Having now examined Joshua Kosman’s review of classical music in 2010 for the San Francisco Chronicle, I cannot resist the urge to perform this exercise myself. However, I want to begin by making a case for playing this game by different rules. Regular readers of my Rehearsal Studio blog probably know of my very strong aversion to “rank-ordering just about anything on the basis of quality” (my favorite example being our national obsession with the “Big Five” American orchestras); so I have no intention of trying to review 2010 in terms of a “Top 10” list of events. By the same count I want to do my best to avoid adjectives like “most” and “least” as well as “best” and “worst.”
As an alternative, I want to try to follow some advice that I gave to a high school student sitting in front of me at a recital. Apparently, his whole class was in attendance; and they all have to write a review of the recital as homework. During the intermission I saw that his program was covered with notes he had scribbled. When he found out that I would also be writing a review, he wanted to chat; so I began by telling him that I never take notes, because they distract from the listening experience. When he asked, “How do you know what you will write about?,” I replied, “I write about what I remember. That is really the only thing you can write about. So trust your memory, and be true to it in what you write.”
I shall try to follow my own advice by considering which events I attended left the strongest impressions on my memory. To set some boundaries, I shall perform this exercise on a month-by-month basis. Some may object that this is unfair, because some months were more “abundant” than others. Well, that was true of the whole calendar year. I have far more than twelve salient memories of performances in 2010; and the month-by-month strategy seems like as good a way to limit my enthusiasm as any! The only real risk is that recent memories tend to be stronger than those from the beginning of the year; but this did not seem to impede my coming up with the following list of “monthly memories.”
January: The San Francisco Performances recital by cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Kirill Gerstein. In performing this exercise I realized that choice of repertoire had a lot to do with the strength of my memories; and their coupling of Benjamin Britten with Sergei Rachmaninoff (along with a transcription of Robert Schumann’s third violin sonata) was as inspiring as it was imaginative.
February: The annual San Francisco Performances concert to introduce the winner of the Naumburg Competition to the Bay Area. My skepticism of competitions is corollary to my aversion to rank-ordering; but I had every reason to title my review of this event “Naumburg picks a winner (again).” The performers were Trio Cavatina; and they offered a “bread-and-butter” account of piano trios by Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, and Johannes Brahms. However, these performances were well balanced and particularly fresh at a time when everyone was getting on the “double bicentennial” bandwagon for Schumann and Chopin.
March: The San Francisco Performances recital by violinist Jennifer Koh. This was particularly memorable because the program consisted entirely of unaccompanied violin compositions. Here again repertoire contributed to memorability. She framed the evening with two unaccompanied violin partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach, following the first of these (BWV 1006 in E major) with the second sonata in A minor from Eugène Ysaÿe’s Opus 27 collection. She launched into the Ysaÿe without giving the audience a chance to applaud the Bach, thus emphasizing Ysaÿe’s “obsession” (his word choice) with Bach’s legacy. Other composers on the program included Kaija Saariaho, Elliott Carter, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Salonen’s work was “accompanied” by a visual interpretation by Tal Rosner, projected behind Koh. How could one not remember an evening like this?
April: The Noontime Concerts™ performance at Old St. Mary's Cathedral of Franz Schubert’s D. 956 string quintet in C major, at which Jean-Michel Fonteneau played the second cello part (as important as the first) with the members of the Cypress String Quartet. I make no apology for my passionate love of this composition, and this was one of those occasions when the right people were in the right place at the right time. If that place was not one of the “standard” venues for concert-goers, then it stands as a case study for seeking out “non-standard” locations. I would not have missed this one for all the world.
May: Cellist Amos Yang’s Old First Concerts recital at the Old First Church. Like Koh, Yang prepared a recital consisting entirely of works for solo cello, covering composers ranging from Bach to the present day (Bright Sheng, in Yang’s case). In Yang’s recital Bach and Sheng were separated by Britten. This made 2010 an opportunity to hear Britten’s compositions for both accompanied and unaccompanied cello. Mirabile dictu!
June: The Old First Concerts recital at Old First Church by the Paul Dresher Ensemble. I have been following Dresher’s work for decades and continue to be a fan. In this case he shared his own music with works by two other composers (Martin Bresnick and Sam Adams). I knew one of the Dresher compositions from a recording, but this was my first chance to hear it in performance. The more recent works involved the Marimba Lumina, an enormous instrument whose performance (by two players) required as much a sense of choreography as of musicianship.
