Music News
Klein Competition Returns
The 23rd Irving M. Klein International String Competition will be held at San Francisco State University next month. The semifinals begin on June 10; public events — including the final round — take place June 14-15, at the SFSU McKenna Theater.
The competition is for string players between the ages of 15 and 23. The winners receive cash prizes and performance opportunities with orchestras and chamber-music concerts. According to Competition Director Mitchell Sardou Klein, 74 young musicians from 11 countries entered this year’s event, with eight advancing to the semifinal stage. There are five violinists, two cellists, a violist, and a double bassist, each of whom will perform a new commissioned work by Frank Stemper, in addition to other pieces.
Meta Weiss
Among the semifinalists is cellist Meta Weiss, a 20-year-old San Francisco resident, who is studying with Norman Fischer at Rice University in Houston. The others are: Si Woo Kim (violin, age 18) from Seoul, South Korea, who placed fourth in last year’s Klein Competition; Emily Deans (viola, age 23), who studies with Kim Kashkashian at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston; Tessa Frederick (violin, age 18), from Richmond, KY, also a New England Conservatory student.
Si Woo Kim
Benjamin Jensen (double bass, age 23) from Syracuse, NY, studies at Indiana University in Bloomington; Char Prescott (cello, age 19) from Bethesda, MD, studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL; Robin Scott (violin, age 21) from Indianapolis, studies with Miriam Fried at the New England Conservatory of Music; and Ying Xue (violin, age 22) from Urumqi, China, studies with Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory.
Ying Xue
First prize is $10,000 from the Irving M. Klein Memorial Award, including solo appearances with the Peninsula and Santa Cruz symphonies, recitals in San Miguel de Allende (Mexico), and the Tulsa Chamber Music Series (Oklahoma), plus a benefit concert and other performances to be announced. Second prize is $5,000 from the William M. Bloomfield Memorial Award. Third prize is $2,500 from The Alice Anne Roberts Memorial Award.
Past winners include Alyssa Park, Wendy Warner, Mark Kosower, Jennifer Koh, Alban Gerhardt, Frank Huang, and François Salque. The jury this year includes members of the Alexander String Quartet, members of the Cypress String Quartet, Peter Gelfand, Marc Gottlieb, Patricia Taylor Lee, Melvin Margolis, Jeffrey Miller, Donna Mudge, Alice Schoenfeld, and Frank Stemper.
Benefactor’s Conducting a Bit ‘Stiff’
Honda’s Asimo robot made his (its?) U.S. music debut last week conducting the Detroit Symphony — behold and be amazed. Asimo came through well, but besides the whoop-de-do, Honda also provided something truly significant: a gift of more than $1 million to create “The Power of Dreams Music Education Fund.”
According to the company, “With the Detroit public schools drastically reducing or eliminating music programs due to financial constraints, many students are denied the opportunity to learn to play instruments, read music, and participate in bands or orchestras. Honda has partnered with the DSO to develop an innovative, multifaceted program to promote and support music education as well as to promote diversity in the field of classical music.”
Honda is sponsoring concerts and master classes by Yo Yo Ma, a string training program, private lessons for aspiring students in financial need, youth ensemble performances, and admission to students to DSO concerts. Let’s hear it for Maestro Asimo and its (his?) creators.
Besides an occasional conducting gig, Asimo also stars in hundreds of humanoid robotics activities around the world, from an auto show in Lisbon to entertaining children in Belgium.
Asimo in charge
Exciting, Free Internet Music Videos
You will hear a lot about tenor Szabolcs Brickner in the future, so here’s a tip for the pronounciation of his first name: “SA-bolch.” He is the winner of last week’s Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, and the video of his final contest appearance is available in its entirety here, just select his name from “Lauréats” on the left.
The program of Brickner’s winning performance includes Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “O Paradis” from L’Africaine, Royauté” from Britten’s Les Illuminations, “Revelge-Um Mitternacht” from Mahler’s Ruckert Songs, Macduff’s aria from Verdi’s Macbeth, and “Kuda, kuda” from Tchaikovsky’s Evgeny Onegin. Don’t miss when the cameras follow Brickner offstage for a brief break, where he takes a bite from an apple. I consulted my sources in Brussels about this, and was advised that one of the tenor’s teachers, the great Nicolai Gedda himself, advised Brickner to do that. Stand by for future discussion of the theme: “Why Should Tenors Eat Apples During Performance Breaks?”
