San Francisco Classical Voice

Evgeny Izotov, the San Francisco Symphony's associate principal oboe for the past seven years, joins the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal oboe in September, SFCV learned yesterday. Izotov accepted the post in May after his successful audition in New York. Describing his affection for the San Francisco orchestra and the difficulty of the decision, he said, "The career makes the decision for you. I'm going from one great orchestra to another and the only reason is that it's a principal position."

In actuality, because his post at the Met will be probationary, as is the case with all newly hired symphony musicians, he will remain on the San Francisco Symphony roster, on a one year's leave of absence. Izotov, a native of Moscow, was supposed to have gone to Russia in the coming fall of 2002 to perform with the Russian National Orchestra as a visiting musician, the SF Symphony's end of an innovative exchange agreement. That has now been put on hold. The first part of that exchange was just completed with the service of Maxim Rubtsov, Associate Principal Flute of the RNO, as a visiting orchestra member for SF Symphony's June 13-30 Russian Festival.

When Izotov, 29, joined the SF Symphony in 1996, he was the first Russian wind player to win a position in a major US orchestra. Prior to that he was principal oboe with the Kansas City Symphony, to which experience he credits his subsequent success. Earlier he played in the Boston Symphony and the New World Symphony that Michael Tilson Thomas directs.

UC Alumni Sing in China

Ranging in age from 15 to 92, the University of California Alumni Chorus and the student choir Perfect Fifth took off for China in May and June, on a concert tour of Beijing, Dalian, Xi'an, Guilin and Shanghai. Directed by Mark Sumner, and with William Garcia Ganz as accompanist, the much-traveled UCAC scored its first Asian tour. The chorus previously travelled to Australia and New Zealand (1988), England (1997), the Czech Republic and Hungary (2000).

The concerts marked special occasions: in Dalian, Oakland's sister city, the chorus participated in the events marking the 20th anniversary of the Oakland-Dalian association. They also sang at the Xi'an Music Conservatory Theater, and the Shanghai Centre Theater (where a reception followed, given by the city's UC-Berkeley Shanghai Alumni Club).

The program they presented "from the Americas" included music from the Caribbean and South America, some Copland, Barber and Randall Thompson, spirituals and folk song arrangements, even pop songs, including I Left My Heart in San Francisco.

Chorus member Marian Kohlstedt (an admninistrator with both San Francisco Performances and Berkeley Opera) told SFCV that the concerts were well attended in every location, many young people in the audience, and they were always eager to talk with the singers, "even asking us for autographs." Besides all that musical ambassadorship, the chorus did a great deal of sightseeing, including Tianamen Square, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, one of the Ming Tombs, the Great Wall, the terra cotta tomb warriors in Xi'an, a cruise on the Li River, and a visit to the "Venice of China," Souzhou.

"The entrepreneurial spirit is definitely alive and well in China," Kohlstedt says, "and we saw no signs of Communist regimentation (which doesn't mean it doesn't exist). But, while still a third-world country, especially in the country, they're rapidly moving into the modern world. Shanghai is giving Hong Kong a run for its money as the trade center of the Far East." If you want to see the chorus and some of what they saw, check www.sternerson.com/images/new/china.

The Tan Dynasty: the First Thousand Years?

It doesn't matter how this makes you feel, better just deal with it: the next decade of opera belongs to Tan Dun. I think that's bad news, but I am taking my own advice and won't give in to denial. In case you haven't had the pleasure yet, Tan's works are interesting, dramatic, rather enjoyable — at least before patience runs out — but here's a small point: the gentleman eschews music, substituting sound effects.

Why should you worry about Tan? Look at the facts: There was Ghost Opera, Marco Polo in Edinburgh and around Europe; Peony Pavilion, Tan's three-week speed-composing effort savaged by Peter Sellars at his most excessive and least responsive to a magnificent subject; a Millennium thing, 2000 Today, played everywhere; another quick-and-dirty (but better, this time), the Oscar'd soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Then came Helmuth Rilling's commission of The Water Passion After St. Matthew for Stuttgart's Passion 2000, to have its US premiere here, at the Oregon Bach Festival, on July 5.

