Words That Should Not Have Been Spoken

Heard on KDFC, said by different announcers:

• ".....the McGill boys," following a performance featuring the distinguished musicians Anthony McGill, principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, and his brother Demarre McGill, principal flute of the Seattle Symphony. They are both great players, if I haven't already made that clear. If you're not aware of it, the McGills are Black men. Apply the word "boy" to adult Black men was something done by white people to dehumanize and disrespect Black men during the period of slavery, during the Jim Crow/segregation period, and at other times. Don't do this, ever. And remember, it would have been easy to refer to "the McGill brothers," which is factual and neutral. 
• "Celebrate Esa-Pekka Salonen's last season as music director of the San Francisco Symphony." COME ON. Somebody at KDFC should be paying attention enough to know that Salonen's last season is nothing to celebrate. It's an institutional disaster and a huge mistake. We should have been celebrating the extension of his contract, but no. I mean...maybe this was part of a paid ad. Maybe KDFC should have refused the money.

Friday Photo

Interior of St. Lawrence Jewry, London

July, 2024

 

Where Has Mark Elder Been All Our Lives?

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

The literal answer is that Mark Elder spent the last 25 years, from 2000 to 2024, as the music director of the renowned Hallé Orchestra, in Manchester, England, UK. His career in the United States has been sparse, as far as I can tell: he conducted Die Meistersinger at SF Opera in 2015; he led 14 performances between 2004 and 2024 at the Boston Symphony; he didn't conduct the NY Philharmonic at all, and he conducted 79 performances at the Metropolitan Opera between 1988 and 2019.

He made his San Francisco Symphony debut last week in a concert that was absolutely sensational, one of the most exciting of the current season.

On paper, it was a distinctly odd-looking program:

• Berlioz, Overture to Les francs-juges
• Debussy, Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune
• Berlioz, Overture to Le Roi Lear
• R. Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra
• Adams, Short Ride in a Fast Machine

And...it all worked, even that bit where there was a four-minute piece following the evening's biggest work.

I was not real happy when Elder picked up a microphone as soon as he got on the podium; I've seen too many conductors who, well, blathered or just repeated what was in the program. But Elder kept it brief and was dryly humorous. He talked about the really weird items on the program, that is, the two Berlioz overtures. The last time Les francs-juges was heard at Davies was in 1988. The King Lear overture had never been played here before.

It was good to hear them –– they are slightly oddball, because they are Berlioz –– and they both got shapely performances. In between came a truly magnificent performance of the Debussy, which was last played by SFS in 2023 with MTT conducting.

Reader, I'm here to tell you: this was better than MTT's performance of it and right up there with the best Debussy I have heard. That Yubeen Kim, the orchestra's fabulous principal flute, was playing, made a big difference, of course. His gorgeous sound, and his personal and insightful phrasing, went a long way toward making the performance stand out from all others, but there was still more. The performance was scaled so that you felt you were listening to chamber music, and the interplay among the various instruments in the orchestra –– the two harps and the oboe in particular –– rounded out that sensation. The sheer sound of the orchestra was rich and yet transparent, a hard balance to achieve. 

Honestly, I should have known how good this would be from a purely sonic perspective. Elder's Meistersinger was also something special. It was amazingly slow, coming in at 5 hours and 45 minutes, which must be some kind of record. And yet, and yet, it never lost shape or momentum, and the sound? Well, I have never heard the SF Opera Orchestra sound better. As good, yes, but never better.

Now, Also sprach Zarathustra is by no means my favorite Strauss and not my favorite of Strauss's tone poems. But this performance was something special. The last time I heard it at Davies, Esa-Pekka Salonen was conducting, and –– I can only half believe that I'm saying this –– this was better than that performance.

