Left Coast Opens Season with New Director
Founded in 1992 and led by Kurt Rohde, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble continues with Anna Presler as artistic director, but for the 2015-2016 season, Nick Benavides is joining her as managing director, in charge of "all aspects of the operations and administration," according to the announcement from the ensemble.
In a relatively short time, the 12-member LCCE has become not only a performing sensation, but it also distinguished itself by commissioning more than 50 new works, playing them along with familiar masterpieces.
Presler introduced Benavides as "an eclectic musician whose experience includes composing classical music, touring with a funk band, teaching composition to kids, playing ranchera music with his grandfather in New Mexico, serving as a recording engineer, editing music videos, and more."
He was among founders of the Guerrilla Composers Guild, having played with progressive rock bands and as a jazz saxophonist, in addition to composing and teaching on the faculty of the Academy of Art University. He scored and recorded the music for The Trouble with Bread, and wrote the music for Zoo Runner, an iOS game. As a sound engineer, Benavides has recorded classical artists in the Bay Area, and his work with the choir Cappella SF has been featured on Classical KDFC.
The Ensemble's season will open on Oct. 25 (at Mill Valley's Throckmorton Theatre) and Oct. 26 (in the S.F. Conservatory of Music), with works by Kaija Saariaho, Eric Zivian, John MacCallum, Brahms, and Poulenc. The program is called "With You In Mind," described as an intersection of composer and muse, featuring works created by composers inspired by a particular performer.
Brahms' Clarinet Trio in A minor, Op. 114, was composed for clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, who impressed the composer so much that he came out of virtual retirement. The Francis Poulenc on the program was written for Jean Pierre Rampal, and two works by Saariaho were inspired by cellist Anssi Karttunen.
Of two world premieres on the program, Zivian's The Swan Takes Flight is written for bass clarinet, to be performed by his colleague, Jerome Simas; MacCallum’s new work has been inspired by Left Coast flutist Stacey Pelinka and cellist Leighton Fong.
The Ensemble's next pair of concerts will be performed Dec. 6 (Mill Valley) and Dec. 7 (San Francisco), with a program of Rossini, Crumb, and Xenakis, with new works by Richard Chowenhill.
Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 will bring "Oboe Bliss," Rohde's arrangement of Manuel De Falla's Suite Populaire Espagnole, a new work by Elinor Armer, plus music by Anthony Porter and Arthur Bliss.
Experiencing the Maraghi Project
When I wrote about the scheduled screening of Six Centuries, Six Years at the SF Iranian Film Festival, I only sensed the possibility in the film, mostly because of the involvement of two great singers/musicians, Mohammad-Reza and Homayoun Shajarian, but last Sunday when I saw the film, I was blown away by it.
A detailed, gripping behind-the-scenes documentary about six years of work preparing for performance the newly discovered 15th century works and notation system of Abd al-Qadir Maraghi, the film transforms a matter seemingly beyond esoteric into an exciting quest for understanding, "translating," and performing music hitherto unknown to the participants.
Homayoun sings his heart out, the head of the project, Mohammad-Reza Darvishi, performs miracles, but in the end the two agree on the need to get "the real Ustad" (Homayoun's father) involved, Shajarian takes over mixing, and the lost-and-found music is revealed authentically and splendidly.
The director is Mostaba Mirtahmasb, best known for his This Is Not a Film, a strange, bold venture responding to his jailing by the Tehran government and the prohibition against making films. In Six Centuries, as well as in his other works, Mirtahmasb includes women in prominent creative roles — something else for which he brings the reactionary government's wrath down on his head.
If you missed the San Francisco screening (or previous ones at the British Film Institute or at festivals), you can get a good sense of the film right here:
Originally, I mixed the terms "Iranian" and "Persian," and that was wrong: Persia goes back to about 3200 BC, Iran was born in the 20th century, so all reference to previous times — certainly to Maraghi — should be "Persian."
Cabaret & Cabernet' at Yiddish Culture Festival
"We tip our hats to the traditional form of Yiddish cabaret, which is notoriously edgy, avant-garde and irreverent," says Bruce Bierman, artistic director for the Nov. 7 event, which opens the Yiddish Culture Festival in the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay. He quotes from a description of Kleynkunst:
A genre of Yiddish performance, Kleynkunst ("little art," also known as miniature theater) developed in the early 20th century, primarily under the influence of Russian and Polish literary cabaret. The genre was also indebted to older forms of Yiddish performance, that of purim-shpilers and badkhonim, as well as to the 19th century semiprofessional performers known as the Broder Singers.
Rooted in traditional Jewish societies, such performers nevertheless subjected the Jewish community and its leadership to merciless parody while exposing a range of injustices. Integrating song and dance with sketches and routines of various kinds, Kleynkunst satirized both Jewish society and the political and social order of the non-Jewish world, especially its impact on Jews.
"Cabaret & Cabernet" features some of the Bay Area’s best-known entertainers, including storytellers Sara Felder and Naomi Newman; singers Sharon Bernstein, Heather Klein, Jeanette Lewicki and Anthony Russell; Klezmer poet Jake Marmer; and fiddler in the Russian style, David Chernyavsky. The MC will be playwright/actor Arje Shaw. The Cabernet is on sale during the event.
Nov. 7 offers a wealth of information, workshops, parformances, and participation. Judy Kunofsky of KlezCalifornia, organizer of the festival, says "emphasis here is heavily on participation. You don't have to be Jewish... in our workshop sessions, anyone can participate by playing an instrument, singing, dancing, or even writing poetry."
On Sunday, between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., there will be 18 workshops to choose from, including instruments, singing, dancing, stories, and poetry. In the evening, a performance by Veretski Pass is followed by a Klezmer dance party, led by Bierman.
Keeping Up with the S.F. Symphony Conductor Laureate
At age 88, Herbert Blomstedt not only holds six important titles, but has an active career that conductors half his age would find a challenge.
The Conductor Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony is also Honorary Conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony, Swedish Radio Symphony, and the venerable Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, whose origins can be traced back into 1743.
Among other activities, Blomstedt is leading one of the world's finest youth orchestras, the Mahler Jugendorchester, on tours, and concertizing in Europe, with a varied repertoire but with emphasis on his specialties: Beethoven, Bruckner, and Nielsen.
In a Gramophone interview, Michael White has asked Blomstedt about the — to him — strange fact that faraway San Francisco Symphony made the best recording of the Danish composer's symphonies:
[I]f Nielsen wasn't in the SFSO's blood, it was certainly in Blomstedt's. Though born in the America, he had Scandinavian parents who took him back to northern Europe at an early age – which is how he came to learn his craft in that part of the world. His first appointment, in the mid-1950s, was with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, after which he progressed in orderly succession through chief conductorships with the Oslo Philharmonic, Danish RSO, and Swedish RSO before returning to the U.S. And it was in fact with the Danish RSO that he first committed a Nielsen cycle to disc: a set made for EMI, who reissued it as part of larger Nielsen package in 2008.
But that Danish Nielsen set was never in the same league as the San Francisco set, as Blomstedt concedes. "At the time I took over the Danish RSO in the 1960s, it was a less than virtuoso orchestra – full of elderly ladies and gentlemen, some of whom had been there since it was founded in the 1920s. There was no retirement policy in those days."