“Pure, Organic” Dutchman to Land in Livermore
Olivia Stapp, world-renowned singer, and acclaimed stage and company director, is now in charge of Livermore Valley Opera’s 25th season celebration with The Flying Dutchman. Among the many memories guiding her in bringing the first Wagner opera to the company and to the Bankhead Theater:
Saw my first Dutchman in Bayreuth, with George London. It was a spellbinding, straightforward production, directed and sung right off the page. No additives, no industrialized, postmodern waste. I still treasure it in my being. I have seen many other productions since that I have been able to appreciate, but I am thankful that my first love affair was pure, organic, and straight from the local growers.
Although thoroughly Italian — “ethnically, voice-wise, garlic-driven, Dante-loving” — Stapp is also a committed Wagnerite, passionate about the “magnificent music” of Dutchman, “an opera which provides opportunity for great, creative staging to accompany the music and chorus, including stormy seas with wild ghost ships suddenly appearing. We have a brilliant creative team with a lot of experience in innovative lighting and magical stage visualizations.”
LVO Artistic Director Alexander Katsman, who conducts these performances, is enthusiastic about the cast: “Anybody who has seen and heard bass-baritone Philip Skinner knows how thrilling it is to see and hear him in any role, and now we get to experience his mastery in the defining role of the Dutchman.”
Skinner heads a cast that includes illustrious LVO veterans Marie Plette as Senta, Eugene Brancoveanu as Daland, David Gustafson 
LVO President Jim Schmidt says Dutchman’s “appeal is the music, and a psychological insight into the characters. All this is enhanced by the combination of shadowy intricate lighting and compelling videos that magnify the experience for the audience. We are thrilled to offer the community this magnificent opera to celebrate our 25th season.”
The opera will be performed four times: at 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 24 and Oct. 1; at 2 p.m. on Sept. 25 and Oct. 2.
Stapp appreciates how “this small company is throwing itself, heart and soul into the project. The volunteer builders have created a massive hulk of the ship, which is huge and yet climbable, designed by Jean-Francois Revon. Generally, there is an air of reverence for this project, and everyone feels it. Jeremy Knight is working on the projections and his work is always superb.”
The company’s 25-year history is also marked in an exhibit through Oct. 16 in the Pleasanton Museum on Main. On display are memorabilia from LVO productions, such as video, posters, costumes, and props, including swords, knives, Romeo’s poison bottle, and the ugly boar’s head from Die Fledermaus.
Rainbow Music with Jill Grove and Emil Miland
Dawn Harms’ Bay Area Rainbow Symphony is getting ahead of other orchestras, first out the fall-season gate, with a concert on Sept. 3 at the S.F. Conservatory of Music. The two soloists, mezzo-soprano Jill Grove and cellist Emil Miland, could just vocalize/tune up to attract a big crowd of devoted fans and admirers, but here they will perform great music.
Grove sings in Sea Pictures by Edward Elgar (1899), a five-song cycle to poems by Roden Noel, Caroline Alice Elgar (the composer's wife), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Richard Garnett, and Adam Lindsay Gordon. Miland is soloist in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1, a delightful alternative to the usual warhorses. It is a super-romantic work from 1873, three movements performed without pause, with the influence of Saint-Saëns-favorite Franz Liszt clearly evident. Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 closes the event in the BARS LGBTQ Composer & Performing Artist Series.
Harms, who begins her fourth season as the Rainbow Symphony’s music director, is ever-present in the Bay Area musical scene: The acclaimed violinist is a member of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, associate concertmaster of the New Century Chamber Orchestra, and co-concertmaster of the Oakland East Bay Symphony. Co-founder and music director of the Music at Kirkwood chamber music festival, Harms also teaches at Stanford University and elsewhere, and also records regularly at Skywalker Studios for movies and video games.
She says of the concert:
Jill Grove recently performed as the grandmother in the San Francisco Opera production of Jenufa and we are thrilled to have her join us in this season’s opening concert. Elgar’s Sea Pictures is a beautiful piece that is abundantly reminiscent of the ocean. The music imitates the ebb and flow of the waves and you can just imagine the fishermen telling their stories.
Emil Miland is freshly back from soloing at the Bear Valley Festival, and is a lifelong friend and colleague of mine in the San Francisco Opera. He is playing on a new cello, (to him anyway) a 1700 Grancino, which sounds wonderful and this piece is one of his favorites, so we’re in for a rare treat.
The Brahms is the last in the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony’s quest to perform all four symphonies. It is typically dark and romantic, and has many subtle and heart-wrenching melodies that will linger in your memory, and as an earworm for days. This one seems easier than No. 3, but is just as satisfying to perform and hear.
