Chanticleer: Out of This World. September 17, 2010

This was the opening concert in San Francisco for Chanticleer's 33rd season. There are two new singers this year. Casey Breves is a soprano, and just graduated from Yale. I met him at the auditions back in February, and I saw him again in April, at Yale, soon after he had gotten the offer from Chanticleer. Mike Axtell is a new baritone/bass. I met him in 2009 at the "Chanticleer Summer Camp" (officially the Summer Choral Workshop at Sonoma State, where 80 singers get together with Chanticleer, arriving on a Wednesday and performing a concert on Sunday). Anyway, both new singers are excellent, as you might imagine.

The theme for the concert, Out of This World!, provided a convenient excuse to sing anything having to do with stars or heaven, which includes just about everything that Chanticleer is likely to sing. I was expecting a "difficult" concert, but when a concert starts with Palestrina (Mary is assumed into heaven), there's nothing to worry about.

I'd forgotten the music of Francisco Guerrero, so I was unprepared for the beauty of the motet Hail, Queen of Heaven. I really hope they record this piece.

I checked my iTunes collections, and I have two other Guerrero motets there, one of which is the beautiful Virgen sancta, which opens with a soprano solo. I have two recordings of it, one from Chanticleer, recorded in 1990, and one from Clerestory, recorded 19 years later. The soloist is the same in both: the always-wonderful Chris Fritzsche.

Next, they launched into four madrigals, beginning with a pair of Monteverdis: Sfogava con le stelle, a piece that I learned long ago, and Ecco mormorar l'onde. The third madrigal was Fuggi dolor by William Hawley, which I've heard them sing several times recently. The fourth was written by Mason Bates, a well-known local composer and DJ, awash in well-deserved accolades these days. It is part of his Sirens song cycle, commissioned by Chanticleer last year. (He had a larger piece in the second half of the program. More anon.) After Bates' madrigal, they sang Britten's Hymn to Saint Cecilia, a piece I also learned long ago, when I sang with the Pacific Master Chorale down in Orange County. The Britten is a strange and difficult piece. The chords change at the drop of a hat (what key are we in now?), and with notes in the extreme high and low ranges, it's sometimes difficult to know whether the singers are still in tune. The text is by Auden and wanders far afield of Cecilia, the patron saint of music. I liked it, but that's only because I learned it. I think it would be hard to hear this for the first time, even reading the words, and get much out of it. Example: "O law drummed out by hearts against the still / Long winter of our intellectual will." Um, right. Got it.

The first half concluded with a Schumann piece for double chorus and what may be Chanticleer's new signature piece, Mahler's Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. This is one of the Rückertlieder, arranged for chorus by Clytus Gottwald. It is a slow, luscious piece, with the richest of harmonies. It's very sad (roughly, I've had enough of the world). It's very difficult to sing well. Those rich sonorities come at a price: miss one little half step, or tuning, and we're off the rails. I've heard Chanticleer sing this piece many times. The first time was with Frederika von Stade as a soloist, accompanied, as it were, by Chanticleer. The original version was for solo and piano, but most people know it in the arrangement for soloist and orchestra. It was a signature piece for Janet Baker. Von Stade's performance was wonderful, and I remember that before she took her bow, she acknowledged the singers, particularly the sopranos, who were singing notes far above hers. Such a gracious lady.

The second half of the concert took a more literal view of being out of this world, starting with Kirke Mechem's Island in Space, which starts and ends with Dona nobis pacem, surrounding a text by an astronaut, Russell Schweichart, and another, far less interesting text, by Archibald Macleish. Schweichart observes that from his viewpoint aboard Apollo 9, there are no borders on the Earth, just a small, beautiful planet. The best line: "You realize that on that small spot is everything that means anything to you: all history, all poetry, all music, all art, death, birth, love, tears, all games, all joy -- all on that small spot."

Then we heard a large-scale piece by Mason Bates, Observer in the Magellanic Cloud. This was, in some ways, the centerpiece for the concert. The "observer" of the title is not a person but a satellite that sees, from a zillion miles away, Maori tribesmen, who are chanting to the satellite's own galaxy. The piece starts with electronic beeping, the sound of the satellite, which sets the pulse for the piece. The singing alternates between the satellite and the Maori tribesmen. In the middle, there's a tribal "dance," where the guys walk around in a circle. Shades of A Village Wedding. Let's just say that dance is not their forte. Indeed, walking is not their forte.

 I liked the Bates piece very much, and it was a polished performance, although the singers told me that it was fiendishly difficult to learn. They spent about 16 hours rehearsing it before recording it earlier this summer.

The last section of the concert had four "popular" pieces, starting with Steve Barnett's arrangment of a Harold Arlen song, Out of this world, followed by Gene Puerling's arrangement of Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars, both of which Chanticleer has performed before. Then came the surprise: a piece billed as "indie rock." It was Cells Planets by Erika Lloyd, whose original performance with her group, Little Grey Girlfriend, you can hear on the Web. I listened to that, and it reminded me of Joni Mitchell, not my favorite stuff. But this arrangement, by Vince Peterson, was completely different. The backup band was replaced by voices, obviously, and the solo was given to the new soprano, Casey Breves, who has a perfect pop sound (albeit a couple of octaves up). He was clearly in his element, and I can just imagine that he must have been in this situation many times: a soloist surrounded by a chorus of really good male singers, namely, the Whiffenpoofs, Yale's most famous all-male singing group, and now the eleven other singers of Chanticleer. It was a star turn, and it brought the house down. The last piece, called Change the World, featured tenor Ben Jones. I don't remember hearing him sing a solo before. He has a very nice voice, perhaps a little too sotto voce for the situation, especially following bravura Breves, and the song is nothing to write home about, but I hope we get to hear more of Ben. In his pre-Chanticleer life, Ben was a featured singer in Beach Blanket Babylon, so he, too, should be comfortable in a solo spot.

