Scaling the Ring

HAMBURG — Who is the first woman to have conducted Wagner’s mammoth Der Ring des Nibelungen? The same who did it the second time, and now is in the middle of her third production of the cycle. Besides being first, second, and third — she is still the one and only. (See the Comments section below for a correction of that claim.)

Australia’s Simone Young has led Berlin and Vienna Ring productions in this decade, and now, as artistic director of Hamburg’s 330-year-old Staatsoper, she is beginning a third cycle, which will run through 2012 — coincidently in the same timeframe with the San Francisco Opera’s “American Ring.”

Apparently, it’s not enough just to produce the 16-hour marathon Ring; it must have an “angle,” too. Come June, the San Francisco Ring — a coproduction with the Washington (D.C.) Opera — will have scenes set during the California Gold Rush and even in the Roaring Twenties. In Hamburg, it’s a sharply and at times grotesquely scaled Ring in which characters range across oversize sets that dwarf the singers, while designer Christian Schmidt has the gods trampling inches-high mountains and looking out of scale again, only in the opposite direction.

Alberich (Wolfgang Koch) cavorts with the Rhinemaidens

Photos by Monika Rittershaus

Claus Guth’s stage production is full of tricks and ideas, some vastly entertaining, some half-baked at most. After the March 24 performance in company’s 82-year-old house, rebuilt in 1955 — with stunning acoustics for a hall this large — there were some boos, but mostly applause, the latter perhaps occasioned more by musical values than the tricky physical production.

Young conducted a rock-solid vocal and orchestral performance, short on brilliance, but impressively long on consistency, balance, and sustained (if unvaried) energy. Except for occasional weaknesses in the brass, the Hamburg Philharmonic — which serves as the Opera’s orchestra, also headed by Young — did itself proud. In the cast without “big names,” the balance among uniformly good singers served the work remarkably well.

From the very beginning, with the three Rhinemaidens cavorting under the “waves” of a bedspread on an enormous, slanted bed (quite without a river), the voices of Ha Young Lee, Gabriele Rossmanith, and Ann Beth Solvang blended perfectly — with each other and with the orchestra. The hall provided flawless audibility for text and music, the former augmented with supertitles.

Appearing first in some kind of chemical suit, in search of something other than love or money (but what?), Wolfgang Koch’s Alberich sustained a fine singing-actor’s performance, well-balanced in his interactions with Mime (Jurgen Sacher) and Loge (Peter Galliard, made by the director to do magic tricks endlessly).

Wotan (Falk Struckmann), on top, surveys his domain

Even Falk Struckmann’s human and beautifully sung Wotan fit in, part of an all-around well-matched cast. Katja Pieweck’s matronly, tea-serving, and surprisingly unshrewish Fricka, as well as Deborah Humble’s brief, but powerful appearance as Erda were noteworthy. The two not particularly large, but definitely Mafia-looking Giants were Tigran Martirossian (Fasolt — but known to San Francisco audiences as Nerses, Catholicos of Armenia, in the 2001 Arshak II) and Alexander Tsymbalyuk (Fafner).

Between the bedded Rhinemaidens and the final scene of Loge thrusting at the audience a hand dripping with Fasolt’s blood, an eventful, but somehow not excessively distracting time was had by all. The most significant director’s touch was in eliminating the Nibelung altogether — the gold-processing race of dwarves, not the Nibelung of the cycle’s title. Alberich’s slaves did their work down below, and later carried the gold to the gods invisibly, which may mean considerable savings in the budget for chorus (actually shriekers, that being their only part in the score), and extras to be whipped and otherwise abused.

The gods of the Hamburg “Ring” depart for Walhalla

Again, beyond all the liberties and shticks, the Hamburg Rheingold is a musically excellent, theatrically “interesting” production, which may well turn out to be far less galling than American flapper gods, doing the Charleston on their way to Walhalla.

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Laying an Easter Egg With Young Brahms

HAMBURG — When you celebrate your hometown hero’s birth 175 times, you will assuredly run out of standards, and start digging for the lesser known. And so, on Easter Sunday morning, the Hamburger Ostertöne concert offered Johannes Brahms’ 1863 Rinaldo, the 30-year-old composer’s incomplete entry for a choral competition. Brahms finished and presented the 35-minute cantata in 1869 (it’s numbered as Opus 50), but it never caught on.

What’s interesting about this how-Beethoven-might-have-written-Baroque-music piece is that if Brahms ever seriously ventured into opera, chances are it might have had a sound similar to this — uniformly heroic and loud, with an unconvincingly lyric fringe. Apt descriptions by others include: “endless shades of gray,” “excessive Baroque conceits,” and “lack of sensuality.”

The story is the episode from Tasso’s 1580 Gerusalemme Liberata, which has to do with the knight and the witch Armida (to whom Handel did justice a century and a half before Brahms’ treatment, and followed by Haydn and Rossini, who favored the lady over the knight). The cantata is written for tenor and men’s chorus, performed here in Laeiszhalle by Johan Botha and members of the Staatsoper Hamburg Chorus. A small configuration of Philharmoniker Hamburg was conducted vigorously by Simone Young.

Simone Young

Botha, possibly the most lyrical of heldentenors today, had his head deep into the score, giving the impression of winging the part. I have always been impressed by Botha, and always had an unspecified misgiving about him. This morning, clarity came in that matter. This wonderful, forward-set voice is as plain-vanilla tenor as a voice can get, quite without color or personality. The chorus sounded as if the men were somewhere backstage, occupied with other matters. My companion, a choral director, pointed out that the Hamburg singers have a “professional sound, not like American opera choruses.” But as for me, give me passion and a presence of sound, never mind “professional sound,” whatever that may be.

Chances are you may not be bothered again (soon or ever) in the matter of Rinaldo, so here is a bit of the text to give an idea of the piece:

A spacious garden … where not a light leaf shakes or zephyr strays, but breathes out love; here, on the fresh green ground in his fair lady’s lap the warrior will be found. But when th’Enchantress quits her darling’s side, and elsewhere turns her footsteps from the place, then, with the diamond shield which I provide, step forth and so present it for a space. That he may start at his reflected face, his wanton weeds and ornaments survey: The sight whereof, and sense of his disgrace, shall make him blush, and without delay from his unworthy love indignant break away.

When sung in German, at least for this listener, the meaning is even murkier.

The concert also included homage to Messiaen (a century-old birthday boy) in the form of Messiaen disciple Gérard Grisey’s Modulations for 33 Musicians, a piece far more cacophonic and disjointed than anything Messiaen ever wrote. Young presented a long introduction to the piece, arguing for its artistic merit. The performance itself attempted to do the same, although conductor and orchestra seemed totally submerged in the score. Seeing this, just 48 hours after a concert in San Francisco with Gustavo Dudamel, makes you wonder if having total mastery of the score might not be a prerequisite of a decent performance.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 12:25 pm and is filed under music news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

It doesn’t matter how much hype is swirling around conductor Gustavo Dudamel. He is the real deal, a great all-around young talent, who consistently delivers the goods, as his debut concerts with the San Francisco Symphony last week proved.

All of Davies Hall’s 2,750 seats were sold for a 10 a.m. open rehearsal, surely a first, and there was a long line of hoping-against-hope applicants for the nonexistent tickets, all but waving a finger in the air a la Deadheads in quest of admission. The cause of it all was Venezuela’s Dudamel, a 27-year-old superstar who has been conducting for a dozen years. He has made a huge splash around the world, and in neighboring Los Angeles where he will succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen as the Philharmonic’s music director next year. Last November he became an overnight idol locally, after leading his Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in a sensational concert (see review).

Inside Davies, in spite of the great expectations, Dudamel was almost unnoticed as he casually walked to the podium, dressed in jeans, T-shirt tail sticking out from under a drab, utilitarian sweater. Without a look at the score (which later served as the resting place for the hastily discarded sweater) he launched into Stravinsky’s 1910 Firebird, and suddenly it became crystal clear what all the hype is about. Two unusual events that took place at the rehearsal illustrate the conductor’s prowess.

First, near the end of The Firebird, as the battle against the evil magician Kashchei is won, heavy, spontaneous applause broke out in the hall even while the music continued, like a deafening “Ole!” rising in a crowded bullring. Then, in an unprecedented scene, there was a standing ovation at the end of the Stravinsky rehearsal.

Twice the Excitement, Twice the Ovations

The standing-O occurred again that evening, and it was not occasioned only by Dudamel cleaning up for the concert. No, the acclaim came in response to the same vital, exciting performance, which had gotten better. Dudamel’s few minutes of brief corrections and suggestions at the rehearsal paid off in a presentation of The Firebird that should resound in listeners’ ears and hearts for a long, long time. It was a spontaneous, unanimous ovation, as the audience and orchestra celebrated a great performance.

Even while Kirill Gerstein unceremoniously polished off the pleasant banalities of the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 1 (on an American Steinway, quite without the brilliance of the Symphony’s other, German, instrument), some wonderful sounds came from the orchestra, whetting the appetite for the Stravinsky.

This was a Firebird for the ages, the music pouring to Dudamel, from the many Ravel-like hushed passages, through a Dukas-influenced sense of playfulness, through to the gnarled, Bartokian climaxes. Balances were flawless, there was rhythmic excitement, lyrical outpouring, and charming interludes, each, in turn, performed exactly right.

At the beginning, the appearance of the Firebird came from a great distance, barely audible. The princesses’ circle dance (khorovod) was simple and charming, the appearances of the Firebird magical. At the end, the “Dissolution of All Enchantments” and “General Rejoicing” pulled the audience out of their seats, with a true, cathartic climax, which did not sound, as it sometimes can, like Respighiesque circus music.

Although the orchestra exhibited ensemble playing at its best, with palpable affection for the conductor, individual contributions were outstanding, especially from concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, acting principal violist Yun Jie Liu, principal cellist Michael Grebanier, principal flutists Tim Day and Robin McKee, and pretty much the entire woodwind and brass sections.

