Author: letterv13

Valentina Peleggi conducting
with Magdalena Kuźma, soprano
March 26, Ryan Recital Hall, St. Christopher’s School

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in G major is the shortest and smallest of his nine symphonies. Short and small are relative terms: The piece lasts nearly an hour and is scored for a more or less standard (i.e., pretty large) orchestra of the late-romantic period.

There are, however, versions of the Mahler Fourth that are truly small. There’s a somewhat convoluted back-story to their existence.

A century ago, Vienna was the European cultural center most resistant to new trends in music. It was also home to a group of composers, led by Arnold Schoenberg, who produced some of the most radically new music of the time. Getting no love from the city’s musical establishment, they organized the Society for Private Musical Performances, which presented programs of contemporary works (their own and others’), including many chamber arrangements of orchestral pieces.

Among the most ambitious of these reductions was a Mahler Fourth, prepared by Erwin Stein in 1920, for string quintet, woodwinds, piano, harmonium and percussion, along with the soprano who sings “Das himmlische Leben” (“Heavenly Life”) from Mahler’s song collection “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”) in the final movement. Stein’s arrangement survives only in sketch form, from which several “reconstructions” have been crafted.

A version by the German pianist and conductor Klaus Simon, introduced in 2007, is being played this weekend by a chamber contingent of the Richmond Symphony.

The first of two performances was staged in St. Christopher’s School’s new Ryan Recital Hall, a 450-seat venue that’s physically suited to music-making on this scale. (The repeat will be in a larger space, Blackwell Auditorium of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland.)

Like many small-ish music rooms built recently, Ryan Hall has a bright, transparent acoustic that gives each instrument or voice its own sonic space. Every note (right or wrong) carries clearly, high pitches tend to stand out, and ensembles have to put extra effort into producing warm collective tone.

A 16-member symphony ensemble, led by Valentina Peleggi, the orchestra’s music director, had mixed success in coping with the hall’s acoustical character.

The string quintet, undergirded by an electronic version of a harmonium, consistently realized Mahler’s bucolic lyricism, the low strings playing with especially glowing warmth. The winds were more vividly colorful and atmospheric than they generally sound in the full orchestration; but they were also far more prominent, at times flat-out loud. Piano and percussion were gratifyingly subtle.

The soprano’s song in the symphony’s finale is meant to convey a child’s vision of heaven. This is a challenge, as few sopranos past teen-age sound child-like. (Some conductors – Leonard Bernstein, famously/notoriously – have tried giving the part to a boy soprano.) Magdalena Kuźma, the soprano in these concerts, sang like a woman who remembers being a girl with a wistful imagination, an agreeable reconciliation of character and tone.

The program repeats at 3 p.m. March 27 at Blackwell Auditorium, Randolph-Macon College, 205 Henry St., Ashland. Tickets: $22. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX);
http://www.richmondsymphony.com

Vladimir Putin has taken time off from genocidal war-making to complain that the West is “canceling” Russian culture, and to tap his most high-profile cultural apparatchik, conductor Valery Gergiev, to take over a “common directorate” to operate the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

Conductor Tugan Sokhiev quit his post as musical director of the Bolshoi earlier this month, and the theater’s director general, Vladimir Urin, crossed the dictator when he signed a public letter opposing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Gergiev has run the Mariinsky since 1988.

In a video conference with artists and cultural administrators, Putin said that “proverbial ‘cancel culture’ has become the cancellation of culture. . . . The names of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff are being removed from playbills. Russian writers and their books are being banned.”

In fact, most bans in the West have targeted artists such as Gergiev who have supported Putin or tried to rationalize refusals to denounce the invasion. Several ensembles called off performances of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” as inappropriate during a Russian-instigated war; and tour engagements of Russian orchestras and ballet troupes have been canceled, in line with other moves by democracies to economically isolate the country.

Evidence of bans of Russian music, literature and other art forms is sketchy to non-existent. The New York Times’ Anton Troianovski and Javier C. Hernández report that currently New York’s Metropolitan Opera is staging Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” while a number of US orchestras are presenting Russian programs and festivals. The 2022-23 seasons that have been announced to date show no significant reduction, let alone a boycott, of Russian repertory.

Individual acts of estrangement from things Russian can’t be quantified: We’ll never know how many liters of vodka have been poured down drains, or how many listeners decided today to listen to Debussy instead of Scriabin.

