New Century Chamber Orchestra in the Presidio

The New Century Chamber Orchestra presented a thoroughly delightful concert on Sunday afternoon at the Presidio Theatre. The 600-seat theater near the Main Parade Lawn in the Presidio National Park is tricky to visit via public transportation, but it's a marvelous, comfortable venue that has started hosting its own programming, along with renting it to outside organizations like NCCO.

Music Director Daniel Hope is an excellent speaker, keeping his introductions short, informative, and amusing. The first work on the program was C.P.E. (Carl Philipp Emmanuel) Bach's 1745 Keyboard Concerto in D Minor. Carl Philipp Emmanuel was the second of J.S. Bach's 20 children and the most successful, becoming the court composer for the gay, art-loving Frederick, King of Prussia in Berlin, where C.P.E. Bach wrote over 40 keyboard concertos among hundreds of other works.

The soloist was the 46-year-old, New York based pianist Inon Barnatan, who did a lovely job with the three-movement concerto. However, after hearing music from this era performed on harpsichords and original string instruments by local organizations like the American Bach Soloists and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, this rendition just didn't sound quite right.

Next up was Shostakovich's lively 1933 Piano Concerto #1 with Inon Barnatan on piano and Brandon Ridenour on trumpet. Hope mentioned that Shostakovich started the composition as a trumpet concerto, but lost confidence in his trumpet writing abilities so he inserted himself as a piano soloist and turned it into what is essentially a concerto for trumpet and piano. This is youthful, sarcastic Shostakovich music, which I adore, and according to Hope the composer borrowed a lot from his time working as an accompanist for silent films, "jumping all over the place, even the Wild West." The performance by the entire ensemble was an utter delight.

After intermission, Hope explained that Bartok wrote his 1939 Divertimento for String Orchestra while a guest of Paul Sacher, the great Swiss conductor and patron of 20th century composers. Bartok desperately needed money to make his way to the United States before the Nazi takeover of Hungary, so this commission was a godsend. "Divertimento usually means a diversion -- light, simple, and amusing, and this work is none of those things, though I believe it's one of the greatest musical works of the 20th century," Hope explained.

The performance by the string chamber ensemble was alternately ferocious and mysteriously atmospheric, with a folk tune inflected final movement that had the entire cello and bass section bobbing their heads in time with the irresistable dance rhythms.

Amy Sherald on MLK, Jr. Day 2025

There was a march downtown this morning celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr., and a concert afterwards at the Yerba Buena Gardens...

...where the gentleman above was singing quite beautifully at about 2PM.

It seemed a good occasion to revisit the Amy Sherald painting exhibition at SFMOMA.

Sherald is less of a realist painter than a stager of scenes.

She casts models, puts them in clothing that she chooses, and occasionally recreates famous photos with black people in place of white people, often on a massive scale.

Her Mona Lisa is the famous portrait of Michelle Obama...

...who managed to do the right thing today when she ignored the grotesque inauguration in Washington, D.C.

Sitting on a bench in Michelle's portrait alcove was a gentleman who looked as if he had stepped out of one of Sherald's paintings.

Happy birthday, Martin Luther King, Jr.

John Adams and Carl Orff, Together at Last at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony is presenting a world premiere piano concerto by John Adams this weekend followed by Carl Orff's "dramatic cantata" Carmina Burana. Presaging the odd juxtaposition, the concert started with the 1906 The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives. It's a strange little piece that consists of a lovely, meditative tune for strings, interrupted intermittently by a plaintive off-stage horn asking the question and a quartet of flutes squabbling dissonantly with the answer. It was a great joy hearing principal trumpeter Mark Inouye again (above) after an extended sabbatical.

Two years ago, the SF Symphony and the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson performed John Adams's second piano concerto from 2018 entitled Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? It was a sensational performance of a manic, hard-driving piece and it so impressed the composer that he offered to write a new piano concerto for Ólafsson, which he entitled After The Fall. (Photo by Brandon Patoc)

Thursday was the world premiere of the 30-minute concerto and it was quite a contrast to the fiendish Devil and his Tunes. There were the usual Adams kaleidescope of rapidly changing time signatures and motoric rhythms, but the overall impression was of a colorful gentleness. The piece starts out softly, sounding a bit like Ravel with many sparkling sounds in the orchestra, and the piano makes its way through quite a journey in three uninterrupted movements, ending as softly as it began. For a good, detailed description of the music, check out Lisa Hirsch at the San Francisco Classical Voice website. (Photo above is pianist Víkingur Ólafsson and guest conductor David Robertson.)

