Music News
Nixon Nixed, Crucible Substituted
Brave little Trinity Lyric Opera had planned to follow its first two productions (both local premieres: Copland’s The Tender Land and Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress) with the North California premiere of “local composer” John Adams’ Nixon in China — see item. It would have been great timing, the production coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the the work, an election year in the U.S., and the Olympic Games in Beijing.
But on Monday, company director Alan Thayer and music director John Kendall Bailey announced cancelation of the production, replacing it with Robert Ward’s The Crucible.
The reason is that Boosey & Hawkes withdrew permission to perform Nixon, a highly unusual move at a time after Trinity’s public announcement and with most of the casting already decided. The publisher’s action, which cited an error in issuing the license in the first place, makes one wonder if the composer might have been involved in denying permission. There was no response from Adams to an e-mail inquiry.
John Kendall Bailey
At San Francisco Opera, whose general director, David Gockley, was responsible for the Nixon in China 1987 Houston world premiere, there is a possibility Nixon may be produced in 2010, or, at least, so Gockley told The Contra Costa Times music columnist Georgia Rowe. (Incidentally and unfortunately, Rowe — a valued writer on the Bay Area scene — has since become part of the continued downsizing trend in music journalism.)
Did the Opera ask Boosey & Hawkes to withdraw permission? Communications Director Karen Ames told Classical Voice that “the Opera had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
A principal participant in the canceled production lamented the news: “Trinity is a company of wonderful young singers whose careers are now taking off, but they all consented to return and sing in Nixon. There is an excellent orchestra, consisting only of professional players from the area’s symphony orchestras and opera companies, and a great chorus, which has been involved in extended preparations.
“Although the company is in its infancy, it could easily grow into an artistic force in the community, better than anything we now have among the second-tier opera companies. These are people willing to do innovative works — unknown works, modern works in an exceptional professional way, a veritable East Bay BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). I truly regret this. Some contracts were signed, synthesizers were to be ordered, the singers mainly cast, we even had a preliminary production meeting, people were calling asking to be in the chorus. Everyone had begun studying and had already fallen in love with John’s work … ”
Alan Thayer
Still, Trinity will continue its mission of presenting rare and underperformed works by 20th-century composers. The 2008 season will open on July 18, and contine on July 20, 25, and 27, with The Crucible, based on the play by Arthur Miller. Robert Ward, the composer, turns 90 this year. Trinity this season will also present a Christmas program, including local premiere of The Gift of the Magi by Bay Area composer David Conte, and the popular Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian-Carlo Menotti.
Musical Affairs for V-Day
With just a bit of a stretch, Valentine’s Day is invoked in the concert title, “Romance and the Double Bass,” but otherwise these upcoming Music at the Mission and Music at Market events are likely to deliver true value. Violinist Cynthia Mei, pianist Aileen Chanco, and double bass player Bill Everett will appear in St. Joseph’s Basilica on Feb. 15, and in Fremont’s Old Mission San Jose on Feb. 16, performing the music of Bottesini, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Adolph Misek. The first concert will be preceded by the irresistibly named “Valentine’s Preconcert Chocolate Affair,” and on Feb. 16, it’s a “Valentine’s Candlelight Preconcert Benefit Dinner.”
Aileen Chanco and Bill Everett
Photo by Janet Grant
Chamber Music S.F. Season Opens
The Eroica Trio will open Chamber Music San Francisco’s 2008 season on Feb. 15, followed on Feb. 17 by a recital of pianist Boris Berezovsky. Next up is two days of performances by Guzik Foundation Award Winners — saxophonist Airapet Arakelian and pianist Daniil Trifonov on Feb. 23, and pianist Konstantin Alexeev and violinist Sergey Dogadin on Feb. 24.
The Eroica’s program: Loeillet’s Trio Sonata in B Minor, Bernstein’s West Side Story Suite, and Dvořák’s Trio No. 3 in F Minor, Op. 65. Berezovsky is performing music by Rachmaninoff and Chopin. All events take place in the Legion of Honor’s Florence Gould Theater.
Eroica Trio
Ethnic Music Triumphant
The music of the Magyars never sounded better at land’s end than Thursday in Davies Hall and Sunday in Herbst Theatre. First, the San Francisco Symphony played works by György Ligeti and Béla Bartók in all their pentatonic splendor, quasi-Asian music on the first day of the Lunar New Year. It was echt-Hungarian music, played in an authentic Hungarian manner, even if performed by a very American orchestra (S.F. Symphony), under a German conductor (Ingo Metzmacher), with a superb French pianist (Hélène Grimaud). Ligeti’s San Francisco Polyphony and the Bartók Piano Concerto No. 3 were exceptional and gratifying. In spite of expected tribal allegiance, I am not a big Ligeti fan, especially when it comes to Le Grand Macabre; this week, I was an enthusiastic listener. [See Jeff Dunn’s review.)
