Gesamtkunstblog for Steve

Steve Sokolow, a mainstay, friend, mentor, peacemaker, and guide of the WSNC since its inception, died October 25th. Those of us who knew him are devastated. Messages of grief from friends have been coming in, but I've also been getting mail from out-of-area members who never met him and are equally stunned. For many of us, Steve was All-Vater.

Steve has been such an active part of WS activities for 30 yrs that it's difficult to separate him from the group. At meetings, Steve drew fascinating, intricate doodles while listening to lectures - one who didn't know him might think that he wasn't paying attention - and then he'd ask penetrating questions, quote passages from the Ring, and make insanely brilliant, insightful comments. Steve led many panel discussions over the years and always pulled the best out of a guest. He was WSNC president for many years and was the grease that oiled the machine.

A frequent attendee at the SF Opera, one could also run into Steve at the LA Opera, MetHD broadcasts, and various other venues, including Gilbert & Sullivan and Grateful Dead-related shows.

A memorial service will be held Sunday, November 27, at 1:00 pm, on what would have been Steve's 68th birthday. It will be held at Steve and Bryana's home:

851 Brittany Lane

Concord, CA

Please RSVP so Bryana can have a head count for refreshments.

All-Vater

Taken by John Chilcott at last summer's Ring

Apropos of never knowing where you'll bump into Steve is this remembrance from David Ehmke:

I have an endearing memory of meeting Steve in Bayreuth in 1996. I was there on my own that year, having been offered tickets after applying for 8 years. Steve was in Europe on business and had driven up to Bayreuth. He got someones ticket and saw the 2nd and 3rd acts of Siegfried - typical Steve.
So, as I was returning to my hotel, much to my surprise here came Steve up the street. We talked for a while. As we prepared to part, he said, "this calls for a hug" which we proceeded to do.
In 1996 I was not used to getting hugs from a guy. But that one has remained in my memory ever since. It was typical of Steve, a warm-hearted, wonderful man whom I shall miss very much.

Please feel free to post comments about Steve below or by email to me. If you have photos you'd like to share, send them to me and I'll put them up.

And please visit the site Steve's daughter Molly is creating for her dad, www.stevesokolow.com. It's still evolving and is a real labor of love. And feel free to cross-post between the two sites.

Symbolism: Call for Papers

We've received a request for papers on symbolism from Professor Rosina Neginsky of the University of Illinois in Springfield. Goodness knows that the Ring is a fleshy topic for symbolic interpretation!

Between 25-28 April, 2012 ALMSD (Art, Literature, Music in Symbolism and Decadence) will be hosting a second International conference, "Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences" with the theme Light and Shade or Light and Obscurity in Symbolism, its origins and its consequences, which will take place at the beautiful Allerton Park, near the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana campus, in Monticello, Illinois. The organization would like to invite you to submit a proposal which will address the theme of the conference in art, literature and music. The proposal should be about 300 words and should be sent to symbolismabstracts@uis.edu before May 10, 2011. Please include a short version of your CV. If you have questions, please contact Rosina Neginsky at rnegi1@uis.edu.

For further information, please refer to: http://www.uis.edu/hosted-orgs/ALMSD/conference.html

Nixon Meets Wagner

I'm appalled that it's been nearly 6 months since my last post! That's the perils of volunteer labor, I guess. It's been busy, busy for us. First it was getting ready for the holidays, then it was recovering from the holidays, and now it's trying to buy a new home in the Bay Area. Lots of driving all over and viewing properties, offers, due diligence & fact-finding, an inspection - which led to cancellation of the contract. Now we start all over. I do think about the blog, but I'm too distracted by current events. House issues, Egypt, Libya, Wisconsin - you name it. All seem so much more present, so much more important than a silly vanity blog.

Last week we went to the Met HD performance of Nixon in China and I was blown away by how much Wagner is contained in the work. I've seen the work live twice before, but not since 1990 in LA. I'm sure I noticed the Wagner at the time, but the piece is now more familiar and I'm more comfortable with minimalism.

I came home, got out our Nixon CDs and ripped them into iTunes and put them on my iPod. And I've listened over and over. The music is so complex and lush - it's just a revelation. In the scene "Tropical Storm" towards the end of the 2nd act, there is a section that is pure Salome dissolving into the gods entering Valhalla and shades of the end of Götterdämmerung.

Here and there throughout the opera you hear the opening Rhine music, bits of Forest Murmurs, which when you think about it is really a precursor to John Adams and Philip Glass (funny thing, but I couldn't remember if it was spelled Philip or Phillip, but on my way to Wiki to check, I thought, "Well, heck, he's a minimalist; I'm sure he'd only use one 'l'." And, indeed, he does.)

