Variola Major

Over on Twitter the other day, I saw someone who should have known better call Larry Brilliant "the man who cured smallpox." 

This is wrong on multiple counts.

• There's no cure for smallpox. If you were exposed to it, being vaccinated within a couple of days of the exposure had a good chance of preventing smallpox. But the treatments for smallpox were supportive, not curative. You would keep the patient hydrated and comfortable, apply whatever cream would provide relief for the sores, and the like. It was 2018 before there was an FDA-approved anti-viral that might be effective in treating smallpox.
• Larry Brilliant was involved from 1973 to 1976 in the effort to eradicate smallpox through an enormous, worldwide vaccination effort. That effort started in 1959, when Brilliant was 15 years old, and lasted until 1979. The last naturally occurring case of the illness was in 1977, and in 1980 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the disease effectively extinct. (Small stocks remain at the CDC and somewhere in Russia, I believe.) You can read about the WHO effort at the CDC web site. (Which should have mentioned that there was inoculation in China long before Edward Jenner, sigh, probably starting in the 16th c.)

So, Brilliant was active for several years only of a concerted 20-year effort to finally stamp out smallpox. Americans really want to have a hero to look up to, but in this case, it's a mistake. All credit to Brilliant for his years of service, but eradicating smallpox was a group effort that thousands of people participated in. From the CDC web site, a note about the last case of smallpox in the wild:

[Photo caption] Three-year-old Rahima Banu, who is the last known person to have had naturally acquired smallpox, or variola major, in the world, with her mother in Bangladesh. Her case was reported to the local Smallpox Eradication Program team by an 8-year-old girl named Bilkisunnessa, who was paid 250 Taka reward for her diligence.

That exemplifies what went into the eradication of smallpox. Local teams and ordinary people and epidemiologists all played their part. No single individual should get more credit than they deserve.

Friday Photo

Tree

Oakland Dimond District

March, 2020

Rolling My Eyes

So, there's a fawning Maureen Dowd article about Renée Fleming posted at The NY Times web site this morning. When I read it this morning, having seen the link elsewhere on the internet, I saw this:

Leaving aside the gushing - I don't find Fleming either wholesome or sensual - there's that "fellow soprano Susan Graham." Graham...is a mezzo-soprano.

I sent in a correction notice! I might not have been the only person to do this, and the Times has updated the article, to this:

That...isn't any more correct than their first take. I have sent another correction, this time with suggested wording, since they're incapable of getting this correct. I don't know if it's Dowd or someone deep in editorial who seems unwilling to get this right, but jeez it is annoying.

UPDATE: It's finally correct.

Museum Mondays

Classical Statuary

Museé du Louvre, Paris

October, 2018

Friday Photo

London Rainy Day

May, 2014

The First Cancellation of 2021

Cruise Ship Seen from the Bay Bridge

April, 2019

(Not the real JoCo Cruise ship, but the closest I could come in my personal photo collection.)

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

It's not even a performance. It's the annual JoCo cruise, which puts about 2,000 science fiction writers and fans on a Caribbean cruise for music, food, and other sorts of fun. The company web page describes it as a "nerdy summer camp at sea", "a writer's workshop", "a music and comedy fest" and so on.

Anyway, the JoCo Cruise for 2021 has now been postponed to 2022. 

Warlikowski on a Certain Type of Fan

Found in the extremely interesting NY Times profile of director Krzysztof Warlikowski:

In the interview, Mr. Warlikowski focused his ire more on a certain subset of star-struck audience members. “The worst public in the opera are these obsessed gays,” he said. “All these rich guys with nothing to do in their life, just following Anna Netrebko or Jonas Kaufmann on all continents. This is not a real audience for me.” 

Very Belated Museum Monday

Musée National du Moyen Age

(Musée de Cluny)

From the exhibit "The Birth of Gothic Sculpture"

Paris, October, 2018

Don't Do This: LOL Version

A small technical writing conference whose mailing list I'm on because I attended it a couple of years back is holding this year's conference virtually, as you might expect. I received an email from them today that left me laughing. I sent them the following reply, which I think is self-explanatory:

LOL you put out an email about a conference without including the dates!

They mention that it's about a month away, but...no dates.

There is a link in the email Announcing Full Schedule, and it links to the conference's web site. I clicked through and sent another email:

The page you click through to for the schedule doesn't include either the schedule or the [conference] dates!!

This is hilariously poor communication for a technical writing conference, I must say.

'Nuff said. The person or people who wrote and proofread the email should be professionally ashamed.

