Listening Ahead
Our Critics’ Choices of Upcoming Events in the Bay Area
for July 15 – 28, 2008
Choral
Maracaibera!
The latest program from Creative Voices takes the choral group outside the classical repertoire to Venezuelan folksongs from the repertory of the Quinteto Contrapunto. The QC was a vocal quintet (with guitar and cuatro accompaniment), whose unusually complex arrangements made it a star performing/recording group on the European and Latin American folk scene between 1962 and 1971. A brief reunion in 1998 refocused attention on the group, and now the original arrangments, by Rafael Suárez have been found. Creative Voices recreates the sound and feel of the Quinteto, not omitting the cuatro player either.
July 20, 8 p.m., The Dance Palace Community Center, Point Reyes Station; Aug. 2, 8 p.m., Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco; $13-$15, (415) 238-0533, www.creativevoices.org/index.html. (M.Z.)
Sing for Your Schola Cantorum
If you want to be the concert, rather than see a concert, Schola Cantorum in Los Altos is the spot for you. Ambitious and enthusiastic South Bay choristers are gathering all this month and next to sing through some of the most popular choral repertory of our day. Next up: Britten’s Ceremony of Carols with the Fauré Requiem followed by the Mozart C Minor Mass paired with Brahms’ Schicksalied. Students in school chorale groups get in at half price.
July 21 and 28, 7:30 p.m., Los Altos United Methodist Church, $15 ($7 for school chorale members), (650) 254–1700, www.scholacantorum.org. (M.Z.)
Symphony
Summer Pops
Sometimes the idea of a “Pops” concert can cause some less than savory experiments to pop into mind — performances involving Grammy-winning artists with “hits” in other genres like rock, that translate into collaborative “misses” in the classical music realm. (Think Styx with the Jacksonville Symphony, Seal with the Minnesota Symphony, and Metallica with the San Francisco Symphony.) Not so in the upcoming Pops concert given by the courageous community orchestra that is the Redwood Symphony. On the program: Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (”Pastoral”), and Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2, with pianist Linette Illastron-Vinluan (winner of the Notre Dame de Namur University Concerto Competition).
July 19, 8 p.m., Cañada College Main Theater, Redwood City, $10-$25, (650) 366-6872, www.redwoodsymphony.org. (C.G.)
Midsummer Mahler
If summer festival music is generally too light for you, you might want to note the date of this Dallas Symphony concert at Festival del Sole, in which mezzo-soprano Jill Grove joins Music Director Jaap van Zweden in a performance of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder, followed by the Fifth Symphony.
July 20, 3 p.m., Lincoln Theater, Yountville, $45-$125, (707) 226-8742, www.festivaldelsole.com. (M.Z.)
Festival
Stern Grove Festival
Once again we can enjoy the S.F. Symphony and Opera outdoors. On June 29, Orli Shaham plays Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini, with James Gaffigan on the podium, while the orchestra gives Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36. The San Francisco Opera closes the festival with a celebration of American opera and musical theater, on August 17.
Through Aug. 17, Sundays at 2 p.m., Stern Grove, San Francisco, $10-$30, (415) 252-6252, www.sterngrove.org. (M.Z.)
Orli Shaham
Photo by Christian Steiner
San Francisco Chamber Wind Festival
The Chamber Mix and Avenue Winds, along with guest artists Susanne Rublein and Josh Friedman, play Bilotta, Broughton, Froelich, Maslanka, Michelson, and more.
July 19, 8 p.m., S.F. Conservatory of Music, San Francisco, $5-$15, (415) 864-7326, www.sfcwf.org. (C.G.)
Music Academy of the West Summer Festival
This festival is centered on an eight-week summer program for pre-professional musicians. Concerts involve students and faculty, along with a few guest artists. This year’s big deal is a performance of William Bolcom’s 2004 opera, A Wedding, based on the Robert Altman film. The Takács Quartet also drops in for a visit, performing with faculty on July 15, and on their own on July 17. Christopher Taylor does Messiaen’s complete Vingt regards again (July 9), and the Academy Orchestra, under the Philharmonia Baroque’s own Nicholas McGegan, performs Messiaen’s Un sourire, along with Mozart, Ibert, and Schumann.