More significantly, the immediate future: an opera, Tea, commissioned by Suntory Hall and Netherlands Opera; "The Map, for Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony; a commission from the Met for 2006, and more . . .

If Water Passion is indicative of the coming Tan Era, singers and audiences are in for hard times, especially the former. The soprano role is an Yma Sumac thing all the way through (Elizabeth Keusch doing a stunning job of it in Stuttgart, without a trace of shrillness even on G overtones on top of frequent D's and E's), the bass is asked to imitate Tuvan throat singers, the chorus has only sounds, shouts and pebbles for castanets — no music to speak of or even to declaim. On the orchestra level, out of 90 minutes, there are two phrases from Bernstein, lifted whole, and a great deal of water dripping, churning, lapping, poured, stirred, spritzing and blitzing. It's raining operas and dogs . . . but I am repeating myself.

Smoking: No Laughing Matter

We were kidding around here a couple of weeks ago about San Francisco Opera's non-smoking Carmen, where the "revolting cigaret-makeresses" chew on politically correct unlit cancer-sticks, but now there is a major battle of consequence over the issue . . . in Glyndebourne, according to reports in The Independent.

British American Tobacco is contributing nearly a half a million dollars to next month's new production of Carmen, but the opposition is deafening. Actor-director-activist Sir Jonathan Miller calls the marketing ploy "amoral," decrying Glyndebourne's willingness "to allow anything to be endorsed that is a killer."

American bass Mark Doss was among the few singers willing to speak up. He said: "Good lung capacity is essential for singing. I consider it inappropriate for a singer to smoke a tobacco product . . . and I also consider it inappropriate for a tobacco company to finance an operatic production in any way other than anonymously."

A spokesman for the tobacco company said: "We've been consistent, if small-scale, supporters of the arts in Britain and around the world. We thought Carmen was an appropriate thing to do in our centenary year. I don't believe a single extra person will smoke because BAT is sponsoring Carmen at Glyndebourne." The company's general director, David Pickard, in effect, pleaded poverty, saying Glyndebourne receives no state funding, "therefore, like many other charitable organisations in the arts, it relies heavily on third-party support."

Yes, We Need No Sopranos

But every other voice is required rather badly, in just a couple of months before a big concert, by Pacific Mozart Ensemble. The group will participate in Berkeley Symphony's September 18 concert of some challenging choral music: Beethoven's Christ on the Mount of Olives and Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, the latter a 16-part a cappella work, described by chorus director Dick Grant as "extremely challenging." If you like a challenge, write to him for audition information, at dick@pacificmozart.org.

The Artist as an Animal on Post-Performance Display

From Fred Crafts' interview with Thomas Quasthoff at the Oregon Bach Festival, in the Sunday Eugene Register-Guard: "Singing with the Berlin Philharmonic is like being given a warm coat on a winter night . . . my feeling and the feeling of the audience was the same: 'Please don't let it end'."

However, when inevitably concerts and recitals do end, especially after Wintereise, the bass needs an hour to be "in this world again" . . . because "you build up during the concert so much tension and you have to calm down." But, instead of "having a beer with friends," there is a ritual most artists resent, but few ever have the courage to complain about. Quasthoff has the gumption: "In America, you have, excuse me, that bad tradition of receptions, which I don't like very much. These official things where you sit like an animal in the zoo and 50 or 60 or 70 people are coming and say, 'Thank you. It was great,' and you have always to say 'Thank you very much, it was very nice.'

"I know that it's important, but I'm honest enough to say that I don't like the official celebrations after the concerts very much. To hang around with my friends, where I have not to choose and think about every word that I say, I prefer much more."

And yet, with all that, plus the memory of some "hard, hard years" dealing with his handicap and serious health problems, Quasthoff enjoys life and fame to the fullest: "I sometimes have to bit my finger to realize if it's really real or not. Sometimes, I have a little bit the feeling that this is a film, and I don't know the director, but the theme of the film I like very, very much."

(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.)

©2002 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved