ArtsSF

If Paganini were a contemporary composer, he might be writing a rocket-powered violin concerto similar to Bryce Dessner’s, heard at the S.F. Symphony. The great violin star Paganini once famously said to Berlioz, if I perform a new concerto, I have to be playing all the time. Dessner’s new opus has the soloist playing frantically at breath-taking tempo, nearly nonstop, through 26 minutes in a whirlwind part of as many as 9,000 notes. The orchestra’s string players venture a similar…

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Eureka, an orchestra changing its spots, reverting to earlier ones traced back to the 1880s! Symphony Silicon Valley is renaming itself the Symphony San Jose, just inches short of that oldest West Coast orchestra known as the San Jose Symphony. Loyalty to this orchestra is formidable. Today you still see many principals playing who were in the earlier SJS incarnation in the 1990s, among them concertmaster Robin Mayforth, percussionist Galen Lemmon, trumpeter James Dooley, clarinetist Michael Corner, bassoonist Deborah Kramer,…

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The San Francisco Symphony opener under new maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen was novel, modern, and unique, certainly unlike any in over half a century of this writer’s memory and attendance. He featured rousing and in part explosive music, none of it familiar, all from 1939 or later. And the performance earned several standing ovations. The patrons’ enthusiasm over the unencumbered reopening of Louise Davies Hall after a year and a half was palpable. Some spoil-sports will grouse about the lack of…

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