San Francisco Classical Voice

Twenty-Six Mozart Minutes

OK, one more Mozart item, the last one for 2006, but it's actually about something taking place next year. When the Goethe Institute brings the 12th annual Berlin and Beyond Film Festival to San Francisco, Jan. 11-17, it will offer a short film titled Mozart Minute. The half-hour-long film contains 26 minute miniatures about Mozart. Vienna's Mozart Year organization has invited Austrian artists to make a statement about the composer — each in one minute.

Opera's Red-Letter Day, in the Black

After several years of deep deficit, and last year's token balance, the San Francisco Opera is reporting a real surplus for the 2006 fiscal year: $557,367 on an annual operating budget of $60.4 million. With David Gockley as general manager since Jan. 1, and George Hume as Opera Association president since Aug. 1, the company's new leadership has cut costs and secured large contributions.

Operating revenue grew from $24.2 million to $29.8 million, with income from ticket sales for the regular season surpassing $20 million for the first time in four years. Contributions totaled $31 million from some 10,000 donors, more than 50 percent of whom increased their donations to the Opera during this season. Unlike the previous practice of reluctantly releasing financial information, the company now posts the audited results on the Opera’s Web site.

SFCM: Trouble in an Acoustical Paradise?

After raving unreservedly about the new San Francisco Conservatory of Music Concert Hall, last weekend brought a troubling experience. As reported before, solo instruments and a full orchestra sounded grand in the beautiful 445-seat hall (its acoustics engineered by the famed Kirkegaard Associates).

On Friday and Sunday, however, I heard singing in the theater for the first time. The occasion was the Conservatory Opera Program presentation of a "condensed version" of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. As you will see in the next item of this column, my junior colleage, Marcus Weiss, was happy enough with what he heard. That was not true for me. On Friday, I heard a half-hour of the final rehearsal — not in order to review the performance, of course, but to sample the sound. Moving around in the back, I heard the piano in front of the stage loud, clear, and well. Voices, however, were fuzzy and indistinct, regardless of the singers' position or mine. I considered the possibility of singers "marking" (using half-voice to save for the performance), so I returned Sunday for the real thing.

Volume was no longer an obvious problem, but clarity was still in short supply. All — all — sung diction in English remained hard-to-impossible to understand (even though I know the libretto by heart). Reverberation times seemed different (and worse) from the previous (instrumental) performances. Spoken passages were better. I recalled the opening night when the conductor briefly addressed the audience — no problem there. But now, with spoken text in the opera, echoes lurked about. It's far from clear what exactly is going on. Options include: 1. There is need for more experimentation with the new hall; 2. The young, inexperienced singers haven't figured out how to project here, in a different situation from the old hall on 19th Avenue; 3. Kirkegaard should put more work into the project; 4. Both my ears had a bad-hair day. For the sake of the school I hope it's the last alternative that was at play here.

At the many previous Conservatory student opera performances I attended over the years, at the old building and other venues, the quality of diction varied from singer to singer. Still, I do not recall a wholesale problem such as this.

A Young Critic's Take on Young Singers

At 8 years of age, Marcus Weiss is a veteran San Francisco Classical Voice junior reviewer. Here's his report of the Sunday performance at 1 p.m. of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Opera Program production of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel:

My program says Kathryn Cathcart was the conductor, Heather Carolo the stage director. It must have been the stage director who made a cute dog part of the opera (somebody in a dog suit), who was very funny. Hansel is supposed to be a boy, but the singer was a girl, Eugenia Chaverdova. Gretel was Adrianna Kraiselburd, and I am glad it's printed because I wouldn't know how to spell that. The Witch had an important role, played by Elana Cowen. There was no orchestra, only a pianist called Ron Valentino. He played well.

My favorite part was when the Witch came out; that's when the story became interesting. I couldn't understand most of what they were singing, but figured out what was happening. I still like ballet the best, but this was as splendid an opera as The Magic Flute I saw in the Opera House.

[Editor's note: Marcus confirmed that the thoroughly professional "splendid" came from him, not anybody helping with the report. Knowing Marcus, I think it's entirely possible, even if he won't turn 9 until August.]

Adlers: Old La Boheme Shines Anew

It's unlikely that something as familiar as the Act I meeting of Rodolfo and Mimi — his Che gelida manina, her Mi chiamano Mimì, and their duet — would become the towering experience of a concert. But that's just what happened at the season-closing Adler Fellows Gala at the War Memorial.

