Music News
Big, Varied Next Season for S.F. Symphony
Classical-music fans are usually so demanding and emotional about their personal preferences that it’s almost impossible to present a symphony season that makes everybody happy, in the colossal arc from traditionalists to avant-garde enthusiasts. Even so, the San Francisco Symphony’s 2008-2009 season, announced Monday by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and Executive Director Brent Assink, is huge, presenting such a range of music and artists that it is virtually bulletproof … even as you can hear the sound of knives being sharpened.
The orchestra’s 97th season, MTT’s 14th at the helm, will run from Sept. 3 through June 21 of next year, presenting dozens of programs in hundreds of performances. In 2,743-seat Davies Hall alone, that means filling some quarter million seats during the season, at prices ranging from the cost of a movie ticket to hundreds of dollars for special events. And, as Symphony President John D. Goldman acknowledged at the Monday press conference, in the face of “difficult economic times” to come, that requires “graduated, reasonable” ticket prices, and the right “positioning of the Symphony.”
Mason Bates
When you have such a large-scale operation, with an annual operating budget of over $58 million, the tried-and-true must play a large role, even as opera houses around the world survive on Carmen and Butterfly productions. And so, there will be plenty of Beethoven (including the grand and automatic hall-filler Ninth Symphony in September), Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Liszt. But MTT stuck his neck out by commissioning new works from the dauntingly “different” Tatar composer Sofia Gubaidulina and the young American Mason Bates, who resides in Berkeley. Both composers will spend time in San Francisco, with Gubaidulina featured in a two-week Phyllis C. Wattis Composer Residency in February.
Sofia Gubaidulina
The highly successful, award-winning MTT/S.F. Symphony Mahler recording cycle will conclude next season with performances and a recording of the Symphony No. 8, Symphony of a Thousand. American composers to hear next season include Jennifer Higdon, Steven R. Gerber, and MTT — in addition to Barber, Bernstein, and Copland. Living composers from outside the U.S. are Britons Thomas Adès and Oliver Knussen. Of local composers, there is a continuing, lamentable dearth.
Among the many invited soloists are 20 debuting artists, including conductors Nicola Luisotti (San Francisco Opera’s next music director) and Fabio Luisi, pianists Piotr Anderszewski, Yevgeny Sudbin, and Krystian Zimmerman. “Hot-property” Lang Lang, 25 but in the limelight for a decade already, will not only give concerts and recitals, but he will also participate in educational events, one of which will be a Davies Hall appearance in December for Bay Area music students.
S.F. Opera Goes to the Movies, Not in S.F.
Details of the San Francisco Opera’s digital cinema program became available on Monday, on the
Opera’s Web site.
The series begins with La Rondine, starring Angela Gheorghiu, in 121 theaters, starting March 8.
In California, Cinemawest theaters in Petaluma, Livermore, Fairfax, Fortuna, Angels’ Camp, Sonoma, and Sebastopol will show the digital films. Is there a city missing in that list? Yes, San Francisco. Yes, we have no San Francisco Opera screenings in San Francisco. Really.
And, there is just one little hitch, perhaps a technicality: The announcement is being made without an agreement with American Guild of Musical Artists in place. It is assumed that the AGMA will sign up for this and other electronic projects — but it hasn’t yet. Members’ votes are still uncounted.
Angela Gheorghiu in La Rondine
All the Bach for Free
Kyoko Oishi, of the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, went to an all-Bach organ recital by James Kibbie at Stanford last week, and discovered a Web site of Kibbie’s Bach recordings on 18th-century organs. The site is not “complete” (yet), but the plan is to make it so by next year.
The selection of works for this series draws on the Bach Werke Verzeichnis, Kleine Ausgabe (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1998), supplemented by other recent scholarship, including the work of Professor Christoph Wolff, and the research of the Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Institut Göttingen. Bach’s organ transcriptions of works by other composers have been included. Kibbie has also recorded those works that survive only as fragments, leaving these works incomplete as they exist in the manuscript sources.
