Benjamin Frandzel has written on music and the arts for a wide range of publications. He has a background as a guitarist and composer, and has collaborated with dance, theater, and visual artists.
In its final program of the season, the Cabrillo Festival continued to surprise, delight, and occasionally frustrate. The rewards and risks of delving entirely into the new were very much on display for the festival’s concert on Sunday, when the players relocated for their annual performance at Mission San Juan Bautista.
The creativity that has been vividly apparent throughout Dawn Upshaw’s career, as she has eschewed the standard opera star route in favor of new works (or simply the repertoire she finds most appealing), has been put to work at this year’s Ojai Festival, where she is serving in the annually rotating role of music director.
Old First Concerts has made itself invaluable in many ways, among them the opportunities it provides for some of the Bay Area’s finer players to appear in new combinations and with inventive programs. Sunday’s recital by pianist Lori Lack, violinist Christina Mok, and cellist Joanne Lin was a stellar example, with performances that would leave you guessing whether this group’s performances were more than occasional.
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players celebrated its 40th anniversary in style this past Monday at the Herbst Theatre, bringing together hundreds of adoring friends to hear a wide range of music, all done very well.
For an adventure, head over to the East Bay, where the Berkeley Symphony continues to surprise and delight. Joana Carneiro’s energetic leadership has produced a season mixing new music, familiar fare, and rarities by major composers. Her Jan.
Sylvano Bussotti is one of the most distinctive composers to emerge from the postwar avant garde in Europe, but he has received relatively little attention in the U.S. Bay Area audiences will have a rare opportunity to experience a broad sampling of his artistry on December 2, when San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents Bussotti accompanying his Rara (film), which impressionistically captures Bussotti’s circle of artists in mid-60s Rome. This will be followed by a career-spanning program of his works performed by sfSoundGroup, with the composer joining in.
In the second season of Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg’s tenure as its artistic director, the New Century Chamber Orchestra continues to move forward with imaginative programs highlighting, and stretching, its collective abilities. Their recent round of concerts, heard in its Herbst Theatre iteration Saturday, was in many ways a testament to the adaptability of great music in the hands of imaginative musicians.
A truly exciting new ensemble made its way to San Francisco Thursday for a local debut, and, hopefully, the first of many visits. The Estamos Ensemble, a collective of musicians from Mexico and the U.S., visited the city as part of Yerba Buena Center’s New Frequencies series. The ensemble — violin, viola, cello, electric guitar, piano, percussion, two multiple-woodwind players, and voice with electronics — offered a potent program of chamber improvisation, with nine works, all of them premieres by Mexican and American composers, plus improvised duos forming bridges between written pieces.
It was that familiar feeling — the warm, almost small-town atmosphere in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, the jokey introductions, the openness of the audience to the new sounds on hand. This could only be the Cabrillo Festival, where Music Director Marin Alsop once again led her players through unfamiliar and often exciting music during the festival’s opening weekend.
Music@Menlo continued its traversal of geographically inspired programs Saturday night with a focus on music from Vienna. Looking at the festival’s range of programs, this approach seems, as often as not, to raise a new banner under which the organization presents a fair amount of familiar repertoire. Last weekend’s thrice-repeated program, heard in its opening iteration at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, continued this approach, though two less familiar works were the most memorable and moving.
Last week’s program at the San Francisco Symphony was a bit of an odd one. It was not bad, certainly, but was strangely bifurcated, veering from some rather fluffy 19th-century French music, by Litolff and Adam, to major works by Chopin and Debussy. Under Michael Tilson Thomas’s direction, the orchestra sounded grand in less than grand music, as well as in works of substance; and piano soloist Garrick Ohlsson was magnificent in everything he touched.
ChamberBridge’s Sunday recital at Old First Church in San Francisco was a model of compositional and interpretive invention, with the San Francisco–based duo of soprano Lara Bruckmann and pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann providing vivid performances of newly commissioned work by a mix of American and Swiss composers. The program, full of musical and technical challenges and stylistically broad, often led the performers to move beyond the expected roles of singer and pianist, and was a paragon of creative partnership between composers and performers.
