For nearly three decades, the Other Minds Festival has been tireless in importing underappreciated composers and performers to the Bay Area from all over the world. Founder and artistic director Charles Amirkhanian stays tuned in to an astonishing network of international discoveries, and he’s unfailingly generous in sharing his findings with the rest of us.
But sometimes the sounds you’re looking for are right in your own back yard. Composer Samuel Adams, whose music took up most of Friday night’s concert at Brava Theater — the second of the festival’s four programs — hasn’t actually lived in his hometown of Berkeley for a while, but he still counts as a local. And Friday’s program, which offered the first live opportunity to delve into a variety of his work at length, emerged as something of a triumph — a rolling, eclectic tour of a highly original musical imagination.
You could begin charting this landscape from any of a number of starting points, but what stands out most immediately for me is Adams’ harmonic language. He has a gift for combining notes into terse little combinations that sound roughly familiar, but aren’t. It’s not that his chords are abstruse or convoluted, either — rather, they’re like wryly ironic twists on our old friends, the major and minor triads. In the first of a set of six Études for piano, which returns at the end, Goldberg Variations-style, Adams leads the listener through a long series of gentle harmonies, arranged in pairs (sometimes with a single note in between). In each pair, the first chord serves as a discreet introduction to the second; each pair, in turn, sends out a secret signal to the next, which lands with a combination of surprise and impeccable logic. The rest of the short chapters in this set turn to other keyboard matters (pedaling, rhythmic precision, and so forth), and all of it was rendered with beautiful delicacy by pianist Conor Hanick.
Alternatively, you could exult in Adams’ control of rhetorical nuance. Violin Diptych, played by Hanick and violinist Helen Kim (Adams’ life partner), begins with an astonishingly eloquent extended monologue for the violin, which pulls a listener into the more rhythmically charged joint exercises that follow. You can hear the care with which Adams guides the audience response through large musical paragraphs. To admire Adams’ command of sonority, meanwhile, you had only to listen to Sundial, in which percussionist Haruka Fujii and the members of the Friction Quartet wove instrumental lines in and out of a bright-hued, active contrapuntal weave.
The one welcome guest in this all-Adams program was the late Ingram Marshall, a lifelong friend of Adams’ father, composer John Adams, and godfather to the son. In Marshall’s resplendently gloomy Dark Waters, English hornist Libby Van Cleve played in combination with excerpts from an ancient 78-rpm recording of Sibelius’ tone poem The Swan of Tuonela to create a dark, roiling and utterly irresistible seascape. (I had known the piece only from Van Cleve’s wondrous 2001 recording; it’s even more thrilling in live performance.) Pianist Sarah Cahill closed the evening with the commissioned world premiere of Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright, Adams’ tender joint tribute to Debussy and Marshall.
Adams’ music burst into the spotlight in 2012, when Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony gave the first local performance of his orchestral work Drift and Providence. It was hard to avoid mixed feelings at the time. The score had wonderful aspects, and had clearly been created by a composer who knew what he was about. At the same time, it was hard to believe the piece would have come to Davies Hall, or to MTT’s attention, had its composer been named Bob Smith. Friday’s concert, though, put any nepo-baby suspicions to rest. Adams fils is clearly a creator of deep originality operating at the highest levels of inventiveness. Just like the old man.
Elsewhere:
George Papajohn, SFCV: “While contemporary music is often focused primarily on execution, Hanick brought a nuanced interpretation to this set. In the slow first étude, his tender expression emphasized the bittersweet beauty of the false relations (classical music’s “blue notes”) that pepper its simpler diatonic chords. As the subsequent études grew increasingly dense and intricate, Hanick’s sensitive touch gave a palpable clarity to the superimposed layers.”
Everything everywhere all at once
How wide a variety of music is regularly on offer around the Bay Area, would you say? Nope, more than that — a lot more. The profusion is practically limitless: jazz, classical, folk music from different traditions, and so much more, available every day with scarcely any effort. SF Music Day, the annual music festival that had its 18th iteration on Sunday at the War Memorial Veterans Building, is designed to celebrate that unmanageable bounty. If you just can’t get enough, this is the event for you.
The building boasts at least three separate performance venues, including the venerable Herbst Theatre, the second-floor Green Room, and the more recent Taube Atrium Theater. (There used to be a fourth venue in the mix as well, but that seems to have run its course.) For six hours, a roundelay of performances, curated by executive director Crystal Pascucci-Clifford, filled each space as if taking part in a clangorous three-ring circus. As much as I love SF Music Day, and consider it a staple of my year, it has the same drawback as a three-ring circus: There’s too much to take in, so you’re always rushing out of some excellent concert, driven by FOMO, to try and catch something else in another space. Conversely, you learn to breathe a sigh of relief when you find yourself at a performance that’s sufficiently uninteresting to justify abandoning it.
