Friday Miscellanea

Pickings this week are exceedingly slim, so we will have just a couple and make up for it with some scrumptious envois.

First up: ‘A New Philosophy of Opera’ Review: Curtain Calls

Operas such as Bizet’s “Carmen” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” with their exotic locales and doomed heroines, have been domesticated by opera producers into familiar, comfortable stories, performed over and over again for the initiated.

In “A New Philosophy of Opera,” the American opera director Yuval Sharon takes the radically opposite view, arguing that the foundational characteristics of opera—collaborative, boundary-crossing, multistranded, experimental—should be embraced in all their messiness and ambiguity. “Rebirth is opera’s true power,” Mr. Sharon writes, and suggests that the art form is infinitely richer and more welcoming than that tired old image suggests.

That has certainly been my experience.

* * *

Trouble in San Francisco: The San Francisco Symphony: When the Ship Hits the Fans

A few things jumped out that I wanted to point out, because it feels like things are really starting to accelerate here. Without a change in course, it’s pretty clear that the S.S. SFS is headed straight toward an iceberg.

When it comes to the SFS meltdown, the media seems to smell metaphorical blood in the bay.

I continue to be struck by the fact that the current leadership of the San Francisco Symphony really has no defenders in any press: local, national, or international. They are getting hammered by all quarters, by all media. And if they were hoping to win over ABC7, that clearly didn’t go well.

Read the whole thing for a thorough and detailed drubbing of the management of the symphony.

* * *

Skipping over a piece on how Taylor Swift would suffer if a new tax on unrealized gains were instituted, I guess that brings us to our musical selections. A Serenade in C by a teenage Mozart was recently discovered in a library in Leipzig. So yesterday the Mozart Stiftung in Salzburg arranged a premiere.

 Here is a fine performance of the E major Violin Partita (just the prelude) by Bach:

Debussy wrote a lot of chansons, which he preferred to call "mélodies." In the Debussy Edition box of CDs, four are devoted to them. I'm sure it is entirely my tin ear, but I have never quite managed to get into them. Here is one in a recent performance.

Actually, that was quite lovely... Speaking of lovely, I have put up at least part of Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder before, but it was not a live performance. Here is Simon Rattle conducting the Bavarian Radio Orchestra:

[Good lord, three harps, seven flutes, etc. It is as if Bruckner had written a secular cantata, except for a bigger orchestra! Sorry, I miscounted, eight flutes! Two contrabassoons?!?]