Szabolcs Brickner
That Web site also contains video of the entire contest from Brussels’ Music Conservatory (semifinals) and Palais des Beaux-Arts (finals), hours and hours performances — just browse among participants in that “Lauréats” selection field. Pay special attention to contestants Isabelle Druet (French mezzo), Bernadetta Grabias (Polish mezzo), and Anna Kasyan (Georgian soprano). A wonderfully complete report on the contest by Margo Briessinck can be found on the GOpera.com site … albeit in Dutch. Check out that site’s English contents at www.goopera.com.
Anna Kasyan as Zerlina (with Nicolas Courjal as Masetto)
An even more amazing treasure trove is www.medici.tv, which streams astonishingly high-quality video and audio of such musical events as last year’s Verbier Festival, the New York Philharmonic in North Korea, and so on. Viewing is free until June 7, and downloads in the future will require a relatively small price. This year’s Verbier Festival will be available on Medici in the summer, also Mozart’s Zaide from Aix-en-Provence, and if you want to save on driving and hotel cost you can watch the Aspen Festival at home, as well.
For now, don’t miss Anna Netrebko at a St. Petersburg gala, a documentary on Maya Plisetskaya, Lang Lang and Simon Rattle in a Tchaikovsky program, and best of all, Leonard Bernstein in a rehearsal of the Shostakovich Symphony No. 1. Current live streams include concerts of the Berlin Philharmonic in Moscow, with Vadim Repin as soloist.
Vadim Repin
The Pleasures of Dons Donald, Dana, and Pasquale
Judge me not, ye fellow slaves to schadenfreude! How could you, while laughing at and enoying the misery of Don Pasquale? My quasi-malicious delight began long before Donald Pippin’s Pocket Opera launched into Donizetti’s work at the Saturday matinee.
Driving toward the Legion of Honor, I was struck by and deeply worried at the rare sight of the entire road through Lincoln Park — clearly marked “No parking at any time” — being bracketed by cars in tight rows, with no space left for even a Yugo. Always a problem on weekends, overcrowding around the Legion assumed historic proportions, as thousands flocked to the next-to-last day of the Annie Leibovitz restrospective in the museum. The delight? A car parked 50 feet from the entrance leaving just as I drove up. Oh joia!
Double-joia, as NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, featured speaker at the Pocket matinee, did the impossible for a government official, and spoke for about a minute and a half before yielding the stage to Donizetti. The former Santa Rosa resident (and author of opera libretti) explained that he is attending only as a fan, with “enormous appreciation” for Pippin’s work. The first time he heard Pocket Opera, Gioia said (establishing his San Franciscan bona fides), was 31 years ago, during the Spaghetti Factory era. Loud applause from fellow veterans. (Gioia didn’t even mention the recently awarded National Endowment for the Arts grants to orchestras … but we will: See next item.)
Donald Pippin
Photo by Bob Shomler
And then came Pippin, funny and brilliant as ever, master of ceremonies, conductor, pianist, and — perhaps most importantly — author of the English translation. Among the dozens of his uniformly singable and elegant/robust/modernized-but-faithful English libretti, the 32-year-old Don Pasquale is still perhaps the best.
“How incomplete the marriage/Without coach and carriage?” demands Norina. And Pasquale exclaims: “I’d be better dead than wed!”
The octogenarian genius is still nimble on his feet in improvising. Who but Pippin could turn an insignificant stage business such as handing Ernesto’s note to Norina into a laugh riot by telling Candace Otto, playing the fetching but silent maid: “Exit servant … hoping for a better role next year!”?
I cannot promise parking ecstasy or Gioia turning up at future performances, but I heartily recommend the two remaining Don Pasquale performances at the Legion, both of which are 2 p.m. matinees, on May 31 and June 1.
Todd Donovan
The cast is strong and well balanced: Roger D, McCracken is the consistent Pasquale, young Brian Thorsett’s Ernesto has a mighty trumpet of a tenor, Heidi Moss as Norina enchants and vocally amazes, and Todd Donovan fairly blows the walls down as Malatesta.
Excellent opera for $20-$37 a pop: What a bargain!
Pasquale’s Brian Thorsett and Heidi Moss, seen here in The Magic Flute
NEA Music Grants
Nationwide, orchestras in 50 cities are providing educational activities, workshops, master classes, and concerts with the support of $1.2 million in grants recently awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts. They include the major funding categories of “Access to Artistic Excellence Part Two,” and “Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth.” In Northern California, recipients include: Berkeley Symphony, $15,000, and San Francisco Youth Symphony (so called in the announcement, although it must be the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra), $60,000.
