Seattle Symphony launches its 2022-23 season tonight with a world premiere by local composer Angelique Poteat, some scintillating Chopin, and a Francocentric smorgasbord of delights led by conductor emeritus Ludovic Morlot.
The lineup includes Saint-Saëns’s La muse et le poète for solo violin and cello and orchestra and the 2nd Suite from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, as well as Poteat’s Breathe, Come Together, Embrace and Chopin’s Andante spianato and Grand polonaise brillante, with Jan Lisiecki as the piano soloist. Lisiecki returns later next week for the first subscription concert to play Grieg’s Piano Concerto. Also led by Morlot, the program (Thurs-Sat, 22-24 September) also includes a new piece by a young American composer — Gabriela Smith’s Tidalwave Kitchen — and Tchaikovsky’s devastating final symphony, the Pathétique.
The performances can also be accessed from home via streaming.
Giancarlo Guerrero conducts the Nashville Symphony this week in a program devoted entirely to American women composers, including the world premiere of a major new choral-orchestral commission from Julia Wolfe titled Her Story. My program notes for the concert are available here (link on lower right).
Last Friday, at a ceremony conducted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative announced the artists who will take part in the 2023-24 cycle of the initiative. Dianne Reeves will become the next mentor in the music division. She has chosen the South Korean singer and composer Song Yi Jeon as her protégée.
The other mentors will include Anne Lacaton (Architecture), Jia Zhang-Ke (Film), Bernardine Evaristo (Literature), and El Anatsui (Visual Arts), each of whom will also serve as mentor to an outstanding emerging artist. Their protégé[e]s are, respectively, Lebanese-Armenian architect, designer and researcher Arine Aprahamian; Filipino filmmaker Rafael Manuel; Senegal-based Ghanaian author Ayesha Harruna Attah; and Capetown, South Africa-based visual artist Bronwyn Katz, whose practice embraces sculpture, installation, video, and performance.
The five-time Grammy winner Dianne Reeves is considered the pre-eminent jazz vocalist in the world. She is recognized for her breathtaking virtuosity, improvisational prowess, and unique jazz and R&B stylings. Her most recent album, 2014’s Beautiful Life, received the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. She became the first Creative Chair for Jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and, in 2018, was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts: the highest honor the U.S. bestows on jazz artists.
Song Yi Jeon is a modern jazz singer and composer from South Korea. She is especially known for her hypnotic voice, which has been likened to a malleable wordless instrument. Jeon studied classical composition at the University of Music and Fine Art in Graz, Austria, and jazz vocals at the Academy of Music in Basel, Switzerland, and Boston’s Berklee College of Music. At Berklee, she was the inaugural Quincy Jones CJ&E fellow and was also awarded the Billboard Endowed Award. Song Yi Jeon released her first album,Movement of Lives, in 2018.
Since 2002, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative has been connecting extraordinary young artists with acclaimed mentors in different artistic disciplines. The mentors personally select the protégé(e)s with whom they wish to collaborate through an international search.
The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative was established “to aid in the transmission of artistic knowledge and craft from one generation to the next,” according to the renowned watch designer and manufacturer based in Geneva, and “exemplifies Rolex’s pursuit of excellence, symbolized by the word ‘perpetual’” — which is inscribed on every Rolex Oyster watch.
The list of mentors who have taken part in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative to date includes the following: Sir David Adjaye, Margaret Atwood, (the late) John Baldessari, Tahar Ben Jelloun, (the late) Trisha Brown, (the late) Patrice Chéreau, Sir David Chipperfield, Mia Couto, Alfonso Cuarón, (the late) Sir Colin Davis, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Olafur Eliasson, Brian Eno, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, William Forsythe, Stephen Frears, Gilberto Gil, Philip Glass, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, (the late) Sir Peter Hall, David Hockney, Rebecca Horn, Zakir Hussain, Joan Jonas, Sir Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Jiří Kylián, Robert Lepage, Lin Hwai-min, Phyllida Lloyd, Spike Lee, Lin-Manuel Miranda, (the late) Toni Morrison, Walter Murch, Ohad Naharin, Mira Nair, Youssou N’Dour, (the late) Jessye Norman, Michael Ondaatje, Crystal Pite, Alexei Ratmansky, Kaija Saariaho, Martin Scorsese, Kazuyo Sejima, Peter Sellars, Álvaro Siza, Wole Soyinka, Julie Taymor, Saburo Teshigawara, Jennifer Tipton, Colm Tóibín, Kate Valk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carrie Mae Weems, Robert Wilson, Zhang Yimou, Pinchas Zukerman, and Peter Zumthor.
