Matthias Goerne and His Magnificent Winterreise

I attended the German baritone Matthias Goerne's Sunday evening concert at Davies Hall of Schubert's final song-cycle Winterreise, and the performance was magnificent, legendary. Though German Lieder recitals are close to the bottom of my list of cultural favorite things, so much has been written over the years about Winterreise and Goerne that it seemed time to give both a chance, and I am glad to have ventured out. Thanks also to Patrick Vaz who told me the 80-minute song cycle about a mopey man whose heart has been broken is as much a bleak Beckett comedy as it is a heavy, Germanic musing on mortality.



If you go to many classical concerts in San Francisco, there are a few people who seem to attend every one, while there are a few concerts which attract all the extremely discriminating musical connoisseurs you never see in public otherwise. Sunday's Winterreise was one of the latter events.

James Parr above is one of those people who seem to be at every concert. Last weekend, in fact, he was a Cultural Iron Man, going to Opera Parallele's Trouble in Tahiti on Friday, battle hymns on Saturday, a Bach organ mass in Davies on Sunday afternoon, topped off with Winterreise Sunday evening.



I listened to Winterreise repeatedly over the last week with a recording by tenor Ian Bostridge accompanied by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. Bostridge is lovely, but the piano playing of Andsnes is breathtaking. At the live Sunday performance, the situation was reversed. Pianist and conductor Christoph Eschenbach was okay, but Goerne gave one of those performances that will stick in your brain forever. Looking like a big, tormented, German slab of beef, reminiscent of the antihero in Fassbinder's 15-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz telefilm, he proceeded to intimately guide the huge hall on a journey that was equal parts crazy, despairing, and beautiful.

Nikola Printz En Travesti

A week ago, the mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz was featured at the Merola Opera Program's first Schwabacher recital series since the pandemic began, and they had a blast playing with gender and an unusual, wide-ranging repertory. She began with a 17th century song by Barbara Strozzi, Lagrime mie, accompanied by Jon Mendle on the theorbo. This was followed by a trio of songs by Rossini, La Regatta Veneziana, where a woman on a balcony urges her gondolier lover to victory in a boat race in the Venetian canals.

Printz was accompanied through most of the program by the pianist Erica Xiaoyan Guo, continuing with the 19th century Licht in der nacht by Alma Mahler which segued without pause into the 20th century lament, I was a woman from David Lang's 21st-century prisoner of the state, It was a strange, effective combination. While Printz changed outfits from the "Femme" portion of the program into the "Masculine", Erica Xiaoyan Guo played the lovely Etude in F-sharp Minor by Louise Farrenc, a 19th century French composer who was a welcome new discovery for me.

Printz returned with a trio of miniature songs by the still-living Ned Rorem set to short poems by Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, a remarkably queer triple play. This was followed by two Schubert lieder, Standchen from Schwanengesang and Schubert's Der Leiermann from Winterreise.

The highlight of the concert for me was Printz singing a pair of Mexican songs, Aquel amor by Agustin Lara and No soy de Aqui by Facundo Cabral that were popularized by the great ranchera singer, Chavela Vargas, a Mexico City street singer who lived long enough to become an international legend. If you have never heard Vargas, click here for her version of No Soy de Aqui.

After intermission, Printz returned in a bright fuschia jacket for the "Neutrois" section of the program that included Drei Lieder Korngold and Cabaret Songs by Britten with tricky, nonsense-verse texts by W.H. Auden.

The fuschia jacket was discarded early in the set "because it's too hot," and for a finale Printz kicked off their shoes as they sat down to the piano and accompanied themself on Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U. Art song recitals are not really my cup of tea, but I've been following Printz in performances around the Bay Area over the last decade, and they are always interesting to watch. It was nice to see this artist under the auspices of the San Francisco Opera Center.

The Seasons in Pacific Heights

The San Francisco Choral Society sang Franz Joseph Haydn's last, monumental oratorio, Die Jahreszeiten (The Seasons), in two performances this weekend at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Pacific Heights. The results were beautiful, magnificent and fun. (The above photo is of the performers in a glass-enclosed warmup room viewed from an outdoor garden at the church.)



The libretto to the three-hour oratorio from 1799 was based on poems by the Scottish poet James Thomson about the annual cycle of seasons from Spring to Winter as experienced by rural peasants. These were then loosely translated by Haydn's wealthy patron/librettist Gottfried von Swieten in Vienna after they successfully collaborated on The Creation.



Though the piece ends with praise for God Almighty, the spirit of the oratorio is almost entirely pagan, with paeans to young love, the fertility of nature, hunting, drinking wine, and the pleasures of community. Even the final Winter section, which threatens to turn gloomy when a traveler in the icy cold confronts his own mortality, has a happy ending when he comes across a cottage with a "glimmer of a light nearby." The moment is like an "up" Winterreise.



