Performed by the excellent singers and instrumentalists from the NEC student body, the production will be updated to Lima, Peru in the “hot, hot 1950s” by stage director Joshua Major. Currently also on the faculty of the University of Michigan, Major is known for an impressive repertoire of productions throughout the United States and Canada for over 25 years.

The costumes, which appear redolent of Carmen Miranda and her top-heavy “tutti-frutti hat,” are the work of designer Katherine Stebbins.  Stebbins received her MFA in Costume Design from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. From 2009-2011, she designed costumes for shows in Chicago including It’s A Wonderful Life at American Theater Company and Collaboraction’s Sketchbook X: Exponential. Her most recent works include a Macbeth at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. She has agreed to share some of her sketches for BMInt readers.

The conductor will be Joel Revzen, the Principal Conductor of Arizona Opera, where he has led over 100 performances featuring such renowned artists as Stephanie Blythe, Dolora Zajick, Christine Brewer, Greer Grimsley, Nancy Gustafson, and Gordon Hawkins. Revzen will also take over as Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Lake Tahoe Summerfest, which will have its inaugural season this summer.

Performances take place on Feb. 11, 13, and 14 at 8 pm and on Feb. 12 at 3 pm at the Cutler Majestic. Tickets are $20, $16 for students/seniors. To order, call 617-824-8000 or online at tickets@aestaged.org

In anticipation of the 100^th birthday of Cage, several of Boston’s musical institutions are programming musical tributes, leading one to wonder whether a reevaluation of Cage’s position in the avant garde canon is underway. Will a composer best known for what he did not compose, and who in later years instructed performers how to resort to chance in performances, continue to hold even a tenuous place when his work ceases to shock? Listeners should be able to decide for themselves after Boston’s mini festival of Cage concludes in three weeks.

The festivities for “Cage.88@100” begin on February 6^th at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall. NEC’s piano department chair Bruce Brubaker and project director Stephen Drury will bring together piano students from the entire spectrum of NEC’s teaching studios for this concert. Drury’s interactions with Cage included the 1991 NEC visit (the year before he died), when the solo part of Cage’s 101 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was premiered, as well as commissioning  a new work from the composer.  Drury has coached students for this upcoming concert and has prepared the piano to be used in the performance of Sonatas and Interludes. The program is weighted towards the period of Cage’s most intensive concentration on writing for piano — in the 1940s and early 1950s — along with two works from much later in his output. A useful link is here.

Installment two will be a presentation of Longy College of Music and Unique Voices. Brooklyn-based So Percussion brings their experimental style to Boston with a program of John Cage and original works on February 9th at 8:00.

NEC will present two additional concerts on February 22^nd and 27^th. The latter will include the world’s first performance in its entirety of Cage’s Music for Piano from 1952, in which “Cage began a series of giant steps to remove traces of intention or ‘authorship’ from his works for piano. The random imperfections that occur in paper due to its organic source as fiber pulp became notation. Anywhere Cage could see an imperfection, he drew a note onto the score paper, [letting it] fall where it may. All other performance decisions are left to the performer: duration and intervals between notes, how the note is struck by the performer, etc.”

On February 7^th that force-of-nature pianist Janice Weber performs a concert of demanding works of the standard repertoire, including: Liszt’s Two St. Francis Legends and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2; Debussy’s Estampes; Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and Rachmaninoff’s Corelli Variations, but Weber will also give a nod in Cage’s direction by including the composer’s The Seasons (1947) in her Piano Masters Series recital at Boston Conservatory’s Seully Hall. The piece was originally composed as a score for a ballet by Merce Cunningham before Cage arranged it both for solo piano and for orchestra.

A Cage tribute by Callithumpian Consort, programmed by its director, pianist Stephen Drury, will include Cage’s Apartment House 1776, Earle Brown’s Available Forms I, and John Zorn’s For Your Eyes Only. This event, on March 1^st will be in the new Calderwood Auditorium at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.  (Callithumpian will return to the Gardner in the fall for two concluding programs including music by Cage, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, and others.)

Detailed information on the concerts mentioned here can be found in BMInt’s “Coming Events.”

This will be a concert performance with Harvard University Choir, an orchestra of 28 members from Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and soloists, Tony Arnold, soprano; Charles Blandy, tenor; Matthew Anderson, tenor; Sumner Thompson, baritone; and Paul Guttry, bass under the direction of Edward Elwyn Jones. According to the composer, “The players will be stationed between Mem. Church’s rood screen and the front pews (on the left, I believe); the solo singers will be similarly placed on the right. Ed and I have talked about movement in two places: (1) the scene in which two sets of thugs proceed through the audience with rope and knife on their way to castrate Abelard and (2) the movement of the choir from the risers to behind the rood screen — to the tolling of a tubular bell — which leads into the last scene in which the choir sings the Credo in the distance while Peter the Venerable, stage right, sings, and Heloise, stage left, reads, his beautiful letter informing her of Abelard’s death. I wouldn’t be surprised, given the solo roster, if some minimal movement between them emerged from rehearsals. (One of the best Wozzeks I ever experienced was at the Chicago Symphony, with very restricted but hugely effective movement.) No props or costumes are planned, but I suppose minor additions might develop in rehearsal (which reminds me, I must bring my astrolabe).”

John Austin met conductor Ed Jones during the Memorial Service for the composer’s Harvard class of 1956’s 50th reunion in June of 2006. A performance there of Austin’s duo on Li Po’s At Yellow Crane Tower Seeing Off Meng Hau-Jan to Yang-Chou, with Ed Jones’s wife, soprano Amanda Forsythe, and the BSO cellist Martha Babcock, apparently impressed Jones enough to suggest a subsequent collaboration. By coincidence Austin and his wife, librettist Christine Froula had been talking for years about doing an opera on Heloise and Abelard. According to Austin, “Ed’s spectacular Memorial Church performance of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast in late winter of 2007 supplied the motivation to actually start writing and left me no doubt that we would be fortunate indeed to entrust it to Ed.”

Now in his early thirties, conductor Edward Elwyn Jones, Gund University Organist and Choirmaster at The Memorial Church, Harvard University is excited about the project. Ed had also been Gil Rose’s chorus master and assistant conductor at the late and lamented Opera Boston. It was through that connection that the members of BMOP were engaged for this project and also the reason why BMOP agreed to lend its imprimatur.

Asked to describe the musical language of Heloise and Abelard, Jones answered,

The music is quite contrapuntal, both rhythmically and melodically, and is often built out of a few key cells that are layered on top of each other to create a dense structure in climactic moments. The orchestration has a chamber quality to it – utilizing combinations of sounds from the various instruments, and reserving the full group for a few powerful outbursts.

Much of the music is very lyrical, with soaring melodies for both Heloise and Abelard, and some beautiful ensemble writing. The music for the villains (for example Abbot Suger) is, as one might expect, rather more angular.

The story depicts one of the most interesting and controversial periods in church history. Though this will be a concert performance, the work is very dramatic and would indeed work very well on the stage. In the most powerful moment, the castration of Abelard, two groups of thugs intone recurring motifs against the beat of a drum; it builds in rhythmic and dynamic intensity until it is abruptly cut off…

Unlike Monteverdi’s earlier Vespro della Beata Vergine of 1610, the 1640 version is incomplete, Metcalfe explained, so he “fashioned a Marian Vespers, based on the 1610 model, featuring psalms and motets from later Monteverdi sacred works, using the 1610 setting of the hymn, Ave maris stella, along with music by the great Venetian, Giovanni Gabrieli and the Milanese composer-nun, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani.” 

Jolle Greenleaf, Molly Quinn, and Virginia Warnken in Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 at St Mary the Virgin, New York City, in January 2011 (Joanne Bouknight photo)

“The specific contents are entirely my own choosing, but the manner in which I put the elements together is exactly the way a 17th-century Italian chapel-master would have assembled the music for a festive Vespers. The service, whose main ingredients are five psalms, a hymn, and the canticle Magnificat, became, at large institutions in early 17-century Italy, a sort of sacred concert. We have various contemporary accounts of these concerts/services, some of which I quote in the notes. Monteverdi’s collections of 1640/41 (Selva morale) and 1650 (the posthumous Messa…et salmi) are largely anthologies of Vespers music from which a chapel-master might choose.”

Metcalfe added that although the Vespers, which begins at 7:30 pm, is not a religious service “per se,” he expects it to be a deeply spiritual occasion. Co-director Jolle Greenleaf chose St. Paul’s Church as a performance space because she finds it “a beautiful sacred space perfectly appropriate to the baroque esthetic of the music — flamboyant, varied, sumptuous, and colorful.”

Metcalfe further explained that there will be a great variety of moods and textures, with forces ranging from a solo tenor accompanied by organ and theorbos (singing an intensely emotional text from the Song of Songs), through ensembles of solo voices, instrumental canzonas by Gabrieli, and voices plus instruments, all the way up to the concluding Magnificat by Gabrieli,  in 14 parts plus basso continuo, mixing voices and instruments. Some of the music is playful and madrigal-like; some rich and sonorous; some virtuosic in the sense people usually mean (i.e. lots of notes), and some virtuosic in that it requires virtuosity of expression. There will be moments of profound stillness and others of dance and rejoicing. There will even be plainchant. This is what the baroque aesthetic means: variety of all kinds.

Members of the Green Mountain Project performing Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 at St Mary the Virgin, New York City, in January 2011 (Joanne Bouknight photo)

Jolle Greenleaf founded the Green Mountain Project in 2010 with the precise aim of presenting the 1610 Vespers in New York City on its 400th anniversary. She invited Metcalfe to join as music director, conductor, and player. That concert was such a success that TENET, a vocal ensemble and non-profit organization directed by Jolle, administratively took Green Mountain under its wing, and she immediately began to dream of more concerts, including performing in Boston, where nearly half of the musicians involved live. She is a Californian who’s lived in NYC for a long time, and Metcalfe, although actually a Vermonter from the Green Mountains, has lived in Boston for a long time. (There is no direct connection to Metcalfe’s Boston-based Blue Heron, except the overlap of music director and some personnel.)

