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.