Free Opera at Its Richest
What a great lineup it was Sunday, at the San Francisco Opera in the Park. Read and weep (if you missed it ... though there is still a broadcast at 1 p.m. PDT on Sunday, Oct. 4, KDFC-FM, 102.1, www.kdfc.com). Conducted by Nicola Luisotti (who still took the Star-Spangled Banner andante, but faster than at the Friday opening night for Trovatore), the singers were Sondra Radvanovsky, Eva Podles, Marco Berti, Brandon Jovanovich, Quinn Kelsey (the "sub" for Hvorostovsky who sounded better than the Silver-Haired Fox with no time for us, the proletariat), Andrea Silvestrelli; and recent and current Adler Fellows Leah Crocetto, Daniela Mack, and David Lomeli.
It was an all-Italian program, plus a Mozart aria (in Italian, of course), mercifully short on Traviata until the concluding and inescapable "Libiamo."
David Gockley, general director and suave emcee, also arranged for the first rain here in many months to begin after the
18,347 audience members left the park. That's an approximate crowd estimate from this former police reporter with an eye for such.
Gockley continues — and improves upon — the recent SFO tradition of using many Adlers in mainstage productions. The upcoming Trittico — starring one of the greatest graduates of the San Francisco Opera Center, Patricia Racette, and conducted by alumnus Patrick Summers — is setting up a record that may never be equaled.
In addition to Crocetto, Mack, and Lomeli (three big stars in the making) singing in Golden Gate Park, there will be Catherine Cook (La Frugola, The Monitor, La Ciesca), Matthew O'Neill (Il Tinca), Tamara Wapinsky, Thomas Glenn, Meredith Arwady (Abbess), Heidi Melton (Nursing Sister), Austin Kness, Bojan Knezevic, Kenneth Kellogg ... among others. Racette, it was announced on Tuesday, will grace the cover of the October "Diva Issue" of Opera News:
This year’s cover diva is American soprano Patricia Racette, just back from a stirring success in Santa Fe Opera’s world premiere of The Letter. This season she sings all three heroines of Puccini’s Trittico in back-to-back productions at San Francisco Opera and at the Met. Scott Barnes tells readers about what has established Ms. Racette as one of opera’s most exciting — and most independent — sopranos.
Autumn at the Conservatory
The rest of 2009 has a good variety of both free and low-cost ($15-$20) concerts at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, including:
- Faculty Artist Series, on Sept. 25, with Ian Swensen, violin; Eric Zivian, piano; and Tanya Tompkins, cello
- The Conservatory Orchestra, on Oct. 3 and 5, conducted by Andrew Mogrelia, in music by Wagner and Sibelius (the Violin Concerto, with Tao Zhang as soloist)
- Master class by S.F. Symphony Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, on Oct. 4
- Blueprint concert with Artistic Director Nicole Paiement on Oct. 10: John Adams, Gnarly Buttons; Allen Strange, King of Handcuffs for tenor and ensemble; Ronald Caltabiano, Concertini; Darius Milhaud, La Mort d’un tyran
- Faculty Artist Series, on Oct. 11, with Mario Guarneri, trumpet, and the Guarneri Jazz Quartet
- Master class by Paul Katz, cello, on Oct. 13
- Master class by Roland Dyens, guitar, on Oct. 15
- Chamber Music Masters concert, on Oct. 15, Mozart, String Quintet in D Major, K. 593; Mendelssohn, Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 49
San Francisco Ballet on China Tour
As you're reading this, dancers of the San Francisco Ballet are packing for their Sept. 17 departure for the company's first tour of China. They will perform in Shanghai, Sept. 22-25; Suzhou, Sept. 28; and Beijing, Oct. 1-3.
The tour is part of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the 30th anniversary of the establishment of official diplomatic relations with the U.S.
Performances in China include Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’s full-length production of the Tchaikovsky Swan Lake, and mixed-repertory programs with George Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Tomasson’s On a Theme of Paganini and the Geminiani-Corelli Concerto Grosso, Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour (to music by Ezio Bosso), and Taipei-born, Marin-raised Edwaard Liang’s Distant Cries (to music by Tomaso Albinoni).