The San Francisco Choral Society is composed of amateurs, in that they don't get paid for their efforts, but in every other respect they are astonishingly professional. In the last year I have seen them perform Orff's Carmina Burana in Davies Hall, David Lang's battle hymns in Kezar Pavilion, and Haydn's Die Jahreszeiten. Three more different pieces of choral music would be hard to imagine, but they sang all of them with stylistic grace and beautiful sound. The acoustics in Calvary Presbyterian, by the way, are bright, warm and clear, though the sightlines from most of the pews leave a lot to be desired.



The oratorio featured the three soloists above as individual peasants Hanne (soprano Marcelle Dronkers), Lukas (tenor Brian Thorsett), and Simon (bass-baritone Eugene Brancoveanu). Dronkers was a fine musical performer, but I didn't particularly care for the timbre of her voice which is completely subjective on my part. Brancoveanu has a huge, ringing baritone that can be lovely, but on Sunday he was pushing his voice and oversinging in the small church, which didn't suit Haydn at all. Brian Thorsett, on the other hand, was exquisite, modulating his volume depending on the moment, and his German diction was so good that it felt as if you could understand every word whether you spoke the language or not. Thorsett has been specializing and excelling in performances of Benjamin Britten recently, and it was a joy to hear him sound this good in different music.



In the wrong hands, Haydn can quickly become a bore, but Artistic Director Robert Geary above turned out to be a wonderful conductor for this music, keeping the long piece lively, textured, and full of humor. The orchestral accompaniment by the professional California Chamber Symphony was superb, highlighted by solos for almost every instrumentalist.

The Choral Society's next concert is at the huge St. Ignatius Church in November where they will be performing Rachmaninoff's Vespers. If the recent past is any indication, the concerts are not to be missed.

A Hardhat Tour of SF Opera's New Digs

Last Monday, the San Francisco Opera offered a hardhat press tour of the fourth floor of the newly retrofitted Veterans Building, which will be their new office headquarters, their new costume shop replacing an old warehouse at 9th and Howard, their new Education Center complete with a beautiful skylit space, their new professional archives with public galleries, and a new 299-seat theater equipped with the latest Meyer Constellation sound system. (Pictured above left to right are Opera Communications Director Jon Finck, KQED radio journalist Cy Musiker, and SF Opera General Director David Gockley.)



Gockley explained the origin story of the project, beginning with a plan to build a $65 million annex to the back of the historic Veterans Building, which was scrapped due to money and time constraints. The War Memorial Board instead offered the opera company the basement and fourth floor to help bring their operations together that have been spread out in multiple locations throughout the city for decades. The project is costing about $21 million and will be completed at the end of this year under the direction of architect Mark Cavagnero above, responsible for the SFAZZ Center and the rebuilt Oakland Museum of California, among other projects.



Gockley is stepping down from his position this year after ten years, and he deserves gratitude for a host of initiatives, including steering the company out of a precarious financial situation through judicious cost-cutting, procuring a few multimillion dollar donations, and now consolidating the patchwork of SF Opera offices along with the Costume Shop. "If we had stayed on Ninth Street, the rent would have soon quadrupled. It's a bad time to be in the commercial real estate market in San Francisco, unless you're the owner."



The overall project is being called the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, after Ms. Wilsey spearheaded the project with a $5 million donation, and the new 299-seat theater will be named the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium for another pair of donors. Joining the hardhat tour were Helen and John Meyer above of Berkeley's Meyer Sound, which is transforming acoustics in concert halls all over the world.



The theater is being shared for six-month stints between the SF Opera Lab, headed by the young director Elkhanah Pulitzer above, and the War Memorial Performing Arts Center, represented by Jennifer Norris below right flanking SF Opera Education Director Ruth Nott, which means groups outside of the SF Opera will be able to use the space.



The SF Opera Lab will initiate the hall with the Schwabacher Debut Recital Series, followed by Matthias Goerne in a multimedia production by William Kentridge of Schubert's Winterreise. This will be followed by Svadba-Wedding, a 2011 Canadian a capella opera about a Serbian Wedding, a series of "cine-concerts" of the French animated movie The Triplets of Belleville with live musical performances by its composer-conductor Benoit Charest, chamber concerts with members of the SF Opera Orchestra and Adler singers, and a cabaret confessional called Voigt Lessons with soprano Deborah Voigt.



The Education Center atrium will also be rentable by groups outside the SF Opera, and the site is already looking to be a stunning addition to the neighborhood.



According to architect Cavagnero, there have been a series of pleasant surprises when uncovering walls and finding original scagliola pillars that were hidden from view during the fourth floor's incarnation as SFMOMA.



The new costume fitting space is a far cry from the dusty little alcoves at the Ninth Street Costume Shop, and the many light-filled offices for administrative staff look like they will be a dream to work in after decades of cramped little cubicles in the War Memorial Opera House and elsewhere.



