Oakland Friday Photo

Garden, Laurel District

May, 2017

Yes, I like Dr. Seuss plants.

Slatkin to Leave Detroit Symphony

And another surprise: Leonard Slatkin will leave the Detroit Symphony Orchestra after the upcoming (2017-18) season. He has been music director for ten years.

Updated list of known openings:

• Detroit Symphony Orchestra (when Leonard Slatkin leaves in 2018)
• Seattle Symphony Orchestra (when Ludovic Morlot leaves in 2019)
• St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (when David Robertson leaves)
• Dallas Symphony Orchestra (when Jaap van Zweden takes up his new post at the NYPO in 2018)
• Milwaukee Symphony
• Shanghai Symphony Orchestra
• San Diego Symphony
• Orchestra Nationale de France
• Vienna Staatsoper / VPO (Dominique Meyer not planning to appoint a WSO MD; his contract expires in 2020.)

Morlot to Leave Seattle Symphony

A surprise the other week: Ludovic Morlot, the very talented young Frenchman who has been music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra since 2011, will leave in 2019 when his contract is up. My impression from 900 miles to the south is that he has been extremely successful with the orchestra. He became MD after Gerard Schwarz stepped down amid controversy; he instituted a new late-night series and modernized the orchestra's programming.

I haven't seen anything about his plans, but presumably there's something in the works that we will hear about eventually.

Updated list of open spots:

• Seattle Symphony Orchestra (when Ludovic Morlot leaves in 2019)
• St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (when David Robertson leaves)
• Dallas Symphony Orchestra (when Jaap van Zweden takes up his new post at the NYPO in 2018)
• Milwaukee Symphony
• Shanghai Symphony Orchestra
• San Diego Symphony
• Orchestra Nationale de France
• Vienna Staatsoper / VPO (Dominique Meyer not planning to appoint a WSO MD; his contract expires in 2020.)

Marc Minkowski Profile in Early Music America

I interviewed conductor Marc Minkowski earlier this month for Early Music America's magazine. He's rehearsing Don Giovanni for San Francisco Opera, in what will be his SFO debut. It's his first visit to SF, so it's also his first local appearance. You can read the resulting profile here. Spoiler warning: contains horses as well as Mozart.

Bonus Friday Photo 2

Detail from a Pieta, LACMA

March, 2017

Bonus Friday Photo

Kauai, HI

April, 2017

Bonus photo because I ran a pair of photos twice this year.

Oakland Friday Photo

Crimini Mushrooms, Farmer Joe's Market

Productivity

William Baumol, an important economist,  died the other week at 95. You can read his NY Times obituary here. The Times is evidently not going to run the letter I sent them, so here's a blog post on the subject.

He is most famous in musical circles for Baumol's cost disease, which is explained in the obit as follows:

For example, he said, it takes exactly the same number of people and the same amount of time to play a Beethoven string quartet today as it did in, say, 1817. Yet the musicians who spent years studying and practicing — and still have to eat and live somewhere while doing that — cannot be paid the same as their 19th-century counterparts. Their wages, too, will rise, even though they are no more productive than their predecessors were. As a result, their work eventually becomes increasingly expensive compared with more efficiently produced goods.

That paragraph takes an extremely unsophisticated view of what musicians do. The violinist of 1817 had far fewer technical resources than the violinist of today, because of changes in how violin is taught, changes in expectations, and changes in the music professional violinists must be able to play today. The violinist of 1817 hadn't seen anything more difficult than Beethoven and Bach. The violinist of today has seen Paganini, Bartok, Wagner, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Stravinsky, Berg, and many, many other composers who make great demands on a player's technique.

This has raised productivity in an extremely important way: the player of today can learn music much, much faster than the player of 1817. That is an increase in productivity. To provide on example, the orchestra for the first attempt at performing Tristan und Isolde had something like 50 or 60 rehearsals before everybody threw in the towel and declared the opera unperformable. Contrast that with the San Francisco Opera orchestra, which had the following rehearsals for the company's 1998 and 2006 productions of the opera:

2006 

12 hours orchestra readings (4 rehearsals)

9 hours sitzprobe (3 rehearsals)

7.5 hours staging (2 rehearsals)

Dress rehearsal (1 rehearsal)

33.5 hours rehearsal

10 rehearsals

1998 

10 hours orchestra reading (3 rehearsals)

3.5 hours sitz (1 rehearsal)

6.5 hours staging (2 rehearsals)

Dress (1 rehearsal)

25 hours of rehearsal

7 rehearsals

(Grateful thanks to Teresa Conception and SFO Orchestra Manager Tracy Davis for providing these details.)

It takes about three to four weeks to stage an opera these days, and.....can you recall the last time a work was declared unperformable after 70 rehearsals? No? That's because of increases in musician productivity - even though it still takes four players the same amount of time to perform a Beethoven quartet as it did 200 years ago.

An Already-Interesting Don Giovanni Gets Even More Interesting

San Francisco Opera's upcoming Don Giovanni production was already intriguing, between the debuts of Ildebrando D'Arcangelo, Erin Wall, Stanislas de Barbeyrac, and conductor Marc Minkowski, and the return of Sarah Shafer, Ana Maria Martinez, Michael Sumuel, and Andrea Silvestrelli. Joshua Kosman had a cast-change article in the Chron last night and now I have the press release:

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (May 12, 2017) — San Francisco Opera’s 2017 Summer Season will include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the War Memorial Opera House beginning Sunday, June 4 through Friday, June 30 for eight performances. In a cast change announced today, Uruguayan bass-baritone Erwin Schrott and American bass Erik Anstine will sing the role of Leporello. Both artists are making their first appearances with San Francisco Opera and stepping in for previously scheduled bass Marco Vinco, who has withdrawn from the production for health reasons. Schrott is scheduled to sing the first six performances and Anstine the last two.

I did not much care for Marco Vinco's last appearance here, as Don Alfonso in Cosi fan tutte in a dispiriting performance of a great opera, so no regrets here, especially with Erwin Schrott coming in for most of the performances.

If you happen to check out my Cosi post, I should note that Ellie Dehn has proven to be a terrific singer in other roles; I loved her Musetta in the last Boheme and she was a standout in last year's Carmen. Maybe this particular role was just not a good fit. AND Claudia Mahnke, not so good in this Cosi, was a fabulous Fricka in 2015's Bayreuth Ring. Maybe they were done in by Luisotti? It is reasonable to expect that Marc Minkowski will be much better.

Oakland Friday Photo

May, 2016

Santa Fe Opera, 2018

Santa Fe Opera announced its 2018 season today:

• Candide, Bernstein, new production (Laurent Pelly), company premiere. Bicket/Rae, Shrader, Burdette, Schneiderman, Ott, Troxell.
• Madama Butterfly, Puccini, revival. Bignamini; Kaduce/Martinez, Gluekert/Guerrero, Marino, Pallesen
• Doctor Atomic, Adams & Sellars, new production, company premiere. Aucoin/McKinney, Bullock, Bliss, Arwady, Okulich, Mix
• The Italian Girl in Algiers, Rossini, revival. Rovaris/Mack, Swanson, Conner, Hendrix, Verm
• Ariadne auf Naxos, R. Strauss, new production. Gaffigan/Echalaz, Sledge, Morley, Majeski, Gilfrey

Most exciting, to me, is the new production of Doctor Atomic. I hope it won't be a duplicate of the SF production. After that, Ariadne. Might see Butterfly as it has been ten years. Candide, maybe, but there will be a good semi-staged version at SFS next season.