Here's the full schedule for the Hot Air Music Festival, this Sunday February 6, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Sorry if this is a little messy, it's the sort of cut-and-paste thing I rarely do and I don't have time to fix it. I have to miss this myself, but it looks like an amazing afternoon/evening:
1:45 Triumphant Digitally Synthesized Fanfare To Hot Air Music Festival by Red Bennett
2:00 Michael Gordon’s Industry, Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion and Osvaldo Golijov’s Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind in the Recital Hall
3:00 Paul Bergel’s Winchester House of Mystery Suite and George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae in the Recital Hall
4:00 Music by Matthew Cmiel, John Russell, Derrick Spiva, Jr. and Christopher Porter in the Recital Hall
5:00 Music by Louis Cruz, Pantawit Kiangsiri, Pierre Jalbert and David Gottlieb in the Concert Hall / Music by Anthony Porter, Luciano Chessa, Harry Whitney and Alden Jenks in the Recital Hall
6:00 Music by Devon Farney and Stephen Hartke in the Concert Hall / Music by Clayton Moser, Aaron Pike and David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion in the Recital Hall
7:00 Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union and Steve Reich’s Six Pianos in the Concert Hall
8:00 Samuel Adams’ Tension Study No.1, Arvo Paert’s Spiegel im Spiegel and Dan Becker’s Gridlock in the Concert Hall
9:00 Kajia Saariaho’s Pres and John Adams’ The Dharma at Big Sur in the Concerto Hall
You can find out more about the Festival here.
Showing posts with label Hot Air Music Festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hot Air Music Festival. Show all posts
01 February 2011
31 January 2011
fun stuff I may or may not get to: February
February 4-6, Magnificat presents works by Renaissance women composers (Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Isabella Leonarda, and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre).
The Conservatory of Music’s Hot Air Music Festival has an utterly fantastic line-up on February 6; unfortunately for me I will have to miss most or most likely all of it, but if I didn’t have a conflict I would be there from opening to closing, because it all looks that good. Check it out and tell them I said hello.
Another interesting event on the afternoon of the 6th: Old First Concerts presents the Wooden Fish Ensemble in songs, piano works, and a new piece for koto ensemble by Young-ja Lee, in honor of her 80th birthday.
The Shotgun Players present Josh Kornbluth’s Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews? from February 9 through the 27th.
February 12, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival takes over the Castro Theater for its winter event, featuring several of Chaplin’s Mutual shorts; L’Argent, a 1928 French film based on Zola’s novel; and the King Vidor La Boheme, with Lillian Gish and John Gilbert.
San Francisco Performances has Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa on the 19th, playing Tartini (arranged by Kreisler), Beethoven, Ives, Bach, and Antheil; and Jenny Lin on the 27th, playing selections from The Well-Tempered Clavier and from Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues.
Ensemble Parallele has two programs this month: On the 5th at the Conservatory of Music they celebrate the 100th birthday of Paul Bowles with music by Bowles, Michele Reverdy, and Maurice Ohana. And on the 26th and 27th they present one of this year’s most eagerly anticipated shows: their circus-inflected production of Philip Glass’s Orphée (based on the Jean Cocteau film).
Cal Performances has the Vienna Philharmonic, but they have them mostly on days when I have conflicts, even if I were willing, with my new-found consciousness of poverty, to pay those ticket prices – I realize this is something special, but for that price I want a full opera (and in the front row), not just the orchestra. They also have Robert Lepage’s group, Ex Machina, in the intriguing-sounding Eonnagata, and I might have blown it with that one by not including it in my choose-your-own subscription, because I thought it was in Zellerbach Playhouse, where they had their last Lepage production, The Andersen Project (Andersen as in Hans Christian Andersen, and Project as in what everyone calls every artistic endeavor these days). Put off by the asinine 8:00 start time in the middle of the week, I figured I’d see how I felt when it came around, because the Playhouse is a manageable size, so that even if I couldn’t get the front row I would have a seat that would be, I will somewhat grudgingly admit, OK. It turns out I should have read the brochure more carefully, because it’s in cavernous Zellerbach Auditorium, and there were no acceptable (to me) seats available last time I checked. Ah well – it’s still at an idiotic time, so maybe that will be a night I sleep well. Maybe. Of course, if I’m not going, it’s bound to be spectacular, so do feel free to rub in what I missed.
The San Francisco Symphony presents Feldman’s Rothko Chapel and Mozart’s Requiem, February 23-26.
And on Monday, February 28, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presents works by Ligeti, Du Yun, Ronald Bruce Smith, and Brian Current.
