January 23–26, 2020 | Herbst Theatre

StringTheory

A Festival Exploring Musical Frontiers

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presentsPIVOT:New Adventures in the Performing ArtsJanuary 23–26, 2020 | Herbst Theatre

Launched in 2016, PIVOT is a San Francisco Performances series created for adventurous audiences interested in truly unique arts experiences. Driven by a philosophy of innovation, creativity and artistic excellence that pushes the boundaries of the traditional concert experience, PIVOT offers exciting performances and creative exchanges between artists and audiences.

Since its inception in 2016, PIVOT been mixing things up around themes that resonate with today’s audiences (see article on page 4). This year, under the theme String Theory, our four-day festival will cross boundaries, explore frontiers and energetically traverse and unify four threads of music: ancient, traditional classical, new music and jazz.

We begin on Thursday with the unique pairing of harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and violinist Stefan Jackiw. Together, they shatter musty stereo-types of the baroque keyboard in a program surveying 300+ years of music that puts the harpsichord in an entirely new light.

The following night, SF Performances’ favorites Jennifer Koh, violin and Vijay Iyer, composer/pianist team up with debut composer/percussionist Tyshawn Sorey. This vibrant trio examines limitless relationships between composer and performer including two new works and improvisations.

On Saturday, category-defying German composer/vocalist Theo Bleckmann joins dynamic jazz pianist Dan Tepfer and San Francisco’s own adventurous Telegraph Quartet in an evening of Berlin cabaret songs of Love and War, Peace and Exile.

We conclude this year’s festival early Sunday evening with the pairing of vio-linist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and cellist Jay Campbell, both known for em-bracing a broad and diverse repertoire. Here they offer a program spanning a millennium and underscoring the timeless power of music to communicate, innovate and move us.

PIVOT: New Adventures in Performing Arts was developed under a grant from:

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Since 1979, SAN FRANCISCO PERFORMANCES has been a pioneer in the Bay Area by introducing hundreds of classical music, jazz, and contemporary dance artists to audiences. With a strong artistic vision and adventurous programming, San Francisco Performances presents the world’s finest in music and dance, connecting audiences with artists in intimate settings. For more info please visit our website at: sfperformances.org

PHOTO CREDITS: PAGE 4: Kronos Quartet: Jay Blakesburg; Brooklyn Rider: Erin Baiano PAGE 5: Philip Glass: Johansen Krause PAGE 23: Theo Bleckmann: Lynne Harty PAGE 24: Dan Tepfer: Josh Goleman PAGE 25: Telegraph Quartet: Carlin Ma

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San Francisco Performances: The First 40 YearsA History of Innovation

San Francisco Performances’ programming has long reflected a commit-ment to artists who are driving classical music forms in new and innova-tive directions. From the start, this philosophy complemented our mission of introducing exciting emerging artists in every season, and it has often—but not exclusively—been these early career artists who have nourished our audiences’ taste for adventure.

San Francisco’s own Kronos Quartet, known worldwide for their commit-ment to new music, has been a frequent presence for more than 30 years, going back to live dance performances with ODC (1986) and Japanese performance duo Eiko & Koma (1997), to their most recent collaboration for the 2017 world premiere of Echoes with The Living Earth Show, the spoken word group Youth Speaks and composer Danny Clay.

In recent seasons the trailblazing string quartet Brooklyn Rider has made a profound impact on our audiences—in collaboration with dancer Wendy Whelan and choreographer Brian Brooks (Some of a Thousand Words, 2017); and last season with a program entitled Healing Modes that ex-plored new works written as a response to Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 15 No. 132 by Caroline Shaw, Gabriela Lena Frank, Reena Esmail and Matana Roberts.

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Over the years we have taken special pride in bringing the iconic Ameri-can composer/performer Philip Glass to San Francisco at regular intervals to highlight the full range of his experiments in sound, from screenings of the Qatsi film trilogy accompanied live by the Philip Glass Ensemble, to the minimalist cycle Music in Twelve Parts, to the epic, three-hour set of his 20 piano études.

