clear blue rain-washed skies
an old woman passes by
muttering madly
28 February 2014
27 February 2014
26 February 2014
25 February 2014
fun stuff I may or may not get to: March 2014
Theater:
Shotgun Players completes its astonishing traversal of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy with the third play, Salvage, from 20 March to 27 April. They are reviving their production of Part 1, Voyage, from 26 March to 17 April and of Part 2, Shipwreck, from 27 March to 19 April. There will be some marathon viewing days in April. For more information click here.
Cutting Ball theater has extended Ubu Roi to 9 March. The production is well worth your time. And their annual Risk Is This. . . festival takes place Fridays and Saturdays in March, featuring staged readings of five new (in development) plays: Stegosaurus or Our Golden Years by their Resident Playwright Andrew Saito, 28 February - 1 March; Ondine by Katherine Sherman, 7 - 8 March; Mt Misery by Saito, 14 - 15 March; WINK by Jen Silverman, 21 - 22 March, and Ex Machina by David Jacobi, 28 - 29 March. More information on all that is available here.
ACT has Venus in Fur by David Ives, directed by Casey Stangl, 19 March - 13 April.
New Music:
At the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Hot Air Festival takes place 2 March, from 12:30 to 9:00. It's free; check out the line-up here. And their new music ensemble, BluePrint, led by Nicole Paiement, performs music by Ryan Brown, John Adams, Lou Harrison, and Terry Riley on 16 March (that's Sunday, not their usual Saturday).
Other Minds, at the SF Jazz Center for its 19th festival, plays music by Mark Applebaum, Joseph Byrd, John Bischoff, and Donald Buchia on 28 February and by Charles Celest Hutchins, John Schott, Wendy Reid, Myra Melford, and Roscoe Mitchell on 1 March. Details here.
Volti sings new choral music by Shawn Crouch, Ted Hearne, David Smooke, Melissa Dunphy, and Forrest Pierce on the broad theme of "war and peace"; that's 7 - 9 March in a different location each day; click here for details.
Baroque Music:
Elizabeth Blumenstock leads Philharmonia Baroque in music of Muffat, Schmelzer, Schein, Biber, Benda, Bach, and Telemann, 5 - 9 March in their usual varied locations; details here.
Chamber Music/Recitals:
San Francisco Performances presents Quatuor Ebène playing Mozart, Bartók, and Mendelssohn on 3 March; pianist Angela Hewitt playing Bach's Art of the Fugue on 9 March; baritone Christopher Maltman on 16 March; and the Pavel Haas Quartet playing Shostakovich, Dvořák, and Beethoven on 31 March; details on all that (and more!) here.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra joins with men's chorus Chanticleer for a re-creation in music of a possible mid-1930s voyage from Berlin to New York, featuring music from Offenbach to Ellington, 18, 20 - 23, and 25 March, in their usual various locations; more details here.
Earplay presents music by George Crumb, Nick Omiccioli, Mark Winges, Jean Ahn, and Howard Hersh on 31 March at the ODC Theater.
The Fourth Annual San Francisco-Shanghai Chamber Music Festival returns to the Conservatory of Music, with concerts on 13 - 14 March and other events from 10 - 15 March.
Karen Clark sings Pierrot Lunaire on a program that includes works by Brahms, Zemlinsky, and Berg, 28 March at Old First Concerts. Check out the rest of their March offerings here.
Symphonic:
At the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the Mahler 3 with soloist Sasha Cooke (27 February, 1 - 2 March) and the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No 1 with soloist Julia Fischer along with Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (6 - 9 March). Then they're off on a tour, but their place is taken in turn by other touring ensembles: Yuri Temirkanov conducts the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic in two different concerts of mostly Russian music (2 - 3 March); Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in two different programs, also mostly featuring Russian music, with Yuja Wang as the soloist in the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No 3 in the second concert (11 - 12 March). Pianist Evgeny Kissin gives a solo recital of Schubert and Scriabin on 20 March. Details on all that and more may be found here.
