San Francisco Classical Voice

To be held in conjunction with the ninth biennial Berkeley Festival & Exhibition, the ABS contest is being named the American Bach Soloists & Henry I. Goldberg International Young Artists Competition, in memory of the ensemble's board president from 2002 to 2005. The first prize will honor Laurette Goldberg, a leading force in the Bay Area's early music community for many years.

The first competition, in 1998, was for harpsichord, won by Michael Sponseller. Baroque violin took the spotlight in 2000, with Simos Papanas taking first place. Flute and oboe players were in the contest in 2002, won by Amy Guitry and Debra Nagy, respectively. After postponing the 2004 competition, ABS Music Director Jeffrey Thomas (a tenor himself) has selected voice for the 2006 competition. ABS is also conducting a search for a new director of development.

Carnival of the Conductors

Because of continuing illness, Kurt Masur, 79, said on Wednesday that he is unable to conduct the London Philharmonic in the orchestra's appearance in Davies Hall on Sunday, March 12. The S.F. Symphony announced that Neeme Järvi, of the Hague Residentie Orchestra, would lead the concert. Shortly afterwards, Järvi also withdrew due to illness, and the conductor slated is now the rising star Roberto Minczuk. The program remains the same: Khachaturian's Violin Concerto, with Sergey Khachatryan as soloist, and Mahler's First Symphony. For the rest of the Philharmonic's tour, the conductor will be Osmo Vänskä, music director of the Minnesota Orchestra.

Conservatory Sunsetting Its Old Campus

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, soon to move into its new complex in the Civic Center, bids farewell to its Ortega Street campus with a gala concert on April 23. Founded in 1917, and a Sunset District resident for half a century, the Conservatory will say goodbye with a program featuring students, faculty, and alumni representing each department: Preparatory, Chamber Music, Opera, New Music, Musical Theater, Guitar, Chamber Orchestra, Piano, and Baroque Ensemble. Longtime composition faculty members Elinor Armer and Conrad Susa will narrate the concert, accompanied by historic visuals. Admission is free to the concert and a reception that follows.

Philharmonia Going Places

Nicholas McGegan's Philharmonia Baroque has been traditionally restless, these wandering troubadours going from Berkeley to San Francisco to Marin and the Peninsula to perform what might have been the first local regional subscription program. But now, the orchestra is traveling in even wider circles, and McGegan is globe-trotting baroquely. Audiences this year will have seen and heard "Nic" in St. Louis, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Birmingham, Ayr, Gateshead, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Lafayette, Kansas City, Tucson, Saint Paul, Milwaukee, Budapest, Göttingen (for the International Handel Festival), and Toronto.

Baker's Dozen Plus Two

The list of Bay Area opera companies in San Francisco Classical Voice's last issue was unintentionally incomplete. Since the publication of the article, two other companies (in Marin and San Jose) have been heard of already ... and there may well be more. Send information to us for inclusion in a soon-to-be updated list. When constructing a new inventory, omissions are understandable, but there will be changes made.

Roland Kohloff

Roland L. Kohloff, principal timpanist of the New York Philharmonic for 32 years, after occupying the same position with the San Francisco Symphony for 16 years between 1956 and 1972, died last week in the Bronx, at age 71. In a New York Times obituary, Mr. Kohloff was hailed for "his effortless grace on one of the orchestra's most exposed instruments."

Ring 'Round the Clock

For the first time since Richard Wagner completed his 15-hour-long Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1876, listeners will have an opportunity to hear it all in one sitting (although probably allowing for occasional stretches). BBC Radio 3 will broadcast a Bayreuth production, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, on Easter Monday, April 17.

Radio 3 made recordings of the complete Beethoven symphonies available for free on its Web site last year, resulting in 1 million downloads. Controversy over the move, which was seen as distorting the recording market, meant that nothing on that scale has been attempted since. But CD label Warner is working with Radio 3 to provide free downloads of Ring excerpts.

Festival Opera Season

Walnut Creek's Festival Opera will celebrate its 15th birthday this summer with productions of Puccini's Tosca (July 8-16) and Mozart's Don Giovanni (August 12-20). The former will feature the company debut of soprano Othalie Graham and tenor Robert Breault, as well as that of director Stephanie Leigh Smith. Festival Opera's artistic and music director Michael Morgan will make his opera stage-director debut in Don Giovanni, with bass Matthew Treviño in the title role.

Merry Christmas, but No Oscar for Merola's Villazón

Christian Carion says music is a character, an important one, in his Joyeux Noël, nominated for the best foreign film Academy Award. (It lost to South Africa's Tsotsi on Sunday.)

Even before you see this epic, emotion-filled movie about a Christmas truce in the trenches of World War I, you'll know by the cast listing of Natalie Dessay and Rolando Villazón that music, indeed, is of importance. Young Villazón, a 1998 Merola Program participant, was engaged, Carion told me, on the recommendation of Dessay, she being a longtime favorite and friend of the director.

