I Would Have Had to Boycott My Own Graduation.

Brandeis awarded an honorary degree to commencement speaker David Brooks. Their article on the graduation ceremonies says that he is "renowned for centrist cultural commentary."

No he is not. He's a total shill for the Republicans and their various so-called values.

(Also pondering what it means that Yo-Yo Ma played a couple of numbers, but fellow honoree Paul Simon evidently did not.)

A Few More Reasons to See Chora Nova Tonight

We had a great dress rehearsal Friday night; our soloists absolutely floored me. Beautiful voices, great singing: Jennifer Paulino and Michele Byrd, sopranos; Paul Flight, countertenor; Brian Thorsett, tenor.

Also, if you come to this concert, maybe you can tell me what a Handelian rage aria is doing in the middle of Galuppi's Nisi Dominus. I nearly fell off my chair when I heard it.

Once more with feeling:

8 p.m.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
First Congregational Church of Berkeley
Corner of Dana & Durant (it's the brick building at that ocrner. Diagonally across the street is First Presbyterian, where we also sing sometimes. Don't go there. :)

Vivaldi Discovered!

Chora Nova concert this weekend! We're sounding great, certainly the best I have heard in the chorus's existence. Wonderful, sparkling music. So if you're around this long weekend, come by First Congo:

Chora Nova

 Saturday, May 28, 2011

 8 p.m.

 First Congregational Church of Berkeley

 2345 Channing Way

 Berkeley, CA 94704

 

 Vivaldi, Dixit Dominus, RV807

 Pergolesi, Confitebor Tibi Domine

 Galuppi, Nisi Dominus

 

 Tickets: $20 general / $18 senior / $10 student - purchase on line or at the door

 

 http://www.choranova.org/

I Would Not Have Expected This from the CDC.

Social Media: Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse

What a Surprise!

Not:

• China Admits Problems with Three Gorges Dam (that would be the dam that is destroying a good bit of the Yangtze River, the ecological balance around the river, many ancient communities, etc.)
• At I.M.F. Men on Prowl and Women on Guard (atmosphere of sexual harrassment) 

Personal to AT

Found in the Times:

A novelty was the Andante movement from Glière’s Concerto for Coloratura Soprano and Orchestra (1943), a piece I did not even know about. Ms. Dessay brought such lovely nuances and intensity to her singing that actual words would have seemed superfluous.

Joan Sutherland recorded the work in the 1960s; I heard it on LP in the 1970s, paired with the composer's Concerto for Harp, thanks to my friend David Urrows, who also introduced me to Isaak Dinesen. Sutherland's recording is still available through ArkivMusic; MDT has two subsequent recordings by less illustrious sopranos (you'll have to search; use the terms Gliere coloratura).

Gustav Mahler

The composer died a century ago today. To commemorate his death, listen to his music, live or on record.

Around the blogosphere, many fine postings:

• Gavin Plumley has been following the composer's footsteps around Austria and posting daily about Mahler's last days.
• Alex Ross has had several postings.
• Matthew Guerrieri presents another installment of Strauss & Mahler.
• Steve Hicken on Mahler and risk-taking in music.

I heard Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony perform Mahler's Second and Sixth Symphonies the other week; they're now touring Europe with those and the Ninth.

You might read Henry-Louis De La Grange's enormous Mahler biography, or Alma Mahler's And the Bridge is Love. And be sure to listen to Tom Lehrer's "Alma," which was my long-ago introduction to Mahler ("Composer of Das Lied von der Erde and other light classics," as Lehrer described him in the spoken introduction to the song).

Let's Clear Up Some Terminology Here

Found in KDFC's latest email to me:

KDFC’s DROID app has arrived.  If you have a DROID phone download the free Classical KDFC app and you can listen to KDFC anywhere.  You can look up music we play, and local events too.  i-Phone users, look for an update to the free KDFC i-Phone app in a few days.

Um. The Droid is a phone made by Motorola. I believe it comes in a couple of different flavors.


KDFC has an app made for one specific phone that's not the iPhone? Really?


