Tickets Still Available for Merola Strauss

Cover of the vocal score for Ariadne auf Naxos published in Berlin in 1916 (from its Wikipedia Web page)

Merola Summer Festival performances will get under way on the evening of Thursday next week. However, readers may recall that, when I announced the season schedule, tickets for the performance of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos were already sold out for the first of the two shows on Thursday, July 30. The good news is that tickets are still available for the second, which will take place in the afternoon at 2 p.m. on Saturday, August 1. Merola alumnus (2014) Omer Ben Seadia will direct this two-part production, the second part of which is basically an opera within an opera. (The first part is about all the bickering that takes place before the curtain rises.) The conductor will be Ann-Katrin Stöcker.

The performance will take place in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Most readers probably know that the venue is located in the Civic Center at 50 Oak Street. The only tickets remaining are Orchestra seats selling for $75. San Francisco Opera has created a Web page for online purchases. Tickets are being managed by the San Francisco Opera Box Office in the War Memorial Opera House at 301 Van Ness Avenue, across the street from City Hall to the east and Davies Symphony Hall to the south. The Box Office may also be reached by calling 415-864-3330.

Revisiting “Elektra” Through Livestream

Some readers may recall that I wrote about the first of six performances of Richard Strauss’ one-act opera “Elektra” at the San Francisco Opera (SFO) in the War Memorial Opera House over the course of this month. Today I decided that another visit to the opera would be useful; but this time I made my visit from home, thanks to livestream technology. While I have been familiar with the music for some time, I think that the current SFO production, created by Keith Warner, revived for the current round of performances by Anja Kühnhold, has been my only visual encounter with this music. As could be seen in my previous article, the stage design by Boris Kudlička almost dwarves the vocalists. Therefore, I enjoyed this afternoon at the television, because it gave me a better view of the personalities of the individual characters in the narrative.

I find it interesting that both Euripides and Sophocles wrote plays about this character in Ancient Greece. In the early twentieth century, Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote his own play, taking Sophocles as his point of departure; and he subsequently used that play as the basis for the libretto he would write for Strauss’ opera. The opera is distilled into a single act, but there is approximately two hours of action in that act.

Warner clearly wanted to distance himself from Ancient Greece. As I previously wrote, what one first sees on the stage is a museum with Ancient Greek artifacts on display. Visitors to the museum leave the stage at “closing time," after which Sophocles’ characters come to life, expressing themselves through some of Strauss’ most intense music. Nevertheless, it struck me that Hofmannsthal’s libretto may have rambled a bit more than his play, probably because Strauss wanted to give his vocalists more music! That said, the score came close to demanding an endurance test for the role of Elektra, sung by dramatic soprano Elena Pankratova; and I was even more impressed with her staying power this afternoon than I was during my previous encounter.

Mother Klytemnestra (Michaela Schuster) and daughter Elektra (Elena Pankratova) having a heart-to-heart “kitchen talk”

What amused me the most, however, was Warner’s inclusion of a scene in a contemporary kitchen. My guess is that this would be the perfect place for Elektra and Klytemnestra to have a “heart-to-heart” talk. That episode in Hofmannsthal’s libretto was definitely better suited to a kitchen than to a museum!

That said, there are only three more performances that will be given of this production. They will all be evening events, beginning at 7:30 p.m. The dates will be Friday, June 19, Tuesday, June 23, and Saturday, June 24. Tickets may be purchased online through a single Web page.

“Elektra” Returns to San Francisco Opera

Yesterday afternoon saw the first of six performances of Richard Strauss’ one-act opera “Elektra” to the San Francisco Opera in the War Memorial Opera House. The running time was only one and two-thirds hours, but the resources are abundant. The orchestra consisted of 95 musicians including two timpanists (one doubling on percussion), three additional percussionists, and four Wagner tubas. There is an offstage chorus of 45 vocalists, and sixteen characters on the stage.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal prepared the libretto, using the Sophocles “Electra” play as his source. Sophocles may have drawn upon the earlier “Electra” play by Euripides, which, in turn, mined sources from the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus. There are sixteen vocalists in Hofmannsthal’s cast, but the title role dominates all others from beginning to end. Even as the curtain first rises, there are five maidservants talking about Elektra.

The narrative itself is one of vengeance. Prior to the beginning of the story, King Agamemnon was assassinated by his wife Klytemnestra. Elektra is their daughter, and she joins forces with her brother Orest to murder their mother for the crime she has committed. As already stated, all of this fits into a single uninterrupted act with a large diversity of instrumental sonorities to keep things moving. The good news is that the vocalists on stage could hold their own against conductor Eun Sun Kim’s intense management of the orchestra. Given Strauss’ reputation for “pulling out the stops,” Kim’s technique would have made the composer (or his spirit) proud.

Elektra (Elena Pankratova) dwarfed by the excessive stage design by Boris Kudlička

The production by Keith Warner, revived for this performance by Anja Kühnhold, was another matter. Rather than trying to establish an Ancient Greek setting, he situated the performance in a museum with Ancient Greek artifacts on display. Personally, I felt that the staging would have benefited from a bit more focus. Too many things were happening (either through projections or “in the flesh”) to keep the viewer attentive to Sophocles’ narrative. It is one thing when Strauss’ music and Hofmannsthal’s libretto navigate us through Elektra’s thoughts and deeds and quite another when the navigation has to contend with superfluity.

In performances in 1991 and 1997, this opera was directed by Andrei Serban. This was a director who was often criticized for “going over the top;” but, every now and then, he knew just how to hit the nail on the head. Watching that production kept me on the edge of my seat. Yesterday, I felt that I was just clocking off the episodes from Sophocles’ play.