There was an encore, of course: Joe Jennings' arrangement of Walk in Jerusalem. Matt Curtis had the first solo, but Brian Hinman took all the others -- by storm. Brian has a trumpet of a voice, loud when he needs it, but always clear and distinct, even in quiet passages. He has a long, plaintive solo at the beginning of Michael McGlynn's Agnus Dei, from two years ago, and that's one of my favorite bits from all their recordings. The piece itself is way too long; it should stop about one minute after the solo is done. It gets lost in pretty chords, alas, after the edgy beginning. Brian's solo is stunning because he brings out a sadness in the words that I had not understood before: Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. But think of it this way: O God, I'm so sorry for making such a mess of my life. Have mercy on me.

A second encore was required for this eager Friday-night audience, and we got Straight Street, with little solos from Eric Alatorre and Cortez Mitchell, about three octaves apart.

I went back and heard the Sunday performance. Some years ago, when I lived in the South Bay, I decided that I would never see another Chanticleer concert just once. They usually do two Bay Area performances, so it wasn't difficult to hear them twice. When I moved to San Francisco two years ago, I stopped going to their South Bay performances, so I did hear some concerts only once, but I've returned to my senses. The reason I like hearing it twice is that they may sing something that is unfamiliar, not recorded (by them, at least), and unlikely to show up at another local concert, anytime soon. That first Mahler performance, with von Stade, echoed in my head for, what?, six years until they finally started doing it again, sans soloist. The Guerrero piece in this program may vanish, too, so it was good to catch it a second time. At the Sunday performance, they replaced the two Monteverdi madrigals with a pair by Marenzio, and we got to hear a different quartet sing them, including the new baritone, Mike Axtell.

All in all, I thought this was an auspicious beginning for the 33rd season. Sometimes the opening concert is a little rocky, especially when there are new singers on board. But not this time. This group is solid. Go hear them. Twice, even.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival, August 10-14, 2010

Every year, I go with friends to see plays at the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. There are two performances a day, a matinee at 1:30 pm and an evening performance at 8 pm. There are three theaters, one of which, the outdoor Elizabethan stage, has performances only in the evening. The cast and the audience would melt at a matinee; it can get very hot here in the summer.

About half the plays are by Shakespeare. Some of the rest are world premieres. Some of those will probably not be seen again. Some, like the drawing-room comedies, are hardy perennials.

In any given week, there are usually 9 plays on the boards. We arrive on Tuesday afternoon, after a 6-hour drive from San Francisco, and we see 8 plays, back to back, which takes us through the Saturday matinee. We have a big blowout dinner on Saturday night and then drive back on Sunday.

Since we can't see all 9 plays, we have to choose which one to skip. That's often hard, and sometimes we make the wrong choice. Two summers ago, we chose Our Town at the Elizabethan Theater instead of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the larger indoor theater, the Bowmer Theater. It was the wrong choice because we all disliked Our Town, and seriously wondered why this play is ever done at all. And we heard that Midsummer was fabulous. I came back in October, on a day where I could see my favorite Shakespeare play from that summer, Coriolanus, at a matinee, and Midsummer in the evening. It was indeed fabulous, literally and figuratively.

Here are notes on the plays we saw this summer (written as the week went on).

Tuesday night:
Henry IV, Part 1 (or as I like to say, Henry 4.1, to be followed by 4.2 and 5.0). I liked this play; my friends mostly didn't. With rare exception, the acting is always outstanding here, but sometimes the production, or direction, or even the play itself, leave something to be desired. John Tufts plays Prince  Henry (to become 5.0), or Hal as he is called here. In Act I, he's the prodigal son, hanging out with low-lifes, indeed, some truly revolting low-lifes, much to the chagrin of his father (4.1). I like Tufts, a CMU graduate. For one thing, he's tall, dark, and handsome (well, that's three things), and that helps but it's not nearly enough to get you lead roles here. While he often plays leads in some plays, he, like everyone else, plays bit parts in other plays. I first remember his as Romeo at the Elizabethan, which Christine Albright as Juliet. Both talented young actors, they made the young lovers seem entirely credible, and the bedroom scene was steamy indeed. He played one forest Fairies in that fabulous performance I returned to see. The production was done in 80's disco version, complete with singing, and an incredibly enthusiatic audience, decades younger, on average, than the crowd that shows up in August.

Wednesday matinee:
Hamlet. The title role is played by Don Donohue, who is a brilliant actor and perhaps the most popular actor in Ashland. The performance begins while the audience is still noisily filing in, with a scene just after the funeral of Hamlet's father: a casket, many rows of chairs, and only one person left: Hamlet. As the other chairs are all put away, only one is left. Then Hamlet leaves, the lights dim, and the play begins. This is done in modern dress; Hamlet wears a jacket, a skinny tie, and sunglasses.

