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MUSIC SHORTS
News Briefs
December 12, 2000
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By Janos Gereben
Adams Premiere in Paris
Initial reviews are in for John Adams' El Niño--La Nativité in its world premiere on December 15 in Paris' Theatre du Chatelet. Critics in French and German newspapers generally praised the music ("mature, well developed") but had reservations about the "Disney-ish" multimedia production with its projected desert landscapes and California beaches. One report spoke of the "passionate and profound" depiction of "the elegiac mystery of the birth of Christ." Half opera and half oratorio, El Niño seems to fall halfway between Adams' operas and his crossover piece, I Was Looking At the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.
The "Nigel Kennedy of opera stage directors"?
That is the strange, thought-provoking (and wrong) title bestowed on the director Peter Sellars in Berlin's Der Tagesspiel review of El Niño, which ignores the fact that beyond the spiky 'do, Kennedy is a great violinist. The writer, Ulrich Amling, also speaks of the production as "video cement… of optical lubricants" used to force the transformation of music into an "opera." The work is based on the Nativity story from the Bible, drawing on lines by Hildegard von Bingen, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and poetry by contemporary Hispanic writers. Produced by the usual Adams team of Sellars and conductor Kent Nagano, El Niño is on its way to the American premiere by the San Francisco Symphony, January 11-13, in Davies Hall. The cast features Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Willard White. Nagano honored
Kent Nagano's photo is on the cover of the upcoming 2001 edition of the "Musical America" annual directory as the publication's "conductor of the year."
AmericanS in Paris A few days before the Adams premiere, there was another American musical newbie in Paris, a collaboration between Lou Reed and Bob Wilson, POEtry, premiering in Theatre de l'Od. The work is based on poetry and prose by Edgar Allan Poe, and it is inspired by the German cinema of the 'Twenties. R.I.P. Ruth Martin
If you are an opera fan from pre- Supertitle times, chances are you were reading libretti in Ruth Martin's translation. Martin, who died last week in Manhattan at 86, joined her husband, the Viennese conductor Thomas Martin, to translate the text of as many as 50 of lesser-known operas; they had a special interest in operas for children.
Cisneros workshops
Evelyn Cisneros, the San Francisco Ballet's retired prima ballerina assoluta, is conducting free workshops in the city's heavily Hispanic Mission District for families with children under 12. The workshops are heldDec. 30 in the Mission Cultural Center; participants receive complimentary tickets to the SFB's Nutcracker matinee on Dec. 31. For information, contact the Ballet, at (415) 861-5600.
"Cultural Exchanges" Israeli conductor Stanley Sperber is making his local debut in the Paramount Theater with the Oakland East Bay Symphony on January 26, in a program called "Cultural Exchanges." The program includes Brahms' Second Symphony, the world premiere of Kenneth Lampl's Piano Concerto No. 1, with Evelyn Chen as soloist, and Aharon Harlap's A Child's World. Both Lampl and Harlap will attend the concert, and join a free pre-concert lecture in the Paramount at 7 p.m. (Janos Gereben is arts editor of the Oakland, CA, Post Newspaper Group and technology editor for www.the451.com.)
©2000 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.
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