What a year it was.

For me personally, that is. Stressful, but good.

So many changes:

• Left Laurel Jujitsu. Obviously I haven't got the new dojo up and running, but 2007 is very close.


• Donna got her doctorate.


• I unexpectedly changed jobs.


• I sang in three different choruses, the unifying theme being conductor Paul Flight (who needs a home page of his own).


• My mom moved to Oakland earlier this month.

Amidst all of this, I am grateful for so many things: my wonderful partner Donna, our home (except for the expensive month of bathroom renovations....); for Janet, Matt, and Alice, for Debbie, Eric, Max, and Tiana; for everybody else at Server Team Tea Time; for many friends on the Well who helped keep me sane; for my many blog buddies.

Technical assistance, anyone?

I was starting to get comment spam, so I disabled Haloscan comments, which turned out to completely disable commenting. I restored Blogger commenting with help from a friend who took a look at the code for a blog where commenting was still enabled.

The question now is whether I can somehow import existing Haloscan comments into Blogger, or whether I need to re-enable Haloscan commenting (oy). Any ideas?

Thanks in advance....

Update: Haloscan comments cannot be imported into Blogger, nor can any other externally-stored comments.

Tomassini on The First Emperor

A few paragraphs into his review of Tan Dun's The First Emperor, Anthony Tomassini of the Times says this:

My guess is that a large number of the ticket-holders are opera neophytes attracted by the novelty of this project and hoping for a grand theatrical experience.

I missed that on my first pass through the review; a friend called it to my attention. I think it's one of the stupider things I've read recently, especially coming from the chief music critic of the Times.

To start with, why on earth is he guessing? He has enough pull to phone the Times and ask who is buying the tickets to The First Emperor. (For that matter, I could call the Met press office and they'd tell me.) That kind of information would be both interesting and useful to anyone interested in the future of opera and classical music in general.

Second, I think it's a dumb guess. Maybe he's spending too much time with the famously conservative Met audience, but in my experience, it's the people who've been around for a while and are sick of endless iterations of Boheme, Aida, and Don Giovanni who want something, anything, new. I really don't think St. Francois and Doctor Atomic were sold out primarily to neophytes.

Third, if a significant percentage of sales are to opera newbies - or to people who love or care about new music in general - that's great! An expanding audience is a good thing!

About Marston

I don't recall whether I have ever discussed Marston Records here. It's Ward Marston's own record label.

Ward is a legendary guy in the world of old recordings - he is a genius at transferring old recordings (pre-1950, generally) to CD. Actually, Ward's first transfers may have been from 78 to LP, but whatever. He does a lot of work for Naxos and VAI; he was responsible for many of the best sets on the now-defunct Romophone label. He is also a genius at FINDING rare recordings and persuading the owners to allow him to release them.

The third area where he's a genius is in figuring out a sustainable model for his own record label. The recording industry is a mess; unlike most people, I blame DVDs, not piracy, but who knows.

Marston Records works on a subscription basis. At the end of every year, Ward announces what he plans to produce in the coming year; if enough people sign up to buy a particular set, it goes through. If a particular set is sold out, arrangements have been made for on-demand production by a third-party company, so you can always get a set you missed. There are also Preferred Customers, meaning Marston Records has your credit card number and sends you EVERYTHING. If you don't want everything, you can be a Piano or Vocal Preferred Customer.

I've been a Preferred Customer for a few years. I'm not equally interested in every release, but I'll take them all, because it's so important to support Ward's work. And there are way, way more hits than misses, in my book: Litvinne, Supervia, Bolet, Vezzani, Gadski, Levy, and on and on and on.

If you're interested in historic recordings, especially acoustic-era vocal recordings, check out Marston Records. And please read the previous posting on this blog.

Mysterious Marston

What on earth could this, found in the end-of-year email from Marston Records, be?

