You Don't Say

In the middle of a harrowing report on efforts to eliminate female genital mutilation in Egypt, comes this:

It is a challenge to get men to give up some of their control over women.

Amplification

I've blogged before about the problems created by amplifying singers in the theater. I have more to rant about now.

On Saturday, I saw Stephen Sondheim's great opera musical Sweeney Todd at ACT, in the touring version of last year's stripped-down Broadway production, with ten performers who both take the principal roles and play the orchestral instruments.

I love the piece and loved the production, and thought the cast ranged from very good to excellent. David Hess and Judy Kaye are both excellent as Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, though neither is quite in the class of the splendid George Hearn and Angela Lansbury, who can be seen in the 1982 film of the stage production.

The production has one huge flaw, and that's the amplification. The ACT Theater is not huge and everyone in the cast is a trained singer. I sat audience left, in the orchestra section, and perceived all the sound as coming from about 20 feet above the stage. The amplification thus removes any sense of people moving on stage.

Why on earth did ACT or the director think this necessary? What's gained?

Arrr!

Avast!

Vocal Chords

I'm assume that Vocal Chords is what Lincoln Center meant when they started this new podcast series, hosted by Deborah Voigt and focussing on the vocal performers featured in Great Performances from Lincoln Center. But, you know, I have the copy-editor gene and had to think about whether it was right, and I'm sure that is not the effect they intended.

The email I got about Vocal Chords says this:

A variety of artists, including baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, soprano Christine Schäfer and tenor Matthew Polenzani, explain their vocal craft. Upcoming podcasts will also feature William Christie, founder of Les Arts Florissants, discussing his upcoming production of Stefano Landi's Il Sant'Alessio. And you'll have the chance to hear Robin Tyson of the King's Singers, explaining the challenges of singing in an a cappella ensemble.

Subscribe today to listen to London Symphony Orchestra conductor Sir Colin Davis discussing Mozart's Requiem, which he considers to be one of the composer's most moving pieces. In the next podcast, available Monday, October 1, Sir Colin Davis will explore Haydn's magnificent Creation.

Certainly sounds good!

Great C Major

• Und es ward Licht


• The opening of the fifth door

Alsop on Bartok

On National Public Radio; the material is both sound and text.

Sometimes You Just Have to RTF Press Release

I complained a few weeks ago that San Francisco Opera had still not announced the full cast for Appomattox. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

For some reason, I believed the Web site and the glossy associated-events brochure I received a few weeks ago, both of which say "Remaining cast: TBA."

The cast announcement was in July in a press release:

Robert E. Lee: Dwayne Croft / Brian Leerhuber
Ulysses S. Grant: Andrew Shore
Mary Custis Lee: Elza van den Heever
Julia Grant: Rhoslyn Jones
Julia Agnes Lee: Ji Young Yang
Mary Todd Lincoln: Heidi Melton
Elizabeth Keckley Kendall Gladen
Edgar Ray Killen: TBA
T. Morris Chester: Noah Stewart
Abraham Lincoln: Jeremy Galyon
E. Porter Alexander: Chad Shelton

There's still one TBA in there, but that is a great lineup of Adler Fellows and other singers. I heard Chad Shelton in Lysistrata last year and thought him very good.

Ringtones

Note to Alex: you can get Short Ride in a Fast Machine from Boosey & Hawkes.

Alas, my Sanyo Katana takes only polytones, so what's the point.

Opera's Relevance and Korngold

Greg Sandow's posting today about what's wrong with Don Carlo put me in mind of a posting of his from a couple of years back, in which he claimed Doctor Atomic wasn't really very relevant to today; we should all watch The Sopranos instead. Note this passage:

So again, with all respect to Peter and to John, if you want to know why new operas tend to be irrelevant, look no further than this supposedly relevant one. Opera simply isn't an art form anybody looks to for discussion of important issues. Sure, the Adams/Sellars Kinghoffer caused a stir, but not because any large number of even cultured, intellectual people took it seriously as a look at burning current concerns, but only because it broke what some people thought was a taboo.

