Probably Pays Peanuts, But...

I am lucky enough to have a job I like a whole lot at a company that has been stable through the recession. But the following job opening crossed my inbox yesterday, and man. I always said the only job that could drag me away from my current gig would be working for an opera company. This would be mighty tempting if I were un- or underemployed.

Editorial Assistant, Grove Music/Oxford Music Online

Have a degree in music and also tech-savvy? Are you analytically minded and do you enjoy untangling complex problems, finding efficient solutions, working with databases, and learning new skills? The world's largest university press has an opening for an innovative and highly organized editorial assistant to support the Grove Music program.

The editorial assistant will play an essential role in the ongoing development of both our print program and Oxford Music Online. Specific areas of responsibility include administrating projects from acquisition to production, preparing content for publishing online, managing workflows and writing content for public pages, liaising with individual scholars and academic editorial boards, editing content, research editing, and general administrative support.

Strong research and writing skills, ability to communicate diplomatically, a keen eye for detail, organizational skills, and the ability to multitask are essential. A degree in music is required. Familiarity with (or at least no fear of learning) HTML, XML, and image-editing software is a definite plus. 1 year minimum of work experience desired.

Submissions for advertised and posted positions should be sent to the email or street address below. Electronic mail responses to positions are also accepted.

Human Resources Representative
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Fax: 919-677-1177
Email: humanres at oup.com

When applying for any position, please state the position you are interested in, salary requirements and the source of the advertisement.

Please, no phone inquiries.

Oxford University Press is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Race to the Bottom

There's a strike at the Mott's apple juice plant in Rochester, NY. The company wants to cut workers' hourly wages, reduce 401(k) contributions, and increase the workers' share of health insurance costs. That's not uncommon in this economy, when so many companies are doing badly and losing money.

What's different here is that the parent company of Mott's, Dr. Pepper Snapple, is profitable, to the tune of a $555 million profit last year. The company claims that the workers at the Mott's plant are overpaid compared to other workers with similar jobs in the Rochester area and also that "as a public company, Dr Pepper Snapple Group has a fiduciary responsibility to operate in the best interests of all its constituents, recognizing that a profitable business attracts investment, generates jobs and builds communities.”

Dr Pepper Snapple increased its dividend by 67% this year, so we can safely say that they're looking out for their shareholders.

As one of the striking workers says, it's disgusting that they want to cut pay to the people who're doing the work. Note to Mott's: when you're profitable, you should be rewarding your workers, not cutting their pay.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up, Illinois Division

Remember Rod Blagojevich, the former Governor of Illinois? Former because he was arrested on a nice array of corruption charges, which included an attempt to auction off the Senate seat formerly held by President Obama?

The jury hung on 23 of 24 counts, convicting him on one. The judge has declared a mistrial in those 23 counts, and he will be retried on them.

And just in case you don't remember Blago, here are the relevant bits from today's Times report on the verdict:

On Dec. 9, 2008, Governor Blagojevich, then in his second term, was awoken around dawn at his Chicago home and arrested. Federal prosecutors accused him of turning his state office into a criminal enterprise to benefit himself, citing what they said were brazen efforts to get political contributions in exchange for legislation to help a local pediatric hospital, state funds for a school, a law to benefit the horse track industry and, most infamously, for Mr. Blagojevich’s choice to fill Mr. Obama’s Senate seat.

Government agents had secretly recorded some 500 hours of telephone calls with Mr. Blagojevich and his advisers, and a portion of those recordings became a crucial element of the prosecution’s case.

Found in the Chron

Two items of interest in the Chronicle in June, 2009, which wound up in a never-published posting - why, I don't know:

• Joshua Kosman's review of the third Schubert/Berg program, which consisted of Berg's Chamber Concerto and Schubert's Great C Major Symphony.
• Jonathan Khuner is interviewed by Edward Guthmann. In the article, he's called a prompter, and the interview focusses on that aspect of his work, but I think the correct term for his position is assistant conductor. His job includes conducting rehearsals and, I would bet, coaching singers, as well as prompting. He has performed the same functions at the Metropolitan and at Bayreuth. I've heard Jonathan conduct many times at Berkeley Opera, and, you know, he is damned good. I wish he'd get a full run of something at San Francisco Opera; he's better than a fair number of guest conductors I've heard there. The little anecdote about Lotfi Mansouri, who tried to get rid of prompting and prompters, is telling. Sheesh.

