In what is now planned as an annual event, Hidden Valley Music Seminars, in Carmel Valley, opened a new production this past weekend of David Conte’s opera The Gift of the Magi.
New Carmel Bach Festival Music Director Paul Goodwin made a refreshing, even startling, impression as he conducted Friday night’s program of the “pastoral” symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Beethoven at Sunset Center. Here was a different facet to the one implied by Goodwin’s reputation as a Baroque specialist, but one showing him to be just as engaged, energized, and imaginative in this repertory.
The widely known British concertmaster, chamber musician, and star of the BBC film Eroica Peter Hanson has staked his claim as the new leader of the Carmel Bach Festival. As with his predecessor, Elizabeth Wallfisch, Hanson took over Monday’s main concert at Sunset Center. The menu offered a miscellany of Baroque concertos by Vivaldi, Telemann, and Mudge; incidental music by Purcell; and symphonies by C.P.E. Bach, all using Baroque instruments.
With the Carmel Bach Festival's new music director in charge, Bach himself has risen from the grave of encrusted tradition. Under Paul Goodwin's lead, last Sunday's performance of the St. John Passion, reclaimed the festival's namesake as Western music's greatest architect.
Bruno Weil’s 19th, and last, season as music director of the Carmel Bach Festival happens, by timely rotation, to include the St. Matthew Passion. Heard Sunday at Carmel’s Sunset Center, this production of the great work was the most satisfying of the many times he has performed it there. Whether he himself would agree that he felt more engaged, only he can say.
Festival namesake Johann Sebastian Bach constitutes roughly 18 percent of the current Carmel Bach Festival’s total programs, now spanning just over two weeks, down from three weeks over the last several years.
The search for a new Carmel Bach Festival music director is already under way, even while Bruno Weil has one last Festival to lead in 2010. One local wag lately suggested in a letter to the Monterey County Herald that Weil might give serious thought to a mostly-Bach program next year.
Bach's Mass in B Minor can be a work of grandeur, just as it can be a miscellany of movements gathered from various of his cantatas with the original words replaced by those of the Latin Mass. Either, and even more possibilities, can readily be justified, or at least rationalized. The sprawling work opened the 71st season of the Carmel Bach Festival Saturday night at Carmel's Sunset Center with Music Director Bruno Weil conducting the orchestra, a Festival Chorale of 28 voices, and a solo vocal quartet.
Unlike the composer's famous St. Matthew and St.
For a change, a Handel oratorio other than Messiah sounded seasonally sweet at UC Santa Cruz — with an added performance in San Francisco — this past weekend. Jephtha, the composer’s last major work, flowered into a satisfying evening in Nicole Paiement’s first production of the work since she studied it with acclaimed conductor John Elliot Gardiner years ago.
Considering that the performers, the university's Chamber Singers and Baroque Orchestra, were for the most part students, Jephtha was remarkably well-executed on Saturday.
Even though it revolves around a love triangle, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther would not have appealed to Verdi because of its lack of a higher moral or sociopolitical conflict. But for Jules Massenet, making a stage work of such a personal, barely dramatic dilemma was just his musical meat. Massenet's Werther, heard and seen Sunday afternoon at San Jose's California Theatre, gives Opera San José a new high-water mark.
At the time of Werther's premiere in Vienna in 1892, Siegmund Freud was practicing neurology and experimenting with hypnosis.
An institutional rarity, the Ives String Quartet is its own nonprofit corporation, and produces its own "Home Series" Bay Area season of concerts. Currently, these include three programs played twice, at St. Mark's Church in Palo Alto and at Le Petit Trianon Theatre in San Jose. The paid staff are the musicians themselves, answerable to a volunteer board of directors.
Making her debut with Opera San José last Sunday afternoon, Khori Dastoor dominated the stage in the coloratura title role of Lucia di Lammermoor, blazing through her shrewdly conceived mad scene with theatrical abandon and scenery-chewing panache. If Dastoor joined the company to gain stage experience — the stated mission of OSJ — then her colleagues can expect to learn even more from her.
Sunday's matinee performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, a feature of the 70th anniversary season of the Carmel Bach Festival, memorialized Sandor Salgo. In doing so, Music Director Bruno Weil demonstrated a lack of insight into the great work's dramatic arch — the very insight Salgo was famous for during his long tenure at this festival's helm.
In what is now planned as an annual event, Hidden Valley Music Seminars, in Carmel Valley, opened a new production this past weekend of David Conte’s opera The Gift of the Magi.
New Carmel Bach Festival Music Director Paul Goodwin made a refreshing, even startling, impression as he conducted Friday night’s program of the “pastoral” symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Beethoven at Sunset Center. Here was a different facet to the one implied by Goodwin’s reputation as a Baroque specialist, but one showing him to be just as engaged, energized, and imaginative in this repertory.
The widely known British concertmaster, chamber musician, and star of the BBC film Eroica Peter Hanson has staked his claim as the new leader of the Carmel Bach Festival. As with his predecessor, Elizabeth Wallfisch, Hanson took over Monday’s main concert at Sunset Center. The menu offered a miscellany of Baroque concertos by Vivaldi, Telemann, and Mudge; incidental music by Purcell; and symphonies by C.P.E. Bach, all using Baroque instruments.
Bruno Weil’s 19th, and last, season as music director of the Carmel Bach Festival happens, by timely rotation, to include the St. Matthew Passion. Heard Sunday at Carmel’s Sunset Center, this production of the great work was the most satisfying of the many times he has performed it there. Whether he himself would agree that he felt more engaged, only he can say.
The search for a new Carmel Bach Festival music director is already under way, even while Bruno Weil has one last Festival to lead in 2010. One local wag lately suggested in a letter to the Monterey County Herald that Weil might give serious thought to a mostly-
