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Month: August 2019

Chamber Music: Masters’ Youth

Chamber Music: Masters’ Youth

SANTA FE, NM—For a month every summer, the Chamber Music Festival lights up the scene with 45 concerts by 87 musicians from all over the map, sometimes twice a day, mostly at the inviting fresco-festooned St. Francis Auditorium. There the small ensembles serve up the three B’s along with many other post-baroque figures, right down to living composers John Harbison and George Crumb, often as seen from an East Coast perspective. I sauntered in casually for the Aug. 15 noon…

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PASSION-WROUGHT ‘JENUFA;’ A HOT-AND-COLD ADULT FAIRY-TALE OPERA

PASSION-WROUGHT ‘JENUFA;’ A HOT-AND-COLD ADULT FAIRY-TALE OPERA

SANTA FE, NM—-With new leadership at the helm, the Opera here is making news this summer with two shows for very different reasons: One, an emotion-torn, gut-wrenching “Jenufa” that was the summer’s runaway hit drama, the other a world-premiere fairy-tale for big people. The human tragedy “Jenufa” is built around the village saga of two dramatic sopranos playing the title role and the stepmother respectively: Jenufa, jilted by the playboy Steva and faced with disgrace for her birth out of…

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Getting Wet with the Festival Orchestra

Getting Wet with the Festival Orchestra

SANTA CRUZ, CA—“Astonish us!” That was the clarion call from Serge Diaghilev, the great impresario of a century ago, to his creative team of composers, choreographers and designers. It could also be the motto of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and its fans, focusing on assimilating new music for its long-established orchestral concerts on this bucolic seaside site some 75 miles south of San Francisco. The astonishing piece Aug. 10 was the overachieving Tan Dun’s Chinese opus. His commission…

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ORCHESTRAL FEEL-GOOD LOVE-IN

ORCHESTRAL FEEL-GOOD LOVE-IN

SANTA CRUZ, CA—Nowhere in my (seems-like) centuries of reviewing is there closer bonding between audience, orchestra, conductor and live composer than at this Cabrillo Festival, now 56 years old. Despite playing in a scruffy former boxing palace with steep stairways, and with musicians thrown together from all over the map, the fest is a feel-good love-in night after night, year after year. Virtually all the composers performed appear in person to introduce their music, take a bow and hug everybody…

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HIT OPERA: IDENTITY IN FLUX

HIT OPERA: IDENTITY IN FLUX

Faust is back again in a modern-day operatic setting with a female Mephisto, thanks to composer Jake Heggie. Is San Franciscan Jake Heggie the next Leos Janacek? In initiating ultra-dramatic opera when nearing the age of 60, Heggie’s path suddenly parallels that of that amazing late-starting Czech operatic master whose belated bursting forth had ushered in the 20thcentury. Heggie, 58, had already created several operas marked by fluid story-telling and lyricism but little fire. Now, for the first time, he…

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