The twenty-seven performers represent the musical communities of these two cities and more, including people from Ann Arbor, San Francisco, LA, as well as many familiar to Boston audiences. Among the singers are sopranos Jolle Greenleaf and Molly Quinn; tenors Zachary Wilder, Jason McStoots, Scott Mello, Marc Molomot, and Sumner Thompson; baritone Jesse Blumberg; bass David McFerrin; with chants provided by altos Virginia Warnken and Luthien Brackett, tenor Jason Rylander, baritone Thomas McCargar, and bass Steve Hrycelak. Instrumentalists include Scott Metcalfe and Julie Andrijeski, violins; Emily Walhout, bass violin; Kiri Tollaksen and Alexandra Opsahl, cornetto; Greg Ingles (NY), Brian Kay (MA), Erik Schmalz, Mack Ramsey, and Liza Malamut, trombone; Hank Heijink and Dan Swenberg, theorbos; and Avi Stein, organ.

The complete program with lengthy, interesting notes may be downloaded here. The concert is FREE, though tickets for a reserved section  may be purchased here.

Nelsons still intends to appear at Tanglewood this summer where he plans to lead both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in concerts July 14th through the 16th.

MARCELO LEHNINGER

Brazilian-born Marcelo Lehninger was appointed assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra by James Levine, Mr. Lehninger made his BSO debut in 2010 with violinist Pinchas Zukerman as soloist and in 2011 stepped in for Maestro Levine at short notice to conduct the world premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s BSO-commissioned Violin Concerto with Christian Tetzlaff. Of his acclaimed Carnegie Hall debut with the BSO the New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini wrote, “He was terrific, conducting all three works with impressive technique, musical insight and youthful energy.” Maestro Lehninger’s next BSO appearances include a subscription night in the 2011-12 season with pianist Peter Serkin, his debut at Tanglewood in 2012 and a subscription week in the 2012-13 season.

Before dedicating his career to conducting, Mr. Lehninger studied violin and piano. He holds a master’s degree from the Conductors Institute at New York’s Bard College, where he studied conducting under Harold Farberman and composition with Laurence Wallach. In Brazil he studied with Roberto Tibiriçá, and he has also participated in master classes with Kurt Masur, Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop, Moche Atzmon, and Andreás Weiss.

A citizen of Brazil and Germany, Marcelo Lehninger is the son of pianist Sônia Goulart and violinist Erich Lehninger. He lives with his wife Laura and daughter Sofia in Boston, MA.

Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and “Procession du Vendredi-saint” (“Good Friday Procession”) from French composer Henri Tomasi’s Fanfares liturgiques will be essayed by the brass and percussion players, then Richard Strauss’s Serenade in E-flat, op. 7, will be played by the winds; and the first half will conclude with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade in C for Strings, op. 48.

The second half of the concert will present the originally scheduled The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky under the direction of Giancarlo Guerrero. He made his BSO debut at Tanglewood on August 22, 2010 and debuts in the BSO subscription series with these performances. Guerrero is now in his third season as music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. In autumn 2011, he also began his role as principal guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra Miami Residency. A full biography of the young conductor is here.

In the second set of subscription concerts that Chailly was to have conducted, Bramwell Tovey will lead the orchestra.  The January 26-31 program will go on as planned, with one work, Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang (Hymn of Praise), for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, featuring sopranos Carolyn Sampson and Camilla Tilling, tenor Mark Padmore, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

Bramwell Tovey made his BSO debut in Tanglewood last summer in a concert performance of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. He also makes his BSO subscription series debut with these performances. His tenures as music director with the Vancouver Symphony, Luxembourg Philharmonic and Winnipeg Symphony Orchestras have been praised for his expertise in operatic, choral, British and contemporary repertoire. His complete bio is here.

Gustav and Alma Mahler “got to know both the city and an assortment of its occupants, … they toured the city’s ethnic quarters, among them an underworld Chinatown with an opium den and a teeming Lower East Side Jewish quarter whose inhabitants Mahler could scarcely see as ‘our own sort of people.’ … ‘Are these our brothers?’ he asked Alma. ‘Can it be that there are only class and not race distinctions?’” wrote Stuart Feder in Gustav Mahler: a life in crisis.

With this background forming part of his understanding of what it means to be a musical stranger, Coleman, the director of NEC’s Contemporary Improvisation Department (founded by Gunther Schuller in 1973), offered an explanation for Tuesday’s concert:

What happens when Classical Music misses its subway stop and gets off at Improvisation? In this concert, NEC’s Contemporary Improvisation and Jazz departments cross paths with their classical colleagues. The virtuosi of NEC’s conductor-less Chamber Orchestra provide a foundation for the imagination of MacArthur Foundation Fellow Jason Moran — the familiar Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 will appear in an unfamiliar, new light. Another NEC MacArthur Fellow, Ran Blake, creates a film of Mahler’s life at the piano keys. Improvising singers add fresh ingredients to Mahler songs. Would Mahler recognize his own music? As a composer haunted by a wide variety of sounds, would he feel right at home?

The NEC website here describes how a wide array of “improvising” and “classical” musicians will combine forces on a program including adaptations, derangements and selections from the following works of Mahler:

Mahler, third movement of Symphony No. 3, re-composition by Contemporary Improvisation ensemble Survivors’ Breakfast coached by Anthony Coleman, with interpretation of posthorn solo

Ran Blake, Mahler Noir, re-composition/solo piano performance based on Blake’s storyboarding of important events in Mahler’s life
I. Death Gong
II. Conversion
III. Death of Maria
IV. Auf Wiedersehen Wien
V. The Last Boat Trip: New York to France
VI. Flashback and Death

Mahler, “St. Anthony’s Sermon to the Fish,” from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, re-composition by Eden MacAdam-Somer, performed by Sarah Jarosz, vocals and mandolin; Eden MacAdam-Somer, violin and vocals; Vesela Stoyanova, MIDI marimba and vocals; Valerie Thompson, cello and vocals; Jeffrey Balter, drums and percussion

Fain/Kahal, I’ll Be Seeing You, performed by Tanya Kalmanovitch, viola; Ted Reichman, accordion; Anthony Coleman, piano.
The standard by American songwriter Sammy Fain and lyricist Irving Kahal opens with melodic material that closely resembles a passage of the last movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.

Mahler, excerpts from Symphony No. 4, re-composition/performance by Fausto Sierakowski, saxophone, and Andrew Clinkman, guitar

Mahler Adagietto from Symphony No. 5, piano improvisations by Jason Moran, performed with the NEC Chamber Orchestra coached by Donald Palma

Mahler, selections arranged by Schoenberg from Das Lied von der Erde
On Youth Maria Kim, vocalist
On Beauty Natalie Cadet, vocalist
Drunk in Spring Nedelka Prescod, vocalist
NEC Wind Ensemble, Charles Peltz, conductor

Bruce Brubaker Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, performed by Huijuan Pan, piano; Yoojin Park, violin; Chia-Hui Hung, viola; Seungwon Chung, cello

“It is in these two works that Schoenberg took his decisive leap into atonality, though without entirely abandoning at least traces of triadic harmony,  BMInt reviewer, musicologist  Mark DeVoto explained. “Stefan George was one of Germany’s best poets in his time, possibly the most widely appreciated after Rilke, who died slightly earlier. There were originally thirty-one poems in Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten. Schoenberg’s fifteen settings, op. 15, are 1908-1909; they are all short, and musically as richly expressive as their texts.

“The String Quartet No. 2 (1907-08) is perhaps a simplification of Schoenberg’s quartet language after the String Quartet No. 1 (1904-05), which though nominally in d-minor is of immense tonal and formal complexity and lasts nearly an hour; No. 2 is contrapuntally just as intricate, at least in its first two movements, but not as thematically intricate and is palpably shorter. The first movement is very chromatic but the f-minor is still strong. The second movement is an apparent scherzo, and is famous for its quotation of ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin’ which provoked roars of laughter at the premiere; Schoenberg was miffed by this, because he thought it should have provoked only ‘a knowing smile.’ One can say that the use of that melody, which in the folksong has the text ‘alles ist hin’ (all is gone), is Schoenberg’s nod to the idea that tonality is disappearing as, in the fourth movement, it does, almost entirely. The third movement, with Stefan George’s sung text, ‘Tief ist die Trauer die mich umdüstert’ (Deep is the sadness that glooms around me), has been associated not only with Schoenberg’s decision to force the tonal issue, but also with the crisis in Schoenberg’s domestic life, when his wife ran off with the painter Richard Gerstl; she was persuaded to return, and Gerstl committed suicide, as Schoenberg later admitted he had himself considered. The fourth movement has the often-quoted text beginning ‘Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten’ (I feel the air of another planet), meaning, presumably, atonality. Even at that, there are what I call paratonal references in this movement, that is, strongly tonal intervals like the perfect fifth, which project here and there even amid the densest chromaticism; you find the same things in the Five Pieces for orchestra op. 16 (1909) and Erwartung (same year). f-sharp minor does return at the very end of the four movement, so one can say the break with tonality isn’t yet absolutely complete.”

Some may remember “The Ludovico Treatment” from Anthony Burgess’s (and Stanley Kubrick’s) A Clockwork Orange as an aversion therapy that leaves its subject unresponsive to violent impulses, with the unintended side effect of rendering him immune to the enjoyment of Beethoven. Since the players of the Ludovico Ensemble have remained studiously nonviolent on stage and have never programmed any work of the master, one wonders whether they underwent the treatment before their founding the group in 2002. The players on November 21 will be Aliana de la Guardia, soprano; Gabriela Diaz, violin; Shaw Pong Liu, violin; Mark Berger, viola; Benjamin Schwartz, cello, Jennifer Ashe, soprano; and Karolina Rojahn, piano.

$10-15  (FREE to students with valid ID)  A link to the program is here.