Local orchestras will be conducted by former Marin Symphony Music Director Gary Sheldon in the mixed repertory programs, and by American Ballet Theatre Principal Conductor Charles Barker in Swan Lake.
Waltzing Into the Symphony Season
At the San Francisco Symphony opening gala Wednesday night, an all-waltz first half yielded to Lang Lang after intermission. He delivered an effortless, brilliant performance of Sergei Prokofiev's 1921 Third Piano Concerto as if it were not one of the most difficult virtuoso works in all of music.
The young Chinese artist dazzled with astonishing dexterity, letter-perfect delivery, and utter ease. This was one occasion when Lang Lang showed off his titanic side, quite without an iceberg lurking around.
Between the breathtaking rush of the opening and closing movements, the slower, quieter middle Andantino could have used more singing lyricism, but here the orchestra, under Michael Tilson Thomas' knowing baton, supplied a gorgeous sound on its own.
And then, during the lengthy ovation, something unprecedented happened: an encore. The Prokofiev is not a work that calls for an encore, more for an exit on a stretcher.
But if you're Lang Lang and 27 (playing the piano since age 3), you will offer a Chopin Étude to the grateful crowd, the 1837 Op. 25, No. 1, called the "Aeolian Harp" (by Schumann) or "The Shepherd Boy" (by the composer). Here was a string of rapid arpeggios following the half-hour neoromantic storm of the concerto; the pianist's switch from the neoromantic storm to the early romantic filigree was both impressive and welcome.
The first half of the concert, not much longer than the brief concerto in the second half, was typical season-opening-lite, three symphonic waltzes that demonstrated an orchestra just warming up for the long haul of months of concerts.
The first work, Franz Liszt's 1860 Mephisto Waltz No. 1, opened in a rather messy fashion, but MTT soon pulled the musicians together, and briefly the orchestra laid a gossamer fabric beneath the flute imitating the nightingale against harp glissandos. Messy Liszt is no fun, but the great romantic composer is good to hear when played well — in one short performance, the audience got both.
Maurice Ravel's 1920 La Valse has been performed by MTT/SFS a number of times, and the Wednesday rendition sounded very much like "another performance" — smooth and pleasant, but without the magic this work can invoke.
The waltz from Richard Rodgers' 1945 musical Carousel is a first-class example of meaningful crossover between Broadway and symphonic music, but a piano trio or string quartet would have been more appropriate than a 100-piece orchestra. Withal, it too was an audience favorite.
The same program was repeated Thursday at the by-invitation All-San Francisco concert at Davies Symphony Hall, with Ilya Yakushev playing the solo in the piano concerto. The orchestral part of the concert was given at a free outdoor concert on Friday, at Justin Herman Plaza by the Ferry Building. On Saturday, the Thursday program served as the season-opener in Flint Center, Cupertino.
Multitasking Conductors
It used to be both fun and exhausting to keep track of Kent Nagano's super-jet-setting between his orchestras in Berkeley, Lyon, Manchester, Berlin, Los
Angeles, Munich, and Montreal — not all at the same time, but certainly not in a serial manner either. Nagano has settled down as music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and Munich's Bayerische Staatsoper — with guest conducting assignments and even an occasional return home, for Berkeley Akademie concerts.
But now we have another local notable, San Francisco Opera's just-departed Music Director Donald Runnicles, tripping the light fantastic. In addition to his new positions as general music director of Deutsche Oper Berlin and chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Runnicles remains principal guest conductor of the Atlanta Symphony, where he will lead the orchestra in works by Korngold, Strauss, and Mendelssohn Oct. 22-24. In Berlin, he will lead Der Ring des Nibelungen in April next year.
Oh, and speaking of Nagano's current home base, Runnicles will also guest conduct the Munich Philharmonic, Oct. 1-4, in works by Adams, Elgar, and Richard Strauss. In the summer, Runnicles is expected to continue heading the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming, with the participation of musicians from San Francisco.
Farkas on Vocal Recording
You can benefit from just a brief portion of Andrew Farkas' lecture about the good old days of unmanipulated voices, about the host of singers ruining their voices trying to imitate Caruso.