For Putin, “[w]hat’s most important right now is to indoctrinate his supporters,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told The Times. “Our cultural life is not ending, and we don’t need anything from the West.”

Valentina Peleggi conducting
with Daisuke Yamamoto, violin
March 19-20, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center
(reviewed from online stream, posted March 23)

In the Richmond Symphony’s latest Masterworks program, “From Scotland’s Highlands,” all that was missing were . . . Scots.

So it usually goes. Most of the familiar classical works on Scottish themes have been composed by outsiders – in this case, two Germans, Felix Mendelssohn and Max Bruch, and the English-born Peter Maxwell Davies. (Davies was an adopted Scot, living on the Orkney Island of Sanday for the last 45 years of his life.)

Daisuke Yamamoto, the symphony’s concertmaster, was the soloist in Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy,” a showpiece for violin virtuosos (written for Pablo de Sarasate) built on well-known folk tunes, most prominently “Through the Woods, Laddie,” its recurring theme, and “Scots Wha Hae” in the fantasy’s finale.

Yamamoto gave the work’s sonically brilliant fiddle figurations and Scottish rhythmic “snap” their due, but more constructively concentrated on Bruch’s free phrasing and coloristic shading of melodies. The violinist’s sound was bronze as often as silver; the moods he conveyed were more often contemplative or nostalgic than declarative.

Valentina Peleggi, the symphony’s music director, set a complementary tone in the orchestra’s accompaniment, managing along the way to bring some continuity to a piece that can sound like an episodic succession of orchestral pronouncements followed by violin elaborations.

Continuity more or less takes care of itself in Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony (No. 3 in A minor), one of the most perfectly constructed, no-notes-wasted, no-theme-undeveloped works in the orchestral literature. The only interpretive interventions it really needs are balancing of instrumental voicings and properly contrasting animation and songfulness in treatments of its tunes.

On those interpretive scores, Peleggi opted for high contrasts in voicings – solo and ensemble winds sounded more prominently than strings, at least in the audio stream of the performance – and generally fleet tempos.

That seems to be the current fashion in performances of early 19th-century works whose styles straddle the classical and the romantic. A classical approach can enhance some of this music (Franz Schubert’s early symphonies, for example); but in pieces like the Mendelssohn “Scottish” that are driven by evocative melodies and outdoorsy atmospherics, too brisk a pace effectively underplays the music. That’s what happened in this reading.

“An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise,” the most popular of Davies’ many Scottish-themed compositions, could be characterized as Scottish with generous shots of Scotch. The composer, a onetime “bad boy” of British musical modernism, liberally garnishes the piece with massed instrumental collisions – drunken brawls – alongside representations of folksy nuptials and the early morning after.

The work’s highlight comes at the end, when a bagpiper plays while pacing from the back of the hall to the stage. Robert Mitchell, the piper in this performance, brought both flair and gravitas to his cameo appearance.

The stream of the program remains accessible through June 30. Single-concert access: $30. Full Masterworks season access: $180. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://www.richmondsymphony.com

In its 2022-23 season, Virginia Opera will bracket a contemporary opera, “Fellow Travelers” by Gregory Spears, with “The Valkyrie” (“Die Walküre”), the second installment of its ongoing Wagner “Ring” cycle, and two audience favorites, Verdi’s “La Traviata” and the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta “The Pirates of Penzance.”

Spears, a Virginia Beach native, introduced “Fellow Travelers” in 2016. Based on Thomas Mallow’s 2007 novel and set to a libretto by Greg Pierce, the opera relates the love story of two gay men working in Washington during the “lavender scare” of the 1950s, when homosexuals were purged from federal employment.

“The Valkyrie,” to be staged in an arrangement by Jonathan Dove, follows an adaptation of “Das Rheingold,” first of the “Ring” cycle of four music dramas, which launched the current season. Virginia Opera plans to continue with “Siegfried” in the 2023-24 season and the final installment of the cycle, “Götterdämmerung” (“Twilight of the Gods”), in 2024-25, the company’s 50th-anniversary season.

All four 2022-23 offerings will be conducted by Adam Turner, Virginia Opera’s artistic director, with members of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra in the first three productions and the Richmond Symphony in “La Traviata.” Casts and stage directors will be announced later.

Subscribers and donors will have access to a special concert by Will Liverman, the Virginia-born baritone who serves as Virginia Opera’s creative partner and advisor, with Turner as piano accompanist. The date of the concert will be announced later.

