Music News

/ April 24, 2007

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Del Sol’s Free Premiere Triplet

Del Sol String Quartet is performing three new compositions at noon on April 25 at UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall. The free concert features works by Robin Estrada, Jen Wang, and Nils Bultmann. (All Web sites offer examples of the composers’ works to be downloaded or streamed.)

S.F. Performances Announces Next Season

San Francisco Performances has announced a rich, extensive 28th season to begin in September. It will present Philip Glass, András Schiff, Luciana Souza, Marc-André Hamelin, Emmanuel Pahud, Ian Bostridge, Xuefei Yang, Yundi Li, Dubravka Tomsic, and other soloists. The Emerson, Alexander, Belcea, Brentano, and Kronos String Quartets are other highlights. SFCV will report more on the season next week.

April 25 Salon Program Postponed

San Francisco Performances‘ music salon, “Daniel Lockert: Pure Gershwin,” originally scheduled for April 25 at Hotel Rex, has been postponed due to an illness in the family. It is rescheduled to June 13, at 6:30 p.m.

Irene Dalis Vocal Competition

In honor of Opera San José’s founder-director, the inaugural Irene Dalis Vocal Competition will be held on June 1, at the California Theatre, with prizes totaling $40,000.

Judges include Peter Mark, artistic director of Virginia Opera; Diane Zola, artistic administrator of Houston Grand Opera; and Christopher Hahn, artistic director of Pittsburgh Opera. After the contestants are heard, the audience will vote for its favorite, who will receive a $5,000 prize. Participants in the competition will be selected from more than 130 artists at the West Coast Auditions for Singers from May 29-31 in San Jose.

“When Arts Management Services announced that their West Coast Auditions would be held in San Jose, it seemed natural to link our competition to their three-day audition,” says Dalis.

Dutoit’s Appointments

Charles Dutoit, 70, who conducted the San Francisco Symphony last week, received an important appointment while he was in town. The Royal Philharmonic named him artistic director and principal conductor, starting with the 2009 season. The new position overlaps with another new post as chief conductor and artistic advisor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In London, Dutoit succeeds Daniele Gatti, and in Philadelphia, Christoph Eschenbach.

One Musician’s “Reactions to the Record”

SFCV’s Lisa Hirsch writes from last week’s three-day symposium at Stanford, titled “Reactions to the Record:”

All hail the organizers, Professor George Barth and Lecturer Kumaran Arul, both of whom teach piano at Stanford, where Barth is head of keyboard programs. The two brought together a diverse group of academics, performers, and individuals interested in this subject matter: What can be learned from the performance styles found on old recordings, most of them made before World War I. This report is too brief to comment on all the sessions, nearly every one of which riveted me. See my blog, Iron Tongue of Midnight for more, much more, about the symposium.

Barth’s own presentation, with the misleadingly dry title “Embodied Knowledge vs. ‘Source Worship,’ ” was anything but dry. He discussed changes in the philosophical stance of musicology and criticism toward the score and performance, interweaving that discussion with an account of his path as a performer. Composer and Stanford faculty member Jonathan Berger spoke about the Brahms cylinder and his part in analyzing and reconstructing it. He played that reconstruction and also what he calls “the ghost of Brahms,” a re-creation of the entire First Hungarian Dance based on the performance practices indicated by the fragment recorded on the cylinder. Writer and conductor Will Crutchfield discussed how we might learn and internalize older performing styles. He then conducted a master class with two young singers, in which he proved himself a master teacher in every way: patient, positive, encouraging, and able to show the singers what they were capable of. He was a pleasure to watch.

Donald Manildi, of the International Piano Archives at the University of Maryland focused on the Liszt tradition on record. He compared a number of recorded cadenzas in two Hungarian Rhapsodies and discussed the extent to which there is a Liszt school of playing. SFCV’s own Anatole Leikin analyzed Scriabin’s piano-roll recording of the composer’s Op. 11, No. 2 Prelude. And in one of the two concerts, he extrapolated the performance style to Scriabin’s Op. 2, Two Poems.

Jonathan Bellman of the University of Northern Colorado presented a complex discussion of what, exactly, “vernacular performance” is, as well as what it means in presenting classical works derived from vernacular styles such as mazurkas and gypsy music. Pianist José Bowen, who serves as dean of the Meadows School for the Arts at Southern Methodist University, talked about “Paraphrase as Performance Practice,” using many performers’ versions of James P. Johnson’s Carolina Shout as the basis of discussion. Jeffrey Treviño presented a subtle and important paper about performers’ changing relationship to notation in the 20th century, as composers sought greater control over performers through notational specificity.

