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IN Music News THIS WEEK:
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By Janos Gereben
Kent & Sophia & Misha & Bubba
What do Kent Nagano, Sophia Loren, Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton have in common? Music. Russian winter. Vodka toasts. Caring about the environment. Philantropic contributions. And, offering a welcome relief from news about Iraq, North Korea and the US economy.
In recording sessions from Geneva to Moscow since mid-December, the odd quartet has just completed a CD of Jean-Pascal Beintus's The Wolf and Peter, with the Russian National Orchestra. Nagano, slightly jetlagged from conducting assignments in Los Angeles, Berkeley and Berlin, flew from Quebec to Moscow, while the Bavarian State Opera announced his appointment as the Munich company's next general music director.
The recording, soon to be released on the PentaTone Classics label, will benefit the celebrity soloists' favorite charities. Clinton is donating to the International AIDS Trust (whose advisory committee he co-chairs with Nelson Mandela), Loren to the Magic of Music, an arts therapy program for youth sponsored by the RNO, and Gorbachev to Green Cross International, which he founded 10 years ago.
The strange story began, as most such tales do, in San Francisco. It was at last summer's Stern Grove Festival that Nagano organized and conducted the world premiere of Beintus' ecologically correct take on Prokofiev's work, which examines the man vs. wolf conflict from Peter's anthropocentric point of view, rather than considering the wolf's plight.
The August concert, combining the Russian orchestra and members of Nagano's Berkeley Symphony, presented a work "emphasizing sensitivity to the environment and the need for balance between man and nature," to quote from the program notes.
The Nagano-Beintus connection goes all the way back to Nagano's days in Lyon, when he was music director of the Opera and Beintus was the orchestra's double bass principal. While there, Nagano also recorded the retro version of Peter and the Wolf with Opera de Lyon, Patrick Stewart serving as the narrator. The new work's text is by Walt Kraemer, winner of a dozen Clio Awards for radio programs and commercials. Kraemer created the first Colonel Sanders TV commercials, so it's possible that he will yet come up with a work on the theme of "The Chicken and the Colonel."
 Bill Clinton, Sophia Loren, Edoardo Ponti, Kent Nagano Speaking of Stern Grove . . . Just after the Russian National Orchestra concert at the 65-year-old Grove Festival (see previous item), the Merola Opera Program made its 43rd annual appearance. Music News learned (and published) soon thereafter that Festival officials told the San Francisco Opera that Merola will not be part of coming seasons. We asked for a reason and comment, but got none, and so the mystery of this pointless policy change will remain on our agenda.
Other Minds at 9 The ninth annual Other Minds festival opens on March 5, in the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. The program salutes Ned Rorem, who is expected to attend, on his 80th birthday (coming on October 23), and pays tribute to the late Lou Harrison. Pianist Sarah Cahill and the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus will participate. On the program: Rorem's 1997 Evidence of Things Not Seen for four voices and piano, and an evening-length song cycle of 36 songs on texts by 24 poets, performed by six singers and two pianists from the San Francisco Opera Center. Festival artistic director and Other Minds executive director Charles Amirkhanian has invited nine composers to present their works at Other Minds 9: Jack Body (New Zealand), Ge Gan-ru (China/US) Evelyn Glennie (Scotland), Daniel Lentz (San Francisco); Stephan Micus (Germany/Spain), Amy X Neuburg (Oakland), William Parker (New York); Rorem (New York); and Stephen Scott (Colorado Springs). Composers and performers meet at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside for several days of private retreat before moving to San Francisco for four days of concerts and artist forums. See www.otherminds.org.
By the Time the Snow Melts in New York . . . Nicholas McGegan and the Philhamornia Baroque will appear at the Mostly Mozart Festival in Lincoln Center, performing Mozart's Il re pastore, in the festival's first fully-staged opera. How can we be certain that today's 2-foot snowfall will be gone? Because the festival is in August. The cast includes Heidi Grant Murphy and Mark Padmore. It took Mostly Mozart some time to find a replacement for Gerard Schwarz, holding the fort for 18 years, but the search is over: the new music director is Louis Langreé, 42, of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège and the Glyndebourne Touring Opera, but relatively little known in the US.
More on PhilB Philharmonia Baroque has also signed an agreement to perform in Los Angeles County in March, 2004, at a Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts concert. The program will feature an all-French program of baroque repertoire under guest conductor Bernard Labadie. Violin soloist and Philharmonia member Kati Kyme will be the soloist in a Leclair Violin Concerto.
