On a Pacific Aisle

Half a Century

2009-10-27T08:31:00.001-07:00

Quand j'étais petit, on me disait toujours, "Tu verras quand tu auras cinquante ans." Eh bien m'y voilà à cinquante ans. Et je n'ai rien vu. Rien. — Erik Satie

The Rest is Unquiet

2009-10-14T15:59:00.000-07:00

Things have been a little quiet of late around Noiseville (not that I should talk), and now we know why. Alex Ross has moved his blogging emporium over to The New Yorker, under the rubric Unquiet Thoughts. Initial musings are on György Kurtág, Stile Antico, and more; update your records accordingly.

Now, That's Retro

2009-09-15T14:21:00.000-07:00

A package from Sony waltzed across my desk this afternoon, bringing with it the new recital disc by the strange and wonderful German soprano Simone Kermes. (I haven't spun it yet, but it goes right to the top of the pile; although I haven't reached the levels of Kermesomania that some inhabit, anything she does is automatically of interest.) The package included a couple of CDs in the familiar jewel case, a robust press release, and something else. Something big, flat, and shrink-wrapped.

Honest to God, I didn't know what it was.

My first guess was a wall calendar, my second a video laserdisc. It was my editor who sussed it out: "It's vinyl," she said, and she was right.

We opened it together and shared a little Proustian moment, savoring the gleaming black plastic, the perfect circular center, the broad bands offering visual cues to the different tracks. And it was 1978 all over again.

Monopoly

2009-09-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

I'm told that following Friday's season-opening Trovatore, the members of the San Francisco Opera Chorus have decreed that Sondra Radvanovsky should be the only singer ever again allowed to sing Verdi with the company. A little extreme, perhaps, but I take their point.

In Fond Memory

2009-09-11T22:52:00.000-07:00

Kitty Carlisle Hart (1910-2007)

Because I never hear Trovatore without thinking of my first, and for many years only, Leonora. Requiescat in pace.

Are We Post-Racial Yet?

2009-09-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

There was one interesting nugget o' news out of last night's surprisingly enjoyable San Francisco Symphony season opener: Nicole Cash, the orchestra's recently appointed associate principal horn, is African-American.

In a perfect or even marginally rational universe, of course, this fact would not be worth remarking on. But in this fallen world, Ms. Cash is a rarity. The most recent survey by the League of American Orchestras, taken in 2007, found that just under 2 percent of orchestral musicians were black.

To bring it a little closer to home, Ms. Cash is the first African-American member of the SF Symphony since Basil Vendryes departed to become the principal violist of the Colorado Symphony in 1993. That's, um, a long time. Good to see a little progress on that front.

Ringblogging IV (belated): Götterdämmerung in Seattle

2009-08-21T23:14:00.000-07:00

OK, Friday's Götterdämmerung made it official — I'm in the Janice Baird camp now. Whatever was going on during her unimpressive Walküre Brünnhilde (nerves, adjustment, an off night) faded away during Siegfried and was fully gone by the last opening night of this first cycle. Instead, we got a full-blown, vibrantly heroic rendition that was every bit as impressive vocally as it was theatrically. She's the real deal.

My Ring date (Mom) didn't care for something about Baird's tone, and I understood her objection without sharing it — there's a dark and slightly acidic quality that could hit you in the wrong place if you're in the mood for something laser-like and clean. And there's no denying that her power is iffy in the lower register. But her voice gets bigger and bolder as it goes higher, and she had no problem at all being heard over the orchestra in the more athletic passages of the role.

Nor was it all stratospheric exertions — Baird's more intimate singing in the emotionally charged second act was shapely and specific, informed throughout by a very detailed take on Brünnhilde's travails. I'd also add that she's just about the best-looking Brünnhilde I've ever seen, which is not dispositive, but it's not, y'know, nothing either. This is theater, after all, and when Siegfried starts hollering about a beautiful warrior maiden, it's kind of exciting for once not to have to suspend your disbelief for a second.

