Music News
San Francisco Opera Plans
Drawn by a troika of reliable warhorses, each gussied up beyond routine cash cow-treatment, San Francisco Opera’s next season offers a variety of attractions, including world and West Coast premieres, a total of 11 productions, seven of which are new to the city.
The box-office certainties in General Manager David Gockley’s announcement today of the 2008-2009 season are two ever-present Puccini operas: La Bohème and Tosca, along with Verdi’s La Traviata. But vive la différence: La Bohème features popular soprano Angela Gheorghiu and it is conducted by incoming SFO Music Director Nicola Luisotti; Tosca offers debuts by Adrianne Pieczonka in the title role, and of Lado Ataneli as Scarpia; and La Traviata signals the return of Anna Netrebko to the War Memorial, in a controversial Los Angeles production by Marta Domingo.
Running from Sept. 5 to July 5, 2009, this is Gockley’s third season, but it’s the first that is completely his own, without prior arrangements or obligations. Gockley’s interest in voices and “stars” is prompting re-engagement of some big names, in addition to local debuts for as many as 21 singers. Among them: Inva Mula, the unforgettable “blue diva” of The Fifth Element, as Adina in Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love (with tenor Ramón Vargas and the debuting Giorgio Caoduro and Alessandro Corbelli); Emily Magee and Torsten Kerl in the nearly century-late San Francisco premiere of Erich Korngold’s 1920 Die tote Stadt (The Dead City).
Inva Mula’s Fifth Element blue diva: She will look different as Adina
The season opens with Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the title role, Barbara Frittoli making her debut here in the role of Amelia. As before, during 33 years in Houston, Gockley presents a premiere every season. In September comes Stewart Wallace’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, to a libretto by Amy Tan, based on her novel about a San Francisco family’s history in China and here.
The treasured 1999 John Copley production of Mozart’s Idomeneo returns this season, conducted by Donald Runnicles, with Kurt Streit in the title role, Alice Coote as Idamante, and debuts by Genia Kühmeier (Ilia) and Iano Tamar (Elettra).
Donald Runnicles
Photo by Michael Winokur
Mussorgsky’s majestic Boris Godunov arrives in a recent Geneva production, with Samuel Ramey in the title role, Vitalij Kowaljow, Vsevolod Grivnov, and Vladimir Ognovenko in the cast. Former Moscow Philharmonic music director Vassily Sinaisky will make his conducting debut.
A Scene from Last Acts
Photo by Brett Coomer
Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers (premiering next month in Houston as Last Acts) with Frederica von Stade and Kristin Clayton, will have its West Coast premiere in December, performed in the co-commissioning Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall. That venue will also be used for recitals by Gheorghiu (Sept. 6) and Salvatore Licitra (Jan. 10, 2009).
Washington National Opera’s new production, by Francesca Zambello, of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is due next summer.
Scene from Die tote Stadt
Photo by Axel Zeininger
Unlike the constant rise of upper ticket prices everywhere, Gockley said SFO will have a discount of up to 30 percent on season tickets. Also, protecting the least affluent opera fans, the lowest ticket prices will remain at $15, and standing room at $10 — the price of a movie.
One conspicuous item missing from the next season is the continuation of the Wagner Ring, which opens this summer with Das Rheingold. If the four operas are premiered one year apart, Die Walküre should be on the 2009 schedule. At the press conference today, both Gockley and Runnicles gave straightforward answers to the question.
Runnicles has selected Mark Delavan and Nina Stemme to head the cast, both making their role debuts as Wotan and Brünnhilde, respectively. The only way to avoid cast changes — because of the singers’ prior commitments — was to set Walküre for 2010. Runnicles voiced complete trust in Delavan (the S.F. Symphony’s great Dutchman a few years back) and Stemme (now singing Sieglinde in Europe) in their graduation to the bigger, more demanding roles.
Those Wand’ring Minstrels of Ours
Do you need two jobs to make a living? How about holding down a dozen?
