Omni Video of Mēla Guitar Quartet at St. Mark’s

Mēla guitarists Matthew Robinson, George Tarlton, Michael Butten, and Zahrah Hutton (screenshot of the video being discussed)

Late this morning the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest Live form St. Mark’s video. This captured the entirely of the Dynamite Guitars program performed at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church this past March 8. The performers were the members of the Mēla Guitar Quartet: Matthew Robinson, George Tarlton, Zahrah Hutton, and Michael Butten.

Some readers may recall that they had previously appeared in an OMNI on-location video release at 10 a.m. this past March 3, serving somewhat as a preview for the performance taking place the following Saturday. The “preview video” was of the overture to Mikhail Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, which happened to be the final work before the intermission on the March 8 program. Glinka took five years to compose this opera, completing it in 1842; and these days it tends to be known for little more than that overture. Mind you, when it came to instrumentation, Glinka knew how to pull out all the stops, so to speak. Clearly, the Mēla sonorities were somewhat more limited; but they allowed for better appreciation of the thematic content!

Indeed, in the overall course of their St. Mark’s performance, Mēla never shied away from composers that were all too eager to show off rich instrumentation. The program included two further opera selections by Camille Saint-Saëns (the Opus 47 Samson and Delilah) and Englebert Humperdinck (Hansel and Gretel). The guitarists were just as deft in taking on French keyboard music by both Claude Debussy (the two “Arabesques” compositions) and Maurice Ravel (two movements from Ma mère l’Oye, the “Mother Goose” piano duet).

The fact is that only two of the composers in the program were guitarists creating music for their instrument. The first of these was Laura Snowden, whose “My Clock is Broken!” included percussive effects deftly provided by Hutton. The other was Phillip Houghton, whose Opals was a suite of three movements, each involving a different color of the mineral: black, water, and white.

The duration of the entire video was about 90 minutes. There were only a few moments of reflection on the audience in St. Mark’s for which Mēla was performing. Sadly, I was at another event in the Civic Center when this concert took place; so I am glad that Omni recruited Matthew Washburn to proved a “video capture” of the entire performance.

A Vocal Album of Many Colorful Contexts

Samuel Hasselhorn on the cover of his new album

Tomorrow harmonia mundi will release a new album of performances by baritone Samuel Hasselhorn accompanied by the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Łukasz Borowicz. The full title of the album is Urlicht: Songs of Death and Resurrection; and, for those that really cannot wait, the Amazon.com Web page is currently processing pre-orders! For many readers, both the title and the subtitle are likely to invoke associations with Gustav Mahler; so it is no surprise that four of the ten selections on the album are Mahler compositions. Two of them are settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (the boy’s magic horn: old German songs); and the other two draw upon poems by Friedrich Rückert, which Mahler had collected in a set of five given the title Rückert-Lieder. Woven among these selections are vocal settings by (in order of appearance) Engelbert Humperdinck, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Pfitzner, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Walter Braunfels, and Alban Berg.

In the interest of “full disclaimer,” I should make it clear (to those that do not already know) that I am an unabashed sucker for the development of “new music” that took place during that transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in German-speaking countries. I find it a bit interesting that Friedrich Rückert received more attention than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. However, one of the surprises on this album comes from Pfitzner’s setting of “Herr Oluf” (Sir Oluf), a poem by Goethe’s contemporary, Johann Gottfried Herder, which may well have inspired Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” now best known for its vocal setting by Franz Schubert (D. 328).

Those familiar with the Mahler songs will most likely be satisfied with Hasselhorn’s approaches to them. Personally, however, I have to confess to a soft spot for the Korngold selection. This is the aria from Die tote Stadt (the dead city), which begins with the text “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen” (my yearning, my illusion), usually known as “Pierrot’s Tanzlied” (Pierrot’s dance-song). Those that have followed this site for some time probably know that I am a sucker to this opera and have been fortunate enough to see it twice (once on television and once on the stage). Indeed, I recalled those experiences a little less than a year ago, when violinist Bruno Monteiro included a chamber music version of it on one of his albums.

