Word: franciscos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the cello section of the San Francisco Symphony finished a particularly tricky passage in Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's new Symphony No. 2 during rehearsal last week, the rest of the orchestra burst into applause. What provoked the collegial accolade was a daring cadenza for ten instruments playing as one, a high-wire act that is one of the emotional peaks of Zwilich's aptly subtitled 'Cello Symphony. The musicians' reaction was not surprising: Zwilich, 46, who in 1983 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, has for some time been regarded by fellow professionals...
...music needs no special pleading. In a work like the Double Quartet for Strings (1984), heard as part of the San Francisco Symphony's week-long salute to the composer, Zwilich displays a formidable technical command coupled with a striking ear for beguiling string sonorities. Her 1979 Chamber Symphony, a kind of elegy to her late husband, Metropolitan Opera Violinist Joseph Zwilich, is reminiscent of Shostakovich in its arching melodies and air of melancholic brooding...
...with the rest of the orchestra. Hard driving and explosive, the piece erupts from a single rhythmic idea that propels the music forward relentlessly. Even the moody slow movement cannot dilute the restless surge, which continues undaunted right to the final bar. Under Conductor Edo de Waart, the San Francisco players gave the 'Cello Symphony a committed, accomplished performance...
DIED. William Pereira, 76, master architect and planner who designed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco's Transamerica Corp. pyramid and the city of Irvine in Orange County, Calif.; of heart disease; in Los Angeles. Pereira, who tried to encourage style and balance in sprawling Southern California, once said, "We have come to accept with enthusiasm the unprofessional, unappreciative, unskillful butchery of the land that goes under the name of planning...
...Minister (1926-27), Ambassador to the U.S. (1946-56) and vice president of the International Court of Justice at the Hague (1964-67); in New York City. The suave, elegant Koo represented his country at both the Paris peace talks that ended World War I and the 1945 San Francisco conference, where the United Nations was born...