Aside from Baird's contributions, Götterdämmerung was somewhat hit-or-miss. Stig Andersen was either recovered from his ailment or not, who can say; there was no announcement, but there was still something a bit hesitant and underwhelming about his Siegfried. Maybe that's all he's got.

The whole Gibichung plotline, as is so often the case (at least for me) didn't amount to much. There are few things that make me more impatient than people who complain, in connection with some work of fiction or theater or cinema, that there aren't any characters they "like" or "care about" or "can identify with"; but it's a sin that I myself am guilty of when it comes to this aspect of Götterdämmerung. The various Nibelungen live the fullness of their villainy, Hagen no less than his father and uncle, and Siegfried, for all his obvious character flaws, really is a Held. But Gunther, and to a lesser extent Gutrune, are merely contemptible and tedious; it's a rare performance in which I don't feel they're wasting my time with their whining and sniveling. This wasn't one. Gordon Hawkins, a middling Donner in Rheingold, thundered unconvincingly as Gunther, and Marie Plette, who had brought such fresh ardor to Freia, sounded acerbic as Gutrune. Daniel Sumegi's Hagen came to life most fully in the Act 2 scene with Alberich, perhaps prompted by Richard Paul Fink's insinuating ferocity.

Stephanie Blythe, God love her, returned as both the Second Norn and Waltraute. I had slightly conflicted feelings about the former assignment — her singing was so extraordinary, so potent and full of dark, rich colors, that she put her colleagues into the shade, which in turn upset the balance of the first scene. I'm not sure what a performer is supposed to do in that situation — tone it down to the level of her lesser collaborators? Maybe so, but on the other hand I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity of hearing her sing at full strength. Waltraute's scene, in which Baird held her own, was unalloyed delight.

Whatever intermittent misgivings there might have been about individual performances, there were none about Stephen Wadsworth's staging. The big crowd scenes of Act 2 were impeccably choreographed, as was the more intimate scene of the Norns; the frolicking of the Rhinemaidens in Act 3 was the funniest I've ever seen. And although the ecological theme runs very lightly through this production, the final, post-cataclysmic stage image — the very pine forest we saw in Das Rheingold, now charred almost beyond recognition but still clearly poised for eventual regeneration — felt deeply, movingly apt. Only four more years until the next go-round.

Ringblogging III: Siegfried in Seattle

2009-08-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

Seattle's Siegfrieds are evidently somewhat snake-bit. When the Stephen Wadsworth production was first unveiled in 2001, Alan Woodrow tripped over an exercise machine shortly before his company debut and severed his quadriceps, which left him unable to walk; he sang from the wings while the cover tenor, Richard Berkeley-Steele, leapt and cavorted and slew dragons.

This week, the Danish tenor Stig Andersen kept up the tradition by coming down with a viral infection just before his company debut. Speight Jenkins made the announcement before the curtain went up on Wednesday's Siegfried, and it brought on all the usual emotions — apprehension at his appearance, relief that there was no cancellation, frustration over the fact that there was going to be no reliable way to gauge what we were about to hear. And so it was.

Andersen sounded convincingly like a decent heldentenor still in the grips of a bronchial something-or-other, which is about all I can say. His singing was ragged and hazy by the end of each act (the Forging Song was particularly strained), although he did muster a sweet, precise tone in Act 2. I wasn't much taken with his stage presence (somewhere between nimble and heroic without quite being either) but again, there's no knowing how much of that was due to the vocal struggles.

Oh but look — I buried the lede. The great revelation on Wednesday was Janice Baird's Brünnhilde, as potent and gleaming and theatrically vivid as her Walküre Brünnhilde had been wan and unimpressive. This was a Tarnhelm-like transformation (though to judge from some of the comments here, this sort of inconsistency or unpredictability is something of a trademark), and once again the direction things were headed was obvious before she even opened her mouth.

The first moments of Baird's awakening were an intensely physical display — rubbing one arm and then another, raising her face to the sun in a worshipful grin of delight, moving each muscle in her body, and at last turning a slow whirl of exuberance that would have been an awkward milkmaid cliché under any other circumstances. I don't know when I've seen the thrill of being conscious and alive conveyed with such solid specificity.