The order of the composers other than Mahler on this album is not a chronological one. However, there is still some sense of a “journey” from the “traditional” rhetoric of Humperdinck to the “adventurous” stance that permeates the entire score of Wozzeck. There is thus some sense of “progression” when one attentively follows how one track leads to another across the entire album. It is through that sense that the entire album transcends any sense of a business-as-usual experience.

Taken as a whole, the album left me thinking about what Hasselhorn’s next endeavor will be!

Klemperer’s “Nineteenth Century Miscellany”

On the basis of the content released in the first volume of the Warner Classics Remastered Edition of recordings, it would be fair to say that the nineteenth century was the “sweet spot” for conductor Otto Klemperer. Having examined his extensive focus on Ludwig van Beethoven and generous recordings of the music of Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, and Anton Bruckner, it is now time to address the other nineteenth-century composers that signified in his repertoire. It would be fair to say that the Klemperer legacy accounts for an impressive breadth along with a few instances of what might be called “moderate depth.”

That latter category applies, for the most part, to symphonies. As has already been documented, both Beethoven and Brahms were given the “complete symphonies” treatment. The other composer that is similarly thorough is Robert Schumann, whose four symphonies are conjoined with an account of his Opus 54 piano concerto in A minor. The pianist for that recording is Annie Fischer, who also plays Franz Liszt’s first concerto in E-flat major on that album.

The first three of the Schumann symphonies are coupled with overtures: “Manfred” (Opus 115), “Genova” (Opus 81), and the incidental music for Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The fourth Schumann symphony, on the other hand, is coupled with Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 90, his fourth symphony known as the “Italian.” The only other Mendelssohn symphony is the Opus 56 (“Scottish”) in A minor, which is coupled, logically enough, with the Opus 26 (“Hebrides”) overture. Mendelssohn is also represented by a full CD of incidental music (Opus 61) composed for William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Other notable symphony collections are situated at opposite ends of the century. On the early side we have three symphonies by Franz Schubert: D. 485 in B-flat major, D. 759 (“Unfinished”) in B minor, and D. 944 (“Great”) in C major. There is also a previously unreleased track of the opening movement of D. 417 in C minor. At the other end one encounters the last three of the six symphonies of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Opus 36 in F minor, Opus 64 in E minor, and Opus 74 (“Pathétique”) in B minor.

The only other symphonies in the collection are Hector Berlioz’ Opus 14, given the programmatic title “Symphonie fantastique,” César Franck’s three-movement symphony in D minor, and Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 95 (“From the new world”) in E minor. Other tracks account for a generous number of overtures; and, where Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is concerned, the overture is coupled with the “Traumpantomime” (dream pantomime). Most likely, all of these offerings will be familiar to most listeners. Nevertheless, Klemperer is a stickler for details, meaning that, more often than not, listeners are likely to encounter a generous number of fresh perspectives not previously considered.

Barbirolli at Hallé: 19th-Century Assortment

The remainder of the nineteenth-century repertoire performed by the Hallé Orchestra conducted by John Barbirolli amounts to a relatively mixed assortment. Indeed, in the Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings collection, many of the nineteenth-century selections share CDs with either the eighteenth century or the twentieth. On the basis of the reproduced images of LP album covers on the CD sleeves, I would hazard a guess that these colocations have more to do with Warner Classics trying to fill individuals CDs as efficiently as possible, rather than providing collections of “good neighbors.”

Consider the twentieth CD in the box. It begins with the Viennese Gemütlichkeit of Franz von Suppé and Johann Strauss (both father and son), which then segues across the Atlantic Ocean to the fourth of the Bachianas Brasileiras suites by Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos. The listener is then shuttled back across the Atlantic to the Finland of Jean Sibelius for “The Swan of Tuonela” from his Opus 22 Lemminkäinen Suite. The journey then ends at the 1952 Salzburg Festival, which hosted the world premiere of Richard Strauss’ opera Die Liebe der Danae (the love of Danae). Barbirolli conducts two symphonic fragments from this opera arranged by Clemens Krauss, who had conducted that premiere.

To be fair most of these recordings were made during a single two-day recording session in January of 1955. Nevertheless, the organization of recording sessions rarely takes into account how appropriate listening experiences should be planned. Thus, when the LP albums were released, one grouped together Villa-Lobos, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss, while the other was the Gemütlichkeit collection.