For more than two decades SF Performances has been a member of Music Accord, a national consortium of presenters that commissions and presents new works in the chamber music, instrumental recital and song genres. Recent Music Accord presentations in San Francisco include Caroline Shaw’s Narrow Sea performed by Dawn Upshaw, Gil Kalish and Sō Percussion (2017) and Shulamit Ran’s Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory for the Pacifica Quartet (2014).

Over the past decade, novel curated projects have become a staple of our work. Jennifer Koh’s Limitless program, featured in the current PIVOT series, is representative. As reported in a 2018 profile in The New York Times, “In Mozart’s time, for example, there wasn’t a distinction between new and repertory works ‘because everything was new,’ Ms. Koh said. ‘Now we have pop, jazz, classical, and even new music within classical. I don’t believe in that; I just believe in good musicians and bad musicians.’ This project is also an attempt to add more diverse voices to the violin repertory beyond what Ms. Koh called ‘dead, white European males.’”

PIVOT is a celebration of artists who are moving their art into the present and future, making it accessible to younger audiences while converting many traditionalists to new possibilities. They represent the path forward.

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THEO BLECKMANN | Vocalist DAN TEPFER | Piano TELEGRAPH QUARTET Eric Chin | Violin Pei-Ling Lin | Viola Joseph Maile | Violin Jeremiah Shaw | Cello

Saturday, January 25, 2020 | 7:30pm Herbst Theatre

Berlin—Songs of Love and War, Peace and Exile

Program to be announced from stage

With his Berlin program, Theo Bleckmann breathes new life into classic German songs by Weill, Eisler, and Dessau, mostly set to poems by Bertolt Brecht. Bleckmann performs these songs with a rare delicateness while maintaining and emphasizing their political bite, which is especially rele-vant today. Even with those songs that he sings in German, Bleckmann has a way of conveying their essence to English speakers, so that language is not a barrier to understanding. He is joined by Dan Tepfer, a brilliant pianist of skill and epic lyricism, and San Francisco’s own Telegraph Quartet.

This program is made possible in part by the generous support of Susan S. Blake and Joel Kaufmann

Theo Bleckmann is represented by Music + Art Management, Inc. musicandart.net

Dan Tepfer is represented by Blu Ocean Arts bluoceanarts.com

Telegraph Quartet is represented by Jensen Artists jensenartists.com

Hamburg Steinway Model D, Pro Piano, San Francisco

Please join us after the performance for a brief Q&A with the artists and Cy Musiker

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ARTIST PROFILESTheo Bleckmann makes his SF Performances debut tonight. Dan Tepfer made his SF Performances debut in November 2014. The Telegraph Quartet returns for the fourth time since their debut in January 2017.

A jazz singer and new music composer of eclectic tastes and prodigious gifts, Grammy-nominated Theo Bleckmann makes music that is accessibly sophis-ticated, unsentimentally emotional, and seriously playful, leading his work to be described as “from another planet” (New York Times), “magical, futuristic,” (AllAboutJazz.com), “limitless” (Citypaper, Philadelphia) “transcendent” (Village Voice) and “brilliant” (New York Magazine).

Bleckmann, who has been residing in New York City since 1989, has released a series of gorgeous and irreverent albums, including his highly acclaimed Hello Earth—the Music of Kate Bush. In recent years, he has appeared as a special guest on recordings by Ambrose Akinmusire for Blue Note Records and Julia Hülsmann’s trio for ECM, and in 2017, ECM released Theo’s recording with his Elegy Quintet, produced by Manfred Eicher. In their album review of Elegy, the Wall Street Journal called Bleckmann “a jazz vocalist for the 21st Century.”

Bleckmann has collaborated with musicians, artists, actors and composers, including Laurie Anderson, Uri Caine, Philip Glass, Ann Hamilton, Sheila Jordan, Frances McDormand, Ben Monder, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kenny Wheeler, John Zorn, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and, most prominently, Meredith Monk, with whom Bleckmann worked as a core ensemble member for over 15 years. He has been interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air and appeared on the David Letterman Show with Laurie Anderson. In 2015, Bleckmann premiered his commission for the American Composers Orches-tra at Carnegie Hall, and 2016 brought the premieres of two new works to the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics.

