Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Isabel Leonard

There were a number of highlights from this year’s Santa Fe excursion. One of them for me was seeing and hearing mezzo Isabel Leonard in performances that stood out in my mind for their beauty and technical ability. She’s appeared in Santa Fe before this year and is well known on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera as well in both Mozart and Rossini roles. She was most notably filmed in the Claus Guth production of Cosi Fan Tutte during the 2009 Salzburg Festival. This season in Santa Fe she is the scene stealer in Vivaldi’s Griselda where she sings Costanza. The fact that she has one of the most challenging and well known arias from the opera, “Agitata da due venti”, doesn’t hurt of course, but after two viewings of the biggest ovations for any individual singer I saw in this year’s festival it felt like a major arrival to my ears. Of course, Leonard has enjoyed increasing notice all over the world in the last five years and is no stranger to any of the major opera and concert stages. So it may have been my own awakening more than anyone else's, but this Costanza felt like something more than another well-sung Dorabella or Cherubino. Leonard held the large empty stage and kept all attention unwaveringly focused on her prodigious performance, the kind of thing the biggest opera superstars do everyday.

And just to put a point on it, on Sunday I stopped by the Scottish Rite Center before leaving town for a solo recital from Leonard hosted by the Santa Fe Concert Association. The SFCA presents classical programs in Santa Fe throughout the Fall and Winter, and this recital, the first in a brand new series, was a way to give some of the great vocalists involved with the opera festival a chance to perform in a concert setting. It’s a new series and a new program for everyone involved and this first recital, which is followed by one from Daniel Okulitch on August 2 and Eric Owens on August 7, was seen by an almost sold out crowd in the acoustically beautiful, if somewhat visually odd, auditorium of this Masonic temple.

Isabel Leonard as Costanza Photo: Ken Howard/Santa Fe Opera 2011

And outside of feeling like I was part of some Cremaster VI movie at the odd moment, it was a purely enjoyable program focusing on bread and butter arias that have made Leonard’s career to date. The hour long set included both of Cherubino’s arias, “Una voce poco fa” from The Barber of Seville, and “Svegliatevi nel core” from Handel’s Giulio Cesare. There were also three songs from Rachmaninoff and de Falla’s Seven Spanish Folk Songs. All of this is likely familiar material to fans of vocal music, but Leonard made the show seem very fresh with her warm personable manner and expressiveness. She could be fiercly intense at one moment and playful to the point of giggling the next in service to these pieces. She was accompanied by Joseph Illick who is the director of SFCA, giving the show an added layer of familiarity and fun. And for the group on Sunday afternoon, including myself, it was clear that this is a young singer destined for much bigger parts in the very near future. (Including Rosina at the Met this fall.)

The other interesting thing about this recital was the continued expansion of Santa Fe as a summer music and art destination. Granted both Santa Fe Opera and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival have been staples for decades now. And the various art shows including the Indian Market at the end of August give the city a cache in at least one corner of the art and antiques world. But the nearly sold-out recital showed that there is plenty of hunger and interest in music during the summer beyond what the city has already. Perhaps Santa Fe could become the Salzburg of North America? Sure Santa Fe is half the size, but it has all the beauty that rivals that European city. Of course, there are still some major issues including the absence of an association with a major international orchestra, the city’s elevation, and a dearth of performance venues. But wouldn’t it be great to have such an expansive multi-site performance and music festival of that kind on our own shores. One can dream. And maybe our own Karajan will come along one day in the desert Southwest to unify the necessary forces.

Labels: Santa Fe Chamber Music

The Calder Quartet with Christopher Rouse Photo: mine 2011

It wouldn’t be summer in Santa Fe without new music. And while the newest thing on offer from the typically trail blazing Santa Fe Opera this year is Menotti’s 1963 opera The Last Savage, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival is bringing a number of recent commissions to local stages as is their annual tradition. The piece I was most excited to hear (although there are several other great offerings in this month’s schedule) was Christopher Rouse’s String Quartet No. 3, which received the final two performances of its rolling premiere here. Rouse composed the work with the support of the Festival and other organizations specifically for the young and extremely talented L.A.-based Calder Quartet who performed it on both Thursday and Friday in the St. Francis Auditorium. Rouse describes the work, his first chamber piece since 1996, in his notes as perhaps one of his most personal compositions calling it music that has been in his head a long time, but never before now finding expression due to the limitations in rehearsal time and other logistics in writing the piece for a full orchestra. Thus when the Calder commission for a quartet came along, it was the perfect time to offer up this music in a chamber format to a group that could make the long term commitment to what Rouse warned would be a particularly difficult piece to play. He likens the work to a seizure and it’s a bracing, forceful, and jarring single movement. Much of this is played in unison by the quartet and despite a quieter middle section, the work does come out swinging. The Calder Quartet showed amazing skill in managing the work’s coordination challenges as it reels from moment to moment.