The play-proper begins on the walls of the castle. The guards are in camouflage, with lights attached to their automatic weaons. There are security cameras on the walls, blinking, turning, producing a Big Brother effect. The Ghost of Hamlet's father is barely visible in a flickering lighting effect, but he gradually becomes more corporeal. The one aspect of this production that I disliked was the use of Howie Seago, an actor who is deaf, as the Ghost. He and his family communicate using American Sign Language. In fact, the family use ASL even when talking to each about the dead king. In his conversations with the Ghost, Hamlet speaks most of the Ghost's lines, translating for us. But he doesn't translate everything, and there are long sections where they are conversing, but we, the audience, are left wondering what they're talking about. For me, this derails the action of the play, the same way it would have if the Ghost had been delivering his lines in, say, Danish. I think this choice is hyper-politically correct, and they've done this in other plays, again with Mr. Seago. The worst was in Our Town last year, where everything stopped dead when Seago had lines to deliver.

But that was the only failing in an otherwise terrific performance. The fatuous king, his queen (whose motivation seemed unclear here), and a terrific trio of Polonius and his kids. His famous lecture to them before Laertes goes back to college ("Neither a borrower nor a lender be...") was moving and funny. Just before Laertes can escape, his loquatious father has yet one more thing to say. His words of advice are well known to the kids; they recite it with him in perfect teenage exasperation. Richard Elmore, who has "bluster" down pat, has found a perfect role in Polonius. More surprising was Susannah Flood as Ophelia: energetic, bright, and lots of fun, unlike your typical spaced-out depressive, so that when she does her mad scene, standing on chairs, removing bits of clothing, we are as astonished as the family.

Hamlet has all the best lines, of course. Donohue makes the most of the wit and sarcasm. I'd forgotten how funny this part of the play can be, with barbs and puns a-flying. And no one can deliver those lines better than Donohue. The physical part of his acting is also flawless and inspiring at the same time. Although this portrayal is unlike any I'd seen before, it seemed so natural that I can't imagine it being in any other way. I'd seen Hamlet done here years ago, and all I remember was that it seemed interminable and I couldn't wait for it to end. To be fair, that performace was in the outdoor theater, and they may have not cut as much, if any, from the script as they did here (two small scenes, I heard); also, I may have been cold. This Hamlet was in the chronically over-air-conditioned but otherwise comfortable Bowmer Theater. (In the sweltering heat of Ashland in August, you see crowds in shorts, T-shirts, and sandals, but many of them are carrying coats that they will don for the theaters.)

I came up to Ashland back in February and saw this Hamlet (you can't see this production too many times), Pride and Prejudice (which I saw again this time), and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Act II is the long dialog between Brick and Big Daddy. The scenes in Brick and Maggy's bedroom, especially the opening where Brick starts out in the shower, may have been the most visually arresting, but it was the argument of Act II that made this piece truly memorable. Two actors, Danforth Cummins as the hunky, broken son, and Michael Winters as the angry, blustery father who loves him, made you forget the fancy set. It's for moments like this, and almost any scene with Dan Donohue, that we come to Ashland, year after year.

(Here's the rest of the schedule. I hope to have time to add comments about these, too.)


Wednesday night, at the Elizabethan Theater:
The Merchant of Venice.

Thursday matinee, at the New Theater.
Ruined.

Thursday evening, at the Bowmer Theater:
Throne of Blood.

Friday matinee, at the Bowmer.
Pride and Prejudice.

Friday evening, at the Bowmer:
She Loves Me (a musical).

Saturday matinee, at the New Theater:
American Night.

Nemorino. Check. Check.

Tonight, we heard from both of the tenors singing Nemorino in this summer's Merola Opera, L'Elisir d'Amore, with four performances, two casts. I have a ticket for one of the performances, but I might just have to buy one for the other cast. Our two Nemorinos (Nemorini?), Alexander Lewis and Daniel Montenegro, have very different voices, but each sounded great tonight.

This was the "Merola Auditions for the General Director," which always sounds like someone's auditioning for that job. But this is auditioning in front of the General Director, as well as the music staff and some lucky audience members. Each of the 19 singers came out on stage, and with piano accompaniment, sang one 5-minute aria. There was a 15-minute break, and then some were asked back to sing a second aria. In some years, it seems that the director just wanted to hear certain singers sing something different, and this sometimes produces revelations, as it did with Nathaniel Peake two years ago. He sang La donna è mobile for his first aria. It was a fine, jolly piece, and the high B at the end was firmly in place, but when he was asked to sing again, he sang an aria from Faust that was astonishing.

This year, though, I thought that the seven singers who were asked back were the best of the crop, which is saying something, because this is a terrific bunch of singers, and it's going to be fun listening to them in master classes, in the Schwabacher concert, in the opera, and in the Grand Finale.

I won't comment on all of them, but here are some of my favorite moments.

Baritone Sidney Outlaw was the second singer of the evening, and he sang an aria from Rinaldo. There were several other baritones to follow, but when Outlaw was asked back and sang a piece from I Puritani, I decided I liked his voice more than the other baritones. Smooth and agile (for a baritone :-), he's just a tad showy, hanging on to a few notes a bit longer than necessary, but he also has great breath control. He sang one set of runs that was so long, I ran out of air just listening to him. At an event on Friday, "Meet the Merolini," we heard a few words from each of the artists, and Outlaw said he liked Handel and Bellini "because they make me sound glorious." No lack of self-confidence here.

