The atmosphere at Monadnock Music, founded in 1966 by James Bolle, has seemed to visitors very much like “Our Town.” Gilbert stressed that she and Bagg, who have over 20 years of association with Monadnock Music between them, are “going right back to the grassroots — trying to engage as many people as we can, in as many ways with music… for our beautiful, humble, rural Monadnock Region.”

Gil Rose (BMOP file photo)

Opera Boston, on the other hand, which Rose joined in 2003, had devoted itself to becoming a main-stream opera destination. Will Chapman was in charge of development there, before becoming executive director of Monadnock Music last June, so he and Rose had worked together for seven years.

Chapman stresses, however, that not only will the mission of Monadnock Music — to “deepen a sense of community by means of diverse classical programming”— remain, but it will return to “what it used to do — a lot of early music, opera, orchestral music, concerti, vocal recitals, piano recitals, opera on stage, … Jim Bolle did Don Giovanni in 1980 with [Peter] Sellars, [James] Maddalena, at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. We have this legacy. I think Gil can do justice to it.”

Bagg and Gilbert, drawing upon over 100 letters they received after their dismissal, have set up a core group of supporters — prominent among them Monadnock-region residents Miki Osgood and Linda Harris and composer Melinda Wagner — and already have called upon some of the Monadnock performing regulars.

“Everyone is delighted to be asked,” asserted Gilbert. “The musicians are giving generously of their time. We are paying them, but a modest amount. We are having to start small; it is a pay-as-you-go sort of festival. … People have to feel they are part of the organization, so we are engaging a lot of volunteers to be working for us and with us.” She and Bagg, she says, plan to go to Monadnock three or four day a month, “much more starting in May.”

Rose will continue programming of Boston Modern Opera Project in the Boston area during the regular concert season but will be able to go to Monadnock for meetings with its staff with relative ease. He is well known in the Boston area for his commitment to contemporary music with his innovative, imaginative programming for BMOP, which he founded in 1996, and which has received many favorable notices and several Grammy nominations. He has featured the music of Louis Andriessen, Derek Bermel, John Cage, Robert Erickson, Lukas Foss, Charles Fussell, Michael Gandolfi, John Harbison, Lee Hyla, David Lang, Tod Machover, Steven Mackey, Steven Paulus, David Rakowski, Bernard Rands, George Rochberg, Elena Ruehr, Gunther Schuller, Reza Vali, and Evan Ziporyn. Two seasons ago, Rose entertained audiences at Jordan Hall with “bad boy” George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, a recording of which, according to Rose, is coming out this summer.

Although he used to play clarinet, he “makes no claims to do it now.” A Tanglewood Fellow in 1994-1995, he has conducted the American Composers Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra of the Ukraine, (et alii) and he has made several appearances with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.

Jonathan Bagg (file photo)

Bagg, a professor at Duke University, has been a member of the Ciompi String Quartet for 25 years, in a career that included hundreds of concerts across the U.S. and abroad, in Europe, China, Israel, and South America, as well as over a dozen recordings. American Record Guide hailed him as “an excellent violist who approaches the music with intelligence, passion, and clarity.”

Gilbert, a flutist, joined Monadnock Music in 1995. She has performed around the world as chamber musician, soloist, recitalist and guest lecturer in addition to founding and performing with Aureole, a trio comprised of flute, viola and harp.

On the face, it does not seem that the two groups will interfere with each other, at least for a while.

Electric Earth’s concerts have been planned so that five precede MM’s season: the first in July is mid-week, and the ones for August and September are after MM’s season. At the First Church in Jaffrey Center, there will be two concerts: on February 27, music from Dowland to Rorem with guitar, flute, violin, piano, and soprano then Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata played by Rieko Aizawa, piano; and on April 1, the Ciompi Quartet, in music of Mozart, Beethoven, Foote, and Dvorák. In early May there will be a fund-raising evening of Kurt Weil with Lauren Flanigan, soprano. A new chamber group, the Horszowski Trio, will make its debut in New Hampshire with two concerts, one on June 14 with music of Dvorák and Haydn (so far), and on June 16, with Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Brahms. On July 17, the Borromeo Quartet will appear in a concert preceded by George Gopen, delivering T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece “Four Quartets,” a work inspired by Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 132. Projected for late August, when the MM season is over, is “Twilight of the Romantics,” German Romanticism from Brahms’s early symphonic Serenade to Wagner’s only song cycle, performed by a chamber ensemble under German conductor Andreas Delfts; and in September, Choreographer Cherylyn Lavagnino and her modern ballet dancers and photographer Betsy Weis partner with Music for the Mountain musicians for a multi-faceted reflection on Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp and Rameau’s Pièces de Clavecin.

Laura Gilbert (file photo)

Rose’s duties — spelled out by Monadnock’s Executive Director Will Chapman (“season programming, engaging artists, conducting on occasion, and helping to design and oversee education and outreach programs, among other duties”) — begin with this summer season. They do include the free community concerts at different venues, so Rose plans to visit them all, to get “my feet on the ground for how much we can do on the budget.“I want to do music that can be sacred to the venues,  like an Episcopal church he visited that had an “old-world early-music feel” that is suitable to chamber or choral music. Asked if he plans to use the same musicians long affiliated w/ MM, he responded, “Yes, absolutely”; and he wants to “recapture ideas that Bolle had… but it depends on how fast we can raise the money.”

Electric Earth has more work ahead of it than the already-established Monadnock Music. Bagg and Gilbert have plans to do “serious fundraising. … particularly coming off such an experience during the last year, when collaborative discussion deteriorated, we want to go extremely slowly. We want people to see what we are about. People who would be good board will emerge.”

Where there may be potential conflict is in out-reach programs, which are so important to organizations for attracting funds. Monadnock Music has an impressive track record with its program, “Lend an Ear.” To be determined is how both groups will succeed.

Chapman, asked if there will be some drawing away by Electric Earth from Monadnock Music’s traditional base, said “I don’t think it is going to have any bearing on anything at all. As to why the new group was formed, he said, “Of course, they have to do it out of love. Musicians do not do what they do out of love for money. On average.”

Editor’s Note: BMInt published an earlier article on changes in Monadnock Music here.

Bettina A. Norton is a retired museum professional. She has published widely in her field, American historical prints, and has been attending classical music concerts since the waning years of World War II.

“Over the years, we have never had a big loss; we have raised enough money,” explained Bulger. “Unfortunately, in the last fiscal year that ended in July, we had the biggest budget deficit in our history — over $200,000. Normally, we have an end-of-the-year campaign which in this year did not go well. Some donors just didn’t come through.”

Also, Bulger said, a donation from a major foundation, which had been a major regular supporter, was denied this year. Boston Musical Intelligencer was told that it is believed to have been a company that moved some of its facilities and therefore some of its allegiances, to New Hampshire. That seems to spell Fidelity.

According to another reliable source, however, that is not the full picture. Special funding last year in two cases came as a one-time extra gift so that the new director could come on board with no debt. For both donors, those gifts were “emergency, supplemental,” and “in no way had the donors later withdrawn their regular  support.”

Opera Boston has its origins in the Boston Academy of Music “re-founded” by Richard Conrad in 1980. He was ousted in 2003, and Carole Charnow, who had run Glimmerglass Opera, was hired with the mandate to revivify Conrad’s organization. The name was changed to Opera Boston, Gil Rose was hired as artistic director, and a strong board was developed under the chair of Bulger. Under Charnnow’s leadership, Opera Boston had a spectacular growth. When she left in the summer of 2010 to become director of the Children’s Museum, Lesley Koenig was hired as general director, but never got the chance to lead.

Repertoire under Charnow and Rose has been adventurous and challenging; some productions were successful, some less so. BMInt, since its inception in the fall of 2009, has reviewed eight:

Although there was “bel canto in abbondanza at Opera Boston’s production of Rossini’s Tancredi  in the fall of 2009,” the review noted, the staging was “park and bark.” In March 2010, “Opera Boston now has to its credit Boston’s first operatic world premiere in two decades, Zhou Long’s attractively scored Madame White Snake, … a huge undertaking, not least in diplomacy and marketing, and if the work finally proved interesting rather than deeply memorable, it was a worthwhile effort, well led by Music Director Gil Rose.” Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, reviewed in May, 2010, was a “generally satisfying and wholly entertaining performance successfully [that] avoided the pit-and pratfalls often associated with this genre.” Cardillac, reviewed in February 2011, “is a troublesome work, a richly kaleidoscopic, multi-layered feast of the fraught that requires equally varied music that the young Hindemith was unable to deliver.” Maria Padilla, reviewed in May 2011, “is a troubled work, riddled with beautiful music and a single damning flaw — an opera whose entire dramatic impetus is a setup for a tragedy that never occurs.” For Beethhoven’s Fidelio, reviewed on October 22, the audience “was treated to some superb singing and playing. The cast was excellent throughout,…” and Béatrice et Bénédict  had many fine elements, although “[a] work like this, however, needs a bit more daring for it fully to come to life.”

Yet that opera left Opera Boston with a $30,000 shortfall. The production slated for this coming February, Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage, was to have cost $500,000. “We just didn’t see enough money coming in to pay the bills,” Bulger said.

Paul Buttenwieser, whose Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser Foundation has been a major supporter of the opera company “under its different incarnations since the beginning,” had not yet learned of the closure when contacted. “I’m saddened by the loss of this wonderful company,” he stated.

Neither the current General Director Lesley Koenig, nor Artistic Director Gil Rose could be reached for comment.

In the closing days of this holiday season, Opera Boston is offering its final presentation, Mozart’s Bastien und Bastienne, featuring some of the company’s younger singers, for First Night on December 31.

Santa Sabina interior

Composer Andrew Norman finds in “the rhythm of the brownstones” —  the stoops, the windows, and the doors that line the streets where he lives in Brooklyn — “music that is just waiting to be written.”

Boston Modern Opera Project (BMOP) had just announced that this young gifted artist will be the Music Alive Composer-in-Residence for two years, from now until 2013. His Air: Concerto for Theremin (2011), with Dalit Warshaw on theremin, will be performed at the January 27 concert at Jordan Hall. BMOP, the adventurous Boston music group, was one of five orchestras nationwide selected for an extended residency under a program of Meet the Composer and the American Symphony Orchestra League.

The young Norman (he is 32), who has already been a fellow in two European academies of music and has received a number of commissions, has absorbed his life-long interest in architecture with the compositional techniques to create his style — or, more accurately, multitude of styles.

Composer Andrew Norman (Christian Steiner photo)

“My music comes out differently every time. Musically speaking, a part of me is super-interested in mid-century extended techniques, Penderecki, crazy sounds. But I am also a lyric composer like Samuel Barber. A lyrical moment is something we can hold onto and remember. … We relate to lyricism because it is such a human thing. … Over the course of my life, I have been naturally inclined to be a lyrical composer, but there are other ways of approaching music. I am trying to embrace everything, an eclecticism of my music. I am interested in it as a composition tool. Sort of  Babbitt with Bernstein, or Barber with Xenakis.”

Completed work already includes three pieces for orchestra; five for chamber music with various combinations of instruments; three solo pieces, one for viola or cello and two for piano; and one vocal piece, a lullaby. His appointment as Composer-in-Residence at the Academy of Rome, in 2006-07, resulted in Companion Guide to Rome, with each of its nine movements intended to invoke the Eternal city’s lesser known architectural gems. The ninth movement, for Santa Sabina, was the only one composed while he still was in Rome and was actually played in the church. The rest of the movements — Santa Maria della Vittoria (which Norman calls “over-the-top Baroque), San Benedetto, Santa Susanna, Tempietto Bramante, St. Ivo, San Clemente, San Lorenzo Oltre Le Mure, and Santa Cecilia — were written in Berlin, where he also was a fellow at its academy. A similarly appealingly titled composition is Garden of Follies for saxophone and piano, commissioned by the Society of Composers, Inc. and ASCAP. “Follies” here, too, refers to the often extravagant architectural conceits in lavishly landscaped gardens of England, France, and Italy — subsequently imported, of course, to America. Another piece is Farnsworth: Four Portraits of a House.

Norman is a strong advocate for live performance, alluded to in his comment, “What is special about the kind of music I make is that it is live, and that this piece will only happen once. It will be there for ten minutes, and then it won’t be there any  more. And that kind of transience is really special to me, that element of chance, and surprise, that things will happen differently. This is what I find really interesting and exciting,  about writing music and about listening to live music.”

This is what Norman will be doing, and the audience will be hearing, in Boston, starting with a performance of his piece on the January 27th Jordan Hall program. His residency at BMOP will involve him in all its concerts; and he will participate in pre-concert discussions and out-reach programs.

Shop sign for Auersbachkeller in Leipzig, the tavern in which Goethe is said to have been inspired to write Faust

While BMInt’s Esteemed Leader with two assistants held down the fort for a bit over two weeks in October, your executive editor and her spouse were in London and Germany (Leipzig, Dresden, then Berlin), attending to the Nortons’ four main food groups: music, architecture, history, and politics. Boston connections could be the excuse, if one were needed, for an article on the various musical events we were fortunate to catch; but another reason, according to Lee Eiseman, is that “Publishing dispatches of European concert-going from eminent Bostonians was a tradition of BMInt’s progenitor, Dwight’s Journal of Music in ‘Diaries from Abroad’.” (An example from “Leipsic” in 1854 is  here.)  Not only are the “Musical Offerings” worth it, there still is ample evidence, in the German cities of the former Soviet bloc, of welcome reconstruction and rebirth.

