Invitation to a Dialogue?

Sigh.

The NY Times has a more or less weekly feature called Invitation to a Dialogue. They pick out a letter to the editor on some subject of interest and invite interested readers to respond; the original letter writer then gets to write a response to the responses.

This week, former Met Opera Orchestra violinist Les Dreyer, who gets letters published in the Times with remarkably frequency, has a letter discussing how to save classical music.

Well, it's not even clear to me that classical music needs saving. I won't say much about why, but I've written about the subject plenty over the years. Mr. Dreyer doesn't come close to defining all of the issues and problems facing classical music. After all, you could write a book about this - and indeed, a few people have or are trying to (hi, Greg!).

I can't imagine the resulting letters will saying anything that hasn't been said at great length and with more detail than we've already seen in the last few years.

Elections, Vote Suppression, and Vote "Fraud"

Some months ago, I asked a knowledgable friend about resources related to voting issues such as vote suppression and vote fraud. He suggested the following:

• Rick Hasen, The Voting Wars
• Andrew Gumbel, Steal This Vote
• Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote
• Joseph Harris, Election Administration in the United States, possibly available at the Federal Elections Commission's web site
• Web search on the names John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, academic advocates for more restrictions on voting

Hoping to get to them by 2016.....

Carter Obituaries & Blog Postings

There'll be more.

• Allan Kozinn in the NY Times
• Mark Berry (Boulezian)
• Anne Midgette in the WashPost; she has a Classical Beat posting too.
• Joshua Kosman in the Chron
• Alex Ross
• Patty Mitchell (OboeInsight)
• Tim Mangan
• Boosey & Hawkes
• Paul Pelkonnen (Superconductor)
• Joe Barron (Liberated Dissonance)
• Pliable (On an Overgrown Path)
• Tim Rutherford-Johnson is also aggregating obits
• Ivan Hewett in the Guardian
• Ivan Hewett in the Telegraph (really!)
• Mark Swed in the LA Times
• Janos Gereben in SFCV
• Matthew Guerrieri, who links to his own Boston Globe article and blog postings from Carter's centenary year (and who used the same post title I used)
• Lisa Hirsch
• Bruce Hodges, who links to his own article in Seen & Heard International, which is my favorite of all Carter memorials.
• Contrapuntalism, where there's a photo and a quotation
• Steve Hicken, who links to a great deal of his writing about Carter; make sure you check out the series of blog postings about specific Carter works.

Let Me Count the Ways 2

No, actually, the goofs are uncountable in this "review" of Philharmonia Baroque at the Mondavi Center in Davis. Megan Ihnen, whom I follow on Twitter, pointed us to it, terming it the worst review ever.

She might be right. The "reviewer" thinks you use sticks on a bassoon - maybe in some 20th c. piece, but not in Beethoven, you don't - confuses "base" with "bass," doesn't know what a fortepiano is (I bet the program notes said something about this...), and thinks Nic McGegan referred to Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto as a Baroque work. I, uh, can't imagine circumstances in which Nic would say such a thing.

If you ever find yourself wondering why it's important that music critics know something about music, just re-read this travesty.

You Be the Judge.

Hot and cold running Toscas, from San Francisco Opera:






I feel sure you can tell which is which, even with your eyes closed.

Anti-Abortion Laws Kill Adult Women

Terrifying and tragic story from Ireland: a woman in the midst of miscarriage, 17 weeks into her pregnancy, was denied a swift termination of the pregnancy and died several days later of septicemia.

That's right, she was miscarrying, but the doctors would not perform an abortion, which would have saved her life.

I'm linking above to a blog at the Irish Times. There've been protests and vigils both in and outside Ireland. The Indian ambassador to Ireland is going to pay a call on the Irish PM: this is turning into an international incident, because Savita Halappanavar was an Indian citizen.

It is a disgrace, a criminal act. When you hear the phrase "war on women," think of Savita Halappanavar's death.

Drama at the War Memorial

Act II of tonight's opening Tosca was delayed when Angela Gheorghiu was taken ill and went to the hospital. Melody Moore stepped in and, according to a tweet from Richard Scheinin, burned the house down in Act II.

