World Ballet Day LIVE: Cavalcade of Dance Streamed Free
Returning for the third year, World Ballet Day LIVE will be seen on Oct. 4 on the websites of the five participating companies: San Francisco Ballet, Australian Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, The Royal Ballet, and National Ballet of Canada. Also, for the first time, the daylong program will be available on Facebook as well.
The schedule for this combination of performances, rehearsals, interviews, and backstage footage will be announced later this month. Subscribers to World Ballet’s free email updates will receive information well before the event.
In addition to the five live segments, there will be recorded footage from a dozen other dance organizations spanning the globe, from Boston to Hong Kong.
Last year’s program had a viewership of 349,000 on the day itself and subsequently reached an audience of over 2 million. Working with Facebook LIVE, it aims to reach an even wider audience via social media channels including Instagram. Viewers are encouraged to get involved using the hashtag #WorldBalletDay.
World Ballet Day LIVE was inspired by Royal Ballet Live in 2012, a nine-hour live event that streamed via YouTube and The Guardian website.
The World Lights 70 Candles for Berkeley’s John Adams
John C. (for Coolidge) Adams turns 70 on February 15, 2017, and his works will be performed around the world ... even as they have been for most of the past 50 years or so. Berkeley’s distinguished resident is among the handful of most famous, most performed, living classical-music composers. He is a decade younger than once-fellow-minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
I remember Adams’ 50th birthday as if it were yesterday. It was in Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, with Kent Nagano, Peter Sellars, Stuart Canin, Sarah Cahill, and the Crowden String Ensemble — with both of Adams’ children in principal chairs.
A prime venue for the birthday observation is at Adams’ “home orchestra,” the San Francisco Symphony, which has commissioned and featured his works through the years. He joined the S.F. Symphony artistic staff in 1979, serving as New Music Adviser, creating and leading the S.F. Symphony New and Unusual Music concerts in the former Japan Center Theater (now the Sundance Kabuki). Adams later became the orchestra’s first composer-in-residence. His works written for and premiered by the S.F. Symphony include Harmonium (his greatest work to my ears), Grand Pianola Music, Harmonielehre, El Dorado, and My Father Knew Charles Ives.
The S.F. Symphony celebrates this long association with a weeklong focus that features presentations of his Passion oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary (Feb. 16–18) and Scheherazade.2 with violinist Leila Josefowicz (Feb. 22-25). The Los Angeles Philharmonic will follow suit with a production of Nixon in China, conducted by the composer in early March. Additional Los Angeles Philharmonic presentations feature Adams conducting the orchestra in five premieres by other composers (Oct. 1) as well performances of Absolute Jest conducted by Gustavo Dudamel (Sep. 29-30).
Elsewhere, Adams will conduct his Nativity-tale opera El Niño this December with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, at the Philharmonie de Paris, and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir in the Royal Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. El Niño receives its first Russian performance in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski.
Currently, Adams is in residence with the Berlin Philharmonic conducting the orchestra in the German premiere of Scheherazade.2. That orchestra will also present the Berlin premiere of The Gospel According to the Other Mary, conducted by Simon Rattle in January, and City Noir conducted by Dudamel in June. Also in the lineup: Paris, Lyon, Houston (Nixon in China), New York (The Gospel), and elsewhere.
Einaudi Could Say: “Elements, My Dear Watson”
“I don’t crave acceptance in the classical world,” Ludovico Einaudi has said, but he is more than accepted — acclaimed really — in most musical worlds, especially in pop, rock, folk, and other genres. (By the way, Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson,” but it’s good for a somewhat tortuous headline.)
The Italian composer-pianist, who started at the Milan Conservatory (Conservatorio “Giuseppe Verdi”) and studied with Luciano Berio, went on to combine minimalist, ambient, and world music, with a pinch of whatever it is you may hear in elevators. He is now taking his latest album, Elements, on a North American tour, landing in San Francisco’s Herbst Theater Oct. 4 and 5, going on to Davis’ Mondavi Center on Oct. 6.
Elements, published last year, has topped classical charts in 42 countries. In the United Kingdom, it reached 12th place in the album chart, surpassing releases by pop stars James Bay and Taylor Swift. The album has had 130 million streams, 500,000 followers, and 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Einaudi’s activities have ranged from film scores (The Intouchables, Black Swan), to commercials (Nike, American Airlines) to live performances with Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Avicii, and Kendrick Lamar. He is well known for performing on a floating platform in the Arctic to help raise awareness for Greenpeace’s “Save the Arctic” campaign. Einaudi comes from a distinguished family: His grandfather Luigi was president of the newly created Italian republic, his father, Giulio, created a publishing house with authors such as Italo Calvino and Primo Levi.
Lynn Harrell and the Shostakovich Cello Concerto for
Silicon Valley Opener
Symphony Silicon Valley opens its 15th season on Oct. 1 and 2 in San Jose’s California Theater with a program featuring Lynn Harrell in the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1.
Veteran conductor John Nelson leads the concerts, which open with Berlioz’s Le corsaire Overture, and close with Brahms’ Symphony No. 4. Nelson, 74, has had an acclaimed international career of a half a century, specializing in large choral works such as the Berlioz Requiem, which he performed with the San Francisco Symphony in the War Memorial before Davies Hall opened.
Nelson led several 300th anniversary celebrations of Bach and Handel at Carnegie Hall, conducting Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions, the B-Minor Mass, and Handel’s Semele.
Harrell’s distinguished career also includes appearances with the orchestras of San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, London, Munich, Berlin, and in Israel, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.