Michael Morgan long ago mastered the art of making each of his Oakland East Bay Symphony performances feel like a real event, not just the latest subscription program. For Friday night’s performance at the Paramount Theatre, the sense of occasion was brought about by two substantial pieces that treat their soloists as heroic protagonists, plus a world premiere that took some stylistic turns I didn’t expect on an evening of symphonic works.
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble organized its April 5 concert at the War Memorial’s Green Room around the idea of visual inspirations for music. The theme of “Audible Visions” led to a creative program, with all but one piece written in the past 25 years, and many kinds of musical thinking. What really mattered, of course, was what we heard, and that was marvelous.
The Cabrillo Festival’s second night brought program music of various sorts to the full house that on Saturday filled the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. Music Director Marin Alsop and her high-energy orchestra provided sharp, dynamic performances of three works that drew on eclectic sources of inspiration and were generally quite accessible.
The San Francisco Symphony's "Dawn to Twilight" festival got off to a more than solid start with its opening run of concerts at Davies Symphony Hall beginning last Wednesday.
His life and musicmaking were inextricably entwined with the Viennese milieu of his time, in both its artistic richness and its provincialism. In his life he faced illness, felt a strong sense of fate governing him at times, and met a tragic, early death. In his music, a listener finds raw feeling and intellectual brilliance, a lyric impulse wedded to a unique approach to musical form, frequent moments of sensuous beauty tied to a gift for musical narrative.
By now, Philip Glass is such a familiar aural presence — in a general sense; through operas, recordings, and film scores; and locally, in his frequent Bay Area concerts — that it would seem we know him as well as we’re going to know him. Yet some of his most valuable and significant music remains lesser known, especially in a live context.
Like the amazing week that preceded it, the Oakland East Bay Symphony's concert last Friday night at the Paramount Theatre was all about moving forward through history. Conductor Michael Morgan surprised by reversing the typical program order, placing the ballet and concerto in the second half and opening with the weightiest piece, Brahms' Symphony No. 3.
In its final program of the season, the Cabrillo Festival continued to surprise, delight, and occasionally frustrate. The rewards and risks of delving entirely into the new were very much on display for the festival’s concert on Sunday, when the players relocated for their annual performance at Mission San Juan Bautista.
The creativity that has been vividly apparent throughout Dawn Upshaw’s career, as she has eschewed the standard opera star route in favor of new works (or simply the repertoire she finds most appealing), has been put to work at this year’s Ojai Festival, where she is serving in the annually rotating role of music director.
Old First Concerts has made itself invaluable in many ways, among them the opportunities it provides for some of the Bay Area’s finer players to appear in new combinations and with inventive programs. Sunday’s recital by pianist Lori Lack, violinist Christina Mok, and cellist Joanne Lin was a stellar example, with performances that would leave you guessing whether this group’s performances were more than occasional.
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players celebrated its 40th anniversary in style this past Monday at the Herbst Theatre, bringing together hundreds of adoring friends to hear a wide range of music, all done very well.
For an adventure, head over to the East Bay, where the Berkeley Symphony continues to surprise and delight. Joana Carneiro’s energetic leadership has produced a season mixing new music, familiar fare, and rarities by major composers. Her Jan.
collective abilities. Their recent round of concerts, heard in its Herbst Theatre iteration Saturday, was in many ways a testament to the adaptability of great music in the hands of imaginative musicians.
The Cabrillo Festival’s second night brought program music of various sorts to the full house that on Saturday filled the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. Music Director Marin Alsop and her high-energy orchestra provided sharp, dynamic performances of three works that drew on eclectic sources of inspiration and were generally quite accessible.
His life and musicmaking were inextricably entwined with the Viennese milieu of his time, in both its artistic richness and its provincialism. In his life he faced illness, felt a strong sense of fate governing him at times, and met a tragic, early death. In his music, a listener finds raw feeling and intellectual brilliance, a lyric impulse wedded to a unique approach to musical form, frequent moments of sensuous beauty tied to a gift for musical narrative.
especially in a live context.
Like the amazing week that preceded it, the Oakland East Bay Symphony's concert last Friday night at the Paramount Theatre was all about moving forward through history. Conductor Michael Morgan surprised by reversing the typical program order, placing the ballet and concerto in the second half and opening with the weightiest piece, Brahms' Symphony No. 3.
