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Month: August 2023

EARLY MUSIC IN THE AMERICAS, REVIVED

EARLY MUSIC IN THE AMERICAS, REVIVED

BERKELEY, CA—One of the newest and most versatile early-music singing groups locally is Tactus SF, now seven years old, affiliated with the San Francisco Early Music Society. Mention “early music” and you expect to hear polyphonic from Europe. Not so, this time. This 20-member a cappella group put together an entire program of early New-World music, “Cantus Mexicanus,” digging out sacred renaissance choral music of “New Spain,” as it was then called—-music that we almost never get to hear, part…

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UKRAINE, MOZART COMMEMORATIONS

UKRAINE, MOZART COMMEMORATIONS

Ukraine and Mozart, an unlikely coupling indeed, paired to light up Davies Hall Aug. 18 in a gratifying choral-orchestral concert under Robert Geary. Geary’s S.F. Choral Society linked with Ukrainian composer Alexander Shchetynsky, 63, from afar unveiling his Requiem (1991-2004), a serene lyrical outpouring with string orchestra. However somber a work, the composer establishes a mellifluous flow in his work with Latin text, closer to the spirit of Brahms’ Requiem. Among his original touches was the “Lacrimosa,” with choral sound…

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CORNUCOPIA ON THE DISTAFF SIDE

CORNUCOPIA ON THE DISTAFF SIDE

SANTA CRUZ, CA—–For the last Saturday of the 60-year-old Cabrillo Festival featuring five mainline symphonic concerts overall, Music Director Cristian Macelaru focused on a quartet of living women composers, who have formed an ever greater portion of the festival palette in recent years. The festival remains both newsworthy and rather miraculous, limping along with a tired, ancient (and, I’d assert) unsafe sports palace and still attracting near-SRO audiences with nights of contemporary symphonic music, all of it composed in the…

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HOME-STRETCH SPRINT NEEDED

HOME-STRETCH SPRINT NEEDED

SANTA FE, NM—-Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” all about opera’s most famous water nymph, is too striking a fairy-tale drama to dissolve into a meandering finale. The composer with the rich romantic patina clearly had a far finer musical instinct than a theatrical one. At the risk of heresy, I’d propose engaging some current rewriter master (like formerly Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel or Alfano) to revise and tighten up the dawdling ending of an otherwise sterling opera-tragedy. In other regards, a reprise of this 1901…

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OPERATIC SEAFARERS TURNED LANDLUBBERS

OPERATIC SEAFARERS TURNED LANDLUBBERS

Santa Fe, NM—Did we see the Mother Lode country with its colorful miners living it up, maybe? Or the giant water sluices of Hoover Dam’s power plant? Any guess about site or scenery is possible at “The Flying Dutchman,” an opera that composer Richard Wagner thought he wrote about seafarers. And about a curse, like a majority of the operas the first week of August here. So once again (as in “Rusalka”), the revisionist decorators have struck with their zany…

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Opera Singer as Acrobat

Opera Singer as Acrobat

SANTA FE, NM—-Monteverdi’s opera “Orfeo,” like the ancient Greek tragedy, executes all the high drama, gore and bloodshed offstage. But this staging has the title character jumping through hoops suspended high in the sky for close to a half-hour in the most startling operatic tour de force I’ve encountered in 60 years of opera-going. The acrobatic Orfeo is the dramatic tenor Rolando Villazón, who I hope gets a nightly hazard pay supplement, like at Covent Garden, where one veteran London…

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New Mexico’s Pre-Oppenheimer Days

New Mexico’s Pre-Oppenheimer Days

LOS ALAMOS, NM—-Well before the start of the bio pic “Oppenheimer” delineating the birth of the atom bomb, the historic mesa was the home of the Los Alamos Ranch School and little else. At 7,350 ft. altitude, the mesa was healthy enough, miles away from traffic, towns, congestion, drugs and booze, a good hour’s drive uphill from Santa Fe. In the words of Richard Colgate from the Long Island toothpaste family, one of the teenaged students boarding there, “It was…

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