Mozart at the SF Symphony

An utterly delightful all-Mozart concert is taking place this weekend at the San Francisco Symphony. It was conducted crisply and with verve by Harry Bicket, who leads the early music group The English Consort and is also the longtime music director of the Santa Fe Opera. The program began with the 1776 Serenade No. 6, Serenata notturna for a small complement of strings and timpani. Coming onstage with Bicket as soloists were four members of the orchestra: violinists Alexander Barantschik and Dan Carlson, violist Yun Jie Liu, and bassist Scott Pingel, who all had amusing solo outings during the serenade.

I have heard enough deadly dull live Mozart performances over the years that it always feels like a small miracle when musicians perform him well. Bicket's conducting style was crisp and transparent, which worked well, and the musicians seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely while playing the 1780 Symphony No. 34, the last symphony Mozart wrote before ditching small-town Salzburg for big-city Vienna. (Pictured above are violinists Wyatt Underhill and Jason Issakson.)

After intermission the South African soprano Golda Schultz sang arias from the three famous operas with libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte: Deh,vieni, non tardar from Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Come scoglio from Cosi fan tutte, (1789), and Or sai chi l'onore from Don Giovanni (1789), with a Mozart concert aria as an encore. The arias proceeded from yearning to defiant to vengeful, and Schultz's glorious voice and presence was a pleasure to experience.

The concert ended with a wonderful rendering of the 1786 Symphony No. 38, Prague. I snagged a $30 Rush ticket at the box office on Thursday, and they are also available tonight (Friday). Considering that general admission Chris Stapleton tickets for a Super Bowl concert at Bill Graham Auditorium are currently selling for $810, the SF Symphony feels like one of the best deals in town.

The Seasons of Eugene Onegin at SF Ballet

After a December of Nutcracker performances and an Opening Gala in January, the San Francisco Ballet opened up their regular season with the world premiere of an ambitious, full-length story ballet based on Alexander Pushkin's 1830s verse novel, Eugene Onegin. In Russia, the book is a standard, revered classic that everyone reads in school, but outside that country the story is mostly known from Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera, which has one of the greatest musical scores he ever composed. San Francisco Ballet's new version, co-commissioned by the Joffrey Ballet, is the work of former SF Ballet dancer and choreographer Yuri Possokhov to new music by Ilya Demutsky. The result was a triumphant addition to the many films, plays, operas, and ballets that have already tackled the story of a precociously jaded young antihero who breaks a young woman's heart and kills his best friend in a senseless duel. (All production photos are by Lindsey Rollo.)

The ballet's four acts are framed by abstract visions of the seasons, beginning with a long ensemble dance representing the Spirits of Spring, headed by the reliably fabulous Nikisha Fogo. Although these interludes seem to belong to another ballet altogether, they are entertaining in their own right, with gorgeous costumes by Tim Yip highlighted by casually sexy outfits for the Boys of Summer.

In the Tchaikovsky opera, the 17-year-old Tatiana is the main character, who falls hopelessly in love with the sophisticated city slicker Onegin. In this version, as in Pushkin's poem, the central emphasis is on the 18-year-old Onegin who casually spurns Tatiana after she confesses her deep infatuation in a letter. Katherine Barkman was fine as the bookish, lovelorn young woman but a bit too recessive, as she was often upstaged by the other characters, particularly Joseph Walsh as Onegin.

I recently read the original Pushkin poem-novel, and it was a surprisingly rich experience. (Click here for the free 1881 Henry Spalding translation at Gutenberg Press.) Midway, there is a scene detailing Tatiana's prescient nightmare of being abducted by surreal creatures before watching Onegin slay Lensky with a knife. The scene is omitted in the Tchaikovsky opera but is one of the the ballet's dark-hued highlights.

The two subsidiary characters of the young poet Lensky and his fiance Olga, Tatiana's younger sister, often steal the show in this tale, and they did so once again thanks to the energetic, entrancing dancing of Wei Wang and Wona Park.

At first the musical score by Ilya Demutsky sounded bizarrely old-fashioned to me, rather like film music from an earlier decade. However, it became more interesting as the ballet progressed, varying dramatically from scene to scene, and it struck me as a real accomplishment. By the time the tragic duel occurred, the synthesis of music and dance felt seamless.

The last act has Eugene returning to Russia after journeying in self-exile abroad for eight years and going to a fancy ball where the hostess is none other than country bumpkin Tatiana transformed into fashionable society woman after marriage to an old general. This finally allows for a full-on romantic duet for Tatiana and Onegin in Possokhov's choreography.

The finale featured the incomparable Joseph Walsh dancing in despair with the Winter Spirits, having screwed up his own life and that of others irreversibly. Congratulations to all involved at the SF Ballet for delivering a successful new story ballet.

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.