Music News
Klein Competition Winners
Top winners of the 2008 Irving M. Klein International String Competition, conducted over the weekend at San Francisco State University, are:
- First place — Tessa Lark, 18-year-old violinist from Richmond, KY, student of Miriam Fried at the New England Conservatory of Music.
- Second place — Robin Scott, 21-year-old violinist from Indianapolis, IN, also a student of Miriam Fried.
- Third place — Ying Xue, 22-year-old violinist from Urumqi, China, student of Donald Weilerstein, at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Finalists were chosen from among 74 entrants representing 11 countries, and they range in age from 15 to 23.
Tessa Lark, Ying Xue, and Robin Scott
Photo by Philip Goldworth
Birthday Cake of Many Candles for Our Founder
Robert Commanday, founder of San Francico Classical Voice, turns 86 on June 18. Your birthday notes and good wishes are welcome at editor@sfcv.org. Please use the subject line: “Commanday HB.”
Robert Commanday
Music@Menlo Premiere
Music@Menlo’s fifth program this summer will close the 2008 festival, on Aug. 7 and 8, with performances of its first commission, the premiere of Kenneth Frazelle’s Piano Trio. Written for pianist Jeffrey Kahane (who will be joined by violinist Joseph Swenson and cellist Andrés Diaz), the Trio explores elemental images, with movements titled Of Water, Unto Dust, and Into Light.
The program, “Music Now: Voices of Our Time,” will also feature two of today’s leading women composers: Jennifer Higdon’s Scenes From the Poet’s Dreams, written for pianist Gary Graffman, and selections from Gabriela Lena Frank’s Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea. It concludes with Tan Dun’s Snow in June for cello and percussion quartet, written in the wake of events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The festival opens on July 18.
Kenneth Frazelle
Giants Substitutes in the Ballpark
Of the San Francisco Opera summer season, the most appropriate work to feature in this year’s free simulcast at the Giants’ AT&T Park would be Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which has two giants of its own. Instead, General Director David Gockley is going with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, to be seen simultaneously at the War Memorial and on the ballpark’s 3200-square-foot, Diamond Vision scoreboard, at 8 p.m. on Friday, June 20.
The simulcast is free (Opera House tickets range from $45 to $225), and you can attend without reservation> But for seats on the field, go online to print out a free ticket. For the field, blankets are recommended by the thoughtful Opera management, especially as no lawn or beach chairs are permitted.
A Brahmsian Emoticon
There is a famous e-mail from Sept. 19, 1982, in which Scott E. Fahlman proposes “the character sequence :-) for joke markers,” adding that it should be “read sideways.” But was that the “original” emoticon?
Wikipedia and others would make you think so, but here, at the Department of True Provenance, we go a full century before that with a claim of “first” — and through a musical connection to boot. Behold:
The discovery was made by artist-scholar Geoffrey Blum (the leading authority on Disney cartoonist Carl Barks) in Johannes Brahms, The Herzogenberg Correspondence, edited by Max Kalbeck, translated by Hannah Bryant (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1909). If, like me, you’re not well familiar with Heinrich von Herzogenberg, a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on him should be of interest.
Making Strudels: a Yiddish Parsifal
In the three years since the first performance in Davies Hall of The Thomashefskys, this charming and important show by Michael Thomashefsky Tilson Thomas (or MTTT) has made the rounds (New York and Chicago), but last week it came back to San Francisco.
Telling the story of MTT’s grandparents, Yiddish theater megastars Boris and Bessie, took years of research. The production featured Linda S. Steinberg’s media design (see her program notes), Patricia Birch’s direction, the S.F. Symphony, and four outstanding actor-singers: Judy Blazer, Neal Benari, Ronit Widmann-Levy, and Eugene Brancoveanu.
Judy Blazer
Photos by Stefan Cohen
At the heart of the show (and it has a ticker as big as all the outdoors) is MTT, reminiscing, narrating, conducting, playing the piano … and bringing down the house singing and dancing the 1910 Nora Bayes song Who Do You Suppose Married My Sister? Thomashefsky!
As back in 2005, I was once again struck by the razor-thin line separating opera and the music-theater genre of the Lower East Side. Giacomo Minkowsky, for example, is not all that far from his Italian namesake, G. Puccini, judging by the surviving duet from his 1892 Alexander, the Crown Prince of Jerusalem. It’s called an opera, it sounds like an opera, by gum, it is opera, even if the duet — “As if on wings I come” — is sung as “Vi gefloygn kum ikh vider.”