DSO: Wagner with Tchaikovsky and Strauss

The text for yesterday evening’s latest YouTube livestream of the performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) began as follows: “Stories of tragic love unfold through the expressive power of the orchestra.” Each half of the program began with music by Richard Wagner: the Prelude and Liebestod episodes (the latter performed without vocalist) from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde and the “Siegfried Idyll” tone poem, which serves as a supplement to the operatic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen  (the ring of the Nibelung). The first half of the program concluded with another tone poem, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Francesca da Rimini;” and the program concluded with an instrumental suite of excerpts from Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier. Music Director Jader Bignamini led the ensemble.

What struck me most positively was the conductor’s measure-by-measure sensitivity to Wagner’s dynamics. Those familiar with the composer know how his sensitivity to dynamics underscores the narrative subtleties that provide the backbone of the music. Those dynamics are better appreciated when the narrative is performed in its entirety, but there are always subtleties underlying many (if not most) of Wagner’s excerpts. One could appreciate those subtleties in watching Bignamini at work, even when the music has been deprived of its overall narrative context.

The music of the other two composers on the program was anything but subtle. The narrative behind Tchaikovsky’s tone poem was inspired by one of the “Inferno” episodes in the first of the three parts of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. I must confess that the account of forbidden love borders on soap opera, and Tchaikovsky’s music just adds more soap to the narrative. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the composer’s approaches to instrumentation, particularly when he deploys a trio of three separate flute parts, given a thoroughly engaging account by last night’s Detroit musicians:

Three members of the DSO flute section playing Tchaikovsky (screen shot from last night’s YouTube livestream)

Where Rosenkavalier is concerned, I much confess that I prefer the full-length opera to the excerpts. The “magic” resides in the relationship between the music and the overall narrative. When selections are performed, they tend to be most meaningful only to those that know the whole story. The most significant case in point concerns the most familiar instrumental waltz, which is actually providing background for a scheming scoundrel! Fortunately, I could engage my own memories of the opera as context for Bignamini’s performance and could fully appreciate the excerpts he performed!

Spoleto Festival USA Launches Album Series

In the early summer of 1958, composer Gian Carlo Menotti launched the Festival dei Due Mondi (festival of the two worlds) in Spoleto, Italy. He is best known for the one-act Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, commissioned by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to be broadcast live on television on December 24, 1951. For the better part of my secondary school years, I would watch that performance annually. In 1977 Menotti launched a second festival in Charleston, South Carolina, naming it, appropriately, Spoleto Festival USA.

Over the course of my life, I have known about these festivals in name only. I had written a term paper about Menotti in secondary school; but, by the time I began my freshman year (1963) at the Massachusetts Instutue of Technology, he had pretty much faded into a figure of the past, making Charleston an effort to revive attention. Nevertheless, the festival has outlived its founder, who died on February 1, 2007. While I knew about the festival from time to time by leafing through magazines, I never encountered any specifics about the music being performed.

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

A little over a month ago, I learned that Phenotypic Recordings would release a series of albums documenting performances at last year’s Spoleto Festival USA. The first of these albums will be released tomorrow with two more releases to follow in April and May, respectively. The title of tomorrow’s release is Live from Spoleto 2025: Orchestra. The Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra is conducted by Timothy Myers, and the concerto soloist is violinist Alexi Kenney.

The concerto is Jean Sibelius’ Opus 47 in D minor, first composed in 1904 and revised in 1905. The “overture” for the program is the world premiere recording of “Stellar,” composed by Nigerian-American Shawn Okpebholo. The “symphony” is the suite of music extracted from Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier. The origin of this suite is somewhat uncertain, but the Wikipedia page for the opera suggests that it was probably arranged by conductor Artur Rodziński, who first performed it with the New York Philharmonic in October of 1944.

“Stellar” is a vigorous burst of energy lasting less than three minutes. Sadly, it is the only track on the album that does not overstay its welcome. Mind you, the Rosenkavalier music was given a fair shake; but, for anyone that has experienced and enjoyed the entire opera, it does little more than revive pleasant memories. Similarly, there is no arguing with Kenney’s violin skills; but, under Myers’ baton, the performance comes across as just another visit to the Sibelius concerto.

Whether the April and May albums of chamber music performances from Spoleto will make a more lasting impression remains to be seen.

“Metamorphosen” as Originally Planned

Among the late works composed by Richard Strauss, “Metamorphosen” tends to be the one that draws the most attention. The completed version requires 23 solo string performers, divided among ten violinists, five on viola, five cellists, and three on double bass. However, the composer first explored a more transparent ensemble in the form of a septet for pairs of violins, violas, and cellos joined by the bass.

LCCE musicians Michel Taddei, Tanya Tomkins, Leighton Fong, Phyllis Kamrin, and Anna Presler

At the beginning of February of next year, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) will present the second program in its 33rd season, and the title of that program will be Metamorphosen. The septet will be performed by violinists Anna Presler and Alisa Rose, Phyllis Kamrin and Kurt Rohde on viola, cellists Tanya Tomkins and Leighton Fong, and Michel Taddei on bass. Taddei will also give a solo performance of a composition that could not be more different than anything written by Strauss. He will play the “Sequenza XIVb,” which was originally composed by Luciano Berio for solo cello as “Sequenza XIV.” The program will then leap from the lower register into a solo flute composition by Hendel Almetus entitled “Tounen.” The final selection will be “Sonitudes” by Robert Hughes, who died in 2022 and had received commissions from both the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Ballet.

