When it came to the soloists, the “Show Boat in Concert/From the Jerome Kern Songbook,” this season’s American Masterworks Series installment from the Oakland East Bay Symphony, scored a well-deserved 10.
Olivier Messiaen’s 10-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie is rarely performed because of its length (about an hour and a quarter) and its unusual instrumentation (the score calls for ondes martenot, vibraphone, and glockenspiel, among many other instruments). The double whammy makes performances of this 20th-century masterpiece hard to find — and fund.
Everybody knows Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Each century has its standard, default large-scale choral work (Messiah, Verdi’s Requiem), and, like it or not, Carmina Burana fills that role for the 20th.
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy is living up the "lucky" part of his name as the world celebrates his 200th birthday. Were he alive, he might revel in the good fortune of being well honored by Vance George and the San Francisco State Chamber Singers.
Chatting with subscribers who have been with her for all of her ensemble’s 17 seasons, Barbara Day Turner had her mission confirmed. “They’re noting how much being constantly exposed to different things has changed how they listen to music,” Turner reports.
“Spring Symphonies” is the title that Symphony Silicon Valley gave to its May program, which I heard Saturday at the California Theatre in San José. Sure, it’s adequately descriptive for a concert performed in the spring. Yet neither of the symphonies on the program had Spring or Pastoral in their titles, or any other obvious programmatic connection with the season.
America can’t get enough of Mason Bates, the young alchemist who blends the sonority of traditional ensembles like the symphony orchestra with the limitless possibilities of computer-generated “electronica.” It’s almost as if we’ve been waiting for just such a sorcerer to put a bit of groove in our Grieg, to mix up our Messien, to bring something fresh and transformational to the concert hall.
Some orchestral programs are naturally perfect — the compositions are linked by friendly key relationships, similar temperaments, and compatible styles.
Another milestone in the history of American showmanship hit Walnut Creek’s Hofmann Theater last Sunday and Tuesday: California Symphony's claim to the world’s first presentation of a 3-D video to accompany — or rather, subordinate — a live performance of a symphonic work. The plea for more funding that followed was justified by the quality of the previous numbers on the program.
