New Century Chamber Orchestra: Visitations

 New Century Chamber Orchestra opened its season on Thursday last at First Church in Berkeley, with a wide-ranging & appropriately seasonal program titled Visitations, whose general theme was the intersection between spirit & mortal worlds, though some of the pieces dealt with people caught in other liminal spaces. The Church was moodily lit with masses of thick white candles flickering around the altar/performance space, with a lit candle at the center-aisle entrance to each row. The NCCO players entered through the back, down the center aisle; when they started playing, the eight-person chorus followed the same path, entering singing the first piece, Bogoroditse devo (Rejoice, O Virgin) from Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil; this was followed immediately by Fólk fær andlit (People Get Faces) by Hildur Guðnadóttir. The Rachmaninoff is based on Slavic church chants & the Guðnadóttir, though a contemporary piece, harks back to the hypnotic overlays of medieval chant, as the singers repeat the Icelandic words for Mercy & Forgive us for. . . . Although People Get Faces has a spooky sound, the composer wrote the piece in 2015 because two refugee families from Albania had been denied asylum in Iceland, so this is one of the liminal spaces mentioned above: people caught between countries, people invisible (ghost-like, perhaps) until our realization of their individuality gives them faces. & of course it's possible that refugees denied admission will end up sent to whatever spirit world there might be, if they are forced to return to their former homeland. (The protest against the denial, which this piece was part of, was successful& the families were admitted to Iceland & granted citizenship – so a small happy ending amid the tragedies of the many refugees in the world.)

So an effective mood was immediately set. It was then disrupted by talking from the stage, of which there was a lot. I am not a fan of this practice, preferring to let the music speak for itself & establish its own thoughts & moods (also: I read the program notes, so I've already heard most of what gets said from the stage), though I realize the tide is very much against me & this sort of stage chat is pretty much obligatory these days. But I wonder if it helps make the audience chattier than it should be; there were quite a few talkers during the music, & even people videotaping parts of the performance. I will never understand the value people put on a few seconds of shaky footage.

The next section featured mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor in three pieces; first up was the Ária (Cantilena) from Bachianas Brasileiras #5 by Villa-Lobos, an elegantly floating vocalise nicely sung by O'Connor. This was followed by Peter Lieberson's Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres (My love, if I die and you don’t) from his Neruda Songs, which are of course indelibly associated with his wife, the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, though O'Connor made the song her own. & that was followed by Schubert's Erlkönig, in an arrangement for chamber orchestra (Hope did mention the arranger's name, but it's not in the program, which is an odd omission, as he did a number of the pieces on the program). O'Connor sang vividly & with intensity, but I felt she differentiated among the different characters in the song more with her body than her voice. The audience was very enthusiastic. It's easy to see how the Schubert fit into the program's theme, but the Villa-Lobos does have an otherworldly sound, & the selection from the Neruda Songs is about lovers eventually separated by Death & the on-going life of their Love, characterized as part of the earthly landscape, as a long river flowing onward past our vision (& of course this music reminds us of its dedicatee, who died shortly after she premiered this work by her husband). So though the program was eclectic in style, & used several different forces (orchestra alone, with chorus, with soloist), & involved a number of fairly short pieces, it all hung together in a convincing way.

The first half ended with a highlight, the world premiere of an NCCO commission, Doña Sebastiana (Lady Death) by Nicolás Lell Benavides. Before it began, the composer told us the folk tale on which it is based (taken from Cuentos: Tales from the Hispanic Southwest by Rudolfo A. Anaya): a very poor woodcutter is preparing his meager meal. A shadowy figure appears & asks to share it; it is Jesus, & the Woodcutter spurns him, as he doesn't do enough to help the poor. Another figure appears & asks to shaire it: it is the Virgin Mary, & he spurns her, as she doesn't make her son help the poor. A third figure appears & asks to share his meal: it is Lady Death, & he agrees to share with her, as she treats everyone equally. In thanks, she gives him the gift of healing, but warns him that if he sees her at the bedside of a sick person, that soul is hers & he must not save it. Time goes by, & eventually the Woodcutter, now a well-off healer, is called to the bedside of a very ill rich man, who promises him incredible wealth for a cure. Lady Death is at his bedside, but the Woodcutter cannot resist the lure of riches & gets her out of the way so that he can save the man. Later that day she reappears, takes him to a church & shows him two candles, one of which is almost sputtering out. She informs him that that was the rich man's life, but as the Woodcutter saved him & she still needs to collect a life, she will switch his light with the Woodcutter's, & thus ends his life & his access to the riches he was promised.

From this tale Benavides has shaped a rich orchestral piece, with the solo violin (Daniel Hope) portraying Doña Sebastiana while the others portray the changing moods & situation of the Woodcutter. Death is single, but the human personalities are varied & shifting (& sometimes shifty). Lady Death is brilliantly characterized by Benavides, & brilliant performed by Hope, with a sound that is distinct, firm, but never overly emphatic; with an edge of eerieness, a bit out of this world, but also a part of it, inescapably. There's nothing melodramatic about this Lady Death, but she's clearly a presence. I was reminded of Whitman's Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet. I hope I get an opportunity to take this piece in again, & soon.

In fact I would have been happy if they had opened the second half with a reprise, instead of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The adaptation for chamber orchestra (again, the name was omitted from the program) was fine & it's always a fun piece, but whenever it's played there's an elephant in the room in the shape of a mouse, specifically Mickey. As Hope mentioned, the piece is inerasably linked with its segment of Fantasia, & who can help seeing the Sorcerer's high hat & grim face as he stills the waters unloosed by his mischievous apprentice? Very amusing, but I would have preferred another hearing of the Benavides.

This was followed by two short pieces: first Carlos Simon's Elegy: A Cry from the Grave & then Arvo Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. As with the piece by Guðnadóttir, Simon's piece seems, based on its title, spooky, but like that piece has an urgent political meaning – Simon wrote it to memorialize Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, & Michael Brown, all black men murdered by police or vigilantes. The music is elegiac, lyrical but somber, rising up & rising above. The Pärt was inspired by his late discovery of Britten's music. As with the earlier pieces on the program, its hypnotic use of repetition & slight variation associated it with early Church music, an association strengthened by the reverberations of bells. That led us to the final piece, Ariel Ramirez's Misa Criolla (arranged for chamber orchestra by Paul Bateman, with Hope's solo violin taking one of the vocal lines), which featured Gabriel Navia on charango (a lute-like stringed instrument from the Andes) as well as our chorus, led by David Xiques. This is one of the "folk masses" that appeared after Vatican II allowed Mass to be said in the vernacular. It is vibrant music, filled with echoes of traditional Latin American & Hispanic folk sounds: again, a piece between two worlds, the formal tradition of the Mass & the folk sounds of the people. As usual NCCO plays with a rich & almost plush sound that belies its relatively small number. The chorus, assembled for these concerts, was excellent throughout. The whole program was thoughtfully assembled, a nice mix of the unfamiliar & the familiar done with a twist. But the Benavides was definitely the highlight.

New Century Chamber Orchestra: season opener

Last Thursday I went to First Congregational Church in Berkeley to hear the New Century Chamber Orchestra. The concert was not only this excellent group's season opener, it was the first under new Artistic Partner Daniel Hope after Artistic Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's departure and the first concert (at least that I've been to) at First Congregational since the terrible fire there about a year ago. There was new music, too, so the concert's official title – New Horizons – seemed more appropriate than these things usually are.

