Pulcinella at the San Francisco Symphony

This week's San Francisco Symphony program starts with a conductorless octet for brass and woodwinds written by Stravinsky when he was living in Paris in 1923. It's about twenty minutes of unemotional, cool, and genuinely interesting music. The eight players gave a wonderful performance on Wednesday's opening night, and by the fourth concert on Saturday evening, they will probably be bordering on the extraordinary.



This was followed by a semi-conductorless performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto #23, with the Symphony's longtime music director, Michael Tilson Thomas, as the piano soloist conducting from the bench. This was a brave thing to attempt, since MTT isn't ordinarily a concert piano soloist, and he's ridiculously busy with his extensive conducting career not only in San Francisco but around the world.

Mozart is an odd composer for both performers and audiences. Some people immediately understand Mozart in their bones the first time they hear his music, while others have to work at it, or sometimes just decide that Wolfgang isn't their cup of tea. This doesn't have much to do with good or bad taste, since there are both performers and listeners with exquisite musical taste who absolutely don't get Mozart.



MTT has always struck me in the latter group, with performances of Mozart that are enthusiastic, loving but sounding slightly embalmed. I was hoping that throwing himself into the middle of the orchestra as a soloist might free his Mozart up and make it sound livelier like the renditions of his recent assistant conductor, James Gaffigan. In the event, the performance on Wednesday was something of a train wreck, with a moment in the first movement where he seemed to lose his way altogether, and a slow movement so dirge-like I thought the ghost of Kurt Herbert Adler had arisen from the grave.



All was forgiven after intermission, when Tilson Thomas led a great performance by the orchestra and three vocal soloists in my favorite piece of music by Igor Stravinsky, the 45-minute ballet "Pulcinella," a commedia dell'arte piece for Diaghalev's Ballet Russe in 1920 with sets by Picasso. The music is a moderne Stravinsky "re-orchestration" of about 20 short tunes by the early Italian Baroque composer Pergolesi, though it turns out that he only wrote about 50% of the ur-score. It seems that much of Italian music from that period was subsequently ascribed to Pergolesi whether he wrote it or not because his name was an established brand in later decades.



The brass and woodwinds, who had already warmed up at the beginning of the concert, were superb and confident, and they helped lead the orchestra in a fearless rendition of the rhythmically tricky and extremely transparent score where there is nowhere for anyone to hide.



The three vocalists were Sasha Cooke, soprano; Bruce Sledge, tenor; and in a bit of luxury casting, Eric Owens, bass. They were all good, and their trio in the middle of the piece may be the most beautiful thing that Stravinsky ever (re)wrote. Plus, my favorite detail from the program notes by Michael Steinberg: "The eight vocal pieces have nothing to do with the plot; they are part of the scenery, just like Vesuvius, the boat, and the moon."

Berlioz at the San Francisco Symphony

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The San Francisco Symphony's long season is finally ending this week with an all-Berlioz program that was programmed at the last minute after a proposed Berlioz "Romeo and Juliet" was scrapped. This didn't augur well for the actual concert but in a happy surprise, it turned out to be an exquisite Friday night of music at Davies Symphony Hall thanks mostly to two young soloists.



After the "Roman Carnival Overture," which Berlioz cobbled together from his "Benvenuto Cellini" opera failure, the young mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke sang "Les Nuits d'Ete" ("Summer Nights"), which is four orchestrated poems by Gaultier about death and absent lovers bracketed by two lively poems about traveling off on adventures. Except for her deeply unflattering concert dress, Ms. Cooke was perfection, giving one of the most beautiful performances I've ever heard. She is also one of the few vocal soloists at Davies who somehow manages to fill the hall with sound when singing softly. Cooke was great in Stravinsky's "Pulcinella" earlier in the season, but this was a revelation.



After intermission, they played "Harold in Italy," which is a wonderful, weird symphony in four movements for viola and orchestra. It's not a traditional concerto since the viola soloist is representing "Harold" wandering dreamily around 19th century Italy while stumbling across religious pilgrims and bacchanalian orgies represented by the orchestra. The soloist was Jonathan Vinocour, who was appointed at the start of the season as the new Principal Viola for the orchestra. I'm still not convinced by Michael Tilson Thomas as a Berlioz conductor, but Vinocour like Sasha Cooke before him, understood and conveyed the eccentricity of the music perfectly.



