Month: February 2009

Sound Magazine ran one of my posts from January where I observed the comparisons between the San Francisco Symphony and the Seattle Symphony.  The conclusion I made in that post was the SSO is sitting a similar place as the SFS was when they hired Michael TilsonThomas.  Who is chosen to replace Schwarz is vital to the growth of the orchestra and the musical health of Seattle.

Officially, there is no search committee.  Crosscut reported a few days ago the orchestra will announce its search plans next month.  Still, the search process is coming together painfully slow.  Schwarz steps down after the 2010/2011 season.  When he announced he would not seek a contract extension last September, next season was being finalized.  Next season will be interesting for what it’s not – a season built around finding Schwarz’s replacement.  This leaves one season to air out the podium skills of anyone else who is interested in becoming music director.

Henry Fogel, CSO alum and orchestra Yoda, allegedly said the opening in Seattle is the most exciting opportunity in the United States right now.  Really?  Philadelphia is looking for a new conductor.  I would say that is at least marginally more interesting.  But Seattle is an exciting opportunity because of where we are.  The Northwest has been a musical playground for many years.  The right music director can help connect Seattle’s orchestra to the rest of musical life in the city.  If Seattle is as exciting as reported, then all the more reason for the board to get moving.  If the board goes too slow we could very well have to settle and that wouldn’t be good for the orchestra or music.

Being too deliberate might also mean a long period without leadership at the top.  The Chicago Symphony got away with this because they had Pierre Boulez and Bernard Haitink.  If Seattle does it, I fear it will just mean a few more years of Schwarz leading the orchestra, but not in an official capacity as music director.

Next season has a number of fine guest conductors, but I would be satisfied by only a few of them.  This season’s guest conductor list is better, and I hope people like David Robertson, JoAnn Falletta, and others are seriously considered.  Also, where is Stephane Deneve?  He would be a wonderful choice for Seattle.  Young, vibrant, engaging, French.  He is also being bandied about as a possibility to lead the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Not only do I hope the SSO board gets moving to find a new music director, I also hope they open the process up and involve the community in the search.  Why not have college students, musicians, arts critics (are there any left?), bloggers (I would gladly serve), and average Seattleites involved in the search?  I probably love the Seattle Symphony more than the folks who snooze through concerts.  The Seattle Symphony doesn’t have to carry an air of exclusivity.  And, from a marketing perspective, it might make more sense to push the process now, before a successor is chosen, as a way to build interest in the candidates and ultimate choice.  Seattle is a process heavy city anyway, and opening up the selection process can only be good for the health of the orchestra.

In any case, time is wasting.  The Seattle Symphony board may want to get the process right, but getting it right also means actually finding a conductor who can help the orchestra grow, enrich the musical life of Seattle, and be an ambassador for the orchestra and serious music.

Last year’s Theater of Needless Talents, a dance production set to the music of Erwin Schulhoff, is on tour.  James Garlick a friend of the Gathering Note and violinist will be blogging from the road.  You can find his dispatches from the midwest and elsewhere here under Road Report. Thanks James!

Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, plays Town Hall on February 28th.  You like sackbuts, shawms, and krumhorns then Piffaro is for you.  The LA Guitar Quartet comes to town on Tuesday, March 3rd, and will play with the Seattle Symphony.  March 7th is the date the Puget Sound Symphony plays their winter concert.  Alan Shen and his volunteer band will bite off Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony and Grieg’s Piano Concerto.  The Seattle Philharmonic plays their “America Sings” concert on March 8th.  Adam Stern has programmed an interesting alignment of familiar composers and new names.  Gershwin and Copland frame pieces by Peaslee and Levant.  The Cascade Symphony delves into Verdi’s operatic Requiem March 9th.

The faux, brick frame used to set off Robert LePage’s production of Bela Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Arnold Schoenberg’s Ewartung did more than house a stage within a stage.  Profoundly, the arrangement literally and figuratively created a window into the human condition.  Seattle Opera’s success with these two difficult, 20th Century operas, depends on the visceral impact the sets had with me and likely will have with others.  But, it also depends on strong singing from the cast of three and adroit playing by the orchestra, both of which were achieved.