Along with these riches came two splendid concerts, and every performance was distinctive and richly nuanced. Andrew Rangell’s interweaving of Bach’s French Suite No. 1 with Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Op. 25; Malcolm Bilson’s gorgeous performance of Schumann’s Waldscenen on a beautiful replica of a Graf piano, c. 1830; and Kumaran Arul’s gripping Chopin and Schumann set were special highlights — but I call them out with some hesitation because everyone was so good.

California Symphony Residence Program’s Unique Concerto

California Symphony’s Young American Composer-in-Residence program marks its 15th anniversary with a unique concerto collaboration. In the final concerts of the season, May 6 and 8, there is the premiere of Young American Composers Concerto for Orchestra. The concerto consists of four movements — each one emphasizes a different section of the orchestra — and was composed by YACR alumni Pierre Jalbert, percussion (Music of Air and Fire), Kevin Beaver, woodwinds (Tipsy), Kevin Puts, strings (Furioso), and Christopher Theofanidis, brass (Hymn to Music).

California Symphony composers-in-residence
Kevin Beaver, Pierre Jalbert, Kevin Puts,
and Christopher Theofanidis

Music Director Barry Jekowsky, recipient of the Leopold Stokowski Conducting Prize, created the YACR program out of the same consideration that motivated him to include at least one American work on every program he has conducted for the last 20 years — at the California Symphony (which he founded in 1986), and the National Symphony in Washington D.C., where he served as the associate conductor for four years.

Puts credits YACR for his success: “I would not have the career I have were it not for the opportunity the YACR program gave me. The hard thing about embarking on an ‘orchestral’ career is that no one will commission you unless they are convinced you can navigate the challenges of writing for this amazing instrument. And the only way to convince someone is to play a recording — and usually only a high-quality one works. The California Symphony produced three such archival recordings for me, and they continue to be a personal source of pride.”

The many honors going to YACR alumni demonstrate the program’s success. They won two of the three BBC International Masterprizes awarded to date (Jalbert and Theofanidis), four Rome Prizes (Kamran Ince, Puts, Jalbert, and Theofanidis). Along with the latest alumnus, Kevin Beavers, their careers have continued to flourish with major commissions and residencies. The program was also instrumental in enabling the creation of 21 new works by American composers — an unparalleled achievement for a regional orchestra with an annual budget under $2 million.

The May 6 and 8 concerts in Walnut Creek also feature Anoushka Shankar in performance of her father Ravi Shankar’s Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

S.F. Symphony Chorus Auditions

The San Francisco Symphony’s new chorus director, Ragnar Bohlin, has announced auditions May 9-21, at Davies Symphony Hall, for the SFS Chorus’ 2007-2008 season. Both volunteer and professional positions are available. Volunteer singers are expected to perform one classical song of their choice, as well as two excerpts selected by Bohlin. Professional singers will perform two classical songs of their choice (from memory), as well as one excerpt selected by the chorus director, who will judge the 20-minute auditions. The Chorus will perform a total of 26 concerts with the San Francisco Symphony, including works for a capella chorus. For information, call (415) 503-5207.

YujaMania I

Before singing a note, you take a breath. Before touching a key on the piano, you get your arms in position. Preparation, attack: That’s how it works. But Wednesday night, in Davies Hall, I saw and heard something different.

Yuja Wang, 20, the San Francisco Symphony’s soloist in the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2, performed technical and musical miracles. But the way she approached each note dazzled most of all (except for the utter beauty of those pearly, “hesitating” notes in the Adagio). I didn’t quite believe it then, and it seems impossible even more in retrospect: Wang seems to make no visual or audible preparation for the notes. When it’s time for her entrance, she touches, attacks, begins — yet none of it, perceptibly. There is only the music, not the “technique,” nor the making of music. Her appearance here at the same time as eccentric titan of the piano Marino Formenti’s San Francisco Performances concerts in the de Young Museum made last week a red-letter entry in the diaries of keyboard fanatics.

Yuja Wang

Photo by Christian Steiner

A noted Aspen Festival veteran, Jane Erb, wrote to Classical Voice about her: “I have known Yuja since she was 15 and blew my socks off by learning the second and third movements of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 for a master class with Leon Fleisher. She learned that monster in two weeks, while doing other things, and memorized them the day before the master class. She was solid, too, and knew right where to go when Leon directed so. This was just before she entered Curtis while she was a New Horizon student here at Aspen, with John Perry.