I'm guessing that they have a new app for the Android cell phone operating system - but I'm not testing that guess on my Nexus S. Not that I could even if I wanted to....because there is no link to the location of this new app.


P. S. I've sent email to KDFC asking what exactly they mean.

Congratulations on the New View, Alex!

Condé Nast will be the anchor tenant at World Trade Center 1.

How Many "Songs" is Goetterdaemmerung?

Google announces cloud-based music storage:

Users can store 20,000 songs free, as opposed to Amazon’s service, which stores up to 1,000 songs without charge.

S.F. Opera Ring Cycle Cast Change: Fricka

Liarissa Diadkova out, for personal reasons; Elizabeth Bishop in.


Bishop covered the role in 1999, too, and stepped in for an indisposed Marjana Lipovsek. Janos Gereben had this to say about her at the time, though others who also posted to opera-l were less happy:

Luck was with SFO tonight: the last-minute illness of Marjana Lipovsek brough her cover to the stage, and Elizabeth Bishop stepped into the role of Fricka gloriously. Besides her exceptionally clear and strong vocal performance, Bishop also provided a far more restrained and believablewronged wife than the usual shrill portrayal.

Matthew Guerrieri on the "Cost Disease"

A must-read blog posting for anyone interested in the health of orchestras. Unfortunately, Greg Sandow probably won't see it - he doesn't read other bloggers much.

Resurrection

My review of Mahler's Second at SFS is up. What a performance!

• Joshua Kosman called it the same way. 
• Patrick Vaz was annoyed and said little, even though he liked the performance.

Reviewing a piece this long is challenging. You can go long, if you have extensive notes and your editor is willing to publish 3,000 words. (Mine won't, and he's right.) Or you can go short, try to hit the high points, and do your best to sum up the whole adequately. Let me say, there were way more high points - transcendently gorgeous chords, brilliant solos - than I could list. I did not quite figure out how to say that I was on the verge of tears from the beginning of "Urlicht" until the final release. How'd they do it??? If yesterday hadn't been Mother's Day, I would have gone again.

Sightings

At Davies tonight, for the Mahler Second -

• Matias Tarnopolsky, Director of Cal Performances, seen near the ticket windows beforehand, chatting with a slender gent who turned out to be...
• John (Coolidge) Adams, whom I also saw 1) while he was apparently looking for his seat shortly before the lights went down and 2) right after the concert ended. We were about two feet away from each other, and I did not manage to get out what I was thinking, which was "Nixon in China was incredible, congrats on your Met debut, can't wait to see it in SF."
• Jeffrey Kahane, seen leaving a center seat around row M or N after all the cheering had stopped and the hall was mostly cleared. I wish I'd buttonholed him, and what I would have said was "We were talking over dinner about your crazy 2005 Music@Menlo program and remembering how great it was." (He'd played the Goldberg and Diabelli Variations on the same program; when he came out for the Q&A afterward, the first thing he said was "Well, I never have to do that again!" It was an amazing feat of musicianship, concentration, and endurance.) 

More on the BSO

• Matthew Guerrieri does the numbers on next year's repertory. The winner: that rarely-played master, Beethoven!
• Jeremy Eichler reports broadly on the season; Mark Volpe divulges that the search committee to replace James Levine has not even met. Indeed, it sounds as though next season was planned on the assumption that Levine would still be music director. There must have been plenty of scrambling to deal with that.

Levine Cancels

I know, it's the least-surprising post title you'll see this year. But this cancellation is of all performances from now until mid-October, excepting the two upcoming Met performances of Die Walkuere. Here's the press release:

Following his doctors’ advice, James Levine is taking the summer off to rest and recuperate from his ongoing back condition. While he will conduct the remaining performances of Die Walküre at the Met (May 9 and 14 – a matinee performance that will be transmitted live in HD), he will not join the Met on its Japan tour this June or conduct the MET Orchestra’s Carnegie Hall concert on May 15. Fabio Luisi, the Met’s principal guest conductor, will replace him for these engagements, conducting Verdi’s Don Carlo and Puccini’s La Bohème in Japan, and the May 15 concert at Carnegie featuring soprano Natalie Dessay. 

