latest issue of The New York Review has an article entitled “Once Upon a Time There Was a Big Bubble.” Written by Cass R. Sunstein, the text is a review of Robert J. Shiller’s latest book, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. The idea of representing the structure of rich media content in terms of narrative occupied my thinking during the Nineties. I spent much of the first half of that decade at a research laboratory in Singapore, running a project concerned with developing techniques for indexing video content, including video that was primarily narrative in nature, such as commercial films and episodes of television series. When, in 1995, I returned to the United States to lead a Multimedia group at the Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, I shifted my focus to hypermedia authoring; and, thanks to Seymour Chatman, a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, I found myself introduced to the discipline known as narratology.

Thanks to Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, it did not take me long to verify that the noun “narratology” never shows up in Schiller’s book, nor does it appear in Sunstein’s review. Rather, the book is concerned with how stories may be used as examples that, at best, may lead to hypothesis creation. Since a story can never be anything other than an example, Schiller makes it clear that stories cannot validate such hypotheses. At best they can help invalidate a hypothesis by providing a counterexample.

Narratology teaches us that narrative is a complex structure unto itself. In his book Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Chatman explains how a narrative text is the product of an elaborate process. First, there is the simple division between what is recounted by a story and the discourse techniques involved in the recounting process. The story itself can then be structured into events and “existents.” The events are divided into actions willfully taken by agents and “happenings,” events that occur independent of agent activities. Those agents constitute one of the two subclasses of the existents, the other being the setting in which both actions and happenings occur.

One may say that Shiller’s book presents the reader with examples of stories and why they may influence the course of economic events. However, any understanding of how stories come to be or how they are interpreted by those to whom a story is told is left as an exercise for the reader. In the course of my efforts to link Chatman’s theoretical writings to the technical machinery of hypermedia, I learned about Deirdre McClosky, currently Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I discovered that McClosky had written a book entitled The Rhetoric of Economics as early as 1985, which saw a second edition in 1998. This was followed by The Writing of Economics in 1987 (reprinted as Economical Writing in 2000), The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric in 1988, and If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise in 1990. More recently, she wrote The Economic Conversation in 2008 with Arjo Klamer and Stephen Ziliak.

As my research progressed, I discovered that narrative had become a popular bandwagon for those that liked to call themselves “futurists.” It did not take me long to realize that I did not want to explore their paths. One of them had proposed a “digital campfire” for exchanging stories, which turned out to be nothing more than a display of a virtual burning fire around which “real people” could gather! Snake-oil was easy to find during the second half of the Nineties.

Mind you, I have too much respect for other writings by Schiller to accuse him of pedaling snake-oil. Nevertheless, Sunstein’s review left me with the impression that Schiller’s book served up a generous platter of “what” without necessary venturing into the “why” behind all that “what.” It is, of course, important that stories often figure significantly when invoked as part of the logic of decision making or forecasting. Ultimately, however, those stories are “soft” data, which persuade through rhetorical disposition, rather than abstract logic. They may be valuable when brainstorming, but inferences based on mere hypotheses are never sound. We need safeguards to avoid rushing to conclusions that cannot be validated by hard logic. Put another way, we must be careful that “stories that drive major economic events” do not lead us over the edge of a very high cliff!

Symbolism for All Ages

Last year Danny Clay held the 2019 McKnight Visiting Composer Residence in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. He spend his time working with two different vocal ensembles. MPLS (imPulse) has a mission to build “choral communities by performing living music, embracing the singer experience, and fostering novel collaborations.” It should not take too much cerebration to deduce that this group, a semi-professional project-based chamber chorus, is based in Minneapolis. ComMUSICation (CMC), on the other hand, was created to bring skills of music-making to all youth, regardless of background. It is a member of El Sistema USA, a United States program based on the El Sistema movement initiated in Venezuela by Jose Antonio Abreu. CMC is based in St. Paul’s Frogtown.

Clay decided to create a composition, entitled Sounds in Motion, which consisted of a collection of a cappella compositions each created by the members of one group to be sung by the other group. Furthermore, none of the participants would work with conventional music notation. Rather, each composition would be written using graphic primitives, such as squiggles, wiggles, blobs, and doodles. When a composition was presented, the composer would demonstrate how the elements of his/her graphic primitives should be interpreted in sound. The performance of each song was then accompanied by an animation that would trace its progress through the score being interpreted.

