Favorite Musical Performances of 2019

In January, the composer Luciano Chessa presented a concert at Old First Church of music by the late Julius Eastman, climaxing with four pianists performing Crazy Nigger, a mesmerizing hour-long work that just kept getting better as it progressed.

Later in the month the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presented a fascinating concert at the SF Conservatory of Music, starting with Ingram Marshall's 1989 A Peaceful Kingdom and ending with composer Ted Hearne above singing his own 'The Cage' Variations.

West Edge Opera crossed the bay for their annual Snapshot of operatic works in progress, with the highight being Nathaniel Stookey's monodrama Ivonne, which was given a masterful performance by soprano Marnie Breckenridge.

I missed most of the American Bach Society's concerts this year, but did attend a February performance at St. Marks Lutheran Church of various J.S. Bach cantatas which was surpassingly beautiful.

The San Francisco based Friction Quartet began a series of commissioning projects this year with a concert at the Center for New Music in April. This was followed by another great concert at Old First Church with a starry cameo by pianist Sarah Cahill premiering Gila: River, Mesa, and Mountain, a piano quintet by Max Stoffregen. The Friction Quartet are the the most wonderful mixture of technically secure and wildly musical which was an interesting contrast to the Elias Quartet, a more buttoned up UK ensemble that gave a brilliant performance of Britten's String Quartet #2 the following week in April at Herbst.

San Francisco Performances presented the Tetzlaff Trio in April at the Herbst Theater. Consisting of my favorite violinist in the world, Christian Tetzlaff, the great pianist Lars Vogt, and Christian's sister Tanja Tetzlaff on cello, they played Shostakovich's Piano Trio in E Minor, Opus 67 in a breathtaking performance. Their Mozart and Dvorak were pretty good, too.

The SF Silent Film Festival features some of the most interesting live musical performances around, and their opening night presentation of Buster Keaton's The Cameraman featured an original 2010 score conducted by composer Timothy Brock with musicians from the SF Conservatory of Music. The experience was wonderful, and made me wish the SF Symphony would augment its movie series with great silent films that were originally presented with symphony orchestras. (Start with Wings, where the percussion section would get a serious workout.)

The Other Minds Music Festival gave the world premiere of The Pressure at Yerba Buena Center in June. A strange, ambitious oratorio/multimedia event featuring a micro-tuned chamber orchestra of 23 and five vocal soloists among its forces, it was composed by Brian Baumbusch to a poetic horror narrative written by his brother Paul with projected woodblock illustrations by Spanish illustrator Fede Yankelevich. The SF Silent Film Festival should consider reviving it sometime at the Castro Theater.

At the end of the 2018-2019 season, the San Francisco Symphony announced that Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas was taking a sabbatical for heart surgery, and replacement conductors would be found. Joshua Gersen and the audience lucked out with a wonderful Steve Reich premiere, Music for Ensemble and Orchestra, and Yefim Bronfman playing the stuffing out of the fiendish Prokofiev Piano Concerto #2. It was a thrilling concert.

Dvorak's Rusalka at the San Francisco Opera during the summer was the company's highlight of the year and its debuting conductor, Eun Sun Kim, was soon offered the post of SF Opera Music Director starting in 2021.

The SF Symphony imported a spectacular production of Ravel's one-act opera, L'enfant et les sortilège from Opéra National de Lyon, featuring a luxury cast, huge choruses, and magical projections by Grégoire Pont.

West Edge Opera's trio of Oakland warehouse operas this August was crowned by an incisively directed production by Mark Streshinsky of a great new opera by Missy Mazzoli, Breaking The Waves, with a taut libretto by Royce Vavrek from the dark Lars von Trier film. The soprano Sara LeMesh gave the single most impressive operatic performance I saw all year.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra under Music Director Daniel Hope has offered some strange programming this year, but one of the oddest was simply awesome, Ernest Chausson's 1891 Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet with the quartet's music beefed up for a string orchestra. Part of the fun was hearing a major work for the first time and another part was watching the 16-year-old wunderkind pianist Maxim Lindo infusing the hour-long piece with so much energy the audience walked out vibrating.

Allegra Chapman and Laura Gaynon's third annual Bard Music West festival at Noe Valley Ministry focused for two days on the music of a mid-20th century Polish composer, Grażyna Bacewicz, along with her influences and colleagues. I made it for two of the three concerts and was completely impressed both by the quality of the composer's music and the quality of the performers assembled. This festival feels like a gift.

Speaking of gifts, Céline Ricci's Ars Minerva company has been offering an annual modern world premiere of 17th century Venetian operas for five years and it just keeps getting better. This year it was the 1680 Ermelinda, composed by Domenico Freschi with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piccioli that had a superior cast that included Nika Printz, Sara Couden, and Kindra Scharich who was also extraordinary in Breaking The Waves. Congratulations, everyone, on great work.