Then, what do you know, just a block over, at Herbst, there was Beijing-born Yuja Wang Sunday afternoon — playing, yes, Ligeti and Bartók, oh so well. If there is a prodigy who is getting even better with age, it’s Wang. At 20, and with a decade of performance behind her, this recital in Herbst Theatre exhibited a rare combination of an astonishing virtuoso and a brave, solid, humble musician.
We’ve been lucky here, having heard Wang twice already with the San Francisco Symphony, but this San Francisco Performances recital (reviewed in this issue by Anatole Leikin) was still a big surprise. What a challenging program this was — two of Ligeti’s Etudes, the Liszt B-minor sonata, Bartók’s Sonata for Piano, Scriabin’s Sonata No. 2, and Ravel’s La Valse.
With steel fingers like Lang Lang’s (but none of his mannerisms), Wang reigns over the piano effortlessly, putting all her attention into the music, not the production of notes. In the sprawling Liszt, for example, Wang played the work as one piece, not a collection of episodes. The devilishly difficult Scriabin and Bartók never sounded like something difficult being played. No wonder Martha Argerich asks for Wang whenever she cancels, a substitution that can create a whole career for a lucky pianist.
Martha Argerich and Yuja Wang
Ligeti’s Fanfares and Der Zauberlehrling were fabulous, the two hands singing a duet of equal brilliance, together but their “songs” were distinguished, separate. It was a performance equal to or better than these notable recordings of Fanfares and Der Zauberlehrling. It’s well and good that Wang buries herself in the performance (instead of showing a bobbing head or rolled-up eyes), but she needs to overcome her shyness otherwise. Other than in school recitals, I have never seen such awkwardness in receiving applause — and there was a lot of that, including shouts of “Brava!” and many in the audience rose to their feet to applaud. Her unspoken but clear reaction: “Get me out of here!” She virtually ran off the stage after the last note of each piece; between the Ligeti and the Liszt, she sat down to play, hoping to stop the applause (she failed), and in general appeared embarrassed and inconvenienced by the warm-to-hot response. Not like Lang Lang at all, more like Glenn Gould — minus the humming and overcoat.
György Ligeti (not Einstein)
More from (Greater) Eastern Europe
As if all the foregoing weren’t enough, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s next program will offer Sándor Jemnitz’s Trio for violin, viola, and guitar, plus Sofia Gubaidulina’s Rejoice for violin and cello. Jemnitz is Hungarian, Gubaidulina is originally from the Tatar Republic of the Soviet Union, but the program is called “Music of Eastern Europe” anyway, with a bit of geographic stretch.
Also on the program: Dusan Bogdanovic’s Quatre Pieces Intimes for cello and guitar, Dvořák’s Terzetto for two violins and viola, and Prokofiev’s Sonata for two violins. Bogdanovich is from Ukraine, Dvořák (of course) was Czech, and Prokofiev is a prominent east-of-East Europe composer.
The concerts are on Feb. 21 at Mill Valley’s Throckmorton Theatre, and on Feb. 25, at Herbst Theatre.
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
Big Plans for Napa Valley Symphony
Napa Valley Symphony, which has gone through serious problems recently, is planning for an ambitious event on April 12-13: Performances in Yountville’s Lincoln Theater of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, with current and former San Francisco Opera Adler Fellows as soloists, as well as the Pacific Mozart Ensemble. The conductor is Carlo Ponti Jr., Associate Conductor with the National Russian Orchestra, who made a successful debut at the Festival del Sole. The soloists will be soprano Heidi Melton, mezzo Katharine Tier, tenor Matthew O’Neill, and baritone Bojan Knezevic.
Carlo Ponti Jr., son of the late film producer and Sofia Loren
There Is a Sondheim-There There in Oakland
Says Michael Morgan: “This is a great work, of ingenious connectivity between the words and music — the timeless story of aging, learning from past mistakes and passing wisdom down from generation to generation. These qualities make it a work that can speak to people of diverse backgrounds and experiences. And all of these serious subjects are dealt with in an atmosphere of great infectious energy and fun.” What is this wonderful music drama? Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, to be presented in concert by Morgan’s ever-adventurous Oakland East Bay Symphony.
Morgan has engaged a remarkable cast for the May 16 and 18 performances at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre, including Rita Moreno, Val Diamond, Sharon McNight, Sheri Greenawald, Tami Dahbura, Mindy Lym, Melody Moore, Katy Stephan, Darla Wigginton, Ben Jones, Trente Morant, Clark Sterling, Greg Zema, and members of the Berkeley Broadway Singers. Dancers include Oakland Ballet veterans Joy Gim and Joral Schmalle in a new pas de deux choreographed by Ronn Guidi. (Frederica von Stade, who originally planned to be part of this production, was unable to join the cast. Back in 1999, the famed operatic mezzo made her Sondheim debut as Desirée Armfeldt with the Houston Grand Opera, then directed by David Gockley.)
