San Francisco Classical Voice

Modesto Symphony Strike Settled

Modesto Mayor Carmen Sabatino, fed up with the three-month long strike, lack of talks and ever-increasing acrimony between the administration and musicians of the Modesto Symphony, brought the two sides together on Friday. In a little over an hour, negotiators for the orchestra board and American Federation of Musicians Local 12 reached a settlement.

Modesto Bee arts writer Lisa Millegan reported over the weekend that the agreement ending the strike is for a four-year contract. The union leadership accepted lower raises for the musicians and the Symphony board made concessions on cancellation and dismissal policies, and the status of substitute and extra players. Percussionist Tom Rance, the union negotiating chairman, called the new contract "fair to all parties," Wendell Reed, board negotiating chairman, commended the musicians for taking lower raises to help the orchestra recover financially from the work stoppage, which resulted in an estimated loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and $90,000 in ticket refunds.

Average salary for the part-time orchestra is $4,000 a year. Under the new contract, musicians will receive a 3% raise each of the first three years and 5% in the fourth year; the original demand in a three-year framework was for 6, 3 and 5 percent boosts. Most observers agreed during the strike that salary issues were not at the heart of dispute, which was created and made worse by lack of communications and personality clashes. Pending the widely expected contract ratification, the orchestra will return on stage for performances on January 10 and 11, with guest conductor Nicholas Cleobury.

Arts to Swim in a Deeper Sea of Red Ink

The California Legislature began work on Monday to deal with the state's anticipated $21 billion deficit and Gov. Gray Davis' proposal to trim $10.2 billion from the budget. The plan calls for cuts of $74 million for the University of California, $60 million for the state university system, even a 10% cut in the already parsimonious support for nursing homes. Given the past quarter century of the state's sorry record in arts/music education and support to arts organizations during the boom times, what may be expected now and for the next few years? NB: It's a rhetorical question.

Adler Fellows for 2003

Four Adler Fellows are returning in the SF Opera Center's 2003 season: Brad Alexander, Saundra DeAthos Greta Feeney and Hugh Russell. (Tiffany Abban is leaving the program.) New participants in the class are Elizabeth Caballero, Ricardo Herrera, Katherine Rohrer and Karen Slack. They are all in their twenties.

Besides receiving the fellowship, Rohrer also made her SF Opera debut this weekend when she was called to replace the ailing Sarah Castle as Oberto in Alcina.

Come One, Come All!

The scooplet here, a couple of weeks ago, that the Music Critics Association of North America will hold its 2003 national convention in San Francisco in June has not yet been confirmed (or denied), but now there is an interesting "sidebar" to the story. Attracted by the city, and by summer festivals of both the SF Symphony and the SF Opera, the American Symphony Orchestras League has confirmed that it will hold its 58th national conference in the city at the same time as the MCANA meeting, June 17-21, hosted by the SF Symphony.

Carlo Bussotti Remembered

A Memorial Concert for the late Carlo Bussotti, concert pianist and member for 32 years of the San Francisco State University music department faculty, will be held in the University's Knuth Hall, 3:00 p.m., Saturday, January 11. The violinist Ruggiero Ricci and the Alexander Quartet will be among the performers participating. Mr. Bussotti, who died on November 6 at 80, was a prodigy who graduated from the Conservatory Luigi Cherubini at 13, and made his debut the next year, playing a Mozart Concerto with Radio Italy. Born in Florence, he served in the Italian army during World War II, and thereafter pursued a major career as a soloist and in association with violinists Joseph Szigeti, Ruggiero Ricci, Nathan Milstein and others. His perfomances and recordings were highly praised.

Mr. Bussotti moved to San Francisco in 1959 and taught piano first at the SF Conservatory of Music, then, from 1961 to 1993, piano and chamber music at San Francisco State University. He is survived by his wife, Caralinda Lee Bussotti, of San Francisco, a daughter, Francesca Spencer, a sister, Giuliana Bartolini Salimbeni of Rome, and three granddaughters. A scholarship fund in his name has been established at the university.

Silent Berlin Symphony at the Castro

Walther Ruttmann's famed 1927 silent film, Berlin: Symphony of a City (Die Sinfonie der Großstadt), with a live music score, has been remade, and it will be shown in San Francisco.

Director Thomas Schadt is responsible for the work that's part of the upcoming Berlin & Beyond Film Festival. It will be shown in the Castro Theater on Sunday, January 12. Schadt, who will introduce the work in person here, retained some of the basic dramatic principles and characteristics of the original film, such as organizing every shot in the film according to a symphonic structure, depicting one day in the life of the city using several main themes, and shooting on black-and-white 35 mm film. For information about the festival, see www.goethe.de, about the film, www.german-cinema.de.

Such a Klezmer Experience

It might not have been a deliberate misrepresentation, but a San Francisco Performances family matinee Saturday in Herbst Theater was far more than the exotic-ethnic funfest for kiddies you might have expected. Mommies, daddies, and the little tykes crawling around on both sides of the stage and elsewhere — without interfering with the concert — had a riotous good time, to be sure, but that was not the real point of the event.

The San Francisco Klezmer Experience, a newish group of young artists, presented a very special musical performance. The six-year-old organization swings and dazzles with sheer virtuosity, presenting "shocking" rhythmic changes and rich Bartokian dissonances at the drop of a yarmulke. Founder-bandleader-violinist Daniel Hoffman and clarinetist Sheldon Brown handled the klezmer's wicked syncopation and wild dynamic changes. They were joined by singer-accordionist Jeanette Lewicki (who learned Yiddish — wait for it! — at Oxford University), Stephen Saxon, on trumpet,cornet and cantorial/Broadway vocals, Richard Saunders (bass) and Kevin Mummey (drums).

