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San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Esa-Pekka Salonen's next-to-last S.F. Symphony concerts promise renewal
Composer Gabriella Smith knows how to make a lasting impression. Her organ concerto ' Breathing Forests ' was a highlight of the San Francisco Symphony's 2023-24 season, a work of tremendous power and originality. Smith is back with a Symphony commission called 'Rewilding,' a paean to birds, insects and the process of returning the Earth to its natural state by undoing human damage and disruption. The 33-year-old Berkeley native has been dedicated to environmental concerns since her high school days, and these issues are major sources of inspiration for her music. 'Rewilding' had its world premiere on Friday, June 6, at Davies Symphony Hall on a program conducted by outgoing Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The audience's enthusiasm for Salonen overmatched the poignancy of his impending departure. Before the performance, Smith talked about her work in ecological restoration, most recently on a project to rewild a former military runway in Seattle. She cited the failure of current politicians to address the climate crisis but ended on a message of hope. 'There are people all around (you) who are taking action,' she said Like 'Breathing Forests,' 'Rewilding' is a work of startling inventiveness, a cascade of astonishing sounds unfolding over about 25 minutes. Smith's music has an immense sonic palette, owing not only to her expressive skill with orchestration but also her penchant for unusual instrumentation. Bicycle frames, unshelled walnuts, metal mixing bowls, water bottles, twigs and branches are some of the everyday objects put to musical use. In Smith's orchestra, you can't always tell where a particular sound is coming from. Strings slither from one note to the next while the winds bend their pitches, clouding the texture for the sake of achieving a particular color. 'Rewilding' may incorporate certain minimalist techniques — and the score introduces an element of chance by instructing the strings to play out of sync with each other — but the music's scope and riotous colors are anything but minimal or random, even if the structure isn't always clear. The orchestra hummed, buzzed and yipped with the imagined sounds of insects, birds and maybe even canines. Popping noises arose, frogs ribbitted, a chorus of woodpeckers went wild. The sonorities pass from one group of instruments to another, thickening, bubbling, thinning out. 'Rewilding' builds, fades, builds again. A high-pitched section gives way to the lower strings and then to massed brass. After the last fade-out, you hear only bicycle wheels turning. Listeners curious about where Smith will go next can get another peek into her imagination next April, when she's scheduled to curate a pair of SoundBox concerts for the Symphony. Salonen opened the evening with a swift, sometimes very loud account of Richard Strauss' early tone poem 'Don Juan' — the same titular libertine who inspired Mozart's 'Don Giovanni.' In under 20 minutes, Strauss' vivid scene-setting does nearly as much with the character as that three-hour opera does. The performance was a blazing display of the orchestra's virtuosity, starting with the sleekly lustrous strings and trumpets. Highlights included principal oboe Eugene Izotov's lyrical solo and his interplay with principal clarinet Carey Bell and principal bassoon Joshua Elmore. And then there was the brilliant horn section, led by guest Daniel Hawkins, a former member of the orchestra and now principal horn of the Dallas Symphony. Hawkins and company took charge in 'Don Juan' and in the program's concluding selection, 'Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks,' also by Strauss. If you've ever wondered whether music can be sarcastic, this is the place to look for it. Salonen's interpretation had all the wit and cheek required. Alexander Barantschik nimbly dispatched the brief violin solo, and Matthew Griffith shone on E-flat clarinet. The evening also included Jean Sibelius ' mysterious Symphony No. 7, the Finnish composer's final completed work in that form. (Sibelius is believed to have labored for some years over an Eighth Symphony, burning whatever existed of the score sometime in the 1940s.) Brooding, monumental and yet compact — consisting of only a single 20-minute movement — the Seventh, like other Sibelius works, implies a vast physical and spiritual landscape. Salonen led the music with solemn grandeur, shaping it firmly.
