Amid all the sadness about Kaija Saariaho's death were many reports of her kindness and generosity to others, particularly other composers and performers. I want to also note that it's not everyone who has their adult children as artistic collaborators, but Saaiaho did. Her son Aleksi Barrière worked on translations for Innocence and her daughter Aliisa Neige Barrière is a conductor and violinist who was assistant conductor for the SFS bring-up of Adriana Mater.
Joshua Barone's review of Adriana mentions that there will be a recording based on the performances, which fills a gap in recordings of Saariaho's works.
Gabriela Lena Frank (composer) and Nilo Cruz (librettist)'s
Elúltimo sueño de Frida y Diego
Photo by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SF Opera
San Francisco Opera's last presentation of the centennial season was Gabriela Lena Frank (composer) and Nilo Cruz (librettist)'sElúltimo sueño de Frida y Diego, which has proven to be a big hit, and with good reason. The music is wonderful, the libretto is excellent, the performers terrific. It was only scheduled for five performances, and considering that the remaining performances are more or less sold out, I expect the company wishes they'd scheduled a couple more.
I filed my review very late and it wasn't published at SFCV until Monday. I was surprised to hear that Joshua Kosman's review, published on line the day after the premiere, didn't make it into print until today. Whatever, if you can get a ticket, go see it.
My only regret about my review is that I didn't mention that the opera has some pretty funny moments in it, and I should have gushed more over the amazing performance by Yaritza Véliz.
Nicholas Phan, Fleur Barron, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Axelle Fanyo, Christopher Purves
Cast and Conductor of Adriana Mater
June 8, 2023
Photo byBrittany Hosea-Small, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony
San Francisco Symphony performed a semi-staged version of Kaija Saariaho's second opera, Adriana Mater, the other week. It was quite an emotional occasion: Esa-Pekka Salonen had known Saariaho since they were in school together. Peter Sellars, who directed, had known her since the 1990s.
My editor was sitting close enough that he could see that the cast and Salonen were in tears when Adriana was over. Nicholas Phan said on Twitter than the experience of learning and performing the opera had been life-changing.
She's had a distinguished career with many highlights: music director of the Virginia Symphony, Ulster Philharmonic, Women's Philharmonic (which did so much important work), Long Beach Symphony, and of course the Buffalo Philharmonic. She's made a huge number of recordings, many of unusual repertory.
Falletta was recently awarded the 2023 Eroica Award for Outstanding Service in Music, by MOLA: An Association of Music Performance Librarians. You can read the full details here and also see Falletta's acceptance on YouTube.
Photographed from the parking lot of Hollyhock House.
Both houses were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
This photo gives you a clear idea of the immense scale of Ennis House. The two-story white house just below the main massing of Ennis House is Richard Neutra's Wirin House. Grateful thanks to the friend who tipped me off to Hollyhock House as a good photographic vantage point and who also identified Wirin House.
I feel like every time I see or read about Puccini's Madama Butterfly at San Francisco Opera, a new production is involved. I remember four or five over the last 30 years, which is something, considering that I haven't even seen the opera in fifteen years.
I took myself to the new SFO production, a co-production withTokyo Nikikai Opera Foundation, Semperoper Dresden, and Det Kongelige Teater, Copenhagen, for a few reasons: I was skeptical about the concept behind the production and I actively wanted to hear music director Eun Sun Kim and the singers.
Weeeelllll. I wound up feeling that I might as well have stayed home, which you can read as I could have swapped my ticket for yet another performance of Die Frau ohne Schatten, an opera I don't get to see every three years. Kim was fine, and the singers were fine, except that there was no chemistry at all between soprano Karah Son and tenor Michael Fabiano, and Son sang well but without any special insights, either musically or dramatically. The other primary singers were also fine: perennial baritone Lucas Meachem and the excellent mezzo Hyona Kim. The latter was fantastic in Dream of the Red Chamber and I'd like to see her in more leading roles. Also notable was Kidon Choi's Prince Yamadori; he's got a great voice and commands the stage.
