It's News to Me

Janos Gereben on July 5, 2016

Donald Pippin, 90, Prepares Pocket Opera’s 40th Season

Pocket Opera triumph: Rigoletto, with Maya Kherani and Igor Viera | Credit: Robert Selinske

At Pocket Opera’s terrific production of Rigoletto on Sunday, founder-director-godfather Donald Pippin still delivered his inimitable narration, but it was guest music director/pianist David Drummond who did such a great job leading the Pocket Philharmonic.

At age 90, Pippin is no longer the physical dynamo we have long known him to be, and his seat in the first row of the Legion of Honor’s Florence Gould Theater to make short round-trips to the microphone could be deemed a matter of logistics.

I have another theory: Pippin was sitting so close to the stage in order to experience the performance fully. At least, that’s what his rapt attention and broad smile indicated. Pippin loves opera so much that he can never be close enough to a performance.

Donald Pippin

Pippin founded the company four decades ago, already well into a splendid musical career and two decades after he started bringing chamber music and opera to the hungry i and Opus One in North Beach. Having since produced more than 90 original, sparkling English opera translations, Pippin is not sufficiently acknowledged for being a one-man Merola Opera Program. He has discovered and mentored scores of young singers.

Proof positive is the Rigoletto cast, headed by Pocket regular Igor Vieira singing the title role (and serving as stage director), and the sensational coloratura Maya Kherani as Gilda. Although Kherani is an San Francisco Conservatory graduate and obviously an enormous talent, it was Pippin (and Ensemble Paralèlle) who featured her locally before she relocated back to the East Coast.

Another outstanding veteran Pippin associate, company manager Nicolas Aliaga, used his out-of-town gig with the San Diego Opera (where he was assistant director for Jake Heggie’s Great Scott), to borrow that company’s lavish costumes for Rigoletto. Local costuming is handled by Paula Dodd Aiello.

Of singers he has advocated, Pippin says: “It’s been quite a trip: the adventure, misadventure, and romance of the operas themselves, but also seeing the vast number of singing careers Pocket Opera has launched over the years. For me, it’s been an unexpected joyride — at times perilous, always exhilarating.”

Veteran Pocket fans remember well when singers in street clothes held scores and pretty much stood in place, in the manner of a concert performance. In fact, the company’s own website states that even today “Pocket Opera is a theater of the mind and of the heart. Productions are staged with minimal costuming and without sets, using only the few practical props that are essential to convey the story.”

The fully produced, costumed, and staged (to the extent possible on the Legion’s tiny stage), Pocket performances are still operating on the level of the mind and of the heart, but today with much more in addition.

Even as he is closing the 2015 – 2016 season, Pippin is at work on the next season, ready to add to or repeat some of the company’s beyond-pocket-size repertory. It’s too early for anything more than speculation, but our well-informed sources speak of one of Donizetti’s queens and Pippin’s new translation of Die Fledermaus.

Pocket Opera’s current season is typically varied and features some rarities.

Return to top


Music Directors’ Salaries Hit New High

Jaap van Zweden set a new record for compensation. |

Drew McManus’ Adaptistration has just revealed compensation figures for orchestral music directors for 2013 – 2014. Why so late? Because the information comes from IRS reports that nonprofits file well after each fiscal year. No way around it — two-year-old figures are the most recent.

As McManus points out, the numbers do not show the complete compensation picture because they don’t include severance, deferred pay, bonuses, expense account, etc. In one specific case, a half-million-dollar annual payment to a conductor’s management company is not included.

Looking at the complete package, McManus says, the season being reported here shattered all previous records for music director compensation, thanks to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which paid Music Director Jaap van Zweden a whopping $5,110,538.

Van Zweden will leave Dallas when he takes over the New York Philharmonic in 2018. Despite rave reviews from some quarters, he is apparently not a favorite with numerous musicians in Dallas, and there are questions about both the source and expenditure of his salary.

The rest of the Top Ten:

  • Riccardo Muti, Chicago Symphony: $2,309,837
  • Christoph Eschenbach, National Symphony: $2,274,151
  • Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony: $2,105,920
  • Alan Gilbert, New York Philharmonic: $1,751,570
  • Gustavo Dudamel, Los Angeles Philharmonic: $1,661,493
  • David Robertson, Saint Louis Symphony: $1,043,313
  • Franz Welser-Möst, Cleveland Orchestra: $977,496
  • Marin Alsop, Baltimore Symphony: $914,747
  • Leonard Slatkin, Detroit Symphony: $800,957

(Boston Symphony was without a conductor during the period, after James Levine left in 2011. The music director now is Andris Nelsons.)