The red brick church itself, in its stripped-down New England Protestant style, looks as good as ever, though a little more bare than it used to be inside (if there is an altar it was moved, and their usual banners were not hanging). Outside things are a little rougher than I expected; some of the yard in front of the church is fenced off, and there is a burnt-out parish building still braced and blockaded. I don't know if something is not yet settled in the back of the church, because the players entered and exited by walking down the center aisle. So the rebuilding is still in progress, but it's nice to have this familiar and beloved venue available again.

The new pieces on the program were framed by old favorites; the concert opened with Mendelssohn's Octet and closed with Tchaikovsky's Serenade, both performed with NCCO's familiar sound, lush and deep. I hadn't heard either piece for quite a while and it's nice to have that "oh, yeah, this is that piece" feeling as the music returns to memory. Hope spoke before each piece; his remarks were brief and pertinent, though I continue to feel that if your work-night concert is not even starting until 8:00, then you should eschew the chatting.

Before the second piece we heard a brief introduction from Alan Fletcher, which was fine since he was the composer and this was its world premiere. A co-commission among NCCO, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, and the Savannah Festival, this violin concerto (titled Violin Concerto) featured Daniel Hope as the soloist and is dedicated to him. Fletcher mentioned some of the influences on him while writing it – mostly visual, like moonlight on the ocean off the Maine coast, but also aural, from the natural world, as in the sound of waves and lapping water. (I was a bit amused that in his remarks he mentioned inspirational waters around the Bay Area, along with other connections to this area, while in the program book his notes mostly linked these elements to Zurich and its lake: why not, water is everywhere, and necessary everywhere. There is also a chorale by Reformation leader Zwingli worked into and varied in the music; Zwingli is ineluctably Zurich, but Fletcher did point out how appropriate it was that we were in a Protestant church (though one inclusive beyond the Reformer's dreams or fears).) The piece opens with a cleaner, more stylized "tuning" segment of the sort that gets done informally before each concert, and then it moves off into a more romantic sound world, though instead of working up a few big tunes that get repeated the music frequently swerves off into another view until finally it swirls up and vanishes. There is a lot of landscape-inspired music now, much of it evoking wide-open spaces and airier more evanescent qualities; this piece sounded heftier – more mountainous, if you will. It's a very attractive piece, which I enjoyed quite a lot.

The other new or newish piece on the program came after the intermission, Orawa by Wojciech Kilar. The title refers to a region in Poland, named for the river that runs through it. So as with the Fletcher piece, we had music inspired by landscapes, particularly those involving water, but in this case there was also a concentration on the peasant dances of the region. There is a repeating figure that gets louder, somewhat in the style of Ravel's Bolero, and it ends with the orchestra players all crying out Hey! It was a fun piece. Then came the melodious enchantments of the Tchaikovsky Serenade, followed after applause by a brief encore, a setting of America the Beautiful, and here's where for once I wanted to hear something from the stage, because I was curious who did this arrangement, which managed to shed a poignant grace on the exhausted sentiments of the overly familiar song.

Next up for New Century is a concert series on 8 - 12 November, with violinist Benjamin Beilman leading another combination of music both old (Bach, Biber, Beethoven) and new (Andrew Norman; and should Stravinsky go here or, at this point, under old music?). Check here for more details.

Ray Chen plays with New Century Chamber Orchestra

The Saturday after the presidential election I trekked out to Herbst Theater in San Francisco to hear violinist Ray Chen as guest soloist and conductor for New Century Chamber Orchestra. I believe he also chose the program. It was an evening that brought balm, despite the woman behind me coughing all through the Mozart Violin concerto #3 (followed by an impressive improvised cadenza of constant throat-clearing).

The performance opened with a different Mozart piece, the Divertimento in F major, K. 138. As you might guess from the composer's name, the music was a portal into a world very different from the one most of us have been living in recently. The performers all stood in a semi-circle. Chen is a very physical performer, leaning forward, leaning backwards, sometimes goggling his eyes at others as they saw away (this made one of the people in front of me giggle; I didn't think it was that funny, actually). I had heard him once before, at a subscriber gift concert sponsored by San Francisco Performances, but it was interesting to watch him interact with a whole group and not just one pianist. He conducted too, waving his bow as his baton. He has a full sound, capable of sweetness and pathos. The first half ended with Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, in a haunting performance that brought out things I was not expecting from this music, with which I am mildly and vaguely familiar – here it was sadder, deeper, more mystical and mysterious than I had expected.

I'm not a big fan of chat from the stage, though I realize that is yet another losing battle of mine. I have to say that Chen does it better than most; he's very good-humored and extremely charming. He does ramble a bit, but so do they all, and his ramblings at least led us to amusing and unexpected places. At one point he noted that his original Australian accent had returned, as it sometimes does when he speaks publicly (his background is Taiwanese and Australian; he moved to this country at age 16, roughly a decade ago, to attend the Curtis Institute). In discussing his programming, he quoted his father as saying, "Mozart is to music as oil is to the wok," a koanic comparison that led to a moment of apparently stunned contemplation on the part of the audience. He also introduced us to his violin, joking that it was his girlfriend. It turns out he plays the Joachim Stradivarius – the very instrument played by Joseph Joachim, the great nineteenth-century violinist. Chen joked that this means that when he plays pieces like the Brahms Violin Concerto (dedicated to and first performed by Joachim) "the notes are already there, I just have to pull them out." I would have been interested in hearing how he came to play that instrument, but he did not tell us, and it was time to return to music anyway.

The charming Chen can go into different places when he plays (music coming from inside perhaps being a truer form of communication than words directed outwardly), and the second half opened with a stylish yet searching performance of Mozart's Violin Concerto #3 (accompanied by coughing directly behind me, as previously mentioned), followed by the stately rolling clouds of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for Strings.

I can't emphasize enough how good it was to hear this music performed so richly at the end of a week that left most of us shocked, angry, and disgusted. I don't buy a lot of the bromides about art: I think music can divide us as easily as bring us together, I'm not sure anything can heal what has been happening in this country, but it was profoundly moving to see this varied group come together and, working in harmony, create and recreate the fleeting beauty left us by those who have gone ahead of us. What was happening outside had still (and was still) happening, but during the concert I kept thinking about Larkin's lines about the jazz trumpeter Sidney Bechet:

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes. . . .

New Century Chamber Orchestra launches its silver season

New Century Chamber Orchestra is turning 25 this year, and to mark this milestone they have christened this their Silver Season. The other major milestone they are marking is the ninth and final year of Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's time as their Music Director, a term that has been marked by a higher profile for this fine ensemble as well as the very welcome Featured Composer Residency program, culminating each season in a new work written for the ensemble (on 16 May 2017 you can hear these works in the first of three final and farewell concerts).