Messe de Tournai

My review of EUOUAE's Messe de Tournai program is up at SFCV now.

This didn't make it into the review: some of the music was sung from original notation, some from transcriptions. Some singers appeared to be singing from memory, some from music.

One of the men read his music from an iPad.

A Tale of Two Concerts

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm a big fan of California Bach Society. I've been attending their concerts for some years now, starting when Warren Stewart was their director. Warren was (and still is, with Magnificat) a brilliant programmer. Paul Flight, who is in his third season, puts together great programs and has led Cal Bach to an even higher vocal standard than the chorus had previously reached. (Full disclosure: I have sung with Paul most seasons since 2005, in several choruses.) Cal Bach sings very much with one voice, a pure, blended, and balanced voice. The chorus's sound is focused, clean, and clear, almost always perfectly in tune; it's the most consistently gorgeous tone I've heard from a non-professional chorus.

This approach works beautifully in most of the music Cal Bach sings, especially in the sacred music that makes up two-thirds or three-quarters of their programming. This past season, in a program of selections from Monteverdi's madrigals, it was less than perfectly successful. As usual, the sound was exceptionally lovely, transparent and vibratoless; as usual there was good unanimity of attack and dynamics, though it must be said that in this context, some fumbled attacks at the start of a few madrigals really stood out.

But I have to question the whole enterprise of singing madrigals, an intimate form, with a 30-voice choir in which individuality has, of necessity, to be suppressed. Monteverdi's madrigals set passionate and sometimes heart-rending texts, such as the series written when the composer was grief-stricken over his wife's death. As much as I admired the beautiful tone, I would have preferred more individuality, more spontaneity, and more guts in the singing, less the sense of a uniform group singing in carefully-rehearsed unanimity.

The second half of the program brought some of this individuality, with the appearance of tenor Brian Thorsett and a couple of the choristers for some solos and duets and a concluding work with the chorus. The emotional temperature of the performance went up noticably, and I, for one, would have liked the whole program to be hotter and more passionate.

Around the same time, I saw San Francisco Renaissance Voice in a program called

"Songs of Love and War." (Full disclosure again: I sang with SFRV for one program in 2007.) This was an immense and ambitious program, about two hours of music that included motets, madrigals, character pieces, and a mass by Victoria.

Now, Cal Bach is an auditioned amateur chorus; SFRV is a chorus of pros and semi-pros. SFRV singers have bigger, fuller, more soloistic voices than Cal Bach singers. The SFRV sound is less pure than Cal Bach's; you can pick out individual voices and everything is generally more full-throated and sometimes rougher around the edges. I rather liked this; I found it appropriate to the theme of their concert and liked the greater thrust of the sound. It's probably closer than the Cal Bach sound to how secular works written for performance in the home would have sounded.

This is obviously a matter of taste and not everyone will share my particular taste. I confess, as well, that my particular taste in madrigal singing has been influenced by the number of them I've sung myself and also by an LP of Gesualdo madrigals I bought in the distant past. The very young Marilyn Horne is one of the singers, to give you an idea.

I seriously question whether the pure and ethereal choral sound is the right one for all early music. I know I'm not the first person to wonder about this. Greg Sandow and Robert Philip have both written about it, and in fact there's a book called The Sound of Medieval Song that discusses the this issue, starting by quoting all known sources that describe what medieval singers sounded like. (I'd own a copy if it weren't an insanely expensive OUP book. Can you believe $185, or a mere $99 if purchased from Amazon?)

I am not expecting Cal Bach to turn around and start incorporating a less unified sound into some of their concerts, especially since they sing predominantly sacred music. But it would be an interesting musical stretch for the group if they did!

It Took 110 Pages...

...for me to throw Ann Patchett's Bel Canto against the wall. By that time, I had realized I did not give a damn whether the terrorists lined up the hostages and gunned them down one by one. In fact, I was hoping they would, just so the book would end.

