Music News
New Position for Runnicles
Donald Runnicles, San Francisco Opera’s outgoing music director, has been named chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, effective September 2009. He will succeed Ilan Volkov, who joined the orchestra in 2003 at age 26, and now wants to devote more time to his young family. Runnicles was named music director in San Francisco in 1992. He will be succeeded here in 2009 by Nicola Luisotti.
Donald Runnicles
Born in Scotland, Runnicles, who is 52, has not conducted in the United Kingdom for almost two decades while pursuing a career in Germany and the U.S. He first conducted the regional BBC Orchestra only recently, in 2001 at the Edinburgh International Festival. Scheduled to leave his San Francisco position at the end of the next season, but engaged to conduct Wagner’s Ring cycle through 2011, Runnicles also serves as music director of the Grand Teton Music Festival, and principal guest conductor of the Atlanta Symphony.
Reports The Scotsman:
A Scottish conductor who made his name in the opera houses of Germany and the United States, but who for years dropped out of sight from the Scottish music scene, was picked to lead one of the country’s top orchestras.
“Donald Runnicles was long known as a Scot who was never recognized in his own land,” said The Scotsman’s music critic, Kenneth Walton. Outside the Edinburgh Festival and BBC Proms, he has not conducted a regular U.K. concert in 18 years.
Runnicles is one of a number of Scots who have found success overseas, a phenomenon that has occurred repeatedly through history, says the cultural historian Neil Cameron. … Mr. Cameron said: “Probably one would just have to accept that Scotland is a small place, opportunities are limited and people’s imaginations are limited as well. By moving abroad you escape all that and the sense of limitation. If they stay where they were brought up, it doesn’t allow them to free themselves from that culture.”
MTT Substitutes for Perlman
This week’s sold-out San Francisco Symphony concerts, featuring Itzhak Perlman as conductor and violinist in a program of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms, had to be modified over the weekend when Perlman said he is too ill to perform.
Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas came to the rescue in the sudden change of plans. He will conduct a program that includes the originally scheduled Brahms Symphony No. 2, as well as Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with Jeremy Denk as soloist, and the King Stephen Overture. The concerts are at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall. Call (415) 864-6000 to buy, exchange, or return tickets.
Behold the Talich
Prague’s Talich Quartet, one of my favorites in this hemisphere and the next, is opening Music at Kohl Mansion’s 25th anniversary season on Sunday, Oct. 21. The fierce foursome (Jan Talich, violin; Petr Macecek, violin; Vadimir Bukac, viola; and Petr Prause, cello) will play Mozart’s String Quartet in G Major, K. 387; Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 (”Kreutzer Sonata”); and Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 44, No. 3. As usual, the Mansion will offer a postconcert reception with the artists, and feature the Adopt-an-Instrument program, encouraging those attending to bring used instruments to donate to children in public schools.
Talich String Quartet
Schiff Beethoven Cycle
While the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, one of the world’s finest, sort of skipped through town on the way to a concert in Sacramento (alas, “we don’t do many chamber orchestras,” said a San Francisco Performances executive), another great Hungarian musician is here to stay: Pianist András Schiff will begin his two-year complete Beethoven sonata cycle in Davies Hall next week, in a copresentation by San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Performances. Oct. 7: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4; Oct. 14: Nos. 5, 6, 7, and 8; April 6, 2008: Nos. 9, 10, 11, 19, and 20; April 13: Nos. 12, 13, 14, and 15. The cycle will conclude in the 2008-2009 season.
Our Swallow Is Chicago’s Non Grata
Angela Gheorghiu, who is to make her long-anticipated San Francisco Opera debut in Puccini’s La Rondine (The swallow) next month, was unceremoniously fired by the Chicago Lyric Opera last week, a few days before opening night. The female half of opera’s “Bonnie and Clyde” pair didn’t bother with rehearsals in Chicago — she was busy attending opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, starring her husband, the tenor Roberto Alagna. (He has had his own share of labor-management issues, running into, and losing, a big dispute with Milan’s La Scala.)
