|
IN Music News THIS WEEK: Adler Fellow Wins Contest
March 12, 2002
|
By Janos Gereben
Adler Fellow Wins Contest
Up in Portland, Oregon, where they still have old-fashioned contests (rather than those newfangled PC "everybody wins" singing events), baritone Brad Alexander won the $10,000 grand prize in the Portland Opera's 2002 Eleanor Lieber Competition. Second and third prizes went to soprano Heather Calvete and bass James Creswell, a 2000 Merola participant, respectively. Brian Anderson, also an Adler Fellow, was a finalist.)
Alexander, a native of Austin, Texas, is currently an SFO Center Adler Fellow, he was a member of the 1999 Merola Program class and sang in the Western Opera Theater's national tour of Die Fledermaus. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Alexander appeared in the Santa Fe Opera's 2000 American premiere of Henze's Venus and Adonis. His recent contest wins include the 2000 Jessi Kneisal Lieder Competition, the 1999 Civic Morning Musicals Competition for Singers, and an honorable mention in the 1998 Marilyn Horne Foundation Competition.
Alexander will join another Adler Fellow, mezzo Elena Bocharova, at the next Schwabacher Debut Recital, on Sunday, April 7, in Old First Church. On the baritone's plate: Schumann's Dichterliebe, along with songs by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.
The busy baritone will also sing the role of Podestà in the SFO Center's 2002 Showcase production of Mozart's La finta giardiniera, in Cowell Theater, April 19-28. Six other Adler Fellows are participating in the opera production: sopranos Saundra DeAthos (Sandrina), Tiffany Abban (Arminda), and Greta Feeney (Serpetta), tenor Brian Anderson (also placing as a finalist in Portland, Belfiore), Hugh Russell (also singing Podestà, in the other cast) and Kwang Shik Pang (Nardo). Judith Yan conducts the production staged by Roy Rallo.
SJ Symphony Struggles to Survive The San Jose Symphony, which suspended operations last fall, is planning a 2002-'03 season of four programs, one performance each. This represents a huge reduction from its aborted current season of 12 subscription programs, each performed three times, in addition to numerous single special concerts, amounting in all to some 40 services for the musicians. Where there's life there's hope however, and a blue-ribbon panel is working hard in the hope of bringing the West's oldest orchestra fully back to life.
Verdi at Terezin Murry Sidlin, resident conductor of the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, is the force behind a performance project to commemorate the little-known story of Verdi's Requiem sung by Nazi concentration camp inmates 60 years ago. The Czech conductor Rafael Schaechter, imprisoned at the Terezin concentration camp, near Prague, apparently organized and led 16 presentations of the Requiem, pivotal parts of which are Libera Me, the prayer for delivery, and Dies Irae, about the day of judgment, sung to Nazi officials in the audience. Sidlin's "concert drama," entitled Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin, will be performed in Portland on April 20-21, and televised nationally at a future date on PBS. Additional performance dates in other locations are also being announced. Sidlin's work is based on both historical records and interviews with survivors who participated in the performances. London Decca has released a related work, Franz Waxman's The Song of Terezin, a powerful piece using children's poetry.
WebMusic Marches On Listening to music on the Internet, while all around us, is still in its infancy. And yet, the infant has a mighty kick. Most computers today come with a built-in soundboard and speakers, so if you add a high-speed Internet connection and get hold of some Web addresses (URL or Uniform Resource Locator), you can experience this brave new world for yourself. For example, a fascinating new site offers Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, in an electronically jazzed-up version, with great graphics. The site, ethericarts.com/dutch/movie.html, also offers a dozen important links for opera fans. A very practical, immediate use of the Web in the San Francisco area is to make up for the lack of Metropolitan Opera FM broadcasts. The broadcast schedule and Web addresses are available at MetBroadcasts. Look for the Satie-Poulenc-Ravel triple bill next Saturday. The SF Symphony is setting up a new Website for young music-lovers, at www.SFSKids.com, to open on March 14. The planned music learning Website for kids and families will be accessible only from Thursday on. And where there is technology, can academia be far behind? A very large, truly international organizing committee (hundreds of musicians and musicologists) is hard at work already for WedelMusic2002, in Darmstadt, Germany, Dec. 9-11. To look in on preparations for the project sponsored by Fraunhofer-IGD, the University of Florence, IRCAM and the IEEE's Committee on Computer Generated Music, go to www.wedelmusic.org/wedelmusic2002 Topics include - protection formats and tools for music, business models for publishers, music manipulation and analysis, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21, viewing and listening tools for music, databases/archives for institutions: publishers, libraries, theaters, and many more.
This Week's Edition of `Hot New Russian Talent' A colleague in London sent Music News a note about great excitement last week in Wigmore Hall, where the 24-year-old Russian tenor, Daniil Shtoda, made his debut. Accompanied by Larissa Gergieva (the conductor's sister), he sang songs by Alyabiev, Gurilyov, Varlamov, Moskvin and Bulakov, adding Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff only to prevent complete dislocation. The message says, in part: "A true rich tenor with all it takes to delight and seduce an audience. He did some wicked daring things. I loved his clear Russian and passionate response to the music. Devoid of vulgarity but prepared to give his all at climaxes, he impressed me most with piano high notes held in long diminuendo with a seamless falsetto. "As he sang the Italian song (for encore), his tone, ardor and unaffected style reminded me of yes, Caruso. Shtoda will be singing Lensky this year at Aix, and Beppo in a new Covent Garden production of Pagliacci with Domingo and Gheorghiu, also Don Ottavio in Washington. There are recitals scheduled in Amsterdam, Paris, NYC (Tully and Carnegie), Lisbon, etc."
`Sibelius' for the Mac Walnut Creek's Sibelius Group, developer of a sophisticated software much needed by composers and musicians, is bringing Sibelius 2 to the market. This new version of the best-selling music notating software program is now available for the Mac OS X, Apple's latest UNIX-based operating system.
(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.) ©2002 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved |