Proofreaders Wanted, at Several Musical Organizations

No, this is not a want ad. It's a plea for sanity.

• San Francisco Opera's E-Opera email newsletters have twice referred to Simon Boccanegra as "highly prized." It's pretty clear, from context, that they mean highly-praised.
• "Gut grabbing vocal heft" - is that the best possible description of Dmiti Hvorostovsky's voice?
• Seattle Opera's web site currently refers to operas being performed in January through May, 2009, as the "Spring 2008" operas, here and here. Oops! After I clicked a link in email I received from Seattle, I thought I'd somehow missed a program I would like to see.
• The page for Erwartung and Bluebeard's Castle says "By Bela Bartok" at the top of the page. Scroll down and you do find Arnold Schoenberg's name, but why should you have to scroll?
• Yes, I did email the Seattle Opera webmaster about those little gaffes.
• Printed matter from the San Francisco Symphony is unclear on how to style one of Schubert's symphonies. I've ranted about this before: that rather long symphony is not The Great Symphony. It is the Symphony No. 9, "Great C Major," or "Great" C Major. In context, it probably should have been styled The Great C Major Symphony, but two mailings from the SFS are wrong in two different ways! The idea is to distinguish it from the "Little" C major symphony, a shorter work from the composer's youth.
• Lastly, I got a beautiful printed brochure in the mail last week from one of the Bay Area's major concert presenters. The type is largely 6 point sans serif white on black or mauve backgrounds. Please, have pity on those of us who never had 20/20 vision to start with. 

Jorge Liderman Memorial Concert

Bob Schneider passes along the word that the University of California, Berkeley, Music Department is presenting a concert in memory of Professor Jorge Liderman, who died tragically in January. The program will include the following works by Liderman:

Tropes V (Jackie Chow, piano)
Tiempo Viejo (Florian Conzetti, percussion)
Aires de Sefarad (Duo46, Matt Gouldd, guitar; Beth Ilana, violin)
Antigone Furiosa (film clip)
Swirling Streams (Berkeley Contemproary Chamber Players)

Hertz Hall

Sunday, September 14, 2008

2 p.m.
Tickets not required.
Event Contact 510-642-4864

A Sad Day, A Great Day

Del Martin died yesterday, age 87, after a long and well-lived life as a lesbian rights activist. You can find obituaries here and here.

A founder of the Daughters of Bilitis, the pioneering lesbian organization; the author of several books; the first openly lesbian NOW board member; the loving partner for 55 years of Phyllis Lyon, who survives her, Martin will be missed by, well, everyone who knew her or her work. She lived long enough to marry Phyllis; their wedding, this past June, was the first legal marriage in California of a same-sex couple, as well it should have been. 

Deepest condolences to Phyllis. Rest in peace, Del - you fought the good fight and won a lot of battles for millions of people.

Some hours afer Del's passing, Barak Obama received the Democratic nomination as the party's presidential candidate. Over the last few days, Senator Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Senator Henry Reid, Senator Joe Biden (the nominee for vice president), President Bill Clinton, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have all made kick ass speeches at the convention. Senator Obama accepts the nomination tonight. 

It is a great day, and it's also a matter of considerable shame that protestors at the convention are confined to "free speech areas." 

Shades of the Bush presidency! Hello? Are you turning Republican? This is no way to start a new era.

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival

This looks like fun!

The essentials only, copy/paste from an emailed press release:

For Immediate Release:
Press Contact: Matt Davignon
P: 510-268-8213,
mattdavignon@gmail.com

THE SAN FRANCISCO ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL 2008
San Francisco's only festival dedicated to electronic music, featuring five nights of performances by emerging and internationally renowned artists.

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival 2008
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 through Sunday, September 7, 2008
Project Artaud Theatre, 450 Florida St, San Francisco, CA
Wednesday/Thursday/Friday/

Saturday performances start at 8pm
Sunday performance starts at 7pm

Further Information: www.sfemf.org
Full calendar listing at bottom of page.
For web photos, please visit http://www.sfemf.org/PressMaterials2008.html

At the Mostly Mozart Festival

The Times reports that Osmo Vanksa, besides conducting at Mostly Mozart, is playing clarinet in a couple of pieces. Bravo to him, I say.

He is also conducting the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, with Kari Kriikku as the soloist.

I'll tell you, if I were programming this year's MMF, and there was a certain emphasis on Finns as both performers and composers, and I had Kari Kriikku handy, I wouldn't have him playing the Mozart. I'd program Magnus Lindberg's fabulous Clarinet Concerto, which has been spectacularly recorded by Kriikku, with Sakari Oramo at the helm. Yeah, Mostly Mozart, but why the Spectacularly Overexposed rather than the Spectacular?