I meant to blog about this back in 2005, but I find I did not. First things: Doctor Atomic sold out. Apparently some people thought it was worth seeing. Next thing: Did Greg truly not find an opera concerned with weapons of mass destruction and scientists' ethical and moral dilemmas relevant to the modern world?

Matthew Guerrieri has a very fine rant posted about Greg's Don Carlo comments. But I have to respond to this claim:

If you want to know why classical music has receded from our culture, just watch some of Captain Blood, the classic (and wonderfully silly) 1935 pirate film, starring Errol Flynn. It might as well be an opera. Its plot, dialogue, and aesthetic are almost operatic, and so is its score, by Erich Korngold. Which meant that in 1935 you could go to the opera, and go to the movies, and see practically the same thing. So opera was close to everyday life, in a way that it just can't be now.

I can't quite get a handle on exactly what Greg means here: surely not, as Matthew asks, that everybody carried rapiers and dueled on ships in the 1930s. Maybe he means that entertainment forms converged more than they do now? Or is he implying that you could go to the opera house and see lots of Korngold there? (You couldn't, as a look at the archives of any U.S. opera house will tell you.)

I guess what I'm wondering is why it's important that opera and movies should be similar ("close to everyday life" isn't quite what he means). And which operas is he talking about, anyway? The Met's repertory for the 1934-35 season included Aida, Hansel und Gretel, Die Walkuere, Manon, La Gioconda, Siegfried, Lucia di Lammermoor, Faust, La Boheme, Tannhauser, Mignon, La forza del destino, Linda di Chamonix (!), La Traviata, Lohengrin, Rigoletto, Simon Boccanegra (the house premiere), Cav, Pag, Der Rosenkavalier, Tristan und Isolde, Don Giovanni, In the Pasha's Garden, Goetterdaemmerung, Romeo et Juliette, Madama Butterfly, Die Meistersinger, Das Rheingold, Il Trovatore, Parsifal, Lakme, La Serva Padrona, Don Pasquale, Peter Ibbetson, La Sonnambula, Pelleas et Melisande, and Tosca. (Whew.) How were those operas any more or less like movies then? The staging would have been far more stilted than today, when we are more concerned with naturalism and real acting. Stand-and-sing was more the style in 1935 than now, and you wouldn't have found that style in many films.

Lawrence Tibbett was athletic and might have been able to pull off some Flynn-like stunts, although of course Flynn may have had stunt doubles. But Lauritz Melchior wasn't going to be singing Tristan while swinging from the booms, and anyway, the big news of the season was the debut of a new soprano from Norway, one Kirsten Flagstad, singing in the highly irrelevant operas of Richard Wagner, which, of course, have nothing to teach us about the world, power, or nature.

More Hatto!

The case of the purloined piano recordings just won't die! Intelligent Life magazine has a long article on Joyce Hatto and the fraud perpetrated by her husband William Barrington-Coupe and, presumably, the pianist herself.

Apparently the "Hatto" recordings have been traced to 66 different pianists. (Details are at Farhan Malik's site.) Rod Williams, the author of the Intelligent Life article, has tracked the literature about Hatto and found that some unsubstantiated claims had been made over the years about her training and early career. What a surprise, eh?

I'm especially intrigued by this:

James Inverne, editor of Gramophone magazine, was contacted by two critics who wished to remain anonymous, to warn him off this story.

I wonder if those particular critics would be willing to come forward now.

Update, Sept. 11: Mark Singer's New Yorker article is now on line and a must-read.

George Crumb?

Update: There's no sign in the news or blogosphere or at his home page that Mr. Crumb is anything other than alive and well, so perhaps Jamie at Urban Flute Project heard an untrue rumor.

Earlier: A posting at Urban Flute Project implies that George Crumb has died. I have not found confirmation of this on line - has anyone got more information?