The music came from the instrumentalists, but Dudamel was responsible for the gestalt of the sound, by turns hushed, bright, assuasive, charming, glittering, and intense. As usual with him, Dudamel took no solo bows, standing with the musicians and giving them all the credit, which was richly deserved. It was the icing on the cake. Yes, no hype can spoil the Dudamel Experience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under review, symphony. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Good Response for “Call & Response”

Regarding your review and News item on the Cypress String Quartet’s concert: We really had a great time with this year’s “Call & Response” concert and the preceding outreach — it’s wonderful to see that the students and general audience alike responded so well to our program. I think that placing the music in historical context through our outreach visits provided a deeper understanding about the composers and their music and made it all the more compelling and interesting to our student audience members. We’ve already begun planning the 10th anniversary edition of “Call & Response” and we’ll be sure to keep you posted as we finalize details.

SFCV is doing a great job covering the extensive classical music offerings in the Bay Area. The service you provide is invaluable!

— Todd Donovan, Executive Director, Cypress String Quartet

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under listeners' box. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Lovefest, joyful reunion, royal tribute — such descriptions merely begin to tell the tale of the U.S. premiere of “Pauline Viardot and Friends.” This major fête from San Francisco Performances, which repeats in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre on Saturday night, March 22, not only affords the opportunity to see two of the greatest mezzos of the last 50 years strut their stuff in fine form, but also allows a major reassessment of the prodigious compositional gifts of their legendary mezzo predecessor, Pauline Viardot (1821-1910).

“Imagine that is Pauline Viardot writing that!” exclaimed host and narrator Marilyn Horne after soprano Melody Moore had done a wonderful job in bringing Viardot’s dramatic Scéne d’Hermione to life. So powerful was the music that we all nodded our heads in agreement. It was only one of the several Viardot works on the generous program, whose drama and passion Tchaikovsky and Chopin might have recognized as equal to their own.

Thanks to Horne’s awe-inspiring gifts as a raconteur — abetted (it seems) by a diminutive prompting screen spied by a balcony attendee — and the equally inspiring gifts of the performing musicians (who included, in a brief quartet, Horne herself), our appreciation of Viardot’s gifts grew. We already knew that she had been the vocal toast of Europe, for whose instrument and “unearthly technique” Meyerbeer wrote Le Prophète (”the hardest music I ever sang,” said Horne), Brahms wrote the Alto Rhapsody, and Berlioz revived Gluck’s Orphée and Alceste.

From Horne we learned that Viardot was also the pianist whom Saint-Saëns proclaimed the equal of Clara Schumann, the salon host who brought together the continent’s literary greats, and the uncredited genius who helped Gounod write Sappho and Berlioz write Les Troyens. But as a composer, she was handicapped by the fact that she was a woman composing in the 19th century. Thus her songs and operettas were basically neglected during her lifetime and for at least 60 years after her death.

Remarkable Sisters Rediscovered

Then the tide began to shift. First came Horne’s recently remastered Souvenir of a Golden Era. Inspired by London Records’ Terry McEwen, this major tribute to the repertoire of Viardot and her younger sister, Maria Malibran (the two were called “the Sisters Garcia”), drew renewed attention to Viardot (listen online). Further attention was drawn to the clan when von Stade revived the mezzo version of La Sonnambula that Bellini arranged for Maria Malibran. (I still recall Flicka sleepwalking on the San Francisco Opera set, singing with rare grace.)

Then came recordings of Viardot’s music by Cecilia Bartoli and Isabel Bayrakdarian. Finally, in its third appearance and second incarnation, we have “Pauline Viardot and Friends.” The program is also available on CD in an Opera Rara live recording from Wigmore Hall that includes some significant — not for the better — cast changes.

Which takes us to the evening itself. Director Lotfi Mansouri set the stage, approximating with elegant simplicity an intimate salon: lovely chair and flower-set table on the left for Horne, backed by a tastefully patterned screen; Peter Grunberg’s polished piano in the middle, with room for cellist Emil Miland’s two appearances; and three chairs and table (with flowers and water) on the right for the three vocalists, backed by the obligatory potted palm.

Filling the first chair was a radiant blonde, Horne, who recently survived chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery for pancreatic cancer. (She also credits her recovery to daily sessions of hypnotherapy.) The picture of health (despite a sore throat), she looked resplendent in a bright red dress and sequined cape. Soon she was followed by Vladimir Chernov, handsome with longish gray hair and a modern rendition of black-tie formality; von Stade, glamorous as all get out; and Moore, more simply attired.

The singing was major. Von Stade’s vocal production remains admirably steady, her hollow, low sounds heart-touchingly profound, the highs strong and ringing. At her incomparable best in the softer-voiced Die Sterne (The stars), she projected the first line with ravishing, transfixing beauty. Describing a motionless, mystical moment gazing at the stars, her wondrous, show-stopping performance was breathtakingly mesmerizing.

Chernov is another great artist. So masterful that he made Viardot’s vocally challenging Russian-language songs sound easy, he sang with elegance and restraint. Turning on his abundant charm, Chernov capped the opening Dve rozy (Two roses) with a gorgeous, sweet high falsetto. Elsewhere, he darkened his tone as required, sweetening at the end of phrases only when appropriate, and hinting at his preeminence as a Verdi baritone by opening up with hall-filling drama at the end of the final song. You could sense snarl and menace in his blood, but mostly he closed his eyes to purr up the paramour and the pussycat.

A Surprising Melody

“I knew that Flicka and Vladimir were great,” said Horne, “but Melody is the surprise for me.” As she was for many of us. Despite her embrace of heavier rep — Gluck’s Divinités du Styx (Gods of the Styx) is, after all, Eileen Farrell and Kirsten Flagstad territory — I hear Moore’s voice at this point as basically lyric with spinto pretensions. There is a dramatic darkness to the lower range, and the always secure, easily voiced highs can open with impressive, quasi-spectacular color, but the dramatic weight (let alone the Flagstadian grandeur and Hina Spani-like glamour) are not (yet?) there.

Given some of the hardest, most demanding songs of the evening, Moore sang wonderfully, with a rock-steady, healthy tone throughout the range. Her beautiful final solo Ici-bas tous les Lilas meurent (Down here all the lilacs die) displayed abundant lyric gifts that I hope are not lost in a push toward bigness.

Grunberg was more than the ideally supportive accompanist and music director. His perfectly postured, handsome countenance steadily beamed volumes of appreciation as Horne conquered her newest role with awesome ease. Emil Miland was the droll cellist-trickster, playing wonderfully, the foil of Flicka’s gags, the icing on the cake.

What great artists and music. Special thanks to producer Judy Flannery, writer Georgia Smith, music researcher Marta Johansen, and project advisor Clifford Cranna for helping create this extraordinary evening. I’m still vibrating from the experience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under review, chamber music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Early Music

Anthems by Handel and Purcell

As it always does, Philharmonia Baroque brings in the Philharmonia Chorale to end the season. This year, there won’t be an oratorio. Instead the orchestra performs Handel’s festive Dettingen Te Deum, commemorating a victory by George II and his allies over the French during the War of Austrian Succession. Philharmonia also offers Zadok the Priest, the most famous of the Coronation Anthems composed for George II’s accession in 1727, and two of Purcell’s gorgeous anthems, the forerunners of Handel’s in the English tradition.

April 3, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre, San Francisco; April 4, 8 p.m., First United Methodist Church, Palo Alto; April 5, 8 p.m., and April 6, 7:30 p.m., First Congregational Church, Berkeley; $30-$72, (415) 252-1288, www.philharmonia.org. (M.Z.)

Vivid Vivaldi

Symphony orchestras like to bring big-draw repertory items with them on tour, so why not a Baroque group? When Europa Galante, with its violinist-leader, the fabulous Fabio Biondi, come to Cal Performances, it will feature “Summer” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, along with works by Telemann, Purcell, Leclair, and Biber. No apologies necessary, though: If any readings of Vivaldi’s overfamiliar masterpiece can be called revelatory, they would be Europa Galante’s two recordings on Op. 111 and Virgin Classics. Biondi benefits from modern historically informed performance practices, obviously, but is not bound by them. He heads straight for the emotional, rough heart of the music, and pulls out all the dramatic stops. Listen here to the Adagio e spiccato, No. 2 in G minor RV578 (from L’estro armonico), and the second movement from L’estro armonico.

April 4, 8 p.m., $48, First Congregational Church, Berkeley, (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu. (M.Z.)

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Chamber Orchestra

New Century Chamber Orchestra

Stuart Canin, NCCO’s founding music director, returns to lend his silken violin tone to the solo part of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5, K. 219. The concert will also feature string orchestra versions of Mendelssohn’s Octet and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8. (NCCO gave one of the best concerts of 2007.)

April 3, 8 p.m., St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Berkeley; April 4, 8 p.m., St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto; April 5, 8 p.m., Florence Gould Theatre, San Francisco; April 6 at 5 p.m., Osher Marin JCC, San Rafael; $28-$42, (415) 392-4400, www.ncco.org. (D.B.)

Stuart Canin

Swedish Chamber Orchestra

The Swedish Chamber Orchestra brings a program of Beethoven and Schumann to Cal Performances, with pianist Piotr Anderszewski as soloist in Beethoven’s first concerto. The Coriolan Overture and Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 are also featured.

April 6, 3 p.m., $34-$58, (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu. (M.Z.)

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Chamber Music

Words, Stories, and Music

The power of words in music is the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s charge for its March concert, and the works chosen range from old to new: There’s Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet No. 2, Intimate Letters; Carl Schimmel’s The Pismirist’s Congeries for violin, cello, flute, and piano; the U.S. premiere of Sean Varah’s Borderline for cello and tape; and the West Coast premiere of Harold Meltzer’s Sindbad for narrator and piano trio.

March 27, 8 p.m., Throckmorton Theater, Mill Valley; March 31, 8 p.m., Green Room, San Francisco; $25-$40, (415) 642-8054, www.chambermusicpartn.org. (C.G.)

Left Coast Chamber Ensemble

TinAlley String Quartet

The San Jose Chamber Music Society promised to bring us the winner of last fall’s Banff International String Quartet Competition, and here it is: The TinAlley String Quartet from Australia. Past winners of this competition include the St. Lawrence, Miró, and Jupiter Quartets, so with those forerunners we should be in for some excellent and distinctive music-making. It will be a challenging program: Haydn’s delicate Op. 76, No. 5; Mendelssohn’s somber Op. 13; and Bartók’s fearsome Fourth. The quartet is also giving a free performance in San Francisco earlier in March, with the same program except for Alban Berg’s early and rarely heard Op. 3 in place of the Bartók.

