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IN Music News THIS WEEK:
Cypress: At $2.50 per Quartet, What a Deal!
Gilbert & Sullivan & Bernstein & Ashworth
Speak Up or Forever Relish Your Safe Classics
The Incredibles on 'Sound & Cinema'
Hitler . . . Stalin . . . Symphony Management?
From Tom Waits to Shostakovich, from Six Feet Under to Lear
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By Janos Gereben
Sándor: a Unique Link to Bartók
At age 92, the Hungarian pianist György Sándor is a formidable presence, strong, clear-headed, with a wicked twinkle in his eyes. He doesn't particularly like opera, he said when encountered at the Legion of Honor Friday evening: "the music comes to a halt too often." And yet, the exchange took place before a San Francisco Lyric Opera performance of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. Will he sit through all three acts? Yes, Sándor retorted vigorously, and he will do it again the next day!
How come? Ballo, he explained, was the reason for his visit from his Manhattan home because he is part of the Palmer family now managing the the Lyric, including the son, Barnaby Palmer, music director and conductor. "I will attend all performances when my grandnephew conducts; he is so talented," Sándor says with admiration and affection.
How does he keep busy these days? Working on a book, about Béla Bartók, his teacher and mentor some six decades ago. What can he say about the composer that hasn't been covered? He has a unique perspective, Sándor says, being Bartók's only piano student who went on to a professional career. The only one? Listeners to the conversation are searching their memory and suggest names. No, Sándor insists, although Bartók's piano classes were well attended, no one else went on and maintained a concert career. (Not so in the case of Ernö Dohnányi, the other eminence on the Budapest Music Academy faculty, the leading piano teacher and head of the program.)
Music reaching us from the opera cast warming up backstage prompts Sándor to correct an old and widely accepted saw about the savage "laugh" in Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. No, he says, it was not making fun of Shostakovich (a variation on the legend says Bartók was bitter about an award or commission going to the Russian composer instead of him), but rather both composers were mocking the Nazi military machine. Now, the theme for both, says Sándor, humming to illustrate his point, came from a drinking song used by Lehár in The Merry Widow . . . and so it goes, facts and memories tumbling out at high speed.
A major purpose of Sándor's writing project is to counter the intimation or outright claim of Bartók atonality or bitonality. Sándor is particularly critical of Halsey Stevens' "The Life and Music of Béla Bartók," and its references to "Schoenberg atonality that had touched Bartók throughout his creative years."
Dissonance, yes, Sándor allows, but then he sings and whistles examples of music, naming the keys Bartók used, proving that there was no diversion from the diatonic system. Then, suddenly, there is a flashback to a review in Oakland of his Today's Artists recital 30 years ago when a writer took issue with Sándor's progam note about Chopin's Scherzo, Op. 31, identified both as in B Flat minor and D Flat Major.
Just as clearly as he recalls his first lesson with Bartók, Sándor explains the fine points of the key nomenclature (which are different in English and Hungarian) at issue three decades ago, still maintaining that the Scherzo is in D Flat Major, "des-dur vs. G-moll," and asking to be put in touch with the critic so that the dispute may be resolved. And then he settles down to the opera, the first of two performances.
Born in 1912 in Budapest, Sándor made his debut in 1930, the year he started studying with Bartók. After his successful debut at Carnegie Hall, he settled in the US. He became a US citizen by enlisting in the Army, and serving in the Signal Corps, Intelligence Service, and Special Services between 1942 and 1944. On February 8, 1946, Sándor gave the first performance of Bartók's Third Piano Concerto (unfinished when the composer died the previous year), with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. To this day, Sándor continues giving master classes, judging international piano competitions; he is on the faculty of the Juilliard School, and still giving concerts — the next one will be in Turkey, on April 30.
Cypress: At $2.50 per Quartet, What a Deal! The Cypress String Quartet will give a lunchtime performance in St. Patrick's Church on Mission Street, beginning at 12:30 p.m. A donation of $5 is requested. The program: Haydn's Quartet in G Major, Opus 33, No. 5, and Beethoven's Quartet in C Major, Opus 59, No. 3. See www.cypressquartet.com.
Gilbert & Sullivan & Bernstein & Ashworth San Francisco's Lamplighters have ventured into productions beyond the G&S canon, but I don't think they have done anything as "heavily operatic" as Bernstein's Candide. At the Saturday evening performance in Herbst Theater, presenting the West Coast premiere of the Royal National Theatre version, the "light opera" company did Bernstein proud, both theatrically and musically (even while the downtown theater district was shut down by a blackout). Baker Peeples conducted the onstage orchestra splendidly, adjusting well to Herbst's acoustics, which favors chamber music; he also performed the role of Voltaire/Narrator, dressed to look the part, and lending his baton to Candide to better slay opponents now and then . . . wiping the baton off thoroughly after the deed. The sensation of the performance was Jennifer Ashworth's Cunegonda; she nailed "Glitter and Be Gay" in a thrilling fashion, with a perfect vibrato, every note on the money. She has followed up well on her outstanding Yum-Yum, and that most operatic of G&S roles, Mabel, of Pirates of Penzance. Andrew Truett made his company debut in the title role, Stacey Helley was the Old Lady (with a deep-throated "I Am Easily Assimilated"), Leontyne Mbele-Mbong the Paquette, and Rick Williams as Pangloss, with a huge cast in multiple roles. Additional performances are scheduled in Walnut Creek on March 29, and in the Napa Valley Opera House, April 2 and 3. See www.lamplighters.org.