It was coherent, which is tough to do in a work that opens like the sun rising and eventually becomes Viennese frippery, where you're sure you've been dropped into uncredited outtakes from Der Rosenkavalier, which, of course, wouldn't be composed for some years. But the orchestra played like it was the greatest piece of music ever written, and you know, that kind of fervor isn't common and isn't easy to elicit, even from a great group like SFS. Even I was convinced that I was hearing the greatest piece of music ever composed, and I know perfectly well that it is not. 

And it sounded fantastic. Elder didn't overload the hall; even at its loudest, there was no bombast or blaring or bad taste. (I'm imagining certain conductors in Also sprach and....there would have been a lot of bombast and bad taste.) The orchestra was in perfect balance and so beautifully layered. I mean, Strauss gives you the ingredients, right? He was a consummately great orchestrator! But not every conductor can make his music sound this good.

The audience applauded wildly; lots of people got solo bows; Elder left the stage when the applause was still going on. He came back on, picked up the microphone again, and said something like "I've always felt that some works need a bit of a chaser after them. We've just drunk four big steins of German beer, and here is the chaser." He then led a banger of an account of Short Ride, and you know what? He was absolutely right that it was a great end to the evening.

Two final comments: first, it was a bit like the old days, when MTT would pull an orchestral encore out of his hat at the end of an already-satisfying concert. I miss those days, I really do. Second, if I weren't a reasonably responsible adult, I would have bagged the concert I reviewed Saturday night and come back to hear this one a second time.

Elsewhere:

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle. Comes down on Rebecca's side rather more than mine. Probably I'm wrong or missed problems in the performances.
• Rebecca Wishnia, SFCV and SF Chronicle. The review is rather the opposite of mine.
• Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio

 

Museum Mondays

Virgin and Child Enthroaned

Rosselli di Jacapo Franchi

1376-1457

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

July, 2024

 

We Saw What We Saw

I'm not going to embed any videos, because I don't want to inadvertently upset or traumatize anyone who would be hurt, upset, or traumatized from seeing a Nazi salute, but: if you saw what Elon Musk did during the inauguration and think it was a Nazi salute, you are complete right. You saw what you saw and interpreted it correctly. Neo-Nazis seeing it thought it was a nod to Naziism and Hitler. Germans, who have some experience with this, thought it was a Nazi salute. 

For anyone who might want to see the evidence, I will link to videos of Musk and of Hitler himself demonstrating this gesture. I suggest turning down the sound.

• Musk at the inauguration
• Hitler on May 1, 1936. This video contains many swastikas, film of Hitler, and film of crowds saluting him. Hitler's salute is about 35 seconds in.

Note that Musk is also playing footsie with Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany; AfD), the farthest-right of Germany's current political parties, so far right that it's Nazi-adjacent.

I've got a conclusion about Musk, myself. He's not hiding his Nazi sympathies from us. The United States and its allies fought a long and bloody war to rid Europe of Nazis. Naziism is anti-American and completely antithetical to the ideals, still not realized, of the United States, as expressed in our foundational documents. And this is the kind of person that the 47th president is associating himself with.

Friday Photo

 

Houseboats

Lake Union, Seattle

September, 2016

Opera Omaha Season Announcement

Opera Omaha, located in Omaha, Nebraska, has a short but mighty season coming up in 2025-26:

THE BARBER OF SEVILLE

Friday, October 24 | 7:30 PM
Sunday, October 26 | 2:00 PM
Orpheum Theater

Figaro | Alexander Birch Elliot

Rosina | Daniela Mack*

Count Almaviva | Minghao Liu*

Conductor | Gary Thor Wedow
Director | Stephen Lawless*

SUSANNAH

Friday, January 30 | 7:30 PM
Sunday, February 1 | 2:00 PM

Orpheum Theater
Music and Libretto by Carlisle Floyd

Susannah | Caitlin Lynch*

Olin Blitch | Andrew Potter
Little Bat | Christian Sanders*
Sam | Robert Stahley*