(Speaking of Finns, wish I could be at this program at the Kaplan Penthouse.)

"Wrenching and Gravely Beautiful"

Anthony Tommasini reviews La passion de Simone.

Ancillaries

The upcoming premiere of The Bonesetter's Daughter has inspired a host of ancillary events, which are listed on a convenient page at the San Francisco Opera web site. I remain skeptical, but the book has plenty of fans, so have at these events, and the opera itself.

Mmm-hmmm.

Today's SFCV Music News column brings to mind something Steve Smith wrote last month in a Times review:

During a panel presented recently at the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, the American Music Center and the American Composers Forum reported preliminary findings from “Taking Note,” a survey of American composers. The study was undertaken to help those organizations better serve their constituencies. According to its findings, the average American composer is a highly educated 45-year-old white male.

Music News includes an item saying that Composers, Inc. has seven world premiere commissions on its 2008-09 season, by Sean Friar, Clint Needham, Robert Greenberg, Frank La Rocca, Jeffrey Miller, Martin Rokeach, and Allen Shearer. (The latter composers are five of the six artistic directors of Composers, Inc.) The group will also present works by Ann Callaway, Edmund Campion, Matthew Cmiel, Cindy Cox, Donald Crockett, Richard Felciano, Derek Jacoby, and Robert Muczynski during the upcoming season.

Saariaho in the Philadelphia Inquirer

David Patrick Stearns writes a primer on Saariaho's music, a fine piece that makes an excellent complement to Steve Smith's article in the Times.

Brewer at the Met (and Everywhere Else)

Sieglinde notes:

[Christine] Brewer travels all over Earth as the world's stopgap dramatic soprano, yet she hardly stops by the Met to show off. Finally we get her, but only for one Ring cycle (the early bird special on Saturday matinee) and one extra Walküre. Why such limited exposure? Deborah Voigt's people must play real hardball, Sieglinde's telling you.

Why such limited exposure? Because Brewer is big and makes no bones or apologies about it. In this HD broadcast universe, the world's greatest living Wagner soprano isn't going to get much exposure at Peter Gelb's Met.

Or, I fear, at David Gockley's San Francisco Opera. Keep your eye on the casting for our Ring cycle.

Note to Peter Gelb

Alienating subscribers - who are typically an arts organization's strongest and most consistent supporters - is never a good idea. Telling them it's for their own good and some day they'll understand why is patronizing. Saying the problem is that your organization, one of the richest in the world, didn't communicate certain changes well enough is adding insult to injury.

Personal to Daniel J. Wakin: describing the Metropolitan Opera Guild as a "support group" doesn't conjure up quite the image you want. Try "education and outreach group" instead.

Update: La Cieca is soliciting and publishing accounts of readers' experiences at the cattle call ticket exchange.

Trust Me on This.

It's a big mistake to take David Brooks seriously.

Saariaho in the Times

Just in advance of the U.S. premiere of Kaija Saariaho's La passion de Simone, at the Mostly Mozart Festival in NYC, Steve Smith has a portrait of the composer in the Times.

Bitter Laughter

George Bush, heard on TV during a news break:

Georgia is a sovereign nation. Its territorial integrity must be respected.

Robert Bowman at the Hillside Club, Berkeley

Nice program here:

Robert Bowman
In Recital
Friday August 29th at 8:00 PM
Admission $15 ($10 for HSC members and Seniors)
The Berkeley Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street
Berkeley 94709
Info: (510) 845-1350

The Berkeley Hillside Club is delighted to welcome back to our stage keyboard artist Robert Bowman in a concert of keyboard music spanning three centuries, including works by Prokofiev, Mozart, Scarlatti, Gottschalk, and Brahms. Don't miss this wonderful artist performing in our acoustically-excellent hall!

The Artist:

Keyboard artist ROBERT BOWMAN has performed extensively on the West and East Coasts of the United States in solo and chamber ensemble recitals, numerous appearances with orchestra, and on radio and television since 1960. He has also performed in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Mexico, and Prague (Czech Republic). He has also performed and lectured for state conventions and local branches of the Illinois State Music Teachers, CAPMT, MTAC, AGO, and Northern Nevada Music Teachers Association.

He has taught on the music faculties of U.S.C., Eastern Illinois University, and California State University, Chico where he was coordinator of the keyboard program for 33 years and Certification Program in Keyboard Pedagogy for the past 7 years. He was awarded Professor Emeritus in 2003 and fully retired at the end of the Spring Semester 2008 after teaching half-time for the past 5 years.

