San Francisco Classical Voice

S.F. Symphony's Prokofiev Festival

The San Francisco Ballet's terrific production of Yuri Possokhov's Firebird features the Ballet Orchestra firing on all cylinders in the magnificent Stravinsky score. Coincidentally, the San Francisco Symphony announced plans last week for its summer festival. "Russian Firebrand, Russian Virtuoso: The Music of Prokofiev" will run June 14-24 in Davies Hall.

Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, following in his lifelong affinity for Russian music, will lead works featuring noted pianists Yefim Bronfman, Vladimir Feltsman, Ilya Yakushev, and Mikhail Rudy. In addition to concertos, there will also be a sampling of works from Prokofiev's large warehouse of ballet, opera, and film scores. Before each performance, Feltsman, Yakushev, Rudy, and Symphony Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik will take turns in preconcert recitals.

Paul Taylor, Coming and — Sigh! — Going

For those of us who have delighted in the Paul Taylor Dance Company for more decades than you would prefer to count, the upcoming annual visit to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be especially important.

As for the numbers: Improbably enough, Taylor is 76, the dance company turns 53 in May, 17 years ago Ruth Felt's San Francisco Performances (and the San Francisco Ballet) hosted PTDC for its 1990 Opera House debut, and S.F. Performances presented the company eight more times (this year will be the ninth). Since 2003, it's been an annual affair, including some one- and even two-week residencies.

Paul Taylor's varied, often surprising, always entertaining choreography (in the manner of Prospero's "something rich and strange") was once just one among many touring attractions. It could be appreciated as a veritable extension (but in no way an imitation) of George Balanchine's neoclassical concatenation of substantial (often commissioned) music, 19th-century elegance, and contemporary freedom of movement.

For local ballet afficionados, looking for regular tours by the country's best dance troupes, San Francisco's choices included the Opera House or, for example, the Curran, the Joffrey Ballet, Dance Theater of Harlem, American Ballet Theater ... and others. One by one, they fell away, victims to the high cost/low income paradigm of touring. But Paul Taylor, the world's most-traveled company, is still with us, thank goodness.

What, then, is the significance of the 2007 tour, unfolding at Yerba Buena, March 27-April 1? The good news is that Paul Taylor will once again bring a good mix of the company's classic showpieces: There's Piazzolla Caldera (set to Piazzola's tangos), Promethean Fire (with J.S. Bach's music), and "Polaris" (music by Donald York). There will also be some rarely performed works, and — of special interest — West Coast premieres of new works by Taylor.

Now the not-so-good news. Next year will mark a hiatus in the annual tours. Then, beginning in 2009, we can expect PTDC only every other year. So let the good times roll while they may. Get your fill of this year's three programs, and pay special attention to the premieres: Troilus and Cressida (Reduced) and Lines of Loss.

For the former, think Trojan War to Ponchielli's music, including The Dance of the Hours (also known as "Hello mudda, hello fadda ..."), with the small giant, the indestructible Lisa Viola having her way with a warrior or two. Lines of Loss is a somber work. Its eight pieces of lamentation are set to music that spans centuries — from Machaut to Pärt and Schnittke — and all recorded by San Francisco's Kronos Quartet. If it is properly placed, Lines of Loss should be the last work on the last program, to serve as a temporary goodbye.

K-Mozart Goes Country in L.A.

KMZT-FM — "K-Mozart," for heaven's sake! — went to country-western Monday morning, abandoning its classical format in order to serve the Mammon of ratings. The Los Angeles station, which reached millions of listeners, was among the last of a vanishing breed: big FM stations that play classical music.

As San Francisco's KDFC-FM is teetering on the edge of a similar switch (as the result of the recent ownership change), generations of music fans growing up on "that kind" of music on the radio may be gnashing their teeth. Even with all the CDs and iPods around, it's just not the same.

But even country music fans are not safe: KZLA-FM, which once billed itself as "America's most listened-to country station," has dropped the format after 26 years, changing to dance- and R&B-flavored pop music (and renamed as KMVN-FM).