One of the most interesting observations of the resulting performance was that it was a great equalizer. Clay created a “title page” for each song, accompanying the title by identifying which group composed the piece. However, if one did not pay attention to who was doing the singing, almost always it was difficult to distinguish the groups. Mind you, every now and then one would unmistakably detect more refined vocal work and assume that the performance was by MPLS; but most of the symbolic primitives did not allow for such refinement!

Danny Clay (top row second from left) introduces his performers prior to presenting his Sounds in Motion composition (screen shot from the YouTube video of the performance)

The entire composition, being given its world premiere, was relatively brief, lasting roughly one quarter of an hour. The video of the performance, which was uploaded to YouTube by ComMUSICation, included an introduction by Clay of about ten minutes duration. Clay provided a straightforward account of what listeners (and score followers) could expect. As a result, most viewers were well prepared for both the what and the how of the performance that followed.

The result was an engaging and inspiring venture of exploration into processes of making music unencumbered by many of the stale academic precepts of what music is supposed to be.

Further Thoughts about Fatigue and Multimedia

Having rambled my way around the question of whether or not visualization can compensate for the fatigue that tends to arise when listening to a long and challenging piece of music, such as the original version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 130 string quartet in B-flat major with the “Große Fuge” as its final movement, I realized that the recital by Calidore String Quartet that prompted these thoughts had a “punch line” that I had overlooked. Having felt as if I had been pushed to some limit of endurance by the “Große Fuge,” I discovered that my attention span was not going to get a break during the encore. The selection served up more Beethoven in the form of the second (Adagio ma non troppo) movement from the Opus 74 (“Harp”) quartet in E-flat major. My reaction at the time was to describe this selection as pushing too-much-of-a-good-thing beyond the limits of “reasonable endurance!”

To be fair, I have a rather unconventional history with this particular movement, which dates back to when I had been using a music data-entry system on an early Macintosh laptop. Unless I am mistaken, I was using an early generation of Lime™ software, whose manual demonstrated a notational “acid test” taken from that particular Opus 74 movement:

An example of challenging data entry from the second movement of Beethoven’s Opus 74 string quartet (from the Dover Publications reprint of the 1863 Breitkopf und Härtel edition, from IMSLP, public domain)

It is relatively easy to see that there is a lot going on in this excerpt, all of which could be handled in Lime™ by a patient user.

On the other hand, this is the sort of composition that poses as many challenges to the listener as to the performers. Even the most avid score-follower runs the risk of letting his/her eyes glaze over during this passage. As a result, I was very curious as to what Stephen Malinowski would present to the attentive listener in the visualization he created for this particular movement.

The good news is that he was spot-on in accounting for every note and aligning it properly with the accompanying recording of the Alexander String Quartet playing this movement. On the other hand my own subjective impression was that watching this single movement tended to impose significantly more fatigue than I had encountered in yesterday’s exercise with the “long version” of Opus 130. Was this a matter of my personal state of well-being; or was it actually a “content-related” issue?

I suspect the answer has much to do with what the attentive listener knows about this music and what (s)he expects of the experience of listening to it. Let’s not kid ourselves. Even the most attentive among us will probably confess to incidents of “tuning out” for some reason or another, perhaps for something as trivial as checking to make sure that the phone was turned off. We are all all-too-human; and mind can wander off on its own without our necessarily paying much heed to it.

However, I would conjecture that, when an auditory experience is reinforced by an animated visual one, attention is less inclined to wander, simply because so much of the “space” is now being “covered.” After all, even the slightest movement tends to draw attention; and, in accounting for the many subtleties in this one Adagio ma non troppo movement, attention is being not only prompted but also drawn to many different loci on the screen. In other words keeping track of what is happening on the screen is more demanding than watching the activities of a gathering of four musicians.

Mind you, every now and then we come across evidence that suggests that such a high level of attentiveness is not always necessary. There is an old joke that Igor Stravinsky claimed that the music of Franz Schubert would consistently put him to sleep. However, he then continued by observing that, when he awoke, he discovered he was in Heaven! The reader is free to decide whether this is nothing but a joke or a suggestion that attentive listening may involve some kind of subconscious substrate in the background that complements the wealth of detail one encounters in the foreground.