The Program:

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Sonata #1 in F Minor, Op. 1: Allegro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Sonata #8 in A Minor, K 310
Allegro maestoso
Andante cantabile con espressione
Presto

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869)
Le Bananier (Chanson Nègre), Op. 5
Morte!!(Lamentation)
Souvenir de Porto Rico (Marche des Gibaros), Op. 31
Le Banjo (Esquisse Américaine), Op. 15

Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757)
Sonata in F major, Kk. 44, Allegro
Sonata in C minor, Kk. 84, Presto
Sonata in F minor, Kk. 238, Andante
Sonata in F minor, Kk. 239, Allegro

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Sonata #3 in F minor, Op. 5
Allegro maestoso
Andante. Andante espressivo - Andante molto
Scherzo. Allegro energico avec trio
Intermezzo (Rückblick / Regard en arrière) Andante molto
Finale. Allegro moderato ma rubato

Adriana Mater Roundup

A number of reviewers and bloggers have weighed in on Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf's Adriana Mater:

• My SFCV review; I thought it an absorbing and beautiful masterpiece.


• Brian at Out West Arts felt the same way about it that I did, and says it eloquently and with fewer words.


• Anthony Tommasini agrees with us in the Times.


• Steve Smith has a long and loving aside about Adriana in a blog posting otherwise occupied with New Albion Records.


• Sarah Bryan Miller, writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is unimpressed. (She's wrong about the reason the singers were amplified; the opera was never so loud that they couldn't have been heard over it. It's never as loud as, say, Elektra or Salome. The singers were amplified so some electronic processing could be done, and it was Saariaho's decision to do so.)


• Anne Midgette has praise with some qualifications in the WashPost.


• Steve Robert Allen was mostly positive.


• Lawrence A. Johnson terms the libretto stiff and talky, but finds the music majestic.




• Alan Riding's 2006 Times review of the Paris premiere


• Alex Ross's New Yorker review of the Paris premiere

San Francisco Opera on WFMT

San Francisco Opera's 2007-08 season will be broadcast on WFMT's national network, with weekly airings from August 23 through October 11. Full details are here.

Opera in Tempori Belli

Reviewing Adriana Mater, by Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf, Santa Fe Opera, July 26, 2008.

Update: That should be "...in Tempore Belli." Oh, well!

All Things Must Pass

Every time I've seen the great Frederica von Stade's name on a program in the last few years, I've breathed a sigh of relief and bought myself a ticket. I've been behaving as though each appearance might be her last.

She now has a date, or at least a year, for those last appearances. She will retire in 2010.

I gather that her management company has advised performing arts organizations of this. I hope we'll have a few more chances to see her in the Bay Area over the next couple of seasons.

Where I've Been

I can't apologize for the long silence. The week of July 13 to 18 was what I usually call "system release hell," though it wasn't exactly a system release. It was hell because I had two solid days of meetings right in the middle. No kidding, and that's what made the release hell, not the release itself.

After that - well, I went to Santa Fe, where I had a very good time and saw Radamisto, Billy Budd, and, most importantly, Kaija Saariaho's newish Adriana Mater.

I haven't got much to say about Radamisto, which I loved: wonderful singing and conducting, a great opera, directing with a few questionable decisions, but not many. If you like Handel, and you're anywhere near Santa Fe, go see it.

I have plenty to say about Billy Budd, which I will leave for its own blog posting. If I were reviewing it, I'm sure I'd be the odd man, er, woman, out.

I had lots to say about Adriana, and in fact my review is up already. Go to the San Francisco Classical Voice home page and look in the sidebar; no direct link because the URL will change tomorrow when the full new issue is published. I mentioned a symposium about Adriana; I have extensive notes and will blog about it too.

Gypsies, Nobles, and Nuns

Expectations have a lot to do with how I respond to a particular performance, especially when it comes to opera. Only big companies can hire the best singers in the business, who can cost $10,000 and up per performance.

Not that the big companies always hire the best, and not that hiring the best invariably results in a good or great performance. San Francisco Opera's last run of Verdi's Il Trovatore was a thoroughly dispiriting affair, with a dreadful production (a giant horsehead on stage, the first of many), an underpowered Leonora, a dull Manrico, a scattershot di Luna, and a conductor who was asleep the night I attended. Only the Azucena of Dolora Zajick, sung with great spirit and voice to spare, began to meet the requirements of the score.