Last Saturday I headed out to Herbst Theater in San Francisco to hear the first concert of their season. It opened with Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement), written by a youthful Webern for his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg (in a version for chamber orchestra prepared by Gerard Schwarz). It is a brief (roughly ten minute) but full and even lush piece, written when both composers were immersed in that late romantic style that is so replete in every way (size, sound, luxurious longing, impending sadness and exhaustion) that the only place to turn from it was to the bracing asperities that I at least love in the works of the Second Viennese School these composers are now mostly associated with. I hope it's not damning to call this piece tasteful, but there's always a sense of elegant restraint behind even its most voluptuous swellings. This was followed by Mozart's Piano Concerto No 13 in C Major, with soloist Inon Barnatan. He is sort of an elfin fellow, and the silver of the season also seemed appropriate for his silvery, mercurial touch; C major is seen as such a triumphant key, but that didn't seem quite what was going on in this delicate yet striking performance. The piano was situated so that Barnatan on his stool was just a few feet away from Salerno-Sonnenberg in her Concertmaster's seat. He frequently glanced over at her, and the two exchanged cues wordlessly. But when he was not looking at her, he did not look at us; instead, a smile of blissful distance on his face, he seemed to be floating off on effulgent clouds he himself was calling forth.

After the intermission, we had Philip Glass's Symphony No. 3. I am a long-time Glass fan, but I was a little mixed on this symphony, though the playing was, as is to be expected with this group, full and fine and thoughtful. The symphony is in the usual four movements, and though I found them all enjoyable enough it was only the third and longest movement that I really connected with. It is also the most "Philip-Glass-like" of the movements, which left me feeling dubious about myself, since I've always rejected "that performance didn't sound like [insert name of composer here: Beethoven, Prokofiev, Glass. . . ]" as a standard – why should people always "sound like" themselves? It's like those painters who have one technique and use it over and over, until it can seem more like a commercial gimmick than anything else. Nonetheless, here I was, most absorbed in the most Glass-like part of the work, feeling in it that undertow of melancholy I hear in his work, with the deep strings lamenting forward, overlaid with the plangent thrusts of Salerno-Sonnenberg's violin. The other movements seemed a bit more haphazard to me, a little less specific in what they summoned up, if you will.

The concert closed with Peter Heidrich's Variations on Happy Birthday, in which the familiar tune is treated in the styles of various composers and traditions, from Bach and Haydn to "film music" and jazz. It's a fun item, so I can see why they thought it would be, you know, fun to include it in the first concert of their 25th birthday season, but it seemed like a bit of a goof after the sort of pearly sadness that underlay the other pieces, though of course the playing was still on a high level. Salerno-Sonnenberg announced that they weren't playing all the variations and we could enjoy ourselves guessing which piece was supposed to be which composer, but I genuinely hate guessing games, which kind of blunted the edge of that for me. And I wonder how many of us would be able to detect a Max Reger parody (Variation IX) unless it was clearly labeled as such, though in general it's easy enough to hear roughly who or what is being parodied. Despite this there was much whispering around me from the previously attentive audience as they tried to pin each butterfly to the board. The young woman next to me asked several times to borrow my program. (Why not just listen? But I do realize it took me a long time to learn that,) Violinist Evan Price, whose birthday it was, did an elaborate solo. Someone behind me decided to chant his name. Some people tried clapping along during the "Hungarian" variation. None of these audience interventions really took off, though. It was not my favorite ending to an otherwise dreamy concert.

New Century Chamber Orchestra: Daniel Hope's tribute to Yehudi Menuhin

Last Thursday I was at First Congregational Church in Berkeley to hear New Century Chamber Orchestra. Violinist Daniel Hope was the guest concertmaster, and he had put together an interesting and varied program in tribute to his mentor, Yehudi Menuhin, who would have turned 100 this coming April 22. Hope has a new CD out called My Tribute to Yehudi Menuhin whose program is a bit different from the one I heard Thursday, a difference which shows the wide range of Menuhin's musical interests and influences. All of the pieces had some association with Menuhin; some were commissioned by him or written in his honor, others he played frequently.

Hope's mother was Menuhin's secretary and then manager, and Hope grew up in close association with the great violinist. Though I'm not a big fan of musicians talking from the stage rather than playing, I make an exception in certain cases, as when an artist is talking about his or her own work or a performer is giving some personal insight into a great composer or older musician. I have to say I found Hope's comments a bit disappointing in this regard; too often they were general remarks about the music, which could speak for itself. We did get some more personal anecdotes and insights, but I would have preferred more, with comments on the music left for the program book. That was really my only disappointment with the concert, though.

Each half began with a substantial baroque work; in the first half it was Bach's Concerto in D Minor for 2 Violins, Strings and Basso Continuo, BWV 1043. Hope and Dawn Harms were the titular two violins. I've heard New Century fairly often, but each time I'm impressed by the richness and precision of sound they produce. Hope obviously has a great rapport with the group, and there was much generous and genial back-and-forth in the playing and during the bows after each piece. After the Bach we heard some more recent pieces, Arvo Pärt's Darf ich . . . (May I . . .)  – Hope said that when Menuhin received the piece, which was written for him, he looked at the title and said, "May I what?" That suggests some of the open-endedness of the piece. As is typical for Pärt, haunting effects were created through seemingly simple means. It's an interesting piece to have written for a virtuoso, suggesting spiritual substance rather than flash. The same was true of the next piece, Philip Glass's Echorus for 2 Violins and Strings. Echorus is meant to evoke echo rather than e-commerce; the echoing violin was played by Iris Stone. The music had that undercurrent of melancholy that I frequently hear in Glass. The first half closed with a youthful Violin Concerto by Felix Mendelssohn – not the famous one, but one written when he was thirteen and only rediscovered in the 1950s, when Menuhin gave the modern premiere. It's an inventive, bubbling piece and provided a flashing end to the first half.

The audience had been impeccable so far, but apparently several people came down with a severe cough during intermission, and the two women behind me felt that it was very important to whisper during one of the pieces. I suppose the general audience impeccability had been too good to last, but I enjoyed it while it did. Our big baroque opener for this half was Vivaldi's Concerto for 2 Violins in A Minor, RV 522. Then, again duplicating the structure of the first half, we had two fairly brief and meditative modern pieces: first Unfinished Journey, which borrows the title of Menuhin's autobiography. It was written by Bechara El-Khoury for the tenth anniversary of Menuhin's death and was premiered by Hope. The next piece, Toru Takemitsu's Nostalghia: In Memory of Andrei Tarkovskij, though written in memory of someone else (the great Russian film director Tarkovsky), was composed for Menuhin. Both these pieces, as well as the Pärt and Glass in the first half, suggested an interesting portrait of Menuhin as a searching and spiritual man and artist. Other than that they were not similar pieces, but had a pleasing variety of effect. The concert ended with a lively rendition of Béla Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances. Hope told an interesting story at this point about Menuhin's deep connection with this composer: he played him one of his violin and piano sonatas, and Bartók responded that he thought a composer had to be dead for years before his music could be played like that. It was another indication of the deep commitment and searching artistry of the older violinist. I never had a chance to hear Menuhin live, but after this concert I felt I understood what he was about. What a beautiful tribute to a great man.

New Century Chamber Orchestra: Letters from Russia (& other places)

Last Thursday I was at First Congregational in Berkeley for the first concert of New Century Chamber Orchestra's season. The program was called Letters from Russia, since it featured the Letter Scene from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin among other Slavic music, but there was some contemporary music featured too, from Jennifer Higdon, this season's featured composer.