The event around which we planned our entire itinerary was a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado, in which pianist Marc-André Hamelin was soloist in the Szymanowski Symphony No. 4. It is a wonderful, lush piece, previously unknown to us. Hamelin’s wonderful phrasing, superb command of the keyboard, and concentration, well known to Boston audiences, swept the listener along. He played the incredibly dense score from memory (generally the case with solo pianos, but a high-in-command BSO person stated that he could recall two other performances of the Szymanowski at which the soloist used a score). As in Hamelin’s playing of Liszt, cadenzas are clean and brilliant, and the way he lets the conclusion of certain phrases fade away compels one’s concentration, too — to a sense of sublime satisfaction. He said after the concert that he and Heras-Casado worked very hard on the balance of soloist with orchestra. It showed. One does not have to take my word for it; there are four reviews in German newspapers I have seen, but this from Der Tagesspiegel encapsulated them: “The particular characteristics of the composition, a hybrid of symphony and concerto, are heightened when a pianist of Marc-André Hamelin’s caliber is in command. It is well known that given his virtuosity he favors seldom played works. In the case of Szymanowski it becomes especially clear what quality of tone production he has. …. Even in the most orgiastic moments Hamelin’s sound transcends the percussive nature of the piano and creates characteristic colors.” Perhaps the BSO can be persuaded to have this shimmering work at an upcoming concert, with Hamelin at the keyboard?

Berliner Philharmonie (1963), first major building designed by Hans Scharoun. He felt the parts of a building had to be like 'individuals in a democracy.' Its forward-thinking design met much resistance at first but now is regarded as an icon of Berlin and has become the model for many orchestra halls throughout the world. All photos by Bettina A. Norton

Both interior and exterior of the Berliner Philharmonie show Scharoun’s interest in an “aggressive articulation of parts.”

In Boston, at a WGBH recital only two weeks earlier, we had heard him play Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H. We  heard it again in Leipzig, played formidably well by a teacher and performer, Birgitta Wollenweber, professor of piano at Academy of Music Hans Essler in Berlin, at a recital on October 16 in Mendelssohn’s well-preserved and maintained house. She included Mendelssohn, of course: Variations sérieuses in d-minor and Rondo capriccioso op. 54 (1841) as an encore. Wollenweber has cut back on recitals, she said after the concert, until her two young children are older; we hope to live long enough to hear her again.

It was a pensive moment, thinking that Mendelssohn composed these pieces at a piano in this house, where he was living at the time, only a few blocks away from Schumann. How much more effective it would be if the piano in Mendelssohn’s house were a French Erard —  one of his favorite pianos, according to Patricia Frederick, who with her husband owns the Frederick Historic Piano Collection in Ashburnham (q.v.); She said Mendelssohn also was known to have thought highly of Viennese pianos, particularly those by Conrad Graf, and English pianos; just before his death he was given a English Broadwood. The argument on the use of historic pianos for period pieces has its pros and cons, but in the houses of composers that are extant, it seems a shame that there are not pianos of whichever make they used in situ.

Mendelssohn’s study in his house in Leipzig.

Mendelssohn-Haus is a house museum that has many furnishings from the composer’s occupancy; his study demands more than a moment of silent admiration. On a few walls throughout the house are a number of his very accomplished watercolors of scenes throughout Europe. (Mendelssohn’s style was typical of the period; in fact, they have strong affinity with the style and soft colors of contemporary aquatints.)

Predictably, it would be at a recital in Leipzig where we would run across a man, who like me was toting two tomes on Bach by Christoph Wolff. (Each is two inches thick.) He, too, had chosen to fly intra-Europe on bargain RyanAir, with its crippling checked-bag weight restrictions, and was obliged to load these hefty Wolff volumes into the one allowed carry-on item. My canvas bag had to hold these along with a borrowed Blue Guide, Fodor’s, Let’s Go for England, my husband’s book on early Christian history and my large pocketbook, jammed in. And I was obliged to wear superfluous layers of clothing.

Brigitta Wollenweber at the Mendelssohn-haus. The piano is a Boesendorfer, a “brand-new, overstrung piano, with hard, heavy hammers.

The concert at the Schumann-Haus was another piano recital, by Frank Peter, a student from the Hochschule für Musik Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy who later studied in the U.S. at West Georgia State University. His homage to Schumann was with two pieces, Papillons and Kinderszenen, both written before the composer and family moved to the house on Inselstrasse in 1840. Schumann was using the Graf piano that had been given to Clara as a wedding present, Patricia Frederick said. But, again, the piano now in the house is not of the period, and the recorded music emanating from a touch-button was composed well before he moved there. Given the number of compositions between 1840 and 1843, when he was in residence and where he died, that also is a shame.

One of the many pleasures of Leipzig is that these two composers’ houses are close to each other and within a short walk from the city’s historic district, which is where one would wish to stay. We did, at Motel One (with a name like that, we had avoided it), suggested to us by Prof.

Christoph Wolff. And how right he was; it is inexpensive, sleek, no-frills but with essentials well presented and well located. Our room overlooked Nicolaskirche, one of the churches which Bach oversaw. The walls of the main lobbies of all Motel Ones began using horizontal slabs of rock composite in 2007 that are similar to those used in Rockport Music’s new Shalin Liu auditorium, and to the same good effect on acoustics. Svenja Hansen, head of design for Motel One, said it was employed to give “a natural, high-quality look”; it is a very popular element and is now one of the hotel’s “brand marks.”

Leipzig Gewandhaus, dedicated in 1981. This third Gewandhaus building, designed by Rudolf Skoda in close cooperation with then-Music Director Kurt Mazur, has 1,900 seats.

The BMInt connection secured us house seats at the Leipzig Gewandhaus for October 14. Riccardo Chailly conducted the Beethoven Fourth and Sixth, with the premiere of Upon one note  by Bruno Mantovani. This piece could never be done in a hall with muddy acoustics. It begins with tonal variations, to a middle section generally fortissimo, then the return to the one-note motif, with interest. Chailly executed lightning-fast change from militaristic march to gentle swaying of orchestral sound, fluttering his fingers to bring it home in the Beethoven 6th. The storm scene was the most dramatic I have ever heard, with piercing waves of dynamic change, followed by the first violin’s sweet, poignant motif, with the outcome that I then had to add the complete Chailly Beethoven symphony cycle CD set to that already over-stuffed, onerously heavy carry-on canvas bag on the flight back on RyanAir to London.

Dresden’s Semperoper, an architectural pastiche recalling buildings in Thomas Cole’s famous series of paintings, Course of the Empire. Originally built in 1841 to designs of Gottfried Semper, it has been destroyed twice (the second time, in WWII bombing), but was rebuilt almost identical to the 1878 building to plans entrusted by Semper to his son, Manfred.

For those who think Europeans make better audiences, there was nervous clapping after the second movement of the 4th and before the final notes of the 6th — in both cases, stopping abruptly when it was obvious it was out of place.

The Gewandhaus has a strange double standard regarding its musicians. They do not wander on stage at their own pace to sit down and tune up or practice, as they do in Boston and the States generally, but come on as a group just before the start of the concert, to applause from the audience. At the same time, the program does not list the members of the orchestra! It was explained to me that there are close to 200 members and (obviously) they do not all play on any given occasion. So why, one wonders, cannot those who are playing be listed? One reason, of courses, is that European houses do not issue separate programs for each concert; one is supposed to buy the paperback program book.  I found it annoying not to know the name for example, of the flutist, that wonderful first violinist, or the other concertmaster (duties were divided).

Interior of Dresden Semperoper.

Mendelssohn was only 26 when he became conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835. (It was founded in 1743.) During his twelve-year tenure, he transformed it into one of the leading orchestras of Europe. By the end of the century, in 1884, the second Gewandhaus was built; this one became the model for our own Symphony Hall, built sixteen years later, but was so badly damaged in the bombing of World War II that it was finally demolished under the Communist regime in 1968. The third Gewandhaus on Augustusplatz opened on October 8, 1981; the chief architect was Rudolf Skoda, whose team worked in close cooperation with Kurt Masur, Gewandhaus music director at the time.

It had taken more than four years to build. We sat next to the board member who eagerly recounted construction of the new building which he oversaw and gave us a private tour, the success of which we promised to convey to BMInt readers. Opinions of knowledgeable Bostonians with whom I subsequently have discussed the acoustics of the Gewandhaus have varied from “muddy in the center balcony,” to “perfectly fine.” I found everything perfectly clear and audible, especially the pppps.  I love this hall, inside and out (again, some do not agree), from the interior elongated semi-circular shape of so many modern halls, with audience “behind” the orchestra — which is becoming the modern style — to a dramatic exterior that beautifully captures the building’s function.

The famous St. Thomas Church Boys Choir, established in 1212 and over which J.S. Bach presided, was not in residence, but we did hear a service on Sunday morning, October 16, that included the Bach Cantata 47, Wer sich selbst erhöet, 320, with a chamber group and Ulriche Böhme, Thomasorganist. We left before the sermon — along with the chamber musicians; our excuse was being at the Mendelssohn concert on time.

Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, where Bach served from 1723 until his death in 1750. Nothing remains of the organ he used. The nearby Bach Archive's Museum has a room that allows visitors to hear amplified individual instruments while an orchestral piece is playing.

The rebuilt concert hall that did recreate (substantially) its original was Semperoper in Dresden, our next stop. Our misfortune was to be in this city on two evenings when the hall was dark, but we were given a superb tour of the building in English, offered once every day, at 3 pm. ….

Organ in Dresden Hofkirche

At noon on that day, to the peal of bells from the magnificent Frauenkirche we rushed in to hear an organ recital, so to speak. Not enough from the organ, but plenty of speaking, both a sermon from the Lutheran minister and a long lecture on the building — in German. What information was given in the folded service program for the two musical selections? “orgelmusik”(!) The large Baroque organ case (reconstructed) is a faithful reproduction of the original damaged in World War II bombing and has an even more elaborate case than the one in the Hofkirche, the former Catholic Cathedral.  At the Hofkirche, the housing of the Silbermann organ and parts of the wind plant were also destroyed by bombs in World War II, but the pipe work had been removed and so was saved. A fairly accurate reconstruction, it is not true to the original, however, due in part to differences of opinion between conservators and organist (who prevailed).

Before Germany, we spent four days in London, where we saw Gounod’s Faust at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Verdict? The Faust, Vittorio Grigolo, should not be missed, wherever and in whatever he sings. And I don’t think we suffered much loss having Malin Byström sing in place of Angela Gheorghiou. Overall, the production, conducted by Evelino Pidó and directed by David McVicar, was a treat. And set the tone for a dinner later that week at the Auersbachtkeller — where Goethe got his inspiration — in Leipzig.

*     *     *

Non-music addendum

On our last day in Berlin, we took the bus to Checkpoint Charlie. We had not realized that this October is the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, a cataclysmic event celebrated with an in-situ street exhibition running for two sides of a long block, until the end of the month.

Tower in Berlin's Jewish Museum

1904 Sauer Organ from Berliner Dom

Mimicking the height of the original wall, billboards explaining the history — in German and English — from the Potsdam Conference to the current day were being eagerly absorbed by hundreds of people. A mock Checkpoint Charlie scene, with posts and Soviet guards, was placed in the exact spot of the original. We had a similar encounter with the end of a Communist regime when we were in Prague in May 1989, just after the break from Soviet but before the first election, when a similar exhibition of life under Soviet occupation was put up in Na Pricope, one of the city’s main streets, telling of religious persecution, World War II, lack of freedom of the press, Jan Hus, …

Then we visited the Jewish Museum. The entrance is in the 18th-century building (In England and the U.S., it would be called “Georgian”), but the main museum is approached by a long descending staircase… this mood of somber dread is maintained throughout the museum. The floor is slanted, leaving one uneasy. Two diagonal axes dramatically portray two routes: toward annihilation or exodus to another country. Most emotionally effective is the “Tower,” an enclosed space with very high walls, each slanting inward, to a hole about 50 feet above, where a little light in visible. A ladder leading up to the opening is attached to the wall — but about 15 feet above the floor. We were struck by its emotional ties to L’Orecchio di Dionisio, the famous rock formation in Syracuse, Italy, in which acoustics were so good that, purportedly, prisoners’ soft whispers could be heard by the infamous ruler.

At the airport on the way to London, we ate dinner next to a table of ten people, six emotionally or physically impaired, with four caretakers, who treated their charges with such respect and lack of condescension that we were impelled to ask the name of the facility from which they came. The Albert Schweitzer Institute, one said. These three experiences during our last day in Germany reaffirmed out faith in humanity. As did the music we were privileged to hear.

During its three years of existence, BMInt has reviewed ten concerts of Monadnock Music, of which nine were highly favorable; this period is within that of the artistic directorship of Jonathan Bagg and Laura Gilbert, who took over from its founder, composer James Bolle, in 2006. Members of BMInt’s staff also have attended many concerts, both those with admission fees and free concerts, for the past twenty years or so.