Alexander Lewis sang a piece from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette. At the Friday event, he talked about sports and had everyone in stitches, explaining his interest in "jumping off things" (e.g., bungee jumping from bridges), but his speaking voice left me unprepared for his singing voice. Talk about glorious!

Nadine Sierra sang Caro nome with wonderful high notes, and returned to sing a piece from Roméo et Juliette. I can't wait to hear her sing Adina in L'Elisir.

Kevin Ray is this year's Wagnerian tenor. He started with Winterstürme (which we heard just last week at the Summer Opera). That was good, but he was really impressive in his second aria, from Britten's Peter Grimes. This is a long, difficult, and dramatic piece, and is sung mostly without accompaniment. How he kept track of the key, I'll never know. Towards the end, a few of the high notes weren't there, but that hardly mattered. You won't be able to miss his voice at the Schwabacher concert.

Speaking of Britten, baritone Benjamin Covey sang a piece from The Rape of Lucretia that also revealed dramatic chops. Soprano Hye Jung Lee had the highest and most pitch-perfect notes of the evening; she sang Zerbinetta's aria from Ariadne auf Naxos and made it look easy. She's been studying in Germany, so her choices of Mozart and Strauss made sense. Eleazar Rodriguez, here for his second year, was practically a home-town favorite, with high notes that we watched Jane Eaglen teach him to sing last summer.

As good as these singers were, there was one who stood out. Way, way out. Tenor Daniel Montenegro sang Una furtiva lagrima and would have brought the house down if we had been allowed to applaud. (They allow only one round of applause, for the entire group, at the end.) I saw him at the event last Friday, where he said that his inspiration to become a singer started the day when someone took him to the LA Opera and he heard Placido Domingo for the first time. Well, he's been paying attention. This is an Italian tenor with a spectacular voice. He's at ease on stage, and it's hard to believe he's a newcomer. The top notes rang out clearly, seemingly without effort. One of the best parts of the Merola Opera program, which I actually enjoy more than the parent SF Opera, is that you occasionally come across someone like Montenegro and you think how lucky you are to have seen the beginning of what promises to be a great career in opera.

SF Symphony Chorus. April 11, 2010

The always-wonderful SF Symphony Chorus gave their annual "just us" concert this afternoon. The first half was all Swedish music, probably unknown to 99% of the audience; the second half had some of the Rachmaninoff Vespers and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, probably familiar to 99% of the audience, especially anyone who ever sang in a big chorus. Interesting extremes.

The opening piece, Let There Be, a creation formula for mixed choir and percussion, was written by Frederik Sixten, who was in the audience. I always applaud living composers, even when I'm not crazy about their pieces. This was the world premiere. The percussionist was Jack Van Geem, one of the SF Symphony's percussionists. He was kept quite busy, and did quite well, even though he was on crutches.

The piece has lots of tone-clusters, where the choir might be singing C, C#, D, D#, and E all at the same time. It's easy to lose your way as a listener and, I fear, as a singer. There were moments where the pitch was so uncertain, I thought the choir had aimed and missed. It wasn't microtonal, e.g., with pitches halfway between C and C#. Or perhaps it was, but they didn't sound very confident about it. Of course, this was "wet ink" music, so one expects a certain amount of struggling. Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, only half the chorus sang the piece.

The next piece was Easy Listenin' compared to the first. It was Jorden oro viker by Ludvig Norman. Very pretty, with some moments that reminded me of Brahms.

While the chorus reshuffled themselves for the third time (was that really necessary?), Ragnar Bohlin, the director of the Chorus, told us what he liked about the next piece, called ... a riveder le stelle, by Ingvar Lindholm. I'm afraid I didn't like this piece at all. There's forte, and then there's just plain loud, and this had a lot of loud singing. The chorus was divided in 16 parts, and there was a lot more of this half-step-apart music that sounded like a disagreement about pitches. There was a solo part near the end, sung beautifully by Pamela Sebastian, but in some key unrelated to what the chorus was singing. Bohlin warned us that this piece was polytonal, but to pull that off, whether in a string quartet or a full-stage orchestra, you have to have nerves of steel and exude confidence. I didn't sense that here.

There were two more pieces on the first half, ending with a folksong that was supposed to be funny, perhaps a drinking song. It had a tenor soloist, Keith Perry, who was quite good but was so serious, we weren't sure whether the song really was funny. Some people just don't tell jokes very well.

After intermission, we heard six movements from the Rachmaninoff Vespers. The first one, Come, Let Us Worship (sung in Russian), restored our faith in humanity, tonality, and choral unity. Things went astray after that, however. Again, only a part of the choir sang. I wonder why; choirs love to sing this music, and I'll bet that everyone in the SF Symphony Chorus has sung the piece several times before. The sound was certainly in no danger of being too big, not in Davies. The mezzo soloist for this second movement was not up to the task. Fortunately, the tenor soloist in the fourth movement, Kevin Gibb, was terrific. The basses, or some of them at least, managed the incredible low B-flat at the end of the fifth movement, Lord, Now Lettest Thou Thy Servant Depart.

