This is More Like It.

Ojai notices that women compose too, or maybe Peter Sellars, longtime associate of Kaija Saariaho, noticed. From the press released I received earlier today:

For the 2016 Festival, Peter Sellars is shaping a program deeply rooted in the cultures of Ojai, starting new traditions and setting out fresh agendas for the 70 years to come. The Festival will take place June 9-12, 2016.

As the 69^th Ojai Music Festival opens this week (June 10-14, 2015) with Music Director Steven Schick, the Festival’s 2016 Music Director Peter Sellars shares thoughts on his distinctive approach to programming the Festival:

The Ojai Valley has long been recognized as a rare and beautiful natural site that invites retreat, renewal, and regeneration, from Chumash ceremonial life to Krishnamurti's legendary talks under the trees. The valley has both grandeur and a human scale that inspire and allow the deepest human questions to resonate, and create a setting for the most personal search for answers. The magical play of light across the canyon and the heady aroma of orange blossoms bring the senses to life, awaken the mind, and create a profound aura of openness and well-being.

Music incites many of the same thoughts and emotions, with similar immensity and intimacy and awe. The 70th Ojai Music Festival will gather this powerful energy and spirit of inquiry and reflection into a weekend of peak experiences and secret revelations.

For the first time the composer Kaija Saariaho will come to Ojai. We will feature two of her most potent and visionary works. Her new chamber version of ‘The Passion of Simone’, a meditation on the life of the courageous French philosopher Simone Weil, written to a wise and humane text by Amin Maalouf, will receive its American premiere with the extraordinary young soprano Julia Bullock. It is a work of startling integrity and permanent challenge in dark times, with a flame of hope that burns brightly and intensely in the darkness.

Kaija Saariaho’s newest operatic creation is a sequence of two Japanese Noh plays in English versions by Ezra Pound, entitled ‘Only the Sound Remains’. Again Ojai will offer the American premiere. These two plays will be performed in the tradition of Japanese Takigi Noh in the amphitheater at the Ojai Valley School Upper Campus, lightly held in the gentle grasp of a protective arroyo under a radiant early morning sky for ‘The Feather Mantle’, a play of illumination, transcendence and evanescence, and just before midnight under an intense starlit sky for ‘Always Strong’, the harrowing and haunted story of a young warrior’s spirit struggling to return to life on earth.

From Tahrir Square in Cairo, Dina El Wedidi and her band come to America to present a new song cycle that paints a personal picture of the realities, aspirations, disappointments, and determination of the Egyptian revolution. Dina El Wedidi epitomizes the new Egyptian women of a rising generation, her gorgeous and unmistakable voice alive with courage, allure, and the breath of freedom. Her band includes traditional Egyptian and modern electronic instruments, and for these performances she will bring three extraordinary older women from the Egyptianzār tradition who are singing in full-throated solidarity with the activism and vision of Dina and her generation.

Julia Bullock will also be the center of a unique and poignant evening honoring the brilliance, daring, public courage, and private tragedies of Josephine Baker, the black icon who created a declaration of independence with her black body, and blazed a trail of irresistible challenge and charm in France in the same years that Simone Weil pursued her feminist vigil on behalf of a larger humanity. Our Ojai evening will be a very personal portrait of a fearless civil rights pioneer and visionary who paid dearly for every forward step. And kept stepping.

The final Sunday of the 2016 festival will shift into an exuberant children’s festival for the first part of the day, featuring music written and performed by, with, and for children and anyone who is ready to listen to the world with fresh ears. Those programs will then expand and flow into a huge street party culminating in sheer communal pleasure, the joy of improvisation, increasingly wild juxtapositions, spontaneous jam sessions and very, very good times.

Among the featured artists at the 70^th edition of the Ojai Music Festival, we are extremely pleased and proud to welcome, in addition to ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Roomful of Teeth, the path breaking vocal collective, participating in the Kaija Saariaho premieres and surprising new works written for and developed by the group. Classical Indian music will be performed in breathtaking settings at specific times of day to reflect the shifting of the light, and films will be screened during those times when we crave the dark. Talks and lectures that illuminate and amplify our current history with cultural and philosophical perspectives will alternate with sessions focused on spiritual thinkers offering quieter moments of contemplation and peace.

The Ojai Valley sunrises and sunsets will do the rest.

–2016 Music Director Peter Sellars

Gloire à Berlioz

Still working on the review, but Troyens was overwhelming and wonderful, greater than the sum of its parts. What a piece! What amazing scale! What spectacle! What a cast!

Yes, you could say I was happy with it. More after I file, which will be sometime tomorrow.

Some Troyens Trivia

Thanks to the SF Opera press office for answering a couple of my questions:

• They're using the Barenreiter edition of the opera.
• No ophicleide; the part will be played by a tuba.
• No saxhorns; their parts will be played by trumpets, horns, and the tuba.

