San Francisco Classical Voice

Gösta Winbergh, 58

Gösta Winbergh, who died of a heart attack in Vienna on Tuesday, was an outstanding, rare tenor, whose career spanned the range from lyric roles to heldentenor. San Francisco Opera audiences were fortunate to hear both his remarkable Mozart performances (in Don Giovanni, Idomeneo) and his late-in-life Wagner as well, beginning with the relatively small role of Erik in a 1997 Flying Dutchman. The Swedish tenor made his US debut in 1974 with the San Francisco Opera as Don Ottavio in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Elsewhere, he went on to the great leading roles, Tristan and Parsifal in Europe, Lohengrin in Los Angeles last year, conducted by Kent Nagano. He was scheduled to sing both Siegfrieds in Zurich and Bacchus in a Covent Garden Ariadne auf Naxos.

That Winding `Silk Road'

Yo-Yo Ma and the traveling Silk Road show are not inseparable. Ma is scheduled to appear at the Cal Performances event in Zellerbach Hall on April 21, but when the caravan moves on to Stanford, on April 29, former Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud will take Ma's part.

Music of the Californias

Musicians from San Francisco, San Diego, Houston and Dallas constitute the new Orchestra of the Californias, backed by state governments of California and Mexico's Baja California and Baja California Sur. Beginning with a tour last month, the orchestra performs to help youth music groups in disadvantaged communities on both sides of the border. Government subsidy and private donations enable the organization to charge as little as $15 for tickets while offering free master classes and other educational programs. Proceeds from ticket sales are donated to youth groups in San Diego, San Luis Obispo and elsewhere.

The Language/Langage/Lenguaje of Opera

Deep within the bowels of San Francisco's Parc 55 Renaissance Hotel over the weekend, CIStA and FAIS held forth with a well-attended English-French-Spanish conference on World Languages and Cultures. Those mysterious acronyms will be decoded further on, but let's first get to the musical portion of the business.

Friday afternoon, with the buzz still loud about the previous night's keynote address by Leonard Shlain on Language, Art and Culture (left brain, right brain, Gutenberg, TV, how the proliferation of images is contributing to the re-emergence of the feminine, and many other intriguing topics), there was a wonderful session on Le Francais bien chanté, a demonstration of teaching French diction to opera singers.

Patricia Kristof-Moy — a San Francisco Opera French diction coach for some 20 years, now with SF's International High School — put present and past SF Opera Center participants through their paces. They were soprano Kristin Clayton, mezzo Elena Bocharova and bass-baritone Bojan Knezevic, with Peter Grunberg as pianist. As couple of hours went by, the chant became noticeably more bien under Kristof-Moy's straightforward, sympathetic coaching.

Reviewing "performances" in a coaching demonstration is no cricket, but I cannot resist saying that moments of magic in Bocharova's Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix served as a powerful reminder that his young Russian-American mezzo — former Merola participant and Adler Fellow — is well on her way. No objects hurled in this direction, please, but I heard a note or two that sounded like a hybrid of Ris” Stevens and Olga Borodina on a good day. You can get a jump on the future, at her upcoming Schwabacher Debut Recital, on Sunday, April 7, in Old First Church. The event will also feature baritone Brad Alexander, who won the $10,000 grand prize in the Portland Opera's 2002 Eleanor Lieber Competition last week.

Almost forgot: CIStA and FAIS — Council of International Schools of the Americas (NOT affiliated with the CIA) and French-American International School.

What's Better Than a Steinway?

A Hamburg Steinway, that's what. I have long noticed the excellence of the instrument in Herbst Theater (rented from Pro Piano by San Francisco Performances), but there were four (4) testimonals last week from folks with better ears than mine. At Thomas Quasthoff's memorable recital on Thursday, the audience included Garrick Ohlsson, soloist for the next-door San Francisco Symphony concerts. Ignoring mother's admonition about eavesdropping, I heard Ohlsson say: "Why can't they have a piano like this in Davies Hall?!"

Both Quasthoff and his brilliant accompanist, Justus Zeyen (all 6'5" of him) expressed delight with the instrument, and then on Saturday, the same Hamburg Steinway not only withstood Lang Lang's hurricane-like Liszt, but sounded as fine at the end of the concert as at the beginning. Zeyen's aside: "You wouldn't believe the bad pianos we've gotten in America." As anybody who travels around, I do believe. The instrument is so popular with visiting artists that there is a long list of signatures inside, expressing pleasure by musicians, some of whom are better known for complaints than for kudos.

Easing `Difficulty'

The American Conservatory Theater's upcoming world premiere of the David Lang-Mac Wellman The Difficulty of Crossing a Field will present the audience with one of Ambrose Bierce's strangest, most X Files-like stories. To get ahead of the curve this intriguing project will be throwing at you, see www.usoperaweb.com.

As for Bierce's original, see ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/ for Difficulty and other Bierce ghost stories. Save the address ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/ to access thousands of Project Gutenberg books from this terrific public-service download database.

Beating Up on Sellars Down Under

Sandra Bowdler's andante.com review of the Adelaide Festival production of John Adams' El Niño contrasted the music with Peter Sellars' accompanying film in delightfully and appropriately unkind words:

"It may seem odd to suggest that interesting music, satisfactorily performed, can be made unbearable by the addition of a further dimension, but the damned thing was interminable and distracting and made the proceedings seem twice as long as they were. One looks forward to a movie-free performance of El Niño some time in the future."

Bowdler liked the Marin Symphony's music director on the podium: "The orchestra played particularly well under Alaisdair Neale, negotiating the variable rhythmic streams and changes of tempo with ease."

And Now, to Serve You Better, Paid Web Radio

The US Copyright Office is considering a proposal to set royalty rates that Webcasters will have to pay the major record companies represented by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Industry experts say fees may structured on the basis of the number of on-line listeners, not the percentage of revenue used to establish what traditional radio stations currently pay — a potentially much higher cost, which is sure to be passed on to listeners.

To make the situation even worse, royalties may be made retroactive to 1998, putting most Webcasters out of business. For information, read and weep: www.beethoven.com/copyrightnotice.asp.

(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