Founded by Bolle in 1967 and run by him until five years ago, Monadnock Music provides ticketed concerts, usually at the Peterborough Town House, and many free concerts throughout the summer season in neighboring communities. When Bolle retired, he hand-picked three persons to succeed him, including Bagg and Gilbert as co-artistic directors. Bagg had been affiliated with Monadnock for 27 years; Gilbert, for 18.

The first question that occurred to BMInt is why the two were let go in hopes of replacing them with someone from the Monadnock local community, as was stated, when a request for names to replace them went out to a broad community, into Connecticut. And in these days of the prominence of email communication, what is the added value of somebody local? Another question was, given the apparent success of the co-artistic directors, whether there had been any discussion with them about adjusting programs and fees, or any other issues, or whether the reasons for termination were to be found elsewhere. And general questions came to mind: would replacing the artistic directors address the main concerns of the board? Are the concerns financial? Were there other major changes being contemplated? Last and most important, would this imbroglio impair or improve the future of Monadnock Music?

“My first reaction was astonishment,” said Margaret Johnson, long-time supporter and volunteer who began and headed up the highly successful Monadnock program “Lend an Ear!” for elementary schoolchildren. “I am baffled — deeply distressed.”

Miki Osgood, former staff member in charge of special events — arrangements for practicing and accommodations for musicians, volunteer coordination, etc. — who was let go in the reorganization, noting a change of direction, fears “the uniqueness of Monadnock is being jeopardized.” Additionally, she added, “Will Chapman sent out the end-of-year appeal the week before the ax went down…. People are saying, ‘There is no way I am giving to MM with this going on.’”

This was not what the board had in mind, according to President Michael Petrovick. “We needed to make a change. The entire model for non-profits is changing, especially with what is happening with available funds. We were going to be under more and more stress. We really needed to have our staff more involved in day-today fundraising, to meet with donors, patrons, on a day-to-day basis; it wasn’t working not having [Bagg  and Gilbert] accessible.” So the decision was made to extend the net to within a 150-mile radius of Peterborough, to allow the next artistic director — and it would be only one, Petrovick stressed — “to go to meetings and social events with ease. But I don’t think anyone would have handled it the way it was portrayed….  Believe it or not, the vote [of the board] was unanimous,”  he continued,  “but someone essentially high-jacked the process. … Unfortunately, it got a life of its own.”

Bolle indicated there had been difficulties, but, he offered, “For anyone coming in, it is difficult to deal with these eccentricities at Monadnock. It is a unique organization. There was bound to be a lot of tension.”

That portrayal of a neighborhood conflict was first made public in an article by Dave Anderson in the Monadnock Ledger Transcript on October 20, in which Bagg was quoted extensively. That article is here.

Contacted about his original source, Anderson said he heard from a few people in the community. Asked if he had heard from either Bagg or Gilbert, he responded, “They did not contact us first. I called them. And they responded to my questions.”

Petrovick stated that the one thing that came out of both the strategic assessment, which the board commissioned in 2010, and the audience survey, for which participation was solicited at each concert this past summer, “was not against the artistic directors. … The underlying message was that there was too much of them as performing artists and that concerts were featuring too much music in which they participated, or music played by their friends. … We had had that conversation with them on several occasions,” Petrovick  asserted.

Bagg said that is not true. The issue was never raised with them, he reiterated. Gilbert agreed.

As for the comment that Bagg and Gilbert used their friends, Margaret Johnson has a different view. “It isn’t their friends; many of them were the good old Monadnock musicians whom we all recognized. [Bagg and Gilbert]  have a pretty wide acquaintance and they are more than able to pick the good ones. Quality is what they are after.”

The strategic assessment “wasn’t bad,” Petrovick continued. In fact, it was “inconclusive, in that Monadnock Music has always has gotten mixed feedback because the programs are so diverse”; and so the board instituted the second survey this summer.

Osgood questioned the earlier 2010 survey run by the board at the onset of this change in direction. “It seemed as if it were set up as a bias,” she mused. “People chosen were not necessarily a cross-section… Some very intelligent individuals were not asked.”

The second survey this past summer was passed out to the audiences at eight concerts. To the question “What would you most like to see changed?” an impressive number — 69 out of 187 — responded with a variety of ways, some quite imaginative, of saying “nothing”; others called for “more”: more concerts, more locations: “move east!” “move to Texas!” “Bring a concert to Nashua.” Suggested changes on programming were for “more” of various types of music: Baroque, songs, Schubert, etc. (One said “Do not play non-melodic modern music.”) Most problems cited were with facilities: hard seats and poor air-conditioning. Basically, for the programming aspects, the survey results were overwhelmingly favorable.

Bagg noted, “This summer, we got the formula just right. We made the Peterborough [paying] concerts different enough from the free town concerts, so people would say, ‘This I want to buy a ticket to.’ We programmed Mahler, Wagner, Das Lied plus Siegfried Idyll, so that it felt big. …I think it worked pretty well.”

In further affirmation of the past season, Executive Director Chapman, who had been away for three weeks and recently spoke to BMInt upon his return, pointed out that in this past summer, ticket income was up 40% and donations to village concerts up 70%. “But having said that, people don’t restructure because we are trying either to adapt to new condition or anticipate a new environment. Everything we are doing is to ensure we sustain and stay on our mission.”

On the basis of the strategic assessment, the board was enlarged and reorganization was instituted: the staff and artistic director were to be under the executive director, who would answer to the board. Petrovick decided to throw his hat in the ring, so he said, “I recused myself from the board.” Riccardo Barreto, who had been president of the board for three months, resigned when his partner, Will Chapman, decided to apply and was appointed. Bagg and Gilbert, among others, felt Chapman’s fundraising skills were just what was needed.

However, once Chapman was on the job, Bagg and Gilbert said they no longer were invited to take part in board meetings. Chapman instructed them that reports they used to submit directly were to go to him, and he would present them.

“The artistic directors’ reports were a way of keeping the board informed about what grants we had gotten, what was successful and what not,” Bagg explained. When he and Gilbert questioned Chapman about the versions presented to the board, according to Bagg, Chapman “told me there was nothing ‘actionable’ in the report.”

Gilbert concurred. “Not only did he rewrite and leave out part of our report, but evidently, through channels that I’d rather not discuss, it was reported that the final artistic director’s report was his interpretation. He didn’t convey our words about what we thought were good and bad about the season.”

Asked about the assertion that he was rewriting reports, Chapman stated, “I am not going to comment on anything involving personnel.”

Bagg and Gilbert also dispute the assertion that they performed too often. “We had a huge plethora of performers,” Gilbert bristled, “and to keep things under a responsible budget, we played when we needed to. We were incredibly conscious of [this]; it was always one of the first and foremost things we made sure of. When you have good relations with your colleagues, they want to work with you and will do things they might not necessarily do for strangers. Why do they want to come? Because of our relationships, making music the way it should be made.

“We got absolutely the best. Musicians were paid $950 [for being at Monadnock] from Tuesday through Sunday, and they still had to pay their food and travel, and get to all the different venues. We provided a bed.”

Chapman stated that the new direction was “no criticism of Jonathan and Laura; they are excellent musicians…. There’s never been a problem with the programming. Musicianship, it’s not about. It’s about the basic business model…. It’s clear that the model has to change, but not the mission. It’s how it is executed.”

The financial picture is driving the board decisions, including the possibility of dropping the free town concerts. The organization received a lot of grants based on both the village concerts, and new music, Osgood stressed. The dropping of the latter has to be a concern. “Once they cut back, then OK, what happens to the grants?”

According to Anne Alexander, retired business manager of Monadnock Music, “Things were rolling around nicely…. The programming has grown, it has been spectacular, with musicians willing to come up here, not getting paid what they would in New York, but they are dedicated to this organization. I thought the audiences were increasing. They were not huge, and the free concerts of course always have large attendance…. [Bagg and Gilbert] deserve a lot of respect for their accomplishments.”

Of the reported aim to attract more people, Alexander noted, “It is a good goal, [but] I think there is a certain wait-and-see element to it. It is early days.”

Echoed Miss Johnson, “I think it just has to play itself out. Every organization has some critics. I don’t happen to hear them, but I suppose they are there. I hope fervently that MM will still continue and be of the same wonderful quality that it has been. It is a rare treasure, not a business model to be replicated.”

“I think it is going to work just fine,” stated Chapman.  “A lot depends on who ends up here. Obviously, there’s going to be teamwork. Coordination. Making sure we are meeting all our benchmarks, not only artistic and musical. [There’s] a level of rigor that I am being held accountable for. I think it’s healthy.”

The most recent local performance of a work of his was at a concert at Agassiz Theater only two weeks before he died; he was not only present but participated in the pre-concert discussion. Mary Wallace Davidson wrote of that concert here, “Let me say at the outset that James Yannatos’s two-act Rocket’s Red Blare, in the opera buffa tradition, is richly rewarding on many levels…. Yannatos is a fine craftsman: the music was perfect for this multilayered invention, yet in a classical style with respect to recitatives and arias. In particular I enjoyed the humorous use of the woodblock or snare drum to punctuate recitatives.”

 The Boston Symphony Orchestra Assistant Principal Cellist Martha Babcock, an alumna of the H-R Orchestra, reminisced, “He meant a tremendous amount to me when I was a student. He was a superlative musician, a natural and uninhibited person, and I appreciated it very much, as a 17-year-old coming from a small Illinois town. He was a person one could really connect to as a musician.”

Federico Cortese, music director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, told the Intelligencer, “I was not his colleague, so I did not work with him for a long time. I was his successor. But I have affectionate memories, many. He always came to our concerts. Always. And he would come backstage and discuss things in a very gentle, nice way. Sometimes he came to rehearsals, too. He was not territorial at all; he was generous. No one knew better than he what the challenges were. Also the quality. He had a very good understanding of how a performance went, and he helped. Always.”

The H-R Orchestra’s concert in Sanders Theatre on December 6 will not only be dedicated to his memory but will feature a performance of the James Yannatos Concerto Competition winner, Ariel Mitnick, in the Barber Violin Concerto.

A Memorial Tribute to Dr. Y will be held on Dec. 10 at 3 pm, also at Sanders Theatre.

“Fringe” is commonly thought of as something peripheral, on the edge, but it can also be thought of as the decorative element that adds interest to whatever it is attached. In this spirit, Sharon Daniels director of Opera Programs at Boston University, founded the BU Fringe Festival in 1997 to heighten interest in the field of opera, to encourage a broader audience.

Adrian Smith (Bluebeard) with Meredeth Kelly (Judith). Credit is BU Photography.

With a career singing a wide variety of opera roles and recitals throughout the United States, Daniels has produced principal artists in many professional venues locally, nationally and internationally since she joined the Boston University faculty in 1989 and has directed mainstage productions of the same wide diversity of repertoire that  her singing career. (She also developed the new curriculum for the Opera Institute, started by Phyllis Curtin.) A history of the productions is here.

Daniels wrote to BMInt, “In keeping with the Festival’s mission, the musical offerings this year are dynamic in content, music, design, and direction.  While production values are still minimalist, they have unique designs which support the music and action. Audience is close to the action. The singers have advanced training not only in vocal technique but also as actors. We are excited to have the composer Jake Heggie (Moby Dick, Dead Man Walking) in attendance for opening night of his Three Decembers on October 14; and he will also narrate and play his own songs with our singers on October 28 in Heggie on Heggie, Art Song Meets Theatre. Our singers and the school will have had the benefit of his coaching in a residency the previous week.”

Bluebeard’s Castle, the mordant story which opens the Festival offerings this weekend, is jointly presented by The BU Opera Institute and School of Theatre. It is based on the French fairy tale by Charles Perrault. The English translation of the libretto by Béla Balázs — whose own life was filled with upheaval — is the one by Jeffrey Stevens. William Lumpkin is music director and piano accompanist, and Jim Petosa, director. The one-act opera of 65 minutes is double cast with students, so each cast will sing twice. Costume and set design is kept to a minimum, as is the tradition at the Festival. Performances are the BU Theatre, a 90-seat black box theatre, on Friday, October 7, at 8:00 pm; Saturday, October 8, at both 6:00 pm and 8:00 pm ; and Sunday, October 9, at 2:00 pm, with a post-show discussion with special guests.

Three Decembers, according to the BU press release, is a “powerful and poignant one-act opera explores the painful and complex relationships between a famous actress and her two grown children, as they unfold the family’s hidden truths: infidelity, separation, homophobia and AIDS, tragedy, and loss.” It is based on an original play by Terrence McNally and with a libretto by Gene Scheer; music director is Allison Voth, and director, Tomer Zvulun, from the Metropolitan Opera. The composer will be at the performance on Friday, October 14, 8:00 pm, for a post-show discussion. Performances are also scheduled for Saturday, October 15, at 8:00 pm; Sunday, October 16, at 2:00 pm and at 6:00 pm.