It was unnerving in a good sense and seemed to have that effect on the players as well. In Thursday’s noon time concert, which included Haydn’s "Joke" String Quartet before and Beethoven’s No. 11 Quartet after the Rouse, the emotional force of the new piece spilled over into the Beethoven for a raw and rather edgy turn. The whimsical Haydn, served as a double joke in that it actively avoided setting the stage for what was to follow. It was well played and increased the impact of Rouse's new work. On Friday’s “Masters of Modern Music” program the quartet closed the show and came off more unwound and less tense than on Thursday. That may have been in part due to the quartet’s bedfellows on Friday. That show opened with the Calder Quartet playing Peter Eötvös’ Korrespondenz, a setting of communication between Mozart and his father during Mozart’s turbulent Paris years. And while there is no vocal music in the piece, it bristles like a heated conversation and ends with issues unresolved much like real arguments.

The other two pieces on Friday’s program featured some prodigious playing and guts from the harpist Bridget Kibbey. First she paired with flutist Tara Helen O’Connor for Toru Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea III with its take on the American New England coastline from a Japanese perspective. This haunting and lovely moment was followed by Kibbey alone playing the smallest snippet from R. Murray Schafer’s magnum opus Patria. This monumental multi-day expansive musical drama rivals the Ring cycle in scope and this 15-minute solo derivative is like playing the horn solo from Act II of Siegfried on a program by itself. This re-orchestrated passage from Patria No. 5: The Crown of Ariadne, which was originally scored for at least 15 players, is reduced for harp and percussion both of which Kibbey played at the same time. In between moments of playing her specially tuned harp she would suddenly strike out at a bell or chime only to return to the harp in the next beat. At one point she tied on anklets of bells to accompany her playing as well. It was fascinating to watch her level of concentration and the music evoking Ariadne was a pleasure. Sure it wasn’t performed on the beach as the original score calls for with the full ensemble, but you can’t have everything. But on this afternoon, one got some lovely recent music and its significant local premiere from a great late 20th Century composer played by one of the most exciting yong string quartets. And that's plenty.

Labels: Santa Fe Chamber Music

Dawn Upshaw receives flowers as Inon Barnatan looks on in Santa Fe Photo: Ken mine 2011

One of the reasons I love Dawn Upshaw as a performer is that every performance from her brings something new and unexpected. Just when you think you know what she can do, she surprises you with something entirely different. There are few vocalists like her and her appearance in Santa Fe this week as part of her time as Artist-in-Residence at the 2011 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival is proving to be as memorable as any of her other stage appearances. On Thursday, she performed one of three programs she is doing for the festival this year focusing on the works of Schumann. Now admittedly, Upshaw is not the first name I think of when it comes to Lieder. She has recorded a variety of German Lieder with Richard Goode and toured in support of it. But it is often French, English, or Italian that she is best known in. So the power of her performance of seven of Schumann’s Lieder on Thursday came as a shock to me for the extent of their emotional power. Upshaw’s German may not be flawless, but her sense of the dramatic, her ability to establish narrative, and the way she can get inside of a song made these seven various works build to an overwhelming crescendo. It all started brightly and pleasantly enough with “In der Fremde” and “Er ist’s”. But as the minutes wore on a darker and eventually more impetuous sense of love shone through. By the time she reached “Mignon/Kennst du das Land?” and the concluding “Widmung”, the profound sense of being overwhelmed by emotion shone through in the dramatic pairing of these songs. Upshaw was steady and certain throughout without any gravel or missteps.

She was accompanied by young Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan who’ll be appearing on Saturday in a solo piano recital for the festival. He was a last minute replacement for Gilbert Kalish who had been scheduled to appear. Barnatan was quick on his feet and interacted beautifully with Upshaw as he did with the other performers on the program. The show started with Three Romances from Clara Schumann played by Barnatan and violin soloist Jessica Lee. They provided a lush and lovely introduction to Upshaw’s performance that followed. The evening concluded with Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet, which included Barnatan, violinist Soovin Kim, violist Choong-Jin Chang, and L.A. Phil principal cellist Peter Stumpf. Again the sound was polished, warm and lush. It was hard to believe that Barnatan was a last miunte sub given the quality of coordination in the performance. The quartet served as a sort-of response to Upshaw’s performance, as if the intensity of the love in the songs had eclipsed even the words themselves, leaving only this instrumental music. It was a lovely evening and, luckily, Upshaw will be around into next week giving two performances of Golijov’s Ayre on Sunday and Monday at the festival. Even when the opera isn’t performing, there is plenty of fabulous music to hear in Santa Fe.

Labels: Santa Fe Chamber Music

Bryn Hymel and Mark S. Doss Photo: Ken Howard/Santa Fe Opera 2011

Although it may be cheating to say so, Santa Fe has one of the most beautiful opera houses anywhere. The cheating part is that it is not the building itself that provides the beauty. The people of Santa Fe know there is no competing with the beauty of their surroundings, and so the opera house itself is completely open on three sides, including the back of the stage, to the vistas around it providing for some of the most dramatic viewing in a theater anywhere. If you’re an opera fan and haven’t been to Santa Fe during one of their summer festival seasons, you’re missing one of the great joys of loving opera itself. The Santa Fe Opera season, which opened over the past weekend, is a prime example of the variety and excitement the company brings each summer to northern New Mexico. The season will run through the end of August and features performances of five different productions. 2011 is the second year for the company’s Chief Conductor, Frédéric Chaslin, (his third year of performances in Santa Fe), and he and General Director, Charles MacKay, have put together a typically varied and adventurous program I’ll be covering over two weekends in July. In the meantime you can check out the Santa Fe Opera site, which now includes an in-house blog, The Back Deck, that’s worth a look.

The Santa Fe Opera House

First off, any season that includes a Berg opera is on the right track, and Santa Fe is presenting Wozzeck this summer under the baton of conductor David Robertson. The new production, which opens on July 30, is directed by Daniel Slater and features the highly regarded Richard Paul Fink in the title role. He’ll be joined by Nicola Beller Carbone as Marie as well as Robert Brubaker, Eric Owens, and Stuart Skelton. On the complete opposite end of the musical spectrum is the other major highlight of this year’s season, a new production of Vivaldi’s Griselda. Vivaldi devoted much of his career to opera, although the works are little performed today. Santa Fe has ventured into this territory with director Peter Sellars and LA. based designer Gronk who teamed up for the company’s 2005 production of Golijov’s Ainadamar. There’s another L.A. connection with conductor Grant Gershon on the podium who’ll be joined by a starry cast including Paul Groves, David Daniels, Isabel Leonard, and Meredith Arwady in the title role. The run starts on July 16 and it promises to be anything but boring.

David Lomeli and Ana Maria Martinez Photo: Ken Howard/Santa Fe Opera 2011

The season is rounded out with popular favorites and a curiosity. Chaslin will lead a new production of Gounod’s Faust starring Ailyn Pérez and Bryan Hymel with Mark S. Doss as Méphistophélès in a Stephen Lawless production. The other staple is Puccini’s La Bohème starring Ana Maria Martinez and David Lomeli as the tragic lovers in a revival of Paul Curran’s popular staging. Both Bohème and Faust opened last weekend and will run throughout the next two months. The curiosity in the season is Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Last Savage, a parody of 1960s suburbia starring Anna Christy and Daniel Okulitch under the baton of George Manahan. The Last Savage, which premiered in 1963, was critically panned both in Paris and New York where it received a lavish staging at the Met Opera. It’s conventional lyricism and musicality was viewed as unfashionable then and the work lay dormant except for two productions, one in Hawaii in the 1970s and another at the Spoletto Festival in 1981. However, Santa Fe is known for making gold of exactly this kind of American operatic straw and all will be revealed on opening night, July 23.

