Guest Review: Vesselina Kasarova & Hansjörg Albrecht at Muziekgebouw (25 Nov 2014)

This review of Frau Kasarova's November 25th concert at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam is courtesy of Mr John Carnegie. Thanks, John!

VESSELINA KASAROVA + HANSJÖRG ALBRECHT

AT THE MUZIEKGEBOUW, AMSTERDAM

ON 25^TH NOVEMBER 2014

A couple of weeks previously, VK had made unscheduled appearances in Amsterdam substituting for Elina Garanca at the Concertgebouw. Now she was appearing in the city in her own right at the Concert Hall of the 21^st Century at the Muziekgebouw in recital with Hansjörg Albrecht at the piano.

I had not been in Amsterdam for nearly three decades. So I decided to take the opportunity of combining the invitation to run theatre workshops there with the chance to catch VK in concert. I had often experienced her performing live in operas but this was the first time I had ever encountered her in a recital with piano.

The Muziekgebouw is a modern wooden-slat-lined concert hall with moveable walls designed to vary the capacity of the audience and the size of the stage. Such is the popularity of VK in Amsterdam that the walls were out to their maximum width and there was a near-capacity audience.

A pre-concert recital with two young artists near the beginning of their careers (an admirable tradition over here) revealed that the hall’s acoustics favour the piano over the voice. Fortunately, when it came to the main concert, Herr Albrecht was such a sensitive collaborator than he managed to maintain a reasonable balance for much of the time without VK having to strain to be heard over him.

The programme was in two parts. The first half consisted of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. It did not start well. VK was visibly nervous and inadequately warmed-up. In the first song, Der Engel, her increasing evident vocal problem of an obtrusive in breath was worse than I had ever heard it and consonants were swallowed. Things considerably improved from Stehe still! Onwards but there were still problems – such as the occasional misjudging of pianissimo as inaudibility (and I was sitting in the front row so it would have been worse for those behind me). Still, although this Wagner set represented VK at the least effective I have ever heard her live, it was still overall a passable performance.

After the interval, an under whelming opening Villanelle from Berlioz’ Les nuits d’été seemed to presage a return to the vocal problems of the beginning of the recital. However, from the beginning of Sur les lagunes (the third song of the cycle), as if by magic everything suddenly clicked into gear and VK was firing on all cylinders to produce a consumate performance that continued through to the end. The sense of mounting satisfaction in the audience was self-evident. At the end, they exploded into a frenzy of applause and, from most, a standing ovation. (Mind you, a week of theatre and concerts in Amsterdam had accustomed me to the sad fact that the Dutch have caught the American disease of the automatic and indiscriminate standing ovation. However, here at least, it seemed genuine.)

(Video is not from this performance)

VK rewarded the audience with two electrifying Handel encores: Ombra mai fu and Verdi Prati – both delivered for the first time in this recital without a score in front of her. Such direct and consummate communication topped an evening that had an unpromising start but ended up as a triumph.

Brahms' Variations on a Theme of Haydn & Beethoven's 9th Symphony at San Diego Symphony (7 Dec 2013)

I somehow managed to dodge the intermittent rain on my way to Jacobs Music Center (formerly Copley Symphony Hall) last Saturday evening. The San Diego Symphony was offering an early Romantic program of Brahms' Haydn Variations and Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

Box Office at Jacobs Music Center (still under renovation but is open for business).

The young maestro Ken David Masur was the evening's no-nonsense conductor. I wasn't terribly familiar with Johannes Brahms Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn, Op. 56a, so it was quite a pleasant musical discovery. The piece only requires a small orchestra without the bigger brass and anchored by the woodwinds (a happy thing considering the SDSO's first rate winds section!). The lilting pastoral theme is followed by eight fantastically varied variations that allows all the instruments to shine. The end is capped by a virtuosic grand finale. It's an interesting piece... starting like a soft country field dance and ending like a grand symphony. It was a nice prelude to the evening's main attraction; Beethoven's biggest symphony.

Richard Zeller, Robert Breault, Elizabeth DeShong, Measha Brueggergosman, Gary McKercher, Ken David Masur with San Diego Master Chorale and San Diego Symphony Orchestra.

Beethoven's immensely complex Beethoven's 9th Symphony was conducted without a score. Quite a feast for a young conductor! Maestro Masur set a brisk pace and a very clean reading of the much loved epic opus, trading a bit of sentiment for a fresh flair. I suspect the newer and/or younger audience enjoyed it a bit more than the older/more veteran ones. I liked much of it, though there were places where I would have liked a bit more time to process the mood that Schiller & Beethoven tried to describe. The fast pace also was a bit of a chore for the soloists to keep up, though everyone managed.

