Opera fans now have the chance to apply their twitter skills to their opera knowledge, because Marcia Adair, a freelance classical music journalist from Canada aka Miss Mussel, has organized this twittery competition, which sounds like a lot of fun. Here is the lowdown from her e-mail today:
Starting tomorrow morning (April 27) at 9am, the Twitter #operaplot contest will be reprising its role as the most fun opera nerds can have in 140 characters or less.
On Saturday evening (April 18), the near-capacity audience at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall got a far superior deal to the one that greeted the sold-out crowd at the Rose Garden. That’s because the concert goers heard an outstanding concert by the Oregon Symphony under its former conductor James DePreist and guest soloist Garrick Ohlsson while the basketball fans had to endure a poor performance by the Portland Trail Blazers in the first round of the NBA playoffs. That’s the breaks of the game, I suppose.
It was great to see the Schnitz so full, and the audience gave DePreist one of the warmest welcomes that has ever been given to a conductor in Portland. He then led the orchestra in a vibrant performance of “Rainbow Body,” which was written by Christopher Theofandis, a 41-year-old composer who was recently appointed to the music faculty at Yale University. In 2003, “Rainbow Body” won the Masterprize, an international competition for symphonic music, and since that time it has become the most popularly performed symphonic work by a living composer.
With varying degrees of success, the Fear No Music ensemble paired new music with new films at its most recent concert on Friday evening (April 17) at the Colonial Heights Presbyterian Church in Southeast Portland. Entitled “Parallaxis,” the concert showed 14 brief films (although one used a slide projector) that were accompanied by 14 music works. Many of the films were very abstract. Sometimes they only projected blurry or grainy images, but nothing more than that. For those selections, the Fear No Music ensemble played abstract pieces that matched up pretty well. There was no way to tell if the music was in sync with the video or not – except perhaps if the music ended exactly when the video stopped. That happened sometimes and more often it didn’t. No matter, the event had a fragmentary quality that does speak to our lives. People seem to live in fragments, whether they are tuning in to part of a meeting at work, or spending 15 minutes of “quality time” with their kids, or listening to a few minutes of music on their iPods. Yet each fragment can be experienced in a genuine way, and that’s where it counts.
Selecting 14 films from visual artists and finding the right pieces of music that would work with them was a collaborative effort between the Fear No Music ensemble and Leo and Anna Daedalus of the HELSINQI media studio. The music varied from pieces written for soloists to those written for sextets. In this concert, the Fear No Music ensemble (violinist Inés Voglar, violist Joël Belgique, percussionist Joel Bluestone, and pianist Jeff Payne) were joined by violinist Paloma Griffin, cellist Nancy Ives, flutist Alicia Didonato Paulsen, clarinetist Carol Robe, and bass clarinetist Philip Everall.
It’s always interesting to get behind the scenes in a high-stakes event, and in the world of opera the finals of the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions has to rank as one of the most pressure-packed contests of all. How do singers prepare themselves? What are they feeling? How do they behave in front of their rivals? Well, you can find out, because a new feature-length documentary, “The Audition,” takes you back stage and gives you a glimpse into the lives of several singers who participated in the finals of the 2008 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Although “The Audtion” is being released this weekend at 400 movie theaters around the nation, I got the opportunity to watch the entire film ahead of the release date, and I can tell you that it is riveting.
After some short introductory remarks by Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, and Thomas Hampson (all of whom won the National Council Auditions), you quickly dive into the last week of the competition when the 22 finalists are paired down to the final eleven. From that point onward in the story, it is fun to try to figure out which singers will win the final prize of $15,000 and the possibility of singing in a Met production. You also get to see some of the techniques of the Met’s vocal coaches and listen to the jury discuss the singers.
For those of us in the Pacific Northwest, we can watch the progress of soprano Angela Meade, who is a native of Chehalis, Washington and picked up her BA at Pacific Lutheran University. Also, Speight Jenkins, general director of the Seattle Opera, makes a cameo appearance near the beginning of the film while talking with Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met.
One of the biggest gambits is taken by tenor Alek Shrader, who uses the finals week to learn and perform “Ah! Mes Amis,” the aria with the nine high Cs from Donizetti’s “The Daughter of the Regiment.” Just when you start pulling for him, you can get swept up by the story of African-American tenor Ryan Smith, who had stopped singing for three years, because he couldn’t financially afford the lessons.
The film runs over two hours and includes highlights from the arias that the finalists sang with the Met Orchestra. An additional twenty-minute segment includes reminiscences and reflections by Fleming, Graham, and Hampson. The pace of the documentary and the quality of the filming are superb, so you have the feeling that you were there.