If you haven't seen the production, most Bay area theaters are running the encore performance this Wednesday, March 2. And I would encourage those who may not think they're interested to give it a shot. Contained within the minimalism is some gorgeous, lush orchestration that you will probably recognize.

I also wanted to attach a review Martin Bernheimer wrote after he saw the world premiere. (And no, it wasn't in Houston, it was right here in San Francisco at the Herbst Theater a few months before it premiered in Houston. It was a concert version with 2 pianos and Adams conducting, as I recall. It was sort of the off-Broadway equivalent of a preview run before a show hits the Great White Way.) The review doesn't exactly say that it's a dud, but one can infer that Bernheimer wasn't sure the work was here to stay!

Minimalist Mush : Nixon Goes To China Via Opera In S.F.

May 25, 1987|MARTIN BERNHEIMER | Times Music Critic

SAN FRANCISCO — Richard Nixon eyes Mao Zedong nervously, sweats profusely, thinks of his place in history and sings an aria. It is a high baritone aria full of shallow, well-meant platitudes.

The Chinese Chairman receives his guest with quizzical civility compromised by sly bemusement and sings an aria of his own. It is a high Heldentenor aria full of mystical philosophical references.

And so it goes. This is the Imperial City in 1972, or a deliriously unreasonable facsimile thereof.

Pat Nixon spouts giddy petit-bourgeois homilies as well as lyric-soprano cliche-fragments, weeps for the downtrodden and waltzes with her sentimentality-prone husband.

Mme. Mao does some vamping, musing and waltzing of her own, amid daring coloratura flights and gusts of Wagnerian resolve.

Henry Kissinger, a basso-not-so-profondo, provides comic relief. Premier Zhou Enlai sings a symbol-laden soliloquy with something akin to a probing if inscrutable voice of baritonal reason. Choruses of various sizes add Orffian punctuation to the multifarious verbal encounters.

This bizarre but potentially beguiling concoction is "Nixon in China," a pseudo-historic quasi-satirical opera-in-progress by everybody's favorite romantic minimalist, John Adams. (Remember "Harmonielehre"?)

With two intermissions and glib explanatory remarks by the composer himself, "Nixon" ran--sometimes crept--for three and a half trying hours Friday night at the Herbst Theater.

At this so-called "concert preview," the audience in the 1,100-seat hall shrank dramatically as the evening rambled on. That need not suggest a lost cause, however. Things could be very different by the time "Nixon" receives its much-ballyhooed full-scale premiere at the new Wortham Theatre in Houston in October (with reprises to follow in Brooklyn, Washington and Amsterdam).

When finally staged, the opera will no doubt benefit from the theatrical imagination of Peter Sellars, the fashionable enfant terrible who happened to conceive the project in the first place. Mark Morris, another avant-gardish Wunderkind, will no doubt provide off-the-Great-Wall choreography, including a heart-rending ballet divertissement inspired by "The Red Detachment of Women."

By October, the opera should be adorned with bona-fide orchestral accompaniment. The singers, for better or worse, will be outfitted with body mikes.

It all will be terribly daring, terribly mod, terribly chic, terribly up-to-date. It also may be provocative. It may even be fun.

Minimalist Mush : Nixon Goes To China Via Opera In S.F. - Los Angeles Times

Also, here is a fascinating piece with a different perspective by a journalist who was on that historic trip:

Far From Valhalla: A Witness Sees History Restaged and Rewritten

By MAX FRANKEL
A look at the opera "Nixon in China" by Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Nixon's trip to China.

News from Bayreuth

Rats!

Photos Bayreuther Festspiele GmbH/Enrico Nawrath

First it was rotting rabbits in Parsifal and now it's lab rats in Lohengrin.

Here's an email I received from long-time member Sally Eastwood just back from Bayreuth and presumably wishing she'd stayed home:

