How to Develop Opera's Future Audience

Peter Gelb and the Met are doing something right: Opera in the Park and the open house earlier this week are making a fan out of a 7-year-old New Yorker I know.

Her mom recently wrote -

My best fun of late was going to the Met's open house on Friday with my daughter. It was AMAZING! And FREE! We sat in a box seat and watched the full dress rehearsal of Anthony Minghella's gorgeous production of Madama Butterfly, made paper cranes with one of the show's carpenters, ate lunch in the patron's room, and got to walk across the stage afterward. My daughter was spectacularly fussed over, and that night at dinner, she told her dad, "I heard a lot of people say they'd never forget today, and I don't think I will either."

So now she wants to be Cio Cio San for Halloween. I asked my husband, how old do you think she'll be when she realizes she hates us for turning her into a nerd?

And my response was "You must let me take her to the opera some time!
It's never too early to start listening to Wagner." (Really, is there anything cooler than walking across the stage at the Met?!?!)

Sir Malcolm Arnold

Sir Malcolm Arnold, symphonist and Academy-Award winning composer of film scores, has died. The obits are sad; he was an alcoholic and a schizophrenic who had a troubled life.

The Times Online obituary mentiones that reviewers considered Arnold's music too "popular," and that certainly caught my eye.

What on earth did such reviewers mean? His style was too much like that of popular music? His music got played too much? His music wasn't complicated or obscure enough? He made too much music composing?

All of the above?

I haven't read any of those reviews, and I don't know any of Arnold's music - well, okay, I've seen at least part of The Bridge on the River Kwai. What's representative? What's good? And has anyone seen any of the reviews, or know something about his reputation over time?

James Schwabacher

James Schwabacher died in July. His name is attached very publicly to the Schwabacher Debut Recital series; he had a career as a concert and operatic tenor; he gave freely of his time and money to support the musical arts in San Francisco. There've been a number of written tributes to him, and they all show how well-loved he was as a person. Here are some links

• Robert Commanday's SFCV feature on Schwabacher.


• Singer Brad Curtis's letter to SFCV.
  
  
• Joshua Kosman's report from the memorial service.
  

A lovely man, obviously. I'm so sorry I never knew him personally. I'll be looking for his recordings.

Off Balance

The last couple of months have been pretty distracting. The month in New Jersey was difficult in some ways, rewarding in others. My mom's house is now under contract and enough inroads have been made that she really will be moving out. Yes, I saw a few good concerts, and I may even blog retroactively about them. I made a new friend, and saw a number of old ones, and met a couple of online friends for a the first time.

A couple of other things going on have had me a bit off-balance as well, though one was resolved quickly and easily, and the other will be resolved soon enough (and I seem to have stopped spinning about it, thankfully). (No, I'm not going into any details.)

I've got a bunch of ideas for blog postings and hope to be writing them up soon.

Emerson/Bartok

Boosey & Hawkes, which publishes the music of John Adams, was kind enough to lend me a study score of Naive and Sentimental music a couple of years ago. They also put me on the mailing list for their newsletter.

The spring issue contained a pointer to an interactive feature on the Carnegie Hall Web site, in which the Emerson String Quartet explores the quartets of Bartók. I have not examined this in any detail, but it looks fascinating. It's oriented toward performers; I am sure that anyone who loves that music and knows something about it will learn lots:

Italian Summer Music Festivals

Goodness knows how I got on their email list, but I was sent a list of Italian summer music festivals. Oh, maybe it's from the tickets I bought over the net to see Stephen Kovacevich in Florence in May, 2004.

Anyway, if you happen to be in Italy, some are still in progress -

Puccini Festival - Torre del Lago Viareggio - from 18 june 2006 until 20 august 2006

Spoleto Festival - Spoleto (Perugia) froml 30 june 2006 until 16 july 2006

Opera Festival Firenze - Boboli Garden - from 15 june 2006 until 10 august 2006

Ravenna Festival - from 17 june 2006 until 23 july 2006

Teatro Greco of Siracusa - from 11 may 2006 until 25 june 2006

Medieval Festival of Brisighella (Ravenna) - froml 23 june 2006 until 02 july 2006

Jazz in'it - Rocca di Vignola (Modena) 23-24-25 june 2006

Information and tickets on-line on: Music Festivals

Going East

I'll be in NJ at my mother's for about a month starting Sunday, July 30. I can't spend every minute dealing with the house and will have plenty of social time. I am especially interested in old music (the Tallis Scholars have a tasty concert of mid-17th c. German vocal music), new music (whatever you think is good/interesting), and opera. Also, visits to museums - there are shows I want to see at the Frick, Met, and Morgan, as well as the Bruce in CT - and eating some good food. Would anyone like to join me at Babbo, if we can get in?

Rothko Cricket Frightwig

The not-evil cat, known as Cricket, and sometimes Mr. Wig.

