Rodelinda, San Francisco Opera

Handel's great opera seria Rodelinda has reached San Francisco, following an acclaimed production in 2004 at the Met. We got David Daniels from that cast, and later in the season Kobie van Rensburg takes the role of Grimoaldo for a few performances. Otherwise, cast and production are unique to San Francisco.

It is a tremendous opera, full of brilliantly written and deeply expressive arias for all of the characters. The Met gave it a period setting; SFO, with David Alden directing and Paul Steinberg designing the sets, placed the work in the 1940s, giving it a striking, gorgeously lit film noir look. What this had to do with the King and Queen of Lombardy, I don't know, but it certainly was handsome, and the singers looked great in their 1940s suits and dresses.

Like 2002's Alcina, there were some pointless directorial conceits, such as turning the deposed King Bertarido's loyal supporter (servant?) Unulfo into a figure of laughter and Bertarido's sister Eduige into a drunk. For that matter, I didn't much like Bertarido represented as a street person, bottle in hand. All three characters have unfailing noble arias and as far as the text goes, none of them behave like boors or drunks or klutzes. Other odd directorial problems included Rodelinda and Bertarido standing 20 feet apart while singing "I embrace you" and an awful lot of unnecessary stage business during arias. At least the on-stage action was mostly understandable, unlike the incomprehensible antics of Alcina.

Also: no gratuitous sex, although there was a moment when I thought perhaps Garibaldo was going to have at Eduige on the bonnet of the Mercedes that was part of the scenery during Acts II and III. (If you want nongratuitous sex in Handel, I refer you to Semele and especially the title character's aria "Endless pleasure," which is about exactly what you think it is, or even her "With fond desiring.")

In any event, the September 25th performance of Rodelinda was spectacularly sung and conducted. Catherine Nagelstad, singing Rodelinda, got off to a weak start; throughout Act I she had difficulty maintaining a good line except while singing slowly. Her trills weren't clean and her passage work was disconnected from the underlying meter of the arias; consequently, she seemed to be meandering and without rhythmic focus. Everything changed in the second and third acts, and once again the brilliant singer of Alcina was before us in all her glory, dramatically riveting and gorgeous in line and tone. David Daniels, as Bertarido, matched her in every way; they were ravishing in the act II reunion duet, "Io t’abbraccio." The young Adler Fellow Gerald Thompson, countertenor, sang beautifully and brought considerable dignity to the role of Unulfo, despite the director's efforts to the contrary. He seems a complete artist already, and it's not hard to see a great career in front of him. Phyllis Pancella was a fine Eduige, making the most of both her drunken and dignified moments. Umberto Chiummo was a suitably evil Garibaldo. Paul Nilon, as the usurper Grimoaldo, sang lyrically but in a style that sometimes seemed from another century. Nonetheless, his passage-work, trills, and breath control were excellent. Roy Goodman conducted with spring and vigor; the orchestra did a splendid job of embracing Baroque style.

Three performances remain (Thursday, September 29; Sunday, October 2; Saturday, October 8); if you like opera seria, or, for that matter, if you like great singing, go see Rodelinda.

Another Doctor Atomic Cast Change

I haven't seen an announcement of this and there's nothing in the Press section of the SF Opera Web site yet, but on the cast page it now appears that Friedemann Röhlig is out, Richard Paul Fink is in, as Edward Teller.

I saw Fink first as Escamillo in Carmen some years back; the role didn't suit him at all and I dismissed him out of hand. In 1999, he was a decent Kurwenal in the Met's Tristan, and I thought, "Oh, okay, good."

I got one of the happiest surprises of my opera-going life in 2001, when he was a brilliant Alberich in the Seattle Ring. Two years later, he was excellent as Klingsor in Seattle's Parsifal. I am looking forward to his Teller; I expect he will be excellent or better.

Update: There is a discussion of the cast change in Georgia Rowe's Classical Notes column on the Contra Costa Times Web site.

Sigh...

If you're expecting or hoping to see me in Seattle for the Ring, alas, work pressures caught up and I am in Oakland working working working.

Dress Codes: Free the Men of Music@Menlo!

