- Dec 15 – Romeo et Juliet (Netrebko, Gunn, tenor TBA)
- Jan 1 – Hansel and Gretel (Schaefer, Coote, Plowright, Langridge, Held)
- Jan 12 – Macbeth (Guleghina, Aronica, Ataneli, Relyea)
- Feb 16 – Manon Lescaut (Mattila, Giordani, Croft, Travis)
- Mar 15 – Peter Grimes (Racette, Griffey, Michaels-Moore, Donald Runnicles conducting)
- Mar 22 – Tristan und Isolde (Voigt, DeYoung, Heppner, Schulte, Salminen)
- Apr 5 – La Boheme (Gheorghiu, Arteta, Vargas, Tezier, Kelsey, Gradus, Plishka, Nicola Luisotti conducting)
- Apr 26 – La Fille du Regiment (Dessay, Palmer, Florez, Corbelli, Zoe Caldwell)
Friday, October 19, 2007
Met HD Telecasts
The dates, operas, and partial cast lists:
Tears
Picking up a meme from Tim Mangan and Heather Heise, some music that makes me cry:
- The Schubert Quintet, first movement, second theme, the first time I heard it and occasionally since.
- Le Nozze di Figaro, too many moments to count, starting at the downbeat of the overture, and including some moments in the act 2 finale, Deh, vieni, that moment when Figaro and Susannah stop with the teasing, and the moment when the Count finally realizes he's been chasing the wrong, er, the right, woman around in the dark. Oh, and "Sua madre?!" Is it odd that the Countess's arias don't get me?
- Beethoven, Op. 111, second movement, variation, um, three? four?
- Tristan und Isolde, act 2, I'll find the measure or score marking when I have the score in front of me; it's pretty deep in the love duet someplace.
- God, how I hate to admit this, but that moment in Madama Butterfly when she brings out the child, and then again at "Tu, tu, piccolo iddio." I knew I was seeing a great performance the time I burst into tears during "Un bel di."
Sibelius
The Fourth Symphony is the most enigmatic piece of music I have ever heard.
I am curious: has anyone ever heard a live performance of his string quartet?
I am curious: has anyone ever heard a live performance of his string quartet?
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Anxiety Dream
I was singing in an opera. The first performance was approaching, and I couldn't find the conductor, the other performers, the members of the musical staff, the director. I think I had the score. I hadn't learned the part yet. The opera, apparently, was Salome, yes, the Strauss, though I didn't figure that out until someplace near the end of the dream. I was singing the part of the sweet young thing who should be the one to marry the male lead - a character like Micaela in Carmen.
Jump to a performance of the opera. We weren't in a real theater; there weren't real wings, there were no flies. It was more like a garage, a deep, low-ceilinged, rather wide garage. The audience wasn't inside; one side of the building was open and people were watching from outside, mostly sitting on the ground or standing, I think. There was a lot of concrete.
The company had the air of traveling gypsies, or maybe a community theater group. The production looked more like Fiddler on the Roof than Salome. I remember hovering around the curtains that passed for wings and watching the production with horror. I am sure I was visible from the audience sometimes.
I still didn't know the part, so they wouldn't let me go on, but that was fine, because the opera was Salome, and there is no sweet young thing who should marry the male lead. The soprano singing the title character was very bad.
Jump to a performance of the opera. We weren't in a real theater; there weren't real wings, there were no flies. It was more like a garage, a deep, low-ceilinged, rather wide garage. The audience wasn't inside; one side of the building was open and people were watching from outside, mostly sitting on the ground or standing, I think. There was a lot of concrete.
The company had the air of traveling gypsies, or maybe a community theater group. The production looked more like Fiddler on the Roof than Salome. I remember hovering around the curtains that passed for wings and watching the production with horror. I am sure I was visible from the audience sometimes.
I still didn't know the part, so they wouldn't let me go on, but that was fine, because the opera was Salome, and there is no sweet young thing who should marry the male lead. The soprano singing the title character was very bad.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Romance at the Met?