Two things bothered me about this performance of the Rachmaninoff. First, the chorus had their noses in their books. I can understand that for the Swedish pieces, but not for the Vespers. The Russian is not easy to learn, but the notes are. I was sitting upstairs; they were all looking down; the result was a muffled sound. 96 singers exclaiming Rejoice, O Virgin! should rock the hall. Second, I think the tempos were simply too fast. Many of the subtle chord shifts got lost. I know Davies doesn't have much reverberation, so you can't use the hall in the way you could use a big ol' stone church, but Bohlin could have done a lot more with tempo and dynamics. As you might guess, I've sung this piece several times, and I remember every note, so I really missed all those great crunchy passing notes and the occasional floor-shaking bass lines.

We got some floor-shaking in the last piece, Chichester Psalms, courtesy of Robert Huw Morgan at the Ruffatti organ. I've never heard this arrangement (with organ instead of orchestra), but it started with a bang, lots of reeds in the Pedal, very exciting. Morgan, who is the organist at Stanford, is a fine musician, but after the first few measures, I feared he would drown out the Chorus. My fears came true. He had interesting registrations (choices of organ stops), but he simply overpowered the chorus, especially the basses, who are no match for a 16' Diapason, let alone a Bombarde. (The name says it all.) All I can imagine is that they had only one rehearsal, it sounded good on stage, and they didn't send anyone out into the hall to check the balance.

In the blazing-fast, tongue-twisting Lamah rag'shu, the synchronization suffered. The percussionist was back, but he was at center stage, surrounded by singers. The pipes, however, are way up above everyone, and it just takes a while for sound to move. An organist will play a little ahead of the beat to compensate, but at this speed, and with all the reeds Morgan was using (they "speak" more slowly), it was a race (who's ahead now?). Believe it or not, there was a harpist on stage. Organ versus harp? No contest! She could have been practicing scales for all we knew.

The singing, the singing... The Chorus was fine. A few false entrances (here and elsewhere in the concert), but they projected the fun of a quick, vintage-Bernstein 7/8 meter near the beginning, and the practically Hawaiian slow 5/8 near the end. Zachary Weisberg was the boy soprano, a little rough around the edges, in the affected style that is now so popular with this role. The final movement is an a cappella chorale, and it was really nice to hear the chorus sing all by themselves for a few moments, lingering over those major-sevenths Bernstein loved so much. (His Mass ends in the same way.) The very last few bars are accompanied, alas, and even then, the organ was too loud.

There is probably an arrangement for piano instead of orchestra (or organ), and I think that would have worked much better. Earlier in the evening, we heard the Chorus' own pianist, Matthew Edwards, doing a great job with the rich accompaniment for Sven-Eric Johanson's Fancies II. I'm sure he would have done a great job with this piece, too: nicely percussive and quick, an occasional booming chord, but all in all, a better match. And we would have heard the harpist.

Stunning Shostakovich, SF Symphony. Friday, April 2, 2010

Shostakovich wrote the most beautiful miserable music in all of the 20th century. His Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65 (1943), was the major event of the evening. The San Francisco Symphony has never sounded better, and Vasily Petrenko, 34, was the finest guest conductor I think I've ever heard in Davies Hall.

Like many of Shostakovich's symphonies, this one is a long and winding journey through dissonance and stress, to moments of quiet beauty, to explosions of sound. It starts like the famous Fifth, with cellos versus violins, and if you missed the sense of foreboding in the opening of the first movement, you can't miss it in the ending: drum rolls, like distant thunder, warn us of the storm to come, and when it hits, we are swept into it.

When it comes to Shostakovich, the San Francisco Symphony has a secret weapon: Catherine Payne, the piccolo player. Just when you think the storm is in full fury, the piccolo enters, loud and very, very high, kicking it up a notch. When this movement ends, everyone, including the audience, is out of breath.

Not limited to special effects, Ms. Payne played a difficult but dazzling solo in the second movement. I'm sure it's a piccolo player's dream -- or nightmare -- but she played it perfectly, confidently. The other long solo was in the English horn, beautifully played by Russ deLuna. Pick your favorite depressing image: a cold, winter sunset; a lone, lost soldier; post-war grief. This is not tug-at-your-heartstrings sad, this is end-of-the-world sad.

For the music-theory fans, this piece has everything, including a passacaglia and a great fugue in the last movement. There were other solos, too: French horn (Nicole Cash), violin (concertmaster Alexander Barantshik), clarinet (Carey Bell), flute (Tim Day), and a spectacular moment -- and workout -- for the tympanist (David Herbert).

But the star of the performance was the conductor, who was in total control, yet let the players shine. He owns Shostakovich, in the same way that Michael Tilson Thomas owns Mahler, or Herbert Blomstedt owns Bruckner. Now, I've never seen this guy before, and for all I know, he actually prefers conducting Haydn, or Ravel. But from now on, when I think of Shostakovich, I will remember Vasily Petrenko and this night.

There's one more performance left. I might go back, if I can bear it.

The concert opened with the Grieg Piano Concerto in A minor, with Simon Trpčeski as the soloist. This piece is so familiar that no one ever listens to it. I wore out an LP with this and the Rachmaninoff Paganini Variations when I was in high school. (The pianist was the late, great Leonard Pennario.) It's been easily a decade since I heard it live. Too bad, because even though I thought I remembered every note from that recording, I'd apparently forgotten a few. This was a thoughtful performance, not flashy.