In one section of the tour, Gockley made the offhand remark that "these offices will be for the Development staff which will soon be 200 people while the Artistic Planning staff will be whittled down to 3, if present trends continue."



Whatever the case, the place already looks like a marvel.

12 Memorable Musical Moments in 2013

As part of a completely subjective and unscientific survey, here are 12 favorite musical moments of the last year. The San Francisco Symphony offered a few great concerts in 2013, many of them involving the Symphony Chorus under Ragnar Bohlin. The evening that made me seriously delirious with pleasure back in February was Charles Dutoit conducting the orchestra and chorus in Poulenc's Stabat Mater and Berlioz's monumental Te Deum. Honorable mentions to pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi in his Symphony debut as a soloist playing Poesis with Herbert Blomstedt, pianist Jeremy Denk playing an exquisite Mozart 25th Piano Concerto, and both orchestra and chorus performing in Britten's War Requiem.



In March at the neighborhood's new SFJAZZ Center, there was an extraordinary fusion of classical/jazz/bluegrass/raga when banjo player Bela Fleck, bass player Edgar Meyer and tabla player Zakir Hussein collaborated for a three-hour set on Hussein's birthday.



Later in the month, the legendary violist Kim Kashkashian played a concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as part of their Chamber Music Masters educational series. She was spellbinding, performing Dmitri Shostakovich's final composition, the 1975 Sonata for Viola and Piano.



The Thrillpeddlers put original Cockettes composer Scrumbly Koldewyn back to work again, expanding and revising the early 1970s Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma, and Scrumbly was even recruited to sing and dance. The book was literally all over the map, but the songs were a constant reminder of how good Koldewyn's music at its best can be.



The San Francisco Choral Society under director Robert Geary pulled off three massive concerts this year, starting with David Lang's battle hymns in Kezar Pavilion above, a fine rendition of Haydn's oratorio The Seasons, and Rachmaninoff's Vespers. Three more disparate pieces could hardly be imagined, and the amateur choral group pulled them all off, brilliantly and in the case of battle hymns, audaciously.



I heard Schubert's bleak song cycle, Winterreise, live for the first time sung by German baritone Matthias Goerne accompanied by Christoph Eschenbach on piano. Goerne was astounding, making me momentarily reexamine an inborn antipathy for lieder and German Romantic mopiness.



My first visit to New York's Carnegie Hall happened soon after in a perfect concert for the auditorium. Simon Rattle guest conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in Webern, Berg's Scenes from Lulu, and the Secret Police Chief's aria from Ligeti's Le Grande Macabre, the latter two sung by the incredible soprano Barbara Hannigan above. They also played Beethoven's hackneyed Pastoral Symphony and the performance was so fresh and the hall's sound so warm that the piece got me weepy, the last thing I expected.



Mark Morris above was in charge of the Ojai Festival this year, and its virtual repeat the following week on the UC Berkeley campus. The bulk of the programming consisted of obscure and neglected pieces by the West Coast triumverate Henry Cowell and his students John Cage and Lou Harrison. The two concerts I caught were strange and wonderful, and it was a kick looking down a row in Hertz Theater and seeing Morris glowing with pleasure while listening to some of his favorite music live.



Berkeley pianist Sarah Cahill holds a special place in the field of contemporary music because both composers and audiences trust her. Cahill has taste and intelligence and verve, making her a perfect guide into both the new and the undiscovered in music. When one of her concerts clicks, like her Old First Church recital in August featuring Henry Cowell and Ann Southam, you walk out with your brain buzzing, refreshed.



Every year the San Francisco Opera runs an intensive summer camp training program for young singers on the cusps of professional careers. This year's crop was not only one of the best in memory, but their two staged productions of Britten's The Rape of Lucretia and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro were two of the best versions I have ever seen of those two operas. Conductor Xian Zhang above right in the Mozart pulled off a miraculous performance with no orchestra pit and probably very little rehearsal.



On the big stage of the San Francisco Opera, the September world premiere of Tobias Picker's opera taken from Stephen King's potboiler, Dolores Claiborne, gave every indication that it was headed for disaster, and instead was a surprising, considerable success on a number of levels. Filling in at the last minute for Dolora Zajick who bailed out of the difficult title role with three weeks to curtain, soprano Patricia Racette saved the day in one of the great operatic coups of all time. Honorable mentions to the San Francisco Opera Chorus in Mefistofole and Bryn Terfel, Meredith Arwady and the SF Opera Orchestra under Luisotti in Falstaff.



The SFJAZZ Center has been used by a handful of classical music organizations this year while the Herbst Theatre is retrofitted, including San Francisco Performances. In November, they presented The Pacifica Quartet with pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin performing the long, modernist, insanely difficult and thoroughly mind-blowing Quintet for Piano and Strings by Leo Ornstein from 1927. It helped to immunize me from all the public Christmas music soon to come.