Can't wait to see the reviews and am rather sorry I turned down a review opportunity!

Change of Name

The SF Opera Future Seasons page is a little more general now, given some interesting information found on Stefan Margita's web site.

Revenge of the Nerds

One thing about the election season just past: the nerds got it right. Andy Tanenbaum at electoral-vote.com, Nate Silver at the Times, Sam Wang at Princeton, and Scott Elliott at electionprojection.com all the nailed or came close to nailing the electoral vote.

That's because these guys looked hard at the numbers and weren't swayed by ideology. Andy and Nate are left-leaning, Scott is right-leaning, don't know about Sam. But out there, as Frank Rich points out, most of the Republican party was living in Fantasyland, where the polls were all skewed and their feelings, or desire, that Romney would win were facts. No, they're not, and it turns out that the Romney campaign drank the Kool-Aid on this, unskewing public and their own polls to match "reality." They were surprised that Romney lost, despite months of polling data showing him behind Obama.

Next time around, I suggest paying attention to the facts, not your daydreams.

Early SF Opera Announcement

The season announcement for 2013-14 is scheduled for Monday, December 3. The last few years, it's always been in mid/late January. No idea why it's been pushed up. Also, there's a press conference. The last two or three years, we've gotten a press release, and that's it.

Here's what we know already, based on singer and conductor bios, blabbing, overheard in the house, etc:

• Flying Dutchman; Patrick Summers conducts, Greer Grimsley in the title role.
• Falstaff, Bryn Terfel in the title role. Assume Luisotti is conducting.
• Dolores Claibourne by Tobias Picker; announced by the company for the fall.
• Show Boat

If it's an eight or nine opera season, I wonder what else is on the schedule. They've cycled through most of the major Mozart operas in the last few years and just about all of the Puccini. Something unusual in the way of Verdi? What about Corsaro?

Wednesday Morning Quarterbacking

The inevitable "how did Romney and the Republicans lose" articles are being published, and there's lots of speculation about it. Here's what I think.

• Romney blew off half the electorate as unimportant mooches.
• Ryan wants to privatize Medicare and Social Security. These are unpopular views with people over the age of 65, many of whom are deeply dependent on those programs.
• Romney's tax returns. Yep, I'd love to know what's in them.
• Romney had no plan.
• Aiken, Mourdock, and other Republicans pooh-poohing rape in various ways pissed off an awful lot of women.
• Perhaps people are coming to realize that cutting taxes doesn't do much for the economy.
• Yeah, pissing off a growing demographic such as Latinos isn't a good idea either.
• Mitt Romney is a tough guy to get enthused about.
• Urbanized liberals will continue being able to outvote rural conservatives. There are more of us.

I love that some analysts are saying the Republicans need to be even more conservative. Nope. Not gonna work.

Now That THAT'S Over....!

It's not much of a surprise to me that electoral-vote.com and electionprojection.com (a right-leaning poll analysis site) went down for the count early on. Andy Tannenbaum had posted that electoral-vote.com was getting a thousand queries per second and he was trying to keep the servers up, but....The bigger surprise is that the NY Times's servers fell over a couple of times during the evening. I would have thought 1) that they would have done accurate projections of demand and 2) lined up enough server capacity.

Apparently not. I wasn't the only person I know who lost touch with the Times occasionally.

If I were trying to keep a site up during brief periods of extremely high demand, I'd go with a provider that could rapidly release capacity to me. Practically speaking, I think that probably means Amazon's web/cloud services or Google Cloud Services or maybe MSFT Azure. I've heard that it's not hard to get applications running on App Engine. And goodness knows - we have, uh, CAPACITY.

Hitting Refresh

It's that time of the decade, and one can only hope that the election will be decided tonight, and not in a recount or the courts. It was all over by 8:30 in 2008, of course.

I'll be in jujitsu class from 8 to 9:30 tonight, which will be good for me, unless my students don't show up. In the meantime, here are the sites I'm watching.