The production....well...the concept is that young Trouble, age around two in the opera, has grown up and discovered what happened to Cio-Cio-San. He reads some letters and goes back in time (I guess?) where he observes everything that happened between Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San. That means that he is pretty much always on stage.
This just does not work. His presence is distracting and doesn't add a thing to the main narrative. Amon Miyamoto's direction in general lacks insight and doesn't have much to say. I think that Kate Pinkerton was on stage a lot more than usual.
I found the production cheap looking: it has about two pieces of furniture and some curtains that fly around the stage and act as the screen for some projections. And that horse statue that Prince Yamadori rides in on? I started laughing because I would have sworn it was recycled from Francesca Zambello's Luisa Miller. It's not - I checked production photos - but the concept certainly is. I have no idea what would have been wrong with having him just walk on stage or be carried in a sedan chair, but what do I know? He was dressed in a Western-style military uniform, so maybe that was it.
Seen from above - I was in the dress circle - it was mighty dull. It looks better in production photos than it looked from the dress circle. Compare with last year's Orpheus ed Eurydice, which was spare but absolutely gorgeous and wonderful to look at. I admit to one minor exception: I loved the dress worn by Mikayla Sager as the young Kate.
The other thing I scratched my head about was Cio-Cio-San's knee-length dress? slip? that she's wearing through a lot of Acts 2 and 3. What the actual: I am not an expert in women's turn-of-the-20th-century undergarments, but I know enough that the outfit registered as wrong.
I'll probably go another 15 years before I see Butterfly again. I'm sorry to have missed Liana Haroutounian in the title role, but the December, 2007 noon matinee with Patricia Racette and Brandon Jovanovich, cond. Donald Runnicles, was one of the greatest performances I have ever seen of anything. I dug up Joshua Kosman's review and was relieved to see that I hadn't misremembered it.
Lastly, no amount of concept is going to fix the awfulness of the libretto: child sex trafficking (she's FIFTEEN and it's clear from the libretto that he BUYS her); fake marriage; abandonment; stealing the kid. What, you think he'll have a rough time in Japan? It's 1904! He's going to have a terrible time in American, too, and possibly get locked up in the 1940s.
Johan Reuter (Barak) and Nina Stemme (Dyer's Wife)
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Act 3
Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera
Die Frau ohne Schatten opened on Sunday at SFO, some thirty-four years after its last performance on the War Memorial Stage. The performance was a triumph for all involved, especially Donald Runnicles, conducting the score for the first time (I was so surprised when I learned this), and the orchestra. They played absolutely magnificently, and you know, this isn't a work that they play every day. By and large the singers are also great. I have a quibble or two but not many.
The company used Karl Böhm's cuts "as sanctioned by the composer" and I'm trying to get some more details on that. I can tell you that in Act 3, some of Barak and his Wife's wanderings around the Temple are trimmed and also the Empress's long speech before she finally refuses to take the Wife's shadow. There are cuts in Act 2 as well, but I can't be very specific about them.
Camilla Nylund (Empress) and David Butt Philip (Emperor)
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Act 3
Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera
This is....a problem child of an opera, with extraordinarily beautiful music wedded to a maddening libretto laden with symbolism and full of apparent pro-natalist views and links between full humanity and fertility. I have one friend calling the opera garbage and another defending it (it's all about transformation! Well, yeah, but also babies! Babies! BABIES!). I am myself somewhere in between. I'd like to have a talk with Hofmannsthal, which is not happening, but I'm not throwing out anything this freaking gorgeous.
And it is! There is very little in opera that's this consistently beautiful. I saw the dress rehearsal and the first performance; I have a subscription ticket and likely I will go to at least one more performance. It is that good and who knows? It might be another 34 years before SFO stages Frau.
Here are the reviews that I have seen; no link to mine because it'll be in the August issue of Opera News.
Robert Wesley Mason (Jack Torrance), Kearstin Piper Brown (Wendy Torrance)
and company members.
Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of Opera Parallèle
My review of Opera Parallèle's new production of Paul Moravec and Mark Campbell's The Shining, in a new orchestration and based on Stephen King's novel, is now published at SFCV. Here's my media round-up.
