The Berlin Staatsoper just released a statement by long-term general director Daniel Barenboim announcing the end of his tenure there for reasons of health: “Unfortunately, my health has deteriorated significantly over the past year. I can no longer provide the performance that is rightly demanded of a general music director. Therefore, I ask for your understanding that I am giving up this position as of 31 January 2023.”
It’s the sad culmination of what has been a very difficult period for the maestro. Over the last few months, he had to cancel the many celebrations that had been organized around his 80th birthday in November.
This will be a sea-change for Berlin in particular, whose musical life the indefatigable Barenboim has dominated for decades.
Company’s first production of TheRing of the Nibelung (1935)
SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport have unveiled a new exhibition in connection with San Francisco Opera’s centennial titled San Francisco Opera: A Centennial Celebration. The curated installation in the Harvey Milk Terminal 1 (located post-security in Departures Level 2) showcases the Company’s first century and the art of operatic stagecraft.
The exhibition, on view through 13 August 13, 2023, captures San Francisco Opera’s rich history through a selection of costumes, stage props, set models, video and archival photographs from the collections of San Francisco Opera, the Museum of Performance + Design and the Metropolitan Opera Archives.
Costumes worn by operatic superstars who have graced San Francisco Opera’s stage during the past century are the focus of the presentation.
SFO Museum’s Curator of Exhibits Daniel Calderon said: “SFO Museum is delighted to feature the history of San Francisco Opera during the Company’s Centennial Season. San Francisco Opera is such an important cultural and artistic institution, and their story is both local and international. With their support, along with loans from the Museum of Performance + Design and the Metropolitan Opera Archives, SFO Museum has assembled a vibrant exhibition of costumes, photographs and artifacts that span almost a century of opera history. We know the exhibition will spur the interest of our traveling public and hope it will make new opera fans in the coming months.”
San Francisco Opera’s Director of Archives Barbara Rominski said: “Working with Daniel Calderon and the entire SFO Museum team has been rewarding on so many fronts, not least for the opportunity to share our archival collections with the airport’s enormous daily audience. Whether travelers have only a few seconds to spend with the exhibits or a long layover to really dive in, these remarkable garments and artifacts have a way of inspiring wonder at the creative possibility of this lively art form.”
Highlights include:
The cape and hat worn by famed Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette during San Francisco Opera’s inaugural 1923 season.
Legendary Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad’s Brünnhilde costume from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre in the 1935 Company premiere of the composer’s four-opera cycle, TheRing of the Nibelung.
The military outfit worn by French soprano Lily Pons in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment during the 1940s.
A dress from Massenet’s Manon worn by soprano and inaugural recipient of the Company’s Opera Medal, Dorothy Kirsten.
American soprano Leontyne Price’s costume from the 1981 production of Verdi’s Aida. An iconic interpreter of the title role, Price sang her first Aida with San Francisco Opera in 1957.
Additional costumes from productions of Tosca, Un Ballo in Maschera, Tannhäuser and Rigoletto reflect the work of designers Thierry Bosquet, John Conklin, Paul Brown and Constance Hoffman.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been channeling her passion for Richard Wagner into a podcast discussion on SWR2 in a three-episode series as part of Sprechen wir über Mord!? Merkel’s podcasts explore criminal contexts and motives in the Ring cycle. The podcasts are in German.
Angela Merkel: “The ring is so universally applicable to humanity that from family life to political life, you can always find things that just keep happening to us humans.”
Angela Merkel: “To claim that anyone is completely free of vanity, well, I wouldn’t say that for me either. Vanity is something that is quite inherent in people, but it also has to be restrained.”
UPDATE: Due to freezing rain and icy streets, The Saddest of All Keys with Richard Lefebvre & Rachel Kessler will be postponed to 14 January 2023.
Marimbist Erin Jorgensen joins forces with poet/Renaissance woman Rachel Kessler and ubiquitous front man Richard Lefebvre for a one-night-only-anti-holiday-holiday show. Expect dreamy visions, tales of kicking drugs, musings on seasonal depression and spiders, JS Bach, and amplified and acoustic marimba – all in the key of D Minor, of course.
Two shows on Friday 23 December at 6 and 9pm at Odd Sea | 1539 NW Leary Way. The venue is a new performance space made from a former auto-body shop in Ballard. Run time is approximately 50 minutes. Tickets here.