Dance:
San Francisco Performances presents the Stephen Petronio Company in Like Lazarus Did on 14 - 15 March.
San Francisco Ballet revives Cinderella, with music by Prokofiev and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, 11 - 23 March.
ODC Dance presents two different programs, 20 - 30 March, at the Yerba Buena Center.
All of the Above:
Some highlights from the month at Cal Performances: the Vienna Philharmonic plays at Zellerbach for three nights, with three different conductors and three different programs, 7 - 9 March (there are also various lectures and panel discussions connected with their history); the Jerusalem Quartet plays three by Shostakovich, 16 March; the Takács Quartet plays the six Bartók quartets over two days, 22 - 23 March; and countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford perform songs by the Elizabethans (and Nico Muhly) on 28 March. Check out their other offerings this month here. As usual I don't list sold-out events because what's the point, but there might be turned-back tickets for some events, so you may want to check out their procedures for sold-out events.
Shotgun Players completes its astonishing traversal of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy with the third play, Salvage, from 20 March to 27 April. They are reviving their production of Part 1, Voyage, from 26 March to 17 April and of Part 2, Shipwreck, from 27 March to 19 April. There will be some marathon viewing days in April. For more information click here.
Cutting Ball theater has extended Ubu Roi to 9 March. The production is well worth your time. And their annual Risk Is This. . . festival takes place Fridays and Saturdays in March, featuring staged readings of five new (in development) plays: Stegosaurus or Our Golden Years by their Resident Playwright Andrew Saito, 28 February - 1 March; Ondine by Katherine Sherman, 7 - 8 March; Mt Misery by Saito, 14 - 15 March; WINK by Jen Silverman, 21 - 22 March, and Ex Machina by David Jacobi, 28 - 29 March. More information on all that is available here.
ACT has Venus in Fur by David Ives, directed by Casey Stangl, 19 March - 13 April.
New Music:
At the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Hot Air Festival takes place 2 March, from 12:30 to 9:00. It's free; check out the line-up here. And their new music ensemble, BluePrint, led by Nicole Paiement, performs music by Ryan Brown, John Adams, Lou Harrison, and Terry Riley on 16 March (that's Sunday, not their usual Saturday).
Other Minds, at the SF Jazz Center for its 19th festival, plays music by Mark Applebaum, Joseph Byrd, John Bischoff, and Donald Buchia on 28 February and by Charles Celest Hutchins, John Schott, Wendy Reid, Myra Melford, and Roscoe Mitchell on 1 March. Details here.
Volti sings new choral music by Shawn Crouch, Ted Hearne, David Smooke, Melissa Dunphy, and Forrest Pierce on the broad theme of "war and peace"; that's 7 - 9 March in a different location each day; click here for details.
Baroque Music:
Elizabeth Blumenstock leads Philharmonia Baroque in music of Muffat, Schmelzer, Schein, Biber, Benda, Bach, and Telemann, 5 - 9 March in their usual varied locations; details here.
Chamber Music/Recitals:
San Francisco Performances presents Quatuor Ebène playing Mozart, Bartók, and Mendelssohn on 3 March; pianist Angela Hewitt playing Bach's Art of the Fugue on 9 March; baritone Christopher Maltman on 16 March; and the Pavel Haas Quartet playing Shostakovich, Dvořák, and Beethoven on 31 March; details on all that (and more!) here.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra joins with men's chorus Chanticleer for a re-creation in music of a possible mid-1930s voyage from Berlin to New York, featuring music from Offenbach to Ellington, 18, 20 - 23, and 25 March, in their usual various locations; more details here.
Earplay presents music by George Crumb, Nick Omiccioli, Mark Winges, Jean Ahn, and Howard Hersh on 31 March at the ODC Theater.