But Where Did He Find Them?

Email received from Lincoln Center, about the Great Performers series there, reports that William Christie and Les Arts Florissants are performing a piece that requires nine countertenors.

At His Best

Here's a clip of Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland, from the 1972 Gala in honor of Rudolph Bing, who had retired as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. It's from Lucia di Lammermoor. They're singing the same language, and they are at their respective vocal peaks, but you'll understand him a lot better.

Oy

Tomorrow's Times Week in Review has an article by Daniel J. Wakin about the mystique of the tenor high C, inspired, of course, by the death of Luciano Pavarotti.

Now, I like a good high note or high register as much as anyone, but some operaphiles fetishize high notes to the point of absurdity. If you don't believe me, visit the archives of opera-l and take a look at postings about Zinka Milanov singing the phrase "Enzo adorato," etc. in La Gioconda.

Right in the middle of Wakin's article comes this:

Then, with the rise of Romanticism and a taste for bolder singing — and perhaps a distaste for gelding — the modern tenor voice was born. The first notable tenor to hit a modern high C was the Frenchman Gilbert-Louis Duprez. He sang the note not with a falsetto but with a chest voice, at the first performance of Rossini’s “Guillaume Tell,” in 1831. Rossini was not pleased. The sound, he said, was like “the squawk of a capon with its throat cut.”

But there was no turning back, especially with the heroic tenor voices demanded by Wagnerian opera.

Wagner's tenor roles are notably punishing, but primarily because of their length and the size of the orchestra. If anything, they lie of the low side compared with Italian roles. And just how many high Cs are there in Wagner's tenor roles, anyway?? Are there any?

Getting back to high Cs, Wakin's article is called "High C: The Note that Makes Us Weep." Speak for yourself, Dan. What made me cry in those Pavarotti videos wasn't any particular note, it was his glorious sound, involvement, line, and diction.

And Speaking of Obits...

We've had some illustrious singers die in the last few months, and I haven't had all that much to say about them. Jerry Hadley I'd at least seen in person, so I could say something about my personal experience of him. I missed Beverly Sills entirely, though I saw Regine Crespin - once - at San Francisco Opera in the mid-1980s. I knew very little about voices and opera at the time and I hardly remember a thing about her performance. I also managed to miss seeing Luciano Pavarotti in person, as I'd missed Birgit Nilsson.

I know Nilsson, Crespin, and Pavarotti on record, of course; Sills somewhat less so because her repertory is not exactly my thing. And, of course, I've followed Pavarotti's career over the last 12 years or so, as his appearances turned into caricatures of what they had once been. Accounts in the press and blogosphere mention recitals where he could barely remember what he was singing and had to rely on the score; for his 1990s Met appearances as Calaf, he had to be helped around the stage by attendants.

He hadn't sung at San Francisco since 1988, and I seem to recall there were issues of some kind that kept him away. I'm tremendously sorry I never saw him, as I'm sorry I missed Nilsson and, especially, Leontyne Price. Records, even great ones, don't tell the whole story, ever; I always want to get a sense of the physical impact of a voice heard in a hall.

For all the variability of his declining years, at his best Pavarotti was unquestionably among the greatest Italian tenors of the 20th century. His plangent, slightly reedy voice couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's. He had Italian style in his bones, from the effortless line to the ring at the top of his range to his splendid diction. Alex Ross describes some of this far better than I can.

But you should listen for yourself. Alex links to several clips of Pavarotti, all of which I heard earlier today. "Che gelida manina" and "Una furtiva lagrima" are perfectly lovely, models of style and beautiful singing. And both give him ample opportunity to charm and beguile the audience, which he could do so well. The audience goes absolutely nuts after "Che gelida manina," and with good reason.

I feared that "E lucevan le stelle," so easily exaggerated or overdone, would bring out the worst in Pavarotti, but no. It's a Golden Age performance, despairing and passionate, dignified, magnificently sung, and it brought me to tears.