Levine will return to the Met in the fall to conduct the new production of Don Giovanni, which opens October 13.

The Carnegie program will remain the same except that Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, Opus 20 will replace Debussy’s Images pour orchestre.

Maestro Luisi is currently conducting a run of Rigoletto at the Met and leads the first of three performances of Ariadne auf Naxos tomorrow.

This Week in the Death of Classical Music

Busy week, presumably stimulated by the bankruptcy filing of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

• Soundcheck had a discussion called "Orchestral Bright Notes," with critic Anne Midgette and Brooklyn Phil artistic director Alan Pierson.
• Anne Midgette had a follow-up column in the Washington Post. I'm interested to see that in the first paragraph, she mentions good and bad boards, and visionary or phlegmatic music directors, leaving out management, which has a vast amount of responsibility for the health of an organization.
• Drew McManus says Relax, It's Not a Crisis (be sure to read the comments!), in response to...
• American Orchestras: Endangered Species? at WQXR.
• Greg Sandow has a lot to say (read all May and recent April postings)....
• Alex at Wellsung has a bone to pick with Greg.
• 24/7 Wall Street has a Sandow-esq piece called "The Death of Classical Music in America." Repeat after me: institutions are not the same as the art form itself.
• Proper Discord has a serious, serious bone to pick with 24/7 over giant errors in the piece.
• Daniel Wolf has a few remarks about Perfect Careers.
• UPDATE: Adding Matthew Guerrieri's great posting on the so-called "cost diease," which amounts to hand-wringing over a few things: 1. The fact that ticket sales do not now (and have not ever) covered costs, thus the model includes (gasp!) fund-raising and endowment-building as major tasks of management 2. Musicians are the largest cost of any orchestra (this should be a self-evident factor of an orchestra - it would be much, much worse if administration were the largest cost, hmm?) 3. Certain industrial efficiencies are not possible.

Now We Know

Back in March, I speculated about the Boston Symphony Orchestra's programming and leadership options for 2011-12, given James Levine's resignation from the position of music director there. The press releases related to the season just landed in my in-box, and here's the story: it's a season of guest conductors.

They'll be led by (in order) Anne-Sophie Mutter, Sean Newhouse (BSO Assistant Conductor), Juanjo Mena, Kurt Masur, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos (two weeks), Myung-Wun Chung, Ludovic Morlot (two weeks), Jiri Belohlavek, Andris Nelsons, David Zinman, Riccardo Chailly (two weeks), Charles Dutoit, Jaap van Zweden, Stephane Deneve, Kurt Masur (again), Christoph Eschenbach, Juraj Valcuha, Leonidis Kavakos (yes, he is playing and conducting), Christoph von Dohnanyi, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Bernard Haitink (3 weeks).

Whew!

That is quite a line-up, running the gamut from the up and coming (Newhouse, Morlot, Nelsons, van Zweden) to towering figures like Haitink, Chailly, and Dohnanyi. Plenty of tasty programming as well. I'm seriously curious whether the BSO had two schedules planned, one with and one without Levine, or if they had to scramble mightily to figure out who was available when and get them under contract.

Of local interest: Ludovic Morlot, the incoming music director of the Seattle Symphony, is taking the West Coast tour dates, which include two programs in S.F. He'll be leading the already-announced program - another big whew, because I really really want to hear the Carter Flute Concerto.

In any event, the season is a good one, and if I lived in Boston, I'd just get a ticket to everything. Well, almost everything, anyway.

Much of the press release is after the cut.

Fox Hunt Found.

In the comments to a wise and perceptive posting about Anthony Trollope,  Vicki Baker,  Joshua Kosman and Patrick Vaz lament Trollope's foxhunts. Here's JK:

Yeah, the fox hunts....God help us. They're tedious, and they're a cheap plot trick on those occasions when Trollope wants to kill off a character, or give someone a long recuperation in the home of the person he wants them to fall in love with. I didn't mention them because — well, I figured I'd let people discover them on their own.