So it's with quite a bit of pleasure that I can report that Festival Opera's current production of the opera is in many ways more satisfactory than what I saw five years ago in San Francisco. It's by no means perfect, and I have plenty of nits to pick, one of them quite a sizable nit. The four principals sing with energy and enthusiasm; they've all got healthy, young, well-matched voices; the production doesn't have any inexplicable stupidities. The direction is unfussy and unpretentious, if not particularly illuminating or urgent; the unit set does well enough in representing palace, fortress, prison, and monastery. (Okay - the tree in scene two, which looked as though it was going to fall on the singers, is ridiculous and has got to go.) The orchestra plays well, balances between the orchestra and singers were fine (though at times the coordination was not); the conductor moved the music along. The chorus sang accurately and with a nicely-blended sound, though they need more coaching in Italian.

The large theater at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts is a grand venue, one of my favorites in the area. It seats around 900 or 1000, so you are never very far from the stage. Singers don't have to force or bellow, and their movements and expressions don't have to be exaggerated to make an impact on audience members sitting 250 feet away. The pit is big enough for a full orchestra, but positioned partially under the stage, so that the instrumentalists never overwhelm the singers.

You could do worse than this. A lot worse.

At the same time, there are plenty of problems with the individual singers, each of whom is to some degree unsatisfactory for dramatic or vocal reasons or both. I'm surprised that more of these issues weren't worked out during the rehearsal period; perhaps some of them will be mitigated past the opening performance.

I missed last year's Un ballo in maschera, which starred both soprano Hope Briggs and baritone Scott Bearden. I'd heard Briggs before, in an impressive debut as the Duchess of Parma in Busoni's Doktor Faust at San Francisco Opera. That role suited her well, and she has the right kind of voice for a middle-Verdi heroine: a warm, vibrant, sound without register breaks and with reasonable flexibility. She sang the cabaletta "Di tale amor" with good trills and clean runs, though at a moderate tempo. She sounded lovely for most of the evening, excepting some soft high notes, which seemed thin and artificially produced. She ran into more serious trouble in "Tacea la notte," where she finished her cadenza in the wrong key. And "D'amor sull'ali rosee" lacked repose, at least in part because the soprano overacted and overdramatized the music. Moreover, she didn't have a good feel for how to fit the trills into the rhythmic line, or for the line of the cadenza.

Scott Bearden, who sang di Luna, presents a conundrum: he has won a couple of vocal prizes, and yet what I heard was by no means exemplary. Oddly, my initial reaction was to wonder whether he might be a heldentenor in disguise, considering the bright timbre and size of his baritone. The color is all wrong for a Verdi baritone, and so was the all-too-frequent forcing. He sang coarsely and inexpressively throughout the performance, with blurry Italian pronunciation. "Il balen" sounded as if Bearden was complaining about Leonora rather than meditating on her radiant beauty, and something very bad happened, pitchwise, to the first verse.

Much less problematic were both Noah Stewart's Manrico and Patrice Houston's Azucena. Houston sang with consistent beauty of tone, and she has the range and power for Verdi's mad gypsy; the high notes came easily, though, like Bearden's baritone, her voice seems too brightly colored to pass for the classic dark tone of an Italian dramatic mezzo. And, alas, she has no trill.

Stewart has a beautiful, full-bodied voice, but is he really a spinto? He sounded perfectly lovely in the more lyrical passages (the offstage serenade; "Ah, si, ben mio"); nonetheless, I heard forcing and tightness at the top of his range, a worrisome thing in a young singer. But Festival Opera should find him a new costume: Stewart looked like something out of The Court Jester, and I expected him to ask about the pellet with the poison at any minute.

For all these complaints, in the end the performance was quite a bit greater than the sum of its parts. Hearing Trovatore in a small theater performed by singers with some guts and vocal heft is a treat, so take yourself to Walnut Creek. The remaining performances are on July 15 and 18 at 8 p.m. and on July 20 at 2 p.m.

Levine Endorses Pilates

Okay, the big news of the day is actually that James Levine is having a kidney removed, because of a cyst, and will miss the balance of the Tanglewood season. He sounds especially frustrated by missing the Elliott Carter celebration concerts, and who can blame the maestro for that?

Geoff Edgers' report includes this bit:

He returned that summer to Tanglewood after losing 35 pounds thanks to what he said was a changed diet and exercise on a recumbent bicycle and through Pilates.

After doing Pilates for nearly a year, I can report that my back is quite stable and almost completely pain-free. Has there been any weight loss from the Pilates? Noooo. Maestro Levine's weight loss is more likely to have resulted from the exercise and changed diet.