Another old joke is the observation, “Sometimes I sit and think, and other times I just sit.” Perhaps we all need to come to terms with the relationship between sitting and thinking. I have no idea how to begin to approach that relationship, but I am pretty confident that it is not a static one!

Attentive Listening and the Fatigue Factor

Every now and then I am reminded that I have been falling behind in keeping up with Stephen Malinowski and his innovative approach to creating animated visualizations of music that augment a recorded performance with a “video track.” On this site I wrote about his work most recently in July of 2016, when he had completed visualizations of the preludes and fugues in the first book of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Malinowski has never shied away from major challenges, and my first encounter with his work took place back when I was writing for Examiner.com and I viewed the video he had created in honor of the 100th anniversary of the first performance of the ballet “The Rite of Spring,” for which Igor Stravinsky had provided the music.

The final measures of Beethoven’s “Große Fuge” (Artaria first edition, from IMSLP, public domain)

At the end of last month I learned of his latest “anniversary” project. In honor of next year’s celebration of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday, Malinowski has created visualizations of all of that composer’s music for string quartet, working with recordings made by the Alexander String Quartet. The entire collection has its own playlist on YouTube.

Last month San Francisco Performances got the celebration off to an early start with a recital by the Calidore String Quartet in which Beethoven’s Opus 130 quartet in B-flat major was played in its original version, concluding with the “Große Fuge,” which would later be published separately as Opus 133 and replaced by a shorter concluding movement for Opus 130. As a result, Beethoven’s quartets are already on my mind; and I was curious as to how visualization might relate to the impressions of the Calidore performance I had documented.

Those who read my account of that performance know that I felt it necessary to address the problem of fatigue. From a mathematical point of view, the “information content” of the original version of Opus 130 is impressively high, quite possibly noticeably higher than any previously composed music. Whether or not one appreciates such a mathematical argument, the subjective consequence is that, when it comes to processing the auditory stimuli, mind has a lot on its plate. Indeed, there may well be more than most minds can handle, meaning that, before the performance has concluded, some (many?) of those minds have begun to “tune out” due to that fatigue factor.

At that particular recital, my own mind had already sustained quite a workout from the performance of of Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/32 quartet in C major, whose final movement is a fugue with four subjects (or, as H. C. Robbins Landon preferred to call it, a double fugue with two countersubjects). Haydn clearly believed in challenging both performers and listeners; and, since Beethoven’s experiences with Haydn as a pupil did not go particularly well, it is understandable that the pupil would have an ongoing need to one-up the teacher! Beethoven was still scratching that itch late in life; and the original version of Opus 130 remains one of the most imposing challenges in the repertoire for both performers and listeners.

I was thus curious about whether my own personal battle with fatigue would arise while viewing Malinowski’s visual interpretation of this music. My guess is that he may have wondered the same. In the playlist he created, Opus 133 follows the Cavatina (fifth) movement of Opus 130, as Beethoven had originally planned; and the “replacement” Finale is the next item. In other words listening to the published version of Opus 130 requires “manual intervention” between the fifth and sixth movements.

I should probably note, by way of context, that I have been following recordings with scores ever since I was in high school. Just about every music course I took as an undergraduate or a graduate student involve score-following in one context or another. Indeed, much later in life, when I attended a pre-concert talk that Steve Reich gave at the University of California, Los Angeles about his “New York Counterpoint,” he concluded by playing a recording while setting out the score for those of us in the audience to follow. It was only after I began to write about music on this site that I realized that paying too much attention to marks on score pages might distract from the experience of listening itself, and these days I only consult scores after a performance has taken place.

To some extent watching a Malinowski visualization is an alternative to score following. He clearly understands the information content of the score; but, on the basis of my past experiences with his videos, I would say that his visualizations have more to do with auditory impressions than with the marks on paper beyond the performance itself. On the other hand, the score is not ignored entirely. Thus, when the instrumental voices cross over each other in Beethoven’s score, one sees that crossing in the unfolding images. Similarly, he introduces a “splash” image to represent notated pizzicato playing.