“The Audition” opens this Sunday at high noon in Washington at the following theaters:
– Regal Auburn 17 Theatres in Auburn
– Cinemark Century Theatres Federal Way 16 in Federal Way
– AMC Kent Station 14 in Kent
– Regal Alderwood 7 Theatres in Lynnwood
– Cinemark Capital Mall 14 in Olympia
– Independent – The Rose Theatre in Port Townsend
– Regal Bella Bottega 11 Cinema in Redmond
– AMC Pacific Place 11 in Seattle
– Regal Northtown 12 in Spokane
And in Oregon at high noon at the following locations:
– Cinemark Cedar Hills Crossing 16 in Beaverton
– Regal Old Mill Stadium 16 in Bend
– Cinemark Clackamas Town Center in Happy Valley
– Cinemark Tinseltown in Medford
– Regal Lloyd Center 10 in Portland
– Cinemark Cinemark 17 in Springfield
If you want to see a preview of the film, click here.
It might seem odd to place a seasoned professional in the midst of fine young opera singers who are still getting their ears wet, but Richard Zeller and the opera students at Portland State University performed Verdi’s “Falstaff” with gusto. Zeller, who has sung many times at the Met and other stages around the world, made the most of his debut in the title role, one of the choice plumbs for any baritone. His colleagues from Portland State showed some unevenness, but they more than held their own. As a result, the performance on opening night (April 13) at St Mary’s Academy (Portland State’s Lincoln Hall is still undergoing renovation) satisfied the senses.
Whether he sauntered about in a bathrobe or donned a dandy’s costume (with a huge Muskateer’s hat and gaudy outfit), Zeller commanded the stage with his presence. He could easily throw his ample weight around but never carelessly. He always used it to his advantage, even when pursuing the fairer sex.
The richness of Zeller’s voice, as well as its agility and heft seemed to be tailor made for this role. The way that he could grumble, demand, accuse, and tease was spellbinding, and they were just a few of the vocal qualities that he employed in the first scene. But he topped it all with a cooing falsetto that almost tickled the ears.
On the student’s side of the ledger, Anna Viemeister gave a stellar performance as Mrs. Alice Ford, the primary object of Falstaff’s desires. Viemeister’s enticing soprano combined power and beauty to soar above the orchestra.
Michael Miersma was outstanding in the role of Ford, who as Alice’s husband tries to ensnare Falstaff. Miersma’s shining moment came during a long aria in the second act when he sang of his jealousy. His baritone remained gorgeous even as he greatly increased its volume towards the end of the solo.
Lucas Tannous, a young professional tenor who sang in PSU’s production of “La Boheme” last year, created a passionate Fenton, the young man who is in love with Ford’s daughter Nanneta. Her character was charmingly sung by soprano Jennifer Davies.
In the role of Dame Quickly, mezzo Claire Craig-Sheets showed a superb sense of comic timing whenever she interacted with Falstaff. Other student singers who distinguished themselves in the cast were Alison Nordyke as Mrs. Meg Page, Michael Sarnoff-Wood as Doctor Caius, Jeremy Griffin as Pistola, and Carl Moe as Bardolfo.
The orchestra, conducted by Ken Selden, struggled at times with the Verdi’s challenging score, but they conveyed the spirit of the opera and supported the singers gallantly.
Tito Capobianco provided crisp directions that aided the storytelling. The near-seduction scene between Alice and Falstaff was a hilarious. Another very funny scene occurred when Falstaff wedged his body into the largest laundry basket in Portland. Near the end of the opera, when the villagers were mocking Falstaff, I thought that they might force him into a weight-watchers program, but fortunately no one was that serious, and we, in the audience, went home laughing.
Four diverse chamber works received fine performances from the Portland Chamber Orchestra at Kaul Auditorium on Saturday evening (April 11th). Led by its music director Yaacov Bergman, the ensemble played music by Wojciech Kilar, Dmitri Shostakovich, Antonio Vivaldi, and Astor Piazzolla. Guest violinist Lindsay Deutsch inspired the orchestra with vivacious interpretations of “Summer” from Vivaldi’s “Four Season” and Piazzolla’s “Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas” (“The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”).
The concert began with Kilar’s “Orawa,” a very rhythmic and pulsating work that refers to the Orawa River and the mountainous region near the border of Poland and Slovakia. The constant musical motion of this piece and shifting key changes made it very easy to imagine water rushing around boulders and plunging down crevices. A few of the highlights included the thrumming sound of the violins before the rough-hewn exchange near the end of the piece when the ensemble picked up speed and the water rushed maddeningly. After the final chord, the audience (prepped by Bergman before the piece began) made a splash by yelling “Hej” (aka hey)!