Heggie explained, “Under the shadow of a tragic event, a famous, beloved Broadway star and her two adult children struggle to know and love each other. Over three decades, they become estranged due to family secrets and lies, love, loss, AIDS, alcoholism and homophobia. The opera poses powerful questions of identity: Who are you in the context of your family? Who are you on your own? Who are you in your chosen family? Especially influenced by the lyricism and sweep of the American musical theater, the opera was originally composed in 2008 for the great American mezzo Frederica von Stade with an 11-member chamber orchestra. The music uses melodic and rhythmic motifs to identify characters and events, and offers big solo arias as well as duets and trios. “Three Decembers received its premiere at Houston Grand Opera and has since been performed at San Francisco Opera, Chicago Opera Theater, Central City Opera, Ft Worth Opera, as well as at USC. The production at Boston University features a new, two-piano reduction.”

Art Song Meets Theatre: Jake Heggie on Jake Heggie is being given one performance, on Friday, October 28, at 8:00 pm. Heggie joins singers from the School of Music to perform selections from his vast song literature, including a new cycle marking the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy. The evening of staged songs concludes his residency.

Check BMInt’s “Upcoming Events” for details and dates.

Composer Avrom Sutzkever

As a child (in the World-War II era) on the North Slope of Beacon Hill, I used to jump the roofs abutting Vilna Shul, then a religious center for that Lithuanian town’s early twentieth-century immigrants to Boston. At precisely the time of my aerial highjinks, Yiddish poetry was being set to music for four revue shows at the Vilna Ghetto Theater.  Within one to two years, the vast majority of residents in the ghetto, including poets and writers involved in this project, had been starved then killed, most slowly, in ways too horrible to believe.

Selections from those shows will be brought to life for the seventieth anniversary — to the day — of the founding of the Vilna ghetto in a performance at Goethe-Institut on September 6. The titles of the pieces on the program instill poignancy; almost all seem songs of denial of the horrors the inhabitants experienced — physical and emotional, yet the texts of many of these songs are laced with satire, irony, devastating fatalism, a few with an occasional cry of hope. To wit, according to the Goethe press release, “We are presenting moving and witty excerpts from the four revue shows composed by gifted composers and lyricists after ten-hour work days on starvation diets.”

The songs from Yiddish poems — which will be sung in Yiddish — include such offerings as Es iz geven a zumer-tog (alternately, S’iz geven a zumertog , “It was a summer day”) about going into the ghetto, Korene yorn un vey tsu di teg (“Years of rye [alternatively, corn] and days of woe”), and, from the last reviews in the Ghetto Theater in September 1943, Es dremlen feygl oyf di tsvaygn (“Birds are dreaming in the branches”), Es shlogt di sho (“The hour strikes”), and Mir lebn eybik (“We live forever”). Shortly after that last revue, the inhabitants were sent to camps, from which only 3,000 of the original 80,000 survived.

The lives of the poets and composers represented in this program, culled from a superb websites here and one specifically on the Vilna Theater here, give insight into that horrific period in Europe.

Composer Shmerke Katsherginski

Following the unsuccessful partisan uprising of September 1943, poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a key member of the Yiddish literary and artistic group “Yung Vilne” (Young Vilna), fled with some compatriots to the forest between Lithuania and Byelorussia. In August 1944, he participated in the Soviet liberation of Vilna and soon set to work locating and salvaging Jewish books and cultural artifacts.  Disillusioned with the Soviets, he eventually wound up in Paris. Shortly after the end of the war, he published three books on ghetto songs, the best known being the landmark anthology Lider fun di getos un lagern (Songs of the Ghettoes and Concentration Camps).

Avraham Sutzkever, also a member of Young Vilna, became one of the ghetto’s most celebrated poets. Unter dayne vayse shtern (Under your white stars), set to music by Avrom Brudno, was one of the most popular in the ghetto. When the SS demanded the seizure of Jewish books in Vilna, a city famed for its remarkable Jewish library and university, Sutzkever helped save the most important texts and valuable documents from the YIVO (Jewish Scientific Institute). After receiving word of the ghetto’s impending liquidation, Sutzkever and his wife escaped to Moscow and finally settled in Israel, where he became one of the most important figures of post-war Yiddish culture. In February 1946, he was called up as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials to testify against Franz Murer, murderer of his mother and son. A poem written during Vilna to his murdered newborn, ‘The Grave Child’, won a ghetto literary prize.

By the age of eleven, Alek Volkoviski, already well known as a pianist, had composed several other songs, including music for Avraham Sutzkever. Shtiler, shtiler (Hush, hush), with lyrics later added by Kaczerginski, became one of the best-loved songs of the ghetto. The lullaby was first performed at one of the last Jewish Council-organized concerts before the ghetto’s liquidation in 1943. The original line “all roads lead to Ponar” had to be changed to “all roads lead there now,” though the audience understood the inference to the Nazi liquidation site. Volkoviski and his mother, although sent to a concentration camp, survived the war, and Volkoviski moved to Israel, where he became a professional pianist under the name A. Tamir.

Vilna Theater During War

Mikhl Gelbart toured with a theater group in Poland before immigrating to the United States in 1912. A beloved teacher in New York City, he left a huge body of work that includes six oratorios, fifteen operettas, eight orchestral pieces, and settings of the works of some one hundred and twenty poets. He also published some twenty books of Yiddish songs.

Most of the lyrics by the young Rikle Glezer, a teenager at the ghetto, were set to the melodies of popular songs. Rather than depicting the beauty of Vilna, however, Glezer’s lyrics relate the grim conditions there. Her best-known song, which opens the concert, was the popular S’iz geven a zumertog (It was a summer’s day); it does mention that forest of Ponar. Glezer lived to see Vilna liberated by the Red Army in 1944.

These were among the few inhabitants of the Vilna ghetto who survived. Most (over 96%), including other Vilna poets and musicians, were not so fortunate.

Avrom (Avreml) Brudno, who perished in the Estonian concentration camp Klooga, was responsible for the melodies of some of the ghetto’s most successful songs, like Friling (Spring), to a poem by Kaczerginski, as well as Avraham Sutzkever’s Unter dayne vayse shtern (Under your white stars). Both songs are in this concert.

Vilna Ghetto

The lyrics for five songs in the concert are by Kasriel Broydo. During the liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943, he was forced along with thousands of other prisoners on a death march to a small town on the Baltic Sea, where they were pushed into holes blasted into the ice — and shot if they tried to get out. Two of his songs on the program, Korene yorn un vey tsu di teg and Geto (Ghetto), were set to music by conductor and composer Misha Veksler, also an important musical figure of the Vilna ghetto. Veksler was seized during the final liquidation of the ghetto in 1943 and perished at Majdanek.

Another Veksler composition on the program, ‘Peshe fun reshe’ (Peshe from Reshe) was written in collaboration with the poet and lyricist Leyb Rozental. Rozental, the oldest child in a highly cultured Vilna family whose portrayals of daily ghetto life are especially valuable, also was sent to the Estonian concentration camp Klooga and probably died in the Baltic Sea.

Thanks to the efforts of people like Kaczerginski and Gelbart, the songs survive, of which some of the most representative are in this program. The vocal artist is mezzo-soprano Sophie Michaux. Born in London but raised in France, she studied classical music at the Haute École de Musique in Geneva. She is currently studying voice with Anna Gabrieli at the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge. Although Michaux’s degree was in Early Music, she also sings jazz, Cabaret — and Yiddish songs. Pianist for the program is Eugenia Gerstein, a native of Moscow who taught at the Music Teachers’ College in Voronezh, where she chaired the Department of Music Theory. She moved to the United Sates in 1994 and is now choral conductor at Newton’s Temple Emmanuel, the biggest Conservative shul in New England. Scholar Suzanne Klingenstein, who assembled the program, will be speaking during the concert — in English.

“The Vilna Ghetto Theater/ Yiddish Poetry Set to Music (1941-1943)” begins at 7:30 at the Goethe-Institut Boston, 170 Beacon Street. Admission is $5.

Alisa Weilerstein (Hilary-Scott photo)

The prospect of this season at Tanglewood did not tingle the spines of many musicologists, and certainly not enough audience-goers. More’s the pity. The prevailing view that this summer’s offerings are ordinary ignores this summer’s inherent drama: what conductors might be in the running to take over as BSO music director, not to mention interpretations of this “ordinary fare” that just might be way beyond ordinary. This afternoon’s concert (July 30) in the Tanglewood Shed with Christoph Eschenbach conducting the Mahler Symphony No. 1 was spectacular. And cellist Alisa Weilerstein in the Haydn Cello Concert No. 1 was not “astonishing,” if one knows her playing; it was predictably polished, perfectly executed, sensitively played.

Alisa Weilerstein is from a local musical family that includes her parents and her younger brother Joshua (concertmaster of Discovery Ensemble and just appointed assistant concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic). How pleased these parents must be. She plays with them in the New England Conservatory-based Weilerstein Trio, but she is also developing an increasingly busy solo schedule in a repertoire so far belying her academic career — a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Russian history (!). She is a champion of contemporary music.

Nonetheless, from the first notes of her entrance in the close-to-250-year-old Haydn Cello Concert, she demonstrated wonderful dynamics and tempo, with subtle pauses that seemed just right. The respectful, rapt audience in the hall and even on the lawn allowed her delicate pianissimos and drawn-out solo passages in the second movement to be savored. It may be an anachronism to use the term, but it seems so appropriate to call her rapid, right-on-intonation playing in the third movement, “bel canto from the cello.” The long line waiting to see her during intermission indicated that the audience knew they had witnessed a rising star.

As someone who heard Mahler at the BSO back in the early 1950s and who had, among only six LPs owned during a two-year enforced servitude (through marriage) in the US Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune, NC, the Bruno Walter/NY Philharmonic recording of the Mahler First (from Book Clearing House — anyone remember it?), I am more than familiar with this symphony. But today’s performance has to be one of the best I have ever heard. The back-and-forth re: tone poem or symphony to the contrary, it is almost impossible hearing such a performance from Eschenbach not to see the creation of the Mahler landscape, from the slow awakening in a quiet sunrise to shimmering appearance of the sun, the brief call from four off-stage trumpets before the minor-key shadows of the cellos, then the peaceful bustle of the main theme, replete with strong, two-note bird so strongly accented by the conductor.  The entire mood struck this reviewer as more “pastoral” than that other famous symphony.

Jessica Zhou’s harp was a key initiator of many thematic elements. Her pizzicato, echoed by the clarinets, then the flutes, was beautiful.

Other notable moments overseen by Eschenbach were the descending notes on the strings, increasingly pianissimo in the second movement, and in the third, the sensuous sway of the clarinets with the interrupting oom-pah-pah of the “band” — precursors of Ives? — and the frantic orchestral scream, with the roar of the tuba, to the gorgeous catharsis from violins and cellos, then full strings. The eight stand-up horns did indeed “drown out everything else with the song of joyous triumph,” as Steven Ledbetter’s excellent notes informed us was Mahler’s specific instruction.

The united, spontaneous scream of delight from the audience, jumping to it feet, indicated they it, too, found the performance outstanding. The audience also had a chance to thank retiring first percussionist Frank Epstein for forty-three years of devoted service to the BSO.

As a BSO savant said in the parking lot afterwards, “Everything fell into place.” Amen.

Bettina A. Norton, editor of the Intelligencer, is a retired museum professional. She has been attending classical music concerts “since the waning years of World War II” but reviews only when it would be a sin not to give notice here to such a performance.

The big question for organizations such as these is what direction they will take under new leadership and what loyalties will remain. Does new leadership for each mean a change either in the mission or the support?

Bolle’s legacy is a highly regarded southern New Hampshire cultural institution;  Peter Van Zandt Lane, one of Boston Musical Intelligencer’s reviewers, wrote in 2009, “Monadnock Music is at the top of the music festivals in the Northeast.”

Yet for Monadnock Music, any transition is difficult, acknowledged William Chapman, who began his duties as executive director almost two months ago. “Even with James Bolle’s support, it is delicate.” However, he added, “We have a new board president, Michael Petrovic, an avid music lover who is based in Francestown [and new co-Artistic Directors, flautist, Laura Gilbert and violist, Jonathan Bagg].”

Chapman himself has a long association with the community. He and his partner bought a second home in Peterborough in July, 1985, and went to their first Monadnock concert that August.

“We would have gone in July,” Chapman added, “if we hadn’t gone immediately to Europe on vacation.”

His familiarity is an asset, according to Boston attorney Ernest Klein, a supporter of many years of Monadnock Music who has a home in the area.

“Will Chapman is just the man for the job,” he noted, “because he is familiar with what it is like to live in New Hampshire year-round. And he is efficient, knowledgeable, and a good guy.”

“Community,” specifically, the several communities in the Mount Monadnock area, is one of the big strengths of Monadnock Music.  The popular site for summer homes for many Boston and Cambridge families for over a century provided a built-in audience for classical music; but there is a second “community” peculiar to Monadnock Music, one that has been important from its genesis.

Many free concerts are still offered through the summer in the region’s picturesque town centers — at Walpole Unitarian Church, Harrisville Community Church, Wilton Center Community Church, Hancock Community Church, Francestown Old Meeting House, Deering Community Church, Milford Town Hall, Ahavas Achim Synagogue in Keene, Washington Congregational Church, and Franklin Pierce University in Rindge. In fact, village concerts were the genesis of Monadnock Music.