BMInt’s review is here

The original loudspeaker orchestra.

The Goethe-Institut Boston in collaboration with the Cultural Services of the French Consulate, Harvard University, and Northeastern University will be presenting a very interesting three-day festival of electroacoustic music. Sound in Space Festival, bringing together prominent representatives of top-notch institutions in Germany, France, and the USA, will create performance opportunities for composers enrolled in North American institutions and will commemorate the beginnings of electroacoustic music in the 1950s. The festival will run from November 17 to 19 at Northeastern University’s Fenway Center, 77 St. Stephen Street, Boston. The Awards Ceremony and Closing Reception will be at the Goethe-Institut Boston, 170 Beacon Street, Boston

The “performers” at these events will be the 32 loudspeakers of the Harvard University “Hydra” Speaker-Orchestra, a sound projection system designed for the performance of electroacoustic music with or without the participation of instrumentalists. Distributed both horizontally and vertically, in order to provide a wide range of sound planes and perspectives, the speakers are controlled by two interfaces with 32 faders, permitting real time control and configuration for each work performed.

Similar “speaker orchestras” include the Acousmonium, conceived and developed at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Radio France) in the early 1970s, BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre) developed by Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham, GMEBaphone, IMEB, Bourges (France) and the loudspeaker orchestra of Musiques & Recherches in Belgium.

The festival considers electroacoustic music interpretation and gives composition students and the public insight into its possibilities. Prominent representatives from top-notch institutions in Germany, France and the USA will be presenting for the first two dates, and the final round of the Sound in SPACE Competition will be for students of North American institutions. The six finalists present their works in two concerts following participation in interpretation workshops and coachings. Further concerts feature the French and German composers-in-residence as well as recent North American electroacoustic works. A panel discussion frames the debate on interpretation of electroacoustic music in Europe and North America. The festival ends with an awards ceremony. All concerts, workshops and panel discussions are free and open to the public.

GRM Bayle Acoustimonium from 1970

While such festival are somewhat novel in the US, in Europe there continues to be a great deal of interest in presentation of sound-images. The advancement of loudspeaker orchestras has permitted much more development in this discipline. Further innovation in music performance has brought new requirements for interpretation theory and implementation in live performance. Ideally, each and every space requires a studied interpretation of the sounds of a given composition, its changes in dynamics, and its compositional gestures.

Two key cultural institutions for this revolutionary music are currently the GRM (Groupe de Recherche Musicale) in Paris and the ZKM (Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe. Their regular cooperation in the promotion and performance of electroacoustic music in the past fifteen years has opened up new sonic worlds for audiences through international artistic collaboration, innovation, and experimentation.

The term ‘orchestra’ in ‘Loudspeaker Orchestra’ is appropriate, not only because of the deployment of individual ‘loudspeaker-instruments’ in space but also because of the different registers and timbral qualities of each loudspeaker. However, the setup of a speaker orchestra is not fixed. The largest “Speaker Orchestra” in the world is the GRM Acousmonium with 80 loudspeakers. It groups very different types of loudspeakers into an imposing spatial setup.

Participants:
Ludger Brümmer, director of ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics in Karlsruhe (Germany)

Harvard's Hydra Orchestra

Daniel Teruggi, director of GRM | Groupe de Recherche Musicale (France).
Hans Tutschku, professor & director of electroacoustic studios at Harvard University
Mike Frengel, professor at Northeastern University
Elainie Lillios, professor at Bowling Green State University

Complete Schedule:
Thursday, November 17, 2011
4:00 PM  Interpretation Workshop
7:30 PM  Competition Finalists Concert
9:00 PM  Portrait Concert – Daniel Teruggi

Friday, November 18, 2011
4:00 PM  Interpretation Workshop
7:30 PM  Competition Finalists Concert
9:00 PM  Portrait Concert – Ludger Brümmer

Saturday, November 19, 2011
4:00 PM  Panel Discussion with invited composers
6:00 PM  Curated concert of recent electroacoustic works from North America
8:00 PM  Composition Competition Awards Ceremony

For more information visit www.goethe.de/boston-soundinSPACE or contact Annette Klein at program2@boston.goethe.org or (617) 262–6050 ext 11

This program is supported by the Elysée Treaty Fund for Franco-German Cultural Events in Third Countries.

Courtney Lewis: I think this will be a concert that the audience members will leave with smiles on their faces. There’s a lot to discover and enjoy: new sounds and color, jazz, several excellent musical jokes, and of course everyone loves Mother Goose. I’m looking forward to hearing Discovery Ensemble — a chamber orchestra with eight first violins — play Ravel. Mother Goose isn’t a part of the usual chamber orchestra repertoire. I’m excited to see if we can find unusual timbres and balances and textures in a piece which is so familiar.

Am I being a Philistine or ignoramus in assuming that because your bio begins in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that you somehow grew up in relative poverty and had benefited in your youth from something like the El Sistema approach that you now so enthusiastically espouse?

Courney Lewis talks to Dorchester kids (Eric Antoniou photo)

Well, yes! I come from a middle-class family. My mother is a professor at Queen’s University Belfast and my father is a barrister. So I did not experience music education in an El Sistema model. Alongside lessons, I had an incredibly inspirational high school music teacher who opened the door to everything that came later. It’s very easy for a student to spend years making music — I was a pianist, a clarinetist and a chorister —  without developing a habit of listening to music. That’s a separate interest. Thankfully, when I was twelve I was encouraged to listen to as much as possible by my high school music teacher. That’s when I began to be really excited about music. I spent every afternoon after school listening and reading scores at Belfast Central Library. Stravinsky and Bach were my gods! Because I was so interested in twentieth-century music, I began to compose. Later, I went to study at Cambridge because the composition faculty there taught practically every major British composer over the last two hundred years, apart from Benjamin Britten!

When I went up to Cambridge I began to conduct. The student orchestras there are conducted by students — they don’t bring in professionals. With a little experience, and if you audition well, you can have several symphony orchestras at your disposal. This was my privilege for three years. I was able to conduct all the time and I realized it was something I wanted to do much more. In terms of composing, I realized that I much preferred making music with other people than being by myself. Also, I preferred to spend my time with great music rather than what I was composing, which I wasn’t always so happy with!

It’ll be up to others to decide whether this is false modesty.

They’re never going to get the chance. No one’s ever going to hear anything I wrote!

After Cambridge, what prompted you to become a Zander Fellow? Tell us about that experience and how it tied in with the El Sistema program that you experienced.

I spent an extra year there studying the late music of Ligeti and conducting a lot. Since Ligeti died in the middle of that year, the project had to take a different turn. Then I went to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester where I studied conducting with Sir Mark Elder, conductor of the Halle Orchestra; he’s a frequent guest conductor of the Boston Symphony.

When I finished at the RNCM I was still quite young and without much experience conducting professional orchestras. The Zander Fellowship seemed like a great position in which I could grow, spend time thinking about music and conducting in a semi-professional environment, without the pressures of an actual assistant conductor’s job. One of the great things about that time was the trip to Venezuela with Ben Zander. He conducted the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Mahler 1 and 2 over a couple of weeks. I was able to spend a lot of time with El Sistema, going into many núcleos, which are the centers where all the music education takes place. Many of these are in barrios, not very great areas of Caracas. It was moving to see how this system was able to transform children’s lives — children who didn’t have much else going on. I’d walk into a shopping center in some really bad area where you’d see people shooting up drugs all around you. Bodyguards with guns accompanied us. Then we’d go into a basement room where an orchestra of 15-year-olds was playing Don Juan. Experiencing the immediacy and passion with which these kids related to music was absolutely incredible.

Continuing with your description of what you took away from the Zander Fellowship. Did you get any actual coaching in conducting from Ben?

I learnt a lot from watching Ben talking to concert audiences. He’s great at that, and it’s something I’ve been called upon to do an enormous amount in Minnesota But I was very lucky. During my two years as Zander Fellow, NEC hadn’t yet set up a conducting course. Nowadays, every time a guest conductor comes in, the conducting students have prepared the orchestras, but a few years ago not only were there no conducting students, but there wasn’t a large enough conducting staff to do all the preparation. So I was asked to prepare many of the orchestras for illustrious guest conductors, including Hugh Wolf and Gustavo Dudamel. I conducted a huge amount of repertoire. No Zander Fellow before or since has done that, so I was lucky. That’s how I met all the people involved when I went on to found Discovery Ensemble with [musicologist] David St. George.

But it wasn’t just about the musicians, the concert audiences and me. When David and I were thinking about how to begin an orchestra in Boston, we agreed that education had to be a very large part of it. In a small way we are imitating El Sistema by bringing Discovery Ensemble into under-privileged areas of Boston and exposing kids to classical music. This was our brief when we founded the orchestra, hence the name Discovery. Beethoven’s Eroica is certainly a discovery for kids in Dorchester!

The discovery of music by kids is matched by the discovery of new music by existing concert audiences. The idea was that we would play unusual repertoire, providing opportunities for sophisticated audiences to make discoveries as well.

Do you have any theories of thematic programming or do you simply select pieces that interest you and hope it all goes together?

Last season all of our programs had titles. This year we have put together programs of pieces that speak to each other in a particular way. But we always have programming guidelines. There is always a piece that’s appropriate to bring to our workshops in schools. Then we tend to have a classical symphony (we’ve played a lot of Beethoven!), and we always want to have a piece that the regular concert audience is not familiar with. The program that we’re offering on November 6 is classic Discovery Ensemble. It includes a piece that is reasonably well known, Haydn’s Symphony No. 90. Then we will take Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite into the schools. It’s perfect for kids who haven’t heard classical music before. Copland’s Clarinet Concerto is a fantastic piece with many interesting turns that fit in so well with the wit of the Haydn. Julian Anderson’s Khorovod, written in 1995, is for fifteen soloists: percussion, winds and strings. A khorovod is a Russian dance: there’s one in Stravinsky’s Firebird. Anderson’s piece is all about dance, and it’s full of color, wit and frequent changes of direction. Not many people will know the composer, even though he was for a time a resident at Harvard. Every piece on the program, even Mother Goose, has a certain lightness of touch, of wit, of a winking eye. That vague idea, that type of deft wit, ties the program together.