• electoral-vote.com, but it has not refreshed in the last 10 minutes, and I'm thinking Andy Tannenbaum may have underestimated how much additional server capacity he would need tonight. He reported 1,000 QPS an hour ago, after all. Update: He is reporting that the servers are totally overloaded. "I am not giving up, but I'm not hopeful."
• NY Times live update page, where they've already called Indiana and Kentucky for Romney (duh) and Vermont for Obama
• Google Election Results page

Don't worry too much about the early returns from Florida. It's a big state and has a history of messy elections.

Vote

Yep, go vote tomorrow, if you haven't already!

And if you are of my political persuasion, note the following:

Scorrevole

You can't live forever, but I thought Elliott Carter just might. Alas, bowing to the inevitable, the great composer died today at 103, just a few weeks short of his 104rd birthday.

In recent years, I was lucky enough to hear the Pacifica Quartet play all of his string quartets in one astounding program, Ursula Oppens play (almost) the complete piano music the next day, Elizabeth Rowe and the BSO in his gorgeous Flute Concerto, and the premier of a wind piece in NYC. Mr. Carter, frail but still lively - and still composing - was at that program.

Mr. Carter may be gone, but there's more of his music to come: his page at Boosey & Hawkes mentions a premier at the Seattle Symphony in 2013.

There's a ton of Carter on YouTube; listen to Night Fantasies or the Piano Sonata or the Flute Concerto or anything else, and hoist a drink to a life well lived.

Chora Nova Fall Concert: Handel and Hummel

Chora Nova, with which I sang for several years between 2006 and 2011, has a great program coming up. A Hummel mass?? When did you last see one of those programmed? Of interest to all lovers of choral music and the transition from the classical to romantic periods.

Handel and Hummel

• Handel:
  • Choruses from Solomon:
    • "Your harps and cymbals sound"
    • May no rash intruder disturb their soft hours"
    • "From the censer curling rise"
  • Te Deum for Queen Caroline
  • Zadok the Priest
• Hummel:
  • Mass in D Minor

Soloists:

• Jennifer Paulino, soprano
• Christina Santschi, mezzo-soprano
• Danielle Reutter-Harrah, alto
• Mark Bonney, tenor
• Paul Murray, bass

Details (NOTE 7 p.m. start time):

7PM Saturday, November 17, 2012

First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley

Corner of Dana & Channing

First Presbyterian is diagonally across Dana & Channing from First Congo.

San Francisco Opera Open House, November 10, 2012

Here's an event that looks like great fun. I would go if it weren't for The Tempest in the morning and Wozzeck in the evening:

With Music Director Nicola Luisotti, soprano Melody Moore, tenor Brian Jagde and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and Chorus.

Saturday, November 10, 10:30am–2:30pm
War Memorial Opera House
301 Van Ness Avenue

JUST ANNOUNCED: Register today and be entered in a drawing to win complimentary tickets to the production of your choice! Choose between:

• Two tickets to Tosca
• Two tickets to one of our Summer 2013 operas
• Four tickets to The Secret Garden at Cal Performances (previously announced prize)

Join us for this unique experience to view onstage technical and musical demonstrations, participate in fun family activities and a screening of Carmen for Families—The Movie! and explore the historic War Memorial Opera House. Additionally, at the Open House, attendees can enter to win an exclusive same-day backstage tour! 

"As we celebrate San Francisco Opera's 90th Season, we invite everyone to the historic War Memorial Opera House for our free Community Open House. This anniversary is a testament to the extraordinary talents of all of the artists and individuals onstage and behind the scenes who have contributed to this Company's storied history, as well as a testament to this community's passion and support for the operatic art form. Please join us as we showcase the many facets of this great opera company and this beautiful opera house."

–General Director David Gockley

For more information and an activity schedule, please visit our Community Open House webpage. 

Melchior in Context

As Axel Feldheim discusses, I gave a talk to the Wagner Society of Northern California yesterday. Big thanks to Terri Stuart and the Society for their gracious welcome and for having me as a speaker; the talk was great fun to research and give. I'll get my playlist and sources posted later today. Suffice it to say, I came with about two hours of music in a giant playlist and we didn't get through it all. If I were doing it over, I might have fewer tenors in the first couple of numbers. In general, I'd go for more variety.