Dear Mr. Holland:

Please try to get the facts right when you pen obits of the famous.

• That first Three Tenors concert wasn't put on for the filthy lucre, but to raise money for Jose Carreras's medical care when he had leukemia.


• Please stop with the canard about how Domingo's tenor is "manufactured." He's not a high-note singer, but I remind you that no one survives forty years and thousands of performances of the most punishing tenor roles unless he's a tenor - not to mention the fact that Domingo sounds pretty damn good after those forty years. If you don't believe me, check out the career of Ramon Vinay, baritone, who managed to sing tenor roles for about a decade before sliding back whence he'd come. Or look at the career of another great tenor who was originally, mistakenly, though a baritone, one Lauritz Melchior. Or, the great Carlo Bergonzi.

Arrived in the Mail...

...a big, glossy brochure from San Francisco Opera, telling me about all of the events associated with the upcoming premiere of Appomattox.

Both this brochure and the SFO Web site list the cast as follows:

• Robert E. Lee: Dwayne Croft /Brian Leerhuber (10/24)


• Ulysses S. Grant: Andrew Shore*


• Remaining cast: TBA

Really? It's opening in four weeks and the balance of the cast is TBA? Are they still holding auditions, or is it a two-character opera, or what??

Read This

Kyle Gann's reports from the First International Conference of Music and Minimalism at the University of Wales in Bangor.

Don't Bother

I'm a big fan of the pianist Stephen Kovacevich, who is a superb interpreter of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Mozart. When I read a few years ago that EMI was thinking of having him record some Chopin, I was intrigued but had some trepidation as well.

The CD was published in 2006, and I bought it earlier this year, then waited months to open it. The performances are about what I'd feared: the notes are all there, and everything else is all wrong. Kovacevich's penetrating intelligence and intensity are misapplied to Chopin. In Beethoven, he illuminates form and structure brilliantly - but that's not what Chopin is about. He doesn't seem able to let go and let the music unfold with freedom and flexibility. Instead, his tempos are rigid, and Chopin's filigree and ornamentation sound applied to the line rather than growing naturally from it. There's no charm at all in his playing, though he manages a fine range of charm, wit, and humor when he plays Beethoven. I think Kovacevich just hasn't got much of a feel for how Chopin should go; it's a bad fit with his own artistic temperament. And that is okay: every musician has strengths and weaknesses.

Not long before I opened the CD, I picked up a copy of his early LP of Chopin on eBay. It's still sitting unopened, but maybe I will give it a whirl and see if things were different with Kovacevich and Chopin 30 or more years ago. I won't be able to do any direct comparisons, because there is no overlap between the CD and the LP.

I'm looking forward to whatever he has in the works for the future. I know he's been playing both Berg and Bach on his last couple of tours, and those composers do seem like a good fit for him.

Why Usability Matters

It's August, which means that Drew McManus is looking at various aspects of orchestra Web sites. In the past, he has typically not evaluated usability at this sites - but usability matters. Here are some issues I've seen at...well...let's call them the web sites of major classical music institutions.

• This past June, I tried to find 2007-08 season information at one opera company's web site, and could not. I sent email to the webmaster, who then pointed me to the link. Now, I'm reasonably sophisticated about technology and how web sites work, but the link was not in an obvious place mere months before the commencement of the 2007-08 season. I felt slightly dumb for not having found it, but there were too many places to look.


• One symphony has a search box that periodically goes out of whack, to the extent that searching for the music director's name doesn't return anything like the number of concerts he's conducting. Pick a composer whose work is being performed once during the season, search for that, and that program doesn't come up. I have a long-standing professional interest in search, so this is this is the sort of thing I notice, but I'm sure I'm not the only one.


