Symphonic music may be about to take a nose-dive in San Francisco, due to the imminent departure of conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, shamefully let go by the short-sighted administration of the S.F. Symphony. Chamber music, on the other hand, is still alive and well all over the Bay Area. From Music@Menlo, south of the City, to festivals like Valley of the Moon and Music in the Vineyards up north, from tiny venues in churches and storefronts to more official auditoriums in Berkeley and San Francisco, smaller-scale concerts of classical music are at a peak.
Two of the best places to hear chamber music these days are the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, where San Francisco Performances presents most of its concerts, and Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley, where Cal Performances holds sway. Last weekend, I had a chance to sample the offerings at both, one after the other, and the result was more than satisfactory. If similar concerts were offered every weekend of the year, I probably wouldn’t have a Saturday night or a Sunday afternoon available for anything else.
The Saturday night concert at Herbst featured a classical guitarist whose single-name appellation, Milos, was completely unknown to me. (But then, so is just about the name of every other classical guitarist except Andres Segovia.) The house was not packed, but it held a good-sized audience, many of whom had what I imagine to be the vaguely nerdy look of fanatical guitarists.
As we sat waiting for the concert to start, the curtainless stage was empty save for a single chair and a backdrop that pressed close behind it. When Milos came out, carrying his guitar, he turned out to be a slender, handsome young man dressed in casual black and sporting a slight but discernible accent. As the program booklet stated, and as he later mentioned during one of his interludes of talk, he was born and grew up in Montenegro: hence the accent. But at the age of seventeen he went to London to study classical guitar, and he has pretty much lived there ever since.
Because of the intimate way he dealt with us, along with the quiet nature of his performance itself, the concert hall felt much smaller than it was. His music was entirely unamplified, and between each piece he spoke to us (without a microphone) about what he had just played or was about to play. Clearly he had something very specific in mind when he designed his program—that is, the Baroque as reflected and portrayed on the guitar—so he began with two pieces by Silvius Leopold Weiss, one of the earliest composers for the lute. That sounded just right on the guitar, but the two subsequent pieces—an excerpt from a Rameau opera, and a Handel menuet—sounded like the transcriptions they were: something designed for another instrument and then wilfully relocated onto the guitar. Only when he got to the close of the first half and played Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor did the transition from violin to guitar make complete sense: not only because the Bach piece is so beautiful that it would probably sound okay played on a kazoo, but also because the variety of simultaneous notes the composer demanded from his violinist were well suited to the chords of a guitar. Only a master guitarist could have pulled it off, though, and it was in this particular work that Milos most thoroughly demonstrated his mastery.
The second half started with a bang—the Asturias by Albeniz, which really was designed for guitar, and which knocks me out every time I hear it—and then wandered, by way of Scarlatti and Barrios, up to the present, which included a slightly trashy rendering of “Over the Rainbow” and then a complicated modern piece by Mathias Duplessy, written explicitly for Milos. None of this could compete with the Bach, really, but Milos’s generally charming manner, his modest way of receiving our enthusiastic applause, and his confiding manner of speaking with us all made the evening a quiet if consistent pleasure.
I had almost the opposite feeling—of being lifted out of my seat with the intensity of the experience—when Jeremy Denk played Brahms’s Piano Quintet with the Takacs Quartet at Hertz Hall on Sunday afternoon. The concert had been sold out for weeks if not months, and this was the curtain closer; it had been preceded, before the intermission, by Beethoven’s Opus 18, No. 1 and Janacek’s Kreutzer Sonata string quartet. I have heard the Takacs do both of these before, and there were no surprises: though they do them well, their performance left me relatively unmoved this time.
But Denk! He was something else again. I realized, hearing him in this piece, that I had only heard him play solo piano over the course of the past few decades, and while he is a marvelous pianist (and speaker) on his own, the possibility of collaboration brought out a new side to him. Located behind the string players but nonetheless leading them at every moment, he raised the Takacs musicians themselves to a new level of explosive, emotional strength. I love Brahms anyway, but his music can be done well or badly; this was Brahms at his best, and Denk at his best, and the Takacs at their best as well. “Worth going out of the house for,” I murmured to my husband, as we heartily joined in the standing ovation at the end.
And then we walked home in the late afternoon twilight, because Hertz Hall is only about a twenty-minute walk from our house. That too is an incomparable luxury—to have music of this caliber brought to one’s doorstep, courtesy of the irreplaceable Cal Performances. I shudder to think what our life in Berkeley would be like without them.