That’s what violinist Karen Shinozaki has been doing for more than a decade. Here’s a partial list of her concurrent employment: The Santa Rosa, Berkeley, and Marin Symphonies; New Century Chamber Orchestra, Symphony of the Redwoods, San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Santa Rosa Chamber Players, Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players; Sor, Worn, and Adorno Ensembles; and she also performs as a regular extra with the San Francisco Opera and Ballet Orchestras.
When you attend concerts in the larger Bay Area, from Santa Rosa to Sacramento to Monterey, you will soon notice the same musicians popping up everywhere. Who are these wand’ring minstrels? They are the heroes of a new film, by Tal Skloot and Steven Baigel, titled Freeway Philharmonic. It will be shown on PBS stations at the end of the month, including San Francisco’s KQED, Channel 9, first at 6 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 27. Theater screenings are scheduled at the Rafael Film Center, at 7 p.m. on Jan. 24, and at the Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, at 7 p.m. on Jan. 29.
Karen Shinozaki
All around the country, for every large, full-time orchestra — such as the San Francisco Symphony — there are dozens of small orchestras that use freelance musicians. “Pickup orchestras” thrive in the larger Bay Area, with commuting musicians playing in as many as eight orchestras. These “road warriors of classical music” drive hundreds of miles on the freeways and rural roads. In fact, bassoonist Karla Ekholm has 330,000 miles on her old car. Trombonist Bruce Chrisp gets vegetable oil discarded by a Chinese restaurant to power his Mercedes.
They, and the documentary’s other main characters — French hornist Meredith Brown, cellists Robin Bonnel and Eugene Sor, and trumpeter Kale Cumings — both hope for and dread “triple weekends.” Bonnel explains: “10 in the morning, rehearsal in San Rafael, with the Marin Symphony; 2 o’clock, dress rehearsal in Santa Rosa, 8 o’clock, the concert. You get home at 11:30, a rehearsal at 10 the next morning, then you’re out here, playing a concert at 3, and another at 7:30. The next morning, there would be a rehearsal with the New Century Chamber Orchestra in the morning and afternoon, a concert at night. …”
All that through traffic jams, rush-hour traffic, freeway accidents, and near-misses. And yet — while envying the stability and security of colleagues playing with big orchestras, and auditioning from time to time — musicians of the Freeway Philharmonic put their love of music into their busy lives and manage to enjoy much of it with great gusto.
Full-time orchestras, they agree, develop their sound as musicians are sitting next to someone for 10 years, and can anticipate every movement, every nuance. Freelancers rarely sit together in the same section, and they play together maybe once a month. But it can also make for more spirited, more exciting performances. Also, they get to play opera, chamber music, symphonies — the kind of variety you don’t get playing with just one orchestra. The downside is mostly logistical: color-coding orchestra schedules to avoid overlaps and conflicts, driving hundreds of miles to rehearsals and performances … and then driving back home. Few would do this without an overwhelming passion for what they do. If they didn’t, hundreds of regional orchestras — unable to maintain a regular staff — wouldn’t exist.
“Music is my spirituality, my personality, my ecstasy … when it’s good, there’s nothing better, and if you can do this for a living, it’s good gig,” says Bonell. And he drives on.
Robin Bonell
Horne in Remission
Wonderful news came Monday evening: Marilyn Horne’s pancreatic cancer, first diagnosed in late 2005, is now in remission. The singer was quoted by the Associated Press that she is “cancer-free.” The same illness killed Luciano Pavarotti at age 71, last September. Horne is 74. The mezzo underwent radiation and chemotherapy at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for nine months, and has been receiving a new experimental cancer-vaccine treatment at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.
During treatment, Horne continued her work, directing the vocal program at the Music Academy of the West, a summer school and festival in Santa Barbara, and maintained her foundation work to support promising young artists.
