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Month: July 2018

THE UNLIKELIEST STAR RECITAL’S MUSICAL FIREWORKS

THE UNLIKELIEST STAR RECITAL’S MUSICAL FIREWORKS

In the evening you poke through the Tenderloin, S.F.’s counterpart to NYC’s Bowery, past the homeless, jobless, hustlers, panhandlers and addicts. And encroaching couples clutch arms uncertainly, side-stepping litter on darkening sidewalks. Paying at the door, you get no ticket, nor printed program, and you enter the 30-seat hall. A flyer lists several composers (all female) and the night’s violinist (male). Wearing blue jeans, he walks in bearing his instrument, with no accompanist anywhere on the horizon; he might as…

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RUSSIANS’ NEW MUSICAL PERMUTATIONS

RUSSIANS’ NEW MUSICAL PERMUTATIONS

MENLO PARK, CA—With the chamber concert focused on 19th-century St. Petersburg, Russia, you expected Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Instead, the focus was on lesser names having great ideas, especially in innovative instrumental combinations. Glinka, Balakirev and Arensky. Not exactly household names—more likely, a Russian law firm. Their style and textures offered few surprises, but their instruments were innovative. How about Anton Arensky’s string quartet, with the second violin replaced by a second cello, immediately placing the spotlight on low notes? And…

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ANTON WEBERN: DOING IT HIS WAY

ANTON WEBERN: DOING IT HIS WAY

ATHERTON, CA—The Music@Menlo chamber-music festival  fills a major summer void in concerts with players from all over who are downright virtuosic. The three-week cornucopia of performances, now in its 16th  season, draws robust crowds to intimate venues, some more suitable acoustically  than others. This year’s format for the (mostly) 18th and 19th century  music has each concert focusing on a single European arts capital. Vienna got the call on July 19, with works of Webern, Haydn and a master named…

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VIRTUAL TRIP TO A VERY DIFFERENT SPACE

VIRTUAL TRIP TO A VERY DIFFERENT SPACE

Let yourself go, depart from traffic-choked urban reality, and immerse yourself in a nebulous world of modern art and sound. It’s Audium, the Shaff family’s Other-Galaxy experience, going strong over nearly half a century, mostly 100 times a year. On the surface, Audium is an hour-long sonic foray into a latter-day musique concrète , first created by the Frenchman Pierre Schaeffer in the mid-20th century—a combination of found sounds and electronic ones. But it’s delivered in total darkness, with all smartphones switched off….

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MUSIC TO RECALL PAST DETENTIONS

MUSIC TO RECALL PAST DETENTIONS

The Old First Church in San Francisco provides an intimate but intense concert series with low-price tickets, and some real surprises—like world premieres. On July 1 the timely new work was a hard-to-define, 23-minute multi-media opus, with music, theater, dance, narration, and pre-recorded percussion tracks having considerable political-historical significance. “Gateway—Stories from Angel Island” is the most unorthodox performance piece I’ve run across in years, cutting across  many disciplines and cultures. It recalls the isle in S.F. Bay serving for decades…

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COMING OF AGE WITH THE MAHLER SYMPHONIES

COMING OF AGE WITH THE MAHLER SYMPHONIES

We’re not the world leaders in music education, but we’ve evolved rather incredibly in concert maturity. Between the two world wars Grandma would proudly attend the afternoon musicale concerts at a Washington, DC club and rave about the Pilgrim’s Chorus or the Strauss waltz she had heard. It was virtually the only classical music in the nation’s capital apart from the symphony with its mediocre conductor, playing in a huge hall. One of the musicians later reported that at the…

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