When you’re only giving three (or the season after this, six) programs in a single season, you don’t really have space to give a whole concert one idea. There are so many pieces we want to play, so you have to sit and wonder whether these pieces relate to each other in some way that binds them together, even if there isn’t a discernable theme.  If you have a twenty concert season then maybe some can be thematic.

Eric Antoniou photo

You’re such a globetrotter with commitments in Minneapolis and LA and also elsewhere. Tell us for instance, was LA a shock after Cambridge University?

I know southern California very well because my father lived there between his eleventh and eighteenth years. I have two aunts and an uncle and many cousins who live in San Diego. I had been to LA many times before I went there professionally. I love LA! It’s one of my favorite places. It’s very different from Cambridge [UK], yes, and very different from Boston and Minnesota, but it has tremendous energy. It’s especially exciting to be in LA as a guest of the LA Philharmonic because their hospitality is absolutely breathtaking. The city is such fun and that orchestra has the resources to do absolutely anything, like the BSO. They have incredibly interesting programming ideas and an astonishingly brilliant staff, both administrators and creative artists.

I’ll be conducting the LA Phil in two sets of Neighborhood Subscription Concerts. These are programs that the orchestra takes into poorer neighborhoods during which the conductor spends some time talking to the audience. First up is an all-Dvorak program in December. I’ll return in March for Beethoven 1 and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.

I have just started my third season with the Minnesota Orchestra. We have a big subscription season, much like the BSO, for over thirty weeks a year. We also have Summerfest, which, though not as extensive as Tanglewood, presents a month of events in the summer. We also have an extensive program of young peoples’ concerts, all of which I program and conduct. We do six programs a year, each of which is each given six times. So, thousands of kids hear the Minnesota Orchestra every year. We also do tours to underserved parts of the state. In April, I conducted an extensive tour to rural parts of the state. This is why, since the 1970s, the orchestra has been called the Minnesota Orchestra instead of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. I’m also very excited about conducting regular subscription concerts for the first time this season, beginning with a fully-staged production of Hansel and Gretel at Thanksgiving. In February I have a regular subscription concert. It will be nice to conduct subscription concerts after having put so much time into education work.

Note: A related review is here.

Costume Designs by Robert Perdziola

In a production by Opera Boston, Berlioz’s last opera, Béatrice et Bénédict, based on Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, will have a three-performance run at the Cutler Majestic beginning on October 21^st. Set by the noted Metropolitan Opera stage director, David Kneuss, in the frothy 1950s, the production features noted singers, mezzo-soprano Julie Boulianne and tenor Sean Panikkar in the title roles. It will be sung in French with English titles under the baton of Opera Boston’s Artistic Director, Gil Rose.  BMInt spoke briefly with him:

BMInt: Most of us don’t know Béatrice et Bénédict. Please tell us which Berlioz was responsible — the composer of the Requiem and the Damnation of Faust or the composer of L’Enfance du Christ. In other words, is this sweetly lyrical or boldly dramatic?

Gil Rose: This work shows Berlioz at his most light and lyrical. As a late work with the spirit of youth, it is akin to Verdi’s Falstaff.

Berlioz began writing Béatrice et Bénédict four years after his former wife, the English Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, died. This was his only opera on a text of the Bard. Did Smithson’s death somehow revive his interest in Shakespeare or is this a coincidence?

I think it must have been, but Romantic composers always have held the Bard in the highest regard and often turned to him for inspiration.

Scenic Designs by Robert Perdziola

The set and costume design looks 1930s-ish. Please tell me more.

It’s actually 1950s Sicily. The design reflects the carefree and lighter than air nature of the music and the narrative.

What’s the Boston performance history of the piece?
The BSO performed the piece (semi-staged) at Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood in 1978, with Seiji Ozawa conducting and our stage director David Kneuss directing. The Boston Lyric Opera staged it in the 1992-93 season, with Lorraine Hunt as Béatrice, Jon Garrison as Bénédict, and Robert Spano conducting.

Why are you offering Berlioz now for Opera Boston audiences?

As Opera Boston is always looking to present the full stylistic range of the operatic art form, it was time for an early romantic comic work. We also wanted to open the season with a comedy.

Julie Boulianne as Beatrice and Heather Buck as Hero in dress rehearsal (Clive Grainger photo)

Have you ever considered a staged Damnation of Faust? 

We would love to BUT we’re hampered by the friendly confines of the Cutler Majestic. Béatrice et Bénédict is as big a Berlioz as we can manage for now.
Remind us of the connection between the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Opera Boston.

Me. Other than that they are two completely separate entities who have collaborated in the past.

Who are the orchestra principals whose names are familiar?

Boston’s finest. Our section chairs are Sarah Brady, flute; Jennifer Slowik, oboe; Jan Halloran, clarinet; Margaret Phillips, bassoon; Ken Pope, french horn; Mary Lynne Bohn, trumpet; Dana Oakes, cornet; Gregory Spiridopoulos, trombone; Craig McNutt, timpani; and Robert Schulz, percussion. Charles Dimmick is the concertmaster and Heidi Braun-Hill chairs the second violins; Kate Vincent chairs the violas; David Russell, cellos; and Anthony D’Amico, double basses.

David McFerrin as Claudio, Sean Panikkar as Benedict, and Robert Honeysucker as Don Pedro in dress rehearsal (Clive Grainger photo)

Additional instrumental players get in costume and become part of the onstage action. Banda players you’ll see include: Benjamin Fox and Joseph Halko, oboe; Adrian Jojatu and Sebastian Chavez, bassoon; Richard Watson, Geoffrey Shamu, and Gregory Gettel, trumpet; Nicholas Tolle, percussion; and Maarten Strager, guitar.

Please point BMInt’s readers to  some capsule biographies of the principal singers and more information on the production staff?

Click here!

If readers want to learn more about the opera and the production, or if they wish to buy tickets, can you point them to the right place?

With pleasure —Opera Boston has a great deal on our pages.  Click out our special features here. And click here for tickets.

Christian Steiner photo

On October 16, Boston Chamber Music Society will be opening its 29^th season with a special guest, Narek Hakhnazaryan, who will be making his first Boston appearance since winning the Gold Medal in cello in this year’s Tchaikovsky Competition and making many celebratory concerto appearances with major orchestras. At Sanders Theatre beginning at 7:30 the BCMS players will offer an exciting mixed program discussed in detail below. To mark this event BMInt interviewed BCMS Artistic Director Marcus Thompson and cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan.

The first interview is with Marcus Thompson:

BMInt: Marcus, I see that cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan will be making his debut with BCMS in your opening concert. This will also be his first Boston appearance following his international triumph! How did you meet him and determine him a good fit for BCMS? 

Marcus Thompson: I’m ashamed to say I actually never met him at NEC where I teach and where he had been an Artist Diploma student of Professor Lawrence Lesser, soloist with one of NEC’s orchestras, and a favorite among the knowledgeable. Later on Narek and I were part of a large number of artists who participated in a twelve-hour marathon chamber music concert at Symphony Space in New York to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Young Concert Artists, Inc. and its founder Susan Wadsworth. Susan is the one with eye for talent. And seeing again many of the people she has helped over the years was really thrilling.

The last piece of the day was the Mendelssohn Octet, in which I played first viola, and Narek, first cello. So, we were sitting right next to each other having to play several important phrases together. After two days of rehearsals and a nice party the following morning, I felt I knew him and his playing enough to invite him to play with BCMS. Of course, I was told by the agency I was too late: Narek had completed his studies, was planning to leave Boston to study in Paris next season, and wouldn’t be readily available. But just in time they called to say that October was being held for US appearances and that our concert week might just work. Narek’s later Tchaikovsky win was the promotional icing on the cake.

How did having him on board affect your programming? 

I knew from hearing him in other pieces last February that he was very flexible and could play well a wide variety of music. I also knew that even though I wanted him very much, I did not need to feature him. In that sense I was free to program with all the artists and repertoire equally in mind. Once we settled on our theme of piano quintets for the season, and our practice of seeking out important anniversaries, the Loeffler Songs called Four Poems (he was born 1861), and the Gubaidulina Piano Quintet (her 80th birthday is later in the week) were natural fits with a Mozart piano trio to start. Of course, since Narek won the competition we thought our audience would love to hear him in something more revealing of his solo ability. Mihae Lee and he will play the Schumann Fantasy Pieces which I know he plays supremely. I shouldn’t neglect to mention the names of the other players: Krista River, mezzo-soprano; Ida Levin, Jennifer Frautschi, violins; Roger Tapping, viola; and Mihae Lee, piano.

BMInt next interviewed Narek Hakhnazaryan:

BMInt: Congratulations on your Tchaikovsky Gold Medal. We have followed the studio of Laurence Lesser for many years and I’m not astonished that one of his students had this recognition. Tell us about how you came to work with Professor Lesser.

Narek Hakhnazaryan: I first met Professor Lesser on a visit to Boston in when I played for him in 2006. Our second meeting was at the previous (2007) Tchaikovsky Competition where he was on the jury. After the competition he invited me to study with him in Boston. In 2008 and 2009 I also participated in the Ravinia Music Festival where I met many other faculty members of NEC, like Miriam Freed and Kim Kashkashian. I also met some NEC students and realized that NEC’s level of everything was so high that I was just won over.

Entering the Artist Diploma program with Professor Lesser led to two of the most productive years of my professional life. It was a really great experience—really amazing. And NEC’s attitude towards me made me feel like a member of a family. I’m really happy about my two years.

For sure I improved so much! Even my pianist told me how much I improved in sound and everything. And my repertoire changed too. Because of Mr. Lesser I learned Hindemith’s Solo Cello Sonata, Britten’s Sonata No. 3 for Solo Cello…but I also learned and played for the first time Bach’s Sixth Suite…It was very, very productive. I hadn’t really been exposed to twentieth century music so much before, or so deeply.

