2011 Reviews

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Review: Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot, with violin soloist Renaud Capucon

By Melinda Bargreen

Only two concert programs into the season, conductor Ludovic Morlot has already made it clear that he’s a man on a mission: to shake things up at the Seattle Symphony and drive the orchestra toward new standards of excellence.

Thursday’s opening subscription program for 2011-12 followed less than a week after the opening-night gala, for which the reviews varied from highly favorable to ecstatic (including Thursday’s laudatory summation in The Wall Street Journal). Like the gala program, the subscription opener was French-accented in several respects: the concerto was Henri Dutilleux’s “The Tree of Dreams,” with French violin soloist Renaud Capuçon, and the opener, Frank Zappa’s “Dupree’s Paradise,” was commissioned and premiered by Pierre Boulez.

The Zappa work, rhythmically complex with its constantly changing meters, sounds in part like Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” on hallucinogens – sharing Gershwin’s bouncy vigor, but a vastly different orchestral palette and melodic language. Morlot drew a nuanced, detailed account from the attentive, upbeat orchestra.

The maestro took to the microphone to introduce the Dutilleux concerto, pointing out some less-familiar instruments and some musical motifs employed in the piece. In one respect, this introduction is helpful to listeners; it’s also a clear indication that you don’t trust the work to succeed with the audience by itself. (Morlot also recounted that Dutilleux said he interjected a passage where the orchestra appears to be tuning up “because sometimes you don’t know what to do next.” That was clearly the case; this is a concerto that doesn’t know when to stop.)

Capuçon, a stylish and elegant violinist with a pure, silvery tone, played a series of virtuoso obbligatos and cadenzas over the otherworldly, shimmering colors and shifting dissonances in the orchestra.

One problem with shaking up a symphony audience is that you run the risk of leaving them “shaken, not stirred,” to borrow a cinematic phrase. Audiences want to be stirred – reached on an emotional level – as well as introduced to unfamiliar repertoire. At intermission, there were a few mutinous rumblings amongst the concertgoers, many of whose members were waiting for the more accessible harmonic language of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. Morlot did not disappoint them: the Beethoven was stirring indeed. Morlot led a high-energy reading of the “Eroica,” full of big dynamic contrasts, beautiful phrasing, and carefully characterized musical gestures. The orchestra gave him a big-hearted performance, with playing at a level that augurs for a thrilling season to come.

[Melinda Bargreen also reviews concerts for 98.1 Classical KING FM. She can be reached at mbargreen@aol.com.]

Review: Seattle Symphony’s Opening Night Gala with Ludovic Morlot

By Melinda Bargreen

There was Ravel’s “Bolero,” chugging its way forward as the entire Seattle Symphony plucked and tooted and sawed its way through the grand finale of Ludovic Morlot’s first opening-night gala.

And where was Maestro Morlot?

Midway through the Ravel, he left the podium, strolled into the first violin section, picked up a fiddle, and sat down next to violinist Mariel Bailey to play the music alongside the musicians, while Michael Werner continued the steady rhythm of the snare drum. (Morlot returned to the podium in time to coordinate the final explosion of chords, however.)

This was only one of a series of groundbreaking gestures that marked one of the more memorable opening nights in recent Seattle Symphony history. From the first notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the conclusion of the “Bolero,” it was an evening of electric excitement both on the stage and in the house, with standing ovations accorded to nearly every piece, to Morlot, and to cello soloist and Seattle favorite Joshua Roman.

It also was an evening that sent clear signals about new SSO music director Morlot, the diminutive 36-year-old Frenchman who succeeds the long tenure of the orchestra’s conductor laureate, Gerard Schwarz.

Morlot is a boundary-breaker, a man of the people, a guy who wants to shake things up and play to the crowds that don’t usually come to Benaroya Hall. He likes to chat with the audience, and ended up thanking everyone from his predecessors on the podium to the stage crew. Temporarily joining the violin section during the “Bolero” (he is said to be an excellent player) tells the world he doesn’t consider himself an exalted maestro, but a musician alongside other musicians.

And choosing a gimmicky, kitschy, but very fun piece like Friedrich Gulda’s 1980 Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra is a nod to another boundary-smasher, Gulda himself -- a composer who juxtaposed rock, minuet, march, jazz, improvisation, and polka elements into a hodgepodge of a highly entertaining score. It wasn’t a bad idea, either, to invite a popular and crowd-pleasing artist like Roman, who played the spots off the score and threw in a snippet of “La Marseillaise” during his improv cadenza as a nod to Morlot’s heritage.