Joyeux Noël, also nominated for César and BAFTA awards, is a terrific, memorable film, highly recommended. The music — including Bach's "Bist du bei mir," Franz Grüber's "Stille Nacht," and John Francis Wade's "Adeste fideles" — is an important bonus. The soundtrack composer, conductor, and pianist is Philippe Rombi (of 5x2, the splendid Look at Me, Jeux d'enfants, Le coût de la vie, and Swimming Pool).

In Joyeux Noël, Dessay is Diane Kruger's singing voice, Villazón is Benno Fürmann's, but the singers appear as themselves in Joyeux Noël: La musique du film. I don't know at this point, due to a slight language problem with Carion (mine, not his), if this 40-minute documentary, directed by David Dessites, will be part of the main film's DVD edition. One hopes.

Nagano's First Montréal Season

Berkeley Symphony's Kent Nagano had an "eventful" time vis-à-vis the Montréal Symphony. Years ago, it was rumored that in spite of his many other obligations in Europe, he would become the Montréal orchestra's music director. Then came appointments as music director in Los Angeles and Munich, then quitting his Berlin position (and later Los Angeles as well), and then — suddenly — he was with Montréal ... except that the organization there fairly melted down in a bitter, five-month-long musicians' strike.

Fast-forward to last week, and l'Orchestre symphonique de Montréal is back in business, Nagano announcing an ambitious — if not exactly ground-breaking — first season. There will be a survey of Beethoven's symphonies, performances by pianists Nikolai Lugansky and Lang Lang, and a return visit by Valery Gergiev. From Berlin and Berkeley, Nagano will also bring along such contemporary works as Galina Ustvolskaya's Symphony No. 4.

Help is on the way for the well-traveled Nagano with a lineup of guest conductors, including Neville Marriner, Roger Norrington, Marek Janowski, and Lawrence Foster. At the introductory press conference, Nagano delighted the local press and attending dignitaries by delivering part of his presentation in French, his years at Opéra de Lyon (1989-1998) assuring him of feeling at home in Montréal.

San Francisco Symphony's Next Season

[Reprinted from a late edition of last week's Music News]

Another year, another opera by Berkeley's indefatigable John Adams. At the San Francisco Symphony's March 1 press conference, in Davies Hall, Michael Tilson Thomas announced a season featuring 19 first performances — a mix of world, U.S., local, and Symphony premieres — 13 of them by living composers and six by Americans, including Adams' A Flowering Tree.

The composer, whose Doctor Atomic premiered last year in the War Memorial Opera House, said today that "after three years of handling plutonium" and being preoccupied with a story "dealing with literally the possible end of the world," he was relieved to turn his attention to a more heartening topic.

"This is my contribution to the 250th anniversary celebration of Mozart," Adams said, "a piece in response to The Magic Flute, about young people gaining moral awareness and falling in love." The source of A Flowering Tree, suggested to Adams by his longtime collaborator, the director Peter Sellars, is a Tamil legend about a young girl who transforms herself into a tree.

The opera — being written in what Adams called a "shockingly compressed time period" (he began work on the score barely three months ago) — will have an orchestra of 65, a chorus, baritone-narrator Eric Owens (who was General Groves in Doctor Atomic), soprano Hyunah Yu, and tenor Russell Thomas. The world premiere is scheduled for November 14, in Vienna, followed by performances in Berlin, the U.S. premiere in San Francisco (on March 1, 2007, and repeated on March 2 and 3), and then going on to Lincoln Center and finally to Barbican Centre.

To make the project's internationalism more rampant, Adams said Sellars' production will have "radical Balinese" elements, and the orchestra and chorus will come from Venezuela in the Viennese performance. The Berlin performance will be a concert version and San Francisco's will be "semi-staged" — described by Adams as "decaf, or, why bother?" to a brave but obviously pained smile from MTT, whose past semi-staged opera and music productions have been anything but lacking in stimulation.

Composers of other upcoming premieres in Davies Hall include Kevin Volans, Osvaldo Golijov, Victoria Borisova-Ollas, Victor Kissine, Charles Koechlin, and Kalevi Aho. Just back from a Hong Kong-Shanghai trip, SFS is planning an extensive touring schedule, going to the Lucern Festival in September, then Carnegie Hall, Vienna, and Prague next year.

On tour and at home, MTT will further expand the Symphony's Mahler repertoire with Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Thomas Hampson) and Symphony No. 8 (Marisol Montalvo, Erin Wall, Laura Claycomb, Michelle DeYoung, Elena Manistina, Anthony Dean Griffey, James Johnson, Raymond Aceto). The Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation is underwriting both the tour and the extension of the Mahler recording project.

Visiting orchestras and Great Performers soloists will include Christoph Eschenbach and the Philadelphia Orchestra (with Matthias Goerne), Joshua Bell and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Andrew Davis with pianist Jonathan Biss and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Vladimir Ashkenazy and the NHK Symphony of Tokyo, Yuri Bashmet and the Moscow Soloists, and Vladimir Spivakov and the National Philharmonic of Russia. The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, now led by Benjamin Shwartz, will mark its 25th anniversary with special events.

The season announcement, programs of the Great Performers series, and the full Symphony schedule are now online.