The Demon Barber of Fremont

So reads the headline of Janos Gerberen's rave review of Fremont Opera's Il barbiere di Siviglia at San Francisco Classical Voice. He did not mention the chorus other than to say that we were not large, but there were only 5 of us and we were on stage for maybe 15 minutes. My friends thought we sounded and looked good.

This was the best mix of outstanding singing and really funny comedy that I have been privileged to participate in. The cast was really strong in all the different roles. Thanks to everyone who attended! The audiences were great, with the Friday audience laughing from the very first jokes during Eleazar's orchestral serenade.

I've performed in Sweeney Todd too, so I tried to think of interesting potential mash-ups along the lines of the review title. But these two works are about as far removed from each other in spirit as you can get! The world could use more top-notch comic operas these days.

Coming Up: The Barber of Seville

Next weekend I will be singing in the chorus of Rossini's The Barber of Seville at Fremont Opera. Jonathon Field is stage director and David Sloss is conductor. This is the same artistic team that I have performed with in Mahagonny and The Rake's Progress at West Bay Opera.

The publicity describes this as a semi-staged production, but as far as I can see the only semi- is the absence of full sets and costumes. The staging for both principals and chorus has little else semi- about it.

Performances are at the Smith Center for Performing Arts at Ohlone College in Fremont on Friday, August 22 at 8:00 pm and Sunday, August 24 at 2:00 pm. Tickets are $44 and $48 and are available online. It should be a great show; opera is so good to see in smaller houses like this 400-seat theater.

Cabrillo Festival 2008 - Riffs and Refrains

Cabrillo came up with another winner in last night's concert, featuring works by Matthew Cmiel, Mark Anthony Turnage, John Corigliano, and John Adams. I was particularly taken with the Turnage and Adams works. Turnage's concerto Riffs and Refrains featured spectacular clarinet playing by Cabillo principal Bharat Chandra.

The closing work was the west coast premiere of John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony, based on music from his recent opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Trinity test. The Doctor Atomic opera contains some of the best musical portrayals of the science and engineering process ever written. JoAnn and I saw the opera in its San Francisco premiere, so during this concert we had to turn off that annoying voice in our heads that was going "Where did this music come from in the opera? Oh, yes, that's right. The opera was better, wasn't it?" If you know music and think analytically, this type of inner commentary is pretty easy to fall into. But it distracts from listening to the symphony and appreciating it as-is.

The symphony concludes with the music that we and most people who saw the opera considered the musical high-point: the first act finale with Oppenheimer singing a deeply moving setting of "Batter my heart, three person'd God". In the symphony, Oppenheimer's music is set for solo trumpet; it was played brilliantly by Cabrillo principal Craig Morris. The brass gets a lot of the vocal lines in this symphony; earlier on, General Leslie Groves's music was given over to the trombones, particularly the solo trombone of Cabrillo principal Ava Ordman. As a tenor I have been selfishly disappointed that Adams's operatic writing tends to give the best men's music to baritones. As an ex-trumpeter, I am delighted to see Adams give some of the best music in this symphony to the solo trumpet! It was fun to meet with Cabrillo trumpeter Mark Flegg after the concert and discuss the great brass playing in the concert.

MusicXML Support in MaxScore and BrailleMUSE

MusicXML is drawing ever closer to support by 100 applications. I recently heard about two new applications that have added MusicXML support:

• MaxScore is a Max object that adds music notation to the Max/MSP system, including export to MusicXML files.
• BrailleMUSE is a free Internet server that produces Braille scores from MusicXML documents.

Links to these and all other MusicXML applications are available on Recordare's site at http://www.recordare.com/xml/software.html.

Cabrillo Festival 2008 - Triple Play

Saturday's Cabrillo concert was another winner. It opened with a beautiful piece by Dorothy Chang, moved on to an intriguing work by Mason Bates, and concluded with a spectacular percussion concerto by John Corigliano with Evelyn Glennie as soloist.

I found Liquid Interface by Mason Bates particularly interesting in its combination of live electronics with the orchestra. Back in my student days, where digital electronic sound could not be done in real time, this meant synchronizing the musicians to the time of a prerecorded tape, often with unsatisfactory results. Nowadays those older pieces are generally performed using a CD, not tape, but the pre-recorded part remains unyielding. Some composers would use analog live electronics within the ensemble, but the equipment was usually temperamental and could generally only be operated adequately by the composer.