The Fourth Annual San Francisco-Shanghai Chamber Music Festival returns to the Conservatory of Music, with concerts on 13 - 14 March and other events from 10 - 15 March.
Karen Clark sings Pierrot Lunaire on a program that includes works by Brahms, Zemlinsky, and Berg, 28 March at Old First Concerts. Check out the rest of their March offerings here.
Symphonic:
At the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the Mahler 3 with soloist Sasha Cooke (27 February, 1 - 2 March) and the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No 1 with soloist Julia Fischer along with Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (6 - 9 March). Then they're off on a tour, but their place is taken in turn by other touring ensembles: Yuri Temirkanov conducts the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic in two different concerts of mostly Russian music (2 - 3 March); Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in two different programs, also mostly featuring Russian music, with Yuja Wang as the soloist in the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No 3 in the second concert (11 - 12 March). Pianist Evgeny Kissin gives a solo recital of Schubert and Scriabin on 20 March. Details on all that and more may be found here.
Dance:
San Francisco Performances presents the Stephen Petronio Company in Like Lazarus Did on 14 - 15 March.
San Francisco Ballet revives Cinderella, with music by Prokofiev and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, 11 - 23 March.
ODC Dance presents two different programs, 20 - 30 March, at the Yerba Buena Center.
All of the Above:
Some highlights from the month at Cal Performances: the Vienna Philharmonic plays at Zellerbach for three nights, with three different conductors and three different programs, 7 - 9 March (there are also various lectures and panel discussions connected with their history); the Jerusalem Quartet plays three by Shostakovich, 16 March; the Takács Quartet plays the six Bartók quartets over two days, 22 - 23 March; and countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford perform songs by the Elizabethans (and Nico Muhly) on 28 March. Check out their other offerings this month here. As usual I don't list sold-out events because what's the point, but there might be turned-back tickets for some events, so you may want to check out their procedures for sold-out events.
24 February 2014
Eco Ensemble: Bedrossian, Jodlowski, Ligeti
Last Saturday I went up to Hertz Hall on the UC-Berkeley campus to hear their new music group, the eco ensemble, led by David Milnes. According to a note in the program the ensemble's name comes from its connections to the cultural ecosystem in the Bay Area; nonetheless they pronounce the name like "echo" and not "eeko." I have been to several of their previous concerts and have to admit I hadn't given the name much thought. I figured it was related to the Italian Ecco, which is like the French voilà, but of course it's spelled differently, and that point my theories broke down and my mind wandered elsewhere.
The first piece was titled IT, composed by Franck Bedrossian in 2004 and revised in 2007. I won't quote anything the program says about it because I read the write-up and it did not sound particularly enticing. It turned out to be a stunner, and the write-up didn't do it justice (I can't say mine does, either, in all honesty). It begins quietly, then swells up into strange, growling, enticing bursts of sound and the saxophone slowly rises through and the sounds end by circling back to the quiet beginning. It was fascinating, given the instrumentation (listed below), to hear what sounds were produced; in a way you were made intensely aware of the nature of each instrument exactly because they were often called on to produce sounds that were not what you expected from them. At times the noise from the saxophone seemed mostly the player's fingers strumming the keys; the violin and cello produced eerie whispers. I was shocked when I realized afterwards that the piece was only about ten, possibly fifteen minutes long; I mean it as a sincere compliment when I say it seemed much longer: it was such a varied, intriguing, rich sound world that I was sure we must have covered as large a temporal area as we did aural.
The players were Stacey Pelinka on flute, piccolo, and alto flute; Bill Kalinkos on bass clarinet; David Wegehaupt on alto saxophone; Hrabba Atladottir on violin; Leighton Fong on cello; and Ann Yi on piano. All were excellent. I particularly enjoyed Wegehaupt on saxophone; he threw himself physically into his playing, so that at times his left leg it seemed involuntarily went across his right knee (at one point, and it may just have been the angle from my seat, it looked as if he were using his left heel as a mute on the saxophone).