I must confess that I have a particular place in my heart (not to mention several different recordings) for “Metamorphosen.” Whether in the concert hall or the opera house, Strauss could be very good at “pulling out all the stops,” so to speak. Those familiar with his preferred rhetorical stance are likely to be surprised when encountering the (presumably sincere) intimacy of “Metamorphosen.” The work is seldom performed, probably because of the unconventional resources; but LCCE seldom (if at all) shies away from the unconventional!

The performance in San Francisco will not take place until 4 p.m. on Sunday, February 1. That will give readers ample time to become acquainted the “Metamorphosen” through the many available recordings. I am willing to confess a personal preference for a live recording made in 2014 for a two-CD album of the composer’s lesser-known works performed by the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden under the baton of Christian Thielemann. (On Amazon.com, this is currently only available for MP3 download.) The performance will take place at the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located in Noe Valley (of course) at 1021 Sanchez Street, just south of 23rd Street. Admission will be $40 with a $15 rate for students and $5 for Arts Access. Tix has created a Web page for online purchases.

SFS: Strauss and Sibelius Prevail over New Work

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen led the penultimate program in his tenure as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). The program was framed by the two best-known tone poems by Richard Strauss, beginning with “Don Juan” (Opus 20) and concluding with “Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks” (Opus 28). Opus 20 was followed by Jean Sibelius’ final symphony, Opus 105 (the seventh), a single-movement composition in the key of C major. The second half of the program began with “Rewilding” by Gabriella Smith, composed on an SFS commission.

Taken as a whole, the occasion provided the perfect opportunity to appreciate Salonen’s mastery of detail and his chemistry with the ensemble. The two Strauss works, both composed late in the nineteenth century, have sustained their war horse reputation well over a century later. Both of them exploit the affordances of a large symphonic ensemble. Salonen clearly appreciated all of those affordances and guided the entire SFS ensemble in such a way that any attentive listener could appreciate them just as readily.

The Sibelius symphony, on the other hand, is seldom encountered, perhaps because the uninterrupted flow of his five movements is unabashedly enigmatic, even though the key signature is C major. My last account of this music involved the first recording of the work ever made, which was by Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1939. The last time Salonen conducted the work in California was during his tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last night he knew how to make every note count, and every member of the ensemble was there with him to make sure that even the subtlest of gestures would be within the “auditory grasp” of anyone prepared to listen.

Sadly, the weakest offering was also the most recent. Smith had previously composed “Tumblebird Contrails” in 2014. It was selected for the Nobel Prize Concert in 2023, when Salonen conducted it with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. It was then performed by SFS later that year, following up on a performance by the SFS Youth Orchestra in March of 2022. I was fortunate enough to attend that performance and wrote the following:

Smith’s “Tumblebird Contrails” was a reflection on the diverse environments that the composer encountered while backpacking in Point Reyes. The attentive listener could either follow those environments by reading Smith’s program note or just let his/her/their imagination run its course through past personal experiences. Either way, it was not difficult to appreciate Smith’s ability to turn those environmental impressions into instrumental themes and textures, but she exhausted her vocabulary and her capacity for elaboration roughly halfway through the duration of the score.

Were I to substitute “Rewilding” for “Tumblebird Contrails” in the above text, the message would remain the same.

Cover design for Littoral (from the Recordings Web page on Cheryl E. Leonard’s Web site)

A little less than a year ago, I was fortunate enough to encounter composer Cheryl E. Leonard presenting a program entitled Antarctica: Music from the Ice at the Golden Gate Valley Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Leonard had an uncanny knack for taking field recordings and turning them into music, and I took great pleasure writing an article about two of her albums. Little did I know how high the bar had been set in the genre of creating music inspired by natural sounds. Sadly, that bar was too high for Smith to mount, at least on the basis of her approach to “Tumblebird Contrails.”

Bignamini and DSO Span Nineteenth Century

Yesterday evening my wife and I settled down to dinner while watching the latest “free live HD webcast” presented by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). The guest soloist was cellist Steven Isserlis, whose visit to San Francisco when I was first building up my writing chops I still fondly remember. His concerto selection was Robert Schumann’s Opus 129, composed in the key of A minor. The “overture” for the program was “Les Préludes” by Franz Liszt, Schumann’s contemporary and colleague. The second half of the program vaulted over to the other end of the nineteenth century with two of Richard Strauss’ best known tone poems, his Opus 20 “Don Juan” and the Opus 28 “Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks.”

Steven Isserlis with DSO in their performance of Schumann’s cello concerto (screen shot from the video being discussed)

From a video point of view, this program provided a generous number of opportunities for the viewer to visit the many sections of the ensemble. Indeed, Strauss’ imaginative approach to instrumentation brought a significant number of the members of the orchestra into the spotlight, and the video director was well aware of these moments. (Readers may recall that, back in my student days, telecasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra were meticulously directed by Jordan Whitelaw, allowing solo passages to be highlighted visually as well as audibly.) Video also well accounted for the interplay between soloist and ensemble in the Schumann concerto. Isserlis then “took the spotlight” for his solo encore, Pablo Casals’ arrangement of the Catalan Christmas carol “Cant dels Ocells” (song of the birds). With all this diversity of narrative, “Les Préludes” served as the perfect introduction in both letter and spirit!

SOMM to Release Tribute to Fischer-Dieskau

While I had recognized the name of baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau through my regular perusals of the Schwann catalog of recordings, my “first contact” with listening to his voice came about when I added Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem to my collection. The libretto incorporated poems written by Wilfred Owen during World War I; and Fischer-Dieskau took the “role” of a German soldier, complemented by tenor Peter Pears representing an English soldier. Fischer-Dieskau had more than a few problems with English pronunciation; but none of them interfered with the expressiveness of his delivery, whether it involved the intensity of battle or the poignant setting in the final movement of “Let us sleep now,” sung in duo with Pears.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the cover of the “tribute” album about to be released (from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording)

However, my account of Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings has been relatively modest, particular in light of the eleven-CD box set of the recordings he made for EMI. This Friday, SOMM Recordings will release a two-CD album entitled Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: A Centenary Tribute; and, as is usually the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. The second CD is devoted entirely to two interviews, the first for his 75th birthday in 2000 and the second for his 80th birthday in 2005. The first CD offers an engaging interleaving of familiar vocal works among the less familiar.

