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Wednesday, November 6, 2024
 Recent Reviews
CHORAL AND VOCAL
ECLECTIC WORKS IN CANTIAMO SONOMA'S SEASON OPENING CONCERT
by Pamela Hicks Gailey
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Cantiamo Sonoma’s season opener was delayed by a few weeks due to director Carol Menke’s summer surgery and recovery, so it was very gratifying to see her take to the podium (walker assisted and conducting seated) Oct. 27 for a lovely, if somewhat low-key performance in five sets with a brief interm...
CHORAL AND VOCAL
BAROQUE EXTRAVAGANZA AT AMERICAN BACH MARIN CONCERT
by Abby Wasserman
Friday, October 25, 2024
T. Iliev T. Chulochnikova J. Thomas Oct. 25
The original home of American Bach (formerly American Bach Soloists) was St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere, and they have performed there every season since, and were there on Oct. 25 to launch the company’s 36th season with a program called Baroque Extravaganza. The title was no exaggerat...
RECITAL
LARGE AUDIENCE HEARS AX IN WEILL PIANO RECITAL
by Terry McNeill
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Emanuel Ax Oct. 24 in Weill
Piano recitals are now rare items on the North Coast, with just Jon Nakamatsu’s Dec. 8 SRJC concert left on the 2024 calendar. So it was a happy development to see 800 attending Oct. 24 in Weill for the Emanuel Ax recital and a balanced program of Schoenberg, Beethoven and Schumann. The two Beetho...
SYMPHONY
SRS' NEW SEASON OPENS WITH BEETHOVEN AND COPLAND IN WEILL
by Terry McNeill
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Violinist David McCarroll
Historically the Santa Rosa Symphony opens its first concerts of the season with a snare drum roll and the National Anthem, but at beginning of their Oct. 20 concerts there were solely stage announcements from Board Chair Keven Brown and President Andy Bradford. However there was plenty of patrioti...
CHAMBER
TWO CHAMBER MUSIC WORKS AT MARIN'S MT. TAM CHURCH
by Abby Wasserman
Sunday, October 13, 2024
l to r: L. Li J. E. Kwark M. Eldridge K. Maulbetsch M. Yeo
The Marin Symphony Orchestra’s musicians have been nomads since mid-2022, when retrofitting began on the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium. A limited number have performed chamber symphonies and choral works in the Dunn Theatre at the College of Marin, or intimate chamber music in churches and hal...
CHAMBER
CALLISTO'S ELEGANCE IN UPBEAT 222 GALLERY CONCERT
by Terry McNeill
Friday, October 11, 2024
Calisto Quartet Oct. 11 at the 222
The Yale based Callisto Quartet fashioned a stirring concert Oct. 11 in Healdsburg’s fashionable 222 Art Gallery before 80 attentive listeners. Three works were programmed – Mozart’s D Major, K. 575; Reena Esmail’s “Ragamala” and Dvorák’s No. 12 in F Major (“American”). All received committed perf...
CHAMBER
FINAL ALEXANDER SQ CONCERT AT MUSIC AT OAKMONT
by Terry McNeill
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Alexander SQ with John Novacek (middle) Oct. 10
Music at Oakmont’s new season launched Oct. 10 in Berger Auditorium with a concert of musical contrasts. 100 attended the first of six concerts in the splendid series that began 34 years ago with the insouciant impresario founder Robert Hayden. In their ensemble’s final career tour the San Francis...
CHORAL AND VOCAL
MERCURY IN FLIGHT
by Pamela Hicks Gailey
Saturday, October 5, 2024
Elly Lichenstein
The former home of Cinnabar Theater, Petaluma’s legendary little red schoolhouse become theater jewel on the hill, has reopened after a season of renovations and remodeling with a new name: Mercury Theater. The entity known as Cinnabar still exists but has moved a new location. This event was celeb...
CHORAL AND VOCAL
SPARKLING ART SONG AND PIANO SOLO RECITAL AT THE 222 GALLERY
by Pamela Hicks Gailey
Saturday, September 28, 2024
The 222 Gallery in Healdsburg just launched its 2024-25 marvelously diverse and extensive concert season, and Sept. 28’s opera program featured a powerful duo, baritone Daniel Cilli with pianist Temirzhan Yerzhanov. It was a seamless 70-minute recital of compelling art songs and piano solos showcasi...
SYMPHONY
MOZART THE SUBLIME IN UKIAH SYMPHONY'S CONCERT
by Terry McNeill
Sunday, September 22, 2024
J. Todorov P. Yarbrough with Conductor P. Lenberg Sept. 22
Sublime was the word in the air at the Ukiah Symphony’s season opening concert Sept 22 in the Mendocino College Theater. Sublime in the event’s title and in the unfolding of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364, that occupied the concert’s first half. Conductor Phillip Lenberg was joined by virtu...
Local Concerts  
SYMPHONY REVIEW
Sonoma County Philharmonic / Saturday, October 26, 2024
Norman Gamboa, conductor