Nevertheless, the overall images themselves and the ways in which those images unfold tend to have more to do with auditory impressions, rather than with the marks on paper behind the performance itself. Thus, the visualization reflects rhetorical interpretations that escalate the performance above merely getting all the notes right. It is through that attention to rhetoric that one appreciates a view of “music being made,” rather than “notes being interpreted.” One might think that this would lead to greater “information overload” than what comes with listening in a concert setting. However, as one settles into the “image vocabulary,” that risk of mind having to process too much seems to have been diminished.

This may be due, in part, to the variation of the “image vocabulary” as one advances through the movements. Thus, in my own situation, I no longer faced fatigue during the Cavatina. Indeed, I was more immersed in its uniquely sensuous rhetoric than I usually am when listening to this music in recital or on recording. Mind you, I do not think that Malinowski was deliberately going after sensuous images; but the visualization brought to the foreground the devices through which the subjective nature of that music flourished. (On the other hand I have to confess to some disagreement over foreground-background decisions; but those involve picking nits that would distract from the significance of the visualization technique itself.)

My conclusion (at least where this repertoire is concerned) is that, when there is more coming through the “auditory channel” than mind can handle, adding another medium to the mix may be beneficial!

Disappointing Opera at Davies Symphony Hall

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), led by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT), presented a semi-staged performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. Staging to accommodate the limitations of the performing areas was directed by James Darrah. His supporting team provided lighting design (Pablo Santiago), video design (Adam Larsen and Hana S. Kim), scenic and costume design (Emily Anne MacDonald and Cameron Jaye Mack), and choreography (Christopher Bordenave). Bordenave led and performed with a company of five other dancers. Choral resources were provided by both the SFS Chorus (Ragnar Bohlin, Director) and the Pacific Boychoir (Andrew Brown, director). The cast requires a prodigious number of roles, several of which were taken by members of the SFS Chorus. (For the record, last night saw the only one of the three performances of this opera that did not overlap action taking place across Grove Street in the War Memorial Opera House.)

Mussorgsky’s opera is based primarily on a play by Alexander Pushkin, whose full title is A Dramatic Tale, The Comedy of the Distress of the Muscovite State, of Tsar Boris, and of Grishka Otrepyev. Pushkin claimed to have written this play “for the reading desk,” meaning he never intended it to be staged. One might say that he endowed major and minor figures of Russian history with first-person voices as his way of reflecting on a period known as the Time of Troubles. The result is that each of the scenes of Mussorgsky’s opera is based on what as almost a Socratic dialog on some aspect of Russian life during that period. The original version, completed in 1869, had seven of those scenes. When Mussorgsky revised the score in 1872, he dropped one of the scenes and added four, two of which took place in Poland and have come to be called the “Polish Act. Last night’s performance consisted of seven scenes, six from the 1869 version and the final scene from the 1872 revision.

Given that most of the text had its origins “for the reading desk,” there is no particularly compelling reason why Mussorgsky’s score cannot be given a simple concert treatment. Because so much of the text (not to mention the music) involves reflections on action, rather than action itself, Boris Godunov amounts to more of an oratorio than an opera. However, these days there seems to be a contingent of stage directors who do not know to leave oratorios well enough alone, although Darrah has established himself as one of their more capable members. He was particularly effective in his staging of the SFS performance, again conducted by MTT, of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 123 “Missa solemnis” in June of 2015.

Darrah’s approach to Mussorgsky never came close to the imaginative inventiveness he brought to Beethoven. Bordenave’s choreography did little more than get in the way, while much of the staging of the SFS Chorus resulted in singers losing eye contact with both conductor and musicians, resulting in a few disquieting cuing errors. More importantly, Darrah never seemed to have a clear idea of what Pushkin was doing or what Mussorgsky was doing with Pushkin. The result was one of major gaping holes in the action that never got filled by any sense of motivation.

Where the action was most explicit, the performance was most satisfying. Bass Stanislav Trofimov delivered a dynamite account of the leading role. His enactment of Godunov’s death (in the sixth scene of last night’s performance) was definitely a sight to behold; and I would like to believe that much of the body language can be attributed to Darrah’s efforts. Where minor characters are concerned, Vyacheslav Pochapsky delivered a thoroughly engaging (as well as more than a little alcohol-saturated) account of the siege of Kazan by the dissolute monk Varlaam. In that (fourth) scene in an inn on the Lithuanian border, mezzo Catherine Cook’s portrayal of the innkeeper never missed an opportunity to steal audience attention, whether or not Darrah had a hand in the works. In contrast tenor Yevgeny Akimov captured every Machiavellian detail of the opportunistic Prince Vasiliy Ivanovich Shuysky, while bass Philip Skinner perfectly nailed the minor role of a thuggish police officer in the opening scene (once again presumably based on input from Darrah).