Baritone Richard Zeller clearly enjoyed his lines and they benefited handsomely from his voice. The star soloist of the evening had to be Robert Breault, though. I was quite amazed at how youthful he sounded and how supple his voice still is. He injected quite a bit of pitch-perfect bel canto and a whole lot of good nature pathos into his solo, and even managed to convince Maestro Masur and the orchestra to temper their tempo to avoid an acoustic train wreck.

I'm afraid I couldn't hear much of Elizabeth DeShong (but then I wasn't in a very acoustically favorable section of the house). Soprano Measha Brueggergosman proved quite eye-drawing (in a good way! She just sat in her seat with this exotic look and a Mona Lisa-ish smile on her face that was hard to look away from) even before she started any singing. When she did stand up and started sounding, though, her voice dominated the hall. The lass was loud... though quite uneven. This was the first time I heard her live and I quite liked the sweet middle part of her voice. Alas, Beethoven, when penning the soprano solo bit for this number, was more interested in the upper notes, and those from Brueggergosman were quite less sweet and at times downright shrieky (it didn't really help that she was much louder than everyone else whenever she was singing).

Another star of the evening was the impeccable San Diego Master Chorale. To be honest, this band is getting on my nerves a bit with their dependability. How are you supposed to criticize a chorus when they are always turning up on their A game??? The tenor section used to be the most vulnerable part of the choir, but they were just as spotlessly fantastic as the rest of the group were Saturday night.

All in all, the concert was a big success, and I think I wasn't the only audience member who was hoping for a Choral Fantasy as an encore when the show was over as we clapped the performers out for three rounds of curtain calls. (That's about as many as you're going to get here in San Diego. It's a strange town... We give easy standing O's, but we are also always in a hurry to get home and won't keep clapping for long).

PS: I didn't get rained on on the ride home either, but man, 5th Avenue can really use some repaving. It's no fun sprinting uphill on such a wavy pavement!

Cold winter, behind the scene opera, and Viviane Hagner's Mendelssohn concert

Well, 2013 sort of started on a bit of a hiccup for me. The apartment's internet modem is officially fried. I don't know how... we don't even have a working heater in the place! Anyhow, that made properly posting stuff online a bit inconvenient. The good news is that the replacement modem should be arriving tomorrow or Wednesday, however, so there is a happy fully wired bliss looming in the future for me.

Don't we look like we were about to go trek across Antarctica?

We've had a really nicely dry if rather cold week. I mean, it got so cold here a few days ago that people had to actually put on a sweater to go outside! What's the San Diego climate coming to??? A week ago we were out walking around in t-shirt and jeans (and some even wore shorts). Now we're all bundled up in long sleeved sweater! Wimpy me even had 4 layers and a pair of ear muffs on when I got up early to go for a ride on Saturday morning. Granted 2 of the layers came off shortly into the ride (going up the steep first 3 pitches of Mt Helix tends to heat out-of-shape cyclists up in a hurry). I'm telling you, San Diego is almost fooling me into believing that it has more than one season in a year!

Okay, okay, enough needling of people who actually are experiencing legitimately cold weather... Last week a favorite classical music/opera oriented blogger friend of mine posted a link to this fascinating webpage with a really cool behind-the-scene video of what goes on behind the stage during a live performance of one of the most complicated opera on the repertoire, Wagner's The Valkyries, at the Royal Opera House. It is a really awesomely educational watch for me. I shall now appreciate it much better when things don't go wrong on stage during an opera performance... considering the boat-load of things that happen all at once!

I also made it to the Saturday performance of Mendelssohn's violin concerto and Nielsen's 5th symphony at Copley Symphony Hall on Saturday night. A good evening at the San Diego Symphony, which started off with opera fans-friendly overture from Rossini's La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie). I had been wanting to hear Viviane Hagner play live ever since I first saw the video clip of her playing Saint-Saëns' Introduction et rondo capriccioso with Zubin Mehta and the Israeli Phil on Classic Arts Showcase back around 2004. The lass was only 14 yrs old then.


