As we cautiously turn the corner towards Thanksgiving, not being very sure about which blessings to count, it might be well to review what the current season has been and might be. That it’s been different is as certain as our knowing that the Christmas pressure is already upon us. While the San Francisco Symphony seems to be holding its large audiences, the other orchestras are managing, more or less at their normal attendances, and performing well, their programs often more interesting than San Francisco’s. All the good stuff — new music, early music, chamber music, recitals — in venues all over the area continues as strong as ever, just as we’ve been reporting it. It’s the musical life blood. The San Francisco Opera, meanwhile, has been noticeably hurting at the box office. All season, for the first six of the eight productions, there were lots of empty seats.

Possibly some of that resistance reflects word of mouth criticism of this or that production, although empty seats for the second performance of Otello in an O.K. traditional production (never mind the tenor issue) cannot be attributed to audience disfavor. And while Katya Kabanova was widely praised, its performance deeply admired, there was overriding discontent with the production design, and not only were tickets very available, but some were being distributed free, according to reports from inside the company.

No doubt the depressed economy is significantly to blame , which only means the company, along with the rest of us, will, somehow, have to ride it out, The general director’s decision to cut from next year’s season two operas that were to have been imported, reducing the number of operas in that season, is undoubtedly appropriate. Too bad she felt it necessary this season to spend money importing the Washington Opera’s Otello. That production was not superior in any way to the production on hand (save for changes that needed to be made in the last scene). But done is done, spent is spent, and after Thanksgiving will be time enough to size it up and review Pamela Rosenberg’s first season of her own. A lot of folks have been nibbling at the edges of her cookie house already, of course.

One curious aspect of the season to date is the blandness of the San Francisco Symphony’s programming. Not a single striking work stands out. The Mahler Third was welcome of course, though hardly a newcomer, and certainly also Bartók’s neglected masterpiece, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Otherwise it was programming as usual, not particularly distinguished, giving the impression that the marketing department had a disproportionate say in its design. The Symphony is so well institutionalized and popular, it can just do what comes easily, and perform that very well. But leadership in the musical world? Initiative? No.

Given today’s circumstances, the completion of the now fully operational Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis was a most significant development. It means that UC Davis now becomes the cultural center of its region, while Sacramento, Home of the (basketball) Kings, shopping malls in every direction, is its suburb, at least as far as the performing arts are concerned. The Davis-Mondavi phenomenon is analogous in some respects to the decade-old New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts, which has helped turn the city of Newark around. With 135 performances this year, the NJCPA has the sixth largest budget of U.S. arts centers. Already, UC Davis has moved its programming of events up several notches, to an impressive new level.

If the Santa Rosa Symphony and Sonoma State University had to put its Green Performing Arts Center construction on hold, that $50 million project will come to pass in time. Now celebrating its 75th anniversary, the Santa Rosa Symphony will be around to open that Center. Despite all, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is pressing ahead with its new facilities downtown to become part of the Performing Arts Center. These projects go in waves and follow the economic cycles. Some in fact, wind up helping the economic climate as well as the morale of their communities, contribute towards turning things around. More’s the pity, the shame actually, for San Jose now that the bankruptcy of its symphony is legal and final. May the San Jose Ballet flourish in its attempt to keep the flame flickering with the debut of its Symphony San Jose Silicon Valley Saturday with Corigliano, Stravinsky and Dvorak At the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

We urge those who have a modicum of discretionary money to pitch in and help the performing arts organizations during these times. Grant-giving institutions, like so many individuals, the rest of us, have suffered losses in their net assets because of the depressed market. That means fewer and lower awards to the worthy applicants. At the same time, the general public is besieged with mail petitions for support not only from the established charitable agencies but from scores more, their numbers having proliferated like rabbits to judge from the mail received. It’s time to make choices.

If you can manage to save out a little and direct one of your year-end gifts to San Francisco Classical Voice, you will be helping us to survive and sustain the support we give to the whole spectrum of classical performing arts groups. We are as non-profit as non-profit can be, spending a high percent of our budget on the actual services we provide. Almost all of every contribution we receive goes directly to the writing, editing and publishing. Be an angel and help us help all those groups and performing enterprises you read about here. For the most part, we’re the only ones doing it. Be a part of the team.

Chanticleer has come through with a fine new CD, Our American Journey (Teldec 0927-48556-2). This "journey" progresses through 18 selections in performances so skilled, polished and refined, characteristically for this eminent group, that they are persuasive even of some the pieces that might otherwise come into question. The earliest are a traditional Appalachian tune setting of words from a 1745 English hymn, "Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah," (sung in unison but as if it were a chant in a cathedral) and two selections from the so-called Mexican Baroque, Credidi (Psalm 118, for double choir) and Versa est in luctum by Juan de Lienas and Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla. (Music from the Mexican colonial times had no impact on American music, the California Missions not having the musical resources to perform such polyphonic music.)