This appealing list of venues for those who wish to explore old New England villages is an added bonus to the concerts for those who drive up from the Boston area, but it has the very appealing primary value of attracting each village’s residents.

Chapman notes of any concert, “Half the village is there. When I first started coming up, I’d see the volunteer fireman, people working at the recycling center…”  Sometimes the locals go to concerts in other towns, but at the same time, “they are very loyal to their towns, there’s a lot of local cultural pride.”

The goal still is, he emphasized, to make music accessible to everyone in a rural area, and to do that “without falling back on safe and defensive programs.”

This season’s offerings bear that out.  A number of regular performers are returning, as they have for several years: Tawnya Popoff , Curtis Macomber, Jesse Mills and Rieko Aizawa, Ilana Davidson, Gabriela Diaz, Eric Pritchard, Rafael Popper-Keizer, Randall Hodgkinson, Stacey Shames, Krista River, Curtis Macomber, Adela Pena,  Greg Hesselink, Dan Lippel.

Bolle, as a conductor, often had an full orchestra— missing in this year’s lineup. But Chapman says the possibility of guest orchestral conductors will be brought up at the retreat scheduled for the board and staff at the end of the season.

There will be a chamber ensemble conducted by Hugh Keelan on August 6 for Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, arranged by Keelan, with soprano Jenna Rae and tenor James Anderson.

The concerts are as varied and full of contemporary composers’ works as they were in former years. Melinda Wagner is composer-in-residence for the summer; her Four Settings for soprano and ensemble will be heard in a program of “Emily Dickinson’s poetry in music and dance,” on July 23 at Peterborough.

On the following weekend, July 30-31, “Vox Americana” presents music of William Billings, Robert Beaser, and Dvorák, then Amy Beach, Aaron Copland, Gordon Getty, and Marion Bauer, in “Emily and New England.”

Other composers, many contemporary, whose works will be heard in various programs include Charles Koechlin and John Tavener, Amy Beach and Max Reger, Kaija Saariaho and Toru Takemitsu, André Previn and Eric Moe, Pierre Jalbert, Andrew Earle Simpson, Dahl, Schnittke, William Grant Still, Alberto Ginastera and Yu-Hui Chang, Bryan Christian, Daniel Brewbaker, and Thomas Àdes.

Ticketed concerts are held most commonly at the Peterboro Town House and the Jaffrey Center Meetinghouse.

The season opens on July 7 with the Choir of St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge, in English Renaissance music at Jaffrey Center, where Nicholas Kitchen will play Bach on July 10 and the Chiara Quartet, “Chamber Masterpieces” on July 24. The full Borromeo String Quartet, a favorite of many Boston concert-goers, is giving several concerts, on July 13, 15, and 16 in Hancock, Francestown, and Peterborough.

One concert theme is Emily Dickinson, another, Americana. Quite a selection. Quite a testament to the Bolle’s legacy for Monadnock Music. Truth be told, it is difficult to single out attractive programs. Readers are advised to check it out in BMInt’s “Upcoming Events” or by going to Mondanock Music’s website.

The opera originally was performed towards the end of the seventeenth century, which saw the birth of modern opera with stage techniques of perspective, proscenium, curtains, stage scenery, pit, lighting, masking, layering, … when spectacle was grist for the mill. The fruitful century also saw the birth of collecting as a mania, and — thanks to Louis XIV— of the elevation of printmaking to the status of one of the liberal arts, both of which figured for Blin in creating the set for Niobe.

Gilbert Blin holding one of the many drops of the model for Niobe. (BMInt photo)

Audience members versed in art history immediately recognize in this production the allusions to Claude Lorrain, the great seventeenth-century French artist— the peaceful landscapes with sweeping airy vistas softening as they recede in the distance — a fascination with delineating perspective; trees almost always framing and often the focal point, their leaves at the end of branches rows of tiny nodding silhouetted, almost transparent, ovals; buildings or fragments of Classical architecture peaking out of groves; figures small — really accents; and subjects (ostensibly) often mythological. A perfect stage for Niobe and possibly the source of the original production, as Claude’s pictures were very well known in prints almost immediately throughout Europe.

While a full-time student at the Sorbonne he also attended the École du Louvre, but after two years the intensity of the schedule caused him to make a choice to continue in theatre studies at the Sorbonne — not before having absorbed a good knowledge of European art history, however.

“In my mind, art history and painting history are intimately linked with theater history. It’s what I like to do for the stage.”

Blin’s first goal was to understand the context of the first performance at the Salvatortheater in Munich in 1688. (There is no documentation of any other early performances, in Munich, Paris, anywhere.) He found a published libretto, Niobe, regina di Tebe,… from the collection of the Duke August in Wolfenbüttel, printed both in Italian for the Court and in German “for the lower classes,” he noted. The cast is listed, down to the Comparse (loosely translated, the retinue). The libretto is not illustrated, but it does contain short descriptions of scenes of three types. Two are generic: city architecture — “Camere Regie,” Regale con trono,” “Piazza di Tebe”; and rural scenery: “Boscaglia,” “Colline con Fonte.” The third, specifically linked with the action, exist only in this libretto. It refers to specific moment of the action: “Reggia dell’Armonia” , “Muraglie”. Blin’s challenge was to discover what these scenes might have been, whether they would work for the current production.

Model of the stage set with the drops for the miraculous walls of Thebes. (BMInt photo)

Enter a second source he discovered, a book by the seventeenth-century architect brothers Domenico and Gasparo Mauro, illustrating their redesign the 1642 Salvatortheater for the 1686 wedding of the Prince Elector of Bavaria— two years before Steffani’s opera was to be seen.

The book was a gold mine and became the basis of his design, to recreate the possibilities of sixteenth-century’s division of sets into tragica for the city (Thebes, one of the settings in Niobe, was a city where tragic events happened), and pastoral landscape.

However, Blin explained, “We wanted to reduce to what was important for the action.” He had to, in fact. (The book shows five wings — or shutters — on each side, but the shallow depth of the Cutler allows for only three.)

The book’s illustrations show a heavy Baroque frame around the proscenium with low bulging balconies at the base, trompe-l’oeil curves and counter-curves on the monumental Baroque columns on the wings. The landscape seems to extend for miles, à la Claude.

“The backdrop had to be a light color to achieve that effect of the landscape extending far into the distance,” Blin noted.

Inspiration for the “marble” columns and their pink to purple coloration came from Drottningholm Palace in Sweden, built at the end of the seventeenth century for the royal family. Asked why the source was Northern Europe, Blin responded that Munich had been influenced by Venetian culture, which moved north and even into Denmark and Sweden early on, so it seemed feasible to use those elements of for the cities. The polychromy of marbles in Versailles was also an inspiration.

The actual stage set. (Photo by André Costantini for BEMF)

So the Niobe set is essentially what was used over three centuries ago, even to the mechanical movement of the scenery, though there are two notable changes brought on by the modern age, one electrical, the other, digital.

Lighting was the biggest compromise, true for all modern audiences, Blin explained. They do not tolerate darkly lit sets. But thanks to talent of Lenore Doxsee, lighting designer, period illusion was also achieved.

“Paintings [in the seventeenth-century stage] gave the main source of light, and candles reinforced it,” Blin explained. Hundreds of candles were needed, because their light is not directional and reflectors are difficult for creating contrast.

The set for Niobe has thin flexible electric lighting tubes running down the back of each shutter to simulate candlelight.

The second “change” was the use of computers to digitize the “painted” sets. Up close, one can see the pixilation.  It was cheaper, Blin noted, to recreate the paintings this way than to find and hire painters in America skilled enough to accomplish it, though according to Blin, in Europe the reverse is true.

What does Blin think about directors who reinterpret operas in modern situations?

“Oh! I’ve done that, too!” he quickly retorted. It’s OK to smash the icons for familiar works, he added, “But this piece did not need me! This is a sharing experience. I come after.”

Bettina A. Norton is a retired museum professional. She has published widely in her field, American historical prints, and has been attending classical music concerts since the waning years of World War II.

But now, Boston is hosting its first conference on opera, Opera Entrepreneurship: Building on Tradition, being staged by New York-based Opera America, from May 7 through May 11, in the Theater District. Boston Lyric Opera, one of the two co-hosts of the conference, gets the head start with its spring production, Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opening this Friday, April 30, at the Shubert Theatre; it continues during the conference.

Boston Baroque is putting on a choreographed performance of Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes during the conference (Friday, Mary 6 and Saturday, May 7) in Jordan Hall, with Amanda Forsythe, Nathalie Paulin, Daniel Auchincloss, Aaron Sheehan, Sumner Thompson, and Nathaniel Watson.

According to Lee Perry, a prominent local supporter of opera since the 1970s with Boston Concert Opera, David Stockton, Boston Opera Theater, Peter Sellars (Marriage of Figaro) et al,  “Opera America is information central for all things opera-related in this hemisphere. It’s all over the United States, in Canada, South America, and half of Europe.” Organizers expect close to 400 people to attend, he noted. The intent is to involve boards, administrations, and performers — but also audiences.

As for those audiences, one of the general sessions that should prove of interest to BMInt readers is “The Audience Knows Best,” a session led by Dr. Thomas Wolf, in which ordinary opera-goers will be able to discuss their ticket-buying decisions, what they like to see and hear, and what might send them to more opera.

The opening session and keynote address by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, on Monday, May 9, followed by a panel, “Think Like a Startup,” to discuss the benefits or hazards of risk-taking and entrepreneurial thinking, are also open to the public, as is the closing session on May 11 at 3:00 p.m. Those who register (fee is $95) will also be entitled to enroll through May 3 in the Online Learning Course on Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The “start-up” approach, according to Marc A. Scorca, who has served as OPERA America’s president and CEO for exactly half of its 40-year existence, is that “the opera field is transforming — companies are taking risks and retooling business practices, repertoire and venue selections, audience cultivation efforts and modes of presentation. Boston offers us the perfect setting to probe this entrepreneurial energy animating the field.”

To that point, Tod Machover, whose Death and the Powers just had its premiere in Boston (Boston Musical Intelligencer, March 23, 2011) followed immediately by a highly successful run in Chicago, has promised a tour of the provocative MIT Media Lab, where elements of his opera were generated (pun intended).

“We’ll show some of the technologies behind Death and the Powers, and probably see an Operabot or two up close,” he said. “Then I’ll talk about the culture of innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship at the Lab, how that can be relevant to the opera community, and how it bubbles up in projects like Death and the Powers. I will play some excerpts from Powers, and will also leave time for some Q&A.” This session is available only to participants in the full conference, however.

So twenty open sessions, the bulk of the offerings during the course of Opera Conference 2011, will address the needs of staff and trustees in the areas of artistic and artist training, management, development, finance, marketing, public relations, and technical/production. Since its founding, Opera America has made grants of over $10.5 million to assist opera companies with expenses associated with producing new works.

Boston’s young Guerilla Opera is production liaison for the American Repertory Theater which will host the New Works Sampler to be presented at OBERON in Cambridge on May 9. The Sampler features local Boston opera companies presenting scenes from new operas that have been or will be premiered this season nation-wide. Guerilla Opera’s Heart of a Dog, presented at Boston Conservatory last year (BMInt review here) will have two encore performances for the conference.

On May 6, the night before the start of the conference, Opera Boston, the other co-host of the conference, will open Donizetti’s Maria Padilla, which also can be seen on May 8 and May 10.

Registration for the Opera Conference 2011 is required for admission to this event. More information is available here.

BAN: First, congratulations on the Diapason D’Or — for your Rachmaninoff?

ST: Yes. I was a little bit surprised; I didn’t expect it. But when I heard, while in New York for my Carnegie Hall debut with the Baltimore Orchestra, I flew back to Paris for two days to receive it, then went on with my tour schedule, to Chicago and Estonia.

BAN: And in 2009, when you were 31, you received the Presidential Order of Merit for Macedonia, one of the country’s highest honors.

ST: Yes.

BAN: What part of Macedonia do you come from? Vardar? Pirin? Aegean?

ST: That’s a difficult question. I was born in Skopje, Vardar Macedonia. But still I consider myself ethnically Macedonian. My grandparents came from the Greece part [Aegean], and the Asian part [Pirin].

BAN: So your name is …

ST: Completely unique Macedonian. Lots of people mix it with Polish. but it’s not. I have never met anyone in Poland with the same name.

BAN: The Seattle Times said you are “the best thing to come out of Macedonia since Alexander the Great.” He is probably the ONLY person the interviewer know who came out of Macedonia. But it is a great line… So — how many world-traveling musicians have come out of Macedonia?

ST: “We have a couple of singers. Tenor Blagoj Nacoski [who has sung throughout Europe and Asia but evidently not in the US], and two others who sing primarily in Austria and Germany. And we have pop singers very popular in the Yugoslavia area.

BAN: You have performed with major symphonies in the UK, Germany, Russia, Denmark, Holland, Japan, Seoul, Hong Kong, New Zealand… And in the US, you have performed with the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras, the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, the Pittsburgh, Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, and Baltimore Symphony Orchestras, et cetera. So what took so long for you to perform with the BSO?

