Heather Raffo's New Libretto

See my preview of a free reading of a new opera libretto-in-progress, this evening at Georgetown:

Reading of New Libretto by Heather Raffo Tonight at Georgetown (The Washingtonian, August 29):

New York-based playwright and actress Heather Raffo came to international attention a few years ago with her award-winning one-woman play Nine Parts of Desire. For her latest project, Raffo is writing a libretto for a new opera to be premiered at City Opera Vancouver next year. As part of Raffo’s ongoing residency at Georgetown’s Department of Performing Arts, a group of Georgetown students, faculty, and guest artists will join Raffo in a public reading of the current form of the new libretto. This reading will not include the opera’s music, which is still being completed by Vancouver-based composer Tobin Stokes.

Over the weekend, Raffo told The Washingtonian about how she came to be writing her first opera libretto. “It was a stroke of luck,” she says. “ Nine Parts was being performed in Vancouver, and the president of the board at City Opera Vancouver saw the show. She thought I might be a right fit for this libretto, and they had been looking for a writer. So my name got thrown into the mix. Around the time that my son was being born last November, I got a call that I got the job.” She did not meet the composer until the first workshop for the opera in Vancouver. As reported earlier this year, the Annenberg Foundation awarded a $250,000 commissioning grant to City Opera Vancouver, to bring the chamber opera to the stage. [Continue reading]

In Brief: Hurricane Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Chant Grégorien d'Aquitaine, Schola Hungarica St. Elizabeth of Hungary: Two Medieval Offices, Schola Hungarica

  The news came from Budapest this week that Prof. László Dobszay, one of the giants in the field of Gregorian chant scholarship, has died at the age of 77. He was a specialist in central European folk song, in the tradition of Bartók, and he brought that approach to a primarily oral form of music to his equally thorough and valuable research in Gregorian chant, specializing in the manuscripts and melodic tradition of Hungary and central Europe. With David Hiley, Ruth Steiner (my mentor in graduate school), and others he founded the Cantus Planus study group, a collection of international chant scholars who met regularly and opened up the field of Gregorian chant research. He taught, since the 1970s, at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, and among his many achievements was the publication of an enormous study of central European chant known as Corpus Antiphonalium Officii Ecclesiarum Centralis Europae (CAO-ECE). With his colleagues Benjamin Rajeczky and Janka Szendrei, Dobszay founded the Schola Hungarica, a choir of adults and, most strikingly, children devoted to the performance of Hungarian and other central European forms of chant. Their many recordings remain some of the most beautiful and most convincing interpretations of Gregorian chant ever made. How they ever taught children to sing Latin chant so well never fails to amaze me. [New Liturgical Movement]


• Ride out the effects of the hurricane with some online listening: this week, the Sixteen sing Allegri and Les Talens Lyriques perform oratorios by Carissimi and Charpentier, both at the Utrecht Early Music Festival; David Fray plays Mozart's 25th piano concerto and Yefim Bronfman play's the Emperor concerto, both with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra; Adam Laloum plays a recital and soprano Julie Fuchs sings, both at the Festival de Chambord; the Ensemble Zefiro plays Baroque music at the Festival Itinéraire Baroque en Périgord Vert; Handel's Rinaldo with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from the Proms; the Zemlinsky Quartet from the Festival de Saintes. [France Musique]


• In London David Fray plays the same Mozart concerto with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; David Robertson leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with Yo-Yo Ma playing a new cello concerto by Graham Fitkin and Christine Brewer in Beethoven's ninth symphony; Zubin Mehta with the Israel Philharmonic; the Budapest Festival Orchestra; the BBC Singers in Tavener and Gubaidulina; an organ recital by Thierry Escaich; and Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. [BBC Proms]


• In online video, concerts from the Festival international de musique classique à Annecy all this week -- including performances by Renaud Capuçon, Valery Gergiev, the Apollon Musagète Quartet, and Denis Matsuev. [Medici.tv]


