Ron Bierman - Page 3

Gounod’s overture introduces ROMEO AND JULIET with a prophetic mix of lyrical romance and tragedy. Yves Abel, the Principal Conductor of the San Diego Opera, is an expert in French opera and made sure that resonant brass and lush strings produced the mood a Parisian composer of the time would have favored. The quick pace was especially important in a five-act opera some productions turn into a turgid ordeal. No chance of that with Abel leading the San Diego Symphony.

When he was four-years old Joshua Bell's parents found him making music by plucking rubber bands stretched to different lengths on dresser drawers. Clearly, he needed a real instrument. Fortunately, they bought a violin rather than a guitar. Ten years later he was the youngest ever to solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and went on to become one of the most successful violinists in the world. The 'Gibson' Stradivarius has replaced dresser and rubber bands. In his most recent San Diego appearance Bell stood as soloist while conducting the acclaimed Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chamber orchestra in concertos by Bach and Samuel Barber. After intermission he conducted Beethoven's third symphony, the 'Eroica,' from the first violin chair.

Conductor Yves Abel arrived in San Diego from Europe a few days ago to begin rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet by French composer Charles Gounod. The Maestro does get around a lot, even for an internationally in-demand musician. His wife and boys five and eight sometimes travel with him when he conducts but remain at home in Italy this time. Perhaps Abel’s wanderlust began in childhood. His family immigrated from France to French-speaking Quebec when he was young. His father couldn’t find work there, so it was off to English-speaking Toronto where he spent most of his formative years. Next stop New York City for study at the Mannes School of Music, and after New York frequent work in Italy, then Germany. Abel’s travel has resulted in fluency in French, English, Italian and German.

Jeff Thayer was at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Temecula when we spoke for an hour on Zoom. 'I'm usually here right before I have something big to do.' He was referring to upcoming performances of the ninth violin concerto of The Chevalier de St. George at The Conrad in La Jolla. As the San Diego Symphony's Concertmaster, Thayer has realized an ambition dating back to high school. To further his ambition, he went on to graduate from the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School's Pre-College Division.

The La Jolla Music Society has been bringing some of the world’s best string quartets into the Baker-Baum Concert Hall at The Conrad. With a little over 500 seats and acoustics that allow you to hear off-stage whispers, it’ a setting that could only be improved upon if the performing quartet visited your living room. But if The Conrad is a great place to hear one quartet, how about two at the same time? The Dover and Escher Quartets performed last weekend to prove, resoundingly, that is also a delight. Since they are two of the most highly praised string quartets in the world, the excellent sound and quality of playing was predictable, but good music for a string octet is rare compared to the cornucopia of quartets Available. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven combined wrote more than 100 string quartets, but not one for string octet.

In its most recent season, Classics 4 Kids reached nearly 37,000 people at 256 San Diego County schools, two thirds of them in lower income areas. You’d think Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber was performing the way more than 1000 young San Diego students cheer at a Classics 4 Kids concert. Music Director and conductor Dana Zimbric gets audiences young and old excited about great music. In an email interview she explained to me how she does that and how she became a musician.

I admire the plucky inventiveness of the San Diego Opera. On an annual budget of roughly three percent of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, it has managed to mount a consistently appealing and entertaining variety of productions, traditional and contemporary, in both good times and plague times. The latter even forcing an excellent performance of a much-edited La bohème in a hockey-rink parking lot with an audience seated in an armada of vehicles. But although it was an enjoyable performance over all, now and then I was glad to be wearing a California-mandated mask so that no one would know I was at the current Civic Center staging of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.

'I'm just Reggie from Atlanta' baritone Reginald Smith, Jr. explained during our hour-long discussion on Zoom. That may be how he would like to view himself, but it's hardly how most others do since he's also a Grammy winning opera star who's performed at the Met. Until high school, neither opera, much less the Met were in his plans. Then when 13 he saw an Atlanta Opera production of Tosca. 'A classical voice was not new to me.' But the spectacle of unamplified voices together with theatrical staging, an orchestra, and eye-catching scenery was a revelation. 'I vividly remember the show going along, the tenor comes out, the soprano. But when Scarpia made his first big entrance, I thought Whoa, that's a different voice. It just went, boom, you know, like, like an arrow right into my heart. And I thought, what is this person?'

It seems variety is the spice of classical music and opera in San Diego. The city’s symphony orchestra plans to appear in a dozen or more venues next year, and the opera company has used a different venue for each of its three recent recital concerts. The latest of these featured Mexican-born tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz, and the operatic tenor’s program choices continued the varietal spice. The first half began with five Italian canciones followed by four Spanish zarzuelas and concluded with two Puccini arias. But many in the audience were waiting for the all-mariachi second half. Their reward was 11 Mexican-Spanish favorites sung in front of the 10-piece Mariachi Continental de México led by musical director Silvano Chavez.