She has since blossomed into a beautiful woman and a marvelous virtuoso violinist. The Mendelssohn concerto is, of course, played to multiple deaths ever since it premiered in 1845 for obvious reasons. It is just about as perfect a violin concerto as you can get, and it allows for quite a variety of interpretations. Everyone has their favorite version(s) of how this thing is performed, I think. I have a few... and must now add Hagner's communicative and nuanced performance of it to my short list. What can I say? It's wonderful to listen (and even watch) fantastic soloists who make musical dialogues when they could have gotten away with just showcasing their talents and visions. Hagner listened and reacted to the orchestra (San Diego Symphony under Jahja Ling) that was playing with her, and it responded in kind, and the music came alive and gave quite a zing to the evening.


The latter half of the concert was also a treat for yours truly. I had never heard any of Carl Nielsen's music before. It is quite a discovery and a nice stylistic contrast from Mendelssohn's ultimate romantic number. Many times when I go to the symphony I have felt quite let down in the second half of the performance when the SDO would regress to beautifully and correctly playing minus the communicativeness and the infusion of personality that the featured soloist had incited out of the band in the first half of the show. Saturday was quite different and in a very good way!

I'm afraid that's my blog update today. I've been at this internet cafe for many hours now, nursing my mug of hot cocoa until the last drop got nearly as cold as chocolate ice-cream, and the proprietor is starting to look at me funny. Really, if the internet modem turns up in the mail earlier than Wednesday I think I'll have to kiss the postman out of sheer gratefulness. Can't wait to be reliably wired on to the ethernet again!

San Diego Symphony Does Respighi, Haydn and Tchaikovsky 2nd Piano Concerto (with Garrick Ohlsson) [12 Oct 2012]

It had been a long while since I last dropped in on the San Diego Symphony, but Garrick Ohlsson was in town last weekend to do Tchaikovsky's 2nd piano concerto. Since when can a smorg resist a temptation like that?

Copley Symphony Hall box office

I couldn't resist the concert line up, but plenty other people apparently could as the main orchestra level of the auditorium was only about 70% occupied on Friday. Not that that didn't have its upside. Many of us who started out in the cheaper section got quite an upgrade into better (more centrally located) seats after the intermission. I don't think the ushers minded it much.

The concert started off with Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs & Dances Suite# 1. This is a rather neat set of modern rearrangement of late Renaissance music by obscure composers (one of whom was Galileo Galilei's dad!). I had never heard the music before and therefore was much looking forward to a new experience. Alas, I seem forever at odds with maestro Jahja Ling when it comes to delivery of chromatically expressive music. The Raspighi sounded like it could be absolutely delightful - a masterpiece of impressionistic descriptive scenery. The music wants to jump out at you, but its enthusiasm was foiled by excessive restraint and regularity, so much so that it left me feeling left out in the cold. I can't fault the technically impeccable orchestra. The instrumentalists delivered all that was asked of them, alas, they weren't asked to musically live out Count Orlando's march into the village or dance the gaillard or the villanelle or the play out the risque masquerade. It was like listening to Ben Stein dead panning a spicy Italian play, every syllable sounded out with the same weight and rhythm as the others. It took much of the charm out of some of Respighi's best orchestration. After a while I found myself disengaging and starting to pay more attention to the violinists' trouser cut, the paintings on the auditorium walls, the bald spot on the back of an audience member's head, among other things, than to the music I had paid to hear!

'scuse me while I take a little well earned nap...

That said, the Respighi still came out alright compared to what became of Joseph Haydn's witty Bb major Symphony (No. 102). Perhaps opera-fan me demand more emotional commitment in musical performance than warranted. That is possible. But I think even the musicians knew something was really off from the really lukewarm applause they got at the end of what should have been a really infectiously fun symphony. I mean, we're talking about the Copley Hall symphony audience that regularly give rousing applause and standing ovations even to mediocre performances here. The applause they gave after the first half on Friday night was comparable to a no applause at other more demanding halls! I had never been so tempted to walk out in the middle of a performance. The fact that this is such a fine orchestra that can technically do anything made it worse. A spirited performance by a group that could barely cope with technical requirement would have fared better than an indifferent one by a perfectly capable band, I think. Ultimately I think my problem is more with the bandleader (conductor) than the band itself. It was his vision of the music that I had problem with. He is probably too nice and mild-tempered a guy all around while I long for a more volatile musician waving the baton on the podium.