And then came "Heil dir, Sonne," and I practically fell out of my chair. Here at last was the big, radiant and superbly controlled sound that you want for Brünnhilde (and especially at this juncture). And she kept it up all the way through the long final scene, launching volley after volley of effortlessly heroic tone over the din of the orchestra and evidently inspiring Andersen to similar feats. If this version of Baird shows up again for Götterdämmerung we're all in for a treat.

The rest of the evening was no less fine. Greer Grimsley finished out his assignment with a resplendent Wanderer, full of regrets and autumnal wisdom; his dialogue with Erda (the rich-toned Swedish contralto Maria Streijffert) was particularly probing. Richard Paul Fink's saturnine Alberich made a welcome return.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the night, though, was tenor Dennis Petersen as a strong-toned and incisively acted Mime. Petersen came up through the San Francisco Opera training program a good while back (I'm pretty sure I reviewed his debut recital as a cub critic more than 20 years ago) and since then he's been mostly relegated to small character roles — at least in San Francisco, where he's been the go-to Goro practically forever.

Turns out he's been underused all these years. His Mime was a prodigious display of vocal muscle and unapologetic physical vigor, with nary a hint of cringing, whining or wheedling. The effect was to make him loom as a formidable antagonist both to Siegfried — the notion that he might succeed in chopping off the boy's head suddenly didn't seem so laughable — and to the Wanderer in the riddle scene, which I like to think of as the Wagnerian version of Wait Wait … Don't Tell Me! ("Answer three questions about the events of the past few nights and win Carl Kasell's voice on your answering machine!").

Siegfried also contains what may be my favorite of Thomas Lynch's gorgeous sets, the mountain-and-forest combo of Neidhöhle in Act 2. Most of the sets to this point have been either rocky cliffs or piney woods, and whenever the curtain goes up on this new setting — divided right down the middle of the stage between the two — I start trying to figure out which of those previous sets we're revisiting. The answer, of course, is none. This is a transmuted blend of themes already encountered — which is to say, nothing less than a visual counterpart of Wagnerian leitmotif technique.

Ringblogging II: Die Walküre in Seattle

2009-08-13T12:13:00.001-07:00

To exemplify the sensitivity and imagination at work in director Stephen Wadsworth's superb Ring production, you could hardly do better than the scene between Wotan and Fricka at the beginning of Act 2 of Walküre. I've had occasion to rhapsodize about other aspects of this scene before, but what struck me on Monday night was how fierce and yet tender the argument between these two becomes in Wadsworth's staging.

Think about that showdown too often goes — an onslaught of legalism and passive-aggressive whining in which a henpecked husband is brought to heel (yes, he concedes that Fricka's right, but always reluctantly and generally without a hint of grace). But Wadsworth takes a much more humane view of this marriage — particularly in Rheingold, which is studded with little interludes of smooching and schmuggling, but here too, as the relationship comes under its most severe pressure.

In this version — and I've never witnessed the scene enacted with the degree of musical and theatrical vividness that Greer Grimsley and Stephanie Blythe lent it this time around — Fricka brings Wotan around to his better side through the sheer force of her love and the bond they share. She looks him face-on — fearlessly and firmly but sympathetically — and leads him, rather than merely chivvying him, through the steps of her unassailable case. And when she invokes the sanctity of marriage, it's not (or not only) in the spirit of a patroness protecting the prerogatives of her constituency. She's reminding Wotan of their own marriage, of what it has meant and still means to him. It's as though Brünnhilde, with her catty, callow remarks about storm and strife and womanly battles, is the child watching a parental fight with no understanding of the depth of feeling underlying it.

As I say, that's just one splendor among many. You could also point, for instance, to the extraordinary flux of emotional tension in Act 1, dispelled in a huge rush of liberation in the Winterstürme duet, or the contrapuntal skill with which Wadsworth deploys and individuates a gaggle of Valkyries in Act 3. It's a joy to hear and see this story told so fluidly and with such resourceful energy.