Principal Guest Conductor | Steven White
Director | Patricia Racette*

HERCULES

Friday, March 13 | 7:30 PM

Orpheum Theater
Composed by George Frideric Handel
Libretto by Thomas Broughton

Presented by The English Concert

Dejanira | Ann Hallenberg*
Hercules | William Guanbo Su*
Iole | Hilary Cronin*
Lichas | Hugh Cutting*

Conductor | Harry Bicket

BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE

Friday, April 24 | 7:30PM
Saturday, April 25 | 7:30PM
Holland Performing Arts Center

Composed by Béla Bartók/ Libretto by Béla Balázs

A co-production of Opera Omaha and the Omaha Symphony

Bluebeard | Ryan McKinny*
Judith | Michelle DeYoung*

Conductor | Lidiya Yankovskaya*

Projection Design | David Murakami*

UNSHAKEABLE

Friday, June 5 | 7:00PM
Saturday, June 6 | 2:00PM
Saturday, June 6 | 7:00PM
Sunday, June 7 | 2:00PM

Hoff Family Arts & Culture Center

Composed by Joseph Illick / Libretto by Andrea Fellows Fineberg

* Opera Omaha Mainstage Debut

Season tickets for Opera Omaha’s 25/26 Season are available now at www.TicketOmaha.com or by calling Opera Omaha at (402) 34OPERA (346-7372).

Adams and (Shudder) Orff at SFS

David Robertson, John Adams, and Víkingur Ólafsson

Davies Symphony Hall

January 16, 2025

Photo: Brandon Patoc, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

I reviewed San Francisco Symphony, with David Robertson conducting, in the world premiere of John Adams's beautiful new piano concerto, After the Fall, and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. Yes, believe me, I had questions about the pairing, which I suppose I could have directed to SFS, but I had no particular hope of getting an honest answer about this pairing. When you've got David Robertson on board, why would you program Carmina to go with an Adams premiere? This was the ninth Adams premiere that SFS has performed and I'd be surprised if they haven't performed all of his major works. The last big local premiere was Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, with Ólafsson and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Were there a lot of empty seats? I do recall a number of performances in 2021-22 and since then with shockingly low attendence.

I did discover that it wasn't the first time Robertson conducted the thing with SFS. I wasn't at that performance, because singing Carmina once, when I was in graduate school, and hearing an amateur chorus sing it once, were more than enough for me. It is admittedly much more impressive with the 125-voice SF Symphony Chorus and SFS itself than when performed with two pianos and percussion, but "impressive" is not the same as "good." Robertson is a terrific conductor and I'm sure that he made Carmina sound about as good as it can sound, but hey - he's done great Messiaen and great Carter here, so why ask him to do Carmina again?

Media round-up (updated on 1/23 to include Gabe Meline's review):

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle, writes beautifully about After the Fall and then savages the Orff. He calls the Adams "spectacularly beautiful and ingratiating," then goes on to question the programming decision that put Carmina on the same program. In addition, he says that "Carmina burana taints everything it touches. It’s a ghastly piece of music — repetitive, simple-minded, and resolutely scornful of anything approaching harmonic or contrapuntal substance. We could bring in the piece’s other sins as well, including its fraught history with the Nazi regime and its pilferings from Stravinsky’s Les Noces." 100%, as they say on social media.
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV and SF Chronicle. Note that I could not squeeze in that the harp parts look beautiful, but I could not hear them very well from my seats at the dress rehearsal and first performance. A friend seated closer and in the center of Davies reports that she could hear them loud and clear at the Saturday performance.
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio. "After the Fall came across as little more than a weak shadow of what Adams had been doing some forty-odd years ago."
• DB at Kalimac's Corner. "Led by guest conductor David Robertson, this was a pretty dull run-through if you've heard Carmina as often as I have." And he liked After the Fall better than Must the Devil Have all the Good Tunes?
• Gabe Meline, KQED. On the Adams: "After opening with cascading notes on harp and celeste reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score, Thursday’s world premiere at Davies Symphony Hall of After the Fall presented blissful, clustered melodies on the piano, and the type of sharp jabs that Ellington once delivered on his piano from the brass and woodwinds." On Carmina: "People either love or hate Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. I am in the latter camp, but had never before heard it live. It was performed very well, and I now dislike it more."
• Opera Tattler. "The music swirled and buzzed, and I had the very weird sensation of pinpricks in my ribcage from the various sounds."
• Previously: Media round-up for Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?

