SF Symphony Gala 2017

An old friend, Joshua Contreras, had left a pair of Stacy Adams wingtips in our closet for the last 10 years, lost and forgotten. Last month he sent an SOS from El Paso, asking if they happened to still be in the closet, and they were. Before sending them off to the Lone Star State, though, I took them out for a last spin at the San Francisco Symphony Gala Opening last Thursday.

I was joined by my friend Steve Susoyev above who was wearing the other pair of fancy footwear as he guided Frances Hsieh around the Prosecco Promenade in the Davies Hall lobby.

Frances managed to upstage us both.

The annual fundraising gala opens with a quintet of dinners and cocktails at City Hall, a party tent next door, and the tiny Wattis Room for the truly elite.

After dinner, the crowds join each other in the lobby to see and be seen.

This year's edition was younger and mellower than usual, and the people watching was perfectly delightful.

There was also an opening musical concert wedged in with music director Michael Tilson Thomas leading the audience in a sing-along Star Spangled Banner, a Happy 90th Birthday arrangement which he sang to Bernard Osher who was perched in a stageside box, and a quartet of classical music bon-bons with the orchestra.

The concert started with a rambunctious performance of Bernstein's overture to Candide, which the orchestra will be presenting complete in January. This was followed by the star of the evening, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, playing the Saint-Saëns Cello Conerto #1 and Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations. This was the first time I had heard Yo-Yo Ma play live, which felt a bit like checking off a box on a bucket list. Decades ago, I heard an older Isaac Stern make a mess of a Mozart violin concerto so I was a bit apprehensive about encountering another legend late in their career (Ma has been performing in public since child prodigy days in the early 1960s), but there was no reason to worry. It was easy to hear why he is a legend.

The concert ended with yet another traversal through Ravel's Bolero, followed by parties and dancing in the tent and outdoors on Grove Street. Even with our magic shoes, we were wimps and only lasted about an hour, but the food and drink and people were fun.

An Evening with Edgar Meyer

The New Century Chamber Orchestra kicked off their year-long, five-concert season with guest star Edgar Meyer, a very famous bass player who everyone in the world has heard of except me.



According to his Wikipedia entry:
[Meyer]'s styles include classical, bluegrass, newgrass, and jazz. Meyer has worked as a session musician in Nashville, part of various chamber groups, a composer, and an arranger. His collaborators have spanned a wide range of musical styles and talents; among them are Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma, Béla Fleck, Zakir Hussain, Sam Bush, James Taylor, Chris Thile, Mike Marshall, Mark O'Connor, Alison Krauss, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and the trio Nickel Creek.



He also received the MacArthur Prize for genius in 2002, and has recorded a pair of bestselling Appalachian music CDs with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O'Connor. And according to blogger Axel Feldheim, who was also at Saturday's concert in Herbst Theatre, Tom Hanks should definitely play Meyer in the movie.



After the orchestra played a "horrendous" Sonata in G Minor written by the twelve-year-old Rossini (the description is the composer's, the music and the performance were just fine), Meyer came out for a bit of solo Bach on his double-bass transcribed from one of the unaccompanied cello suites, and then joined the orchestra in a Concerto for String Bass No. 2 by Giovanni Bottesini, somebody else I'd never heard of before. It seems the 19th century Bottesini was "the Paganini of the double-bass," and besides writing and performing on the instrument, he was also a famous conductor who led the first performance of Verdi's "Aida" in Cairo. The music was fun, and the performance wildly virtuosic with cadenzas written by Meyer for the first and last movement.



After the bouncy first half of the concert, the orchestra waded into darker waters. They started with a transcription for string orchestra by Rudolf Barshai of Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet, which the composer renamed the "Chamber Symphony in C Minor." The Eighth Quartet was written in 1960, just after a trip to Dresden, which left the Soviet composer suicidally depressed and thinking about his imminent death (he lasted another fifteen years). The great Soviet composer's music is sounding better with each passing year, but I still prefer Sardonic Shostakovich to Gloomy Shostakovich, though God knows he had plenty of reasons to write the latter. The chamber orchestra's playing was my favorite of the evening, particularly the crazed, jagged second movement which is cribbed from Shostakovich's own Eighth Symphony.