For the “dubious” works which may or may not be by Bach, Kibbie has chosen to record such pieces long associated with the Bach canon as the Pedal-Exercitium, the Kleines harmonisches Labyrinth, and the Gigue Fugue. On the other hand, some works long identified with Bach are now widely regarded as spurious, and so have not been included.
James Kibbie
Jupiter Rises in Burlingame
The young but superbly accomplished Jupiter String Quartet from Boston — violinists Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel, violist Liz Freivogel, and cellist Daniel McDonough — will perform Sunday evening at the Music at Kohl Mansion, now in its 25th anniversary season, joined by Spanish clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester.
The program: Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135; Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581; and Béla Kovács’ Hommages à Bach, à De Falla.
The Jupiter Quartet and Dog
Photo by Christian Steiner
Using Music@Menlo Hiatus Well
Among the many “moonlighting” activities of Music@Menlo codirectors Wu Han and David Finckel are joint and individual concert appearances and recordings around the world. While awaiting the next festival in Atherton and Palo Alto (July 18 – Aug. 8), the musical duo/couple now involves the third member of the family, 13-year-old Lilian. The latest issue from the decade-old “private label” ArtistLed (10701-2) is Wu Han’s Russian Recital, inspired by and dedicated to Lilian.
Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, Op. 37b; seven preludes by Rachmaninov; Fritz Kreisler’s Liebesfreud (”Love’s Joy”) in Rachmaninov’s transcription; and Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 4, Op. 30, reflect not only Taiwan-born Wu Han’s love for Russian music, but Lilian’s response to it, as well.
Seven years ago, when Finckel and the Emerson String Quartet released a complete Shostakovich cycle, the family was deeply immersed in Russian music, and Wu Han often played the Tchaikovsky work that’s now on the CD to Lilian, who devised her own choreography to it, the 6-year-old dancing around the piano. Wu Han, a devoted Tchaikovsky fan since her own childhood, says Seasons “speaks to the most basic human emotions. I know it’s not a piece with a huge form, or a massive, colossal sound, but its simple melodic lines hit directly into your heart and soul. And I was reminded by our daughter’s reaction to this piece of the magical power of such wondrous music as this.”
Wu Han: To Russia, with Love
Stravinsky at Stanford
Along with the Stravinsky feature in this issue and the item in Listening Ahead, here’s more about Uncle Igor and Stanford’s “Stravinsky Project.”
Organizers call March 7-9 a “meaty weekend” of concerts, lectures, demonstrations, and discussions, featuring pianist Alexander Toradze and musicologist Joseph Horowitz. The mini-festival includes a talk about “Hollywood Exiles” (Stravinsky, Fritz Lang, and Rouben Mamoulian); a free preconcert event, “Interpreting Stravinsky,” with Toradze, George Vatchnadze, and Genadi Zagor; as well as concerts titled Stravinsky’s “Grand Works in Intimate Form” and “The Elaborated Stravinsky.”
Iphigénie en KDFC-FM
Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, the San Francisco Opera performance that was recorded last summer, will be broadcast on KDFC, 102.1 FM, Sunday night at 8 p.m., with Susan Graham in the title role, Bo Skovhus as Orestes, and Paul Groves as Pylades; Patrick Summers conducts.
Will MTT Files Be Heard Again?
Now that KALW-FM concluded rebroadcasting this superb eight-program series, the question is: Where and when to find it again? On the Internet, in podcasts, on CDs? No easy answer is available, but let’s look for them together — future News columns will follow up. The American Public Media list of radio stations for The MTT Files is no help at all. If you click on KQED-FM, for example, you get an error message, and going directly to the KQED Web site for a search for the program yields no information.
At least, on KALW, you find this:
This week: 5 Degrees of Separation — In this FINAL installment of The MTT Files, Michael Tilson Thomas explores the teacher/student relationship and examines the qualities of what makes a great and memorable teacher.
