Election Section

Don’t let the title fool you. The San Francisco Chamber Ensemble’s American Classics program this weekend pays due homage to both Europe and America, the past and the future, crabbed age and youth. 

From Europe’s past, from its youth, there are two now hoary Bach concertos. From America, there are New World compositions from Aaron Copland (20th Century) and Paul Dresher (21st Century). An especially youthful note will be sounded by debut artist Juliann Ma, a 15-year-old tenth grader at Albany High School and already a highly acclaimed performer. 

If you were lucky enough to catch the San Francisco Chamber Ensemble’s New Year’s Eve Concert, you know how much fun this group and its music director, Benjamin Simon, can be. That evening, as well as performing the world premiere of Harold Meltzer’s quirky “Concerto for Two Bassoons,” a couple of Boccherini’s fluffy confections and an exquisite rendering of Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante,” there was also a fund-raising auction for the Ensemble that lead to Mr. Simon’s surrendering his baton to an adorable little girl who hammed her way through all the choruses of Burns’ “Auld Lang Syne” with the audience singing along. 

It put me in mind that Mozart and Burns were contemporaries and fellow Masons. It was a perfect transition, both musically and emotionally, into the new year, effervescent, wacky, yet still haimish. 

This weekend’s program promises just as much mixing of music and moods. The Bach pieces, the “Third Brandenburg Concerto” and the “D minor Piano Concerto,” are acknowledged masterpieces. Like so much of Bach’s greatest work, they seem to peel the skin off the universe to reveal “all that mighty heart” pulsing underneath. One of the oddities of the “Third Brandenburg Concerto” is its inexplicable two-chord second movement. It feels at once truncated and modern. In the ensemble’s version, the violinist will play a brief improvised cadenza leading into the final movement. 

Juliann Ma will be featured on the “D Minor Piano Concerto,” a piece Bach wrote to display his own harpsichord virtuosity in performances with his orchestra at Zimmerman’s Coffee House in Leipzig. This is a muscular music that is still tender, celestial and inevitable. 

Our scene shifts from the German baroque to the American modern with Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” here performed in its original version as a suite for thirteen instruments. Copland (1900-1990) started out as a neo-classical follower of Nadia Boulanger, but in the Thirties his music took a populist path when he wrote the ballet scores, “Billy the Kid” (1938) and “Rodeo” (1942), both set in the American Old West. 

Then in 1943, dancer Martha Graham commissioned “Appalachian Spring.” The title comes from a Hart Crane poem, but the ballet was about a Shaker couple building a new farmhouse in Pennsylvania. The old Shaker hymn, “Tis the Gift to Be Simple” is featured prominently in the suite. As a lagniappe, the Ensemble’s version will also include additional ballet music that was left out of the suite. 

The Ensemble’s world premiere of Paul Dresher’s “Still, Rise, Fall, Again” takes us from 20th Century modern into 21st Century post-modern. Dresher’s compositions show an awareness of American jazz, folk, rock and popular music; indigenous non-European music; and classical and avant-garde European music. 

In other words, everything. The writing of this new piece also took into account the fact that it would share the program with Copland’s original chamber version of “Appalachian Spring.” Beyond that, expect to be surprised. The same might be said of the whole tripartite program, a big, delicious slice of musical Neapolitan ice cream.  

›