At many spots in this piece, Grieg writes giant, two-fisted chords that also include booming octaves in the bass, which you have to play a split second before the beat, ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom. The trouble is that you really want that bass note to be loud, since the whole chord is built on it, but playing those notes with the left hand and then zipping over to play the left fist of the two-fisted chord is hard if you want both power and accuracy. Trpčeski played with accuracy but with less power than I wanted. The performance was a crowd-pleaser, as expected.

The pianist took rather long bows, and for an encore, he played a short piece (also by Grieg, I think) that he said he learned when he was 7 years old. I suspect most piano students don't master this piece until they're, oh, 10 or 11. I thought it was inappropriate fluff.

I have to wonder how many people came to hear the short, "easy" Grieg and were not prepared for the long, "difficult" Shostakovich. (What the heck was that?) But maybe there were some converts who came for the appetizer but were very happy they stayed for the main course.

Iveta Apkalna, organist. Davies Hall. March 28, 2010

Iveta Apkalna is a young organist from Riga who made her US debut tonight, in a program of music that was mostly unheard in this country. She gave a charming speech at the start of the concert, saying she was glad to have such a large audience ("You must all be organists, or husbands of organists, or wives of organists!") and felt welcomed ("So many smiling eyes" -- her idioms not quite in place). She said she would be playing mostly music by composers from Latvia, her country, and didn't apologize for it. "If we don't play this music, who will?"

The first piece, I was disappointed to see, was the warhorse of warhorses, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565. If she was right about the audience, at least half of them have played this piece in their youth. Her rendition wasn't special, though her technique was fine. As many performers do, she play that last page of chords and arpeggios lickety-split. I don't see the point. If you're going to play this piece, you might as well do it in full-on Majestic. Go for gravitas; skip the kitsch.

Once that was dispensed with, the next piece was a Toccata on the Chorale Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr by Aivars Kalējs. A delightful piece, it's one long crescendo, which is always dramatically satisfying. This was followed by "Four Miniatures" by a composer whose name I didn't catch. (It was a last-minute substitution for some other piece, but apart from re-ordering the pieces on the program, I think she actually played everything that was listed. Much confusion. A piece had been dropped, we were told, because of some mechanical problem with the organ.)

These miniatures are for pedal solo. Hands-free organ pieces exist for two reasons, to show interesting sounds way down in the low register that you'd never hear otherwise, and to show off the organist's technique (more often the latter). These miniatures didn't seem miniature enough to me. I'm not a fan of technique alone. That is, if you realize that she's playing all that with her feet, why, it's dazzling. But if you close your eyes and just listen to the music, it's not so dazzling. Indeed, with a Pedal-to-Great coupler, you could play the whole piece with your hands. Now would the music sound so impressive? Right; didn't think so.

There are piano pieces for the left hand alone, and there are stories about pianists who played these pieces because they lost an arm in wartime, or in the famous case of Leon Fleischer, a peacetime injury to his hand that healed decades later. They are also good exercise pieces. After some shoulder surgery last summer, my right arm was out of commission for a while, and I dragged out Brahms' left-hand-only version of the Bach Chaconne and played that for weeks. Anyone who has ever heard Marc-André Hamelin play those incredible left-hand-only pieces in Godowsky's Studies on Chopin's Etudes knows that there can be great compositions in this format, music you'd love even with your eyes closed.

But pedal-only pieces aren't like that. They are more like transcriptions, which are sometimes fun to play but often strike me as bizarre. Years ago, I heard Eliot Fisk play Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas -- on the guitar, in his own transcriptions. Peerless technique, a great musician, but I kept thinking, did he run out of guitar pieces to play and had to borrow some elsewhere? The answer could well be yes; the guitar literature is tiny compared to that of the harpsichord. But at some point, it goes overboard.

This evening, we heard such a transcription, Jean Gillou's transcription of Liszt's Symphonic Poem No. 5, Prometheus. I don't think I've ever heard the orchestral version, and I probably wouldn't like it. (I didn't like his Tasso when the SF Symphony played it recently.) But even on a large organ like the Ruffatti, it's impossible to capture the big-orchestra bombast of Liszt. For one thing, this organ doesn't have cymbals. (Liszt for theater organ? That might fit.)

For another thing, Davies Hall is quite dry. Great swaths of the organ literature were written for big, echo-y churches, where you can hear that final, final chord still ringing when you're halfway out to the parking lot. Such pieces are much harder to play in a dry acoustic, because the performer can't use the hall. The advantage of dryness is that you get to hear details that get lost in the cathedral, so with music that's changing harmonies quickly, or is thickly textured in some other way, a dry hall can help. I like the Hindemith Sonatas for Organ. When I first took organ lessons at 15, struggling through the Bach chorales, I listened to another student who was learning Hindemith's First Sonata, and I thought it was the weirdest music I'd ever heard. A few years later, I worked on the First Sonata, and like the other two, it's filled with crisp harmonies, so strange that you really need to hear them clearly. Now Hindemith himself played them on the organ in Woolsey Hall, which has an enormous reverberation. (As a symphony critic once wrote, "Only organists like Woolsey Hall.") Of course, if you're playing softly, and the audience is sitting close to the stage, the sound is direct. Who knows? Maybe Hindemith liked the effect.