Opera America Commissions

Some excellent news about works in development that have received support from Opera America:

• Beth Morrison Projects (Brooklyn, NY) for In Our Daughter’s Eyes by Du Yun 

• Boston Lyric Opera (Boston, MA) for The Desert Inn (working title) by Ellen Reid 

• Guerilla Opera (Haverhill, MA) for HER:alive/un/dead: a media opera by Emily Koh 

• HERE (New York, NY) for A Practical Breviary: Terce by Heather Christian 

• Houston Grand Opera (Houston, TX) for Turn and Burn, a Rodeo Opera by Nell Shaw Cohen 

• Opera on Tap (Brooklyn, NY) for Joan of the City by Kamala Sankaram 

• Opera Orlando (Orlando, FL) for The Secret River by Stella C. Y. Sung 

• Opera Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA) for The Listeners by Missy Mazzoli 

• The American Opera Project (Brooklyn, NY) for Precipice by Rima Fand 

The rest of the press release is after the cut. I'll just say that I'd love to see every one of these.

Belated Friday Photo

Tomatoes and Sunflowers Attempting to Escape Over a Fence (not mine)

Oakland, CA

July, 2020

Museum Mondays

Portrait of Marcel Proust

Jacques-Émil Blanche

Musée d'Orsay, Paris

October, 2018

Friday Photo

Black Lives Matter

Fruitvale Triptych

July, 2020

(Click to enlarge; the column width is too narrow to display the three photos side-by-side, alas)

Museum Mondays

Fountain and Mural

Marciano Foundation Museum, Los Angeles

(sadly closed)

June, 2019

This is Quite a Tell.

The Philadelphia Orchestra announced a new appointment last month, and hoo boy, the self-tell:

(Philadelphia, June 16, 2020)—The Philadelphia Orchestra is pleased to announce the appointment of Nicole Jordan as principal librarian beginning in the 2020–21 season. The position will bring her back to Philadelphia, where she was raised and began her career as The Philadelphia Orchestra’s library fellow from 2008 to 2011. Jordan will be the first African-American woman to join the Orchestra as a full-time member.

Uhhhhh and the situation isn't so different elsewhere. I would be interested to know when each US professional orchestra hired its first full-time Black member, man or woman. When did Philly hire the first African-American man, for example? 

 

Friday Photo

Clock near the Conciergie, Paris

February, 2019

Upcoming Streams at San Francisco Opera

Janáček’s "The Makropulos Case" with Karita Mattila as Emilia Marty 

Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

Well. San Francisco Opera will have two superb productions streaming in July:

July 18, 2020: La Cenerentola (Cinderella), Rossini

Cast:  French soprano Karine Deshayes as Angelica (Cenerentola) opposite American tenor René Barbera as her Prince Charming, Don Ramiro. The cast includes baritone Efraín Solís as Dandini, baritone Carlos Chausson as Don Magnifico, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn as Alidoro and soprano Maria Valdes and mezzo-soprano Zanda Švēde as Angelica’s stepsisters, Clorinda and Tisbe, respectively. Jesús López-Cobos conducts.

(Regular readers and friends of mine know I'm not a big fan of the Rossini comedies, but for this cast....Deshayes was a wonderful Urbain in the Paris Huguenots, René Barbera is one of the great bel canto tenors of our time, and Efraín Solís stole the show as Golaud in the WEO Pelleas two seasons ago. So I'll be watching!)

July 25, 2020: Vec Makropulos (The Makropulos Case), Janáček

Cast:  Finnish soprano Karita Mattila in her role debut as the enigmatic, renowned singer Emilia Marty. The late Jiří Bělohlávek conducts this 1926 Czech masterpiece full of “restless, sharp-edged, brilliantly scored music” (San Francisco Classical Voice). The cast also features Slovak tenor Miro Dvorsky as Albert Gregor, German bass-baritone Gerd Grochowski as Baron Jaroslav Prus and America bass-baritone Dale Travis as Dr. Kolenatý. 

(Karita Karita Karita. Bělohlávek was superb; the whole cast was excellent, and this was the perfect role for Mattila.)

Museum Mondays

Cupping set

Old Operating Theatre Museum, London

November, 2019

Sexual Abuse, Classical Music Edition, Part ???

Here are some links that've been floating around open browser tabs for too damn long.

• Music's Perpetually Open Secret: Allegations against Professor Dan Welcher at the University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music went on for 18 years before being addressed.
• Women accuse opera legend Domingo of sexual assault.
• LA Opera investigation finds sexual harassment allegations against Placido Domingo credible
  
• Plácido Domingo had 'inappropriate conduct' with many women, opera finds
  
• Domingo barely apologized, then walked the "apology" back two days later.

You can look up all of the allegations against Domingo, which came from 20 women who'd worked with him at various opera companies. A least one was a dancer and the rest were singers. I have privately heard some stuff about his behavior - warnings given to singers along the lines of don't be alone with him, don't let him in your dressing room alone, etc. This would have been the whisper network doing its job.

In this NY Times article, we find LAO claiming the following:

Los Angeles Opera, however, said its investigation had “found no evidence that Mr. Domingo ever engaged in a quid pro quo or retaliated against any woman by not casting or otherwise hiring her at L.A. Opera, especially since casting and other hiring decisions are complex, performance-specific and determined by multiple people.” 

