Listening Ahead
Our Critics’ Choices of Upcoming Events in the Bay Area
for August 12 – 25, 2008
Opera
Britten’s Dream
Benjamin Britten’s most lyrically effusive and delightful opera, A Midsummer Night’s Dream comes to Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, with a fine young cast. (See review.) Britten’s artful way with words serves Shakespeare’s text as well as it’s ever been adorned by music. Even if you’re not a fan of 20th-century opera, this is a score that may charm you.
Aug. 12, 15, 8 p.m.; Aug. 17, 2 p.m.; Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, $36-$100, (925) 943-7469, www.festivalopera.com. (M.Z.)
Transcendent Dickinson
Emily Dickinson’s poems leave a lot of open spaces for interpretation, and even in white space on the page. Though the impeccable verse structure makes them easy to set to music, their opaque quality challenges a composer to find the right expression. There are any number of songs to her poetry, but “visual artist” Lesley Dill goes further, using Dickinson as a springboard for a celebration of 19th-century American transcendentalism. The music for this interdisciplinary collaboration is by Tom Morgan and Richard Marriott. The performers include Dill, the Del Sol String Quartet, and The Choral Project.
Aug. 13, 8 p.m. to midnight, Garden Theater, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, $15-$55, (408) 961-5800, www.montalvoarts.org. (M.Z.)
Sonoma Opera’s Don Pasquale
Sonoma Opera presents Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, in Donald Pippin’s sparkling English version, in a production headed by Antoinette Kuhry (artistic director), Nina Shuman (music director), Michael Fontaine (stage director), and Peter Crompton (set designer). The Norina is Angela Cadelago, the soprano making a name for herself in Berkeley Opera’s L’elisir d’amore; tenor J. Raymond Meyers is Ernesto, Rod Gomez is Malatesta, and Robert Stafford sings the title role.
Aug. 16, 8 p.m.; Aug. 17, 3 p.m., Presentation School, 276 E. Napa St., Sonoma; $15-$32, (707) 939-8288, www.sonomaopera.org. (J.G.)
Angela Cadelago (Norina) and Rod Gomez (Malatesta)
Youth Music
Youth Music International
The First Youth Music Festival last year started off in San Francisco and took a gifted group of kids from the U.S. and the U.K. (and their faculty) to Oxford for performances at Christ Church Cathedral and Wesley Memorial Church. They are back for a set of concerts (there are two left) featuring diverse repertoire at a few of San Francisco landmarks. It promises to be an extraordinary collaboration of talent with impressive selections by Mozart, Shostakovich, von Dohnányi, Holst, Barber, and others.
Aug. 12, 7:30 p.m., Mission Dolores; Aug. 13, 7:30 p.m., Grace Cathedral; San Francisco, $10-$16, (510) 595-9378, www.youthmusicinternational.org. (C.G.)
British and American students from the First Festival in front of Grace Cathedral
Festival
Music Academy of the West Summer Festival
This festival is centered on an eight-week summer program for preprofessional 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, Christopher Taylor, the Academy Orchestra, under the Philharmonia Baroque’s own Nicholas McGegan, are other highlights.
Through August 15, Santa Barbara, (805) 969-4726, www.musicacademy.org. (M.Z.)
Takács Quartet
Photo by Peter Smith
Banned Jewish Music
The music of some of the many Jewish composers blacklisted by the Nazis will be performed as part of the Music in the Vineyards in Napa Valley. The campaign against Jewish composers’ music, which the Nazis called “degenerate,” included abolishing music organizations, removing music from concert halls, and persecuting the composers. Many fled Nazi Germany while others perished in concentration camps. The “Degenerates” music program, supported by last month’s Jewish Vintners Celebration, will revisit the works of these composers and musicians. The program includes Ernest Bloch’s Suite Hebraique for viola and piano, Weill’s The Threepenny Opera Suite, Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, and Erwin Schulhoff’s String Quartet No. 1.
Aug. 16, 5 p.m., Clos Pegase, 1060 Dunaweal Lane, Calistoga, $50, (707) 258-5559,
www.musicinthevineyards.org. (J.G.)
Stern Grove Festival
Once again we can enjoy the S.F. Symphony and Opera outdoors. Highlights so far have included Orli Shaham playing Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini, with James Gaffigan on the podium. 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
Contemporary
Festival of Contemporary Music
As the Cabrillo Festival ends, the sixth annual Festival of Contemporary Music (See two reviews), a much more local and small-scale new music series, will open up. Run by composers Brian Bice, John Bilotta, and C. Michael Reese, under the aegis of Bice and Reese’s New Music Forum, this minifestival will take place at the Community Music Center in San Francisco. Over two days, listeners can hear works by 16 composers, some young and unknown, some with reasonably impressive resumes. As usual, the festival will be distinguished by its breadth. Koji Nakano brings Ancient Songs, based in folk material and premiered at this year’s Japanese Spring Festival sponsored by the United Nations’ International School. Bruce Bennett, a graduate of the Ph.D. composition program at UC Berkeley, contributes an older piece for piano, Schematic Nocturne (1997), which reflects the composer’s research into electroacoustics. Bilotta, having run the recent San Francisco Chamber Wind Festival, presents the premiere of his woodwind quintet, First Light, among other highlights.