I'm glad I stuck around for Garrick Ohlsson's playing of the not often heard Tchaikovsky's 2nd piano concerto (in G major), however. Mr Ohlsson's vision of the piece was a bit different from mine, but he was both technically splendid and emotionally committed that his conviction not only won the evening, it also resuscitated the orchestra! Suddenly the players started to accentuate their phrases and indulged in tasteful rubato that made the music seemed came alive from series of printed notes on the score. Special notice to concertmaster Jeff Thayer (violin) and Yao Zhao (cello) for their solos and duet/trio bits with the piano. The rousing audience reception at the end was a big contrast to the one at half time. So much so that we were all rewarded when Maestro Ling urged Mr Ohlsson into giving us an encore. A fleeting playing of Chopin's C# minor waltz (Op. 64 No. 2).

Jahja Ling urging Garrick Ohlsson on for an encore during the sustained round of applause at Copley Symphony Hall Friday night.

A good finish can make up for a lot of sins indeed. After the show Jahja Ling, Garrick Ohlsson sat down with Nuvi Mehta (the associate conductor here who does the pre-concert lecture. He had a bit of an off night Friday, but he is usually a delight to listen to) for a little informal talk with the audience. I stuck around for a while, but had to leave before it was over.

There are a few good symphony concerts coming up this winter season. I'm hoping to catch a few, but have to see how my schedule would accommodate them. If you feel like enjoying some symphonic evenings while in San Diego, check out sandiegosymphony.com for their performance schedule.

Beethoven & Shostakovich with the San Diego Youth Symphony & SD Master Chorale

We have got smashing young classical musicians here in San Diego. I rode Downtown to catch the San Diego Youth Symphony and the San Diego Master Chorale in their 'Ovation' concert at Copley Hall with a couple of my buddies on Sunday afternoon. We had quite a blast!

Kanga at Copley Symphony Hall

For a junior group, the SDYS sure are ambitious. I mean, there are complicated music, and then there are things like Beethoven's Choral Fantasy and just about any of Shostakovich's symphonies!

Do these guys look like they'd compose anything that's easy to play???

The first half of the concert starred Reece Akana as the piano soloist. The young local pianist-golfer-ace student from Chula Vista recently won first prize at the 2012 California Association of Professional Music Teachers (CAPMT) Contemporary Musical Festival in San Mateo, and played both the 3rd movement of Beethoven's 3rd piano concerto  and his Choral Fantasy like a pro. The tempo on both were quite slower than I would have preferred, but he managed to not let it drag (which was quite an accomplishment!). I was even more impressed at how sensitively he listened to the orchestra and the chorus during the Choral Fantasy. Hat's off to him and to maestro Jeff Edmons for keeping everyone in good sync. Kudos to the violin and the flute soloists, too, they were quite gorgeous (music-wise)!

I've got to needle maestro Edmons a bit for letting the symphony railroad the Master Chorale a bit, however. They are an excellent amateur chorale, but they haven't got strong soloist voices and got quite drown out on key moments by the adrenaline-driven orchestra. That was a bit jarring considering the text that they were singing!

With the fabulous Choral Fantasy capping the first half of the show, it was hard to imagine following it with another half hour of music, but maestro Edmons and the SDYS pulled it off in style with their convincing performance of Shostakovich's fifth symphony. The piece isn't as turbulent (and complicated) as his later works, but it still is a big play for a band of teenagers!

That was a good program, I think... It made me, as I walked out of the auditorium, think about the difference between Beethoven's time and that of Shostakovich. But perhaps the times weren't all that different at all. After all, Beethoven lived in the time of revolutions and Napoleon's marches across Europe while Shostakovich lived in constant suppression by the Stalinist regime and the ever-present threat of nuclear war. Many people I know today are convinced that we are living in the worst of time, but I doubt it. We have better and faster access to news, so even though there's no town being bombed a few miles away (or no high-fatality disease epidermic on the scale of the European plagues or the Spanish flu, etc), we somehow feel close to the war/epidermic/disturbances happening far away... which give the impression of our time being worse than it really is.

Anyhow, it's interesting that my buddies (who aren't used to classical music) were more enamored of Shostakovich's dissonance-fest music than they were of Beethoven! 

San Diego Youth Symphony's Chamber Strings Group in Copley Hall lobby.

PS: It pays to get to the symphony hall a bit early when you go to performances. You never know what goodies might be available to early birds. I got there 1/2 hour early and got to listen to the SDYS' Chamber Strings Group serenading us symphony-goers with some really nice playing of Mozart pieces. That was some cool appetizers!

