Eyes on Paradise, Dwelling in the Abyss

The San Francisco Symphony summer festival, now in progress, is called Romantic Visions: From Paradise to the Abyss, and the end was reached at the beginning last Wednesday. Attendance at the festival-opening symposium, presented by James Conlon, was, well, abysmal. There were not even 100 listeners in the 2,743-seat Davies Hall, a spectacle of emptiness I have not experienced since the hall's opening in 1980. No one inside or out of the Symphony could offer a plausible reason.

Empty hall or not, Conlon, who is responsible for the festival programs and who conducts each performance, held up his end of a meaty, fascinating conversation with SFS program annotator James Keller. The focus was on the art and literature that inspired composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: works of Oscar Wilde (Zemlinsky, Strauss), Dante (Liszt), and the Italian novelist Manzoni (Verdi). There was little talk of paradise, but the "other place" got plenty of attention, none more intriguingly than in the case of Liszt's treatment of the Inferno, in the Dante Symphony.

It appears Conlon has been a passionate advocate of the work ... with a twist. Having discovered the amazing fact that Liszt introduced it a century and half ago in a "multimedia setting," many years before movies were invented, Conlon decided to replicate the idea. In fact, the June 22-23 performances in San Francisco will represent the American premiere of the work in its original form, albeit with more advanced technology.

Liszt wanted to illustrate the text, taken from Dante's Divine Comedy. Lacking audio-visual tools, he had paintings of Purgatory physically carried across the stage during the performance. Conlon — after much research and sleuthing — found the paintings used in the presentation, but he is eschewing an exact duplication because "carrying the paintings across the stage is too noisy, and the insurance costs are prohibitive."

And there will be projections of illustrations by Giovanni Buonaventura Genelli (1798-1868), whom Liszt had asked for sketches to present with the magic lantern of Gropius for the premiere (a plan that proved impossible), and by Filippo Bigioli (circa 1797-1878), who produced some 30-odd paintings of The Divine Comedy. Conlon obtained copies of the Genelli sketches from East Germany back in 1984 and had the European "premiere" of the illustrated Liszt in Rotterdam, where he led the Philharmonic. The Bigioli paintings were the ones hauled (in their frames) behind the orchestra.

A Double Brancoveanu Debut

In the musical portion of the Symphony's symposium (see item above), former Merola Program participant Eugene Brancoveanu made his Davies Hall debut and appeared as the father of two for the first time. His wife delivered the couple's second baby (the first coming shortly before Brancoveanu's recital debut — the man likes to keep such things symmetrical) while the baritone was rehearsing on Tuesday.

Accompanied by Peter Grunberg, Brancoveanu performed Stölzel's Aus der Tiefe, rufe ich, zu dir (music often — and mistakenly — attributed to Bach), and, accompanied by a chamber orchestra, two songs by Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920), surely one of the period's most unjustly neglected composers. Brancoveanu's performance of Le Jardin and Impression du Matin permeated the empty hall with great warmth and effortless diction.

S.J. Chamber Orchestra: Hotbed of New Music

In just 15 seasons, San Jose Chamber Orchestra music director Barbara Day Turner gave premieres of 60 contemporary works and presented important soloists. Announcement of the next season in Le Petit Trianon speaks of a similar effort.

Besides standards and classics, SJCO will offer works by Vitezslava Kapralova (performed by Sara Davis Buechner) and Larry Delinger, Gerald Finzi's Clarinet Concerto (with Gareth Davis), a collaboration with the Choral Project, and Anthony Quartuccio conducting new works by Santa Clara University's Anica Galindo and San Jose State University's John Casados. In an unusual juxtaposition, Day Turner is scheduling Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (Nora Chastain, violin), and Astor Piazzolla's Cuatro estaciónes porteñas (Cynthia Baehr, violin).