Composer Carlos Escalante Macaya

FRANKENSTEIN THRILS IN UNIQUE SO CO PHIL CONCERT IN JACKSON THEATER

by Peter Lert
Saturday, October 26, 2024

The Sonoma County Philharmonic’s concerts of October 26 and 27 featured a somewhat unorthodox Halloween-adjacent theme of just two works: Rachmaninoff’s 1909 symphonic poem Isle of the Dead and a new score by contemporary Costa Rican composer Carlos Escalante Macaya for the 1931 Universal Pictures classic movie Frankenstein. Both concerts are reviewed here.

The stage arrangement at the Jackson Theater, So Co Phil’s customary venue, was modified to allow the complete film to be screened “in glorious black and white” above the orchestra during the performance.
Rachmaninoff had been searching for a theme for a symphonic tone poem during the early 1900s and found inspiration in a print of “Die Toteninsel” (“The Isle of the Dead”), an 1880s painting by Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin. The picture of a shrouded figure being rowed toward a gloomy islet with tombs and cypress trees was so popular that Böcklin himself produced no fewer than five versions of it, and black and white lithograph prints of it were distributed all over Europe. In keeping with this, the piece opens (and in large part continues) in quintuple 5/8 time, evoking the “pull, pause; pull, pause” rhythm of rowing.

The quiet opening gradually builds to a triumphal climax in 3/4 time, during which the brass tended to overshadow the normally lush string writing so characteristic of Rachmaninoff. This was due not to any lack of effort on the part of the upper strings, led by concertmaster Pam Otsuka, but simply to their limited number—so much so that some basses and cellos, including this writer, didn’t participate in this particular concert in the interest of better string balance. However this allowed me to attend the dress rehearsal, following the scores for both works, to get a better idea of the overall structure of the pieces.

The composer’s fascination with liturgical music, particularly the plainsong chant dies irae (the Day of Wrath) is well known, and it appeared here (as well as in at least 12 of his other works) both in its original form and in a descending progression of minor and major seconds that he’d later recycle in his Symphonic Dances some 30 years later. Conductor Norman Gamboa and the orchestra gave a relaxed, polished, 24 minute performance of the work, such that a long moment of silence followed the quiet ending before the beginning of applause.

The concept of music to accompany films is hardly new, as the great movie palaces of the 1920s had pit orchestras of varying size, while small local theaters had to make do with a single pianist. The pit orchestras of silent films were later replaced by remarkable theater organs with far more stops and textures than the largest church instruments; the “Mighty Wurlitzers” and their performers often were attractions in their own right. Sometimes these artists had to make up their own accompaniments to films, but studios provided musical “cue sheets” with selections to be played along with specific scenes on the screen.

With the advent of synchronized sound in the late 1920s (“the talkies”), studios at first felt that musical accompaniment might actually distract from the story, not to mention composing, performance and recording would all have been significant costs. Thus, Universal’s two 1931 horror blockbusters, “Dracula” and ”Frankenstein,” were essentially devoid of music, apart from a few moments of Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Schubert in the former and an ersatz-Bavarian Schuhplättler for the dancing peasants in the latter.

Mr. Escalante Macaya, who was present and received standing ovations at both performances, chose to emulate the “cue sheet” formula with self-contained musical accompaniments for many of the action sequences while often allowing gaps for much of the dialogue. (And a good thing, too: while the opening credits touted the then-new “Western Electric Noiseless” sound recording technology, it wasn’t, and many in the audience were grateful for the supertitles accompanying the distinctly "Lo-Fi" original sound. The sections of the score were marked as “cues,” beginning with a mysterious prologue and opening reminiscent of a minor version of the eight-note bass line of the Pachelbel Canon in D so loathed by cellists. Fortunately it was repeated only twice, rather than the 54 times of the original, but then transitioning to fortissimo chords appropriate to foreboding castle towers on storm-lashed crags.

No less than 17 further cues followed, of varying length and evoking colors varying from soothing and reassuring, through foreboding, and on to dramatic and tumultuous depending on the action. Taken as a whole the style seemed very reminiscent of the grandiose sweep of the symphonic film scores of the golden age of cinema, rather more so than the excellent, but minimalist, score written by Philip Glass for string quartet in 1998 to accompany Universal’s earlier Dracula.

