Music News
Sellars to Address the State of Cinema
Opera director Peter Sellars — composer John Adams‘ longtime collaborator — has been chosen to give the “State of Cinema” address at the upcoming, landmark season of the San Francisco International Film Festival. At 50, SFIFF is the country’s oldest film festival, and the event (April 26 to May 10) is drawing attention worldwide.
In addition to the April 29 address at the Sundance Kabuki Theater, on April 28 Sellars will join Adams at the Castro Theater for the screening of Jon Else’s Wonders Are Many. This documentary feature deals with the sources and the making of the San Francisco Opera-commissioned Doctor Atomic, written by Adams and Sellars, who also directed it. (The two also collaborated on A Flowering Tree, premiered in the U.S. by the San Francisco Symphony last month.)
Scene from the Adams-Sellars’ Doctor Atomic
The festival will also present two of the seven music-films — Daratt and Opera Jawa — commissioned by Sellars, who was director of Vienna’s New Crowned Hope Festival, staged in honor of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. The former is Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s fable from Chad about a young man seeking to avenge his father’s murder, a theme explored in several Mozart operas. Garin Nugroho’s Opera Jawa is a postmodern musical that updates an ancient Sanskrit epic and features gamelan music and Indonesian dancing.
In his plans to celebrate the San Francisco film festival’s half-century mark, Graham Leggat might have been inspired by Oscar Wilde’s bon mot: “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” Surely, Leggat, executive director of festival parent organization San Francisco Film Society, would prefer “just right” to “excess,” and if all goes well that’s the way it will be. From an observer’s initial viewpoint, however, the nimiety and overabundance of SFIFF-50 is simply stunning. Simply put, this is big. Take a look for yourself, at the festival Web site.
How in this world of hundreds of competing film festivals do you put together some 220 different programs and live events — including 108 feature films and 92 shorts from 54 countries — as well as organize 25 juried awards, and present more than 100 notable filmmakers? No wonder an audience of 80,000 is expected during the 15-day event (many times more than that number if you include the expected Internet participation).
No movie news — even that of sophisticated festivals — is complete without name-dropping. So here’s a taste: George Lucas (to receive the Irving Levin Award), Spike Lee (SFS Directing Award), Robin Williams (Peter J. Owens Award), Peter Morgan (Kanbar Award), film historian Kevin Brownlow (Mel Novikoff Award), and Rosario Dawson and Sam Rockwell (Midnight Awards).
The country’s oldest festival started modestly back in 1957, when Eisenhower was president. A precious few “foreign films” were shown outside New York’s Thalia, back when gasoline was pumped for you by a uniformed attendant at 29 cents a gallon (19 cents during price wars), first-class mail took a 3 cent stamp, and the Oscar went to 80 Days Around the World — yes, that long ago.
Fifty years ago, the Metro Theater served as the festival venue. Today, it takes place all over the Bay: the newly renovated and renamed Sundance Kabuki Cinema, Castro Theater, the Museum of Modern Art, Cowell Theater at Fort Mason, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and Landmark’s Aquarius Theater in Palo Alto. There are also several satellite and “nontraditional” venues, such as the McBean Theater, a giant outdoor screen at Justin Herman Plaza, the Intersection for the Arts, and elsewhere.
As always at these festivals, great discoveries can be made at any screening, so attention should not be limited to the special events … but here they are anyway: Opening night is Emanuele Crialese’s historical drama, Golden Door, with Charlotte Gainsbourgh, which is about a Sicilian family’s immigration to America. The centerpiece presentation is Tom DiCillo’s comedy, Delirious, about paparazzi. Music is in focus on closing night, with Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose, a biography of Edith Piaf, with Marion Cotillard.
S.F. Chamber Orchestra: Free and Devilish
Benjamin Simon’s San Francisco Chamber Orchestra continues its unique season of performing substantial musical fare, for free. Next up: “The Devil Made Me Do It!,” a program showcasing Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat (”The Soldier’s Tale”), narrated by Joel ben Izzy, and featuring the Mark Foehringer Dance Project’s Duettos, to music by Heitor Villa-Lobos.