The fact that he looks and moves like a geeky Princeton chemistry graduate, which he was in 2001, only added to the complete charm of the performance. He's a major addition to the orchestra.

San Francisco Symphony 2009-10 Preview

Literal signs of high musical culture have been sprouting all month around the Civic Center, including the San Francisco Symphony whose opening night gala is in a couple of weeks on Wednesday, September 9th. There have been a number of complaints recently at the San Francisco Classical Voice site about how Michael Tilson Thomas and the Symphony don't play enough living, local composers (the site is bankrolled by would-be composer Gordon Getty, and you can make your own conclusions). They also point out how unadventurous MTT's programming has become since he blazed into the Music Director role with his American Mavericks series over a decade ago.



I don't particularly buy the argument, particularly since the list of composers they advocate for are nowhere near the top of my list of neglected great composers. For instance, I really don't need to hear another note of music by either the late Andrew Imbrie or the living Jake Heggie.

It is true that this year's season isn't as adventurous as the last two, but overall, there are individual concerts that will appeal to everyone, from the beginner hearing their first Brandenberg Concertos live to jaded old audiophiles like myself who are excited hearing something brand new and who tend to get impatient with Brandenberg Concertos unless they are insanely, brilliantly done.



I decided to see how this year's San Francisco Symphony season stacked up in "adventurousness" with a few other orchestras in the country, and looked at the nine-month seasons for Boston, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia during the same period. The results were as follows: Philadelphia under Charles Dutoit is Warhorse Central this year with some of the dullest programming imaginable. New York under the young new music director Alan Gilbert is much more interesting than its previous recent seasons under Lorin Maazel, but the programming is essentially very dull and conservative with a few exceptions.

Boston under James Levine is probably the closest to San Francisco in terms of its eclectic mix of the new and the tried-and-true. For every Elliot Carter premiere, for instance, there's an all-nine-Beethoven-symphony survey by Levine. So I'd call it a draw between Boston and San Francisco, except as my friend Patrick Vaz would immediately point out, the Boston Symphony Orchestra gets to play in the 1900 Boston Symphony Hall which is considered "acoustically, among the top three concert halls in the world and is considered the finest in the United States" while the San Francisco Symphony plays in Davies Hall. We're giving Boston the nudge here.

The real surprise was that the Los Angeles Philharmonic under new music director Gustavo Dudamel has the most consistently lively and interesting programming over the next year of all the five orchestras. Besides genuinely varied repertory, they are having a two-week festival in late November and early December called "West Coast, Left Coast" that is featuring most of the interesting composers in the Bay Area such as John Adams, Paul Dresher, Mason Bates, and Ingram Marshall along with Cowell, Harrison, Partch, Zappa, Cage and Salonen. The second festival is at the end of April next year, and is called "America and Americans" with major works by Bernstein, Golijov, Estevez and more.



However, Los Angeles is just one bad day away from the apocalypse, as my friend Markus Crouse once said, so let's concentrate on San Francisco. Here's a list of the concerts by the San Francisco Symphony that are attracting me on paper:

The first three weeks of the season is a Mahler festival with the First Symphony leading off, which will be followed the next week by a potpourri of works that are going to be changing each night depending on what they want to put into the latest "Keeping Score" television show, and it wraps up with the Fifth Symphony preceded by the Italian mystic Scelsi's "Hymnos."

The next highlight is Bach's six-part "Christmas Oratorio" in December in place of the usual "Messiah." It's incredibly beautiful music and it's actually about the Birth of Jesus rather than the Death of Jesus.

In January, there is a two-week residency by British composer George Benjamin who will be premiering a fistful of his works and conducting one of the concerts. The week following has MTT conducting with Yo-Yo Ma for Shostakovich's cello concerto no. 2, along with obscure pieces by Sibelius, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. At the end of January, MTT takes to the piano for a Mozart concerto which is bracketed by Stravinsky's "Octet" and complete "Pulcinella."