Musically, the performance was mostly superb as well, though I continue to wish that Robert Spano's conducting could match the zest and vibrancy of the staging. Stuart Skelton and Margaret Jane Wray were phenomenal Wälsungs, singing with unbridled power, precision and tonal freshness; their Winterstürme was a masterpiece of erotic urgency. Andrea Silvestrelli made a strong Hunding, and Grimsley was first-rate, from that detailed beginning to Act 2 all the way to the emotionally capacious Farewell.

The one problem — a big one — was Janice Baird's tentative, underpowered Brünnhilde. I knew even before she opened her mouth for the first "Hojotoho" that trouble was on the way, because I could see her going through the same mental calculations my cat makes before leaping onto the kitchen counter: gauging the height of the ascent, envisioning a practice run or two, re-checking the calculations, and finally making the jump. She boasts a lively, girlish stage presence, and there was some probing lyricism to her singing in Act 3; but she's no warrior maiden.

Ringblogging I: Rheingold in Seattle

2009-08-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

One of the first things people like to point out about the Ring cycle is that the "cyclical" part is key — by ending Götterdämmerung where Rheingold began, Wagner reinforces the idea that this is a timeless yarn that plays out again and again into eternity. And not just the story, but the reenactment thereof, so don't wait to buy your tickets for next year as soon as this year's performances are over.

Like so many of Old Klingsor's ideas, this one is easy to mock and hard to resist. When the curtain went up on the first scene of Rheingold Sunday night and I saw those wonderful swimming Rhinemaidens, twirling and somersaulting in the depths of the river, it felt exactly like the recurrence of an old and welcome ritual. It's been four years since the last outing of director Stephen Wadsworth's brilliant, emotionally probing Ring for the Seattle Opera, and those years melted away in an instant.

I can't even pretend to any kind of equanimity about this production, with its phenomenally beautiful physical trappings (sets by Thomas Lynch, costumes by Martin Pakledinaz, lighting by Peter Kaczorowski) and Wadsworth's riveting blend of traditionalism and theatrical vividness. I absolutely love it.

Freed from the crippling dictates of an overarching concept, Wadsworth's staging is at once faithful to its roots and entirely autonomous. He relies on the basic story as Wagner conceived it, but finds room for innovative or imaginative touches that shed new light on what's happening — particularly the lively erotic charge between Fricka and Wotan, which makes clear that his philandering has nothing to do with any caricatured notion of her as nag or shrew. Wadsworth also makes Fricka a force of conscience by having her linger behind, contemplating Fasolt's corpse in silent horror, while the other gods process over the Rainbow Bridge to Valhalla.

The sheer visual splendor of the production is almost embarrassing in its profusion. The green, piney mountaintop of the even-numbered scenes is like an idealized version of the reality looming nearby; the waters of the Rhine look cool and fluid enough to dive into.

And the opening night promised the best musical incarnation of this production yet, even under Robert Spano's blandly capable leadership. As always, Stephanie Blythe's Fricka outshone everyone else for vocal heft, tonal elegance and interpretive clarity. If you're determined to do so, you could spin that negative, as an all-too-cynical young critic of my acquaintance managed to do ("You know you're in trouble when Fricka is the best singer of the night"), but really, why would you want to? In what opera is Stephanie Blythe not the most magnificent performer on stage?

The happiest news was that Greer ~~Garson~~ Grimsley has finally grown into the role of Wotan. When he took on the role for the first time four years ago, Speight Jenkins' advocacy for him seemed touching but a bit misplaced; he was callow, tentative, underpowered. Not any more. This was a commanding, vocally resplendent performance.

Most of the rest of the cast was first-rate, too — Richard Paul Fink returning yet again in his signature role of Alberich, Marie Plette as a bright-toned Freia, Jason Collins, a new name to me, as a clarion Froh (yikes — turns out I heard him as Froh in San Francisco just a year ago, but he didn't make a similar impression). The one weak point was Kobie van Rensburg, a dull, blockish Loge; with all the magic happening onstage, his performance was the least magical.

Objectivity "Я" Us

2009-06-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

An on-line commenter on one of my recent reviews has some sage advice:

Spare us your subjective judgements and report on the concert. How were the performances?