New York Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
With a Different Ending, ‘Don Giovanni' Becomes a Requiem
Partway through the dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov's new production at the Komische Oper in Berlin that pairs Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' and Requiem, text is projected across an abstract set piece representing a graveyard. 'Here,' it says, 'the dead teach the living.' At this point in the opera, the statue of a murdered man is about to come to life to confront his killer. But there is perhaps another meaning to be found in the text. 'It's a requiem,' Serebrennikov said in an interview, 'for all of us.' His production, which runs through May 23 before returning next season, follows a pre-20th-century performance tradition of dispensing with the final sextet of 'Don Giovanni,' a pat moral lesson sung after its title character is dragged to hell. Instead, the hellfire blaze of D minor and major leads directly into the soft, D-minor chords of the Requiem. That work was left unfinished at Mozart's death, in 1791. Serebrennikov, together with the choreographers Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev, stages the roughly 20 minutes of music that Mozart completed as dance theater. Don Giovanni's soul, embodied by the former Pina Bausch dancer Fernando Suels Mendoza, struggles against and finally accepts death as the chorus and soloists perform last rites. 'The Requiem is not only a funeral Mass,' Serebrennikov said. 'It was written, like 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead,' not just for those still living, but also for the dead: to help them find a condition for themselves after death.' Serebrennikov's production — the final in his cycle of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas at the Komische Oper — opens with Don Giovanni's funeral, and transforms the plot into a nonlinear series of scenes set in the bardo, the Tibetan transitional space between life and death. He leans into the enigmas of the title character and the work as a whole, starting with its label as a 'dramma giocoso': 'funny tragedy,' Serebrennikov said, 'the mixture of all genres, all intentions.' Hubert Zapior, who sings the title role, said in an interview that the process of working on a Serebrennikov show involves 'struggle' against preconceptions and the expected. The reward, he said, is getting to 'make the character new, and interesting, giving it a whole new quality.' James Gaffigan, who took up the music directorship of the Komische Oper in 2023, said, 'I never would have taken this job at this house if I didn't like these sorts of things.' Referring to the liberties the production takes with 'Don Giovanni,' he added: 'Would I choose to do it all the time? Not necessarily. But when you have someone as brilliant as Kirill, I want to make this work.' (As if to illustrate the point, Gaffigan's office is decorated with a large red neon sign that says 'Yes.') Serebrennikov sought to broaden Don Giovanni's tastes as a seducer. To that end, Donna Elvira has been transformed into Don Elviro, sung by the male soprano Bruno de Sá. That role, a character often written off as a harridan, requires ferocious energy and includes both sustained high singing in two enormously difficult solo arias as well as low notes in ensemble singing. 'It's a weird range for any soprano, or mezzo-soprano,' de Sá said. 'But I think I've never had this deep a connection with a character. He's so misunderstood. He just has a broken heart.' In a traditional production, de Sá would readily go on as Elvira in drag, the way that mezzo-sopranos strap down their chests to play trouser roles. 'But the fact that it's a man in this show brings something else,' he said. The Catalog Aria, in which a mourning Elvira learns from Leporello about his master's many conquests, 'becomes a whole different universe.' 'But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if it's a man, or a woman, or a trans person,' he added. 'Human emotions are always there.' Gaffigan said that the idea works for the opera. 'How great is it that Don Giovanni's not just seducing women, he's seducing everyone?' he said. 'This is not a check box to say, 'Let's do something crazy.'' Critics have mostly agreed. In Die Deutsche Bühne, Joachim Lange described the 'casually irreverent creativity' of Serebrennikov and the production, writing that the show 'sounds more cerebral than it appears onstage' and that 'Serebrennikov manages to tease out the humor of the whole thing in almost every scene.' Ulrich Lange, writing in the Tagesspiegel, praised de Sá's 'heart-piercing' singing and the orchestra's 'sharp Mozart sound.' The Komische Oper, predicated like all repertory companies on the uneasy relationship between the living and the dead, is on track to sell 92 percent of its tickets this season, an enviable figure for any house. In 2024, it was named Opera House of the Year at the International Opera Awards in Munich. But the state of Berlin, which is the house's largest funder by far, is sharply cutting culture spending, threatening the ongoing renovation of the company's longtime home theater and its annual operating budget. This season, those cuts have already led to the cancellation of one premiere, of an East German operetta adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 'The Importance of Being Earnest.' In Serebrennikov's production, Leporello holds up a sign in the second act of 'Don Giovanni' dryly noting that a tenor's aria 'was unfortunately cut due to the slashing of Berlin's culture budget.' On opening night, audience members cheered and applauded. 