It was easy to get lost listening to a dense piece of music for the first time so I looked into buying a cheap ticket for one of the two remaining performances on Saturday or Sunday, but the nosebleed second tier seats which usually cost about $30-$50 were instead being offered for the dynamic pricing amount of $225. (Photo of conductor David Robertson, composer John Adams, and pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is by Brandon Patoc)

This was not because the entire world was clamoring to see an important world premiere by John Adams, but because of the massive popularity of Carmina Burana, Carl Orff's 1936 hour-long cantata about fortune, nature, drinking, love, and sex. I had seen the work in 2012 at Davies Hall in a staged version by Opera Parallele's Brian Staufenbiel with the San Francisco Choral Society, but this was the first time hearing the crude, melodic, crowd-pleaser full blast with the entire SF Symphony and Chorus along with the SF Girls' Chorus and a trio of starry soloists.

Soloists soprano Susanna Phillips and baritone Will Liverman were both excellent, as was the orchestra under David Robertson. (Photo by Brandon Patoc)

Tenor Arnold Livingston Geis (above right) hammed it up as the dying swan, which was entirely appropriate, and William Liverman (above left) had such a beautiful baritone voice that it was good to hear he'll be returning to the city this summer for SF Opera's production of La Boheme.

Soprano Susanna Phillips was luxury casting in a small role where she basically sings whether or not she should lose her virginity or remain a proper maiden. (She eventually chooses the former option.)

The real star of the evening was the SF Symphony Chorus, which finally reached a financial settlement with penny-pinching management after an anonymous donor put up $4 million to pay the 32 professional singers who are the core of the ensemble. They sounded great, even though I never want to hear the opening and closing song, O Fortuna, ever again in this lifetime.

Ray Chen and James Gaffigan at the SF Symphony

This weekend's San Francisco Symphony concerts were a mixed bag. It began with conductor James Gaffigan leading the orchestra in the 2016 Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) by the talented 44-year-old American composer, Missy Mazzoli. This wondrous, ten-minute piece was making its SF Symphony debut, and it actually sounded like the cosmos spinning, no mean feat. I hope it becomes a concert opener staple.

This was followed by violin soloist Ray Chen playing the 1940 Violin Concerto of Samuel Barber. Even though it's an often-performed standard, I wasn't familiar with the work at all, so went to YouTube and listened to a performance featuring violinist Joshua Bell. "That music sure is dull," my spouse commented. "Let's try this version with Ray Chen, who we'll be seeing tonight," I replied. By the end, the jury agreed, "This is a gorgeous piece of music." (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

The performance on Thursday's opening night was hard-charging, which seemed at odds with the gentleness of the first two movements, but it was an interesting approach that made the piece sound more anguished than meditative. The problem was that Gaffigan had the orchestra playing too loudly, drowning out Chen at various climactic moments. (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

Chen's performance, however, was flawless, bringing out the pathos of the Andante movement, and reveling in the pyrotechnics of the final Presto movement.

Chen addressed the audience before playing an encore. Born in Taiwan, raised in Australia, and until recently living in Philadelphia, Chen announced that he had just moved to California, which prompted applause from the audience. "Unfortunately, I just settled in Los Angeles, and I'm in a state of shock right now" on account of the fires currently destroying the city. "This piece fits my mood right now," he continued, before playing Eugène Ysaÿe's Obsession from his Violin Sonata No. 2. Starting with a J.S. Bach quote, it's a wild, knotty piece that felt fitting.

The second half of the concert was dedicated to Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, a triumphant 45-minute hymn to Mother Russia at the end of World War Two. After Gaffigan's "rather vigorous conducting" (as my London seatmate put it) of the Barber concerto, I was worried about Gaffigan's approach to the Prokofiev symphony, which already leans toward incoherent bombast, particularly its long first movement. The worry was fitting because the performance sounded like Gaffigan was trying to see how fast and how loud he could have the orchestra play, with hardly any modulation or quiet moments. Hearing the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony can be a great, exciting experience, but by the end of this concert I felt bludgeoned. (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

Sarah Cahill Plays James Cleghorn

Old First Concerts opened their 2025 season with a fascinating piano recital by Sarah Cahill, playing the music of a forgotten San Francisco composer, James Cleghorn (1913-1987).