Bluebeard’s Castle

and Ewartung are separated by a few years in time but are stylistically different.  Bartok relies on his love of Hungarian folk music and Schoenberg his zeal to change the musical paradigm of the 20th Century.  Both operas, however, provide a glimpse into the minds of two composers essential to the classical music of the time.  Seemingly, they both preconceive the tortured, loneliness that would consume people, countries, continents, and the muse of the world’s artists as the result of economic collapse and two world wars.  Bluebeard seems to analyze the loneliness of the individual, while Ewartung examines the tug of war between conscious and unconscious.  Schoenberg spends twenty-five minutes in the company of the madness of the Woman’s stream of conscious externalized internal meanderings. Its not hard to imagine the Woman’s anxiety as Schoenberg’s own.

Schoenberg’s music has always carried the stigma of being difficult to listen to.  The composer had bouts of insecurity but, like most artists, longed to be accepted while he challenged the established order of music.  During the time he lived in the United States, he wanted to write film music.  For him, it wasn’t necessarily about money, but about becoming part of popular culture through movies.  Schoenberg’s prospects weren’t good and he died never composing music for the big-screen.  Schoenberg’s name and music have been so maligned, the City of Birmingham Symphony offered a money back guarantee if listeners didn’t enjoy a recent performance of the composer’s hyper=romantic Gurrelieder .

Both operas are difficult to hear, Schoenberg’s especially so.  The material of Erwartung jumps around, scattering and coalescing, a perfect match for the Woman’s eerie tale.  Bluebeard is a little easier on the ears.  Bartok avoided Wagnerian leit-motifs, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t reuse material to remind us of moods and moments.  Bartok’s sound world is sustained by glumness, even as light and love penetrate the cracks of the castle.  Bartok’s rhythms, especially when sung, gallop and give the back and forth between Bluebeard and his fourth wife, Judith, a determined forward motion leading to an inevitable conclusion – Judith taking her place among Bluebeard’s other disappeared wives.  Lead by Evan Rogister, the orchestra was in top form.  These complex scores came to life under his baton.  They emerged naturally, even a little softer around the edges than I have heard on recordings.

On the vocal side of things, Susan Marie Pierson was spectacular as the Woman in Ewartung.  Whatever you think about the twisting madness of the libretto or Schoenberg’s gnarled music, Ewartung requires a soprano of unimpeachable skill to sing almost uninterrupted for nearly thirty minutes.  John Relyea who sang Bluebeard and Malgorzata Walewska who sang Judith did well too.  These two, however, seemed unable to project at times.  Maybe it was the limitations of the sets and staging?  Maybe it was the limitations of these two singers?  I am not sure.

The real star of the evening were the sets and stage direction.  Spartan but versatile, the set was a visual feast.  In Ewartung the fake brick wall gave way to creeping, physically able actors.  They moved with dream-like elegance fueled by the gripping madness of the Woman.  Props – a bed, scythe, chair, trees, and other devices – floated and shifted on stage with the help of The Mistress, The Lover, and The Psychiatrist.  The set was basically the same for Bluebeard’s Castle.  In this opera, however, the illusion of depth, light, and projections onto a gauzy screen haunted Judith and Bluebeard as the seven locked doors were opened.

Ewartung and Bluebeard’s Castle run until March 7th.  The operas aren’t easy.  There is little hummable music, yet it will still leave you breathless and with a better sense of the human condition.  Bartok and Schoenberg understand better than most the conflict within the self.  With the help of the Seattle Opera these examinations were well worth my time and attention.

There are no airs or temperamental drama about Susan Marie Pierson, the soprano who not only sings every performance of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” in Seattle Opera’s double bill the next two weeks, but covers for the soprano in Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” as well.

“When we did this production in Edmonton (Alberta, 2006) I sang both roles,” says Pierson who considers “Erwartung” (“Expectation”) alone to be the equivalent of singing all of Act II of Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung.”

The pairing of these two short works has become a staple among opera companies

“It’s hard to find two one-act operas which fit together as these do in a strange way,” says Pierson, pointing out that this production by Robert Lepage has been around for 14 years, and that the stage director, Francois Racine, and three dancers travel with it. “One is very tonal and Mahleresque, the other is, well, just out there. It’s a very entertaining evening. I will say that the main character in the whole evening is water. We have a rubber stage, and that’s all I’m going to tell you about it!”

Singing “Erwartung” has its challenges. It’s a one-woman monodrama of lyrical, emotional music, but completely atonal as well so that the singer has no reference note from which to find a pitch. “It took me 18 months to learn it for Edmonton,” says Pierson., “but you get to a point with Schoenberg that you have muscle memory and you can always hit the note. There’s a sense of how that pitch feels in the throat and the ear.”

She appreciates that Schoenberg was exact in what he wanted, the tonal colors, the dynamics, “but the biggest challenge is staying with the conductor without staring at him,” because Schoenberg changes meter and tempo constantly.  “I just try to memorize in my own body the rhythm and the tempo that (conductor) Evan (Rogister) wants to take.”

At one vocal entrance, she says, she is lying flat on her back and it would completely spoil the moment to lift her head and check with his beat.

I ask Pierson who is this woman, who is the character who has no name, no history nothing except the words and emotions of the moment.

For Pierson, “she’s an outsider. I’ve always seen she has a little house outside town, with a garden, and a wall around it. Her lover is from the town. I don’t know if he’s married or unmarried, but he can’t be with her every day, and now it has been three days and he hasn’t shown up. She’s afraid. Is he sick? Does she have a rival? Has he left her? She goes to look for him, and has conversations with the moon, which casts shadows, plays tricks and frightens her. She finds him dead, in a pool of blood. There’s no place for her in the town. Is she a foreigner? Divorced? I don’t know.”

Pierson sings almost without cease for the full 30 minutes of “Erwartung,” and she paces herself carefully. On the support side she places Sweet Tarts or sour gummy bears in strategic places around the stage (“my costume has no pockets”) and the stage hands know not to remove them or sweep them up. The stage goes briefly dark several times when she can pop one in her mouth and, twice during the show, she has 30-40 seconds when she can rest.  At those moments, a stage hand is ready nearby to give her a quick sip of water.

For the rest, “you’ve got to keep that one small part of your brain trying to be careful and in charge: here’s your five seconds, remember to swallow, don’t go overboard there.”

Pierson grew up listening to opera, began singing early and started voice lessons at 14. She knew by the time she was 11 or 12 that she wanted to be an opera singer. “My first recital was at age 12, and after that it was a question of just putting one step in front of the other.” She won the Pavarotti competition and then sang Amelia with him in “Un Ballo in Maschera” for a PBS telecast, after which her career took off steadily.

Edwin McArthur, Kirsten Flagstad’s accompanist told her “‘You’re going to be a Wagner soprano. Promise me you won’t touch it until you’re 30,'” she says. “And I didn’t.” She has since sung Wagner all over Europe including Brunhilde in “The Ring” over  five years with Finnish National Opera.

Today, she’s a veteran. At 56, she looks and moves years younger, and says that after a performance she’s energized. “I can’t go to sleep for six or seven hours after. My teacher told me, If you feel you could go and sing it again, you’ve done it right.”

Philippa Kiraly

I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Maestra Falletta this weekend.  Falletta has been in Seattle this past week for a series of three concerts with the Seattle Symphony.  The concerts have been a compelling mix of the seldom heard, a dark showpiece, and a deeply moving requiem by the understated Gabriel Faure.  The chamber version of Gabriel Faure’s Requiem has closed out each of the concerts.  The chamber version, scored for chorus, one violin, minimal violas, cellos, and basses, horns, harp, and organ is the austere predecessor of the more popular version for full orchestra and chorus.  With only one violin, the color of the instrumental writing is much darker.  The violas, led by Arie Schachter, create a lugubrious foundation that is both sad and comforting.  The first half was marked by a full-throttle performance of Ravel’s La Valse and Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.1.

During my conversation with Falletta, I couldn’t help but walk away feeling like she is a musician possessed by great joy in not only making music, but helping people genuinely value, feel, and experience serious music.  We talked about her impressions of the Seattle Symphony, what considerations go into concert programs, the importance of the Buffalo Philharmonic as a professional orchestra in a city decimated by the collapse of the steel and manufacturing industry in the United States, and how music is innate to our existence as people.  Toward the end of the interview, we also chatted briefly about her Grammy Award winning recording of Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.

You can watch the video after the jump.