The performance opened with Estonian Arvo Pärt's Trisagion, which is Greek for Thrice Holy, and if you know anything about Pärt and his music you will not be surprised to hear that the piece is linked to the Russian Orthodox liturgy, or that it flows with a steady meditative quality, or that it is beautiful. NCCO has such a rich and sometimes even sumptuous sound; yet they can also plink and pluck and be acerbic in the Shostakovich style, as we heard later on. After Pärt's fifteen minutes, Ailyn Pérez came out for Rachmaninoff's Vocalise. She was glittering in a floor-length silver sheath, looking almost incongruously glamorous, like a mermaid just risen from the depths, among the sombre black and purple clothing of the orchestra, there in the austere arches and angles of the colonial New England-style church. She gave a suitably rich performance of Rachmaninoff's flowing line.

And then to close the first half we had sort of a Higdon sampler: Strings, the "quasi-scherzo" second movement of the Concerto for Orchestra from 2002; String Lake, another second movement, this time from All Things Majestic, a 2011 work inspired by the mountainous scenery of Wyoming; and To the Point, an arrangement of the third movement of Impressions, a 2003 string quartet written in response to Impressionist painting as well as the quartets of Ravel and Debussy. (The piece had been commissioned by the Cypress Quartet as part of a series in which composers were asked to respond in some way to a classic of the quartet repertory.) This may sound potentially like a grab-bag mishmash, but actually all three pieces went nicely together, offering enough variety as well as congruity to form a satisfying suite. I'm looking forward to hearing more of Higdon's work (including a world premiere at the season's final concert); there are depths there worth exploring.

After the intermission, the second half started with Shostakovich's Elegy and Polka (also known as Two Pieces for String Orchestra). The first part was shaped from a melancholy, moody aria from his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District, and the contrasting second part was adapted from his ballet The Golden Age, about a Soviet soccer team traveling to Paris. It sounded suitably sporty.

Then Pérez came out again to perform the Letter Scene from Onegin, in which the naive Tatiana writes a letter declaring her love to the sophisticated, Byronic Eugene Onegin. (It does not turn out well.) Clarice Assad did the arrangement of Tchaikovsky's music. When Pérez entered, she once again (glittering in her silver sheath) looked so glam and sophisticated, so much the opposite of a young country girl like Tatiana, that I wondered how she could possibly convey the character. With vocal skill, it turns out; with a finely detailed, yearning performance. Even with only the English words in the program it was easy to know exactly where she was in the aria, so well-defined was her emotional arc. The orchestra matched her level of passion and precision. What a wonderful thing all around. The applause was so great afterwards that the orchestra did an encore, a piece by Schnittke, whom Music Director and lead violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg amusingly described as of course "the first name that comes to mind when Russian music is mentioned!"

Next up for NCCO is a holiday concert in December, featuring the San Francisco Girls' Chorus and klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer; that's 17 - 20 December and you can find out more about it here.

Lovely "Rita"

Last night I was at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley for the first in New Century Chamber Orchestra's latest concerts, their first foray into operatic repertory. They programmed wisely, starting with a selection of opera-related pieces and then, after intermission, concluding with a Donizetti rarity: Rita, a roughly hour-long comedy for three singers (rescored and edited for New Century by Peter Grunberg, and staged by Eugene Brancoveanu).

Fortunately we were spared any chat from the stage and the first part opened immediately with music, the Intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, arranged by Clarice Assad, followed by the Prestissimo from Verdi's String Quartet in E Minor, then the Meditation from Massenet's Thais, arranged by Clarice Assad, with NCCO leader Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as the violin soloist, and  closing with the Overture to Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus, arranged by Mats Lidstrom. The orchestra members clearly enjoy playing together, and cast a melodious spell in these popular favorites, the fleeter, more comic selections alternating with the more poignant. The Verdi is probably the least familiar, though parts of it sounded very Verdian, as if these embryonic slashes would swell into something like a chorus from Ballo. Salerno-Sonnenberg as Thais provided an inward Meditation, a searching contemplation that clearly affected some of the audience, who stood up to applaud when that selection was finished. The part of the Meditation usually taken by (I think) a harp was replaced by (I think) a xylophone, whose comparatively less ethereal sound provided an interesting and contrasting earthward pull and comment on the soaring violin. [UPDATE: I am reliably informed (see the comments) that it was a marimba, not a xylophone, that replaced the harp.] The Fledermaus Overture was very pleasant and I was surprised at how familiar I was with it, since though I understand many people really love Fledermaus I am not among them. It could maybe have sparkled a little more, but it was enjoyable, which is all that I can ask and usually more than I get from that particular operetta. So a very enjoyable first part, about thirty-forty minutes, preparing us with arching beauty and dashing tunefulness for bel canto comedy.

I was actually a little surprised at how much fun the performance of Rita was. To get some complaints out of the way, the concert, in the middle of the work week, started at the ridiculous hour of 8:00, which is probably why most members of the audience looked as if they were retired. And the second half started with a useless video, in which Salerno-Sonnenberg went on about wanting to do something operatic with the group and choosing the Donizetti because it was manageable and then warning us about the subject matter ("spousal abuse," and though they didn't come right out and say it I'm going to guess that NCCO is, in fact, opposed to it) but it's a farce so it's all OK (I was relieved that the term "politically incorrect" was not used) and that was intercut with the director giving away crucial elements of the plot. What was the point of all this? We're already sitting there, waiting – we don't need to be persuaded that this is worth seeing, we don't need behind-the-scenes banalities. Why not let us discover the piece on our own? We'll find out soon enough what it's about. It's rare enough that we see an opera where we don't know semi-quaver by semi-quaver what's going to happen next; please, let it unfold as it was meant to, in real time on stage in front of our ears and eyes. Last NCCO concert I went to they performed the Four Seasons, prefaced with one of these unnecessary videos, in which different members of the orchestra talked about parts of the music they liked, which is very nice but I'm more interested in the parts I like. Anyway once they actually started performing the Vivaldi, there was bustle and applause from the audience after each segment until the third or fourth time it happened when Salerno-Sonnenberg, without looking at the audience, lifted her bow off the violin and pointed it at us, commanding silence. It was a dramatic (and effective) gesture, but if you're going to get all chatty and personal from the stage you can't blame the audience if they take you at your word and think they're at a cocktail party and don't pay much attention. (And in fact the audience was noisier during Rita than during the first part of the concert.)

So I was sitting there, having been told plot twists I had carefully avoided reading about, wondering glumly if farce was my least favorite form of comedy, or just close to my least favorite, and – OK, I'm going to give away some plot elements here; to be both clear and obscure, I'll say that the basic plot of Rita is a comic variant of  Enoch Arden – reflecting that I don't find "spousal abuse" any more amusing when it's the man who's being abused. Then the performance started and it was, as I said, a surprising amount of fun. Brancoveanu, who directed and designed the staging and prepared the English-language spoken parts between the musical numbers (which were sung in Italian, with surtitles), is well known around here for his beautiful baritone and strong stage presence, but he's just as talented on the other side of the stage lights; the staging was filled with clever, witty touches (starting with the cover of the program, which showed the three singers in a pose reminiscent of the Lubitsch/Ben Hecht film Design for Living – OK, there's another plot tease for you). Not everything worked brilliantly, but most of it did, and there was nothing dull or wrong-headed. Lots of it was surprisingly funny, like a slow-motion boxing match between the men. He also avoided the trap of making the stage business so busy and constant that shtick overwhelmed the performance, something I've seen happen with bel canto comedy fairly often (looking at you, Barbiere). It's too bad they didn't have a raised stage for the singers, the way Philharmonia Baroque does when they stage things at First Congregational, but it was all visible enough with a bit of neck-craning.