Farkas is coauthor, with Caruso's son, of My Father and My Family, a book righting such established wrongs as saying that the singer was 18th of 21 children; he was, in fact, third of seven, and heaven only knows how New Grove and other authorities could have miscounted so badly.
And, while you're thinking of Caruso, here's his last recording, the 1920 performance of "Crucifixus" from Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle — just a year before his tragically premature death at age 48; just think how well other great tenors performed in their 60s or even beyond.
Del Sol's Polish-Cuban-Mexican Debut in New York
Copresented by the Polish Cultural Institute, San Francisco's Del Sol Quartet will make its first appearance at Symphony Space in New York City on Oct. 1, playing quartets by contemporary Polish composers Pawel Mykietin and Pawel Szymanski. Also on the program: the New York premiere of Esencia, written for Del Sol by Cuban-American composer Tania León, through a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation; also a work by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz.
On Oct. 2, Del Sol will present a lecture-concert at New York’s Korean Cultural Service, featuring music by Paul Yeon Lee and others. The much-traveled quartet was hanging out on Fridays at San Francisco International Airport, participating in the You Are Hear project for other travelers. To read about the quartet's local plans, see the Web site.
Louvre Concert on Medici.TV — Live and Free
When Paris' Auditorium de Louvre opens its season tomorrow, Sept. 16, Medici.TV will telecast it live, without charge. The concert, beginning at 11 a.m. PDT, features violinist Akiko Suwanai and pianist Nicholas Angelich in sonatas by Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven. Suwanai is playing the Stradivarius Dauphin, once owned by Jascha Heifetz.
Morris to Direct Opera From Stoppard Play
Choreographer Mark Morris will direct a public workshop of scenes from a new opera by Herschel Garfein (of Places to Live and American Steel), adapted from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
In the title roles: Keith Phares (San Francisco Opera, Glimmerglass Opera) and Matthew Burns (Met, NYCO). Performances will take place Nov. 21-22 as part of OPERA America's 2009 National Opera Week. The venue is the Mark Morris Dance Center, across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
This week, the Mark Morris Dance Group is performing in Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. The program includes Empire Garden (set to Ives' Trio for Violin, Violoncello, and Piano, S. 86), Visitation (to Beethoven's Cello Sonata No. 4 in C major, Op. 102, No.1), and what is Morris' best work in my book, V (to Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat, Op. 44), which had its first performance in Berkeley shortly after 9/11, even before the official world premiere in London, on Oct. 16, 2001.
The upcoming San Francisco Symphony Mahler Festival, Sept. 16 through Oct. 3, brings up many memories. Long before he arrived to head the orchestra here 14 years ago, Michael Tilson Thomas served the cause launched by his mentor almost a half century ago. Leonard Bernstein was responsible for making the monumental, complex, magnificent music of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) popular in this country.
In the past decade and a half, MTT has led SFS in performing and recording every one of Mahler's symphonies: nine complete — and lengthy — works, the unfinished No. 10, and the symphony-all-but-in-name Song of the Earth.
Of the many Mahler experiences for San Francisco audiences, the sizzling, all-of-a-piece 1998 performances of the Fifth Symphony, and of the Sixth Symphony in 2001, stand out. The latter was an unforgettable concert, with a gut-wrenching impact a few days after 9/11, leaving the audience in tears, feeling numb, assuaged — and experiencing sorely needed catharsis after that great tragedy. At their best, conductor and orchestra can perform miracles with Mahler, in the same class with orchestras in Vienna and Berlin that "own" the composer. One evening, I heard this in just the first few bars of the Fourth Symphony.
Right up front, where most interpretations have a little "burp" in the release after the introductory phrase, the San Francisco performance was smooth as silk, firmly, logically connected, instead of consisting of two disparate elements. Multiply that tiny bit a thousandfold, and you have great Mahler.