Runnicles in the Park

2009-05-27T16:29:00.000-07:00

One thing that I unfortunately didn't have room to include in today's exit interview with Donald Runnicles was his stated fondness for the company's Opera in the Park concert. For those not familiar with this institution, it's a free annual event that takes place outdoors in Golden Gate Park, on the Sunday afternoon following the opera or operas of the opening weekend. Basically, whichever singers are in town for the first two or three productions of the season offer a mixed lineup of arias, duets and ensembles, massively amplified, while people picnic on the grass and the sun beats down and the breezes threaten to blow the music off of the players' stands.

I probably shouldn't say this, since my employer is the event's main sponsor, but Opera in the Park has never done much for me. I appreciate it in theory — sunshine, fresh air, picnic baskets, music — but for anyone with a strong connection to the art form, it's so completely not the way you want to hear opera. And I would have bet any amount of money that the artists, more than anyone, would regard this as just one of those onerous obligations that come with the job.

So imagine my surprise when Runnicles said this:

A highlight for me, year in and year out, was the park concert. In the first years, I took so much trouble with the lineup, planning what to put in and how. And then over the years — I won't say we winged it but it took less and less work. I loved that concert. What a unique event! If there are 50 people hearing their first Winterstürme or Turandot, you may have sown a seed.

I don't know when I've felt so small or cynical.

Dresdenszenen II: One of These Things...

2009-05-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

On the facade of the Kunstakademie, the Germans make a game stab at establishing their national bona fides in the field of the visual arts. Can you guess which of these is not like the others?

(Sorry that I couldn't quite squeeze the whole thing into the frame without falling into the Elbe or reading the manual of my digital camera. Still, you can probably figure out the truncated name on the right. Click to enlarge.)

Notes from Abroad (2)

2009-05-27T16:05:00.001-07:00

One of the things the cellist Jan Vogler is trying to do as the new head of the Dresdner Musikfestspiele is to expand the range of performers who show up on the schedule. So on Tuesday night in the Frauenkirche — the large and beautiful church in the city center, destroyed by bombs in 1945 and painstakingly rebuilt in the subsequent decades — Valery Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic performed music of Sibelius and Shostakovich. The VPO tours far and wide, but this was the orchestra's first appearance in Dresden in 12 years and the locals were in a state of high anticipation.

My God, it was magnificent. There's no way to listen to the VPO without feeling some tinge of moral unease at that unbroken sea of white male faces (some of my fellow critics amused themselves during the applause by scanning for the two or three women that are now scattered among the orchestra's ranks). But it's just as hard to resist the magical sound of this orchestra — the warm, fluid string textures, or the glowing, utterly distinctive brass.

And Gergiev was in top form (not always a sure bet with this notoriously uneven artist). The Sibelius First was full of dark splendor, its rhetoric forceful but unconstrained. After intermission came "The Firebird," in a rendition that mixed dramatic urgency (the opening low string passages pushed forward like some kind of techno rhythm track) with vivid pictorialism. Even the weather was in on the game — the whole performance was punctuated by lightning bolts flashing through the upper windows of the church. Sounds corny, but when the last one came exactly in time with the downbeat for a big orchestral chord, it sure seemed like something unusual was going on.

Dresdenszenen I: Time's Wingless Chariot

2009-05-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

Most of us occasionally find it hard to keep from looking at our watches as a less than scintillating performance drags its way through its prescribed course. What does one do on an off night at the Semperoper, where the slow progress of the evening is tauntingly marked right there above the stage, five cruel minutes at a time?

Notes from Abroad (1)

2009-05-26T08:38:00.001-07:00

I had to come to Dresden to get a line on the much-ballyhooed young British conductor Daniel Harding. Well, somewhat ballyhooed — the torrents of extravagant praise that have been heaped on him (mostly among his fellow countrymen) have been followed more recently by the revisionism and bewilderment that so often come in the wake of such an introduction. There seem to be only two categories among people who've heard him conduct — those who think he's the Second Coming and those who can't imagine what the fuss is about.