Our Mystery Release

For the past ten years, Marston has produced a few releases that will be remembered for their historical importance: The Edison Trials: Voice Audition Cylinders 1912-1913; In Their Own Voices: The U.S. Presidential Elections of 1908 and 1912; and The Edison Legacy, which, is to be released early in 2007.

Our May release may be the most important “find” in the history of recording. It is also an anomaly for Marston. First, we are asking you to order this on faith. For a number of reasons, we can’t give a full description, not the least reason being it is of sufficient importance that a full-fledge press campaign is warranted, and we don’t want to spoil the impact of an announcement in our newsletter. Second, it is a multi-disciplinary CD that includes voice, piano, violin, and chamber music. (Because of the multi-disciplinary nature of the compilation, only our All Preferred Customers are scheduled to receive this issue automatically so PLEASE sign up to receive your copy, including our Vocal and Piano Preferred Customers.) Finally, these recordings were made by an individual and not a record company! We guess this may be our best seller ever and we are announcing this as part of our 2007 Season because we want to make sure that you have first crack at one of the relatively few copies that will be pressed.

Either it's material recorded off the air, or they're private recordings made by someone rich or famous enough to persuade important musicians to perform or record privately. No bets here; there were lots of important musicians featured on broadcasts during the 20s and 30s, and some of them could certainly count as great finds. The Chicago Opera broadcast during the late 1920s, for example....but I bet that would not be the "greatest" find.

Uh-oh.

Jonathan Wellsung and Maury D'Annato both walked out of The First Emperor after one act.

"Maybe it got better," I thought to myself last night.

Apparently not: Manuela Holterhoff got out the knives for her review. I especially like this:

Domingo delivered his wan lines with a furrowed brow, burnished tone and increasingly concerned glances at the prompt box. I don't know how he learned as much of the role as he did between evening shows conducting Puccini's ``La Boheme.''

And JSU at An Unamplified Voice was unimpressed as well.

(I admit that I have to quibble with this because, after all, Wagner got away with it:

A lawyer who represents himself, it is said, has a fool for a client. The same ought to be said for the composer who writes his own libretto.

Maybe JSU doesn't like Wagner. If not, I point to Mark Adamo and his superb libretto and music for Lysistrata.)

Update: Tony Tomassini doesn't like it either. And neither did Alex.

Score one for Holland.

I'm known not to be much of a fan of Bernard Holland, but this review is a winner all around. Tip of the hat, also, to the author of that headline, without which I probably would have ignored the review.

LHL on Bridge

Bridge Records is re-releasing a recording of LHL singing John Harbison's Due Libri dei Mottetti di Montale. $14.99 in the U.S. and Canada, and there's more Harbison on the disk.

(They've also got releases of electronic compositions by Paul Lansky and violin music of Biber in December.)

Housing Slump's Effects (not off topic)

The company that supports the Met broadcasts, Toll Brothers, reports an earnings slump. A big earnings slump.

Two Great Shows

Art shows, in this case.

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz survived the Holocaust in Poland, as a teenager, through her own courage and determination, and brought her younger sister to safety as well. She met her husband in the late 1940s in Belgium, married him, and came to the U.S., where she worked as a seamstress and dressmaker. In old age, she told her story in a beautiful and heartbreaking series of fabric pictures. You can see this remarkable show at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley.

Meanwhile, in the deep south in a hamlet called Gee's Bend, African-American quilters developed their own distinctive style. A magnificent collection of these quilts has been on tour for some time and will be on exhibit at the De Young Museum until December 31. If you think the quilts look good on line, just wait until you see them in person.

More bad news.

This is a companion-piece, of sorts, to the bad news discussed by ACD last week.

The Times reports that EMI has been approached by a potential buyer.

EMI holds one of the world's great catalogues of recorded notational music - not that they have necessarily always been good stewards of it - and how likely is it that new owners, especially if consisting of a couple of American investment banks, would take good care of that catalogue?