Matvey Andreevich Shishkov’s 1874 design for the inn on the border and its raucous patrons (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The rest of the time, however, the production lumbered along with not much sense of orientation. Even the orchestra seemed more than a little out of place during the second (coronation) scene. This should not have been a surprise: When the orchestra players were not being shouted down by the chorus, they were being overwhelmed by the heavy bells in the Terrace that obscured even the loudest of any other sound sources.

Finally, there were clearly some higher-level problems of organization. The program book suggested that this would be a trimmed-down performance lasting about 115 minutes. This turned out to be about 90 minutes short of the mark. Of course those of us who have devoted much of this week to spending our time across the street are well adjusted to Richard Wagner’s penchant for extended durations. However, the stagecraft being presented by the San Francisco Opera is in such a different league from last night’s approach to Boris Godunov that it was no surprise that the Davies offering not only felt unduly lengthy but also turned out to be that way.

The Second Sunday of June will be Just as Busy as the First

As could be seen in some of last Friday’s dispatch, June tends to be the month of end-of-season programming. So it should be no surprise that the second Sunday of the month will be as busy as the first. In this case, however, one event will mark end of one season, while the following event will mark the anniversary of another. Here is the current “state of play” for concerts taking place on Sunday, June 11:

3:30 p.m., Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco: The HIP (Historically Informed Performance) Forum is an ensemble that gives performances on period-appropriate instruments of music from both the Baroque and Classical periods. This month’s concert will be devoted entirely to works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The program will offer the K. 478 quartet in G minor, played by Derek Tam at the fortepiano and the string trio of violinist Kati Kyme, violist Anthony Martin, and cellist Erik Anderson. Less familiar will be the K. 138 divertimento in F major, which features major solo work for bass, played by Kristin Zoernig. The final selection will be the K. 251 divertimento in D major, scored for two violins, viola, bass, oboe, and two horns.

The Swedenborgian Church is located in the “border area” between Pacific Heights and Presidio Heights. The address is 2107 Lyon Street, near the northwest corner of Washington Street. General admission will be $30 with a $25 rate for seniors and members of the San Francisco Early Music Society and a $10 rate for students with valid identification. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Brown Paper Tickets event page.

4 p.m., Luggage Store Gallery: The Beth Custer Ensemble will host a performance of Water Worship, a multimedia oratorio about the use, misuse, and regeneration of our most precious resource. The instrumentation will include a collection of water-inspired instruments, assembled and performed by Bart Hopkin. He will be joined by a string quartet consisting of members of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. The text will be narrated by Dean Santomieri, and the additional media will take the form of projections presented by Craig Baldwin. As most readers should know by now, the Luggage Store Gallery is at 1007 Market Street, directly across from the Golden Gate Theatre at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street. No advance information has been provided about admission, which may mean that donations will be appreciated.

4 p.m., San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM): Symphony Parnassus will conclude its season by highlighting two young musicians. There will be the world premiere performance of “Luz Dorada” (golden light) by Stefan Cwik, the ensemble’s composer-in-residence, who is currently an SFCM faculty member. The piece was inspired by three paintings by the artist Eduardo Rodriguez Calzado. Appropriately enough, the intermission will be followed by a performance of Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition suite. The other young musician will be seventeen-year-old pianist Elliot Wuu, who will perform Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 43 rhapsody based on the last of Niccolò Paganini’s solo violin caprices.

This performance will take place in the SFCM Concert Hall. SFCM is located at 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni Station. Ticket prices are $25 for adults, $20 for seniors, and $10 for those under the age of 26. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Brown Paper Tickets event page.

8 p.m., Herbst Theatre: The Merola Opera Program will launch its 60th Anniversary Season with a special concert. Two of Merola’s most well-known alumnae, soprano Deborah Voigt (1985) and mezzo Dolora Zajick (1983), will be featured soloists. They will be joined by several more recent alumni. The program will be divided into four sections.

