Al Fresco 3: Inuksuit at Land's End

In an interesting departure, the SFJAZZ Center hosted the composer John Luther Adams for a week-long residency in San Francisco, including a quartet of concerts at the Center, a six-hour "sound installation" at Grace Cathedral, and a free outdoor performance of the 2009 Inuksuit, written for 9 to 99 percussionists outdoors.

I went to the Inuksuit performance a couple of Sundays ago with a quartet of friends and thousands of strangers. (Click here for a two-minute video impression by Tony Hurd.)

The concert was advertised as taking place in the ruins of the Sutro Baths near Seal Rock, but the actual performance was on cliffside trails at Land's End stretching for about a quarter of a mile.

The 90-minute piece has an arresting beginning, where all the percussionists make the softest noises imaginable on a range of odd instruments from conch shells to plastic tubing.

The delicacy forces the audience to listen carefully, and to note the ambient natural sounds around them, in this case the wind, ocean, and foghorns while picking out the manufactured sounds of the musicians. The crowd was remarkably silent for the most part, keeping conversations to hushed whispers.

After about 20 minutes, the sound of gongs and other bright percussion instruments began drifting in from their various locations while retaining a mysterious gentleness.

Finally, the musicians take to drums and other instruments in a slowly rising crescendo.

I heard Inuksuit in 2012, performed in a grassy glade near Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley led by percussionist Steven Schick for whom it was originally written.

The climactic sections were more intense in the smaller Berkeley area, while the experience at Land's End with the composer in attendance sounded more diffuse and mysterious, which was fine since no performance is intended to sound the same.

It was also much warmer in Berkeley than during a bone-chilling, foggy San Francisco summer afternoon. Unlike the iron man above in his T-shirt, we had to leave before the end because we had foolishly not brought enough layers.

Savitri and River of Light at Festival Opera

The East Bay's Festival Opera, in an ongoing attempt to resurrect itself from fiscal crisis, presented a double-bill of East Indian themed operas at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center this weekend that were an unexpected delight. On Saturday morning, I took a ferry boat to Jack London Square with West Edge Opera board member James Parr and coloratura soprano Mithuna Sivaraman, who was born in Singapore and raised in New Jersey. "We are counting on you to tell us how good or bad the cultural appropriation is at these operas," we told Mithuna, and she replied, "You mean, on a scale from one to Lakmé?"



The first chamber opera was the 1908 Savitri by Gustav Holst, written for three solo voices, a small wordless female chorus, and an instrumental combination of two flutes, a cor anglais and a double string quartet. In an episode taken from the Mahabharata, the soprano Maya Kherani as Savitri welcomes Death after he has come for her young husband, and manages to charm him into restoring her spouse.



The staging by Tanya Kane-Parry was a bit clunky, but the musical performance by Kherani, Jorge Garza as her husband, and Philip Skinner was superb, as was the chamber orchestra under conductor John Kendall Bailey. It's a wonder the opera is such a rarity because the musical forces are simple and beautiful, and the story of love overcoming death affecting.



The style is very austere, almost like Benjamin Britten in his Church Parables, but the women's chorus took the piece onto a new level of musical richness.



The companion piece was Jack Perla's River of Light, a 2013 opera premiered in Houston about a driven young career woman from East India who marries an American, and in this version moves to Oakland where she tries to negotiate her cultural displacement in a series of scenes set during American holidays like Fourth of July and Halloween. After the birth of a daughter, she has a homesick breakdown during Diwali, the Indian holy festival of lights, wondering how she can pass on her own culture to her child.



Kherani and Daniel Cilli as the mixed culture pair sang beautifully and were thoroughly convincing in their roles, joined by the entertaining Molly Mahoney and Michael Boley as neighbors at various holidays. What was genuinely exciting about the 40-minute piece was the integration of Eastern and Western musical styles in the chamber orchestra, which consisted of Arjun Verma on sitar, Nilan Chaudhuri on tabla, Brian Lee on violin, Amy Brodo on cello, and Ben Malkevitch on keyboards. This wasn't Western music masquerading as Eastern or vice versa, but something new, rather like the jam session I once heard at the SFJAZZ Center with tabla master Zakir Hussein along with bass player Edgar Meyer and banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck.