• Oh, yes, and someone named Irene came to visit yesterday, and she was not a pleasant guest. Winds took down a large tree in front of a neighbor's house: miraculously, it fell across the street and did not hit anything or anyone. Just as miraculously, the dead tree that has been darkening our doorstep for months lost some branches but somehow remained standing. Everyone at Ionarts Central is safe, we still have power after a harrowing night, but headquarters did sustain some heavy water damage overnight, after some bad wind gusts took off a section of our roof (and those of our two neighbors). As a result, transmissions from Washington will likely be affected this week, but you should be able to enjoy more reports from Salzburg. [Capital Weather Gang]

Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 15 )

Chamber Concert • Beethoven, Ives

I still remember my first encounter with the Zehetmair Quartet: A cold January Sunday in 2003 at the National Gallery of Art, performing moving Schumann, strong Bartók, and exceptional Cage during which I sat up like electrified. Then as now the Quartet (Thomas Zehetmair, Kuba Jakowicz, Ruth Killius, Ursula Smith) perform their repertoire from memory… one of the exceptions where even I can appreciate the act of playing without a score. Not for the circus-trick element involved, but because it signifies an internalization of—and dedication to—the material that, for a quartet, is truly extra-ordinary.

The program at the Grand Hall of the Mozarteum on Monday, August 15th, with Beethoven’s late string quartets opp.131 in c-sharp minor and 135 in F, looked good, especially as the two works were bridged by a performance of Charles Ive’s Concord Sonata played by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. The Ives fulfilled its promise, the Zehetmair Quartet strangely not. The opening of op.131 hesitant, made it difficult for the ears to follow the line. Dynamic differentiation was kept to a minimum until the end of the first movement and, most surprising, intonation and entries were rarely clean. There’s always the question of whether one might mistake some curious interpretive choice for a bad performance, merely because it does not accord one’s own expectations… But by the time of the third movement I felt fairly safe in ruling that out. This just about above-average performance (to the extent one hears op.131 often enough in concert to establish a meaningful ‘average’) was considerably less than I had hoped for.

C.Ives, "Concord" Sonata & Songs, P-L.Aimard et al. Warner

What to write about the Concord Sonata, this bold and terrific work; massive and challenging as Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata (and referencing it, too)? There are too many facets, ups, downs, lefts and rights in it to list them all and still be meaningful. Hearing is where it’s at. (More about the Concord Sonata on ionarts here.) Playing it is certainly a full-contact sport, involving all of Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s body in the first movement—which the French pianist mastered with brawny excellence. Positively indulgent, actually. That first movement, “Emerson”, was smooth as pebbles and weighty as boulders with a Steinway stress-test thrown into the bargain. The sonata can be—and was—completely mesmerizing before bubbling away into marches and Yankee-doodling. Are the ‘serious’ bits in sent-up by the trivial or are they a send-up of the listener and his ideas of the serious? Whatever the case, one scarcely stops marveling at all the things happening before it’s over.

After the second intermission back came the Zehetmairs with op.135. The primarius was harsh in his attacks, strident at the expense of accuracy, and certainly sparse with any semblance of beauty. Hushed pianissimos were hesitant, quick and loud accents ugly. In late Beethoven, at least the latter may well be intent and the first three movements were in any case considerably better performed than op.131. The result was befuddlement on my part: Was I meant to hear it like this; meant to endure it for some higher artistic purpose I could not perceive? The encore, the second movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet (due to the amiable desire of “we wanted to play something all-together”), suggested it was just an off-night; all the extensive preliminary tuning didn’t help to get this to sound right, either. Not that it could dim the evening’s joy the Ives Sonata had brought.

À mon chevet: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

The bell rang. Ron and Hermione led the way to History of Magic, bickering. History of Magic was the dullest subject on their schedule. Professor Binns, who taught it, was their only ghost teacher, and the most exciting thing that ever happened in his classes was his entering the room through the blackboard. Ancient and shriveled, many people said he hadn't noticed he was dead. He had simply got up to teach one day and left his body behind him in an armchair in front of the staff room fire; his routine had not varied in the slightest since.

