Younis Raza

“American Tapestry,” opened Earplay’s  24th season Oct. 20 at Herbst Theater, featuring the works of five living American composers. Guest bassoonist Rufus Olivier brought depth, humor and technical wizardry to tether the experimental music. Balanced by cello, violin and piano in Jennifer Higdon’s Dark Wood, named for bassoon, his abrupt notes, squat polyps of sound, interleaved off-beats of piano and plucked cello. Higdon moved between this perky mix and more sustained...

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Struck, plucked, scraped shakes things up at Yerba Buena “Struck, plucked, scraped & shaken”  broke new ground in the fertile area of contemporary percussion music. Last Tuesday the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts hosted the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players for a twenty-first century program performed by five percussionists, harp, bass, and voice. Two of the composers were in attendance, and joined mezzo soprano...

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Lively concert in lovely hall Last Tuesday Berkeley Chamber Performances inaugurated a new season with the Völs String Quartet at the sumptuous Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club. The program wandered through the twentieth century with satisfying variety. Two seasoned performers teamed up with two more youthful for a sound that was both mature and delectably energetic. La Oracion del Torero by Joaquin Turina opened and closed enigmatically. The quartet...

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The SF Electronic Music Festival kicked off its ninth season last Wednesday at Project Artaud’s Florida Street theater. Partnered with the ODC dance collective, the festival this year marks a new collaboration with SFSound, a group of high caliber musicians who specialize in extemporaneous extended technique electronically amplified contemporary music. That is to say, they blow softly and carry a big woofer. Staffed entirely by volunteers, the festival showed off 15 very different takes on...

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Final concert shows Music@menlo is simply the best The peninsula’s prestigious Music@Menlo festival capped off three weeks of events with a spectacular final concert, concentrating on contemporary music, and three of the four composers were in attendance. Jennifer Higdon, one of America’s most performed living composers, offered Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams, written in 1999. Five very different moods were evoked by the Borromeo String Quartet and pianist...

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Huge Line-up Continues at Menlo Festival Music@Menlo’s fourth concert showcased seven works from the early twentieth century. Debussy ushered in an age of world wars with his Violin Sonata, written in 1916-17, late in his life. Fighting a final illness, he composed this piece with the gentle joy which inhabits much of his later work, using an “impressionist” palette, one of his legacies to music. Ian Swensen, a hometown violinist profiled in the July 30...

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