While the stage was being set up for the second piece composer and Berkeley professor Edmund Campion came on stage, clearly excited by what he had just heard, and brought Bedrossian on stage. The latter has recently joined the music department at Berkeley. He was lanky and soft-spoken and looked pleased and took every opportunity to thank the musicians. He said he had composed the piece "about nine years ago" but that it was still representative of his work.
Campion introduced the next piece by saying that they were all very glad that Hertz Hall had a new sound system (it was then I noticed semi-discreet black speakers hung at intervals down the lengths of the side walls) so they could do spatial music pieces like Pierre Jodlowski's Limite Circulaire (composed in 2008). The house was darkened and Tod Brody came out and played flute, alto flute, and bass flute, while various flutish-related electronica, managed by Greg T. Kuhn and Jeff Lubow, came through the speakers in various places of the hall. It was enjoyable enough but with pieces like this I tend to feel after the first few minutes that I've pretty much gotten the point. It did suffer from comparison with the intense overload of the first piece, which I was hoping they would play again as an encore.
It also suffered by comparison with the third piece, Ligeti's Chamber Concerto from 1969 - 1970, though unfortunately there was an intervening intermission. I prefer not to have the mood- and behavior-break caused by intermissions if it's at all physically possible, and in this case it certainly was, since the players were mostly different for each piece and the whole concert, including late start, set-up time, and intermission, was only 90 minutes, so playing the whole thing straight through certainly wouldn't have taxed anyone unduly. The Ligeti is in four movements, each quite distinct in its sound world, though throughout each note seemed to wobble and dissolve immediately into another note, as if the whole piece were coming to us with the wavy indeterminacy of a mirage, a hallucination of an early symphony. The third movement, Movimento preciso e meccanico, was particularly striking; it brought to mind (as the program note also noted) the sound of Ligeti's piece for 100 metronomes (the Poème Symphonique). The players for this piece were Stacey Pelinka on flute and piccolo; Kyle Bruckmann on oboe, oboe d'amore, and cor anglais; Peter Josheff on clarinet; Bill Kalinkos on clarinet and bass clarinet; Alici Telford on horn; Brendan Lai-Tong on tenor trombone; Ann Yi on harpsichord and Hammond organ ("Oh, look, a harpsichord!" exclaimed an audience member as we walked back into the hall after intermission; it was perhaps not what he was expecting to see at a concert of contemporary music, though he sounded pleased); Karen Rosenak on piano and celesta; Jennifer Curtis and Dan Flanagan on violin; Ellen Ruth Rose on viola; Leighton Fong on cello, and Richard Worn on double bass.
Eco Ensemble's next concert is 12 April; they are presented by Cal Performances.
The first piece was titled IT, composed by Franck Bedrossian in 2004 and revised in 2007. I won't quote anything the program says about it because I read the write-up and it did not sound particularly enticing. It turned out to be a stunner, and the write-up didn't do it justice (I can't say mine does, either, in all honesty). It begins quietly, then swells up into strange, growling, enticing bursts of sound and the saxophone slowly rises through and the sounds end by circling back to the quiet beginning. It was fascinating, given the instrumentation (listed below), to hear what sounds were produced; in a way you were made intensely aware of the nature of each instrument exactly because they were often called on to produce sounds that were not what you expected from them. At times the noise from the saxophone seemed mostly the player's fingers strumming the keys; the violin and cello produced eerie whispers. I was shocked when I realized afterwards that the piece was only about ten, possibly fifteen minutes long; I mean it as a sincere compliment when I say it seemed much longer: it was such a varied, intriguing, rich sound world that I was sure we must have covered as large a temporal area as we did aural.