Beginning NEXT week: Join us for “Music from Mills” — five programs of concert highlights from the Mills College Music Department and Center for Contemporary Music, hosted by KALW’s David Latulippe.
Here are the other programs in the The MTT Files series:
- Program 1: You Call That Music?!
- Program 2: What Does America Sound Like? — Part 1
- Program 3: What Does America Sound Like? — Part 2
- Program 4: Igor Stravinsky’s Copyright Blues
- Program 5: The Last Virtuoso
- Program 6: Freud and the Ballet
- Program 7: We Were Playing Boulez, But We Were Listening to James Brown!
But wait, minutes after the original publication of this item came e-mail from Harvey G. Lehtman, of Los Altos: All the MTT files are archived at the American Public Media Web site: www.americanpublicmedia. And so they are. Download or stream, have fun.
MTT
Mordake Premiere
As part of the next San Francisco International Arts Festival in May, Erling Wold’s multimedia opera (or “fabrication”) will have its premiere. Mordake — with libretto by Douglas Kearney, starring John Duykers, and directed by Melissa Weaver — is about a 19th-century mystery, the case of Edward Mordake and his “devil twin.” Mordake is a man tormented by a woman’s voice coming from a face on the back of his head … which should make for a lively opera. More about the festival in the next issue of News.
The Back of Mordake’s Head (possibly)
Where Are They Now? Sarah Viola
There she was at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, being put through some bizarre paces by Thomas Hampson, at a memorable master class. Now, six years later, Sarah Viola, a California-born soprano from Oregon and an SFCM alumna, is making a career for herself in New York, and ranging all the way to Italy, where she will sing Giulietta in the premiere of Emily Wong’s Romeo e Giulietta. The production travels to Philadelphia next year. While still a West Coaster, Viola sang with Opera Santa Barbara and at festivals in Mendocino and Bear Valley.
Sarah Viola
Wong, composer for the new opera, is known locally from the Cabrillo Music Festival, where first she was the youngest member of the Festival Orchestra, and later one of the featured composers. As a pianist, she has appeared with the San Francisco Symphony, the Oakland Symphony, Philharmonica Virtuosi, Continuum, and American Composers Orchestra.
New Score for Old Film
The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival (April 24 – May 8) will feature the premiere of Black Francis’ original score for the 1920 German expressionist silent film The Golem. The program will take place at the Castro Theater on April 25.
The film is the last in a trilogy on the golem myth by director Paul Wegener, and tells the story of a rabbi’s creation of a Frankenstein-like creature sculpted from rough clay and brought to life through sorcery to protect the threatened Jewish Ghetto.
Black Francis (Charles Thompson) began his career with the Pixies — the musician and the group now considered as an important influence on contemporary musical groups from Nirvana to Radiohead to Weezer.
Black Francis
Bravo Brave Opera!
Michael Capasso’s announcement of Dicapo Opera’s next season is impressive, to say the least: seven new productions, including one world and two U.S. premieres, plus a commission.
- Lily, with music by Kurt Weill — world premiere of the “monodrama”
- Janáček’s Šárka: first U.S. performance
- Honegger’s La mort de Sainte Alméenne: first U.S. performance (double bill with Šárka)
- Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr. Fox: New York premiere
- Robert Ward’s The Crucible
- Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algieri — this and the The Crucible to be directed by Robert Alföldi, new artistic director of the Hungarian National Theater
- Turandot, concluding DiCapo’s Puccini Project
But there is more:
- Dicapo’s first commission: an opera by Italian composer Francesco Cilluffo based on The Mortara Case, about the abduction of a Jewish child by Papal Guards
- Celebration of Puccini’s 150th birthday with a gala concert at Lincoln Center on Dec. 22
- The first of an annual series of Composer Retrospective Concerts, honoring the legacy of impresario Guilio Gatti-Casazza and his patron Otto H. Kahn
- A “Dance at Dicapo” presentation under the direction of Nilas Martins
- Dicapo Opera Resident Artists featured throughout the season, including the “Death by Aria” concert
Bravo Dicapo!