San Diego Youth Symphony, San Diego Master Chorale, Reece Akana.

Villa Lobos, Mozart & Fauré requiem at the San Diego Symphony

It's been a while since I went to a San Diego Symphony concert, but this weekend's program of Villa Lobos' Bachianas brasileiras No. 5, Mozart's E-flat sinfonia concertante, and Fauré's Requiem was too inviting to stay away. To add to that, one of my buddies also agreed to go with me on very short notice, so the evening was looking quite on the up!

The show started on a bit of a down note, however. Nicole Cabell, the featured soprano who enchanted Copley Hall audiences when she sang Solveig's Song here during the run of selections from Grieg's Peer Gynt a few years ago had called in sick for the entire run. On Friday night she was replaced by Alice Teyssier, an obscure music specialist and flautist who is in town working on her doctorate degree at UCSD (Saturday and Sunday performances will feature Jessica Rivera instead). I doubt that she was given much rehearsal time, but she did a credible job interpreting and enlivening Brazilian passion in the Villa Lobos, and displayed beautiful musicianship with her phrasing. The voice itself was quite beautiful and light, if not quite full-bodied (come to think of it, she sort of sounded like her instrument, the flute), and she underprojected when singing softer than mezzo-forte in both the Villa Lobos and the famous soprano solo 'Pie Jesu' in the Fauré requiem - both very lightly accompanied numbers.


I would have preferred a slower tempo for the  Aria (cantilena) section of the Bachianas Brasileiras, but both the soloist and the cellos coped nicely with its speedy briskiness. A slower tempo would have provided a better contrast with the fieriness of the following Dansa, however. I also thought Maestro Ling could have helped keeping the cellos volume down to avoid covering the soprano's voice. I guess the lack of rehearsal time was the major factor (I mean... she was also covered during the very soft passages of the Pie Jesu, and the accompanying instruments really couldn't have played much softer than they did).



Mozart's concertante for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn soloists was, I thought, the highlight of the evening. The San Diego Symphony is a really well endowed group when it comes to its principal instrumentalists! Sarah Skuster (oboe), Sheryl Renk (clarinet), Valentin Martchev (bassoon) and Benjamin Jaber (horn) were all flawlessly inspiring in their virtuosity, yet they cooperated so well that one would think that they could all finish each others' sentences. The orchestra under Maestro Ling was wonderfully supportive. Everyone was so in sync with everyone else that they actually sounded like they were all enjoying the piece, and their enthusiasm infected the audiences, which clapped the musicians out for three curtain calls before giving way to the intermission.


Fauré Requiem took up the second half of the concert and it was quite splendid for the most part. Joining the symphony on the stage were the two soloists; Alice Teyssier and baritone Quinn Kelsey, along with the utterly reliable San Diego Master Chorale. Both the chorus and the orchestra were impeccable. As to the soloists, if my ears had to strain to hear Ms Teyssier, Mr Kelsey effortlessly delivered his beautifully controlled and stately baritone right through them. With his tone as reassuring as Fauré anxiety-free music was, their combination really rendered peace to the hushed auditorium in the Libera me section. A really classy performance for an upcoming operatic baritone to look out for!

There are two further performances of this show at the San Diego Symphony this weekend. I wish I could go, but I had spent all of yesterday goofing off (went on a long bike ride to Mission Trails Regional Park and back before going to the symphony) and am now condemned to spend today and tomorrow catching up on work. If you are in town and don't know what to do with yourself, however, there is hardly a better show to catch this weekend!

Met HD Die Walküre & San Diego Opera's Carmen

When a couple of early morning cancellation opened last Saturday (May 14th) up like a peeled banana I made a galloping sprint right over to the AMC Mission Valley 20 cinema with 40 minutes to spare to catch the Metropolitan Opera's HD live broadcast of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). Like the other 3 operas in the Wagner cycle, Die Walküre is a long sit at 5 hrs plus intermissions, so it pleased no one when the performance was delayed for 40 minutes.

No announcement was made until 15 minutes had lapsed since the posted showtime when the screen went black and ran the 'This performance has been delayed. The show will begin shortly,' notice. Half an hour into the delay a cinema staff came in and told us that there will be a 20-30 minutes further delay due to 'projector failure', which was both good and bad to hear. Most mechanical failure is quite more welcomed than 'indisposed principal cast' announcement! Not wanting to stay seated for longer than we already needed to, about half the audience (me included) went out in the lobby and walked around a bit. I came back to my seat after 8 minutes or so to find that the theater screen was showing live image from the Met auditorium with a running countdown clock saying that the show was about to begin in 1:50 minutes. Eh! At least 1/4 of the opera goers were still out of the theater buying food or stretching their legs because nobody had told them that the delay had been cut by more than half.

