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Month: January 2020

Unfamiliar Sounds from Poland

Unfamiliar Sounds from Poland

STANFORD, CA—Could anyone doubt that classical music is the world’s true lingua franca today, drawing together four continents? Consider a Polish orchestra coming here on tour with a South Korean violin soloist who had studied at the Juilliard School, NYC, and Nicaraguan conductor with an Italian name. Playing music from Germany and the Czech Republic from different centuries. The Polish NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic made a rare swing through Northern California and played two home-grown specials plus the Brahms First. This…

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DIVERSITY ON MANY LEVELS

DIVERSITY ON MANY LEVELS

Please don’t say avant garde. The PIVOT concert series is defined as “Our adventures in chamber music,” per the program director Melanie Smith. With it, San Francisco Performances mixes the old with the contemporary and experimental. On Jan. 24 it also entailed solos and duets that were partly or fully improvisational, drawing a sizable audience. Despite resplendent performances by the trio, most of the audience remained gratuitously in the dark. The printed program ended up so scrambled, by the end…

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FROM DARKEST TIMES TO BRIGHT LIGHTS

FROM DARKEST TIMES TO BRIGHT LIGHTS

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Explosions! Horror! Melodrama! Not your average story of a girl learning to play the piano, but there’s all this and more in “The Pianist of Willesden Lane,” a compelling work now showing at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts in a four-week production by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. It all comes from one woman, a stage and a concert grand piano. “Pianist” features the multi-talented Mona Golabek telling the riveting, heart-warming story of her mother’s struggle to…

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Taking Chances on the Unpredictable Stage

Taking Chances on the Unpredictable Stage

A lively reprise of chance music that was in vogue six decades ago proved a surprisingly effective diversion in the Contemporary Music Players concert Jan. 17. In (aleatoric) chance music, players can make many musical decisions normally mandated by composers. This can mean selecting, on the spot, the sequence of spelled-out segments and movements, as in the score of Henry Cowell’s “Mosaic Quartet.” Or the players can gain wider latitude, getting graphs and sketches to interpret instead of musical scores,…

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HOLOCAUST VIOLINS EVOKE MOVING PREMIERE

HOLOCAUST VIOLINS EVOKE MOVING PREMIERE

BURLINGAME, CA—Historic violins spoke to us in song and left many in tears. A world premiere inspired by violins rescued from the Holocaust is as eloquent as it is disheartening. For the “Violins of Hope” instruments retrieved from the Nazis’ sites of their death-camp terror 75 years ago, librettist Gene Sheer and composer Jake Heggie have created a deeply moving song cycle with vivid imagery, in which the voices speaking to us were more from the surviving violins themselves than…

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AX, WOLFE, MTT AT THE SYMPHONY

AX, WOLFE, MTT AT THE SYMPHONY

The bracing symphony concert lit up the night with inflammatory bookends, and sweet music in between. The meticulously planned S.F. Symphony concert featured a work from each of four centuries, as if to trace the evolution of classical music in the post-baroque era. The sweetest was the most famous musical birthday/Christmas gift of all time, Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” written for his wife’s dual celebration in 1870. It’s in pyramid form, starting and ending as if on cat feet, with a…

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RARE DUALITY IN A NEW SONG CYCLE

RARE DUALITY IN A NEW SONG CYCLE

At age 75, it was a colossal iron-man achievement. He conducted his own world premiere song cycle, added on the challenge of less familiar Mahler lieder and led a stirring program from start to finish. This task was approaching a musical version of a triathlon. Before it was out, you half expected him to join the Berlioz brass section, realign the chairs, or go dancing down the aisle in Ravel’s “La valse.” Yes, this is the outgoing leader Michael Tilson…

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