San Francisco Classical Voice

SF Opera Trims Season, Budget

As reported here a month ago, two productions planned for the next season are being cancelled as the San Francisco Opera is trying to control a $7.7 million deficit. Last week, general director Pamela Rosenberg made it official what contracted artists were told some time ago: Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or and Weber's Der Freischütz will not be offered, even though they were both scheduled as part of Rosenberg's "Animating Opera" project. David Hockney's once-bright, now fading, production of The Magic Flute will be substituted for The Golden Cockerel.

Other works in the adventurous "Animating Opera" series remain on schedule for the next season, including Virgin Thomson's The Mother of Us All, Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, Busoni's Doktor Faust and Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

Artist Corrects Critic

Last week's SFCV carried an enthusiastic review of 10-year-old Kit Armstrong's Stanford recital, ending with this whimsical/musicological paragraph: "One of Kit's earliest compositions was the `Chicken Sonata,' almost five years ago, and he followed that with `Chickens in Spring Time: Theme and 46 Variations.' He continues to raise chickens, so in the future, once he gets through mastering orchestration, a Chicken Symphony may well be in the cards."

How little do we know! Here's Kit's measured response by e-mail: "Hi, I read your on-line review with interest. I thought you might want to know that I indeed wrote a chicken symphony when I was seven years old. It was my first symphony and the first movement of it was performed by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra as well as my high school orchestra a few years back. Kit Armstrong."

I won't disclose Kit's address, but it's noteworthy that it contains the string "chicken_music." A brilliant young man with a singular commitment to poultry! Other readers suggested Kit's work should be transcribed by Maurizio Pollini ("little chickens"), perhaps to be performed at the A Pollo Theater in New York.

Youth's Magic Horn and `Front & Center'

Following the highly successful San Francisco Opera-San Francisco Performances joint event in Herbst Theater on the occasion of the Opera's new production of Kat'a Kabanova, the Opera Center is offering a Herbst concert, The Youth's Magic Horn, on November 25 to mark the current Hansel and Gretel production. The program of music written for romantic fairy tales and folklore by Mahler, Brahms, Schumann and Humperdinck will be performed by former Adler Fellows Twyla Robinson and David Okerlund, and visiting artist Helene Schneiderman. For information, see www.sfopera.com.

Frederica von Stade heads the Opera Center's "Front & Center" fund-raiser in the St. Francis Hotel on Dec. 8. Adler Fellows "singing for their supper" include sopranos Tiffany Abban, Saundra DeAthos and Greta Feeney; tenor Brian Anderson; baritones Brad Alexander, Kwang Shik Pang and Hugh Russell. For information, see www.sfopera.com.

Possible Houston Meltdown

The Houston Symphony, which was going great guns in recent years, is now reeling under the combined weight of the economic rollback, the Enron scandal, the expiration of a contract of unprecedented length (4 1/4 years), and the aftermath of tropical storm Allison. So now, the 79-year-old organization, headed in recent years by Christoph Eschenbach and now by Hans Graf, is forced to make drastic salary cuts, which in turn, are likely to provoke a strike.

Charles Ward, Houston Chronicle music critic for over a quarter century, regards the possible strike as disastrous, similar to the last one, in 1976, which lasted five months. "The Symphony's reputation as a troubled institution would be reinforced, especially among donors and the close-knit world of artists and conductors who perform here, or might someday. The most skilled musicians would leave, and replacements would be harder to find. Except for hard-core fans of symphonic music, listeners would drift away and possibly never return," writes Ward.

Musicians want an increase over the $74,100 annual minimum they get now, but the administration proposes to cut it back to $63,000. Last season the organization lost $1.6 million, reduced form an expted $3.7 million with a special fund-raising campaign. Damage from Allison alone was about $1 million, the rest of the loss being the result of a failed software program for ticketing and fund raising. At the end of the current season, the Symphony's debt may reach over $4 million. (In comparison, the San Jose Symphony was bankrupted — officially, as of last week — by a deficit of $3.4 million.)

And Now, for Some Good News

Clear Channel Communications, largest owner of TV and radio stations in the US, has pledged $31 million for a vital redevelopment project on the decaying Boston Opera House. Closed for over a decade, the building may now be reopened by 2004.

Another opera house to come back to life is Venice's La Fenice, an ancient house that burned to the ground in 1996 during renovation construction. A reopening date has been set for Dec. 14, 2003.

Rachleff Is New San Antonio Maestro

The San Antonio Symphony picked Larry Rachleff, a conductor in Providence and Chicago, as the orchestra's new music director. Selection process took three years, beginning before Christopher Wilkins concluded a 10-year-old run as the head of the Symphony at the end of the last season. In an unusual arrangement, an orchestra musician, principal percussionist Marilyn Rife, headed the search committe. Among the many financially pressed organizations nationwide, the San Antonio orchestra this fall reduced its budget to deal with a $750,000 deficit, and the musicians accepted a paycut.