I asked the "gear question" during the Q&A session that followed the concert about how the electronics were being controlled. The audience could see Mason using a Mac laptop, but what software was being used and could somebody else use it? In this performance, Mason was in the orchestra controlling the electronics using Digital Performer on a pair of Macs. But performances where the composer is not present still do rely on a CD player.

I hope that in the near future, composers like Bates can find a third way between the complexity of powerful sequencers like Digital Performer and the rigidity of the CD. This would allow for electronics to more fully integrate with orchestras. Perhaps the systems used for orchestral augmentation of pit orchestras (such as Sinfonia and Notion) can be adapted for use in these types of compositions. Maybe we can evolve MusicXML's .mxl format so it can serve as an archival format for electro-acoustic works in the future like it can work for traditional scores today.

Cabrillo Festival 2008 - First Night

August in Silicon Valley means that it's time for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music over the hill in Santa Cruz. This is an amazing two-week festival of contemporary orchestral music. Since 1992, the brilliant Marin Alsop has been the music director and conductor. Marin excels in both roles. She chooses very high-quality programs full of communicative music, then conducts them to provide the maximum impact possible on first hearing.

Key to the programming is the balance between composers new to the festival, and probably new to most listeners, combined with in-depth explorations of the music of particular favorite composers. Opening night at Cabrillo 2008 was a perfect example. The first half contained music be Stephen McNeff, Eric Lindsay, and David Sanford - all making their first appearance at the festival, and all new composers to me. The second half featured the world premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra by festival favorite Christopher Rouse. Rouse's music is near and dear to Alsop's heart - so much so that the festival has played all his orchestral works so they had to commission something new. Marin also wanted a piece from Chris that was written specifically for her, that she can take as a calling card to other orchestras to introduce them to his music.

As usual for Cabrillo concerts, all four works were well worth hearing, but some made a stronger impression than others. For me, the two highlights were Lindsay's Darkness Made Visible and the Rouse Concerto. Lindsay's piece had a novel premise. To quote from the program notes, it is a collision, then merger, of "two opposing musical forces: one angular, aggressive and disjointed; the other conservative, predictable, and harkening back to Lisztian bravura." The merger phase is particularly interesting as "the tenor of the rest of the piece is shaped by the high-stakes race between which type of music will retain the most identity in the ultimate synthesis." Three versions of the merger take place; the first two are dominated by one music or the other, while the last achieves a more blended balance.

So who has written an orchestral composition about a merger before? The piece is full of life, seriousness, and humor, and accomplishes a great deal in its roughly 10-minute length. The form of the piece is so inventive and carried off with such panache that I asked Lindsay why he was going back for his doctorate if he could already write music like this! (A great thing about Cabrillo is that you can walk up to composers at intermission and ask them questions like this.) He explained that he felt he wanted some guidance to take things to the next level. And if you're going back to music school, Indiana University is a great place to go!

Marin has transmitted her love of Rouse's music to us and most of the Cabrillo audience. We even travelled down to Los Angeles to hear the premiere of his Requiem last year. Both JoAnn and I thought that the Concerto for Orchestra was our favorite of Rouse's pieces that we have heard so far. A main reason for this is that the piece is more accessible, without in any way being dumbed down.

This accessibility comes from several factors. First is the interesting form. Divided into two halves, the first half is a fast-slow-fast-slow-fast alternation. The second half then expands first the slow music and then the fast music. The end result is an interesting yet easy-to-follow form for a half-hour piece. It also provides a great balance between fast and slow music, happy and sad, light and dark - but with more emphasis on the fast and the light.

Another key factor in the accessibility is the transparency of the texture. Rouse's music is often dense. There are lots of interesting things going on, but it can be difficult to sort them all out on first hearing. Perhaps as a result of the Concerto for Orchestra format, the music here is less dense. The contrapuntal lines are more soloistic, clearly separated, and easier to hear than is sometimes the case. The Concerto hardly reveals all its secrets on first hearing - not that I would want it to! But I felt I could grasp more of it on first hearing than in other Rouse works, and that was a good thing that made the piece communicate more directly and powerfully. JoAnn and I give this one four thumbs up, and the rest of the audience agreed with an enthusiastic ovation.

So the Festival is off to another delightful start! We will hear two more concerts this year, including John Corigliano's Conjurer and John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony in their US west coast premieres.