Email from the Met offers the following choices for their Connect at the Met program (singles, meet other singles!):
Also, I note, as one of the over-40s, that Iphigénie is not an opera that encourages romantic feelings.
- Die Zauberflöte, if you're in your twenties or thirties
- Iphigénie en Tauride, if you're in your forties and up
- Le Nozze di Figaro, if you're gay or lesbian
Also, I note, as one of the over-40s, that Iphigénie is not an opera that encourages romantic feelings.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Noise Comes to California, and to Google
Alex's book tour brings him to California this week and next. One stop isn't listed, and that's his talk tomorrow at Google.
I, of course, am in Los Angeles, working from our local office and attending Sibelius Unbound at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. We will be at opposite ends of the state for Alex's entire trip, as far as I can tell.
But! YouTube to the rescue!
All talks by speakers in the Authors@Google series are filmed and posted to YouTube. You can see talks by the 2008 Presidential candidates, so far including Clinton, McCain, Richardson, Paul, Edwards, and Gravel, presumably with more to come. (That's me asking the public health question in the Edwards Q&A period.) You can see authors from Cory Doctorow to Atul Gawande.
I expect Alex's talk will be posted there by the end of this week, and I will post the URL when the video is available.
I, of course, am in Los Angeles, working from our local office and attending Sibelius Unbound at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. We will be at opposite ends of the state for Alex's entire trip, as far as I can tell.
But! YouTube to the rescue!
All talks by speakers in the Authors@Google series are filmed and posted to YouTube. You can see talks by the 2008 Presidential candidates, so far including Clinton, McCain, Richardson, Paul, Edwards, and Gravel, presumably with more to come. (That's me asking the public health question in the Edwards Q&A period.) You can see authors from Cory Doctorow to Atul Gawande.
I expect Alex's talk will be posted there by the end of this week, and I will post the URL when the video is available.
Woof!
Matthew overcomes an obstacle while buying his copy of The Rest is Noise.
I have had my copy in hand since last Friday but I am determined to finish Battle Cry of Freedom before I start it. Well, I might be persuaded to read Noise first, because as Matthew says....
I have had my copy in hand since last Friday but I am determined to finish Battle Cry of Freedom before I start it. Well, I might be persuaded to read Noise first, because as Matthew says....
Friday, October 12, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
And Yet...
...having just posted that very long entry about what affects reviewers, I have to say that a series of truly maddening events Tuesday evening did not affect one bit my enjoyment of a spectacular chamber music concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall (Saariaho, Dallapiccolla, and you'll hear more about the concert eventually).
All Alone
[I started this review last March and never finished it; its existence just came up in the comments at oboeinsight, and so I am completing and publishing it now.]
A couple of years back, I started a never-completed blog posting called "Walking Out," about performances of various types where I'd left in the middle. There haven't been very many of these over the years. It's worth going into a little detail about what they were and why:
All this is by way of making the point that factors having nothing whatsoever with the quality of what you're seeing on the stage can affect your response to what you see. In a different mood, I expect I would have enjoyed that Rosenkavalier and at least liked the nameless play.
It's not much of a problem for most of us, but it's certainly something I think about when I review a performance, whether it's for SFCV or this blog. What kind of a mood am I in? What worries or discomforts might be affecting how I respond to a particular work?
All this is by way of disclaimer leading up to the comments below, about John Adams's new opera, A Flowering Tree, because I am alone among the reviewers in not having liked it very much.
I don't have a paid review out there someplace; this is it. A few factors undoubtedly influenced how I heard and saw the piece. My mother got pneumonia at the beginning of February; by the beginning of March, she was almost completely recovered, but February was very hard for me. I saw the Friday night performance of the Adams and was dead tired. On top of that, the shuttle trip up from Mountain View was longer and less physically comfortable than I would have liked. In short, I was not in the sort of mood I like to be in when I arrive at a performance
So, about A Flowering Tree.
My problems with the piece are largely extra-musical. I thought the music always effective and often extremely beautiful. But I hated the libretto and disliked the staging.