Return to top


 S.F. Ballet Already Hard at Work for 2017 Season

Justin Peck’s In the Countenance of Kings is on San Francisco Ballet’s next season | Credit: Erik Tomasson

True, not counting the December Nutcracker blitz, San Francisco Ballet will not perform in the War Memorial until 2017, and yet, as of July 5, classes and rehearsals began for the next subscription season. The dancers are working with Jirí Bubenícek to prepare for his Program 1 world premiere. Arthur Pita, who is choreographing a new work for Program 5, will be here next month, working with the company.

In other news from the Ballet:

 Principal dancer Davit Karapetyan was choreographer for the dance film 1915 Meran Vor Aprink (They Died So We May Live), about the Armenian holocaust, which last month received an Emmy Award by the San Francisco Northern California Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The short film was among more than 900 English and Spanish submissions in some 67 categories.

 Fathom Events and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts announced three encore performances of the Lincoln Center at the Movies film series. On Aug. 9, Helgi Tomasson’s Romeo & Juliet will be screened in theaters across the country. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater screening is on July 26, followed by Ballet Hispanico on Aug. 2. (An acclaimed theatrical version of Romeo & Juliet from London’s Garrick Theatre, produced by the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company, is screened in Fathom theaters on July 7.)

 C.F. Kip Winger’s Conversations with Nijinsky - which features Music Director Martin West with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra - reached #1 on Billboard’s Traditional Classical Albums chart and #3 on the Classical Albums chart last month. 

Return to top


Toland Vocal Arts Competition Winners

Toland Competition winner Cody Quattlebaum | Credit: Samuel Crossley

Winners of the third annual James Toland Vocal Arts Competition include two Juilliard-trained singers and two current participants in the San Francisco Opera Merola Program. A total of $20,000 was awarded in cash prizes along with performance opportunities at Oakland Symphony and Masterworks Chorale concerts.

Bass-baritone Cody Quattlebaum won both the Grand Prize and Audience Favorite awards and soprano Eva Gheorghiu received first place in the Tier II competition. Both have studied at Juilliard; Quattlebaum is currently earning a master’s degree in vocal performance and Gheorghiu recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music.

Sopranos Yelena Dyachek and Julia Metzler, tenors Arnold Livingston Geis and Alexander Taite, and bass-baritone Timothy Madden won the other awards. Quattlebaum and Dyachek, who also won the Masterworks Chorale Award, are participants in the Merola Program, and both are featured next month in a production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte.

Developed to support and nurture the emerging talents of artists as they begin a career in vocal performance, the competition attracted 150 applicants. Finalists performed before a panel of judges and audience members at Holy Names University in Oakland.

Return to top


In Brief: Mendelssohn Razzes Berlioz; March to a Sousa Operetta; KDFC Expands to the South

Mendelssohn on Berlioz: “Indifferent Drivel”

Tchaikovsky looms over the Mighty Five: clockwise from the top - Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Cui, Balakirev | Credit: Ruhrfisch/Wikipedia

Buzzfeed’s 23 Of The Shadiest Insults From Classical Composers is a venerable collection of insults that great composers hurled at their peers. They range from Tchaikovsky calling Brahms’ music “just some chaotic and utterly empty wasteland” to Rimsky-Korsakov denouncing the other four of Russia’s Mighty Five (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, and Mussorgsky), and 21 other not-so-bon mots. Enjoy and use with gusto in musical arguments.

March to a Sousa Operetta

When you hear the name of John Philip Sousa mentioned on the Fourth of July, you automatically think of the marches accompanying fireworks — Stars and Stripes Forever, indeed. And yet, the topic here is Sousa’s operetta, El Capitan, which will be performed on July 30 and 31 by the adventurous Lyric Theater of San Jose.

If you lived in New York at the end of the 19th century, you could have seen El Capitan in the theater during its four-year-long run, complete with its Act I finale, “Bah! Bah!” For now, the place is Fremont High School’s fine auditorium, where you’ll find out all about the viceroy of Peru disguising himself as the dead rebel leader, El Capitan.

KDFC Expands to the South

Classical-music station KDFC-FM is extending broadcasts to Monterey, Carmel, and Big Sur, pending FCC approval of applications. The frequencies will be 103.9 in Monterey and Carmel, and 95.9 in Big Sur. Call letters for both of the existing stations will be changed. The two stations’ formats currently are classic hits (103.9) and classical (95.9).

Return to top