The Calder Quartet

Of course, Santa Fe is more than a one trick pony even when it comes to music and mid-July will also welcome this year’s Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in its 39th season now under Artistic Director, Marc Neikrug. As usual the festival will offer a huge variety of programs this year, ranging with music from the Baroque up to premieres of new commissions. The list of visiting artists is again filled with some of the most exciting names in classical music with a roster this season that includes Dawn Upshaw, the Calder Quartet, Joyce Yang, Daniel Hope, Jeremy Denk, Gilbert Kalish, Inon Bartanan, and the L.A. Philharmonic’s own principal cellist Peter Stumpf. There’s so much music to choose from, but I’m most looking forward to hearing Upshaw perform Lieder from Robert and Clara Schumann and the Calder Quartet’s local premiere of Christopher Rouse’s String Quartet No 3, commissioned especially for them. Check out the SFCMF schedule and be sure to take advantage of the other Santa Fe summer music institution while you’re in town.

Labels: Santa Fe Chamber Music, Santa Fe Opera 11

Simone Dinnerstein in Santa Fe
Photo: mine 2010

I wanted to make one last note about my experiences in Santa Fe before moving on. On the last day of July, wedged between opera performances was a short but very sweet recital from Simone Dinnerstein. The program featured her much celebrated Bach, in this case the French Suite No 5, as well as four Schubert Impromptus, Op. 90. All were played with a striking accessibility and clear-headedness that reinforces her meteoric rise to fame in the last few years. Much has been made of her unconventional path to success. But if there is anything unconventional in her performance style, you wouldn’t have noticed it in the beautiful St. Francis Auditorium in Santa Fe. In fact I was most impressed by her unbelievable professionalism in the face of some incredibly rude audience behavior.

One of the drawbacks to Santa Fe is its elevation. Over 7,000 feet above sea level, the city presents breathing challenges even to the healthiest visitors. Singers must come to the city weeks in advance to acclimate to the elevation before they start seriously rehearsing. Every year there’s visitors who are unaware of this fact, resulting in a significant number of Emergency Department visits for altitude sickness. Soon, these same folks can be seen dragging oxygen tanks behind them around town. Trust me, given my own personal family experience with the phenomenon, it is no fun.

But perhaps even less fun is trying to listen to a piano recital over the click of someone’s "demand flow" oxygen tank. You breath in and the machine blows a puff of oxygen into your nostrils. A modern miracle to be sure, but a decidedly noisy one for a piano recital. Admirably Ms. Dinnerstein prevailed, but not a second of her performance went by without the rhythmic click and puff of someone’s oxygen tank. The St. Francis Auditorium is a small venue and the noise was clearly audible to everyone throughout and as much as it was ruining the experience for me and heaven knows how many others, I admired Dinnerstein’s cool collection and ability to play despite the circumstances. I know I would not have been able to tolerate it. And perhaps it is wrong of me to say so, but people, if you can’t sit through a show quietly without making constant noise, maybe you shouldn’t be there. (And for those of you wondering, oxygen tanks do not all have this particular kind of “demand flow” system that produces the rhythmic clicking noise.)

Labels: Santa Fe Chamber Music

Susan Graham, Paul Groves, and an exiting David Zinman
Photo: mine 2010

Mahler is not a name that one typically associates with chamber music. However, I was in Santa Fe over the weekend where things often appear in a new and different light. And thanks to the programming folks at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, which just kicked off on July 18, Mahler’s music did make a substantial and rather grand appearance on the stage of the tiny St Francis Auditorium. Of course the other person to thank for last weekend’s Mahler was Arnold Schoenberg. (And really isn’t that just about always the case in all great things musical these days?) Schoenberg created the stripped-down chamber version of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde for fifteen instrumentalists and two vocalists that fit perfectly into the notion of “chamber music,” although there is nothing slight or tiny about Mahler’s grand romantic songs of love and death even with those forces.

And to make clear the fact that this performance, which I saw Sunday and was repeated on Monday, was grand, the festival brought in conductor David Zinman and soloists Susan Graham and Paul Groves. Graham is SFCMF’s first “Artist-in-Residence” and this was one of several performances she was giving during the festival while Groves is currently starring in the title role of Les Contes d’Hoffmann with Santa Fe Opera. (I should also mention that the excellent ensemble included Jeremy Denk on piano, who also appeared on July 27 in a program previewing his latest recording of Ives, to appear on iTunes today.) Both soloists seemed at the peak of their powers here, giving warm and engaging interpretations of these alternately jovial and bleak songs.