March 30, 7 p.m., Le Petit Trianon, San Jose, $25-$40, (408) 286-5111, www.sjchambermusic.org. (D.B.)

St. Lawrence String Quartet

The St. Lawrence String Quartet bring their yearlong residency at Stanford to a close with a Haydn classic, Op. 77, No. 1, and the premiere of Jonathan Berger’s String Quartet No. 4, The Bridal Canopy. Pianist Stephen Prutsman joins the quartet for a performance of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Piano Quintet.

April 6, 2:30 p.m., Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford, $20-$44, (650) 723-2551, www.livelyarts.stanford.edu. (M.Z.)

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Recital

Elza van den Heever

This soprano and native of South Africa has one of the more astute sensibilities to the fine points of vocal coloration. Van den Heever is no foreigner to Bay Area audiences, as she graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory and recently made her debut with the San Francisco Opera as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. Her San Francisco Performances recital promises to showcase another side of her repertoire with songs by Brahms, Strauss, and Debussy. Her temperament, musical sensitivity, and intelligence will be a nice match for the rich ruby-red carpets and intimate setting of the Hotel Rex.

March 26, 6:30 p.m., Hotel Rex, San Francisco, $20, (415) 398-6449, www.sfperformances.org. (C.G.)

Elza van den Heever

Nikolaj Znaider

He’s got a Guarneri “del Gesu” and he’s not afraid to use it: Nikolaj Znaider is the latest star violinist to grace the Bay Area with an appearance. He’s not toting any of the Brahms works he just released on CD, but the San Francisco Performances concert does include a couple of Beethoven sonatas: the D Minor Bach Partita (No. 2), and, by way of variety, Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin With Piano, Op. 47. Pianist Robert Kulek accompanies.

March 26, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, $27-$39, (415) 398-6449, www.performances.org. (M.Z.)

Tambourine (and Everything Else) Man

Chen Zimbalista, like many percussionists, has personality to spare. He’s a virtuoso with a little bit of old-school showman in him. Wired with the intense energy of a rock star, he devours the technical challenges of 20th-century and contemporary repertory, plays classic concertos, arranged for percussion, with style, and regularly gives “world music” concerts in which he plays more than 40 instruments. In his appearance at the 2008 Jewish Music Festival, Zimbalista focuses on the music of contemporary Israeli composers, including a few of his own pieces. Percussionist Katja Cooper and Argentine pianist Josè Gallardo, lend their assistance.

March 27, 7:30 p.m., St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, $20-$24, (510) 848-0237, www.jewishmusicfestival.org. (M.Z.)

Ian Tracey, Organist

Ian Tracey is an organist in such demand, he’s had to give up his day job. After a quarter century as organist and then music director at Liverpool Cathedral, in January, he turned over his duties to David Poulter and became the cathedral’s “Organist Titulaire” — in other words, its musical star performer. He’s made several recordings on the cathedral’s grand organ, among his dozen or so CDs. His recital in Grace Cathedral, part of his 22nd U.S. tour, will be quite an event, and, like all organ recitals at Grace, it’s free.

March 30, 4 p.m., Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, free, (415) 749-6355, www.gracecathedral.org. (M.Z.)

Ian Tracey

With Replacements Like These …

Pianist Murray Perahia was originally slated to lead the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in performances of Mozart piano concertos (No. 21 in C Major, K. 467, and the equally marvelous No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491) and his “Paris” Symphony, No. 31 in D Major, K. 297, as well as Haydn’s crowning symphonic masterpiece, the “London” Symphony, No. 104, and a pair of Mendelssohn perennials, the Hebrides Overture and the “Italian” Symphony, No. 4. Because of an illness, he has been replaced by pianist Yuja Wang and conductor Sir Neville Mariner. With backup talent like this spoiling Bay Area audiences, we better not let it go to our heads.

March 30, 7 p.m., March 31, 8 p.m., Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, $25-$95, (415) 864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org. (M.Z.)

Leon Fleisher

This native of San Francisco is no stranger to challenge — when he suffered a debilitating ailment to his right hand, he fought back by performing and recording repertoire for the left hand (to popular and critical acclaim), eventually worked to regain the use of his right hand, and now performs (to popular and critical acclaim) with both hands. His Chamber Music S.F. concert, including both solo works and four-hand works with pianist Katherine Jacobson Fleisher, will feature Schubert’s Fantasy in F Minor and Ravel’s La Valse (both for piano four hands), as well as a Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960.

April 5, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, $47-$51, (415) 392-4400, www.chambermusicsf.org. (C.G.)

Beethoven Cycle

Even to a pianist as devoted to complete traversals of composers’ piano works as András Schiff, the Beethoven 32 piano sonatas are something of an irresistible mountain that requires repeated climbing. Schiff has played the full set a number of times and he is in the midst of recording it. The four concerts in 2007-2008 at San Francisco Performances, offer exactly half of the sonatas. In the upcoming concerts, Schiff goes slightly out of order so that the tragic, experimental Op. 26 in A-Flat Major (No. 12), can join its soulmates, the Op. 27 pair (Nos. 13, “Quasi una fantasia,” and 14, “Moonlight”), and Op. 28 (the “Pastoral”, No. 15). On the earlier program, Op. 22 in B-Flat Major (listen here), with its gorgeous, expansive, Adagio movement, is followed by Op. 49/1 in G Minor (listen here), which sports a lyrical, elegiac, Andante for a first movement. The two sonatas of Op. 14 (Nos. 9-10) and the remaining one in Op. 49 (No. 20), complete the program.

April 6, 13, 7 p.m., Davies Symphony Hall, $25-$81, (415) 398-6449, www.performances.org. (M.Z.)

Daniela Mack

When John Bender reviewed the Merola Program’s La Cenerentola for SFCV last year, he praised mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack, in the title role, in fulsome terms: “The velvet integration of her vocal registers and her amazing fluency in ornamentation are enough to make crystal-ball gazers predict future greatness.” You now have the chance to hear this young singer in a Schwabacher Debut Recital, and it would be a shame to miss it. The next chance you have might cost you a bundle.

April 6, 5:30 p.m., Temple Emanu-El, San Francisco, $20, (415) 864-3330, www.sfopera.com. (M.Z.)

Daniela Mack

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Contemporary Music

Lighting Up the Switchboard

The Switchboard Music Festival promises to bend genres, challenge preconceptions, and entertain for eight hours straight. The interactive event offers a who’s who list of contemporary musicians — “an eclectic, genre-crossing, convention-breaking, bastardizing group of experimentalists, innovators, and musical omnivores” — including the Del Sol String Quartet, Amy X Neuburg, Edmund Welles, Christopher Adler with Wong KrajaukThet (The Ostrich Ensemble), Gamelan X, Inner Ear Brigade, and Slydini. The composers represented are just as boundary-pushing: Osvaldo Golijov, Dan Becker, Ryan Brown, Ian Dicke, Robin Estrada, Erik Jekabson, Aaron Novik, Jonathan Russell, and Ian Dickenson.

March 30, 2 to 10 p.m., Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco, $5-$25, (800) 838-3006, www.switchboardmusic.com. (C.G.)

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Choral

S.F. Choral Artists Hit Home

Local choral composers are featured in San Francisco Choral Artists’ April concerts. The 23-year-old chorus presents a grab bag of musical styles and premieres from Kirke Mechem, Henry Mollicone, Herb Bielawa, and others.

March 30, 4 p.m., St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto; April 5, 8 p.m, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, San Francisco; April 6, 4 p.m., St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Oakland; $9-$22, (415) 979-5779, www.sfca.org. (M.Z.)

Song of Peace

On the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, choruses around the world are joining together to sing a song of peace. Singers pledge to perform a setting of “Dona nobis pacem,” or words that call for peace in another language, during the month of March. Check the Web site for updates, but so far participating choruses in the Bay Area, where the initiative began, include American Bach Soloists, Clerestory, Schola Cantorum San Francisco, San Francisco Renaissance Voices, Threshold Choir, San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, Sonoma Valley Chorale, and numerous church choirs.

March 2008, dates, times, and locations vary, info@songofpeace.org, www.songofpeace.org. (M.B.)

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Dance

Swan Lake Double Take

Tchaikovsky Perm Ballet brings Natalia Makarova’s Swan Lake to Cal Performances, with full orchestra. Makarova was one of the great Odette/Odiles, pre- and postdefection from the Kirov, and her choreographies of the Russian classics — my favorite is her La Bayadere — are legion. Among the ballerinas taking on Swan Lake’s legendary dual role: Paulina Semionova, a principal dancer at the Berlin State Opera Ballet.

March 28, 8 p.m.; March 29, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; March 30, 3 p.m.; Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, $34-$90, (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu. (J.B.)

Swan Lake Pas de Deux

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Symphony

Alan Gilbert at the San Francisco Symphony

The music director-designate of the New York Philharmonic returns to the San Francisco Symphony, and this time he’s mostly given free rein to do what he does best, which is to conduct music of the last hundred years. The program is billed as “Richard Goode Plays Mozart,” and that great pianist is sure to satisfy in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 18 — but for my money, the real draws are Steven Stucky’s Son et lumière and Nielsen’s Symphony No. 2, The Four Temperaments.

March 26, 28, 29, 8 p.m.; March 27, 2 p.m.; Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, $25-$125, (415) 864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org. (L.H.)

The Ode That Never Grows Old

Fabio Mechetti conducts the Symphony Silicon Valley in Brahms’ Schicksalslied before launching into Beethoven’s Ninth with the 100-voice Symphony Silicon Valley Chorale (Elena Sharkova, director). This symphonic celebration of the human voice, combining both chorus and soloists, apparently warrants the addition of an extra performance (on Friday). Soloists include: Jane Jennings, soprano; Gigi Mitchell Velasco, mezzo; Noel Espíritu Velasco, tenor; and Scott Bearden, baritone.