They're listening intently to Peter Sellars (not shown)
Terrible news this morning: the great Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has died, age 70, of glioblastoma diagnosed in 2021. This explains why her daughter represented her at an event a couple of months ago, where she was awarded an important title by the president of Finland.
She was among the best and most important composers of her generation, perhaps best known in the U.S. for her operas. Adriana Mater had its U.S. premiere at Santa Fe Opera in 2008; some years later, the Met produced L'amor de Loin, her first opera. Her most recent opera, Innocence, is coming to San Francisco Opera next year and to the Met in a future season. Both companies are co-commissioners.
I heard a number of her chamber works in 2007, when they were performed at Disney Hall in LA as part of the Sibelius Unbound Festival; I reviewed Adriana the following year.
She was important to so many; to other composers, to many critics, and of course to her friends and family. Deepest condolences to her family; her husband and children issued the following statement this morning:
We are crushed to announce that Kaija Saariaho has passed this morning. She slept away peacefully in her own bed, at home in Paris. As her family, we are issuing this as our solestatement, and request the peace of our time of mourning be respected.
In February 2021, Kaija was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer, found from the onset to be uncurable and lethal. With characteristically strong determination, she fought daily to both slow its growth and live fully. The multiplying tumors did not affect her cognitive faculties until the terminal phase of her illness; they were located in the area controlling her motor skills on the right side of her body, which led to growing difficulties in walking and talking, in turn exacerbated by ensuing falls and broken bones. Kaija's appearances in a wheelchair or walking with a cane have prompted many questions, to which she answered elusively: following her physician's advice, she kept her illness a private matter, in order to maintain a positive mindset and keep the focus on her work. Her case should however help raise awareness concerning the nature and detection of brain tumors. It should also highlight the plight of immunocompromised individuals: twice Kaija has contracted Covid in public events where insufficient measures were taken, if at all, to protect the most fragile among us. Her experience as a wheelchair user also made her more aware of the inadequacy of many locations she visited, including cultural venues. All of this she would now want publicized. She also hoped that, through the experimental treatment protocols she underwent at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, she could, on a small scale, help advance research on conditions such as hers.
Kaija, who was born in 1952 in Helsinki, Finland, died prematurely at the age of 70, but lived a full life. Her early trajectory brought her from the avant-garde music circles of Finland to the European stage between Freiburg, Darmstadt and Paris, giving her the opportunity to contribute to the golden age of computer music, and later integrate a new understanding of harmony and psychoacoustics into the tradition of modern orchestra and opera writing. She achieved universal recognition among her peers and both public and critical success, all while never ceasing to challenge herself to explore new directions.
During the time of her illness, Kaija had the joy of being surrounded by a close circle of faithful friends and collaborators, and even of expanding it. She was involved in many new productions of her music, and in the premiere performances of her latest works: the Saarikoski Songs, the chamber music piece Semafor, the orchestra work Vista, the madrigal Reconnaissance, the re-creation of her first music theatre piece Study for Life, and her acclaimed last opera Innocence. She also did not relent in her commitment to teaching and passing the torch. One of her last endeavors was to lead the jury of an organ composition contest she initiated for the inauguration of the Helsinki Music Centre's new organ, an instrument she helped fund.
The final months of Kaija's life were devoted to the completion of her trumpet concerto. HUSH, which will be premiered in Helsinki on August 24* by Verneri Pohjola, with Susanna Mälkki conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Kaija is survived by all of us who loved her and were blessed with her relentless generosity and insightful artistic support. But more importantly, we will all be survived by the bold, sensitive, exploratory music she has created, termed a classic of this century already in her lifetime.
Jean-Baptiste Barrière, composer and multimedia artist, her husband; Aleksi Barrière, writer and director, her son; Alisa Neige Barrière, conductor and violinist, her daughter
Photo by Kristen Loken, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony
Well, this was a disappointment. Julia Wolfe's Her Story, the latest in her historical oratorio series, played at San Francisco Symphony last week, and...I thought it was not very good. Too few words, unvaried music, a staging that didn't do much for me. Anthracite Fields was so much better! Joshua Kosman was also disappointed.