The players were Stacey Pelinka on flute, piccolo, and alto flute; Bill Kalinkos on bass clarinet; David Wegehaupt on alto saxophone; Hrabba Atladottir on violin; Leighton Fong on cello; and Ann Yi on piano. All were excellent. I particularly enjoyed Wegehaupt on saxophone; he threw himself physically into his playing, so that at times his left leg it seemed involuntarily went across his right knee (at one point, and it may just have been the angle from my seat, it looked as if he were using his left heel as a mute on the saxophone).
While the stage was being set up for the second piece composer and Berkeley professor Edmund Campion came on stage, clearly excited by what he had just heard, and brought Bedrossian on stage. The latter has recently joined the music department at Berkeley. He was lanky and soft-spoken and looked pleased and took every opportunity to thank the musicians. He said he had composed the piece "about nine years ago" but that it was still representative of his work.
Campion introduced the next piece by saying that they were all very glad that Hertz Hall had a new sound system (it was then I noticed semi-discreet black speakers hung at intervals down the lengths of the side walls) so they could do spatial music pieces like Pierre Jodlowski's Limite Circulaire (composed in 2008). The house was darkened and Tod Brody came out and played flute, alto flute, and bass flute, while various flutish-related electronica, managed by Greg T. Kuhn and Jeff Lubow, came through the speakers in various places of the hall. It was enjoyable enough but with pieces like this I tend to feel after the first few minutes that I've pretty much gotten the point. It did suffer from comparison with the intense overload of the first piece, which I was hoping they would play again as an encore.
It also suffered by comparison with the third piece, Ligeti's Chamber Concerto from 1969 - 1970, though unfortunately there was an intervening intermission. I prefer not to have the mood- and behavior-break caused by intermissions if it's at all physically possible, and in this case it certainly was, since the players were mostly different for each piece and the whole concert, including late start, set-up time, and intermission, was only 90 minutes, so playing the whole thing straight through certainly wouldn't have taxed anyone unduly. The Ligeti is in four movements, each quite distinct in its sound world, though throughout each note seemed to wobble and dissolve immediately into another note, as if the whole piece were coming to us with the wavy indeterminacy of a mirage, a hallucination of an early symphony. The third movement, Movimento preciso e meccanico, was particularly striking; it brought to mind (as the program note also noted) the sound of Ligeti's piece for 100 metronomes (the Poème Symphonique). The players for this piece were Stacey Pelinka on flute and piccolo; Kyle Bruckmann on oboe, oboe d'amore, and cor anglais; Peter Josheff on clarinet; Bill Kalinkos on clarinet and bass clarinet; Alici Telford on horn; Brendan Lai-Tong on tenor trombone; Ann Yi on harpsichord and Hammond organ ("Oh, look, a harpsichord!" exclaimed an audience member as we walked back into the hall after intermission; it was perhaps not what he was expecting to see at a concert of contemporary music, though he sounded pleased); Karen Rosenak on piano and celesta; Jennifer Curtis and Dan Flanagan on violin; Ellen Ruth Rose on viola; Leighton Fong on cello, and Richard Worn on double bass.
Eco Ensemble's next concert is 12 April; they are presented by Cal Performances.
Poem of the Week 2014/9
To the Tune "The Fair Maid of Yu"
Once when young I lay and listened
To the rain falling on the roof
Of a brothel. The candle light
Gleamed on silk and silky flesh.
Later I heard it on the
Cabin roof of a small boat
On the Great River, under
Low clouds, where wild geese cried out
On the Autumn storm. Now I
Hear it again on the monastery
Roof. My hair has turned white.
Joy – sorrow – parting – meeting –
Are all as though they had
Never been. Only the rain
Is the same, falling in streams
On the tiles, all through the night.