March 27, 7:30 p.m., March 28-29, 8 p.m., March 30, 2 p.m. California Theatre, San Jose, $37-$73, (408) 286-2600, www.symphonysiliconvalley.org. (C.G.)

Classics for Kids

April is party time for the underage set at the San Francisco Symphony. The indispensible Benjamin Schwarz, who takes charge of most education concerts and events at the Symphony, leads the orchestra in two concert sets this month, one for kindergarten through third grade, and one for grades 4-9. The April youth concerts are 45-minutes long and include a wide variety of fascinating music, including Christopher Rouse’s Ku-Ka-Ilimoku, a canzona by early-17th-century composer Giovanni Gabrieli, Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango (listen here), and the Times Square ballet sequence from Leonard Bernstein’s 1944 musical, On the Town (listen here). Note that tickets are not available online, only from the box office.

April 1, 3, 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.; April 4, 10 a.m.; Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, $5, (415) 864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org. (M.Z.)

The Search Continues at Berkeley Symphony

Laura Jackson, the third of six finalists in the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra’s search for a music director to succeed Kent Nagano, leads the Symphony’s last concert in its Zellerbach Hall series. She’ll conduct Milhaud’s 20-minute-long ballet La création du monde, which demonstrates the composer’s interest in jazz, and the Rimsky-Korsakov’s colorful fairytale Scheherazade. Two additional pieces by international prize-winning composer and singer Susan Botti are on the program: a piece set to poetry titled The Exchange, with tenor Thomas Glan and harpist Wendy Tamis, and the West Coast premiere of Translucence, the symphonic setting of The Exchange.

April 2, 8 p.m., UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, $20-$60, (510) 841-2800, www.berkeleysymphony.org. (C.G.)

Laura Jackson

Baroque Standards

Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Handel’s 3rd suite of Water Music are the highlights of the San Francisco Symphony’s program with guest conductor Harry Christophers. Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s Chacony in G Minor and Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances add a touch of the 20th century to the Baroque standards.

April 2, 5, 8 p.m., Davies Symphony Hall; April 3, 8 p.m., Flint Center, Cupertino; $25-$125, (415) 864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org. (M.Z.)

Mahler’s Third

The ambitious, all-volunteer, and always impressive Redwood Symphony is at it again — this time for the marathon that is Mahler’s Third Symphony, which promises to be as stirring as ever with alto Theresa Cardinale and the Peninsula Women’s Chorus. Rapturously nostalgic, like the composer’s more haunted Ninth, it ends in an extended Adagio that demands extraordinary concentration and dedication from the conductor and the orchestra. Kristin Link will lead the concert, which also includes a work that is a comparison in contrasts: Lutosławski’s skittish and intense — one and a half minute long — Fanfare for Louisville. Listen for the stellar wind section before the sprint is over.

April 6, 3 p.m., Cañada College Main Theater, Redwood City, $10-$25, (651) 366-6872, www.redwoodsymphony.org. (C.G.)

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Opera

Xerxes

It’s almost a crime to attempt to describe an opera that Donald Pippin is sure to describe in person, poignantly and with a dose of his trademark humor. But, the tangled love story that is Xerxes deserves an advance plug for not only Pippin, but also for the stellar cast: Elspeth Franks is in the title role, Karen Carle is Arsamene, and Aimee Puentes is Romilda.

April 5, 12, 2 p.m., Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; April 6, 2 p.m., Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, $20-$34, (415) 972-8934, www.pocketopera.org. (C.G.)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under listening ahead. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Like freelancers in other fields — journalism comes to mind — Laura Jackson, one of the six finalists in the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra’s search for a music director to succeed Kent Nagano, flies in, forges bonds, does her job, and moves on. What she’d like to do is find a place where she can stay.

From 2004 to 2007, Jackson, 40, was assistant conductor at the Atlanta Symphony, where she was also an American Conducting Fellow, the League of American Orchestra’s program for promising young conductors. She made her first conducting visit to California in February, filling in at the Sacramento Philharmonic at the suggestion of Michael Morgan, who had to conduct in Buffalo.

“California is so awesome,” Jackson said by phone from her home in Ann Arbor, where she teaches at the music school of the University of Michigan. Her BSO tryout brings her back for two concerts exploring myth and literature: “Under Construction” on March 30 at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, featuring works by the symphony’s three composers in residence, and a second, more formal affair April 2 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, where she conducts Darius Milhaud’s La création du monde and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. She’s chosen to conduct two additional pieces by international prize-winning composer and singer Susan Botti: The Exchange, scored for tenor and harp and set to a luminous poem by May Swenson; and Translucence, a symphonic setting of The Exchange.

And then she waits, since this search will not end until December of next season, after finalists four through six have had their turn. But Jackson will not be letting the grass grow under her feet, nor her baton molder. The day after the Berkeley gig, “I run off to Florida,” she says, to lead the Boca Raton Philharmonic Symphonia. See her Web site for a taste of Jackson’s busy schedule: She started this season as guest conductor of Michael Tilson Thomas’ New World Symphony in Miami, then crisscrossed the country with stops in Texas, Montana, New York, Michigan, Wyoming, and Alabama, before ending back in Atlanta in May.

Itinerant conducting is “an adventure,” says Jackson. “All you can do is prepare for a spontaneous interaction. You can’t prepare a rehearsal. All you can do is know the music well, and be very open, and centered enough to take care of business. You need to figure out when an orchestra might need you, and when they don’t. It keeps it very fresh.

“It’s almost like a blind date,” she says. “That intimacy is what keeps me in it.”

Jackson began as a violinist, moving from public school in upstate New York to the North Carolina School of the Arts, and then to Indiana University, where her degree in performance was derailed by tendonitis of the wrist. Jackson went home to her parents, who had moved to New Hampshire, and, having recovered enough to teach violin and freelance in Boston, began conducting on the side.

The Power of Vulnerability

“The first time I conducted a professional orchestra, I was so amazed at how direct the communication was,” she recalls. “I had nothing in my hand except a stick. The vulnerability of that interaction! You have to give that vulnerability back to the audience. At the time, I was studying a lot of tai chi. And there’s something about the tai chi way of drawing energy from the earth — emptying yourself out, and letting the energy flow through you. I found it beneath my feet. It was just wonderful in a whole new way.”

Orchestras, she says, have personalities just like people. “Sometimes there’s a better chemistry than others. What is wonderful is that human souls are human souls. The basics of music are pretty universal.” When she was on a conducting fellowship in Xian, China, in 1998, “I would get up there and speak a few words of Chinese, and they would crack up. We would communicate through universal gestures, and through a little bit of Italian. So much is universal. They intuit the music the way people do in Wyoming,” she says.

Wherever she lands, “What I try to do is be clear, so that they’ll feel comfortable enough to play. Gosh, I hope it’s more than that,” she reflects. “I guess what’s most important to me is that the music is vibrant and alive, that no matter what piece it is, it’s still a very contemporary commentary. Music helps us process the life experience, the experience of death, helps us reflect on our society.”

Few experiences in life, she says, call upon people to be “as present as we have to be in a symphonic concert in order to get anything out of it. It’s so amazing that people get together and create beauty that lasts only the second it’s generated.”

The Woman Thing

The big question, always, is her experience of being a woman conductor, though she finds it hard to answer it, because “I’ve never woken up and been anything but a woman. I don’t think I’ve knowingly hit up against any walls yet,” she says. “I choose not to credit any failure of mine to gender, because if I lose an audition and I decide it’s because of my ability, I can work harder and I can improve. If not, there’s nothing I can do about it. I use everything as an opportunity to get better at what I do.”

She seems to be doing fine. Reviewers in Atlanta, Boston, and Sacramento have been lavish in their praise, and the opportunities have come thick and fast. One of her favorites was the Taki Concordia Fellowship, a week working with Marin Alsop, now music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, on Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet at the Colorado Symphony.

“It was great fun to work and chat with her,” she says. “She had tons of experience and wisdom. What was great was, she would say things no male conductor would ever take the risk of saying. [About] my left hand — which academically is used for dynamics, articulation, and expressiveness — she said, ‘Your left hand is just way too girly.’

“What was fun, too, is, I just so often get the question, What do you wear? It’s that women are so far from many people’s vision of what a conductor is, a Toscanini, with the wild hair and the tuxedo, so the first thing I asked Marin was, ‘What do you wear?’ She’s been a wonderful mentor to me. She’s definitely done what no woman has done. If there’s a glass ceiling, she’s pushed it.”

And what does Jackson wear? She laughs. “I have two tuxedos, but they’re women’s suits. One has a longer jacket and one has a shorter jacket. I used to wear a long skirt, but I was worried about catching my heel.”

Jackson is one of two female candidates in Berkeley, and she is the only one among six music director finalists at the Fairfax Symphony in Virginia, which will also make its pick in time for the 2009 season. To make the final cut at Berkeley, she sent in a resume, references, and an audition tape and answered written questions. Her resume, incidentally, includes a bachelor’s degree in music history from the University of New Hampshire, and a master’s degree and a doctorate in orchestral conducting from Michigan. She was a Seiji Ozawa conducting fellow at Tanglewood.

And it all started, she says, in the sixth grade in Plattsburgh, New York, on the shores of Lake Champlain. “I went to a little one-corridor elementary school, but it had a music teacher, and they put a violin in my hands,” she says. It’s why she believes music education is just as important as subscription concerts. “It’s the future. It’s crucial.” As is engaging and growing an audience. And multimedia interests her.

“Why not have a collaborative thing, an artist who designs a lighting sculpture. Not something that would move or distract — something where you can ruminate visually. Or, why can’t concerts be more theatrical? What if we had a screen that shows the keyboard with fingers flying around” during a piano concerto? She also believes in talking from the stage — not for every piece, but now and then. “You can establish a personal connection,” she says.

Her first conducting experience was with the Nashua (N.H.) Chamber Orchestra. “We rehearsed in the biography section of a public library, and we built that institution into a thriving orchestra,” she says. “They really taught me the power of music. It was all-volunteer. We had a young man who was 12 years old, people above age 70, a famous chemist, a grocery-store clerk, a car mechanic.” What struck her was “how much they needed it, how much they needed to come on Tuesday nights to that public library to do that. They really loved it. And then over the years, how we, together, developed a vision, and figured out how to increase the concert series and increase the audience size.”