Here's an NPR article that quotes the Met saying this:

We take accusations of sexual harassment and abuse of power with extreme seriousness. We will await the results of the investigation into Plácido Domingo's behavior as head of the Los Angeles Opera before making any final decisions about Mr. Domingo's ultimate future at the Met. It should be noted that during his career at the Met as a guest artist, Mr. Domingo has never been in a position to influence casting decisions for anyone other than himself.

A couple of comments:

1. The Met was absolutely craven not to make its own investigation.

2. Re LAO's hiring claim: Yeah, they're complicated, but as General Manager and a big star, Domingo would certainly have had influence on casting. I'd love to see the basis of the claim that there was never any retaliation or quid pro quo.

3. Re the Met, hahahahahahahaha. Of course he was. You don't have to be part of the Met's administration to have influence. It's easy to imagine a conversation between, say, Levine and Domingo in which Domingo says "Oh, if you're thinking about casting for [opera], I recently worked with [soprano] / heard [soprano] elsewhere, and she just wouldn't be right for that role. Have you considered [some other soprano]?" And somehow, [some other soprano] gets the job. I mean, I have heard of at least one singer, a singer who was never GM of even one opera company, putting their foot down about a particular piece of casting and getting their way, not at the Met, and that singer was never a star on level of Domingo.

As you know, San Francisco Opera got out ahead of this by canceling a planned concert celebrating Domingo as soon as the news broke. This suggests a couple of things to me: the company wanted to do the right thing, and perhaps they knew of credible allegations from women who'd worked with Domingo at SFO. Also, ahem, Opera Magazine's "We've heard that..." column mentioned that SFO would open the 2020-21 season with Macbeth, which turned into Rigoletto by the time of the season announcement. One might wonder who was cast in the title role of the Scottish opera.

Ojai Virtual Festival

Libbey Bowl and audience

Ojai Festival, 2019

Photo by Annelies van der Vegt, courtesey of Ojai Festival

The other week, the Ojai Festival had a virtual festival, and various talks and musical excerpts are on line for us to hear and see. 

Friday Photo

Roof of St. Pancras Station, London

November, 2019

SF Performances, Really?

Screen shot of SF Performances home page

San Francisco Performances is simultaneously asking for donations and bravely (?) acting as though there is going to be a full 2020-21 season, including the fall, in which no performances are cancelled.

I'd just like to know what SFP knows that San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, Cal Performances, New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan, to name a few organizations, don't know.

Ten Years Ago

Davies Symphony Hall

Ten years ago, I was thinking about who might be the next music director of the San Francisco Symphony. You can read the whole post at the link, but there's this, in which I have crossed off the names of the now-deceased and highlighted the name of our music director designate:

It's easier to make a list of the unavailable than of the available. Not: Muti, Abbado, Gilbert, Levine, Nezhet-Seguin, Dudamel, Salonen (sob), Jurowski, C. Davis, A. Davis, Haitink, Mackerras (double sob), Barenboim, Nelsons, Rattle, Runnicles (sobbing even more)

People we don't want: FW-M (busy with contracts in Vienna and Cleveland, anyway), Mehta, Previn, Schwarz, Ashkenazy, Maazel, Masur. :)

Been there/done that/don't come back except as a guest: Ozawa, de Waart, Blomstedt.

Probably not: Simone Young

Wish We Could: Le formidable Boulez (say it with a French accent), nearly 85 and with regular guest gigs in Chicago and Cleveland

I would look to the frozen north, and I don't mean Canada). One of the Baltic states, Scandinavia, Finland. There's someone there, maybe someone we know: Osmo Vanska? Sakari Oramu? Where are Neeme Jarvi and Mariss Janssons working? How about Marek Janowski? Eschenbach? Dohnanyi? But the latter two are both 70-ish. So is Frubeck de Burgos.

Favorite from the frozen north: Susanna Malkki, who is Finnish, female, young, and made a big splash in NY at Mostly Mozart a year or two ago.

Of course, I was in the camp of "there's no way Salonen will take this job" right up to the moment I saw the announcement.

I note that this post was my first mention of Susanna Mälkki, and also that Blomstedt, while looking a bit frailer as time passes, is still conducting very fine programs here at almost-93 (his birthday is July 11).

Rubin Institute

Rubin Panel

This year, especially, the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism panel is way too homogenous: eight white-presenting men and two white-presenting women; eight from the east coast, one from the west, one bicoastal. I'd be curious about the minimum age of the participants. At this historical moment, it's not a good look. I'm seeing a lot of good discussions about white supremacy in classical music on Twitter, and, well.....

I hope that those who run the Rubin Institute are thinking about this, and trying to figure out how to broaden the panel in various ways. I mean, I can certainly think of a few folks who would be great to have on this panel.

Museum Mondays

Crandall Typewriter

San Francisco Airport

June, 2017