Press

SSO with Emanuel Ax: mastery coupled with humanity

When Emanuel Ax plays Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto, any participating orchestra’s principal cellist can expect to be accorded an equal place in the spotlight. It was heartwarming, at Benaroya Hall on Thursday evening, to observe the pianist’s insistent inclusion of Efe Baltacigil in his acceptance of the audience’s plaudits. Read more …

John Adams’ ‘Absolute Jest’ in San Francisco

By Mark Swed | Los Angeles Times

When John Adams was a young composer and conductor in San Francisco in the early ’70s, he would often perform the experimental music of John Cage and other radicals, which was the hip thing to do at the time. But he has said that all that avant-garde business could leave him musically dissatisfied, and he’d go home and put on recordings of late Beethoven string quartets.
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