All of the familiar offerings are by Gustav Mahler, with three songs from Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit coupled with three of the Rückert-Lieder songs. These are all recital recordings with pianist Karl Engel accompanying Fischer-Dieskau. There are also five tracks of settings by Ferruccio Busoni of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as also single settings of Goethe by Richard Strauss and Max Reger. The less familiar composers in the repertoire are Anna Amalia, Johann Friedrich Reichart, and Carl Friedrich Zelter. The album then concludes with three songs in Hungarian, two by Zoltán Kodály and one a folk song.

I have to confess that one of the reasons that drew me to this album is my interest in the Busoni catalog. I am almost certain that this was my first encounter with his approach to art song, and Fischer-Dieskau could not have been a better advocate. It is also worth noting that the Kodály tracks provided accompaniment by the London Symphony Orchestra with Kodály himself on the podium. Thus, as “centenary tributes” go, the “historical content” of this album is decidedly impressive. My guess is that Busoni and Kodály will be the primary factors in drawing me back to this album for further listening!

Schwabacher Series to Conclude with Crocetto

Next month will see the conclusion of the annual Schwabacher Recital Series, presented jointly by the San Francisco Opera (SFO) Center and the Merola Opera Program. The final recitalist will be soprano Leah Crocetto, who will be accompanied at the piano by Carrie-Ann Matheson. Some readers may recall her involvement with the Momenti trio, performing with bass-baritone Christian Pursell and pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg. A little over a year ago, this site reported the release of their Momenti album.

Leah Crocetto (photograph by Jiyang Chen, from a Classical Post Web page)

Crocetto has prepared an impressively diverse program for her Schwabacher performance. She has compiled a diverse assortment of art song selections by Clara Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. She will also be joined by baritone Lester Lynch to sing “Ciel! mio padre” from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida. On the more popular side, she will sing “Losing my mind” from Stephen Sondheim’s musical Follies and wrap up with Sammy Fain’s “I’ll be seeing you,” setting lyrics by Irving Kahal.

This performance will take place in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater on Thursday, April 10, beginning at 7:30 p.m. This venue is on the fourth (top) floor of the Veterans Building, which is located at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. General admission will be $30. Tickets may be purchased online through an event page on the San Francisco Opera Web site. Note that wheelchair accessible seating is an option. The telephone number for the Box Office is 864-3330. In addition, subject to availability, student rush tickets will go on sale at 7 p.m. at the reduced rate of $15. There is a limit of two tickets per person, and valid identification must be shown.

Paponiu Brings Diversity to SFS Youth Orchestra

Yesterday afternoon was my first opportunity of the season to catch up with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Youth Orchestra led by Wattis Foundation Music Director Radu Paponiu. The program was an engagingly diverse one with major selections by both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss, each of which was paired with a more recent work by Gabriela Lena Frank and Arturo Márquez, respectively. Paponiu led with a solid command of the full breadth of diversity offered by this repertoire, and all the members of his ensemble came across as well-tuned to his every gesture.

“Marriage à-la-mode: The Countess's Morning Levee,” a painting by William Hogarth that may have inspired the first act of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Mozart led the way with his K. 385 (“Haffner”) symphony in D major. This was given a vigorous delivery under Paponiu’s baton, introducing the ensemble with a dazzling account of the clarity in their “musical diction.” This was complemented in the second half of the program by a suite of instrumental excerpts from Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier. As an opera-goer, I have long appreciated the role that this music played in the unfolding of the narrative; but that narrative was left by the wayside in the suite that Strauss extracted. Nevertheless, the performance evoked my own personal memories of the Marschallin, Octavian, and Baron Ochs, even without much sense of the story that unfolded.

The Frank and Márquez selections were both “first encounters,” although I had listened to other Frank works over the last few decades. Each of these new encounters offered its own technique on Latin rhetoric, and both were equally engaging. However, I must confess that I was particularly impressed by Márquez leaving it to the violas to take the lead on the primary theme! This was his second “Danzón” composition, completed in 1994; and the performance convinced me that his repertoire deserves more attention.

Schwabacher: Two Vocalists and Two Pianists

Tenor Michael John Butler and Baritone Olivier Zerouali (courtesy of the Merola Opera Program and the San Francisco Opera Center)

The annual Schwabacher Recital Series, presented jointly by the San Francisco Opera (SFO) Center and the Merola Opera Program, will continue in a little less than two week’s time. This month’s program will present tenor Michael John Butler and baritone Olivier Zerouali; and it will be the second of the three programs presented this season. Accompaniment will be provided by two pianists: Julian Garvue and Ji Youn Lee.

The program will present four song cycles. The oldest (and probably most familiar) of these will be Robert Schumann’s Opus 48 Dichterliebe (a poet’s love), setting sixteen of the poems that Heinrich Heine collected in his Lyrisches Intermezzo. Francis Poulenc will be represented by two cycles. The program will begin with Le Travail du Peintre (the work of the painter), providing “musical portraits” of the artists Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Jacques Villon. The other cycle collects six songs under the title Calligrammes. The remaining cycle on the program will be I Was There: Five Poems of Walt Whitman by Lee Hoiby. The program will conclude with the last three of the four songs that Richard Strauss collected for his Opus 27.

