San Francisco Classical Voice

NEA Grants

The National Endowment for the Arts last week announced a distribution of $25.3 million through 915 grants in the first phase of Fiscal 2004 awards. Seventy-four Bay Area organizations are sharing $2 million of the grants. The largest amount, $100,000, goes to the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Ballet.

Some of the other NEA grants: $40,000 each to the San Francisco Opera and the Kronos Quartet for its Northern Lights Project; $37,000 to Kitka; $35,000 each to Chanticleer and the Yerba Buena Arts Center; $30,000 each to San Francisco Performances, CAL Performances and Berkeley Symphony Orchestra — the latter previously received a $25,000 Creativity Award for the 2004 premiere of a "secular oratorio" by Kurt Rohde, titled Bitter Harvest (a love story); $20,000 to the Axis Dance Company for works created mostly for dancers with disabilities; $15,000 each to the Santa Rosa Symphony and Philharmonia Baroque; $12,500 each to the California Symphony and Oakland East Bay Symphony; $10,00 each to the Cabrillo Music Festival, Cypress String Quartet, 42nd Street Moon, . Nationwide, there were 51 grants to orchestras, totaling $1.8 million.

Waxing Violatic

Probably inspired by the citywide blackout enveloping San Francisco around — but not in — Davies Hall Saturday evening, Martin Haselböck's thoughts turned to candles. Here to conduct the SF Symphony's Messiah, the music director of the Wiener Akademie gave an entertaining pre-concert lecture, touching on the topic of lighting at Handel's time. It was, of course, by candles, and that's the reason the viola section is sitting idle time and again during Messiah performances, while the other strings play their hearts out. The connection?

According to Haselböck, changing candles in the theater, about every 20 minutes, was the viola section's task. They received a lower salary for making music, but more than made up the difference by collecting payments for the candles. That, plus not having to play all that much. Is this is a historical fact or just another unfortunate joke at the expense of the noble violas?

In the vocal department, Bejun Mehta in the alto role and Vance George's SFS Chorus waxed splendid. The other soloists were soprano Linda Perillo, tenor John Tessier, and baritone Nathan Gunn.

Next door, in the War Memorial Opera House, the building was without lights, but a generator was used to provide enough juice for the stage to save Nutcracker from cancellation. The show started an hour late, and the scene in the lobby and on the dark streets around was rather chaotic, but the sugarplums won out in the end. The Sunday matinee was cancelled, the evening performance saved by the generator again, and sometime after the show was over, the War Memorial blackout finally ended.

Locals Split the Philharmonic

It rarely happens that the New York Philharmonic plays "in competition" with itself, but it's going on now, and the two simultaneous concert series are both headed by Bay Area musicians, making their Philharmonic conducting debuts. Jeffrey Kahane, music director of the Santa Rosa Symphony, is leading Philharmonic concerts (and playing piano solos) in the Avery Fisher Hall, while Philharmonia Baroque maestro Nicholas McGegan is on the podium for the Philharmonic's Messiah concerts in Riverside Church.

Allan Kozinn's New York Times review of the two debuts was unreservedly complimentary about both. "McGegan is a star of the period-instrument world," Kozinn wrote, "and his knowledge of Messiah is encyclopedic. At least, the recording he made with his own Philharmonia Baroque (on Harmonia Mundi USA) is: it includes every variant setting Handel wrote for his most popular oratorio between 1742 and 1759.

"It would be foolish of course to expect the Philharmonic to play like a period-instrument orchestra, and Mr. McGegan made no effort to force that kind of sound from it. In place of the astringent timbres of early strings, for example, the Philharmonic's strings produced the broad, silken tone that is one of the orchestra's best traits. The brass and percussion, in the later sections of the work, were as hefty and assertive as ever. Mr. McGegan's stamp had more to do with tempos, which in the choruses were uncommonly brisk, and with coaxing his singers and players to produce the kind of articulation that gives every moment of the work both a crystalline texture and the right emotional weight."

The soloists for McGegan were soprano Rosemary Joshua, mezzo Alice Coote, tenor Mark Padmore, and baritone Gerard Finley. Participating in the performances: the Westminster Symphonic Chorus.

Kahane's program, according to the Times review, "was easily as satisfying but in different ways. His conducting, though less dramatic than Mr. McGegan's, was fluid in gesture and sound and took modern notions of 18th-century style into account. The same can be said of his piano playing: in the Mozart concerto, textural details always came through clearly, and he performed his own well-made cadenzas." Among the players singled out in the review: associate principal cellist Hai-Ye Ni, a product of San Domenico School and the SF Conservatory of Music, a former principal player in the SFS Youth Orchestra.

Richard Brown, Senior SF Opera Chorus Member

Richard Brown, 73, died earlier this month in Stockton, of heart problems he had suffered from in recent years. Unlike the majority of the San Francisco Opera Chorus, who join the group early in their singing career, Brown became a fixture around the War Memorial after retiring from a lifetime of teaching. He was 60 when accepted in the regular chorus, as a member of the first-tenor section.

Brown's will included this message to his wife, adult children, friends and colleagues: "Have a good time. I've had a good life. I have a wonderful family. Celebrate, and keep the grieving to a minimum."

Music for a Planet, NOT by Holst

Oakland's Chabot Space & Science Center is paying close attention to Saturn, closest to Earth in a 60-year period, not only through lectures and shows in its Ask Jeeves Planetarium, but it has gone the extra step by commissioning A Saturn Symphony from Joyce Whitelaw, an English composer, now a California resident.

The work will be performed at 2 p.m., Saturday, January 10, in the Center, as part of the Saturn observations, which also include a "Saturnalia Party" on Dec. 30, and Chabot's traditional "New Year's Balloon Drop" in Chabot's solar observatory at 4 p.m. — which is midnight and New Year by Greenwich Mean Time. For information: www.chabotspace.org.

Teeny-Tiny Bit of Elgar

Coming soon: the first recording of a hitherto unknown work, composed by Edward Elgar in 1919. The work, for heroic baritone soloist and very large orchestra (including eight horns and swirling harp), will be included on a disc featuring Elgar's cello concerto. The piece was unknown until the autograph manuscript came up for auction earlier this year and was bought for about $5,000 by the Elgar Birthplace Museum in Worcester, where it is now on view.

Elgar's Smoking Cantata lasts just 42 seconds, something close to a record. It may take more time to read the full title than to perform it: "A specimen of an edifying, allegorical, improving, expostulatory, educational, persuasive, hortatory, instructive, dictatorial, magisterial, 'inadautory' work for soloist and orchestra." Elgar marked it as Opus 1,001. The competition: Chopin's Waltz in D flat, Op 64, No 1, misnamed as the Minute Waltz and lasting about two minutes; four of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op 10, last less than a minute each; Charles Ives's The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or Firemen's Parade on Main Street lasts two minutes; and Stravinsky's Greeting Prelude, written in 1955 for the 80th birthday of Pierre Monteux, is about a minute long.

The world's shortest opera, Milhaud's The Deliverance of Theseus, runs 7 minutes and 27 seconds. King Harald's Saga by Judith Weir is a three-act opera with eight sections, lasting about one minute each, and a total length of under 10 minutes.