Seattle Pro Musica presents its holiday program on 17 December at 3pm at First Baptist Church in Seattle. Titled Behold the Star, the program offers holiday favorites as well as the world premiere of Shruthi Rajasekar‘s newly commissioned I am my own, set to texts by the three Brontë sisters (Emily, Charlotte, and Anne). Winter and holiday-themed works by Herbert Howells, Francis Poulenc, and Guillaume Dufay share the program.
Behold the Star is the third in Seattle Pro Musica’s New American Composer Series. The five-concert series celebrates Seattle Pro Musica’s 50th Anniversary,with commissions and Seattle residencies by five BIPOC composers from across the country.
This performance will also be available by livestream in real time and on demand following the performance (simply register in advance here).
This is a holiday treat I’m especially looking forward to: the upcoming “teaser” for choreographer extraordinaire Donald Byrd‘s The Harlem Nutcracker at Spectrum Dance Theater.
Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s Nutcracker Suite is the musical inspiration for this work-in-progress. “The original story centers around an African-American family in Harlem on Christmas Eve,” according to Spectrum’s description. “It highlights the unique warmth and centrality of the grandmother in African-American culture, the resilience of Black American families and Harlem as a center of the African Diaspora.”
This year’s performance is being billed as a “teaser” to the complete production, tentatively scheduled to premiere in a little over a year. It includes the whole show except for the final 20 minutes — which will be unveiled as a surprise at the full premiere.
Dates: DEC 8-11 + 15-18, 2022 at On the Boards, 100 W Roy Street, Seattle, WA 98119. Tickets here.
As a gesture of solidarity and to support humanitarian aid to Ukraine, the Grammy-winning, Ukrainian-American pianist Nadia Shpachenko has released the album Invasion: Music and Art for Ukraine. The title work, composed for for piano, alto saxophone, horn, trombone, timpani, snare drum, and mandolin, represents the response to the war of her longtime collaborator and Pulitzer Prize winner Lewis Spratlan.
Invasion was composed for Shpachenko at the beginning of the invasion (the period 24 February–13 March 2022). The rest of the album features world premiere recordings of other works by Spratlan for solo piano. “These pieces reflect on the human experience, often finding solace and inspiration in nature and music of the past,” notes the press release from Reference Recordings. “Wonderer, a major piece that closes the album, connects in its character to the current experience of many Ukrainian people, especially those displaced by the war. The hero, searching through the unknown, overcoming pain, and reminiscing about things past, triumphs at the end.”
100% of the proceeds go to benefit Ukrainian people affected by war.
To celebrate the art ofMeredith Monk — who turns 80 today — Flotation Device is presenting a two-hour career retrospective from her experimental origins (w/Collin Walcott & Don Preston) through her recordings for ECM to the large-ensemble works she has written in recent years. Sunday 10pm to midnight PST, @KBCS 91.3fm https://kbcs.fm.
The incredible João Carlos Martins — a genuine cultural hero — celebrates the 60th anniversary of his debut at Carnegie Hall this evening at 7pm ET. He will lead NOVUS NY in a program combining Bach with music by the Brazilian composers Heitor Villa-Lobos and André Mehmari.
One of the great Bach interpreters at the keyboard, Martins shifted to conducting when it became no longer possible to continue his career as a concert pianist as a result of injuries and the condition of focal dystonia (which also affected the late Leon Fleisher). You can read in much greater detail here about the musician’s epic struggles and the love of music that has kept him going.
I had the honor of writing the program notes for his Carnegie Hall concert, which will present the following program:
J.S. Bach: Brandenburg Concertos 1 and 3 “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” from the Cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben BWV 147 (arranged by Heitor Fujinami)
HeitorVilla-Lobos Prelúdio from Bachianas BrasileirasNo. 4 W264 – 424
Lucerne Festival’s three-day fall edition devoted to contemporary music starts today. The opening program of Forward takes place at the Swiss Museum of Transport planetarium and is centered around the Swiss premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Enigma for string quartet, featuring with 360-degree video by Sigurður Guðjónsson.
Telescope meets microscope: let’s shake up the relationship between outside and inside, between macrocosm and microcosm! Under the massive planetarium dome at the Swiss Museum of Transport, you will zoom into the infinite expanses of the universe, accompanied by improvisations. Sigurður Guðjónsson’s immersive 360-degree video Enigma also makes visible what is normally hidden from the human eye: with the help of an electron microscope, Guðjónsson scans the surface of a carbon fragment – suggestive images reminiscent of Martian landscapes. In tandem with the sounds of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, which oscillate subtly between flow and fragmentation, they combine to form a hypnotizing Gesamtkunstwerk.
MEMETERIA 