This performance will take place in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall on Wednesday, March 19, beginning at 7:30 p.m. This venue is on the eleventh floor of the Bowes Center, which is located at 200 Van Ness Avenue. General admission will be $30. Tickets may be purchased online through an event page on the San Francisco Opera Web site. Note that wheelchair accessible seating is not an option. The telephone number for the Box Office is 864-3330. In addition, subject to availability, student rush tickets will go on sale at 7 p.m. at the reduced rate of $15. There is a limit of two tickets per person, and valid identification must be shown.

Renaud Capuçon Honors Richard Strauss

Cover of the album being discussed

At the end of last month, Deutsche Grammophon released a three-CD collection of compositions by Richard Strauss featuring performances by violinist Renaud Capuçon. This makes for a generous collection of symphonic music and chamber music, with a particularly engaging diversity in the latter category, The former will probably be known best for the recording of the Opus 40 tone poem “Ein Heldenleben,” performed on this album by the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester conducted by Seiji Ozawa. However, far more intriguing was the opening selection in the collection, the Opus 8 violin concerto in D minor with the Vienna Symphony conducted by Petr Popelka.

Strauss was still a teenager when he composed this concerto, which was completed in 1882. Nevertheless, it is clear from the opening measures that Strauss was already cultivating his proclivity for broad strokes. It would also be fair to say that Strauss was already acquainted with a rich repertoire of embellishing tropes. One gets the impression that he was no stranger to past concertos and knew how to deploy those tropes to throw the genre into a new light, so to speak.

About five years later, Strauss composed his Opus 18 violin sonata; and the first CD in the collection provides an engaging opportunity for “side-by-side” listening to these early efforts. The other early work from that period is the Opus 13 piano quartet in C minor, which Capuçon performs with violist Paul Zientara, Julia Hagen on cello, and pianist Guillaume Bellom. I have to say that, while Strauss never really warmed up to chamber music, I enjoyed the opportunity to listen to these samples (which occasionally reveal what would become more familiar tropes in his orchestral repertoire).

What I find interesting about this anthology, however, is the rise of chamber music towards the end of Strauss’ career. His Opus 85 opera Capriccio, first performed in 1942, begins with a string sextet, which sets just the right mood for a work that was given the subtitle “A Conversation Piece for Music;” and, only a few years later, Strauss composed his “study for 23 solo strings” entitled “Metamorphosen.” Both of these selections provide clear evidence that Strauss’ rhetoric could be intimately understated when he wanted it to be.

I suppose what is most important about this collection is that, where the violin is concerned, there was a lot more to Strauss’ inventiveness than the egocentric preening that one finds in “Heldenleben!”

Conductor Mark Elder Makes his SFS Debut

Conductor Mark Elder (photograph by Groves Artists, courtesy of SFS)

Mark Elder is no stranger for those that have followed the San Francisco Opera for some time. I first encountered him in the fall of 2015, when he had trouble keeping the brass section under control while conducting Richard Wagner’s score for Die Meistersinger con Nürnberg. My only other experience with his performance was in the spring of 2019, when he was the conductor for the Great Performances at the Met broadcast of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila. Sadly, this was no more satisfying than his approach to Wagner.

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Elder made his debut conducting the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Having more liberty to prepare a repertoire, he put together a program that was decidedly more engaging than either of his previous operatic encounters. The first half of the program accounted for French music from the two extremes of the nineteenth century. The “central” selection was Claude Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune,” which was composed in 1894. This was flanked on either side by overtures by Hector Berlioz. The program began with his overture to Les Franc-juges, described in the program book notes by James M. Keller as his “first operatic failure.” The first half concluded with “Le roi Lear,” a concert overture inspired by William Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Berlioz was never shy when it came to instrumentation, and Elder displayed a solid command of the scores for both of these overtures. Of particular interest was the interplay across the first and second violin sections. This was enhanced through the conductor’s decision to have the two sections face each other, rather than play side-by-side. This afforded the attentive listener better opportunities to appreciate the many details in how Berlioz managed his orchestral textures.

Those textures were equally significant during the second half of the program, most of which accounted for Richard Strauss’ Opus 30 tone poem “Also sprach Zarathustra.” Strauss was heavily interested in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, which he encountered in the early 1890s. Also sprach Zarathustra was conceived by Nietzsche as a four-part treatise; but it unfolds as a prose narrative, whose plot line (such as it is) provided Strauss with a framework for his tone poem. Each of the tone poem’s episodes reflects on a specific segment of Nietzsche’s text. To be fair, I have to confess that, over the course of my several listening experiences, I could easily apprehend the episodic structure without finding much of a relationship to a narrative thread. Nevertheless, Elder’s conducting could not have been clearer in guiding one through those episodes, regardless of any presence or absence of a plot-line.

He then decided that Strauss’ account of heavy philosophy deserved a lighter “punch line.” As a result, last night’s program concluded with one of John Adams’ most engaging compositions, “Short Ride in a Fast Machine.” This quickly blew away any of the “scholarly cobwebs” that may have been induced by Strauss’ musical reflections on Nietzsche! This music was an SFS favorite back when Michael Tilson Thomas was Music Director. Personally, I was glad to encounter it again.