The first section will begin with Voigt and Zajick singing the famous duet “Belle nuit, o nuit d’Amour” (beautiful night of love) from Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. The 2017 Merolini will provide the choral accompaniment. This will be followed by “Suzel, buon di” (Suzel, you are good), the so-called “Cherry Duet” from the second act of Pietro Mascagni’s L’amico Fritz (friend Fritz). The vocalists will be soprano Julie Adams and tenor Pene Pati, both 2013 Merola graduates.

The second section will begin with baritone Quinn Kelsey (2002), who will be singing the title role of Rigoletto during the Summer Season performances of the San Francisco Opera (SFO). He will sing Gérard’s aria “Nemico della patria” (enemy of the state) from Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. Soprano Tracy Dahl (1985) will then sing the famous coloratura aria “Je suis Titania” (I am Titania) from Ambroise Thomas’ opera Mignon. The two of them will then join forces for the duet “Il pallor funesto, orrendo” (the horrid pallor) from Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

In the third section Zajick will return to sing “Voi la sapete” (you know it) from Mascagni’s one-act opera “Cavalleria rusticana.” She will then join tenor Issachah Savage (2013) in the duet “Ai nostri monti” (to our mountains) from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore (the troubadour). Then, in a sort of tag-team approach, Savage will take the briefly-heard role of Samson as mezzo Zanda Švēde (2013) sings Delilah’s aria “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix” (my heart opens itself to your voice) from Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah. He then will sing “Siegmund heiss’ ich” (my name is Siegmund) with soprano Sarah Cambridge (2016) in the plot-critical duet of Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre (the Valkyrie).

The final section will be devoted to the greatest classic musicals of Broadway. Mezzo Catherine Cook (1990) will join Voigt to sing “Anything you can do” from Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun. Jerome Kern’s Show Boat will then be represented with the duet “You are love” sung by soprano Kristin Clayton and bass-baritone Bojan Knežević. Cook will then sing “I am easily assimilated” from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide with backup from tenor Amitai Pati and baritone Andrew G. Manea. The evening will then conclude with an all-hands performance of “Make our garden grow,” the finale of Candide.

The entrance to Herbst Theatre is on the ground floor of the War Memorial Veterans Building, located at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. All tickets for this concert are being sold for $60. They are being handled by the SFO Box Office, which is in the outer lobby of the War Memorial Opera House, on the other side of the War Memorial complex at the northwest corner of Grove Street. The Box Office can also be reached by telephone at 415-864-3330. There is also an event page on the SFO Web site for online purchase.

Finally, this concert will be preceded by a Gala Dinner that will be held across the street in City Hall. This event is currently completely sold. However, there is a waiting list for any openings. Those interested in being on that waiting list may contact Miriam Rosenfeld at 415-936-2311.

An Artful Celebration of Mathematics at Pamela Z’s ROOM Series

Last night the Royce Gallery hosted the first of three performances of Pascal’s Triangle, the second concert in the 2017 season of Pamela Z’s ROOM Series. Both the music and the concept were the joint effort of Z and Donald Swearingen; and the result was a continuous composition lasting somewhat more than an hour conceived to celebrate the beauty, ubiquity, and indispensability of mathematics. That last sentence actually testifies to that indispensability, since the definition of “continuous” will be familiar to anyone acquainted with undergraduate mathematics after (if not during) the freshman year of college.

Z and Swearingen both worked with their own arrays of electronic gear, Swearingen supplementing his with a keyboard and Z adding her voice to the mix. She also designed the videos projected over the course of the performance, and the two of them both used some variant of a Smart Board as both a whiteboard and a screen for the display of some of those videos. They were joined by violinist Kate Stenberg and cellist Hannah Addario-Berry, both playing without electronic enhancement.