Still, profusion is better than its opposite, and my visit on Sunday, for all its frantic running around, was pretty much pure delight. The highlight of my afternoon was spending time with the great Vietnamese-American musician Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, the creative virtuoso of several traditional Vietnamese instruments, and her Blood Moon Orchestra. In a way this was cheating on my part, since I was already familiar with Võ’s artistry, and should have been exploring new terrain. But if you can resist a wordless version of Led Zeppelin’s rock classic “Black Dog” arranged for monochord, soprano sax, marimba, and taiko drums, you’re stronger than I am.
And that was just a short stretch of a day that included music by jazz harpist Destiny Muhammad and her trio, a bit of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition by pianist Elizabeth Schumann, and the infectiously swingy Puerto Rican jazz of the Pedro José Pastrana Trio. I heard a vibrant recital of Spanish-language art songs by soprano Esther Rayo and pianist Peter Grünberg, string quartets by Schubert and Gabriella Smith from members of the Benicia Chamber Players, the smooth stylings of the Berkeley Choro Ensemble, and chamber music by Mozart and others, dexterously rendered by the teen players of the Burlingame-based Young Chamber Musicians. It was a lot. When I left, sated and invigorated, the music was still resonating from floor to floor.
Sound judgment
The most interesting development out of Saturday’s concert by the Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali had nothing to do with the music or the orchestra. It had to do with the venue: UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, long known as an acoustic graveyard for orchestras. Since last season, the hall has had an acoustic makeover, courtesy of the folks at Berkeley’s Meyer Sound, and this was the first chance to hear the new configuration in action.
Is the sound now better? It definitely is. Is it a lot better? Too early to say. Acoustics is a notably imprecise and vibes-based world, and any judgments about questions like these require a lot of time to aggregate a lot of individual reactions. On the basis of just one evening, one can say that the hall’s sound is now brighter and clearer at its center; Víkingur Ólafsson’s solo work in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 registered in almost clangorously high definition. At the same time, there seemed to be some murk around the edges, as the lower strings and the brass struggled to be completely heard. But all of this, as I say, is highly provisional. There will be many more occasions to garner a more nuanced sense of things.
The program itself, the first part of a two-night visit by the London orchestra, need not detain us long. Ólafsson, renowned for his performances in music by Bach and John Adams, didn’t seem to have much of urgency to say about Beethoven, and the concluding account of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony was tailored for those with a deeper love for the score than I can muster. More interesting was the local premiere of Si el oxígeno fuera verde (“If Oxygen Were Green”), a 14-minute tone poem by the Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz that begins in light-hearted quasi-minimalist spangles before turning denser and more ominous.
Elsewhere:
Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “Ólafsson, the New York-based virtuoso and a 2025-26 Cal Performances artist in residence, unveiled one fresh insight after another in the concerto. That’s saying a lot, given a work as familiar as this one.”
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #290 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Escape from Korea, but deviously (8)
Last week’s clue:
Change of life beginning to demand discipline (5)
Solution: FIELD
Change: anagram indicator
life: anagram fodder
beginning to demand: D
discipline: definition
Coming up
• Benjamin Appl: Anyone with an interest in the art of song is likely to admire the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Baritone Benjamin Appl has built an entire recital program as an homage to his eminent predecessor, stocked with music associated with him. Together with pianist James Baillieu, Appl will perform a large group of Schubert songs, as well as music by Edvard Grieg, Clara Schumann, Hanns Eisler, and many others. Oct. 24, Herbst Theatre. www.sfperformances.org.
• La Traviata: This is quite a year for Verdi’s La Traviata, and what opera deserves it more? In the wake of last month’s production by the Livermore Valley Opera, and in advance of next spring’s version by Opera San José, comes a concert staging by Festival Opera, presented in partnership with the Diably Valley Symphony. It features soprano Jamie Chamberlin, tenor Nathan Granner, and baritone Zachary Gordin in the title roles, with Matilda Hofman conducting. Oct. 24 and 26, Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek. www.festivalopera.org.
So glad you wrote this appreciation of Sam's work. He is, to my mind, one of our finest composers, and it's all the more astonishing that he's emerged with such a clear voice given the long shadow of his dad's work and influence on so many of us!
My most vivid memory of the orchestral graveyard of Zellerbach was when the Philharmonia Orchestra visited, conducted by some guy named Salonen, and performed a concert version of "Wozzeck." My recollection is that the sound barely made it past the proscenium before dying.