I logged on to Twitter a while ago to tell Alex Ross that we won't have much Wagner in SF on the 22nd either, but before I could get that tweet off, I saw Alex's For Harold Shapero link, and knew what had happened. The composer died last night in his sleep, peacefully, from complications of pneumonia, at 93.

Harold Shapero was one of my professors at Brandeis in the 1970s. (If you didn't already know my approximate age, you do now.) When I started, he was some years into what we thought was a major-league composer's block. Over at Sequenza 21, where there's a statement up from the Shapero family, Christian Hertzog notes in the comments that Mr. Shapero "retreated from composing after being attacked by some of his peers in the late 1940s/50s."

I don't personally have any information about why Mr. Shapero stopped composing, but given the quality of his early work, that retreat, or block, or whatever it was, was a sad thing. He was a good teacher; I took electronic music and analysis with him. If you ever hear me refer to the later variations of Beethoven's Op. 111 piano sonata as "the heavenly raindrops," I'm quoting Mr. Shapero. And I think he must have been great to study composition with.

The electronic music class was a lot of fun. Brandeis had a Buchla and a Moog, and Mr. Shapero wouldn't let us touch the Moog. "You will just be writing for keyboard if you use the Moog. Go play with the Buchla." So I learned a little about what a sequencer could do. I still have the resulting tape, my only extended composition ever. It's right over there in a bookcase, and has not been played since the 1970s. And I have a '70s era music department brochure that has a photo of me sitting in the electronic music studio in front of the Buchla. (The brochure also stars David Urrows's boots.)

I was last in touch with Mr. Shapero about ten years ago, following Arthur Berger's death, and he was much as he had been in the 70s: warm, funny, sharp. That correspondence was in an old email account; it's still active, but it seems I deleted most email from 2003 at some point, owing to storage limits. He remembered me (though not what I looked like), and we had an entertaining exchange. In one of the lost emails from him, he lamented the loss of a beloved cat and said he and his wife were not getting a new cat more because he couldn't stand to lose another. He was also composing again and had been for some time, a good thing.

I pitched an interview with him a few years ago and was turned down; I should really have pitched harder. It would have been good to have a few extended conversations with him.

Hail and farewell, Harold Shapero, and condolences to his wife and daughter, who survive him. You will be missed.

Updated May 19 with links and some more comments.
Updated May 23 with more links.

• Alex Ross met the Shaperos once. Yes, he was boisterous!
• Brandeis University remembers Harold Shapero
• Sequenza 21 has the family's statement and nice comments
• Anthony Tommasini plumps for the Symphony for Classical Orchestra
• NY Times obit by Tommasini (thank you for this one, Tony)
• MetroWest Daily News obit by Chris Bergeron, a lovely look at the man (thank you, Chris!)
• Gramophone obit published on Limelight
• Tim Mangan wrote program notes for Nine Minute Overture and an editor did him wrong.

Interesting-looking mostly new music program from SFCA, with Veretski Pass:

More links added to my earlier posting about the late Harold Shapero.

Last, but not least, New Century Chamber Orchestra announces its 2013-14 season.

The most interesting program, from my perspective, is the February program, which includes Donizetti's one-act opera Rita, though the first half of the program is string arrangements of various non-Wagnerian bleeding chunks. Curious how the Salome Dance of the Seven Veils will sound with a small string orchestra.

The featured composer this year is Michael Daugherty, a popular, easy-listening, blandish, competent composer. The first program is all Daugherty except for Josef Suk's Serenade, Op. 6.  Clarice Assad's Dreamscape makes its return, on a program that includes the premier of a new violin concerto by Daugherty. There's a concert with Chanticleer, repertoire TBA. Well, there's work by a female composer on the season.

Full details after the cut. Update: Fixed the dates, because all of the 2013-14 season concerts are not in 2013. :) (The detailed listing was correct, just not the headers, for the 2014 programs.)

Jane  Eaglen comes in for a lot of stick around the operatic blogosphere, mostly from people who've forgotten that she could really sing. Here she is with the Immolation at the Levine 25th anniversary gala in 1996.



Greatest performance of this I've ever heard? No, that would be one of the Flagstag/Furtwangler performances, but damn good.

Seattle Opera celebrates with a Wagner Sing-Along!

It's free! They'd like you to pre-register.

Lauritz Melchior, Helen Traubel, and Arturo Toscanini set Carnegie Hall on fire in the Goetterdaemmerung dawn duet.

Greeting the sun for the first time this day in Leipzig, May 22, 1813, Wilhelm Richard Wagner.

Astrid Varnay greets the sun and is soon joined by Wolfgang Windgassen:


Watch this space; more later.

The Times has a puff piece on the dismantling of The Machine, that nasty unit set used for the Met's current Ring production, which is going into storage for the nonce. Ho hum, except for the quotations from Peter Gelb, who inserts his foot farther into his digestive system with every comment:

Mr. Gelb suggested that the machine had become a scapegoat. “One of the reasons the ‘Ring’ has been criticized so much is people disagree with his approach, not the machine,” he said, referring to Mr. Lepage. “The machine is a victim, not entirely innocent because of its creakiness, but, you know, every production at the Met makes some noise.” 

He said he had not lost his enthusiasm for the machine. “It worked far more times than it didn’t work, and when it didn’t work sometimes, the machine was blamed when it wasn’t its fault.” He mentioned a moment in “Das Rheingold” last month when a jam on a separate “track-and-trolley” device prevented acrobats from zooming over the stage. Still, that problem forced the crew to stop the machine. 

He added that while it had delayed that 2011 “Die Walküre,” it had never interrupted a performance. “I’ve been to Broadway shows where the performance was stopped and the audience sat with the house lights on because things weren’t working,” he said. “That never happened to us.”