On Blue Sky Social, Michael Good had the following to say:

Here's my take on Carmina Burana, in stark contrast to @joshuakosman.bsky.social and @lisairontongue.bsky.social. It's a visionary piece that anticipates rock and roll by nearly 20 years. It elevates rhythm, melody, lyrics, and repetition over harmonic complexity. Its popularity is well deserved.

If what we're looking for is elevating rhythm, melody, lyrics, and repetition over harmonic complexity, let me mention the works of one Igor Stravinsky, who did all of that between 1913 and 1923, long before Orff, in Le Sacre du Printemps and Les Noces, and, not incidentally, did it all much, much better than Orff. Okay, Stravinsky is much more harmonically complex than Orff, but I'm sure you get the point I'm making here.

(Belated) Museum Mondays

 From La Cartonería Mexicana, an exhibit of Mexican paper and paste art

Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM

August, 2024

Friday Photo

Moon and Jupiter over a tree outside Grace Cathedral

San Francisco

January, 2025

 

The Fires

Oakland, CA

September 9, 2020

I took the photo above in September, 2020. It's a view up the street from my house, showing a couple of rooftops, some trees, and the sky, which is eerily orange, turned that color by smoke from the fires then burning to north of us. The great city of Los Angeles, 350 miles to the south of me, has now been suffering for a week from major fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, and smaller fires in other locations. Fire warnings for tomorrow, at levels from elevated to extreme, have been issued for everywhere in the huge geographic triangle bounded by San Diego, Bakersfield, and Santa Maria. (Gift link; scroll down to find the map with that area.)

The losses so far, in human life, in homes, in art and music, in community and the built environment, are incalculable, and I fear they will only worsen. Alex Ross, who has an abiding love for the architecture of Los Angeles and the city's deep cultural history, has posts about lost architectural sites and about Villa Aurora, which still stood as of Saturday, January 11.

The fires are a consequence of global warming and the failure of governments worldwide to take action soon enough and with sufficient vigor. The risks have been known to some for fifty years or more, yet preserving the Earth and its people has taken a back seat to profit. One of this country's major parties acts as though climate change isn't real, though its leaders must know differently. They have managed to persuade numerous U.S. citizens that it's not real.

If you're writing about the fires and about the losses, I encourage careful fact-checking. A couple of days ago, the destruction of Belmont Music, housed in a building at Larry Schoenberg's home in Pacific Palisades, led to fears that the manuscripts of Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire had been lost. The former manuscript is in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. and the latter is in the Morgan Library, New York City. 

According to the NY Times (gift link), Belmont Music lost its entire inventory of performing materials for Arnold Schoenberg's works, as well as digital backups that were housed on site, plus letters, memorabilia, and related material. It is a tremendous loss for the family, for performers, and for all who care about the composer. It is likely to affect performances for some time, as Mr. Schoenberg rebuilds the collection –– but the composer's original manuscripts are safe in archives and libraries around the world. The Arnold Schoenberg Center has a helpful online database of the composer's compositions and the locations of the manuscripts.

The effects of the fires will be felt for years and likely decades, owing to the scope of the destructions, the number of people affected, and the economic and cultural importance of Los Angeles. I recently started listening to the podcast Not Built for This, which is about United States infrastructure and climate change. The second episode is about the ripple effects of the Camp Fire (Paradise, CA) and its impact on those who lost homes and the city of Chico. The podcast is sobering and frankly terrifying, well worth listening to regardless of where you're located.