Through August 15, Santa Barbara, (805) 969-4726, www.musicacademy.org. (M.Z.)
Takács Quartet
Photo by Peter Smith
American Bach Soloists SummerFest ’08
The splendid American Bach Soloists bring us another edition of their new festival, full of understated elegance and intimacy, and also ultra-refined playing. The repertory of this year’s three “main events” ranges from Bach to Mendelssohn, advertising the fact that these musicians aren’t sequestered in one corner of the repertory. The “twilight serenades,” hour-long concerts in the early evening, include The Whole Noyse, playing wind and brass music from the 16th and 17th centuries; and a concert of salon music.
Through July 20, Belvedere, San Francisco, and Davis, (415) 621-7900, www.americanbach.org. (M.Z.)
Festival del Sole
This is the festival for the starstruck classical music fan. It rolls out the big names — Joshua Bell, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Andre Watts, the Rosetti String Quartet — all performing, considerately, in the early evening, so that those patrons who have done a little winetasting and arts-and-crafts hunting can take in the concert and still find their way home to the Bay Area at a reasonable hour. This year’s concerts also feature young and up-and-coming talent in free recitals, which may tempt those who don’t want to part with the festival’s $45-$125 prices. If you’re headed up to the first weekend of Festival del Sole concerts, don’t overlook the young artists’ concerts happening at Copia Winery at midday. On the 12th, it’s 25-year-old guitarist Ryan Haverty, and a day later, Karla Donehew Perez on violin.
Through July 20, Napa Valley, (707) 226-8742, www.festivaldelsole. (M.Z.)
Joshua Bell
Mendocino Music Festival
Here’s a festival that sports an actual big-top tent. The 22nd festival, as always, adds a number of jazz and world music concerts into the mix. This year’s highlights include a performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro with Brian Leerhuber (Figaro), Nicole Foland (Countess), Christine Brandes (Susanna), and Eugene Brancoveanu (Count Almaviva). Pianist Stephen Prutsman gives a concert mixing jazz and classical works, an evening is devoted to the “degenerate” musical culture of the Weimar Republic, and the festival orchestra brings the festival to a ringing close with Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
Through July 26, Mendocino, www.mendocinomusic.com. (M.Z.)
Midsummer Mozart Festival
This movable feast of a festival doesn’t invite you to go to the mountains, it brings the mountain to you. The two main Mozart programs include Jon Nakamatsu playing the A-Major Piano Concerto, K. 488, Nikolai Demidenko working over the C-Minor Piano Concerto, K. 491, and Laura Griffiths, principal oboist of the S.F. Ballet Orchestra, performing the Oboe Concerto, K. 271k. This year’s festival is expanded to reach San José, with a semi-staged performance of The Abduction From the Seraglio, at the California Theatre, and starring some recent Opera San José stalwarts, and a concert at Le Petit Trianon on August 2.
Through Aug. 3, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Sonoma, Berkeley, San Jose, www.midsummermozart.org. (M.Z)
Jon Nakamatsu
Music@Menlo
The impressively funded Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival offers multimedia full immersion, if you want to take advantage of the lectures, “Café Conversations,” open houses, CD-based listening guides, art displays, and “Encounter” discussion centers. It is also a training program for young musicians, who merit their own series of concerts. The main concerts this year present a chronological march through the development of chamber music beginning with a survey of the Baroque period from Salamone Rossi through to J.S. Bach and ending with a program of contemporary music including a premiere of a piano trio by Kenneth Frazelle. The recital series includes the Borromeo String Quartet playing the complete Bartók string quartets; Stephen Prutsman in a program that juxtaposes preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier with a kaleidoscopic variety of works, classical and not; and Gary Graffman in a program of left-hand piano music.