Marilyn Horne
Le Cid: A Sad Coincidence
Word comes from Zürich that José Cura, after singing the opening performance of Le Cid, will miss the next two performances due to the death of his father.
In 1981, Placido Domingo was to sing three performances of Le Cid in a San Francisco “stylized concert performance,” but at the last moment he canceled, due to the death of his father. William Lewis, carrying the score during the performance, stepped in to sing the role.
José Cura
Parnassus Goes to School
Steve Paulson’s Symphony Parnassus, which usually performs in Herbst Theatre, will make its debut in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Concert Hall on Sunday, Jan. 20, at 3 p.m. The all-Russian program will feature Conservatory faculty member Steven Bailey in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat. The concert will open with the rarely performed symphonic poem Rus by Balakirev (one of the first Russian orchestral works that actually sounds Russian), and conclude with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, with Dawn Harms as the violin soloist.
Steve Paulson
China’s Western Opera Comes to the West
Slice and dice Rossini, early Verdi, Minkus, Mantovani, Borodin, and Andrew Lloyd Weber. Add just a pinch of Chinese folk songs. Bake well, and serve in the War Memorial Opera House — and there you have the U.S. premiere Saturday of Xiao Bai’s Farewell My Concubine, just three months after its premiere in Beijing. Pleasant, if rather pointless as it satisfies neither Western nor Peking Opera fans fully, the work nevertheless demonstrates huge progress since the days of the half-baked Yellow River Piano Concerto. For more background information, see Angela Hsiao’s review in this issue.
The big, colorful production — on its way to a half dozen other U.S. opera houses — is presented by some 150 traveling artists of the China National Opera House: a full orchestra, conducted by Yu Feng, an excellent chorus (overcoming a tentative first scene), and impressive soloists well-schooled in Italian opera, albeit still showing the long-range impact of Soviet voice coaches more than a generation ago.
Taking its text from the ancient story about devastating wars between the Chu, Qin, and Han, Xiao Bai’s opera (libretto by Wang Jian) abbreviates, simplifies, and — to some extent — dumbs down this great tale of love and war. Although most of the English supertitles pass muster, peculiar lines do pop up here and there, on the order of “Spring water flows into my knotted heart.” (To be fair, no faithful fan of most Italian librettos has a good case to make here.)
The tour serves as further exposure for the China National Opera House, which the program says has produced Western opera in Beijing (and, surely, in Shanghai). Puccini, Verdi, Bizet, Mozart, and so on, have long been presented by the company, which was formed in 1952. There is no word on what happened during the murderous decade of the Cultural Revolution, but surely no decadent Western art was cultivated during that period.
As for now, company president Liu Xijin calls opera “a global art, often thought of as the pinnacle of all civilization … a reflection of our national strengths, as well as the foundation of our individual cultures. China is fast becoming a country with top-ranking opera productions.”
With several outstanding Korean and Japanese opera singers long active in Europe and the U.S., Chinese artists are sure to be added soon to the rosters of major houses in the West. All four principals in Concubine are fully qualified to do so now: Sun Li (Xiang Yu, the Chu Emperor), Li Shuang (Han Xin, Xiang Yu’s brother, and later the head of the opposing Han army), Ruan Yuqun (Yu Ji, the “favorite concubine”), and Niu Shasha (Yu Shu, Yu Ji’s sister) each could easily join the cast of an Italian opera — and, in fact, they have.
Ruan Yuqun was the most impressive among the singers, although her biography in the program caused an involuntary raising of the reader’s eyebrows. She won first place in the third Maldini International Opera Vocal Competition in Italy, the note says, “and was nicknamed the ‘Chinese Callas’ by nine of the judges.” How did the nine arrive at the identical nickname, how many judges were there altogether, and why did the other judges — if any — demur? At any rate, what I heard tonight was not Callas, Chinese or otherwise, but someone who could sing well just about any dramatic soprano role in the Italian repertoire.