Today was as boring as ever. Professor Binns opened his notes and began to read in a flat drone like an old vacuum cleaner until nearly everyone in the class was in a deep stupor, occasionally coming to long enough to copy down a name or date, then falling asleep again. He had been speaking for half an hour when something happened that had never happened before. Hermione put up her hand.

Professor Binns, glancing up in the middle of a deadly dull lecture on the International Warlock Convention of 1289, looked amazed.

"Miss -- er -- ?"

"Granger, Professor. I was wondering if you could tell us anything about the Chamber of Secrets," said Hermione in a clear voice. [...] Professor Binns blinked.

"My subject is History of Magic," he said in his dry, wheezy voice. "I deal with facts, Miss Granger, not myths and legends." He cleared his throat with a small noise like chalk snapping and continued, "In September of that year, a subcommittee of Sardinian sorcerers ..."

-- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, pp. 148-49

As someone who teaches music history I could not help but take note of this portrait of the dusty, boring history lecturer: theater students dread theater history, art students dread art history, and music students dread music history, just as students of magic dread the History of Magic. The mean-spirited depiction cuts to the quick: the droning voice, reading from the same notes, so old and calcified that he did not even notice that he died, simply continuing to read from his note year to year as if nothing had happened. Plenty of stereotypes to be careful to avoid in class!

Wolf Trap Opera Turns 40

See my review of the 40th anniversary gala concert for Wolf Trap Opera in The Washingtonian:

Wolf Trap Opera Turned 40, August 26:

Each summer the Wolf Trap Opera Company stages high-quality productions of major operas for its cadre of young singers. Over the years, the best of these apprentice vocalists have gone on to important careers, which is one of the best parts of attending their performances: to see and hear great talent in the making. Wolf Trap Opera took stock of its 40-year history on Wednesday night, with a gala concert of opera’s greatest hits, pairing some of this year’s new talent with some of the best who got their start in America’s National Park for the Performing Arts. Like most events of this type, it had some memorable moments among others that were less so, and it ran too long with speeches, mostly entertaining but too many in number. (At least at an awards dinner, they serve you food and wine.) If two of the scheduled singers, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and tenor Carl Tanner, had not canceled, it would have gone on even longer than three hours.

At the top of the roster was tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who brought the house down with a gutsy rendition of “Ah, mes amis!” from Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, those famous nine high Cs all on pitch and laser-focused. He also paired off with baritone Richard Paul Fink, heard earlier this summer as an impressive Wozzeck at Santa Fe Opera, in the famous duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, “Au fond du temple saint.” Bass-baritone Alan Held was a brooding, granite-solid Wotan leading the gods into Valhalla (from the end of Wagner’s Das Rheingold), as well as a charming Leporello in the catalogue aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, played with an iPad highlighting 1003, the number of the Don’s conquests in Spain. Held’s Scarpia in next month’s Tosca, at Washington National Opera, will certainly be worth hearing, as will -- if the planets align correctly -- the return of his Wotan in WNO’s first complete Ring cycle. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Anne Midgette, At Wolf Trap Opera gala, enough star wattage to power operahouse 40 more years (Washington Post, August 26)

Susan Dormady Eisenberg, As Wolf Trap Opera Marks 40th Year, 14 Star Alumni to Return for Benefit Concert (Huffington Post, August 16)

Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 12 )

Camerata 1 • Mahler Scenes 8

Picking my program for Salzburg, the first of the Camerata Salzburg concerts with Kent Nagano and Maria João Pires was one of the two, three most immediate choices. With Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Fourth Symphony and Mozart’s last Piano Concerto (K.595 in B-flat) as the main ingredients, it virtually selected itself. When the—presumably sole—opportunity presented itself to attend the Riccardo Muti / Peter Stein Macbeth the same day, I faced a dilemma. Attend the show that was the hottest ticket of the summer, or go with where my heart was, musically? Even before I knew that I would get to attend an earlier performance of Macbeth after all (review here), I opted for Nagano-Hartmann-Pires-Mozart. If I figured after attending Macbeth that it was the right choice; I knew after the Camerata Salzburg concert that there isn’t any Macbeth I wouldn’t have missed this concert for, and gladly.