And here comes another disclaimer: you need to know that I saw A Flowering Tree from the second tier, far from the stage, and also that I had had to make a last-minute - VERY last-minute - ticket exchange. I wasn't even sure I'd make it past thedragons ushers in time for the curtain. None of the other reviewers had to contend with that and they were all a lot closer to the action, and the director's perspective, than I was.
But about that libretto.
I think that somehow John Adams doesn't believe in opera as a form, despite having written several masterly and widely-performed operas. He doesn't like operatic singing, for one thing, and evidently believes that amplification somehow changes or improves operatic vocal style. The orchestra in Doctor Atomic was amplified! He and Peter Sellars compiled the Doctor Atomic libretto from various sources that resulted in a mixed bag of a libretto, and he is one hundred percent responsible for the libretto of A Flowering Tree. [Note: the libretto was a joint effort by Adams and Sellars. See the comments to this posting.]
It's a libretto in which at least 40% of the text is assigned to a narrator; the two main characters each sing arias of sorts, but barely engage with each other vocally; a libretto in which dance plays as much of a part in the action as the singing. Is it an opera? Maybe my mistake was to take the assigned genre too seriously. But the text doesn't sound very singable, and it's pretty unpoetic. A friend who is in a position to know tells me that Adams evidently didn't know how the characters' South Asian names should be accented, and consequently, he consistently misset one of them.
Besides those issues, I didn't like the plot; I hated the way the female character was constantly being forced to transform herself from human to tree form, and the fact that apparently her husband was only turned on by her when she was transformed or in the act of transforming. (If this is inaccurate....I don't have the libretto in front of me.) I disliked the way she was referred to as a thing when she got trapped halfway through a transformation.
I didn't like the use of dancing, which seemed weirdly superfluous; I didn't like the amount of writhing on the floor.
In retrospect, I think that A Flowering Tree would work much better for me on record, and preferably not in English, so that I could ignore the text and staging and focus on the glorious music. But I also have to note that a trusted friend who saw A Flowering Tree from the orchestra section of Davies tells me that he found the dance very moving and loved the staging. Perspective really counts, and I can't say how much more I might have liked the piece if I'd seen it up close.
Read the reviewers here:
A couple of years back, I started a never-completed blog posting called "Walking Out," about performances of various types where I'd left in the middle. There haven't been very many of these over the years. It's worth going into a little detail about what they were and why:
- In high school, I walked out of The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, a French film and ostensible comedy that wasn't very funny and seemed anti-Semitic.
- La Favorite at San Francisco Opera. I dislike Donizetti, I hated Sonia Ganassi and her tenor, the production was ugly. I fled during the second act.
- The Merry Widow at SFO, an overblown production with a lead-footed and tin-eared adaptation by Wendy Wasserstein, plus, Flicka called in sick that day.
- Rosenkavalier at SFO. This begins to be more interesting, because the performance was perfectly fine (Mackerras/Fleming, Graham). We got there late (who would have dreamed Rosenkavalier started at 1:30 p.m., not 2 p.m.?) and had to stand through Act I without being able to see a thing; this put me badly out of sorts. Act II was so brightly lit that I had a hard time watching it, and I was still in a bad mood. So I decamped in the middle of the act.
- A play that will remain nameless, seen in London in 2004; it remains nameless because it will surely be performed in San Francisco some time, and why prejudice anyone else against it? I was tired and had had a hard time picking out a play from the Leicester Sq. discount ticket booth; the theater was Victorian, the seats tiny. The playwright's style got on my nerves; the set distracted me because I thought the actors were physically at risk. I left at the interval. Reading reviews later, I found that the second act was universally considered stronger than the first - so perhaps I'd made a mistake. The scary stage design has lasted through productions elsewhere.
- As Good as It Gets, at a point where I feared that both dog torture and homophobia were going to be big themes of the movie. Plus, I mostly can't stand Jack Nicholson.
All this is by way of making the point that factors having nothing whatsoever with the quality of what you're seeing on the stage can affect your response to what you see. In a different mood, I expect I would have enjoyed that Rosenkavalier and at least liked the nameless play.