Through Aug. 8, Atherton and Palo Alto, www.musicatmenlo.org. (M.Z.)
Borromeo String Quartet
Photo by Christian Steiner
Carmel Bach Festival
The Carmel Bach Festival packs an awful lot of music into three weeks. This year, the theme seems to be the Bach-Brahms connection. The main concerts include Bach’s B-Minor Mass, the complete Brandenburg Concertos, a concert that connects the Viennese School greats, and one that pairs Brahms’ German Requiem and Bach’s Cantata No. 21. In the chamber concerts series, Sanford Sylvan sings Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise, and an all-Brahms vocal evening. In addition, there are the preconcert (Twilight) concerts, and the postconcert (Candlelight) concerts. You could spend a day and hear a week’s worth of music.
Through Aug. 9, Carmel, www.bachfestival.org. (M.Z.)
Sanford Sylvan
Photo by Susan Wilson
Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music
Marin Alsop has her ear to the ground for composers of contemporary orchestral music, and you could do no better than to let her Cabrillo Festival programs be your guide through this particular thicket. This year, the festival brings back some longtime associates, like Christopher Rouse, whose Concerto for Orchestra, a Cabrillo Festival commission, anchors the opening night concert, on August 1. John Corigliano’s percussion concerto, Conjurer, with its original soloist, Dame Evelyn Glennie, highlights the second concert. But in addition to these, plus works by Mark-Anthony Turnage, John Adams (the Doctor Atomic Symphony), and Osvaldo Golijov, there are a number of composers represented who are in their early 30s or younger. One of them, Matthew Cmiel, is all of 19. With Mason Bates performing on electronica in his Liquid Interface, composer Michael Daugherty featured in an evening of jazz, and cellist Matt Haimovitz and Bates combining for a concert with electronic soundscapes, this year’s Cabrillo Festival embraces the huge diversity of musical possibilities present at the beginning of the 21st century.
July 27 – Aug. 10, Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista, www.cabrillomusic.org. (M.Z.)
Evelyn Glennie
Opera
Opera for Young Singers
The Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute is a pre-professional training program that puts on a series of shows with their enrollees in July. Many of the singers are from the San Francisco Conservatory. Coming up this weekend are performances of a pair of one-acts (Dido and Aeneas and Gianni Schicchi, and, at a different venue, The Marriage of Figaro).
Double bill: July 17, 20, 7 p.m., St. Monica School Auditorium, San Francisco, $17-$25; Figaro: July 18, 19, 8 p.m., Throckmorton Theatre, Mill Valley; July 24-27, various times, Spreckles Theater, Center for the Performing Arts, Rohnert Park, $20-$30; (415) 255-3333, www.basoti.org. (M.Z.)
Casting coup in Il trovatore
Il trovatore’s star has secured a place in the hearts of Verdians, despite a fairly ridiculous plot. The central character, the gypsy Azucena, has seen her mother burned at the stake as a witch. Like Rigoletto, both parents are bent on revenge and both involve their children in that revenge. Rigoletto does so unintentionally, but the act is more complicated in Azucena’s case. Is she crazy? And does she care at all for the troubadour Manrico, the child she has raised? Festival Opera’s production, directed by Giulio Cesare Perrone, brings together a powerhouse cast to conquer each successive scene, each with a new aria or dilemma to be conquered. The strong vocals of Hope Briggs (Lenora), Noah Stewart (Manrico), Scott Bearden (Count di Luna), Patrice Houston (Azucena), Kirk Eichelberger (Ferrando), and Jessica Mariko Deardoff (Inez) promise to convey this compelling melodrama of unceasing rage and revenge, in which each character is permanently entrapped. Michael Morgan conducts.
July 15, 18, 8 p.m.; July 20, 2 p.m.; Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, $46-$100, (925) 943-7469, www.festival.com. (C.G.)
