Music News
Meet NCCO’s New Music Director
In a long-awaited announcement, the acclaimed violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg has been named the New Century Chamber Orchestra’s music director. NCCO has been searching for a new director for nearly two years, with numerous candidates “auditioning” as guest concertmasters (see SFCV’s September 2007 review of a concert under Salerno-Sonnenberg’s direction).
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg
A musician, author, and teacher, Salerno-Sonnenberg is recognized as one of the world’s preeminent violinists performing today. In 1981, she was the youngest recipient ever of the Walter W. Naumburg International Violin Competition, and since then she has toured internationally and made several television appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 60 Minutes, and Sesame Street, among others.
She won the Avery Fisher Prize (1999), was honored with an Avery Fisher Career Grant (1983), and she also has an Oscar nomination to her name for her documentary film Speaking in Strings.
In the 2007-2008 season, Salerno-Sonnenberg will tour the West Coast with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and she will perform with the New Jersey, Houston, Oregon, York, Baltimore, and Colorado Symphony Orchestras. Highlights this season also include recitals with pianist Anne-Marie McDermott and residencies at orchestras in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La.
In addition, Gordon Getty has awarded NCCO a one-year $500,000 matching 2-for-1 grant — the largest gift the orchestra has ever received. Getty has been chair of the NCCO’s honorary board since the orchestra was founded in 1992.
Phantom Halls of the City
San Francisco and its environs have fine musical facilities, but not enough of them. One reason, for example, that San Francisco Opera is unable to resurrect its important Spring Opera program is the lack of an appropriate venue. Ever since his arrival here, General Manager David Gockley has been searching for a medium-size space, complete with some theater facilities, but so far he’s had no luck.
Meanwhile, there are plans, or rather ideas. The most recent one popped up over the weekend: a report of the San Francisco Giants and the Port of San Francisco trying to figure out what to do with the large plot next to AT&T Park, now used for parking.
According to a report in The San Francisco Chronicle, “The Giants will announce plans next month for a 4,000- to 5,000-seat concert hall on the 16-acre Parking Lot A — the same port-owned lot where 1,800 to 2,000 cars now park every game during the baseball season. It’s the last of the undeveloped parking parcels serving the Giants, who at one time controlled as many as 5,000 spaces in the neighborhood.”
There is (or was?) a grandiose plan, for a medium-size music theater across Van Ness from Davies Hall, something that might one day satisfy those Spring Opera cravings … except that the project is going nowhere fast. The proposed San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design, meant to open in 2008, is, alas, still a hole in the ground.
Then there is the Asian Art Museum’s putative plan to build a performance hall adjacent to the museum, which is now served — rather poorly — by Samsung Hall, something with poor sightlines and no acoustic to speak of. The possibility was reported here three years ago, but there is no progress that we know of:
At the east end of the Civic Center, the new Asian Art Museum (formerly the main library) has Samsung Hall for various events, but a vacant lot adjacent to the building has always been regarded as a potential theater/concert hall, with Senator Dianne Feinstein as one of its proponents. Says the museum’s Tim Hallman: “We envision a concert hall, costing $45 million to $60 million, and seating approximately 350. It would also include more special exhibition galleries. Ideally, we would have something by 2010, but we’re still taking the temperature of the community for another campaign.”
Two relatively new small (and good) performance spaces, the Koret in the de Young Museum and the Phyllis Wattis in the Museum of Modern Art, are not being used much for music. On the plus side: There are the new Conservatory of Music Concert Hall on Oak Street, and Kanbar Hall (see item below) in the San Francisco Jewish Community Center on California Street. Still, the city and communities nearby need more concert halls, opera houses, and chamber-music venues. The real thing, not just plans.
S.F. Lyric Theater: the dream
Nixon Returns, Premieres
The first performance of Berkeley composer John Adams’ Nixon in China took place in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, back in 1985, two years before its staged premiere (in Houston, one of David Gockley’s many commissions, with choreography by Mark Morris, who was not nearly as well-known then as he is now). OK, so we have San Francisco, 23 years ago, and what’s the news here? Nothing less than the upcoming Northern California premiere for the staged opera heard around the world … but not here.
That memorable Herbst Theatre event was a concert version, a kind of public run-through as the work was still being born. Then, as the years went by, Nixon didn’t manage to come closer than the Los Angeles Opera. And here comes punchline number two: Who is going to present the opera — San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose, West Bay …? None of the above. It will be the young, tiny, daring Trinity Lyric Opera, a company whose entire existence is comprised of the unusual: Copland’s The Tender Land and Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Trinity’s new music director, John Kendall Bailey, will conduct Nixon July 18-27 at the Castro Valley Center for the Arts. Olivia Stapp directs, Pat Brandon is the set designer, and Patrick Kroboth is the costume designer. Tickets go on sale this week.
