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.

Friction Quartet and Sarah Cahill, Together at Last

The marvelous Friction Quartet unveiled Part Two of their world premiere commissioning initiative at San Francisco's Old First Church a couple of Fridays ago. Pictured above are violinist Otis Harriel, violist Lucia Kobza, cellist Douglas Machiz, and violinist Kevin Rogers.

They started with ABACISCUS by Englishman Geoffrey Gordon from 2013, which they also performed at the Center for New Music in the first installment of the commissioning initiative. Having heard the piece twice now, I have to admit that I find Kevin Rogers' introduction to the energetic, fractured, four-movement work more interesting than the actual music.

Joining the quartet in a public performance for the first time was Lucia Kobza, replacing longtime violist Taija Werbelow. Musically, she seemed to blend in without a hitch.

The world premiere of Piers Hallawell's Family Group with Aliens was introduced by the British composer himself. Unlike most of his brethren, he was a wonderful explainer of his own music, and funny besides, explaining that there were three movements to the quartet that were like members of a family wedding party and the "aliens" were the in-laws and cousins commenting on the family. The six movements are written with the instruction that the performers can play them in any order they want, as long as a family movement is paired with an alien. The work is dense, witty and all over the place, and I really enjoyed it. In a 21st century wonder, a YouTube video of the Friction performance has already been posted, and you can hear it yourself by clicking here.

Douglas Machhiz introduced the final commission, The Gila: River, Mesa, and Mountain, a piano quintet by Max Stoffregen featuring guest artist Sarah Cahill. After the rather frenzied intellectual virtuosities of the English Invasion before it, the work was soft, dreamy and delightful, taking you along with the composer on a marathon Southwestern hike. There's a YouTube video of this performance too, which you can hear/see by clicking here.

It was lovely seeing some of my favorite musicians playing together for the first time. Pictured above are violinist Otis Harriel and pianist Sarah Cahill, and Old First Church was a genial concert setting for the group.

Brent Miller Album Release Party at C4NM

Two Fridays ago I crawled down to the Tenderloin after work, had a falafel on the sidewalk on Market Street, and then arrived late for an album release concert and party by Brent Miller (above) at the Center for New Music on Taylor Street.

Many of San Francisco's arts non-profits are ossified and administration-heavy, with the fostering of art and artists a secondary concern, so it's always refreshing to step into the Center for New Music which is the ideal opposite.

The Center opened in 2012 on a wing and a prayer as an artists' collaborative, and it's been extraordinarily successful in its aims. Instead of being a curated space where there are gatekeepers, anyone can become a member for $100 and then put on a show where the performers receive !00% of the box office. In other words, you can even learn how to make money off of your art.

The two founders of the Center for New Music were two college buddies, Brent Miller and Adam Fong (above). Adam has moved on to the Packard Foundation in Silicon Valley and they are lucky to have him, while Brent continues on as the director of the Center.

The small space has put on hundreds of concerts over its last seven years, some of which are legendary, but that's not the point of the place. Its true value has been as a social space where musicians of all generations and levels of success can meet and collaborate.

Nomad Vigil, Brent Miller's "album," that major concept which has become anachronistic in our own short lives, can be found at this link.

A Tale of Two String Quartets

I attended a pair of concerts a couple of weeks ago by two young string quartets which were gender-inverted mirror images of each other. The Bay Area based Friction Quartet (top) has three males and one female while the Manchester, England based Elias Quartet (bottom half) has three females and one male. Both quartets featured wonderful musicians, but for sheer adventurousness in programming and virtuosic technique, the nod goes to Friction who have been amazing me since I first heard them at the SF Conservatory of Music in 2013.

The Friction Quartet (left to right above, violinist Otis Harriel, violist Taija Werbelow, cellist Doug Machiz, and violinist Kevin Rogers) have been commissioning new music, and this was "Concert 1 of Friction Premieres" where they offered two works for the first time. The concert venue was the tiny Center for New Music in the Tenderloin where we were basically in the musicians' laps, which was fun.