The Conservatory of Music’s Hot Air Music Festival has an utterly fantastic line-up on February 6; unfortunately for me I will have to miss most or most likely all of it, but if I didn’t have a conflict I would be there from opening to closing, because it all looks that good. Check it out and tell them I said hello.
Another interesting event on the afternoon of the 6th: Old First Concerts presents the Wooden Fish Ensemble in songs, piano works, and a new piece for koto ensemble by Young-ja Lee, in honor of her 80th birthday.
The Shotgun Players present Josh Kornbluth’s Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews? from February 9 through the 27th.
February 12, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival takes over the Castro Theater for its winter event, featuring several of Chaplin’s Mutual shorts; L’Argent, a 1928 French film based on Zola’s novel; and the King Vidor La Boheme, with Lillian Gish and John Gilbert.
San Francisco Performances has Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa on the 19th, playing Tartini (arranged by Kreisler), Beethoven, Ives, Bach, and Antheil; and Jenny Lin on the 27th, playing selections from The Well-Tempered Clavier and from Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues.
Ensemble Parallele has two programs this month: On the 5th at the Conservatory of Music they celebrate the 100th birthday of Paul Bowles with music by Bowles, Michele Reverdy, and Maurice Ohana. And on the 26th and 27th they present one of this year’s most eagerly anticipated shows: their circus-inflected production of Philip Glass’s Orphée (based on the Jean Cocteau film).
Cal Performances has the Vienna Philharmonic, but they have them mostly on days when I have conflicts, even if I were willing, with my new-found consciousness of poverty, to pay those ticket prices – I realize this is something special, but for that price I want a full opera (and in the front row), not just the orchestra. They also have Robert Lepage’s group, Ex Machina, in the intriguing-sounding Eonnagata, and I might have blown it with that one by not including it in my choose-your-own subscription, because I thought it was in Zellerbach Playhouse, where they had their last Lepage production, The Andersen Project (Andersen as in Hans Christian Andersen, and Project as in what everyone calls every artistic endeavor these days). Put off by the asinine 8:00 start time in the middle of the week, I figured I’d see how I felt when it came around, because the Playhouse is a manageable size, so that even if I couldn’t get the front row I would have a seat that would be, I will somewhat grudgingly admit, OK. It turns out I should have read the brochure more carefully, because it’s in cavernous Zellerbach Auditorium, and there were no acceptable (to me) seats available last time I checked. Ah well – it’s still at an idiotic time, so maybe that will be a night I sleep well. Maybe. Of course, if I’m not going, it’s bound to be spectacular, so do feel free to rub in what I missed.
The San Francisco Symphony presents Feldman’s Rothko Chapel and Mozart’s Requiem, February 23-26.
And on Monday, February 28, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presents works by Ligeti, Du Yun, Ronald Bruce Smith, and Brian Current.
22 August 2010
Thompson/Cmiel/Carter: Sexton/Rukeyser/Bishop
Last night I went to the Hot Air Music Festival's Musical Textual at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, featuring Anne, a performance piece by Wolfgang Thompson using the poetry of Anne Sexton; Murmur, Matthew Cmiel’s setting for vocal quartet and hand-percussion of a poem by Muriel Rukeyser; and A Mirror on Which to Dwell, Elliot Carter’s setting of six poems by Elizabeth Bishop.
Anne was performed by Ella Barros and Wolfgang Thompson, and is in three parts. She is dressed all in black and lying on the floor. She loudly chants Sexton’s words (in the first part, from a series of poems about Jesus). Thompson, who sometimes grunts or yells but is wordless throughout, performed a series of movements while she recites: he jumps over her supine body, he slaps the floor with his hands, he scuttles over her in a sexual position. In the second part, they are sitting at a table, with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread, but this section doesn’t use the Jesus poems. In the third section, using poems from The Death Notebooks, Barros is again lying on the floor, with her arms wrapped straight-jacket style in her black top. Again, Thompson performs the repertory of gestures, with looks of concern or anguish.
Kind of to my surprise, I enjoyed the piece, despite several issues. First, the textual part of the evening: it seems they had problems printing the program (though I did manage to find a stray piece of paper that gives the names of most soloists, but otherwise I’m relying on my memory of Cmiel’s announcements from the stage) so I don’t know if they had planned to reprint the texts, but only stray lines and snatches of text were intelligible. I could go either way on printing or projecting the texts, by the way; on the one hand, you want people to pay attention to the performance, not keep their eyes glued to the word-book; on the other, it’s difficult to make out sometimes obscure or knotty verse when it’s shouted from an acoustically unpromising position, and if the meaning of the words is important to you, you might want to help people out a bit.