The staging was solidly grounded in the personalities and performances of the three excellent leads, soprano Maria Valdes as Rita, tenor Thomas Glenn as Beppe, and baritone Efraín Solís as Gasparo. All are young and good-looking enough so that the strong physical attraction behind their abused/abuser byplay was clear. Clever use was made of the physical differences between the two men; Glenn, who starts out as the hen-pecked husband, has a slighter build than does Solís, and his clear and distinctive tenor is not as large a voice as Solís's baritone, and those distinctions made part of the comedy. Glenn was hilariously meek as the opera opened, dressed, ironically, in a wifebeater, as he obediently painted his wife's toenails. His bearing and voice opened up when he realized he had a chance to escape her (the opera was of course written before divorce became a realistic possible solution for unhappy marriages). In a very funny bit he appropriates Gasparo's jacket (which he stuffs with things to create the appearance of muscles), and his dark glasses, and his swagger, and also a bit of Lucia's mad scene. Both Solís and Valdes are charming enough to get away with their "abusive behaviors," which seem like pre-emptive attempts not to be overwhelmed by their attraction for each other. Gasparo had some funny interplay with the orchestra, when he asked for something romantic and Salerno-Sonnenberg obliged with a brief reprise of the Meditation from Thais until he stopped her and demanded something italiano. Beautiful singing and playing all around, with lots of joy in the audience. When the opera ended the amiable older gentleman next to me, who had earlier noticed my bag from Moe's and with whom I had been summoning up remembrances of bookstores past, cheerfully said of his elegant wife, "Well, now I have to go home and beat her" and we all three laughed.

There are three more opportunities to catch the performance, and when else are you going to get to see Rita: Friday 14 February at First United Methodist Church in Palo Alto, Saturday 15 February at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, and Sunday 16 February at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael. More information and tickets here.

The Three Bs (Bartok, Britten, birthday)

Last night I was at the San Francisco performance of New Century Chamber Orchestra's first concerts of the season. They got a jump on the 2013 Britten centenary by scheduling the Simple Symphony and Les Illuminations, but Bartok's Divertimento, sandwiched between the two, more than held its own.

The band filed into their seats on the Herbst Theater stage, all in black with the occasional splash of peacock blue. Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg gave a brief and not really necessary preview of the season, which will include a world premiere next May by Lera Auerbach, this season's featured composer, though the featured composer for these first concerts is Britten the birthday boy. Salerno-Sonnenberg said the Simple Symphony was youthful and high-spirited and Les Illuminations was . . . not, which was amusing. This was all fine but I could have done without her assurance that the performance we were about to hear with Melody Moore was going to be the best ever. I mean, I did enjoy it very much, but I prefer not to be given instructions beforehand, as if I have no other choice.

The Simple Symphony is very enjoyable, though its antic alliterative section titles (Boisterous Bouree, Playful Pizzicato, Sentimental Saraband, and Frolicsome Finale) make the piece sound simpler than it is and don't really do justice to the stylish naivete of the actual music, though the energetic performance did. The Saraband in particular reaches depths of emotional dignity its title wouldn't lead you to expect. I also really enjoyed the delicate skittering sound of the Playful Pizzicato. The Bartok too had a bit of a misleading title, being meatier music than Divertimento might lead you to expect. When it started I was kind of surprised to discover that I knew the piece already; I would have said beforehand that I did not, but it's always gratifying to discover that one is even more knowledgeable than one thinks one is. It starts with sort of a country-jaunt sound, and at one point it seemed like very angsty salon music, and then it takes a few more turns, including a loopy pizzicato passage near the end. More pizzicato! It was an excellent selection to go with the Britten, being along the same lines but down a different track, but I thought it had more substantial qualities that almost showed up the birthday honoree, though he did reclaim the spotlight after the intermission with Les Illuminations.

I had realized I knew the Bartok but then I realized I had the wrong piece in mind for Les Illuminations, so I guess balance was restored in my little universe. For some reason I had it confused with the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings. You'd think I'd have been tipped off by the French title and by a soprano rather than a tenor as the soloist. (Also the lack of a horn soloist, but let's not pile it on. . . .) Anyway this piece is actually the setting of some late (as in, written when he was around twenty) prose poems by Rimbaud, and it shows a more sophisticated and various side of Britten, as he responded to the French poet's surreal, beautiful disturbances. Moore was a vivid and strong soloist, gesturing and acting out. I wish they had had surtitles; there was a distressing amount of program rustling going on, as well as a lot more whispering throughout the whole concert than there should have been, especially since, judging from some of the overhead conversations, many of the audience members were musicians themselves. Also, three incredibly rude people came in later after the second half had started, wandered down to the front, and stepped over others to get to their seats.

There was an encore, for Moore and Salerno-Sonnenberg's solo violin: an arrangement by Clarice Assad of the famous hymn Amazing Grace and the less famous spiritual David Play Your Harp (its formal title might be a bit different). I have to say I wasn't crazy about the results. Perhaps it would have sounded better after the first half, since those pieces hearkened back to hymns, dances, and folk tunes, but the effect was a bit jarring coming after the bizarre comedy and artistic alienation of Rimbaud and the music he evoked. But more than that, I didn't like the arrangements very much: the vocal line was very traditional, and Moore sang with a lot of heart and joy (though she did tend to swallow the word "harp" each time she sang "David play your harp," which might have been her or the arrangement), but the violin part was I thought too filigreed and artsy and recessive for the style of these sacred songs.

A to Z

glances backwards and forwards. . . .

Some of my favorite concerts feature artists performing their own music. San Francisco Performances had a wonderful one last year: an evening of music by poet and composer Lera Auerbach, with Auerbach herself on piano, joined in the first half by Alisa Weilerstein on cello and soprano Lina Tetriani. I was particularly interested in this concert since I had been bowled over by The Little Mermaid at San Francisco Ballet (Auerbach composed the score). Her music is lyrical and direct and strong. She also has the gift of being able to talk to audiences about her work in a way worth hearing. The first piece, Last Letter, joined all three performers. The text is from Marina Tsvetaeva's poem Novogodneye (New Year's Greeting). Poetry is notoriously what gets lost in translation and I think I hear this said more about Russian poetry than any other and about Tsvetaeva's poems in particular perhaps most of all. Music is another, and possibly more successful, way of translating poetry.

Auerbach started by telling us a bit about the poem and then reciting it in English (I would have liked to have heard it in Russian as well, but you can't have everything). Tsvetaeva wrote it shortly after the death of Rainer Maria Rilke, which was around the 1927 new year. The two poets (as well as Pasternak) had been engaged in an intense correspondence in the year or so before Rilke's death. Auerbach mentioned the suffering of the Russian poets, and because Russian and poetic suffering is such a monumental "thing" with us, a cultural trope, a number of us laughed knowingly, which didn't seem to faze Auerbach, but I was immediately ashamed of myself; who am I to chuckle at the tremendous historical sufferings I have been spared? Auerbach recommended the collected correspondence to us, and I procured a copy as pleasant penance for my smug Americanness. Anyway that piece was followed by the Sonata for Cello and Piano, Opus 69, the second movement of which, the composer informed us, uses a theme associated with the Little Mermaid in the ballet. The second half of the concert was Auerbach solo, playing her Twenty-four Preludes for Piano, Opus 41. She has composed three sets of such preludes for different instruments (I think the others are for viola and cello, but I might be mistaken) and told us that San Francisco Performances was the only place in the world that had presented all three sets (I know I heard one other at a different concert, but I somehow missed a set). Altogether a wonderful concert.