A piece that worked really well tonight was Evocation II by Thierry Esciach, a composer in Paris, where all the churches echo a lot. But this piece has a repeated eight-note going on in the pedal, while increasingly wild things happen above it on the manuals. I think this piece would get lost in a big church. Or perhaps it was such a success here because Apkalna's technique is so good; she probably had to play it faster than the composer does at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. That pedal pattern is obsessive and scary by the time the piece is done.

We also heard a Toccata by Marie-Alphonse-Nicholas-Joseph Jongen (what were his parents thinking?), and a Fantasia, written for and dedicated to Miss Apkalna by Ēriks Ešenvalds. In announcing this piece, she said, "It is his first piece for organ, and as far as I know, his last." That drew chuckles from the audience. She explained that the composer is busily writing in other forms, e.g., an opera, but we got the hint that this might not be terribly well-suited for the organ. Actually, I thought it worked quite well. For one thing, it was nice to hear some slow, quiet music (much of the program was fast and loud), and the voices were often major sevenths apart as they ambled around. The middle section was a little rough: big, crunchy chords, the sort where you can't tell whether the performer is playing the right notes at all. But it ended in the style with which it began. A success.

The Liszt transcription was the last piece on the program, but happily for us, Apkalna played an encore, a transcription, also by Jean Gillou, of Prokofiev's Toccata in D Minor, Op. 11. Now this transcription really worked, probably because the piece was originally written for piano. It's very fast, incredibly difficult, and when it reaches its grandest, craziest moments, Apkalna's hands and feet were flying everywhere. When it ended, a breathtaking 4 minutes later, the crowd roared, but she just smiled and bowed. No big deal. Right.

I enjoy hearing music for the first time, and I'll probably never get to Latvia, so this was a perfect concert for me. Apkalna said several times that she hoped that the young composers would be invited to play in San Francisco. I hope just hope we get to hear her again.

Jarrett's complaint turns into a fiasco

Keith Jarrett played a solo concert at Davies Hall tonight, or started to, anyway. He wrecked it by chastising the audience about coughing, with speeches that grew longer and longer. He abandoned two pieces in the first half, and spoke about our "inability to concentrate." Things went from bad to worse in the second half. Well into a lovely, quiet song, played with dazzling technique, a few more coughs caused him to stop the piece. He then stood at the microphone and complained more, lamenting "I flew my engineer from Switzerland to record this concert." After several minutes of this hectoring, someone in the audience yelled, "Just play!" That did it. Jarrett got angrier, the audience got angrier, at him and each other, and more yelling ensued. Some audience members tried to be realistic ("If you gotta cough, you gotta cough." "Yeah, what if you've got a cold?"), but others agreed that silence is golden ("If you've got a cold, stay home!"), while others got really rude ("Shut up and play!"). Finally, someone yelled out an expletive. In all my years of concert-going, I've never heard an audience member call the performer an a-hole before.

Pandemonium followed. Jarrett retorted that he couldn't play his music, or possibly any music. "What do you want me to play?" he asked, testily. The audience missed the sarcasm and started calling out names of songs and groups. ("The Cure!") Several people called out "Summertime." Finally, Jarrett sat down at the keyboard and started playing fast and loud. A minute later, the tune emerged: Summertime. There was a collective sigh from the audience, although it seemed clear to me that he was doing this in anger (You want "Summertime"? All right, I'll show you "Summertime"!) I was reminded of jazz joints in the French Quarter, where you pay to have the band play a tune, but you have to pay extra to get them to play "When the Saints Go Marching In," again.)

Things cooled off a bit after that, and Jarrett spun out the song nicely. At the end, he acknowledged that it might have been a good idea. ("I didn't think of that.") He played a third piece, and finished with a quick, fourth piece that echoed the opening number. Done. Short second half.

The audience was still of many minds. Some applauded loudly, while others sat silently, perhaps waiting for the house lights to come on so they could get the hell out of there. Jarrett returned and played an encore: Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It's a sweet, sad version; when he played it as an encore on the Tokyo recording, it sounded charming and intimate. I thought he might have chosen it as a nice gesture; not an apology, but maybe a way of calming tempers, mending hurt feelings. But when tonight's audience recognized the tune, they laughed. Have an audience and a performer ever been less in sync?

A second encore followed, and a third, both loud and jazzy. The fourth encore was a song-like piece. It may have been the most successful piece of the evening, either because the coughers had already left the hall (much of the audience was gone by then, some fleeing during the shouting match), or because Jarrett was in a better mood. A fifth and final encore, and then it was really, finally over.

I'm a true believer that silence is golden, and I don't understand why people cough loudly, why they don't muffle themselves with handkerchiefs. But in a group of 2,743 people (the concert was sold out), the odds are excellent that someone will cough. By going off the deep end about it, Jarrett made this the focus of the concert, sensitizing the audience to the point where, when someone inevitably coughed, we flinched.

So, enough about the fiasco of flaring tempers. What about the music?

The opening piece was pretty strange: flying fingers, much crossing of hands, no chords, no key. A flurry of notes, then silence. Hummingbird music. It seemed to be a warm-up piece, in both senses. It returned as the last piece on the program, by which time it at least was familiar.