Judy Blazer and Eugene Brancoveanu
Brancoveanu and Widmann-Levy performed the gloriously sentimental music in a manner that could make the duet well at home across Grove Street at the War Memorial. Ditto for Brancoveanu’s performance of the aria “Babkelekh,” from Abraham Goldfaden’s 1879 Koldunye (The witch).
The most intriguing opera reference was a casual aside by MTT — visually supported by a photo from the production — about Boris Thomashefsky’s production of Parsifal in Yiddish. Apparently, it was a contemporary of Thomashefsky’s translated and “improved” version of Hamlet (the play, not the opera). I’d give an eyetooth to see either, but especially Parsifal — the mind boggles.
Feelings are front and center in The Thomashefskys, MTT’s affection for Boris, but with Bessie it is especially palpable and worn on the sleeve. Yet, the show is not really a family testimonal, what with a quote from Bessie about MTT’s parents being “conventional,” one mention of his father, and no reference to his mother.
The show’s new finale is terrific. After Brancoveanu sings the title song from Joseph Rumshinsky’s 1919 Vi mener libn (The way men love), MTT reprises and expands the story of Bessie’s explanation of “genius” — “you go to the kitchen, wash your hands, put on an apron, and make the strudel.” That (aside from Bessie’s advice “never to sign a release”) is the way he goes about his work, MTT said, whether the task is conducting Mahler or Stravinsky. One wonders if Bessie ever signed a release so that Nike could pick up on “Just Do It!”
MTT of the Thomashefskys
Tosca for MTT
While still awaiting Michael Tilson Thomas’ debut with the San Francisco Opera, Zürich has procured him for an April 2009 run of Puccini’s Tosca. The cast also has local connections, including baritone Thomas Hampson, and Emily Magee, who is heading to San Francisco this fall for Die Tote Stadt.
Dance: ‘The Next Generation’
ODC Theater’s “Local Heroes/The Big Picture” festival features three challenging programs, June 26 through July 26, at the Project Artaud Theater.
At the June 26-28 concerts, Kate Watson-Wallace’s House will fill the lobby spaces (including bathrooms, the release says) of the Artaud, with an “ambient mix of dance, theater, and visual art in the form of installation set pieces. Performers and audience members physically travel together through time and space, breaking down the fourth wall of common separation between artists and observers.” Watson-Wallace is known for choreographing spectators as well as performers, so be ready to participate.
The festival’s middle weekend, July 17-19, presents three Bay Area choreographers, who represent the next generation of dance creation: Yannis Adoniou (formerly with LINES), Manuelito Biag (an ODC alumnus), and Alex Ketley (from LINES and Robert Moses’ Kin).
Manuelito Biag
Photo by Marty Sohl
The final weekend, July 24-26, presents “new traditionalists” Vishnu Tattva Das, Colette Eloi, and Hearan Chung, who fuse their master choreographer/performer-level experience and training in centuries-old and culturally specific dance with contemporary content. The choreographers — Indian, Haitian, and Korean, respectively — represent three of the fastest growing communities in the changing Bay Area demographic.
Hearan Chung
All Classical Music, from All the World, All the Time
San Francisco Opera archivist Kori Lockhart is one or the earliest and most dedicated Internet music listeners, but her latest discovery prompted even her to say “Almost too much!”
Classical DJ is a global storehouse of music stations everywhere, at your fingertips — or keystrokes — by continents: Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa, Australia (including New Zealand, something that may not amuse Kiwi patriots); and sorry, nothing from Antarctica. Check it out and be amazed.
Meanwhile, our old friend, Medici.TV, is still there, spectacular as ever, streaming sensational music videos, live and taped, including the entire 2008 Aspen Festival. Free until now, Medici.TV is apparently going commercial. Meanwhile, it still offers a great deal gratis.
Ethnic Doesn’t Mean ‘Quaint’
Before the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival grew up — it turns 30 this year — it had an understandable emphasis on the exotic, the different, the quaint. Those characteristics are still all there, but mixed with some more substantial, even gritty, content.