Yes, I'm sorry the company didn't hire an ophicleide and the saxhorns, but them's the breaks.

London Friday Photo

St. Andrew Undershaft, Swiss Re Tower ("The Gherkin")

London, May, 2014

"An unbelievable, an amazing performance"

The Belmont Stakes is on Saturday (post time 6:50 Eastern, 3:50 Pacific), and because American Pharoah has won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, there's some hope that, for the first time since 1978, there might be a Triple Crown winner. And there's a lot of ink being spilled about what has to happen for American Pharoah to win. Here's a typical article, talking about the track, the jockeys, how you have to pace the horse. There are trainers talking about their horse and rider losing focus or never having it in the first place, where a favorite took off after a very fast pace horse and ran out of gas.

Of course there is that one exception to every rule: Secretariat. All Ron Turcotte had to do was make sure he had a clear path. They went for the lead on the first turn, which is maybe a furlong past the gate. He went head-to-head with Sham, briefly falling a neck behind, but in retrospect, well, Secretariat was just toying with the other horse. He never gave up the lead and just drew away from the field. His world record time of 2:24 for 12 furlongs on dirt is still standing.

Chic Anderson, the caller, termed it "the most sensational Belmont Stakes in the history of the race." He was right.

Italie! Italie!

The stage directions for the Royal Hunt & Storm, Act Four, First Tableau, Les Troyens:

An African forest; morning. At the back, a high crag; below and to the left of it, the opening of a cave. A small stream flows along the crag till it merges in a natural basic bordered with rushes and reeds. Two naiads appear for an instant and vanish; a moment later they can be seen bathing in the pool. Royal hunt: Hunting calls resound far off in the depths of the forest. The frightened naiads hide in the reeds. Tyrian huntsman pass, with dogs on leashes. Young Ascanius gallops across the stage on horseback. The sky darkens; it begins to rain. The storm grows....It becomes a tempest, with sheets of rain, hail, lightning, and thunder. Repeated horn calls are heard amid the tumult of the elements. The huntsman scatter in different directions. Finally, Dido and Aeneas appear, she dressed as Diana the huntress, bow in hand and quiver on shoulder, he in semi-military dress. Both are on foot. They enter the cave. Immediately the nymphs of the forest appear, with disheveled hair, on top of the crag, and run back and forth, shouting and gesticulating wildly. In the midst of their yells, one word can from time to time be heard: Italy. The stream swells and becomes a foaming torrent. Several other waterfalls form at different points on the crag and mingle their noise with the noise of the storm. Satyrs and sylvans, with fauns, perform grotesque dances in the darkness. A tree is struck by lightning, shatters, and catches fire. The wreckage of the tree falls on the stage. The satyrs, fauns, and sylvans pick up the flaming branches and dance with them in their hands, then disappear with the nymphs of the forest. The storm passes. The clouds lift.

Well, okay, then. I am not expecting to see all of this on the War Memorial stage (please, no horses), but I assume the above is one of the ballet sequences.

Casting

The Bayreuth Festival is the only festival in the world that can sell out all of its tickets without bothering to tell the audience who will be singing. With the curtain up on July 25, less than 2 months away, the casting finally went up last week. From the main schedule page, click an opera's name in the right-hand column, then click Cast.

My personal highlights? Annette Dasch and Klaus Florian Vogt as the not-all-that-happy couple in Lohengrin, Wolfgang Koch as Wotan, and Anja Kampe as both Sieglinde and Isolde.

J.M.W. Turner at the de Young

The de Young show J.M.W.  Turner: Painting Set Free opens on June 20, 2015 and runs through September 20. The show is evidently the first to focus on Turner's late work, from 1835 to 1850. It will feature a number of extremely famous paintings, including War and Peace, as well as some watercolors recently identified as documenting a fire at the Tower of London.

There is even an operatic tie-in: the show includes "a suite of paintings depicting the classical lovers Dido and Aeneas dating from 1850, the year of his last exhibits at the Royal Academy in London." See Les Troyens and visit this exhibit for a complete artisitc experience!

Full details on the exhibition here. And if you haven't already seen it, now's the time to take in Mike Leigh's wonderful Mr. Turner.