The exuberance of that first piece was cooled off to a simmer by the somberness of the next work, Shostakovich’s “Chamber Symphony for Strings.” This work was originally composed by Shostakovich as his Quartet No. 8, but Russian conductor and violist Rudolf Barshai arranged it for chamber ensembles. Somehow the idea was spread that this work expressed Shostakovich’s fear and dread of fascism because of the bombing of Dresden during WWII, but scholars have determined that the music is intensely autobiographical and its despairing tone reflected Shostakovich’s suicidal mental state at the time when he composed the quartet in 1960.
More intensity from the Portland Chamber Orchestra would’ve helped to give this work more bite, but the ensemble did a fine job overall, and its principal cellist Katherine Schultz played soulfully during her solo passages.
Wearing a red dress, Deutsch backed up her dramatic presence with a finely honed performance of the “Summer” movement from Vivaldi’s well-loved masterpiece, “The Four Seasons.” It was fun to watch Deutsch turn to her fellow musicians and gamely challenge them to keep up with her during the fast sections that depict a violent summer storm. The orchestra could’ve played a little more cleanly, but it had plenty of vigor and esprit de corps to stimulate the audience which erupted in enthusiastic applause.
The concert concluded with Piazolla’s “Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas” (“The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”), which is infused with the atmosphere of Argentinean tango yet also contains a number of quotes from Vivadi’s “The Four Seasons.” Deutsch put passion on the front burner and delivered her solos in full flambé style. She put a searing zing on the high notes and played the slow, sensuous passages with ardor. Several fine cello solos by Schultz added measurably to the evocative blend and the audience rewarded each movement with applause.
I had not heard the Portland Chamber Orchestra in many years, and I have to say that this ensemble has made tremendous strides in improving the quality of its sound. The PCO also took a big gamble to perform on Easter weekend, but it looked as if this concert drew over 300 people, and I noticed a lot of young people in the audience. So, hats off to the Portland Chamber Orchestra.
The Oregon Symphony has been selected to perform at Carnegie Hall in 2011 as part of the new Spring for Music Festival. The orchestra is one of seven that will play in Carnegie in this new music series that is “designed to spotlight the artistic vision of orchestras dedicated to distinctive and adventurous programming.” Festival organizers are calling this festival “a high-profile artistic laboratory for programming and concert experimentation in the world’s most competitive and visible musical environment.”
The 2011 festival includes seven concerts over nine night nights, May 6-14. The Oregon Symphony, with Music Director Carlos Kalmar conducting, will perform on Thursday, May 12. Also invited are Albany, Atlanta, Dallas, Montreal, Oregon and Toledo Symphony Orchestras and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.
“The invitation to appear at the first Spring for Music festival is a tremendous endorsement of what the orchestra has achieved over the past six years under music director Carlos Kalmar”, said Oregon Symphony Association president Elaine Calder. “This gives us a chance to show to the rest of the country what a great orchestra we have here. Playing at Carnegie Hall is the dream of every classical musician and ensemble – it’s simply the venue, and the ultimate testing ground. This is a terrific opportunity to build morale and support at home, and burnish our national reputation.”
“We hope many of our friends and supporters will join us on the trip to New York, and we’ll be starting work immediately to raise the money to go, and to organize some very special events both in Portland and in Manhattan.”
Click here to read all about this in the New York Times.
When a pianist places a score in the piano (on the inner frame) as sort of a security blanket for an important piano recital, I become suspicious and begin to wonder what might be wrong. That was a recurring theme running loose in my noggin during Ingrid Fliter’s concert on Sunday afternoon (April 5) at the Newmark Theatre as part of the Portland Piano International recital series. Fliter, the 2006 winner of the Gilmore Artist Award (with its $600,000 in monies) has established herself as one of the world’s preeminent pianists, but on Sunday afternoon she delivered a concert that was subpar for the most part.
The entire affair got off to good start with a nuanced performance of Bach’s “Italian Concerto” in F Major (BWV 971). Yet in the faster passages Fliter often would tap her shoes on the floor. She did turn a page on her Bach score, but didn’t seem to refer to it all that much.
