Hiromi is a phenomenon of our times. When she settles in with jazz piano, it’s as if an alien spirit of high inventiveness has taken over artistic control, using her as a mere vessel to exude a wealth of ideas, transitions and pulse-quickening runs that defy easy characterization. A composed Japanese woman and mother, she still exudes glints of the precocious girl who vied to be a classical artist. What stands out after a long evening at SFJazz was her…
This is the sleek new 2022 model of Carmen, straight from the showrooms. Forget gypsies, forget Spain. The new Carmen is a cool sorority sister type and girl-next-door coed. And yes, the 2022 Carmen is wearing blue jeans; in the finale, she could well be transformed into a casino croupier. And oh yes, she’s hanging out in the dregs of a bankrupt amusement park with wrecks of merry-go-round and roller coaster. Ahh, modern-day symbolism! I think I heard, after a…
SANTA FE, N.M.—A story at once preposterous and all too real propels the new opera “M. Butterfly.” But where is the music that can propel the thoughts, the moods, the innermost personalities of the players? Composer Huang Ruo’s rugged score reproduced all the conflicts and disruptions in the libretto. But where is the music to let the singers expound, philosophize, emote and breathe? So much work, yet so aloof remain the protagonists. This story of multiple enigmas is based on…
SANTA FE, NM—–A dawdling Mark Twain said it best, tongue-in-cheek, when late to a lecture in German: “We’ll get there in time for the verb” (which comes at the end). The Santa Fe Opera made a grand and memorable stab at its first oversize opera ever, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” a huge work for huge voices few thought ever possible in this indoor-outdoor theater with scant flies lacking elaborate stage machinery and giant orchestra pit while projecting the opera world’s…
SANTA CRUZ, CA—Resolute not to let Covid win for the third year in a row, the plucky Cabrillo Festival cobbled together a concert program with half an orchestra to prevent yet another cancellation. After the total washouts of 2020 and 2021, this week Cabrillo found no less than 16 orchestra members who were suddenly Covid positive, leaving it with only tatters of a woodwind and brass section. So with just percussion and a string orchestra intact, Music Director Christian Mãcelaru…
Opera Parallèle was not content just staging a chamber opera, but rather mounting a troika of simultaneous images in one of the most imaginative productions ever in San Francisco. In the process, it linked a fantasy fairy tale that is millennia old with a vintage 1946 French film as well as a recent Philip Glass score in dazzling counterpoint with one another, assisted by Brian Staufenbiel’s recent movie footage running in between. The triple play elevated the Glass instrumental ensemble’s…
One of the boldest S.F. Symphony programs featured three works of average age 42, the anchor being the stellar Sibelius Symphony 5. While most of the interest was focused on the popular septuagenarian Berkeley composer John Adams, the work that really blew me away was “Radical Light” by the late Steven Stucky. The fact that Stucky, a master of sonic delights, has been virtually unknown is directly related to his being, for many years, the composer in residence of the…
Composer Igor Stravinsky had created a model hybrid with his “Oedipus Rex.” So why not hybridize further with brainstorms of the mercurial Stage Director Peter Sellars? We thus ended up with a Stravinsky-Sellars double bill of “Oedipus” and that deft choral-orchestral companion “Symphony of Psalms”—Old Testament visionaries and Greeks in a strange choral-orchestral amalgam. By dramatizing the two neoclassical works in semi-staged fashion, Oedipus got to play in both ends, though mute in the second, which has no solo roles…
Composer Mason Bates, 44, keeps astounding us with his versatility. Long seen as the unlikely East Bay DJ getting a classical Ph.D. at Cal, he then created a biopera about Steve Jobs and produced orchestral scores integrating live players with electronic sounds getting wide attention. And now he has launched his high-impact Piano Concerto—a boisterous and varied message stating that he is still very much out there. with yet more surprises up his sleeve. Bates’ new 29-minute Piano Concerto sets off…
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—For this early opera, if you generously award 1.5 stars to Richard Wagner, you have to give at least four stars to Pocket Opera for its spanking-fresh semi-staged production. San Francisco‘s smallest opera troupe brought off an animated, sparkling show with Wagner’s “No Love Allowed” (Das Liebesverbot), an early production before Wagner became Wagner. Instead of the usual stab at German mythology and grim machinations, here we get a pseudo-Italian frivolity sounding like Donizetti, featuring an assignation-with-wife plot…