The second piece was a long meditation on the natural minor scale ("no sharps"). The third piece was a stomping, 4/4 blues number, interesting until to the point where he landed back at the home chord and decided never to leave home again, which I found taxing. The stomping was real: Jarrett played standing or crouching, no pedal, and eventually stomping on every beat. He also started his characteristic "singing," which is somewhere between moaning and just wildly off-pitch vocalizing. I cannot be the only person struck by the irony of an anti-coughing zealot who obscures his own music by singing along, out of tune. I didn't like it with Glenn Gould or Emmanuel Ax, either.

The fourth piece, like the fourth encore, was a gorgeous song. I think this is Jarrett at his best. A beautiful line, later paired with a second, lower voice, surrounded by rich harmonies, completely tonal, giving our Western ears a comfortable sense of structure. There were two more pieces before intermission, each in a different texture; Jarrett's stylistic palette has many colors.

The second half opened with another quiet song, in B flat, I think. Shimmering with trills and repeated notes, exploring in new and interesting directions, this seemed likely to be a contender for the best piece of the night, only to be cut short, any happy feelings immediately overwhelmed in the fight that followed.

I saw Jarrett play here in 1994. His program then seemed more improvisatory than this one (which comes on the heels of performances in Chicago and Los Angeles), but I thought the muse was not with him that evening. He seemed to struggle, and eventually settled down into some nice, comfortable, straightforward jazz, which no one plays better. I remember that he had his issues with coughing back then, too, ridiculing someone who coughed by mimicking them with chords to match their coughs. After a six-year hiatus, my hopes were high for this evening.

Jarrett is still a brilliant musician and pianist. Live performances, however, may no longer be the right thing for him. Perhaps he finds inspiration before an audience that he doesn't find in a recording studio. It's risky, and tonight we saw it go south.

San Francisco Symphony. March 5, 2010

They were 1 for 4 tonight. Three mediocre pieces and one winner. All four were played well, of course. The concert opened with the world premiere of Post-scriptum by Victor Kissine. Wet ink: the piece is dated 2010. I applauded the composer when he came out to take a bow, but only because I think all composers should be applauded, at least the ones that get this far. I didn’t enjoy the piece, however. It sounded like movie music, but there are far better composers in Hollywood. I recently heard Jim Svejda interview Hans Zimmer, who wrote the score for Sherlock Holmes. Banjo versus orchestra. I’d much rather have heard 15 minutes of that. The Kissine piece had all sorts of musical effects, and there was nothing offensive about it. It cites The Unanswered Question, by Charles Ives, building up strange chords from always-strange Ives. But even that sounded ... familiar. I told Chris it sounded like movie music. "Yes," he replied, "from a horror movie." Exactly.

Then Christian Tetzlaff came out and played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, every note of which is well-known to audiences, except the whole middle movement, which is quiet, lovely, and deserves to be remembered. What I liked most was that Tetzlaff, who’s 44, has played this piece for a long time, so what came out was the music, not just all those terrifying notes. How many times have we seen teenage prodigies tackle this piece and wow the crowd with technique? That’s fun, too, but this was better. Risk the notes for the song.

Musical imprinting story: I’m sure I heard this piece when I was in high school, but the first performance I remember was when I was in college or grad school, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg played this piece with the New Haven Symphony. She was the new star on the musical scene. She strode out onto the stage in Woolsey Hall, wearing a gold dress with "big shoes." (Platform heels? I don’t know from shoes.) All nervous energy. A tigress. She held her violin by the neck and paced back and forth waiting for her entrance, which is several bars into the piece. I thought she was going to whack the conductor with her violin if he didn’t speed it up. The audience was all tittering at the costume, the pacing, and those shoes! Who was this person? And then she put bow to string ... and the tittering stopped. OMG, she can Really Play. The first movement has a big-bang ending, and the crowd went wild. Me, too. I totally forgot that it was just the first movement.

Back to tonight. After the intermission we heard Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, which didn’t grab me. I kept wishing for La Valse. The program finished with Liszt’s Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo. Wow. I didn’t know Liszt could write such bad music. There were some big-brass chords straight out of Les Preludes, note for note, I’ll bet. But the piece wanders through a jungle of diminished-seventh chords and so-called Tristan chords, made famous by his son-in-law Richard Wagner. When it finally lands somewhere, there was so much percussion that it drowned out the chord. Indeed, the cymbal crashes come early and often. There’s a big tune in the middle, repeated at the end (presumably the trionfo), and I was shocked at the clumsy harmonic progressions. Was he breaking new ground, or just breaking first-year music-theory rules that are there for a reason? Whatever he was trying, it didn’t catch on.

Michael Tilson Thomas conducted both of these last two pieces a year ago. I guess he liked them well enough to bring them out again. Or perhaps he just wanted an easier week: one wet-ink piece to work on, one warhorse to review, and two B-list pieces from recent memory. I expect never to hear the Kissine piece again. I hope never to hear the Ravel or Liszt again. (OK, the Ravel, on the radio, while working.)

Our usual group of 6 had dinner at Absinthe beforehand. I love the roasted beets appetizer. I’m sorry to see Citizen Cake go. I hope some equally worthy restaurant opens in its place, if only to have an alternative to Absinthe (often noisy and crowded) and Jardiniere ($$$). Actually, my friends would get bored, but I’d be happy to have all my pre-Symphony dinners in the Wattis Room.