An illustration of Peer Gynt for an 1896 book of Norwegian folk tales (by Peter Nicolai Arbo, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Only two of the CDs are devoted to a single composer. The composer on one is Edvard Grieg; and it makes for an appealing departure from the ordinary, particularly where the music for Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt play is concerned. Rather than confine himself to the two suites that Grieg prepared, Barbirolli extended those eight selections with another four, arranging the twelve tracks in their “order of appearance” in Ibsen’s narrative. This includes vocal solos by sopranos Patricia Clark and Sheila Armstrong and the Ambrosian Singers chorus adding to the frenzy of the Mountain King episode. The other composer to fill an entire CD is Hector Berlioz, whose album couples the Opus 14 “Symphonie fantastique” with three instrumental excerpts from the Opus 24 “dramatic legend” La damnation de Faust (the damnation of Faust).

Sadly, only two of the Brahms symphonies are included in this collection, Opus 90 (third) in F major and Opus 98 (fourth) in E minor. Curiously, each is introduced by one of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera overtures, coupling the early nineteenth century to its latter decades. The good news is that Barbirolli would later record the entire cycle of Brahms symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic. Similarly, Mahler is represented only by his first symphony in D major; but most of his symphonies were composed in the twentieth century. The Mahler tracks are preceded by the overture to Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel opera (whose premiere in Hamburg, following its first performance in Weimar, was conducted by Mahler).

Taken as a whole, this is a “what you get is what you get” assortment. The performances are consistently perceptive, often providing the attentive listener with new approaches to old chestnuts. There is also one twentieth-century offering that allows Barbirolli to exercise his sense of humor, the divertissement that Jacques Ibert composed in 1930. Sadly, I have never heard this performed in concert; and I have not heard a recording of it since my undergraduate days. I was glad to discover that the music is still as funny as it was when I first encountered it.

SFO’s Imaginative Approach to Humperdinck

Yesterday afternoon in the War Memorial Opera House, the San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the second of its eight performances of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. A co-production with the Royal Opera House in London, this marked the SFO debut of both Director Antony McDonald and his Associate Danielle Urbas, who supervised the restaging in San Francisco. The title characters were sung by mezzo Sasha Cooke as Hansel and soprano Heidi Stober as Gretel. Yesterday’s performance also saw Adler Fellow Mary Evelyn Hangley take the soprano role of Gertrude (Hansel and Gretel’s mother) when Michaela Martens had to withdraw due to illness.

McDonald’s staging was both a visual feast and a penetrating approach to an all-too-familiar narrative. During the overture one observed Hansel and Gretel enjoying an abundant dinner with their parents. The lights on the scene then dim, and a clock rapidly advances forward in time against the rapid pace of the instrumental music. We then see the same family in abject poverty making do with what little could be brought to the table. This second view established the perspective when the overture concluded and the curtain rose on Act I.

That perspective was one of poverty as a downhill spiral. Things are so bad that they have to depend on a single pitcher of milk left by a kindly neighbor. As might be expected, bad turns to worse when the pitcher breaks during an aggressive confrontation between Gertrude and her children; and the mother sends them into the woods to pick berries. Pessimism turns to irony when Peter (the father, sung by bass-baritone Alfred Walker) comes home with a generous supply of food, purchased with the money made from selling the brooms that Hansel had been making. Peter and Gertrude celebrate his good fortune; but darkness returns when he learns that the children were sent into the woods (specified in the program book as the Black Forest), which he describes as a sinister and dangerous place.

The remaining two acts of the opera take place in those woods, and hunger remains the prevailing theme. The children eat the berries they have picked before they can bring them home. They then fall asleep in the woods and encounter the edible witch’s house the next morning. It is only with the death of the witch that appetites are finally sated.

It is worth noting that the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm were published in 1812, about half a decade after the folk poems and songs collected by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in Des Knaben Wunderhorn appeared in print. (For the record, the Wikipedia page for the Brothers Grimm affirms that the Wunderhorn collection was an influential source.) In that context it is worth singling out two Wunderhorn poems that Gustav Mahler set to music, “Das irdische Leben” (the earthly life) and “Das himmlische Leben” (the heavenly life). The first of these is all about hunger, culminating in death by starvation, while the second is about the most massive banquet one could possibly imagine. It is worth thinking about the “Hansel and Gretel” tale as a reflection on this stark opposition.