• The same organization's web site is so hammered today, because single-ticket sales went live, that you can't actually use their Web site to buy tickets. They're in the process of fixing that, and the box office will sell you tickets over the phone even though that wasn't scheduled for today, I found when I called the box office after 2 hours of trying. By then I was so frustrated I declined to buy anything.
• Post-script to the bullet above: the fix for the hammered web site was to turn off single-ticket sales entirely. In the course of doing this, the same apologetic text appears twice on the home page. The text is text in one place, in a graphic in the other. Embedding text in a graphic means that people using screen readers will never see the text; it's a big usability error. The text plus graphic bit makes no sense at all. OTOH, this web site is notably cluttered, and it's antiquated both in layout and function. I've been informed that a redesign is in the works....
  

These episodes occurred at the web sites of big, well-funded organizations that presumably have IT departments, and they were pretty darned frustrating. I can't be the only person ready to hit my head against the wall over web sites that don't work very well.

The bottom line is that poor usability costs organizations money and good will, when patrons try to find out what's going on or buy tickets and can't.

Updated Aug. 31.

This Week's Quiz

From Matthew Guerrieri comes another insane quiz. I am failing utterly on the great piece/terrible title and terrible piece/great title questions, but here we go.

1. What's the best quotation of a piece of music within another piece of music?

I'll have to go with an obvious one, the quotation of "Non piu andrai" in the last act of Don Giovanni. Although, of course, the quotation from Tristan during Elisir is also very good. *

2. Name the best classical crossover album ever made.

Cheating: Caruso's "Over There" and Melchior singing various pop tunes in his movie career.

3. Great piece with a terrible title.

4. If you had to choose: Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett?

Britten. Are you mad?

5. Who's your favorite spouse of a composer/performer? (Besides your own.)

Much as I'd like to cite Clara Schumann or Pauline Strauss, I have to pick Sir Peter Pears, the greatest of all musical muses. (I deeply regret missing Alma.)

My least favorite is Charles Seeger, because Ruth Crawford was destined for greater things than she accomplished as a composer.

6. Terrible piece with a great title.


7. What's the best use of a classical warhorse in a Hollywood movie?

Depends on your definition of warhorse, I guess. I am having to tie up my hands to keep from posting THAT piece in THAT movie. However, I can't keep away from Kubrick, so I'll say that Ligeti piano piece in "Eyes Wide Shut" or maybe the waltz in the same film.

8. Name the worst classical crossover album ever made.

Leontyne Price singing patriotic songs, maybe. I have a copy on LP and have never had the nerve to play it.

9. If you had to choose: Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye?

Sam Cooke.

10. Name a creative type in a non-musical medium who would have been a great composer.

Robertson Davies, who understands musicians so well, or maybe Lawrence Durrell, whose highly perfumed prose might be Zemlinsky or Sorabji or someone in between.


Opera nerd:
a. Are you kidding? Tibbett in a cakewalk.
b. Galli-Curci

Early music nerd:

I have never heard the 1950s recording of the Machaut mass with a mixed chorus of 50 and a symphony orchestra, but I love the idea.

* Heard only in an edition unique to San Francisco Opera. Right, it's the opening measure or so. It was side-splitting the first time, not so much the second.

Compare and Contrast 4

Or, what a good agent can get you.

San Francisco Symphony Opening Gala:

• Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man


• Crawford Seeger, Andante for Strings


• Adams, Short Ride in a Fast Machine


• Ravel, Shéhérazade


• Puccini, “Vissi d’arte” (Tosca), “O mio babbino caro” (Gianni Schicchi)


• Prokofiev, Scenes from Romeo and Juliet

Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; Renée Fleming, soprano


Los Angeles Philharmonic Opening Night Gala:

• Berlioz, "Love Scene" from Romeo and Juliet


• Ravel, Shéhérazade


• Boccherini/Berio, Ritirata notturna di Madrid


• Puccini, “Vissi d’arte” (Tosca), “O mio babbino caro” (Gianni Schicchi)


• Berlioz, "Ball Scene" from Romeo and Juliet

Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; Renée Fleming, soprano

True, not the same Romeo and Juliet.