Then last May I heard the season closer of the New Century Chamber Orchestra, which seems to be having a golden period right now, under music director Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg. Though they are a chamber orchestra they have such a full, rich, and even lush sound - lush yet precise. The concert opened with Grieg's delightful Holberg Suite, whose backward-looking elegance led nicely to the second piece on the program, Commedia dell'Arte, a world premiere by that season's featured composer, Ellen Taafe Zwilich. The first three of the four brief movements are named after famous commedia characters - the trickster clown Arlechinno, his beloved the lovely Columbina, and the boastful Capitano; the fourth movement, Cadenza and Finale, brings them all together. I thought it was a delightful piece, much fresher than actual commedia performances, with amusingly different instrumentation for each movement - for example, a toy drum for the Capitano, which captures his spirit perfectly.

After the intermission came a gorgeous performance of Schoenberg's gorgeous, emotionally rich Verklarte Nacht, and, to close out the ensemble's twentieth anniversary season, the Happy Birthday Variations by Peter Heidrich, in which the eponymous tune is played in the style of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, and Dvorak, and then as a Polka/Waltz, as film music (of the Waxman-Korngold era), as ragtime, as a tango, and then a czardas. The composers and styled are listed in the program but it's actually fun to guess what you're hearing, and though I usually loathe any variation on a guessing game I didn't cheat by looking at my program. That was fun, and the concert was near my companion's birthday, so she had a little serenade. As an encore they played a chamber-orchestra version of "Nimrod," from Elgar's Enigma Variations, which Salerno-Sonnenberg referred to as the most beautiful music in the world.

The connection between these two concerts is that, just as Zwilich was last year's featured composer for NCCO, Auerbach is this year's, with a world premiere coming next May. (More information on that here)

random previews: symphonic

As you may have heard by now, this is the centennial season of the San Francisco Symphony, and as you have probably also heard, they are unleashing an Avalanche of Awesome this year – every week a highlight! Since the full schedule was announced last spring various friends have been wondering how to keep up, and keep from bankrupting themselves this year. Well, good luck with that, that’s all I can say.

I think I was initially sort of overwhelmed by the announcement – the Symphony has what you might call a baseball season, as opposed to the football season of the Opera, so it takes a longer time for it all to sink in, especially since the most appealing and intriguing items are often tucked away between more popular (or so the marketers hope) pieces. So there’s a huge lot of fragmented information to take in, which might be why my brain seized on the Mahler 3, and I kept thinking, I just have to make sure I get to the Mahler 3. No particular reason, it was simply the drifting log I grabbed on to in the swirling vast ocean.

So: the Mahler 3 (21-25 September) is among the tickets I already have, along with:

James Conlon conducting the Verdi Requiem, with Sondra Radvanovsky, Dolora Zajick, Frank Lopardo, and Ain Anger, 19-22 October;

Michael Tilson Thomas conducting a world premiere by Sofia Gubaidulina and also the Brahms Requiem with Jane Archibald and Kyle Ketelsen, 17-20 November;

Tilson Thomas conducting Janacek’s Sinfonietta and Debussy’s Le martyre de Saint Sebastien, with Karina Gauvin, Sasha Cooke, Leah Wool, and Frederica von Stade narrating, 12-14 January 2012;

Charles Dutoit conducting Stravinsky’s Le Chant du rossignol, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, and the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Arabella Steinbacher, 1-3 March 2012;

and Tilson Thomas conducting Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw and the Beethoven 9th, which closes the season 27-30 June 2012.

Some other especially enticing possibilities (Tilson Thomas conducting unless otherwise noted): the west coast premiere of Thomas Ades’s Polaris, along with Mozart’s Haffner and Stravinsky’s Petrushka (29 September – 1 October); Alan Gilbert leading violin soloist Renaud Capucon in Dutilleux’s L’Arbre des songes, along with the Beethoven 8 and the Haydn 99 (27-29 October); Esa-Pekka Salonen leading violin soloist Leila Josefowicz in his own violin concerto, along with Pohjola’s Daughter by Sibelius and Christine Brewer in excerpts from Wagner’s Ring (8-10 December); Christian Tetzlaff in the Ligeti Violin Concerto, along with Liszt’s Prometheus and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony 1, Winter Daydreams (6-8 January); and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, with Michelle DeYoung and Alan Held, along with Jeremy Denk in the Liszt Piano Concerto No 1. (Further information and tickets are available on the Symphony's website here in case you missed it above.)

There’s also an American Mavericks series in March 2012, with some amazing programs, including pianist Jeremy Denk and vocalists Jessye Norman, Meredith Monk, and Joan La Barbara in works by Foss, Cowell, and Cage; and world premieres from Mason Bates and John Adams (details here).

And I haven’t even mentioned the visiting orchestra series, featuring two programs each (many featuring music they have commissioned) from the Los Angeles Philharmonic , the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra (details here).

That’s all kind of overwhelming (as well as all kinds of overwhelming), and I’m not sure how any of us who actually have to go work are going to keep up. But even all that isn’t the only game in town:

Cal Performances is also hosting several orchestras (details here), and the Berkeley Symphony has an appealing line-up (the one that’s jumping out at me features Sarah Cahill in the Lou Harrison Piano Concerto, which I love; that’s on December 8, and the rest of the schedule can be found here); the Oakland East Bay Symphony schedule is here; and last but certainly not least the very fine New Century Chamber Orchestra has an excellent line-up (details here), including a world premiere from this season's featured composer, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: September (OK, second half of September)

Yes, I realize the month is half over, but here goes anyway. There were a couple of reasons I didn’t post this sooner: first, for some reason my energy level tends to drop in September. I’m not sure exactly why: changing seasons? bad allergies and debilitating allergy medications? more hot days? accumulated lack of time off? Some combination of the above? Fortunately for me I decided long ago that “watching DVDs” counts as “getting something done” – that Netflix queue isn’t going to arrange itself – so I don’t feel completely worthless.

The second reason is that for a long time there didn’t seem to be anything much going on this month, which is weird, since September is usually crammed. But some of the major presenters (Cal and San Francisco Performances in particular) are starting later than usual, and some other major presenters (San Francisco Opera and Symphony) have fairly unexciting seasons, so I currently have only one ticket for the whole month:

That would be Werther at the Opera, with an excellent cast featuring Ramon Vargas and Alice Coote.

But some other stuff has come up as well:

Next Saturday, September 18, at 8:00, Old First Concerts presents Heidi Melton (accompanied by John Parr) in a tasty array of songs by Berg, Wagner, Barber, and Richard Strauss.

The Berkeley Symphony opens its season on Thursday, September 23, at 7:00, and I feel I should go just to encourage more such sensible start times, but the program is also enticing: the violin concertos by Beethoven and John Adams, with Jennifer Koh as soloist (I heard her last March in her SF Performances recital, and she was excellent).

The New Century Chamber Orchestra opens its season with music by Rossini, Bottesini, Mahler, and Shostakovich, featuring this year's resident artist, bass player Edgar Meyer. That's September 23-26, in various locations, with an open rehearsal on the 20th.