The final piece, Mahler's Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony (overused in Visconti's 1970s movie of "Death in Venice" with Dirk Bogarde) was being recorded for an upcoming CD release from the orchestra. The audience was admirably silent and we floated along on the ten gentle minutes of harp and strings quite happily.

Pictured above are music director and concertmaster Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, violinist Robin Mayforth, principal second violin Candace Guirao, violinist Deborah Tien Price, and bass principal Tony Manzo, who did a great job in the opening Rossini.

Weill Hall Announces Its Inaugural Season

The full name of the impossibly beautiful, new 1,400-seat concert hall above at Sonoma State University is the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Hall, Lawn and Commons at the Donald & Maureen Green Music Center, which should give you some idea of the long and winding road this building has taken towards its realization over the last decade.



Last Friday, members of the press were invited for a lunch and the announcement of the inaugural season at the hall. Opening weekend will start on Saturday evening, September 29th, with a concert by pianist Lang Lang, followed by a Choral Sunrise Concert on Sunday morning, the Santa Rosa Symphony in the afternoon, and bluegrass superstar Alison Krauss with Union Station on Sunday evening.



The building opens up at the back, where the curtain is in the photo above, and terraced outdoor seating is envisioned with dining tables looking towards the stage. Also included in the plans is an adjoining permanent outdoor stage for 15,000 people with "large video screens and audio equipment which will broadcast the performances to patrons seated in the Weill Commons, just east of the concert hall."



The great modern architect William Rawn (check here for his website) has modeled the building, by request, after his own Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood which was "designed to replicate the intimacy and acoustics of Vienna's Muskverein and Symphony Hall in Boston."



For a sample of sound, the Sonoma State Brass Ensemble were recruited to play from the back balcony while we sat on the stage, which wasn't a particularly good test of the acoustics. What was thrilling about the sound, however, was when a young soprano started singing a Puccini song and the warm resonance of the voice as it bounced off those wooden chairs and walls was extraordinary and extremely flattering. Singers are probably going to love this place.



Robert Cole, the retired UC Berkeley Cal Performances impresario, was pulled out of retirement to recruit "High and Wide" for the starriest performers in a variety of musical genres. So you have cellist Yo Yo Ma in recital, composer John Adams conducting a 20th century music concert, opera stars Stephanie Blythe singing Kate Smith songs and Joyce DiDonato singing operatic Drama Queens, Wynton Marsalis playing with Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the San Francisco Symphony making four guest appearances, among others.



Sanford I. Weill above and his wife Joan looked pleased as punch to be the new cultural king and queen of Sonoma County.



Sonoma State University President Ruben Arminana looked happiest of all. He later told us how it all began, with an academic conference in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. With his wife, he went with friends to a concert at the nearby Tanglewood Music Festival where the Seiji Ozawa Hall had just being constructed. "I want one of those," he told his wife, and through some form of sorcery he did get one of those, and in the Bay Area we're all the richer for that vision.



Also adjoining the concert hall is a beautiful indoor/outdoor restaurant and bar that has already become the newest, hottest ticket for wedding receptions in the wine country, and it's easy to see why. For more information on the season, click here for the Green Music Center site, and click here for Axel and here for Charlise who were perfectly delightful companions on this field trip, and who have more detailed reporting about the season.

A Musical Week 3: Left Coast Chamber Ensemble Plays Saariaho

The Paris-based Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho is in the Bay Area for over a month giving a series of lectures at UC Berkeley, and the musical community has stepped up with a series of concerts featuring her compositions. Last Monday it was the the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble at the SF Conservatory, which began with a fascinating interview of Kaija by Kate Sheeran, who is Provost and Dean at the school.