This was the third socially-conscious work I reviewed this year, and by far the weakest. The others were Gabriel Kahane's emergency shelter intake form and Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon. The latter is receiving a couple of performances in NYC, at Lincoln Center, in mid-July, if you're nearby and you're curious. I loved it and I'd suggest reading the book first. Keep an eye on Kahane's web site for future performances of emergency shelter intake form.
Here's a real surprise: Gustavo Dudamel is leaving the Paris Opera after only two seasons as its music director, effective in August. The appointment was its own surprise because he'd conducted hardly any opera at the time he was tapped for the job. (Anthony Tommasini wrote an article back then saying of course that was just fine! I thought he was being ridiculous. There is a link to the article in the article I linked to.)
All he's saying is that he wants to spend more time with his family, with whom he lives in Spain. Ahem. So for the next couple of years he'll be in LA a substantial part of the time anyway, then he'll be closer, anyway, with the new job in NY. We now know that one reason for the NY Phil position was, presumably, not for the shorter commute to Paris.
Next question: who takes over Paris from him? Well, their former music director, Philippe Jordan, is leaving Vienna early, though (double ahem) he certainly wouldn't be my first choice. And Susanna Mälkki's term at the Helsinki Philharmonic is ending. Henrik Nanasi is a few years out from the Komische Oper now (and is a tremendous opera conductor). And there are tons of other good conductors out there.
I read pianist Jeremy Denk's memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story in Music Lessons, recently. I can't remember why I picked it up; I know that I hadn't read any reviews. Whatever, I'm very glad that I did. Denk is an elegant writer with a distinctly wry voice, and he's written a wonderful book.
The book is a memoir about becoming a pianist, about how you learn both the technique of playing and how you become a musician. It's about his teachers and the choices he made and what he learned from each of them, starting with the very basics of playing boring piano exercises. This part of the story will be familiar, in some way, to everyone who has ever studied a musical instrument.
But not everyone becomes a good enough player and a good enough musician to become a professional musician, not to mention the particular combination of good decisions, personality, and luck that combine to put you in the right place at the right time, where people hear you and think that you have potential or that you have already arrived at a place where you have reached your potential. Denk had all of this, and sometimes you can tell why, while other times it's less clear. He is self-deprecating about his skills; like many people who've worked hard over many years, he is very self-critical. You find out at least as much about his weaknesses, as he perceives them, as about his strengths, which you sometimes have to infer. You often see him through the lens of his teachers and what they say to him. The book is appropriately modest; to find out just how good a player Denk is, you'll have to see him in concert or buy his recordings.
His teachers are quite a group, and as he approaches graduation from Oberlin, his undergraduate institution, he makes a last-minute decision not to go to USC, where he has been admitted and knows with whom he'd be studying, and to instead go to Indiana University to study with György Sebők, a wizardly Hungarian pianist and teacher. Sebők isn't nearly as well-known as his compatriot, dear friend, and fellow Hungarian, the cellist Janos Starker, but he was clearly the right teacher at the right time for Denk. The book is dedicated to him, and it's clear how much Denk loved and admired him, and why. There are also some mentions of the pianist and teacher Evelyn Brancart, who seems wise in ways different from and complementary to Sebők. These mentions are tantalizing and always made me wish for more.
Every Good Boy Does Fine is also a slow, gradual coming-out story, which I found extremely touching and sweet. There were many moments of confusion for Denk and for various girlfriends along the way, because that's how it is; people come out at their own pace and in their own time. In this, the memoir put me in mind of Philip Kennicott's Counterpoint, another pianistic memoir, in which Kennicott, a good amateur pianist, wrestles with the piano, his grief over his very complicated mother's death, and learning to play the Goldberg Variations. If you like one, you'll like the other, too.
Photo: Robert Millard, courtesy of San Francisco Opera
If you're reading this blog, it's very, very likely that you know that as part of its centennial season, San Francisco Opera is presenting, for the first time in more than 30 years, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Die Frau ohne Schatten.Frau is a monster and a monument, with a gigantic orchestra and a libretto that is, well, complicated and full of contentious issues.