Plans for the 2024 Merola Grand Finale

The specific selections to be performed at the annual Merola Grand Finales have not yet been totally finalized. However, the Merola Opera Program has now released the list of operas that will provide excerpts for the program. That list includes the following:

• Gioachino Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia and L'italiana in Algeri
• Gaetano Donizetti: Don Pasquale and Lucia di Lammermoor
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Così fan tutte (K. 588)
• Vincenzo Bellini: Norma and I puritani
• Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio
• Pietro Mascagni: L'amico Fritz
• Richard Strauss: “Das Rosenband” (from the Opus 36 set of four songs) and Die ägyptische Helena
• Johann Strauss: Die Fledermaus
• Jules Massenet: Werther
• Charles Gounod: Roméo et Juliette
• Terence Blanchard: Fire Shut Up in My Bones
• Jake Heggie: Dead Man Walking
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Iolanta
• Young-Sup Choi: “Longing for Mountain Keum-kang”
• Emmerich Kálmán: Die Csárdásfürstin
• Noël Coward: “I’ll See You Again” from his operetta Bitter Sweet

All of this season’s Merolini will participate. In alphabetical order they are:

• Lucy Joy Altus, New York, New York (Mezzo-Soprano)
• Moriah Berry, Atlanta, Georgia (Soprano)
• Nathan Bryon, Geurie, Australia (Tenor)
• Michael John Butler, Bowie, Maryland (Tenor)
• Hannah Cho, Seoul, South Korea (Soprano)
• Sujin Choi, Seoul, South Korea (Pianist/Coach)
• Alexa Frankian, Oakville, Ontario, Canada (Soprano)
• Julian Garvue, Seattle, Washington (Pianist/Coach)
• Simona Genga, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (Mezzo-Soprano)
• Viviana Aurelia Goodwin, Tulsa, Oklahoma (Soprano)
• Lydia Grindatto, Tijeras, New Mexico (Soprano)
• Giorgi Guliashvili, Rustavi, Georgia (Tenor)
• Elizabeth “Hanje” Hanje, Vestavia Hills, Alabama (Soprano)
• Mary Hoskins, Saratoga Springs, New York (Soprano)
• Sihao Hu, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China (Baritone)
• Hyemin Jeong, Seoul, South Korea (Pianist/Coach)
• Donghoon Kang, Seoul, South Korea (Bass-Baritone)
• Yedam Kim, Paris, France (Pianist/Coach)
• Ji Youn Lee, Seoul, South Korea (Pianist/Coach)
• Lindsay Martin, San Diego, California (Mezzo-Soprano)
• Tessa McQueen, Loveland, Colorado (Soprano)
• Kara Morgan, Andover, Minnesota (Mezzo-Soprano)
• Angelo Silva, Houston, Texas (Tenor)
• Benjamin R. Sokol, Westbury, New York (Bass-Baritone)
• Hyungjin Son, Seoul, South Korea (Baritone)
• Samuel White, Columbia, South Carolina (Tenor)
• Justice Yates, Leesburg, Florida (Bass-Baritone)
• Olivier Zerouali, Middletown, Delaware (Baritone)

The conductor will be Steven White, and 2024 Merola Stage Director Anna Theodosakis will account for the staging of the entire production. The performance will begin at 7:30 pm. on Saturday evening, August 17. Ticket prices will be $65, $50, $40, and $25. Those aged 25 and under or attending their first Merola performance will be admitted for $10. The venue will be the War Memorial Opera House, which is located at 301 Van Ness Avenue on the northwest corner of Grove Street. Further information will be available by calling the Box Office at 415-864-3330.

Jill Morgan Brenner at Old First Concerts

Oskar Kokoschka’s 1912 “Portrait of Alma Mahler” (public domain, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, from a Wikipedia Web page)

Last night at Old First Presbyterian Church, soprano Jill Morgan Brenner performed in the first of the three Old First Concerts events planned for this month. She was accompanied at the piano by Alexander Katsman in a program entitled An Evening of German Lied. The first half began with Franz Schubert’s D. 118 “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” one of his earliest compositions (as can be seen from the catalog number). This was followed by Richard Wagner’s collection of five songs commonly known as Wesendonck Lieder. (The texts were poems by Mathilde Wesendonck.) The second half of the program began with three of the five songs by Alma Mahler that were published in 1924 but were composed much earlier, before her first encounter with Gustav Mahler. This was coupled with Four Last Songs, composed by Richard Strauss at the age of 84 but not published until after his death.

These were all impressive undertakings, bearing the promise of a highly engaging evening. Sadly, that promise was not fulfilled. Brenner clearly felt strongly about all of her selections, but her delivery was consistently uneven through the entire program. It almost seemed as if she was still struggling to get all the notes in place, leaving little room for the expressiveness behind any of the musical phrases. The overall plan to survey the many aspects of German texts set to music was a good one. However, Brenner’s approaches to interpretation were too uneven to encourage the listener to explore those aspects. German art song deserves better.

Program Announced for Schwabacher Concert

Following The Song as Drama, the next public performance to be presented by the Merola Opera Program will be an annual presentation of the Schwabacher Summer Concert. As in the past, the program will be structured around staged scenes, one of which will be directed by current Merolina Anna Theodosakis. The remainder of the program will again be directed by Omer Ben Seadia, a Merola alumnus from 2014. The conductor will be Louis Lohraseb.

