Top Musical Events for the New Year

Michael Zwiebach on January 5, 2016
The Kronos Quartet (Photo by Jay Blakesberg)
The Kronos Quartet (Photo by Jay Blakesberg)

Kronos Festival 2016

The Kronos Quartet has such a wide repertory — they’ve commissioned more than 750 pieces of music — and such a wide range of musical collaborators and interests, that practically every concert they do is a festival. To look at the lineup and musicians for this, the quartet’s second festival, is to realize how protean and adventurous David Harrington and Co. have been in their 33-year history.

Kronos Festival 2016, running Feb. 4-7 at the SFJAZZ Center, showcases commissioned works, artistic projects, and musical collaborations. Guest performers include David Coulter (U.K.), Fodé Lassana Diabaté (Mali), Ritva Koistinen(Finland), Mariana Sadovska (Ukraine), and Vân-Ánh Võ (Vietnam). Local musicians from the San Francisco Girls Chorus and Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts will also be joining Kronos onstage. The festival will feature new and recent works by internationally-renowned contemporary composers, such as Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Sahba Aminikia, Donnacha Dennehy, Philip Glass, Nicole Lizée, Karin Rehnqvist, and Aleksandra Vrebalov.

More information can be found at kronosquartet.org.

Cloud Gate Theatre of Taiwan performing <em>Rice</em> (Photo courtesy of Cal Performances)
Cloud Gate Theatre of Taiwan performing Rice (Photo courtesy of Cal Performances)

Cal Performances

Cal Performances has a stellar year planned out, but they saved the best for the spring season. If I were a student now, I would probably spend the whole semester camped out at Cal Performances, eating ramen to save money for tickets to see as much as possible of what they have on offer. Except for the possible health complications, it would be worth it.

Start just about anywhere: The second half of the Cal Performances year begins with Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan, which brings Rice, a dance that explores the interaction of human civilization and the environment through the life cycle of East Asia’s staple crop. If you’re a dance fan, you’re probably already planning to catch the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, coming in for an extended residency at the end of March. (And if you’re not a dance fan, you should see Ailey’s Revelations, anyway.) And then there’s Chitresh Das Dance Company’s Shiva, coming Feb. 27-28.

Meanwhile, the St. Louis Symphony will visit at the end of January and will devote a concert to Olivier Messiaen’s awe-inspiring Des Canyons aux etoiles (From the canyons to the stars), a symphony inspired by the composer’s visit to the American West, and featuring, in this performance, a multimedia visual design by Deborah O’Grady, using her photographs.

Chicago’s foremost new-music group, eighth blackbird, teams up with Brooklyn’s Sleeping Giant Composer’s Collective (Timo Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein, Andrew Norman) on Feb. 14. Andres also has a premiere included on the Takacs Quartet’s Feb. 22 performance, but the Takacs are worth seeing whatever they play.

Jordi Savall is not just a great musician, he’s a great soul and a great thinker. He’s doing a concert of folk music — Celtic dances, songs, laments from across Europe and America. Two weeks after Savall, Christina Pluhar brings her group L’Arpeggiata for an appearance based on their last, highly praised album, Mediterraneo, mixing a variety of sources that show the interconnections of Mediterranean peoples and music.

S.F. Symphony

Hillary Hahn
Hillary Hahn (Photo courtesy of S.F. Symphony)

The San Francisco Symphony is, as usual, bringing in at least one star performer a week (not counting the orchestra players themselves). Among the bounty, make time for:

  • pianist Stephen Hough, who has devised, with conductor Edwin Outwater, a program they’re calling “The Exotic East,” featuring colonial Europe’s take on the European “other,” including Ferruccio Busoni’s Turandot Suite and Saint-Saen’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Egyptian.”

  • Maria João Pires, a brilliant pianist making an overdue Davies debut with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, conducted by Herbert Blomstedt

  • Charles Dutoit conducting Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, with Jonathan Vinocour as soloist, Mar. 17-19

  • MTT conducting Copland, but not the Americana pieces, with Inon Barnatan playing the Piano Concerto, March 30 - April 8

  • Hilary Hahn in a recital featuring a new set of violin partitas by Antón Garcia Abril, one of the composers featured in Hahn’s “Encores” project

  • the New York Philharmonic, with Music Director Alan Gilbert doing Sibelius (Seventh Symphony, Finlandia) and Beethoven, May 6-7

  • Bernstein’s On the Town, semi-staged and (probably, knowing MTT) really well cast, May 25.

Opera

Cybele Gouverneur (Carmen) and Alex Boyer (Don Jose) in OSJ’s 2008-09 production of Carmen (Photo by Pat Kirk)
Cybele Gouverneur (Carmen) and Alex Boyer (Don Jose) in OSJ’s 2008-09 production of Carmen (Photo by Pat Kirk)

It’s a long time until the late spring, when San Francisco Opera will satisfy opera fans’ cravings with Jenufa, Don Carlo, and Carmen, but in the meantime, to paraphrase Spencer Tracy in Pat and Mike, “There ain’t much meat, but what’s there is ‘choise.’”  

Start with Opera Parallele, which is staging jazz composer/trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s Champion, about “Emile Griffith, a man haunted by memories of his past who struggled to reconcile his sexuality in a hyper-macho world.” Blanchard is providing a new, reduced orchestration for this production, which will feature video capture and projections as well as a gospel chorus.

West Edge Opera has an interesting pair of concert operas coming up, Giovanni Paisiello’s Barbiere di Siviglia (Feb. 7, 9) and Leoncavallo’s La Boheme (March 20, 22). These operas are the also-rans to two of the more famous scores in music history, but they have lots of “choice” parts and are definitely worth dusting off every once in awhile.

Meanwhile, Opera San Jose has Carmen (February) and André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire (April), and West Bay Opera has Yevgeny Onegin (Feb.) and Madama Butterfly (May).

Vocal fans should turn, as always to San Francisco Performances, which will host recitals by Mark Padmore, a great lieder specialist; Christianne Karg, a huge talent; and Nicholas Phan, who brings an art song program based in American transcendentalist poetry.