Angela Gheorghiu
The reason Gheorghiu didn’t show in Chicago? She was to sing Mimi in La Bohème , and she said, “I have sung La Bohème hundreds of times, and thought missing a few rehearsals wouldn’t be a tragedy.” Management, on the other hand, kept a count and announced that “Miss Gheorghiu has missed six of 10 rehearsals, including the piano dress rehearsal and both staging rehearsals with the orchestra. She missed one of the most critical stage-orchestra rehearsals when she left the city for New York without permission, a direct violation of her contract.” Apparently, she also refused to attend fittings for the new costumes that she herself had demanded.
Elaine Alvarez, Gheorghiu’s understudy, is taking over the role. Her MySpace motto: “Molto High Drama!”
The last time the Lyric fired a star was almost two decades ago, when Luciano Pavarotti was told he would not be engaged again with the company where he had canceled 39 out of 60 of his scheduled performances over the years, including all dates for the last two operas he had been booked to sing.
The Chicago Bohème is directed by the great soprano Renata Scotto, a frequent performer of Mimi, including a Covent Garden production in 1960 when Scotto phoned on what she thought was her night off to see what was playing, and was told it was Bohème. A brief debate was followed by a mad dash to the theater.
The Tosca Project
For some 80 years, the Tosca Cafe in North Beach has been a favorite of opera singers, poets, Russian émigrés, dancers, famous and newcomer artists, and “colorful characters,” in general. The Tosca Project, coming to Yerba Buena Center, Oct. 26-28, is American Conservatory Theater Artistic Director Carey Perloff’s tribute to the famed nightspot.
Choreographed by Val Caniparoli, this “movement-theater” is a blend of music, drama, and dance, with the participation of such San Francisco Ballet greats as Muriel Maffre, Sabina Alleman, and Pascal Molat.
Pascal Molat
Photo by Erik Tomasson
And Youth Shall Be Served … in Los Angeles
The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association is presenting an International Youth Orchestra Festival that should be the envy of the musical life of any city. From Oct. 23 through Nov. 11, the Walt Disney Concert Hall will host the Sibelius Academy Symphony Orchestra (conducted by L.A. Philharmonic Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, an alumnus of the Sibelius Academy), the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (Gustavo Dudamel, L.A. Philharmonic Music Director Designate), and the UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra (Charles Dutoit, new chief conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra).
Individual concerts will be interspersed with open rehearsals, seminars, and joint activities, and the festival is capped by a full day of free performances from Los Angeles-area youth orchestras.
Gustavo Dudamel
Giving a Leg Up to the Reviewing Competition
Just as there are many would-be musicians among writers, some singers just wanna write. The difference is that some of our own San Francisco Opera Chorus songbirds do a great job on their Web sites, while I am still an unknown for my in-shower “Vesti la giubba.” Of special interest: Tom Reed’s backstage report on the current Tannhäuser production.
A moving passage:
On his way to Wartburg (Tannhäuser) encounters a group of male penitents slowly crawling their way to Rome to receive absolution. Carved into their backs with thick red syrup are their individual sins. (I asked that my sin be BURGER KING, but that has too many letters, so we compromised and made it HATE. When I cover the H with my costume, it appropriately reads: ATE.)
Unfortunately the quick-drying syrup tends to stick to the costume, which then pulls and tugs painfully. Think of this Tannhäuser run as a 24-day back-waxing, one hair at a time. It takes the pained penitents almost three minutes just to crawl the 64 feet from stage right to stage left. If you factor in the mandatory 15-minute breaks, that’s just 947 feet per hour. At this rate, the 632 mile trip by knee from Wartburg to Rome will take 32 weeks, 4 days, 6 hours, and 28 minutes, give or take the Alps. And that’s just one way. Think of the overtime!
Ah yes, the fortunes to be made by choral singing! Besides innumerable choral appearances, Reed has made his mark in the War Memorial with solo roles in Harvey Milk, Der Rosenkavalier (Waiter at the Inn), The Magic Flute (Second Priest), The Ballad of Baby Doe, Falstaff (Host of the Garter Inn), and so on.
On your knees, pilgrims!
