Going back about six decades now, there were Alan Watts in Marin and the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, the pioneering Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Lou Harrison’s gamelan works from San José and Santa Cruz, Berkeley’s Center for World Music, and countless others.
Jazz pianist Taylor Eigsti has made a name for himself with his own music, and is well-known to Bay Area jazz lovers. Peninsula Symphony subscribers heard him with the orchestra two years ago, and now have the chance to meet him again, as he and Mitchell Sardou Klein's orchestra tackle three great Gershwin scores: Rhapsody in Blue, Cuban Overture, and Porgy and BessSymphonic Suite.
The oboe is not the easiest instrument to play under the best of circumstances. So deciding to play Baroque and classical oboes, the less-techologically advantaged forerunners of the modern instrument might seem like a recipe for frustration akin to attempting to surf the internet with a 1980s-era personal computer.
Of the many big names in postwar modernist composition, György Ligeti stands out because his music retains the power to influence and inspire young musicians. The new music group sfSound acknowledges this status in their upcoming concert. Ligeti's glittering Chamber Concerto is the focal point, with a number of musicians from the Bay Area composing short works in response to it.
Major anniversaries of a famous composer’s birth or death often occasion great fanfare, yet such honors are seldom accorded the anniversary of the publication of an individual piece.
It’s play time for the Ives Quartet. This time, in the second of its three-concert series titled “The Nature of Playing,” the Ives will explore how to play well with others.
Not that that’s really a problem; ensemble playing is not exactly a sand box. “Playing,” in all senses of the word, is something the quartet already does well.
Old First Concerts on Jan. 24 will do what it does best: promote talented, emerging young musicians, when it presents pianist Elizabeth Dorman in chamber concert with cellist Robert Howard and violinist Dan Carlson.
Composers and directors often combine art forms in their quest for artistic expression and interesting programming. Pairing music and dance, or music with a visual element, spices up a concert. Yet the California Symphony’s concert on Jan.
One of the best one-line put-downs of Romantic poetic excess comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. “Do you yearn?” the poet Bunthorne asks the dairy maid. “I yearn my living,” she replies. Take that, aesthetes.
Patience is as funny as any of the other great G&S collaborations, but unlike the heavy hitters in the canon (The Mikado, H.M.S.