It's not much of a problem for most of us, but it's certainly something I think about when I review a performance, whether it's for SFCV or this blog. What kind of a mood am I in? What worries or discomforts might be affecting how I respond to a particular work?
All this is by way of disclaimer leading up to the comments below, about John Adams's new opera, A Flowering Tree, because I am alone among the reviewers in not having liked it very much.
I don't have a paid review out there someplace; this is it. A few factors undoubtedly influenced how I heard and saw the piece. My mother got pneumonia at the beginning of February; by the beginning of March, she was almost completely recovered, but February was very hard for me. I saw the Friday night performance of the Adams and was dead tired. On top of that, the shuttle trip up from Mountain View was longer and less physically comfortable than I would have liked. In short, I was not in the sort of mood I like to be in when I arrive at a performance
So, about A Flowering Tree.
My problems with the piece are largely extra-musical. I thought the music always effective and often extremely beautiful. But I hated the libretto and disliked the staging.
And here comes another disclaimer: you need to know that I saw A Flowering Tree from the second tier, far from the stage, and also that I had had to make a last-minute - VERY last-minute - ticket exchange. I wasn't even sure I'd make it past the
But about that libretto.
I think that somehow John Adams doesn't believe in opera as a form, despite having written several masterly and widely-performed operas. He doesn't like operatic singing, for one thing, and evidently believes that amplification somehow changes or improves operatic vocal style. The orchestra in Doctor Atomic was amplified! He and Peter Sellars compiled the Doctor Atomic libretto from various sources that resulted in a mixed bag of a libretto, and he is one hundred percent responsible for the libretto of A Flowering Tree. [Note: the libretto was a joint effort by Adams and Sellars. See the comments to this posting.]
It's a libretto in which at least 40% of the text is assigned to a narrator; the two main characters each sing arias of sorts, but barely engage with each other vocally; a libretto in which dance plays as much of a part in the action as the singing. Is it an opera? Maybe my mistake was to take the assigned genre too seriously. But the text doesn't sound very singable, and it's pretty unpoetic. A friend who is in a position to know tells me that Adams evidently didn't know how the characters' South Asian names should be accented, and consequently, he consistently misset one of them.
Besides those issues, I didn't like the plot; I hated the way the female character was constantly being forced to transform herself from human to tree form, and the fact that apparently her husband was only turned on by her when she was transformed or in the act of transforming. (If this is inaccurate....I don't have the libretto in front of me.) I disliked the way she was referred to as a thing when she got trapped halfway through a transformation.
I didn't like the use of dancing, which seemed weirdly superfluous; I didn't like the amount of writhing on the floor.
In retrospect, I think that A Flowering Tree would work much better for me on record, and preferably not in English, so that I could ignore the text and staging and focus on the glorious music. But I also have to note that a trusted friend who saw A Flowering Tree from the orchestra section of Davies tells me that he found the dance very moving and loved the staging. Perspective really counts, and I can't say how much more I might have liked the piece if I'd seen it up close.
Read the reviewers here:
- Janos Gereben, reviewing the S.F.S. performance
- Joshua Kosman in the Chronicle, reviewing the S.F.S. performance
- Jeff Dunn in SFCV
- Richard Scheinin in the San Jose Mercury News. Rich didn't like some aspects of the production.
- Alex Ross on the Vienna premiere
Surrender
Appomattox reviews are appearing all over the net; more to come:
Jon Carroll in the Chronicle, not exactly a review
Updated, obviously, Oct. 11.
- Lisa Hirsch (me) at San Francisco Classical Voice
- Joshua Kosman in the Chronicle
- Anthony Tommasini in the Times
- Richard Scheinen in the Mercury News
- Janos Gereben at Opera West
- Jason Victor Serinus at the S.F. Examiner
- Georgia Rowe in the Contra Costa Times
- SFMike at Civic Center
- Cedric at SFist
- Edward Ortiz in the Sacramento Bee
- David Mermelstein at Bloomberg
- Mark Swed in the L.A. Times
- Philip Campbell in Bay Area Reporter
- Sean Martinfield in the S.F. Sentinel
- Robert Avila in the S.F. Bay Guardian
- Robert Bammer in The Reporter
- Patrick Vaz's exceptionally eloquent comments at The Reverberate Hills
Updated, obviously, Oct. 11.