Cahill was introduced by Matthew Wolka, who is not only the director of the Old First Concerts organization, but was working as the A/V tech and stage manager. He also mentioned that the City of San Francisco Grants for the Arts program had unaccountably rejected their application for funds this year after supporting them for decades. The venerable church on the corner of Van Ness and Sacramento has hosted the concert series since 1970, and the wide range of musical performances by mostly local artists is unmatched anywhere else in San Francisco. If you would like to get in touch with SF Grants for the Arts to support Old First Concerts, you can write a letter to this address: 401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 321, San Francisco, CA 94102. Or send them an email at gfta@sfgov.org.

James Cleghorn, pictured above with his first wife Fern, was born and raised in the Bay Area. According to Bill Alves, who co-wrote the great 2017 biography Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick, "What we knew of Jim Cleghorn was mostly through interviews with Lou and with John Dobson, who was also a roommate with them. Lou met Cleghorn in the SF State choir, where Lou sang bass and Cleghorn tenor. They were also both in the ancient music ensemble. Dobson remembered Cleghorn as a brilliant man (“an IQ of 170”) who exchanged poetry and music with Lou. Lou remembered him as plugged into the arts community in San Francisco, alerting Lou to things like Cowell’s performances and the New Music Society. At some point while they were living there, Dobson remembered Cleghorn coming downstairs and announcing that they needed to take him “to the booby hatch.” Dobson took him to a doctor. The doctor asked Cleghorn where he was born, and Cleghorn the intellectual replied with the original Indian language name for the area. The doctor took the answer for gibberish and agreed to recommend that he be committed to a sanitarium."

Alves continues: "After Lou Harrison moved away from San Francisco, they lost touch. We asked the reference desk at the SF public library, and they told us that Cleghorn was hired as a librarian in August 1946, became senior librarian in Feb. 1948, and was appointed principal librarian in Art, Music, and Recreation until his retirement in 1971. Lou and Cleghorn were back in touch by 1957, as there’s a letter from him in Lou’s archive. Cleghorn arranged to commission a fanfare from Lou for the opening of their new fine arts division. Lou composed Majestic Fanfare in 1963 while in residence at the East West Center in Hawaii. It was never performed as planned for the library but was performed in Hawaii."

That Art, Music, and Recreation department that Cleghorn developed in the old Main Branch of the SF Public Library was a marvel, with masses of musical scores, opera libretti, and LP recordings. Best of all, you could reserve a stereo and headphones to listen, which is how I did my homework in the 1970s before rushing across Civic Center Plaza to buy a $3 standing room ticket at the SF Opera in the years before Supertitles. I still have vivid memories of hearing Don Giovanni and Peter Grimes for the first time in that library. Sadly, most of the collection was thrown out along with hundreds of thousands of books when the new Main Branch opened next door in 1996, an indignity that author Nicholson Baker wrote about in The New Yorker magazine and a book called Double Fold.

CORRECTION: The Art, Music, and Recreation Department left the following comment: "While Nicholas Baker accurately reported the rampant removal of books for the Library's collection, the Art, Music and Recreation Center did not take part in this act. We preserved our book and score collections during the transition to the new building. We were told by the Chief of the Main Library discard our LP collection, but we retained it and retain it to this day."

Cahill's Cleghorn concert on Sunday afternoon was spurred by contact with his son, Peter Cleghorn, who brought her piles of unpublished scores in manuscript form.

Peter Cleghorn was in the audience and was invited by Sarah to offer some context to a few of the pieces, most of which were receiving their world premieres. One of my favorite works on the program was actually written for Peter on his seventh birthday, a brilliant, amusing riff on piano instructor John Thompson's Teaching Little Fingers to Play: A Book for the Earliest Beginner. The actual title of the 1945 Cleghorn piece is An Apotheosis of John Thompson: A Sonatina on Tunes from Teaching Tiny Fingers to Play (to Peter in his seventh year).

Though most of Cleghorn's music remains unpublished, Henry Cowell did print the 1937 How Do You Like This? Three Ironies for Piano in his groundbreaking New Music magazine. The performance by Cahill was wonderful, craggy and lyrical simultaneously.

Cahill performed 13 separate works on the program, many of them undated miscellaneous works in a series Cleghorn called Cyclus. There was also a Sonatina in memory of Bartok, a 1980 work called The Fear and The Trembling from Ludus Arbitralis, and a gorgeous, extremely sophisticated 1935 work, Six Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme. The entire concert was historical music excavation at its most rewarding.

Even better, the music is going to be recorded later this month by Cahill for the Other Minds music organization. In the photo above, Other Minds Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian was congratulating Peter Cleghorn at the end of the concert for helping to rescue his father's music.