I hope his back, which has long been troubled by sciatica, is being helped by the Pilates, and I wish him a swift recovery from the upcoming surgery.

Compare and Contrast 10

The reviews are piling up for Die Soldaten:

• Anthony Tommasini likes it ("a miraculous realization of an opera once deemed unperformable").


• Martin Bernheimer likes it. ("It is good. Very, very good.")


• Anne Midgette is unimpressed. (Detailed arguments too complex and interesting to be summed up or excerpted.)


• Greg Sandow calls it "laughably bad."


• Alex Ross is impressed and overwhelmed.


• John Simon hated it.


• Everyone in the comments section here loved it.

Well! I wish I'd been able to hear this. I'll reread all the reviews and try to reconcile them. I wonder which of these folks will be at Santa Fe for Adriana Mater, which I will have my own opinions about.

What Terry Said

Go, run, see the gigantic J.M.W. Turner retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

I caught this show at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, in November, 2007. It is overwhelming; the cumulative impact of 150 Turners in one place can't be overstated. You might want to go twice and take in half the show each time.

The retrospective is at the Met through September 21, 2008. It's the first Turner retrospective in the United States - this I find amazing - and many of the works are on loan from British museums and private collections. I don't expect to have another opportunity to see them all in one place again.

Critics, Journalism, and the Internet

It's been a bad year for music journalists, with critics losing their jobs left and right, through buyouts, layoffs, and resignations. Some have been replaced; Tim Page by Anne Midgette, Peter Davis by Justin Davidson. Most have not: Bernard Holland, Melinda Bargreen, Alan Rich, and others. Davidson's spot at Newsday was not filled.

Martin Bernheimer has an article in the Financial Times, dated tomorrow, that discusses the role of critics as arbiters of excellence and maintainers of standards, and the trend away from respect for expertise toward the view that everyone is a reasonable critic. Along the way, he mentions the Internet as one reason for the decline of journalism and professional critics.

I think a number of the points he makes are on target, but others are truly arguable. The consolidation of the news media has been going on for decades, since the relaxation of rules on how many types of media a particular company could own in a particular market. Some newspapers are losing money - for reasons including their own failure to move their advertising onto the Web, pronto - but many others are profitable. They're just not making high enough profits for their corporate masters and Wall Street; therefore, their staffs get cut. (Justin Davidson provides some context in a Musical America article. Justin, about that last point you make: San Francisco Classical Voice is independent of both arts organizations and print journalism.)

I have to especially argue with this point in Martin Bernheimer's article:

A primary cause of our imminent extinction must be the internet. An impatient generation is succumbing to the free and easy lure of computer-enlightenment. Not all those who cover the arts in old-fashioned print are paragons, badness knows. Still, most have sufficient education and/or experience to justify their views. On the web anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal. Some sort of criticism may indeed survive the American media revolution, but professional criticism may not.

Just how familiar is Mr. Bernheimer with the classical music blogosphere? The bloggers I read can be loosely classified as follows (and apologies to those of you I've omitted from this incomplete list):

• Professional critics such as Alex Ross, Joshua Kosman, Jessica Duchen, Steve Smith, and Tim Mangan


• Composers and composer/critics such as Elaine Fine, Kyle Gann, Steve Hicken, Matthew Guerrierri, and the whole gang at Sequenza 21


• Performers such as singer/arts administrator Sidney Chen, pianist Jeremy Denk, conductor Kenneth Woods, and singer Anne-Carolyn Bird


• Consultants such as Drew McManus and Greg Sandow. Oh, did I mention that Drew has a past as a performing musician and Greg is a composer and critic?


• Well-informed and educated listeners such as A.C. Douglas, Patrick Vaz, and sfMike.

These voices are provide invaluable viewpoints, even the ones I spend too much time arguing with. I cannot say that any of them are in any way "impersonating" experts; the non-pros are perfectly clear about the fact that they're not professionals. I'd really like it if Mr. Bernheimer could point out some people who are impersonating classical music experts or taking jobs away from professional critics. And I hope he'll keep in mind the fact that the blogosphere is more like a salon than like a newspaper: a bunch of people sitting around exchanging opinions with themselves and their readers.

He's not the only critic who has gone astray writing about classical music on the Internet recently. The anonymous bloggers at The Detritus Review had a fine time taking apart an article by Mark Swed. And Out West Arts reports that newly-minted blogger Alan Rich said recently that there are "no important music blogs on the West Coast at this time." Welcome to the blogosphere, Mr. Rich, and check out those of us who've been here a while.

Update, July 5: A.C. Douglas has a few words on the same subject.