There's been plenty of discussion in the blogosphere about the sometimes-stulifying atmosphere of classical concerts. I myself am on the fence about this; I get a special thrill from formality and love the infrequent occasions for which I put on a gown. But there's a lot to be said for comfort and a lot to be said for informality.

The audience for Music@Menlo is varied in age and personal style; I saw blue jeans and suits and everything in between at the concerts I've been to.

The women performers get to wear whatever more-or-less formal wear they'd like. Last night, violinist Jorja Fleezanis wore blue pants and a very beautiful flowing top in shades of blue, purple, red, turqoise, and other colors. (I should have asked her where I could get one like it!) Violist Cynthia Phelps was in a floor-length lavender gown with spaghetti straps. Pianist Wu Han wore black pants and some kind of black top with a spectacular red and black number on top of it, and red high heels of the kind that are nice if you can handle them. They'd break my ankles in a second, but whatever! They looked great on her, and, yes, she could pedal JUST FINE in them.

Given this, I feel sorry for the male performers, who are mostly stuck in white tuxes, white shirts, white bow ties, and black dress pants. (Jeffrey Kahane wore black pants and a black button-down shirt for last week's variations marathon.)

Soooo.....

Free the men of Music@Menlo! Let them wear whatever they'd like!

Music@Menlo's Steinway

To the Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms program at Music@Menlo last night (see my SFCV review on Tuesday), and I must comment on the piano -

I wish I'd asked the piano technician about it last night while he tuned it during intermission. This piano is a beauty, producing a gorgeous sound. The sound throughout the piano's range is even and clear and warm, never harsh or clangorous. The bass is present and strong but never thuddy or muddy or obscuring the rest. The upper register is sweet and projects well, never glassy or thin or unpleasant.

It sounded pretty different when played by Kalish, Han, and Kahane, so it's very responsive to different styles. Kahane especially got some incredibly beautiful sound qua sound out of it; one of the variations last week just melted, it was so, so beautiful. And in the Brahms last night, Han got an enormous sound of it without its ever sounding bangy.

Obviously some of this is the pianists' own skill, but wow.

Semi-Hiatus

Some blog postings are in the works, but delayed by the fact that for the rest of the month I'm in system release heck, if not hell. I keep looking at my to-do list and alternately thinking "It's all under control" and "How on earth will I get this all done?" A complicating factor is my ticket to cycle 3 of the Seattle Ring. The cast is mostly not new to me and I saw the production - well, most of it - in 2001, but I am eager to hear conductor Robert Spano's take on the work. I may be taking a laptop to Seattle with me.

What I hope to blog about: the insane concert given by Jeffrey Kahane this past weekend at the Music@Menlo chamber music festival, consisting of a lecture, the Goldberg Variations, the Diabelli Variations, and a Q&A session. Oh, yeah, there was a 75-minute lunch break between variation sets, but the whole thing took from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. anyway. And also the three operas SFO performed this summer under the rubric "The Gamble of Love."

(Why did I only see "most" of the 2001 Seattle Ring? Because my mother, who attended with me, fell and broke her wrist about three hours before the Goetterdaemmerung curtain, and so I spent most of that evening in the emergency room with her. Damn opera is so long I made it to the opera house for Act III anyway. :-)

Minor Fame

Yesterday when I got home, I found that a copy of a book called Reviewing the Arts, by Campbell Tichener, had arrived in the mail. It's described on the back cover this way:

Developed for those media writers assigned to review an artistic event or performance, Reviewing the Arts provides the tools a journalist needs to write informed and enlightened reviews of the arts. This useful text guides writers through the steps for producing an acceptable review of the fine and performing arts, covering the range of arts from film and television to drama and dance; from sculpture and architecture to music.

The book's intended as a journalism textbook, and this is its third edition.

I've got a copy because my review of the Berkeley Opera's Legend of the Ring, which ran last year in San Francisco Classical Voice, is discussed in the book, and in fact it's on page 4 - the first review quoted. It's in the context of a discussion of SFCV and its goals.

I'm tickled pink by this, especially since that was only my second professional review.

Doctor Atomic Cast Change

Playbill reports that San Francisco Opera has announced Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's withdrawal from Doctor Atomic on doctors' orders, because of a back injury. She's being replaced by Kristine Jepson.

Not much to say about this other than "Waaaaaah."