Roman, who played an amplified cello, announced from the stage that he was first introduced to the Gulda work via a YouTube clip, and his immediate response was “Oh, yeah.” That was the audience’s response, too, to a virtuoso performance that included Roman’s spinning the cello on its end pin a couple of times. The standing ovation drew an encore, Roman’s favorite “Julie-O,” by Mark Summer.

The rest of the program can fairly be said to fall into the “bonbon” category, even Beethoven’s dutiful-sounding “Overture to ‘The Consecration of the House, the program’s only nod to “the classics.” It wasn’t the best effort, either, with some messy-sounding passages in the violins.

French-accented pieces concluded the program, with Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” as the more substantive. It also got the evening’s most interesting performance: Morlot led a reading that was light, fleet-footed, and buoyant and full of good humor. It seems clear that this “Frenchman in America” has earned a warm welcome in Seattle.

If Morlot’s arrival was propitious, there also was a decidedly less propitious departure: John Cerminaro has left the orchestra on terms that have not been disclosed -- a huge loss to Seattle music lovers. One of the country’s great horn players, and still at the height of his powers, Cerminaro has served as principal horn of the SSO for more than a dozen years. Finding his replacement will be difficult; finding his peer might be impossible.

Obituary: Vilem Sokol -- Conductor, teacher, violist, great human being.

By Melinda Bargreen

He was born in a log cabin in Pennsylvania, but his favorite place was on the conductor’s podium. Vilem Sokol, 96, who died of cancer on Friday evening in Seattle, was the beloved godfather of Seattle classical music and an internationally prominent conductor, professor and violist. As longtime music director of the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra and its Marrowstone Music Festival (1960-1988), and music professor at the University of Washington (1948-1985), Mr. Sokol shaped more than four decades of young talent, inspiring generations of students and listeners.

Even in his 90s, that craggy profile and thick, wavy hair made him instantly recognizable to his fans. Mr. Sokol couldn’t shop for groceries or enter a big warehouse store without someone calling out, “Mr. Sokol! Remember me? I was in your violin section back in 1968!”

The amazing thing was that he really did remember. Famous for learning the name of every player in every year’s fresh reincarnation of the Youth Symphony, Mr. Sokol retained details about a certain youngster’s solo or another’s life problems several decades after the fact. He influenced the lives of thousands of Youth Symphony players, and many thousands more at the University of Washington, where he began teaching in 1948.

He loved his music and his students. An adored father confessor figure, Mr. Sokol also was called upon for extra-musical advice, which the deeply religious conductor dispensed generously. The big Capitol Hill house where he lived with his late wife Agatha and their ten children was a mecca for kids, and the Sokols became used to the concept of the magically expanding dinner table as they fed the multitudes who always seemed to congregate at their home.

“I will always think of Vilem as a true 'Pied Piper' of Music,” said Robin McCabe, his faculty colleague and former director of the UW School of Music. “His warm and engaging personality was simply a magnet, and he reached out to transform thousands of students in his career -- he was a much beloved teacher. From the principals to the last stand of every section, every student in the Youth Symphony wanted not only to please Mr. Beethoven or Mr. Dvorak; they wanted to go the extra mile to please Maestro Sokol.”

Mr. Sokol was almost as famous for his repertoire of jokes and anecdotes as for his music making. Sometimes he was only half joking, as when he would announce to an out-of-tune second violin section that he was surely going straight to heaven upon his death, because he was enduring purgatory at the moment.

“He may have claimed he was in purgatory when we played out of tune in rehearsals,” said Terry Ewell, who went on to become principal bassoon of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, “but in concerts, he was in heaven. And so were we.”

Several years ago, Mr. Sokol explained his methods: “I'm very tough on them, but they know why. I tell my students, ‘Do you know why I want you to play so well? Because I love you.’ ”

Many Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra graduates now play in the Seattle Symphony and the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra; others have gone on to careers in such orchestras as the Orchestre de Paris, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Teatro alla Scala, the Boston Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Famous musical figures lauded Mr. Sokol’s efforts: the late composer William Schuman called his orchestra “a superb music-making organization that needs apologize to none in the technical and musical standard of its performances,” and late composer Alan Hovhaness described it as “a miracle everybody should know about and support with pride.”