The title of the show refers to a triangular pattern of integers based on a very simple rule: Start with 1 at the top. Image that this integer is surrounded on both sides by an infinite row of zeros. The second row is shifted slightly to the side and each entry is the number that is the sum of the upper-left and upper-right numbers from the previous row. That means there will now be a 1 to the lower-left and lower-right of the first 1. Then, as the saying goes, “rinse and repeat.” In the next row there will now be a  2 directly under the top 1, and there will be a 1 to either side of that 2. The first six rows unfold as follows:

Image of Pascal's Triangle constructed by Conrad Irwin for Wikimedia Commons (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

This array of numbers has a prodigious number of fascinating properties and even crosses the bridge from discrete mathematics to the continuum with an integer approximation to the normal distribution (or, as non-mathematicians call it, the “bell curve”). However, Z and Swearingen were less interested in this specific construct than they were in the broader scope of mathematics. For example, Z delivered a delightful riff on Georg Cantor’s discovery of an “infinity of infinities” (the idea that there were infinite numbers of different sizes … an infinite number of them). She also delivered an excerpt of a text by Albert Einstein in the original German.

However, the “spinal cord” of the evening involved the pursuit of the droll observation that you cannot count to one billion. In other words, if you start counting from 1 and the usual pace, even if you try to rush it as much as you can, it is unlikely that you will make it as far as half a billion over the course of your lifetime. Z prepared a series of videos to illustrate this, show subjects counting off numbers whose ages ranged from infancy to advanced old age. These video clips served as spacers between the other episodes of the evening. Their recurrence amounted to a running gag that kept getting funnier as the ages of the counters grew more advanced. (The oldest of those counters was sitting in the front row last night.) Much of the humor came from the fact that, as the numbers got larger, it took more time to recite each one of them.

If there was any shortcoming to this entertainment, it was that the subject matter tended to overwhelm the music. In fairness this may have just been the result of my holding both undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics. Nevertheless, the full breadth of Z’s vocal skills were on display last night; and, for me at least, there was something joyous about how she could engage her expressiveness in the service of higher (and sometimes not-so-high) mathematics. Beyond that, however, the most memorable musical effect was probably Kate Stenberg’s violin punctuations of a riff on why mathematicians prefer chalkboards to whiteboards. Anyone familiar with the former can probably guess the sorts of sounds Stenberg eked out of her instrument.

The remaining two performances will both be at 8 p.m., tonight (Saturday, May 6) and tomorrow night (Sunday, May 7). The Royce Gallery is located in the North East Mission Industrial Zone at 2091 Mariposa Street. General admission will be $13. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Brown Paper Tickets event page. That page also includes the Generous option of $20, which better represents the actual cost of producing this concert. However, there is also a Pick a Number! sliding scale for both those concerned about limited income and those whose support may be called more than generous. The only constraint is that the lower bound (another mathematical construct) for admission is $7.

The Bleeding Edge: 11/21/2016

As might be guessed, this will be a quiet week. In fact the BayImproviser Calendar lists only one event taking place within the San Francisco city limits. The good news, however, is that this is a stone that really should not be left unturned.

Gray Area Art And Technology will continue the PERPETUAL MOTION series presented in partnership with the San Francisco Cinematheque. This program should be of particular interest, since it combines innovative approaches to the projection of animated images with real-time performance of music, primarily on electronic devices. For those of my generation, this may be a bit like a trip in a time machine back to the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in 1966 Manhattan, when engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer collaborated with artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman to produce 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. (Participants in this series included John Cage, David Tudor, and Lucinda Childs, as well as Rauschenberg himself.) The title of this new program is Birth / Death / Resurrection, and it will consist of three sets.

The first is entitled “Toward the Death of Cinema.” Created by the Oakland-based duo of Malic Amalya and Nathan Hill, it is basically a real-time duet for 16mm projector and synthesizer, in which the projection process contributes to the spontaneity as much as does the sound synthesis. This will be followed by three short works by Australian Sally Goulding, “Ghosts—Loud + Strong,” “Light at the End of the Tunnel,” and “Spirit Intercourse,” all of which are based on analog media, hand-processed audio waveforms, and improvised electronics. The program will then conclude with the West Coast premiere of “After Psycho Shower,” a deconstruction of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable scenes created for 16mm projection by Seoul-based Hangjun Lee working with electronic musician Jérôme Noetinger.

This show will begin at 8 p.m. tomorrow (Tuesday, November 22). The Gray Area Art And Technology Theater is located in the Mission at 2665 Mission Street. Admission is $20 at the door. Tickets purchased in advance are only $10 or $15 on the day of the show. A cash bar will be available for those aged 21 or older. Ticketfly has created an event page for advance purchase of tickets.