I'm One
Not that you didn't know! But I join my gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered sisters and brothers in saying Happy National Coming Out Day!
Fans (Of Leonard Cohen, That Is) May Disagree
However, I am not one: Joshua Kosman on The Book of Longing.
P. S. Put down the coffee or water bottle before reading.
P. S. Put down the coffee or water bottle before reading.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Compare and Contrast 6
Opinions on Graham Vick's new Tannhäuser production at San Francisco Opera:
- Joshua Kosman, in the Chronicle and on his blog
- The Standing Room
- Elsewhere on this blog
- Anthony Tommasini
Monday, October 08, 2007
Hail and Farewell
News of two opera singer deaths, from opera-l -
- Gary Rideout, tenor, age 55. I haven't seen anything about the cause of death yet. He sang in SF quite a few times between 1989 and 2001, and I saw most of those appearances. I remember him best as Flavio in Norma one year (where he outsang the wretch attempting Pollione) and, more memorably, as Mime in Das Rheingold and Siegfried. He brought off the latter, a long and difficult role, with aplomb, again sounding far better than the ghastly Wolfgang Schmidt, who sang the title role.
- Giuseppe Valdengo, baritone, 93, best known for singing Falstaff on Toscanini's great recording of that great opera. I do not quite remember the circumstances, but he autographed postcards for a number of opera-l members some years ago, and I sent him a thank-you note in return.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Going South
Appomattox last night - watch SFCV for my review - and today I'm off to Santa Monica, where I will be working from my company's office there and covering the LA Philharmonic's Sibelius Festival. I will be blogging and emailing as usual.
Friday, October 05, 2007
As Long as We're Talking About Cellists....
Alex Ross has reported a couple of times on Jamie Foxx's cello lessons, and today Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll is talking about music lessons. He claims along the way that "Cello players frequently look suicidal."
He needs to go to the San Francisco Symphony more often, where Associate Principal Cellist Peter Weyrich always looks very happy to be playing the cello.
He needs to go to the San Francisco Symphony more often, where Associate Principal Cellist Peter Weyrich always looks very happy to be playing the cello.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Available
Tickets are available in every section for the premiere tomorrow night of Appomattox.
San Francisco Opera has provided a tiny preview - the production photos are already posted.
San Francisco Opera has provided a tiny preview - the production photos are already posted.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Compare and Contrast 5
Different strokes for different folks vis-a-vis Glass:
- Joshua Kosman's review in the Chronicle
- Janos Gereben in his SFCV Music News column (note the word "lullaby")
- My own SFCV review
Lullaby--Oh my!
Soporific is that guy!
To hear the same arpeggio
While down and down my eyelids grow
And DUH-duh rhythms thud and glug
Just makes me want to PULL THE PLUG!
Monday, October 01, 2007
Philip Glass at San Francisco Performances
Chambered Glass, Philip Glass, piano, Wendy Sutter, cello, Mick Rossi, percussion.
What to Do?
The Rest is Noise is short of its official publication date, but reviews are starting to arrive.
My policy as a concert reviewer is that I don't read read others' reviews until I file my own. I have a copy of Noise on order, and I will have lots to say, I presume, though no one is paying me to say it.
So, I will be collecting links to reviews in one place, the better to read them in one fell swoop after I'm done reading The Rest is Noise. Stay tuned!
My policy as a concert reviewer is that I don't read read others' reviews until I file my own. I have a copy of Noise on order, and I will have lots to say, I presume, though no one is paying me to say it.
So, I will be collecting links to reviews in one place, the better to read them in one fell swoop after I'm done reading The Rest is Noise. Stay tuned!
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