Saariajo talked about studying to be a singer and arriving for a recital where not a note would come out of her mouth. "I think my body was telling me this wasn't the path I was supposed to be on. Soon after, I became a composer, it's one of those decisions that chooses you, usually around your early twenties," she noted, rather as if it was the onset of schizophrenia. She went to the Conservatory in Helsinki, but got tired of being the one "girl composer" and went to Germany to study, which opened a new world even though she felt stifled by the strict serialism dogma of her instructors. She then encountered the music of French "spectral" composers like Gerard Grisey and joined them in Paris in the early 1980s to work on music that combined acoustic and electronic elements at IRCAM.



"The computers were huge, taking up whole walls, and they were very slow. You'd finish a bit of work, put it into the computer, go to a movie, return and program a bit more, then go to sleep, and return when it was finished." Another turning point came with her discovery by director/impresario Peter Sellars who put her together with the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf to write operas, rather like Sellars joined John Adams and Alice Goodman for Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. "Amin and I were very polite and formal when we first started working together [they've created four operas]. The biggest challenge was that Amin is a novelist and not used to deadlines, whereas I had to have a piece done for a set performance date, but we now work closely and well together."



The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble concert was titled With You in Mind, referring to the fact that all the pieces were written for particular performers to play. The evening started with a world premiere by Oakland composer John MacCallum for Stacey Pelinka on flute and Leighton Fong on cello, enhanced with electronics. It was a short, interesting work that was eventually overshadowed by Saariaho's piece for the same forces later in the concert.



Pianist Eric Zivian joined bass clarinetist Jerome Simas for a transcription of Saint-Saens' The Swan, followed by a sequel where The Swan Takes Flight written by Zivian for Simas.



The first half of the concert ended with Poulenc's 1957 Flute Sonata written for Jean-Pierre Rampal who was sort of the Lang Lang or Yo Yo Ma of the 1950s through 1970s. The sonata was once ubiquitous on classical music stations, and is one of Poulenc's most successful pieces. Stacey Pelinka did a fine job playing the flute, but Eric Zivian pounded the piano accompaniment so loudly that the music was destroyed.



Two of Kaija Saariaho's most trusted collaborators in Paris are the cellist Anssi Karttunen and the flautist Camilla Holtenga, who have both appeared at UC Berkeley in concerts surrounding Saariaho's residency. On Monday, it was cellist Leighton Fong playing Sept papillons, seven miniatures characterizing butterflies in motion. They were incredible, and so was the performance. Saariaho has a form of synaesthesia, where music triggers her senses into colors, tastes, and touch. Listening to Sept papillons you could almost do the same.



This was followed by the short Miroirs for flute and cello, which was originally written for a CD-ROM that allows you to recompose the piece yourself "by combining pre-defined fragments." It would have been fun to hear a couple of different versions, but the Saariaho template was rich and fun. I didn't stay for the Brahms Clarinet Trio because I was afraid Zivian would play the piano too loud again, and according to Stephen Smoliar, everything was fine until the final movement when Zivian did just that.

SF Symphony 100th Season Preview

The San Francisco Symphony, including publicist Louisa Spier above left, hosted a reception in the basement of the Main Library last Tuesday in honor of the publication of "Music for a City, Music for the World," an authorized history of the institution's first 100 years written by Larry Rothe (below).



Cedric Westphal had a funny distillation of the large, lavishly illustrated coffee table book at SFist (click here):

"...if there is a drinking game associated with the book, it is to gulp a shot every time a music director is said to have brought the orchestra up to national status and recognition. You'll drink to Alfred Hertz, Pierre Monteux, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt and MTT."

There is an associated exhibit at the Main Library which mainly served to remind me that I am old and have been listening to live concerts by the San Francisco Symphony for almost half of its century-old existence. As a teenage hitchhiker from Southern California, I remember buying a standing room ticket at the San Francisco Opera House for one of Seiji Ozawa's concerts in his love-beads and Beatle haircut first season. Ozawa announced that he was going to focus on Berlioz and Haydn that year, and that first concert consisted of Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms," one of Haydn's 100+ symphonies, and Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" in a sensational performance.



At the reception, we were joined by the Symphony's current principal trumpeter Mark Inouye above who turned out to be as charming as he is musically gifted. Inouye told a few stories involving his Giants Rally Rag and tuxedo, along with a recurring practical joke involving standing for applause with his brass section. I am not sure the tales were meant to be shared, so ask me in private if you're dying to know what he said.