Often a Yiddish pasteurization of the music of Jews from Lybia, Egyptian songs with Hebrew text, Moroccan liturgy, Arabic and Turkish lute, and sacred music from ancient cantors, klezmer can be a unique, integrated musical form. In the presentation of SFKE, it surpasses its elements, goinge beyond the domain of ethnomusicologists on the one hand, kitschy "wedding music" on the other. Next time you see a concert announcement by this group, don't be fooled by the "family matinee" come-on, attend an important musical event. Although the word comes from "klei zemer" (musical instruments), SFKE plays from the heart, making the instruments transparent.

Ring Moves South . . . and North

Los Angeles Opera's "Star Wars Ring," originally budgeted at $60 million, looked impossible even in the good times (circa 1999), but in view of today's financial maelstrom, it's highly unlikely that there will be a Der Ring des Nibelung to the south of us . . . unless you keep going.

Way south, in Mexico City, plans are being made for a joint project between the National Opera Company, Pro Opera, and the Mexico City Historic District Festival to produce Wagner's Ring starting in 2003 and completing the cycle in 2006.

Project manager and director is Sergio Vela, the conductor will be Guido Maria Guida, Jorge Ballina will design the production. Stephen West is scheduled as the Rheingold Wotan, and the cast includes one Anastasia Soupuruvskaya as Erda.

Another Ring in the works is at the Canadian Opera Company. Toronto has a strange schedule of starting with Die Walkure in 2004 and ending with Das Rheingold in 2006. Richard Bradshaw will conduct, stage directors are Atom Egoyan (Die Walkure), Francois Girard (Siegfried), Tim Albery (Gotterdammerung), Michael Levine (Das Rheingold, also the designer for the whole cycle).

Varieties of Music Education

From Matthew Gurewitsch's article in the December issue of Opera News on the state of music education in the country: "Pamela Rosenberg, the new general director of San Francisco Opera, stands at the threshold of the most fascinating experiment in opera programming currently to be found in this country: a five-year plan, 'Animating Opera.' The brand of innovation she practiced at Stuttgart Opera, her address from 1990 to 2000, involved plenty of unusual, musically advanced repertoire but also edgy production teams, with nostalgia and mainstream entertainment values very low on her agenda.

". . . she takes the question of musical literacy as an invitation to range very widely. 'I wouldn't say in any way that because people don't have enough music education in the schools, I can't show them Janácek or Messiaen,' she begins. 'But unless we wade in with massively more education, the audience will grow older and older, and not just in the U.S. Demographically, one fears that the next generation of people for whom it's normal to listen to classical music or attend symphonies or operas just isn't coming along."

"As for curating her season, Rosenberg points out that her approach will not differ in kind from what she did in Europe. 'I've always been adamant about maintaining a balance from Baroque to contemporary, with Italian and French and German repertoire, etc. So the balance for my first season in San Francisco is actually quite standard, except that the twentieth-century piece happens to be this Messiaen monster, and the Baroque piece — Handel's Alcina, in Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito's production — is being presented to them in a way that they probably haven't experienced before.'

"Aren't we talking about aesthetic education far, far beyond the musical here? 'For sure. A lot of visual sophistication gets left at home when people come to the opera house. Many of our subscribers who have certain expectations of what an opera should be go to the Museum of Modern Art and get engrossed in Motherwell and de Kooning. Maybe they're less willing to deal with visual experiences at the opera, because you may need to look twice before you discover everything. At a museum or with a new building, they'll do that, but in the opera, they buy one ticket and don't see it again.'"

Mackerras, Toronto, Glimmerglass Appointments

Charles Mackerras, "principal guest conductor emeritus" of the SF Opera, has been appointed principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Mackerras is also conductor laureate of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conductor emeritus of the Welsh National Opera, and principal guest conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Toronto Star reports that Peter Oundjian is likely to be appointed music director of the Toronto Symphony soon, a post vacant since the departure of Jukka-Pekka Saraste almost three years ago. Orchestre symphonique de Montréal has not yet replaced Charles Dutoit who quit in face of an uprising with charges of "harassment, condescension and humiliation." (And the times, they are hard also for orchestras in Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.)

Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York, has named Joanne Cossa as the new general director. Cossa, currently the executive vice president of New York City's Symphony Space, succeeds Esther Nelson, who retired at the end of the 2002 season.

Brantley Hearts, Bernheimer Disses Luhrmann

Not even the greatest fans of Baz Luhrmann's Boheme during the San Francisco "tryout" came anywhere close to Ben Brantley's helpless stammering in the Monday New York Times. He appeared overcome by "the visual equivalent of the sensual beauty and vigor of the score." The SFCV review of "Luhrmann's gross amplification, and hectic, busy, relentless, in-your-face direction" predicted a huge commercial success on Great White Way, but not Brantley's unprecedented gushing in the Times, like "Rapturous reimaging . . . the coolest and the warmest show in town . . . an enchanted mixture of self-conscious artistry and emotional richness . . . extraordinary production . . . exultant, defiantly stagey sense of theatricality . . . ravishingly shaded lighting . . . apotheosizing play of shadow . . .” and on and on. The Second Coming's already here.

From the "Were We at the Same Show?!" department comes Martin Bernheimer's review in the Financial Times: "Big and glitzy, glib and giddy, brash and clunky . . . dramatically inflated, musically diminished . . . gilding the accessibility lily . . . a feeble Broadway band, synthetically 'sweetened,' reduced Puccini's passions to pathetic pap in the pit," and those are his good comments.