On a Completely Different Subject

Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin have published a brief review of mine at Body Impolitic, their body-image blog. It's about the film Monster House (which you should skip).

Into the Deep End

Joshua Kosman joins the fun: welcome to the bløgösphère.

Bayreuth Broadcasts

Ooops, they started yesterday! But you can still catch the entire Ring, Tristan, and Parsifal over the net. OperaCast has a handy Bayreuth page with radio station links.

LHL

A friend with many more friends than me is reporting that Lorraine Hunt Lieberson has died of metastatic liver cancer.

I saw her only once, as Ottavia in two performances of "L'incoronazione di Poppea" in 1998. The production was one of the glories of the the Mansouri years, with a fabulous cast that included David Daniels, Ruxandra Donose, and Robert Lloyd.

LHL made her entry while laying on a moving sofa. Even after it stopped, and before she started to move, let alone sing, you could not keep your eyes off her, she so dominated the stage. Her last entry, for "Addio, Roma," was a slow, slow walk downstage, and again, she drew the eye in a way I've seen only from her.

During the opera, she looked 10 feet tall and might as well have been the most beautiful woman in the world. When I went to get autographs, I found she was a couple of inches shorter than me and, while pretty enough, someone you'd never give a second glance on the street. She seemed a bit shy, and very modest; every inch a creature of the stage without an inch of diva ego.

I'm lucky to have seen her, and deeply sorry it was just that once.

________

Update: Bloomberg publishes the first obituary: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Singer of Bach, Handel, Dies at 52

Update, July 7: It seems as though everyone in the blogosphere who knew her work has commented on her passing. I'm not going to try to list them all; The Standing Room and Oboeinsight are both collecting links to blog postings and news articles about LHL. And be sure to catch Joshua Kosman's appreciation in today's Chronicle.

I have plenty of cat photos available, but no catblogging this week.

Update, July 17: Anthony Tommasini reports that at Friday's BSO concert, James Levine opened with “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen," from the Brahms Requiem, in memory of LHL.

Evil Oberon

Friday catblogging!

Dottoressa Strega

Well! My beloved filed her dissertation yesterday. She is now Donna H. Odierna, Dr. P.H. (Doctor of Public Health). Her dissertation is called "Learning to See the Invisible: Marginalization, Attrition, and Health Inequalities in a Study of Welfare and Substance Use."

Here's what she looked at:

• Social marginalization and its effects on participant attrition in a particular study population


• The relationship between marginalization and health, where she found a negative association between severe marginalization and health


• Whether attrition of hard-to-find participants affects results, where she found that it can

The latter part of the dissertation worked by taking a set of results from a particular study population, backing out hard-to-find respondents, and re-running the original analysis. There were differences in the results. Retaining hard-to-find respondents has a significant effect on research results, in other words, and thus, possibly, on policy based on those results. She did an enormous amount of work on hard-to-find survey respondents and the efforts that went into retaining them in the study population, because the original researchers went to incredible lengths to retain as many respondents as possible.

I'm so proud of her!!

Seen at Davies

At the Verdi Requiem, the other day, soprano Jane Eaglen; this just a couple of days after the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra concert I reviewed for SFCV. I spotted her and her husband waiting for the elevator, and if anyone recognized her, it didn't show.

Conlon: Two for Two

I was in Civic Center Saturday night at 10 p.m. because I'd just gotten out of the San Francisco Symphony's next-to-last performance of the Verdi Requiem. I wish I'd gotten to it earlier in the run, because I would have loved to hear it multiple times. It was nearly perfect: I only say that because I know something must have gone wrong, that there must have been a bobble in there someplace. Whatever it was, I didn't hear it.

What I did hear was the sound of the Symphony Chorus, ethereal or thunderous as needed; the Symphony itself, with a richer and more luminous sound than what's typical when MTT is conducting; four outstanding soloists; and a performance with the emotional range, heroic scale, and drama the work itself requires. James Conlon, returning to SFS for the first time in many years, led a beautiful, shapely, wholly involving performance. At the end, he seemed faintly embarrassed by the ovation he got, deferring repeatedly to outgoing Symphony Chorus director Vance George, the soloists, the orchestra, and the chorus itself.

Well, really, everyone made marvelous contributions. The soloists were the kind of quartet I dream about: uniformly musical, comfortable with the style, and in sound vocal condition. That said, they were not all equal. Bass Vitalij Kowaljow sang well, but a bit anonymously. Tenor Frank Lopardo is now working with a voice that has lost its nap; still, he sang stylishly, with a fine Verdian line, very beautiful soft singing, and a lovely trill.

The vocal stars of the show were certainly soprano Christine Brewer and mezzo Stephanie Blythe. I think you could not ask for a better pairing; they sounded marvelous together, and, really, what I want now is to hear them as Aida and Amneris. There were plenty of decibels; more importantly, there were two beautiful and even voices, up high and down below, easily produced, perfectly steady, and with seemingly endless reserves of breath and power. The line went on and on and on - really, they were breathtaking, putting nearly every dramatic soprano or mezzo walking the earth in their shadows.