Based on Harding's mediocre performance Sunday night with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and Chorus, I'm going to claim membership, at least tentatively, in the latter camp. In Brahms' "Haydn" Variations, Harding managed to be fussy and sloppy all at once — conducting the life out of every note and phrase without bringing any kind of discipline or direction to the music. (The red-faced gentleman seated in front of me in the Kreuzkirche turned to his neighbor when it was over and proclaimed in a stage whisper, with the kind of outrage that only cultured Germans can truly muster in these situations, "That was a joke!") The rest of the program, including Schumann's Nachtlied and Schubert's Mass No. 6 — which Michael Tilson Thomas, coincidentally, will conduct June 10-13 in Davies Symphony Hall — skated by on the strength of the chorus, a truly first-rate ensemble. Aside from a couple of deft touches scattered throughout the Schubert, Harding's role was largely to get in the way.

I'm not in Dresden, of course, to scout conductors (for that matter, Harding was actually a last-minute substitute for Nikolaus Harnoncourt). The city's tourism office brought a passel of music critics over to take in a bit of the Dresdner Musikfestspiele, the intensive 2½-week festival that fills the various churches and concert halls of this neo-Baroque/Cold War/21st century city. This is the festival's first season under the artistic leadership of Jan Vogler, the genial and energetic young cellist who's busy planning seasons ahead that build on the festival's traditions while taking it in new directions.

This year's title and theme is "The New World," and the schedule is replete with nods toward the Americas among the expected Teutonic faves. Saturday night, before I got here, Gustavo Dudamel led the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Semperoper in a program that included Carlos Chávez's Symphony No. 2, the "Symphony India"; on Monday, the New York organist Gail Archer provided the unusual chance to hear the music of Barber and Persichetti played on Gottfried Silbermann's majestic 1755 organ (his last) in the Hofkirche. Also, and unrelatedly, Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking is on at the Semperoper tonight; also, and totally unrelatedly, the city is semi-agog over next week's visit by Barack Obama.

There's no mistaking the fact that Dresden is a city in transition, still recovering day by day from the twin calamities of the 1945 firebombing and the ensuing decades of Communist rule. The old center of town is split about equally between painstakingly reconstructed historic facades and massive construction sites; this view of the Frauenkirche from just off the Neumarkt is pretty representative.

Remembrance of Things Pastreich

2009-05-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

Lisa Hirsch is on something of a tear today about the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra's decision to hire former San Francisco Symphony executive director Peter Pastreich as its new manager. She seems to feel that it's a pretty ominous development, which of course is her prerogative — though I might have wished for her to bolster her argument with something other than a tendentious and weirdly selective quote from an old article of mine.

She also feels that my announcer in this morning's paper glosses over the unhappiest episode of Pastreich's SFS tenure — the bitter nine-week strike that disrupted the orchestra's 1996-97 season — and she may well be right. If something that big happens on your watch, maybe it deserves to get mentioned every time you do something new that puts your face back in the paper. I dunno.

But I have to take issue pretty strenuously with the notion that I'm "ducking" the points raised in the 1997 thumb-sucker, mainly because — well, because Lisa doesn't seem to have quite understood what those points were. That post-mortem pinned the blame for the strike on both parties with almost namby-pamby even-handedness, laying out exactly the ways in which I thought each side was at fault. You have to read the article from way over to one side for the takeaway to be that Pastreich is bad news.

For the benefit of out-of-towners and those coming in late, here's the Cliffs Notes version. Pastreich is a brilliant, far-sighted and deeply experienced orchestra manager, whose leadership was one of the key elements of the Symphony's rise to its current stature and prominence. He's also a hard-driving sumbitch, and no one who's worked for him has ever looked back on the experience and said, "Well, that was fun." There were currents of bad blood between him and some members of the orchestra, and those got worse with time, until the animus exploded in a puerile and wildly unfocused strike, which Pastreich made worse by mishandling it.

I guess you could take the moral of that story to be "Never hire Pastreich again," but that kind of leaves a lot out of the equation, doesn't it? If I'm running an orchestra board, I'm going to see whether I can't get the benefits of his wisdom and leadership while dodging the negatives (either because the situation is different or because Pastreich himself has changed, or both). The Philharmonia board thinks they can do that, and more power to them; personally, I'm going to assume they're right until proven otherwise.