Made my third and final trip to Bayreuth last month and was saddened and deeply disappointed that there is not a trace of Wagner there anymore. The whole experience was defiled beyond recognition. Since I have lived so long "out of the loop", perhaps I'm the last to know. I had been forewarned about the Meistersinger, which was the last of the seven operas I attended, but by that time I had been assaulted by so much pornography, ugliness, pointless violence and distracting nonsense that I was numb. I like to think it is ignorance rather than intentional that his own family is trivializing and ridiculing his work. Have the audience and the directors even read the texts? Wagner wanted all the elements of his work (musical, text and visual aspects) to work together for an experience deeper than "entertainment" or "distraction." I was always moved by the beauty which touched the depths of my soul and took me to a deep place of no time/ space. Where I always experienced it as an antidote to the world's insanity, I now saw it as a REFLECTION of the world's insanity. During the few moments when the distracting, pointless busyness ceased and the words and music were allowed to simply speak for them selves, I noticed the audience looking at their watches. Young people now are "wired" differently seeking outer satisfaction and an overabundance of input coming from all sides or else they are "bored." It all depends what one is seeking...depth and stillness or stimulation and "entertainment", an inner experience or an outer one. It is also generational I suppose as I am not "wired" to have my senses bombarded with ugliness, frivolity and chaos, especially when it involves something that has meant so much to me for so long. Enough kvetching already. Suffice it to say that if I want a Ring where technology is used to enhance not detract from the text and which still retains its beauty, depth, meaning and humanity, you'll find me in Seattle rather than Bayreuth.

And in a followup email, Sally remarked about the Lohengrin:

I was in the far-most Loge seat for this where half the stage was blocked from view. I considered myself LUCKY!

Festspielhaus infestation!

The embryonic thing in the eggshell is supposed to be Gottfried. Perhaps this is why Jonas Kaufmann was sick and canceled his last two performances.

Not too hard to figure out who's supposed to be naughty and nice here:

I wonder why the caged rat sings (with apologies to Maya Angelou):

I'd love to hear from others who attended and what they thought. Is there any redemption to be had? Perhaps we should have a caption contest?

Completely off topic

Ok, this has nothing to do with music of any sort, but I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. As someone who currently has a huge watermelon rocking and rolling around the bottom shelf of her fridge, this idea seems like pure genius and that sort of head-slapping "Why has no one come up with this before?"

Space in Japan is always at a premium, so smart farmers have begun creating square watermelon; the melons are grown inside rigid containers. Brilliant!

They, of course, fetch a premium price at 10000 ¥ (about $118), roughly the 4 times the cost of a traditional watermelon, but everything in Japan fetches premium prices.

This article is from 2001, so perhaps the prices have changed since then - the exchange rate certainly has!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1390088.stm

"u" the opera

Klingon opera

Not Wagner, but let's be honest here. The Nordic sagas that we love are cut from the same cloth as all the warrior mythology. And Star Trek has certainly taken its place as a major interpreter of that heroic mythology. So it's sort of a second-cousin-once-removed from Wagner's Ring.

Sure, it's odd, but if I were anywhere near the Netherlands next week, I'd definitely attend, if only for the value of being able to say, "Why yes, I've seen a Klingon opera!". (And while I'm not a Trekkie, these characters are just as alive to Star Trek fans as Wotan, Brünnhilde and Siegfried are to us Wagnerians.).

The next performance of the opera ‘u’ will be:

9, 10, 11 and 12 September 2010
Theater Zeebelt

De Constant Rebecqueplein 20A

The Hague
For reservations email kassa@zeebelt.nl or call +31 (0) 70 3656546

And if you want to know more, there's lots of u and Klingon lore here, including a couple of videos in the Klingon language.

http://www.u-theopera.org/

Thanks to OperaBobb for sending this tidbit in his newsletter.

Review: Lotfi Mansouri's new tell-all book

Whilst perusing Amazon, debating whether to buy Lotfi's new book in print format or wait until it's available for Kindle, I saw Janos Gereben's review of it and asked him if I could put it on Wagner Bytes. He graciously responded with an expanded version, plus his review of the current Berkeley Opera offering, Legend of the Ring. Thanks, Janos!

The World According to Mansouri

By Janos Gereben

Reading "Lotfi Mansouri, an Operatic Journey" is a guilty pleasure.

The former San Francisco Opera general director's straight-from-the-shoulder - if inevitably self-serving - autobiography is published by University Press of New England; it is available from

http://www.amazon.com/Lotfi-Mansouri-Operatic-Journey/dp/1555537065

This 330-page delight of backstage stories from a 60-year-long international career is perhaps disquieting for the genteel reader, made to witness a tell-all orgy, ranging from the discourteously candid to the nakedly retaliatory... some with numerous grains of revelatory truth, others purely of personal resentment.

Hundreds of the past half century's best-known singers, conductors, and administrators are praised-and-demolished or just the latter. It is amazing stuff, even if one feels uneasy to be so positive about it. Yikes! I am beginning to sound like the book.

Examples of Mansouri dishing it out, picked at random:

- Santa Fe Opera founder/director John Crosby had an "unmatched tenure [of 43 years]," was "an incredible fund-raiser," but "his people skills were nowhere near his managing talents... the price he paid for his fear of human contact was the coldness of his conducting."