On June 9, I heard Conlon's first program of three in the Romantic Visions festival, consisting of three dances from operas inspired by Oscar Wilde, written by Zemlinsky, Shreker, and Strauss, and Zemlinsky's one-act shocker A Florentine Tragedy, also written by Zemlinsky (and also based on Wilde). The dances were, comparatively, fluff, though of course Salome's "Dance of the Seven Veils" is integral to the eponymous opera. They gave you a nice glimpse of the composers but mostly leave you wanting more.

The opera, though - whoa. It is from about 1916, and is quite firmly in the lush, splashy, style of Richard Strauss. It's written with enormous confidence and skill, brilliant orchestration, and plenty of drama. Not very much happens during the 90-minute confrontation between a merchant, his wife, and her aristocratic lover; it's largely a psychological drama. The outcome is....not what you might expect. I'm not giving it away, and, frankly, if you ever have a chance to see this piece, don't read the libretto or synopsis.

It got a bang-up performance. James Johnson provided a tour-de-force of focussed dramatic singing as Simone, the merchant. He has Wotan in his repertory, and all things considered, it is amazing that James Morris and Greer Grimsley are hired ahead of him. I'd love to hear him in the role. Kim Begley was convincing as Guido Bardi, the lover. Bianca, Simone's wife, has a tiny part, amounting to no more than five or ten minutes of work; still, Kate Aldrich made plenty of impact, and I hope she'll sing in SF again. Conlon could have kept the orchestra down a bit; the singers were overwhelmed a few times. Still, the performance was passionate and cohesive.

It's too bad the piece doesn't appear more often. I think it would fit very, very well on a double bill with Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle.

Conlon's a marvelous conductor - not so many conductors will do brilliantly with works as different as the Verdi and Zemlinsky. I hope he'll back soon, either at SFS or across the street in the Opera House. I'm sorry I didn't get to the Liszt/Tchaikowsky concert, since who knows when either of the works on that program will cross my path again?

Minor Updates on Wednesday, June 28.

Happy Gay Day.

War Memorial Opera House, June 24, 2006, around 10 p.m.

LHL and JL

Buried in Lawrence Van Gelder's "Arts, Briefly" column today in the Times, Daniel J. Wakin reports the worrisome news that Lorraine Hunt Lieberson has cancelled all of her scheduled performances for the year, "for personal reasons."

The adjacent item brings happier news: James Levine returns to the BSO podium on July 7, leading the opening performance at Tanglewood.

Where I've Been

Hither and yon - three weeks in New Jersey, not quite confined entirely to my mother's house, and under some work pressure, as well. I think I am ready to resume posting, however.

Sunday Dogblogging

Molly (in front) and her buddy Jupiter hoping for treats yesterday at the Albany Bulb.

She's Right, You Know

Read vilaine fille and weep. And then write letters of complaint (to the NY Phil) and of warning (to Peter Gelb).

Buh?

The TAFTO discussions continue, entertainingly, with participant Marc Geelhoed of Deceptively Simple and TAFTO skeptic A. C. Douglas exchanging broadsides at their respective blogs. I note that ACD seems to have misunderstood something Drew said. The following sentence is not about TAFTO:

If this business ever hopes to reverse the trend in declining ticket sales and lack of participation throughout their communities, they are going to need the help of the people who already care about classical music.

It's about the classical music business.

(Oh, and - I got some mail from Marc that made me laugh. If he says he was joking, I bet he was.)

Updated, April 27: Email to Drew resulted in a one-word reply to this posting: "Bingo!" - meaning yes, "this business" refers to the classical music business, not TAFTO, in the sentence quoted above. Further, ACD has posted Marc's email with the soprano joke. Dry, yes, but funny, at least to me.

Top 10

Steve Hicken (listen) is one of the bloggers featured in the Classical Music section of Top Ten Sources. When I followed the link from listen, I was pleased and surprised to find myself there too, and in excellent company. There's a related category, Top Ten Opera. I'm not quite sure what the eclectically brilliant Steve Smith is doing there; his writing about opera is terrific, but so's his writing about chamber music, the symphonic repertory, jazz, and rock 'n roll.

Chicago Classical Music

Chicago Classical Music is a Web site for classical music lovers in Chicago; it's been established "under the auspices of" the Arts & Business Council of Chicago. The site is very nice; there are bloggers from several arts organizations, a ton of interesting content, lots of comments, many links. Pay a visit!

Alex Shapiro

A month or two back, I ran across notes from the kelp, composer Alex Shapiro's blog, because of referrals to me (thank you, Site Meter!). She had a funny and challenging TAFTO Month contribution last week. And today, I listened to some of her music. You should, too; it is extremely beautiful and interesting. I especially like At the Abyss and Bioplasm. Alex's Web site has a catalogue of recordings, too.

And love the photos of marine objects at notes from the kelp.