In another round of awards, the NEA gave 122 grants to orchestras through the Grants for Arts Projects categories, totaling $2.8 million. Awards to all arts disciplines through the NEA’s three largest grant categories — “Challenge America: Reaching Every Community Fast-Track Review Grants,” “Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth,” and “Access to Artistic Excellence” — numbered 1,790 and totaled $41.1 million.
Congress allotted $144.7 million in total funding for the NEA in Fiscal 2008 — that’s for the entire country, and for all programs. Compare that to the $553 million the city of Berlin provides for arts (a significant reduction from
$805 million in 2001). Another interesting contrast: Federal and city funding to the reconstruction of Berlin’s Staatsoper covers its entire $236.5 million cost; when the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, where the opera company is a major tenant (but not owner), was rebuilt in 1990s, only two-thirds of its $90 million cost came from government sources.
Community Orchestra’s Big Concert
Symphony Parnassus — originally the orchestra at UC San Francisco — has been led for a decade now by Stephen Paulson, and its activities are increasingly ambitious. At the next concerts, June 7 and 8 at the San Francisco Conservatory, Parnassus will perform nothing less than Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.
Participants in the performance of the Ninth Symphony, under Paulson’s direction, include soprano Pam Sebatian, alto Heather Carolo, bass Bill O’Neill, and Shulamit Hoffmann’s Viva La Musica Choir. Preceding the symphony, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 is on the program, with Elizabeth Dorman as soloist. She will “warm up” for the June concerts this week, in a joint recital with cellist Tanya Tomkins on May 30 at Sonoma’s Burlingame Hall. The program: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in F-sharp Major, Op. 78; Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 5; Chopin’s Études, Op. 10, No. 8 in F Major, and No. 9 in F Minor; Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violoncello in A Major, Op. 69.
Elizabeth Dorman
Conservatory Plans
Continuing from last week’s column item, here is more news about the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s plans for the next season.
The Conservatory Orchestra opens its season on Sept. 6, with a program of works by faculty composers Elinor Armer and Conrad Susa, including scenes from Susa’s Dangerous Liaisons, which premiered in the War Memorial Opera House in 1994. The Conservatory’s Chamber Music Masters series features Kim Kashkashian, viola (October), Anthony Marwood, violin (November); Menahem Pressler, piano (February 2009); Norman Fischer, cello (March); and Robert Mann, violin (March). Under Program Director Richard Harrell, the Conservatory Opera Theater presents Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers next spring.
Baroque Violinists’ Struggle for Primacy
American Bach Soloists and the Henry I. Goldberg International Young Artist Competition will present six semifinalists in the ninth annual competition, which happens to be an all-Baroque violinist affair. UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall is the venue for the semifinals on June 5, and the finals on June 8. The participants:
Brandi Berry — Bloomington, Illinois
Andrew Fouts — San Rafael, California
Diana Lee-Plaines — Bayonne, France
Marc Levine — Islip, New York
Aisslinn Nosky — Toronto, Canada
Johanna Novom — Cleveland Heights, Ohio
A Requiem to Die for
The evening didn’t start well. This final program of the San Francisco Symphony’s Brahms Festival opened with Brahms’ Song of the Spirit and Four Songs for Women’s Chorus — all in a languorous-to-funereal fashion, with Michael Tilson Thomas taking it slow and easy; rather lifeless. (For a rather different take, see the review in this issue.)
But then came A German Requiem, with MTT, the orchestra, and Ragnar Bohlin’s Symphony Chorus all coming to life magnificently, languid turning to majestic. The frosting on the cake was the two soloists, brilliant in their teeny-tiny roles. Even with nine and six minutes total run time, respectively, Matthias Goerne’s “Herr, lehre doch mich” and “Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende” filled huge Davies Hall with power and lyricism, Laura Claycomb’s “Ihr habt un Traurigkeit” sparkled with colors, glowed with beauty.
In this, Bohlin’s first major production as chorus director, the Symphony Chorus sang as well as ever — a huge claim after the 23 great years with Vance George in charge. Baritones and basses were especially grand, giving backbone to the mighty pedal points in the opening “Selig sind,” prompting (appropriately) gooseflesh in “Denn alles Fleisch.” There were moments, especially in large, powerful passages, when the Chorus reached perfection; at other times, the grace and agility of sopranos and mezzos delighted and enchanted.
Except for a bit of weakness in the perhaps under-rehearsed “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen,” this was A German Requiem to treasure.
Laura Claycomb (as Cunigonde in Candide)
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.