As to the perceived economics of radio, The Los Angeles Times quoted Mt. Wilson FM Broadcasters President Saul Levine as saying that although the classical music audience might be well-heeled, advertisers who buy airtime on stations are looking for younger listeners. Levine said much of the KMZT audience is in its 60s, while advertisers covet the 25-to-54 age group. He went on to say that KMZT's revenue had dropped 80 percent in the last year, and it had lost accounts with BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and AT&T. "If we don't get the support we need, what can we do? We are a for-profit corporation," he says.

Unlike FM-foresaken San Francisco, in Los Angeles classical music persists on the AM dial on KUSC-FM (91.5) and KCSN-FM (88.5), as well as KMZT.

Adams Moves Forward Into the Past

Most composers reach into the past or use the stuff of legends, but not John C. Adams. The Berkeley composer has virtually invented "documentary classical music," on the order of the operas Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic, a musical in the aftermath of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, and his Pulitzer-winning On the Transmigration of Souls, which commemorates 9/11.

But now, Adams — who turned 60 this month — is going old-fashioned with an opera about something phantasmagorical and exotic. A Flowering Tree, which will have its U.S. premiere by the cocommissioning San Francisco Symphony, March 1-3, has a mythical subject.

Adams and his frequent collaborator, the director Peter Sellars, wrote a libretto based on an ancient southern Indian folktale about a young woman who can turn herself into a tree. She sacrifices her human form in order to enable her sisters to sell flowers from the tree to help their old, sick mother. The plot thickens as a prince falls in love with the girl, and her transformations create a dramatic conflict with the expectations of domestic bliss.

Unlike most operas, Tree has a happy ending, as this multiethnic, multicultural, eminently colorful work reunites prince and girl, who is restored to her human self. The hope is that the production will make the story clear, even against the complexities of its language: The choral sections are sung in Spanish, the soloists sing in English.

The story is ancient, and the music is modern, but accessibly so. It is anchored in and reflects some of finest 20th-century idiom, notably those of Ives, Janacek, and Mahler. As always, Adams also shows his minimalist roots, but in a rich, substantially varied package.

Just as at the opera's premiere in Vienna in November, Adams will conduct the work himself in the "semistaged" performances at Davies Hall. At European performances, Tree had a veritable United Nations of a cast, with Indonesian dancers Rusini Sidi, Eko Supriyanto, Astri Kusama Wardani, the Joven Camerata de Venezuela, and the Schola Cantorum de Caracas.

Principal singers coming to San Francisco are young singers just now rising to prominence: soprano Jessica Rivera and tenor Russell Thomas will both make their local debut. They join bass Eric Owens, already heard here in Symphony appearances, and as General Groves in Adams' Doctor Atomic at the San Francisco Opera.

The Jewel of Military Zone 7 Stadium

Last weekend, the first billion-dong opera production in history had its debut in Ho Chi Minh City's Military Zone 7 Stadium. Kim Van Kieu, an opera about the stormy life of legendary Vietnamese beauty Thuy Kieu, attracted an audience of 3,000 — a small figure considering that the production featured 515 singers and musicians.

The huge set is reported to be "a meticulous reproduction of the sceneries in Nguyen Du's epic poem: babbling streams, mountains, pagodas, farms, and taverns." The 1 billion dong cost translates to well in excess of $6 million.

New Heggie Opera for Flicka

Houston Grand Opera will give the premiere of Jake Heggie's Last Acts on Nov. 10. Commissioned by HGO, the chamber opera is written for Frederica von Stade, with libretto by Gene Scheer, and based on a work by Terrence McNally. The two-piano accompaniment will be performed by Heggie and HGO Music Director Patrick Summers.

The Houston season, the first since David Gockley switched to the helm of the San Francisco Opera, consists of A Masked Ball, Daughter of the Regiment, The Magic Flute, The Abduction from the Seraglio, La bohème, Billy Budd, and the newly commissioned Song of Houston, by Christopher Theofanidis.

Weather Vacates Recital

As would-be audience members were arriving Sunday to the much-anticipated Berkeley recital by Rudolph Buchbinder, they found out that the pianist was still stuck in Minneapolis, where inclement weather had closed the airport. ("Inclement" is the right word for the ice storm that closes an airport in hardy Minnesota.) Cal Performances is offering refunds or exchanges. Buchbinder's concert on March 4 is on track — especially if our own, much milder, version of bad weather (including snow in the Berkeley hills?!) allows it.