ArtsSF

SANTA FE, NM—For a month every summer, the Chamber Music Festival lights up the scene with 45 concerts by 87 musicians from all over the map, sometimes twice a day, mostly at the inviting fresco-festooned St. Francis Auditorium. There the small ensembles serve up the three B’s along with many other post-baroque figures, right down to living composers John Harbison and George Crumb, often as seen from an East Coast perspective. I sauntered in casually for the Aug. 15 noon…

Read More Read More

ATHERTON, CA— Music@Menlo is one of the jewels of the Bay Area summer, which needs it; otherwise, the season is so often laggard in performing arts. This major chamber-music outlet brings in distant artists (19 of 49 from New York this year) for a wealth of concerts in an inviting setting. This year’s format is stimulating: Seven concert programs in chronological sequence, each focusing on a significant decade of creativity. And each time a whole new team of three or…

Read More Read More

Is violinist Daniel Hope a reincarnation of the great California-born (but English) Yehudi Menuhin? He is headed down that very path in his versatility while hopping across the Atlantic, but this time in a westerly direction. Now he is whipping up Americana music like a local, then pairing with the amazing jazz of the Marcus Roberts Trio in idiomatic outpourings that are driving audiences wild. His Friday (May 10) audience in fact was so demanding of encores that, in order…

Read More Read More

OAKLAND—It was a bizarre concert, the most haphazard of events thrown like a tossed salad, yet one of the most stimulating of the season. Single-sheet printed programs were late arriving (ink already dry!), handed out to patrons moments before the downbeat. And no one thought to print the names of the three instrumentalists anywhere. You hardly expected a barn-burner, in a modest 150-seat church well removed from the main venues, with the long-haired presenter/arranger/pianist Derek Sup buzzing about in his…

Read More Read More

BERKELEY—A great new era was launched here. Now there is Hope for us all. British leader/violin virtuoso Daniel Hope, that is, who is our latest classical-music rock star. He led the most exquisite “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis” you have ever heard in his debut as artistic director Feb. 8. His New Century Chamber Orchestra produced breath-taking sonorities and perfect tuning in  playing an updating of a 17th-century theme reenkindled a century ago by Ralph Vaughn Williams. A…

Read More Read More

BERKELEY—The best lecture-demonstrations on the music and life of Dmitri Shostakovich these Saturday mornings has unfolded by way of the informal visiting San Franciscans of the Alexander String Quartet and the entertaining lecturer Robert Greenberg. These “play-lects” have been profound, funny, insightful, leading you to hear the master’s music through new ears. Shostakovich (1906-75) you recall was under the Soviet yoke all his life. Furthermore, at least till the 1960s, he was derided by the cognoscenti over here as  being…

Read More Read More

You’ve heard of the barefoot contessa (the old Gardner-Bogart movie; also the more recent cooking show). But are you ready for the barefoot violinista? She’s one of a kind, and hardly your everyday recitalist. Meet the fast-rising Patricia Kopatchinskaja from Moldova (formerly USSR), a petite  artist who looks like a sweet young woman but surprising you, playing with great fire and passion. In her Herbst Theatre recital, she called impromptu inaudibles (sic) from the stage, flip-flopping the opening selections, and inserting…

Read More Read More

Vincent Calianno’s world-premiere string quartet was considerably more than four players given its bonus offering: added prerecorded tracks of electronics, voices, and even more string sounds. Entitled “A History of the String Quartet in its Natural Habitat,” this catalogue traces the evolution of both media—chamber music as well as  electronic enhancement—starting stylistically about 1900, going from fully structural to  aleatoric music to the present times. Calianno, 39, offers a lot of subtle solo-instrumental work building up to outbursts in ebb…

Read More Read More

Illuminating the otherwise underlit transition from summer stuff to the fall concert season, a four-concert splash of Debussy’s chamber music in San Francisco was welcome indeed, lighting up the night with as few as four performers each night, commemorating 100 years since the fascinating innovator’s death. Composer Claude Debussy, as much as any one, had ushered in the era of modern music—plain and simple, he marched to another drummer. He broke with the strict dictates of the Theory of Harmony…

Read More Read More

        SANTA FE, NM—Now in its 46th season, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival remains a monumental achievement, assembling elite players from all over in repertoire both neglected and beloved. Take the recent Mozart-Chausson program, for starters. Much as in the Brandenburg concertos by Bach, Ernest Chausson revived a concerto-grosso practice and  created a rare late-19th-century work with a duo doubling as  both soloists and ensemble members. Modern artists like Emanuel Ax rave about playing it, even though the piano…

Read More Read More