Gann in the Bay Area

I have two performances coming up in San Francisco and Berkeley next week – one I’ll be present for, the other I won’t. Red-headed pianists Sarah Cahill and Kathleen Supové – I call attention to their hair color because the title of the concert is “Two Redheads and 88 Solenoids,” although I think of Cahill as more of a strawberry blonde – are playing some music for piano and Disklavier plus piano, dotted with pieces for Disklavier alone. The premiere in my case is Private Dances, a set of dances of which I wrote two in 2000 and four more last summer, 25 minutes in all. Cahill is also playing pieces by Carl Stone and Tania Leon, while Supové is offering works by Dan Becker, John Adams, and Randall Woolf. During intermission some of Becker’s and my Disklavier pieces will be featured. (The Disklavier, by the way, is an acoust-, oh forget it.) Details for the two identical concerts are as follows:

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004

8 PM

The Slavonic Cultural Center

60 Onondaga Ave. (corner of Alemany Blvd; near Balboa Bart)

San Francisco

$12

and

Saturday, November 6th, 2004

8 PM

The Berkeley Arts Festival Gallery

2324 Shattuck Ave.

Berkeley

$12

To make the first concert I would have had to fly across the country on Election Day, and it occured to me that Dick Cheney might choose that day to order his Pentagon friends to shoot a couple more planes out of the sky and then claim he was mistaken again. So I’ll wait until President-Elect Kerry is securely ratified, and go out for the Saturday performance.