I can point to a few musical points that made me think Patchett just doesn't know much about opera - her star soprano sings Sonnambula three days in a row and also has Tosca in her repertory - plus there's a Spanish error that even I could spot, and what I think is a borderline error of medical fact - but what pushed me over the edge is that I really did not care one bit about any of the characters or what happened to them.

Putting it another way, I am simultaneously reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Way We Live Now - very different books! - and I'd be happy to be stuck on a train chatting with any character in those books. If I were stuck with any of the characters from Bel Canto, I'd push them onto the tracks.

EUOUAE

Like Patrick, I went to the EUOUAE program Friday night at Old First. If they do more concerts and if you love medieval and renaissance music, do go. They were wonderful and performed marvelous repertory. Watch for my SFCV review, which I just filed.

Martin Bernheimer is 100% Right

Read Martin Bernheimer's comments on what a newspaper should do when an outside entity demands the firing, demotion, or reassignment of a critic.

Also read the interesting comments at Anne Midgette's blog.

Worst of All

Alex Ross summarizes the responses from the classical blogosphere and embeds an attempt to manufacture the worst of all possible musical works. I got itchy when the bagpipes entered....and nearly threw in the towel at 8:45.

Prohibition is Stupid for All Sorts of Reasons

The dangers of tobacco are well known, and I support government public health efforts to persuade and help people to reduce their use, from smoking cessation programs to taxes on tobacco products to age restrictions. I don't support prohibition; we already know how well that works.

But the latest, at least as reported by A.C. Douglas, is insane. Rolling your own from comparatively unprocessed tobacco might well be safer than using tobacco company products and it's certainly more economical. Insert rant about regressive taxes here.

(For the record, I also support legalization of marijuana use and decriminalization of other drugs. The drug war and prohibition do more harm than open, regulated drug use would do.)

Update: It turns out ACD was misinformed. The legislation is to ensure proper payment of taxes, not to ban shipping.

Pulling Up a Lawn Chair

Last month, a blog posting of mine linked to an article by Heather Mac Donald. I have to confess: I responded to two sentences of a long article. Greg Sandow, though, has responded to her entire thesis with five blog entries' worth of commentary posted over a five-day period. MacDonald has now replied to him.

I'm not going to link to the whole shebang. Instead, you can visit Drew McManus's Adaptistration posting on the vendetta discussion, where he has individual links.

Candidates

Alex Ross nominates a performance of Wilhelm Furtwängler's Piano Quintet as the worst recording ever made, and offers a clip as evidence. "The work is an immensely earnest mishmash of Brahms, Franck, Bruckner, and Reger, full of unmemorable ideas developed at unrelenting length" also describes the worst work I have ever heard performed by a professional ensemble, Amy Beach's Piano Quintet. Perhaps almost no one can write a decent piano quintet, but the several minutes I've heard of Beach's piano concerto are no better.

That said, the worst recording in my personal collection is very likely Lorin Maazel's Tosca. I had to take it off somewhere in Act I. Honestly, is there another recording with two artists so badly miscast as Birgit Nilsson (Tosca) and Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau (Scarpia) are on this??

Conrad L. Osborne loves this recording, claiming that Nilsson gives the best purely vocal performance on record as the Italian diva, but he is just plain wrong. I don't give a damn whether she sings every note with perfect accuracy. She is completely at sea stylistically, her legato is nonexistent, and she sounds like she should be singing Isolde or Elektra. Oh, wait.....

Whew.

I'd given some thought to going to Seattle this month to see the new production of Tristan und Isolde. After seeing the video the opera company has produced - well, part of it, because I just can't sit through too much of Speight Jenkins's yakking - hoo boy. I dodged a bullet: boring production, soprano who doesn't sing in tune, silent-movie acting. The 1998 production, which Seattle Opera told me last year has been mothballed for financial reasons, was spectacularly beautiful, well directed, and well sung. Too bad!

After you watch the video through the Liebestod, try this for immaculately-sung contrast:

(And note Dame Margaret's use of portamento, which I was recently informed just isn't allowed in Wagner. Uh-huh. Tell it to Kleiber and Price. Pending some library research, I'll have a few more things to say about that assertion.)

Sunday Miscellany

News, upcoming events, etc.