James Levine's return to the podium is tomorrow, and the concert will be broadcast on the web. Details from the Met press release:

The Sirius XM Radio broadcast of this Sunday afternoon’s MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall concert—Met Music Director James Levine’s first public performance in more than two years—will be simulcast on the Met’s Web site.  The broadcast can be heard live on Metropolitan Opera Radio on SIRIUS XM Channel 74 and streamed live at www.metopera.org/stream.aspx beginning at 2:55 p.m. on Sunday. The concert begins at 3 p.m. this Sunday, May 19. The program will include the prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin; Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major with soloist Evgeny Kissin; and Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, “Great.”

Finalmente!

Andris Nelsons has been appointed Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For the 2013-14 season, he has the title Music Director Designate. After that, he's the MD.

The photos in the press release include one of Nelsons with his wife, soprano Kristine Opolais. Presumably this appointment means she will be more available to companies in the US, although of course she presumably also has a schedule going out five years or so.

I've read a lot about Nelsons in the last few years, but haven't heard a note of his work. Anyone?

Update: Joshua Kosman has heard Nelsons, with the BSO, no less, in Mahler, and wound up scratching his head.

San Francisco Opera's Tales of Hoffman takes a couple more hits:

• Alice Coote has withdrawn "for personal reasons," and is replaced by American mezzo Angela Brower.
• Soprano Jacqueline Piccolino replaces Jennifer Cherest as Stella.

While we were on the east coast, I took my mother to the New York City Ballet. My uncle Sonny, who has more connections than I can describe in the theatrical community, had offered to get Met tickets for me, but the schedule for the last 12 days was all operas I had seen and had no particular desire to see again, plus I was concerned about accessibility issues for my mom. So, no opera, but the Jerome Robbins program at NYCB looked promising.

I was out of town on the east coast starting on May 1, mostly taking my mother around to see friends and relatives. She moved to the Bay Area in 2006 and hadn't visited the east since 2010; in the last couple of years, it's definitely gotten to the point where it's best for me to travel with her. So, there you have it. I missed the Beethoven weird-stuff programs (and the repeat of the Missa), which I regret deeply, and gave my Goerne Winterreise ticket to a friend because I was at my wit's end the last weekend in April.

I'm back now and resuming blogging.

It's a double-header of Matthias Goerne and Christoph Eschenbach this week at Davis; tonight is the last of three programs of Wagner excerpts and the New World Symphony, tomorrow it's Schubert's Winterreise. I attended the symphony concert last night and came away with what you might call mixed feelings:  dissatisfaction with Eschenbach over a few issues, and love for Goerne co-existing with mild frustration.

Let's start with the length of the first half of the program. Okay, the two excerpts are nice bleeding chunks, but man, Die Frist ist um is an odd way to open a concert, creeping on stage as it does. Why not fatten up the program by starting with the overture to The Flying Dutchman? Rehearsal time issues? Um, maybe. I can't think of when I last heard so many messy brass entries as last night, and from a brass section that has been sounding unbelievably great for the last couple of years.

Goerne sang with his characteristic virtues: a gorgeous voice and an unerring line, deep intelligence combined with raw passion. I really could listen to him singing the telephone book; I'm sure he would project each individual's life story effortlessly based only on their name and address.

He could be the greatest Wotan ever, but only under highly controlled circumstances: if he has the stamina,  in a small house with a conductor willing to keep the orchestra's volume under control. In the giant barn that is Davies, he really didn't have a chance. His low notes disappeared - this happened in last year's stunning Mahler / Shostakovich recital as well - and Eschenbach gloried rather too much in the SFS brass, so that Goerne's voice disappeared in the racket at some critical moments. It's pretty impressive to hear an orchestra of this quality cutting loose in Wagner, but you have to wonder how much opera Eschenbach conducts, considering that he did a pretty poor job of supporting the singer.

And you'd also have to wonder how much Wagner he conducts. I do not know Dutchman well, so no comments on the tempos in Die Frist ist um, but jeez, the tempos of the last 2/3 of Wotan's Farewell seemed slow almost to the point of dragginess. Well, presumably they were at least partly Goerne's idea, and they did not cause him trouble. It's not as though the tempo caused any of the balance problems.

Eschenbach's New World performance, lacking a soloist, didn't have the kinds of balance problems the two Wagner excerpts had. I think I have never heard it live, and what a beauty, though a discursive beauty, it is. Still, I left vaguely dissatisfied: the brass issues continued, making the gorgeous chords at the opening of the slow movement less than mysteriously beautiful; some tempos were off (slow movement could've been slower, scherzo could have been quicker and more savage, etc.), and there were a couple of times when you knew, really knew, that Eschenbach is German, not Bohemian. Why the performance got a standing O is beyond me, other than that the loud parts were really, really loud.

UPDATE: Joshua Kosman and I were at the same concert, though he was there Thursday. He's blunter about Eschenbach's failings, too. He reminds me to say: Russ deLuna, you are a marvel. I hope to hear you play the Tristan solo some day.

Found in a novel I'm reading: The front and back covers and the title page call the book The Atrocity Archives. The header on every page of the text calls it The Atrocity Archive.

My bad: Daniel Wolf quite rightly points out that The Atrocity Archive is the name of one of the novellas in the book, so the header is correct.

LA Times, what's wrong with this picture?

Via Joe Barron comes word of a local group, the Mobius Trio, which was formed at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and is dedicated to commissioning and performing new music for guitar trio. Very cool!

Less cool is the unreadable web site: guys, I have a large, high-quality monitor and I can hardly read 6 point grey-on-black type. Suggest you reconsider the hipster design; I know the Command-+ trick for making the type bigger (Control-+ on Windows), but not every potential ticket buyer does.