An Enlightening Rehearsal with NCCO

The New Century Chamber Orchestra is offering a concert entitled Enlighten Me this weekend, and the public were invited to a free rehearsal on Thursday morning at the SF Conservatory of Music. There is something magical about listening to a musical performance being shaped in real time, and the two-hour-plus session was thoroughly absorbing.

The young American violinist Simone Porter is the concert's guest soloist and concertmaster, and the first half of the rehearsal was dedicated to Sabina, an enormously complex composition by Andrew Norman depicting a sunrise inside a Roman church. The 10-minute piece has gone through a number of transformations since its origin as a work for solo cello in 2008. In 2013, he created a solo violin version which you can hear on YouTube in a wonderful performance by Simone Porter.) In 2020, Norman was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic to write an expanded version for string orchestra and the result is exquisite, starting with a nearly inaudible opening that eventually blooms into a glorious sound. (Pictured above are Simone Porter, Associate Concertmaster Dawn Harms, and violinist Michael Yokas.)

The complexity stems from the fact that each of the 23 players has their own separate music so getting the timing and the accents to work with each other took over an hour, and it was fascinating to hear the new music evolving and improving with each repetition. Because there is no official conductor, various members of the orchestra offered their suggestions when something didn't sound right. Pictured above is the viola section trying to figuere out a tricky section with Simone Porter

Then it was on to Heinrich Biber's eccentric, fabulous Battaglia from 1673. It consists of eight short movements depicting any army readying for war, getting drunk and cacophonous, and going into battle. Pictured above is Simone Porter rehearsing with double bassist Colin Corner in a duet where Corner makes his instrument sound like a marching drum while Porter plays an aria over the beat.

They also practiced foot stomping in another movement, and a stand-and-salute sequence led by principal cellist Evan Kahn.

This concert is also featuring a half-dozen SF Conservatory of Music students joining the ensemble in the Norman and Biber pieces, and a Mozart Divertimento. It was fun watching their energetic blend of excitement and sheer nervousness.

The program also includes short pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos (Bachianas Brasileiras No. 9), J.S. Bach (Violin Concerto in E Major), Hildegard von Bingen (O virtus sapientiae, and Juhi Bansal (Cathedral of Lightt). The first performance is Friday the 23rd at Stanford's Bing Hall, and the second performance will be at the SF Conservatory of Music on Saturday the 24th. Click here for tickets.

A Journey to the Planets at the SF Symphony

After a month and a half of holiday music and playing live accompanist to popular movies, the San Francisco Symphony finally got back to playing symphonic music this weekend. The British conductor Edward Gardner offered a mostly British program, starting with the Overture to The Wasps by Ralph Vaughan-Williams, composed in 1909 for a Cambridge University production of the Aristophones play. It had never been performed at the San Francisco Symphony, but if you listen to classical radio stations at all, you have heard the piece because it has a couple of catchy, buzzing tunes. On Friday evening, the orchestra sounded top-notch.

This was followed by one of the mainstays of the Romantic violin concerto repertory, German composer Max Bruch's 1867 Violin Concerto #1. The composer was born in 1838 and had a youthful success with this concerto, but then he stubbornly stuck to the same musical style until his death in 1920, eventually becoming embittered by his treatment as an obsolete composer.

Still, composing a piece that will live forever is something, and this violin concerto with its achingly beautiful melodies in the first two movements is one of my favorite warhorses. It was given a decent performance on Friday by the 29-year-old American soloist Randall Goosby, though his coordination with Gardner and the orchestra sounded a little off, as if they had two different ideas for the piece.

Goosby has recorded the concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the recording has been praised for Goosby's cool, elegant playing. However, this concerto really welcomes a more romantic, heartfelt style, and Goosby's performance sounded a bit too recessive for me.

After intermission, we heard another composer's one-hit wonder, Gustav Holst's The Planets from 1917. Holst mostly composed on a smaller scale, writing chamber music, song cycles and one-act operas which aren't played much in the U.S., although everything I have heard over the years has been interesting. The Planets, though, is an hour-long work for a huge orchestra that consists of seven tone poems for the astrological qualities of Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, in that order. Though it has been plagiarized extensively over the last century for film scores, most notably by John Williams for Star Wars, the full work is still full of surprises, such as odd instrumental combinations like harps and basses bouncing off each other, a great use of the celesta, and a ghostly, unseen womens' chorus that vanishes into space at the finale.

Conductor Gardner obviously loves this music and he led the orchestra in a smashingly good performance, with a particularly fine outing by the brass. The piece is also a popular favorite, possibly because of the Star Wars plagiarism, so Davies Hall was full on Friday evening and skewed younger than usual, which is always nice to see.

Tesla ICE Protest

The weekly anti-fascist protest continues from noon to two in front of the San Francisco Tesla showroom at the corner of Van Ness and O'Farrell.

The energy was supercharged at 12:15 this afternoon on account of the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis by a federally employed ICE psychopath on Wednesday, January 7.