July: Giacomo Puccini’s “Suor Angelica” performed by the students of the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (BASOTI) under the stage direction of Rod Gomez. One might have expected things to slow down in July, but this was a month when too many good things were happening. However, while I am far from Puccini’s greatest fan, this was a production that mined every detail of the scenario’s psychological complexity with harrowing results. Indeed, Gomez’ achievement was all the more notable in the context of the highly effective staging by James Robinson that the San Francisco Opera presented the preceding fall. The BASOTI schedule offered this production only three times, each by a separate student cast; but, as I reported at the time, it was definitely a “must see” event for the summer.
August: Guitarist Yuri Liberzon’s Old First Concerts recital at Old First Church. Like Koh and Yang, Liberzon provided a “historical tour” of his instrument’s repertoire, ranging in this case from the seventeenth century to the recent past. His selections were about as non-standard as you could get, including arrangements of the Beatles songs “Michelle” and “Yesterday” by, of all composers, Toru Takemitsu. Liberzon’s awareness of the characteristic sounds of the individual strings of his instrument made this a guitar recital for serious listeners who might have been unjustly dismissive of guitar recitals.
September: Paul Hersh’s recital in the Faculty Artist Series at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Hersh offers a regular series of these recitals every season, and he usually uses them to showcase both current students and those who are now alumni. However, he “flew solo” for this concert and organized it under the title Remembrances, taking the title from the last piece in the tenth (and final) volume of Edvard Grieg’s Lyric Pieces (Opus 71, Number 7). The whole recital amounted to a logical path to this brief work (which uses the same theme as the very first of the Lyric Pieces); and the conception was nothing short of brilliant. Suffice it to say that Hersh’s execution perfectly matched the quality of that conception.
October: Philharmonia Baroque’s all-Bach concert. There is nothing new about Philharmonia Baroque giving a lively and well-informed account of Bach; but this event was in the hands of two exceptional guests. One was the soprano Maria Keohane, who performed the BWV 202 “Wedding” cantata, Weichet nur, Betrübte Schatten, who gave a whole-body performance perfectly matched to both music and text. More important, however, was visiting conductor Lars Ulrik Mortensen, who led all the performances from the harpsichord and also took the solo parts in two keyboard concertos, BWV 1052 in D minor and BWV 1054 in D major. Philharmonia Baroque regulars are used to Nicholas McGegan’s lively style, but there was a spontaneity to Mortensen’s execution that reminded us that Bach’s capacity for invention was the noble predecessor of the great jazz innovators of the twentieth century (John Coltrane being my usual case in point).
November: The San Francisco Performances recital by soprano Measha Brueggergosman. This was another concert with a thematic title, Night and Dreams. This was also the title of her latest CD released by Deutsche Grammophon; but her recital was far from a “replay” of the selections on the CD. Most important was that the second half of her program featured an ingenious interleaving of songs by Richard Strauss and Alban Berg, which was even more impressive in its execution than it looked on paper.
December: The Noontime Concerts™ performance at Old St. Mary's Cathedral by cellist Samsun van Loon accompanied by Michael Tan. This was clearly the most difficult month for making a decision. None of the memories had really endured a significant test of time, and I had quite a few alternatives to consider. I also feel a bit guilty, because this was the most recent of all of my candidates; but, once again, my decision had a lot to do with how the program was conceived. That program coupled late cello sonatas by composers from two different centuries, Ludwig van Beethoven (Opus 102, Number 2, in D major) and Sergei Prokofiev (Opus 119 in C major). (Note that neither composer figured in any of the previous month’s selections.) This was the perfect way for the year to end in the same spirit of serious listening with which it had begun.
What can I say? This was clearly a great year for performance in San Francisco with a rich diversity of opportunities for those of us on the audience side. I can imagine several cities in the world that might match our offerings but none that would surpass them. It is also worth observing that, while four of the programs were presented by San Francisco Performances, five were products of our two major church venues, Noontime Concerts™ and Old First Concerts. Taken together, these organizers accounted for three-quarters of the year.
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