Berkeley Opera

My review of the Berkeley Opera potted Meistersinger will be up at SFCV tomorrow; suffice it to say that the performance is a mixed bag, but I heartily approve of the edition, which sends 90 minutes of overblown twaddle about the creation of "heil'ge Deutsche Kunst" straight into oblivion, leaving behind a less-ponderous opera that almost approaches wit.

My idea of an operatic comedy? Le Nozze di Figaro, say, or Falstaff. For that matter, the Ping/Pang/Pong music in Turandot is wittier than anything in Meistersinger.

And speaking of Falstaff, Berkeley Opera is performing Verdi's great masterpiece next season. I hope they have enough players and rehearsal time to put across the quicksilver orchestral writing, but what a pleasure it will be to see and hear it in the tiny Julia Morgan Theater, where the performers don't have to be larger than life to make an impression. The other offerings are equally interesting: a new work by Clark Suprynowicz and John O'Keefe, and an adaptation by the brilliant David Scott Marley of La Fanciulla del West. Considering his superb work on The Riot Grrrl on Mars, Bat Out of Hell, and other operas, I can't wait.

MIT Weblog Survey

Abridging the Classics

Today's Times brings a report that the Metropolitan Opera plans to present a 90-minute version of The Magic Flute. ACD is predictably up in arms over the matter.

My friend Bill Kasimer is annoyed, too, and presents better reasons than ACD. Here's what he had to say about it on rec.music.opera:

Why is it necessary to abridge Magic Flute? It's short enough already. I took my son to a performance of it at the Met, and he didn't have any trouble sitting through the whole thing. He was seven at the time. A few months later, I took him to a "family performance" of the opera, and he bitched about the cuts.

If the Met really wants to be "family friendly", they should schedule Sunday matinee performances, and start some of the evening performances earlier, so that they end at a reasonable hour. Or how about a "family series", a small number of weekday performances that begin around 4:00, with a longer intermission for dinner, and then finishing up early enough to get kids to bed a reasonable hour?

It'll never happen.

I have to agree with Bill on all of those points, although I also understand the reasons the Met might not be able go with his ideas - union contracts, scheduling issues, etc. They're still great ideas.

I don't especially mind the abridgement, myself. There's a long history of cutting operas in performance, for better or for worse, depending on circumstances, conductorial fancy, the demands of running an opera house, current fashion, and current scholarship. San Francisco Opera has had a portable one-hour, piano-only production of Hansel und Gretel for decades; it's played at schools and mostly during the holiday season. Last year, Berkeley Opera put on a bang-up one-evening production of the Ring that I, for one, loved. My partner, not much of a Wagner fan herself, thought it a ton of fun and even flirted with the idea of going to the Seattle Ring with me this year. So, sure, there's a place in the world for abridgement. It does not mean the sky is falling, unless, of course, you think any change means the sky is falling.

Head. Wall. Bang.

Earlier this week, Anne Midgette had an excellent article in the NY Times about the disappearing classical music audience, how orchestras sell tickets, and related issues. (It ran on June 25 and will be free for one week from that date.)

Today's Times prints several letters to the editor responding to Midgette's article. I'm happy to see a music professor lamenting the fossilized classical concert format and calling for greater flexibility in programming, and a historian discussing the marginalization of classical music in the United States.

It's dismaying, though, to read the claims by a professional violinist - a member of the Houston Symphony - that critics "castigate" performers who play masterpieces and that the art form tries to "relegate its masterpieces to the trash heap."

It's too bad the Times doesn't ask letter-writers to provide evidence to back up their claims. Just who are the critics the letter writer is thinking of? Where are the performing organizations that are banning Beethoven? (And why would she mind if, say, a new music ensemble eschews 18th century music?) How can an art form do anything to its masterpieces, anyway? Isn't she talking about musical institutions and performing organizations?

Now, I have to confess that I myself, a sometime critic, have castigated the San Francisco Symphony a couple of times for its programming. I thought it was a mistake to match the "Emperor" concerto with Webern and Hartmann, and the Beethoven violin concerto with Adams's Naive and Sentimental Music. My problem wasn't with programming Beethoven, however; it was with programming, in general, where the works don't illuminate each other in some interesting or telling way. (Yes, I realize this kind of programming sometimes has to do with which soloists are available when, what they want to play, who is conducting, and so on. There's no way to please everybody!)