And we have the Bay Area premiere of Jerry Springer: The Opera. The show was a big hit in London several years ago, and there was some talk it would tour out here, and I was quite excited and defended the concept against the denunciations of a co-worker of mine, who considered the title alone as proof that Western Civilization had, once again, Fallen and was unable to get back up. I suggested to her, among other things, that she might want to review the libretto for L’Incoronazione di Poppea. OK, then I ordered the CDs from England, and have to admit I was disappointed – except for some baroquey choruses, the music is much more Phantom of the Opera than actual opera. And it’s sure to be amplified. But I’m starting to hear rumors that this is a good production, so I may try to fit it into my busy schedule of staring at the floor wondering why one lone man can’t keep even a single goddam room clean. It’s presented by Ray of Light Theater at the Victoria Theater, which I understand is right by the 16th Street BART station, and it runs through October 16.

That’s it so far – if you know of anything else, please pass the word on. I’m hoping to do some random season previews before I plunge back too deeply into the maelstrom.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: May

Here it is May Day already. Do you know why America celebrates Labor Day in September? The capitalists had to give the workers something, but they didn’t want May 1 to be a worldwide day of worker solidarity. So into September it went, where it now mostly signifies the end of summer, as if summer matters in a country with criminally small amounts of time off for most workers. Years ago someone gave me that bit of information about the move to September – such casual mentions are what we used to have instead of Wikipedia, which I’m not going to bother to check. On past May Days I would occasionally wear a red tie and red socks to work; just another of my little jokes which no one realized I was making, which is probably just as well (though someone in Boston did once think the socks were a baseball reference, so I went with that). Anyway here's what I'm seeing or wouldn't mind seeing in May, and some of these are coming right up! Internet failure and migraines delayed my posting. So rush out there to celebrate the Art workers among us by purchasing tickets – remember, culture costs.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra closes its season with a world premiere violin concert, Romanza, by this year's featured composer, William Bolcom, with NCCO Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as soloist; the balance of the program features Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings and Copland’s ever-fresh Appalachian Spring in its original version, along with the Hoe Down from Rodeo. That program takes place May 6-9, four times in four different locations. There is also an open rehearsal on Tuesday, May 4, at 10:00 a.m. in Berkeley.

On May 2 and 4, the California Symphony in Walnut Creek presents Silicon Blues, a world premiere by Mason Bates, at the conclusion of his three-year tenure as the orchestra’s sixth Young American Composer-in-Residence. The program also includes the Beethoven 5 and Sarina Chang in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo Capriccioso for Cello and Orchestra. (Yes, she plays both piano and cello.)

The Oakland East Bay Symphony closes its season on May 14-16 with the Beethoven 9, featuring soloists Kristin Clayton, Layna Chianakas, Thomas Glenn, and Bojan Knezevic, along with Jake Heggie’s The Deepest Desire: Four Meditations on Love, based on poems by Sister Helen Prejean. Chianakas is also the soloist in the Heggie piece and Music Director Michael Morgan is the conductor.

Volti will close its season with Nocturnes, a new song cycle by Morten Lauridsen, who will accompany the chorus himself on the piano. These concerts also include works by Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, and Robin Estrada. There are two performances, May 14 in Berkeley and May 15 in San Francisco. Be advised that the May 14 concert also features a whole mess of high school choirs. You can also buy Volti's latest CD here if you can't make it to the concerts.

Cal Performances presents Laurie Anderson in Delusion on May 7-8, and jazz great Sonny Rollins on May 13, as part of his 80th birthday tour. I heard him at Cal a few years ago and he was amazing.

SF Performances presents baritone Eugene Brancoveanu on May 16, in works by Sviridov, Bellini, Schubert, Loewe, and Duparc.

Incidentally Cal Performances is announcing its next season on May 4, and San Francisco Performances makes its announcement on May 11. I’m hoping both of them will come through for local audiences – that is, the local audiences who go to the theater for something besides the bland comforts of familiarity. Everyone else seems to be dragging out every over-familiar standard they can, which wouldn’t be so annoying if they all didn’t keep insisting on how very innovative they are.

SF Ballet closes its season May 1-9 with Helgi Tomasson’s version of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which of course is based on what the Ballet’s website rather bizarrely describes as Shakespeare’s “phenomenally crafted tale.” By the way, I’m glad the Ballet is reviving The Little Mermaid next season, since I missed it due to poverty. Not that I'm expecting to be richer next season, but after hearing Lera Auerbach’s San Francisco Performances recital, I’m eager to hear more of her music. I’ve also heard knowledgeable friends praise the theatricality of John Neumeier’s choreography.

The San Francisco Symphony has Dalbavie’s La Source d’un Regard, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and the Brahms 2 conducted by Eschenbach on May 5-8. The Dalbavie presumably takes the place of the Thomas Larcher commission announced in the concert schedule. The Symphony has an irritating way of disappearing pieces and performers from its website without even a note mentioning the substitution, so that, for example, if you had a vague memory that last year’s announcement included Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, you could gaslight yourself searching the website, because it’s gone without an explanation. The excellent young pianist David Fray is the soloist in the Beethoven. I heard him last December with the New York Philharmonic in an exciting performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and it’s to his credit that it wasn’t completely swamped by my memory of Martha Argerich’s performance of the same piece with the San Francisco Symphony earlier in the year (my post on that is here). His publicity photos are all male-model stylish angularity, but in person he’s quite tall and thin, with an endearingly bird-like gawkiness. Unfortunately the Friday concert is one of those silly 6.5 affairs, at which they drop a piece of music and substitute the conductor blathering from the podium, so that those who are there only for whatever fading social cachet attaches to “attending the symphony” are relieved from being forced to listen to so much actual music. I assume the Dalbavie is being dropped, but the website doesn’t specify that, so I’m just guessing based on past experience.

May 19-23 Tilson Thomas conducts Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe and Stravinsky’s Threni, Lamentations of Jeremiah. That looks promising.

UPDATE: I've just been informed that due to visa problems the Stravinsky is being rescheduled to some future season. Instead the Symphony and its Chorus will be performing Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. My excitement over this concert has just cooled considerably.

And May 27-29 he conducts the Schumann 3, the Rhenish, and then the orchestra is joined by soprano Erin Wall for Mozart’s Bella mia Fiamma – Resta, o cara, and Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence. I’m especially eager to hear the Holloway, since Clarissa is one of my favorite novels. (I’m still angry over the BBC dramatization from approximately twenty years ago, which was so awful I couldn’t get past the first hour. I took one look at the actors and knew they weren’t going to do it right.) The Symphony programmed the work a few years ago, but the singer got sick and unsurprisingly no one else knew the piece, so if I'm remembering correctly they tried substituting a solo violin for the vocalist, and the performance had a somewhat endearing yet disappointing air of the slapdash about it. The piece is drawn from Holloway’s opera, which I would love to see, but I’m not holding my breath. At this point I'd settle for a recording.

And I have to mention the New York Philharmonic’s May 27-29 performances of Ligeti’s opera, Le Grand Macabre, because it’s killing me to miss it. I considered going to New York to hear it but reluctantly had to abandon that plan. My reaction to the American premiere, back when San Francisco Opera used to be exciting, is here. This is really a piece to hear and see live – my only reservation was that the music was almost too sheerly gorgeous for the comic grotesqueries of the story. The performances coincidentally were right after the re-election of war criminal George W. Bush and his gang of thieves, and in the miasmic despair of those sickening days, only this wonderful piece of theater managed to lift my spirits even briefly.

