Music News
Lively Discussion of The Dead City
At a Herbst Theatre Insight Panel on Monday, the eve of the San Francisco premiere of Erich Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt, Donald Runnicles’ discussion of the work included two startling statements, which bracketed the eight years of his involvement with it.
The San Francisco Opera music director, who will lead the War Memorial performances, from Sept. 23 to Oct. 12, has also conducted Die Tote Stadt in Vienna and Salzburg.
Surprise No. 1: When asked how long he has been familiar with the opera (first performed in 1920), Runnicles said that up until 2000, when he started preparing for the Vienna production the next year, he only knew of the work’s two popular arias, “Pierrot’s Tanzlied” and “Marietta’s Song.”
This came as great relief to most opera fans, myself included, with similarly limited knowledge of the work, which was enormously popular at first, then virtually disappeared from the scene, only to be revived again long after the composer’s death in 1957. In the U.S. the New York City Opera led the way, with the 1975 Frank Corsaro production, featuring Carol Neblett and John Alexander. (The American premiere took place in 1921 at the Met, with Maria Jeritza as Marie/Marietta, shortly after the unprecedented double world premiere in 1920 in Hamburg and Cologne.)
Donald Runnicles conducting
As for Runnicles’ No. 2, the scene shifts from 2000 to last Friday and the San Francisco dress rehearsal. Repeatedly described by the conductor as “fiendishly hard,” the music presents constant tempo changes, difficult balances, and virtuoso but youthfully unconventional orchestration from a wunderkind composer who completed the work at age 23. Although it elicited “impolite responses” from musicians here on first reading, the San Francisco Opera Orchestra performance at the dress rehearsal was not only on par with performances in Vienna and Salzburg, Runnicles said it was “better,” with more clarity and detail. Whoa!
Runnicles and stage director Meisje Hummel (who was Willy Decker’s assistant at the original Salzburg production) spoke at length of the opera’s complexities. Based on Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 novella Bruges-la-Morte (The dead city of Bruges), Die Tote Stadt is about a man’s obsessive grieving over his wife’s death, his encounter with a woman who resembles her, and then the story unfolds in a constant — and at times sudden and mysterious — interplay of reality and dreams.
From the San Francisco production
Photo by Terrence McCarthy
The opera takes place in two realities, Hummel said, one being the dreams — nightmares — of Paul, the principal character. He is “petrified” in his grief and comes through an enormous struggle between his pain and the will to live. An alternative title Korngold considered for the opera was The Triumph of Life. As to dreams, Runnicles said, as people get older, people reappearing in dreams take on strange forms, dreams become busier and busier, and in cases such as Paul’s a great personal loss further complicates and colors dreams. And yet, he said, “by the end of the opera, you won’t want to leave, just as you don’t want to be awakened from a rich dream.”
Written at a time “when Freud was Elvis Presley in Vienna,” Die Tote Stadt is rich in psychological aspects, Runnicles said, but there is an even larger reality to it. “It is a metaphor for Vienna after World War I, feeling loss and bewilderment” in a vastly changed world.
While the ability to feel and depict “deep, painful nostalgia” by the elder Korngold (Vienna’s most famous music critic) is understandable, Runnicles said, it is a mystery how the young composer — without memories of prewar Vienna — could hold up his end. (With tragic irony, Korngold’s latter years in Hollywood, while outwardly successful, were spent in grieving over the loss of his status as a great opera composer, Runnicles suggested.)
Led by Director of Music Administration Kip Cranna, the Herbst Theatre event also included baritone Lucas Meachem, who sings the dual roles of Fritz and Frank, and has the ovation-evoking “Pierrot’s Tanzlied.” Meachem, a recent Merola Program participant and Adler Fellow, is engaged in a busy international career. He spoke of the opera’s “phenomenal music” and its “celebral stimulation,” and is looking forward to reprising his role in Madrid in a couple of years.
Lucas Meachem as Frank
Photo by Terrence McCarthy
Geniuses Galore
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced 25 new $500,000 “Genius Awards” on Tuesday, including these in the performing arts:
- Walter Kitundu, 35, San Francisco instrument-maker, best known for his phonoharp
- Jennifer Tipton, 71, a stage-lighting designer for dance, theater, and opera
- Violinist Leila Josefowicz, 30
- The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, 40
- Saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón, 31
Jennifer Tipton
Doctor in the House — on DVD, at the Met
The Opus Arte DVD of Adams’ Doctor Atomic is out, and the San Francisco cast is performing in Holland with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus. Publication coincides with the opera’s Metropolitan Opera premiere and it runs from Oct. 13 through Nov. 13. Unlike in San Francisco and at other productions, the director in New York will be Penny Woolcock, rather than librettist-director Peter Sellars.