The first world premiere was Two Hearts, a gorgeous, two-movement work by Sarang Kim, a young Korean composer studying at UC Santa Cruz. The work incorporates Korean tuning techniques at the beginning and shades into propulsive Western minimalism in the second half. The composer could not attend the concert because of her pregnancy which is what the two hearts was referring to: "My heart has enabled me to breathe from the moment I was created. It is now breathing stronger than it ever did before to keep another heart, a smaller one, beating. The two hearts are beating for each other and sensing each other's presence for about 280 days. One day, the smaller one will be able to work without the bigger one's help, keeping a new human being breathing. This piece describes the process from the very beginning when the two begin to coexist to the last moment they start beating separately." Unlike a lot of extra-musical descriptions by composers, you could actually hear all this. A recording of the performance is already up on SoundCloud where you can listen by clicking here.

The second piece was the relatively ancient ABACISCUS by Geoffrey Gordon from 2013. The four movements are titled Circus Scene, Orpheus, Bikini Girls (the favorite of introducer Kevin Rogers above), and The Angel before St. Joachim, all based on mosaics the composer had encountered in the Mediterranean. It was interesting music (click here to check it out) but it felt rather male and assaultive after Kim's piece. I'd never thought about gender based music before, but this juxtaposition brought it unintentionally into focus.

The concluding world premiere was El Correcaminos (The Roadrunner) by Nicolas Lell Benavides, one of my favorite composers to make his way through the SF Conservatory and join the larger musical world (he's just moved to Los Angeles). It's an ambitious work depicting his home state of New Mexico through the centuries.

The detailed narratives Benavides offered in person and in the program turned out to be unnecessary because the music works on its own. From modernist frenzy in the first movement, Latino rhythms in the second, a long, still and repetitive softness in the third, and an attempt at capturing the spirit of a roadrunner in the finale, it was all sort of wonderful.

A few evenings later I heard the Elias String Quartet (left to right above violinist Sara Bitlloch, violinist Donald Grant, violist Simone van der Giessen, and cellist Marie Bitlloch) in a San Francisco Performances concert at the Herbst Theater. The printed program was upended to make more sense, with the Schumann String Quartet #1 starting off the evening in a silky, plush rendition.

The violinist Donald Grant, with the most charming Scottish accent imaginable, introduced the next work, the String Quartet #4 ("Nine Fragments") by British composer Sally Beamish which the quartet premiered last year. It was commissioned to be a musical response to the Schumann we had just heard, and Grant gave us a few instructive examples, but the piece will probably live better on its own.

After intermission, they played the piece that had attracted me in the first place, Britten's String Quartet #2, written soon after he had returned to Britain during World War Two. The Elias Quartet gave a superb performance of a real masterpiece I had never heard live before, with precision but also enough passion they could have been confused for the Friction Quartet.

The Great Debate Cabaret at C4NM

On Sunday evening, September 9th, at the Center for New Music in the Tenderloin neighborhood, a theatrical event rook place which was billed as "Erling Wold's Fabrications: The Great Debate Cabaret. Political Debate 2018 as Subtext Wrestling Match/Genderbending wrestling love orgy. Featuring Nikola Printz and Laura Bohn (pictured above) as the contestants, Hadley McCarroll as the master, Erling Wold master of ceremonies."

I arrived about 15 minutes late and missed the concept explanation from composer/MC Erling Wold, but my friend James Parr filled in for me: "Nikola (pictured above) represented the far left and did her dialogue in a convincing Bernie Sanders-esque accent while wearing a dowdy, ill fitting suit. Laura represented the far right and put on an excellent southern-drawl ala Jeff Sessions, although I'm pretty sure she's considerably taller than Mr. Sessions."

I arrived as the narrative was unraveling, as were the costumes.

I sat back and made up my own story, which was easy to do, because the performers were so committed, talented, and daring that the air was ripe with references and suggestions. The music set list ranged all over the Western musical universe, from the Adler/Ross Whatever Lola Wants above...