But it's truly unfortunate that a professional violinist apparently doesn't have an interest in creating a living classical musical culture in this country. That means programming new and 20th centurey music, supporting living composers, and communicating with the audience about new music and why it's important - not just playing familiar music by the safely dead.

Readings for a New Opera 3

From The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 274-275:

The following Saturday Oppenheimer discussed the discovery [of fission] in a letter to a friend at Caltech, outlining all the experiments [Luis] Alvarez and others had accomplished during the week and speculating on applications:

"The U business is unbelievable. We first saw it in the papers, wired for more dope, and have had a lot of reports since... In how many ways does the U come apart? At random, as one might guess, or only in certain ways? And most of all, are there many neutrons that come off during the splitting, or from the excited pieces? If there are, then a 10 cm cube of U deuteride (one would need the D [deuterium, heavy hydrogen] to slow them without capture) should be quite something. What do you think? It is I think exciting, not in the rare way of positrons and mesotrons, but in a good honest practical way."

The next day, in a letter to George Uhlenbeck at Columbia, "quite something" became "might very well blow itself to hell." One of Oppenheimer's students, the American theoretical physicist Philip Morrison, recalls that "when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppeneimer's office a drawing -- a very bad, an execrable drawing--of a bomb."

Readings for a New Opera 2

Occasional quotations from whatever I'm reading as background material for Doctor Atomic; this, again, from The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 259-260:

When she was thirty-one, in 1909, [Lise] Meitner had met Albert Einstein for the first time at a scientific conference in Salzburg. He "gave a lecture on he development of our views regarding the nature of radiation. At that time, I certainly did not yet realize the full implications of his theory of relativity." She listened eagerly. In the course of the lecture Einstein used the theory of relativity to derive his equation E=mc2, with which Meitner was then unfamiliar. Eistein showed thereby how to calculate the conversion of mass into energy. "These two facts," she reminisced in 1964, "were so overwhelmingly new and surprising that, to this day, I remember the lecture very well."

Sing-In Season

The Oakland Symphony Chorus's summer sing-in series starts in just a couple of weeks. It will run from July 12 to August 23 on Tuesday nights at 7 p.m., at First Coventant Church, 4000 Redwood Road, Oakland. Each sing-in is $10, or $60 for the 7-event series.

Works include the Brahms Requiem (July 12, led by Vance George); the Bach Magnificat and excerpts from the Dvořák Requiem (July 26, led by Michael Morgan), The Creation, by Haydn (August 16, led by Bruce Lamott), and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, (August 23, led by Lynne Morrow).

Events for a New Opera

The San Francisco Opera Web site now has an extensive listing of events related to the premiere of Doctor Atomic. (It is also mirrored at the Doctor Atomic Web site.)

The calendar starts in July, when the Simnuke Project attempts to simulate a nuclear explosion in the Nevada desert. This will be followed by a gallery show in San Francisco about the simulated explosion. In August, there is a San Francisco Opera Guide celebration on the Peninsula, and the Commonwealth Club looks at world security issues on August 3 in a round-table discussion that includes Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

September and October bring a host of mouth-watering events:

• The Exploratorium has a talk featuring Richard Rhodes in conversation with John Adams and Peter Sellars, on Tuesday, September 13 at 7 p.m.


• The cast and production team talk about the opera at Herbst Theater, S.F., on Thursday, September 22, at 6 p.m.


• The Consortium for the Arts & Arts Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, will sponsor a free evening symposium, at Wheeler Hall on the UCB Campus, called "Science and the Soul: Robert Oppenheimer and Doctor Atomic." John Adams and Peter Sellars will talk; there will be a musical preview; Dean of Physical Sciences Mark Richards, Physics Professor Marvin Cohen, and Artistic Director of the San Francisco Opera Pamela Rosenberg will also partcipate. (Monday, September 26, 8 pm)


• The UCB Art Department will sponsor a lecture on "the U.S. government competition for a monument at the site of the first atomic bomb test" on September 22.


• A composer's colloquium with John Adams is planned, but the date hasn't been announced yet.


