ArtsSF

         In this age of distress, disease and discord, how welcome to encounter a composer both mellow and inventive. He was an innovator and modernist, not in harmonies, but rather in building strangely compatible  pairings of live and canned sounds. The posthumous tribute by SF Performances provided an all-Ingram Marshall concert combining live musicians with electronic input (or, as he’d have called it, with tape). The career of Marshall (1942-2022) the sometime mystic has spilled over both coasts with commitments…

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With little more than an array of cellos, composer Clarice Assad portrayed the rise and fall of an entire fictional civilization in a fascinating world premiere having, alas, one major defect, emanating from one seat, back around the eighth row. In the space of 22 minutes, her “Lemuria” followed the Lemurians from crude beginnings through cultural evolution, developing humble instruments like ocarinas, chanting in rituals, gorgeous sonorities and even dances, then falling victim to thunderstorms and upheaval. Despite the bizarre…

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Philip Glass has a unique hold on a huge, diverse audience, and he is one of only three or so living American composers with an instantly recognizable style. When the composer-synthesist played this week before a near-sold-out Davies Hall crowd, he got an instant standing ovation at the end. During the preceding nonstop 90 minutes, hypnotic and repetitious though his music be, I only saw one patron in more than 40 around me dozing off. Glass may just be the…

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The happiest composer I ever met was the prolific Lou Harrison, whose centennial celebrations, like his large output of music,  couldn’t all be squeezed into 2017. The Harrison joy persisted up to Jan. 24 with a small-ensemble concert of amazing variety at the inviting and sold-out Strand Theatre. In the end, doing even an intimate all-Harrison concert  comes down to finding exotica like “junk-yard” instruments, gamelans and even genuine Studebaker brake drums to provide the ever broader sonic array needed…

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Stemming from a family of top vaudeville performers, symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas would inevitably strike his show-business colors eventually. After two decades’ serious-minded leadership of the San Francisco Symphony, he brought forth an astonishing orchestral concert of American Moderns augmented with colored lights, hot dancers, jazz ensemble, projections, spatial (but not spacey) musicians’ placement, video and singers in glitzy spangled outfits. Did your recent symphony program list both a stage director and choreographer like Michael’s, perchance? This main-stage program…

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For a grand finale, the New Century Chamber Orchestra served up a savory mix of post-millennium musical canapes. Call it Nadja’s antipasto. Leaving after nine hyperactive years as leader, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg dished up a night of excerpts from NCCO premieres logged during her tenure. And what could be more appropriate? Within its rather short seasons, the NCCO serves the Bay Area a rich menu of new works. And all indications are that whoever is appointed to succeed her as…

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There have been game efforts by various Bay Area groups to mark the centennial of composer Lou Harrison via performances of his music, but they fall short. Harrison’s  large portfolio either involves exotic instruments, ranging from gamelans to improvised to radically retuned ones, or they are large-scale pieces such as his four symphonies for orchestra. But there’s hope, at least if you can wait till the May 20 all-Harrison concert featuring the large American (made) gamelan, to be given in…

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Surprise! A Living Composer Who Is a Hit Number By Paul Hertelendy artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance Week of Sept. 12-19, 2016 Vol. 19, No. 1 Never forget that physics course you took. It can help you where you least expect it. When I interviewed composer Steve Reich here in 1965, I referred to his musical style as “phase-shift music,” using terminology encountered in the Theory of Oscillations in physics. He liked the…

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