Speak Up or Forever Relish Your Safe Classics A friend and a reader (is there any other combination?) writes about the "shocking lack of contemporary music" on the San Francisco Symphony's next season: "We renewed our SFS subscription online and wrote a tart note explaining that we will reduce the number of concerts to attend, after more than a decade of increasing them each year, and that we will not donate at all to show our disappointment with the '05-'06 programming and the lack of new music or even 20th century music . . . We received a call from the Symphony, somebody very pleasant, wanting to chat about the renewal. "The man on the phone expressed regret that no donation was coming this year, but also told us that when he took our critical note to the production people, they were jubilant since nobody, nobody ever writes to them with this message. It is always the people who love dead Russians who write that if they continue being blasted with new music, they will withhold bequests. Clearly, there may be a big difference between the Symphony production staff and the marketing people, but we, the audience, caught in the middle, better make our wishes known. Signed, Some of My Best Friends Are Dead Russians."
The Incredibles on 'Sound & Cinema' The Sound & Cinema speaker series, it says here, "shines light where film and music meet." Case in point: the next event, on April 7, with The Incredibles director Brad Bird and composer Michael Giacchino. The series, produced by The Rights Workshop, deals with partnerships between film directors and musical artists, composers, and sound designers. The event begins at 7 p.m., in the San Francisco Film Center Palm Room, 39 Mesa Street. See www.calendar.org.
Hitler . . . Stalin . . . Symphony Management? "On November 30, 1939, before he knew Hitler was going to betray him and not honor the Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin attacked its Northeastern neighbor Finland. What he thought was going to be a piece of cake and matter of a few days turned out to be one of the bloodiest and toughest battles of all times. [In] what is known as the Winter War, during the next 104 days the Finns put up an incredible fight . . ." so goes the opening paragraph of a statement by Ilkka Talvi, at www.schmaltzuberalles.blogspot.com. ("Schmaltzuberalles" — that's cute.) Talvi is Finnish, and he is, or rather was, concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony, until he was let go, after 20 years on the job. He is putting together his proud national history and what he considers beastly treatment at the hands of the Seattle Symphony officials, invoking the dark specter of 1939, and concluding ominously: "I am darn proud of my roots and the mandate it gives me to defend what is right. Incidentally, my last name 'Talvi' translates as 'Winter'." Coincidence? You be the judge. If you want to read about the Battle of Seattle, go to www.seattletimes.com.
From Tom Waits to Shostakovich, from Six Feet Under to Lear Announcing the American Conservatory Theater's next season at a press conference on Monday, ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff said she had searched for a suitable follow-up to the multimedia biggie opening the current season: the Robert Wilson-directed The Black Rider, with music by Tom Waits. And so, the curtain-raiser on the 2005-'06 season, on August 25, will be another unusual musical spectacle: "a wordless theater piece" from Canada, by Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling, based on Gogol's "The Overcoat," with music by Shostakovich. Unlike the live band for Black Rider, however, the future multimedia production will use recorded music, a generous selection of excerpts from the piano concertos, the Tenth Symphony, the Tenth String Quartet, ballet suites and the First Jazz Suite. Mario Bernardi conducts the CBC Radio Orchestra in most of the selections, with Angela Cheng (piano) and Jens Lindemann (trumpet). At the end of the season, Shakespeare will return to the ACT after years of absence, with King Lear, James Cromwell in the title role. The Farmer Hoggett of Babe, the doctor to Al Pacino's Roy Cohn in Angels in America, Cromwell is currently seen in Six Feet Under, the demise of which makes it possible for him to take this most demanding of roles in all theater. Cromwell, last appeared in the Geary Theater as A.E. Housman in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love. Perloff said when she told Stoppard about "Jimmy as Lear," the playwright said: "I have to see this!," possibly returning to San Francisco again in yet another of countless visits here from London. Cromwell spoke briefly and passionately at the press conference about the upcoming "communal effort" (Carey will direct, but the actor said, "the play is called LEAR, although a king is only a king because he is made that by others"), saying the play is "about a time of crisis, the end of the world, the need for our species to learn then as now that it cannot continue to behave the way it has." Ahmanson Theater music director Karl Fredrik Lundeberg has been commissioned to write a score for ACT's new production of A Christmas Carol, Perloff and Paul Walsh creating a version to replace the one that ran for 27 seasons. Because it serves as an entry point to the theater for so many children and young people, low ticket prices (starting at $10) will be maintained for "Carol." ACT's youth and training programs, by the way, accommodate a startling total of 2,500 participants each year, starting careers for many, including four current award winners: Annette Bening, Teri Hatcher, Anika Noni Rose, and Omar Metwally. The next season — ACT's 39th and Perloff's 13th as artistic director — will also feature the West Coast premiere of Caryl Churchill's A Number, Rene Augesen in the 50th anniversary production of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, new productions of Sheridan's The Rivals and David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com.)
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