• On all Wednesdays and Sundays in October, the Pacific Film Archive will show films related to the bomb, the effects of nuclear war, and "the Faustian aspects of science and technology."


• On October 15, there will be a reading at UCB by 22 poets of new work created for the occasion.


• Amazing Light: Visions for Discovery is a three-day symposium, October 6 - 8, in honor of the 90th birthday of Charles Townes, inventor of the laser, and in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Einstein's accomplishments in 2005 and the 2005 World Year of Physics.


• The Jung Institute has a one-day event on October 8 with John Adams called "The Faust Myth and the Archetype of the Apocalypse."


• In conjunction with the Word Year of Physics, the American Physical Society will sponsor a number of events related to Doctor Atomic, but none of these are enumerated at the SFO Web site and a very curosry look at the APS Web site didn't yield anything yet either.

There's more detail to come, I'm sure. And I will be at many of these events.

Usability and the Orchestra Web Site

Last September, Drew McManus reviewed the Web sites of some 70 American orchestras. San Francisco Symphony's ranked number 8 at the time.

If they're that good, I hate to think of what the other Web sites are like. I've run into several issues at the SFS Web site recently:

• The Search box simply doesn't work. Try, for example, searching for the term Thomas, which, for obvious reasons, should be returned dozens of times. Searching for it returns no results at all. Neither does Tilson. Neither does Gershwin, whose musicals Of Thee I Sing and Let Them Eat Cake make up this week's SFS program.


• Purchasing tickets on line now requires a login name and password, a change from a year or so back. I set up these credentials at some point, but have forgotten them. I tried to reset the password, but the promised email with information on how to do that never arrived. Email to ticketservices@sfsymphony.org was not answered.
  
  That's right: the Symphony has made it harder to purchase tickets over the Web. (I wound up phoning the last time I needed to buy tickets.)


• Apropos of yesterday's posting about Keeping Score, I tried to find a press release on the Web site about the choice of Fresno. Unfortunately, the last press release is dated May 27, and it's about casting updates for this week's program.

SFS could be doing better than this. Maybe next year!

Keeping Score in Fresno?!

Buried in David Wiegand's S. F. Chronicle arts column today is this item:

Score one more for Keeping Score, the San Francisco Symphony's multimedia program designed to build new audiences. Last week, the Symphony received a $1. 65 million grant from the James Irvine Foundation that is part of the $10 million challenge grant from the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund. The first part of the Irvine Foundation money will support the program's educational component

The pilot program for Keeping Score's educational component will start in Fresno this next school year. Twenty teachers from grades kindergarten through 12 have been chosen to participate and will use the Keeping Score multimedia programs to add classical music to the core curriculum.

The teachers will be in San Francisco next week for training sessions.

It would be so interesting to know why Fresno was chosen as the pilot program's location, but darned if I can find anything on the Symphony's Web site. Was it lack of interest on the part of the San Francisco public schools? Lack of music programs in the S. F. public schools? Lack of interest on the part of the Symphony?

Readings for a New Opera 1

Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb:

In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come.

New Wagnerian Voices

I've been lucky enough, in the last year or so, to hear three new major Wagnerian voices.

"Or so" is because I first heard Linda Watson in 2003, singing Kundry in the Seattle Opera's Parsifal production. She was a vivid stage presence and sang movingly; I was uncertain about her upper register at the time, which seemed overly pushed. Not any more, if her performance last week at Berkeley Symphony Orchestra is any indication. Read my review of that concert here. No, I wasn't so happy with her interpretation of the Strauss, but I was plenty happy with her voice qua voice.

San Francisco Opera's 2004-05 season brought two other significant debuts. I'd heard Christine Brewer in Mahler's Eighth Symphony at San Francisco Symphony a few years ago, but she worked miracles in the Runnicles 50th Birthday Gala, singing with a ruby-red depth of tone and enormous alertness to the words.

Nina Stemme, who appeared in that concert as well as a passionate Sieglinde, debuted on stage as Senta earlier in the fall, and gave a spectacular account of that role. The production was too static and didn't give the graceful and physically intense Stemme nearly enough to do, but oh, my! At the end of the opera, she put on one of the most impressive vocal displays I've ever heard in the house.