Was there any 20^th century music in the Tchaikovsky Competition?

There was a required piece written by Penderetsky especially for the competition. And in addition to that I chose to play a new  sonata for cello solo by the  Armenian composer Adam Khuduyoan. I also played a lot of 19^th century music. There were also a Brahms sonata and a Beethoven sonata—and a range of repertoire including Bach.

I’m also very proud that I not only won the competition, but I also got a prize for the best performance of a classical concerto. And it was Haydn’s C Major Concerto with a chamber orchestra for the second round. The two concertos in the final round were the Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, a required piece, and my second choice of a concerto was Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. And you can watch and listen to all of this on the Tchaikovsky Website in very high quality.

Where are you living now?

Well I’m based for now in Moscow, but I have plans to move to Europe.

How come your English be so good?

Well, I lived in Boston for two years and I had learned it also when I was traveling around, because English is the only language you can speak in most other countries.  In Germany, Italy—everywhere people speak English.

Tell us how you met Marcus Thompson, the artistic director of Boston Chamber Music Series.

Last February in New York we were both playing in a Young Concert Artists gala concert. We were playing the Mendelssohn Octet together—Marcus was first viola and I was first cello and we were seated next to each other. In the slow movement there is a huge duo that we shared—it’s so beautiful—I was very happy to play with Marcus because he’s such a great violist. We felt really very comfortable together.

Since your win are you going to be too busy playing concerti to do as much chamber music as you would like?

I will always try to play as much chamber music as I can, but it surely  will  be less chamber music than I used to play since my schedule is so much busier now.

The problem with playing cello concerti is that there are only a very few that orchestras wish to engage cellists to play.

That’s a pretty big problem, but now many presenters ask for a contemporary piece like the Penderetsky Concerto or Lutoslawski, so my future plans are to learn new concertos and to play them.

Now that you’ve begun to love 20^th century music, how about 21^st century music? Are there any composers you’d like to commission?

I would really love to have composers write pieces for me and I would love to play them. I’m really open to new ideas and suggestions, but there is no particular composer yet of the younger generation whom I really want to work with, but I hope some connections will develop. It’s already happening that composers are offering works to me, but I haven’t yet had the time to pursue any.

Do you still have your own life? Are you working harder than you want to?

Sometimes I get a bit tired, but this is the kind of tiredness I’d dreamed about having. I’m happy to be tired in that way.

Does the Tchaikovsky Competition victory accord you many performances?

Yes, but also after the competition I signed a contract with two major management companies, and since then I have played at Suntory Hall with the Tokyo Symphony, in the Barbican Hall with the London Symphony under Gergiev, and I went on a tour with the Russian National Orchestra with Mikail Pletnev conducting. At the end of October I will play with the Mariinsky Orchestra and Gergiev in Baden Baden. All of these have been arranged for me by the competition—they’re part of the prize.

In your chamber music playing is it important for you to have a close working relationship with a pianist?

Yes, very much. I am very happy in America with Noreen Polera. In Europe I’m still getting to know a lot of different pianists, but it’s always better to have the one that you can trust and be comfortable with. But it’s wrong to stick with only one. It’s also important to work with a pianist who is a real partner—not just an accompanist. I want to work with someone who can show himself or herself to be brilliant.

NEC’s President Tony Woodcock boasts, “Only NEC could conceive and promote this festival. It represents the diversity and influence of Mahler’s music as well as the rich variety of music that inspires our faculty and students — whether they are improvisers, singers, orchestral players, or jazz musicians. There is no artistic director of this celebration. Instead, I have asked faculty to devise their own ideas and programs reflecting this theme of diversity and counterpoint. Performances of the symphonies will co-exist with symphonic movements,  improvised tropes, jazz explorations, and elaborations of Mahlerian themes, works by Mahler’s contemporaries who were influenced by the composer, Mahler’s arrangements of other composers’ music, Mahler’s vocal music, and Mahler works in their earliest versions. Lectures and panels will explore the many facets of the composer-conductor’s artistry, career, and ongoing influence.  And it’s all free.”

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 will be performed from a reconstructed edition, based on two of the earliest manuscript sources for the symphony. The majority of the score comes from a newly discovered manuscript at the Mahler-Rosé Collection at the University of Western Ontario; it contains three movements of the originally five-movement symphony and is believed to be the earliest version of the First Symphony, premiered in Budapest in November 1889. The two movements missing from the Ontario manuscript – the Blumine and the Funeral March – are performed from their own earliest manuscript source from the Osborne collection at Yale, reflecting the second, 1893 Hamburg performance of the symphony.  This performing edition has been prepared from microfilms of the manuscripts by Kristo Kondakci ’09 Prep, ’13 B.M., an NEC composition major studying with Michael Gandolfi and John Mallia.

The performance of the First will include not only the Blumine movement that Mahler initially took over from another work and ultimately discarded but also significant segments of music, notably in the Finale, that never made it into any subsequent versions. Originally called Symphonic Poem in Two Parts, the work features a smaller, less Mahlerian orchestra than in its later incarnations and gives insight into the compositional process that transformed this piece into the First Symphony that we know today. This work, in Mahler’s words “the most spontaneous and daringly composed of all,” was subsequently heavily revised, yet due to the public’s rejection, remained, as he observed, his “child of sorrow.”

The performance opens with Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan, which had its premiere the same year as the Mahler. This will be followed by a talk by Mahler scholar Dr. Katarina Markovic, Chair of NEC’s Music History and Musicology Department, who will illustrate some of the differences between the original version and the later and more familiar versions of Mahler’s First Symphony.

BMInt asked Katerina Markovic some questions:

The introduction of the 1st movement is significantly re-orchestrated.  Among other things, the orchestra is much smaller.  Also, portions of the last (the 5th and in modern performances 4th) movement are basically recomposed, and dozens of measures are deleted. In this final movement, the recapitulation is very different – there is no gradual, fugato entry of the solo viola, but instead the crash of the Finale’s introduction is brought back in a literal manner.  The piece had 5 movements – the lyrical trumpet serenade “Blumine” was there in Budapest, but in later revisions got cut.  And in general, throughout the Symphony, there are numerous details of orchestration and articulation redone.

That was never our objective.  We don’t advocate for a resurrection of this version as a regular item in orchestral repertoires.  Rather, we believe it needs to be heard and acknowledged as an important stepping stone in Mahler’s symphonic development, and it also provides unique insight into Mahler’s compositional process.

His lieder exist for both orchestral and piano accompaniment versions.  There are also Beethoven symphonies – with Mahler’s “retouschen” that have been performed and recorded.  The First Symphony has sometimes been performed and recorded with the Blumine movement, while the Sixth Symphony of course has a different inner movement order in different conductors’ approaches.

New England Conservatory is believed to have affiliations with more MacArthur Fellows than any other school of music. NEC’s other laureates are Gunther Schuller, Ran Blake, Jason Moran, Steve Lacy and Miguel Zenón.

Since 1981, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Fellows Program has awarded unrestricted fellowships to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. About Alysa Weilerstein they have written:

Alisa Weilerstein is a young cellist whose emotionally resonant performances of both traditional and contemporary music have earned her international recognition. As a soloist with some of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and conductors, Weilerstein is a consummate performer, combining technical precision with impassioned musicianship. Raised in a family devoted to the arts, she began performing on the cello as a preschooler and made her public debut with a professional orchestra at the age of thirteen. Unlike many musical prodigies, Weilerstein chose to pursue a liberal arts degree while continuing to maintain a busy performance schedule as both a soloist and as a chamber musician, performing and recording with her parents as the Weilerstein Trio. While her repertoire includes the classics, Weilerstein is a tireless advocate for contemporary music, introducing audiences to works by major composers of our day and, in many cases, performing with them. In 2007, she worked with composer Osvaldo Golijov on a complete revision of Azul, his concerto inspired by a Pablo Neruda poem, incorporating orchestra, accordion, and percussion to support cello melodies. Performing in more than one hundred concerts a year, Weilerstein has successfully navigated the transition from child prodigy to accomplished, professional musician and is expanding the cello repertoire through her collaborations with leading contemporary composers.

Alisa Weilerstein received a B.A. (2004) from Columbia University. She has performed with orchestras throughout the United States and internationally, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the Boston Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic, among others. In 2009, she was appointed artist-in-residence at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Her recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto is forthcoming with Decca Classics.

Is Guerilla’s latest outing merely shocking, or perhaps some alternate aesthetic? Well it’s apparently Loose, Wet, Perforated, written by Nicholas Vines. It opens September 16 at Boston Conservatory’s Zack Box Theater, 8 the Fenway, and has subsequent performances on September 17, 21, 22, 24, and 25.

Guerilla Opera image

Inspired by Medieval morality plays, Loose, Wet, Perforated is the tale of the characters “Loose” and “Wet,” who undergo various “ordeals” to climb rank in their Guild system. One begins in a privileged position and descends to isolation and despair, and the other begins in a lowly position and rises to fame and fortune by way of ruthlessness and violence. The opera is directed by Jeremy Bloom; scenic design is by Julia Noulin-Mérat; and the cast includes Aliana de la Guardia as Loose, Jonathan Nussman as Wet, Rebekah Alexander as Perforated, and Jan Zimmerman as Various. Instrumentalists are Rane Moore (clarinets); Kent O’Doherty (saxophone); Chris Reade (trombone); and Mike Williams (percussion).

Composer Nicholas Vines’ works have been performed in his native Australia, the US, the UK, and Europe by such interpreters as Alarm Will Sound, ChamberMade Opera, the Ensemble Offspring, Gedanesis Chamber Choir, White Rabbit, the BT Scottish Ensemble, the Australian Voices, Eliot Gattegno and Liwei Qin, and Boston-based groups Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), Callithumpian Consort, and Schola Cantorum. He is making his Guerilla Opera debut with Loose, Wet, Perforated.