Charlip Benefit

The Bay Area music and dance community will rally to support an iconic figure of local contemporary dance: the artist, choreographer, dancer, and children's book author and illustrator Remy Charlip, who is recovering from a stroke. "Every Little Movement" will be held at 7:30 p.m., June 17, in Theater Artaud, with the participation of June Watanabe, Joanna Haigood, the Dance Brigade, Scott Wells and Dancers, Anne Bluethenthal, Keith Hennessy, Norman Rutherford, and Kathleen Hermesdorf and Albert Mathias of MotionLab. A minimum donation of $20 is requested, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Tickets are available at the door.

Hampson Talks Schumann

... although, of course, mainly he sings Schumann (see review of his Herbst Theatre recital in this issue). And yet, as it was reported here in the last issue, the baritone had quite a lot to say on the subject, and then there was a coincidental e-mail, bringing up a 13-year-old conversation about Dichterliebe. The story is far from over. The singer-scholar responded to the Classical Voice item, explaining his stand on the issue. Because of the note's length, we are presenting it off-site and call attention once more to Hampson's self-created, self-written, self-run Web site on this complex subject.

Gyõrgy Ligeti

Gyõrgy Ligeti, a major avant-garde composer whose music became familiar to millions through the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, died Monday in Vienna at age 83. His opera Le Grand Macabre had its U.S. premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Halloween 2004.

Born in Romania to Hungarian Jewish parents, Ligeti studied at the Klausenberg Conservatory and the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. In 1956, he fled to the West, settling in Cologne, where he worked in the studios of West German radio. In 1961, he found international recognition for Atmosphères, a large-scale work consisting of slowly evolving, massive chords, or "sound masses." He called the technique micropolyphony. Parts of Atmosphères, Ligeti's Requiem, and Lux aeterna appeared on the soundtrack for 2001, a 1967 film by Stanley Kubrick that became a cultural icon (Kubrick apparently using Ligeti's music without permission).

Records Are Made to Be Broken

Another major recording label is falling by the wayside: Warner Classics is shutting down operations, letting 40 contracted artists fend for themselves. The company responsible for important opera sets, such as the Barenboim-conducted Parsifal, performances conducted by San Francisco Opera Music Director Donald Runnicles, Sinopoli's performances of Webern and Schoenberg, and so on, just went out of business.

"In a move that has surprised the classical record industry as much as the people involved," says the new issue of Gramophone magazine, Warner Classics has, in essence, ceased to be an active record label. Matthew Cosgrove, who has steered Warner Classics and created a respected niche label ... had left the company," and Warner Classics is being rolled into Rhino, Warner's reissue division. The move reduces the so-called majors in the classical record arena to just EMI, Universal, and Sony-BMG. (And privately owned Naxos, which sells more classical recordings than any of them.)

Norman Lebrecht comments on the news: "The tragic fact of the matter is that giant media players are pulling out of minority art, a myopic strategy that gives them no chance of tapping the next quirk in public taste or contributing to cultural evolution. Warner bought its way into classics just ahead of the Three Tenors 1990 boom and scored an eight-million follow-up CD at the Los Angeles World Cup. It gobbled up one independent after another — Erato in France, Teldec in Germany, Finlandia, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi — and went into overproduction along with all the others in the 1990s until the roof fell in and the outlet was slimmed down to a single stream of mainstream classics."

The House That Bradshaw Built

Canada's musical life is well intertwined with the San Francisco Opera. Dozens of young Canadian singers having come through the Merola Progam, Merolinis get roles up north, former S.F. Opera General Director Lotfi Mansouri came here from the Canadian Opera Company (COC) in Toronto — a company run for the past decade and a half by former S.F. Opera chorus director Richard Bradshaw.

Bradshaw has made a good name for himself in Toronto, but now he has achieved what none of his predecessors managed, however hard they might have tried. COC has just opened a splendiferous, $150 million new opera house, Bradshaw's baby from the start. Architect Jack Diamond's spare, modernist structure makes Bradshaw — according to the Toronto Star — "the happiest kid in the sandbox."

After decades of renting in homey and homely Hummingbird Centre, with its severely limited facilities and poor acoustics, the COC now has the Four Seasons Centre, sporting a backstage area three times larger than before. After gala concerts and special events, the opera company's fall season in the new facility will open with three cycles of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, designed by Michael Levine.

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