The 1971 Follies — about two generations’ farewell visit to an ancient music hall about to be demolished — was preceded by Sondheim’s Company in 1970, and followed by his 1972 hit, A Little Night Music. Composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim and producer/director Hal Prince created all three works, going on to produce other notable music theater pieces in the following years. The original production of Follies included Alexis Smith, Dorothy Collins, Yvonne DeCarlo, Ethel Shutta, and a young Victoria Mallory, among others. Among the many memorable numbers of the score: Broadway Baby, I’m Still Here, Losing My Mind, and In Buddy’s Eyes.
Rita Moreno: Broadway Baby
Doctor Atomic, the Symphony
Nixon in China seems to have a tough time finding its way to San Francisco (see above), but John Adams’ Doctor Atomic exploded here for the first time, at a 2005 War Memorial Opera House world premiere. Similar to Nixon, however, the new orchestral version — Doctor Atomic Symphony — may take some time to get here, although perhaps not two decades.
The work had its U.S. premiere last week in St. Louis with David Robertson conducting, and Nonesuch Records on the scene to produce a CD of the performance. Robertson, to whom Adams dedicated the Doctor Atomic Symphony, and the Saint Louis Symphony (SLSO) will repeat the performance on tour in Carnegie Hall on Feb. 17. There are performances scheduled in Europe and the U.S., including by Michael Tilson Thomas’ New World Symphony in Miami on March 22 with Adams conducting. And when do we get to hear it? The answer will have to wait until March 3 when MTT announces the San Francisco Symphony’s next season.
In a Symphony magazine article by Thomas May (not available online), the famously reliable Adams, always on time delivering new works, explains that the reason for being so late this time was that the scheduled March 2007 premiere by the commissioning SLSO had to be shifted to a London Proms concert in August.
John C. Adams
“I was extremely embarrassed that I missed the original premiere date,” Adams told May, who writes that the composer had a “powerfully creative re-engagement with the music that proved to be more time-consuming than he had initially allowed for — expanding from one month to seven.”
Robertson, although missing out on the being first, had a sanguine view of what happened: “John wasn’t just grabbing bleeding chunks [from the opera] and trying to suture them together … What I hear in Doctor Atomic are certain things that are innovations for John in his own language. The story brought out an extra layer from him. At first there was talk of a vocal symphony based on the opera, but then I thought an instrumental piece would be more interesting.”
The symphonic version of Atomic, May writes, “required Adams to return to the opera’s sonic world of nervously crackling polyrhythms and ominous harmonies.” Adams — who had spoken of becoming ill “handling plutonium for three years,” leading up to the opera’s premiere — at first regarded the instrumental version as a matter of “compiling … cut-and-paste.” But when he started the work, he says “I realized symphonic logic and operatic logic are two completely different species.”
Some musical ideas in the opera, May writes, “felt cut short as a result of stage priorities. His process with the symphony became one of elaborating on some of those ideas by extending and transforming them, following a trajectory dictated not by dramatic concerns but by the score’s self-contained musical language as it unfolded.”
Even the symphony’s length turned out different — longer — than Adams had originally expected it to be. Rather than something “along the lines of Hindemith’s modestly scaled three-movement symphony drawing themes from Mathis der Maler,” Adams’ symphony is running about 45 minutes, becoming his second-longest instrumental work, after Naive and Sentimental Music.
A scene from Doctor Atomic
Bank Abandons Verbier
One of the finest musical sponsorships in recent years has been the Swiss financial empire UBS‘ support for the phenomenal Verbier Festival, music to be enjoyed around the world through Medici Arts. Alas, no more.
Titled the “UBS Verbier Festival” until now, the French organization cannot really complain, having received a whopping $90 million in subsidy from the bank. And yet, the end was strange: Festival founder Martin Engstrom says he was notified by e-mail. “It appears Verbier has become too small for UBS,” Engstrom lamented. A UBS vice president minced no words: “Once a project is so successful and the environment doesn’t allow it to grow, you have to look for other opportunities.”
The logical idea, that the global banking crisis has something to do with this, apparently doesn’t apply. UBS sponsorship of the London Symphony Orchestra continues, and the bank is looking for another festival to carry its name. Meanwhile, Verbier will just have to pick itself up and go on.
The Life — and Death — of a String Quartet
There is a fascinating story about “the stormy, intimate life of the string quartet” in the The London Times, on the occasion of the Alban Berg Quartet dissolving itself after 40 years in the majors.
San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet is 35 and going, but grand-daddies Juilliard Quartet and Beaux Arts Trio are 62 and 53, respectively, with the Beaux Arts retiring this summer. The Berg — deeply impacted by the death of Thomas Kakuska, the quartet’s long-time violist — is calling it quits after a farewell season in London, beginning this week.
Salute the quartet by watching it perform the first movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op. 18, No. 1 on YouTube.
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.