MTT says the most "extraordinary" thing about Mahler's work is that
... it just seems to come from nowhere. He was only 17 when he wrote the piano quartet, and you can already hear the kind of depression, melancholy, turbulence, yearning, and a kind of odd, ungainly awkwardness that would be lifelong characteristics of his style.Highlights of the upcoming three-week, 12-concert event are complete performances of the First and Fifth symphonies, Songs of a Wayfarer, with baritone Thomas Hampson, the Rückert Lieder, with mezzo Susan Graham, and a program called Origins and Legacies, being filmed for the SFS Keeping Score television series.This early piece is an extraordinary example of someone who as a teenager was so in touch already with the basics of his musical language ... that was a clear expression of tremendous loneliness and frustration. It is the true outcry of an outcast ... and highly tinged with Jewish music.
Soon after taking over the Symphony here, MTT — who had performed Mahler with orchestras around the world — headed a major festival of the composer's works in 1998. The conductor then spoke of programming "veritable musical documents of society, full of themes coming from churches, Jewish weddings, marches, pop songs — all cinemalike, fascinating, exciting, a glorious adventure."
That festival presented two of Mahler's last three symphonies, the enormous Eighth and the sublime Ninth. The Eighth, called "Symphony of a Thousand" because of the massive forces it requires, is an MTT favorite:
It's such a huge, probing work, an explosion of joy, full of spontaneity and humor. True, it has immense pathos, but it also has tremendous humor, especially in the second movement. It's a difficult piece to shape because ... the first movement is like an enormous rush of jubilation. A great gasp is what it actually is.But MTT's "favorite Mahler of them all" is the Ninth Symphony:It is a kind of 20-minute-long "aaaaaaaahhhhhh," and then suddenly it's over. The last movement is so huge it is difficult to take in all of its details. Or, perhaps because of its details it is difficult to perceive its real shape. But the main point of this movement is something so simple and yet so powerfully symbolic.
... a supremely graceful piece about the beauty of life at the point of death, a leave-taking in endless, generous, gorgeous development, a real vision of life gently ebbing away. There is acceptance, quietness, resolution, ultimate simplicity, and beauty.A special aspect of the festival 11 years ago was the participation of Henry-Louis de La Grange as a lecturer. Now 85, La Grange has spent a lifetime studying
the composer, and his Mahler biographies run thousands of pages — a project probably never to be finished. It takes true journalistic impudence to ask such a dumbed-down question as "Why Mahler?" from La Grange, but I did, and the answer was illuminating:
I discovered Mahler in New York in December 1945. I arrived there with my mother and father (who had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and liberated six months earlier by U.S. troops in Germany).Think about it: A lifetime of passion for Mahler and La Grange is still finding whatever he is listening to "the most fascinating of all." During the upcoming Mahler Festival, it may be your turn to start — or enrich — a lifelong affair with a great composer.We were staying in an apartment next door to Carnegie Hall. I rushed out to look at the announcements and saw that Bruno Walter was conducting the N.Y. Philharmonic. I worshiped Walter, whom I had heard conduct Fidelio and Don Giovanni at the Met before the war. I bought a ticket and heard the Mahler Ninth two evenings later.
An immediate revelation? Not at all! My experience of the repertory was limited to what was played on the French Radio during the occupation, and nothing had prepared me for Mahler! What struck me most was the Finale. "Crazy music," I thought, and I wasn't quite wrong.
Two months later, I heard the Fourth Symphony, with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Desi Halban, again Walter conducting. The very fact that I attended this second concert proves that I was already fascinated. This time the "neoclassical" appearance of the first movement and the idea of a Song-Finale shocked and fascinated me.
By 1946, when I went to Yale, I had already bought half the available Mahler records and then I bought the other half in New Haven. They were heavy and bulky albums to carry around but it did not take me long to decide that Mahler was the greatest of the unknown and underrated composers ... or the most underrated of the great composers. In any case I quickly decided that Mahler needed someone to write about him and to find out the available facts.
Still today, I find Mahler's provocations, his excesses and paradoxes, an essential part of his greatness. How could anyone go that far at that time?
I have just spent a whole week listening to — and writing about — the Finale of the Seventh Symphony. It is not my favorite Mahler piece but it is surely one of the most fascinating of all!