Photo by Terrence McCarthy
The Contemporaries
David Milnes’ San Francisco Contemporary Music Players open the season on Oct. 8 in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, presenting premieres of works by Fausto Romitelli, Philippe Leroux, and Edmund Campion. Among the featured artists: Tod Brody (flute), Andrea Menafra (electric guitar), and Julie Steinberg (piano).
David Milnes
Ragazzi’s 20th Season
Little boys grow up, and all of a sudden, it’s the 20th birthday for the Ragazzi Boys Chorus. Actually, if you’re 20 or over, you don’t belong: Ragazzi range in age from 7 through 18. But for those who are members — 130 singers from 86 schools in 26 Bay Area communities — there is a big anniversary year coming, with four major concerts of classic, contemporary, and traditional music, along with the premiere of a new choral opera, and then a summer tour to British Columbia. One of those concerts will be the Mahler Third Symphony in April, in collaboration with the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, at Cañada College Main Theater in Redwood City. The premiere: Ted Teows’ The Emperor’s New Clothes, April in San Mateo.
The Boys of Ragazzi
A Dershowitz Opera?
“My retirement project,” writes Alan Dershowitz in the October issue of Gramophone, “is an opera I’ve been working on about Gerson Sirota, a great and famous cantor in Warsaw who recorded for the same company as Caruso.” The Harvard law professor is a famed criminal appellate lawyer, who successfully argued to overturn the conviction of Claus von Bülow for the attempted murder of his wife. He was the appellate advisor for the defense in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson.
Sirota, Dershowitz writes, was in the Warsaw ghetto “and such was his fame that the Nazis offered him a chance to leave for America. He decided to remain, and died during Passover, 1943. I have been working at the piano with a couple of singers and have been plotting out the melodies based on Jewish liturgical themes.
“I have a substantial amount of the libretto written but I will have to find a proper collaborator. It’s an incredible story and musically brings together my great loves.”
Music of the French Enlightenment
Next up in the Humanities West series: “Voltaire and the French Enlightenment,” Oct. 5-6 at Herbst Theatre. Along with learned discussions about Voltaire and his brilliant scientist mistress, Émilie du Châtelet, there will be much said and demonstrated of the period’s music: David Morris will perform works by Rameau on viola de gamba, along with David Wilson on violin and Katherine Heater on the harpischord. San Francisco Opera Musical Administrator Kip Cranna will lecture on the composers of the era.
David Morris
Ciao, Left Coast!
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble opens its 15th season on Oct. 25 (at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley) and Oct. 29 (at the San Francisco Veterans War Memorial Green Room) with a program titled “Viva Italia!” (see review).
It will perform Salvatore Sciarrino’s All’Aure in una Lontananza for solo flute, Giacinto Scelsi’s Nuits for solo double bass, Antonio Vivaldi’s La Folia for string trio, and Luciano Berio’s Sequenza for solo flute. From there the program proceeds to such novelties as new works by Luca Antignani (Il viaggio di Humbert), the winner of the 2005 Barlow Award, and “seven infinitely short periods of (winter) time,” by Bruno Ruviaro, the winner of the 2007 Left Coast Chamber Ensemble Composition Contest.
Brokeback Mountain, the Opera
Charles Wuorinen, 69, has received a commission from the Metropolitan Opera to write a work based on Annie Proulx’s novel, Brokeback Mountain, also the basis of last year’s popular movie by Ang Lee. One of Wuorinen’s compositions is Haroun, from Salman Rushdie’s children’s story.
Glass Half Full
A week before the Oct. 5 premiere of his Appomattox next door in the Opera House, Philip Glass gave an intimate, pleasant chamber-music soirée for an audience of 900 in Herbst Theatre, an event highly praised in this issue of Classical Voice.
The San Francisco Performances concert on Friday appeared to dazzle newcomers to Glass’ music, but made a different impression on this veteran, an early fan of his — until the Liquid Days equivalent of Pavarotti’s commercial outing with Yes, Giorgio — and someone who appreciates his score for Mishima, as well as the Cocteau operas.