So, when Laura Jackson lands, once and for all, as a music director somewhere — she’s also a finalist in Reno, Nev., and Ithaca, N.Y. — she hopes for “synergy between the orchestra and me. Do we have the potential to make something together that can change the landscape of a community? And then I will revel in the challenge.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Thunder and lightning flashed from the piano in Herbst Theatre last Tuesday night as Canadian virtuoso Louis Lortie presented a sort-of-Liszt program, under the auspices of San Francisco Performances. Actually, most of the evening was built around Franz Liszt’s great admiration for Wagner. Transcriptions abounded, because of some last-minute programming shuffling.

Lortie opened with a piano version of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, as transcribed by Wagner’s assistant Joseph Rubinstein. That was followed by two pieces that Liszt wrote as memorials to Wagner: La lugubre Gondola II and RW–Venezia. The first half of the program closed with a number unrelated to Wagner: Vallée d’Obermann.

The second half consisted of Liszt’s Wagner transcriptions: the “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, plus the “Evening Star” aria and Overture from Tannhäuser. (Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, which had been on the program, was dropped in favor of the Obermann piece — a tactical mistake, if you ask me.)

Liszt’s one frustration in life was that he never managed to write an opera equal to those of his friends Berlioz and Wagner. There is only the one Liszt opera, Don Sanche, written in his midteens while a student in Vienna. Although he aspired to write epics, and planned for eight of them, none was completed. Those included subjects such as The Divine Comedy, Faust, Spartacus, and Joan of Arc. He had to settle for A Faust Symphony — a grand work whose opening theme was the first 12-toned tune.

Passion for Grand Opera

Liszt satisfied his operatic passions, instead, by writing opera transcriptions and not a few rhapsody-fantasies on famous operas by other composers. But even here, Liszt managed to achieve magical touches of inventiveness. Tuesday’s program largely illustrated that point. The Tannhäuser excerpts are brilliantly pianistic, which would not seem obvious.

By contrast, the Tristan finale didn’t work on the piano, and can’t. Its texture depends too much on sustained, long threads of lyricism, whereas the very nature of a piano note is that it begins to die off immediately after being struck. The “Liebestod” when played on the piano ends up sounding a tad silly, like someone wearing clothes of the wrong size.

On the other hand, Siegfried Idyll sounded as if it were written originally for that instrument. Part of that effect lay in Russian pianist Joseph Rubinstein’s adaptation. Rubinstein (1847-84) had been Wagner’s assistant for ages, even helping in the building of Bayreuth and launching Wagner’s full Ring cycle. Wagner, of course, died in Venice in 1883, followed shortly by Liszt’s three elegies on the subject. They’re quite beautiful, in a grim sort of way, and written with obvious devotion. There is no hit of flashiness in them, but instead an almost religious zeal.

In addition to the two that Lortie played, there is an even more gaunt one, also from 1883, titled Am Grabe Richard Wagner (At Richard Wagner’s grave). It, too, contains 12-tone implications in one long recitative for harp and string quartet. (Liszt then rearranged it for piano.) Neither version has found favor with performers.

Off-Key

The one sour note of the evening, a work more favored by virtuoso pianists than most audiences, was Vallée d’Obermann, from the first book of Années de Pèlerinage (Years of pilgrimage), pieces based on Swiss subjects. The Obermann piece is full of bluster and bombastically bristles with technical fireworks. It’s the kind of piece in which you end up admiring the facility of the performer, if not the shallowness of the score.

On the lighter side, Gondoliera (1859) is an arrangement of an actual, and quite pretty, gondoliers’ barcarolle that Liszt heard when in Venice. It laps along its aquatic way spreading Italian charm in its wake. It was a nice bit of relief after those two laments on Wagner’s death.

Lortie’s performances were keen as a whip, both in his poetic lyricism and invincible coloration, and in his overpowering dynamics at flank speed. Had he stopped short during one of those mad Lisztian keyboard gallops, I suspect he’d have left skid marks on the keys. Behind the pyrotechnics, as well as Lortie’s intellectual musicianship, lay a keen feeling for which music needed a bit of rubato, as opposed to which needed to move along without his stopping to smell the roses. Those are judgment calls that pianists rarely encounter, made right on the button.

My one complaint would be against Lortie’s opening his recital with a 15-minute music appreciation chat. He accomplished this with informal grace, but took too long, as the audience just wanted to hear him play.

Audience enthusiasm, however, was volcanic after the concluding Tannhäuser Overture. Lortie responded with two sensationally played encores: Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse (The joyous isle) and Liszt’s concert etude Un sospiro (A sigh).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under review, recital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

“Once More Unto the Breach”

We went through this after Prop. 13, after the dot-com meltdown, after 9/11 … then there was a slow recovery. And now, with the deafening crescendo of economic bad news, guess where the first funding hits will come again? Reports The New York Times on Monday:

In the Alameda school district in Northern California, trustees voted to reduce the $83.7 million budget by cutting $200,000 to the sports programs, eliminating music programs for all children below fourth grade, and increasing class sizes in ninth grade to an average of 29 students, up from 20.

And this is before the real impact of major California state budget cuts is being felt, before the “trickle down” of corporate losses diminishes contributions.

Buckle up, educators, artists, art organizations. The Troubles are here again. Bear Stearns, which nearly collapsed on Monday, will obviously not provide support again. Even before the current bad run of news, the Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris), the Reader’s Digest Association, and other big donors cut or eliminated their budgets for contributions. Unlike in Europe, where government still plays a vital role in supporting the arts, on the American scene individual, foundation, and corporate giving is the be-all and end-all of financing.

Unlike the calamitous disregard for economic decline in 2001 by the San Francisco Opera administration that was in charge then, almost certainly the city’s arts administrators today will be prudent — it’s not as if they have a choice.

“Eliminating music programs …” — what a terrible thing, especially in face of the well-demonstrated benefits of music education early in life, and against the evidence of such heartening events as reported in the next item.

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Call & Response & Awesome Kids

I’m glad to have the collaborative testimony of Classical Voice colleague Jeff Dunn in his review of the Cypress Quartet’s “Call & Response” concert at Yerba Buena Center on Saturday, because I still find it difficult to believe what happened there.

Arriving at the Forum, I was taken aback by the sight of a full auditorium, full mostly with children. Not “youth” — children, of the 5th- and 6th-grade variety, in addition to a few high school students. Mostly kids, little ones.

Even somebody not of W.C. Field’s disposition couldn’t help wondering: What will they do? What will they do during the performance of the last quartets by Haydn (No. 77) and Bartók (No. 6), and the premiere of Kurt Rohde’s Gravities? Will they fidget, shuffle, cough, sneeze, whisper, slap, kick, text, or just make cellphone calls outright? If they get through the Haydn, what will they do during 35 minutes of the darkest, heaviest, most sorrowful of all Bartók, a Transfigured Night on steroids and without transfiguration?

The kids (and accompanying or independent adults) were spectacularly quiet during the Haydn, there was some coughing during the Rohde (a stunning work, instant classic, but Bartók-like “heavy”) — and that wasn’t the story. During the Bartók — that Bartók, the one with each movement opening mesto (sadly) and going downhill from there — there wasn’t a sound from the audience, not one. From the Franz Liszt Academy to Carnegie Hall, I heard this work, always with some “ambient sound” from the audience; at Yerba Buena, there was only listening, zero sound emission. It was uncanny, spooky, impossible.

Cypress’ rich outreach programs, the schools’ teachers, parents — all should be recognized, but the heroes of this story are the 11- and 12-year-olds (some looking “young for their age”) who listened to Bartók’s angst without a peep. (And I still think such a demanding, difficult, full-blown concert is not really appropriate for such an audience, results notwithstanding.)

To make sure the children were not Conservatory students of short stature, I surveyed them during the intermission, verified the information with Cypress outreach coordinator Lindsay Jones, and here is a partial honor roll:

Miller Creek Middle School, San Rafael
Westlake Middle School, Oakland
Edna Brewer Middle School, Oakland
James B. Davidson Middle School, San Rafael
Aragon High School, San Mateo

Bravi!

The Cypress: They silence children

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Lucia di AT&T Park

Last year, it was Samson et Delilah in the AT&T ballpark, a free, highly successful simulcast from the San Francisco Opera, with some 15,000 showing up on a chilly September night. According to an announcement on Monday, it will be Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor making a similar outing to home plate on June 20. The Opera and the San Francisco Giants will collaborate in presenting the simulcast from the Opera House, in a production featuring Natalie Dessay in the title role.

Tenor Giuseppe Filianoti, baritone Gabriele Viviani, Merola alumnus Oren Gradus, former Adler Fellow tenor Matthew O’Neill, and currecnt Adler Fellows soprano Heidi Melton and tenor Andrew Bidlack, will be in the cast. Graham Vick directs, and French conductor Jean-Yves Ossonce will make his company debut.

Once again, the transmission technology will involve 1920 x 1080 high definition via fiber and satellite to AT&T Park’s 103-foot-wide Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision scoreboard. In the theater, a multicamera shoot will be directed by Frank Zamacona, director of the company’s simulcasts of Samson and Delilah, Don Giovanni (June 2007), and Rigoletto (October 2006). The Opera’s new Koret-Taube Media Suite uses Sony cameras and Cambotics robotics, operated by robotic camera operators using remote-control technology.

Natalie Dessay will be in the ballpark, but Barry Bonds won’t

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PALM Resurgent: Celebrating Performance and Design

San Francisco’s splendid Performing Arts Library and Museum has renewed itself, spectacularly so, and changed its name to the acronymically less appealing Museum of Performance and Design. On Saturday, MPD (formerly PALM) threw itself a reopening party, and a wondrous event it was. Vitally interlinked with the city’s ballet company from its foundation in 1947 by dancer and costume designer Russell Hartley, the restructured museum’s first exhibit is “Art & Artifice: 75 Years of Design at San Francisco Ballet.” And, as long as the Ballet — “America’s Oldest” — is celebrating that diamond anniversary, the museum opening was coupled with a reunion party for SFB, with the participation of artists whose careers go back to near the beginning of the company.