Trinity Lyric Opera Executive Director Alan Thayer says he is “thrilled as we begin work on what has been termed the most significant opera of the late 20th century. What an opportunity for us to do what we do best, bringing rarely heard masterpieces to our Bay Area audiences. To think that we can even contemplate doing something like Nixon in China in our third year of productions is tremendously exciting. This is also a presidential election year, and with the opening of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing scheduled less than two weeks after the curtain falls on our final performances, what better timing could we experience? That, plus the fact that last year was the 20th anniversary of the work’s premiere in Houston, makes it an irresistible choice for us this year.”
John Kendall Bailey
Miland Benefit
Emil Miland is not only one of our finest cellists, he is among the best liked and most popular musicians around. If all his friends attend his upcoming benefit concert, there will be nary a seat (or standing room) remaining. It’s a heartwarming event, scheduled for 4 p.m. on Jan. 27 at Alameda’s Twin Towers Methodist Church. “A Winter Evening with Emil Miland and Mack McCray (piano)” will raise funds for the Tommie and Emil Q. Music Fund, which Miland set up to honor his parents. Each year the fund’s scholarship is awarded to high school musicians. On the program: Mozart, Ravel, Britten, Schumann, and other composers.
Miland, who started playing the cello at 10, is honoring his father, who was the coordinator of music for Alameda schools for 30 years, until Prop. 13 cut funding in 1978 and destroyed the programs and, with them, the elder Miland’s work. “They were selling the instruments in Alameda,” recalls the cellist. “There were no orchestras anymore. It [the proposition to cut property taxes] decimated the schools.” His father died in 1988, his mother in 2001, and Miland then set up the fund in their honor.
Miland’s Alameda roots go deep. He attended Edison Elementary and Lincoln Middle School. His cello instructor was Carlton Hanson, now 90. At 48, Miland is a soloist, chamber musician, orchestra member, teacher, Conservatory coach, and competition judge.
Even with benefit tickets costing only $25 ($15 for students and seniors), the fund for graduating seniors from Alameda public high schools has already granted $1,000 scholarships to seven recipients. In case you can’t attend the concert, contributions to the fund can be made by mail to: AEF Miland Music Fund, P.O. Box 1363, Alameda, CA, 94501.
Emil Miland
Merry January From Bach Soloists
Going against the (dumb) grain of seasonalizing music, with all Messiah and Nutcracker performances restricted to three weeks of the year, Jeffrey Thomas’ American Bach Soloists bravely scheduled Bach’s Christmas Oratorio for Jan. 25-28. Thomas will conduct eight singers and the orchestra of period instruments at St. Stephen’s Church in Belvedere, on Jan. 25; First Congregational Church, Berkeley, Jan. 26; St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco, Jan. 27; and the Mondavi Center, Davis, Jan. 28.
Midwinter Benefit for Midsummer Mozart
Pianist Seymour Lipkin is the soloist at a benefit concert for the Midsummer Mozart Festival, held at the Berkeley City Club at 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 27. George Cleve conducts members of the Midsummer Mozart Orchestra, in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 13 in C Major, arranged for piano and string quartet, and in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
George Cleve
Turkmenistan Re-embraces Opera
Turkmenistan will end its seven-year ban on opera and the circus, which was introduced by the Caspian nation’s former eccentric leader, according to a report by Reuters from the capital, Ashkhabad.
Saparmurat Niyazov, who cultivated an elaborate personality cult during his 21-year rule, died in late 2006 of a heart attack. He banned opera, ballet, and the circus, saying they are “alien” to Turkmen culture.
The new leader, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, has sought to promote a softer image for the gas-rich nation bordering Iran, and he has reversed some of Niyazov’s most eccentric policies. Late on Sunday, state television announced his plans to reopen an opera house, resume circus shows, and build a cinema in the capital.
“Today a new period is starting in our country, which we have called an era of great renaissance,” Berdymukhamedov said in televised remarks, his speech interrupted by applause.
During his long rule, Niyazov took the title of Turkmenbashi (Head of the Turkmen), and had thousands of portraits and statues of himself put up throughout the country, including a statue in gold leaf that rotates to face the sun in Ashgabat. Isolated from the rest of the world and criticised in the West for human rights violations, Turkmenistan has sought to end its isolationist policies under the new president and attract more foreign investment in its vast oil and natural gas sector.
Turkmenbashi: Anti-Opera
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 the 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 is in the title role, and Barbara Frittoli is 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 California.
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, and 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. 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 a press conference, 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.
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.
Now if Gockley would pull the plug on the horrible screens in the balcony, above the balcony circle, with their wretchedly over-produced opera videos … But I dream. Our long-time seats in the front row of the balcony circle have been trashed. But with this season, we may not have needed an excuse to drop our 25+ years’ season subscription and move to selected singles.
Posted by Stan Ulrich on January 27, 2008 at 4:44 pm