Arts & Events

"Look up one day and all you got left is what you ain't spending."

The scene is the station office of a jitney outfit in Pittsburgh's Hill District, 1977, where the drivers sit around waiting for a call to pick-up, talking, arguing, playing checkers ... The rhythm of mostly street speech is cut only by the ringing of the phone, the invariable answer: "Car service"and— an occasional message for Shealy, the neighborhood numbers runner, who comes and goes ...

It's 'Jitney,' the eighth of August Wilson's 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, a century of African American life, decade by decade, as performed by the Lower Bottom Playaz of West Oakland, directed by their founder, Ayodele Nzinga, in what was a good two-weekend run at the end of the holidays at the Flight Deck on Broadway in Uptown Oakland. -more-

Noir City, the annual festival of film noir at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco will be running from this weekend through to next, January 16-25, with a dozen double (or triple) bills, priced at $10 per program—or a $120 "passport" for all programs, plus opening night reception with refreshments and entertainment at 6 p. m. -more-

Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony’s Music Director, presided over a 70^th birthday for himself in a gala concert Thursday, January 15, 2015, at Davies Hall. As might be expected, this concert came up short on great music but long on schtick. What can one expect from a concert whose featured work for six pianos and orchestra was sketched out by Franz Liszt in 1837 but apparently never com-pleted and never performed by Liszt in its intended version. This work, Hexameron, or “Grand Bravura Variations on the March from Bellini’s I Puritani, for Six Pianos,” was ‘reconstructed’, as it is said, by Robert Linn from orchestral cues in Liszt’s solo piano scores. Michael Tilson Thomas may well have been the first to organize a performance of the six piano and orchestra version in a 1971 concert in Boston. MTT also led San Francisco Symphony in a similar performance of Hexameron in a 1985 concert here. More about this work later in this review. -more-

Compared with his later St. Matthew Passion (1729), Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion (1724) may today seem somewhat stodgy. But to the congregation of St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig who heard the St. John Passion performed on Good Friday of 1724, this work must have seemed revolutionary. Only recently appointed Kappelmeister in Leipzig, (after this post was turned down by Georg Philipp Telemann and Christoph Graupner), Bach no doubt sought to show Leipzig what he could do; so for his inaugural work in Leipzig he transformed the musical account of Christ’s Passion from plainchant and an occasional chorale sung by the congregation to a multidimensional work with choruses, recitatives, arias, and chorales. -more-