Museum Mondays Resumed

Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Attendant Angels

Luca di Tommè, active 1355-1389, Siena

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

July, 2024

 

The First of Many?

Christian Tetzlaff

Photo: Georgia Bertazzi

Christian Tetzlaff has cancelled his upcoming performances in the United States, owing to the Trump administration's policies. That includes seven performances by the Tetzlaff Quartet–one was a San Francisco Performances appearance–and three concerto performances with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He's on the Chicago Symphony schedule for 2025-26. I guess he will be their first program change.

I expect there will be more of these. News coverage:

• New York Times (gift link)
• The Violin Channel
• S.F. Chronicle
• Alex Ross

If you have a ticket to the cancelled SFP concert, you have the following options:

·         Apply the value of the tickets toward another performance

·         Convert the value of the ticket purchase into a tax-deductible donation to San Francisco Performances

·         Request a full refund for the ticket purchase 

  Patrons may contact SFP regarding their chosen option:

·         By email: tickets@sfperformances.org (preferred)

·         By phone: 415.677.0325 (Mon-Fri, 11am - 5pm)

The Pigeon Keeper at Opera Parallèle

Craig Irvin (Thalasso), Shayla Sauvie (Kosmo), Angela Yam (Orsia), Bernard Holcomb (Pigeon Keeper / Teacher / Widow Grocer) in David Hanlon and Stephanie Fleischmann's The Pigeon Keeper

Photo: copyright 2025 Stefan Cohen, courtesy of Opera Parallèle

Opera Parallèle's The Pigeon Keeper, by composer David Hanlon and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, is the first work I've heard from the Opera for All Voices project. San Francisco Opera was originally one of the lead companies, along with Santa Fe Opera. The other participating companies were Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Minnesota Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Sarasota Opera and Seattle Opera. 

Here's crucial paragraph from SF Opera's 2017 press release about OFAV:

The consortium is working together to commission new American operatic works that are flexible in scope and scale, with the potential to be performed in smaller venues and off the main stage while striving for rich storytelling and artistic integrity. The first new work, composed by Augusta Read Thomas with a libretto by Jason Kim, will receive its premiere in 2019 at Santa Fe Opera. The second commission, by composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist Kimberly Reed, is slated to premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2020. Complete information including cast, creative team and performance schedule will be announced at a later date. Additional commissions will be chosen through an open invitational and in partnership with a panel of esteemed jurists.

The 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons were curtailed by the pandemic, obviously. Ruth Nott, who headed SF Opera's Department of Education in 2017,  left the company at the end of 2019. She's now managing director of Opera Parallèle. 

SF Opera never performed the Kaminsky. I'm sorry about that, because I liked the music for Kaminsky's As One, with librettist Kimberly Reed and Mark Campbell, despite the issues in the libretto.

OFAV has as part of its remit creating operas for all audiences (of all ages) and diverse subjects, with each opera on a small scale, making them financially accessible. They are also supposed to be short.

These constraints are certainly a challenge to the librettists and composers. They have to write operas that eschew the musical impact that you can have with a big orchestra–think about the scale difference and emotional impacts of two great operas, Dido and Aeneas and Les Troyens–and the dramatic impact of, well, traditional tragic operas that include such subjects as murder, rape, kidnapping, etc. They're still supposed to be serious operas on significant subjects.

I think that Hanlon and Fleischmann did an excellent job, particularly within those constraints. As I noted in my review, I felt as though the opera could have an alternative, bigger orchestration that would give it even more impact. I'd be very interested in hearing the first opera they wrote together, After the Storm.

Review round-up (to be updated later this week):

• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV and SF Chronicle
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler

 

International Women's Day

On International Women's Day, I can't do any better than point to composer Pauline Oliveros's 1970 NY Times essay on women composers. I am driven slightly mad by it, because what she said 55 years ago is still so true today. Take this, for example:

At last, the dying symphony and opera organizations may have to wake up to the fact that music of our time is necessary to draw audiences from the people under 30. The mass media, radio, TV and the press, could have greater influence in encouraging American music by ending the competition between music of the past and music of the present.

JFC, some things never change. Audience members who were under 30 in 1970 are now 55 and up. Then there's this:

The second trend is, of course, dependent on the first because of the cultural deprivation of women in the past. Critics do a great deal of damage by wishing to discover “greatness.” It does not matter that not all composers are great composers; it matters that this activity be encouraged among all the population, that we communicate with each other in non-destructive ways. Women composers are very often dismissed as minor or light weight talents on the basis of one work by critics who have never examined their scores or waited for later developments.

It's infinitely harder to get anywhere in classical music if you're a woman than if you're a man, from getting your music performed if you're a composer to getting into an orchestra or getting a principal position if you're an instrumentalist to getting a highly visible job if you're a conductor. Just think about how many top level orchestras in the U.S. have or about about to have women as their music directors: three (3). 