Grimm characters consulting their “source text” (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

McDonald’s staging does not underscore that opposition. Rather, he lets is grow on us as the narrative unfolds. He also makes it clear that, once Hansel and Gretel leave their house, they enter a supernatural world. It is the mythical element of the Sandman (Adler mezzo Ashley Dixon) that invokes a dream sequence in which the characters of many of the Grimm tales engage with each other (a bit in the spirit of the Once Upon a Time television series, but far less mundane). By the time the Dew Fairy (Adler soprano Natalie Image) brings the morning, the audience members (as much as Hansel and Gretel) are uncertain about whether they are back in the “real world.”

Nevertheless, it is the prevailing uncertainty of distinctions between real and fantasy that drive the libretto from the oppressive hunger of the first act to the “happy ending” of the third. The one certainty that integrates the overall narrative is the music, and Christopher Franklin conducted with a sensitivity to the intimate relationship between the phrases on the score pages and the subtleties of the narrative. Thus, even though the tunes in the first act were simple, there was always a touch of Wunderhorn irony in the musical settings of those tunes; and the rich instrumental textures for that dream sequence populated by fairy tale characters transcended the high jinks that unfolded as those characters crossed paths.

Taken as a whole, this was a production that seized attention from the opening chorale in the orchestra and held that attention all the way into the final boisterous chorus. Any sense of “Christmas spirit” may have been absent. However, McDonald’s keen understanding of the “uses of enchantment” (to appropriate shamelessly a book title) had its own spirits to deploy; and they could not have been more apposite.

SFO to Conclude Fall Season with Christmas Favorite

The final opera to be presented in the 2019 Fall Season of the San Francisco Opera (SFO) will be Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. Humperdinck was inspired to write this opera thanks to his sister, Adelheid Wette. She had written songs based on the “Hansel and Gretel” fairy tale (in the version documented by the Brothers Grimm) as a Christmas present for her children. She encouraged Humperdinck to extend those songs into a full-evening opera; and Hansel and Gretel was the result, with Wette providing additional text for the libretto.

The Sandman and the Dew Fairy watch over the sleeping Gretel and Hansel (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

Next month Hansel and Gretel will return to the stage of the War Memorial Opera House after an absence of almost two decades, and it will serve as a seasonal offering. Staging will be by Antony McDonald (making his SFO debut) for a co-production with The Royal Opera, resident at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. The libretto will be sung in the English translation by David Pountney, who (unless I am mistaken) provided the English version for the last SFO Hansel and Gretel. The title characters will be sung, respectively, by mezzo Sasha Cooke and soprano Heidi Stober. The cast will also include two Adler Fellows, soprano Natalie Image as the Dew Fairy and mezzo Ashley Dixon as the Sandman. Christopher Franklin will conduct.

There will be eight performances of this production. These will take place at 7:30 p.m. on November 15, 21, and 23 and December 3 and 7 and at 2 p.m. on November 17 and 30 and December 1. All performances will be sung in English with English supertitles. Each performance will be preceded by a Pre-Opera Talk given by Peter Susskind, beginning 55 minutes prior to curtain.

Performances will take place at the War Memorial Opera House at 301 Van Ness Avenue, on the northwest corner of Grove Street. Single tickets are priced from $26 to $398. There is also a facility fee added to the price of the tickets: $2 for all Balcony sections and $3 for all other tickets. Tickets may be purchased online through an event page on the SFO Web site that provides hyperlinks for each performance. Tickets may also be purchased at the Box Office in the outer lobby of the Opera House. Standing room tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. on the day of each performance. They are sold for $10, cash only.

Summer Night in Vienna with Eschenbach and Fleming

This past May the annual Summer Night Concert presented by the Vienna Philharmonic was held fir the first time directly in front of Vienna’s imperial Schönbrunn Palace. Christoph Eschenbach conducted, and the featured soloist was soprano Renée Fleming. Fleming’s selections included opera arias by Antonín Dvořák and art songs by Sergei Rachmaninoff. With the exception of the “Song to the Moon” from Dvořák’s Opus 114 opera Rusalka, there were unfamiliar selections. However, Eschenbach saw to the audience’s comfort zone with excerpts from the scores for two ballets, The Sleeping Beauty (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky) and “The Firebird” (Igor Stravinsky). The prelude to Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel was complemented by Dvořák’s concert overture “Carnival;” and the “Dance of the Comedians” from Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride was thrown in as an encore; and popular tastes were satisfied with “Hedwig’s Theme” from the music that John Williams composed for the Harry Potter films.