'We're not safe in any way, shape or form,' Gaffigan said. 'We're fighting for our survival. From year to year, we don't know what's going to happen.' In an emailed statement in German, Christopher Suss, a spokesman for the city's cultural department, said that 'there will be no halt to construction' on the house's renovation project and emphasized that 'the closure of this unique opera house is out of the question.' He wouldn't comment on further cuts because the city's budget is in the process of being negotiated. On Friday, Berlin's top culture politician, Joe Chialo, resigned his post; his resignation letter laid out his opposition to forthcoming planned cuts that, he warned, would 'lead to the imminent closure of nationally renowned cultural institutions.' 'I have never seen anything like it, where a company is doing so well, and we're terrified for our own existence,' Gaffigan said. 'Doing as well as we are doing, I thought the Komische Oper would always be there. And one night you wake up and realize, 'Maybe not.''
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
Austria Pavilion: Composing the Future
The theme for this pavilion is Composing the Future, which is highly appropriate for this land of music. The design, with its spiral rising up to the sky, represents a musical score. One highlight is a replica of the grand piano Emperor, presented to Emperor Meiji at the 1873 Vienna World's Fair, symbolizing the bond between Austria and Japan. Moreover, depicting the future of music, visitors can compose music using AI and enjoy remote piano performances. In May, the pavilion will be filled with music with performances by the Vienna Boys' Choir, along with pieces from Mozart's violin concertos played on his favorite concert violin, and a splendid production of the opera Don Giovanni . Local cuisine, including the traditional meat dish Schnitzel and buttery Kaiserschmarrn pancakes, can be enjoyed too. The Austria pavilion is located in the Empowering Lives zone. ( See the official map for details.) Austria marks its national day on Friday, May 23, at the Expo National Day Hall. Another view of the pavilion spiral. (© ) (Originally published in Japanese. Reporting and text by Uchiyama Ken'ichi and Photographic assistance by Kuroiwa Masakazu of 96-Box. Banner photo © .)
Forbes
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The Met Opera's 'Le Nozze di Figaro' Star Federica Lombardi Talks Travel and Opera
'Le Nozze di Figaro' Star Federica Lombardi Evan Zimmerman/ Met Opera Italian soprano Federica Lombardi stars as Countess Almaviva in the Metropolitan Opera's 'Le Nozze di Figaro' , streaming Live in HD to cinemas around the world on Saturday, April 26 at 1PM ET. Hailing from Cesena, Italy, located in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, Federica made her Met debut as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni in 2019. Currently praised as one of the most sought-after Mozartians, she is right at home singing in Le Nozze di Figaro at the Met. At the Met, Federica has also performed as Musetta and Mimì in La Bohème, Elettra in Idomeneo, and Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. In February of 2025, Federica took on the title role in Vienna's new production of Norma. Next season at the Met, she will return to again sing the role of Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. I interviewed the Mozart-pro recently about her favorite spot in Rome, her pre-performance ritual, and more, below. My favorite opera that's not my own is… 'Tosca.' It has everything! Drama, passion, and Puccini's music is glorious! 'Not my own' for now…I would love to be Tosca one day! My pre-performance ritual is… I need a few minutes completely alone. I breathe, I focus, and I remind myself why I love this so much. After a performance, I… Take off my makeup as fast as I can, change into something cozy, and eat something good! My favorite kind of operagoer (does what)… Listens with their heart. You can feel when someone is really, truly present—it gives you energy on stage. The best piece of career advice I've gotten is… 'Never settle.' Always keep growing, and remember to keep learning. Remind yourself that there is no finish line in this career. Get the most out of an opera by… Listening with your ears and your eyes. Watch the singers' faces, the small gestures, the atmosphere —opera is theatre, just get completely involved. My must-have travel item is… My humidifier! It saves my voice when it's too dry. My preferred way to destress is to… Take a long walk, ideally in nature or a quiet city street, with good music in my ears. The destination I love to travel to most for work is… Vienna! There is a special magic in the air there. Vienna has such tradition and beauty. Also New York of course! The Met is something unique to me, I love the atmosphere in the theater. It's an extremely professional experience and the audience is amazing! My favorite travel destination for vacation, not work is… Anywhere by the sea in Italy. I need sun, good food, and the sound of waves. My favorite restaurant is…where I can find a good pizza! My favorite spot in Rome is… The Orange Garden, located on the Aventine Hill. It has amazing views, and that silence—pure magic.
Boston Globe
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Martin Pearlman's historic journey with Boston Baroque
Over its 53-year history, the group has taken on an ever more ambitious range of pieces, expanding its repertoire from Baroque chamber music to 17th-century operas to 19th-century Classical symphonies. Their performances of Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony were the first in America to be done on period instruments, and they were the first period orchestra to perform at Carnegie Hall. 'In the beginning, especially, we had a lot of 'firsts,' ' Pearlman said when I interviewed him recently. 'But it's not about doing something different. What's important is: Is it a good performance?' Even though the music is old, Boston Baroque's sound is exhilaratingly lithe and fresh. Tenor Jason Wang, a longtime member of the group's chorus, told me of Pearlman: 'He's always reminding us that it's about being in the moment. We're not reading from a history textbook, we are playing and singing as if this is the first time. It's a reminder that music is a hyper-developed kind of communication between human beings.' Violinist and concertmaster Christina Day Martinson has worked with Pearlman since she was his student at Boston University; they have also recorded together, including a Grammy-nominated album of composer Heinrich Biber's 'Mystery Sonatas.' She spoke of the trust that she and the other musicians have in Pearlman, because he trusts them. 'There's a nuanced and subtle energy that's coming from the top, and it creates a musical rapport and freedom in us,' she said. 'It's like a school of fish — the whole group swerves but the energy is transmitted so quickly that you can't even see it.' Advertisement This is Pearlman's last Boston Baroque season. The season began with Haydn's 'The Creation,' and then Handel's 'Messiah,' an annual event with the group since 1981. Their annual New Year's concert followed, which Pearlman describes as 'a spotlight on the soloists, with pieces that are fun. Basically a bunch of bon-bons.' Boston Baroque will continue, with a new conductor (an audition process will take place next year, with a series of guest conductors). But first, Pearlman will conduct his final two concerts: a Classical program later this month, featuring Mozart's 'Haffner' Symphony and Beethoven's Symphony No. 2; and Handel's opera 'Ariodante' (originally scheduled for spring 2020 and canceled due to the pandemic) in May. 'I didn't think about it consciously when I was programming,' Pearlman said, 'but the Mozart was the first score I ever bought, when I was 9 or 10. I remember I used to read it in bed at night. And the violin part in the Beethoven is something I played at Interlochen Music Camp, the summer I was 12.' Pearlman said he looks forward to focusing on composing, his first and most abiding love. He has also joined the board of North Star Baroque, a new period-instrument orchestra founded by his daughter, Anna, in Portland, Maine. If you go on Advertisement Looking at this archive, recalling past performances, I'm even more grateful to have been in Boston Baroque's audience for more than 40 years — enjoying the concerts and witnessing an artistry that has both preserved history and refreshed it. 'I'm not really that comfortable with the spotlight,' Pearlman told me. 'When I'm conducting I have my back to the audience. I'm just getting to do the music, and I love having people listen in.' Joan Wickersham's latest book is, 'No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck." Her column appears regularly in the Globe.
