Extension proposed for Mark

A proposal to extend Peter Mark’s tenure as artistic director of the Virginia Opera for an extra season will be presented to the opera board on Oct. 30. Under its terms, Mark would remain artistic director through the 2012-13 season, conducting one production in 2011-12 and one in 2012-13, thereafter taking the title artistic director emeritus. Mark reportedly has agreed to the plan, writes Teresa Annas of The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk):

http://hamptonroads.com/2010/10/proposal-submitted-extend-opera-directors-job?cid=ltst

The opera board’s executive committee has decided not to renew Mark’s contract when it expires at the end of the
2011-12 season. A group of dissenting board members, led by Edythe C. Harrison, the company’s founding president, has been campaigning to keep Mark, who has been in artistic charge of the company since 1975.

OCT. 31 UPDATE: The Pilot's Annas reports that the board discussed but did not vote on the extension proposal:

http://hamptonroads.com/2010/10/virginia-opera-board-discusses-directors-contract

Tuba (abbreviated?)

Taylor Brizendine, blogging for NewMusicBox on the 2010 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, reports on a score-editing session with master engraver and copyist Bill Holab. "Never abbreviate the word 'tuba,' " Holab advises:

http://www.newmusicbox.org/chatter/chatter.nmbx?id=6636

Which begs the question: How would you abbreviate "tuba?"

Lullabies in birdland

The Australian composer John Levine, creator of "Alphamusic," or sound that affects brainwaves and brings on a calming "alpha state" that enables the listener to sleep, is demonstrating the effect this weekend at a music festival. His subjects are budgies, Amanda Greaves reports in the Bradford (UK) Telegraph & Argus:

http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/8464799.Healing_music_is_not_just_for_birds/

(For those of you who don't watch enough British TV, a budgie is a pet bird.)

* * *

And a survey by a hotel chain of 6,000 Britons found that 20 percent used classical music to help get to sleep. The three most sleep-inducing composers were Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, BBC Music Magazine reports:

http://www.bbcmusicmagazine.com/news/classical-music-makes-sleep-inducing-top-ten

Review: 'Rigoletto'

Virginia Opera, Peter Mark conducting
Oct. 24, Carpenter Theatre, Richmond CenterStage

The Virginia Opera’s production of Verdi’s "Rigoletto," which concluded its run over the weekend, proved to be one of its best in recent years in terms of vocal casting and orchestral performance. Visually, it was drab.

The South African baritone Fikile Mvinjelwa, in the title role, was a commanding presence with a powerful yet nuanced voice; and the Korean soprano Sang-Eun Lee, as Gilda, combined bell-like and focused tone with affecting characterization, especially in Gilda’s great aria, "Caro nome."

Tenor Aurelio Domínguez, a onetime cover singer with this company, brought to the role of the Duke of Mantua a fine if still somewhat young voice, and delivered the goods in "La donna è mobile," this opera’s most familiar number and Verdi’s greatest hit tune. In characterization and stance, Domínguez came across more as a languid preppy than an aristocratic roué, not a critical shortcoming as the duke is a rather passive villain – no need for him to exude menace.

The menace was provided, with bracing chilliness, by bass Nathan Stark as the assassin Sparafucile. Stark and mezzo-soprano Audrey Babcock, who produced big tone and acted with delicious raunchiness as Maddalena, cooked up the most volatile emotional chemistry of the show in Act 3. No such vibes, alas, in the interactions of the duke’s courtiers and Mantuan damsels in Act 1.

Bass Evan Brummel was in good voice, but brought too much youthful vigor to the role of Count Monterone, an elderly man cursing the duke for debauching his daughter and the jester Rigoletto for making light of the outrage.

Peter Mark conducted an orchestra drawn from Hampton Roads’ Virginia Symphony in accompaniment that was dramatically charged but never overtaxing to the voices; several of the orchestra’s soloists delivered memorably sensitive support.

With the exceptions of Rigoletto’s gold jester’s garb and assorted bits of lingerie, costumes were predominantly black, garnished with grays and dark earth tones. The set, divided between a revolving tower and tri-level scaffolding, was similarly dark. The lighting shed not enough light on this tunnel.

Review: Charles Rosen

with Christoph Genz, tenor
Oct. 23, Virginia Commonwealth University

When we think of musicological research's transformations of musical performance, we generally think of pre-19th century music; but a goodly number of romantic, even some modern, works are commonly heard in versions reflecting second thoughts of their composers and revisions, truncations and other tinkering by editors and publishers, and so could stand some re-examination. Robert Schumann's music, certainly: He had a lot of second thoughts, and much of his music has been put through the editorial mill.

Enter Charles Rosen, the eminent pianist and musicologist, who is marking the 200th anniversary of Schumann’s birth by taking on tour the rarely heard original versions of two familiar titles, the Fantasy in C major, Op. 17, for solo piano and the song cycle "Dichterliebe."

In the case of "Dichterliebe," Schumann’s settings of poems by Heinrich Heine, the collection grows from 16 to 20 songs, and the restored titles (all published posthumously, and separately, by Clara Schumann) bring more intimacy and emotional edge, not to mention a couple of the most hummable tunes, back to the cycle. The original fantasy, meanwhile, is even grander in scale and more integrated in content, thanks to the restoration of a more ambitious final movement.