To be fair, this was a festive evening, rather than a musical one. However, by the end of this past June, Sony Classics was ready to release it in CD form. The concert was also captured on video and broadcast on PBS last August 18. Nevertheless, even if the music itself was not the highest priority, many will feel that the encounters with less-performed selections by Dvořák and Rachmaninoff will be “worth the price of admission.” I am inclined to agree, although the Williams selection was so far removed from the context of the rest of the program that it bordered on cringe-inducing!

Karajan’s Twilight of the Nineteenth Century

Like the tenth box, the eleventh of the thirteen box sets that comprise Warner Classics’ Karajan Official Remastered Edition has a title that reflects the composer that are included, Herbert von Karajan: Brahms • Bruckner • Wagner • R. Strauss 1970–1981. These are all composers associated with the final years of the nineteenth century, and they are not the only composers represented in this particular collection. The others are Johan Strauss II, Franz Schmidt, and Engelbert Humperdinck.

It is in this historical period that Karajan appears to find his most extensive comfort zone with the Berlin Philharmonic. This is most evident in his approach to the two symphonies by Anton Bruckner that are included, the fourth (“Romantic”) in E-flat major and the seventh in E major. In both cases Karajan works from scores edited by Robert Haas for the first critical edition of Bruckner’s works. This edition fell out of favor following the end of the Second World War, since Haas himself was a member of the Nazi party. Most likely, however, these were the scores from which the young Karajan learned his Bruckner; and he apparently saw no reason to compare them with subsequent scholarly efforts.

Unless I am mistaken, the fourth and the seventh are the only two Bruckner symphonies that I have encountered in performance. Between those concert experiences and the recordings about which I have written, I feel as if I have settled into a comfortable acquaintance with both of them. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to pick on flaws, whether they involve a structural logic that never tends to go very far beneath the surface or harmonic progressions that take a long time and do not advance very far.

From a rhetorical point of view, however, the sympathetic listener should have no trouble recognizing, if not appreciating, the extent to which Bruckner, who may have been happiest when his job involved serving as church organist, could summon musical expressiveness as a means to communicate the personal conviction of his faith. One might think that this might not be the best match for a conductor like Karajan, who tended to present audiences with a basically secular disposition. However, if Karajan never sought to be as devout as Bruckner, as an interpreter he seemed to grasp what it would take to “let Bruckner be Bruckner;” and both of these recordings succeed through Karajan’s ability to convey how he went about doing so. Bruckner experts may chafe at some of Karajan’s approaches to interpretation; but, for those with little background listening experience, these recordings definitely make for a good way to get to know this composer.

Equally satisfying are the orchestral excerpts from the operas of Richard Wagner. This should not be a big surprise. If, as has already been observed, Karajan served up some of his best chemistry when working with the Wiener Singverein, then he could be just as stimulating in his contributions to opera production, not only for his work in the orchestra pit but also for his consummate skill in working with vocalists. All of the Wagner excerpts involve the use of an instrumental ensemble either to set the context for the narrative of the opera or to reflect on it. For that matter the satisfaction that one can take in his approach to Wagner can also be found in his interpretation of the overture to Humperdinck’s opera Hänsel und Gretel.

It would probably also be fair to say that, through his understanding of opera, Karajan could be more successful than others in negotiating the narrative threads of Richard Strauss’ tone poems. That skill can be appreciated in the recordings of both “Ein Heldenleben” and “Symphonia domestica,” whatever the shortcomings of the narratives themselves may be. As a result, the only real weaknesses in this box can be found in Karajan’s approaches to Johannes Brahms; but it has already been observed that Karajan was more in his element with Brahms’ choral music than he was with the orchestral repertoire.