ST: [laughter]. This is not a question for me! But — I am so glad I got an invitation now. I will try my best, presenting myself before the very sophisticated Boston audience. I am glad it is the Liszt because one can show both virtuosity and lyricism.

BAN: On that note, The New York Times‘s Anthony Tommasini praises your dazzling musicianship, saying “He tore through the double-octave outbursts with arm-blurring speed and no sense of strain. Yet in tenderly lyrical moments he caressed the phrases, playing with naturalness, never milking anything.” You seem very lyrical, very romantic, a big proponent of Rachmaninoff, and I gather Prokofiev and Scriabin… others? Mostly the romantics?

ST: I would say I am a romantic person. But I have to say I was really taught to find myself in any piece I play, starting from Bach onwards, to try to feel the music, between my soul. There is really a lot of romantic stuff in Bach, and really before Bach. From my teachers I had well-built [instruction]. The Russian influence was natural, but on the other hand they were really open to build my repertory in different directions, my education. For the last several years, now working by myself, I really try to broaden my repertory. It’s very healthy.

BAN: You will be playing the Lizst Piano Concerto No. 2. How often do you perform the Liszt?

ST: Since this is the Liszt year, the invitation for the BSO was a reason to go back to him more seriously.

BAN:  You’ve never done the First?

ST: No. I have always loved him as a composer especially because of his free spirit. I have always loved his concertos, planned to play them at some time… The BSO suggested the first, but I suggested the second, and they agreed…. I have been adding repertory apart from the Russian, — the Brahms horn trio, with Philip Myers and Glenn Dickterow of the NY Philharmonic, and the Hindemith Quartet with Julian Bliss, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, and Sol Gabetta,… I went back to Beethoven and Mozart lately. And Grieg, …

BAN: When I was 14, I thought he was the greatest composer..

ST: [laughter], Very understandable. Lots of people think his concerto is more or less easy, but it is not easy at all, to put together with an orchestra.

BAN: Your handlers suggested to ask you about Macedonian folk songs. There’s a great debate on YouTube on a Macedonian folk song: “it’s really stolen from Albania,” “it’s Turkish,”  “For God sake stop claiming exclusivity on something if you use it. You also use doorknobs, it doesn’t mean it is Turkish….”

ST: [laughter] Two things about it: its unique melody and its rhythm from the language itself. I am happy to come from here, because the folk music is in our blood and helps me a lot in my profession. My grandmother, my father’s mother, knew a lot of songs, folk song and dance. The fact that I had a chance to sing a lot, the way I grew up, all the other difficult rhythms, definitely sophisticated rhythm, that helped my technique. The singing helped in developing a natural feeling, lyrical… I sometimes do an encore that uses Macedonian songs.

BAN: and it is?

ST: In Struga. The name means “town of poetry” — it’s in the southwest of Macedonia,

BAN: Is this the one I heard you do on YouTube, that you played for KDFC in San Francisco?

ST: Yes! It is part of a suite Bsni I Shepoti — “Songs and Whispers” — by Pande Shahov, in honor of Chopin. He has two quotes from Chopin, the other four are transcriptions of folk songs. It received its premier in London at the opening of the International piano season, at Queen Elizabeth Hall, in October of 2009. I have performed it several times in Canada, DC, LA, Seattle, Brazil, Europe, …

BAN: Do you have another piece you like to use as an encore?

ST: Yes! Dance from Skopje, Skopsko Oro, arranged by Damir Imeri.

BAN: Encores are, if not nonexistent at the BSO, exceedingly rare. Programs have to end at a set time. Union rules,…

ST: Ah well, yes. Music is a live thing, though. You cannot frame it, make limits. Sometimes it is hard to shut it off.

D'Anna Fortunato (Susan Wilson photo)

Not only is there to be a concert of poems set to music in honor of the eighty-fifth birthday of Gunther Schuller this coming Tuesday, but also the octogenarian composer, a Boston institution, is to be one of the panelists on a pre-concert discussion moderated by Phoenix classical music critic, Lloyd Schwartz. He will keep order among Gunther and Boston’s other major contributors to the musical scene whose pieces will be heard — John Harbison, Mohammed Fairouz, Andrew List, and John Greer. Gunther is a former president of New England Conservatory, which is sponsoring the event in Jordan Hall on April 5.

The concert  features mezzo-soprano D’Anna Fortunato. The first cycle on the program, music by Mohammed Fairouz to poems by Lloyd Schwartz about his mother, prompted Fortunato to think of having the panel discussion.

“It seemed so appropriate,” she explained, “He is our poet, here in Boston, and so well respected. He would be the person to moderate.” Entitled “Text Setting and Vocal Chamber Music Composition,” the panel will run from 7 pm to 7:40 pm.

The centerpiece of the concert is Schuller’s six songs, Li-Tai-Pe, Chinese poems paraphrased by Klalbund, that our prolific composer wrote when he was nineteen. The concert also includes John Lawrence Greer’s arrangements of three Canadian folk songs; a world premiere from Andrew List, On the Wind, a song cycle in celebration of birds to poetry of  Mary Pinard (who will also be present); John Harbison’s Book of Hours and Seasons, to poetry by Goethe, and another composition by Fairouz, Three Shakespeare Songs.

Greer will be the pianist with Flutist Renée Krimsier, and cellist Rhonda Rider. The noted Boston musicians in the Chamber Ensemble, conducted Yoon Jae Lee, include James Buswell, Violin, James Orleans, Bass, Steven Jackson, Clarinet, Richard Svoboda, Bassoon, Steve Emery, Trumpet, Norman Bolter, Trombone,  and Ann Hobson Pilot, Harp.

An Operabot (Jonathan Williams photo)

Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic of The Boston Phoenix, stands for musical excellence, and most tellingly, the drama of humanity well portrayed in music. So it is that he once wrote of composer Tod Machover, “What might be most exciting about Machover’s  pieces in general is how beautiful and moving they are, what lyrical and exotic melismas keep surfacing (and how scintillatingly they contrast with the shattering electronic textures), how dramatically they build, how they have not a dull moment, and what magnificent opportunities for performers they provide.”

The LA Times, in an obvious pun, called Machover “America’s most wired composer.” True enough: his music, a synthesis of acoustic and electronic sound, not only leaves behind traditional artistic and cultural boundaries but incorporates numerous contemporary musical genres. He has expanded the notion of what constituted music, in the way, perhaps, that Charles Ives did earlier in the twentieth century, providing auditory awareness in a musical vocabulary of what surrounds us.

The Musical Chandelier engages in a sensuous duet with Simon Powers’ wife, Evvy, mezzo-soprano Patricia Risley (Jill Steinberg photo)

(The Ives analogy aside, Machover’s teachers were Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions.)

Having composed pieces for amplified cello and live electronics, Hyperpiano with orchestra and interactive graphics, computer sounds and animated texts, and other electronic wonders, Machover, most noted for his operatic productions, has written a new one, Death and the Powers, which has its American premiere next Friday, March 18, at the Cutler Majestic in Boston. It is a joint project of the MIT Media Lab and American Repertory Theatre, with the Chicago Opera Theater, where it goes in early April. The director is ART’s Diane Paulus and conductor, Gil Rose.

Machover is understandably excited about this project, which he has been working on practically around the clock, this week. Asked to explain how his Hyperinstruments, which he launched in 1986, use “smart” computers to enhance composition, Machover replied, “Since I was a kid in the ‘60s, I was intrigued with how one could perform in real time such previously studio-only masterpieces like Stockhausen’s Kontakte or The Beatles’ Sgt.Pepper’s, so as to combine technological richness and precision with the spontaneity and gestuality of live human expression.

“All of our Hyperinstruments — whether for virtuosi like Yo-Yo Ma and Prince, to the kinds of general public instruments that led to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, or environments we design for children or in a therapeutic context — use technology to capture the intention and feeling of a performance, meet the musician at his or her level (augmenting skills and circumventing limitations), and attempt to translate natural musicality into the richest possible result.”

Simon Powers, James Maddalena about to download himself into The System (John Williams photo)

How he did, or did not, incorporate ideas of his former teachers, Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions. And is there any affinity with Ives and his appropriating the sounds all around us into music?

“I think I already had a fairly developed compositional voice when I first went to Juilliard, so both Sessions and Carter helped me to listen even more closely to my own intuitions and follow my musical passions (both men were brilliant and intuitive, in my view, highly analytical but never didactic) wherever they might lead. I have always had a primal melodic instinct — perhaps from being a cellist — and Sessions was a great model for allowing melodies to develop fully and to keep their integrity and independence. And Carter simply has the most unpredictable and vivacious musical mind I have encountered. Besides learning much about non-tonal but functional harmony and complex but limpid textures, I also was inspired to look at every single musical situation with an unbiased, creative and joyful eye (and ear). Carter never makes a decision by rote or habit, and whenever I find myself doing so I think of him looking over my shoulder.

“As for Ives, I wasn’t much of a fan growing up — as a student I always preferred Schoenberg, that other 1874 baby — but have come to admire Ives enormously as a composer and a man over the years. Perhaps there is no one who I feel closer to, in the way that he felt impelled to explore without a map, to pull all sounds together in a new kind of unity, and to imagine the highest possible impact that music can have on individuals and societies. He is such an inspiration for all these things, and paid a price by pursuing difficult ideas to the most consequent conclusions. Then again, we know increasingly that Ives was a more complex figure than he appeared on the surface…..but then so am I, I suppose.”

Poet Laureate Emeritus Robert Pinsky, noted for his skillful, melodic verse translation of Dante’s Inferno, from La Divina Commedia, is librettist for the opera. Pinsky has written that he was inspired by the flow and tension of jazz and the excitement that it made him feel, an incredible experience that he has tried to reproduce in his poetry.

Pinsky was chosen by Machover, he explained, because, “… when I started thinking about Death and the Powers, I had two simultaneous ideas. One was that I wanted the stage to come alive — physically — to help tell a story, while being shaped and “inhabited” by human presence in much the same way that my Hyperinstruments do for sound. At the same time, I was thinking a lot about mortality and legacy, and how the intricate, essential texture of any human life can be fully shared — let alone passed down through generations — from one person to another. Before having a story for the opera, I had a sense that this piece would have mythic qualities, would need a fluidity of text which would let objects ‘speak’, and that I would need to find a new kind of flexibility —for me — between words and music.

The Miseries surrounding and swirling Miranda,soprano Joélle Harvey (John Williams photo)

“In the past, I have often gone to novels or novelists for my opera texts. Philip K. Dick for VALIS and Tolstoy for Resurrection, for example. But felt that I needed to work with the poet for this project, to explore the qualities mentioned above. I had been an admirer of Robert Pinsky’s work for years, greatly appreciating the combination of intelligence, precision, lyricism, directness and musicality of his work. I called him out of the blue, we had coffee together in Cambridge, and he agreed to work with me on what turned out to be Powers. It was definitely a leap of faith on his part!”

Once again, the legacy of the musical talent of Emmanuel Music rises to the fore of some of the most provocative, musically rewarding, performances heard throughout the world in the last twenty years. Emmanuel alumnus James Maddalena, who has starred as Nixon in John Adams’s Nixon in China since its debut in Houston in 1987 and most recently at the Met, has a prominent role, along with Emmanuel Music’s still-present light, tenor Frank Kelley.

BMInt’s publisher Lee Eiseman heard Machover on WBUR earlier this week opine that every opera production looks old-fashioned, that opera needs to be more like movies, TV, computers, … so Machover was asked if he really thinks that conventional opera is dead.

“I actually think that opera is one of the most dynamic, exciting and promising artistic forms at present. It brings together story, character, words, visuals, objects, and public communion, all with music at the center. In a city like London, opera is flourishing in unexpected ways and places, such as with the world’s first 3D opera transmissions, Anna Nicole Smith (or someone playing her) at Covent Garden, and the brilliant Punchdrunk staging a new ENO production in a giant warehouse where no member of the audience experiences the same spectacle.

“On the other hand, many huge institutions have been built up to preserve operatic forms and conventions of the past, and these structures are often difficult to move or modify. I think that by going back to the roots of what opera was always meant to be — passionately human stories, expressed through amazing music, presented via the most effective techniques and technologies available — we will find that the best and most exciting work is yet to come.”

As if the Boston Symphony Orchestra does not have enough problems with the withdrawal of Music Director James Levine, the orchestra now has had to replace an ailing Colin Davis, also canceling due to ongoing health problems, in concerts originally scheduled for April. The first program, scheduled for April 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12, has a new conductor, Johannes Debus, but the program remains the same: Mozart Symphony No. 32, Mozart Clarinet Concerto with soloist BSO Principal Clarinet William R. Hudgins, and Haydn Symphony No. 97.

The second, to be conducted by Stéphane Denève on April 14, 15, and 16, has been changed to Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”;  Roussel Symphony No. 3; and Ravel La Valse. Soloist in the Beethoven is Jonathan Biss. The pre-concert talk will be given by Jan Swafford, on the composition faculty of Boston Conservatory.

BSO Managing Director Mark Volpe announced today that James Levine will step down as music director as of September 1, 2011. Unclear from the press release is what role Maestro Levine will play in the Tanglewood summer season, though the release does mention ongoing discussions of what role he will play. Assistant Conductor Marcelo Lehninger is to lead the BSO concerts in the upcoming set of concerts.