Symphony’s Brahms Festival
The San Francisco Symphony’s summer festival will be devoted to Johannes Brahms, featuring his works at Davies Hall, May 8-24. Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas will conduct, soloists include pianists Leif Ove Andsnes and Yefim Bronfman, soprano Laura Claycomb, and baritone Matthias Goerne. Performances of Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) will conclude the festival, May 21-24.
Laura Claycomb
Peter, Wolf Take Oscar
Suzie Templeton’s and Hugh Welchman’s film of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf took the Best Animated Short Award at the Oscars on Sunday, a well-deserved honor.
The half-hour-long film, writes Jonathan Hickman, “employs the same stop-frame model animation popularized by Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations. … The behind-the-scenes production story might rival the film itself. … The puppets were digitally photographed thousands of times and the digital pictures fed directly into computers (each camera had its own workstation). This took as much as one week to complete one shot. From that point, the photos were integrated with digital video effects and matte paintings. The result is truly a work of art. Little details like the hands of the Grandfather are simply perfect, and yet, unreal in an otherworldly way.”
The film is unusual in its lack of any dialogue or narration, the story is told purely in images and sound, with sustained periods of silence. The soundtrack is performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra; the film received its premiere with a live accompaniment in the Royal Albert Hall. (Watch the trailer.)
Suzy Templeton
SFS to Benaroya Hall
Jumping ahead of the San Francisco Symphony’s season announcement, due on March 3, the Seattle Symphony says SFS will visit the city next season. To be conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, the orchestra will play in Benaroya Hall, which is celebrating its 10th birthday.
The anniversary season opens with Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, and it will feature premieres by Aaron Jay Kernis and Samuel Jones. Guest conductors include Andre Previn, Nicholas McGegan, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, David Robertson, Dennis Russell Davies, JoAnn Falletta, Vassily Sinaisky, Leonard Slatkin, and James DePreist.
In the Nordstrom Recital Hall, there will be performances of all Beethoven string quartets by various ensembles, including the American String Quartet, Pacific Quartet, Talich Quartet, and Ying Quartet.
Benaroya Hall
Report on Ives Symphony in Davis
Composer/musicologist Charles Shere was taken by the Mondavi Center performance of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 4 in Davis, and by the combined orchestras of UC Davis and the University of the Pacific, under Nicolas Waldvogel. He writes:
The piece is huge and complex, a simultaneity of tenderness, strength, spiritual reflectiveness, and mundane effort. It spread from a stage seating scores of winds and strings to two balconies with chamber ensembles and, in the upper balcony, the eloquent University Chorus led by Jeffrey Thomas.
Rarely undertaken, the Fourth is significant far beyond its history of live performances (it was last played in San Francisco six years ago); a 20th-century analog to the 19th-century Beethoven Ninth. Unlike that masterwork, though, Ives’ Fourth is essentially of the people, woven of their hymns and marches, drinking songs, and dance-hall music. Playing it and hearing it is an exercise in public responsibility, and both university music departments are to be congratulated, and their musicians deeply thanked, for clarity, discipline, enterprise, and the beauties of the result.
For more, see Shere’s blog.
Capital Britten
Sacramento, famed — if perhaps less than fully metropolitan — capital of California, is not where you’d expect world-class opera. And yet, on Sunday afternoon, this first-time visitor to Sacramento Opera had a delightful surprise by an outstanding experience therein.
Imagine Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in a spirited, flawless performance, a splendid cast, convincingly directed, spectacularly sung and played production. Company Artistic Director and Conductor Timm Rolek deserves double acknowledgment for selection and execution.
Few opera companies venture to put on this gem, a complex, puzzling ghost story based on Henry James’ 1898 psychological thriller. Not to divert attention from the Sacramento event by dealing with the work itself (both James’ and Britten’s), here is an offering of material, ranging from a basic account to a highly complex dissertation.