Tosca
The tiny Julia Morgan Theater will play host to the big passions of Puccini’s Tosca in the new Berkeley Opera production featuring Jillian Khuner, Kevin Courtemanche, and John Minagro.
Through July 20, various times, Julia Morgan Theater, Berkeley, $15-$44, (510) 841-1903, www.berkeleyopera.org (M.Z.)
La bohème
In La bohème, Puccini works his musical gifts, playing with the music, and skewing the narrative away from its darker aspects — the desperate circumstances of women up against men of privilege pretending to be starving artists. One of Puccini’s tricks is a subtle nostalgia that seems to inspire recollections of déjà-vu style memories. The score is worth it on its own, but the Pocket Opera production looks promising: Bharati Soman is Mimi, Erina Newkirk is Musetta, and Debra Lambert directs.
July 19, 20, 27, 2 p.m. Legion of Honor, San Francisco, $20-$34, (415) 972-78934, www.pocketopera.org. (C.G.)
Recital
Suddenly Simone
Pianist Simone Dinnerstein is suddenly a hot commodity on the classical music scene, at the unusually advanced age of 34. The story of the recording that made her famous — a Goldberg Variations that was financed by friends, recorded while the pianist was pregnant, and released a full two years after being recorded — has been told in The New York Times among other places. At the Festival del Sole she plays the Mozart Concerto K.488 (No. 23) in A Major with the UBS Verbier Symphony Orchestra, while her beloved Goldberg Variations are subjected to the dubious honor of arrangements by violinist/conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky.
July 17, 6:30 p.m., Castello del Amoroso, Calistoga, $75-$125, (707) 226-8742, www.festivaldelsole. (M.Z.)
Trailblazing Sarah Cahill
In her concert at Old First Church, pianist Sarah Cahill presents two works written for her, Evan Ziporyn’s Pondok and Kyle Gann’s Private Dances. Also on the program are two rarities by Mark Blitzstein, which the pianist is slated to record on the Other Minds label.
July 18, 8 p.m., Old First Church, San Francisco, $12-$15, (415) 474-1608, www.oldfirstconcerts.org. (M.Z.)
Sarah Cahill
Trumpeter Jason Tinsley
Trumpet recitals are rare occurences, so Jason Tinsley’s concert at Old First Church might be Sunday’s destination spot for lovers of well-played brass. Along with a few transcriptions (Bartók’s Rumanian Folk Dances and Ravel’s Piece en forme de Habanera), Tinsley, joined by pianist Miles Graber, is scheduled to play several short concerto works, as well as Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for Trumpet and Piano. He and Graber will also play a few jazz selections.
July 20, 4 p.m., Old First Church, San Francisco, $12-$15, (415) 474-1608, www.oldfirstconcerts.org. (M.Z.)
Music Installation
ARIA
Cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and Italian designer/artisan Alessandro Moruzzi present their music installation ARIA, as part of a Yerba Buena Center of the Arts Galleries event. Inspired by the many permutations of air (”aria” in Italian), the artists explore the politics and poetics of this powerful, invisible element. Politics of air? That could be about polution, but until the premiere takes place on July 19, there is no way to know. Warning to unadventurous classical-music fans: ARIA on that evening is followed by Bay Area Now, a compendium of exhibits and bands, including Softhug, Bronze, Eugene International, and the like, with the promise: “We turn YBCA upside down as we open up every available space to party …”
July 19, 8 p.m., July 26, 7 p.m., Yerba Buena Gardens; $12-$15, free to museum members; July 26 is free with museum admission, (415) 978-2787), www.ybca.org. (J.G.)
Joan Jeanrenaud
Photo by Michele Clement
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
Catherine Getches is managing editor of San Francisco Classical Voice. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Salon.
Michael Zwiebach holds a Ph.D. in music history from UC Berkeley.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, Catherine Getches, Michael Zwiebach, all rights reserved.