The Met On Screen

Several Metropolitan Opera productions are going to be broadcast over the next few months to movie theaters around the country. In the Bay Area, that means the Regal Hacienda Crossing in Dublin: this is about a 25 minute drive for me and is very close to where I used to work. From San Francisco, alas, I assume it is a much longer drive. On the other hand, admission is $18, and unless you're traveling to NYC, well....let's just say, I'm springing for a few of the telecasts. They are:

• The Magic Flute, a short version of Julie Taymoor's production, on December 30


• I Puritani, January 6


• The First Emperor, Tan Dun's new opera, starring Placido Domingo, on January 13


• Eugene Onegin, February 24


• The Barber of Seville, March 24


• Il Trittico, April 28

I'm sorry the series doesn't include Jenufa, with Karita, or Simon Boccanegra (still the great unknown Verdi opera), or that tasty-looking Don Carlo, but you can't have everything, and this is definitely a good start.

Pinchgut Opera

I got some entertaining email the other day from the intrepid Ken Nielsen, who tells me that he and his wife had "accidentally" set up an opera company. This would be Pinchgut Opera of Sydney, Australia. They're currently working on their fifth production, Idomeneo, and they're blogging the rehearsal process. Take a look! Lots of excellent photos and discussion of what goes into putting on opera - fascinating stuff, all.

Bums thrown out.

My political leanings are not a secret; I spent a couple of years compiling reasons to vote George Bush out of office, after all. You can imagine how I'm feeling today; the sparkling wine at friends' around 11:15 last night could not have tasted better.

We have the Democrats taking back the house and, it looks like, evening up the Senate. Hello, Speaker of the House Pelosi; good-bye, Senators Rick Santorum, Mike DeWine, Conrad Burns, and Lincoln Chafee*. This morning, Donald Rumsfeld resigns. I only wish he'd done it long ago when his incompetence first became obvious.

I love the smell of Schadenfreude in the morning, don't you?

* Chafee is one of the few remaining moderate Republicans, along with Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe; as such, I'm half-sorry to see him go, since he is one of the last vestigates of principle in the party. Still, it's not like they did much to hold back the politicization of everything in the last few years.

What Steve Said.

I'm off to do my civic duty momentarily. Go vote!

And before you do so, read the New York Times on the subject of ballot initiatives. Yes, yes, yes!

Volti: Baltic Traditions Now

A couple of weeks ago in SFCV, I wrote a Listening Ahead recommendation for Volti's program of music from countries bordering the Baltic Sea. I went to the first performance last night, at St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco (one of my favorite venues for both singing and listening).

In a word: stunning. There are just a few pieces on the program, by Arvo Pärt, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Pekka Kostianen, Olli Kortekangas, Veljo Tormis, and Per Nørgård. These works are all dense, chewy, and extremely beautiful, with texts from sources such as the Kalavela and from 20th century literature (Rilke, Lorca, Lawrence).

I loved the singing - what a great collection of musicians and voices, and what a performance they gave. Great music, great programming, great conducting. Composer Veljo Tormis himself was present; after his piece was performed, he hugged Robert Geary and kissed the soprano soloist's hand. It was a wonderful piece - so were they all. I would happily have heard the whole program through again.

And I might, because it's being given twice more. You should go!

Sunday, Nov. 5, 4:00 p.m., St. Mark's, Berkeley, 2300 Bancroft Way (Note: FOUR, not four-thirty; I goofed in my original posting.)

Wednesday, Nov. 8, 7:30 p.m., Acalanes H.S., Lafayette, 1200 Pleasant Hill Road.

Matthew Guerrieri and a note about the blogroll

I've added the charminginly-named Soho the Dog, where composer/pianist/conductor Matthew Guerrieri is blogging rather entertainingly. (It was the posting about multi-fingered pianists that got me over there, via, um, Mr. Noise, I think.)