London Friday Photo

Thames Barrier

London, May, 2014

Music Pile-Up Weekend, June, 2015 Edition

There is too much going on the first weekend of June:

• At San Francisco Symphony, Charles Dutoit conducts Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6; the program is Ravel's Alborado del gracioso and L'Heure espagnol and De Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain. A Spanish theme with most of the music by a Frenchman, yep. But it should be great fun.
• The New Esterhazy Quartet and soprano Christine Brandes perform two Haydn string quartets and two Haydn cantatas in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Palo Alto, June 5-7.
• The International Orange Chorale sings a concert called Burning Light: Songs of Nature and the Seasons, on June 6 and 7, in San Francisco and Berkeley. Program includes works by Carter, Tormis, Weininger, and Jakobsons.
• The Bay Area Rainbow Symphony's annual Pride concert is a doozy this year: works by Vítězlava Kaprálová, Clara Schumann, and Dame Ethel Smyth. Pianist Sara Davis Buechner is featured soloist in C. Schumann's piano concert. SF Conservatory, 8 p.m., June 6. At 3 p.m. Buechner gives a lecture/recital about her life and journey as a transgender woman, also at the SFCM.
• And at San Francisco Opera, on Sunday, June 7, Les Troyens opens.

I'd like to see all of these programs, but I am reviewing Troyens and that is immovable unless I give up the review. What to do!

Erin go bragh!

And if you want to sit sobbing at your desk - in a good way - take a look at the Twitter hashtag #hometovote.

London Friday Photo

Former National Provincial Bank Building

(now Gibson's Hall)

Carved panel representing Shipbuilding.

Bishopsgate and Threadneedle St.

London, May, 2014

London Friday Photo

Facade of St. Mary Moorfields, Eldon St., City of London

May, 2014

Composers in Alameda

And a Great Sigh of Relief was Heard All Around the Bay

Mark Inouye

SFS Photo

Marvelous Mark Inouye, principal trumpet of SF Symphony, will be staying put. So says a tweet from Joshua Kosman, who has evidently heard from the orchestra on this important subject.

Also, You Know, We Need Unions.

The NY Times has printed a couple of top-notch investigative stories about worker abuses and health hazards in nail salons in NYC:

• The Price of Nice Nails
• Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers

And today, they've got an editorial about how to make the system safer and more just. They mention "organized" in passing, but let's just be blunt: unions are made to protect worker safety and pay.

What He Said.

Metropolitan Opera production photo

Over at SF Civic Center, SF Mike has a blog post called Why You Should Buy a Ticket to The Trojans. I'm here to tell you that he is right. If you are reading this blog and you can possibly get to one of the six performances coming up at San Francisco Opera, just buy a ticket. You don't need to have heard or seen it (heck, it's never been performed in full here, only in a heavily cut version 47 years ago); just go. Take our word for it. You need to see this, and it's so expensive to produce, with its immense cast and long running time, that you might not get another chance.

Les Troyens, to give it its French name, is sui generis, a giant epic that sounds like nothing else. Berlioz: a genius, so underappreciated that it wasn't until 90 years after his death that this great, great opera was performed in full.

If you need any convincing, get yourself the 1983 Met video, or the video of the Scala/ROH/SFO production (with some of the same cast members). Or get one of Colin Davis's two recordings; while you get Jon Vickers on Davis I, you also get the paint-peeling Berit Lindholm as Cassandra. I picked up Davis I, used, more than ten years ago and was hooked by the end of the first chorus.

And get yourself a ticket. There are quite a few left for the performances that Davida Karanas was originally to sing.

I due Foscari, West Edge Opera

West Edge Opera's Opera Medium Rare season has closed with Verdi's 1844 I due Foscari, which I saw last Sunday at Rossmoor in Walnut Creek.

I had never heard a note of the work before, but a look at the Wikipedia synopsis suggests that there were few or no cuts. It's typical late-early Verdi, with some big sweeping tunes, cabalettas to go with each cavatina, some requirement of florid singing, and rousing choruses. Based on a Byron play, it tells the story of the two Foscari, father and son. Father is Doge of Venice, son is...his son. Son is falsely accused of murder; Dad won't save him despite a lot of desperate pleading from his soprano daughter-in-law; son dies in circumstances not entirely clear in libretto - fleeing rather than go into exile?; someone produces evidence that son was innocent; father is forced to give up his position and dies on stage shortly after singing lines that are an invitation to God to strike you down.

Okay: the libretto does leave something to be desired. However, the music is fine and has some terrific moments. I understand completely why baritenor Placido Domingo, having done a good job as the Doge of Genoa in Simon Boccanegra,* would want to take on the Doge of Venice as well.

The WEO cast had some standouts: veteran baritone Roy Stevens as the Doge mostly sang without his score and gave an impassioned and dramatically convincing performance. Tenor Michael Paul Krubitzer has a beautiful lyric tenor and a great sense of Italian style; I look forward to hearing him again. Paul Cheak was a commanding Loredano, the bad guy in the story. He sounds like he's got a Rigoletto or di Luna in him, too. Melody King sang the difficult role of Lucrezia, the son's wife.