Brewer will be back this fall for Fidelio at SF Opera, and her Web page at Askonas Holt says she'll be singing Isolde here in the future. Be still, my heart!

And I want to hear Stemme and Watson again soon, too.

Making the Rounds

Tim Rutherford-Johnson tossed this week's meme to anyone who wanted to respond. That'll be me, for one.

Total volume of music on my computer

Hardly any, measurable in megabytes rather than gigabytes; I'm not even sure what's there.

I'm an iPod holdout. My listening patterns aren't suited to carrying around that volume of music, I don't want to spend time ripping my CD collection, the iTunes software isn't well-suited to the kind of music I listen to (says my friend who spent several years as an engineer at Apple - and who listens to the same kind of music I do), and I've got CD players every place I want to listen.

Last CD I bought

An order from Tower arrived on May 31. It consists of:

• Four Savall Cabal CDs:
  
  
  
  • Ninna Nanna
  • Homenatge al Misteri D'Elx
  • Cantigas de Santa Maria
  • Music for the Spanish Kings
  
  
• A CD of works by Paul Moravec, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tempest Fantasy (purchased on the advice of Terry Teachout)


• Biber violin sonatas performed by Andrew Manze with Nigel North and John Toll

A final Hesperion CD, Villancicos y Danzas Criollas, isn't here yet.

Before that - Vol. 2 of the complete César Vezzani series that is in process by Marston Records. (NO, I haven't listened to it yet.)

Song currently playing

Nothing at the moment, but the last thing I listened to on May 31 was the Brahms second piano concerto, in performances by Stephen Kovacevich and Artur Schnabel. Today I expect to open some of the CDs listed above.

Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me

I'm going to have to bend the definition of "song" to mean "song or work or album." This will mostly be music that means a lot to me for one reason or another, but if you'd asked me this question in February or March the answers would have been different.

• Ezio Pinza singing Leporello's catalog aria from Don Giovanni, the first classical piece I can remember hearing. I listened to it a lot at the tender age of 6 - it's a good thing I didn't understand what he was singing about. Pinza recorded this very late in the day, but late Pinza is better than almost any other bass in his prime. I bonded so firmly with the record that Pinza remains one of my favorite basses and this my favorite performance of the aria.


• Eva Turner singing "Ritorna vincitor!" from Aida, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, a recording that changed my life profoundly. I heard it for the first time on a CD I bought for my then-housemate; the intense hunt for more Turner recordings that followed turned me into an opera fan; my quest for more information on Turner herself got me onto various opera newsgroups and mailing lists and eventually made me many important friendships. I'm now working on a biography of Turner and have a tiny second career as a music writer. If this hadn't happened, I might have a darkroom in my basement. This was very likely the better outcome (and it happened as a result of numerous doors opening and closing).
  
  Oh, and it is one hell of a performance. If you've never heard it, do look for it.


• Le Nozze di Figaro, with its perfect structure and three-hour parade of great music, is almost the only opera I'm willing to see annually. It also appears to be virtually bulletproof, or maybe it just brings out the best in everybody: I've seen five or six different productions that cost from thousands to millions and they all worked, musically, dramatically, and vocally. (I could live with seeing Tristan und Isolde annually if the intensity didn't kill me.)


• La Bohème persuaded me that I was an idiot not to take Puccini seriously.


• I've been listening obsessively to the two CDs by Csókolom, a string group that performs what it descrbes as the music of Greater Transylvania. Sometimes Greater Transylvania extends as far as Hollywood and Henry Mancini's theme for the Pink Panther films, but mostly it's wild music from Hungary, Romania, and greater Romany. Anti von Klewitz sings and plays lead violin with bite and a truly remarkable rhythmic sense. The mixture of joy, fierceness, and melancholy is perfect and perfectly suits my state of mind. If only I had the language and vocal range to sing the songs, or knew the steps that go with the dances!


• Stephen Kovacevich playing the last Beethoven piano sonata, op. 111. He's recorded it several times - this would be the version in the EMI box of the complete sonatas. Passionate, imaginative, and transcendent; one of the greatest recordings I've ever heard of anything.

Right; that's six bullet points, but I had to get something purely instrumental on the list.

Five people to whom I'm passing the baton

Like Tim, to anyone who'd like to take it.