Bleckmann has been a regular presence in “Best of” polls, from DownBeat, Rhapsody, and WQXR. In 2010, Bleckmann received the prestigious JAZZ

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ECHO award in his native Germany, and in 2019 was voted Jazz Vocalist of the Year in the El Intruso Jazz Poll in Argentina.

One of his generation’s extraordinary talents, Dan Tepfer has earned an international reputation as a pianist-composer of wide-ranging ambition, individuality and élan — one “who refuses to set himself limits” (France’s Télérama). The New York City-based Tepfer, born in 1982 in Paris to Ameri-can parents, has performed around the world with some of the leading lights in jazz and classical music; he has also crafted a discography striking for its breadth and depth, encompassing probing solo improvisation and intimate duets, as well as trio albums rich in their rhythmic verve, melodic allure and the leader’s keen-eared taste in songs no matter the genre.

Tepfer earned global acclaim for his 2011 Sunnyside album Goldberg Varia-tions/Variations, a disc that sees him performing J.S. Bach’s masterpiece as well as improvising upon it—to “elegant, thoughtful and thrilling” effect (New York Magazine). Tepfer’s newest album, Natural Machines, stands as one of his most ingeniously forward-minded yet; available now as a video album on YouTube and as an audio-only CD/download/stream via Sunnyside, this solo project five years in the making finds him exploring in real time the intersec-tion between science and art, between coding and improvisation, between digital algorithms and the rhythms of the heart.

Tepfer has also composed for various ensembles beyond jazz. His piano quintet Solar Spiral was premiered in 2016 at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, with Tepfer performing alongside the Avalon String Quartet. Tepfer has received commis-sions from the Prague Castle Guard Orchestra for two works: the suite Algo-rithmic Transform (2015) and a concerto for symphonic wind band and impro-vising piano, The View from Orohena (2010). In summer 2019, Tepfer unveiled his jazz-trio arrangement of Stravinsky’s Baroque-channeling Pulcinella.

Tepfer’s honors have included the first prize and audience prize at the 2006 Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition, first prize at the 2006 East Coast Jazz Festival Competition, and first prize at the 2007 competition of the American Pianists Association. He was voted a Best New Artist in JazzTimes

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(2010) and a Rising Star in DownBeat (2011). Tepfer garnered the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014; a Mac-Dowell Fellowship, with a residency at the MacDowell Colony in 2016; and a three-year creative grant from the French Foundation BNP-Paribas in 2018.

The Telegraph Quartet (Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violins; Pei-Ling Lin, vi-ola; Jeremiah Shaw, cello) formed in 2013 with an equal passion for standard and contemporary chamber music repertoire. Described by the San Francis-co Chronicle as “…an incredibly valuable addition to the cultural landscape” and “powerfully adept… with a combination of brilliance and subtlety,” the Telegraph Quartet was awarded the prestigious 2016 Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award and the Grand Prize at the 2014 Fischoff Chamber Music Competition.

The Quartet has performed in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, San Francis-co’s Herbst Theatre, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Chamber Masters Series, and at festivals including the Chautauqua Institute, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, and the Emilia Romagna Festival. They have collaborated with pianists Leon Fleisher and Simone Dinnerstein; cellists Norman Fischer and Bonnie Hampton; violinist Ian Swensen; and the Hen-schel Quartett. A fervent champion of 20th- and 21st-century repertoire, the Telegraph Quartet has premiered works by John Harbison, Robert Sirota, and Richard Festinger. In 2018 the Quartet released its debut album, Into the Light, featuring works by Anton Webern, Benjamin Britten, and Leon Kirch-ner on the Centaur label.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Quartet is currently on the cham-ber music faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as the Quar-tet-in-Residence and has given master classes at the SFCM Collegiate and Pre-College Divisions, through the Morrison Artist Series at San Francisco State University, and abroad at the Taipei National University of the Arts, Na-tional Taiwan Normal University, and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

For more information, visit telegraphquartet.com.