While the screen actors’ occasional “over the top” emoting (after all, they’d learned their trade in the age of silent films) sometimes evoked audience giggles where in an earlier age they’d have been horrified, it was as much the music as the actual film that held them spellbound for 70-odd minutes, and Escalante Macaya’s directions for the various cues include words like “somehow comedic,” “mysterious,” “very aggressive,” “agitated,” “dramatic,” “martial,” and, for the final credits, “apotheosic.” The writing, while accessible to both musicians and audience, was by no means simplistic; indeed, and possibly as an inside joke, the 14th Cue, for the scene in which the Monster first seems to befriend a little girl, but then throws her into a lake to drown, was noted by the composer as being based on a counterpoint exercise written by Beethoven for his teacher in Vienna, Johann Albrechtsberger.

Overall, the orchestra performed the score with both technical musical excellence and considerable enthusiasm. It was a very successful performance and very well received by an audience of 350, the largest attendance in recent So Co Phil concerts.

Events Calendar

SYMPHONY
Santa Rosa Symphony
Saturday, November 9, 2024
7:30 PM - Rohnert Park
Francesco Lecce-Chong, conductor. Jon Kimura Parker, piano
Tchaikovsky: B Flat Concert, Op. 23; Valerie Colman: Seven O'Clock Shout for Orchestra; Prokofiev: Suite from the Ballet Romeo and Juliet Concert repeats Nov. 10 (3 p.m.) and Nov. 11 (7:30 p.m.) in W...
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CHAMBER
The 222
Sunday, November 10, 2024
7:00 PM - Healdsburg
AYA Piano Trio

Trios of Beach, (Op. 150), Beethoven (Op. 70, No. 2) and Brahms' B major (1889 revised version) Tickets are $30...
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CHORAL AND VOCAL
Cantiamo Sonoma
Thursday, December 5, 2024
7:30 PM - Santa Rosa
Carol Menke, director
Program TBA Preferred seating: $45; general seating: $30 The program is repeated in the same church and at the same time (7:30) Friday, Dec. 6...
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SYMPHONY
Santa Rosa Symphony
Saturday, December 7, 2024
7:30 PM - Rohnert Park
Francesco Lecce-Chong, conductor. Magdalena Kuzma, soprano; Gabrielle Beteag, mezzo-soprano. SSU S
Jonathan Leshboff: Warum hast du gelitten (world premiere); Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) Concert is repeated Dec. 8 (3 p.m.) and Dec. 9 (7:30) in Weill Hall...
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CHAMBER
Music at Oakmont
Saturday, December 14, 2024
1:30 PM - Santa Rosa
Duo Turgeon. Anne Louise Turgeon and Edward Turgeon, piano
Program: TBA Oakmont concerts are open to Oakmont residents and their guests. Tickets at the door ar $30...
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SYMPHONY
Santa Rosa Symphony
Saturday, January 11, 2025
7:30 PM - Rohnert Park
Francesco Lecce-Chong, conductor. Adelle-Akiko Kearns, cello; Andrew Harrison, saxophone
Elmer Bernstein: Symphonic Suite from the movie The Magnificent Seven; Korngold: Concerto in C Major; John Williams: Escapades from the movies Catch Me If You Can; Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances Conc...
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SYMPHONY
Marin Symphony
Saturday, January 11, 2025
3:00 PM - Kentfield
Alexandra Arrieche, conductor. John Wilson, piano
Arturo Marquez: Danson No. 2; Grieg: A Minor Concerto, Op. 16; Elgar: Enigma Variations, Op. 36 Program repeats in the same hall Jan. 12 at 7:30 Tickets: $43 to $83 ($3 fee)...
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CHAMBER
Green Music Center
Saturday, January 18, 2025
3:00 PM - Rohnert Park
New Century Chamber Orchestra. Daniel Hope. violin; Aaron Schuman, trumpet; Inon Barnatan, piano
Shostakovich: C Minor Concerto (No. 1), Op. 35; CPE Bach: Keyboard Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, H. 420; Bartok: Divertimento for String Orchestra Admission is $35 to $95...
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SYMPHONY
Vallejo Symphony
Sunday, January 19, 2025
3:00 PM - Vallejo
Marc Taddei, conductor. Nicola Prinz, alto; Corey Bix, tenor
Haydn: Symphony No. 31 (Horn Signal); Mahler: Das Lied Von Der Erde...
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CHAMBER
Redwood Arts Council
Sunday, January 19, 2025
2:30 PM - Santa Rosa
Jill Brindel, cello; Tammie Dyer, violin; Marilyn Thompson, piano; Roy Zajac, clarinet
Shostakovich: Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67; Brian Wilson: Elements; Dvorák: E Minor Trio (No. 4), B. 166 (Dumky)...
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