New Century Chamber Orchestra

I discovered the New Century Chamber Orchestra this season (well, only in the sense that Columbus “discovered” America – they’ve been there for quite a while, but now I know about them, with surely happier results than the Italian’s discovery). I went to last November’s concert, which featured Strauss’s Metamorphosen. The complex, sombre mood of this piece comes through even if you don’t know about the bombing of the Munich opera house towards the end of Strauss’s life or about his complicated relationship with the Nazi regime. I heard a performance at the Boston Symphony back when I lived there and it’s one of those performances that has haunted me since. And I still remember one fatuous concertgoer cheerily announcing afterwards, “That was not written by a happy man!” which he seemed to find alien in some way.

I was fascinated by NCCO’s performance, which despite the richness of its sound brought out something lighter in the piece than the BSO did – something that made me realize why it was called a metamorphosis rather than an elegy, something that brought out the possibilities of change as well as the sadness of loss. I understand from Joshua Kosman’s article on NCCO in the latest Gramophone (the one with so many pages dedicated to Mahler that it looks like the San Francisco Symphony’s season schedule) that their next recording will feature Metamorphosen, so that’s certainly one to look forward to.

William Bolcom was the other composer featured last November (he is this year’s Featured Composer, a program that is one of the innovations of newish music director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and their early May concerts will include the world premiere of his Romanza, a violin concerto they commissioned). I’m a long-time Bolcom fan, from back in the days when I knew him only as an impresario of American song, and not a composer. It says a lot for Bolcom’s strength that his music stood up to the Strauss, since both his pieces were lighter in conception and tone. First came Serenata Notturna, featuring Laura Griffiths on oboe, which as the name implies is a bit along the lines of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. That was followed by Three Rags for strings, including Graceful Ghost, which I had only heard before in its piano version. It’s a gently insinuating piece, and I sometimes see it described as Bolcom’s best known, which I believe; I swear I heard it the other day through the overhead speakers as I was walking through a shopping mall on my way to work.

About a week or so ago I went to their third concert of the season, Serenades and Dances (NCCO gave me a ticket to this one). The first piece was Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade, which was an interesting view into a composer mostly famed for lieder, kind of like hearing Chopin’s songs and realizing that he did more than one thing, even if the one thing is what he’s justifiably best known for. That was followed by Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings, which is one of those pieces I realize I know when I hear them – one of those “oh yeah, I recognize that!” pieces. Both were beautifully played but there was something odd about the acoustic that night. Perhaps it was just that I was farther back than I usually sit (I heard both concerts at First Congregational in Berkeley, and I’ve had odd experiences with the acoustics there during some Philharmonia Baroque concerts too). It may just have been a more distant sound that I’m used to, but I really wasn’t that far back. I didn’t feel that great that night, so that may have entered into it.

It takes audiences as well as performers some time to get used to a building’s acoustic, so maybe that was why it took me a song or two to start enjoying the first piece in the second half, Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, Strings and Pages Constantly Rustled by Three Ladies Too Damn Stupid to Find the Texts in the Program And Who Are Of Course Sitting Right Next to Me. Um, yeah, there may also have been some irritation with the audience going on there. Kevin Rivard provided the horn playing, superlative throughout. Brian Thorsett was the tenor. I found his first song too slow – it just fell apart for me and sounded choppy. But either he adjusted or I did and by the time we got to the Elegy and Dirge of the fourth and fifth movements (the settings of Blake’s O Rose and of an anonymous fifteenth century dirge) I was finding the power in his performance. His commitment to the performance was never in doubt. He has a bit of an English tenor sound, which of course is the voice Britten wrote this piece for, but for some reason I wasn’t expecting it, I guess. I honestly don’t quite know what to make of my initial reaction, and I should point out that people I trust were much more enthusiastic about the entire Britten performance than I managed to be (check here for Lisa’s view and here for SFMike’s, though he did hear a different performance in a different venue). Maybe I just wanted too much from it – the Britten was the big draw for me on this program. I went into my CD piles afterwards and dug up three other versions (Britten/Pears/Brain, Britten/Pears/Tuckwell, and Bedford/Mackie/Tuckwell) to listen to for comparison. I mostly came to the conclusion that it’s a great piece, and I wish there were more opportunities to hear it live.

The concert ended with Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, which were just wonderful: rich and vivid and piquant, each ending abruptly after giving us a glimpse of a whole world. When I got home, as usual after a concert it took me a while to fall asleep so I was channel-surfing and came across something called Celtic Thunder, which seemed to be the butch version of the equally horrifying Celtic Woman. It was all so bad – the clunky dancing, the ugly sets, the generic lyrics and overdone pop songs, the omnipresent facial microphones for the singers, making them look as if they had foul tumors near their mouths – that I found it perversely riveting. My usual view is that I don’t care what people listen to as long as they don’t make me listen to it and that life is not so full of pleasures that I will sneer at something that gives other people happiness, but sometimes I get sick of trying to be wise and generous and my inner daemon has to burst forth sneering. Maybe because this tripe was on a public television station, and I’m old enough to remember when they regularly featured operas and symphonies and jazz and filmed plays – you know, things you really actually couldn’t get on other stations. And now they not only feature this trash, they insist it’s why we should support them. What a contrast to the concert I’d just heard in Berkeley. It made me very grateful for the dedicated musicians I heard earlier in the evening, who don't get nearly the fame and financing of something like Celtic Thunder but whose work is so immeasurably superior.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: March

Lots of exciting new or newish music coming up in March. . .

starting on Monday, March 1, with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presenting Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura.

March 4-7, the New Century Chamber Orchestra presents an enticing program of Wolf’s Italian Serenade, Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings, Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, and Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. NCCO is participating in a food drive at these concerts, which you can read about here.

San Francisco Performances has some very exciting concerts: on March 9, violinist Jennifer Koh plays Bach, Ysaye, Saariaho, Carter, and Salonen; then on March 16, British composer Thomas Ades plays Janacek, Liszt, Prokofiev, Schubert, Beethoven, and the US premiere of his own Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face (his strange and strangely moving opera).

March 4-7 the San Francisco Symphony has Christian Tetzlaff playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, along with the world premiere of Victor Kissine’s Post-scriptum and works by Liszt and Ravel. March 11-14 Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the Mahler 2 with soloists Laura Claycomb and Karaina Karneus, but be forewarned that the Friday concert is one of those 6.5 things so presumably you’ll have to endure endless conductor-blather before you get any actual music.

San Francisco Ballet presents a mixed program featuring the SF Ballet premiere of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, and the US premiere of a new evening-length Little Mermaid.

On March 21, Ian Bostridge performs Winterreise in Berkeley; unfortunately it's in cavernous Zellerbach Auditorium, so take that under advisement.

Cutting Ball Theater has a new play by Marcus Gardley, . . . and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi.

And the third annual Switchboard Music Festival takes place Sunday, March 28. I went last year and it was a really fun day (and night), with an intriguing and eclectic line-up.

ADDENDUM: and a h/t to sfmike for reminding me that the Other Minds Festival is March 4-6.