Museum Mondays

Italian single-manual harpsichord, c. 1680

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

July, 2024

 

SF Symphony: James Gaffigan with Ray Chen

James Gaffigan

Photo copyright Miguel Lorenzo / courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

James Gaffigan, once an associate conductor of San Francisco Symphony, currently music director of the Komische Oper, Berlin, was back this week, leading a program of, really, pretty standard stuff and also chatting with Iris Kwok of SFCV. I went to the second of three performances last night, and you bet I was surprised: I was mostly bored.

What didn't bore me at all was the first work on the program, Missy Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), which was about ten minutes of purely gorgeous sound, rotating slowly around the orchestra and with a remarkable concluding sonority that included a bunch of harmonicas. Looking at the instrumentation, which called for one member of several sections to play harmonicas, I'll note that, perhaps respecting the sheer size of Davies, two members of each section played harmonicas.

I do not really get people's love for the Barber Violin Concerto, here well-played by Ray Chen. It is kinda dull, with pretty moments. The last movement is extremely perky and ends abruptly. I was expecting something resembling a development and didn't get it. Back to the drawing board, Sam! Or maybe not; he's long gone. Chen's Bach encore was imaginatively and flexibly played; he's good.

The Prokofiev Fifth Symphony came across as noisy, musically incoherent (the composer's fault, I'd guess), and uninteresting (the conductor's fault, because I can certainly imagine it working a lot better in someone else's hands).

I'd definitely encourage you to read the interview with Iris Kwok, in which Gaffigan some interesting things and others that maybe he could have thought through a bit. Here he's talking, generally, about SFS's music director search (a job I'd guess he would be interested in):

This could be dangerous for an institution because then you’re just checking off boxes — we want an old European conductor, we want a young female conductor, or we want a person of color. Those things have nothing to do with what the institution needs artistically. For me, I don’t care what gender, what color skin, what nationality you are — you have to fit the mold as a musician first and foremost for the institution, and you need to have the same values and mission statement as the institution.

He's not wrong about having the same values and mission (a severe divergence is why we're losing Salonen) but also: representation does matter. It would have been wild if the Oakland Symphony had hired a white guy to succeed Michael Morgan, for example. 

I must also note that Gaffigan is very clear that it's easy to find worthy music by women:

In Missy Mazzoli’s case, she’s a dreamer, and her music is always filled with fantasy. Her piece is abstract: about orbits, space, the way things come around and meet with one another again, how things get faster and accelerate with time. She just writes great stuff, whether it’s five or 10 minutes or a [longer] symphonic piece. As a conductor, I’m always looking for modern music. The funny thing is, all the artistic administrations are always like, “We need more female composers.” And I’m like, “There’s no problem finding them. There’s so many great female composers.” She got to the top very quickly because she’s a natural.

He's got some rightfully pointed things to say about American orchestras and their apparent love for European conductors versus Americans, and how he felt he had to have European credentials to eventually land a music director job here. I'm with him all the way on this: he doesn't say "this is ridiculous," because he can't, but it is. 

There is a lot of conducting talent in the United States, but how many of the major (and major-ish) orchestras are currently or recently led by U.S.-born music directors? The Baltimore Symphony (Jonathon Heyward, previously Marin Alsop); Buffalo Philharmonic (JoAnn Falletta; previously MTT); Metropolitan Opera (previously James Levine); SFS (previously MTT); Boston Symphony (previously James Levine); NY Philharmonic (previously Alan Gilbert, previously Lorin Maazel); St. Louis SO (previously David Robertson). How many others? The article I link to below lists a few, but note that Carl St. Clair is retiring, and will be replaced at the Pacific Symphony by a British.

I'm reminded that last March, the NY Times ran an article (gift link) about why Americans have such a hard time getting hired at orchestras here. Mostly, they talked with, or were only able to quote, conductors! For crying out loud: talk to orchestra boards and CEOs about this. They're the ones hiring music directors. 

Elsewhere:

• Rebecca Wishnia, SFCV/Chronicle, who dismisses the Prokofiev in just a couple of sentences, like me.
• DB at Kalimac's Corner
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Previously, Joshua Kosman on MTT's Prokofiev 5. 