• The last performance of Berkeley Opera's Legend of the Ring is this afternoon at 2 p.m., at El Cerrito High's excellent theater. Hear some terrific singing and a novel production in a small theater!
• Concert presenters: Enter your programs for the whole year for inclusion on San Francisco Classical Voice's performance calendar. You do need to be a registered user of the site.
• SFCV also has a new Musicians for Hire directory!
• Deutsche Grammophon is celebrating Mahler's birthday in style. Among other things, you can vote for a People's Cycle of the symphonies. Right now, Kubelik's First and Mehta's Second are getting the most votes for those symphonies. Mehta? Love his opera recordings but I'm not convinced his style is right for Mahler.
• California Bach Society's Summer Choral Workshop is on Saturday, August 21, 2010, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. They're singing through Hidden Treasures of Mozart and Haydn. I attended this last year, and I'd go again except that I sang the major works in 2006 with the Haydn Singers. $45, includes lunch, a great opportunity to work with Paul Flight, who is a terrific conductor. It's in Palo Alto and worth the drive if you're not on the Peninsula. Registration closes on August 14.
• Speaking of Cal Bach, they're auditioning all voice parts on August 25. Read about the repertory for the 2010-11 season here.

And Here I Thought Lindsay Graham Was Somewhat Sane

He has floated the idea that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be, well, amended so that children born here are not citizens under certain circumstance. Even Mitch McConnell appears to be backing slowly away from Graham.

Don Rosenberg Loses His Lawsuit

Don Rosenberg lost his lawsuit against the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Cleveland Orchestra. Read Dan Wakin's article here.

I'm only half surprised. I thought the age discrimination allegations would be tough to prove, but it did look as though the Orchestra put improper pressure on the Plain Dealer because of Rosenberg's critical opinion of Franz Welser-Most.

As Previously Announced..

....anonymous posting is now disabled.

Experiment

As I mentioned a few postings back, I've been reading Trollope's The Way We Live Now on my phone. I wanted to report back on how this has worked out.

It's not the first book I've read on my phone, which is a Nexus One. The Nexus One - which has evidently gone out of production, sigh - has a great screen, competitive with the iPhone. It's easy on the eyes.

I started the experiment with John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is short. (The book bears some resemblance to the famous Hitchcock film but the screenplay invented great swaths of plot.) That worked out, so I thought, well, why not try something a little longer, a book I've wanted to read for a few years?

So I downloaded The Way We Live Now. I am delighted at just how well this is going. The Way We Live Now runs something between 750 and 1000 pages in print, amounting to 100 chapters. Carrying around a book of that size is a pain in the neck, and, of course, you can easily see just how much is left to read.

I'm using the free Aldiko reader on my phone. It has chapter listings, and you can find out what percentage of the book you've read, but there's no pagination, and of course I'm not lugging around a two-pound paperback or five-pound hardcover. I don't feel daunted by the length. I can read a chapter or two at leisure wherever I am - my living room, the bus to work, someplace I'm waiting. The reader picks up where I left off and provides various navigation aids if I want to jump back or forward. The Way We Live Now is in the public domain, as was The Thirty-Nine Steps, so I downloaded them for free.

I'm surprised and happy! I'm on chapter 39. And the other day I found that Ulysses is in the public domain.

Opera? on Television?

Yes, and it's not even Live from Lincoln Center.

Several San Francisco Opera productions will be broadcast on KQED TV between August 26 and September 23, 2010. That's a heft dose of concentrated opera, and of course right around the opening of the season. There will be multiple showings of each; Rita Moreno hosts and each broadcast will include interviews with singers, conductors, and members of the creative team.

The first broadcast of each is on a Thursday evening at 8 p.m. For subsequent airings, "see local listings."

Here's the lineup:

• Madama Butterfly, with Patricia Racette, Brandon Jovanovich, Zheng Cao, and Stephen Powell/Donald Runnicles, August 26.
• Don Giovanni, with Mariusz Kwiecien, Elza van den Heever, Charles Castronovo, and others/Donald Runnicles, September 2.
• La Rondine, with Angela Gheorghiu and others, September 16.
• Samson and Delilah, with Olga Borodina and Clifton Forbis, September 23.

