Several Items Make a Post

Some not-random notes:

• SFS Chorus Director Jenny Wong has extended her contract with the orchestra through the 2028-29 season.
• San Francisco Girls Chorus has appointed Nicolás Lell Benavides as their 2025-26 composer in residence. (He is the composer of Dolores, which was a big hit at West Edge Opera this past summer.)
• Genevieve Graves is the new executive director of Volti (as of August; yes, I'm a little behind!). The press release noted that "She holds a Ph.D. from Santa Cruz University and a B.A. from Harvard University in Astrophysics, and brings over a decade of leadership experience across tech startups and data science consulting. She is an alumna of the Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir and played a significant role as that organization rose to a level of national and international prominence. She went on to found a chamber choir at Harvard and to sing with additional choirs in Boston, the Bay Area and Santa Cruz."
• Are you a French horn fan? Jesse Clevenger, who played with SFS for two seasons, is playing a couple of pieces of interest with the Vallejo Symphony this Sunday: the world premiere of John Williams's Serenade for Horn and Strings and Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, the latter with Salvatore Atti. The Britten is a great masterwork. Also on the program are works by C.P.E. Bach and Stravinsky. October 26 at 3 p.m. and I'd go if I didn't have a conflict.

Double Header

I have a busy musical schedule this week, of which Saturday's Kuhnau and Zelenka performance was just the first step. The concert went very well, and we had a big turnout, always gratifying. I wish we could do each program more than once, and I know everyone else in Chora Nova feels the same way. Our Board of Directors has been careful about our budgeting, and that is a good thing; when we have the financial means and audience to expand, we will.

Yesterday afternoon, I saw Mahler's gigantic and sonically overwhelming Eighth Symphony at the San Francisco Symphony. As I told a friend who had tickets for Friday, the opening is like a rocket taking off, and the intensity barely lets up for the next 90 minutes. I could not fault the chorus's beauty of tone, clarity, precision, or diction; hats off to the magician Ragnar Bohlin, chorus director for the last 18 months. Special props to MTT for conducting a coherent, well-balanced, beautifully-paced, very intense performance of an impossible piece. The sound of the orchestra in the first ten minutes of Part II will linger long in memory (those pizzicatos, those harps, the winds), as will the glorious end of the piece.

I mostly loved the soloists; Erin Wall led the way with brilliant tone, joined by the darker-voiced Elza van den Heever, who alone among the soloists looked like she was having a good time. Yvonne Naef impressed with her rich-hued tone and Katarina Karneus with her power and focus. Laura Claycomb was luxury casting for Mater Gloriosa's two lines. I'd love to see Wall, Naef, and Karneus in opera, and I'd love to see van den Heever and especially Claycomb again; David Gockley, where are you? Among the men, Quinn Kelsey was the star, singing with reserves of power, very fine diction and phrasing, and extremely beautiful tone. I can fault Anthony Dean Griffey only for being perhaps a bit light for his role. Of James Morris....well, his performance raises issues I will blog about in another posting.

This was the third Mahler 8 set since 2000. It is so expensive and time-consuming to perform that I have to think it will be a while until the next set, and that makes me sad. Here's hoping it's performed to the south at Disney Hall; I would fly down for it, no question.

Believe it or not, after the cheering had died down, I got on BART and headed to Hertz Hall, where I caught a screening, with live music, of Carl Dreyer's 1927 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. I had seen only one Dreyer film previously, his Vampyr, many years ago at the Pacific Film Archive. As the program notes said, Joan is on every film critic or scholar's short list of the greatest films ever made, and rightly so. The cutting, pacing, cinematography, and acting style must have seemed alien to contemporary viewers, because they are far more like a film made in the 1980s or 1990s than in the 1920s. It is one grim film, compressing Joan's trial and execution into just one day; it contains one of the most shocking screen images I have ever seen, and also one of the greatest acting performances, from Maria Falconetti, as Joan.

The accompanying score, Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, was composed in the early 1990s; it was performed by various UC Berkeley choirs and a group of instrumentalists. It is mostly minimalist, with a semichorus as Joan's own voice and the massed choirs singing...other text. It is a beautiful score, and so well integrated with the film that they really did seem to be one.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is available on DVD, and one of the soundtracks available on the DVD is the Einhorn score.

Mahler 8 Ticket?

I have a ticket to tomorrow's SFS Mahler 8 in hand, but after hearing the Bernstein recording, my partner, who declined to have me buy one for her a few weeks back, changed her mind. If you have a ticket you can't use, please let me know.

When Worlds Collide

We had a musical visitation at Google last week. Here's my writeup, in Janos Gereben's SFCV Music News column. I took photos, some of which may appear here or on my Flickr account once I get them off the camera, but the best were of Banda and the gorgeous Shayna.

Paul Newman

Rest in peace, Paul. You were one of the greats on screen and off.

Whoa, and Congratulations!

Not only is Alex Ross about to celebrate the paperback publication of The Rest is Noise, apparently he has recently gotten a call from the MacArthur Foundation!! Congratulations!!

Update, 1:15 p.m.: The new recipient talks about his plans, which include starting a new book next year.

Remember Him?

Alberto Vilar, investor and one-time heavy-hitting arts donor, goes on trial this week. The Times story details the charges; to the extent that he admits anything, he says the problems were "regulatory." We'll see how the trial turns out.

Update: I corrected the link and spelling of Vilar's name around 2:15 p.m. on Monday.

Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Farewell to The House that Ruth Built. 

I last saw a game there in the early 1970s, when it was  a fearsome  460 feet to center field (though not quite as fearsome as the original 490 feet). I have not been back since the mid-70s renovation.