Music News
L.A. Hotshot to Conduct S.F. Symphony
The Los Angeles Times, which broke the story last weekend of L.A. Philharmonic Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen leaving his position, reported yesterday how Salonen’s designated successor, Gustavo Dudamel Ramírez, got his start:
Three years ago, Dudamel entered a conducting competition sponsored by the Bamberg Symphony in southern Germany. When he gave his first downbeat to the orchestra and it played its first chord, he loudly exclaimed, “Wow!” He was 23 years old and music director of the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Caracas, Venezuela. He had never before stood in front of a professional ensemble.
Esa-Pekka Salonen was one of the judges. And when he arrived in Bamberg three days later for the finals, he said in an interview last week, Dudamel was already a seasoned pro. That the competition launched a meteoric career is already part of the Dudamel legend. He is now in demand everywhere. He has a fancy contract to record for Deutsche Grammophon. And Monday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced officially that Dudamel would succeed Salonen as music director in 2009.
Dudamel’s career took off in the last two years with an unprecedented series of conducting debuts: at the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among others, in 2005. Last year, he appeared with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. He made his debut at La Scala with Don Giovanni last November.
This month, he will debut with the Chicago Symphony, and next March, Dudamel will appear as guest conductor with the San Francisco Symphony, leading performances of Stravinsky’s The Firebird and the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 1 (with Kirill Gerstein). Dudamel will be only 27 then (he was born on Jan. 26, 1981), and he’s just a few months younger than S.F. Symphony Associate Conductor James Gaffigan. Whatever happened to conductors of Methuselah’s age?
Gustavo Dudamel — and Dudamel, just a few years ago
Stanford’s “Reactions to the Record” Symposium
Stanford University’s Music Department is hosting a three-day symposium April 19-21, titled “Reactions to the Record: Perspectives on Historic Performance.” The meeting’s focus is on the earliest acoustic recordings and player piano rolls. Performance styles common on these early technologies began to vanish during World War I and were considered almost scandalous after World War II.
A forum for experiment and dialogue, the symposium will explore what these traces of vintage styles mean to performers, composers, and listeners today. Located in Campbell Recital Hall in Stanford’s Braun Music Center, events include: performances by Malcolm Bilson and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, recordings on Duo-Dextra pianola (reproducing piano), Duo-Art and Ampico piano rolls (of Ravel, Granados, and Rachmaninoff), early Victrolas, and cylinder players. There will be rare film footage of historic performances by Josef Hofmann, George Gershwin, Emanuel Feuermann, and others. The symposium will be recorded by Chicago’s WFMT Radio Network for international distribution as a two-hour radio special.
Music, the Great Soporific
“We got our report card back — the results of the KDFC Listener Survey — and its pretty darned good,” reports San Francisco’s only remaining classical-music FM station, which advertises itself as “the oasis of calm in your busy workday.”
“On a 10-point scale, 85 percent of you rate your overall satisfaction with KDFC at eight or above. For what reasons do you listen? To relax and stay calm, said 82 percent, while 69 percent find KDFC energizing, 72 percent listen for background music … 71 percent listen to learn something.”
To relax, perchance to sleep. This inane KDFC sales pitch of recent years — music as a tranquilizer — was used as an excuse to limit vocal music and leave the city without a major FM station to carry the Metropolitan Opera live broadcasts. Although backed up by this survey, the policy of keeping music quiet and calm is now being put to the test by the agreement with the San Francisco Opera to broadcast from the War Memorial.
Perhaps the self-confessed 69 percent who seek musical amphetamine will appreciate the turbulent strains of Wagner and the like, while the 82 percent who desire to chill out and the 72 percent “backgrounders” will turn to another source of Muzak. Is that too harsh? Not if you match Muzak’s synonyms — easy listening, MOR, elevator music — with KDFC’s “so soothing” advertising campaign.
A friend who has a classical music program on a Midwest radio station writes in response to the KDFC survey: “I was traumatized (seriously) to read this, which is exactly what my program director says. He has a ban on vocal music because he says it scares people away. On the other hand, you may remember the advertising campaign by the Baltimore Opera in the early 1990s: They were hysterical, played on the rock stations, and subscriptions went up 90 percent!”
