The young Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado is conducting a marvelous program at the San Francisco Symphony this weekend. I heard the first performance at Thursday's matinee and there are three more chances to catch the concert at Davies Hall on Friday at 6:30, Saturday at 8, and Sunday at 2.
It started with the Symphony's first performance of John Adams' Chamber Symphony from 1993. I have been listening to the Nonesuch recording for decades and love the Looney Tunes meets Arnold Schoenberg work for 15 players, but had never heard it live before.
Though hyperactive and continually pulsing with energy for twenty minutes, the piece felt oddly delicate in Davies Hall. Keisuke Nakagoshi was on a very subdued sounding synethesizer while percussionist Jacob Nissly was mostly very gentle in his playing. They were both superb, playing Adams' fiendishly difficult time signatures with style and accuracy.
Violinist Nadya Tichman gave one of the best, fiercest performances I have ever heard from her, and the composer seemed to agree as he embraced her at the end of the performance.
Son of Chamber Symphony, Adams' sequel, is more frequently performed, partly because it was written for a Mark Morris ballet, but the original is top drawer John Adams.
This was followed by Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, the piece of music Adams was riffing on, which also calls for fifteen instrumentalists. However, the programmers went for Schoenberg's reorchestration of the piece for a larger orchestra that he did in the 1930s after leaving Austria for Los Angeles. It was fascinating music but made me wish some programmer would repeat this program in a small concert hall with the Adams and the Schoenberg in its original 15-person version.
After intermission, there was a performance of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with Joshua Bell as the soloist, and it was a surprisingly great performance in music that can be dull from overfamiliarity. There was nothing routine about Bell's performance and Heras-Casado brought out the sheer fun of this score in a sharp turn by the orchestra.
The marathon 8-hour Switchboard Music Festival took place on Saturday at the Brava Theater on 24th Street, and offered the usual interesting mix of musical performances that ranged from brass bands to rock and roll ensembles to contemporary string quartets. I went to the 2009 edition of the festival at Dance Theatre Mission and again in 2013, and the series only seems to be getting better, though my brain always starts exploding after about three hours of new music.
I volunteered as an usher for the first two hours on Saturday because I like the people in charge, founders Jeff Anderle (above left) and Ryan Brown (above right), joined this year by Annie Phillips as co-curator (above center).
The festival started off with a blast of pure energy in Brass Magic, a group of guys who bonded in Brooklyn and moved to Oakland while creating a new musical synthesis for brass party music.
They were followed by an ambitious music with multimedia presentation by Berkeley/New Zealand resident Bill Baird. Bill played an electric guitar and sang with his back mostly to the audience, surrounded by an electric and acoustic bass, cellos and marimbas while the musicians were deconstructed in real time on a large screen behind and a quartet of flat-screens in front. The imagery was abstract, psychedelic and a bit too much in that I started worrying about epileptic seizures caused by Pokemon style strobe flashing. The short songs reminded me, oddly, of the 1980s Australian band Midnight Oil and were musically rich.
The hot, young Bay Area string ensemble of the moment, the Friction Quartet, played three recent pieces: Universe Explosion by Adam Cuthbert, Stephen Feigenbaum’s Parachute Dance, and Ian Dicke's Unmanned about drones that ends with a variation on Haydn's Surprise Symphony, except the machine music continues after the live musicians leave the stage.
Kevin Rogers and Otis Herrial on violins switched first and second, which was charming, and Kevin seemed to be spending a lot of time trying to get the electronics to work with all the pieces.
The tech crew at these festivals are magicians, especially considering the complexity of the setups and breakdowns involving electronics interacting with acoustics. The rock group Random House, fronted by festival founders Ryan Brown and Jeff Anderle, had the worst breakdown when a Mac attached to a synthesizer kept needing to be rebooted. Anderle announced, "We pride ourselves on how sharp this festival runs, and acts don't go overtime, and well, here we are..."
Ryan Brown, while waiting for the reboot, told us that he used to be a rock guitarist before he was a notated composer, and that he wanted to put together a band for the festival to play some music he composed. They were lively and fun and would probably profit from a vocalist weaving in and out.