Music Executive Moves

Gary Ginstling, who left the NY Phil last year, has been appointed Executive Director and Chief Executive Officr the Houston Symphony, effective February 3, 2025.

From the press release:

Houston Symphony Board President Barbara J. Burger, on behalf of the Board and Music Director Juraj Valčuha, announced today the appointment of 25-year veteran orchestra leader Gary Ginstling to the position of Executive Director & Chief Executive Officer of the Houston Symphony. In this position, Ginstling will hold the Margaret Alkek Williams Chair and will begin his new post on February 3, 2025. Ginstling succeeds John Mangum, who stepped down from this role at the end of September 2024 to lead the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Ginstling has held several leadership roles at major American orchestras. Most recently, he spent two years at the New York Philharmonic, serving in the roles of executive director and, until July 2024, as president and CEO. Previously, Ginstling served as executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) in Washington, DC, from 2017 to 2022, and as CEO of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (ISO) from 2013 to 2017. His prior orchestra leadership positions include general manager of The Cleveland Orchestra; director of communications and external affairs of the San Francisco Symphony; and executive director of the Berkeley Symphony.  

Recently appointed:

• Matias Tarnopolsky to the NY Philharmonic, commencing January 1, 2025
• Kim Notelmy to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, commencing July 8, 2024
• Brent Assink to acting CEO of the Minnesota Orchestra, August, 2024
• John Mangum to CEO of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, commencing fall, 2024, leaving the job at Houston open
• Michelle Miller Burns to the Dallas Symphony, leaving the Minnesota job

Open positions:

• Minnesota Orchestra, following Michelle Miller Burns's move to Dallas
• Philadelphia Orchestra, with Matias Tarnopolsky's appointment to the NY Philharmonic
• Dallas Symphony, with Kim Notelmy's appointment to the LA Phil
• Cincinnati Symphony, following the retirement of Jonathan Martin in February, 2025
• St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, after Jon Limbacher retires next year
• New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, after Gabriel van Aalst left for a different job

Friday Photo

Mushrooms

Berkeley, CA

December, 2024

 

Can We Blame Prop. 13 for the LA Fires? (And So Much More?)

I think we can. 

Proposition 13 made it harder, much harder, to raise taxes of any kind in California, and limited property taxes and reassessments. Basically, taxation can't keep up with the population growth of the state or with its infrastructure needs.

Take this, for example, from the NY Times:

Traci Park, the Los Angeles City Council member whose district includes Pacific Palisades, said the city’s water systems were among several pieces of critically underfunded infrastructure.

“There are environmental catastrophes waiting to happen everywhere with our water mains,” she said, adding that some were a century old. “As our city has grown, we haven’t upgraded and expanded the infrastructure that we need to support it.”

Consider the crumbling schools and roads in much of California, including Oakland, where I live. Californians voted for it because they'd rather have cash than infrastructure and because of concern trolling about older people threatened with losing their homes because of high property taxes. Blanket limitations on taxes weren't the right way to deal with that particular issue, of course: a split property tax roll dividing up commercial and personal real estate, or even some kind of age-based cap, would have done it, but no.

The Biden-Harris administration is jumping in feet first with aid for the state and city, as it would for disasters anywhere in the country. They believe that we are all in this together. Don't expect the same from the incoming administration.

Of course, there are other issues with fires and fire safety:

Greg Pierce, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies water resources and urban planning, echoed the concerns over water systems that are designed for urban fires, not fast-moving wildfires. But redesigning water systems to allow firefighters to take on a broad wildfire would be enormously expensive, he said.

A more fundamental question, he said, is whether it’s a good idea to rebuild neighborhoods adjacent to wildlands, an issue that has been broadly debated across the West as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of fires on what is known as the wildland-urban interface.

