ArtsSF

SANTA CRUZ, CA—Resolute not to let Covid win for the third year in a row, the plucky Cabrillo Festival cobbled together a concert program with half an orchestra to prevent yet another cancellation. After the total washouts of 2020 and 2021, this week Cabrillo found no less than 16 orchestra members who were suddenly Covid positive, leaving it with only tatters of a woodwind and brass section. So with just percussion and a string orchestra intact, Music Director Christian Mãcelaru…

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One of the boldest S.F. Symphony programs featured three works of average age 42, the anchor being the stellar Sibelius Symphony 5. While most of the interest was focused on the popular septuagenarian Berkeley composer John Adams, the work that really blew me away was “Radical Light” by the late Steven Stucky. The fact that Stucky, a master of sonic delights, has been virtually unknown is directly related to his being, for many years,  the composer in residence of the…

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Composer Igor Stravinsky had created a model hybrid with his “Oedipus Rex.” So why not hybridize further with brainstorms of the mercurial Stage Director Peter Sellars? We thus ended up with a Stravinsky-Sellars double bill of “Oedipus” and that deft choral-orchestral companion “Symphony of Psalms”—Old Testament visionaries and Greeks in a strange choral-orchestral amalgam. By dramatizing the two neoclassical works in semi-staged fashion, Oedipus got to play in both ends, though mute in the second, which has no solo roles…

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Count on mezzo Julia Bullock to design a program quite unlike anything ever at the S.F. Symphony: a multimedia perusal of the history of black women in America, bravely breaking out of the mold, played before a largely white S.F. Symphony audience. By the end you were convinced you’d earned a credit toward a master’s degree in sociology. In the process a lot of long-gone readings by notable artists were brought back to life in a viable format. The only…

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Although never billed as such, the latest S.F. Symphony program unreeled a tribute to the creativity of women—as conductor, as soloist, as composer. And by the end, I found myself reaching for my seat belt during a brassy, rambunctious large-orchestra finale of modern music that, yes, even got a standing ovation May 13. Yes, that dissonant modernist Lutoslawski gets a standing ovation—imagine that! The woman composer in a more dulcet mode was Lili Boulanger, sister of the legendary composition professor…

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ROHNERT PARK, CA—A composer can still strike gold. Yet today. I had Michael Daugherty, 68, pegged for a 21st-century Ferde Grofé—-a skilled tone painter in music for our times. Until, that is, we got to the finale of his new suite for and about Sonoma County, “Valley of the Moon.” That finale segment, “Call of the Wild,” was immensely engrossing. Instead of the expected happy music, Daugherty here turned troubled, unsettled and enigmatic, much like the adventurous author of said…

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Guest conductor Gustavo Dudamel was back with gusto, leading “this foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound,” as Mahler once described his own raging Symphony No. 5. The Venezuelan led with fire—and no printed score—through this 71-minute masterpiece that Mahler’s compatriots in Vienna would call “gefühlsmȁssig”—surfeited with emotion. The crowd at Davies Hall stayed hushed in awe, without fidget or distraction, in hearing a master at work with the virtuoso San Francisco Symphony. Until the patrons’ jubilant ovations at the end….

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WALNUT CREEK, CA—The California Symphony served up a twin-barreled surprise March 27 that went well beyond expectations. No sooner had they served up the amazing world premiere by Katherine Balch two years in the waiting than, before the applause had even died down, a fire alarm was set off, forcing every one out in the street cooling heels figuratively and literally. We should make clear that the fire alarm, which arriving firemen proved false, was not a part of Balch’s…

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Pairing a most introspective work with a most extroverted one was yet another instance showing Michael Tilson Thomas still on top of his game in programming. And his program of Shostakovich and Prokofiev was winning wide admiration from the patrons, despite the works coming out of Russia, not exactly our closest neighbors these days, and out of old Soviet Russia at that. As if to attest to his on-going recovery from the brain surgery of last summer, Music Director Laureate…

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ROHNERT PARK, CA—The Santa Rosa Symphony’s brave 2022 resumption of concerts (with VAXXes and masks everywhere) continued with a tumultuous world premiere, a major artist, a Beethoven concerto and a choice memorial. Most distinctive is the premiere of a ground-shaking symphony by Gabriella Smith of Berkeley, “One,” which Music Director Francesco Lecce-Chong called the hardest work he has ever conducted. The musicians might be in broad agreement. Without question “One” opened our ears, with some applauding vigorously, others ready to bolt from…

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