Pierre-Auguste Lamy’s engraving of a scene from the third act of Gounod’s Faust (public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

This year the program will consist of extended scenes from six decidedly distinctive operas:

1. Lucrezia Borgia: Gaetano Donizetti’s opera about Venice in the early sixteenth century based on a play of the same name by Victor Hugo about the machinations of the Borgia family
2. Faust: Charles Gounod’s five-act account of the narrative in the first part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust
3. Pagliacci: Ruggero Leoncavallo’s two-act (with prologue) account of infidelity among commedia dell’arte players
4. Cendrillon: Jules Massenet’s freely-adapted grand opera account of Charles Perrault’s familiar “Cinderella” fairy tale
5. La bohème: Giacomo Puccini’s highly popular account of Bohemian life in nineteenth-century Paris
6. Ariadne auf Naxos: Richard Strauss’ eccentric opera in which, after having been abandoned by Theseus, Ariadne is entertained by a troupe of commedia dell’arte players

This concert will be given two performances on Thursday, July 11, at 7:30 p.m. and on Saturday, July 13, at 2 p.m. They will both take place in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music at 50 Oak Street, a short walk north of the Van Ness Muni station. Each date has a separate Web page created for purchasing tickets, as indicated by their respectively attached hyperlinks. Once again Merola will be offering tickets to those 25 and under for only $10. In addition, there will also be a $10 rate for those seeing their first Merola production, with specific directions for this offer on the associated Web pages. All other ticket prices will be either $35 or $65. Those purchasing tickets in advance should be informed that a discount will be applied automatically when tickets for all four productions are included in the online cart. There is a single Web page listing all of those productions (with all necessary hyperlinks for the individual performances).

Simon Rattle in Berlin: What Remains

Poster for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (from Wikipedia, provided by DreamWorks Pictures, complies with Wikipedia non-free content policy and fair use under United States copyright law)

This final account of the anthology of recordings made by Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic may best be described as “odds and ends from the twentieth century.” That would account for all but one of the remaining CDs, since there is one “outlier,” which is the original soundtrack from the 2008 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I must confess that I did not know that this movie existed, even though its cast included Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, and Ben Whishaw.

Not long before I began my freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a friend loaned me a couple of soundtrack albums based on films by Federico Fellini. This was a whole new genre for me; and, during my freshman year, I spent many happy hours at the Brattle Theatre catching up on Fellini’s films. The composer for those films was Nino Rota, who would eventually establish a name for himself on his own, particularly in opera.

The score for Perfume, on the other hand, was a joint effort by Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, and Reinhold Heil, all performing on electronic gear. The Berlin Philharmonic is joined by the State Choir of Latvia along with three vocal soloists, sopranos Chen Reiss and Melanie Mitrano, and boy soprano Victor de Maizière. As is often the case for a product conceived by a committee, the music really does not hold up very well on its own (and, for that matter, the film did not do very well, particularly in the United States). Nevertheless, it was included in the anthology for the sake of completeness!

Where my own listening was concerned, the remaining selections all triggered different pangs of nostalgia. The most satisfying was Richard Strauss’ Opus 60, the suite of incidental music he composed for a performance of the Molière comédie-ballet, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Jean-Baptiste Lully composed the music for Molière, but Strauss composed music for Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of the play. His version plays up many of the eccentricities of the title character, making for an engaging listening experience. Unfortunately, on this CD, Opus 60 is preceded by Opus 40, the “Ein Heldenleben” tone poem, whose “protagonist” is even more laughable than Molière’s creation!

To some extent the revival of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana cantata also comes across as more than a bit laughable, half a century after it was all the rage. (Actually, it was already a butt of jokes when it showed up on television in the soundtrack for a cigar commercial.) Nevertheless, I have to say that I enjoyed the personalities evoked in the vocal solos by baritone Christian Gerhaher, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, and soprano Sally Matthews.

An entire CD is devoted to Carl Nielsen with Rattle conducting two of his concertos. The first of these is the flute concerto with Emmanuel Pahud as soloist. This is followed by Sabine Meyer taking the solo part in the clarinet concerto. The remainder of the album is the wind quintet with Pahud and Meyer joined by bassoonist Stefan Schweigert, Jonathan Kelly alternating between oboe and cor anglais, and Radek Baborák on French horn. While Nielsen’s music is no longer the “great discovery” it was during the second half of the last century, I have to confess that revisiting all three of these compositions was an enjoyable experience.

On the other hand, I am not quite sure what to make of Rattle’s decision to add Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” following the last two movements of Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony. I suppose the conductor decided that, in the interest of filling out the CD, one good Adagio deserves another. Where my own listening was concerned, however, there was just too much cognitive dissonance!

Two Richard Strauss/Maurice Ravel Pairings

Conductor Karina Canellakis (from the SFS Web page for the concert being discussed)

Yesterday afternoon saw Karina Canellakis return to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) for this week’s concert given three performances. Her program was particularly interesting for its overall structure. Each half concluded with a major composition by Maurice Ravel. The first of these was his D major piano concerto with a solo part to be played by the left hand alone, composed in 1930. The conclusion of the program presented “La Valse,” which Ravel completed a decade earlier in 1920. Each of these pieces was preceded by a tone poem that Richard Strauss composed in 1889. The program began with his Opus 20 “Don Juan;” and the second half opened with “Death and Transfiguration,” his Opus 24.

All four of these compositions benefit from the foundation of a thorough talent for instrumentation. In other words, for the most part, the SFS musicians were kept busy from start to finish! What was important was that, in the face of the breadth of resources, Canellakis always found the right ways in which to make sure that all those sonorities blended properly while, at the same time, consistently accounting for the diversity of thematic material. As a result, the attentive listener could benefit from the rich variety of both similarities and differences encountered in the sonorous qualities of each of the four scores she conducted.

The concerto soloist was Cédric Tiberghien. Between his focus on the keyboard and Canellakis’ attention to balance, one could appreciate the full richness that Ravel summoned without straining the limitation of commanding the keyboard with only a single hand. The work is in a single movement and nods almost vaguely to the structural framework one expects from a nineteenth-century keyboard concerto. Indeed, one might almost conjecture that Ravel was more interested in structuring sonorities, rather than thematic material. To the extent that they can be identified, many of the themes are fragmented with only a few episodes in which more extensive “sentence structure” unfolds. Nevertheless, while Ravel clearly wanted to depart from tradition, all of the contributing musicians brought a coherence to the performance with a clarity that was consistent from the opening murmurs to the “Bang!” that concludes the entire composition.