I can't post the whole talk because, while I had several pages written out, I also inserted a long section on the question of how Wagner should be sung right at the beginning, and that was delivered extemporaneously, based on some rough notes from my research.

I learned a few interesting things while putting the talk together, one of which I only realized fully in the middle of the talk itself.

I discussed something close to a dozen singers, all of whom were retired from staged opera by 1950 at the latest. Melchior's last stage performance was a Lohengrin in 1950 at the Met; Rudolf Bing gave him and Helen Traubel the boot that year. The circumstances remain, to me, a bit murky, and could have included a general house-cleaning, Bing's dislike of Wagner, Melchior's dislike of rehearsal, Melchior's age (he was 60 and not exactly a dashing figure at that point), and various other issues. In any event, Melchior concertized through the 50s and perhaps into the 60s; Traubel didn't sing much opera after that, as far as I know. The Corsican Cesar Vezzani retired as a result of ill health in 1948 and lived a few more years.

A few things really struck me.

Several of these tenors came from poor or working-class families and didn't have much formal education. Walter Widdop, the fine English tenor, left school at 12 to work in the mills, and didn't become a professional singer until age 30. Paul Franz and one of the other singers were railroad workers. Franz was also a late starter, again at age 30. Wealthy patrons played a role in the careers of several of the singers. So becoming an opera singer provided some economic and social mobility for these tenors.

Could that possibly happen today? We do not abound in wealthy people looking for poor singers to sponsor; since the 19th c. opera has been reframed, especially in the US, as an elite or aspirational art form, rather than an everyday form of entertainment. Youth who are thinking about music are far more likely to buy a guitar, which you can learn on your own, than to think about opera singing.

I was also struck by the trajectory of some of these careers. While Miguel Fleta burned out early and died young, and Isidoro Fagoaga fled the opera world under odd circumstances, the balance of the singers had long and distinguished careers of 25 to 40 years. That does not seem to be the norm these days, when 20 to 30 years is more typical. And these were singers in the most strenuous and difficult tenor repertory.

I was surprised by the fact that several made their debuts after just a couple of years of study, and several made their debuts at 25 or younger as Lohengrin. Few professional singers get on stage these days with so little formal study or in a helden role.

Also interesting: except for Melchior, who after a certain point sang Wagner 95% of the time, all of these singers sang a wide variety of German, French, and Italian music. The French tenors and the Russian Ivan Ershov had particularly wide repertories.

I had to wonder about at least one of the tracks I played. The Slezak recording of "Nothung! Nothung! Neidlisches Schwert!" has two serious flaws: significant blasting and distortion, and Slezak sings some obviously wrong notes. He was an enormously prolific recording artist. Why did this ever get released???

Lastly, Cesar Vezzani sang all over the French-speaking countries and North Africa, it seems, from the liner notes to the Marston sets, in houses I've never heard of. I would love to know if these houses had full opera seasons (like the Paris Opera or Opera Comique or Met) or whether he was singing at the equivalent of West Bay Opera and Festival Opera. Or was there just a much larger operatic ecology than now?

This Weekend and Next

There's a lot going, and what on earth will I get to?

November 2-4, Cal Performances and Other Minds put on Nancarrow at 100, three days of performances and talks about Conlon Nancarrow. You'll get to hear some of his famous player piano works, and more. Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Pacific Film Archive are the venues.

November 2 and 4, Euouae sings Ockeghem. Tickets in advance required. The Requiem of Johannes Ockeghem (15th c.), the oldest surviving musical setting of the Mass for the Dead, will be presented by the six voice Medieval vocal ensemble Euouae (Sven Edward Olbash, director) in a special All Souls Day performance on Friday, November 2nd, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. at The National Shrine of St. Francis and in an intimate candlelight concert at San Francisco's Swedenborgian Church on Sunday, November 4th, 2012 at 7:00 pm (note early start time).  Advance tickets required, available from www.LacunaArts.org.  For more information, visit euouae.com.