“I am sure you know that her big, blockbuster piece is the Prokofiev Second. As she is tiny, I still can’t imagine how she does it. ‘Yes,’ she said to me, ‘I have small hands but a big stretch.’ I’ve been watching her since that first year. And she’s no prima donna either.”

If you missed Wang this time around, take note of her San Francisco Performances recital next year. Yes, Ruth Felt, who snatched up Lang Lang before he became, well, Lang Lang, contracted Wang early in her rise to fame. She will play a concert on Feb. 10 in the S.F. Conservatory of Music Concert Hall.

YujaMania II

Last week’s Music News referred to Yuja Wang’s Web site, with free samples of her recordings of Prokofiev, Ligeti, and Ravel, among others.

Reader Charlie Cockey, in faraway Brno (of Janácek fame), went online, and after being delighted with her other performances, he turned his attention to Wang’s Ligeti Etudes:

Wow! She plays them right up there with the deity, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who I heard in L.A., in the presence of Ligeti himself. Unlike the pathetic performance of the Etudes a week or so previous in Berkeley (where Ligeti was moved to get up on the stage with a blackboard and explain to the audience what he’d had in mind, because they sure weren’t hearing it from the pianist), in L.A., he just sat there a few seats away from me — his arms were folded across his chest, he had a magnificent, pixie, ear-to-ear grin on his face, just eating it up. Too bad he couldn’t have heard Wang play them as well.

Again, here as in the Prokofiev Toccata on her Web site, it is so easy to hear Wang having fun with the music — and how many players in the world can even play those works, much less with such aplomb, abandon, and sheer glee?

I’ve been listening to the “Fanfares” Etude, and going back-and-forth between the Yuja Wang Web site clip and the Pierre-Laurent Aimard Sony recordings. The differences are both interesting and telling. In the opening 15 to 20 seconds, for example, Aimard’s choice of touch-texture voicing tends to smooth out some of the irregularities in the opening right-hand fanfare. As he plays them, the right hand figures seem almost quarter-note steady (or at least some their metrical peculiarities seem much more invisible). But listen to Wang — that right hand line is hard-edged, and driving, and the asymmetries are somehow much more forcefully evident.

On the other hand, that rolling ostinato in the left hand, when she plays it, is a straight pattern with no accents, but Aimard gives the bottom note a pronounced accent, which sets up an even more insistent regularity to the pulse that makes the right hand’s metric perambulations more noticeable.

So, in their own way, each has set the right hand to a fanfaring, but my ideal performance for this section would be his left hand and her right.

As the piece progresses the differences in the choices of the two pianists continue to amaze and perplex — sometimes Aimard shines and at other times, Wang. Given how much I love Aimard’s interpretation that is mighty praise! For maximal fun, I played the two recordings at the same time, turning the music into a crazy two-piano canon.

Pierre Laurent Aimard

Photo by Vivien Harrison Parrott

No Longer Just the Home of Yellow River Piano Concerto

The Chinese have discovered a hunger for western classical music,” writes Norman Lebrecht in his weekly column. “Millions of children are paying for piano lessons, millions more are playing the violin. Estimates vary, but 40 or 50 million pupils is the conjectural figure, equivalent to the entire population of England.

“Classical music is perceived by many Chinese as a mark of quality. In a nation of 1.3 billion, quality is the opposite of quantity — the assertion of a precarious individuality — and music is a means to express yearnings and emotions which, in a totalitarian Communist society, cannot often be put into words.

“Whatever the cause, all it takes is one child in a tower block to start piano lessons and before he or she can play Chopsticks there is an upright on every floor and a clamour of scales at bedtime. The pianos, too, are no longer matchstick quality. America’s prime Baldwin brand recently bought and upgraded a Yingkou City factory that turns out 30,000 uprights and 10,000 grand pianos a year. Steinway and Bechstein have set up joint ventures with Chinese makers. Every middle-class home, it seems, wants a piano.”

In Memoriam: Michael Smuin

Former San Francisco Ballet artistic director (1973-1985) and world-renown choreographer Michael Smuin, 68, died Monday morning, apparently of a heart attack. He was teaching a class with his dance company, Smuin Ballet, on Market Street, when he collapsed. The dancers tried CPR to revive him, but they were unsuccessful, and he was dead on arrival at San Francisco General. He is survived by a son, Shane Smuin, his ex-wife and long-time dance partner, Paula Tracy, and his brothers, Douglas Smuin and Stephen Smuin.