I left after that set, wishing I could return for the Terry Riley In C Re-Do, where a host of composers offered their own versions of a few simple measures, played by a large jam session of musicians. I hope somebody who was there writes about the performance.
Meredith Monk, the 72-year-old actress/singer/dancer/composer/filmmaker with signature pigtails, was in town with her vocal and instrumental ensemble for three performances of her latest work, On Behalf of Nature, at Yerba Buena this weekend.
Her minimalist musical style paired with modern dance movement and multimedia, which she has been refining since the 1960s, has probably been as groundbreaking and influential as the work of Martha Graham and Steve Reich combined.
I never got a program, where the ecological subtext of the 75-minute work was supposedly explained, but that was possibly a blessing. The abstract, non-insistent piece worked fine on its own. Though nothing made any literal sense, the performers carried enough conviction that you could tell they knew what was going on.
Besides the lovely music, sung and played and danced by a group of eight musicians, the principal thrill was seeing San Francisco bass Sidney Chen as a new member of the ensemble.
Sid used to work for Nonesuch Records in New York City, moved to San Francisco to work as Artistic Administrator for the Kronos Quartet, and has sung in choruses ranging from the San Francisco Symphony to Volti. This latest incarnation as a Meredith Monk singer/dancer looks like an immense challenge and he aced it. I am filled with admiration and a tinge of envy because this looks like serious fun.
Mark Streshinsky, the charismatic General Director of the East Bay's confusingly named West Edge Opera, introduced Donizetti's rarely performed 1838 opera Poliuto to a large and appreciative crowd at Rossmoor's new Event Center on Saturday afternoon in Walnut Creek.
This was the second installment in the company's Medium Rare season which features concert performances of obscure operas by famous composers. They are performed with a quartet of instruments (conductor on piano, violin, cello and clarinet), a small chorus, and supertitles by Music Director Jonathan Khuner explaining what kind of dungeon one of the principals might be entering, and why.
The singers were all based in the Bay Area, with soprano Elizabeth Zharoff above of Sunnyvale as the single female principal, Paolina. Zharoff just had a starry debut as Violetta in La Traviata at the English National Opera, and is about to take off on a top-tier international career. Her music sounded almost impossibly difficult, but she performed it with beauty and courage.
The story is basically a love triangle, with Christian religious martyrdom in 3rd Century Armenia thrown in for good measure. Paolina is married to Poliuto who starts off the opera as a newly baptized underground Christian when that religion was still considered a dangerous cult. Unfortunately, he's also an old-fashioned Italian opera husband who jealously suspects that Paolina is having an affair. Tenor Michael Desnoyers did a splendid job in the title role, with his voice cracking once at the end of the first half but otherwise sounding sweet and unforced.
The other member of the love triangle is Roman General Severo, who was Paolina's beloved before being left for dead on a battlefield. He somehow recovers and returns to Armenia with instructions from Rome to stamp out the pesky Christians. The role was sung by baritone Anders Froehlich with such soulful charm that you hoped Paolina would leave her jealous husband and run off with Severo instead.
In the end, Paolina takes the noble path of converting and joining her husband in the arena for martyrdom, as the lovestruck Severo commits suicide. The 1838 premiere of Poliuto at the San Carlo in Naples was banned by Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, supposedly because he thought the religious story an unfit subject for the stage. His objections might also have been linked to the libretto's fierce anti-clericalism. The High Priest of Jupiter-worshiping Armenians cynically details how to use a bloodthirsty mob's religious bigotry for personal power, in a move that clergy have continued to hone over centuries.
The evil High Priest was played by John Bischoff in a male-dominated, very well sung cast that also included Michael Jankosky, Sigmund Siegel, Jake Scheps and John Minagro. Jonathan Khuner (above left) conducted from the piano, and though the coordination between principals, chamber orchestra, and chorus occasionally didn't quite mesh in the large ensembles, it was close enough to give you an appreciation for the opera, which contains some of Donizetti's best music. There's another chance to catch Poliuto tomorrow evening (Wednesday, April 1st) at Berkeley's Freight and Salvage coffeehouse. The $20 ticket price is one of the best musical bargains in the Bay Area.