And the words themselves . . . despite the weird surreal appeal of many of the lines, maybe it’s just as well to experience the piece through sound rather than sense. When Sexton (and Plath & Co.) started publishing, the voice of an openly angry woman was a shock in lyric poetry (please note I am specifying lyric rather than dramatic or epic poetry). A generation later, it’s a cliché, and there comes a cultural point after the initial eruption when suddenly it all just seems incredibly narcissistic and overdone – we all know what sound and fury signify. This might just be me – I find I follow the same pattern with people expressing strong (and ultimately simple) opinions: after initial fascination, I begin to know already what they’re going to say, and finally find it unsatisfying and sort of boring; irony and nuance last longer than rage.
Maybe it’s an effect of growing older: life fills you with anger? Take a number and get back in line, sweetie. But it may have to do with the passing of time in a larger sense: in one of Woolf’s essays, she mentions how we – she – would come across a Victorian sentiment (in her case, I believe it was a letter from George Eliot correcting a conversational slip from the day before: she had meant to refer to Marivaux to prove whatever point she was discussing) and would “burst out laughing” at the earnestness, the ponderousness, the sheer previous-generationness, of the remark. This morning I picked up The Death Notebooks, which I hadn’t looked at in years, and faced with pages of bald blatant rage, what can you do but smile and shrug and reflect that it probably wasn’t a picnic living with her either?
Given all that, the piece lasted too long (about 40 minutes). Between each of its three sections, the stage went dark and the valiant stagehands came to rearrange and clean up. But the three sections were not different enough from each other for the pause to do anything but break the mood and momentum. Continuous action would have helped, and so would shortening the piece by ten or fifteen minutes generally: what we essentially have here is a woman bellowing at a man for 40 minutes. After a while, especially if he’s not responding, the situation starts to look comic in a James Thurber way. It’s no knock on the piece to say the part that affected me the most was seeing that beautiful loaf of bread ripped up and thrown about in the second part. Maybe I was just hungry. But kudos to Ella Barros for stamina; I kept thinking, like Demetrius in Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Well roared, lion!”
Barros and Thompson came out smiling for their bows, and that was a side of a woman’s personality we hadn’t had a glimmer of during the performance. I found the piece a hoot – not in the sense that I was mocking what they did, but in that it put a smile on my face, which is probably not what they intended, but there it is. There was a lot of great energy and dedication between the two that carried the piece through. By the way, this is the sort of thing I usually see in seedy black-box theaters in the crackhead districts; what a pleasure to see it in the SF Conservatory’s small but elegant and comfortable recital room. And while I'm at it thanks also for the sensible 7:30 start time.
After intermission, Cmiel came out to introduce his Rukeyser piece, Murmur. I’ve already noted that she is responsible for two of the silliest lines of poetry I’ve ever read, and also for some of the weakest stretches of Dr Atomic’s weak libretto, but Cmiel found a poem that made me think I should give her another chance. (Though, again, it’s a little difficult to follow the through-line of a poem in a musical setting unless it’s a soloist, and even then sometimes. . . .) He told us that the form of the piece, which he’s been working on for a few years and will be continuing to work on, was inspired by David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion (which I’ve only heard on recordings), which also uses a vocal quartet with hand-held percussion. This piece uses mostly finger-cymbals which start the piece and sound periodically throughout, their fading vibrations lending a ceremonial sense of order to the music. The four vocalists (three women and one man; they are listed on the sheet only as the Hot Air Vocal Ensemble) trade off the main lines – the lyrics – while the others chant varying murmurs. I did hear the influence of the Little Match Girl Passion, but the piece stands on its own, with a lovely upward lilt on the final word, “soul.” And it was very effectively placed on the program in its almost meditative way between the rage of Anne and Carter’s song cycle.
It’s odd to go to a concert where a Carter song cycle is the best known piece, but that’s why I chose to go to this performance rather than the Merola finale. Carter has easily the best poet of the three; Elizabeth Bishop’s work not only doesn’t seem dated, it seems richer with each year and each re-reading. Unfortunately this wonderful piece brought out the bad behavior in the audience; one oaf actually took a flash photograph as the music started, and there was much whispering, some of it occasioned by Thompson's staging. Another unfortunate thing is that staging, by its nature, limits the way the audience is going to experience the words and the music, which is a shame given how much richer Bishop's poems are than the others on the program. A semi-crazed homeless-type woman (Trish DeBaun) comes in and does – well, nothing much – she walks up and down with her suitcase, then goes on stage, pretends to sleep during Insomnia, wanders around looking distraught or happy, and generally behaving like half the street-people I see in San Francisco, though at least they're not interrupting me when I'm trying to concentrate on Elliott Carter.
