In Tuesday’s (3/24) San Francisco Classical Voice, Lisa Hirsch writes, “Minimalism comes in many flavors…. For the California Symphony’s ‘Northern Lights’ program … on March 21, Artistic and Music Director Donato Cabrera included works by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. Pärt is unquestionably a minimalist composer … Silvestrov’s quiet, self-effacing Stille Musik (Quiet Music), written for a small string orchestra and just ten minutes long, might also qualify as minimalist. The first movement … is a strangely off-kilter waltz … Silvestrov intentionally makes [the final movement] sound exhausted, putting the brakes on any momentum through the markings in the score. Cabrera and his small band gave the work a fine performance. Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, featuring two solo violins, prepared piano, and a large string orchestra, is written on a different scale … It’s one of those works that suspends time for its audience. In the first movement, ‘Ludus – Cadenza,’ the solo violins, wonderfully played by concertmaster Jennifer Cho and associate concertmaster Sam Weiser, are often in opposition to each other … The program closed with a rousing performance of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2 … It’s anything but minimalist … Its presence on the concert showed that the hidden theme was music from countries formerly under the thumb of Russia or the Soviet Union.”
