NCCO presents Love and War, featuring Awadagin Pratt
Presidio Theatre
99 Moraga Ave, San Francisco, CA 94129 USA
3:00 PM, Saturday, May 4, 2024
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## Set One
[3:05 PM] {lights down, welcome from Richard Lonsdorf}
[3:06 PM] {performers out}
[3:07 PM] {Greetings from Daniel Hope}
David Diamond (1915–2005): Rounds, for string orchestra (1944)
[3:25 PM] {DH introduces the next work}
[4:03 PM] {lights down; performers out; DH previews the second half of today's program}
Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990): Serenade (after Plato's Symposium) (1954), featuring Daniel Hope, violin
Today was unexpectedly rainy: and it just kept on drip-drip-dropping out of the sky. Messed up Saturday traffic pretty good! Seeing the ETA stuck at longer-than-usual, I made a mental note to get my butt in gear and out of the house early, but got a little distracted, and so ended up arriving at the venue with only five or ten minutes to spare. Had some extra stress finding a parking spot (lots of idiots parked at weird angles or taking up two spaces), and then a little more when the parking machine wouldn't take my credit card (uh, that means I get free parking, right?).
Found my seat in the theatre and relaxed for a few minutes before the lights went down, whew!
First set today was pretty darn good. I agree that swapping the order of the two Rounds works was a good decision: Jessie Montgomery's new piece was a dramatic burner! It will be interesting to see if that work appears in the SFS repertoire sometime in the years ahead (Awadagin premiered it with the Oakland Symphony last fall).
At set break I moved up to the center of the front row in order to escape the distraction of the grunting and heavy breathing from the couple behind me. I'm sure they're nice people, but if you can't be quiet during a show…. Except for the fact that my eye-level was now about shin-height on the performers, this was a major improvement: I should have moved during the break between the first two pieces!
I thought it really odd that there was no break between the two works on the second half…maybe half a breath of a pause? If Hope mentioned that was the plan, I must have been spacing out!
The Bernstein work was pretty fun, and certainly sounds a lot like his other pieces. Maybe the use of percussion created that impression? I dunno. I'm not enough of a scholar to be able to enunciate what made the work familiar even though it was my first listen.
It had rained a bit more during the show, but seemed to be clearing up as I walked back to my car.
It was another slog driving across SF to get to the bridge: too many people, too many cars, too many jokers not paying attention. What can you do!? My mood improved considerably once I merged onto the Bay Bridge: eastbound traffic was jamming good!
Got home and decided to take advantage of the extra daylight hours by pulling thistles from the empty lot across the street. Once my gloves soaked through I started feeling chilly despite being bundled up decently well, so I stopped once my giant yard bag was relatively full. Cleared out another decent patch, yay!
Molly Colin posted an interesting interview article with Awadagin Pratt about this program at SFCV.
Daniel Hope posted a brief video with his throughts about the Bernstein work that closes today's program.
Back to the previous event ☸ Up to the 2024 yearbox ☸ Up to the 2024 event list! ☸ On to the next event!