Of course, not every organization has what it takes, as Lisa inadvertently reminds us by pointing us toward this little item (third one down). I'm not sure how much mileage we can get out of an item that consists exclusively of unsourced gossip ("That's no rumor — some guy on the internet said it was true!"). But just for fun, let's stipulate that every word in there is gospel, and review the bidding.

The Honolulu Symphony — which according to our gospel writer has been "crisis-torn," "rudderless" and "without effective administrative or musical leadership" — brings Pastreich in for a consult. He looks the situation over and tells them they're in deep trouble. He's willing to hang around on an interim basis and help them get their shit together. They say, "No thanks, please go away," and he goes. And he's the jackass in this little yarn? No, I don't think so.

The Poignancy of Belatedness

2009-05-07T18:04:00.000-07:00

Shortly before his death, Wagner dreams of Schopenhauer, and Cosima records it in her diary:

R. drew Sch.'s attention to a flock of nightingales, but Sch. had already noticed them.

The End of History

2009-05-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

A week or two ago, responding to the wonderful NYTBR essay by the great Jim Holt (yeah, I'm a fan) about memorizing poetry, letter-writer Gene H. Bell-Villada remarked that most composers "can cite at length from the entire classical repertoire, from Bach and Handel to Bartók and Stravinsky." Then today, in a reprise interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Booker T. Jones of MG's fame reminisced about his days in the music library of Indiana University "listening to the old masters — everything from Bach to Stravinsky."

I'm struck by this idea that Stravinsky represents the endpoint of the mainstream classical tradition. I have no objection to it whatever — it's probably the name I would come up with myself in a comparable situation (Booker T. left a long, drawling pause after mentioning Bach, long enough for me to lean into the car radio in anticipation and make a little bet with myself that Stravinsky was coming next). And it certainly tallies with the unavoidable sense that Schoenberg and the tradition he represents haven't made it into the consciousness of the general public as a landmark (not that there's anything wrong with that, aside from the whole "supremacy of German music for the next hundred years" metric).

Still, it does raise some intriguing questions. As for example:

• Where exactly, in Stravinsky's long and varied career, do you suppose the line should be drawn? Surely we can stipulate that everything up through Le sacre is counted among the "entire classical repertoire," while, say, Threni and the Requiem Canticles probably aren't. But what about in between? Does the tradition come to an end before or after Oedipus Rex? How about the Symphony in C? Or The Rake's Progress?

• Who was Stravinsky's predecessor as the terminus ante quem of classical music, and when did he move into that spot? This is actually a factual question, which I bet some canny historian of musical sociology knows the answer to. My money's on Debussy, but that's only a guess.

• Finally, who's going to succeed Stravinsky, and when? Not Carter, obviously. To me, the likeliest candidates would seem to be Reich or Adams, but it's still awfully early for them to take on the old-master mantle to this degree. Is the "Bach-to-Stravinsky" paradigm really going to be with us for decades to come?

Fireworks

2009-04-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

Last week was a hellishly busy one around here (four concerts, three interview features, a handful of news stories) so I skipped Friday's Berkeley recital by Krystian Zimerman despite my unbridled awe at his artistry. Big mistake. Not only does it turn out that this was his final U.S. tour for the foreseeable future (who knew?) but evidently he had some weighty stuff on his mind, to judge from this report of Sunday's recital in L.A. Nothing so overtly dramatic happened up here — I checked — but it would've been good to witness that kind of passion in action.

Kudos

2009-04-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

The NEA is out with its second round of Opera Honors. This year's winners are John Adams, Frank Corsaro, Marilyn Horne, Lotfi Mansouri, and Julius Rudel, which seems like a pretty blue-chip lineup to me.

Anne Midgette, in a bit of either subtle derision or simply breeziness (I genuinely can't tell) refers to this slate as "more of the usual suspects." Is that so wrong?