In February, MTT leads the orchestra in another Schubert Mass (#2) along with the Symphony premiere of Henry Brant's orchestration of Ives' "Concord Sonata," which is supposed to be an amazing piece of music. In March, he conducts Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony which I have somehow managed to never hear live even though it may be my favorite. Another big choral concert will be in May with Stravinsky's rarely heard "Threni" and the full version of Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe." June ends with MTT conducting Poulenc, Villa-Lobos and Ravel sharing the program with Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," and the final concert of the year is Berlioz' strange, beautiful version of "Romeo et Juliette."

If you're feeling poor like me, there is the welcome news that the Center Terrace seats right behind the orchestra, which are great fun to sit in, have been reduced in price from $25 to $15 in honor of Tilson Thomas' fifteenth year with the orchestra. The rush ticket hot line for day-of-performance tickets is (415) 503-5577. They used to be $20 and may be the same price this year. If you'd like to check out subscription packages, click here for the symphony website.

Finally, a note to the Marketing people in charge of outdoor signage. Your color schemes and typography are lovely, but the photos of Michael Tilson Thomas, Alexander Barantschik and Nadya Tichman look like they've been airbrushed to Playboy Centerfold standards which gives me the giggles every time I walk underneath them.

An American Mavericks Preview

The San Francisco Symphony is embarking next week on a reprise of its legendary 2000 American Mavericks festival, and I have one piece of advice: Buy a $100 Mavericks Pass now, and I mean immediately after reading this, because according to Meredith above, tickets for the two concerts featuring Jessye Norman are selling out fast. The Mavericks Pass is good for a single ticket to every performance, which amounts to ten performances of six different programs, and it is probably the best deal right now in all of San Francisco.

The box office is open from 10AM to 6PM, and the phone number to call is (415) 864-6000. If you have already bought a Mavericks Pass but haven't yet redeemed your tickets, particularly for the performances of the 10th and 14th, do it now because these are shaping up to be some of the coolest concerts in San Francisco Symphony history.



I bought a $75 Mavericks Pass for a boyfriend and myself in 2000 for ten separate concerts, and it was one of the most invigorating experiences of our listening lives, introducing me to the music of Meredith Monk, George Antheil, Lou Harrison, John Cage, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varese, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley's In C in a play-your-own-instrument version that could have been a disaster but was instead one of the most immersive, enthralling experiences imaginable.

Michael Tilson Thomas above genuinely loves this often difficult music and the spirit is infectious both onstage and in the audience, which at the 2000 festival was different (slightly sexier and smarter looking) than the usual Symphony crowd. Plus, with a Pass, you ran into the same people night after night and the Festival became a major shared social experience, with everyone arguing over their favorites and dislikes. The programs were also so eclectic that if you were bored with one piece, you knew there was always something coming along right after that was bound to be interesting. The entire experience was brain-clearing and delightful.



2012's American Mavericks Festival sequel starts with a prequel of sorts, free to Mavericks Pass holders: an organ recital this Sunday afternoon, March 4th featuring music by composer Mason Bates among others. It will be played by Isabelle Demers, a student of Paul Jacobs (above), who will be featured in the official Opening Concert on Thursday evening, March 8th. That program starts off with Copland's early, modernist Orchestral Variations, follows with Lou Harrison's delightful, gamelan-style Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra, and ends with a reprise of Henry Brant's A Concord Symphony, a hugely ambitious orchestration of Charles Ives' hugely ambitious Concord Sonata for piano.



On Saturday, March 10th, the festival becomes seriously starry with the convergence of three of the most iconic female singers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk, and Jessye Norman vocalizing and acting with each other and a dozen instrumentalists in a selection from John Cage's Songbooks. Both La Barbara and Monk are composers themselves so this is not uncharted territory, but for Norman it looks like a new adventure. Check out the funny and charming video of La Barbara and Norman above talking about the challenges inherent in Cage's instructions.