Pocket Opera — a Tiny Giant Continuing with reports on the Bay Area's regional opera companies (see last week's Music News), here's word about a personal favorite, Donald Pippin's Pocket Opera. Although slightly down from the previous season's $300,000, the current season's budget is balanced, following a company tradition. One-third of the budget is earned income, the rest comes from foundations and individuals, including $40,500 from the San Francisco Hotel Tax/Grants for the Arts. "We do not foresee a deficit at the end of the fiscal year in September," says Operations Director Narendranath Larson, "but we are skating along the edge. Our greatest sacrifices have been in administrative staffing; we have not approached this season conservatively from the artistic standpoint. Indeed, we have committed to 19 performances of 10 productions between January and June, including a new translation of Puccini's Manon Lescaut. All in all, we have an uncertain future, but what else is there to do but carry on? This is, after all, what we do best."
AGMA Response to SF Opera Contract Talks The San Francisco Opera is negotiating new contracts with the orchestra and chorus as it's fighting the largest deficits in its history. The American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents the soloists, choristers, dancers, choreographers, directors and production staff, last week responded to general director Pamela Rosenberg's message to the company about the company's fiscal difficulties. "Our members know that the only way to assure the Opera's continued existence is to expand the audience, to generate ticket sales, to raise money, to present compelling, faithful operatic productions, worthy of their creators, and to promote this magnificent art form as the greatest synthesis of live entertainment yet devised," the Guild statement began. "We stand ready to join with the San Francisco Opera in finding ways to control its expenses, avoid unnecessary overtime, streamline its operations and make sure that every possible dollar is spent on what can be seen and heard by the opera-going public. Our artists share the company's goal of fiscal stability. Whether or not reducing the number of productions and performances is the most efficient way to achieve that stability, however, must await a closer examination of the company's financial data. "It is already apparent that whatever productions are undertaken must remain spectacular and that cannot happen by cutting wages, reducing the casts, excising choruses or ballets, diminishing the quality of the performance, or by endangering the safety and health of the performers. Meaningful cost savings can not be achieved unless the opera accepts the fact that the unions representing its artists, its orchestra and its technicians are equal partners in the future of the company," AGMA said. An orchestra member told SFCV that the musicians are in the dark about what's happening. "We learn about the situation in the press . . . I am neither optimistic or pessimistic at this time; I am simply stunned and disappointed in the Opera management's behavior."
San Jose Denies Funds to Ballet, Symphony The San Jose Arts Commission last week denied an $100,000 grant to Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley, which includes the city's new orchestra. The 5-4 vote came after City Commissioner Steve McCray, who had previously backed the ballet's plea for financial help, changed his mind. Ballet executive director Andrew Bales had said the requested money was the misssing amount from a $1.2 million emergency fundraising drive to keep the organization going, but in the past week he raised all the money from other sources. The debated amount was part of $200,000 set aside some time ago to aid the San Jose Symphony, which has gone out of business. The money was returned to the city, leaving the arts commission to decide how to spend it. "We have yet to see the city recognize our efforts" to keep a symphony in San Jose, Bales told the commission, according to a Mercury News report. On the other hand, the city awarded $350,585 to the ballet this fiscal year, and about $1.8 million since 1998.
The Troublesome Sounds of Silence The St. Petersburg Times (in Russia, not Florida) chronicles much-anticipated local appearances by violinist/composer/arranger Alexei Aigui, with this ensemble, named 4'33". Beginning in rock, Aigui is now considered a champion of "breaking musical boundaries," best known for his film scores, including the 1997 Strana Glukhikh ("Land of the Deaf") and the 1996 edition of Fritz Lang's 1927 classic, Metropolis. Almost 20 years ago, Aigui formed 4'33", taking the group's name from the famous, eccentric work by John Cage, in which the performer does nothing for the length of time indicated by the title. The group then drifted away from its early academic minimalism . . . into hard rock, but Aigui kept composing in other genres. Possibly because of his film work, the press labeled him as "Russia's Michael Nyman." Aigui was born in Moscow in 1971, to the family of prominent Russian-Chuvashian poet Gennady Aigi. Although his father is highly esteemed in Chuvashia, an autonomous republic on the Volga River, Aigui says that he is linked to the land only by descent. As a teenager, Aigui was into Led Zeppelin, and briefly played bass with a hard-rock band in the mid-1980s. Aigui now divides his time between Moscow and Paris. He performs in France both with 4'33" and in collaboration with French musician Pierre Bastien, a partnership that produced the CD Musique cyrillique ("Cyrillic Music"). If English musician Mike Batt lived in Russia or France, he'd be fine, apparently. But he has been active in Britain and the US, so the publishers of John Cage sued him for copyright violation when he included a silent track on his CD, and he is reported to have paid a six-figure sum to settle the dispute out of court. Act III: Musicians in the German town of Halberstadt began to perform another Cage work, As Slow As Possible, in the right tempo that will make the performance last for 639 years. They are working on the first three notes that should be completed in a year and a half . . . possibly allowing attorneys from the US to make their case there too. (Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janos451@earthlink.net.) ©2003 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved |