Mahani Teave, shown here at a Harriman-Jewell Series recital, will appear at Benaroya Hall Oct. 14 with the Seattle Symphony. (Courtesy of the Harriman-Jewell Series)
I’ve been fascinated — and moved — by Mahani Teave’s story since first writing about her two years ago (link to my New York Times story here). The pianist from Rapa Nui is now in the middle of her inaugural North American tour and comes to Seattle this weekend.
Unlike the rest of her tour, which has been focused on solo recitals, this stop involves a piano concerto and marks Teave’s debut with the Seattle Symphony. She will perform Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto, K. 466, with SSO assistant conductor Sunny Xia on the podium, on 14 October at 7.30pm at Benaroya Hall. Teave will also play two new solo works inspired by Rapa Nui musical tradition. The other orchestral pieces include Aaron Jay Kernis’s Elegy and Juhi Bansal’s Songs from the Deep.
A rare opportunity to hear John Adams’s mammoth symphonic canvas on this weekend’s San Francisco Symphony program. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the world premiere in 1999, conducts. My program note here.
The program also includes the world premiere of Jesper Nordin’s Convergence, with violinist Pekka Kuusisto as the soloist.
Pacific MusicWorks opens the season this weekend with A Concert with the Countess: The Baroque Meets Drag. With music inspired by Shakespeare and Pepys, bass-baritone Taylor Ward channels his actual direct ancestor, Nicholas Lanier, in drag. Also featured are the extraordinary young dancer Tschedzom Tsingkhye and the Pacific MusicWorks ensemble.
Featuring PMW favorites, Danielle Reutter-Harrah, Stephen Stubbs, Tekla Cunningham, Henry Lebedinsky, and Maxine Eilander, and introducing John Taylor Ward and Paul Dudley, the Gala will take place at The Ruins at 570 Roy St, Seattle, WA 98109.
This birthday week for Steve Reich also brings his latest world premiere. I had the honor of writing the program note for Jacob’s Ladder. The New York Philharmonic and Synergy Vocals will perform the new work at this week’s concerts, which also include Leif Ove Andsnes in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. (Notes can be accessed via link next to program listing here.)
Congratulations to Stephanie Childress, Musical America’s New Artist of the Month for October 2023. My profile of this remarkable conductor has now been posted on Musical America’s website here.
The good fairies generously allotted the skills required to succeed as a conductor to Stephanie Childress. Or so it occurred to me while recently seeing this 24-year-old phenomenon in action leading a spirited, remarkably poised account of excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, beginning with “La Fée des lilas.” …
Sound Salon, formerly known as Byron Schenkman & Friends, launches a new season — and a new decade — Sunday evening with a program titled Baroque Meets Karuk. One of my fall picks for The Seattle Times, the concert begins at 7pm on 1 October at Benaroya Hall.
The chamber series has rebranded itself but remains committed to engaging and thought-provoking programs that encourage re-examining assumptions and, even more, making welcome discoveries.
This opening program, for example, will juxtapose pieces by 17th-century European composers with music from the Karuk tradition of the North American Pacific Coast, exploring connections between Spain, Italy, Austria, and the colonization of Turtle Island (now known as the North American continent).
Notes on the Program
By Byron Schenkman
We open our season with festive music from 17th-century Europe and from the Karuk tradition of what is currently known as northern California. Baroque composers of the 17th century learned from the music of diverse nations and cultures, whether by traveling themselves or by exposure to travelers.
Johann Heinrich Schmelzer likely studied in Italy before settling in Vienna where he was employed for many years as a violinist at the Habsburg court. The Spanish bassoonist Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde was employed in Innsbruck and published music in Venice. Andrea Falconieri led the music at the Spanish court in Naples. The violinist Biagio Marini was born in Brescia and died in Venice, but also worked in Brussels and in various German and Italian cities.
Salamone Rossi was a Jewish violinist employed as concertmaster at the court in Mantua. He published many volumes of secular Italian vocal and instrumental music including the first trio-sonatas for two violins and continuo, a genre which would become standard for composers all over Europe for about 150 years. He also published a rare collection of Jewish polyphonic sacred music, starting a potential tradition which was wiped out by the destruction of the Jewish ghetto in 1630.
Like many of the women who published music in 17th-century Italy, Claudia Rusca and Isabella Leonarda were both nuns. Rusca published just one volume of sacred vocal music which also contains two short instrumental works. Leonarda was an exceptionally prolific composer who published hundreds of works including twelve instrumental sonatas.
Henry Purcell never left his native England yet his music was influenced by various international styles. Purcell’s royal employer Charles II spent his years of exile in France and much of Purcell’s theater music, including the Chaconne from “King Arthur,” is closely modeled on French music of the time. The French chaconne had its origins in an indigenous dance brought to Spain from what is now South America.
Duwamish Land Acknowledgement
Sound Salon would like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People past and present, and honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe which has stewarded the land throughout the generations.
Ludovic Morlot conducts the SSO and soprano Alexandra LoBianco in excerpts from Götterdämmerung; photo (c)Brandon Patoc
My Bachtrack review of opening night at Seattle Symphony, which paired pieces played on the orchestra’s first-ever concert in 1903 and at their concert inaugurating Benaroya Hall 25 years ago. The fact that about two-thirds of the seats remained empty didn’t dampen the musicians’s spirits, but what a pity that so many missed out on a substantial, gloriously played program — not the lineup of frothy showpieces that orchestras so often put together for their season curtain raiser.
Review:
Though it ended with the downfall of a whole civilization, the Seattle Symphony’s opening-night concert radiated the excitement of a brand new season just getting under way, with all its attendant fresh hopes.
As part of its ongoing centennial tribute to Maria Callas, The Greek National Opera presentsCallas at the Herodiumon Saturday, 16 September, which marks the anniversary of Maria Callas’s passing. The gala features the repertoire the legendary soprano performed at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in 1944 and 1957. Anna Pirozzi, Catherine Foster, Vassiliki Karayanni, and Nina Minasyan pay tribute to Callas’s remarkable talent and leave their own mark on the iconic venue with this special tribute, led by conductor Philippe Auguin. The program features arias from composers Kalomiris, Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi, Donizetti, and Thomas and celebrates the legacy of Maria Callas at the historic venue that she helped make famous.
Maria Callas’s legacy in Greece is deeply rooted in her performances at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. In 1944, before she left Athens for New York, she sang the role of Smaragda in The Masterbuilder by Manolis Kalomiris, and Leonora in Beethoven’s Fidelio, both under the baton of acclaimed conductors and directors. Thirteen years later, in 1957, she returned to the same venue to give a legendary recital as part of the Athens Festival, showcasing her vocal range and virtuosity in arias from such operas as Tristan und Isolde, La forza del destino, Il Trovatore, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Hamlet.
Opera gala
Callas at the Herodium
September 16, 2023
Odeon of Herodes Atticus
Starts at: 8:30 pm
Conductor: Philippe Auguin
Soloists: Anna Pirozzi, Catherine Foster, Vassiliki Karayanni, Nina Minasyan
With the Orchestra of the Greek National Opera
GALA PROGRAM
Manolis Kalomiris, The Masterbuilder
— Overture
— “The sun, the sun”
Smaragda’s aria from Part II – Vassiliki Karayanni
Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio
— Overture
— “Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin? … Komm, Hoffnung” / “Monster! Where are you hurrying? … Come, hope”
Leonore’s recitative and aria from Act I – Catherine Foster
Ambroise Thomas, Hamlet
— “À vos jeux, mes amis” / “To your games, my friends”
Ophélie’s “mad scene” from Act IV – Nina Minasyan
Giuseppe Verdi, La forza del destino
— Overture
— “Pace, pace, mio Dio” / “Peace, peace, my God”
Leonora’s aria from Act IV – Anna Pirozzi
Gaetano Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor
— “Regnava nel silenzio” / “Reigning in the silence”
Lucia’s aria from Act I – Vassiliki Karayanni
Giuseppe Verdi, Il trovatore
— “D’amor sull’ali rosee” / “On the rosy wings of love”
Leonora’s aria from Part IV – Anna Pirozzi
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde
— Prelude and Isolde’s “Liebestod” – Catherine Foster
The 2023 edition of the BBC Proms offered 84 concerts — 72 at the Royal Albert Hall and 6 across the UK — over eight weeks, concluding with the Last Night event on 6 September.
