The Spanish guitarist Margarita Escarpa offered a recital notable for finely wrought emotion, beautiful sound, and flawless technique on Saturday at the Green Room of San Francisco’s War Memorical Veterans Building.
The American song repertoire is often an afterthought for recital singers, but soprano Nicole Cabell made it the centerpiece of her program Sunday afternoon at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. It was a wise choice, one that showed the young artist’s voice to better advantage than the more traditional repertoire that comprised the balance of the program.
For an orchestra that devotes a full third of its budget to youth outreach and music education, the Oakland East Bay Symphony’s “Celebrating Youth” concert was a major event. The culmination of decades of outreach to youth in the most challenged neighborhoods of Oakland and Livermore, the concert displayed the extraordinary level of musical excellence that youth can achieve when given opportunities for musical expression.
The North American premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s 2007 Violin Concerto No. 2, In tempus praesens (In the present time), arrived Thursday as an important musical event, revealing a strong, compelling, unusual, and rewarding work.
Time and adversity have not been kind to Barbara Bonney, once the possessor of a silvery, clear soprano that responded to her every musical intention. After time off for personal reasons, she has been attempting to place her voice once again on its former secure plane. But the voice will not cooperate: It is unresponsive and unyielding. Gone is the pliability, the suavity, the subtlety — and with them, the artistry.
After I was admitted to the Conservatory in the Hague, I was allowed to see my adjudication sheet. The director had written one sentence: “He has fast fingers.” Bemused, I showed this to my teacher, who clasped me on the shoulder, and said in the most comforting way possible, “That was not a compliment, my boy.”
To celebrate the newly renovated, reopened, and renamed Jeannik Méquet Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills College, various ensembles and musicians gathered on Saturday evening to perform the music of one of the college’s many musical luminaries: Darius Milhaud, the French composer who took up a post there after fleeing the Germans in 1940.
“Things Fall From the Sky” was the theme of Monday’s concert, yet nary a clunker of a composition felled the good spirits of San Francisco Contemporary Music Players attendees. A refreshing eclecticism replaced SFCMP’s usual emphasis on neomodernist and spectralist genres.