"So was it a one or was it Lakmé?" I asked Mithuna on the ride home, and she confessed to being very impressed. "Maya was obviously the only one who sounded like she understood classical Indian singing during the raga section, but Perla added grace notes to the score for Western singers that imitated Indian style brilliantly."

Perla might consider adding an optional women's chorus to the opera because the pairing of the two chamber operas is an inspired match, and could easily become a new repertory staple for everything from music conservatories to small outfits like Festival Opera.

The Cultural Corridor Proxy Event

Students from the San Francisco Ballet were dancing to live music played by young musicians from the SFJAZZ Center on a makeshift stage in the Hayes Valley Saturday afternoon.



One of the pieces looked choreographed but the rest looked improvised.



The primary sponsor was the African-American Shakespeare Company who had joined up with the SF Ballet School, the SF Symphony, and a few other local arts organizations to put on a free show linking the "cultural corridor" of the Hayes Valley to the Fillmore District.



There didn't seem to be a lot of ethnic mixing, with the African-American performances taking place further west on Fulton and mostly white performers at Hayes and Octavia.



After the charming dance performance, an SF Ballet spokeswoman tried to get members of the audience to join in a dance-a-long piece.



This was followed by a musical comedy singer from a Bay Area theater company, and then by a string quartet from the SF Conservatory of Music playing Verdi, although the music was mostly drowned out by a noisy generator providing the electrical power for the show.



In the middle of the piece, they were interrupted by a drum corps that was marching down Hayes Street, merging the two performance spaces. They stopped playing when they saw they were winning an unintentional battle of the bands, and took the stage after the quartet finished with Verdi.

San Francisco Jazz Festival Outdoor Concert

The SFJAZZ Center celebrated the 33rd anniversary of their summer Jazz Festival with a free outdoor concert last Tuesday evening a block from their new concert hall in the Hayes Valley.



The setting was the blacktop area on Hayes Street called Proxy, across from Patricia's Green...



...surrounded by food trucks and long lines for the single beer vendor.



Wind and fog were at their traditional San Francisco summer intensity...



...so it wasn't a particularly comfortable listening experience but the music was good.



Maybe SFJAZZ Director Randall Kline above will move the event next year to earlier in the afternoon when the chances for sun are better. For a look at this year's festival schedule, click here.

Stephen Hough Plays Chopin and Debussy at SFJAZZ

The British pianist Stephen Hough above just spent a fortnight performing a piano recital of music by Chopin and Debussy. According to Hough's blog entry about the concerts, it was "London on Tuesday, then Manchester and Glyndebourne; and the following week Boston, New York and San Francisco." The final concert was hosted by San Francisco Performances and held in the relative intimacy of the SFJAZZ Center, which made most of those attending feel very lucky.



The program was unusual, with the four Ballades of Chopin in the middle surrounded by Debussy pieces, with La plus que lente and Estampes in the front and Children's Corner and L'isle joyeuse in the back. It turned out to be an inspired stroke of programming, though, and the concert grew more absorbing and virtuosically difficult as it went along, with a sweet respite at the Children's Corner before the voluptuous island finale which Debussy confessed, "Lord, but it's difficult to play."



Hough writes about the two composers on the program:

"They were both romantics on the surface but underneath Chopin was a classicist in his tastes...whereas Debussy was, arguably, the first modernist (hat tip: Pierre Boulez) with his revolutionary approach to form and harmony and his exploration of a musical language fragmenting into a new vocabulary and meaning...

The [Chopin] Ballades are stories – epic tales, in scope if not in length, operas in miniature. All of the Debussy pieces are poems, vastly suggestive beyond their duration in time or their presence in aural space."

Hough is one of the most technically amazing pianists I have ever witnessed, and there were moments in the quicker sections where his hands turned into virtual motion blur in front of your eyes, all while maintaining the most perfect musical clarity. Add to this a scary-smart intelligence along with beautiful musical instincts and you have an artist who is very special. The performance surpassed expectations, and the extraordinarily quiet and attentive audience gave him the attention he deserved.