I remember Glynn Ross’s Seattle Opera campaign 20 years before that. The town was festooned with “Get Ahead With Salome” signs, and earned enough money to put on an annual Ring cycle. Perhaps the race does not always go to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but the fight for classical music will not be won by appeals to the somnolent and slumberous.
In Memoriam: Colin Graham
Colin Graham, a highly esteemed opera director around the world, with a notable record in San Francisco, died Friday, at age 75. He was artistic director of the St. Louis Opera Theatre since 1985.
Graham received an Order of the British Empire in 2001, and earned a lifetime achievement award in 2004 from the Texas-based National Opera Association. He was responsible for seven productions at the San Francisco Opera between 1971 and 2001, including premieres of The Dangerous Liaisons and A Streetcar Named Desire, along with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and The Ballad of Baby Doe.
Colin Graham
What If They Gave a Concert … and No One Came?
A brilliant article by Gene Weingarten in
The Washington Post describes a grand experiment with a sad ending. Joshua Bell impersonated a street musician, played his Strad to the best of his ability for almost an hour at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in D.C. — and netted only a few listeners and $23 in donations. Read the story and marvel, or sigh, at the world.
Jeffrey Kahane Ailing
Colorado Symphony Music Director Jeffrey Kahane (former conductor of the Santa Rosa Symphony and music director of Sonoma’s Green Music Festival) has canceled all scheduled appearances in March and April because of severe hypertension. Symphony administrators say they expect Kahane to lead concerts in May and the season finale in June — a weeklong Beethoven festival where the conductor is also scheduled to perform as soloist in five piano concertos.
A cardiologist quoted in The Denver Post commented that severe or malignant hypertension provokes symptoms beyond those associated with typical high blood pressure. These can include confusion, headaches, and vision irregularities. If left untreated, it can lead to heart failure, kidney failure, or stroke. In Kahane’s case, speaking in general terms, the doctor said the cancellations are understandable “because even modest activity can elevate blood pressure and complicate treatment.”
Trinity Lyric Spreads Its Wings
Trinity Lyric Opera, a new enterprise, has a new home and a new season. Alan Thayer’s 3-year-old company from Walnut Creek will perform in the new (and that’s the last use of that adjective for a while) Center for the Arts in Castro Valley. Don’t count on Trinity’s Web site, where everything beyond the main page is “under construction.” But when the construction dust settles, you will see information about July performances of Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land (a premiere of sorts for the full-length opera), which is an interesting project that replaces the originally scheduled Massenet Thais. Trinity’s previous production was of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Guitarrada at the Conservatory
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents “Guitarrada III: Guitars After World War II.” It is an afternoon of presentations by Pepe Romero, Richard Brune, L. John Harris, and David Tanenbaum, in cooperation with the Omni Foundation. The event begins at 2 p.m. on May 6 at the new Conservatory Concert Hall.
From the advent of nylon guitar strings, to the emergence of cedar soundboards, and the radical variations of double tops, raised fingerboards, and lattice bracing, “Guitarrada III” will feature guitars from World War II to the present. Guitars from famed luthiers Robert Bouchet, Ignacio Fleta, and Jose Ramirez III, as well as Greg Smallman, Thomas Humphrey, and other contemporaries will highlight the innovations that have taken the 19th-century Antonio de Torres “modern” guitar in new directions.
Guitarrada was coined by the late guitarist and composer Celedonio Romero, who used the word to describe the spontaneous gatherings at Casa Romero in Del Mar, where a variety of guitars were examined, played, and even traded by visiting luthiers, guitarists, and students. The event, the Conservatory emphasizes, is not a concert or performance. Romero’s exclusive concert appearance in the Bay Area is a San Francisco Performances concert on May 5 at the Herbst Theatre.
Hersh to Scale Parnassus
Paul Hersh will be the soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 with Symphony Parnassus, at 3 p.m. on April 15 at Herbst Theatre. He replaces Robin Sutherland, who is ill. Parnassus Music Director Stephen Paulson conducts the program, which also includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 and features soprano Terri Alvord singing Mozart’s Ch’io mi scordi di te, conducted by Dawn Harms.
Paul Hersh
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2007 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.