Program:

Ockeghem: Requiem

Brumel: Lux aeterna

Du Caurroy: Psaumes

Josquin: Nymphes des bois

Chant from the Laon manuscript 

Performances:

Friday, November 2nd, 2012 at 8:00 pm

National Shrine of St Francis

610 Vallejo

San Francisco

Sunday, November 4th, 2012 at 7:00 pm (note early start time)

Swedenborgian Church

2107 Lyon

San Francisco

November 9-11, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Three concerts: Salonen, Berlioz, Beethoven; Berg's Wozzeck; Mahler's 9th. All at Zellerbach, plus there's a composer portrait discussion of E-PS. Goldstar has tickets to these programs for $20.

The First Four Notes

Matthew Guerrieri/Soho the Dog's book The First Four Notes will be published on November 13, and he has a spiffy new blog devoted to the book. It's about the life and afterlife of the opening of, right, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

He has some east coast appearances scheduled. Go west, young man! Would love to see you talking about the book in the Bay Area.

More on Sandy & the Music World

The Times has an article about visiting nurses and their service during times of great need. One of their patients is the famed countertenor Russell Oberlin, now 84, and, I'm sorry to read, suffering from cancerous tumors on one leg....The NY Phil has had some schedule changes because of Sandy; see their web page for details...A friend reports that Carnegie Hall is moving or canceling performances, not because the hall is flooded or damaged, but because of danger from the hanging crane on 57th Street. Again, see the Carnegie Hall home page for details....David Shengold has a guest post about The Tempest at The Rest is Noise in which he reports that Thomas Ades is haunted by the sinking of HMS Bounty. Me, too: one of the survivors is a friend of mine.

Just How Flooded is Lincoln Center?

The New York Philharmonic has just issued a press release noting that the concert they have scheduled for 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday evening, at Avery Fisher, has been cancelled:

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC STATEMENT

RUSH HOUR CONCERT SCHEDULED FOR WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 31, CANCELLED

Due to the continuing ramifications of Hurricane Sandy, the New York Philharmonic has cancelled the Rush Hour concert scheduled for Wednesday, October 31, at 6:45pm, at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.  This decision has been made in the interest of the safety and well-being of the Musicians of the Orchestra, our audience, and additional personnel associated with the concert presentation.

Ticket holders can exchange their tickets any time within the next week for any other New York Philharmonic subscription during the 2012-13 season.  They can make the exchange online at nyphil.org, via telephone by calling 212-875-5656, or in person at the Avery Fisher Hall Box Office.  They can also request a refund online at customerservice@nyphil.org, by calling Customer Relations at 212-875-5656, or in person at Avery Fisher Hall. 

However, the Met's home page says that while today's scheduled Turandot is cancelled, tomorrow's performance of The Tempest will go on as planned.

The state of Lincoln Center (and the safety of the Met's personnel) aside, as far as I can tell, the buses and subways won't be running as usual tomorrow, so I'm wondering just how the Met audience is expected to get to the opera house. Gondola, perhaps?

Google on Windows 8

You may have seen indicators that the Windows 8 user interface is vastly different from anything that has come before it. It looks sort of like the periodic table of the elements:

Apparently this buries Google services. On Windows 8, setting Google as your preferred search engine or changing the default browser now take many more steps.

Google has set up a web site to help. 

Thar She Blows!

San Francisco Opera was a co-commissioner of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's Moby-Dick, an adaptation of Herman Melville's towering saga, and two years after its Dallas premiere, the opera arrived a couple of weeks ago at the War Memorial Opera House. The production and cast, with one exception, were those of the premiere.

The exception, of course, was that sometime during the rehearsal period, Ben Heppner, who created Ahab, dropped out for personal reasons, with Jay Hunter Morris taking all of the performances rather than the two he'd originally been scheduled for. You can bet I've spent some time pondering whether "personal reasons" means a family member having surgery, or that Heppner wasn't sounding good enough, or that he wasn't looking good enough - not that I think Ahab has any particular look, but Heppner is a big guy and this production is being recorded for eventual TV broadcast.

In any event, I think you could say that Moby-Dick both exceeded and met my expectations. Heggie has grown enormously as a composer since Dead Man Walking. I found the latter almost completely forgettable, with the exception of Susan Graham's radiant singing of a spiritual and Frederica von Stade's brilliant and anguished scene as the mother of the condemned man.