In the early days, there was the obvious challenge of monotony from all that ostinato and slowly shifting patterns. Now, listening to the same music three decades later, that “problem” is no longer bothersome, but even while enjoying the “nice, pleasant” sounds, it all feels terribly bland, closer to “space music” than it had appeared before. Glass’ solo performance of three sections from Metamorphosis was a case in point.
He played this 20-plus-year-old piece from memory, an unvaried two-note ostinato in the left hand; short, pleasant, bland harmonic patters in the right hand. It was not boring, nor irritatingly monotonous, but the soothing sounds from some kind of classical-music lounge in the sky.
Then the scene changed radically as cellist Wendy Sutter began a performance of Songs and Poems. The same basic, simple, and — yes — bland music, but through an instrument that sounded like an organ, more than an amplified cello, a great mezzo perhaps, with extraordinary legato.
“Pleasant” continued with Tissues and The Orchard, with percussionist Mick Rossi joining Glass and Sutter. “Closing,” from Glassworks, was the thematically correct (if musically undifferentiated) end to the 90-minute concert, to a partial standing ovation.
Mahler in Vietman
Stan Gayuski, an ESL instructor in Thailand, and an avid reader of Classical Voice (”I lived in San Francisco for 10 years and sorely miss the music scene there … “), writes of attending the Mahler Fifth in Hanoi, apparently the premiere of Mahler’s music in Vietnam:
The Vietnamese National Orchestra has boldly scheduled a complete Mahler cycle for Hanoi to be spread over the period 2007-2011, performing two symphonies a year, including the Eighth Symphony. Next year, for example, there will be one concert of the Symphony No. 3 and another of the Symphony No. 6.
Where Mahler is played in Hanoi
Recently appointed Music Director Tetsuji Honna has come to Hanoi from Japan, where he has held posts in various Japan-based orchestras, most recently in Nagoya. He is a young conductor now making his way careerwise. While I hold that programing a Mahler cycle is a bit ambitious for such a young and relatively inexperienced conductor, I nevertheless admire his boldness in engaging such an undertaking, particularly in Hanoi where perhaps only one or two “Mahlerites” may reside. …
I held no great expectations for the Hanoi M5, in terms of performance, but I surely wanted to hear just what kind of conceptions this young conductor may have and to learn to what degree this orchestra has developed. … Given the limited musical resources and feedback that must exist in Hanoi on Mahler, I am somewhat amazed that the performance took flight at all. It had its moments but the worst of it was the sagging tempos, “unintentional rubato,” and a general lack of ensemble. …
The violins were not up to much of the task, sounding more like rehearsal violins tend to sound with minor orchestras. The trumpet did not crack the opening motif (I was holding my breath on that) and the initial cadences went “searching for common ground.” The orchestra seemed to be reaching for the material, not quite getting there yet good enough to stay listening. The vital second movement, which I feel is the crux of the work, didn’t quite get the vehemence we all know Mahler wanted but they played their butts off reaching for it.
The Scherzo wandered and I feel got lost midway through tempowise and conductor Honna was beating time more than emphasizing phrasing and nuance. The closing measures went scattered to the four corners in a mush of sound. The orchestra retuned for the Adagietto, which went surprisingly well all things considered, with the harp spot-on. The tempo here was on the slower side, but befitting the material, and I had rested my score to just listen. The strings by now seemed to have gained some grasp (and tuning) and this movement seemed to have been the most rehearsed, or perhaps the most familiar.
In the final movement we have those famous circle-of-fifths that are so enjoyable just to listen to and this movement went reasonably well. The players seemed to have gained some comfort with each other and the “romp” of this movement (if nothing else) was pulled off and I rather enjoyed it.
This orchestra must be applauded for the tenacity and boldness of performing Mahler, even though in most terms they are not quite ready for prime time. That one can have such programming in Vietnam is a statement in itself.
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2007 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.
The Romeo et Juliette that Alagna is singing in is that of Gounod, not Berlioz as listed above. Minor error. Your section of sfcv is always my favorite.
Posted by Andrew on October 2, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Thanks for turning me on to Tom Reed and “The Spearhead!” I loved “Crawling to Rome” and hope he writes a book and it becomes a best seller.
Posted by Eloise Bouye on October 3, 2007 at 1:07 pm