In addition 2009 got us the San Francisco Opera live on a giant video monitor in AT&T Park, bringing the medium to the masses and the masses to the medium. Verdi and Puccini were pulling in 25,000-plus and evoking cheers for “Il Trovatore” (despite a deplorable stadium-sound system) and “Tosca.” Since 10 times as many saw “Trovatore” in the stadium vs. in the Opera House, the great interpretation of Sondra Radvanovsky’s Leonora on stage that night was largely wasted in sonic foofah.

            In more  modern opera, our local patrons and devotees were seen as far away as the Santa Fe (summer) Opera for the world premiere of Paul Moravec’s “The Letter,” a lurid colonial love-triangle-murder yarn starring Patricia Racette. The musical style is original, busy, tonal, constantly in motion, like some of the best film scores, while his plot is part melodrama, part soap opera, part opera noir. Meanwhile the most modern piece widely seen back home was the San Francisco Opera’s go at the black tragedy “Porgy and Bess” (1935), with soprano Loquita Mitchell unforgettable as a fragile, high-strung Bess. For an earth-shaking male voice, you had to catch the South African Johan Botha in the title role of “Otello.”

            In symphonic music, world music came notably to the fore. There was New Yorker David Amram’s piano concerto called, oddly, “Three Songs,” with Jon Nakamatsu as the Symphony Silicon Valley’s soloist, glowing with everything from jazz to ragas; and, at the Oakland East Bay Symphony, Nolan Gasser’s multi-cultural “World Concerto,” incorporating added instruments from India, China and the Arab world. And everywhere the sharp line between classical and pop is fading.  

            The composer everywhere at once had to be Berkeley’s Mason Bates, 32. He created an a cappella chorus “Sirens” for Chanticleer, preceded by an Alan Lomax tribute with the California  Symphony. And then, most significant of all, his eclectic mixed-media premiere “B Sides” with the San Francisco Symphony, which involved live electronics and Bates himself DJ’ing. When will our orchestras get more adventurous incorporating electronics like this with their ensembles? Or is innovation still a dirty word around the symphony halls?

            Santa Cruz’s Cabrillo Festival under the imaginative  maestra Marin Alsop could uncork three recent pieces that really spoke to me in a single  concert, penned by Magnus Lindberg, James MacMillan and Kevin Puts, all with different nationalities.

            From another direction came the Russian-German Sofia Gubaidulina, 77, a petite lady with a huge musical voice as represented by  “Light at the End” (2003) at the San Francisco Symphony. It was a mystical voyage full of uncertainty and two tuning systems, arguably the finest recent work heard in the area. She also contributed a thorny  (i.e., very difficult) violin concerto, with an incomparable Anne-Sophie Mutter as soloist.

            The San Jose Chamber Orchestra meanwhile premiered “Not the Object Alone” for string orchestra  by a Bay Area Korean-American woman, Hyo-Shin Na, incorporating some inflections of music from both musical cultures.

            In the choral world, we had Volti performing “Ecstatic Meditations” (1999) by Aaron Jay Kernis---very new music with very old texts penned by a 13^th-century nun. And the S.F. Choral Society unveiled Donald McCullough’s ambitious “Contraries,” full of the arresting imagery of William Blake’s poetry.

            Other categories of note:

            TALE OF TWO GYÖRGYES (GEORGES)---Kurtag. 80, and Ligeti both share the same first name, and the same national origin (Hungarian). When the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble played Kurtag’s miniatures, each lasting about one minute, it evoked comparisons to a similar aphoristic aesthetic in his late countryman’s piano pieces. Both brevities glow like jewel-bedecked necklaces. As Mies van der Rohe once said, less is more.

            BERKELEY CONTRASTS---The campus featured both vehement tuition-rise protests and  Big Game football rallies, while a  few blocks away, serenity and tranquility reigned with William Bolcom’s new (Nocturnal) Serenade No. 3 for oboe and string quartet, providing a curiously French neoclassical touch applied by a veteran and very American composer, who had attended That Other Campus (Stanford).

          SUBSTITUTIONS---There were several, including Gubaidulina’s work, standing in for an unfinished commission. But no one topped the 21-year-old Russian neophyte Nikita Abrosimov at Stanford University, standing in for his teacher in one of the most difficult of all the piano concerti, Prokofiev’s Second, and getting his audience turned on like a 1000-watt spotlight.

          THE BIZARRE---The Kronos Quartet’s recent play of the mystic Terry Riley’s “Transylvanian Courtship,” calling for custom-made string instruments having added trumpet-like bells to propel the sound farther, heard at Cal in Hertz Hall. They were truly weird in appearance, and metallic in sound besides.  

          THE ARCHIVAL---Finally, there was the archival discovery of some true gems: Chanticleer bringing out the choral lauds by the refined 16^th century Mexican composer Don Fernando Franco, sacred music in the Nahua language. These are apparently the oldest works by any bona-fide New-World composer using conventional music notation for the score. The fact it was in Nahua, not Latin, suggests that Franco had an indigenous chorus adept at Western music.

            Quite a year, quite an abundance!! And now I can’t wait to see all the wonders 2010 has to offer on our Bay Area concert stages.
        ©D. Rane Danubian 2009
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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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