Christopher Rountree leading Wild Up in Femenine at Bing Concert Hall, Stanford.
Photo by Matthew TW Huang, care of Stanford Live
Last month, I saw two performances at Bing Concert Hall, Stanford, of Julius Eastman's music, performed by Wild Up, the LA area new music group, and reviewed them for SFCV. They were both terrific, fascinating music beautifully performed.
One of those performances was devoted exclusively to Femenine, and I got to see it again, last night at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley, in a performance that was very, very different in personnel and style from the Stanford performance. Eastman's sparse notation for Femenine allows for considerable flexibility in performance, and means that no two performances are alike, based on both choice of instrumentation and the particular performers, plus there's a big improvisatory component to the work.
At the SFCV link, I've added nearly 500 words to my original review, detailing the differences.
- Joshua Kosman, SF Chron, reviews the Berkeley performance.
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