Be in the Audience for S.F. Symphony Youth Orchestra's Performance in Ingolstadt
The touring San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra is opening the 25th anniversary season of the Audi Summer Concerts in Germany on Tuesday, and you can be in the audience without travel.
BR Klassik will live-stream the concert at 10:30 a.m. PDT on June 30, but if you miss the live transmission, look for it on the site, which will offer the film for three months.
The concert in Stadttheater, Ingolstadt’s Festsaal auditorium, features Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan and the SFSYO, under the direction of Donato Cabrera. The Audi Summer Concerts began in 1990, and have attracted over a quarter of a million music fans to Ingolstadt in the years that followed. SFSYO said it is honored by the invitation to open this season.
On the program: Mason Bates' Garages of the Valley, Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, and Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.
The 18-day tour takes some 100 Bay Area youngsters to perform in major concert halls in Berlin, Amsterdam, Prague, and elsewhere. The orchestra's concert in Milan on Thursday was a great success.
Hvorostovsky Treated for Brain Tumor
Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky — who has appeared with major opera companies around the world, in recitals with the S.F. Symphony, and in six S.F. Opera productions between 1996 and 2010 — has canceled all appearances through August while undergoing treatment for a brain tumor in London's Royal Marsden cancer hospital.
His Facebook account says: "Although his voice and vocal condition are normal, his sense of balance has been severely affected. Dmitri will begin treatment this week and remains very optimistic for the future. The doctors cannot say anything for certain until more detailed tests are conducted."
Hvorostovsky was born on Oct. 16, 1962, attending school in Krasnoyarsk (2,400 miles from the similar-sounding Krasnodar, where Anna Netrebko hails from). The baritone gained international fame in 1989 when he won the Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
'Gott!' Hitting the Solar Plexus
In dozens of live performances on two continents, I have never heard Florestan's "Gott! welch Dunkel hier!" (God, what darkness here), that most treacherous tenor entrance in all opera, bigger and better than from Brandon Jovanovich at Friday's S.F. Symphony concert performance of Fidelio.
What other role requires the tenor to open his mouth for the first time, produce a heartfelt and rafter-shaking high G, going into a messa di voce, and continue singing a heartbreaking lament? With Jovanovich, that opening note and phrase were powerful, intense, thrilling, perfectly expressing Beethoven's own despair over his descending deafness.
After such a performance, how could there be a complaint or, at least a suspicion? Here's yours truly, writing after the concert:
SFS management may deny or explain away ("it's only for spoken portions"), but I heard amplification ("enhancement") in Davies Hall, which not only goes counter to the essence of concert halls and opera houses — the last refuge of the human voice, free of electronics — but it was laughably unnecessary.
And so, after the weekend, came the official word from S.F. Symphony PR, quoting "one of our artistic staff":
There is absolutely NO amplification for the voices in Fidelio. Any microphones visible were for our recording purposes. The singers carried in both singing and speaking, because they are world-class vocalists trained to project their voices in large concert halls.
I yield to the official explanation, wondering if perhaps wooden panels upstage, behind the singers, might have been responsible for the slower than usual degradation of sound after some notes — usually a telltale sign of electronic presence.
She (It?) May Be Criticized for a Mechanical Performance
Not meant to be comical in spite of its name, Berlin's Komische Oper is presenting an opera featuring robots alongside humans, in a work called My Square Lady. The star of the work by and with the German-British performance group Gob Squad is Myon, an autonomous humanoid robot, on a voyage of discovery through the opera company's departments.
Without answers, the open-ended work explores questions such as what makes a person a person and how could an object or a “simple life-form” be transformed into a person? Using the framework of Shaw's play and Frederick Loewe’s musical, Gob Squad, Komische Oper, and the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory at Humboldt University in Berlin, Myon explores opera, as a "power plant of emotion" in all its facets.
"Whether Myon makes it as a human being — or even an opera star — will be demonstrated at the end of the season, on stage," says the announcement. The opera runs 2 hours 45 minutes with an intermission.
My Square Lady is not the first stage performance to feature a singing robot: Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata premiered I, Worker in 2008, followed by singing-dancing Asimo in 2010. And now there's AIST's HRP-4C fashion robot. Behold.