Alphabetically, from Tilly Abbe to Alexi Zubiria, chronologically from Jocelyn Vollmar — the first Snow Queen in the country’s first Nutcracker, in 1944 — to choreographer Val Caniparoli, who is still dancing with the company, over 150 famed artists converged at the museum reopening, some from around the corner, others from overseas.

Jocelyn Vollmar as Myrthe in San Francisco Giselle, 1947

The party is over, but the exhibit remains, a free show on the fourth floor of the War Memorial Building, right next to the Opera House. In place of the library (which was moved to the north side of the building), there is now a stunning new 3,000-square-foot main gallery, packed full of the “Art & Artifice” ballet memorabilia. The exhibit was curated by Brad Rosenstein, William Eddleman, and Melissa Leventon. The show is a whirl of costumes, sketches, rare photographs, printed programs, and even video from the company’s past, going back to influences from the Ballets Russes. (Don’t miss Caniparoli’s Lambarena excerpt on the big screen.)

In addition to exhibits, the museum also offers collections, archives, and a library containing over 3 million items having to do with the city’s artistic history and legacy — all accessible to the public. An announcement is pending about the museum getting its own building in the Yerba Buena Center within a few years, all the better to spread around.

Board President Cherie Mohrfeld, Museum Director David R. Humphrey, and an advisory council that includes John Adams, Marilyn Horne, Natalia Makarova, and Frederica von Stade also work on further developing the Center for Stage Design, an international forum utilizing the museum’s own holdings and the Eiko Ishioka Archives, a recent acquisition. MPD is continuing and expanding PALM’s community outreach, performances, lectures, screenings, and publications.

Mishima, from the Eiko Isioka Collection, “Art & Artifice”

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Festival Opera Plans

Walnut Creek’s Festival Opera will present Verdi’s Il Trovatore and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream during the 2008 season, in July and August, respectively. Company Music Director Michael Morgan has engaged some of the most successful young singers from the area, getting them to return from burgeoning careers elsewhere. They include soprano Hope Briggs (Leonora), mezzo Patrice Houston (Azucena), tenor Noah Stewart, who is a recent Adler Fellow (Manrico), and Kirk Eichelberger (Ferrando).

Patrice Houston and Noah Stewart

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Choral Loss for Us

Joshua Haberman, a prominent singer, conductor, and teacher with San Francisco Symphony Chorus and San Francisco State University for the past 12 years, has accepted a position directing the choral program at the University of Miami starting this fall, so he is leaving town — reluctantly, he writes. “UM is a beautiful private university, and the Frost School of Music has about 800 majors. I will be teaching masters and doctoral students as well as undergrads, and am looking forward to working with some really outstanding colleagues down there.”

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La Rondine Comes Home

After all the anticipation and discussion, the San Francisco Opera’s series of digital cinema presentations made its first appearance back where the project began — in San Francisco. On Monday morning the Castro Theater screening of a spectacularly high-definition film of the local production of Puccini’s La Rondine attracted an audience of about 400, in pleasant contrast with reports of a handful of viewers elsewhere in the country at the first screenings.

Images are breathtaking (including the brief introductory San Francisco postcard shots), the sound is good, if occasionally too loud, and coming from the appropriate speakers somewhat erratically. The vocal performances — in close-ups to a fault — are grand, especially by Angela Gheorghiu (Magda) and Gerard Powers (Prunier). About the closeups: Yes, they are too close, showing whoever is singing in tight, too tight, fast-moving shots.

These singing actors are remarkably good, and they produce the required sound while acting. But Misha Didyk is still all teeth, the pores are showing on skin, and a little distance would go a long way to help suspend disbelief. But, beyond that pick, the fact of featuring these performances on film is one of General Manager David Gockley’s most important accomplishments in this short (two-year-old), but eventful and rewarding tenure.

Here is another view of the La Rondine film, from Classical Voice reader Howard Gitlin:

I saw the 12:30 p.m. screening on March 8 in Sebastopol. Only about 30 people were in the audience, not surprising given that there was no publicity.

As others reported, there were technical problems with the movie. The sound was too low — the projectionist said it was as loud as could be — and it emanated from the front speakers only, not like the DLP digital surround sound that was demonstrated before the movie began. The early scenes displayed bad lip-syncing.

The main problem, however, was in the transfer from stage to screen. Translating a work from one medium to another is an art. I saw the stage production in San Francisco in November 2007. It was brilliantly staged by Steven Barlow. In contrast, the movie seemed to be edited by an amateur. From the opening scene to the final heart-shattering moment, the editing ruined Barlow’s staging. Barlow created a total experience, a oneness of the music, libretto, sets, costumes, and movement. The movie’s editor undercut this, revealing a complete misunderstanding of Puccini’s score. The incessant cuts, for no discernible reason, created a rhythm all their own that had nothing to do with the music or the action, and the frequent use of close-ups neutralized Barlow’s visually arresting stage pictures.

After the movie, I spoke with a few people in the audience who hadn’t seen the stage production. Most of them liked it, despite its imperfections. They loved Angela Gheorghiu, as did I, though those of us who saw her onstage saw a more nuanced performance. I can recommend the movie to those who’ve never seen Gheorghiu. If you saw it in the Opera House, you might want to pass.

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MTT, sí; Voigt, no

In an otherwise complimentary New York Times review of the San Francisco Symphony’s tour, Allan Kozinn writes something similar to what appeared in San Francisco reviews of the same work:

The performance of Strauss’ Four Last Songs, on Wednesday, was unusual as well, though not in a good way. A listener had every reason to expect great things from Deborah Voigt, unquestionably one of the more eloquent Straussians of our time, at least in the operas. And there was no reason to expect that she might not produce the burnished, autumnal sound that the Four Last Songs demand. But she didn’t. Instead she sang them with a bright, slightly brassy hue, sharp articulation instead of sensuous fluidity and, oddest of all, a tendency to swoop into phrases, particularly in “Beim Schlafengehen.”

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under music news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Chamber Music

Schnittke Cello Concerto

Alfred Schnittke’s urgent, powerful Cello Concerto No. 1 (1985) makes extraordinary demands on its soloist over the work’s 40 minutes. Having won the University Orchestra’s concerto competition, Gabriel Trop will play this astounding work with the orchestra as part of the UC Berkeley Music Department’s Noon Concert series. Although the soloist is a youthful, unknown quantity, it’s worth dropping a lunch engagement to hear this wild, passionate music live.

March 19, Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley, 12:15 p.m., free, (510) 642-2678, www.music.berkeley.edu. (M.Z.)

Words, Stories, and Music

The power of words in music is the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s charge for its March concert, and the works chosen range from old to new: There’s Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet No. 2, Intimate Letters; Carl Schimmel’s The Pismirist’s Congeries for violin, cello, flute, and piano; the U.S. premiere of Sean Varah’s Borderline for cello and tape; and the West Coast premiere of Harold Meltzer’s Sindbad for narrator and piano trio.

March 27, 8 p.m., Throckmorton Theater, Mill Valley; March 31, 8 p.m., Green Room, San Francisco; $25-$40, (415) 642-8054, www.chambermusicpartn.org. (C.G.)

Left Coast Chamber Ensemble

TinAlley String Quartet

The San Jose Chamber Music Society promised to bring us the winner of last fall’s Banff International String Quartet Competition, and here it is: The TinAlley String Quartet from Australia. Past winners of this competition include the St. Lawrence, Miró, and Jupiter Quartets, so with those forerunners we should be in for some excellent and distinctive music-making. It will be a challenging program: Haydn’s delicate Op. 76, No. 5; Mendelssohn’s somber Op. 13; and Bartók’s fearsome Fourth. The quartet is also giving a free performance in San Francisco earlier in March, with the same program except for Alban Berg’s early and rarely heard Op. 3 in place of the Bartók.

March 30, 7 p.m., Le Petit Trianon, San Jose, $25-$40, (408) 286-5111, www.sjchambermusic.org. (D.B.)

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Early Music

The Queen of Egypt

With the Ides of March approaching, Philharmonia Baroque has engaged fabulous soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian to impersonate the equally fabulous femme fatale, Cleopatra, in its upcoming concerts. (See review.) The Egyptian queen inspired 18th-century composers no less than Roman conquerors. Bayrakdarian displays the charms of several of these operas — Handel’s Giulio Cesare, obviously, and Carl Heinrich Graun’s Cleopatra e Cesare, which opened the new opera house in Berlin in 1742. Rounding out the portrait is the other highly regarded German opera composer of the time, Johann Adolph Hasse, whose Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra was written for Naples in 1725, with the hero being sung by the great castrato Farinelli. If you want a recording of this music, Bayrakdarian has already done the honors, backed by Tafelmusik (Cbc, 2004).

March 18, 8 p.m., Lafayette-Orinda Presbyterian Church, $30-$72, (415) 252-1288, www.philharmonia.org. (M.Z.)

Dawn of the German Baroque

The upcoming San Francisco Early Music Society concert promises to take care of all your 17th-century German Baroque needs with music by Johann Rosenmüller, Samuel Scheidt, and Johann Pachelbel. Harmonie Universelle, named after a famed 17th-century music theory treatise by Marin Mersenne, is a relative newcomer to the early music scene (its first recording was in 2005), and this is the Bay Area’s first chance to hear this group’s powerfully poetic and deft way with early chamber music.

March 28, 8 p.m., First Lutheran Church, Palo Alto; March 29, 8 p.m., St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Berkeley; Mar. 30, St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church, San Francisco; $22-$25, (510) 528-1725, www.sfems.org. (M.Z.)

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Recital

Lortie on Wagner and Liszt

Louis Lortie has plenty of flashy technique at the piano, especially when he’s traversing Liszt. But for all that, his is an intellectual art that has quite a lot in common with Romantic interiority. In his concert for San Francisco Performances, he discusses the musical relationship of Wagner and Liszt and plays a program of Wagner transcriptions and some large Liszt pieces, like the Vallée d’Obermann.

March 18, Herbst Theatre, 8 p.m., $30-$49, (415) 398-6449, www.performances.org. (M.Z.)

