I'm beset by California envy again, wistfully reading the prospectus of the 11th Other Minds Festival, which begins on Thursday in San Francisco. Several principal personalities of what is variously called "experimental," "downtown," "avant-garde," or "post-minimalist" music will attend. As a proponent of Lower Midtown Music, I'm inclined to look at this us-vs.-them jargon with a skeptical eye, but it makes for a useful rallying point, if nothing else. The line-up includes Phill Niblock (whose guitar piece Sethwork was one of the highlights of Sounds Like Now last fall); veteran Bay Area sound-poet Charles Amirkhanian; hip-hop-inflected violinist-composer Daniel Bernard Roumain; a concert in celebration of left-wing firebrand Marc Blitzstein, whose centenary seems to have been overlooked on this more politically fearful coast; John Luther Adams, topographer of spacious, imaginatively detailed soundscapes (and not to be confused with the composer of Nixon); and Bang on a Can's Evan Ziporyn.
But there's plenty to see at home this week: an American Composers Orchestra concert on Wednesday night, including a premiere by former Bay Area stalwart Ingram Marshall (his vocal-electronic piece Hymnodic Delays is a digital-age masterpiece); Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, semistaged with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at Lincoln Center on Thursday; a show by Antony & The Johnsons later that night (that's a link to Antony's lustrous new CD, not to the sold-out show*); two concerts by the bright young NOW Ensemble, both featuring Judd Greenstein's fantastic new piece Folk Music, the second with blogger-composer Mark Dancigers; and — could you ask for a more perfect warm-up for the Oscars? — a Sunday Met Chamber Ensemble concert including Kurtág's Hommage à R. Sch. and Berg's Chamber Concerto. If I were a supernatural being, I would also attend Wet Ink w/ Charles Gayle on Wednesday, the Philharmonia Baroque at Zankel on the same night, and Per Tengstrand at Scandinavia House on Thursday. Fans of dramatically batty, diction-free, intermittently gorgeous tenor singing will also want to hear José Cura in Samson at the Met on Thursday or later. Last night's premiere left me personally less than gobsmacked, but knowledgeable opéramanes in my circle were transported.
* "Indirection!" — Miss Gould