Such fragmentation tends to beget ambiguity, and ambiguity provides the core for the musical discourse that unfolds in “La Valse.” One would do well to make note of when this music was composed … not too long after the armistice that concluded World War One. From a personal point of view, I have always imagined a rather opulent ball associated with this music; but all the men at that ball have sustained serious injuries, most of which required the loss of at least one limb.

I am not sure what Canellakis’ own thoughts about any underlying narrative might be, but she certainly knew how to summon up a disquieting rhetoric over the course of the entire composition. (Most important was that she knew how to take the entire ensemble to dynamic extremes on both the soft and the loud sides.) The result left the attentive listener drawn into the music from the opening measure all the way through to the abruptly shattering final cadence.

Richard Strauss composed ten tone poems, the first eight of which were written in the late nineteenth century and constitute most of the composer’s earliest achievements of substance. Yesterday afternoon’s selections were the second and fourth, respectively, in that list. It would be fair to say that, in both settings, Strauss was more interested in a wide diversity of sonorities and thematic content than he was in narrative. Indeed, where Opus 20 is concerned, the music is more a reflection on a legendary figure than a narrative of his achievements. However, since that reflection is achieved through highly imaginative approaches to instrumentation (all of which could be appreciated through Canellakis’ meticulous attention to detail), the attentive listener can simply enjoy the ride without worrying too much about where it is headed.

In Opus 24 one can easily account for the realization of each of the two nouns in the title. Here again, however,  Strauss has no trouble leaving the building-blocks of narrative by the wayside. The “poem” of the tone poem is one of dispositions, rather than events; and the overall title provides the classification for those dispositions. Each of them, of course, is realized through just the right blend of thematic content and instrumentation.

Mind you (probably because this is music) the journey from “first noun” to “second noun” tends to wander, rather than following a straight path. However, as in Opus 20, that wandering leads to a plethora of imaginative instrumental sonorities, which consistently transcend any mundane account of the title. Once again Canellakis knew exactly how to allow each of those sonorities to flourish, seizing and holding the attentive listener from start to finish.

Stunning Tchaikovsky Concerto from Kavakos

Violinist Leonidas Kavakos (from the SFS event page for last night’s performances)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the first subscription concert for the 2023–24 season. The program followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony format. The concerto soloist was Leonidas Kavakos performing Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35 violin concerto in D major.

Kavakos is no stranger to Davies, but this was his first performance since the pandemic. His most recent appearance was as a recital soloist in the SFS Great Performers Series in January of 2019; but, at the beginning of that season, he performed Igor Stravinsky’s 1931 violin concerto in D with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. I suspect that many (if not most) of the audience know the Tchaikovsky concerto so well that they can reproduce it in their sleep. Nevertheless, there was an energetic freshness to Kavakos’ approach to Tchaikovsky, which was more than adequately shared by Salonen’s leadership. As a result, regardless of familiarity, there were any number of edge-of-your-seat moments in Kavakos’ virtuosity, particularly in his interpretation of the well-known cadenza that is usually performed towards the end of the first movement.

As might be expected, the account of the first movement was exciting enough to elicit a rousing burst of applause from the audience. When it seemed evident that they would not stop, Salonen tried all sorts of mime techniques to remind them that the concerto still had two movements remaining! It goes without saying that the applause following the final movement was just as vigorous as the first round. When it was clear that the audience demanded more from Kavakos, he finally offered a solo encore. He selected the Sarabande movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo partita in D minor, making the clear case that he was just as sensitive to quietude as he was agile in jumping through all of Tchaikovsky’s hoops.

The downside is that Kavakos’ appearance made for the only satisfying account of the evening. The “overture” selection was the West Coast premiere of “Herald, Holler and Hallelujah!,” composed by Wynton Marsalis in 2022. Early in his career, Marsalis released albums of both classical and jazz. At that time, I remember listening on the radio to an interview with conductor Raymond Leppard, who asserted rather strongly that Marsalis would have to choose between the two genres if he is to achieve the best of his abilities.

We now know that Marsalis disregarded Leppard’s cautionary remarks. One result is that last night’s opening selection never made much of a mark, whether it involved the “roots” rhetoric of the thematic material or the arrangement of those “roots” for fifteen brass players and (as Peter Schickele liked to put it) “an awful lot of percussion.” Mind you, it was clear that all of the SFS instrumentalists were having a grand old time by “letting it all hang out” (as my generation used to say). However, there was little about the music itself to prompt sustained attention. Since the piece was only five minutes in duration, that disadvantage did not signify very much or for very long.

Would that the same could be said of the symphony offering that followed the intermission! The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Richard Strauss’ Opus 64, “An Alpine Symphony.” Composed in 1915, this is one of his later tone poems, composed not long after his success with the Opus 59 opera Der Rosenkavalier. Those familiar with that opera know that, while the plot unfolds over three acts, the action flies by like lightning.

Sadly, this was not the case for Opus 64. The tone poem was structured around a single day involving ascending and descending an alpine trail. This consists of twenty episodes, all of which were meticulously enumerated in the notes for the program book by the late Michael Steinberg. (The program note concludes with the sentence “This note has been edited for length.”) Even with Salonen’s attentiveness to the many details in the score, last night’s performance could not get beyond coming off as a rather tedious (if well-intentioned) slog. True, everyone up on stage had a turn in the spotlight (along with an organist that seemed to have been situated off-stage). However, when placed alongside the more familiar Strauss tone poems, Opus 64 seems to have little to say to seize and sustain attention.