In early Feb­ru­ary, I inter­viewed Donato Cabr­era, Res­i­dent Con­duc­tor at the SF Sym­phony and guest con­duc­tor for the Feb­ru­ary 28 SFCMP con­cert. In the inter­view, Cabr­era dis­cusses the dif­fer­ences between the Amer­i­can and Euro­pean con­duct­ing tra­di­tions, the dan­gers of over­spe­cial­iza­tion, chal­lenges fac­ing the new music com­mu­nity in the United States, and how he thinks works by liv­ing com­posers should be pro­grammed. You can read the inter­view on SFCMP’s blog.

Rat­ing: 3.5 stars out of 5

George Ben­jamin was the San Fran­cisco Sym­phony’s composer-in-residence this month for this year’s instal­la­tion of their Project San Fran­cisco. Truth­fully, I was not famil­iar with Benjamin’s work, but it came highly rec­om­mended by many of my col­leagues, and so I looked for­ward to hear­ing it. I attended the SFS’s final con­cert with Ben­jamin on Sat­ur­day night (16 Jan 2010), where he con­ducted two of his pieces: Ringed by the Flat Hori­zon (1980), the piece that brought him to inter­na­tional atten­tion, and a more recent piece, Duet (2008; see YouTube video below). In gen­eral, while I found Benjamin’s pieces highly com­pe­tent works, I don’t think he lives up to the (per­haps unfairly) high stan­dard peo­ple attribute to him. Con­tinue read­ing “Review: George Benjamin’s <em>Duet</em> with the San Fran­cisco Symphony” »