That Butterfly was one of the greatest things I've ever seen; the first performance was, well, perfect, and the Don Giovanni far and away the most convincing production of the opera I've seen.

Hector Berlioz Would Have Wound Up in Opera Tattler

From p. 54 of the Dover edition of his Memoirs:

As I was intimately acquainted with every note of the score, the performers, if they were wise, played it as it was written; I would have died rather than allow the slightest liberty with the old masters to have passed unnoticed. I had no notion of biding my time and coldly protesting in writing against such a crime -- oh dear no! -- I apostrophised the delinquents then and there in my loudest voice, and I can testify that no form of criticism goes so straight home as that. For example, I once remarked that in Iphigenie en Tauride cymbals had been put into the first dance of the Scythians, in B minor, where Gluck has only strings; and that in Orestes' great recitative, in the third act, the trombone parts, which, in the score, are so exquisitely adapted to the situation, had been left out altogether. The next time the opera was played I was resolved that if these errors were repeated I would show them up. Accordingly, when the Scythian ballet began I lay in wait for my cymbals; they came in just as they had done before. Boiling with anger, I nevertheless contained myself until the piece was finished, and then, seizing the occasion of the momentary lull which preceded the next piece, I shouted out with all my might, "There are no cymbals there; who has dared to correct Gluck?"

The hubbub may be imagined.

Hector Berlioz Tells You Where to Sit

From p. 51 of the Dover edition of his Memoirs:

After having thus succeeded in getting my man into the theatre when one of Gluck's masterpieces was to be played, I placed him on a seat in the pit, conjuring him not to change his place, seeing that others were not equally good for hearing, and that I had tried every one. Here you were too near the horns, there you could not hear them; on the right the trombones were too loud, on the left the repercussion from the stage-boxes produced a disagreeable effect; nearer to the stage you were too close to the orchestra, and the voices were drowned; higher up you were too far from the stage, and the words were inaudible, or you could not follow the facial expressions of the actors; the instrumentation of this work was best appreciated from such a place, the chorus from another; in one act the scene was laid in a sacred forest, which was so vast that the sound was lost in most parts of the theatre, therefore it was necessary to go nearer; in another, which represented the interior of a palace, and was what is called, in the language of the theatre, a salon ferme, the force of the sound being doubled by this seemingly trifling change, it became advisable to move to the back of the pit,* where the voices would seem to blend in more complete harmony.

* I take "pit" to mean "orchestra seats" or "stalls," in American and British usage.

You Rant About How Terrible Modern Music Is. I Say You Are Not Listening.

Hoisted from the comments, something I wrote:

Twentieth and twenty-first century music runs the gamut from harmonically conservative composers like Schmidt and Vaughn Williams and, hell, Havergal Brian to Britten and Shostakovich, both of whom are firmly in the standard rep, to Stravinsky, Bartok, and Janacek to Glass, Reich, and Adams, to Carter, Xenakis, and Fernyhough (born decades apart), to Lindberg, Salonen, and Saariaho (and Sallinen and Aho and Part and...) to Higdon, Harbison, Diamond, (Melinda) Wagner, and on and on.

Really, there's something for everyone. Any person interested in Western notational music who can't find something to like in the music of the last hundred years isn't trying very hard.

Yes, Indeedy

Neither Hector Berlioz nor A.C. Douglas understands that fiorite carry much of the emotional content in early- and mid-19th century Italian opera, in addition to the joyous (and to them objectionable) display of vocal athleticism. No surprise there; Berlioz grew up conversant with an entirely different musical language and followed his own idiosyncratic path as a composer. You'll notice that ACD hasn't quoted Berlioz's opinion of St. Wolfgang.

(Oh, and I apologize for the long break between Berlioz quotations. I'm reading him at a leisurely pace - he is, um, a little tiring - plus I am simultaneously reading The Way We Live Now (on my phone!) and a popular novel or two. I have plenty of pages dog-eared for posting.)

Anonymous Posting Biting the Dust Soon

I'm going to remove the anonymous posting option later this week. It's gotten to the point where I'm seeing multiple anonymous comments per controversial posting and it's best if people can tell who is posting what. You will still be able post pseudonymously (several people do), but you have to have a unique identity. Google accounts are fine, OpenID is fine. Just use it consistently.