ArtsSF

The timely world-premiere composition by Samuel Adams, which made an agreeable debut with the S.F. Symphony, calls for a detailed essay about the creative process, yet to be written. Because in trying to depict a sunset of our lingering pandemic, Adams revised and reworked his half-hour long opus “No Such Spring” numerous times, adding even a pianist in a prominent new concerto-like post down stage, as current events unfolded. His portrayal of the metamorphosis might be even more interesting to…

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ROHNERT PARK, CA—Get a Frenchman back on the podium, and the fans line up to hear Debussy’s “La mer” (The Sea). That exquisite century-old tone poem has you rocking in the swell and maybe reaching for a lifejacket. At seaside, you hear the waves crashing on rocks and sand, then receding having left just its sound and foam behind. Debussy denied vehemently that he was an impressionist. Fine. But more than any one, Debussy’s master illusion lay in eliminating clear-cut…

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Was Béla Bartók his own worst enemy? He composed his fiendishly difficult Piano Concerto No. 2, in which the world-premiere piano soloist was to be Béla Bartók himself. The net result established him not only as prime modernist/technician/theoretician, ahead of his time composing thus in 1930-31, but also as a paragon super keyboard soloist. It was a Béla Bartók weekend, with the S.F. Symphony in action under Esa-Pekka Salonen, and a block away at Herbst Theatre his chamber music as…

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The nonconformist composer Gabriel Kahane, 41, unreeled a powerful iconoclastic message in Davies Hall, where politics is normally taboo. His abrasive oratorio may have left the walls trembling from the bitterness of his counter-culture poetry. Kahane’s “emergency shelter intake form“ (sic) brought to mind other protest-movement works we’ve run into previously——-from Weill-&-Brecht musical theater, to the incendiary Berkeley rhetoric of the anti-establishment 1960s firebrand Mario Savio, to the gentler saga of John Adams’ “El Niño,” the Nativity story as seen…

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