Sokol's work ethic and family values were instilled by his parents, who left their Bohemian homeland in Czechoslovakia in 1911 and settled on a farm in Pennsylvania. He spent his youth helping his bricklayer father to load and unload bricks from railroad cars. When he was 10, young Vilem (nicknamed “Bill”) was taken to hear Fritz Kreisler, the famous violinist; Sokol began his own violin lessons soon thereafter, later switching to the viola. After schooling at the Oberlin Conservatory, the Juilliard School and the Prague Conservatory, Sokol served four years in the Air Force during World War II. Before coming to the University of Washington in 1948, he taught in Georgia, Kentucky and Kansas City. In 1945 he married his wife, the late Agatha Hoeschele, who was his staunchest supporter.

Mr. Sokol was concerned about all elements of society, not just the music scene. On Thursday mornings, he would regularly pick up bread, fruit and vegetables at area supermarkets to deliver to the needy. He gave freely of his time to students who couldn’t afford lessons, remembering the sacrifice his parents had made during the Depression years to give him music instruction.

A lifelong believer in fitness, Mr. Sokol swam regularly and did calisthenics. He also kept his mind active and was a voracious reader, preferring musical biographies and the works of Shakespeare – and the cartoons of his former Youth Symphony player Dave Horsey.

A special Youth Symphony reunion concert in 2003 of his former players reunited Mr. Sokol with hundreds of grown-up student musicians, gathered to perform again under his direction. One of them, KING-FM program director Bryan Lowe, said later: “He always treated me like a long-lost son, just as though I was such a special person in his life. At the rehearsal, as he scanned that huge reunion orchestra I could see that he felt that way about all of us, hundreds of men and women. Some of them were great musicians scattered through the best orchestras in the world, and he was proud of them. But I know he felt as much for those who became parents, lawyers, or bus drivers. Such love and caring. What a gift to all of us.”

At his 90th birthday party in May of 2005, Mr. Sokol reminisced with friends, fans and former students about the great works of music he had brought to life over the years.

“It is such a privilege,” he said, “to live a life in music and to bring music to young people.”

The privilege, Maestro, has been all ours.

Mr. Sokol is survived by his ten children, all musical: Mark Sokol of Sebastopol, Calif. (violin); Damian Sokol of Arrowsic, Maine (cello and piano); Anne Sokol Philpott of Indianapolis (violin, viola and piano); Paula Elliott of Ann Arbor, Mich.(violin); Angela Russell of Edmonds (cello); Rebecca Duncan of Shoreline (violin); Sr. Claire Sokol of Reno (cello); Mary Brown of Vancouver, B.C. (violin); Jennifer Sokol of Kenmore (violin); and John Sokol of Sarasota, Fla. (piano).

Jennifer cared for him with loving devotion in his latter years.

A funeral mass has been scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 25, in St. James Cathedral, 804 Ninth Ave., Seattle. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations in Mr. Sokol’s memory may be made to the St. James Cathedral Music Program at the above address, or to the Carmelite Monastery, 1950 La Fond Drive, Reno, Nevada 89509.

REVIEW: Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival (Eastside), Aug. 10

By Melinda Bargreen

It was one of those evenings you mark on your calendar when the festival listings are first announced: a concert lineup you don’t want to miss.

The Seattle Chamber Music Society’s last summer festival at the Overlake School (next year, there will be no Eastside presentations) offered an irresistible program for August 10th, starting off with a pre-concert recital of Brahms by pianist Craig Sheppard. The main concert offered two of the most-played and best-loved works of the chamber repertoire, the great Mendelssohn D Minor Trio (Op. 49) and the Dvorak Piano Quintet, all with stellar artists. And then there was the novelty of hearing one of the festival’s most valuable players, violist Richard O’Neill, in a rare solo opportunity: the Rebecca Clarke Viola Sonata, with Sheppard at the keyboard.

Temperatures were a bit chilly outside, but inside the hall, the audience was well warmed-up by Sheppard’s recital of Brahms Waltzes – 16 charmers, many of them performed as continuations of (and variations on) the same musical idea. There are big, splashy waltzes, full of Viennese dash; slighter, more wistful ones; and ones that sound eminently danceable (complete with a hesitation step or two).

Almost every piano student plays these waltzes, but not like this. Sheppard opened with an exuberantly speedy reading of the No. 1in B Major, shifting smoothly into the more reflective charms of No. 2 in E Major. Among the loveliest of this set was the No. 9 in D Minor, all lingering delicacy. And the soft-focus No. 15 in A-Flat Major sounded like the very essence of summer.

The main program opened with the arch-romantic Mendelssohn trio, with two powerful string players (violinist Ida Levin and cellist Ronald Thomas, both longtime festival favorites) and pianist Orion Weiss, whose stylish phrasing made smooth work of the challenging piano part.

