music

Rocking the house… and the boat. A conductor of near-rock star status, Gustavo Dudamel brought the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela to UC Berkeley last week for two sold-out performances and a host of workshops and events. Presently a 200-strong professional touring orchestra, two years ago this was the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, but its members are growing up—they currently range from 18 to 28 years old, and...

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A tale of social pressures and personal madness at Zellerbach Famed Finish conductor and blossoming composer Esa-Pekka Salonen brought London’s Philharmonia Orchestra to Berkeley last week for a residency that included four different concerts, two interviews and a master class. ...

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  Celebrating a shy purist Conlon Nancarrow, a composer fascinated by complex rhythms and the play of multiple tempos, would have celebrated his centennial last month. Living in some obscurity, he was rediscovered by Columbia records in 1969 and then by Charles Amirkhanian in the 1970s, who popularized his experiments with hand-punched piano rolls for the player piano. ...

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Makeovers—taking Stravinsky out on the town The Bad Plus, a Minneapolis-based jazz trio, came to San Francisco last week with a fascinating creation that they have been polishing for a year at New York’s Lincoln Center. Their approach to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was a potent jazz treatment of a revolutionary work. In 1913 Stravinsky’s piece, written for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky,...

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Season opens, Symphony hunting for “Innovators.” What does a fifth Century B.C. numerologist have in common with a contemporary musician and inventor? Quite a bit, actually. Along with the theorem that bears his name, Pythagoras was the father of harmonic theory and ancient Greek tuning. ...

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A passion for life… Last weekend, Semyon Bychkov completed his collaboration with the SF Symphony in style. After a first week program that included famed violinist Pinchas Zukerman in Bruch’s Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s elegant Symphony No. 5, they essayed Shostakovich’s blockbuster Symphony No. 11, the “1905,” to high acclaim. Schubert’s marvelous two-movement “Unfinished”...

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