Ticket prices are : $15/$10/Free, to Students with Valid I.D.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

There are many ways to remember September 11, 2001. For the tenth anniversary recognition in Boston we know of three music based events throughout the day. At 2:00 pm at Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory and the City of Boston are presenting their (sold out) “Day of Remembrance,” a gala concert with orchestra and soloists that includes the world premiere of an “Interfaith Oratorio” Illuminessence: prayers for peace by Silvio Amato. At 3:00 pm, Tufts University Granoff Center will be offering “Ten Years Later: Musical Responses to 9/11,” consisting of works by faculty members Diana Stefan Anderson, William Kenlon, Kevin Laba, John McDonald, Kevin Warren, and guest composer Stephen Hartke’s with Kenneth Radnofsky, saxophone, and faculty artist Donald Berman, piano among the featured soloists.

New England Conservatory and the City of Boston are presenting their (sold out) “Day of Remembrance” at 2:00 pm on September 11 at Jordan Hall in the form of a gala concert with orchestra and soloists including the world premiere of an “Interfaith Oratorio” Illuminessence: prayers for peace by Silvio Amato.

At 11:00 am, the Goethe-Institut Boston and the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation will present a most unusual way to reflect upon the political and religious intolerance that led to the terrorist bombings. To be shown at the Coolidge Corner Theater, the Institut’s offering is the 1922 silent film Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) by the German director Manfred Noa, based on the 1779 play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The play, whose title character was modeled on Moses Mendelssohn, the composer’s grandfather, is a plea for peace and reconciliation. It was banned at the time of its creation, as the film was 140 years later.

A beautifully atmospheric, tinted print of the recently rediscovered and restored film will be digitally projected at Coolidge Corner’s main auditorium via BluRay using the theater’s 2k projector, according to the Coolidge’s program manager, Jesse Hassinger. A musical score commissioned by Goethe-Institut Boston from composer Aaron Trant will be performed by three members of his After Quartet. Following are BMInt Interviews with the director of Goethe Institut Boston, and with the composer.

Jerusalem during the Third Crusade from Noa's "Nathan der Weise"

BMInt’s Lee Eiseman conducted an email-interview with GIB director, Detlef Gericke-Schoenhagen:

Why is the Goethe Institut Boston sponsoring a screening of Manfred Noa’s Nathan der Weise on September 11?

Nathan is a play about religious and cultural toleration.  It’s the first German play that presented positive images of both a Jew and a Muslim; both groups were strongly stereotyped in Germany in 1779, when the play was written.  In 2011, we are still facing strong stereotyping of Muslims and Jews, both in Germany and the United States. We also face strong stereotyping of Germans by Muslims in Germany. This has become a real problem.

Why on September 11?
The terrorists who attacked on September 11, 2001, used their inter­pre­tation of the Koran as justification of their actions.  This led to hard feelings against Muslims in general.  By screening Nathan the Wise on Sept 11, we remind viewers that it is important to base our interactions with each other on reason and mutual respect.  In Germany 24 theaters put on productions of Nathan the Wise in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  When the play was staged in New York on the first anniversary of 9/11, the New York Times theater critic wrote: “Timelessness is a good thing in a play, but timeliness is better. The 18th-century drama Nathan the Wise wins on both counts.”

Why Boston?
In Boston many future decision-makers prepare for future tasks. No other city in the world has such a high concentration of universities and colleges of outstanding quality. Students from all over the world read, study and do research here to prepare for leadership roles in their countries. With our programming at the Goethe Institut we would like to contribute to shaping their mindsets and their moral outlook. Boston is exactly the place where Nathan the Wise should be performed.

Werner Kraus as Nathan

Are members of the world’s warring sects any more likely to respond to pleas for tolerance than they were in 1779 when Lessing’s play came out or in 1922 when Manfred Noa’s film came out?
Let me first say some words about Nathan as a plea for tolerance. Nathan is actually a very shrewd analysis of the way people’s minds work.  The play asks about the elements that go into shaping one’s identity.  Will you follow your heart or will you follow reason?  Will you follow opportunity because you want to make a buck, or will you act decently because you have been educated to be a moral person?  What determines who you are: your descent (your “blood”, i.e. your genes) or upbringing?  If you look carefully at the play, you will see that Lessing is, in fact, quite pessimistic and not upbeat at all about the success of toleration.  He thinks toleration is likely to fail because people are morally weak. People today would do very well to study the play carefully.

Having said that, I should add that Lessing wrote the Nathan 100 years after a 30-year war of conflicting religions which devastated Germany and killed half of its population. In 1779 people still remembered what a war of conflicting religions can mean. Lessing’s “Parable of the Ring”, [read synopsis here] put on stage, or just read to the many illiterates, had a powerful impact on the people and their expectations of those in power.

We also know how in 1922 the fascists were reacting to the film which could have reached a mass audience. They threatened to demolish any movie theater in which the Nathan was to be shown.  After 1933 they destroyed virtually all existing prints. They were afraid of the power of the story, of its metaphors and of the force of the parable.  The essential messages of the Nathan ran counter to the Fascist world view: the message that the equal treatment of religions, faith groups and ethnicities; that neither of the three world religions is better or more human per se than the others, that Jews, Christians and Muslims are equal players, that the different ethnicities are revealed as siblings and close relatives; and that Lessing appointed a Jew as the moderator of the plot and the advocate of humanity.

Today, there is no more problem of illiteracy (as in 1779), nor there is a problem in freedom of artistic expression (as in the 1920’s Munich and 1930’s Germany).  Thus today the “Parable of the Ring” and the narrative of the Nathan can reach its audience and future decision-makers. We will know in 20 years if the message succeeded.

Nathan and his daughter Recha

The restored film’s 2009 Munich debut was accompanied by a multi-cultural youth orchestra performing a score by an Arab composer, Rabih Abou-Khalil. Did this performance have a particular resonance for modern Germans?
The first performance was on October 24, 2009 in Munich, the second on August 20, 2010 in Berlin. The resonance in Munich as well as in Berlin was overwhelming. More than 1,000 spectators gave half an hour of standing ovations for film, orchestra and composer.  It was touching to see the 60 teenage musicians facing the challenge of a score that combined elements of western and eastern music and instruments.  The national “Bundesjugendorchester” consists of the absolutely best young musicians from all over Germany.

How well do today’s Germans know the Lessing play? Will Americans be able to understand the nuances in a silent movie adaptation?
Lessing’s Nathan is among the most-often performed theatre plays in the German speaking countries, it is part of the High School Curriculum and over the last 150 years it has often been quoted in political speeches as point of reference.  Nathan the Wise is hard-wired in the German consciousness.

I am sure Americans can understand the nuances in the silent movie adaptation.

Will GIB’s lecture help?
The lecture will present an analysis of the play.  Knowing the play well means that it is easy to see where the producer, screenwriter, and director made changes.  Right away we see that the film people frontloaded the movie with historical information, while Lessing was playing on the stereotypes of the Jew that he wanted to explode in the course of the play.  Knowing the play really is reading basic to understanding of the film.  Knowing the play well helps understand the movie; but the movie also helps one understand the play.  It’s easy to overlook Nathan’s horrific biography.  The play allows Nathan to speak about himself only once; it’s easy not to listen carefully at that point because so much is going on in the play.  Nathan’s biography (his wife and seven sons are burned to death by bandits and crusaders) begs the question why Nathan is not more angry.  A protestant theologian in the 1780s complained that the play was not realistic because the Jew Nathan should be angry and full of revenge at his mistreatment.  But he isn’t.  Similarly, the play shows Nathan as not resorting to counter-violence.  Hitler’s deputy in Munich called the movie of bag of Jewish lies; maybe he too couldn’t believe that the Jews wouldn’t rise to the contemporary threat.  This is all very explosive stuff, and to ask today whether violence should be answered with violence or whether non-violence is the right response, is precisely the question.  After the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11, how to respond was the CENTRAL question.  Nathan the Wise represents the road not taken.

BMInt’s Lee Eiseman talked by phone with composer Aaron Trant:

I should start out by saying that I have a real fondness for silent movies as well as a strong preference that they be accompanied by music of their period—preferably the music presented at their premieres. But I know that’s not always going to happen and so I try not to be a snob and attempt to listen to new musical approaches on their own terms. I’m not really familiar with your compositional techniques, so I would like to have you tell the BMInt readers what your approach is to scoring and to expect.
The main thing is with the group I’m starting with, the After Quartet, for this performance, actually a trio of trumpet, bass and percussion— sometimes we have guitar in the group and sometimes we don’t. It depends on the logistics— sometimes it’s impossible to get all of us together at the same time. The instrumentation itself lends itself to non-traditional silent film scoring.

 Something like the Alloy Orchestra?
Something like that, though they sometimes use keyboards to emulate string patches or orchestral sounds in that sense. So we moved further away from it. All of the styles I’ve incorporated didn’t exist when the film was made. All the material I’m using is post 1940s musical influences. There’s a lot of jazz and little bit of choral writing, there are some improvs that are in a jazz vein— not necessarily swung, but in that style. And then there are some improv sections that are completely free and meant to be a sort of noise-ish sounding. Large chunks of the film I did as minimalist style. In the more important scenes I’m playing long patterns that repeat.

 Did you consciously think of motifs for each character?
I started out that way since the film contrasts three distinct cultures with the whole idea of the conflicts and resolutions among these three religions and cultures. I first attempted to write stylized themes for the main characters— a little klezmer thing for Nathan; a sort of Gregorian chant type thing for the knights. For me that kind of writing does not come that easily. I’m not what you’d call a world music composer. So I ended up scrapping that whole idea. And I really wanted to add something partly because of the 9/11 memorial, but partly because we have these three cultures that we’re dealing with. But now that it’s seven years later, we’re playing this particular performance in America, so I wanted to have a lot of American influence musically to tie everything together. That’s why I went with jazz styles and minimalism.