During the first two songs she was doing all this in the aisle, and since I was in the front row with my back to her, I assumed that someone in the audience was just moving seats or something annoying like that. Then I thought she simply was an actual street person who had somehow gotten past security and wandered in. There were whispers in the crowd about her antics. What I’m getting at here is that the staging not only didn’t add to the performance, it detracted.
I’m all in favor of innovative approaches to familiar material (I haven’t posted on it yet, but I loved the Beckett/Schubert evening I went to in New York last winter, and when Nathan Gunn and his wife did their conceptual monastic-life recital, it was only poverty that kept me from flying out to see it), but given the rarity of Carter performances, I really would have preferred just to hear the music, thank you, especially since this was a very fine performance. Cmiel conducted a group listed only as the Hot Air Chamber Players (I’m assuming they, and the vocal quartet, were conservatory students), who were excellent in what I’m sure is very challenging music to play, and soprano Shawnette Sulker was just lovely, with a strong and limpid voice used expressively to convey the nuances of the poems. Cmiel prefaced the Carter by talking about his love for the piece and Carter in general, and it was nice to hear tribute paid to one of the great American composers – if you only attended performances at Davies Symphony Hall, you wouldn’t even know Carter existed, much less is still composing wonderful music past the age of 100. Cmiel also noted that one of his professors of conducting once told him that if he ever had a chance to conduct Carter, he was required to take it, which amused me.
The program repeats tonight (Sunday, August 22), at 7:30, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak Street in the Civic Center area. Tickets are $15 at the door, which is an incredible bargain. I’d go again if I lived closer.
Anne was performed by Ella Barros and Wolfgang Thompson, and is in three parts. She is dressed all in black and lying on the floor. She loudly chants Sexton’s words (in the first part, from a series of poems about Jesus). Thompson, who sometimes grunts or yells but is wordless throughout, performed a series of movements while she recites: he jumps over her supine body, he slaps the floor with his hands, he scuttles over her in a sexual position. In the second part, they are sitting at a table, with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread, but this section doesn’t use the Jesus poems. In the third section, using poems from The Death Notebooks, Barros is again lying on the floor, with her arms wrapped straight-jacket style in her black top. Again, Thompson performs the repertory of gestures, with looks of concern or anguish.
Kind of to my surprise, I enjoyed the piece, despite several issues. First, the textual part of the evening: it seems they had problems printing the program (though I did manage to find a stray piece of paper that gives the names of most soloists, but otherwise I’m relying on my memory of Cmiel’s announcements from the stage) so I don’t know if they had planned to reprint the texts, but only stray lines and snatches of text were intelligible. I could go either way on printing or projecting the texts, by the way; on the one hand, you want people to pay attention to the performance, not keep their eyes glued to the word-book; on the other, it’s difficult to make out sometimes obscure or knotty verse when it’s shouted from an acoustically unpromising position, and if the meaning of the words is important to you, you might want to help people out a bit.
And the words themselves . . . despite the weird surreal appeal of many of the lines, maybe it’s just as well to experience the piece through sound rather than sense. When Sexton (and Plath & Co.) started publishing, the voice of an openly angry woman was a shock in lyric poetry (please note I am specifying lyric rather than dramatic or epic poetry). A generation later, it’s a cliché, and there comes a cultural point after the initial eruption when suddenly it all just seems incredibly narcissistic and overdone – we all know what sound and fury signify. This might just be me – I find I follow the same pattern with people expressing strong (and ultimately simple) opinions: after initial fascination, I begin to know already what they’re going to say, and finally find it unsatisfying and sort of boring; irony and nuance last longer than rage.
Maybe it’s an effect of growing older: life fills you with anger? Take a number and get back in line, sweetie. But it may have to do with the passing of time in a larger sense: in one of Woolf’s essays, she mentions how we – she – would come across a Victorian sentiment (in her case, I believe it was a letter from George Eliot correcting a conversational slip from the day before: she had meant to refer to Marivaux to prove whatever point she was discussing) and would “burst out laughing” at the earnestness, the ponderousness, the sheer previous-generationness, of the remark. This morning I picked up The Death Notebooks, which I hadn’t looked at in years, and faced with pages of bald blatant rage, what can you do but smile and shrug and reflect that it probably wasn’t a picnic living with her either?
