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Chloe Veltman: how culture will save the world

The Bing’s Mixed Opening

UnknownStanford’s new Bing Concert Hall opened on Friday night with a concert emceed by Anna Deavere Smith and featuring the San Francisco Symphony, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Frederica von Stade and various university ensembles.

The best thing about the venue is the sound. The acoustics are clean yet limpid. The opening night concert successfully showcased some of the different formats that might be heard in the space from lyrical cor anglais solos in Jonathan Berger’s specially commissioned work, A Place of Concert, to the St. Lawrence Quartet playing Haydn’s String Quartet in F Major Op 77 No 2, to  the San Francisco Symphony  performing John Adams’ A Short Ride in a Fast Machine. And the electronic fanfare that started off the show by Stanford Professor Chris Chafe made great use of the surround sound speaker system.

I wonder what a jazz big band or rock group would sound like in the space? Shame we couldn’t find out on Friday night, which was exclusively focused on western “art” music.

The second best thing about the Bing is its size and shape. The vineyard-style auditorium feels both spacious and intimate. And it doesn’t look like there’s a bad seat in the house.

So the University has managed to get the most fundamental aspects of the concert hall experience right. What I’m less crazy about is the way the management has handled some of the more peripheral yet important details that can make or break a concert going experience for people.

The lobby is vast (it feels like an airport) and yet there are very few places to sit down and have a real conversation — though scattered benches allow you to sit in a row which is less convivial for cheater. There are and only a few tiny tables upon which to balance one or two glasses of champagne. And I really hope the management improves the food offerings. $12 for a measly and not very appetizing cheese plate seems a bit excessive to me.

One more thing: I spent some time on Friday night backstage with the radio crew from KDFC. The facilities seem great, but clearly there are still a few technical kinks to be worked out. The ISDN line that was needed to enable KDFC to do a live broadcast of the opening concert wasn’t working until right before the event started. And then it went out after six minutes leaving radio audiences without a live feed. The quick-witted radio people had to switch to their emergency Plan B of using non-live music from its San Francisco studio. Disaster.

The Longevity of West Coast Conductors

Once a music director has been with an orchestra for 10 years, people start gossiping about whether he or she will stay on longer or start to look for their next move.

Here on the west coast, our music directors seem to stick around for particularly extended periods. Gerard Schwarz is stepping down from the Seattle Symphony at the end of this season after 26 years on the podium. Michael Tilson Thomas has been at the San Francisco Symphony since 1995. Esa-Pekka Salonen stayed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1992 to 2009 and Kent Nagano continued to hold the title of music director of the Berkeley Symphony for 30 years, before relinquishing the position to Joana Carneiro two seasons ago.

Why the longevity?

I think the answer in most cases is simple, really. This part of the country is a pretty wonderful place to be. Conductors put down roots here in a way that they don’t on the east coast. They watch their children grow up in the schools, buy property and become entrenched in the communities. After a decade of this kind of stuff, it becomes harder to leave.

But staying in one place for too long can cause problems for music directors, orchestras and their audiences. Audiences start to wonder whether the conductor is capable of moving on. Musicians and management get tired of dealing with the same person day in and day out over a long period of time. And it must be hard to keep things fresh and innovative as a conductor and programmer when you’re working in the same environment for so many years.

Nagano and Tilson Thomas manage to balance their commitment to their west coast lifestyles with the need to keep moving their careers and interests forwards by forging strong connections with orchestras in other parts of the world and launching interesting new music projects.

But I wonder at what point the pull towards home starts to overpower the desire to make the west coast a base for international escapades for these people? Unlike the east coast, the west coast often feels like a long, long way away from the rest of the world.

Weekend Roundup: Boys Chorus Gala, Jenny Lin’s SF Recital Debut, Academy Awards

Donned a frock on Saturday night and hosted the San Francisco Boys’ Chorus Gala at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. Didn’t have anything near the wardrobe of Anne Hathaway at the Oscar’s ceremony on Sunday, but I had fun anyway. I wish I had been asked to curate the performances for the evening though. All of the soloists and groups on the schedule were wonderful in their own way, but some were more appropriate to the proceedings than others. For instance, I love the Conspiracy of Beards (an all-men’s chorus dedicated to performing a cappella arrangements of songs by Leonard Cohen). But I query the sense of putting them before a crowd of donors and parents who are obsessed with developing a high level of musicality in their children. The Beards, a shambling community chorus, are emblematic of non-punctiliousness in choral music, which is partly why they’re so much fun to watch. They sing with incredible gusto and have a lot of style about them — but their intonation and phrasing can be a bit rough. Hence, giving this group the final ‘headliner’ slot at a gala aimed at raising money to help boys aspire to musical perfection was a bad idea. Plus, the ensemble’s dirge-like renditions of Cohen’s downbeat songs hardly inspired things to end on a high.

The pianist Jenny Lin made her recital debut on Sunday afternoon at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music under the auspices of SF Performances. The program was imaginative: Lin juxtaposed Preludes and Fugues by two composers, Shotakovich and J S Bach, in five sets, each comprising of three works. What was clear from the music was how similar the two composers’ approaches are. Sometimes, it was difficult to hear quite where Bach’s music ended and Shotakovich’s began and visa versa. What I missed from Lin’s otherwise engaging performance, was a sense of the differences between the composers’ mode of expression. Lin brought the same style of attack — clean, clear and often quite hard — to all the pieces in the program. But the playing of Shostakovich requires a different kind of touch at times to the playing of Bach. I would have liked to have heard the contrasts between the masters more strongly.

Spent Sunday evening with some friends in front of the Academy Awards. It’s been a few years since I’ve sat through the whole thing from the opening red carpet parade to the final credits. I don’t think I’ll do this again anytime soon as my brain had turned to custard by about halfway through. There were no surprises. With the exception of Colin Firth’s witty and sweet acceptance speech for the Best Lead Actor award, the winners’ words of gratitude were dull beyond belief. Biggest disappointment of all: James Franco looked terribly embarrassed in his role as co-emcee with Anne Hathaway. I don’t buy the excuse that Franco was too busy working on his phD to spend time rehearsing for the ceremony. If you’re going to take on a gig like this, you should throw yourself into it, no matter how dumb the task at hand might be. While Anne Hathaway made the best of the cheesy situation, Franco gave off the vibe that he’d rather be anywhere else but the Kodak Theatre. I suffered with him. It was too bad.

P.S. I lunched with Michael Tilson Thomas for the first time on Friday. The SF Symphony‘s music director came bounding over and the first thing he did was sing me an old Vaudeville song called “Chloe.” He started with a gleeful rising refrain that went “yup yup yup yup yup” and then sang my name in much the same style as Al Jolson belts out the word “Mammy.” Apparently the stage was bathed in green light every time the Chloe song was sung back in the day. It became so popular that the band would only need to strike up the “yup yup yup yup yup” sequence and the audience would know to belt out “Chlo-eeee” in response. Here’s a link to Spike Jones’ version of the ditty on YouTube. It’s nice to be associated with a song. But I fear that I may never live this down. When I connected with MTT on the phone today for a chat about a story I’m working on for this Friday’s New York Times, the maestro greeted me with a gleeful giggle and “yup yup yup yup yup.”

lies like truth

These days, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy. As Alan Bennett's doollally headmaster in Forty Years On astutely puts it, "What is truth and what is fable? Where is Ruth and where is Mabel?" It is one of the main tasks of this blog to celebrate the confusion through thinking about art and perhaps, on occasion, attempt to unpick the knot. [Read More...]

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