Now that San Francisco Opera has officially launched it 100th-anniversary season — with John Adams’s new opera Antony and Cleopatra, which I’ll be covering soon — the company is also celebrating its remarkable history with a curated series of selected historical recordings. Called Streaming the First Century, this new online hub provides free access to selected historic recordings from the SFO’s past century, along with rare artist interviews, archival photographs, program articles, oral history excerpts, and newly captured conversations among past and present San Francisco Opera creative luminaries.
Streaming the First Century sessions are being released for each month from September through December. Each session includes two complete historic recordings, audio excerpts from four additional performances, and introductions to each preserved audio experience by contemporary scholars, artists, and SFO members to add historical context and insights. The selection have been drawn from performances unique to San Francisco Opera and are not available on commercial recordings.
The themes of the 2022–23 season have been used to guide the selections. Session 1: Slavic Sensibilities pays homage to Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, which returns to the stage later this month (25 September–14 October), by offering an in-depth exploration of the works of Czech and Russian composers through landmark San Francisco Opera performances.
The complete recordings for Session 1: Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa, from a 1980 broadcast starring Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderströmand Sena Jurinac as the stepmother (San Francisco Opera’s first production of a Czech opera in the original language ); and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, from a 1981 broadcast starring Anja Silja as Katerina Ismailova.
Coming up on 10 October is Session 2: Parlez-vous français? — which will have a French focus, in tandem with the upcoming production of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites.
Deeply saddened to learn that Lars Vogt has died. The wonderful, deeply humane pianist and conductor had been battling cancer over the past few years — a situation he movingly described in this 2021 interview: “In the last several years, I often had the feeling that time was passing insanely fast. It was so easy to imagine a ‘whoosh,’ and suddenly I’m 80, and the day is done. It’s something that I think a lot of us experience, an accelerando where time keeps flying by more quickly. Before the illness, I was often depressed, even if it was just for a day or two. I’d stay in bed and think: ‘Oh God, I’m so old.’ Funnily, because of the illness that’s completely disappeared. I’m rarely so defeated. More often I’m utterly happy.”
In his most recently released recording, which came out in March, Vogt combined his personalities as pianist and conductor to give sensitive accounts, together with his Orchestre chambre de Paris, of the Mendelssohn piano concertos. Here the artist shares his insights on Mendelssohn, whose music he likens to “fresh, clean water — completely refreshing in every way”:
Tonight brings the finale concert of this summer’s Music on the Strait Festival. It features the world premiere of Paul Chihara‘s, Duo for Violin and Viola, which was commissioned by Music on the Strait. The concert begins at 7pm PST, with a pre-concert interview with the composer by Lisa Bergman starting at 6.15.
Long based in New York City, Chihara was born in Seattle in 1938 and spent three formative childhood years in the notorious internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, where his family was among the 120,000 Japanese Americans forcibly “relocated” at ten camps throughout the US during the Second World War.
Regarding that experience, Chihara remarked in a recent interview with Diane Urbani de la Paz: “I don’t know how my parents emotionally survived this … we could have come back and found nothing.”
A professor of music at New York University, Chihara has composed a vast body of work, ranging from symphonies, concertos, ballets, and choral music to chamber pieces; he has also written scores for more than 90 films and TV series (Prince of the City, The Morning After, Crossing Delancey, China Beach, and Noble House, among many others).
Music on the Strait’s Artistic Directors Richard O’Neill and James Garlick will give the inaugural performance of the new duo Chihara wrote especially for them. The composer explained to de la Paz that the new duo is a “fantasy” on a song he had written 40 years ago for his violinist wife, “Born to Be Together.” Also on the program is Felix Mendelssohn’s D minor Piano Trio and Edward Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A minor.
