ArtsSF

SANTA CRUZ, CA—The shortest was also the most memorable and newest at this year’s Cabrillo Music Festival: The six-minute world-premiere “Wild Geese” by Anna Clyne as the season-finale number by the orchestra. What I admire most about the petite, soft-spoken English composer is her ability to engage the listener again and again—here, at Cabrillo, Aug. 13, heard for the seventh time (and still being streamed). The current radio-play brings her once again to the forefront. Here she leans in part…

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SANTA CRUZ, CA—–For the last Saturday of the 60-year-old Cabrillo Festival featuring five mainline symphonic concerts overall, Music Director Cristian Macelaru focused on a quartet of living women composers, who have formed an ever greater portion of the festival palette in recent years. The festival remains both newsworthy and rather miraculous, limping along with a tired, ancient (and, I’d assert) unsafe sports palace and still attracting near-SRO audiences with nights of contemporary symphonic music, all of it composed in the…

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One of the most significant conductors of the late 20th century was saved from the gas chambers of Central Europe by the intervention of a Berkeley orchardist. He never got the benevolent attention warranted for his multiple rescues of Budapest musicians in the 1930s. The stellar musician who emerged hale and hearty from the war years was Georg Solti. Repositioned in London, he eventually became a music legend, leading orchestras and opera in performances and recordings and garnering major awards….

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The San Francisco Symphony made its once-a-year venture into theater with the semi-staged opera “Adriana Mater” (2006) by Kaija Saariaho, displaying a brilliant cast with dramatic singing and evocative acting on the confined makeshift stages. The performance of the rabidly antiwar tragedy “Adriana Mater” about the heroine’s travails in a brutal conflict could hardly have been timelier, echoing the on-going Ukraine campaign’s bloodshed. It also serves as a heartfelt memorial to composer Saariaho, who had passed away at age 70…

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BERKELEY, CA—Minorities and timeless tales stepped up in the Berkeley Symphony’s program of June 4 concurrent with Black Music Month. The timely program featured no less than three salient women’s issues and two living composers, the latter in attendance to supplement the interpretations by Music Director Joseph Young. This orchestra has always been about relevance, going back to Kent Nagano’s podium leadership. Curiously, the two novel works from the past six years took varied approaches, but with parallel paths: Both…

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For the most memorable oratorio of the 20th century, I would propose Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” (1961), an extra-ordinary large-scale paean to those who served and never survived, now revived by the S.F. Symphony and Chorus. This is a work that leaves the listener profoundly moved on several levels, recalling those who fell in the world wars as well as the destruction of the hallowed Coventry, England Cathedral in the 1940 Blitzkrieg, then its reconstruction. It also provides us with…

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The self-driving orchestra, with vacant podium, has arrived at center stage. Credit local composer Brian Baumbusch, 35, along with a Covid quarantine, electronics and a touch of Indonesia. Yes, finally, one tiny benefit we gained from that scourge of a Covid virus, leading to some invention and dispersion of musical ideas. Marooned in a Djakarta quarantine last year, Baumbusch composed his “Polytempo Music” which was premiered here April 13 by the elite S.F. Contemporary Music Players. His inspiration relegated conductor…

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How can so much exuberance emanate from one of the most depressing large-scale symphonies ever written? Easy. You put a beloved ex-maestro like Michael Tilson Thomas back on the podium. Upon entry, the revered 78-year-old conductor got a standing ovation from the near-sell-out crowd. And at the end, the fired-up patrons accorded the S.F. Symphony and him an inordinately rare six-minute ovation. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) himself would never have believed it for the deeply aggrieved Sixth Symphony of 1904, which…

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ROHNERT PARK, CA—It’s a parttime orchestra, from a smaller city (Santa Rosa), having a conductor splitting his services with an out-of-state ensemble. So why the Santa Rosa Symphony, where you find yourself returning again and again, despite (in this case) a 90-minute drive to get there? Yes, the forward-looking SRS boasts varied programs regularly, including living composers along with the older masters. Its hall has not only fine acoustics but superb scenery—it’s among the loveliest concert halls of all if…

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When appearing at the piano, can anyone surpass the dazzling attire of the stellar Yuja Wang? Though a superstar in the classics, she and her attire comprised all the queries I got from men and women before the March 1 concert: What was her outfit this time around? Even an usher at Davies ventured to the subject with intrigue, “Well, we’ll soon see what she’s wearing, won’t we?” She dazzled, showing up in a gold-sequined bareback formal somewhere between haute…

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