Museum Mondays

Gustav Moreau

King David detail

Armand Hammer Museum

Los Angeles, CA

December, 2024

 

Friday Photo

View from the Hammer Museum

Los Angeles, December, 2024

 

Brandeis University Destroys Its Music Department

Slosberg Music Center, Brandeis University

Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel

Used with permission under the terms of the 

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed

No changes have been made to this photograph.

I'd reported in 2023 that the Brandeis University administration was threatening to shut down the graduate programs in music. I neglected to report that it appeared, after protest, that these programs, which cost about $300,000/year, were going to be retained.

Ultimately, though, the university decided to shut down the graduate programs and also to lay off the Lydian String Quartet, which has been in residence for forty-four (44) years. In that time, the Lydian has been an advocate for new music and hugely valuable as coaches and teachers as well as performers. The cost of the Lydian was about $275,000/year.

This is truly terrible: what it means is that in the future, the faculty won't have graduate students to teach and the undergraduates won't have the vast wealth of teaching and performing experience of the Lydian. It will be nearly impossible to attract top scholars and composers to Brandeis because there won't be graduate programs.

This has already resulted in the decision of longtime faculty members Eric Chasalow and David Rakowski to accelerate their retirement from Brandeis.

I was an undergraduate at Brandeis in the late 1970s, and my teachers there included musicologists Joshua Rifkin, Edward Nowacki, and Margaret Bent, composers Harold Shapero and Arthur Berger, and conductors James Olesen and David Hoose, who provided a first-class music education. I remain grateful to them all to this day and I deeply regret that future Brandeis students won't have the opportunities that I had.

I sent printed letters in August to various high-level administrators and heard nothing. (The president of the University was on the verge of announcing his resignation, so it's not a surprise that he didn't respond.) I wrote again in October to most of the same group and added a few members of the board of trustees. Only one person bothered to respond; her line was "hard decisions must be made." Note that there was no outreach to music department alumni about the status of the department and no attempt made to raise funds from us.

I did tell each person I wrote to that I had planned a substantial bequest to Brandeis, but I had called off those plans and would never donate another cent. I hope that other Brandeis alumnae who studied in the music department will do the same.

 

Museum Mondays

 

Henri Fantin-Latour, Peonies in a Blue and White Vase

Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

December, 2024

Lookback 2024

What a year it has been, in every area that interests me. This post is both personal and professional.

Looking at my list, I see that this year I wrote 45 paid reviews, previews, and articles, up from 30 last year. Twenty-five were written after I retired. They sort out this way:

• Three previews, summer, holiday, and early 2025, all for the SF Chronicle
• Thirty-two reviews, some for SFCV, some for the Chronicle, some for both. This includes my review of the Eun Sun Kim film.
• Three big features and one small one.
• "Backstage at SF Opera" (SFCV)
• "The Scorekeepers," about music librarians, for SFCV
• Shawna Lucey & Opera San José, for Opera. It's available on line now, behind a paywall, and will be in print in their February issue.
• Featurette about the orchestra's role in the SFO Tristan und Isolde. SFCV and the Chronicle.
• I contributed to SFCV's 2024 round-up of best performances.
•  Five news articles, one for the Chronicle, four for SFCV.

In the last two years, I've discovered that my sweet spot is 1500 to 2500 words; I've written a bunch of features of that length and really like it.

The Good

• I retired from technical writing, after years on an unfulfilling project and multiple frustrations with so much at my former employer.
• I'm having a lot more fun with music writing than I'd had in years with technical writing.
• Joshua Kosman got to retire, and he's clearly having fun with puzzles, writing about classical music on his own schedule, and reading Trollope.
• San Francisco Opera's artistic (and probably financial) success. Yes, I'm making some assumptions / guesses about the money side of things, but from what I've been told and what I have seen, The Magic Flute and Carmen sold like hotcakes, whatever you thought of them artistically, and the artistic strengths of Innocence, Partenope, Ballo, The Handmaid's Tale, and Tristan und Isolde were clear. I'll probably have to do a separate post about Tristan because on balance it was the best, overall, of the seven productions I have seen live, and I want to substantiate that.