The chamber ensemble behind them has the task of sounding much bigger than they actually are. And though things started out a little hesitant, by the halfway point they filled the hall with sound one would associate with far more players. Perhaps Zinman’s balance was more toward the revelry than the loss in these songs, but it was not a superficial interpretation by any means. Even during Graham’s lengthy final song “Der Abschied” there was a lovely and inviting intimacy. And while there are always very lovely evenings in the high desert of Santa Fe, this one stood out with such a memorable performance.

Labels: Santa Fe Chamber Music

Brett Dean
Photo: mine 2009

Summer in Santa Fe is not all about opera. For 37 years now, its been about excellent chamber music as well, under the auspices of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival that takes advantage of the many great musicians and composers who have links to this town or may be working with the Santa Fe Opera or are just lucky enough to be invited to participate. This year is no exception, and I had the pleasure of catching a number of shows at the St Francis Auditorium downtown. The best of these shows highlighted the Festival’s commitment to contemporary music, which on Friday featured a visit from Australian violist and composer Brett Dean. In the decade following his 14 years as a violist with the Berlin Philharmonic, Dean has developed quite a growing audience for his music. He’s been in Los Angeles before for performances of his Viola Concerto as well as a number of smaller pieces for chamber-sized ensembles. Although I wasn’t completely won over then, I was still excited to see him here because he did strike me as a thoughtful and very articulate composer before.

And even though the works on Friday’s program were much smaller in scope, I felt much more convinced of Dean’s ability to write music that is both modern, educated, and at the same time readily enjoyable. He seems to be joining an ever growing group of contemporary composers like Thomas Adés who can take the lessons of the last 80 years of Western art music and create something new that has more than just academic appeal. Two of the pieces on the program were solo works. The first Intimate Decisions is for viola, and Dean played the work himself. Dean describes the work as a sort of personal conversation that ebbs and flows, but I was most taken with his masterful technique and his ability to maintain huge amounts of drama with just this single instrument as a repeating arc of notes fades at the end of the 10 minutes or so the work runs. The other solo piece Demons for solo flute was also a virtuoso test for the performer Tara Helen O’Connor. Here the many facets of the instrument were drawn out through the music like some Pandora's Box of emotion.

Brett Dean with the Orion Quartet, Tara Helen O'Connor, Felix Fan, and Andrew Russo
Photo: mine 2009

The second half of the show featured bigger works starting off with Huntington Eulogy which Dean described from the stage as a mini-Requiem for a young man associated with the Huntington Estate Winery, which hosts a music festival Dean has a long-standing association with. The sonata-like work is scored for piano and cello and evokes desert vistas and the nighttime sky in a way that was quite appropriate for Santa Fe. The performers were Felix Fan and Andrew Russo (two-thirds of the ensemble Real Quiet) and took me by surprise in how much had been packed into such a small musical space. The final piece for string quartet, entitled Eclipse was no less ambitious. Dean does not shy away from topical material in his work, and despite his stated desire that the pieces be taken simply in musical terms, he makes no bones about certain influences. The probing and at times rageful work references a refugee crisis that took place in Australia in 2001 when a number of Middle Eastern refugees fleeing in boats in an attempt to get to Australia capsized in the sea between that country and Indonesia. They were subsequently rescued by a Norwegian ship whose captain then entered a standoff with the Australian government over whether or not to let the refugees come ashore. The Orion String Quartet played beautifully here (as they had earlier in the week during a bang-up Haydn quartet). Again Dean had fashioned a piece that sounded almost orchestral with the most meager of resources.

Hearing Dean’s music again in this setting made me want to hear more of it. Luckily that appears to be in the offing soon. In fact, he’s got a major commission for his first opera from Opera Australia in 2010 for an adaptation of Peter Carey’s Bliss. Given Santa Fe’s long track record of world and American premieres, it may not be unexpected to see Brett Dean out this way again with other projects in the not-too-distant future. He’ll be playing with other ensembles in music not his own over the next two weeks at the Chamber Music Festival and I encourage everyone to check him and the other great music here out as well.

Labels: Brett Dean, Santa Fe Chamber Music