The Machine in Robert Lepage's staging of Die Walkuere at Metropolitan Opera in 2011. (Photo: Ken Howard)

As it turned out, the delay was due to a displaced encoder on one of the high-tech set's dynamic planks and they had to relocate and recalibrate the thing. 'La Machina', stage director Robert Lepage's gigantic mechanical set of the entire Ring Cycle is a real shape-changer that draws as much ire from the audience as it does admiration. I quite enjoy the thing and its many imaginative use to stand in for anything from Hunding's hut to its surrounding dense woods to Valhalla and even the galloping horses of the Valkyries. But then again, I'm a fan of minimalist staging that demands a lot of acting from the singers. After all, one of my all time favorite opera singers, Astrid Varnay (who happened to be one of the greatest Wagnerian soprano/contralto to ever walk the planet), wrote in her memoir that no other opera is as adaptable to the fantastic realms than Wagner's Ring Cycle. It is a mythical tale that can really benefit from imaginative staging... Many in the theater weren't happy with it, though, and spent the intermissions bemoaning the lack of other stage props.

Well, the show started with the entering of Maestro James Levine to the pit. He didn't look in the best of health (and it seemed to have a painful time struggling into his conductor's chair), but conducted with such fervor that ignited his orchestra into a splendidly thrilling playing of the hunt overture (this was one of the few bits of music that actually benefited from the loud volume of the auditorium sound system). If only all 5 hrs long opera could smolder through time the way he led this Walküre I'd risk my achy back sitting through them a lot more often!



Levine's conducting along with the stellar performances by Jonas Kaufmann (Siegmund), Eva Marie Westbroek (Sieglinde) and Hans Peter König (Hunding) made the first act feel just half its length! I heard Ms. Westbroek was battling a throat infection, but that didn't show much. She sounded very secure, and though the acting isn't much in the voice there was plenty of it on her face and in her every gesture. Herr König wasn't given much to do physically and wasn't the usual bad-guy Hunding, but I found him very convincing in his own way as a more reasonable and more passively nasty lord of the hut. Jonas Kaufmann was nothing short of flawless on all fronts imaginable. Rarely have I heard such nuanced singing in a 'Heldentenor' part like this. The voice is beautifully dark and vibrant with colors, deployed with delightful touch and dynamic command... And it drove the music forward in a way that made you anticipate his character's plight. He was also an exemplar colleague to his stage partners, only letting loose his glorious top notes for dramatic purpose and somehow commanding the stage without overshadowing anyone else.



Then, of course, came the second act with the entrance of the gods. Bryn Terfel's Wotan proved that he had the voice to match the physique (6'4") of a deity, and Stephanie Blythe's Fricka was riveting without even having to move off her mobile throne. The star marquee of the show, Deborah Voigt's Brünnhilde, however, was not very over-whelming as Wotan's favorite (and lead) Valkyrie. The voice has shrunk considerably since a few years ago and her pitch was at times a bit iffy. The choreography that had her spanking about with Wotan during her 'Hojotoho!' bits was rather.... ungodly in many ways. Even though I usually favor attempts to find humor in serious operas, this overt sort of silly fun making in a rather dignified and glorious musical scene seemed just frivolous. That said, she settled down after a while and sang much better in the final act (where Terfel was terfel-rific in the famous Abschied... though the orchestra somehow didn't sound very sparkly in the Magic Fire Music that followed... Perhaps that was the sound system's problem).

I had a great time with Die Walküre, and loved most of the intermission features with interviews with cast members and stage hands... Joyce DiDonato is a wonderful host, though I have to take some issue with Maestro Placido Domingo's lack of command of English (even when he was reading it). I will freely agree to anyone who says that Domingo is a great performer and ambassador of opera to a very wide audience. That said, his English is very hard to understand and annoying slow.... especially when he attempted to ad lib stuff. What is wrong with giving the interviewer job to someone who also knows the opera well and can actually speak English... and can really use the money? I'd buy a ticket to hear Domingo sing any day, but you can't pay me to hear him attempt to interview someone in English... I'm not that patient a person.