Aug. 15-16, 8 p.m., San Francisco Community Music Center, $5-$10, (415) 647-6015, www.newmusicforum.com. (M.Z.)
Wordless Music
San Francisco Symphony Resident Conductor Benjamin Shwartz leads the West Coast premiere of Popcorn Superhet Receiver by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood in the first appearance here of New York’s Wordless Music Series. The young organization bridges classical and contemporary instrumental music, including genres such as indie rock and electronica. The local contribution is from the new Magik*Magik Orchestra, with cellist Jean Joanrenaud, violinist Gloria Justen, and percussionist William Winant. The program includes Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Fred Frith’s Save As, John Adams’s Shaker Loops, and Mason Bates’ Icarian Rhapsody.
Aug. 21, 8 p.m., Herbst Theater, San Francisco, $15-$60, (415) 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com. (J.G.)
Jonny Greenwood
Recital
Eclectic Fan
Pianist Joel Fan is a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble who has begun to make waves as a soloist in several prestigous appearances and with his first solo recordings. Leon Kirchner has written a sonata for him. In his San Francisco solo debut, at Old First Concerts, Fan’s repertory will be a little less adventurous than his recent recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which included the Kirchner. The program is anchored by Beethoven’s A-flat Major Sonata, Op. 110, and Liszt’s Concert Paraphrase of Verdi’s “Rigoletto”. But you’ll also get to hear Samuel Barber’s magnificent Piano Sonata, and a group of South American works, including Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Alma brasiliera and Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1, as well as a couple of contemporary pieces.
Aug. 15, 8 p.m., Old First Church, San Francisco, $12-$15, (415) 474-1608, www.oldfirstconcerts.org. (M.Z.)
Joel Fan
Early Music
Interactive Early Music
If you still don’t “get” early music and the historically informed performance movement, maybe what you need is an interactive approach. Enter the Galileo Project, a group dedicated to lifting the early music mist. Their concert at Seventh Avenue Performances, “Sonatas, Grounds, Dances,” will introduce you to three important 17th-century genres, and will include demonstrations of the instruments and playing techniques, as well as an audience question-and-answer period.
Aug. 16, 7:30 p.m., Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church, San Francisco, $12-$15, (415) 664-2543, www.sevenperforms.org. (M.Z.)
Music Theater
The Mikado Returns
Lamplighters’ Music Theatre revives Gilbert and Sullivan’s evergreen satire of English society dressed a la Japonais, The Mikado. (See review.) The show, directed by Phil Lowery and starring the company’s stalwart G&S experts, opens in Walnut Creek, spends the next weekend in Napa, and finally turns up in San Francisco in mid-August.
Aug 15, 16, 8 p.m., Aug. 16, 17, 2 p.m., Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; $11-$46, (415) 227-4797, www.lamplighters.org. (M.Z.)
Charles Martin as The Mikado
Photo courtesy of Lamplighters Music Theatre
Choral
S.F. Lyric Chorus
The Te Deum prayer is often recited or sung after a battle or at the conclusion of a peace treaty. Perhaps the San Francisco Lyric Chorus are being a bit premature if they are offering these works as a prayer for U.S. soldiers and Iraqis, but the group proposes to take you on a tour of the full range of this subgenre. Handel’s famous “Dettingen Te Deum” leads a parade of examples by Haydn, Dvořák, and Britten.
Aug. 23, 8 p.m., Aug. 24, 5 p.m., Trinity Episcopal Church, San Francisco, $17 (students 5-18, free), (415) 721-4077, www.sflc.org. (M.Z.)
Crossover
Tango x 3
A fusion of classical music and tango is at the heart of Ted Viviani’s Extreme Tango series, the second installment of which will feature three prominent pianists performing tango for the first time together. They are: Jovino Santos Neto from Brazil, Polly Ferman from Uruguay, and Erika Nickrenz of the Eroica Trio. The program — presented as a benefit for the San Francisco Breast Cancer Emergency Fund — includes the premiere of two new pieces for three pianos from tango legend Daniel Binelli. Oh, and there will be lots of “regular tangos” as well.
Aug. 15-16, 8 p.m., Aug. 17, 2 and 7 p.m., Palace of Fine Arts Theater, San Francisco, $20-$50, (415) 392-4000, www.xtango-sf.org. (J.G.)
Erika Nickrenz
Chamber Music
Kernis in the Vineyards
In the season finale of Music in the Vineyards, Aaron Jay Kernis sits in on piano with guitarist David Tanenbaum and soprano Anja Strauss for his Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby, recently premiered for the opening of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Also on the bill is a trio by Arvo Pärt, which is based on a Mozart piano sonata (K. 280), and Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G Minor.
Aug. 24, 5 p.m., Markham Vineyards, St. Helena Highway, (707) 258-5559, $50, www.musicinthevineyards.org. (M.Z.)
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.