In the middle of Program 2 last weekend, for example, what followed the fascinating La Fibi Flamenco Dance Company’s Latin American/Caribbean variations on the music and dance of Spain, and the De Rompe y Raja Cultural Association’s drumming and Afro-Peruvian dances, was Imani’s Dream, a fusion of hip-hop and modern dance, performed by a troupe of all ages and all body types. The program, Our Story, told of HIV, people living on the street, teenage mothers feeding their children “by all available means,” words and movements spitting fear, anger, determination. This was a dance presentation with Brecht’s sensibility in the theater, and the shock of Wozzeck in opera.
Imani’s Dream
Upcoming next week and the following final weekend:
- Eszterlánc Hungarian Folk Ensemble
- Vishwa Shanthi Dance Academy
- Murphy Irish Dancers
- Ballet Folklorico Mexicano de Carlos Moreno
- LIKHA Filipino Folk Ensemble
- Niharika Mohanty
- Bolivia Corazón de Américax
- China Dance School and Theater
- Ballet Lisanga II West African Performing Arts Company
Ballet Lisanga
- Chhandam Youth Dance Company
- Hiyas Philippine Folk Dance Company
- YaoYong Dance
- ABADÁ Capoeira San Francisco Performance Troupe
- Fuego Nuevo Ballet Folklorico Mexicano
- Gadung Kasturi
- CollageWest Dance Theater
- Halau ‘o Keikiali’i
- Alafia Dance Ensemble
Halau ‘o Keikiali’i
Levine Birthday
James Levine’s 65th birthday on June 23 will be celebrated by a weeklong tribute on Sirius Satellite Radio’s Metropolitan Opera channel, beginning with his 1978 recording of The Bartered Bride, and concluding with the 2000 Ring cycle under his baton. The Metropolitan Opera and Boston Symphony music director will also be recognized by many events and special broadcasts.
James Levine
Taylor-Gaffigan
San Francisco Symphony Associate Conductor James Gaffigan, 28, and Lee Taylor, 29, both graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music, where they first met. Last week, they were back in Massachussetts, getting married. When Gaffigan joined the orchestra here, Taylor became manager of fund-raising with the Philharmonia Baroque in San Francisco, but she left the position earlier this year, to pursue her studies at the New School in New York.
Mr. and Mrs. James Gaffigan
Photo by Drew Altize
Merola’s Baroque Super Bowl
Three world-famous graduates of San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program returned to the War Memorial on Sunday for the beginning of a seven-performance run of Handel’s 1735 Ariodante. Mezzo Susan Graham, in the title role, brought the house down with the Act 2 aria “Scherza infida,” providing one of the most memorable performances I have experienced in the house during the past three decades. Soprano Ruth Ann Swenson shone as Ginevra, and Patrick Summers conducted with verve and fidelity.
The other principals combined their considerable talents in an ensemble performance: Sonia Prina (Polinesso), Veronica Cangemi (Dalinda), Richard Croft (Lurcanio), Andrew Bidlack (Odoardo), and Eric Owens (King of Scotland) — see the review.
Premiering successfully in the then-new Covent Garden opera house, and then disappearing for two centuries, Ariodante is a typical Baroque opera, with an outlandish story of love, betrayal, suffering, and eventual resolution, all wrapped up in majestic music of beautiful arias and powerful orchestral music. This production is coming from the Dallas Opera; it is directed by John Copley, with John Conklin’s grandiose design, and Michael Stennett’s opulent costumes.
Susan Graham as Ariodante
Whose Mountain?
Incredible as it seems, this column goofed — back in October, and we’re getting a correction just now, in June. Brokeback Mountain, the opera, is being written by Charles Wuorinen on a commission from the New York City Opera, not the Metropolitan Opera.
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.
re: Giants Substitutes in the Ballpark — tickets for the San Francisco Opera *in* the Opera House start as low as $15 (not $45, as noted in your piece). This is for full-price Balcony Rear Sides midweek tickets (on weekends the same seats cost $20). Generous patronage keeps the price of these seats so low, and I’m very grateful (since that’s where my season seats are). C’mon up, the sound’s the best!!
Posted by Ann Rosenfeld on June 17, 2008 at 11:59 pm
On prices, it’s a case of apples and (Love for Three) oranges: If you want to see “Lucia” in the Opera House (and you should!), the lowest price ticket is $45. The $15 and $20 tickets Ann mentions are available (with some difficulty) in a season subscription.
Posted by Janos Gereben on June 18, 2008 at 1:07 pm