Sunset Music | Arts Announces its Third Annual Opera Gala Concert

Exactly one week from today, Sunset Music | Arts will present its third annual opera gala and fundraiser. Four vocalists, all with opera experience that includes either performances in the San Francisco Opera (SFO) Chorus or bit parts in SFO productions will participate to cover the four vocal ranges. They will be soprano Amiée Puentes, mezzo Sally Porter Munro, tenor Colby Roberts, and baritone Frederick Matthews. They will sing both solos and in combinations, all accompanied at the piano by Bryan Baker.

The program will present favorite excerpts from both opera and Broadway. The operas to be highlighted will be (in the order of the program) Die Fledermaus (Johann Strauss II), Roméo et Juliette (Charles Gounod), Samson et Dalila (Camille Saint-Saëns), Don Pasquale (Gaetano Donizetti), Così fan tutte (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Hansel and Gretel (Engelbert Humperdinck), Lakmé (Léo Delibes), and The Magic Flute (Mozart). The Broadway composers will include Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Leonard Bernstein, along with a “bonus” performance of Fred E. Ahlert’s “Mean to Me,” one of the landmarks of Billie Holiday’s recorded legacy (even if she was not the first vocalist to record the song). The concert will be followed by a festive reception.

This recital will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, August 13. Sunset Music | Arts programs are hosted by the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, which is located at 1750 29th Avenue, about halfway between Moraga Street and Noriega Street. Tickets will be sold at the door for $30 for general admission and $25 for students and seniors. Tickets may also be purchased in advance from an Eventbrite event page.

Unfortunately, the Eventbrite page is not currently processing donations. However, since this is a fundraising event, donations are still welcome. The following are categories for suggested donation levels:

• Friend: $1–$99
• Supporter: $100–$249
• Benefactor: $250–$499
• Patron: $500 or above

Donations will be accepted by checks made payable to Incarnation Episcopal Church. They may be mailed to the church at the above address in San Francisco (ZIP code 94122). Further information may be obtained by calling 415-564-2324.

Christine Schäfer's Versatility

Last August I used my Examiner.com platform to declare Thomas Hampson the “unanointed king” of presenting “virtual concerts” through the medium of cyberspace.  I so honored him because not only has he established his presence in cyberspace through an intriguing diversity of channels (including the only occasion in which I found myself writing a classical music review of a PowerPoint presentation) but often he seems to have a hand in just how that presence is established.  The result is that, as I observed in my Examiner.com article, he is the only performer whose cyberspace appearances I try to evaluate from both a technological and a musical point of view.

Recently I have become aware of the extent to which Christine Schäfer has benefitted from performances mediated by a variety of media, so to speak.  Because I am not sure that she has an active hand in how these media products are conceived or delivered, I am not sure that she deserves the sort of regal crown I have assigned to Hampson.  Nevertheless, those media products have represented her in a diversity of performances that I might not otherwise have experienced;  and I always believe in celebrating performers who try to maintain diversity in their active repertoire.

Like many I first encountered Schäfer singing the title role in Alban Berg’s opera, Lulu.  I was fortunate enough to see her do this on the stage, after which I saw the video document of her Glyndebourne performance, now available on DVD.  I was not particularly happy with Graham Vick’s stage direction for the latter production, since I tend to be a purist when it comes to Berg’s own specifications;  but I certainly could not quibble about the casting, particularly where Schäfer’s voice was concerned.  Having come to identify her with Lulu (probably not the healthiest of mindsets), I was, to say the least, surprised when the Metropolitan Opera cast her as Gretel when they decided to produce Richard Jones’ staging of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel (currently available for viewing through Classical TV).  Mind you, there was no trace of “innocent childhood” in Jones’ conception of Gretel;  but I was still pretty impressed with how Schäfer threw herself into a role that would make Bart Simpson look well-behaved.  Then, this morning I discovered, again through Classical TV, that her pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme.  She was one of the two sopranos in an Advent Concert of music by Johann Sebastian Bach prepared by Nikolaus Harnoncourt for performance at the Benedictine Monastery in Melk, not the sort of place where one would expect to encounter either Lulu or Gretel!

I have not yet watched this particular Classical TV video.  I should be able to do so today.  I cannot imagine why a soprano with a firm hold on Berg should not be just as capable in taking on Humperdinck;  but Bach is in another league, particularly when you have someone like Harnoncourt giving a historically informed performance.  In the current lineup of my Examiner.com projects, this one may be fascinating enough to get Spock to raise his eyebrow!