Although they don’t fill stadiums violinist Leonidas Kavakos and pianist Yuja Wang are classical music’s equivalent of huge pop stars. Wang is the better-known of the two partly because of the attention she’s garnered by dressing like one, surely more conservatively than Lady Gaga and Cher, but still eye-catching compared to the usual classical style. On this evening she surprised a bit with a black dress, perhaps to match Kavakos’s dark dinner jacket and the seriousness of the music to follow. The

The imposing mezzo soprano Stephanie Blythe is known for her roles in Wagner, Verdi and Stravinsky. Why would she begin a Balboa Theatre recital for the San Diego Opera with Johnny Mercer’s 'Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive?” Here’s what she said in a recent interview, “I’ve been a great fan of Johnny Mercer’s and I’ve been singing the music of his Great American Songbook for a very long time.” Rather than a concert-hall recital, Blythe was doing cabaret, and doing it far better than most of the opera singers who try to crossover. Her main problem had to be choosing which songs to include in her tribute to Johnny Mercer. He wrote 1500 of them, most often sticking to lyrics in collaboration with the A-list melodic composers of his era. At one point in the 40s he had five of the top ten on the popular radio show “Your Hit Parade.” (If you remember Snooky Lanson and Dorothy Collins, I wouldn’t mention it in your dating app bio.) Mercer’s honors include nineteen Oscar nominations with four wins. That got him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The Jacob's Masterworks Series has been the centerpiece of the San Diego Symphony's concert season for many years. But the pandemic put the series on hold and delayed the launch of Rafael Payare's first full season as music director and conductor. The opening of the outdoor Rady Shell has allowed the Series to resume without the masking or reduction in attendance that would be required indoors. And a successful host it has proven to be. Turnouts have been larger than can ever be accommodated at the Jacobs Music Center, and acoustics, electronically manipulated though they be, are in many ways an improvement on those of the hall.

Classical music is supposed to be serious, difficult to understand, intimidating, right? Who are all these people laughing at what the conductor says, ordering bottles of wine, jumping up to applaud, even, gasp, clapping between movements. Was I amongst Philistines? Had I trustingly followed Waze to the wrong concert? Wait, let me see the program again. No, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak, that sounds right. OMG! It’s gone too far. Now they’re exploding fireworks louder than cannons above the orchestra and from ships in the bay right next to the audience. And the audience is actually on its feet cheering!

David Bennett is now six years into his job as general director of the San Diego Opera Association. When hired, he faced shaky finances, a loss of major donors, and huge turnover in the membership of the board of directors. The new board hired him with the understanding that downsizing and reinvention of the organization were his priorities. Then, after getting off to a surprisingly good start, Bennett had the forced restrictions of COVID-19 to contend with. Perhaps a biblical plague of locusts is next?

What was a makes-you-jump BOOM!! doing in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue? Had someone mistakenly lit an 1812 Overture cannon? Were we under attack?! Oh wait! It was just a bass drum resonating through the San Diego Symphony’s spectacular new state-of-the-art sound system at the Rady Shell. And so, Rafael Payare’s initial in-person public concert during his first full season as music director, though a year late because of COVID-19, was a booming success.

San Diego’s classical music scene coped with the COVID-19 invasion by trading shuttered concert halls for parking lots and online media. Appreciative bravos and bravas were replaced by either honking horns, flashing headlights or painful silence. The city’s Mainly Mozart was an early adopter of drive-in performances. Its first was in July of last year with an audience of 150 vehicles voicing raucous automotive approval for San Diego Symphony Concertmaster Jeff Thayer and seven musicians from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, including Concertmaster Martin Chalifour. The musicians, delighted to be playing in person under any circumstances, delivered lively versions of an early Mozart divertimento and the Mendelssohn octet.

The San Diego Opera continued its quixotic foray into parking-lot adventures with The Barber of Seville by Rossini, social distancing once again forcing substantial changes to a production's length and cast size. Revisions to libretto, costumes, set and lighting went all out for a zany farcical effect that even many staid opera lovers of a certain age would eventually realize harkened back to the free-wheeling spirit of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in, complete with 'Sock it to me,' chicken jokes and Rowan's trademark closing 'Say goodnight, Dick.' This always said to his seemingly clueless partner Dick Martin. Lest you think it was a radically revised libretto, I offer assurances that most of the explicit references to the bygone TV show were displayed in hand-drawn lettering on cardboard placards held up by a man near the stage whose humble garb included a Santa Clause hat. This seemingly homeless but cheerful gentleman was teamed offstage with a gaggle of other extras. Some of them were chorus members, policemen and musicians usually on stage for Rossini's comic opera, but now, during difficult times, especially for opera directors and stage managers, they were singing, dancing and gesticulating wildly offstage, one of them mounted on a pickup truck.

As I write this, mezzo soprano Emily Fons is driving from her home in Milwaukee to San Diego to rehearse the role of Rosina, the wife of roving-eyed count Almaviva in The Barber of Seville by Rossini. Three years ago Fons sang Cherubino here in the related comic opera The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart. The switch to the count's wife from Mozart's Cherubino, a 15-year-old boy and randy rival of the philandering count, is an indication of the mezzo's acting and vocal versatility. I discovered when we met via Zoom (what else?) that her adventurous openness to new roles is typical of the mezzo's approach to life.

A connoisseur's bravos replaced by honkin' horns and flashin' headlights? Puccini's La bohème staged in a parking lot? Such is opera performance in an age of COVID-19. A sold-out fleet of 450 cars contained opera-starved San Diegans who showed their appreciation of the performance in ways never imagined by the composer or previously casts. The intrepid automotive adventurers were rewarded with warm, sometimes thrilling voices thanks to the daring initiative that salvaged a production originally planned for the San Diego Civic Center stage. Quite a feat given the challenge of new outdoor staging and libretto revisions required for social distancing among the performers.

British guest conductor Bramwell Tovey led the San Diego Symphony Orchestra in authoritative performances of William Walton's Crown Imperial (Coronation March), Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto and the Enigma Variations of Edward Elgar. Britannia indeed ruled on this night! In 1936 Walton was asked to write a ceremonial march for the coronation of King Edward VIII. And did he ever! Tovey pulled out all the stops (no pun intended) when a roaring organ joined pounding percussion, crashing cymbals and blaring brass in the work's thrilling climaxes, though the sound became a bit muddy with organ at full-blast.