Appointed one of the two assistant conductors by BSO Music Director James Levine, Lehninger has earned a reputation as “gifted conductor” following his highly praised debut in 2007 as cover conductor for the National Symphony Orchestra’s subscription concerts at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. He made his debut with the BSO in a concert last October reviewed here by Peter Van Zandt Lane, who wrote, “Across the entire program, audience response was overwhelmingly positive, and Lehninger’s conducting was assured and unfaltering.”

Most of Lehninger’s major conducting venues prior to arriving in Boston were in South America; in the US he has conducted, in addition to the National Symphony, several smaller orchestras.

Lehninger is the second Brazilian to have been appointed to this BSO position. The first was his professor, Eleazar de Carvalho, who shared the position with Leonard Bernstein, under then-BSO conductor Serge Koussevitsky. BMInt reviewed his October 21st debut with the BSO here.

The Birwistle new work for violin and orchestra features Christian Tetzlaff, who will also play in the other two works on the program: the Bartok Violin Concerto No. 2 and the Mozart Rondo in C for Violin and Orchestra, K. 373. Robert Kirsinger, Assistant Director of Program Publications, Editorial, will be giving the pre-concert talks at all performances: Thursday evening, Friday afternoon, Saturday evening, and Tuesday evening.

Yesterday’s New York Times (Feb. 26) had a review (by Zachary Woolfe) of the Met’s current Lucia di Lammermoor that treated this issue: “… the Met’s recent productions can seem directed at the camera rather than the audience in the theater.” And yesterday’s performance of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride had an especially egregious example. In the final act, when Iphigénie is musing, the camera was so “in her face” that her face filled almost the entire screen. Not that Susan Graham is not highly attractive, but it was a travesty. And it jarred me out of the mood of the opera by evoking the image of those kissy, close-up scenes that closed movies of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

And, yes, even chorus singers are forced to grimace, fidget, show emotion in their eyes in every second onstage.  A corollary problem relating to the chorus is that one cannot do one’s own browsing. I have a friend who sings in it, and I rather enjoy trying to find her. But just when the roving camera gets close to a suspect, it maddeningly veers away. As a member of a live audience in the concert hall, I can at least resort to opera glasses.

Not that the video direction should keep to the premise of solely duplicating the opera-goer’s experience; the HD version is actually superior, visually. But we HD viewers do not need a lot of close ups that decide what is important for us to see. The images are sharp enough that for the most part, the proscenium arch should be about as close as we have to get, with occasional closer views at key moments for individual characters.

A third problem has more to do with what opera is being produced. When there is no overture before the opening curtain, we never get to see those superb Met players. Wouldn’t it be possible, from time to time and for a moment, to zero in on, say, an oboe or flute solo? This is not a contradiction of the above suggestion; at the times when staging is preoccupied with being “busy” might be just such an occasion. In halls where players are somewhat visible, it is fun to zero in on soloists.

One experiment on the possibilities of telecasting versus live performance was quickly dropped — the disastrous use of split-screen effects in the early HD production of Tristan in 2008, in which there were upwards of 12 screens or so, if memory serves. I hear tell that audience response was heavily negative. I do hope audiences also ask the Met to respect the essential spirit of opera as a staged production.

Woolfe’s review of Lucia hinted that the paying live theater audience may be taking a back seat to the HD ones. It is not clear how this plays out; the live audience would be none the wiser, it seems, to the flick of an eye or grimace. Most in the audience can hardly make out the details of a face, never mind expressions. But the Met is well advised not to have Woolfe’s “rather than” be construed as such.

The backstage mechanics are fun to watch. And one HD moment I hope is never dropped: “Maestro to the pit. Maestro to the pit, please!”

The message to the Met is strictly on the camera work during the performance. Not that there should be no zoom-ins or close ups; those are among the delights of this HD technology. But please, Met, do not overdo it.

Active in Dresden from about 1710 to 1730, Zelenka fell into obscurity, according to Cameron Kirkpatrick, one of the two oboists with the group, because he composed very little secular music, so that when the revival of interest in baroque music was underway thanks to Mendelssohn et al, “Zelenka was left behind. There was nothing for an amateur performer to buy and take home to work on.”  Kirkpatrick’s compatriots in this effort include fellow oboist Ben Fox, bassoonist Sebastian Chaves, and harpsichordist Akiko Sato. Fox and Kirkpatrick studied with John Ferillo, principal oboe of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Chaves, a native of Costa Rica, also received a master’s degree from NEC. Akiko Sato came from Japan to study at McGill University before coming to Boston.

The Project intends to tackle Zelenka’s only secular works, all six Trio Sonatas, in a series of concerts with music of his contemporaries, for context.  So the first concert includes works of Georg Philipp Telemann and Zelenka’s pupil, Johann Joachim Quantz. Telemann’s Bassoon Sonata in F Major will feature bassoonist Chaves. The Quantz G Major Trio Sonata, written originally for two flutes, will be performed for two oboes and basso continuo. All four will also be playing the Zelenka.  One other concert is already booked and the group is working on additional outings. They are also planning to add other musicians. Watch the BMInt “Coming Event” space for more information.

The repertory at these concerts tends to be more cautious than the other three concerts of a regular Boston Baroque season (a fourth, Handel’s Messiah, being the one constant), and this was no exception. But Pearlman decided on a somewhat last-minute felicitous change to the program (printed on an insert, as the book for both this concert and the traditional early December performances of the Messiah at Jordan Hall had already been printed). Bass-baritone Kevin Deas, whose performance in the famous oratorio stunned everyone, was invited to sing a few selections and he certainly added a new dimension to the regular fare—also giving the Boston Baroque’s fine instrumentalists a chance to show different interpretive styles: vibrato and smooth bowing in works of a later era.

The Arcangelo Corelli Concerto Grosso in g minor (“Christmas Concerto”) began the program, followed by the J.S. Bach Concerto for Oboe, Violin and Orchestra, BWV 1060, reconstructed from the suite for two harpsichords, with fine performances from Marc Schachman and concertmaster Christina Day Martinson.

Pearlman eliminated the scheduled Purcell Suite for Strings to make time for Deas’s contributions: the amusing Handel ode “O Ruddier than the Cherry” from Acis and Galatea; a spiritual, Didn’t my lord Deliver Daniel, with the orchestra basically providing the bass line; and — ending the first half of the program on a profoundly moving note — Ole Man River. The gratitude of the audience was palpable.

Actually, because Baroque instruments are a half step lower than modern instruments, Deas said after the concert that Pearlman told him that Ol’ Man River would end up in the key of B, rather than C. Deas responded that it was “fine, as long as it didn’t go higher.” He added that being asked by Pearlman, “What would you like to sing?’ was a dream call from a conductor.

Francesco Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso No. 12 in d minor, a set of variations — twenty-four of them — on La follia, by Corelli, had far too little variation for these ears. Pearlman’s conducting skills stressed differences, minor as they seemed, by bringing out a secondary line, which helped. And one in particular (third from last?) had some refreshing harmonics. Though Handel’s Water Music is a warhorse, Pearlman nevertheless excelled in delivering a wonderful variety of instrumental colors.

There’s not a musician in this band that was not outstanding, shown to such good effect when they are highlighted in smaller groupings. Marc Schachman’s solo oboe in Water Music was commendable — though the superb oboe playing of Gonzalo Ruiz should be singled out. One of the most ravishing moments of the evening was a section of the minuet in Water Music when Pearlman softened the first violins and cellos to focus on the sonority of the violas, second violins, and bassoon in unison. It was ethereal.

Bettina A. Norton is a retired museum professional who has published widely in her field, American historical prints, and in later years, was editor and publisher of The Beacon Hill Chronicle before being persuaded to edit this journal.

Ever interested in ways to encourage more attendance at its concerts, and in an atmosphere that encourages post-performance discussion, the Boston Symphony Orchestra in mid-January is inaugurating a new three-concert subscription series, “Underscore Fridays.” Starting at 7 pm, each concert will include comments of that evening’s pieces by the guest conductor and will be followed by a complimentary food-and-drink reception in Higginson Hall. Two of the concerts will be shorter, intermission-free versions of the already scheduled concerts of that particular Thursday-Tuesday schedule, although the third will be the regular full-length concert, with intermission. The dates for “Underscore Fridays” are January 14,  February 11, and March 25.

The initial concert, on January 14, to be conducted by Sir Mark Elder, will feature Frederick Delius’s Paris: A Nocturne (The Song of a Great City), Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, and the Mozart Piano Concert No. 21, with guest artist Lars Vogt.

Lars Vogt (Anthony Parmalee photo)

As music director of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, England, Elder is generally credited with raising its musical standards. He has held positions as Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Mozart Players and has worked with many of the world’s leading symphony orchestras. He is also known for his refreshing comments. In an interview with Sandra Deeble of the Guardian, published albeit a while ago (Oct. 2, 2004),  Elder said, “I do get excited before a performance. I look forward to seeing what everybody’s combined concentration will produce. At the end of a performance which has gone better that I ever could have imagined I can get a feeling where it seems as if I have expended almost no energy. There’s been this combustion and it’s as if my feet haven’t touched the ground. … It’s as if there’s some force with us that is bigger than all of us, that is lifting us up.”

Vogt, born in Germany in 1970, won second prize at the 1990 Leeds International Piano Competition and has since gone on to give major concerto and recital performances throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. He enjoys regular partnerships with colleagues such as Christian Tetzlaff, Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, and bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff. Vogt also collaborates occasionally with actor Klaus-Maria Brandauer and comedian Konrad Beikircher. His previous performances with the BSO at Tanglewood included the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 on Aug. 6, 2006, and, during the regular season, the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3, on Oct. 18-20, 2007.

Mark Elder (Sheila Rock photo)

For the February 11 concert, Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki will share her observations on that evening’s program of Haydn, Sibelius, and Unsuk Chin’s Cello Concerto, in its American premiere with Alban Gerhardt as soloist. Mälkki conducted the BSO at Tanglewood this past summer in a program of Mendelssohn and Beethoven.

On March 25, conductor, composer, and pianist Thomas Adès will make his highly anticipated BSO debut in a program of music inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, including works by Tchaikovsky and Sibelius as well as music from Mr. Adès’ own opera of the same name.  The Thomas Adès program will be a full-length BSO concert, approximately two hours, including intermission.

For more information visit the BSO’s website , or call the Access Services Administrator at 617-638-9431 or TDD/TTY 617-638-9289.

Spano’s connections with the Boston music scene and NESO’s Music Director Federico Cortese are many. The two met at Tanglewood in 1995, when Spano was a young faculty member and Cortese, a Tanglewood Fellow. (Spano served as head of the Conducting Fellowship Program at the Tanglewood Music Center from 1998-2002, then as Director of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music in 2003 and 2004.) Both were assistant conductors under BSO’s Music Director Emeritus, Seiji Ozawa. When Spano was appointed Music Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1996, Cortese served as his assistant until 1998.

Both also are noted for innovative programming, which the upcoming NESO concert demonstrates. Commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Bermel’s Soul Garden is inspired by African-American music — jazz, blues, Rhythm and Blues, and hip-hop. Bermel notes that the solo viola resembles “a burnished alto gospel singer” and the cello “a rumbling church baritone.”

“Yes, these have a very strong flavor,” Cortese notes. “The rhythmic complexity has less to do with Stravinsky-like strict angularity than with African-American improvisation and freedom. The meter changes with about every bar. But it has a classical structure in many ways; it shows a rigorous evolution of thematic material.”

Speaking of Idyla for Strings by Janacek, Cortese joked, “His teachers liked him more than he liked them, it seems. He was not an easy guy.  Idyla is one of two pieces in a row he wrote for string orchestra, when he was 23 or 24. It was very heavily influenced by Dvorak, who was present at its first performance. But there’s also the influence of popular Moravian music.” Conservative in his early years, however, Janacek composed it as a suite in the Baroque construction.

The same penchant for innovative programming is shown by Spano. He brought international attention to the Brooklyn Philharmonic with Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, John Adams’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, world premieres by Michael Hersch, Bright Sheng, Phillip Glass, and Christopher Theofanidis, and other New York premieres. Now in his ninth season as Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Spano has enriched and expanded its repertoire to new levels of international prominence and acclaim. He also conducts in the major concert halls in North America, Europe, and Japan.

The two men are delighted to be performing together, again. And it gives Boston-area audiences an opportunity to hear Spano at the keyboard. The first performance of this concert will be on December 4 at the First Parish Congregational Church in Wakefield.

Bettina A. Norton, editor of Boston Musical Intelligencer, is on the board of New England String Orchestra.

Peter Zazofsky and BU Symphony conductor David Hoose (Michael Lutch photo)

A concert to honor one of Boston’s most prominent and long-standing violin teachers should concentrate on the violin, and so it did, at Symphony Hall this evening (Nov. 21) for Roman Totenberg as he approaches his 100th birthday (Jan. 1). A near-capacity crowd was treated to a true virtuosic performance without a score of the Bartok Violin concerto by Peter Zazofsky, with the Boston University Orchestra. Zazofsky, professor of violin and chamber music at Boston University and leader of the prominent Muir Quartet, played this in 1977 at the Wieniaski Competiton in Poznan, Poland. Totenberg, who was on the panel of judges, encouraged the young Zazofsky to tour with it. So began a long friendship culminating in collaboration at Boston University.