The concerts are scheduled for April 20 at San Francisco’s Brava Theater, April 21 at Palo Alto’s St. MarkÂ’s Episcopal Church (both at 8 p.m.), and at 3 p.m. on April 22 at Los Altos’ Foothill College Theater.
Speaking of Maestro Simon, his Web site offers the following outrageously insensitive violist story, which we feel compelled to repeat here, if only to discourage such disrespectful behavior:
Timmy came home from school one day and ran into the kitchen, shouting “Mommy! Mommy! We did numbers in school today! All the other kids could only go to five, but I got all the way to 10!” “Congratulations, dear,” said his mother. “That’s because you’re a violist!”
The next afternoon, Timmy burst into the kitchen again, shouting “Mommy! Mommy! We did letters in school today! All the other kids could only go to M, but I got all the way to Z!” “That’s wonderful, dear,” said his mother. “That’s because you’re a violist!”
The next afternoon, Timmy came into the kitchen once again. “Mommy! Mommy! We did measuring in school today! IÂ’m the tallest person in the class. Is that because I’m a violist?” asked Timmy eagerly. “No, dear,” replied his mother. “It’s because you’re 40 years old.”
Page Turner, the Movie
This is for real, not a paranoid musician’s fantasy: Coming to Bay Area Landmark theaters on Friday is Denis Dercourt’s La tourneuse de pages. Yes, The Page Turner is about a young woman who turns pages for pianists too lazy to memorize the score. (Please hold your fire, that characterization is a joke … sort of.)
The film, by writer-director Dercourt, whose films include Lise et André, tells the story of a talented 10-year-old girl who fails her Conservatory entrance exam when distracted by the thoughtless behavior of the jury chair (Catherine Frot), a famous concert pianist. The traumatized child (clearly not cut out for the vicissitudes of a music career) gives up the piano. A decade later, as an adult (played by Déborah François), she turns to page-turning, in what is part of a revenge scheme. When the climactic concert scene comes, will she turn pages too fast, too slow, or not at all? Expect no spoiler here.
A Bridge Not Too Far at Menlo
Artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han have announced the theme of their next Music@Menlo Festival, “Bridging the Ages.” The festival, July 22 to Aug. 10, presents 12 concerts “honoring the timelessness of great music, bringing together works by composers distanced by both geography and history.” A couple of examples:
Program 2, “Sounds of Nature,” unites Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals with Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, German Baroque composer H.I. von Biber’s 1669 Sonata … representativa, Samuel Barber’s woodwind quintet, and George Crumb’s 1971 Vox balaenae (Voice of the Whale) — a stunning range and variety of treatments “bridging” a shared theme.
Program 4, “Death and Transfiguration,” presents treatments of final days. There’s Rachmaninov’s Trio élégiaque; Schubert’s Death and the Maiden; Bruce Adolphe’s String Quartet No. 4, Whispers of Mortality; and Bach’s Ich habe genug (incongruously featuring a singer not on the same plane of existence as those — namely, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Thomas Quasthoff — whose voices we will forever cherish singing this most personal and poignant of Bach cantatas).
With that exception, festival participants are the crème de la crème of the music world. Here are a few examples: violinists Jorja Fleezanis, Philip Setzer, and Ian and Joseph Swensen; the Escher and Miami String Quartets; and pianists Inon Barnatan, Gary Graffman, Gilbert Kalish, Kevin Murphy, and Wu Han.
In addition to the main concerts, Music@Menlo offers the “Carte Blanche” series, in which artists curate their own concert programs. Encounters features multidisciplinary presentations and the Chamber Music Institute features open master classes. There are student performances and family concerts, an all-day Chamber Music Open House, Cafe Conversations, and the popular Prelude Performances by young artists from the Chamber Music Institute.