Also on the program is Lukas Foss' 1967 Phorion which is described on answer.com as follows: "Phorion is derived from the Greek for "stolen goods." The work is based entirely on music "stolen" from the Prelude of Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita for Violin in E major. Foss notes that the work was inspired by a dream of torrents of Baroque sixteenth notes being washed ashore by ocean waves and then being drawn back into the sea."

This will be followed by Henry Cowell's wild and beautiful Piano Concerto played by the blogger cum New Yorker writer cum concert pianist Jeremy Denk above, in a photo from 2007 when he was playing Mozart piano concertos, beautifully, for San Francisco's Summer in the City concerts.



After the Summit of Smart Sopranos, the orchestra will play Carl Ruggles' Sun-treader, just in case one had not been sufficiently sated. Again, if you haven't yet redeemed your Mavericks Pass tickets for the 10th or 14th, do it immediately over the phone at (415) 864-6000, and ditto for buying an entire Pass.



Sunday afternoon the 11th at 2PM brings a chamber music concert that starts with Jeremy Denk returning to play solo piano pieces by Henry Cowell, which is extraordinary music whenever I have heard it played by Sarah Cahill. This will be followed by the revolutionary San Francisco composer Terry Riley with his 1978 G String for String Quartet, his first string quartet and the first of many collaborations with the Kronos Quartet who were in residence at Mills College while he was teaching there. To top it off, there is a world premiere by early electronics composer Morton Subotnick, a reduction of his opera Jacob's Room into a monodrama for a single singer, the legendary Joan La Barbara above who has also been his wife since the late 1970s.



The program ends with a special appearance by the Los Angeles based group PARTCH who hold an annual concert devoted to the wildly eccentric and influential Californian composer, Harry Partch, who created his own musical instruments with alternate tunings. The group is bringing the original Partch constructed instruments with them, and according to Brian at Out West Arts, the group hosts some of the most reliably memorable annual musical concerts in Los Angeles (click here). Though I have read about him for years, I have never heard Partch's music live or recorded so this is going to be a special treat.



The festival continues on Thursday, March 15th (repeated on Friday and Saturday) with two world premieres by local composers Mason Bates and John Adams (above left and right) who both have long associations with the Symphony. Bates has created a piece for organ, chorus and electronics called Mass Transmission with a program about Dutch children exiles in Indonesia and the use of radio to communicate with them. Click here for a video where he explains it all to you while looking like an undiscovered brother of Luke and Owen Wilson.

John Adams, according to a lively video explanation of his new work (click here) has written his own version of Pulcinella, where Stravinsky fractured some Italian baroque tunes through his own musical sensibility. In this case, it is the "quicksilver" scherzos of Beethoven's late quartets that is being filtered through Adams' musical brain, and I can't wait to hear it. Just to add to the sense of occasion, the soloists are the St. Lawrence String Quartet playing within the larger orchestra. This is going to be a major event.



After the premieres, the superstar pianist Emanuel Ax above will be the soloist for Morton Feldman's Piano and Orchestra. I am a terrible, shy interviewer and one of my few attempts was with Mr. Ax in 2008 where I ended the short interview with the question, "Why is the New York Philharmonic programming so conservative?" and he took it personally. So let me repeat, Mr. Ax, you're not the dull one as your adventurous repertory in San Francisco over the years demonstrates.

To end the concert, the orchestra will be playing Frank Zappa's favorite composer, Edgar Varese, in his over-the-top, "ear-shattering" Ameriques.



The final chamber concert on Sunday, March 18th, sounds as interesting on paper as the rest of the festival programs. First off, it starts with a world premiere commission from Meredith Monk above, which is a very big deal. This is like getting to see Martha Graham premiere a new dance while she could still move well.

The remainder of the program is an early Steve Reich piece, Music for Pieces of Wood, Lukas Foss' Echoi with Jeremy Denk returning again as piano soloist, and ending with David Del Trecici's early vocal piece to James Joyce, Syzygy.

Did I mention that all this is available for $100, and that the festival is going on to Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Carnegie Hall after the initial premieres here, and that some of these performances are probably going to end up being in history books? You have been advised.