music

Delightful events as composer turns 100 San Francisco Performances finished its two-day Elliott Carter centennial celebration last Sunday, Dec. 7, with a concert of his piano works by Ursula Oppens, a mainstay of contemporary piano literature. She was in the Bay Area last year when Cal Performances held a Fredric Rzewski festival, where she played punishing piano duets with the composer. Carter’s life and piano compositions were explicated beforehand by Robert...

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A concert of revelations and extremes at Stanford This year marks the centenary of Olivier Messiaen, a French composer who had a profound impact on 20th century music. Last Thursday Stanford Lively Arts kicked off festivities in his honor with a concert of one of his seminal works, Quator pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the end of time), which Messiaen composed while a POW in a German concentration camp, Stalag VIIIA. The unusual instrumentation—violin, cello,...

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Inauguration of the new Oakland cathedral Constructed  over the last three years, Oakland’s newest cathedral held an inaugural concert Sunday evening, Nov. 2, with the Oakland Symphony and Symphony Chorus. Rising like a glass ship at the edge of Lake Merritt, the huge Cathedral of Christ the Light is the headquarters for the Oakland Catholic Diocese. Offices and outreach programs are housed in the immense concrete lower level, including a health clinic for those...

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Joshua Bell in superlative appearance with SF Symphony A confluence of great conducting, brilliant playing and unusual programming made for a top-notch concert last Thursday at Davies Symphony Hall. Fabio Luisi led the S. F. Symphony in a program of Richard Strauss’ Don Juan, Franz Schmidt’s Symphony No. 4 in C major, and two of the great works for violin and orchestra performed by famed artist Joshua Bell. Luisi, conductor of the Vienna Symphony and...

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“American Tapestry,” opened Earplay’s  24th season Oct. 20 at Herbst Theater, featuring the works of five living American composers. Guest bassoonist Rufus Olivier brought depth, humor and technical wizardry to tether the experimental music. Balanced by cello, violin and piano in Jennifer Higdon’s Dark Wood, named for bassoon, his abrupt notes, squat polyps of sound, interleaved off-beats of piano and plucked cello. Higdon moved between this perky mix and more sustained...

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Struck, plucked, scraped shakes things up at Yerba Buena “Struck, plucked, scraped & shaken”  broke new ground in the fertile area of contemporary percussion music. Last Tuesday the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts hosted the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players for a twenty-first century program performed by five percussionists, harp, bass, and voice. Two of the composers were in attendance, and joined mezzo soprano...

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