Well, not always. I'm re-reading Can You Forgive Her?, because I plan to read all of the Palliser novels this year, and just stumbled across the fox hunt, which comes at about page 200 in the print edition I'm reading. There's more to it than cheap tricks, at least this particular fox hunt.


This fox hunt introduces Burgo Fitzgerald, a major character in the novel; he was the first serious suitor for Lady Glencora, who is now married to Plantagenet Palliser. And we learn a good deal about Burgo's character and that of George Vavasor, the first serious suitor for the hand of Alice Vavasor, his cousin, the character who may or may not be forgiven by the novel's close. Burgo rides his horse to death; Vavasor keeps to himself on the hunt, far from the pack of both dogs and men, and is among those who are in for the kill. He also rides, then sells, a fine horse for less than its value because of its bad reputation.


Those things are not insignificant. Perhaps the other Trollope fox hunts are cheaper and more tedious!

I would have preferred a trial.

A trial was sufficient for the leaders of the Third Reich, who started a war that killed 60 million people, including military and civilian deaths and those murdered by the Third Reich in the death camps. I grant the risk that a trial would have meant extended grandstanding and a stance of martyrdom, but the latter status may be awarded him anyway.

And I can't celebrate this death, or wave a flag. I can only contemplate soberly.

Season Announcement Season: San Francisco Performances

The local season announcement season has finally more or less ended. The summer festival have announced, and the last three local presenters have announced for 2011-12. My jaw more or less dropped when I saw the San Francisco Performances schedule; it's astonishing, on par with that of SF Symphony's 100th anniversary season.

The highlights include:

Tribute to Frederica von Stade.

Piano recitals by Marc-Andre Hamelin (Hamelin, Berg, Liszt), Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Debussy, Schumann, Kurtag), and Leif Ove Andsnes (Chopin, Debussy).

Vocal recitals by Stephanie Blythe, Karita Mattila, Simon Keenlyside, Christopher Maltman (presumably rescheduled from this year), Dawn Upshaw, Mathias Goerne (whose pianist is Andsnes!), Jessica Rivera

String quartets include the Arditti (Beethoven, Berg, Ades, Bartok!), Brentano, Alexander (which will play a premier by Jake Heggie with Joyce DiDonato), Ebene. The Alexander takes their Bartok & Kodaly survey to St. John's in Berkeley, as well.

Stephen Isserlis, cello, and Robert Levin, fortepiano, play the Beethoven sonata for cello & piano.

Hector Berlioz Has a Fan

From p. 201 of the Dover edition:

   I was afraid to compromise the performance by again conducting. Habeneck obstinately refuses; but girard, at that time one of my staunch friends, consented to accept the task, and acquitted himself well. The Symphonie fantastique again figured in the programme, and took the whole room by storm, being applauded throughout. My success was complete, and the former judgment on me was reversed. My musicians -- it may be imagined that I took none from the Theatre-Italien -- looked radiant with delight as they left the orchestra. Lastly, my happiness was crowned when the public had all gone, and a man stopped me in the passage -- a man with long hair, piercing eyes, a strange and haggard face -- a genius, a Titan among the giants, whom I had never seen before, and at the first sight of whom I was deeply moved: this man pressed my hand, and overwhelmed me with burning eulogies that set both my heart and brain on fire. It was Paganini.

Hector Berlioz is Hard on the Italians

From his memoirs, p. 183 in the Dover edition of the Newman translations:
 