A Tale of Two Kiddies

2009-04-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

I had a bit of a scare at the start of this afternoon's wonderful Berkeley concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. No sooner had I settled into my seat than a young family — mom, dad, and 4-year-old son — trooped down the aisle and settled into a pair of seats in the center section of Zellerbach Hall.

Uh-oh. In my experience, 4-year-olds aren't generally too great about concert etiquette, and not being on the aisle made any possibility of a hasty exit even more problematic. Plus, the kid was sitting directly in front of The Opera Tattler, who I knew — even if he didn't — would open up a can of tattle-ass on him if he got out of line.

Turned out the danger was somewhere else altogether — in the left-hand balcony, to be specific, where some chattering toddler, out of sight but perfectly within earshot of everyone on stage and in the house, began commenting as soon as the orchestra filed on stage. There were some cries of "ssh!", ignored by the cretinous custodial parent. Richard Tognetti, the orchestra's leader and artistic director, tried a little ironic reverse psychology but misjudged his target. Fortunately, though, he held off starting the performance, which gave the house manager enough time to remove both parent and child — evidently with a crowbar.

And what about the potential problem child across the aisle? Well, he sat through a Haydn symphony and a short piece by Australian composer Roger Smalley leaning forward on his mother's lap, his gaze as rapt and unblinking as that of a normal kid watching Saturday morning cartoons; he dozed off when Andreas Scholl sang Handel; and after intermission — his cultural thirst evidently slaked — he was gone. A perfect angel, with wise and praiseworthy parents.

Moral of the story: Know how much classical music your kid can take, and act accordingly. Which I suppose is yet another subset of the Unified Field Theory of Good Behavior, namely, don't be such an asshole.

Haiku

2009-04-20T09:02:00.000-07:00

Vaz has decided
To write complete paragraphs.
I'll pick up the slack.

On the Money Front

2009-04-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

This morning's New York Times brings news of Barrett Wissman's guilty plea last month on securities fraud charges in connection with some sort of shenanigans at the New York's state pension fund. He's reportedly on the hook for a $12 million fine.

To business reporter Danny Hakim, Mr. Wissman is a "hedge fund executive" and a "Dallas businessman," which I suppose is indeed his day gig. But here on the music beat, we know him better as the head of IMG Artists, which is to say that he manages — or rather, signs the paychecks of the managers of — hundreds of the classical music world's starriest conductors, singers and instrumentalists. He also — along with his wife, the cellist and composer Nina Kotova — runs a couple of sun-dappled music festivals in Tuscany and the Napa Valley, where those very musicians appear regularly.

It's like Balzac almost said: Behind every music festival lies a great crime.

Betty

2009-01-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

Alan Rich brings the sad news of the death yesterday of Betty Freeman, the great music patron and photographer. I never met her — although I always sort of expected, or at least hoped, that the occasion might arise — but of course my life was immeasurably enriched by her largesse, as was yours.

The list of ways in which Freeman helped shape the course of contemporary music over the past 50 years is nothing short of astonishing. It includes commissions and financial support for individual works — Nixon in China, L'amour du de loin, Different Trains, and many more — as well as funding for recordings, rehearsals and other projects. And then there were the broader, unspecified, let's-make-this-happen bequests: annual living grants for John Cage and Harry Partch, the creation of Lou Harrison's Gamelan Si Betty, and Lord knows what else. (There's a jaw-dropping list, probably a little out of date by now, here, as well as a fascinating interview from 2000 with Frank J. Oteri, from which I lifted this photo montage by David Hockney.)

What I always liked best about Betty Freeman was the conviction — I'm not sure where I got this idea, but Alan's obit would seem to bear it out — that her money went to a wider range of music than she actually appreciated or liked. Composers didn't have to cater to her tastes to get her support; that's one of the ways she differed from, say, the Medicis (also, no poison). They just had to be doing serious creative work, in a way that seemed apt to broaden everyone's cultural experience; if Betty herself liked the results, well, that was a bonus.

She was, as far as I could ever tell, a paragon of enlightened patronage. And at this unpleasant juncture in our national life — when accumulated wealth carries with it a particularly noxious stink — she stands as a much-needed role model. R.I.P.