The Great Performances

• Chanticleer and Alkemie's Machaut program at the Berkeley Festival
• Erin Morley's fabulous recital
• Raehann Bryce-Davis's superb recital
• Innocence, SF Opera
• Partenope, SF Opera
• The Handmaid's Tale, SF Opera
• Tristan und Isolde, SF Opera
• Don Giovanni, Merola Opera
• Salonen Cello Concerto, SF Symphony (Salonen)
• Mahler 3, SF Symphony (Salonen)
• Erwartung and Ma Mère L'oye, SF Symphony (Salonen)
• All-Mozart program, SFS (Labadie, Lucy Crowe; I did not hear better singing this year.)
• Wild Up's two Julius Eastman programs
• Kronos Quartet 50
• The Daughter of the Regiment, LVOpera, two hours of frothy delight.

The Bad

• San Francisco Symphony's numerous institutional failures
• Alienating Esa-Pekka Salonen to the extent that he didn't renew his contract.
• Waving bye-bye to him as if it were no big deal.
• Going to the brink with the AGMA choristers.
• Cancelling the Verdi Requiem instead of talking.
• Not returning the musicians' pay to pre-pandemic levels.
• Apparently putting renovating Davies above the musicians, who are the orchestra.
• The shorter season; cancelled projects; cancelled tour.
• Threatening to ban a thirty-year patron who displayed a protest sign about Salonen.
• I repeat: letting Esa-Pekka Salonen go.
• San Francisco Opera is also having problems.
• The 2024-25 season is just six operas and three concerts. Don't count on next season being any better.
• The orchestra staged some kind of labor action on opening night.
• Their contract has been extended multiple times since then.
• Currently, the deadline is toward the end of May, meaning that unless there's a new contract before then, the summer season (La Bohème, Idomeneo, Pride Concert) could be affected.
• The company took a bath on the centennial season, losing $13 million.  It is genuinely shocking that the big donors didn't pony up enough to cover this deficit.
• There are 17 season substitutes this year, which is something around a quarter of the orchestra.
• The Bay Area music press lost yet another member with Joshua Kosman's retirement from the Chronicle. I love his newsletter, which I hope that you're reading, but it's not the same as having a consistent voice reviewing two to four times each week at the big local paper. It is not good that the Chronicle no longer has a full-time music critic, someone close to the vast panoply of organizations here and able to report on and review them with long experience and deep knowledge backing the reviews up. A decade or so ago, you'd have reviews of an important performance by Joshua, Georgia Rowe, Richard Scheinin, Janos Gereben, someone from SFCV, various bloggers, and occasionally out of town critics. The Mercury-News sent Rich to real estate; the East Bay Times and Merc have dropped regular reviews; a few bloggers have stopped writing or moved. SFCV is still here and for the last several months there has been a content-sharing arrangement with the Chronicle. It's just not good to have so many fewer voices weighing in on what's going on in the classical music scene. [I hope that it's clear that I do not in any way begrudge Joshua his well-earned retirement.]
• Brandeis University is consciously destroying its music department.

Friday Photo

Tree bark, Los Angeles

December, 2024

 

Museum Mondays

Gustav Moreau, Salome Dancing for Herod, detail

Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

December, 2024

 

MTT is 80!

Michael Tilson Thomas

Photo by Brandon Patoc (c), 2019

Courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

MTT turned 80 today! What a great life and career he has had, from southern California to Boston and Buffalo to London to the Bay Area. I had my beefs with programming at SFS during his last five years as music director of SFS, but whatever: he's a great conductor and a deeply loved person in San Francisco.

SFS has just scheduled a concert in honor of his 80th birthday - for April! - and tickets go on sale on January 28 at 10:00 a.m. The concert will include Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (Variations on a theme of Henry Purcell) and Respighi's Feste Romane Festi Romani.

Friday Photo

 

Los Angeles City Hall

December, 2024