Mozart Matinee at the SF Symphony

The all-Mozart concerts at the San Francisco Symphony last week were a successful, joyful surprise. I went to the opening on Thursday afternoon, where the audience demographic skews heavily towards elderly women, a sophisticated bunch who know their classical music.

Incidentally, in years past the men's bathroom on the Van Ness side of Davies Hall was turned into a women's bathroom for these matinees to alleviate long lines, but this year there's a new policy where anyone can use any bathroom they want, since stalls are stalls no matter the gender.

The guest conductor was Bernard Labadie, an early music specialist who in 1984 founded Les Violins du Roy, a celebrated chamber orchestra in Quebec City. In a 2023 article by Kyle MacMillan for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: "Even though the CSO performs on modern instruments, Labadie will nonetheless bring a historically informed sensibility to his approach to these works. "That’s what I do for a living," he said. “Orchestras that invite me are willing to go down that path. Otherwise, there’s no point to have me and have the Chicago Symphony play this repertoire the way they would have played it under Georg Solti 40 years ago. So, yeah, I will definitely bring my own signature. At the same time, the purpose has never been and never will be to try to turn the Chicago Symphony into a period-instrument band.” Last week Labadie performed similar miracles with the San Francisco Symphony, and I don't think I have ever heard them play Mozart so well.

The first half of the program was a grab-bag of obscure Mozart pieces, starting with a bracing account of the overture to his final opera, La Clemenza di Tito. This was followed by two concert arias sung by the splendid British soprano Lucy Crowe, who had the audience instantly entranced with her crystalline, colorful, flexible voice. Al desio, di chi r'adora was written as an alternate aria for the character of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro for a singer who wanted something flashier than the original Deh vieni, non tardar. Then she sang Ruh sanft, mein holdes Leben from the unproduced 1780 escape-from-the harem, German-language opera Zaide. It turned out to be one of the most gorgeous arias Mozart ever wrote and Crowe did it full justice. After a respite with five minutes of Masonic Funeral Music which the program notes called gloomy, but which were actually enjoyable, Crowe returned with a bravura aria written for a soprano to interpolate into Paisello's 1782 The Barber of Seville, 35 years before Rossini's version wiped all others out of the repertory.

After intermission, Ms. Crowe returned with Non temer, amato bene, another interpolated aria from Mozart's opera Idomeneo, accompanied in passages by Alexander Barantschik on violin. It was an exquisite performance.

The concert finished with Mozart's Symphony No. 39, a favorite, especially for its Andante con moto movement where a simple melody is repeated, expanded, and becomes heartbreakingly rich by its end. In the MacMillan article, he writes: "For Labadie, a historically informed tack primarily centers on texture and articulation. “Textures will be more transparent,” he said. “It’s not about heft, it’s not about weight. It’s more about having a sound that allows us to hear through the music, to hear through transparency how the music is built and look at it from a different angle. So the sound cannot be thick. It has to be pliable.” Such transparency then allows the conductor to focus on articulation, which he called “the absolute essence of this music.” The idea is not to re-create the past but to use every bit of knowledge that is available about how this music was written, performed and received to shape a fresh way of performing it for contemporary audiences."

Virtually all of San Francisco's principal players were present in this reduced size orchestra, and they were listening keenly to each other while looking energized and happy throughout. It was a treat to experience, and a fitting finale for the ensemble before Davies Hall turns into a Christmas factory for the month of December.

Carmen, For The Very First Time

I took my spouse Austin to see his first Carmen at the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday, advising him beforehand that there were more recognizable hit tunes in this opera than anything he had ever seen. Austin loved it and so did the sold-out audience around us. The feeling was infectious, even though this jaded old operaphile was not particularly impressed by the cast or the production. What saved it for me was Bizet's 1875 musical score itself, a true marvel that somehow never gets stale, especially in this well-conducted performance by the young Benjamin Manis, who was making his house debut.

Let's start with the problems. Francesca Zambello's production, which dates from 2006, is minimalist, well-worn, and downright ugly. The role of Micaela, the good village girl who the hero is supposed to marry, is a dull stock character but she is given two of the loveliest soprano arias in the repertory. However, debuting Welsh soprano Louise Alder's voice was distinctly unlovely and one wished she'd just go back to her village. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

Act One is a tricky business to stage, with a garrison of soldiers next to a tobacco factory filled with cigarette girls, along with a children's chorus, multiple Sevilla residents, and the introduction of most of the main characters. It was a constant traffic mess and felt unconvincing in every detail.

Worst of all, the debuting French mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux was a dud as Carmen. For some reason, she played the character as a bullying Mean Girl, and any seductive allure was sadly absent. Musically, she was fine, but it was difficult to believe that every man wanted to throw themselves at her feet.

Let's finish with what went right. Act Two outside of Lillas Pastia's tavern was well-staged, and the dance sequence choreographed by Anna Maria Bruzzese was delightful. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn was a relaxed, convincing stud as the toreador Escamillo, and he even got to arrive onstage on a real horse, which excited the audience immensely.

I loved tenor Jonathan Tetelman in La Traviata a couple of years ago, and enjoyed him again as the sad sack soldier Don Jose who falls under the spell of Carmencita.

The final act, which starts with a parade coming into a bullfighting ring, was actually the best staging of the evening. Though it's an awful ending, with yet another man murdering a woman because she wants to leave him, the scene felt honest and Tetelman finally let loose with the best singing of the night.

My first Carmen, by the way, was the 1981 Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production at the San Francisco Opera when it was new, starring the legendary Spanish mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza, which set me up for a lifetime of disappointment. If this is your first Carmen, you might love it like Austin too.

French Life and Death at the SF Symphony

There was a lovely concert in Davies Hall this weekend featuring the SF Symphony Chorus singing Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, marred only by the ugly war between management and the 32 paid choristers who are working without a contract. (The remaining choristers are skilled, unpaid volunteers accepted through auditions.) For a full account of the current mess, click here for Janos Gereben's recent wrapup at San Francisco Classical Voice.

The debuting guest conductor was Kazuki Yamada, a 46-year-old Japanese protégé of the late Seiji Ozawa. He is currently based in Berlin, conducting throughout Europe, and has always wanted to go up a hill on a cable car in San Francisco. In an opening speech, he mentioned that his cable car wish had finally been fulfilled. His entire program was French music except for the short opener, Entwine, written by Dai Fujikura, a 47-year-old Japanese composer based in London. The piece was commissioned by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and its moody astringency unfortunately took me right back to that time.

The pick-me-up immediately following was Ravel's 1931 Piano Concerto in G Major with Hélène Grimaud as the piano soloist, looking as French movie star as ever. She's a controversial musician because she plays with composers' phrasing and rhythms, but that's also what makes her fabulous as a live performer. You're never quite sure what you are going to hear. (For a fascinating 2011 New Yorker profile of the pianist by D.T. Max, click here.)

Though I do not have synesthesia like Grimaud, where music translates into visual colors, the concerto's soundscape was so colorful that hues were popping up in my brain throughout the performance. Grimaud gave a virtuoso performance and followed up with an encore by Valentin Silvestrov, a composer Grimaud is currently championing.

The second half of the program was devoted to Gabriel Fauré's 1890 Requiem, and at the entrance of the embattled SF Symphony Chorus, the audience rose in support and applause.

Fauré was an interesting working musician, toiling as a church organist, music teacher, and finally the head of the Paris Conservatoire where he was a progressive, nurturing mentor to Ravel, among other composers. His Requiem is an early work from his church organist days where he seemingly became sick of all the fire and brimstone Latin mass settings, and wrote a gentle choral work that emphasizes the opening lines "Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis (Give them eternal rest, Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them)."

Though the 40-minute mass is virtually all choral music, with a small orchestra, there are a couple of soloists who appear briefly. In these performances, it was soprano Liv Redpath and bass-baritone Michael Sumuel, who were both fine.

The chorus sounded a bit too forceful in some of the more delicate moments of the score, but they convincingly took the audience to heaven in the final movement, In Paradisum, where they sang "Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat (May a Chorus of angels welcome you)."

The Adler Fellows Concert 2024

The annual Adler Fellows concert on Friday featured nine singers in San Francisco Opera's elite apprenticeship program, and some of the voices were so huge in the small Herbst Theater that it became a bit overwhelming. Following are a few of my favorite things from the evening. (All but one of the photos by Kristen Loken.)