Melody Moore and Sean Panikkar brought down the house with their elegant, effortless, gorgeous performances. The soprano from Tennessee has a big, full voice, but that's not the point. She projects well, but you're hardly aware of that. She does what is the most simple and yet the most difficult: She disappears in the music. Following Panikkar's sweet, affecting aria, Moore began Mi chiamano Mimì. Her voice was quiet and warm, and if it were possible to analyze what happened (it isn't because only the music mattered), one might think that for four or five minutes, she sang a single phrase.

There were many other high points of the Adler Fellows Gala Concert, in which honor graduates of the Merola Opera Program close their season. Kimwana Doner's (Trovatore) Leonora, Kendall Gladen's (Werther) Charlotte, and Rhoslyn Jones' (Onegin) Tatiana shared rare characteristics of effortless musicianship. These young artists appeared on a huge stage before an audience of some 3,000, and they managed to hold up the music, allowing it to shine by itself while hiding effort or artifice.

The evening opened with Donald Runnicles conducting a ridiculously raucous Candide Overture. ("Why so loud?" he seemed to say. "Because we can!") Then, settling down for the rest of the evening, the conductor and orchestra soon reached their customary level of excellence, especially in the Act II scene of Billy Budd (with Matthew O'Neill as a superb Captain Vere). Strangely enough, the same was true in a scene from Gordon Getty's Plump Jack. This contemporary treatment of Falstaff (sung by Jeremy Galyon) doesn't exactly belong in the company of Verdi and Puccini. But the orchestra really did its best, which compelled the composer, sitting in the box nearest to the stage, to acknowledge the musicians enthusiastically.

The most substantial piece of the evening was the opening Alcina excerpt, five scenes from Act III. This was fireworks time: Elza van den Heever's Alcina (her big, slightly metallic voice bounced off the walls), Gladen's Bradamante, Gerald Thompson's Ruggiero (although the countertenor was not quite up to his usual brilliance), and Galyon's Melisso. Eugene Brancoveanu, who has sung more small roles on the main stage this season than any other Adler Fellow in history, sang a rather hoarse Count di Luna, a funny Marcello, an impassioned Onegin, and a memorable Billy Budd.

A Flowering Tree Blossoms

John Adams' new opera, A Flowering Tree — on its way to London, New York, and the San Francisco Symphony's Davies Hall early next year — is being performed this week by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Simon Rattle. The Philharmonic Web site provides the opera's story:

"A girl with a magical gift, a noble prince, and a great love which is almost shattered upon the thoughtlessness, ignorance, and jealousy of others — this stuff, based on an old South Indian folktale, inspired the American composer John Adams for his newest work. Just as in Mozart's The Magic Flute, which served as Adams' model, this piece revolves around a deeply human theme: the realization of one's own moral responsibility."

Pamela Rosenberg, former general director of the San Francisco Opera, championed Adams' last opera, Doctor Atomic. She is now managing director of the Berlin Philharmonic, and met the composer on the occasion of the Vienna world premiere of A Flowering Tree. There was a televised conversation on the subject.

Lion King Eats Symphony

San Francisco Classical Voice reader Jim Becker writes from Hawaii about the city-owned Neal Blaisdell Center Concert Hall. The decades-long home to the Honolulu Symphony has "kicked the orchestra, already reeling, out of Concert Hall for three months next year, September through December, the heart of the Symphony season, to make way for a road show of The Lion King. This could be the death knell for the orchestra.

"You will remember when (Mayor) Neal Blaisdell built the concert hall, he promised the Symphony (which then included the Opera) would always have first choice of dates. That was, in fact, his rationale for building it. I wonder what the Disney Corp. is thinking. It spent, what, a half-billion to build a magnificent symphony hall in Los Angeles, only to have a carpetbag promoter parachute into Honolulu with a Disney product and destroy our symphony."

Soprano Meltdown

A funny thing happened to Renée Fleming, reigning soprano in some of the world's leading opera houses. She participated in the Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, and did something utterly bizarre in performing a song from My Fair Lady. Hear the unedited recording here. For the rest of the lengthy program (10 arias and songs, three encores), and even for the earlier part of the song that ended up so weirdly, Fleming did a fine job. What happened there is a matter of conjecture.