Joni Mitchell Worship at SFJAZZ Center

The SFJAZZ Center is holding its annual Gala Fundraiser this evening, and the guest of honor was originally scheduled to be Joni Mitchell in an evening devoted to her music. Unfortunately, Joni ended up in a Los Angeles hospital recently, in a confusingly reported condition reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor's many near-death experiences over the decades, so she was unable to attend the gala where everyone from Kris Kristofferson and Joe Jackson and Patti Austin are singing her songs.



I first heard the album Ladies of the Canyon as a Southern California teenager while falling tragically in love, and it became a personal soundtrack. Some years later, while visiting a friend in Humboldt County, I was in a car driven by a funny young, flannel-shirt lesbian listening to the radio when Joni's latest song from The Hissing of Summer Lawns was played. It was all about wealthy people being alienated, and about halfway through, the driver switched to another station with, "I can't relate, Joni." Close to 30 years later, while looking for soundtrack music, I listened to every album Joni ever produced, and all of it was unexpectedly great. The early, middle and late work were all distinctive, and there was a belated realization that Joni is probably the greatest songwriter of my generation.



I heard her live twice, sort of. The first time was at the Concord "Sleep Train" Pavilion in 2000 in one of Joni's final tours, with a full orchestra, singing American standards and her own songs in a low contralto (click here for an example). The second time was in 2009 when the New York performance artist John Kelly brought his drag incarnation of the young, high soprano Joni to the old ODC theater (click here for a clip of him singing "Blue.") It was one of the oddest, loveliest performances imaginable, and when Joni saw the show for herself she was amused and enchanted, and came backstage to give Kelly her dulcimer to use in future shows (click here for the backstage video).

The Pacifica Quartet Plays With Students

The Pacifica String Quartet were guests at the SF Conservatory of Music all week, teaching master classes and rehearsing students for a wonderful chamber music concert on Thursday evening. In an interesting twist, the celebrated quartet split itself up and created new ensembles with the students, and the mixture of professionals and high-level aspiring artists gave the performances a liveliness and energy that was exceptional.

I heard the Pacifica play Shostakovich's 7th String Quartet a year ago at the SFJAZZ Center, and it was a spiky, compressed, hard-charging performance. With students Autumn Chodorowski (in red) and Meredith Kufchak (in black) joining Sibbi Bernhardson on violin and Brandon Vamos on cello above, it sounded completely different.



It was gentler, sadder, and moodier, which worked just as well as an interpretation, and the four players gave a superb, seamlessly integrated performance.



Shostakovich tends to overwhelm most other music on any program, but the 1904 String Trio in C Major by Dohnanyi held its own, helped along immensely by the unusually soulful, sweet sound of Pacifica violist Masumi Per Rostad on the left, playing the five-movement piece with violinist Joshua Peters and cellist James Jaffe.



After intermission, the entire Pacifica Quartet were joined by four students for Mendelssohn's Octet in E-flat Major, music that can easily become dull and sickly sweet, but this performance was both precise and musically supple. You could hear every individual voice at all times but the performers played with a team spirit that made the music sound exciting and fresh. From left to right below, they were Simin Ganatra, violin; Sibbi Bernhardsson, violin; Autumn Chodorowski, violin; Joshua Peters, violin; Masumi Per Rostad, viola; Luis Bellorin, viola; Brandon Vamos, cello; and Patricia Ryan, cello.



I cannot imagine hearing a better live performance of the piece, and it was especially fun watching student violist Luis Bellorin (third from the right) rocking out through the whole thing.

The Cypress String Quartet's Slavonic Salon

In the 1970s, when I was a not-so-innocent young thing, I attended a lovely, expensive, mostly gay party in a Berkeley Hills home with jaw-dropping vistas of San Francisco Bay. Even more impressive was the wooden living room with its floor to ceiling shelves of books and records. The two items that piqued my interest even though I knew nothing about them were a set of Jane Austen's complete works and a set of Haydn's approximately 70 string quartets, so I asked the elderly host why they were so prominent on his wall. "Oh, Jane Austen? I'll find I want to look up a line from one of her books and then end up reading the whole damned set again. She's that good. And Haydn's String Quartets? They're the best: sane, beautiful, funny, intelligent, you name it."



Last Saturday at the SFJAZZ Center, the Cypress String Quartet above (from left to right Cecily Ward and Tom Stone on violin, Jennifer Kloetzel on cello, and Ethan Filner on viola) started their final Salon Series with a late Haydn Quartet, Opus 76, No. 5, and that unknown host's remark popped into my brain, prompted by their very good performance.