For a list of “Eastern operas” from Europe, see the next column item.
A scene from Farewell My Concubine
East and West, the Twain Straining to Meet
Upon reflection, you may consider China’s “Western opera” coming to the U.S. (see item above) a case of turnabout being fair play.
Counting backward, from the Stewart Wallace-Amy Tan The Bonesetter’s Daughter, due at the San Francisco Opera for a September premiere, and the still-recent The Chairman Dances in John Adams’ Nixon in China, there are legions of “faux- or would-be-Oriental” music dramas from Europe, beginning with the obvious ones: Puccini’s Turandot and Madama Butterfly, another Turandot by Busoni, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, Delibes’ Lakme, even Lehár’s The Land of Smiles, and the Gilbert & Sullivan Mikado.
Were we to include such Asian, but not “Oriental,” venues and cultures as Turkey and Siberia or venture into the Middle East (we are not), there would be dozens more. Consider these mostly obscure, but geographically more obviously “Orientalist” operas: Mascagni’s Iris, Leoni’s L’oracolo, Roussel’s Padmavati, Spohr’s Jessonda, Adam’s Si j’etias Roi, Pacini’s Alessandro, Donizetti’s Alina, Regina di Golconda, and Handel’s Poro, re dell’India.
From a musician friend in that country comes word that the first Danish opera, Bredahl’s 1771 Royal Succession in Sidon, was set in the most ancient of Phoenician cities, and Metastasio’s 1735 Le Cinesi (The Chinese women) served as the basis of an opera by Nicola Conforto in 1750 and by Gluck in 1754.
Feel free to add to the list.
Puccini’s Turandot in a Chinese production
Music on the Air
KALW-FM, 91.7 on the dial, and available on the Internet at KALW.org, is offering a great deal of interesting classical music programs. Try these — Mondays at 9 p.m.: “The MTT Files”; Tuesdays at 8 p.m.: “KALW Performing Arts Special,” hosted by Alan Farley; Fridays at 9 p.m.: “My Word!”, 9:30 p.m.: “My Music!” (from the BBC archives), 10 p.m., “The Record Shelf,” with Jim Svejda, and 11 p.m.: “Music From Other Minds.”
Uneasily Rests Voigt’s Crown
Deborah Voigt — of Fullerton, the Merola Program, 1986 Adler Fellow, an outstanding Ariadne in 2002 — is always welcome in San Francisco, and so she was in Davies Hall on Monday night. Expectations were high on the second night of her engagement with the San Francisco Symphony, to sing Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs and Barber’s Andromache’s Farewell.
Against those expectations, these were the facts: The finest singing Thursday night came from the violin of concertmaster Alexander Barantschik (in Beim Schlafengehen) and from the orchestra under the magic baton of Michael Tilson Thomas. Why MTT is not coveted by the greatest opera houses (and, especially, by the San Francisco Opera, across the street) is a mystery to me. See Jeff Dunn’s review of the Wednesday night performance.
The orchestral portion of the Strauss was perfection itself, ditto the Barber, and the band soared as well in the rest of the unusually varied program — Oliver Knussen’s Symphony No. 3 and Beethoven’s “neglected” Symphony No. 4 — in this otherwise tradition-bound season, typified by Herbert Blomstedt’s all-Tchaikovsky and all-Mozart programs.
Well, what of Voigt? The first three Strauss songs provided an acute disappointment. Big, too big, brassy, and not nearly enough beautiful singing and honest feelings — and, surprisingly from Voigt, lousy diction. Sitting nine rows away and knowing the text by heart, I couldn’t make out the words.
There was a change in In Abendrot, as Voigt sang more quietly and the words came across much better. In the Barber, diction was excellent, and there was not nearly as much “shouting” as in the Strauss, but again, beauty and singing were to be found in the orchestra more than in the vocal performance.
It was a homecoming won by the team, with the queen strangely off.
MTT and Deborah Voigt
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.