Although it is sold out, the concert will be live-streamed at the link above.
Musicians:
Kyu-Young Kim, violin James Garlick, violin Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, cello Richard O’Neill, viola George Li, piano
Paul Chihara Duo for Violin and Viola WORLD PREMIERE (2022)
Felix Mendelssohn Piano Trio No 1 in D minor, Op 49 (1839)
INTERMISSION
Edward Elgar Piano Quartet in A minor, Op 84 (1918)
Music on the Strait 2022 Opening Night: Demarre McGill and Jeremy Denk play Beach and Franck
The 2022 Music on the Strait season began on Friday (see above) with a spotlight on the extraordinary flutist Demarre McGill, who was featured in works by Debussy and Amy Beach in the opening night program. Joining McGill were violinists Elisa Barston and James Garlick (Music on the Strait’s co-artistic director) violist David Auerbach, cellist Efe Baltacıgil, and pianist Jeremy Denk (2022 special guest artist), who will perform César Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor.
The festival takes place on Washington’s beautiful Olympic Peninsula over two weekends, from 26 August to 3 September:
August 26: Opening Night with virtuoso flautist Demarre McGill
August 27: Efe Baltacıgil and Jeremy Denk play Beethoven
August 28: Every Good Boy Does Fine: Jeremy Denk in Recital and Conversation
September 2: Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet
September 3: Festival Finale: A World Premiere by Paul Chihara
ROSTER OF 2022 ARTISTS:
VIOLIN: Elisa Barston, Kyu-Young Kim, James Garlick
Tippet Rise Art Center launches its 2022 season on Friday. For five weeks, from26 August to 25 September, the rural Montana-based festival will present 50 works in some 15 concerts, including three world premieres. Friday evening’s concert at the Olivier Music Barn unveils the first of these new works: a new composition for solo cello by Reena Esmail, which the Canadian cellist Arlen Hlusko will premiere. The program also features violinist Jennifer Frautschi and pianist Zoltán Fejérvári in Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 22 in A major, K. 305, and all three musicians in Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 2 in F Major, Op. 80.
Following several days of showcasing the young generation with performances by various youth orchestras, Lucerne Festival’s summer of music for 2022 officially launches tomorrow, 12 August. Riccardo Chailly will conduct the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in a program of music by Wolfgang Rihm, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Rachmaninoff, with Anne-Sophie Mutter as the soloist in Saint-Georges’ Violin Concerto in A major, Op. 5, no. 2.
This summer’s theme is “Diversity.” The Festival describes the program as follows:
“For a long stretch, until the post-war decades, time seemed to stand still in the classical music scene. Orchestras were a male domain — women could only be found playing the harp or in the ranks of the violins. People of color were almost non-existent, and Asian women had to fight for their place on the stage. Of course, the leadership was also in male hands: the conductor was to be addressed as “maestro” or, in German orchestras, as “Meister” or “Herr Professor.” The repertoire, in turn, was limited to the Eurocentric canon of works, including the Viennese classics, the German-Austrian Romantics, plus Italian opera and a few coloristic touches from the fringes of Europe. This monoculture even persisted with respect to the audience, since access was found primarily among educated bourgeois circles who had enough income for musical pursuits.
A great deal has of course changed since then, yet a lot still remains to be done. Through this summer’s theme of “Diversity,” we want to make a plea for genuine diversity in classical music. That is why we have invited artists from demographic groups that were previously underrepresented in the scene. A number of women have made their mark on the program, and many works that are inherently diverse or have never been heard here before will be performed. And with affordable offers like the “Overture” presented by international youth orchestras, we hope to prove that enjoying classical music is not a question of money. Because music is for everyone.”
The news that 29-year-old Jonathon Heyward has been named Baltimore Symphony’s new music director is most welcome. His tenure will start at the beginning of the 2023-24 season and is for an initial five-year term.
I noted last year that this is an artist who would go far. When I reviewed his Seattle Symphony debut in June 2019, I wrote that “the chemistry between them produced such subtle and winning results that it defies belief they haven’t been regular collaborators for years.”
The only downside is that this development puts him out of the running for Seattle Symphony as it embarks on its search for a new music director.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 