All of these performances are now available online on BBC Sounds until 8 October. The BBC Promenade Festival each summer is justifiably recognized as one of the world’s finest concert festivals, and the 2023 program was probably the most astounding in recent years.
All of the concerts are worth experiencing, but there are some which, in my view, should have special priority. Of course, the opening and closing nights are imbued with special drama and communal music, as the audience becomes involved with the performers, sometimes joining in to sing.
Two other concerts also included some singing from the audience in addition to applause. One was a Sunday program given twice, in the morning and afternoon of 22 July, by the English National Opera. It was designed as an introduction to opera for the many children brought to the concert hall by their families, and also to amuse them. Actors played the roles of Mozart and Verdi, for example, explaining their achievements, while soloists, chorus, and orchestra performed parts of some of their operas. The program’s title was Horrible Histories: Orrible Opera, and it brilliantly exemplified opera’s capacity to convey social and political conflicts that complicate personal love relationships. A closing event presented a musical listing of British Monarchs over the last 1,000 years, in which all audience members were encouraged to join their voices, presumably to convince the attending children of the value of knowing British monarchical history following this year’s coronation, though it seemed that almost as many of us adults as the children couldn’t fully remember the long list.
Another was the outstanding concert, from memory, by all players in the Aurora Orchestra, who are widely admired for performing classical music without instrumental stands or parts. The work was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, performed twice, on the afternoon and the evening of 2 September. The concert’s opening half presented an illustrative introduction to the work led by an actor representing the composer, with key examples of the music played by the orchestra. For a couple of moments of interesting harmony and rhythm, we in the audience were asked to join in: quite a lot us tried, but probably thousands of times less convincingly than the brilliant Aurora experts.
Amongst the other concerts to look for online, I would especially recommend a fine solo organ performance given on 26 August by the Canadian organist Isabelle Demers, who opened with her own powerful and effective organ arrangement of Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger. Also fascinating is a performance of Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri , a fine but rarely heard oratorio, by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. He also led the LSO on 27 August in a superb interpretation of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony prefaced by Figure humaine, a fascinating choral cantata by Francis Poulenc expressing solidarity with the Nazi-occupied French Resistance during the Second World War; it was sung by the admired BBC Singers.
Other recommendations include: a splendid performance on 29 July of Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus and soloists an English translation; William Walton’s powerful and dramatic Belshazzar’s Feast by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus on 4 August by, which was preceded by Yuja Wang’s magnificent rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the European premiere of Jimmy López Bellido’s Perú Negro, a vibrant homage to Afro-Peruvian music; a Budapest Festival Orchestra program on 12 August led by Iván Fischer, which included a wonderful account by Sir András Schiff of Schumann’s Piano Concerto as well as Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony; the same pianist on the following day in Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto, and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony; the Boston Symphony conducted by Andris Nelsons on 26 August, performing Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Gershwin’s Concerto in F; and, in an astounding and rare appearance in the concert hall, a performance of Berlioz’s complete opera Les Troyens by the Monteverdi Choir, a cast of brilliant soloists, and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique founded by Sir John Eliot Gardiner but, after he pulled out of the Proms, brilliantly conducted by his assistant Dinis Sousa, who filled in. Also rarely seen in opera houses because of its difficulty and expense, Berlioz’s hugely passionate and exciting stage epic is a tremendously powerful example of how opera uses social and political conflicts to complicate personal relationships — a point that had previously been made in the special concert of 22 July for children and family audiences. This account of Les Troyens in particular should not be missed.
Also worth mentioning is that, in most countries, some of the live Proms recordings appear on YouTube not only in audio but also in video, conveying the dramatic public enthusiasm expressed by the gigantic Proms audiences — as at the Last Night of the Proms.
Breana McCullough, violist and scholar of both 17th-century European and traditional Karuk performance practices, will be at Benaroya Hall for a Sound Salon performance Oct. 1. (John Williams)
Some recommendations for the fall season in Seattle region for the Seattle Times:
These are turbulent times for the performing arts. Even before the pandemic, there were challenges in attracting new audiences to the concert hall, and key local organizations are facing leadership changes. Yet the Puget Sound region remains home to some of the most imaginative and dedicated artists and presenters in the field. The offerings this fall are wonderfully varied: Here are six well worth your time:
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 