After the Bach came a series of Chopin waltzes, six in all: the Waltz in C-sharp minor (Op. 64. No. 2), the “Grande Valse Brilliante” in A-flat Major (Op. 34, No 1), the Waltz in F minor (Op. posth.), the Waltz in A minor (Op. posth.), and the Grande Valse Brillante in E-flat Major (Op. 18). Fliter played these pieces very smoothly with a lot of control and very little flair. None of them stood out all that much and in the third waltz (the one in F minor), she seemed to have a lapse and replay a phrase.
For the second half of the program, Filter performed Schumann’s “Symphonic Etudes” in C-sharp minor (Op. 13). She showed a lot more freedom of expression in the first half of this long set of etudes and variations. The pieces had drama, but I wasn’t convinced of the overall arc of her interpretation. And again, in the midst of this complex work, and despite having the score in the piano, Fliter suffered a memory lapse that caused her to replay a phrase.
The finale was exuberant and grand, and the audience responded with loud applause, but they didn’t jump out of their seats. Fliter returned and gave two encores: a Schubert “Impromptu” and another Chopin waltz.
Overall, though, I wonder what may be bothering Fliter. I heard her a year ago with the Oregon Symphony, and she was superb (see my review here), but this recital seemed subpar.
Guest conductor Hannu Lintu and the Oregon Symphony presented an interesting concert that featured works by Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Lindberg, and Ravel on Saturday evening at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. This appearance by Lintu marked the fourth time he has led the orchestra, and he again seemed to strike a harmonious chord with the orchestra. All in all, this program has something for everyone, and the audience responded to each piece enthusiastically.
The concert began with Mozart’s Symphony No 36 in C major, which is known as the Linz Symphony, because he composed this work while staying near that Austrian city. He wrote the entire work in five days between October 30th and November 4th, 1783 at the ripe age of 27, and it’s a work a pure beauty.
All of the strings, but especially the violins, played with a lot of precision and polish in this work. Led by concertmaster Jun Iwasaki, the entire ensemble conveyed lots of dynamic contrasts and made the music glow. Lintu used some unorthodox conducting techniques – like crossing both hands on the beat – to add his own stylistic stamp to the performance. All in all, this was a top-notch performance of Mozart and a pleasure to hear from beginning to end.
Guest pianist Horacio Gutiérrez collaborated with the orchestra to sweep the audience of its feet with a very fleet performance of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” It seemed to me that Gutiérrez rushed things a bit here and there and sacrificed some of the emotion of the piece for the sake of speed. But with some terrific assistance from the orchestra, the piece sparkled and the audience responded with a big burst of applause after the final variation concluded with a twinkle.
Before playing Magnus Linberg’s “Feria,” Lintu said a few words about the composition, which was composed in 1997. He explained that this piece doesn’t have any stated movements, but can be understood as having five sections. The first section serves as an introduction to the piece, the second shows off some of the string players before the rest of the orchestra joins in, the third section has big slow chords, and a trumpet solo – which quotes Monteverdi – occurs before the fourth section, which is a concerto grosso. In the fifth section everyone in the orchestra plays at full tilt and “we’ll see which part of the orchestra wins.”
I liked the bright and quick sounds from the trumpets and brass section at the beginning of the piece. This musical urgency was matched at times by furious playing from other sections of the orchestra, and I recall that the violins ignited some of the festivities. After a lot of sonic business, things gradually calmed down, and that exposed some very closely threaded tones in the brass section. I like the way that principal trombonist Aaron LaVere used a mute to make a brief wail that punctuated that passage. I recall a wild solo for concertmaster Iwasaki, fluttering woodwinds, and piano notes that randomly seemed to be sprinkled on top of it all. Everything seemed to end in a loud conflagration of sound that perhaps signaled an end to the festival (“feria”).
Before motioning for the entire orchestra to stand, Lintu directed applause to pianist Carol Rich, and that became one of the first time that I’ve ever seen a conductor recognize the orchestra’s pianist for special commendation. I think that Rich turned several shades of red, and that made the evening that much more special.
The concert concluded with Ravel’s “Bolero.” I haven’t heard this piece played in a concert for many years; so it was very refreshing to hear the orchestra and Lintu perform it. Lintu used very small hand gestures without a baton to shape the first section, and then gradually built the rest of the piece with larger gestures and finally he reached for his baton to signal the big, splashing ending. I loved the way that the orchestra played this work. There were so many finely-wrought solos by many members that the list of names would be rather long. Suffice it to say that members of the woodwinds and the brass really stood out, and LaVere once again was terrific on the trombone. Thunderous applause and a standing ovation greeted the players at the glorious finale, and everyone left the concert hall in a happy mood.
Gathering Note 