The Miami String Quartet
San Franciscans to Prague, New York, Vienna
While reading the Prague Daily Monitor, we came upon news of the 62nd Prague Spring international music festival, May 12 to June 3: “This year’s most expected stars … the San Francisco Symphony with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and baritone Thomas Hampson, visiting Prague for the first time in four years.”
On this stop of the Symphony’s European tour, on May 24 and 25, the concert will feature Stravinsky’s Le Baiser de la fée Divertimento and Symphony in Three Movements, along with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1. (The program will be “rehearsed” at the Symphony’s subscription concerts in Davies Hall this week.) There is another evening of Aaron Copland, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss and both programs will also be performed in Carnegie Hall and Vienna’s Konzerthaus.
New Century, New Concertmaster
New Century Chamber Orchestra’s “guest quest” continues. Each series of concerts is led by yet another guest concertmaster, as the organization searches for a permanent occupant of the seat. For the third program — Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Strings, and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht — the orchestra “leader” (in the British sense) and soloist will be Geoff Nuttall, cofounder of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. The concerts will take place April 11-14, in Berkeley, Palo Alto, San Francisco, and San Rafael.
Geoff Nuttall
The Shape of Ring to Come
The San Francisco-Washington National Opera coproduction of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelung, in Francesca Zambello’s “American setting,” begins in the War Memorial, with Das Rheingold, June 2008. The other three operas will come one at a time in subsequent seasons. The entire Ring cycle will be performed during the summer of 2011. Meanwhile, however, the D.C. company is already halfway through the cycle, with the opening of Die Walküre, last week.
What to expect? Fellow Wagnerian Alan Goldhammer reports from Kennedy Center:
This “American Ring” began last season with an interesting and intriguing Rheingold and will continue after a hiatus with Siegfried in the 2008-2009 season.
As in Rheingold, the opera opens with a scrim-projected Mississippi River whose ripples turn into a vortex midway though the opening music. The projection tracks Siegmund’s run through the woods to Hunding’s hut that frames the ash tree where the sword waits. The traditional Act 1 setting gives way to Act 2 where Wotan sits reading a financial paper in a 1940s office building overlooking a large metropolis. The battleground in the second scene sits underneath an elevated roadway.
The beginning of Act 3 begins with a projection of World War II planes taking off with paratroopers. This approach was not bothersome because of the modern update. In fact, one might argue that this image of the liberation of Germany from Nazi rule is a poignant touch. Several of the eight Valkyries descend onto the mountain top by parachute with pictures of the fallen heroes that are hung on the laddered towers that frame the rock.
The final farewell was dramatically staged with a real ring of fire surrounding the rock where Brünnhilde was put to sleep. The fire ring was tested between Acts 2 and 3, causing dryness in the stage area, something that might have had an impact on the singers. All in all, this was an effective staging of the opera. It was not as dramatic a shift as the Chereau Ring for the Bayreuth centennial or more recent European productions.
There is a lot of change in the characters throughout this opera, which was effectively conveyed through the commitment of the singers to Zambello’s view of the story. Brünnhilde’s playfulness at the beginning of Act 2 and Wotan’s anger turning to tenderness were well acted by Linda Watson and Alan Held. Placido Domingo and Anja Kampe managed to turn the Siegmund-Sieglinde pair of strangers into lovers, and Elena Zaremba’s Fricka was believably angry over the escapades of her wayward husband.
In sum, this was a solid performance marked by good singing and musical preparation by conductor Heinz Fricke. The orchestra continues to grow and improve with each season.
Celebrating American Dance
ODC Dance will host a free event at the ODC Commons, on April 20 at 5:30 p.m. It’s titled “Invention and Reinvention in American Dance: Anna Halprin and Twyla Tharp.” Participants include dance scholars Janice Ross, author of the just published Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, and Marcia Siegel, author of Howling Near Heaven: Twyla Tharp and the Reinvention of Modern Dance. The events will be moderated by ODC founder and artistic director Brenda Way.
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2007 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.