Samuel Adams at Other Minds

The Other Minds Festival describes itself in its beautifuly designed program as follows: "Founded in 1992, Other Minds is a leading organization of new and experimental music in all its forms, devoted to championing the most original, eccentric, and underrepresented creative voices in contemporary music." Though that mission statement makes for some uneven, hit-and-miss programs, last Friday's concert devoted to the 39-year-old composer Samuel Adams was very much a hit. (Pictured above at a panel discussion before Friday's concert are festival co-founder and artistic director Charles Amirkhanian and composer Samuel Adams.)

This year's festival took place over four evenings at the Brava Theater in the Mission District for the first time, and the 24th Street location felt warm, cozy and perfect. The concert began with Adams's 2020 Violin Diptych. The first half is a long, lyrical solo for the violin in an enchanting performance by Helen Kim, and in the second half pianist Conor Hanick joins in with a raucous accompaniment.

Pianist Hanick was back performing the 2023 Études, seven short studies played without pause. The piece was originally written for six different pianists at the Music Academy of the West and also designed to be played in one continuous swoop. I would rather have heard the pieces with pauses in between because it was easy to get lost and at first hearing, about halfway through, I thought, "Is this still the first Étude?"

At intermission, the audience was advised to climb the stairs to an installation by Pamela Z with layers of music and spoken word layered onto 30 different speakers. Pictured is R. Wood Massi blissing out in the middle.

The concert continued with the 2021 Sundial for string quartet and percussion. The strings were played by the fabulous Friction Quartet (Kevin Rogers and Otis Harriel on violins, Mitso Floor on viola, Doug Machiz on cello) and the metallic marimba percussion was played by Haruka Fujii. The sound of the piece was gorgeous and the Friction Quartet Plus gave a passionate performance.

Samuel Adams came onstage to reminisce about his recently deceased godfather, composer Ingram Marshall. He was a buddy of Samuel's famous composer father John Adams when the two were teaching at the old SF Conservatory of Music on 19th Avenue, two East Coasters plunging headlong into the California hippie experimentalism of the 1970s. Samuel talked about his earliest gobsmacking cultural moment at age nine when he was taken to some "small black box theater" by his parents where there was a multimedia performance of Alcatraz, an hour-long conglomeration of minimalist music, speaking, and sound effects by Ingram Marshall accompanied by slides from photographer Jim Bengston.

Woodwind legend Libby Cleve performed Ingram Marshall's 1995 Dark Waters, an English horn solo played in tandem with a fragmented, sampled old 78rpm recording of Sibelius's The Swan of Tuonela. The Finnish version of the River Styx is Tuonela, where the dead cross the water from the land of the living to the shore of the dead, and its evocation of spirits moving on was a perfect preamble for the final piece of the evening.

This was the world premiere of Adams's memorial piece for Marshall, Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright. Written as a commission from pianist Sarah Cahill, the eight-minute piece started as a simple, minimalist hammering on the keys that morphed into something more mysterious and evocative, with sampled sounds of foghorns and bay emanating somehow throughout the piano.

Twenty years ago, at a fundraiser for Other Minds at the Swedenborgian Church, Sarah Cahill played Henry Cowell's The Banshee, which also involved strange sounds coming from the inside of a piano, and I actually saw the spirit of a friend who had died the night before leaving the mortal plane. Something similar happened at the Brava Theater on Friday.

Though Samuel Adams lives in Seattle with his wife and young kids, his San Francisco Bay Area roots are deep, and the concert felt very much a friends and family affair among performers and audience. It could not have been lovelier.