Five new works form the CD's centerpiece and performances of such are most important because Chanticleer is musically and technically equipped to meet the challenges of contemporary choral writing convincingly. The gifts of this ensemble could be used to invaluable effect in music more original, advanced and striking than these. Steven Stucky's "Whispers" (1979) sets a text by Whitman combined with the Ave verum corpus, drawing on Byrd's famous motet, liberally quoted. Also he brings in material of Orlando Gibbons. The effect of Stucky's style, romantic, poignant in tone, with the Byrd and Gibbons blending in, suggests Samuel Barber's music crossed with George Rochberg's retrospective procedures. Jackson Hill's "Voices of Autumn" sets a ninth century Japanese text, using stylistic techniques and the manner of traditional Japanese music. While a listener knowledgeable in that genre might consider this Japanoiserie, it is nonetheless haunting, and beautifully sung .

A work by a composer of Mohican ancestry, Brent Michael Davids, "The Un-Covered Wagon" is built of native American chant and ritual music, including vocalized sounds of shakers and drums, with nasalized tone, all sounding authentic and evocative. Davids' expressive "agenda," dealing with the pioneers and the westward expansion's tragic impact on the indigenous peoples, is manifest in the inserted quotation of the hymn "Faith of our fathers" sung in a shaky fast vibrato, like a surreal overlay. The point is made if in a literal depictive or documentary way, musically obvious. The Chanticleers do sound "Indian" and that is haunting too.

William Hawley's "Labbra vermiglie e belle" (to Tasso, one of "Tre rime di Tasso") is another musically retrospective piece, evoking the passion of the 16th century Italian madrigal but not in its contrapuntal manner but rather in wholly harmonic and romantic manner. The exquisite performances of these five works make one wish that the group take on music of much higher energy and imagination. There's a lot of it out there and Chanticleer could do it justice and really contribute to the choral repertory.

The balance of the CD is devoted to the highly elaborate, harmonically loaded and smooth arrangements of traditional and popular songs, four arranged by the Chanticleer director, Joseph Jennings, two by Gene Puerling, one by Jack Halloran. ("Wayfarin' Stranger, by the way, is not a folk song, but a song in the manner by John Jacob Niles). In their juicy styles, these are far-out and wholly entertaining. This will be a popular CD, deservedly.

In this issue, Anatole Leikin writes a discerning and knowledgeable review of Gwendolyn Mok's performance in Santa Cruz of Ravel's piano music on her period instrument, an Érard. With this same instrument, dating from the 1870s (Ravel's own Érard was built some 30 year later), she has recorded the complete piano works (in chronological order) on a CD with the ambitious title Ravel Revealed (Musicians Showcase MS 1070). She is a fine pianist with the skill and technique for the ambitious task but much on this recording doesn't speak to the subtleties of expression in Ravel, and seems dry, strict and literal, phrases not breathing, tiny rubatos and critical micro-pauses at climactic junctures always associated with the Ravel sensibility just not happening. Sentimentality in the normal connotation of the word is not wanted, but rather touches of the exquisite, fragile Ravel sentiment, a feeling for it.

My suspicions, confirmed by Leikin's observations, laid some blame on the Érard instrument itself. It does not seem to sustain the sound, the insufficient reverberation having to affect interpretation. Last Sunday, Mok played the same recital in San Francisco's Old First Church but on its Steinway, I would wager that in that overly resonant hall and on that modern instrument, her Ravel was much closer to the mark.

The high points on the CD are Mok's "Miroirs," definitely "Le Tombeau de Couperin," crisp and sure, and two late pieces I've never heard before, "À la manière de Chabrier" (a joke, no question as it takes off on Siebels' aria from Gounod's Faust) and "À la manière de Borodine." All in all, the CD's an interesting, often arresting summary of this great music.

On the subject of French music, Maria Tamburrino, longtime principal flute with the late San Jose Symphony, and pianist Roxanne Michaelian, combined in a delightful CD of the music of Debussy and Ravel (Tamarin, TAM 007). These are mostly transcriptions of course, mostly the well-known small piano pieces, but I was surprised and delighted at how effective these can be, played by a flutist with as generous and pleasing a tone as Tamburrino and a pianist as musical and sympathetic as Michaelian. Ravel's "Mother Goose" Suite, sounding as if it could have been written for the combination, was charming.

(Robert P. Commanday, the senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

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