Mahler: What the FINANCIAL TIMES Tells Me

There are any number of risks when it comes to evaluating the experience of one performance of the music of Gustav Mahler on the basis of a report of another filed half-way around the world. However, bearing those risks in mind, I was still interested in reading what Andrew Clark had to say in the Financial Times about Vladimir Jurowski's first effort to conduct Mahler with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), who twenty years ago had built up some awesome Mahler chops under the baton of Klaus Tennstedt. The closest I have come to a direct experience of Jurowski was the Metropolitan Opera telecast of Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel (giving the English title since the performance used David Pountney's English translation). One might think that any connection between Humperdinck and Mahler would be one of the ridiculous to the sublime. However, Mahler was a conductor before he was a composer; and he conducted the Hamburg premier of Humperdinck's opera on September 25, 1894. Having suggested that just about everything in Mahler's "prodigious store of memories" found its way into his compositions in one way or another, I wanted to read about Jurowski simply because his own "experience base" was aligning with Mahler's in an interesting way. My interest was further tweaked when I discovered that the composition Jurowski had selected for his first Mahler experience with the LPO was the second ("Resurrection") symphony, which struck me as a good place to begin for someone with a solid track record in both the concert hall and the opera house.

Nevertheless, I was less interested in Clark's overall evaluation of his experience than I was with one particular observation, which is that Jurowski's approach "underlined how much soft music there is in Mahler," making for "the opposite of a blast-fest." This set me to thinking about the overall conception of the current San Francisco Symphony Mahler Festival with regard to how much soft music Michael Tilson Thomas has selected for his programs. This was immediately evident from his decision to begin the entire affair with the settings of the five poems of Friedrich Rückert that Mahler composed (in the version with piano accompaniment) between 1901 and 1902. Mahler only orchestrated four of these songs; but, when he did, he drew upon some of the sparest, most transparent, and definitely most delicate instrumental resources we encounter in his entire corpus. Indeed, the closest his symphonic writing gets to this kind of instrumentation is the Adagietto of his fifth symphony, which, as Thomas pointed out when it was performed this past Saturday, Mahler was composing at the same time he was working on the Rückert settings. Indeed, that Saturday concert was very much "the opposite of a blast-fest," concluding with a contrived (but surprisingly effective) superposition of the final measures of the ninth symphony with Thomas Hampson singing the opening phrases of the first of the Songs of a Wayfarer.

Writing about the first concert of the San Francisco Symphony Festival for Examiner.com, I included the image of a caricature of Mahler conducting his first symphony, which is probably the ultimate in the effort of pen and ink to convey that concept of a "blast-fest." (A similar caricature was drawn of Richard Strauss conducting his Elektra opera, probably by a different artist.) I chose the caricature because the symphony was the major work on the program; and I even shamelessly appropriated W. S. Gilbert in describing the "beauty in the bellow of this blast." However, even in that symphony, some of Mahler's most interesting moments are the soft ones, particular at the beginning. On the other hand the featured work this coming week will be the fifth symphony, and we shall discover that all that intimacy in the Adagietto will be shattered by the concluding movement (which immediately follows it), in the course of which key thematic material from the Adagietto is reduced to a two-step that would be best suited for either a football field march or a workout class (all this in the context of his setting of the Knaben Wunderhorn poem about a song context between a cuckoo and a nightingale judged by a jackass). Much as I appreciate what Clark had to say, Mahler is far too complex to be reduced to the question of "to blast or not to blast!"

THE LITTLE PRINCE as Opera

I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I went over to Berkeley yesterday afternoon to see Rachel Portman's opera, The Little Prince, with a libretto by Nicholas Wright adopted from the short novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, produced by the San Francisco Opera and presented under the auspices of Cal Performances. The original text (supplemented by the author's own illustrations) is such a magical piece of storytelling, so unlike just about any storytelling one encounters in the United States, that the very thought of adapting it for stage performance, with or without music, struck me as a perilous undertaking. On the other hand in the context of my recent remarks about the "technique of disclosure" demonstrated by Conrad Susa's The Dangerous Liaisons (which presented equally daunting prospects for operatic interpretation), there are many ways in which one can read de Saint-Exupéry's text as a narrative of self-disclosure; and this appears to be precisely the reading that Portman, Wright, and director Francesca Zambello had in mind.