Woolcock is responsible for the controversial movie version of Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer, called “repulsive” by some critics.
The Metropolitan production will be available via the Met HD live telecast series on Nov. 8 in movie theaters around the country.
Having seen Doctor Atomic four times, and being familiar with its recordings, I was not planning to watch the DVD all the way through, but thought I would make a quick check on sound quality and see how they handled subtitles.
Imagine my surprise when I “came to” at the end of Act 1 (and Disc 1) — once again glued to the piece. I still have a problem with Act 2, but I highly recommend the DVD — Opus Arte #OA-0998-D. “Batter my heart three-person’d God” is among peak experiences of all opera, giving Gerald Finley his place in the pantheon of singers; the Adams-Sellars juxtaposition of that sublime aria with General Groves’ litany over his intake of calories is seemingly pointless, certainly weird, but somehow it all really works.
Gerald Finley as Oppenheimer
MTT/SFS Plans to Open Bernstein Celebration in Carnegie Hall
Michael Tilson Thomas will conduct the San Francisco Symphony Wednesday evening at the opening of the Carnegie Hall season with the launch of the citywide festival Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds. The Sunday New York Times has published an essay by MTT about Bernstein, including this passage:
If it was a first night, the piece, though painstakingly rehearsed, might never have been played through completely.
The players, unsure exactly what [Bernstein] was going to do or how it all fitted together, had to watch him every second. He liked that. He knew that musicians could get buried in their parts, looking fixedly at the same notes they had played thousands of times. He wanted the whole band to be out there with him in an experience that felt more like improvisation. He liked fun and a whiff of danger.
He thought that a performance should reveal the emotional states the composer had experienced while creating the work. For him that meant being totally involved emotionally and physically. He felt he wasn’t really doing his best unless he was swaying on the precipice of his endurance. Whether he was conducting Mahler or playing a Haydn trio, it was the same: oceans of sweat, fluttering eyes, hyper-reactive athleticism.
The San Francisco “dress rehearsals” for the Carnegie Hall appearance have been chronicled far and wide, including in the Southland, MTT’s previous residence.
MTT and Bernstein, in 1983
La Celestina Arrives on Nin-Culmell Centennial
Last weekend, Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela premiered Joaquin Nin-Culmell’s La Celestina — to a 509-year-old story by Fernando de Rojas, four years after the composer’s death, and 11 years after the opera was set to be produced in Spain.
Radio Nacional de España is broadcasting the performance today, Sept. 23, beginning at 11 a.m. PST, and it will be repeated at a later date.
The 1499 work is considered the oldest novel in literature. Its full title is Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea or Libro de Calisto y Melibea y de la puta vieja Celestina, and its hero is Calisto (not to be confused by Ovid’s Callisto, which became the one-l Calisto opera by Cavalli) Celestina is a procuress and witch, to be polite with the translation of “puta vieja.”
Born to a Cuban family in Berlin in 1908, Nin-Culmell taught music at Williams College (where Stephen Sondheim was one of his students), and joined the Music Department faculty at UC Berkeley in 1950. He conducted the UC Symphony Orchestra and appeared as a pianist with numerous musical groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. He served as chair of the Department of Music from 1951 to 1954, and was active in planning for the building of Morrison and Hertz halls.
Michael Tilson Thomas opened the San Francisco Symphony’s 1997 season with a commissioned world premiere of a suite from La Celestina.
Joaquin Nin-Culmell
Dresden’s First Woman Intendant
For the first time in its 169-year history, the Saxonian State Opera of Dresden has appointed a woman as its general director. Ulrike Hessler, 52, will succeed Gerd Uecker in 2010, according to an announcement on Tuesday by Saxonian Secretary of Science and Arts Eva-Maria Stange. Hessler has been with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich since 1984, and worked her way up to director from positions in public relations and program development.
When the Bavarian State Opera was without a general manager during the past two seasons, she formed an interim directorship with Music Director Kent Nagano, running the day-to-day affairs of the opera house.
Ulrike Hessler
Genocides Remembered at Bayrakdarian Recital
Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian’s Oct. 4 San Francisco Performances concert highlights the work of Gomidas Vartabed, national composer and a victim of the Armenian genocide, but the event has an even larger scope.
Isabel Bayrakdarian
As Serouj Kradjian — Bayrakdarian’s husband and colleague as pianist, orchestrator, and programmer — told Music News, the “Remembrance Tour,” through six major venues in North America, is dedicated to victims of all genocides, especially the Holocaust. It is supported by the International Institute of Genocide and Human Rights Studies.
Besides Ravel’s Deux Melodies Hebraiques, the concert also features Gideon Klein’s “Variations on a Moravian Folksong” from Partita for Strings. Who was Klein? Kradjian writes:
Gideon Klein
When I was trying to weave the program around the music of Gomidas, the first thing that came to mind were the Terezin (Theresienstadt) Czech-Jewish composers, Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa, Gideon Klein, all victims of the Holocaust. I was familiar with Ullmann’s Schoenberg-influenced compositions and his fascination with quarter-tone music.
I was also familiar with Pavel Haas’ Study for Strings, which appears in the Nazi propaganda film The Führer Gives a Town to the Jews, a big lie in itself, which creates the impression that all is very well in Theresienstadt. Karel Ancerl is seen in the film conducting the Terezin String Orchestra and shaking hands with Pavel Haas, after the premiere of the work.
Serouj Kradjian
But of all the musicians who shared the same tragic fate at Terezin, Gideon Klein was perhaps the most striking figure. He was only 22 years old when he was deported to Terezin and quickly became one of the leading organizers of Terezin’s cultural life, keeping up the highest standards of his artistic work both as a pianist and a composer, even under the worst living conditions.
His collaborations with his fellow inmates and his lectures on music, contributed greatly to the intellectual and social life of the ghetto. His Trio for Violin, Viola, and Cello is full of melancholy and youthful energy. His music is deeply rooted in Czech-Moravian themes, but it has a unique style of a great musical talent who had a lot to offer had he not been murdered at the tender age of 25 (he literally completed the piece days before being deported to Auschwitz and killed).
Years later Czech composer Vojtech Saudek did a spectacular arrangement of the Trio for Violin, Viola, and Cello to Partita for String Orchestra. The Manitoba Chamber Orchestra will perform the rarely heard second movement called “Variations on a Moravian Folk-Song.”
I do hope that this will be a fitting tribute not only to Gideon Klein but also to all the talented composers and musicians of Terezin whose life and creative output were cut short by man’s greatest inhumanity to man.
Bayrakdarian and Kradjian
Ex-San Franciscan music lover Charlie Cockey, who now lives in Brno, comments:
Here in the Czech Republic these composers are far too little performed; in fact, in a way they’re all but overlooked. Haas not so much, since his output was both larger and quite widely varied, including some quite popularly oriented pieces that occasionally border on the burlesque, and thus these pieces do occasionally show up in concert programs. But overall these composers and their works are almost as unknown here as in the rest of the world. The exception is Hans Krasa and his children’s opera Brundibar, which gets productions with a wonderful regularity.
Los Angeles Opera Music Director James Conlon is heading a project called “Recovered Voices,” which produces works by composers who were affected by or perished in the Holocaust. The series begins with a double-bill of Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg and Viktor Ullmann’s Der zebrochene Krug.
Conlon has long worked for the preservation of these works, and continues in his capacity as music director of the Ravinia Festival, as well. Each summer, Conlon presents a different composer from this group with the Chicago Symphony. He has highlighted works of Ullmann, Schulhoff, and Zemlinsky thus far. Conlon’s production of Ullman’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis has traveled extensively since its first showing in New York, and was produced in cooperation with the Juilliard School. It has been performed at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, the Ravinia Festival, in cooperation with the New World Symphony, the Houston Grand Opera, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
James Conlon
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.
I had the honor of seeing Maestro Runnicles conduct Die tote Stadt in Vienna in the winter of 2004; it was stunning. The main difference between the San Francisco Opera production (seen in dress rehearsal; will be seeing again tonight) is in the lighting; the Vienna production was much darker, giving, at least to me, more mystery to Paul’s dreams. I suspect this will be the “sleeper of the season”. Thank you also for mentioning Isabel Bayrakdarian’s recital, to which I am looking forward.
Posted by Ruth C. Jacobs on September 23, 2008 at 4:38 pm
That was mean of you to link to Kosman’s old review of Woolcock’s brilliant docudrama movie version of “The Death of Klinghoffer,” but I’m afraid he deserves it for such a “repulsive” little essay. Was the DVD of “Doctor Atomic” the same Peter Sellars directed version and if so, had he made any adjustments after its San Francisco world premiere? Enquiring minds would love to know.
Posted by sfmike on September 25, 2008 at 10:11 pm