Louis Lortie

Mahler Gets a Caine-ing

Jazz/classical pianist Uri Caine caused something of a stir when he came out with his album of reinterpretations of Mahler, Urlicht, even though the year was 1997. As surely everyone who reviewed the initial release commented, Caine’s eclectic way with the pieces he chose is worthy of Mahler’s own variety of inspiration and sources. His concert at Stanford Lively Arts offers an opportunity to revisit this imaginative and wild symbiosis.

March 19, 8 p.m., Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford, $15-$34, (650) 723-2551, www.livelyarts.stanford.edu. (M.Z.)

Pauline Viardot and Friends

Frederica von Stade has been touring her show about the life of the 19th-century diva Pauline Viardot-Garcia for more than a year. There’s even a recording of the recital in London’s Wigmore Hall on the Opera Rara label. And now it comes here, thanks to San Francisco Performances. Regardless of the state of von Stade’s voice, this is a chance to hear some wonderful and rare songs composed by Viardot herself or for her by a variety of composers, from Rossini to Chopin to Berlioz. Marilyn Horne narrates the singer’s life, which included travels through Europe, the U.S., and Mexico, and an affair with the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. Joining von Stade in performing the songs are soprano Melody Moore and baritone Vladimir Chernov.

March 20, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, $60-$80, (415) 398-6449, www.performances.org. (M.Z.)

Elza van den Heever

This soprano and native of South Africa has one of the more astute sensibilities to the fine points of vocal coloration. Her San Francisco Performances recital — van den Heever is no foreigner to Bay Area audiences, she graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory and recently made her debut with the San Francisco Opera as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni — promises to showcase another side of her repertoire with songs by Brahms, Strauss, and Debussy. Her temperament, musical sensitivity, and intelligence will be a nice match for the rich ruby-red carpets and intimate setting of the Hotel Rex.

March 26, 6:30 p.m., Hotel Rex, San Francisco, $20, (415) 398-6449, www.sfperformances.org. (C.G.)

Elza van den Heever

Nikolaj Znaider

He’s got a Guarneri “del Gesu” and he’s not afraid to use it: Nikolaj Znaider is the latest star violinist to grace the Bay Area with an appearance. He’s not toting any of the Brahms’ works he just released on CD, but the San Francisco Performances concert does include a couple of Beethoven sonatas: the D Minor Bach Partita (No. 2), and, by way of variety, Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin With Piano, Op. 47. Pianist Robert Kulek accompanies.

March 26, 8 p.m., Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, $27-$39, (415) 398-6449, www.performances.org. (M.Z.)

Tambourine (and Everything Else) Man

Chen Zimbalista, like many percussionists, has personality to spare. He’s a virtuoso with a little bit of old-school showman in him. Wired with the intense energy of a rock star, he devours the technical challenges of 20th-century and contemporary repertory, plays classic concertos, arranged for percussion, with style, and regularly gives “world music” concerts in which he plays more than 40 instruments. In his appearance at the 2008 Jewish Music Festival, Zimbalista focuses on the music of contemporary Israeli composers, including a few of his own pieces. Percussionist Katja Cooper and Argentine pianist Josè Gallardo, lend their assistance.

March 27, 7:30 p.m., St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, $20-$24, (510) 848-0237, www.jewishmusicfestival.org. (M.Z.)

Ian Tracey, Organist

Ian Tracey is an organist in such demand, he’s had to give up his day job. After a quarter century as organist and then music director at Liverpool Cathedral, in January, he turned over his duties to David Poulter, and became the cathedral’s “Organist Titulaire” — in other words, its musical star performer. He’s made several recordings on the cathedral’s grand organ, among his dozen or so CDs. His recital in Grace Cathedral, part of his 22nd U.S. tour, will be quite an event, and, like all organ recitals at Grace, it’s free.

March 30, 4 p.m., Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, free, (415) 749-6355, www.gracecathedral.org. (M.Z.)

Ian Tracey

Mozart by One Heck of a Last-Minute Replacement

Pianist Murray Perahia was originally slated to lead the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in performances of Mozart piano concertos (No. 21 in C Major, K. 467, and the equally marvelous No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491) and his “Paris” Symphony, No. 31 in D Major, K. 297, as well as Haydn’s crowning symphonic masterpiece, the “London” Symphony, No. 104, and a pair of Mendelssohn perennials, the Hebrides Overture and the “Italian” Symphony, No. 4. Because of illness, he has been replaced by pianist Yuja Wang and conductor Sir Neville Mariner. With backup talent like this, Bay Area audiences would be right to wonder if we’re a bit spoiled.

March 30, 7 p.m., March 31, 8 p.m., Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, $25-$95, (415) 864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org. (M.Z.)

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Contemporary Music

Lighting Up the Switchboard

The Switchboard Music Festival promises to bend genres, challenge preconceptions, and entertain for eight hours straight. The interactive event offers a who’s who list of contemporary musicians — “an eclectic, genre-crossing, convention-breaking, bastardizing group of experimentalists, innovators, and musical omnivores” — including the Del Sol String Quartet, Amy X Neuburg, Edmund Welles, Christopher Adler with Wong KrajaukThet (The Ostrich Ensemble), Gamelan X, Inner Ear Brigade, and Slydini. The composers represented are just as boundary-pushing: Osvaldo Golijov, Dan Becker, Ryan Brown, Ian Dicke, Robin Estrada, Erik Jekabson, Aaron Novik, Jonathan Russell, and Ian Dickenson.

March 30, 2 to 10 p.m., Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco, $5-$25, (800) 838-3006, www.switchboardmusic.com. (C.G.)

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Opera

Young Loves

La Bohème is the opera of eternal youth and hopefulness. Mimi’s sentimental death, you imagine, will be the subject of many tearful reminiscences from the friends, as it is for the audience. (“I never thought she would die!” exclaims Cher in the 1987 comedy Moonstruck.) And perhaps the death inaugurates adulthood for the others. (“You’re a good woman, Mimi,” says Marcello in the last act, in a moment of true understanding.) No more playacting at life. That’s why local opera companies working with young singers are wise not to shelve La Bohème for too long, and also why you can always return to it. San Francisco Lyric Opera’s production (see review) features two singers’ debuts with the company (Darynn Zimmer, as Mimi, and Nathaniel Hackmann, as Masetto) and plenty of youthful high spirits.

March 21, 22, 7:30 p.m., Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco, $18-$32, (415) 345-7575, www.sflyricopera.org. (M.Z.)

A scene from La Bohème

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Events

Master Class With Joel Krosnick

For many years Joel Krosnick has held down the cello end of the Juilliard Quartet, and has been a champion of 20th- and 21st-century music. But his personal accomplishments aside, he is renowned as a teacher, and his master class in chamber music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music will be a distillation of more than 35 years of guiding young professionals. Two days later he teams up with students to perform Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.

March 18, 7:30 p.m., Conservatory of Music Recital Hall, San Francisco, free; March 20, 8 p.m., SFCM Concert Hall; $15-$20, (415) 864-7326, www.sfcm.edu. (M.Z.)

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Choral

S.F. Choral Artists Hit Home

Local choral composers are featured in San Francisco Choral Artists’ April concerts. The 23-year-old chorus presents a grab bag of musical styles and premieres from Kirke Mechem, Henry Mollicone, Herb Bielawa, and others.

March 30, 4 p.m., St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto; April 5, 8 p.m, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, San Francisco; April 6, 4 p.m., St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Oakland; $9-$22, (415) 979-5779, www.sfca.org. (M.Z.)

Song of Peace

On the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, choruses around the world are joining together to sing a song of peace. Singers pledge to perform a setting of “Dona nobis pacem,” or words that call for peace in another language, during the month of March. Check the Web site for updates, but so far participating choruses in the Bay Area, where the initiative began, include American Bach Soloists, Clerestory, Schola Cantorum San Francisco, San Francisco Renaissance Voices, Threshold Choir, San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, Sonoma Valley Chorale, and numerous church choirs.

March 2008, dates, times, and locations vary, info@songofpeace.org, www.songofpeace.org. (M.B.)

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Dance

Swan Lake Double Take

Tchaikovsky Perm Ballet brings Natalia Makarova’s Swan Lake to Cal Performances, with full orchestra. Makarova was one of the great Odette/Odiles, pre- and postdefection from the Kirov, and her choreographies of the Russian classics — my favorite is her La Bayadere — are legion. Among the ballerinas taking on Swan Lake’s legendary dual role: Paulina Semionova, a principal dancer at the Berlin State Opera Ballet.

March 28, 8 p.m.; March 29, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; March 30, 3 p.m.; Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, $34-$90, (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu. (J.B.)

Swan Lake Pas de Deux

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Symphony

Alan Gilbert at the San Francisco Symphony

The music director-designate of the New York Philharmonic returns to the San Francisco Symphony, and this time he’s mostly given free rein to do what he does best, which is to conduct music of the last hundred years. The program is billed as “Richard Goode Plays Mozart,” and that great pianist is sure to satisfy in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 18 — but for my money, the real draws are Steven Stucky’s Son et lumière and Nielsen’s Symphony No. 2, The Four Temperaments.

March 26, 28, 29, 8 p.m.; March 27, 2 p.m.; Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, $25-$125, (415) 864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org. (L.H.)

The Ode That Never Grows Old

Fabio Mechetti conducts the Symphony Silicon Valley in Brahms’ Schicksalslied before launching into Beethoven’s Ninth with the 100-voice Symphony Silicon Valley Chorale (Elena Sharkova, director). This symphonic celebration of the human voice, combining both chorus and soloists, apparently warrants the addition of an extra performance (on Friday). Soloists include: Jane Jennings, soprano; Gigi Mitchell Velasco, mezzo; Noel Espíritu Velasco, tenor; and Scott Bearden, baritone.

March 27, 7:30 p.m., March 28-29, 8 p.m., March 30, 2 p.m. California Theatre, San Jose, $37-$73, (408) 286-2600, www.symphonyciliconvalley.org. (C.G.)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under listening ahead. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Editor’s note: Opera and the Morbidity of Music, the collected commentaries for The New York Review of Books by noted critic and UC Berkeley music professor emeritus Joseph Kerman, will be published next month. This appreciation appeared in The Review in 1981, four years after the death of Maria Callas. That it is as relevant now as then speaks eloquently to Kerman’s overall premise that reports of the demise of classical music have been greatly exaggerated. Opera La Scala is in the midst of a yearlong tribute to Callas. La Scala Books is coming out with an English translation of its lavishly illustrated Maria Callas: The Scala Years. And a check of any bookstore, online or off, will confirm that much is still being written about Callas, an ongoing influence in the world of opera.