Just like the 2020 George Floyd murder by a Minneapolis policeman, Good's murder was captured on phone video by citizen bystanders.

Even more disturbing were the lies afterwards, served forth by the gargoyles of the Trump administration, which basically amounted to "Are you going to believe The Official Story or your own lying eyes?"

Their mendacity has crossed a line, and we will see how the backlash plays out.

One frightening detail that sticks in my mind was a quote from JD Vance crowing about the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill and that the most important item was the monstrously huge funding of ICE operations for the future.

It behooves all of us to show up to every protest and organizing event we can in an attempt to thwart these villains.

Favorite Musical Moments 2025

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to one of the richest, most varied classical music scenes in the United States. I only attended a fraction of what was on offer this year, and here are some of my favorite moments, starting with the world premiere in January at the San Francisco Symphony of After The Fall, a new piano concerto by Bay Area composer John Adams. He wrote the concerto for Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson who gave an incredible performance with David Robinson conducting.

Also in January, the New Century Chamber Orchestra gave a wonderful concert at the Presidio Theatre, highlighted by a performance of the Shostakovich First Piano Concerto with pianist Inon Barnatan and trumpeter Brandon Ridenour as soloists.

The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale have been fairly rudderless since Nicholas McGegan stepped down as Music Director and his replacement didn't work out. In March, the 47-year-old Irishman Peter Whelan conducted a delightful performance of Handel's Alceste. Soon after, he was named the new Music Director, starting in the 2026-27 season.

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music offers free concerts on almost every day of the week, and there are treasures abounding. In April, I went to an orchestral concert led by student conductors that featured a thrilling performance of John Adams's incredibly difficult Chamber Symphony, led by Chih-Yao Chang.

I've never been particularly moved by La Boheme, Puccini's sentimental weepie about young artists in mid-19th century Paris, but the San Francisco Opera production this summer actually moved me to tears with its fine ensemble cast and production.

The saddest artistic news of the year was the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior of the SF Symphony Board which managed to so alienate Esa-Pekka Salonen that he refused to renew his contract as Music Director. His final concert was a barn-burning performance of Mahler's huge Resurrection Symphony in June.

The happiest artistic news of the year was the literal last-minute rescue by a venture capital family foundation of The Oasis, a nightclub at 11th & Folsom Streets specializing in drag shows, performance art, cabaret and whatever catches the fancy of D'Arcy Drollinger, its hardworking genius impresario. I caught a sophisticated, filthy cabaret show there in June called Noctornal Omissions featuring John Coons and Jonah Wheeler.

Verdi's Requiem was scheduled to open the 2024-2025 season last year with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, but there was a walkout by the SF Symphony Chorus after serious mistreatment by the SF Symphony Board. Finally, an anonymous donor contributed a few million dollars so that the union choristers could continue to be paid, and at the very end of the season, the Requiem was finally performed with James Gaffigan conducting. Even though I'm a longtime Verdi worshiper, I had never warmed up to the massive choral work until this performance at the end of June, which was magnificent.

The Merola Opera Program for aspiring opera professionals put on an absolutely gorgeous production in August of a rarely performed Rossini opera, Le Comte Ory. This was the composer's penultimate opera, written right before his swan song William Tell, and the music is some of the best he ever composed. The young cast did it full justice.

In Oakland, West Edge Opera commissioned and nurtured Dolores, a new opera by Nicolás Lell Benavides about the California labor organizer Dolores Huerta. The titular heroine is still alive in her 90s and attended a number of the performances. Even better, Benavides's music for a small orchestra and voices was consistently brilliant.

The annual Other Minds Music Festival, headed for decades by founder Charles Amirkhanian, took place in October at the Brava Theater on 24th Street this year. One evening of the new music festival's programs was dedicated to composer Samuel Adams performed by a full roster of Bay Area musicians, including Sarah Cahill and the Friction Quartet. It was a perfectly joyful evening.

Also in October, the American Bach Soloists gave a wonderful early music concert called The Grand Tour at St. Mark's Church on Cathedral Hill. Featuring works by Handel, Vivaldi, and J.S. Bach, it was a reminder of why this group under Music Director Jeffrey Thomas is such a treasure.

The San Francisco Opera finished its shortened fall season with two productions that the company conceived and built themselves, and both were invigoratingly successful. First up was Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, with tenor Brandon Jovanovich giving a sensitive performance as the title character and a supporting cast that was pretty much flawless. Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducted the four-hour-plus score beautifully.

Next up was the world premiere of The Monkey King, a new opera by composer Huang Ruo with a libretto by David Henry Hwang. Much of its sold-out success can be attributed to a fantastic production involving thousands of yards of silk, puppetry, dancing, flying, and ingenious staging by director Diane Paulus and puppeteer/designer Basil Twist. Plus, the tenor Kang Wang in the title role was sensationally good, heading up a strong cast and chorus playing gods, monks, undersea creatures, and monkeys. It exceeded everyone's expectations.