Subscription packages for performances at Norfolk’s Harrison Opera House are priced from $95.48 to $560; for performances at the Carpenter Theatre of Dominion Energy Center in Richmond, $85.80 to $492.52. Subscription prices will be announced later for performances at the Center for the Arts of George Mason University in Fairfax.

For details, call Virginia Opera’s box office at (866) 673-7282 or visit http://vaopera.org

Performance dates for the coming season:

– Wagner: “The Valkyrie” – Sept. 30, Oct. 1 and 2 in Norfolk; Oct. 8 and 9 in Fairfax; Oct. 14 and 16 in Richmond.

– Gilbert & Sullivan: “The Pirates of Penzance” – Nov. 4, 5 and 6 in Norfolk; Nov. 12 and 13 in Fairfax; Nov. 18 and 20 in Richmond.

– Spears: “Fellow Travelers” – Jan. 27, 28 and 29 in Norfolk; Feb. 4 and 5 in Fairfax; Feb. 10 and 12 in Richmond.

– Verdi: “La Traviata” – March 3, 4 and 5 in Norfolk; March 11 and 12 in Fairfax; March 17 and 19 in Richmond.

The Russian Lounge at Washington’s Kennedy Center, a space for high-end donors and meetings, has been re-branded, apparently in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The space, located near the Kennedy Center Opera House, was renovated in 2011 with a $5 million gift from Vladimir Potanin, a Russian billionaire and international arts patron who has been linked to Putin. Potanin also was a trustee of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York until his resignation earlier this month.

Reporting for Politico, Tara Palmeri quotes Kennedy Center spokeswoman Eileen Andrews: “The naming period for the Lounge has now ended. Due to the tragedy in Ukraine, the Kennedy Center and the [Potanin] Foundation have mutually agreed to no longer use the name Russian Lounge.” The space has been renamed the Opera House Circles Lounge:

http://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/18/kennedy-center-quietly-ditches-its-russian-lounge-00018664

The Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky has been dropped by his talent manager following an appearance on a state-television talk show, during which he charged the West with provoking Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and suggested that Russian forces cut off electricity to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

The management firm, which had represented Berezovsky for nearly 20 years, issued a statement condemning those remarks by the pianist, whom it called a “gifted artist and paradoxical individual.”

Berezovsky has made several attempts to extricate himself. In the latest, he wrote to the English music journalist Norman Lebrecht, citing, among others, John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist who has advocated a “realist” geopolitical strategy on Russia and opposed NATO membership for former Soviet states. Isaac Chotiner, writing in The New Yorker, quoted Mearsheimer as saying, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”

The pianist’s note to Lebrecht:

Boris Berezovsky quotes US crackpot theorists

“ ‘When the guns are booming, the muses remain silent.’ I should have followed this wise adage,” Berezovsky writes. Three weeks ago, that might have been a plausible, self-protective response. Today, fairly or not, silence is widely interpreted as acquiescence. And now that Putin is calling Russians who oppose his war “scum and traitors,” silence may not be an option for much longer.

With Covid-19 infections falling in this area, the Richmond Symphony has eased safety measures for its concerts at the Carpenter Theatre of Dominion Energy Center.

Vaccine checks will no longer be required for admission; but patrons are asked not to attend if they have tested positive for the virus, have been exposed to someone testing positive in the past two weeks, or do not feel well.

Subscribers and single-ticket holders who are ill or have been exposed are eligible for free exchanges of tickets for future concerts.

Patrons over 3 years old are asked to continue wearing masks in the hall.

Carpenter Theatre concessions will reopen and refreshments may be consumed in the hall.

Open seating will resume during pre-concert talks, and the Dominion Energy Center Donor Lounge will reopen, beginning on April 9.

Normal seating will resume for LolliPops and Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra concerts.

For more information, call the symphony’s patron services desk at (804) 788-1212, Ext. 2, or e-mail patronservices@richmondsymphony.com

Julian Wachner, one of leading US choral directors, has been fired by New York’s Trinity Episcopal Church for as-yet unverified charges of sexual misconduct.

A female singer has accused Wachner of making unwelcome advances, which he has denied. “Depriving Mr. Wachner of the benefit of the full narrative is the antithesis of due process and allows distortions to triumph over the truth,” his lawyer, Andrew T. Miltenberg, wrote in an e-mail to The New York Times’ Javier C. Hernández.

Trinity’s statement on Wachner’s dismissal reads in part: “[W]e have concluded based on recent information that Julian has otherwise conducted himself in a manner that is inconsistent with our expectations of anyone who occupies a leadership position.”