Joseph Kerman

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On the unexpected death of Maria Callas in 1977, aged only 53, two portraits were found in her Paris apartment. One was of Elvira de Hidalgo, a leading opera singer who became Callas’ teacher in Athens between 1940 and 1945 and first identified her proclivity for the bel canto repertory, taught her the technique with exemplary thoroughness, and taught her above all how to study. The other portrait was of the legendary diva Maria Malibran, who was among the first to triumph in that repertory during the 1820s and 1830s. These were icons to the professional Callas. There were no pictures of friends, relatives, or lovers.

Though certainly never the sort of person given to sentimental gestures, Callas once took a special flight to Brussels to visit Malibran’s grave. In a way, she ought to have identified more closely with Malibran’s rival Giuditta Pasta, the greatest dramatic singer of her time. It was of Pasta of whom it was said that with three notes she could stir an audience to the depths of its being. It was for Pasta that Bellini wrote the role of Norma, the most important as well as the most frequent of Callas, roles. But no doubt de Hidalgo spoke less of Pasta than of Malibran — another Spaniard, and a member of the formidable García family of singers and teachers to whom de Hidalgo could trace her own artistic lineage.

Moreover, Malibran led what is called a “tempestuous” life, while Pasta’s life was orderly. Malibran broke with her domineering father and had two husbands and two illegitimate children by the time she died at the age of 28, as the result of incautious exertions following a riding accident. Her behavior on stage was unpredictable, her appearance always hypnotic. Pasta was dumpy. It is not surprising that a dozen books have been written about Malibran and only one, it seems, about Pasta.

Malibran biographies are still being written, the most recent of them in 1979: a bad omen for the bulging Callas bibliography. A dozen books about her had been produced even before her death, and that occasion signaled the preparation of many more. Arianna Stassinopoulos in Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend, wrote what seemed to be designed as an official biography, bolstered by new information furnished by friends and associates, and supplemented by a fascinating collection of informal photographs. Sergio Segalini produced a conventional picture book, Callas: Portrait of a Diva, more comprehensive if less beautiful than the picture section of Callas, by John Ardoin and Gerald Fitzgerald, still the best general book on the subject. Steven Linakis, a cousin who fell out with her over her treatment of her mother, offered in Diva: The Life and Death of Maria Callas little more than a hostile memoir of a woman he scarcely knew in later life. Pierre-Jean Rémy’s Maria Callas: A Tribute, on the contrary, followed in the well-trod footsteps of her many admirers and enthusiasts.

Rémy also had a special idea about the Callas phenomenon: For him this was to be construed as a myth of woman’s destruction by man. Offstage he saw her as victimized by her husband Giovanni Meneghini, her agent Eddie Bagarozy, Rudolf Bing, Aristotle Onassis, Luchino Visconti, columnists, audiences, Rémy himself. Onstage she ritually reenacted her destruction in the personae of doomed heroines such as Violetta and Tosca. That is not, however, the way the Callas performances felt, nor is it indeed the way Rémy describes them. There was another ritual in operation. Again and again a sick, furious, vocally insecure Callas faced truculent audiences and compelled their tribute.

After Tosca jumped off the roof or Violetta coughed her last, the diva would return for her famous 15-minute ovations and flower bombardments. The fire that drove her was the fire to succeed, to triumph, to dominate. The relationship between Callas and the opera world is best described as one of mutual manipulation, and clearly this relationship offered great satisfactions to both.

Bel Canto’s Callas Comeback

The amazing thing is that a career so completely ruled by self-interest should have produced something as selfless as the revival of an entire musical repertory. Callas took the bel canto operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini with the same inexorable seriousness that she brought to her drive to success. Bel canto opera succeeded along with Callas. This revival was itself one of the main changes in the taste for classical music that took place in the postwar, early-LP days, another being the flood of older music from the Baroque period and back, and another the emergence of Mahler as the favored late-Romantic symphonist. Different opinions may be offered of the relative cultural significance of these changes; what is certain is that we are still living and listening under their joint influence.

Maria Callas sang bel canto opera with a technical proficiency that few remembered having heard before, and with a dramatic conviction that no one remembered or had even thought possible. The revival must be attributed squarely to her, even though it is true she had important help: from de Hidalgo, of course, and then from the veteran conductor Tullio Serafin and Walter Legge of EMI Records. It is also true that Callas did not limit herself to bel canto singing — no doubt her voice would have fared better if she had, but her voice and her very well-being were sacrificed to that truly awesome drive to success.

Some of her most unforgettable roles, such as Cherubini’s Medea and Puccini’s Tosca, lay outside the bel canto repertory. But Tosca we have with us always, like the poor, like death and taxes; it was the authority of Callas’ great bel canto roles, her Norma and her Lucia di Lammermoor, that changed the working repertory of opera houses around the world. In fact, nearly half of all the performances she ever sang were of bel canto works. They included some lesser-known ones (Bellini’s I Puritani and La Sonnambula), and others practically unknown when she undertook them (Bellini’s Il Pirata, Rossini’s Armida and Il Turco in Italia, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Poliuto).

There is no word in the realm of sound corresponding to “vision,” yet that was the quality Callas brought to the music of Bellini and Donizetti. In the 1930s and 1940s, this music was deprecated when it was thought about at all, compared invidiously to contemporaneous German music, operatic and nonoperatic, and dismissed as fatuous for the purposes of drama. Its melodies were thought vapid, its ornamentation trivial; it was not truly heard. Here was a singer convinced of the beauty of its every gesture and its every nuance, and able to project this by means of an unfaltering attention to musical line.

Much has been written about her perfectionism in sheer technique: This meant not only singing very fast and very high, but also controlling the tone quality of every note and connecting one note to another exactly as was needed to realize her unique expressive vision. Many singers command the art of molding a musical phrase. The art of this singer was not so much that of molding as of penetrating and possessing an entire melodic trajectory, an entire role, and ultimately an entire repertory.

Her accomplishment was essentially a musical one, then, though this was sometimes almost forgotten in the endless discussions of her qualities as an actress, the deterioration of her voice, and her temperament onstage and off. All of these were prodigious, but none more so than her musicianship. Only in 1954, when she seems to have faced the fact that she could not or would not husband her voice, did she begin cultivating those aspects of an opera singer’s art best described as histrionic (“histrionic” rather than “dramatic,” for in the deepest sense Callas’ use of her voice was the most dramatic thing about her performances).

After losing about 70 pounds, she emerged as a supreme singing actress in productions put on for her by glamorous directors far beneath her in artistry. Stagecraft helped to sustain her magnificently as long as she still had some voice — but no longer. In 1969 she appeared as a nonsinging Medea in Pasolini’s film, and in 1973 she directed a production of Verdi’s I Vespri Siciliani in Turin; the film was no more than a succès d’estime and the directorial venture a failure. Callas created character and drama with her voice, and magnificently supported what her voice created with her body. Without her voice, she had no real resources.

She had no personal resources, either. The Stassinopoulos biography does not change the main outlines of the Callas story as it was known in her great days, though it adds many memorable details. (e.g., La Divina refusing to pay her father’s hospital bills in 1964: “I hope the newspapers don’t catch on. Then I’ll really curse the moment I had any parents at all. P.S. Please keep me informed and don’t let him die where I might be criticized.”) Stassinopoulos tells us about the retirement years, after Onassis left her and then after his death. Most of the time Callas sat around in her Paris apartment. Her favorite activity, “almost an obsession,” was listening to pirate tapes of her opera-house performances supplied by devotees from all over the world.

A First in Audio Preservation

Maria Callas was, in fact, the first great singer whose work has been preserved comprehensively, if not quite completely, on records and tapes. Therefore it is harder to write a futile book about Callas than about Malibran (though not impossible). There is even one distinctly useful book: The Callas Legacy by John Ardoin, which goes through the 110-odd surviving recordings one by one, providing brief analyses and appreciations, comparing the seven Normas recorded between 1950 and 1965, the five Lucias, and so on.

She was never filmed or videotaped in an entire opera, for although of course the technologies existed in her time, opera on film has never really caught on and opera on television has done so (with a vengeance) only recently. Perhaps it is just as well. To the extent that her collaborations with the likes of Visconti and Zeffirelli foreshadowed today’s maddening fashion for utter willfulness in opera staging —

Director Y who with ingenious wit
Places the wretched singers in the pit
While dancers mime their roles, Z the Designer
Who sets the whole thing on an ocean liner,
The girls in shorts, the men in yachting caps

— her histrionic contribution was equivocal. Not so her musical contribution. In opera it is the music that makes the drama — even, Callas showed us, in bel canto opera. Few if any performers have so significantly expanded the range of art experienced in their own and the following generations.

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Works Cited

John Ardoin, The Callas Legacy, fourth edition (Hal Leonard, 2003).

John Ardoin and Gerald Fitzgerald, Callas (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974).

W.H. Auden, poem from Auden’s prescient Metalogue in The Magic Flute, English version by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman (Random House, 1956), reprinted in W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Libretti, and Other Dramatic Writings by W.H. Auden, 1939-1973, edited by Edward Mendelson (Princeton University Press, 1993).

Howard Bushnell, Maria Malibran: A Biography of the Singer, foreword by Elaine Brody (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979).

Steven Linakis, Diva: The Life and Death of Maria Callas (Prentice-Hall, 1980).

Pierre-Jean Rémy, Maria Callas: A Tribute, translated by Catherine Atthill (St. Martin’s, 1978).

Sergio Sagalini, Callas: Portrait of a Diva, translated by Sonia Sabel (Hutchinson, 1981).

Arianna Stassinopolous, Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (Simon and Schuster, 1981).

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Excerpted from Opera and the Morbidity of Music by Joseph Kerman (New York Review of Books). Copyright ©2008 by Joseph Kerman. Copyright ©2008 by NYREV Inc. All rights reserved.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.