   When I reached Milan, Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore was being played at the Cannobiana, and to satisfy my conscience I went to see it. I found the theatre full of people talking at the top of their voices, with their backs to the stage; the singers all the time gesticulating and shouting in eager rivalry. So at least I judged by seeing their huge open mouths, for the people made so much noise that it was impossible to hear a sound beyond the big drum. In the boxes some were gambling, and others were having supper. I therefore retired, since it was no use hoping to hear the smallest fractiom of the music, which was then quite new to me. It appears, however -- so at least I am assured -- that the Italians do occasionally listen. But, at any rate, music to the Milanese, no less than to the Neapolitans, Romans, Florentines, and Genoese, means nothing but an air, a duet, or a trio, well sung. For anything beyond this they feel simply aversion or indifference. Perhaps these antipathies are mainly due to the incompetence of their choruses and orchestras, which effectually prevents their knowing anything good outside the beaten track they have so long followed. Possibly, too, they may to a certain extent understand the flights of men of genius, if these latter are careful not to give too rude a shock to their rooted predilections. The great success of Guillaume Tell at Florence supports this opinion, and even Spontini's sublime Vestale obtained a series of brilliant representations at Naples some twenty-give years ago. Moreover, in those towns which are under the Austrian rule, you will see the people rush after a military band and listen with avidity to the beautiful German melodies, so unlike their own insipid cavatinas. Nevertheless, in general it is impossible to disguise the fact that the Italians as a nation really appreciate on the material effects of music, and distinguish nothing but its exterior forms.

   Indeed, I am much inclined to regard them as more inaccessible to the poetical side of art, and to any conceptions at all above the common, than any other European nation. To the Italians music is a sensual pleasure and noting more. For this most beautiful form of expression they have scarcely any more respect than for the culinary art. They like music which they can assimilate at a first hearing, without reflection or attention, just as they would do with a plate of macaroni.

Letter to the Times: Solo Medical Practitioners

The Times didn't publish this letter, so I'll put it here. I really wanted the patient I discuss to see my comments.

To the Editor:

I was sympathetic toward Dr. Ronald Sroka until I reached the account of his treatment of Alice Beall's plantar fasciitis. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/health/23doctor.html?_r=1&hp, April 22, 2011). 

I've been a member of Kaiser Permanente since 1990. Here's what happened when I went to my primary care physician with pain in my foot. First, she referred me to a podiatry department class on heel pain. At the class, the podiatrist discussed stretches, shoes, orthotics, anti-inflammatories, and steroids, with a recommendation to try stretches and orthotics before steroids. My primary care physician also sent me to physical therapy, where the physical therapist determined that the plantar fasciitis was very likely secondary to multiple ankle sprains in my past. He prescribed a course of stretches and strengthening exercises. Additionally, I have off-the-shelf inserts for my shoes.

Dr. Sroka prescribed anti-inflammatories, to be followed by steroids, for Ms. Beall. She loves him, but his care for her didn't meet the current standard of care for plantar fasciitis. That's just one reason that large group practices are superior to solo practitioners.

Very truly yours,

Lisa Hirsch

Oakland, CA

I had some other issues with Dr. Sroka: he won't go to electronic records, he doesn't provide health insurance to his five part-time staff members, and he's opposed to joining a group practice because of their use of nurse practitioners for primary care. NPs and PAs provide high-quality primary care at a lower cost than MDs, and his view seems to be straight out of the hierarchical past rather than the team-oriented, collaborative present.

Joanna Russ

I'm sad to report that writer Joanna Russ has died, age 74. She was fierce and uncompromising in her books and in her life. Her books were vastly influential and often ahead of their time; she hadn't written much these last years because of chronic ill health.

How to Suppress Women's Writing is the book I point people to who are convinced that women's work, of all kinds, is never minimized, never defined out of existence, never ignored except for reasons of quality. It is a brilliant look at the mechanics of exclusion.

If you haven't read it, you should; I still regret not buying a copy for the professor with whom I had this discussion many years ago:

Me: I am a second year musicology grad student and I have never seen any mention of Hildegard of Bingen before this year. I rather suspect it's because she's a woman.

Prof: What would be the nature of such a conspiracy?

I was absolutely thunderstruck - and I note that the 600-page music history textbook in general use at that time mentions one female composer. (It had other glaring prejudices not visible to me at the time: Debussy and Bartok, both profound influences on the music that came after them, are brushed off as "nationalist" composers. That is, not German, thus, not interesting.)

The (male) professor I'm anonymously quoting went on to do some interesting work on gender in music history and musicology, so I believe I would not have the same conversation with him today.

Rest in peace, Joanna Russ. I honor the work you did and the words you wrote.