They continued with an early Schulhoff Divertimento from 1914, introduced by cellist Jennifer Kloetzel. Erwin Schulhoff (his photo is at the top next to the Haydn set) seems to be the "discovery" flavor of the moment these days. Every presenter goes into long detail about his tragic life as an ardent Czech Jewish Communist who died in a Nazi concentration camp, but his music doesn't need any special pleading. Everything I have heard over the last couple of years has been lively, accessible, and pleasurable. As a jazz enthusiast who adored dancing, Schulhoff also believed in fun and you can hear it in his music, including the Divertimento which had traces of pre-WWI French cabaret about it. Now somebody needs to perform his 1932 oratorio based on The Communist Manifesto, or his 1935 jazz oratorio H.M.S. Royal Oak, which according to Wikipedia tells the story of a naval mutiny against a superior who prohibits jazz on board ship.



After intermission, the quartet played the mid-period Dvorak String Quartet in E-flat Major, Opus 51. The violin playing by Cecily Ward was a bit astringent for my taste but it was more than balanced out by the deeply warm sound of cellist Kloetzel and violist Filner above.



The four play together so seamlessly that it is sometimes hard to tell who is playing what, which is high praise. (Violinists Cecily Ward and Tom Stone are pictured above.)

Vivaldi and Mozart at the SFJAZZ Center

The new SFJAZZ Center has stepped into the breach for a few classical music organizations who have been exiled from the Veterans Building's Herbst Theatre while it undergoes earthquake retrofitting over the next three years. Though amplified music sounds superb at the Center, acoustic performances have been a problem since the Miner Auditorium is so dry, with hardly any reverberation. The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra above has been playing around with "discreet" amplification at their SFJAZZ performances, but the results have been uneven to say the least.



Last Friday the original instruments ensemble performed Vivaldi's only surviving oratorio, the rousing and bloodthirsty Juditha triumphans devicta Holofernes barbarie, where Judith leads the Venetians in their fight against the Ottomans attacking Corfu. The soloists were all fine (above left to right Vivica Genaux, Diana Moore, conductor Nicholas McGegan, Cecile van de Sant, and Dominique Labelle), but there were disconcerting moments of weird amplification when a singer would turn their head and the sound would actually get louder accompanied by a metallic underglow that reminded me of the taste of diet sodas.



The real stars of the show were the chorus above and the dueling theorbos below played by David Taylor and Daniel Zuluaga.



My favorite moment of the evening was Judith's aria Veni, veni mi sequere fide where van Sant was accompanied not only by the two theorbos but by an instrument called a chalumeau, an early prototype of the clarinet that looked to be about half the size of a flute. It was amazing how rich the sound was from the tiny, obscure instrument and the playing by Eric Hoeprich was exquisite.



The next morning at the same location San Francisco Performances offered the finale of its four-concert Mozart series with the Alexander String Quartet and guest pianist Sarah Cahill playing the composer's two piano quartets, along with historical and musical commentary by Robert Greenberg (second from the right above), "music historian-in-residence." Greenberg's music appreciation meets Catskills standup schtick is not at all my cup of tea, but I may be in the minority. The hall was almost filled on a Saturday morning at 10AM, and the crowd was immensely appreciative.



The reason for attending was to hear Sarah Cahill playing classical repertory rather than her usual world premieres and new music. I was nervous for her because Mozart's music is deceptively tricky and I've heard plenty of great musicians who don't have a clue how to bring it to life. The worry was misplaced, however, because she proved to be a wonderful Mozartian, animating the music from the inside, and her quality of listening and sharing with her fellow players made for stirring, beautiful performances. Second violinist Frederick Lifsitz was the top dog string player for the Piano Quartet in G Minor while first violinist Zakarias Grafilo took over after intermission for the Piano Quartet in E-flat Major.

Though a little dry, the sound was warm and resonant throughout the morning's performances and there wasn't a hint of amplification. I asked SF Performances president Ruth Felt how that came about. "It has something to do with the stage baffle being either in or out, I don't remember which one it is, but it seems to make all the difference for performers trying to listen to each other."