Eventful Year-End for the Opera

On a mixed note of triumph and crisis, San Francisco Opera ended the 2003 portion of the season on Sunday, earlier than in any year since 1995. On the upside: great critical and box-office success for Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Shostakovich filling the house for the first time in company history), sellouts for Il Barbiere di Siviglia, with its 35,000-pound centerpiece, and fairly good ticket sales for the mostly disappointing Don Carlos. In the pit, under Donald Runnicles' inspired direction, the Opera Orchestra played excellently well, in possession of a hard-fought new contract. (Runnicles, in the audience, and the Berlin Philharmonic. playing in Davies Hall, are both in San Francisco at the moment, but the two will regroup in Berlin on Dec. 11-13 when Runnicles is making his debut with the orchestra, leading performances of Britten's War Requiem. For a report on Runnicles' master class at the Conservatory last week, see further below.)

On the downside: a continued grave financial crisis and no resolution promised in the almost year-long contract talks with several unions. Among them, AGMA (American Guild of Musical Artists), representing the Opera Chorus, which has been working with a contract that expired in February. Classical Voice has learned that AGMA asked for and has received strike authorization from the San Francisco Labor Council. The singers are getting paid at last year's rates, and they lost ten weeks' worth of income when the season schedule was cut, costing each chorus member about $13,000 on average. Intensive negotiations are scheduled for December, and sources say a mediator is likely to be brought in soon.

Contract talks have been inconclusive for smaller groups of Opera employees (hair, makeup, etc.), a particularly sharp conflict reported between the administration and the union representing the stagehands — IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) Local 16. As to the Opera's finances, a key factor in contract negotiations, the company has yet to make public the amount of deficit for Fiscal Year 2003, ending last July, pending completion of an audit by Deloitte & Touche. The program for the 2004-'05 season will be announced on January 14. The Opera's public visibility will be greatly reduced after a short run in January until resumption of the season next June.

Memorable Memorials?

As a faithful Classical Voice reader, you are naturally a regular visitor to Arthur Brown Jr.'s impressive French Renaissance edifice, the War Memorial Opera House. Based on that experience and a keen awareness of your surroundings, here's an easy pop quiz: Name the nine (9) memorial tablets under the great coffered ceiling, in the most regal lobby the WPA ever produced. If you miss one or two, look for the complete list in next week's Music News, a publication that cares about such things.

Will the Metropolitan Opera Be Heard in This Metropolis?

The sad saga of San Francisco not receiving Met broadcasts on a major local FM station continues, although there are three problematic substitutes: tiny KUSF-FM, 90.3, received only in the immediate vicinity of the University of San Francisco; KDIA-AM, 1640, limited reception and poor AM sound; and the Internet, which is just not the same thing as a local radio station. (The new-fangled XM satellite radio service may bypass the problem, but only at a considerable expense.) San Francisco is at a disadvantage vis a vis such locations as Wailuku (HI), Lovelock (NV), or even Yreka (CA), which has two FM stations carrying the Met.

The broadcast series, in its 64th year (and the last one to be sponsored by Chevron-Texaco), will open on Dec. 13 (10 a.m. PST), with the Met's broadcast premiere of Fromental Halevy's La Juive. Season highlights include Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini (Dec. 27), Strauss' Salome, with Karita Mattila (March 27), and a new Ring cycle, conducted by James Levine (March 20, April 3, 17, and 24). See www.metopera.org/broadcast.

Quasthoff Returns to West Coast

Having skipped the Oregon Bach Festival, his "American home," last summer, baritone Thomas Quasthoff has now scheduled singing the title role of Elijah, two lieder recitals and a jazz-pop concert next year in Eugene.

The 17-day festival, beginning June 25, will mark Helmuth Rilling's 35th anniversary as music director and chief conductor. On the festival program: St. Matthew Passion, Mass in B Minor, the Mozart Requiem and Mendelssohn's Psalm 42, with the participation of the Gächinger Kantorei and the Moran Children's Choir of Israel. Krzysztof Penderecki will conduct Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 and his own Flute Concerto, with soloist Lorna McGhee. A composers symposium will host 40 emerging composers in workshops and concerts of premieres. See bachfest.uoregon.edu

When Is $25 Billion Not the Same as $25 Billion?

One of the latest estimates for the California deficit is $25 billion. The figure rang a bell, and then I remembered: it's the ongoing deficit of Berlin, a consequence of reunification. It's strange that the US state and the German capital should be in the hole with identical amounts because their sizes and their support for the arts are so completely different.