It started with Ives’ Unanswered Question, a work impossible not to be moving. The space of the Mozarteum’s Grand Concert Hall had the solemn strings sit on stage, not outside, and the four answering woodwinds segregated to the back. The questioning trumpet went around the outside of the hall, from door to door, until it didn’t get an answer to its seventh question.

Elephant Graveyard of String Quartets

K.A.Hartmann, Symphony No.4, Cto.Funebre et al., Poppen / Munich CO / I.Faust, Petersen Q4t et al. ECM

Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Fourth Symphony for String Orchestra sounds like the place where string quartets go to die. Its opening is instantly reminiscent of the opening of the Mahler 10^th Symphony, but without the immediate bleeding-heart eruption that Mahler places after the reoccurring string laments. Instead the climax builds slowly, the textures are sparse and haunting, like an overwhelming, oversized string quartet for orchestra. The language is that of the post-romantic tonality that saw itself squeezed out of the Western classical repertoire—courtesy of the post war embrace of the avant-garde and complexity. The angular aspect of Hartmann’s music comes out in the second movement, rhythmically compelling like a Bartók quartet. Dark and narrative, like a walk through the scary forests of German fairy tales.

Ruined to fame by Bernstein & Visconti

Mahler’s Adagietto was performed as a prelude to the Mozart Concerto, with Pires already sitting at the piano which gives a visual clue to how piano-like the rising harp figures are. Ruined to fame by Visconti and Bernstein, the Adagietto has become clad forever in the garb of mourning, associated with the solemn steps along the hearse. It was played like that—lingeringly, funereal—too, but ‘my Gawd’: how gorgeous that can be, at least or especially outside the context of the whole symphony. That’s not what the Adagietto is really about, but it worked well enough in this case, and taking it virtually attacca from the movement’s key of F into the B-flat (subdominant) of K.595, was a gimmick—yes, but one that worked very well, indeed.

Subject to the Swansong Industry

W.A.Mozart, PCs nos. 20 & 27, M-J.Pires / A.Jordan / Lausanne CO Warner/Apex

It also gave the wistful air of hindsight to the Piano Concerto—Mozart’s last, as if it were the softly singing announcement of the composer’s leave-taking. Pires hits just the right (pardon) note between matter-of-factly playing (I love[d] Alicia de Larrocha for that) and unbleeding sentimentality: Classical restraint and a romantic-sensitive touch—to employ these wonderful, useful clichés—in tasteful, unmannered union. Her dynamic range roughly starts at mezzo-piano and ends at mezzo-forte, but her even, round tone is so sublime that it can make even constant mf sound sexy. It perfectly capped a concert that left one back into the busy post-performances streets of Salzburg with a feeling of gratification and elation. Ideal, in short.

Amateur Musicians Still Going Strong

See my preview of the September 11 concert by the World Doctors Orchestra for The Washingtonian:

The World Doctors Orchestra September 11th Concert, August 25):

The phenomenon of amateurs making music is not limited to the piano. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra had a huge success last year with its Rusty Musicians program, giving amateur orchestral musicians a chance to play with the professionals. The latest group of BSO amateurs will take the stage at Baltimore’s Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, side by side with BSO players and under the baton of Marin Alsop, on September 20. The concert is free, if you want to dream about making it into the next class of Rusty Musicians. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra brought together orchestral players from around the world for a concert at Carnegie Hall in 2009 and another one at the Sydney Opera House last March. The latter performance was reportedly the most-watched live concert event on the Internet.