Since 2011, Wachner has been church’s director of music and arts, leading the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, the Trinity Baroque Orchestra and NOVUS NY, and, since 2018, artistic director of the Grand Rapids Bach Festival in Michigan. He was director of The Washington Chorus from 2008 to 2017. He has led ensembles at Spoleto, Tanglewood and other music festivals, and has held several academic posts.

Wachner has been touted as a candidate for director of the Oregon Bach Festival, Hernández reports:

The three largest international recording combines, Sony, Warner and Universal, have suspended operations in Putin’s world. Live Nation, the concert promoter, also announces that “we will not do business with Russia,” The New York Times’ Ben Sisario reports:

Russia already had been ejected from the Eurovision song contest, and Spotify and Apple have restricted access to their streaming services.

Performative gestures, literally – Sisario cites International Federation of the Phonographic Industry data showing Russia to be a smaller market than Mexico and Sweden for recorded music – but also markers of the country’s rapid cultural isolation.

Njioma Grevious, violin
Melissa Reardon, viola
Mary Boodell, flute
Charles Overton, harp
March 6, Seventh Street Christian Church

The latest offering from the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia was a homecoming – and hometown professional debut – for Charles Overton, an alumnus of Richmond Montessori School and the American Youth Harp Ensemble who has become a rising star among US harpists, building a resumé of dates with major orchestras and recital presenters.

Joining three mainstays of the Chamber Music Society – violinist Njioma Grevious, violist Melissa Reardon and flutist Mary Boodell – Overton could be heard in roles ranging from collaborative to supportive, sometimes in the same piece.

The most vivid showcase of his playing came in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Fantaisie in A major, Op. 124, for violin and harp, a fairly late (1907) work from a very prolific composer whose chamber music and orchestral miniatures often featured unusual instrumental combinations or were written for under-employed instruments. (Name another prominent composer who produced a bassoon sonata or chamber music with trumpet.)

The Saint-Saëns Fantaisie is prime example of two genres of late-romantic and early modern French music: Short-ish, rhapsodic works for violin (Ernest Chausson’s Poème is the best-known of these) and pieces that feature the harp. The modern chromatic instrument was introduced by French builders in the 1890s, and soon figured prominently in music by the country’s composers, notably Maurice Ravel’s, but usually as a rhythmic enhancer (somewhat like a continuo harpsichord) or as a means of enlarging the palette of tone colors.

Saint-Saëns makes the harp a full partner, engaging in a real dialogue with the violin. The exchanges between Grevious and Overton, and the merging of their voices as the piece grows more intense and passionate, amounted to a clinic in the interpretation and performance of high-romantic music. Saint-Saëns also was a classicist, devoted to form, balance and musical symmetry, and this duo projected those qualities as well.

In Claude Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1916), one of the rather austere, expressively elusive chamber works written toward the end of his life, the harp plays quasi-continuo or atmospheric roles behind the alternating leads of flute and viola. The harp is also a sonic mediator between the sharply focused tone of the flute and the darker, at times more earthy or wiry, tone of the viola – a role that Overton filled with keen sensitivity. Boodell and Reardon ably negotiated the shifting moods of this music, a weird tonescape that ranges from pastoral reverie to almost hermetic introspection.

The second half of the program was devoted to music by contemporary composers: “Winterserenade” (1997) by the Lithuanian Onutė Narbutaitė and “The Eye of Night” (2010) by the American David Bruce.

Narbutaitė’s piece for flute, violin and viola, styled as a paraphrase of “Gute Nacht” from Franz Schubert’s song cycle “Die Winterreise,” is more of a deconstruction of the melody in the minimalist yet emotionally resonant style often heard in modern Baltic music. Boodell, Reardon and Grevious nicely realized Narbutaitė’s spare texture and ambivalent moodiness while echoing Schubert’s emotive tone.

Bruce’s “Eye of Night,” scored like the Debussy for flute, viola and harp but more democratically apportioned among the instruments, proved to be considerably less intense, technically and expressively, than the other works on this program, giving listeners a pleasant, at times breezy, sendoff.

Boodell was the star of the piece, juggling three different flutes and varying expressive roles across four movements. Reardon and Overton had their moments, too, especially in pizzicato exchanges, a natural opportunity for interplay between harp and fiddle that Debussy, for whatever reason, rarely exploited.

This post has been corrected to clarify Charles Overton’s educational background in Richmond.