At long last: a small concert hall on this side of the Bay to rival
Berkeley's Hertz Hall.  (Don't mean to diss Herbst Theater, but the
sound here is far more focused.)

It took Ruth Felt's San Francisco Performances a full year and a half
after the opening of the de Young Museum to set the debut of Koret
Auditorium as a concert hall, but it was well worth the wait, although
size is a problem: 280 seats vs.  Hertz's 678 and Herbst's 928 - different
scales of economy.

On Sunday evening, Marino Fermenti, a titan of the keyboard with a
thousand voices, gave Koret a workout that's difficult to imagine, even
while witnessing the concert, and the hall came through most impressively.
Koret's acoustics are clean, perhaps not as warm as some prefer, but
with an immediacy of sound, no excessive overtones, and crisp as all
get-out, without being harsh.  It's a pleasure to listen to an instrument
there, and one hopes for a similar welcome venue when it comes to the
voice.  There is just the slightest sense of air conditioning at work.

Koret is steeply raked (even more so than Hertz, more like the old
Berkeley Rep), with perfect sightlines, a small stage of parquet, dark
walls covered with a felt-like material.  It is visually attractive,
with a huge "panoramic" screen (a complex sound system embedded behind
the porous canvas), a grillwork above it, opening to the street, where
passersby can be seen, a bit distracting during a concert.

Thanks to the work of Auerbach & Associates, the sound in Koret far
exceeds what one may expect from a hall without sufficient hard surfaces
in evidence.

Formenti - whose performance is reviewed elsewhere - makes up for all
the interruptions one suffers when symphonies and song cycles are chopped
up by ignorant applause.  Probably to the dislike of some, the pianist
plays through all pieces, not pausing, creating one uninterrupted work
of many - often disparate - components.

With his virtuoso brilliance, seductive intensity and fluid chameleon
shifts in the music, Formenti presents Ives-Bartok-Webern-Stravinsky
before intermission, then
Stockhausen-Messiaen-Stockhausen-Messiaen-Nono-Messiaen, two never-before
heard "arias" without taking a breath.  From ppp to fff, an endless
variety of dynamics and timbre, this unique fare from a great pianist
gave the hall's acoustics a trial no mechanical test could.  The grade,
to these ears, was A+

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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