Given all that, the piece lasted too long (about 40 minutes). Between each of its three sections, the stage went dark and the valiant stagehands came to rearrange and clean up. But the three sections were not different enough from each other for the pause to do anything but break the mood and momentum. Continuous action would have helped, and so would shortening the piece by ten or fifteen minutes generally: what we essentially have here is a woman bellowing at a man for 40 minutes. After a while, especially if he’s not responding, the situation starts to look comic in a James Thurber way. It’s no knock on the piece to say the part that affected me the most was seeing that beautiful loaf of bread ripped up and thrown about in the second part. Maybe I was just hungry. But kudos to Ella Barros for stamina; I kept thinking, like Demetrius in Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Well roared, lion!”
Barros and Thompson came out smiling for their bows, and that was a side of a woman’s personality we hadn’t had a glimmer of during the performance. I found the piece a hoot – not in the sense that I was mocking what they did, but in that it put a smile on my face, which is probably not what they intended, but there it is. There was a lot of great energy and dedication between the two that carried the piece through. By the way, this is the sort of thing I usually see in seedy black-box theaters in the crackhead districts; what a pleasure to see it in the SF Conservatory’s small but elegant and comfortable recital room. And while I'm at it thanks also for the sensible 7:30 start time.
After intermission, Cmiel came out to introduce his Rukeyser piece, Murmur. I’ve already noted that she is responsible for two of the silliest lines of poetry I’ve ever read, and also for some of the weakest stretches of Dr Atomic’s weak libretto, but Cmiel found a poem that made me think I should give her another chance. (Though, again, it’s a little difficult to follow the through-line of a poem in a musical setting unless it’s a soloist, and even then sometimes. . . .) He told us that the form of the piece, which he’s been working on for a few years and will be continuing to work on, was inspired by David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion (which I’ve only heard on recordings), which also uses a vocal quartet with hand-held percussion. This piece uses mostly finger-cymbals which start the piece and sound periodically throughout, their fading vibrations lending a ceremonial sense of order to the music. The four vocalists (three women and one man; they are listed on the sheet only as the Hot Air Vocal Ensemble) trade off the main lines – the lyrics – while the others chant varying murmurs. I did hear the influence of the Little Match Girl Passion, but the piece stands on its own, with a lovely upward lilt on the final word, “soul.” And it was very effectively placed on the program in its almost meditative way between the rage of Anne and Carter’s song cycle.
It’s odd to go to a concert where a Carter song cycle is the best known piece, but that’s why I chose to go to this performance rather than the Merola finale. Carter has easily the best poet of the three; Elizabeth Bishop’s work not only doesn’t seem dated, it seems richer with each year and each re-reading. Unfortunately this wonderful piece brought out the bad behavior in the audience; one oaf actually took a flash photograph as the music started, and there was much whispering, some of it occasioned by Thompson's staging. Another unfortunate thing is that staging, by its nature, limits the way the audience is going to experience the words and the music, which is a shame given how much richer Bishop's poems are than the others on the program. A semi-crazed homeless-type woman (Trish DeBaun) comes in and does – well, nothing much – she walks up and down with her suitcase, then goes on stage, pretends to sleep during Insomnia, wanders around looking distraught or happy, and generally behaving like half the street-people I see in San Francisco, though at least they're not interrupting me when I'm trying to concentrate on Elliott Carter.
During the first two songs she was doing all this in the aisle, and since I was in the front row with my back to her, I assumed that someone in the audience was just moving seats or something annoying like that. Then I thought she simply was an actual street person who had somehow gotten past security and wandered in. There were whispers in the crowd about her antics. What I’m getting at here is that the staging not only didn’t add to the performance, it detracted.
I’m all in favor of innovative approaches to familiar material (I haven’t posted on it yet, but I loved the Beckett/Schubert evening I went to in New York last winter, and when Nathan Gunn and his wife did their conceptual monastic-life recital, it was only poverty that kept me from flying out to see it), but given the rarity of Carter performances, I really would have preferred just to hear the music, thank you, especially since this was a very fine performance. Cmiel conducted a group listed only as the Hot Air Chamber Players (I’m assuming they, and the vocal quartet, were conservatory students), who were excellent in what I’m sure is very challenging music to play, and soprano Shawnette Sulker was just lovely, with a strong and limpid voice used expressively to convey the nuances of the poems. Cmiel prefaced the Carter by talking about his love for the piece and Carter in general, and it was nice to hear tribute paid to one of the great American composers – if you only attended performances at Davies Symphony Hall, you wouldn’t even know Carter existed, much less is still composing wonderful music past the age of 100. Cmiel also noted that one of his professors of conducting once told him that if he ever had a chance to conduct Carter, he was required to take it, which amused me.
The program repeats tonight (Sunday, August 22), at 7:30, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak Street in the Civic Center area. Tickets are $15 at the door, which is an incredible bargain. I’d go again if I lived closer.
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