First off, the young conductor Benjamin Manis did a wonderful job leading the SF Opera Orchestra in a wide range of music, from Handel to Rachmaninoff, while being very attentive to his young vocalists. Manis is currently leading the orchestra in the current production of Carmen next door at the War Memorial Opera House. Secondly, stage director Omer Ben Seadia kept it simple and clean, without silly props or gimmicks. She concentrated on the singers' acting to convey the meaning of their arias since there were no surtitles, which was sort of refreshing.

Manis's conducting was particularly good in the selections by Mozart. The program started out with a lively performance of The Marriage of Figaro Overture followed by the first scene from the opera with soprano Arianna Rodriguez as Susanna and bass-baritone Jongwon Han as Figaro. They were delightful, vocally and theatrically, and Jongwon Han's rendition of the aria Se vuol volare was expert.

Mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz knows how to command a stage, and they were thrilling in the mad aria Where shall I fly? from Handel's oratorio Hercules. (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

They were also a sympathetic mezzo friend to soprano Caroline Corrales in Sorgi, o padre from Bellini's Bianca e Fernando. Corrales was a knockout earlier this year as Moira, the lesbian rebel in The Handmaid's Tale. Though I thought she was forcing her voice in the challenging Ernani, involami from Verdi's Ernani, a nearby friend who knows much more about voices than me predicted Corrales was going to be a serious star of the future.

Speaking of challenging arias, tenor Thomas Kinch sang Gott, welch Dunkel hier! from Beethoven's Fidelio with a huge voice and remarkably accurate pitch. He later sang Mamma, quel vino e generoso" from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana with soprano Georgiana Adams as Mamma Lucia.

Samuel Kidd has a bright, clear baritone and an innate musicality. When he appeared in a small role this fall as Christian the Sailor in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, I secretly wished he was singing the lead role of Renato instead. On Friday, he sang two obscure French arias, O Nadir, tendre ami de mon jeune age from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers and O vin, dissipe la tristesse from Thomas's Hamlet. Somehow, Kidd made them both interesting.

I also loved baritone Jongwon Han, returning for the little-known aria O tu, Palermo from Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani. He's another person who knows how to marry text and music with intelligence, and his voice is a joy to hear.

Though it was not the final piece of the evening, All along? from Puts's The Hours should have been. The finale to that recently composed opera is a lightweight nod to the female trio in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, and Nikola Printz, Arianna Rodriguez and Olivia Smith did a lovely job with it.

Tchaikovsky and Elgar at the SF Symphony

Driving back to San Francisco from Palm Springs on the day after that disastrous U.S. election, we heard Dianne Nicolini on KUSC introducing some piece of light classical music "to help process our feelings," which made me laugh. In a similar spirit, I attended Thursday's San Francisco Symphony concert which was featuring a pair of popular favorites by Tchaikovsky and Elgar, the musical equivalent of comfort food, and it was thoroughly enjoyable.

The debuting guest conductor was the 41-year-old Nicholas Collon, who founded London's Aurora Orchestra 20 years ago. The concert actually started with an edge, the 2007 Three-piece Suite by Thomas Adès extracted from his scandalous 1995 opera, Powder Her Face. West Edge Opera offered a remarkable production in 2016 at the abandoned Oakland train station (click here for an account), and the suite brought back vivid memories of both its lewdness and inventiveness. The opera was written for a small, jazzy chamber ensemble where the sour tangos and frenzied sexuality are more potent than in this large reorchestration, but it was a fun reminder of the original.

Next up was Tchaikovsky's 1875 Piano Concerto #1 with the 30-year-old American pianist Conrad Tao as the soloist. The familiar, ultra-Romantic opening measures set the template for many other composers, including Rachmaninoff's subsequent piano concertos, and Tao attacked the keyboard with abandon. If he was trying to show that he could play the piano faster and louder than anybody else, he clearly succeeded. At moments, it felt like a punk rock version of the concerto, and though I wouldn't want to hear it performed that way all the time, the result was exciting and made the overplayed music sound new and unfamiliar.

After the usual standing ovation, Tao returned for an unusual encore, his own transcription of Art Tatum's 1953 jazz rendition of "that unfamiliar song, Over The Rainbow." It was a kick.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Edward Elgar's 1895 breakthrough compositon, Enigma Variations, a set of 14 orchestral miniatures depicting friends and family, including the composer himself. Collon's conducting was a bit of a mixed bag, but the central Nimrod movement, which Dianne Nicolini seems to broadcast every other day on classical radio stations, was exquisite perfection. It helped to process a few feelings.