After being wined and dined, there was a talk between the author Rothe and Symphony archivist Joe Evans (above) about the process of digging through a century's worth of ephemera to find historical treasures.



A couple of years ago, during the announcement of the programs for the 99th season, a number of writers complained about how boring most of it was and asked if all the exciting stuff was being held back for the 100th anniversary season. The answer then was "no," but they weren't really telling the truth, because this year is jammed to the gills with musical goodies.



I went to the opening concert of the season last Thursday with Yo-Yo Ma playing the Hindemith cello concerto in a great performance of music that doesn't do much for me, though it does for counterpoint enthusiast Jeff Dunn (click here) who thinks it is one of the greatest concertos of the 20th century. The second half of the concert had MTT conducting the Brahms First Symphony in a surprisingly good performance. I haven't been convinced by Tilson Thomas in a lot of 19th century music, so this felt like a good sign.



Here are a few of my favorite things, on paper, that are scheduled for this fall: Mahler's gargantuan 3rd Symphony is coming up this week (September 21-25); the Symphony-commissioned "Polaris" by British composer Thomas Ades with "moving images" by his partner Tal Rosner (September 29-October 1); the great young conductor Vasily Petrenko conducting Elgar's First Symphony and joining with Joshua Bell in the Glazunov Violin Concerto (October 5-9); James Conlon conducting Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14 (October 14-16) and then jumping in as a substitute for Fabio Luisi with Verdi's Requiem (October 19-22); a Symphony commission of a new work from the amazing composer Sofia Gubaidulina (November 17-20); and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Sibelius, his own Violin Concerto, and excerpts from Wagner's "Ring" (December 8-10).



This is without even mentioning the special party guests who will be playing in Davies Hall this year, which include the entire orchestras of Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, many bringing brand new music written for their respective ensembles. Click here to buy tickets or call (415) 864-6000. If you are feeling poor like me, Center Terrace seats behind the orchestra are a wonderful deal at $15 a ticket, and you are basically sitting in trumpeter Mark Inouye's lap.

SF Symphony Gala Opening 2018

San Francisco socialites finally returned from their summer getaways and the Fall Arts Season officially opened last night with the San Francisco Symphony Gala Opening Night.

The evening begins with a quartet of fundraising dinners set variously in City Hall, a special party tent, and the Wattis Room, which funnel into Davies Hall for a champagne promenade where everyone can ogle each other's finery.

There were a few SF Symphony musicians roaming about the lobby talking to the patrons, including Nick Platoff with his trombone...

....and bassoonist Steven Dibner, above right.

Joining me for the parade was West Edge Opera Board VP James Parr, amused at attending his first SF Symphony Gala.

Leading the concert was Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas in his penultimate season before retirement, starting with the audience singing The Star Spangled Banner followed by the orchestra launching into Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No. 1, in a performance more sluggish than demonic. (All concert photos are from Drew Altizer.)

This year's classical music superstar was violinist Itzhak Perlman (Yo-Yo Ma was last year's celebrity performer). He runs a musical training program and brought along six students who performed in tag team style with Perlman over the course of the three movements of J.S. Bach's Concerto #3 in D Minor for Two Violins, strings and continuo. The format was a little weird, and so was the sound of modern instruments playing Bach after listening to so many Bay Area original instrument ensembles, but the performance itself was lovely. Even better was an encore of a double violin piece by Bartok that had been arranged for seven violins. It was spikey, folksy, and fun.

After playing Gershwin's Cuban Overture, the second half of the concert consisted of movie music themes (Amarcord, Out of Africa, Schindler's List, Scent of a Woman) that featured violin solos, played by Perlman. He and Tilson Thomas were then offered huge bouquets by Gala Committee co-chairs James Hormel and his spouse Michael Nguyen-Hormel.

We didn't stay for Gershwin's An American in Paris because we wanted to check out the after parties before they became too crowded.

The projections and lighting fixtures in the tent dance party were pretty...