Duo Revirado at the Red Poppy Art House
The Red Poppy Art House was described to us as SF's answer to NY's (Le) Poisson Rouge, the West Village venue which hosts alt classical music events, and which is so hip it will single handedly rescue classical music from its woes with younger audiences. Rouge as it is, the Poppy won't save classical music: it's too small for that. But it offers indeed a place to listen to music differently, with no fuss and a welcome intimacy. It's the only place "where the front row fills up last," announced a proud volunteer, mostly because you'd get in the way of the musicians on the carpet-delimited stage.
We had a second row seat for a performance of Duo Revirado, a violin-guitar team of alumni of the SF Conservatory. And indeed, we could hear the breathing of the performers, read the handwritten scribbles to add intonations and fingerings on the scores, and had to squeeze by them during the intermission as the backstage area doubles as the hallway to the restroom (singular).
They were Thomas Yee on the fiddle and Jose Rodriguez on the guitar, performing a studious Paganini sonata concertata, an inspired Spanish Dance by De Falla, lively Bartók Romanian Folk Dances, or a sultry encore of Piazzola's Libertango. The program also included two pieces by living composers: Terry Riley's Cantos Desiertos, followed by the word premiere of Beeri Moalem's Kinneret. Beeri is another SFCM grad, a violist himself, and neither he nor the performers is much older than twenty-five.
Kinneret, as Moalem explained, means both the only fresh water lake in Israel (and thus a source of conflict in this otherwise dry place) and a stringed instruments in Hebrew. The piece did combine water motifs with more conflicting textures, all tinged with middle-Eastern harmonics, emphasized by the lines the guitar borrowed from the oud, a non-fretted lute from over there. While we wish Moalem to reach Riley's notoriety, his piece did not pale in the immediate comparison.
There was a refreshing vitality to the concert; the audience clapped between movements. At Davies it would be rank somewhere between a breach of protocol and a crime of lèse majesté, but here it came naturally. You could sip your beer during performance. A cook behind the bar added a sizzling quesadilla orchestration to the first piece after intermission; nobody coming up late was turned away. And yet, there was no denying the commitment to the music from the performers, and their ability to draw the audience in. It was a challenging program of modern music, yet it was really fun.