- Otto Klemperer: "unaware of his health problems [a stroke and a botched brain operation], I just thought he was an abusive boor... His fascination with the opposite sex took precedence over everything else." Klemperer, responding to someone with a Swiss accent: "Would you repeat that in German?"

- Zürich Opera administrator Emil Jucker "had all the integrity of the average viper."

- Kurt Herbert Adler "ran San Francisco Opera like a personal fiefdom, oozing disdain for anyone he considered inferior in judgment or experience, and his list was a long one... tightfisted... could be arrogant, aggressive, rude, and insulting - and this was just on an average day."

Written with Donald Arthur, the book is impressively diverse in its appeal: all about opera, it's a perfectly captivating book for readers oblivious to musical theater - a fascinating read about the struggles of a young man from a dysfunctional family in Iran, his subsequent adventures around the world, and skyrocketing international career.

Apparently stillborn in Tehran, on a sweltering day in 1929, and given up for dead, the baby miraculously revived on a block of ice was named Lotfollah - "kindness of God."

Mansouri's recurring adventures over the years in Iran and in Hollywood are both suspenseful and rib-tickling. In kindergarten, he played the Grand Vizier in a cast with Fatemeh, the future Shah's sister.

Unfortunately, the crown prince himself attended our little performance... and I got so nervous that I wet my pants and started crying onstage. From that moment, I developed a lifelong sympathy for singers' nerves.

In Hollywood, Mansouri played Caruso in the made-for-TV movie "The Day I Met Caruso," and many years later, he was involved with the Pavarotti disaster, "Yes, Giorgio," which, he says, cost $19 million to make and grossed $1 million. He went on to direct the opera scenes in "Moonstruck," with Cher and Nicolas Cage.

Mansouri, who ran opera houses in Geneva and Toronto before, became general director of San Francisco Opera in 1988, just a year before the Loma Prieta earthquake which damaged the War Memorial. "[Administration] dysfunction, strike, recession - and then an earthquake!," he laments.

For the next decade of those trying times, Mansouri held the company together, helped to oversee the $90 million on-time, on-budget, successful reconstruction of the building in the middle of an economic downturn.

And yet, instead of losing audience during almost two years of the company being homeless, Mansouri actually brought in many new and young opera fans with productions such as the "Broadway Boheme" in the Orpheum, and great casts in the Civic Auditorium, transformed for the occasion.

Mansouri engaged Valery Gergiev and the Kirov to San Francisco for their U.S. debut, also signing Christoph von Dohnányi, Peter Schneider, Markus Stenz, Christian Thielemann, Antonio Pappano, Andrew Davis, and Yuri Temirkanov.

During his term, Mansouri commissioned new operas by John Adams, Conrad Susa, Stewart Wallace (whose Harvey Milk, he says, "the cast saved from its second-rate music. I've never even listened to the recording"), André Previn, and Jake Heggie, enhancing San Francisco's reputation for having a leading opera company. On the other hand, Mansouri manages this aside about the Harvey Milk creators:

We met composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie in New York. I found them pretentious, pseudo-intellectual East Coasters and self-satisfied. There was an aura of mirthless superficiality about them.

Then, in 2001, Mansouri was succeeded by Pamela Rosenberg, "who [in Europe] was used to realizing her visions... and then send the bill to the government." During the six-month overlap between them, Mansouri says, "she never talked to me about business. Not once."

By this time, in the transition period to the new general director, Mansouri was "barely on speaking terms with Donald Runnicles," he had named music director of the company a decade before.

At his most Dante-esque, Mansouri reserves the ninth circle of Hell for those two, listing Rosenberg's misdeeds (an appointment resulting from "a search process gone tragically wrong") and, even more, attacking Runnicles in great detail, calling him "the one problem entirely of my own making."

Besides Runnicles' siding with Rosenberg, Mansouri also holds the conductor's behavior ("weirdly insecure") and even work on the podium against him:

When he was on, his performances were very, very good. But when he was off, he was way off. Sometimes he didn't seem familiar with a score, as if he were sight-reading it, even in performance. He also had a habit of letting the orchestra overpower the voices. He cared about some operas, but not about others, which was odd, considering he always had his choice of whatever three operas he wanted each season.

But, beyond personalities and feuds and dishing it out, there is a wealth of material, both fascinating and debatable, in "Lotfi Mansouri, an Operatic Journey."

Janos has covered the SF Bay Area arts scene for many years, as arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group and music editor of the San Jose Mercury News. He now covers music, theater, and art for the SF Examiner, and for the past decade has been Music News columnist for San Francisco Classical Voice:

http://www.sfcv.org/