A Concert You Might Take a Friend To

The International Orange Chorale of San Francisco is giving what sounds like a fantastic concert this coming Sunday, June 5, 2005, at 8 p.m.

It's built around Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir, and includes works in French by Debussy, Hindemith, Janequin, Sermisy, and de Lassus, as well as works in other languages by Part, Takemitsu, and Sarah George (a commission by IOCSF).

It's at the Presidio Interfaith Chapel in San Francisco. I hope to be there.

I Took My Mother to the Orchestra....

...for an all-R. Strauss concert at San Francisco Symphony. Read her thoughts on the concert and mine.

Updated May 26:You can hear this concert live on KDFC on Tuesday, May 31, at 8 p.m. Pacific Time, and decide what you think of it.

Really Bad News for the Classical Recording Business

The London Appeals Court decision against Hyperion Records, in a lawsuit bought by musicologist Lionel Sawkins, will seriously affect Hyperion's future and will surely make other labels extremely leery of running into issues with other editors. Jessica Duchen broke the story in the blogosphere. For other detailed commentary, see On an Overgrown Path and The Rest is Noise.

Updated May 25, 2005:A. C. Douglas has worthwhile remarks on the ruling, as does Tim Rutherford-Johnson.

Updated May 26:Added link to Jessica Duchen; corrected Tim's name.

Sex and the Young Violinist

A few weeks ago, I asked a newish friend what kind of music he likes. "Classical, especially Bach; rock; some jazz," he replied. The next day I handed him Sergey Schepkin's Goldberg Variations recording and, for fun, Dave Evans's brilliant solo guitar record, Sad Pig Dance. (No, it is not bluegrass; do not believe what Tower Records is trying to tell you. Just buy the record, which is sui generis.) I mentioned that when he was done with those, he could have the great Nathan Milstein in the Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin. Oh, he had a recording of some of those, by Lara St. John, he told me.

Never heard of her, I said. He pointed me to her Web site, where I browsed to the page for the solo Bach CD.

Yes, I was startled by that cover. I took myself over to rec.music.classical.recordings to see what the mavens thought, and also emailed a knowledgable collector friend. I was quite curious about how good a player she was.

There were some positive comments on r.m.c.r., and eventually Bill wrote back:

I was not at all impressed by her "showpieces" CD, nor her Bach solo CD (and I think that I commented to that effect on RMCR). The concerto CD, though, is very, very good. I wouldn't quite put it in the class of my favorites (Grumiaux, Manze for HIP), but it's pretty impressive playing, and she's vastly better looking than either Manze or Grumiaux :-).

And there's the rub. What's going on with the cover of that solo Bach record? What exactly is being sold, and to whom?

Take a look at the photo again. It's not just the pose. It's that she's shot to look like a teenager - or younger - and she was 25 at the time.

Can a female musician be taken seriously when she appears on a record cover dressed in her violin? Is that what the critics and reviews should be commenting on? (And some of them did: "...she looks like a bedraggled nymphet," from Lloyd Dykk; "She looks about 10....maybe 12," from The Globe and Mail.) What on earth were her publicist and the designer thinking, anyway?

Whatever they were thinking, they kept thinking it:

• The cover for Gypsy features a leather-clad St. John with nothing on under the jacket and a sultry gaze on her face.


• On the cover of the Bach concerto album, she's tossing her hair about and showing a lot of shoulder.


• St. John's most recent album, from Sony, has more of the disheveled-come-hither look on the cover (depending on your point of view, you may be just as concerned that it's all "crossover" arrangements of bits of J.S. Bach, aaargh).


• St. John appeared in Menz magazine (and on the cover) talking about various things, including music, but mostly about other stuff.

I'm curious what kind of career St. John wants to have and whether this style of self-presentation is furthering that. I'm extremely curious about how others see her and her playing. Are those cover photos selling CDs, or...?

It's extremely difficult to imagine a male violinist, even a young and handsome one, being presented this way. Imagine Joshua Bell on a CD cover dressed in his violin - a little difficult, isn't it? (Yes, the violin would presumably be oriented a bit differently.) Can you imagine him or any other male classical player being marketed in this way? It's hard for me to imagine, anyway, and I have to say I'm sorry that a talented player is marketing herself this way.