Carl de Vogt as the Knight Templar with Nathan

Do you highlight action in an obvious way or is the music more of a background?
It goes back and forth. I try not to overwhelm the film. I think the film is the most important element and music should underlay that. But especially in this movie there’s a big battle scene toward the top- there’s a lot of action and violence especially at the beginning of the move, and all of that stuff is fairly heavy and militaristic, in my approach to that. Then there’s other stuff that’s more subtle where I’m trying just to support what’s going on visually.  I’m hoping that it doesn’t overwhelm the film. My goal is to have everything, even the bigger stuff, underpin what’s going on visually and not taking over the visual aspects.

There seem to be two major schools of silent film scoring: one that underlines ever bit of action with a very distinct musical cue and the other simply attempts to offer a sensitive background. It sounds like you’re of the sensitive background school.
For the most part, though especially on this film I go back and forth. In a Keaton or a Chaplin when there’s a lot of slapsticky comedy it’s easier and more intuitive to bring attention to those actions and  have stuff that goes along with falling down or whatever happens. In a film like this you don’t want to make it comical. One can underline actions with expressive variation of the characters’ motifs— and I do that— there definitely are moments where I’m trying to capture the mood that’s going on.  There’s the whole thing between Recha [The daughter of Nathan] and Leu [who is the main Knight Templar, also known as Curd von Stauffen] where they’re trying to be lovers but they’re actually brother and sister-I definitely have a Recha theme. There’s a Nathan them which comes back in many forms depending on the mood on the screen. I do that. It’s not just background music.

Since this will be in the main auditorium at the Coolidge will you use amplification?
The bass will be amplified and the trumpet will be amplified for some stuff since he’s doing some noise effects, but I think he’ll play open otherwise. Percussion will be acoustic and I don’t think we’ll have problems with volume. We’ll be on the floor off in the corner so we won’t be blocking views

Sunday, September 11, 2011, 11:00 am
Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard Street, Brookline
German silent film with English intertitles
Tickets: $10 ($7 students/members)
Info: +1 (617) 734–2501 or

A special seminar on Wednesday, September 7 at the Goethe Institut, 170 Beacon St., will examine the play on which the film is based.

BMInt published a review here.

While Levine will continue in his position as Music Director, Fabio Luisi has been named the Met’s Principal Conductor, with the new appointment taking effect immediately. In April 2010, Luisi was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Met. He will replace Levine for most of the fall performances, conducting the new productions of Don Giovanni (premiering October 13) and Siegfried (premiering October 27), as well as the MET Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall on October 16.

“While Jim’s latest setback is hugely disappointing for all of us, he joins me in welcoming Fabio’s larger role,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s General Manager. “I am very pleased that Fabio was able to rearrange his fall schedule, and I appreciate the understanding of those companies with whom he was scheduled to conduct.”

In order to replace Levine, Luisi had to cancel performances with the Rome Opera, the Genoa Opera, the Vienna Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony.

“I am honored to have been asked to take on these additional responsibilities, but my thoughts are also with Maestro Levine,” said Luisi.

Luisi will conduct the first five performances of Don Giovanni on October 13, 17, 22, 25, and 29 matinee, and Siegfried on October 27 and November 5 matinee. Louis Langrée will conduct the remaining four performances of Don Giovanni on October 31, November 3, 7, and 11. Derrick Inouye will conduct Siegfried on November 1.

Levine hopes to recover in time to return to the Met in January for the new production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (premiering January 27, 2012), as well as for the full cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen in April and May.

Luisi made his Met debut in 2005 with Verdi’s Don Carlo and has also conducted  a new production of Richard Strauss’s Die Ägyptische Helena (2007), as well as revivals of Simon Boccanegra, Turandot, Elektra, Le Nozze di Figaro, Hansel and Gretel, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Rigoletto with the company. In addition, he has previously stepped in for Levine to conduct performances of Tosca (April 2010), Lulu (May 2010), Das Rheingold (March/April 2011), and, in the June 2011 tour of Japan, Don Carlo, La Bohème, and a concert with the MET Orchestra. He also conducted the MET Orchestra in concert with Natalie Dessay as soloist at Carnegie Hall in May of this year, again replacing Levine. This season, Luisi also conducts a new production of Massenet’s Manon (March 26-April 23, 2012) starring Anna Netrebko and a revival of La Traviata (April 6-May 2, 2012) with Dessay in the title role for the first time at the Met.

Luisi, a native of Genoa, is currently Chief Conductor of the Vienna Symphony and Artistic Director of the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. He served as General Music Director of Dresden State Opera and Dresden Staatskapelle Orchestra from 2007 to 2010, Artistic Director of the MDR Symphony Orchestra in Leipzig from 1999 to 2007, Music Director of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande from 1997 to 2002, and Chief Conductor of the Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna from 1995 to 2000. He has appeared with many of the world’s most renowned orchestras and opera companies, including the New York Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestras, NHK Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Vienna State Opera, Bavarian State Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Deutsche Oper, and Berlin State Opera. He made his Salzburg Festival debut in 2002.

Levine has had previous surgeries to address spinal stenosis, the most recent on May 31 and July 20 of this year. He is scheduled to conduct Götterdämmerung from January 27 to February 11, Das Rheingold on April 4, and three complete cycles of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen between April 7 and May 12. He is also scheduled to conduct concerts with the MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on January 15and May 20. Levine, who made his Met debut on June 5, 1971 conducting Tosca, celebrated his 40^th anniversary with the Met last season.

Li, who gave his first public performance at Boston’s Steinert Hall at the age of ten, currently attends Walnut Hill and studies at the New England Conservatory Preparatory Division with Wha Kyung Byun. As an avid chamber musician, Li is a member of the New England Conservatory’s Vivace Trio, which has played on “From the Top” on NPR and WNET as well as for members of Congress at the Senate Office Building in Washington, DC.

Next season will be extremely busy for Li, He will open the Young Concert Artists Series in New York at Merkin Hall, will make his Washington debut at the Kennedy Center, sponsored by the Alexander Kasza-Kasser Prize, and will appear in Boston at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. His Jordan Hall recital debut will be on Saturday October 29, 2011.

At ages six and seven, he won the Minnesota Music Teachers Association Piano Competition. He has appeared as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra as First Prize winner of the inaugural Cooper International Piano Competition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Xiamen Philharmonic in China, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Venezuela, the Boston and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestras, the Miami, Princeton, Albany and Lexington symphonies, and with “I Solisti di Perugia” in Italy.

The August 12 program offers Czerny’s Variations on a Theme by Rode, op. 33, “La Ricordanza”; the Beethoven  Sonata for Piano no. 23 in f minor, “Appassionata”; two Concert Etude of Liszt  — “Waldesrauschen” and “Gnomenreigen”; and the Schubert Fantasy in C major, Op. 15 (D 760), “Wanderer Fantasy.”

The Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts was organized in 1989 to “enhance the understanding and the appreciation of Eastern heritage through music and performing arts, to increase the visibility of Chinese music and performing arts through performances, to stimulate the research of Chinese music and performing arts, and to provide opportunities and assistance to young artists.” Since their founding they had presented over 90 concerts including Boston debuts of such famous performers as Lang Lang.

Joshua Weilerstein conducts NEC Lab Orchestra (Andrew Hurlbut photo)

New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert has chosen recent NEC graduate Joshua Weilerstein to be assistant conductor for 2011-12 Season. His responsibilities in New York will begin soon after he completes his duties as assistant conductor of Aspen Music Festival and School. This is very much a local story, since the twenty-three-year-old Weilerstein has received all of his professional training at NEC, beginning in the Prep School (class of 2005).  This past May, he received dual master’s degrees from NEC in orchestral conducting and in violin, which he studied with Lucy Chapman.

Chosen for the first class in NEC’s prestigious orchestral conducting program directed by Hugh Wolff, Weilerstein was awarded First Prize and the Audience Prize at the 2009 Malko International Competition for Young Conductors in Copenhagen. That win came just weeks after receiving his Bachelor’s degree in violin performance at NEC.  Weilerstein’s first-prize honors have included conducting engagements over a three-year period with major Scandinavian orchestras, including the Oslo Philharmonic, Finnish Radio Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and the Danish National Symphony. In June 2009 he made his professional conducting debut with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

He shares this honor at New York Philharmonic with fellow conductor Case Scaglione. “We went through an extensive search and are excited to have found two such accomplished and musical colleagues,” said Mr. Gilbert. “They are both extremely promising artists, and I look forward to welcoming them to the New York Philharmonic.”

Weilerstein will conduct the Young People’s Concert on October 15, 2011, and the School Day Concerts there on May 24–25.

In January 2010, he made a conducting debut with the Símon Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, at which the soloist was his sister, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, a member of NEC’s Weilerstein Trio. Weilerstein’s parents are both members of the NEC faculty. Violinist Donald Weilerstein, who was long-time first violinist in the Cleveland Quartet, now holds the NEC Dorothy Richard Starling Chair, and pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein directs the Professional Piano Trio Training Program,.

Publisher Lee Eiseman cannot resist using this opportunity to tell a story on Joshua’s father, Donald Weilerstein, who has a reputation as an absent-minded professor. It concerns an ice cream cone on a hot summer day. Seemingly this very considerate man was about to enter a shop with a sign warning, “No food permitted inside.” To comply, he supposedly put the cone in his back pocket. When Eiseman recently asked him if the story were true, Weilerstein responded with mock indignity, “You got it wrong. It was an ice cream sandwich — and it was still wrapped.”

Bang on a Can photo

The Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) is now halfway through its edgy contemporary music series. The residency concludes with the six-hour Marathon Concert featuring performances by the student/faculty ensembles on Saturday, July 30.  Meanwhile, there are daily performances in the museum galleries, free with museum admission. See BMInt’s “Upcoming Events” for details.