And as usual, the teeny orchestra was terrific. I love Jonathan Khuner's conducting, and kudos to the violinist, cellist, and clarinetist (the Medium Rare page has been taken off the web site, and I don't have the program in front of me). If you're seeing one of these operas at Rossmoor, get a seat toward the rear on the same side of the house as the band; you'll hear them better and the voices will come across fine. And you can see from there too; those back seats are equivalent to maybe Row S or T at the War Memorial.

* The first version of Simon Boccanegra, pre-Boito, pre-Council Chamber Scene, would fit very nicely in the Medium Rare series.

Reversion

Lisa tossing a student at the old location

Sigh. You would think that someone who has quit a lot of Internet experience would have run a web search on her dojo's new name, right? You would be wrong, though: I left out this crucial step until after the dojo web site was updated with the presumptive new name. And then I found out that a Brazilian jujitsu dojo in Oakland was already using the name I had picked out.

D'oh! I don't want to infringe on another sensei's dojo name, and Dan Zan Ryu jujitsu is rather different from Brazilian jujitsu!

So back to the drawing board. Fortunately, my HTML skills were up to reverting the web site to the old name. Classes are still 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 7512 Fairmount in El Cerrito, so come by any time!

Heart of Darkness at Opera Parallele

My review of Tarik O'Regan's Heart of Darkness is up at SFCV. I am generally positive, certainly about the performances and much of the music, but I have more reservations than Joshua Kosman. Georgia Rowe calls out dramatic issues and finds it shapeless.

Philip Skinner was spooky and terrifying; I cannot wait for his Dr. Schoen in West Edge Opera's upcoming Lulu.

Media roundup:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle
• Opera Tattler
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Georgia Rowe, Mercury News
• John Marcher, A Beast in a Jungle
• Jamie Robles, Bachtrack
• Mark Berry, Boulezian, on the 2011 world premiere

UPDATED: Added John and Jamie.

London Friday Photo

St. Mary Moorfields Roman Catholic Church, 

Eldon St., City of London. May, 2014

Good Catch!

A Google Alert sent me this:

And by the time I clicked the link, the newspaper had corrected the headline:

SFO Les Troyens Casting Update

It's NOT about Anna Caterina Antonacci (mostly); you can start breathing again.

Davida Karanas is withdrawing from her scheduled performances of Cassandre owing to her pregnancy. Two of those performances, on June 12 and 20, will be sung by Michaela Martens, American mezzo-soprano.

Antonacci is taking the third performance, on July 1, in addition to her already-scheduled performances on June 7, 16, and 25.

Here's the press release:

SAN FRANCISCO (May 5, 2015)—American mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens will make her San Francisco Opera debut as the prophetess Cassandra in the Company’s upcoming production of Hector Berlioz’s grand-scale opera Les Troyens (The Trojans) on Friday, June 12 and Saturday, June 20. San Francisco Opera today announced that Martens replaces mezzo-soprano Daveda Karanas, who has withdrawn from the physically demanding role due to pregnancy.

Italian soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci, who was previously announced to sing three performances of Cassandra on June 7, 16 and 25, has now agreed to add a fourth on Wednesday, July 1. Antonacci, one of the most sought-after and acclaimed European singing artists today, also sings the principal role of Cesira in the world premiere of Marco Tutino’s lush and highly dramatic opera Two Women (La Ciociara) for five performances on June 13, 19, 23, 28 and 30.

Recent and upcoming career highlights for Michaela Martens include Gertrud (Hänsel und Gretel), Marilyn Klinghoffer (Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer), Judith (Bluebeard’s Castle), Kundry (Parsifal), and the Second Norn (Götterdämmerung) with the Metropolitan Opera; Gertrud with Munich’s Bavarian State Opera; Herodias (Salome) with Santa Fe Opera; Ortrud (Lohengrin) with the Vienna State Opera and in Graz; Kostelnička Buryja (Jenůfa) in Zurich; Judith, Marilyn Klinghoffer and Kostelnička Buryja with English National Opera; and Amme (Die Frau ohne Schatten) with Lyric Opera of Chicago and in Graz. Additional credits include performances with the Cleveland Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony, Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival, and Spoleto Festival U.S.A. She is a past winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and holds a degree from the Juilliard School.

Santa Fe Opera 2016 Season Announcement

Briefly:

• La Fanciulla del West, Richard Jones co-production with ENO. Patricia Racette in the title role.
• Romeo & Juliette, with Ailyn Perez and Stephen Costello. (Is this still happening?)
• Capriccio, with Erin Wall Amanda Majeski, Susan Graham, and Eric Owens
• Don Giovanni, with Leah Crocetto as Donna Anna (missed the rest)
• Vanessa, Erin Wall in the title role (and, editorializing, I say this should have been Racette's role, because if anyone can do something with this thing....) and James Morris as the Doctor (which I must, alas, say is not an attraction).

London Friday Photo

Mural, Spitalfields, London, May 2014