In addition to the dramatic and musical challenges already inherent in The Turn of the Screw, Rolek and company also tackled a daunting task: presenting a chamber opera in a large theater, the 2,400-seat Community Center Theater. To the credit of the city’s discerning classical-music audience, the Sunday attendance — one of three performances — was over 1,400.
Thomas Glenn and Brooks Fisher
Photo by Eleakis
Sound from the six singers and a 13-piece orchestra was so clear and balanced that I suspected (but couldn’t verify) the presence of acoustic “enhancement,” as in, some measure of amplification. Regardless of venue, technology, and so on, as the final scene of Act I (”At Night”) unfolded, Britten’s uniquely enchanting music, possibly the most spellbinding piece Richard Strauss never wrote, swept away questions and even awareness of anything but the beauty of the moment.
(Asked about amplification the day after the performance, Sacramento Opera’s Jennifer A. Lin said no general electronic enhancement was used in the hall, and there were only two instances of amplification — both rather commonplace in contemporary productions — the boy soprano singing the role of Miles used a microphone, and twice Peter Quint’s calls to Miles were briefly amplified to emphasize the ghostly nature of the character, just “for theatrical effect.”)
San Francisco Opera Merola and Adler veteran Thomas Glenn is becoming known increasingly for his portrayal of physicist Robert Wilson in John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, but his Prologue/Peter Quint at the matinee clearly points ad astra.
With a voice of crystalline purity in phrasing and diction (but thanks to Sacramento Opera for the supertitles, anyway), the tenor also has a thrilling stage presence. His ghostly evil character (in Chuck Hudson’s self-effacing and clearly communicating direction) received equally deserved bravos and hisses. Director and singer are both special in their ability and willingness to disappear in their work. There is no Regietheater or star in Sacramento, only good direction and great performance.
Thomas Glenn and Emily Pulley
Ditto for Emily Pulley, a “star soprano” singing the ambiguous, difficult role of the Governess with dedication and restraint. Pulley can be as powerful and intense as any singer, but that’s not what this role calls for (except in a few climactic moments). So instead, she was letter-perfect as the conflicted, eventually agonized woman trying to find her way through imagined and possible spectres of the unspeakable, even as she keeps turning the screw of pressure on the children “for their own good.”
Boy soprano Brooks Fisher performed the crucial role of Miles with musical and dramatic excellence. More mature (and powerful) than a “girl soprano,” Antoni Mendezona was Miles’ sister, Flora. Fenlon Lamb was straight-arrow strong as the Housekeeper, and to show how accurate “splendid” is in describing the cast, consider that the relatively small role of Miss Jessel went to Maria Jette, a singer who is small only in her waistline measurement.
Gregory Mason’s musical preparation, Paul Shortt’s simple and effective set design, and fine costumes by Yvette Harding and Gabriella Nance all deserve kudos.
Withal, the biggest and best surprise of the production was the teeny-tiny orchestra, from members of Michael Morgan’s Sacramento Philharmonic, in Britten’s original orchestration, where each member is a “principal” for the simple reason that he or she is the only member of the “section.”
Dan Flanagan and Tod Brody
Dan Flanagan was concertmaster and first violins, Erika Miranda represented all the second violins, as James Een violas, Lea Bonhorst Andaya cellos, and Thomas Derthick the bass. First among equals, Eric Achen’s horn, Sandra McPherson’s clarinet, and Gregory Mason’s keyboard covered themselves with glory. Tod Brody (flute), Thomas Nugent (oboe), Karen Gale (bassoon), Thomas Rance (percussion), and Anna Maria Mendieta (harp) should be all retained to perform around the Bay in perpetuity … if they don’t already, as witnessed in Freeway Philharmonic.
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.
The San Francisco Symphony’s 2008-2009 season, just announced, suffers from one glaring, shameful, unforgivable omission. This will be the 100th birthday year of our great, living, still active American composer, Elliott Carter, whose works and career will be celebrated throughout the country. Yet not a single work by Carter appears in the San Francisco Symphony’s new season!
Posted by Daniel Greenhouse on March 4, 2008 at 1:50 am