In the resulting strategy the greatest fidelity was to the author's illustrations, which came alive on the stage in ways that I could not have imagined. I was just leafing through my copy of the book, marveling at the dual relationship that has now been established: What I saw on the stage reminded me of what I had read many years ago, and now what I see on the pages of the book I had read remind me of what I had seen on the stage. Next in fidelity would be the overall structure of the narrative, including the fact that this is a first-person account, although the narrator is now addressing a group of children in pajamas, telling a bedtime story, rather than writing for a reader he cannot see. Then it was necessary to preserve the role of the prelude, which introduced the author as a bad artist. This seems like an apology for the crude style of the illustrations in the book until the act of drawing starts to figure in the plot. I suppose about the only criticism I might have about the adaptation is that it is a bit too faithful, taking over two hours to deliver an effect that might have been presented in about half the time.

However, that last observation takes me onto the turf of what this opera is not. That reduced time scale happens to be the approximate duration of L'Enfant et les sortilèges, a one-act opera by Maurice Ravel that may be the best example of what the publicity material for The Little Prince insisted on calling a "kid-friendly" opera. With a libretto by Colette, Ravel's little opera is an easily-grasped story of a bad boy converted to goodness by the harsh but beneficent forces of nature. It demands a rich conception of images from a time (1925) when special effects were realized as suggestions for the imagination rather than explicitly rendered; and it has enjoyed productions that leave viewers of all ages wide-eyed with amazement and wonder. It is hard to avoid memories of L'Enfant et les sortilèges encroaching on The Little Prince, but the two operas do not deserve to be pitted against each other.

This is important because Portman's compositional language is not particularly "deep" and therefore does not deserve to be compared with Ravel's. In terms of approaching any "grandeur" in "grand opera," it falls far short of other more recent works that have made such an approach, particularly Stephen Sondheim's score for Sweeny Todd. This is not a matter of sophistication, since Sam Shepard also made this approach with The Tooth of Crime, Operation Sidewinder, and The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing his Wife, all of which can hold their own against the nineteenth-century warhorses. The problem is one of predictability, at least for those familiar with the operatic repertoire. Portman does not take risks with her score (not that Felix Mendelssohn did in just about anything he wrote). This contrasts with the oddball approaches she has taken with some of her film scores; so it may be that she toned down the risks (without falling back on a repertoire of familiar folk songs, as Engelbert Humperdinck did in Hänsel und Gretel) to hold the attention of young audiences.

Nevertheless, there remains the question over whether or not an opera based on a fantasy-meditation written in 1943 can hold the attention of contemporary audiences of any age. I am not going to fall into the usual trap of trying to second-guess what kids think about these days; but Saint-Exupéry's narrative, at least as it was conceived in this opera, may now be read by adults in a new context, which is that of Pan's Labyrinth. From one point of view, this tale told by a pilot of crashing in the middle of the Sahara before the modern age of sophisticated communication hardware is the story of a man facing the prospect of his own death; and, like the young Ofelia, he does that by lapsing into a world of fantasy with a highly-developed sense of its own logic. Since this pilot is now narrating to all of us, he does not make the "crossing from reality" that Ofelia does; but The Little Prince both comes into "our reality" and then departs from it along a path not that different from Ofelia's.

One final point is that, if a performing ensemble is determined to present an offering as "kid-friendly," then it helps a lot of have kids participating. Thus, there is an extent to which audiences of all ages find ways to identify with The Little Prince, whether with the Prince himself, the pilot, his "audience," which then becomes a context-setting "Greek chorus," or any of the stereotyped agents. This is a far more extended approach than that taken by Hänsel und Gretel; but, from our current perspective of music history, any new work will have to go a long way to top Noye's Fludde, Benjamin Britten's setting of the Chester Miracle Play, which comes closer than any other work I know in involving performers of all ages (including the audience that is expected to participate in singing the hymns). I had the good fortune to see a thoroughly captivating production of this one-act opera while I was living in Singapore, and have been seeking to reproduce that experience ever since!