On this Schumann tour, Rosen is joined in "Dichterliebe" by Christoph Genz, a German tenor whose substantial operatic experience is put to excellent use. His performance at VCU was intimate in delivery, as art-song should be; but he latched onto the drama, even theatricality, of songs such as "Und Wüsstens die Blumen" and "Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube," and put heart, as well as clean, refined tone, into the set’s many romantic reveries.

His diction also was spotless, which the audience's probably few German-speakers appreciated. Other listeners, not provided with translations of the texts, were doubtless more gratified by Genz’s expressive and communicative skills.

Rosen’s accompaniment was beautifully phrased and colored, and he made the piano into a true alternate voice in the cycle’s solo passages. The instrumental postlude to the final song, "Die alten, bösen Lieder," had special emotional resonance.

In the fantasy and the Intermezzo from "Faschingsschwank aus Wien," the 83-year-old pianist’s technical shortcomings were mostly offset by his mastery of Schumann’s musical grammar and expressive rhetoric. A younger Rosen with a more reliable technique could not have made more of "Constellation," the remarkable nocturne-cum-anthem that concludes the original Fantasy in C.

Most pianists will continue to play the "standard" fantasy, with its more lightweight finale. Now, every time they do, I’ll crave the missing magic, as conjured by Rosen.

Review: Richmond Symphony

Steven Smith conducting
with Joanne Kong, prepared piano & harpsichord
Oct. 22, University of Richmond

Composer Michael Colgrass likes to tailor his music to the sound and personality of an individual musician. In Joanne Kong he found an unusually versatile subject, equally adept at piano and harpsichord. The work that Colgrass wrote for her, a
quasi-concerto called "Side by Side," is believed to be the first for a single soloist playing both keyboards, at times simultaneously.

Kong's performance of "Side by Side" with the Richmond Symphony was the last of three that she has given with the groups that commissioned the piece. (She previously played it with the Esprit Orchestra of Toronto and Boston Modern Orchestra Project, both in 2007.) She may be the work’s sole exponent for a while, simply because there aren’t many professional pianist-harpsichordists around – and probably fewer who are inclined toward contemporary music. Once more musicians cross the keyboard and chronology divides, though, they are likely to dote on this piece.

A compact work, about the length of a Bach or Haydn concerto, "Side by Side" explores two themes, one lyrical, the other reminiscent of baroque music in its skittish ornamentation, as if through a prism, or perhaps a conversation of exclamations and interrupted phrases.

The piano is prepared, à la John Cage, with mutes and objects such as screws on its strings, to produce what the composer calls a "barroom piano" sound, and to bring its sound presence and texture closer to those of a French-style two-manual harpsichord. Amplification is also employed to bring their sounds into parity.

The expected roles of the instruments are reversed: The piano sounds more percussive, the harpsichord more tuneful (if not lyrical). The keyboards’ duets are echoed by pairs of instruments – flute and viola, oboe and cello, trombone and double-bass, violin and the combined tones of harp and celesta – throughout the orchestration.

"Side by Side" is unusual not just in its double-barreled soloist, but also in its combination of busy playfulness and luminous sound; the glow, emanating largely from a big percussion section, warms up music that otherwise might strike many listeners as spiky or chilly.

Kong, conductor Steven Smith and the orchestra delivered an alert, crisply detailed and generally cheerful account of a piece that deserves, and will prove rewarding in, repeated hearings.

Heather Stebbins’ "Traces," originally written in 2008 while the composer was a student at UR, reworked here to conform to the orchestration of the Colgrass, has a similarly prismatic or fragmentary quality in its sound and organization.

Stebbins describes the piece as "a musical response to the notion of an event or object leaving behind remnants of existence." Those remnants are more like sharp-edged, solid objects than hazy or idealized memories, and they form a rather dense mass in the work’s several big climaxes.

To precede the new music by Colgrass and Stebbins, Smith chose the "Danses concertantes" of Igor Stravinsky, a late (1942) example of Stravinsky’s neoclassical style that is propelled by drolly off-kilter rhythms and wry, animated wind solos and ensembles. The orchestra’s wind players sparkled and/or frolicked through this witty piece.

This concert was one of the increasingly rare occasions when a showcase performance by a prominent local musician brings out colleagues in force. A wide cross-section of Richmond's keyboard artists and composers attended – a testimony to the high regard in which Kong is held. Further testimony: the long list of local patrons supporting the Richmond commission.

Mediator for the opera?

"We get a distinct whiff of Götterdämmerung-style singed eyebrows — our own — as we peer into the scene," an editorial in The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk) says of the controversy over the Virginia Opera's decision to let Artistic Director Peter Mark's contract expire in 2012. "It’s like a homeowners’ association meeting, with viking helmets."

The editorial suggests reorganizing the opera board, which currently has about 100 members, 19 of them on its executive committee, which made the decision on Mark's contract. And The Pilot calls for bringing in a mediator to deal with the affair:

http://hamptonroads.com/2010/10/melodrama-virginia-opera

Viking helmet optional, breastplate recommended.