Those are the Atlanta Symphony, where Nathalie Stutzmann is music director; the Buffalo Philharmonic, an orchestra that seriously punches about its budget, where JoAnn Falletta has been music director for many years, following in the footsteps of Lukas Foss, MTT, and other fine conductors, and the New Jersey Philharmonic, where Xian Zhang is shortly moving to the Seattle Symphony. Do you think a woman will replace her? I suppose we can hope that one or more of the LA Phil, SFS, and Cleveland might hire women, not that I'm holding my breath over this.

And of course, you are way more likely to be harassed or raped than a man when you're in school or in a male-dominated organization like an orchestra.

Updated, March 9, because I forgot Stutzmann at Atlanta.

Don Giovanni at Livermore Valley Opera

Titus Muzi III as Don Giovanni and Meryl Dominguez as Donna Anna

Photo: Barbara Mallon

I reviewed Livermore Valley Opera / LVOpera's production of Don Giovanni over the weekend, and liked it a lot. 

This was my fourth Don Giovanni since the SF Opera production in 2022. I might give the opera a break for a while, but it certainly has been interesting. I avoided Don Giovanni for a number of years because it is too easy to present it as a parade of great arias, without enough drama. The SFO production in June, 2017 was like that; an awful set and terrible direction left the cast adrift, and that production was a "reboot" of an earlier production that I gather was even worse.

• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler

Joshua Kosman takes note of the boldness of David Walton's Don Ottavio. That he had only "Il mio tesoro" surely had something to do with this. The opera is tighter when Ottavio has just one; in last year's excellent Merola Opera production, the tenor sang "Dalla sua pace," also to excellent effect. (I will note that both of these singers were better than the tenor I saw last year in Santa Fe!)

Two performances remain, March 8 and 9, both at 2 p.m.

 

Josh Marshall on the Current Situation

Words of wisdom:

I’ve said this a number of times. We’re embarked on a vast battle over the future of the American Republic, in which the executive and much of the judiciary is acting outside the constitutional order. That battle is fundamentally over public opinion. We’re in a constitutional interregnum and we are trying to restore constitutional government. The courts are a tool. Federalism is a big, big tool, the significance and importance of which is getting too little discussion. But it’s really about public opinion. And that means it’s about politics. The American people will decide this. That’s what this is all about. Waiting on the courts is just a basic misunderstanding of the whole situation. 

San Francisco Symphony: Added Concerts

 

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

SF Symphony has added some concerts:

• Saturday, March 8, 2025, 7:30 p.m. $50-$200. SF Musicians for LA: A Benefit for Fire Relief. Edwin Outwater conducts music of Copland, Rachmaninoff, Dvořák, with the Symphony Chorus and Garrick Ohlsson, piano. Net proceeds from all ticket sales will be split evenly and donated to two vital organizations providing essential relief services: 
• Entertainment Community Fund
• Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles: ReBUILD LA

• Friday, June 20, 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, June 22,  2 p.m.  $29-$79. Verdi Requiem and choral works of Gordon Getty. James Gaffigan conducts. Soloists Rachel Willis-Sørensen, Jamie Barton, Mario Change, and Morris Robinson. Esa-Pekka Salonen is conducting in Germany that weekend. (The prices for this program are so low that I am guessing Getty is subsidizing the performances.)

Turn It Up or Turn It Down.

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Usually, when you hear a performance that's substantially different from what you're used to hearing, you think one of two things:

• Wow, that was great, I've never heard it done that way before and it really made sense!
• WTF that was just wrong-headed.

This week's San Francisco Symphony program, conducted by Robin Ticciati and heard on Friday, February 28, fell into the second bullet, at least to my ear. 

I was apparently the only person in the room who disliked what Ticciati and debuting pianist Francesco Piemontesi did with Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. Let's start with a couple of decisions that Ticciati made: he used a smallish orchestra, and had the strings play with minimal vibrato.

It just did not work. It dulled the orchestral sound considerably; the orchestra didn't come close to filling Davies; the piano, a standard 9-foot Steinway was louder than the orchestra a lot of the time. 

I don't want the orchestra overpowering the piano and I don't want the piano overpowering the orchestra. This was just wrong. If you're going to perform this concerto with the orchestra playing in a HIP-ish style, use a fortepiano, not a Steinway, and find a smaller venue, too. Herbst is right down the block.

Moreover, I thought the orchestral ensemble was not good at their first entry; I thought that Piemontesi's phrasing was eccentric; I thought that he smudged the decorations at the beginning of the third movement and elsewhere; I thought he lacked wit. It's a great piece and didn't come over as one.

What to say about Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony? It is a big, wooly piece with - again, to my ear - a loosey-goosey structure, which Ticciati did not succeed in tightening up. The whole thing felt loose around the edges, without a lot of forward momentum and pulse except in the second and fourth movements. And it is long. By the end I certainly understood why conductors have trimmed it in various ways over the years, not that I think they should.

Updated, March 5: Elsewhere, Joshua Kosman heard what I heard. The S.F. Chron and SFCV apparently decided that Joshua Bell conducting the Orchestra of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and working with SFCM students was more important to cover.

Previously:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle.  "It was Ticciati’s slack leadership that made Widmann’s concerto sound so gray and meandering, when the music is actually anything but." That is...what I heard last night.
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV.