Recent
Review of Augustin Hadelich with the San Francisco Symphony
There can be only one Brahms Violin Concerto, but boy, did Antonín Dvořák try to compose a second. Maybe it was because he was writing for Joseph Joachim, the great violinist who had collaborated with the elder composer on his concerto, that Dvořák’s first movement takes great pains to sound stern. “Be yourself,” you want to tell Antonín. And, by the third occurrence of ma non troppo (but not too much) in the score, “Make a decision.”
It’s in the Finale, which juxtaposes two Bohemian dances, that Dvořák comes into his own — and it was the best part of the San Francisco Symphony's performance on Thursday. But soloist Augustin Hadelich, the embodiment of decency in art, made the case for the entire piece. Always, he gives the illusion of “just” playing the music — when often it’s he who makes the music worthy of being played.
Review of San Francisco Symphony premiere
I was raised on the romantic concerto, the hero’s journey, but today, things are more egalitarian. The soloist still gets top billing but often doesn’t especially stand out.
This self-abnegation fits the premise of Outi Tarkiainen’s new work for English horn (the SF Symphony’s stellar Russ de Luna): It’s a concerto about breastfeeding. The soloist of Milky Ways keeps the piece alive, but much of the time, his individual voice is diluted in the wash.
And it is mostly a wash — like those first few weeks of motherhood, I suppose. Still, there are a few Kodak moments: the transparent flutters at the end of the first movement, the celesta’s tender windup lullaby in the third. In one inventive episode, de Luna calls the shots in an intricate call-and-response, his own part tiny and insignificant and still the center of the universe.
Review of Britten at Merola Opera
It’s a long road to the Merola Opera Program. Of the 1,300 applicants to the San Francisco Opera-affiliated summer training program, 28 were accepted. At this level, everyone is a superstar, and I can think of no better hands in which to place The Rape of Lucretia, Benjamin Britten’s exasperating, marvelous chamber opera.
It’s Rome, 510 B.C., and the tyrannical Tarquinius Superbus reigns. Our story, though, centers on his son, Tarquinius Sextus, who is concerned less with the war than with his “bevy of listless whores.” We meet his generals, Junius (the mellifluous baritone Cameron Rolling) and Collatinus (bass-baritone James McCarthy, ever commanding), and it’s Collatinus’s wife, Lucretia, after whom Tarquinius lusts. So obsessed is Tarquinius with Lucretia’s purity that he wants to defile it. He demands her hospitality and then rapes her; she kills herself.
Behind the scrim of classical idiom, rape plots feel less fraught. But now that it’s now — Britten’s music does feel that contemporary — standards have changed. Stage the story too graphicly, and it’s trauma porn. On the other hand, treat it too preciously, assault only alluded to as the audience sits comfortably, and the violence is bloodless.
And bloodlessness is probably the easiest way for Lucretia to go wrong. The story is always at a remove, framed by two Choruses (both individual roles) who with a certain pageantry tell the story from some future time. And do they ever tell. The drunk generals can hardly squabble before the Male Chorus explains what you just saw. Parts of the libretto, by Ronald Duncan, are fitting, but the wordy, expository opening of Act 2 is not the only low moment.
“We’ll view these human passions and these years / through eyes which once have wept with / Christ’s own tears,” the Choruses declaim. Human this, human that; each time, the implication is “merely.” Poor Lucretia is a stand-in for Christ, and there’s the sense that this — the crucifixion and rape both — happened just for us: “How slowly time here moves towards the date; / This Rome still has 500 years to wait / before Christ’s birth and death,” even those 30-something years of Christ’s life collapsed into one entity.