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It's News to Me

Janos Gereben on November 8, 2016
MTT answers questions at the Seoul press conference | Credit: Oliver Theil

S.F. Symphony’s Asia Tour Begins with First-Time Appearance in South Korea

Over the weekend, once again, San Francisco Symphony musicians flew across the Pacific to begin a concert tour tomorrow [Nov. 9], taking the orchestra to seven cities in South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Japan through Nov. 22. San Francisco will not reclaim its orchestra until it returns home from the tour and resumes performances in Davies Hall, beginning on Dec. 2, accompanying a program of “Rodgers & Hammerstein at the Movies.”

SFS Director of Communications Oliver Theil, who left San Francisco on Sunday, writes from Seoul, on what is Monday here and Tuesday there: “We just arrived and have a press conference this morning then some various musician activities later today. First concert is tomorrow, Wednesday. We are 17 hours ahead of you.”

This is the fourth tour of Asia for Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. Pianist Yuja Wang will join them later as the soloist in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2; the Chopin soloist in Seoul is Dong-Hyek Lim. SFS toured Asia decades ago, led by MTT’s predecessors, but this is the first time in the orchestra’s 105-year history that it will perform in Korea. Theil writes:

Given the historic occasion, a contingent of local and national press descended on the orchestra’s hotel for a morning press conference. Executive Director Brent Assink and MTT addressed a large gathering of media, arts partners, and city VIPS. The talk and ensuing questions were far-ranging, covering everything from Alma Mahler to Agnes Albert to Lady Gaga and traditional Korean Pansori musical storytelling.

Of special interest was the presence of SFS violinist Kum Mo Kim, a veteran of 41 years with the orchestra, and a vocal supporter of touring to Korea. Theil writes that Kim was a child prodigy in her native city, her father, a conductor, founded the first symphony orchestra in Korea in 1948, which became the Seoul Philharmonic.

MTT, SFS violinist Kum Mo Kim (with the orchestra for 41 years, thanks to Richard Nixon), and Brent Assink | Credit: Oliver Theil

During the Korean War, that orchestra frequently played free concerts to help the community deal with the hardships of war. In 1953, Vice President Nixon stopped by and heard a concert of theirs in Busan and was so taken that he invited Kum Mo’s family to Washington and arranged for a sponsor for her father to study with Leonard Bernstein. At Tanglewood, her father met Herbert Blomstedt, and so began Kum Mo’s own journey to the San Francisco Symphony. During the current tour, Kum Mo also will have a reunion with her sister, who is a symphony conductor -- all in the family!

“A great example of music building cultural bridges,” says Theil. “The orchestra hopes to build more connections to its sizable Korean fan-base over the next two nights.”

Note from the It’s a Small World Dept.: one of conductor Kim’s successors in Seoul was Kyung-Soo Won, whose daughter, Alisa Won, is board chair of San Francisco Classical Voice


Jeffrey Brian Adams (Georg) and Monique Hafen (Amalia) before they fall in love in San Francisco Playhouse’s She Loves Me | Credit: Ken Levin

Playhouse’s She Loves Me Is Based on a Hungarian Source

San Francisco Playhouse is producing the Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick She Loves Me, Nov. 23 to Jan. 14. It’s a musical based on Miklós László’s Parfumerie (which also inspired The Shop Around the Corner, In the Good Old Summertime, and, most recently, You’ve Got Mail. Says Playhouse co-founder Susi Damilano, who is also stage director for the musical:

She Loves Me is a sweet love story full of beautiful music, making it just perfect for the holidays. It will be impossible for people to walk out of this show without a big smile on their face -- and a little pressure to get their holiday shopping done, given the play’s Christmas setting. We’ve cast it with familiar and fabulous Playhouse actors, with Monique Hafen and Jeffrey Brian Adams playing the star-crossed lovers -- a fun tidbit is that they became a “real world” couple while he played the Prince to her Cinderella in our production of Into the Woods.

Damilano found that there is much more to the play than meets the eye. During rehearsals, one of the company’s stage managers, Tatjana Genser, who is from Austria told Damilano “that the play had been required study for her college literature class in Austria because of its political importance.”

“The play takes place in December of 1937. Hungary had only been its own country for a very short time, since World War I. Prior to that they were ruled by Austrian and German monarchs so this is the first time they were on their own … and they didn’t really know exactly how to do it. Common people were used to the monarch making the decisions and [to] not having a voice. Anti-Semitism also had hit hard in Hungary, leading to a political/military alliance with Nazi Germany.”

Georg and Amalia after passing the rocky road to their bliss, in the Roundabout Theater production | Credit: Jooan Marcus

Interestingly enough, Hungarian literature was a not uncommon source for American musicals.

Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom was the basis for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel. Molnár’s The Good Fairy was turned into the Deanna Durbin film I’ll Be Yours (music by Emmerich Kálmán and Brahms, strange bedfellows though they may be), and the fecund Molnár’s The Guardsman became the The Chocolate Soldier (the film, not the operetta, which was based on Shaw’s Arms & the Man).

San Francisco’s 42nd Street Moon has twice produced Rodgers & Hart’s I Married an Angel, based on János Vaszary’s Angyalt Vettem Feleségül, and so on to László and She Loves Me.

With music direction by David Aaron Brown and choreography by Kimberly Richards, the current Broadway revival has received six Tony Award nominations and prizes from the Drama Desk and Outer Critic’s Circle for previous runs. The story follows two perfume shop clerks who don’t like each other, but when they both respond to a “lonely hearts” advertisement ... they end up singing and dancing (often together). 


SFSYO woodwind section at work | Credit: San Francisco Symphony

Last-Minute Change for Sunday’s SFS Youth Orchestra Concert

It took Jason Moon years of work and overcoming tough competition to win the SFS Youth Orchestra Concerto Competition. The big prize is being the soloist in Davies Hall at the orchestra’s next concert. All was set for this coming Sunday when news came that Moon has been “forced to withdraw due to an [unspecified] injury.”

From the illustrious ranks of Youth Orchestra alumni came the instant replacement — Alexi Kenney, who will perform the same work, the Sibelius Violin Concerto, on Sunday. It’s ahomecoming for Palo Alto native Kenney, 22, who was concertmaster of the Youth Orchestra in 2010-2011, and who has since won contests, including a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and has played recitals and concertos around the country.

He began this season with a residency at the Marlboro Festival, along with featured solo recitals at the Caramoor Music Festival and ChamberFest Cleveland. Fortunately for the Youth Orchestra, Kenney performed the Sibelius just last year, with the Santa Fe Symphony. A thoughtful review by former SFS program annotator James M. Keller in the Santa Fe New Mexican said, in part:

Violinist Alexi Kenney was an impressive soloist in Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, playing throughout with technical precision and meticulous intonation. It is not really a young man’s concerto, and at 21, Kenney appeared not yet entirely in sync with the embittered ponderings of the downcast Finn. His interpretation accordingly steered more toward aristocratic elegance than the anguish or cynicism that seem to be the work’s hallmarks.

In his first appearance as the Youth Orchestra’s new music director, Christian Reif conducts a program that places the Sibelus between “Maenad’s Dance” from Hans Werner Henze’s The Bassarids and Shostakovich’s 1939 Symphony No. 6, of which the composer said: “In my latest symphony, music of a contemplative and lyrical order predominates. I wanted to convey in it the moods of spring, joy, youth.” Youthfulness will be a given on Sunday, among musicians between the ages of 12 and 21.


In Brief:

  • Beethoven Is Fighting Dry Rot and Lack of Funding for Music Programs

  • The Shining, the Opera, in Free Streaming

  • Canada’s New Museum Is Dedicated to Music

Roofing company's poster

Beethoven’s Is Fighting Dry Rot and Lack of Funding for Music Programs

There is a roofing company in Berkeley with a Music News-making name of Beethoven’s Gutter Works & Roofing. Besides the name, what commends this business is its reported contribution of six percent of each job’s fee to music programs in Berkeley public schools. I’m sure that the composer of so many tempests would have approved.


Scene from The Shining | Credit: Minnesota Opera

Complete Performance of The Shining, the Opera, in Free Streaming

The Shining, composed by Paul Moravec with libretto by Mark Campbell, is an authorized adaptation of Stephen King’s classic 1977 novel about a family haunted by ghosts in a remote, mountain hotel. Many are familiar with the story through Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie, but King was displeased with some significant changes Kubrick made to the novel’s story and tone. The opera, produced by Minnesota Opera, hews much more closely to King’s original.

Minnesota Public Radio now presents the complete streaming audio of The Shining, as performed live during the premiere run. The audio is available through Nov. 30.


The lobby of Studio Bell, music museum in Calgary | Credit: Jeremy Bittermann/Allied Works Architecture

Canada’s New Museum Is Dedicated to Music

Music now has its own magnificent museum in Canada, Portland architect Brad Cloepfil’s 160,000-square-foot Studio Bell, which houses the National Music Centre in Calgary. It is composed of nine interlocking towers, with a striking sky bridge and shimmering terra-cotta façade, providing - among many other attractions - a 300-seat performance hall.

Bell Canada has paid $10 million for naming rights for the center, for 12 years, easing the project’s $191 million cost a bit.