Chiang Chieh, translated by Kenneth Rexroth
The speaker's entire life is laid out in these lines, and though they may seem impressionistic – we travel from youth and a brothel to white hair and a monastery, with only a small boat on a big river bobbing in between, and even the sex of the speaker is unclear* – it is actually, below its sensuous surface, brutally direct about what remains of the speaker's life when it's been winnowed in old age by memory and experience: a few strikingly vivid visual/auditory moments, isolated from the daily flow of work and sex and general human relations and actions, and a sense that these things of the outside world as stored in the speaker's memory (candle-light on silk, the cries of wild geese, the low clouds, and in particular the rain on the roof; he speaks of these things rather than of his thoughts and emotions) are the things that last, outliving an individual's particular joys and sorrows (which have in fact not even survived to the end of his life). A blunt statement of a concrete detail ("My hair has turned white") acquires resonance from its juxtaposition with a broader philosophical statement ("Joy – sorrow – parting – meeting / Are all as though they had / Never been"), and in turn those lines, which could out of context seem too obvious, perhaps banal and overly generalized, hit home through their connection with the physical evidence of the speaker's increasing age and impending death. No novelistic connections or explications help get us from brothel to monastery, but more information would be an intrusion on what the speaker is saying about what remains of and what matters in his life. The great cycle of Nature, the rain falling in rivers and evaporating back up to the sky and then falling again, will outlast this life.
I've always been entranced by the sound of rain. I wonder if this poem, which I find haunting, would resonate as much with someone who did not feel that way?
* Chiang Chieh was a man, but when I first read this poem I thought the speaker was a woman. I guess I was assuming the speaker was a worker rather than a customer at the brothel. It's not uncommon in translations of Asian poetry to find a building for nuns called a monastery rather than a convent, so nothing here really tips the reader off, but for the sake of convenience I'm identifying the speaker's sex with the poet's.
I took this from Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the Turning Year.
Once when young I lay and listened
To the rain falling on the roof
Of a brothel. The candle light
Gleamed on silk and silky flesh.
Later I heard it on the
Cabin roof of a small boat
On the Great River, under
Low clouds, where wild geese cried out
On the Autumn storm. Now I
Hear it again on the monastery
Roof. My hair has turned white.
Joy – sorrow – parting – meeting –
Are all as though they had
Never been. Only the rain
Is the same, falling in streams
On the tiles, all through the night.
Chiang Chieh, translated by Kenneth Rexroth
The speaker's entire life is laid out in these lines, and though they may seem impressionistic – we travel from youth and a brothel to white hair and a monastery, with only a small boat on a big river bobbing in between, and even the sex of the speaker is unclear* – it is actually, below its sensuous surface, brutally direct about what remains of the speaker's life when it's been winnowed in old age by memory and experience: a few strikingly vivid visual/auditory moments, isolated from the daily flow of work and sex and general human relations and actions, and a sense that these things of the outside world as stored in the speaker's memory (candle-light on silk, the cries of wild geese, the low clouds, and in particular the rain on the roof; he speaks of these things rather than of his thoughts and emotions) are the things that last, outliving an individual's particular joys and sorrows (which have in fact not even survived to the end of his life). A blunt statement of a concrete detail ("My hair has turned white") acquires resonance from its juxtaposition with a broader philosophical statement ("Joy – sorrow – parting – meeting / Are all as though they had / Never been"), and in turn those lines, which could out of context seem too obvious, perhaps banal and overly generalized, hit home through their connection with the physical evidence of the speaker's increasing age and impending death. No novelistic connections or explications help get us from brothel to monastery, but more information would be an intrusion on what the speaker is saying about what remains of and what matters in his life. The great cycle of Nature, the rain falling in rivers and evaporating back up to the sky and then falling again, will outlast this life.
I've always been entranced by the sound of rain. I wonder if this poem, which I find haunting, would resonate as much with someone who did not feel that way?
* Chiang Chieh was a man, but when I first read this poem I thought the speaker was a woman. I guess I was assuming the speaker was a worker rather than a customer at the brothel. It's not uncommon in translations of Asian poetry to find a building for nuns called a monastery rather than a convent, so nothing here really tips the reader off, but for the sake of convenience I'm identifying the speaker's sex with the poet's.
I took this from Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the Turning Year.
23 February 2014
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