Results tagged “mtt”

The music season on Wednesday night, with a sparkling opening night gala. The evening started with complimentary champagne in the hallways of Davies Symphony Hall, because nothing lubricates appreciation for music better than bubbly. Still, two women left the hall after the national anthem, because there is only so much orchestral music than one can put up with, even inebriated. The bemused look on Michael Tilsson Thomas' face as they left was priceless.

The SF Symphony journey from Schubert to Berg is coming to an end this week, with a final program combining Berg's Violin Concerto with Schubert's Mass in E flat major. We believe that the whole exercise was only a pretext to make Berg more palatable to the San Francisco audience: by insisting on the roots of his music into a Viennese romanticism, Berg is much less challenging than as a twelve tone music proponent. The connection between both was elusive, but if a little fuzzy marketing is needed to spoon feed Berg's magnificent music to the audience, so be it, and enjoy!

The SF Symphony journey from Schubert to Berg continued on Wednesday with an intimate exploration of some lieder and chamber music, as well as the Lulu suite. The directions for the voyage (which continues tonight, tomorrow and next week) go like, start from Schubert, take a turn at Brahms, another at Wagner, when you reach Bruckner, go straight until Mahler, make a sharp left there, when you see Schoenberg, you'll have reached Berg. Not exactly a straight line, and not an obvious connection.

The SF Symphony kicks off its Schubert and Berg journey with a mix-and-match of the Viennese composers. Tonight, and repeating through Saturday (the last show in Cupertino), we hear Berg's Seven Early songs, and Three Pieces for Orchestra, teamed up with Schubert's Rosamunde Overture and Unfinished Symphony.

Yuja Wang will dazzle us this week at Davies Symphony Hall, playing the dastardly difficult Prokofiev piano concerto #2 with MTT. Here she plays the concerto's scherzo with the YouTube symphony orchestra. She is all of twenty-two, but already acclaimed as the future of classical music. She has performed with the San Francisco symphony three times already, earning accolade galore from the critics: "an artist of dazzling genius," says the SF Chronicle, surrounded by "an aura of greatness...Wang combines a practically superhuman keyboard technique with artistic eloquence that is second to none." That is some serious hyperbole to put on the shoulder of such a tiny "sparrow, (a very pretty sparrow)," drools the LA Times.

The Sofia Gubaidulina residency with the SF Symphony continues tonight and tomorrow with the US premiere of her Violin Concerto No. 2, , with the magnificent Anne-Sophie Mutter as the soloist, for whom the piece was written.

"'Classical' music does not need gimmicks OR marketers/managers," hrumphs an SFGate commenter.

Each year, the Symphony organizes a summer festival dedicated to a theme or a composer. Next year sounds pretty intriguing: Schubert/Berg, two Viennese schools, two different styles to contrast and highlight each other. We're looking forward to it. This year, not so much: the festival was dedicated to Brahms, and we were like, blah. Programming Brahms is as exciting as a dinner of mac'n'cheese: the League of American Orchestras computed the most performed pieces of the 2006-07 season, and Brahms pieces rank 1st, 4th, 6th and 8th. We feel, why set up a special extra Brahms session when you can't swing a bow without hitting one of his symphonies. It's not like we're Brahms-deprived and need an extra dose. And yet, we went, twice, and had a great time.

We caught the symphony on Thursday for a really cool program: Mostly Ives, with a Mendelssohn violin concerto squeezed in between for good measure. Those quicker than us with their opinions found the concerto rather pedestrian. But it's such a delicious yet cloying confection that even under the the jurisdiction of a particularly uninspired interpretation, is still satisfying. And the soloist, 22yo Sergey Khachatryan, did spark some fireworks in the final movement.