The twelve-hour Marathon Concert is the culmination of Bang on a Can. Vanity Fair described it thus: “Imagine Lollapalooza advised by the ghost of John Cage. There are other places to hear new contemporary music, but it is seldom offered with such a potent blend of intensity, authority, and abandon.”

Bang on a Can photo

This season the Marathon at Mass MoCA is presenting “a supermix of ear-expanding music from the edge,” by Conlon Nancarrow, Julia Wolfe, Christine Southworth, Luciano Berio, Dan Becker, Evan Ziporyn, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Edgard Varese, Osvaldo Golijov.”

Composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julie Wolfe created the first Bang on a Can marathon concert in 1987 in order to break down the barriers that separate musical communities. Instead of sorting music by style or genre or venue, they select by innovation— finding the rebels and restless creators not content to leave conventions unchallenged. Putting all these fresh voices next to each other on one gargantuan concert gives audiences the excitement of innovation itself. Its first marathon featured appearances by such leading lights as Steve Reich, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and Milton Babbitt, but most of the music was by the young and unknown. It is a formula that Bang on a Can follows to this day.

According to Adam Baratz’s BMInt’s review from last year, “Whether it came out of youthful rebellion, an attempt to cultivate a party atmosphere, or as a mirror of the pace of music after minimalism, Bang on a Can has long since passed from musical insurrection to institution.”

Davenny-Wyner Leads Rossini (BMInt staff graphic)

This is the niche adopted by Boston Midsummer Opera, and it is proving a welcome approach to, as they state, “ward off the summer doldrums.” BMO is offering Rossini’s “The Italian Girl in Algiers” — L’Italiana in Algeri — on July 27, 29, and 31 at the Tsai Performance Center of Boston University. Conductor of BMO is Susan Davenny Wyner, well known to Boston audiences.

BMInt: Why English?

Davenny-Wyner: “We feel it is important, for accessibility, to do opera in English,” said Davenny Wyner.

Why summer?

Throughout the country, opera is offered as a summer treat at numerous festivals, athough even the closest — Glimmerglass — is a bit of a trek. But opera is rather thin in Boston during the summer. (Some say, throughout the year.)

How affordable?

Fully staged opera is expensive to put on, so one might conclude there is an angel somewhere. “Absolutely not!” stated Ernest V. Klein, executive director of BMO. “We have high-level administrative help that work pro bono, and we are fiscally very responsible. We make out our budgets and we stick to them.

“Operas are simply yet imaginatively staged. Basically what we pay for are the singers, production staff, conductor, and artistic director.  We don’t have elaborate productions and costumes. Yet the quality of our productions is first-rate. We do not sacrifice the singing. We can do it because we get such good help.”

Initially trained as a violinist and violist, Davenney Wyner had an international career as a soprano before a bike accident in New York City damaged her vocal chords and she turned to the baton. Although a shame for the operatic roster, the has been successful; The New York Times described her conducting as “richly textured and emotionally compelling,” and The Boston Globe four times selected her performances of concerts and opera as among “Best Musical Events of the Year.”

Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri “is a comic masterpiece, not as well known as Barbiere de Seville but at least as good, if not better,” Davenny-Wyner told BMInt. “Part of the reason it is not performed more often is because some of the parts, foremost the lead Isabella, are extremely hard to sing.”

Davenny Wyner felt the key was finding the right singer for the lead Isabella, and she, along with Klein, believes they have, with Sandra Piques Eddy, “who has sung it all over the place.”

With over 100 Metropolitan Opera performances since her 2001 debut and engagements throughout the United States, mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy was most recently in Boston — her home town — for her role debut as Idamante in Boston Lyric Opera’s Idomeneo. Her professional concert debut was with Boston Baroque in Vivaldi’s Gloria, and she returned for its L’Orfeo, and L’Incoronazione di Poppea.

Winner of the New England Regional 2000 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and a national semi-finalist, Eddy graduated from Boston University’s School for the Arts with a master’s degree in Vocal Performance and was an apprentice artist at the Boston Opera Institute.

BMO states that one of its major goals is encouraging new talent, but, truth be told, this year the singers are a mix of those with established reputations and dossiers and those who are up-and-coming. Is there anyone in Boston who does not know of the skill and often comic artistry of David Kravitz? Bass-baritone Eric Downs is rising to the forefront of young professional artists with impressive alacrity. Bradley Williams is one of opera’s most sought after tenors in the bel canto repertoire.  The young American soprano Sara Jakubiak made her first Boston appearance as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni with the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra under Federico Cortese; she has performed a wide repertoire throughout the US and made her New York City Opera debut in 2010-2011 as Dede in Bernstein’s A Quiet Place.

A striking aspect of BMP is its long-standing collegiality. Klein co-founded BMO with Drew Minter, BMO’s director, and long-time colleague Pauline Ho Bynum in 2006.

By signing up with Davenny Wyner, Boston’s midsummer is the beneficiary.

BOC Falstaff Poster Detail

Since 2006, a scrappy young opera company, Boston Opera Collaborative, has been presenting grand opera on shoestring budgets at unconventional locations. The results have frequently exceeded expectations, looking and sounding far better that they have any right to. A production of Verdi’s Falstaff scheduled at the Somerville Theatre on July 15-24 is next in line for the non-profit enterprise, “dedicated to providing opportunities for emerging artists — including singers, directors, conductors, and theater technicians — to bridge the gap between higher education and a career in the arts. Members of Boston Opera Collaborative share in the management of the organization, developing their own skills as artists and administrators through productions and professional development.” BMInt recently interviewed Stage Director Heidi Lauren Duke, Music Director Mischa Santora, and Artistic Director David Gram by email.

BMInt: Verdi’s first comic opera and the second opera he wrote, Un giorno di regno, was a failure. He waited fifty-three years before setting another comedy. Falstaff is his last, and in the minds of some cognoscenti, his greatest, opera even though there are no memorable arias, curses, or elephants. It’s also not ha-ha funny. What makes it great?

H.L D.: Well, of course I would disagree strongly about the ha ha funny — our production will leave you laughing your opera glasses off! In fact, if any of your readers come and don’t laugh once, I will personally refund their ticket price (or refer them to my therapist).  How’s that? It’s also a great piece because Verdi wrote amazing ensembles in which people argue, yell, whisper, and exclaim exactly as they do in real life, but it always sounds bouncy and fun and lyrical at the same time. He also improved upon Shakespeare’s play, which I have also directed, by streamlining characters and side plots.

Boston Opera Collaborative has a propensity to produce operas on stages where operas have never been produced before. Why don’t you find a permanent home?

D.G.: Given the demands of the form and the nature of the work we are producing, finding a venue that not only fits within our budget but also allows us to employ an orchestra and “contain” the scale of the work we are producing … is always a challenge. It goes without saying that we’d love an artistic home. One of my goals as artistic director is to cultivate relationships with venues around town, so that we may not only reach out to a wider audience but also to help our own long-term production planning. Somerville Theatre has been wonderful in this regard, and we hope this is the beginning of a fruitful collaboration. We are doing a production at the Oberon (A.R.T.’s second stage) in the fall. We hope Somerville Theatre will be a place to return to!

The Somerville Theatre is an intriguing location. It’s a vaudeville house that opened in 1914. It’s perhaps the closest thing to an opera house that BOC has ever performed in. How does it sound and how will your Falstaff production look?

Kevin Kees: Falstaff; Desiree Maira: Quickly; Emily Burr: Nanetta (J. Justin Bates photo)

H.L.D.: The audience will come into a gold- and burgundy-curtained opera house, with a full balcony and orchestra pit. Set in the ‘Me” decade of the 1970s, this hilarious farce is an ode to Mafia dons, feminine mystique, boogie nights, and the dusk of Aquarius. And throwing opera propriety aside, you can bring the beer into the show and even have your own cup holder! There will be two intermissions, so lots of time for mingling, but the evening will still be well under three hours — much shorter than many operas.

The production is fully designed and staged by me and my brilliant design team, straight from Broadway, international opera, and HBO … Ada Smith, Scott Bolman, designer for Robert Wilson, and Andrea Lauer, designer, American Idiot on Broadway.  Ada has designed an ingenious set that flows through the six scenes, perfectly depicting the seedy underbelly of Falstaff’s gang as well as burgeoning suburban America. Things will get stranger in the last scene, so if you’ve never seen a disco boogie or roller skates in an opera house, you’re in for a treat!

I’ve done a lot of research on Verdi’s times and his letters. He was a modern man who wrote this opera for real people, to whom the audience can relate. Verdi and his Italian audience didn’t know any more about Elizabethan England than most Americans do now, and I don’t think he wrote it to be English. He wanted to use real rags on stage. He wrote characters with Italian blood, and that’s what our production reflects. You can read more of my thoughts on the subject here.

How big will the orchestra be? How will they be seated? Are all the players members of BOC?

H.L.D.:The orchestra will consist of twenty-three players including harp and percussion. They will play from the pit; they are not BOC members.

Tell us about the singers.

D.G.: Over half the cast is comprised of BOC members as well as many alumni. We are also fortunate to have a few guest artists join us. In particular, it’s important to acknowledge the work of our two Falstaffs, Kevin Kees and Dongkyu Oh, who anchor the show with confidence and a wonderful sense of play. I am extremely proud of both our casts, how they have attacked this show with vim and vigor. Their musicianship, generosity, and humor are to be admired and applauded. This is challenging work and they not only sound great, but they are having a great deal of fun too. I credit Heidi Lauren and Mischa for pushing the entire Falstaff ensemble as both musicians and performers.

H.L D.: Kevin Kees, whom I worked with in NYC on Ravel’s l’enfant et les sortileges, is one of the best acting singers I know. He is hilarious and charming and spontaneous. Dongkyu Oh is also an extremely charming, adorable Falstaff, and his voice conquers all. The featured women are a bouquet of beauty, wit, and sass. Nick Hebert is also a standout character tenor as Bardolpho. But all the singers attack this most difficult score with razor-sharp accuracy and sumptuous tone. You will want to join their party by the end!

See related reviews here and here.