A few weeks ago, Larry Wolff gave a presentation about Frau to the Wagner Society of Northern California about Frau. Wolff is a professor of history at NYU, and his speciality, as far as I can tell from his bio and the books he's written, is central European history from the 18th century to the early 20th century. His is also an opera lover, from an early enough age that his first opera was Aida at the old Met, and he has a professional level of knowledge about opera.
His presentation was based on his most recent book, The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, which was published on May 2 by Stanford University Press. I ordered a copy from my local bookstoreduring his presentation and I'm reading it now. The title is a double entendre, referring to both Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Kaiserin and Empress Zita, the last Habsburg empress.
He's an engaging speaker and I loved the presentation, which includes some touching family history. If you're interested in Frau, see the presentation, buy the book, see the opera - which you can do in person or by livestream on June 20, at 7 p.m. Pacific time.
Here's what I had to say about Philippe Jordan in 2018, when I saw him conduct Tristan und Isolde at the Paris Opera;
Philippe Jordan, who will leave Paris for Vienna in 2020, conducted, and was variable. His pacing of that last scene in Act II was masterly; elsewhere, he could be wayward. Neither of the performances I saw caught musical fire in the way this opera can blaze; the orchestral sound was on the muddy side, though without more experience of the opera house, I can’t determine whether the acoustics of the Opéra Bastille, my seats, or his conducting had the greatest responsibility for this. His pacing was sometimes bizarre: for example, Isolde’s Transfiguration reached its greatest climax far too early, so that the final climax was anticlimactic.
He was much better in Michel Jarrell's Bérénice:
Philippe Jordan’s meticulous conducting balanced a big orchestra beautifully with the voices and brought out every last fascinating color of the orchestration.
My interview with Brandon Jovanovich and Christian Van Horn makes him sound...fussy:
“Philippe is a real master of the score, in that whatever it says, we’re going to do,” said Van Horn, and Jovanovich agreed. “That’s right. If it says piano, everyone will be singing piano. If it says forte, you’re forte.” Van Horn went on: “If there’s a comma between two words, you’re not going to carry that note over.”
“That’s right. ‘Brandon, you’re singing an eighth note there, but it’s a sixteenth note.’ Every time, he would tell you: a sixteenth note. ‘Brandon, Brandon.’ Every time. That’ll change the outcome a lot.”
And something I've said, but I think never printed here: of the three conductors I've seen lead Les Troyens, it was Jordan who didn't make the work sound like the greatest opera ever composed. His conception was far smaller in scale than those of Donald Runnicles and Andrew Davis.
So I was, you could say, a little concerned about how Britten's gigantic War Requiem would go, particularly since the last SFS performances were with the magnificent Semyon Bychkov. I'm sorry to say that my concerns were not misplaced. Joshua Kosman's review says this:
Some of that eloquence registered strongly in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, May 18, when the San Francisco Symphony tackled the piece for the first time in nearly a decade. Some of it, though, struggled to emerge from under the stiff and weighty musical approach of guest conductor Philippe Jordan.
And....yeah. It was stiff, and at the same time felt weirdly as though Jordan's conducting had no spine at all. His conducting lacked forward momentum; it was as if he was focused on rhythm and meter at the bar line level, with no sense of where each movement was headed. Entrances and the beginnings of most movements had no thrust or sense that something important was happening. The overall sensation was curiously inert and shapeless. And the music itself is anything but inert or shapeless.
The orchestra, choruses, and soloists in the vast work were excellent. Tenor Ian Bostridge's singing is something of an acquired taste, one that I have mostly not acquired; I'd prefer a less wiry and nasal sound in this music. Brian Mulligan brought somber eloquence and beautiful tone to the baritone solos. Jennifer Holloway's big, gleaming soprano worked well in her solos. I admit that I would have liked more consonants from all of them.
Updated: May 23, 2023, to add the links below.
Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center. SHADE: "Unfortunately, Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan led most of the big choral sections as if they were Carl Orff's pounding Carmina Burana rather than Britten's brilliant riff on Verdi's Requiem."
