San Francisco Classical Voice

Ring Productions Beyond Berkeley

If Berkeley Opera's Legend of the Ring put you in a frame of mind to hear the real thing, 15 hours instead of 3 1/2 and a big orchestra, with real brass and all, the time is now to start planning for travel. The Metropolitan Opera's Der Ring des Nibelungen cycles, late April through mid-May, are conducted by James Levine and feature Gabriele Schnaut, Lisa Gasteen, Margaret Jane Wray, Yvonne Naef, Elena Zaremba/Jill Grove, Plácido Domingo, Jon Fredric West, Philip Langridge, Mark Baker, Gerhard Siegel/David Cangelosi, Alan Held, James Morris, Richard Paul Fink, Evgenij Nikitin, Sergei Koptchak, Matti Salminen.

Speaking of Salminen, there will be three Helsinki Ring cycles as well, late August through early September, with Salminen (Hagen/Hunding), John Treleaven (Siegfried), Susan Marie Pierson (Brünnhilde), Nina Stemme (Sieglinde), Juha Uusitalo (Wotan), and Esa Ruuttunen (Alberich). There is Bayreuth, of course, in August, three cycles conducted by Adam Fischer, directed by Jürgen Flimm and designed by Erich Wonder.

The closest Ring physically will be next year, 2005, in Seattle, Speight Jenkins producing four cycles, August 7-28, Robert Spano conducting the work for the first time, The 2001 production team returns in 2005: Stephen Wadsworth directing the production designed by Thomas Lynch. For cast announcements, being made in the next few days, see www.seattleopera.org.

MTT Recovering from Shoulder Injury

Last week, Michael Tilson Thomas turned over the first half of three of five subscription concerts to the Symphony's Resident Conductor, Edwin Outwater, on doctor's orders. According to the announcements made at the concerts on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, MTT has experienced an injury to his right arm. At each concert, five times, MTT went ahead to conduct Mahler's Fifth Symphony, clearly handicapped by pain in the shoulder, and received well-deserved ovations each time.

The Symphony's public relations department said that "MTT is following his doctors' orders. He appreciates the care and concern of all those who have expressed concern"; and also that he is scheduled to conduct all concerts this week. Between March 16 and 26, the orchestra will go on a 10-concert, seven-city US tour, including Cleveland, Boston, New York and Philadelphia, MTT scheduled to conduct each time.

Voigt: Size Matters

Deborah Voigt, much acclaimed in recent years for singing the title role of Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos at San Francisco Opera and elsewhere, will not be allowed to perform the role at Royal Opera Covent Garden this summer because of her weight, according to a report by the Associated Press. The article quotes casting director Peter Katona that the company prefers a slimmer singer to appear as Ariadne. A Covent Garden spokesman said Katona "had selected a black evening dress for the part and believed Voigt would not look right in it."

In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Katona said "Normally Ariadne is presented on a stylized Greek island with the singers wearing toga-type clothes, but we wanted to present it in an elegant, modern evening dress," and Anne Schwanewilms, "a more slender but lesser-known soprano," will fill the bill (and the dress) better. Voigt said "I have big hips, and Covent Garden has a problem with them, or at least, the casting directorhas the problem, and he's made it clear that I won't be singing in his house as long as he's around. Which is sad."

Voigt's contract was not cancelled, but no information was released about what kind of arrangements have been made. In an interview last month on Andante.com, Voigt said "This attitude towards heavy people is the last bastion of open discrimination in our society. They simply said I was too fat! It makes me so angry."

A Not-So-Virginal Composer: True Facts Revealed in This Space

When Berkeley Symphony's "Under Construction" concert on Sunday offered an aria from Kurt Rohde's "under-construction" work, Bitter Harvest [see concert review elsewhere in this edition], the composer said it was the first time he composed vocal music. Rohde also wrote in the program notes: "I have not written any choral music or music for voice that I would consider listenable."

That ain't necessarily so, we found out, through a singer speaking from personal experience. Alexandra Ivanoff actually performed Rohde's Three Poems of Seamus Heaney, three short unaccompanied pices for mezzo-soprano. "I sang them in a concert of Rohde's works on May 27, 1995, in Berkeley," Ivanoff said. "They were very evocative, well-written (although difficult), and very satisfying to perform. Granted, they are chamber (as opposed to orchestral) pieces, but I knew then that he had a real feel for writing vocal lines. That work, almost a decade ago, was more than just 'listenable,' but in fact, fascinating."

"Confronted" with the evidence, Rohde said he forgot his youthful effort: "Alexandra is correct; they do exist, and she did a great job on them, my first venture trying to write for solo voice, 10 years ago." His memory thus refreshed, the composer went on to confess other sins of his youth: "In 1984, I set some Plath poems for soprano and piano, but `retracted' them later. When I wrote the Sheamus Heaney pieces, I copied a lot from other composers, felt like the music was telling 'lies' at times. In 2000, I tried writing songs for soprano and piano, using poems by Emily Dickinson. They were a complete failure; really sucked, never performed and since retracted and destroyed." [With a composer like Rohde, you don't need critics, he is certainly hard enough on himself.]

What is a "first" then here? With Bitter Harvest, Rohde says, "I have the instrumental palette I want, the capability of many voices, a text I can use, and time to figure how to write for the voice as truthfully as possible. In essence, this is my first piece for voice."

End of the Affair Begins

Jake Heggie's End of the Affair, premiering in Houston last week, is a chamber opera, for a quartet of vocalists and an orchestra of 24. In spite of the size, writes Wes Blomster in www.musicalamerica.com, aspects of the work are "immense and pressing in contemporary relevance." Based on Graham Greene's 1951 novel (libretto by Heather McDonald) about infidelity in Blitz-ravaged London, the relevance to life in our own post-9/11 world is clear, says the review.

"Affair is a compelling examination of human vulnerability and the frailty of relationships overshadowed by the larger question of God's presence (or absence) and the problem of belief in the modern world . . . (The music) is appropriately `big,' neo-Romantic in its sensuality, but amazingly transparent in execution."

High School Strings Attached

Oakland is one of few major districts with real music going on in its schools. On Thursday, at 7:30 p.m. in the Skyline High School auditorium the Oakland Public Schools presents its Strings Festival, featuring 185 students from three high schools and five middle schools. Michael Morgan, the Oakland East Bay Symphony's music director, will conduct the all-city string orchestra, combining all 185 students.

No Ciao to Luciano

The New York Times' Anthony Tommasini had a rather nasty calendar listing on Friday for Luciano Pavarotti's upcoming Met farewell performances in Tosca: "Mr. Pavarotti, now 68, will try once more to sing Cavaradossi. Three performances are scheduled, the first one tonight. Expectations are so low by now that just his showing up and getting through the performance will be enough. His indulgent colleagues will be the soprano Carol Vaness as Tosca and the bass Samuel Ramey as Scarpia and the conductor James Levine."