Since a special concert in honor of the victims of the Orlando massacre (to a full house), Harms has been thinking in terms of a “cause orchestra,” with “the community as our mission and visibility through artistic excellence, hoping to shed light on important issues of social justice.”
SFMusic Day to Offer 35 Ensembles in Free Events
SFMusic Day takes place on Sept. 25 in four halls of the S.F. War Memorial Veterans Memorial Building: Herbst Theater, Green Room, Atrium Theater, and Education Studio. Some 155 musicians in 35 ensembles will perform in free events between noon and 8 p.m.
Each year, SFMusic Day features a “Field Report,” an immersive programming theme chosen by a guest curator. The 2016 edition, assembled by musicologist Kai Christiansen, deals with “The String Quartet: the First 250 Years.” The program spans the history of the string quartet, featuring repertoire from 1760 to the present.
The S.F. Friends of Chamber Music created Chamber Music Day, now in its ninth year, to showcase a diverse cross-section of the Bay Area’s musical community and the performing groups SFFCM supports. Detailed schedule of performance times and venues for each ensemble will be posted on Sept. 1 on the SFFCM website.
Participating performers include Black Cedar Trio, Delphi Trio, Lieder Alive!, New Esterházy Quartet, Strobe, Sunset Duo, Vajra Voices, and the Kronos Quartet.
Among new-music ensembles: A/B Duo, martha and monica, Earplay, Friction Quartet, Phillip Greenlief's Barbedwire, Redwood Tango Ensemble, and Rova. There are a dozen jazz ensembles in the program.
The mixing of musical genres is an essential part of the project, says SFFCM Executive Director Dominique Pelletey:
Our goal is to create a welcoming environment where seasoned music aficionados and curious newcomers, individuals, and families, can all come here from across the region, and celebrate live music in our community, free of charge.
We intentionally blur the lines between music genres when we program the festival, in hopes that everyone will hear or see something that surprises and delights them in the course of the afternoon.
Unlike the unwritten etiquette for concert events, at SFMusic Day the audience is free to come and go, moving between venues and elsewhere in the Veterans Memorial Building. There are interactive, family-friendly activities, and food trucks are available just outside the building on Van Ness Avenue.
No reservations are necessary – “we encourage the public to just stop by, walk-in, and enjoy the live music,” says the announcement – but there is an Eventbrite site to RSVP, to help the organization gauge attendance. For the “volunteer responders,” there will be email updates and reminders.
In Brief: Gražinyté-Tyla Leads Birmingham Symphony; New Maestro for Old Vallejo Symphony; Celebrating ‘Lou's Centennial’
Gražinyté-Tyla Leads Birmingham Symphony
It may take more time to learn to spell Mirga Gražinyté-Tyla’s name than it took the Lithuanian conductor to rise to great heights. She was 29 earlier this year when she was appointed to lead one of Britain's major orchestras, and on Friday, she conducted her first concert as the new music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
This followed acclaim in Salzburg, Los Angeles (where she is Gustavo Dudamel’s associate conductor), and elsewhere. Among her predecessors in Birmingham: Simon Rattle (now with the Berlin Philharmonic), Sakari Oramo (BBC Symphony), and Andris Nelsons (Boston Symphony, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig).
New Maestro for Old Vallejo Symphony
Vallejo Symphony’s 85th season begins on Oct. 30 in Hogan Auditorium under the baton of Music Director Marc Taddei from New Zealand. The Sunday afternoon concerts are called “Morning - Noon – Evening” after the nicknames of three Haydn symphonies performed on each program: Nos. 6, 7, and 8, respectively.
Among featured soloists: pianist Sara Davis Buechner (Oct. 30), cellist Zlatomir Fung (Jan. 29, 2017), violinist Kay Stern (March 12); and special events in the Vallejo First Presbyterian Church on Oct. 9, 2016, and Feb. 12, 2017.
Celebrating Lou’s Centennial
Lou Harrison – known as Lou, rather than Mr. Harrison ‘round here – was born on May 14, 1917 (he left us in 2003). New-music organization Thingamajigs is pairing its own 20th anniversary with a year-long celebration of the composer’s centennial, beginning on Oct. 15, 2016.
Harrison was a beloved American composer and music educator with lifelong ties to California and the Bay Area. He, along with fellow Californians Henry Cowell and Harry Partch, played a pivotal role in expanding contemporary composition practice to include alternate tunings and non-western musical influences.
Events through the year will be held in Oakland and in Joshua Tree (Lou’s winter residence), including performances of commissioned works by a wide range of composers – including Brian Baumbusch, Dennis Aman, Paul Dresher, Daniel Schmidt, David Samas, Dylan Bolles, and Edward Schocker – in collaboration with various arts organizations.