About that blogroll. It seems unlikely that anyone can keep up with either reading or linking to all of the many worthwhile classical music blogs out there. I know I'm missing a ton of good opera blogs, and I hesitate to even try to keep up. And if you look at everyone else's blogrolls, you'll see that we don't overlap. So I suggest cruising every blogroll you can, because there are soooo many goood music blogs, and so little time.

Kenneth Woods

I'm (finally) linking to conductor Kenneth Woods, whose blog, a view from the podium, will give you a fantastic look inside the world of conducting. He writes insightfully about the organizational, musical, and technical issues conductors deal with; give him a look!

Reminded.

Steve Smith mentions a happy anniversary, the first birthday of Night After Night, and I am reminded that today vilainefille and Iron Tongue of Midnight both turn two.

Grateful thanks to my readers and my many inspirations in the blogosphere!

Oh, please, oh, please.

Anne Midgette writes in today's Times about a rumor I dearly hope is true:

But the biggest news may have been the company debut of Nicola Luisotti, a fast-rising young conductor whose name the rumor mill is currently linking to the post of music director at the San Francisco Opera. Evaluating him on this performance, an opera house would be lucky to have him. It wasn’t just his passion or his ability to bring out every detail of the score and deal with the singers’ sometimes willful phrasing; it was that he conducted “Tosca” as if it really mattered. Even James Morris, who has sometimes sung Scarpia as a growling caricature, picked up on the excitement and turned in a respectably dark villain.

“Tosca” seemed vital again. And in this venerable, twice-told production, that is news indeed.

He was brilliant in last year's Forza, so, MY fingers and toes are all crossed.

Blognoggle

I've known about Blognoggle for months, but, as usual, I am way behind in talking about it here. It's a Web site that aggregates about a hundred classical music blogs - you will generally see the last posting or so for each. Sometimes I turn up there. :-)

Character tenor.

I hope not to be punished for having a case of Schadenfreude, but I find that Wolfgang Schmidt, whose singing made SFO's 1998 Tristan and 1999 Ring such a trial, is on his way to being a character tenor, the last refuge of aging Heldentenors. Yes, there's that single Fidelio in his upcoming engagements, and some Eriks in Fliegende Hollander, but otherwise, lots of Herods, Mimes, and Aegithuses. I don't know Tiefland, though, so maybe that's a leading role.

(Yes, yes, of course I'd rather have an aging Heldentenor as Mime or Loge than a whining character tenor who talks his way through the role.)

SFS: Abbado/Midori

I caught the SFS concert last night with my friend Mike; a program of Petrassi's Concerto for Orchestra No. 2, Britten's violin concerto, and the Schumann Fourth.

The Petrassi is competently written, but meandering; there are real compositional possibilities in the repeated rhythmic phrases and orchestration with which, sadly, he does nothing much. There was a moment when I thought "Wow, sounds vaguely like the score to a Hitchcock film...Bernard-Hermannish..." and when I mentioned this to Mike he finished the thought with "...but Hermann was a much better composer." Right-o.

The Britten...an astonishing piece. He does plenty with repeated rhythmic phrases, and the orchestration is original, arresting, and full of glories. That passage at the end of the first movement, with the cymbals, harp, solo violin, and...a horn? a trombone? The passage elswhere with the tuba and two piccolos (!!). The muted brass sonorities at the end. The incredible scherzo. Midori was magnificent; at the intermission, I said to Mike "Never mind the Schumann. Couldn't they just play that again???"

Maybe that would have been a mistake, maybe a second reading wouldn't have had the magic of the first. And the Schumann was first-class, an excellent performance of a work that I think is somewhat underrated. They played the heck out of it. And Peter Wyrick, one of my barometers, smiled a lot. I hope the musicians enjoyed the concert, the conductor, and the soloist as much as I did.

More new.

Added: Civic Center and A Singer's Life.

New addition

Celeste's Scramblings, the mostly-musical blog of alto Celeste Winant, with whom I sing in The Haydn Singers.

Update, Saturday, Oct. 28: Celeste is linking back here; I blush at her kind words. She is a terrific singer!