Another group of amateur orchestral musicians, the World Doctors Orchestra, brings together physicians from around the world who are all avid classical musicians. A variable roster of musicians gathers in a city to perform a concert, with the proceeds going to benefit a charitable cause. After previous concerts in Berlin, Cleveland, Yerevan, and Taipei, the ensemble will converge on the Washington area this fall, to perform a concert on September 11, in the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda. The WDO claims that its mission is “to raise awareness that healthcare is a basic human right and a precondition for human development and productivity.” In keeping with that goal, the September 11 concert will raise funds for Whitman-Walker Health and “is also a remembrance of 9/11 and a plea for peaceful solutions to world problems.” [Continue reading]

Rott'n'Roll: Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 14 )

Guest Orchestra • ORF RSO Vienna

With Berg on the program (ditto Webern or Schoenberg), ticket sales recede noticeably, predictably. In Salzburg just as anywhere else. When the composer/work that is coupled with Berg (in this case the Violin Concerto) is so completely unknown to audiences as Hans Rott’s Symphony in E, then it is almost surprising to find the Felsenreitschule (1400 seats) at about 95% capacity with only a few lacunae among the seats and “Looking for [cheap] Ticket” signs before its doors, roughly in balance with the “[expensive] Ticket to sell” signs. Reason to stay away for some, reason to attend for others; for me the combination of Rott and Berg spelled out a great concert! Unfortunately it didn’t guarantee a great performance.

HRott, Sy. no.1, S.Weigle / Munich RSO Arte Nova A.Berg, Violin Concerto, A.Steinbacher / A.Nelsons / WDR SO Orfeo

The ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by its young (1980-born) Chief Conductor and Artistic Director Cornelius Meister (also Music Director of the Heidelberg Philharmonic and Opera), performed Berg’s Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja first. He started out with a warm and romantic, confident opening – Kopatchinskaja with a rough, darkly hollow tone in tow. Joyously swaying and bopping along the rhythms, she never descended to pianissimo and or gave that silvery-ethereal tone to the concerto that it is often endowed with. Whether it was that or not, something was missing from the performance; after the notably earthy, terrific start it petered out and offered two movements of well-intentioned tedium.

Hans Rott’s Symphony comes with a great story about which I have written before (for WETA’s now defunct column, and in an upcoming issue of LISTEN Magazine). It’s a grand work, not a great one. It’s flawed, but comprises an absolutely loveable smorgasbord of ideas, and most of them beautifully welded together. If romantic music is up your ally, and a hint of naïve pomposity doesn’t scare you, Hans Rott’s symphony is one you must hear. There are lots of Wagnerian bits, there’s some Schumann, here we go Bruckner, and whoa, Brahms! No wonder the already famous composer wasn’t amused when Rott showed him the audacious work: Rather than being flattered to find himself musically united in a work with these other composers, Brahms probably perceived the final movement of Rott’s symphony—with its more than explicit reference to the finale of his First—as making fun of him.

The ambitious but short (8 minutes, “Alla breve”) first movement, announced with an exposed trumpet solo, received (rightly) spontaneous applause which was of course quickly quelled by the Vigilant Applause Police. It nearly brought tears to my eyes when I imagined how Hans Rott, who—distraught, impoverished, confused—committed suicide at age 26, might have responded to such expression of public approval for his work. The ORF RSO, which recorded the Symphony on the cpo label under Dennis Russell Davis a decade ago, added a terrifically moving Adagio, even as the strings where still clumsy under Meister’s ambiguous, erratically waving direction. The triangle, popping up in some 600 (out of 1500) bars, was only partly reigned in, which added an occasional element of stuck doorbell. The expansive Scherzo and “Very slow – Lively” finale didn’t appear well rehearsed, but no sloppiness could steal the thunder of Hans Rott entirely, helping the composer, if not the performers, to a considerable success. Certainly not a great performance, but still almost a great concert.