The joy shone in Zazofsky’s face when he entered, as he looked up and around at that famous hall, where exactly thirty years earlier (Nov. 20, 21, 22, 1980), he soloed with the BSO under Seiji Ozawa in the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 in d minor.  And in the few times during this performance when he had brief respites from playing, he turned and smiled gently at the young players in the orchestra, some of whom I assume are, or were, his students. In one especially moving moment as he finished a passage in the andante tranquillo, Zazofsky slowly swept his bow downward and pivoted towards the players, almost like a sword salute.

With beautiful tone and perfect intonation throughout, his playing was ravishing, sonorous, especially in the melancholy melody with winds in the middle of the first movement and towards the end of the movement, when the violin soloed with the trombones in their Hollywood-sounding melody.

The andante tranquillo, the high point of this concerto for me, starts with a major triad followed by a soft and languid passage with the solo violin and muted winds. Zazofsky’s frenetic trills, piano, were haunting, then exploded abruptly in a sudden forte allegretto, then back to the tremolo, piano, then back to the haunting elegiac passage with the winds.

What a treat it would be to have Zazofsky play this with a mature, professional orchestra of the caliber of the BSO that could deliver the tension and electricity of the score.

What a credit his performance was to Roman Totenberg, that wonderful centenarian, on hand for all the kudos. So were his three daughters, Amy, Jill, and Nina, along with Cokie Roberts, who acted as Mistress of Ceremonies. The video by Susan Dangel, an account of Totenberg’s rich life, was beautifully done, without the frenetic moments in the ones she did for the BSO’s Kennedy testimonial and Rockport Music’s opening last spring.

The concert ground slowly to a close with the 50-minute Elgar Symphony No. 1—  “pomp and circumstance,” bombast, occasional Prokofiev-like militaristic satire, and final screams. Concertmaster Heather Braun had a very nice solo interlude, all too fleeting.

Note: While I was in attendance at the concert, BMInt Publisher Lee Eiseman was at home watching online. He had this to say:

I had very high expectations for what BU billed as the first streaming video of a concert in Symphony Hall. BMInt even added a banner promoting this ‘first.’ BU further raised expectations by referring to ‘high quality sound and video.’ The result was far below my expectations. The image quality was nothing short of atrocious for the 179 viewers.

In this era when one can see a high def movie streaming live from Netflix (in my case on a 10-ft screen) without a glitch or artifact, there was no excuse for what I observed. The video was shot at a low frame rate which made movement very jerky. Peter Zazofsky’s Mick Jagger-esque prancing appeared in jumps of ten feet or more. Whenever either the camera or subject moved, the image was degraded into out-of-focus macro-blocks. At first the sound quality was no better. Indeed, there was a pronounced echo as though the audio was coming from two separate streams, one delayed by a second.

Then the stream went down altogether for 10 minutes. When it resumed, the sound improved — to OK — but the image was still well below par.

Bettina A. Norton is a retired museum professional who has published widely in her field, American historical prints, and in later years, was editor and publisher of The Beacon Hill Chronicle before being persuaded to edit this journal.

Equally fitting is the fact that the Boston University Symphony Orchestra will perform at the tribute on Sunday, November 21, at 7:30. Totenberg taught violin at Boston University’s Music Department for close to fifty years, mentoring such future musicians as Peter Zazofsky, leader of BU’s esteemed Muir Quartet. Zazofsky will be soloist in the Bartók Violin Concerto No. 2. Also on the program are Beethoven’s Prometheus Overture and Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 in A-flat.

“Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto is Bartók at his most elevated and impassioned, compositionally virtuosic for the performers as well, especially the violinist, whose musical and technical sophistication is challenged to the limit,” said David Hoose, conductor of the BU Orchestra. “Elgar’s Symphony in A-flat, the first of the two great symphonies he composed, came at a great crossroad, 1907, after nearly 300 years of England waiting for its own musical voice to reemerge, and just as the British empire and the world were about to be turned upside down. The day’s optimism and anxiety drive this amazingly beautiful, powerful symphony, music that can speak to us today as powerfully as it did 100 years ago. “These two grand compositions (along with Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus) from three cultures and three musical eras, have the nobility, wit and grandeur to make them appropriate musical statements for this moment … they suggest a few of the personal qualities that make our evening’s honoree such an endearing presence in our musical and educational community—mischievously twinkling, irrepressibly generous, and brilliantly noble.”

“I am a little self-conscious about it,” Totenberg told the Intelligencer. But he is delighted at those who are planning to come, including one of his former violin students in Krakow, composer and violinist Marcin Marckowicz, now with the Krakow Symphony and Krakow String Quartet.

Born in Poland in 1911, Totenberg was a child prodigy, appearing as soloist with the Warsaw Philharmonic when he was eleven. He spent his early years in Russia, Poland, and France, emigrating to New York City just before the start of World War II.  “Musical life there was very active there,” he said. Most memorable were chamber concerts with the New Friends of Music. He toured South America with Arthur Rubinstein and gave joint recitals with Szymanowski. Acclaimed for interpretations of both classical and contemporary music, he has introduced audiences to the Darius Milhaud Violin Concerto No. 2, the William Schuman Violin Concerto, and the Penderecki Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra. Totenberg also premiered the Hindemith Violin Sonata in E, the Barber Violin Concerto (new version), and a Martinu Sonata, as well as giving the American premiere of the Honegger Sonata for Solo Violin.

Among his awards are the Wieniawski and Ysaÿe Medals of Poland and Belgium, the Mendelssohn Prize (Berlin Academy), BU’s prestigious Metcalf Cup and Prize in 1996; and in 1981 he was named Artist Teacher of the Year by the American String Teachers Association.

Robert K. Dodson, recently named Director of the BU School of Music, recounted that soon after he arrived, a young man stopped by his office. He had been a student at Lawrence University when Dean Dodson was there.“He was so excited,” Dodson recalled, “because he had just had a lesson with Mr. Totenberg.” And Totenberg was ninety-eight.

A video of Totenberg’s life, which will be shown at the celebration, has been produced by Susan Dangel, who produced the BSO tribute to the Kennedy brothers last spring and one for the opening of the new Rockport Music Center. “Susan did a remarkable job of telling the story of Roman’s 100 years in about twelve minutes,” said Scott Schillin, Coordinating Producer of the event. Totenberg will be joined at the celebratory concert by family—including daughters Nina, Jill, and Amy Totenberg, friends, and former students, many of whom are today’s leading concert artists.

But opera-goers still love Puccini’s colorful opera, even if it does, as Anthony Tommasini recounts in his book of opera recording recommendations Essential Library of Opera, contain “. . .  a manipulative melodrama, with religious pageantry, sadism, torture, an attempted rape, a murder, an execution, and two suicides in just over one hundred minutes of music.”

Boston Lyric Opera will be presenting its version of Tosca in six performances beginning on November 5, at the Shubert Theater. Tosca is Jill Gardner, seen in previous BLO performances in 2007 as Mimi in La bohème. Cavaradossi is Diego Torre and Scarpia is Bradley Garvin, both making their BLO debuts.

The painter Mario Cavaradossi (tenor Diego Torre) with his painting of Mary Magdalene (Jeffrey Dunn photo)

In charge of it all is Esther Nelson, general and artistic director, now at the beginning of her third season. Before a hiatus of sorts as a management consultant in New York, she had a long career in management of opera companies in Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, and New Orleans, before taking on that position at Glimmerglass, the annual summer opera festival in Cooperstown, NY, where she arrived in 1996. During her six seasons there, the company expanded its artistic growth, dramatically increased ticket revenue, fundraising, special events and education outreach, and nearly doubled its annual budget. Along with the popular operas of Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini, Nelson oversaw a catholic selection of operas by composers such as Carlyle Floyd, Virgil Thomson, Benjamin Britten, and Mark Adamo.

Asked if she carried on that philosophy after she arrived here, with an opera company that had been losing audience reportedly because of its less imaginative repertory, she was quick to respond. “We felt very strongly, the board and I, that we wanted to do more diverse repertory — and also to have in place a good staff experienced in the field of opera. We were able to expand the season, in spite of the economic downturn just when I came. My timing was definitely off, though!”

Nelson has drawn on artists with whom she worked at Glimmerglass. Those on the staff at BLO include Artistic Advisor John Conklin and Director of Artistic Operations Nicholas G. Russell. So is Director of Production Dan Duro, although he started at BLO a month before Nelson arrived. David Angus is one also, but his connection with Glimmerglass is a coincidence, Nelson explained. “He was appointed there after my time,” adding, “but of the pool of applicants for the position, he stood out, so we are fortunate that he accepted.”

In the 1998 summer season, while Nelson was there, Glimmerglass put on a Tosca. Will this one draw on that?

Floria Tosca, Jill Gardner and her nemisis Baron Scarpia, Bradley Garvin (Jeffrey Dunn photo)

“Not at all. The production from Scottish Opera was shipped over here. They updated the concept to the Mussolini era, but we are altering it slightly — putting a Boston stamp on it. We have improved elements of scenic design and costumes, when necessary. It is still set recognizably in Chiesa Sant’Adrea delle Valle, Palazzo Farnese, and Castel Sant’Angelo. Our stage is much different, so we altered it to fit.”

This production’s Tosca, Jill Gardner, also had a Glimmerglass presence. Two of her major roles to her repertoire came through cover assignments: the tour-de-force role of Elle in Poulenc’s La Voix humaine and the title role of Jenufa. She also sang Euridice in Orpheus in the Underworld. Her biggest role, she feels, was in the world premiere of Stephen Hartke’s The Greater Good.

“The biggest role was Madame Louiseau,” she said “and then the new production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld.” This is her third Tosca. First was a concert performance in Binghamton NY, the second a stage production with the Rochester Opera, now this one in Boston. “The bread-and-butter of my career has been Puccini. I have sung Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Liu in Turandot, and both Mimi and Musetta in La bohème, … As well, I look forward to doing my first Manon Lescaut later this season. The main thing I want to do next  is Fanciulla del West and Trittico; that would complete my Puccini repertoire. … I love Puccini heroines. So much vocal writing is not just about the voice — it is beautiful in its vocal lyricism — but it is perfectly aligned with the dramatic intentions.”

Don’t look for a candle to end the famous second act.

“It was preset that the opera is taking place in the Fascist 1940s, so rather than being traditional time, Republicans versus the State, we are now dealing with the Fascist government and the rebels leaning toward French Resistance,” Gardner said. The audience will see “how we transpose certain key elements as the Fascist empire is being taken down. Several slight twists in how it happens. At the end of the third act as well, Tosca makes a very interesting choice in how I die. The costumes freely allow me to be a freedom fighter, a member of the Resistance.”  (“The libretto doesn’t tell the director how to stage it. Frequently, what people don’t realize is that the instructions for staging did not come from composer or librettist, but the first stage production….,” Nelson explained earlier.)

How about “Mario! Mario!” at the end?

“At that point what’s so wonderful is it truly comes out of the dramatic situation,” Gardner said.

Nelson had auditioned “quite a number of potential Toscas” before hiring Gardner. “A singer’s instrument is in their body, so it changes. So you want to keep hearing them. And Gardner is so right now for this role. She’s right there, we realized, as soon as she auditioned. You don’t only want someone you can sing but can act the role. She is one of the performers who pulls you in.”

Incipient execution(Jeffrey Dunn photo)

The Cavaradossi, Diego Torre, who’s from Mexico, was relatively new and unknown in the US when BLO auditioned him. “He has taken off since we hired him, Nelson said. “Locking them in before they have made an international reputation is a nice feeling, when you can find that young person on the cusp of taking off. It’s also nice for our audience to see people later whom they have seen in their hometown.”

The Metropolitan Opera later tapped Torre to play the Messenger in Aida and Federico in Stiffelio in the 2009-2010 season. Future engagements include Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor for Savonlinna; covering for Plácido Domingo in the title role of Il Postino at Los Angeles Opera;  and Don José in Carmen (in concert) at the Santo Domingo Music Festival in 2011.

“I LOVE Mario!” Gardner burst out about Torre.

Baron Scarpia, Bradley Garvin, also making his BLO debut, is known for his commanding stage presence and his powerful, full voice. He has sung the title role in Der fliegende Holländer with the Madison Opera, Jochanaan in Salome at the Toledo Opera, Monterone in Rigoletto at the Houston Grand Opera, the King of Egypt in Aida at the Bregenz Festival, and the Prince Arjuna in Philip Glass’s Satyagraha at the Metropolitan Opera. He also has performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Bach’s St Matthew Passion and with the National Chorale in Bach’s B minor Mass, the Philharmonia Virtuosi in Haydn’s Creation, the Bach Consort of Washington in the St John Passion and the Columbus Symphony Orchestra in Honegger’s Cantate de Noel. According to Nelson, he recently published a book on Tosca.

She is happy with the cast. “The balance is very important to us,” she told the Intelligencer.