Changes

A press release from San Francisco Symphony announces a number of personnel changes in the upcoming season. I cannot link directly to the press release, which comes up in a separate browser window with the mysterious URL "Google." No, I have no idea why.

The magnificent Carey Bell comes on board as principal clarinet, meaning that orchestra across the street will be starting a search of its own. Robert Ward becomes principal horn and some titles in that section are reassigned. (I note that he has been acting principal horn for nine years. What??) Russ deLuna joins as English horn, which I initially mistyped as English norn (Clara Butt?), and third oboe. Amos Yang joins as assistant principal cello. Mark Lawrence retires after 33 years as principal trombone.

Katie Kaudarach, whose presence in the first viola chair I noted at the Mahler Seventh in June, joins as assistant principal viola. This translates to "we still don't have a replacement for Geraldine," and, indeed, another round of auditions begins on September 30. Kaudarach played beautifully in that concert and will be a terrific addition to SFS.

Last, but not least, longtime flutist Tim Day is now on a one-year appointment as acting principal flute, after having been named principal flute a year ago. I guess there will be new auditions for first flute, though no dates have been announced.

Contemporary Music

Here's a list of all pieces by living composers that will be played by the San Francisco Symphony this coming season, 2007-08: work, composer, conductor:

• Short Ride in a Fast Machines, Adams, MTT


• Cobalt, Scarlet: Two Colors of Dawn, Luca Francesconi, R.Abbado


• Si Ji (Four Seasons), Chen Yi, Gaffigan


• Symphonic Variations, Almeida Prado, Roberto Minczuk


• Symphony No. 3, Oliver Knussen, MTT


• Manhattan Trilogy, Rautavaara, Ashkenazy


• Agnegram and Notturno, Thomas, MTT


• Son et lumière, Stuckey, Gilbert


• Ku-Ka-Ilimoku, Rouse, Shwartz


• Ceres, Juno The Torino Scale, Turnage, Gaffigan, Shwartz, or Bohlin


• New work by Magnus Lindberg, Oramu

I pulled that together by going through the whole ghastly SFS web site concert by concert. I know I've missed something, because there is a recent addition to the program, a concert where James Gaffigan is conducting a different Lindberg piece. But you see the point I'm making: MTT himself is conducting four pieces by living composers this coming season. Two are by....MTT.

There are other interesting works by 20th century composers scheduled:À l‘Île de Gorée, by Xenakis, with MTT;Messiaen's L'ascencion, with Chung; Ligeti's San Francisco Polyphony, with Metzmacher; some Janacek, the Barber piano concerto, and other pieces. Overall it's a pretty dull season. Blomstedt does what he does; MTT's big festival for the year is Brahms....I know that MTT is responsible for the overall planning of the season, but, really, he's doing his most interesting work with contemporary music elsewhere, and I'm sorry about that.

Philip Glass

Philip Glass turned 70 on January 31, 2007, and various Bay Area organizations have commemorated this with concerts or commissions. Here's what's coming up around here:

• Marin Alsop conducts Glass's Eighth Symphony at the Cabrillo Festival. Well, you missed this one - it was on August 11th.


• Glass himself and cellist Wendy Sutter present a concert at Herbst Theater on September 28


• A concert at Stanford Lively Arts includes a new commission, a setting by Glass of texts by Leonard Cohen


• San Francisco Opera commissioned Appomattox, about Lee's surrender to Grant at the close of the Civil War


• San Francisco Symphony...um....has nothing by Glass on its schedule for 2007-08, and played nothing of his last season. I'm only half-surprised by this. Last year, a new piece by Steven Stuckey was bumped from a concert in order to make room for a token work by Steve Reich commemorating his 70th birthday. MTT is living up to his reputation as an advocate for new music - in Europe and with the New World Symphony - but not, alas, in San Francisco.