I also attended the San Diego Opera's opening performance of Bizet's Carmen on the same evening. This post is already long enough to make me a Wagnerian suspect, however, so I'm not writing about it here. If you are interested, though, I did muse on it earlier at another website.

For Whom The (Joshua) Bell Tolled: Concert @San Diego Symphony (12Mar2010)

Friday night in San Diego is a good time to hop downtown to catch a concert with the San Diego Symphony at Copley Hall, and this past Friday (yesterday, that is) was even more than usual. The SDSO is celebrating its 100th season and has packed their concerts with A-list artists from practically every classical music sub-genre. I can't be happier with the line-up.... except perhaps had they been able to score a Kasarova recital (but then one can't have all the cakes and then eat them too.... or perhaps one can but shouldn't. It's bad for the teeth or something!).

As a side note, though, I went by old Wahrenbrock's Book House on Broadway on the way there. The beloved collectible/used book dealer has been out of business for more than 6 months now, though the place is still boarded up... If anyone feels any compulsion to erect a monument to the disastrous economic near-collapse of 2008, it doesn't get any more sorrowfully surreal and effective than the way that building looks now. A business that had anchored that stretch of downtown since 1935, man... I miss all the hours spent browsing through its cavernous space and double filled book shelves.

Anyhow, Friday's concert at Copley Hall featured music by Antonin Dvorak, Max Bruch, and Peter Tchaikovsky. I was well familiar with Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, of course, though Bruch's folk songs inspired Scottish Fantasy and Tchaikovsky's supposedly Mozart-minded Strings Serenade were mostly foreign to me and to many in the packed auditorium.

Philip Mann was at the podium last night and opened the show with only two selections from Dvorak's Slavonic Dance op. 72 (the B major and E minor dances); a bombastic opening with the smoothly melancholy follow up, though, in this performance, both were rushed through in such no nonsense manner that most of the endearing Slavic flavor in them was lost in the swift whirlwind of his baton.

It was just as well since virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell (in a somewhat elegant maroon shirt with a big black center stripe) then came on the stage and proved the merit of all his accolades. His 1713 Gibson Strad wasn't very loud, but man, it sang with a sweet and sleek sound that commanded attention! The entire auditorium was soon acoustically transported to ruggedly beautiful Scotland (the piece is Bruch's symphonic setting of Scottish songs) as Bell and his hypnotically colorful violin conjured up a hall-filling Scottish soul with beautiful tones and musically imaginative phrasing. His conviction and lyricism drew real life out of the orchestra, which suddenly found itself engaged in a lively musical dialogue with Bell's solo. Special praise should go to the principal flutist, Demarre McGill, for his virtuosic ease that exquisite matched up with Bell in their brief in-piece duet.

At the end of the last note the auditorium erupted into a prolonged and enthusiastic standing ovation that brought the violinist back out for four curtain calls. The third of which was punctuated by a solo encore of Henri Vieuxtemps' wittily humorous and stupendously virtuosic 'Souvenir d'Amerique: Variations on Yankee Doodle.'


(This Youtube clip is from another performance up at Sala Sao Paolo)
It was an awesome show of technical virtuoso as well as communicative artistry as his Gibson Stradivarius sang, snarled, cajoled, and even whistled the massively over-ornamented (in a most entertaining way, that is) beloved American tune to the delighted audience.

It was something of a programming blunder to not have the Joshua Bell act end the night. Having spent the intermission recomposing ourselves from the absolutely bedazzled state, the final half of the performance with Philip Mann conducting Tchaikovsky's Strings Serenade in C Major was anti-climatic to say the least and sleep-inducing to say the worst. Or perhaps the worst was the fact that by the 3rd movement of the thing many were so bored by it that they were compelled to find quietly distracting things to do while sitting through the seemingly never-ending music (not a compliment here, many of us really couldn't wait for it to be over with!). In my row of 10 people or so 3 were actually re-reading their program booklet from front to back just to past the time. It was a strange thing since the SDSO is usually so dependably good. Last night it was just lacklustering...

There are many more potentially spectacular concerts to catch at the San Diego Symphony this year, though. If you're in town, be sure to drop in at their website and see if you can score a ticket! In the meanwhile, the San Diego Opera is opening a 4 shows run of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette at the Civic Theater a few blocks to the east. I'd love to catch the 2PM performance of Tchaikovsky's 1st piano concerto at the symphony on Sunday, but I'm already rather worn out. Will see what state I'll be in after the opera tonight!