...to songs and arias by Korngold, Berg, Weill, Bernstein and Britten.

There were also a quartet of pieces by the composer and ringmaster Erling Wold from operas old and brand new: UKSUS, Rattensturm, and She Who Is Alive.

As the two performers became less confrontational and more worshipful with each other, the music selections veered towards the French: Massenet, Saint-Saens, and Delibes.

Their exit music that stuck in my head for the next 4 hours was the instant earworm that is The Flower Duet. The show was put together quickly and on a whim by musicians who love to work together, and it felt like one of the hippest, playfully artistic occasions in the world.

Gamelan in the Gardens

The Yerba Buena Gardens Festival in downtown San Francisco all summer is one of the best-programmed, least-attended free concert series in the Bay Area. Last weekend featured the return of Gamelan Sekar Jaya, an East Bay ensemble formed in 1979 to perform Balinese music.

Having mostly white Americans playing Balinese skirts cultural appropriation, but the group takes the music very seriously. It also hosts visiting Balinese artists and musical gurus for residencies that last from a month to two years, so the effect is closer to cultural cross-pollination.

They have even expanded to a dancing troupe with performers scampering among the musicians.

For a more detailed description of the music, check out Stephen Smoliar's account.

Vanessa Langer Sings Crumb and Coll

The soprano Vanessa Langer offered an adventurous, brilliant concert at the Center for New Music a couple of Saturdays ago. Collaborating with pianist Allegra Chapman, flautist Elizabeth Talbert, and sound designer/composer David Coll, Langer sang two chansons about birds by Messiaen, a five-movement song cycle by George Crumb using phrases from Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, and two works by David Coll himself. There was even an added duet for flute and piano by the contemporary Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu.

The 1979 Crumb piece, Apparition, is a virtuosic seven-movement marvel for the pianist who plays inside and outside of her instrument, sometimes simultaneously. The vocal lines are all over the place, from tender and delicate sighs to what are almost shrieks and Langer made all of it beautiful and compelling. I can't imagine a better performance.

The first David Coll piece was Refuse Collection, a work in progress setting of poem by the British poet Jeremy Prynne, written in 2004 in response to the Abu Ghraib horrors coming to public light. The poem and the musical setting are like one of Trump's word salads, a surreal mixture of disquieting specificity overcome by a torrent of banalities. Vanessa used just about every type of voice, speech, whisper, and cry imaginable in the short excerpt, and it made me look forward to hearing the completed work.

The 1982 Digital Bird Suite by Yoshimatsu is "extracted from fictitious music for a fictitious ballet, the hero of which is a mechanical bird named Digital Bird" and a conceit doesn't get any more Japanese than that. The music was sprightly, strange, and enjoyable, particularly the performance by Elizabeth Talbert on flute.

The finale was David Coll's Position, Influence, a setting of a speech given by Charles de Gaulle after the 1968 Paris protests, which Coll has collapsed and fragmented in an amazing sounding piece for a soprano who is orating, singing, screaming, and somehow guiding a whole wall of sheet metal pieces into action with her voice. I heard the piece a couple of years ago, without knowing about the political oration subtext, and was stunned by the excitingly different and expressive work. Hearing it a second time only confirmed how good it is, a French Political World Salad on steroids.

The level of musicianship all evening was extraordinary, and the playing of pianist Allegra Chapman, looking and sounding like a junior Sarah Cahill, was particularly astonishing.

Though I hate walking through the Tenderloin neighborhood on Taylor Street, the Center for New Music is one of the coolest spots in the entire world. For $15, we heard music that was basically all new for most of the audience, performed at a level of accomplishment that was dazzling. The space that Adam Fong and Brent Miller have built is a small miracle, and a template for others around the globe.

Vanessa Langer moved from the Bay Area to Italy on Thursday to live with her Milanese husband, but her career is international and I can't wait to hear what she does next when she returns.