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IN Music News THIS WEEK:
Chamber Music for Cheap or Free
Symphony League: Who's on First?
Oakland Programming: Where Is the Award?
Golden Girl WAY West
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By Janos Gereben
A Festival Not to Keep Under Your Hat
FEZ, Morocco — When they shout "balek!" behind you (or, rarely, "attention!" in French), hug the
wall and make yourself as thin as possible. In the maze of the narrow alleys of the ancient (but
vibrantly alive and cell-phone saturated) Fez medina, "Balek!" means that a donkey is passing in the
middle of teeming humanity, so give way or else. These small but powerful beasts of burden have had the
right-of-way since the city's birth in the 8th Century, and the rule stands, even under satellite dishes
crowding each other on the roof of every building.
From this fabled imperial city, I am advising "Balek!" to Californians who
might have missed this year's just-concluded Fès Festival of World Sacred
Music. For the first time, musicians from the festival will tour with a
festival show, appearing in Davis' Mondavi Center next March 19, and in
Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall the next day. (Fès is the French, and therefore local, spelling of the anglicized form of the Arabic name; the
same applies to Marrakech-Marrakesh, Tanger-Tangier, etc.)
The Fès Festival is a truly extraordinary event. It brings together musicians from various cultures,
societies, religions, ideologies, allowing them to leave all that excess baggage behind and celebrate
music and humanity. The American opera singer Julia Migenes appears along with Iran's great Sufi
singer Mohamed Reza Shajarian (a Berkeley favorite after appearances with Cal Performances),
Yungchen Lhamo of Tibet chants along with the Gospel songs of the Anointed Jackson
Sisters, Brazilian Gilberto Gil and Indian Madhavi Mudgal, artists from Pakistan,
Vietnam, Sénégal and, yes, even Iraq (the wonderful Farida Mohamed Ali) make the musical scene of
this historically cosmopolitan and tolerant city a model of what the world should be.
Goran Bregovic's oratorio, Et mon coeur sera tolérant, is performed here during the
nine-day celebration along with shows by Morocco's own Hassania R'Miki, the group Les
Roudaniyates, Ensemble de Femmes de Taroudant, and performers of Andalusian Jewish music, as
hundreds of artists and audiences of thousands congregate in and near Moqri Palace, in the heart of the
Fez medina, and, throughout the city.
There is a poignant connection between the origin of the Fès Festival of World Sacred Music and its 2003
edition. This year's festival opened in June, US troops occupying Iraq, a fellow Arab country, just
3,000 miles away. War there, peace here, even with the aberration of a terrorist bomb in Casablanca. The
creation of the festival followed the 1991 Gulf War, in part to promote a better understanding of people
from all faiths through music in that atmosphere, similar to today's.
The late king was a sponsor of the first festival, in 1994; today, it's under the patronage of his son,
King Mohamed VI. The festival is the brainchild of Dr. Faouzi Skali, and a couple of years ago,
it was honored by the United Nations as one of the featured events of the year of "Dialogue Amongst
Civilizations," its organizers named "Unsung Heroes of Dialogue," having reached across the "divide" to
"the other." And on top of all that, good intentions and noble efforts aside, it is a festival of
absolutely terrific performances. Check it out here next year or, for a sampler, in Mondavi Center.
Chamber Music for Cheap or Free Young Bay Area musicians are taking their program of Mozart and Schubert on the road, performing at 7 p.m., on Friday, July 18, in Berkeley's Crowden School of Music, charging $12 for adults, $7 for students, but repeating the concert for free the next day, July 19, at 8 p.m., at the SF Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street. Participants include violinists Wei He, Michelle Maruyama, violist Cary Koh, and cellists Eugene Sor and Beth Vandervennet.
Symphony League: Who's on First? Two seemingly contradictory items appeared in this column last week, reporting on ASCAP awards for adventurous and contemporary programming given to the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (for the 21st consecutive year), and to Michael Tilson Thomas' New World Orchestra, in Miami. The head-scratcher: both won "first place." But now, with the release of the American Symphony Orchestra League's programming awards, after the organization's June convention in San Francisco, it became clear that there are various categories, according to size and budget, so it's entirely possible to have two (or any number) of first places. ASOL's "adventurous programming" honors went to the Detroit Symphony ("strongest commitment to new American music"), the Cleveland Orchestra ("innovative programming"), and the New York Youth Symphony ("Leonard Bernstein Award for educational programming"). Awards for promoting contemporary music were given to the Chicago Symphony in the big-orchestra category (meaning annual operating expenses of $13.5 million), MTT's New World Symphony in the next group, the Brooklyn Philharmonic after than, and then — drum roll, please — to Kent Nagano's Berkeley Symphony, in the quaintly-defined "$385,000 to $1.6 million" category.
Oakland Programming: Where Is the Award? Speaking of "new and unusual," Michael Morgan's Oakland East Bay Symphony is really keeping up with the most adventurous, award-winning or not. The revised schedule for the 2003-2004 season in the Paramount Theater, just released, has a contemporary work on every program, four of them commissioned world premieres, by Mason Bates, Ingram Marshall, Ann Lathan Kerzner, and Anthony DeRitis. For details, see www.oebs.org.
Golden Girl WAY West Puccini's Girl of the Golden West will ride next in the Mendocino Headlands, at two performances, in the Mendocino Music Festival (www.mendocinomusic.com). On July 18 and 20, conducted by Allan Pollack and directed by Meg Patterson, the fully-staged opera (in Italian, with supertitles), will feature in the cast Julia Kierstine, Gabriel Reoya-Pazos, Dan Morris, Mark D. Lew, Ross Halper, and Gary Ruschman.
(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.)
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Julia Migenes