By contrast, Moby-Dick is a feast for the ears, one beautiful orchestral moment succeeding another, mixing arias, duets, and ensembles deftly, and flowing beautifully along. The orchestration is layered on richly, and there's no sense that he's marking time with infinite ostinato, which was a big problem with Dead Man Walking. I was happy with Patrick Summers's conducting, though I think the piece could have moved along more urgently a few times.

The staging is spectacular, matching the music: the deck of the Pequod and below decks are shown using a couple of different stage levels; projections show some of the ship's movements, and, well, it's all quite lovely. There's just one failure, and it's big and obvious: if you didn't know the story going in, you could never guess that Moby-Dick stoves in and sinks the Pequod. This is fixable, and it's rather surprising that it hasn't been fixed yet.

The cast is just about flawless in their execution. Jonathan Lemalu, whom I disliked in El Nino a couple of years ago, is exactly right as Queequeg, his gravely, hefty baritone well suited for the part. (If anyone is thinking of changing him out, try Quinn Kelsey; he is also an islander, from Hawaii, and has a much more beautiful voice.) Stephen Costello, as Greenhorn, sings sweetly and affectingly; Talise Trevigne makes a convincing young Pip and has one of the best solos in the piece, which she sings high above the stage on a wire after Pip goes overboard and nearly drowns. Morgan Smith is a sonorous Starbuck, joining Brian Mulligan and Kelsey among the talented young baritones we've been seeing lately in SF. Robert Orth and Matthew O'Neill are excellent as Stubb and Flask.

And then there's Jay Hunter Morris, limping around on a pegleg (and consequently rather limited in the scenery-chewing department), glaring a lot, singing well, and unfortunately not coming across very strongly as the crazed and demonic Ahab.

A friend who saw the primo in Dallas tells me that Heppner was a good deal more effective, and I can believe that: I've seen Heppner's Tristan, and boy howdy was his Act III searing. But I think the major problem is the music itself and the organization of the libretto.

Now, I think the libretto is pretty damned impressive. Scheer took an enormous novel and devised a libretto that does a good job of portraying both life at sea and the intricate relationships among the characters. But it's a compact libretto and opera and what's missing is Ahab's insanity and his obsessive and fanatical desire to Get That Whale. I seriously wonder whether they were deliberately trying to bring the opera in at no more than three hours and whether that limited what they put on stage.

More to the point, the music is so beautiful that it simply fails to portray Ahab's obsessions with any power. If you closed your eyes, you'd hear a lot of beautiful music and have little idea of how nuts he is. Putting it another way, Heggie taps into Rosenkavalier when he needed to mine the Elektra vein. Now there's someone obsessed, and there's a musical language that can portray rage and insanity and hatred. Stop trying to be so accessible, Jake, and let the craziness rip.

Sing Along with SFRV

San Francisco Renaissance Voices has a fund-raising singalong this Wednesday, Halloween. It should be great fun!

Cut & paste from their email:

October 31 - 7:30 pm  

7th Avenue Presbyterian Church

1329-7th Avenue (between Irving & Judah Streets), San Francisco

Ever wonder what it would be like to sing with San Francisco Renaissance Voices? Well, here's your chance!!  Join us and our host as Artists-in-Residence, Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church, on Halloween for a All Saints/All Souls Days Sing-a-Long of Tomás Luis de Victoria's Misa O Quam Gloriosum and Quam Gloriosum motet with readings of remembrance for the dead.  Then event should last just over an hour so there's still plenty of time to hit the streets for trick or treating and all of your Halloween parties; and be sure not to be late - our guest conductor Don Scott Carpenter has promised us a prelude of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor to start the event!
A limited number of both scores will be available at the event for $20; however we recommend you print a free score of both the motet and mass (motet is about a third of the way down the page and the mass about two-thirds down the page; mass is separated by sections so be sure to print all of them) by CLICKING HERE.

This is no trick!  Entrance to the event is free, however a free-will offering will be taken; and we hope you will treat us with a donation at the concert that benefits San Francisco Renaissance Voices and the music programs at Seventh Avenue.