Michael Smuin

Smuin had a close call about 15 years ago when he was working on a film and rolled down a staircase to the applause of the crew, who appreciated what they believed to be a stunt. In fact, Smuin had an infraction, flatlined as paramedics got to him, but was revived soon thereafter. In the years following, he spoke proudly of his reform from a cholesterol reading of 380 (”like walking butter,” he said) to normal levels, through a regimen of a healthy diet, walking, weight-lifting, and yoga.

Born in Montana, Smuin studied dance in Salt Lake City with William Christensen’s Ballet West and came to San Francisco at the age of 15, to attend the Ballet School and Galileo High School. He joined the San Francisco Ballet on its 1958 tour of South America and, a year later, on its tour to the Middle East, where Haile Selassie and Gamal Abdel Nasser were in the audience. After service in the Army, from 1961-1962, he became a leading dancer of the San Francisco Ballet, and later, its ballet master and resident choreographer. In the 1960s, he moved to New York, where he became a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre and where he was also active on Broadway.

When Smuin returned to San Francisco, he was named coartistic director with Lew Christensen, succeeding William Christensen in that position. The mid-1970s were financially difficult for the company, which was rescued by “SOB,” the famous Save Our Ballet campaign. And yet, Smuin managed to take the company on tours to Hawaii and elsewhere.

During the 12 years he directed the company until Helgi Tomasson succeeded him, Smuin hired many exceptional dancers — Betsy Erickson, Kirk Peterson, Lawrence Pech, Antonio Lopez, among others — and he personally helped develop young talent, such as Linda Meyer, Evelyn Cisneros, Joanna Berman, Robert Gladstein, and Vane Vest. Smuin encouraged his dancers to choreograph works of their own, and he commissioned music from local composers. In doing so he launched the careers of Val Caniparoli and others. The combination of commissions and dancer-choreography produced such works as the 1978 Le Rêve de Cyrano, set by John McFall to a score by Berkeley’s Joaquín Nin-Culmell (with Attila Ficzere and Allison Dean). Smuin also brought in cutting-edge choreography from Europe: works by Maurice Bejart and John Cranko, for example.

Smuin’s own choreography ranged from neoclassical (Romeo and Juliet) to the theatrical grandeur of The Tempest and A Song for Dead Warriors. The latter’s review in The New York Times, by Jack Anderson, included verdicts of “hysterically melodramatic” and “ingenious … with power … striking moments.” For local critics, as well, Smuin was often a matter of love or hate: Some admired his bold talent and colorful works, others decried his excesses.

For months, before the Ballet Board refused to renew Smuin’s contract, and for months after Tomasson’s arrival, there was a long period of polarization between board, staff, company members, as well as among fans. Suddenly, with the change of administration, all of the many Smuin ballets (along with Christensen’s) disappeared from the repertoire. Then, Smuin could access the local dance scene, which he had long dominated, only by creating his small company. It is expected — with the passage of time, and now with his death — that the current Ballet administration will embrace some of the former artistic director’s legacy.

Tomasson issued the following statement Monday evening: “San Francisco Ballet is saddened by the sudden passing of Michael Smuin. The Company would like to acknowledge the important role Michael played in San Francisco Ballet’s history, not only as a co-director, but as a dancer and choreographer. Michael was also an important figure in the Bay Area dance community and beyond for many years, and he will be missed.”

Smuin’s Broadway credits include Little Me (1962) as a dancer, Anything Goes (1987) as a choreographer, Sophisticated Ladies (1981) and Shogun: The Musical (1990), as choreographer and director. He worked as choreographer on many films, including The Fantasticks, A Walk in the Clouds, The Joy Luck Club, The Cotton Club, and Rumble Fish. He was nominated for two Tony Awards and an Emmy: He won an Emmy for Great Performances: Dance in America, and a Tony for choreographing Anything Goes.

From 1976 to 1979, Smuin served as member and cochairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Dance advisory panel. In 1980, he traveled to China as a member of the first official U.S. dance study team. For the past 13 years he ran Smuin Ballet, and choreographed some 50 pieces for his dancers. The company announced that the upcoming season at Yerba Buena Center will be held as scheduled.