Through the huge deficit, Berlin keeps paying huge subsidies to its three major opera companies, dozen orchestras, numerous museums, etc. California, even before the bottom fell out this huge economy (world's fifth or sixth largest), spent pennies to Berlin's dollars. And now that the bad times are here, the situation is getting a lot worse here, while Berlin keeps spending money it doesn't have . . . on the arts.

Speaking of Berlin . . .

With Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in town, some interesting items are bubbling up in the international media, some with a "local angle." For instance, Rattle has commissioned an opera from Berkeley's John Adams, to be performed and recorded by the Philharmonic in 2006. (Adams already owes a new work, Dr. Atom, to the San Francisco Opera by 2005, so chances are he rather very busy.)

Rattle, at 48, still advocates new music and neglected repertoire the way he did in his 20s, in Birmingham. In an interview with Billboard, he spoke of the Philharmonic's previous near-obsession with Brahms and Mahler (while rarely playing Mozart and Haydn), "on the contemporary front, they had played a lot of Kurtag and Rihm and some Ligeti, but never John Adams or Magnus Lindberg, just to pick out two great names . . . "

"I want to give this great big bird as many colored feathers as it can take," Rattle said "I'm doing the big central pieces, but we're also doing works like Messiaen's Eclairs sur l'Au-Dela, which the whole orchestra feels is such a raving masterpiece. And we're going to record the extraordinary Dvorak late tone poems, which nobody knows."

Elza Redux, with Consonants Like Butter

All evening long, Donald Runnicles pushed consonants. "Milk them," he told the young singers in his San Francisco Conservatory of Music master class Tuesday night. "Emphasize them, especially the l's, m's and n's, articulate them, but without breaking the line. They are incredibly important in the German literature."

To promote consonant health, he had his young charges sing only the vowels, all the more to appreciate those m's and n's, in a scene right out of "Sesame Street". The San Francisco Opera music director spoke fondly of the "six or seven years" he spent in Bayreuth, at the beginning of his career, having his fill with consonant-rich Wagner operas. And so, at this German-repertory master class, he kept stressing the point . . . until the last singer.

When Elza van den Heever finished singing the Composer's aria from Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, Runnicles said: "OK, let's go home." No need for consonant alert or much of anything else — although the two did spend almost a half an hour working on the aria, especially on the phrase about music being the holy art . . . and the performance kept growing, shining brightly, even as the mezzo's voice.

Elza has done it again. The mezzo from South Africa already stunned the audience last summer in the War Memorial Opera House, at the Merola Program Grand Finale. She scored twice, first with a wonderfully musical performance of Salome's "Il est doux, il est bon," from Massenet's Herodiade, then with her response to the ovation. It was the "you like me, you really like me" reaction, accompanied by a huge smile, showing unaffected, sincere joy. The same quality came through from the singer in Hellman Hall, the 24-year-old working with Runnicles in the manner of a 10-year-old, finding a new, shiny toy. With her singing and her sincerity, the mezzo (who may yet go the soprano way) makes a great impression. The voice is bright and soaring, the technique is good, and — above all — she sings, serves the music.

Between anecdotes about Terence McEwen talking James Morris into switching from Verdi to Wagner, and about Sinatra setting the example for singing long notes, Runnicles worked hard with the young ones. He revised, corrected and admonished (gently), but he also spoke of "being in awe of singers, who open their soul in public," generously complimenting them on a "gorgeous F major resolution" and the like. He spent a quarter hour — almost four minutes per word — on the first four words of Die zwei blauen Augen with another mezzo, Raeeka Shehabi-Yaghmai, from Mahler's Songs of the Wayfarer. Singing "t" instead of the proper "d" of "die" turned out to be sage advice.

"Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen," from Korngold's Die tote Stadt got similar treatment, as baritone Andrew Cox worked hard on Pierrots Tanzlied. The accompanist, Leesa Dahl, got some of the finest singing of the evening out of the piano. An impressive, very young mezzo, Katherine Crowdon, took the Mahler cycle home, with "Ich hab' ein glühend Messer," Runnicles spending a great deal of time on "Messer." Each time Runnicles asked for a repetition of the opening phrase, accompanist Kristin Pankonin did not spare her fingers on the fff chords, representing the storming orchestra on the piano. In the lobby of Hellman Hall, among photos of past master classes, a 1970 photo of Beverly Sills and Placido Domingo, giving a class together. How did I miss that?!