The high-adrenaline evening continued with O’Neill and Sheppard in the Rebecca Clarke sonata, a challenging work that both players absolutely nailed. O’Neill’s honeyed tone and the lambent warmth of that lowest octave were bewitching to hear. His command of both fingerwork and phrasing makes O’Neill one of the most exciting violists around; he and Sheppard were certainly of one accord in all the performance details.

Finally, the Dvorak Quintet. When you have James Ehnes as first violin, you’ve just taken a major step toward an amazing performance. Ehnes (also the festival’s artistic advisor) joined violinist Scott Yoo, violist Che-Yen Chen, cellist Robert deMaine, and pianist Adam Neiman for a definitive reading of this beloved, ultra-popular chamber work (it’s gotten 14 performances during the 30 years of this festival). The energy was off the charts; the control and the musicianship were exemplary, and the performance galvanized the audience for one of those classic, standing-shouting-whooping ovations from an excited and thrilled audience.

A couple of notes, in conclusion: pianist Neiman used an electronic tablet instead of a paper score for the Dvorak, “turning the pages” himself (apparently with a foot control). In a piece like the Dvorak, which goes like the wind and requires lots of fast page turns, this technological solution looks brilliant. Let’s just hope the batteries are always fully charged!

And this year’s program notes, provided by Seattle’s Steven Lowe, are both witty and brilliantly lucid. Three loud cheers in his direction

REVIEW: Seattle Chamber Music Society, July 25

By Melinda Bargreen

It was chamber music heaven on July 25th in Nordstrom Recital Hall, from the opening phrases of Bach from cellist Johannes Moser to a fiery, incendiary main concert that made the audience temporarily forget an otherwise miserable day.

We had a new death count in the horrendous Norwegian terror disasters; desperate debt-ceiling discord in Washington, D.C a stormy end to the shortest (two-day) summer on record; and endless gloom from the Mariners, to whom the New York Yankees are currently being extremely mean. Not that all these miseries are comparable, but there was a sort of cumulative awfulness from near and far that would be enough to daunt the most cheerful.

However: We also had the Seattle Chamber Music Society, whose festival presented what I think I can safely call one of the greatest sonata performances ever given in this city. Violinist James Ehnes and pianist Jon Kimura Parker presented the challenging Prokofiev Violin Sonata in F Minor (Op. 80), in the kind of performance you wish you could take with you and listen to in your car, except that you might go off the road because this is music that demands complete attention.

Ehnes and Parker, both artists who began with this festival when they were barely out of their teens and have gone on to top international careers, absolutely own this sonata. They played with a level of absolute intensity and utter mastery that induces hyperventilation in the listener. From the spare, somber opening of the Prokofiev, dark and dangerous-sounding, Ehnes and Parker went on to playing of controlled ferocity and unearthly beauty. Ehnes’ muted scalar passages in the first movement sounded like eerie ghosts soaring through the hall; Parker attacked the keyboard in glittering cascades of sound that seemingly required the pianist to be everywhere at once.

The third-movement Andante temporarily moved the duo into a lush, delicious soundscape, for which Ehnes adjusted his vibrato to suitably romantic levels. (His sound is so beautiful that it is a pleasure just to hear him tune up.) And the finale (“Allegrissimo”) brought the players past any ordinary limits of what can be accomplished on those two instruments. The audience, which called the two artists back to the stage again and again with cheers and whistles, finally reeled dazedly out into the lobby for intermission. One thing’s certain: nobody needed any caffeine.

The excitement started long before, when German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser lit up the audience with the first of the Bach Suites, the G Major. The articulate cellist preceded the performance by a chat with the listeners, noting that if there are 10 cellists in a room, there will be 11 opinions about interpreting the Bach Suites. We’ll bet none of them would have suggested sticking the short, thorny Lutoslawski “Sacher Variations,” complete with quartertones and lots of lugubrious glissandi, right smack in the middle of the G Major Bach Suite, which is precisely what Moser did. Cellists and cello fans sat up as if suddenly stabbed. It was a cheeky thing to do, but weirdly effective. It helps that Moser’s Bach was thoughtful, imaginative, and exquisitely refined.

The rest of the program also had its joys. The exuberant Dohnanyi Piano Quintet in C Minor (Op. 1) got a huge-scale performance, launched like a rocket from the keyboard of Anton Nel. The pianist and the four string players (Erin O’Keefe, Aloysia Friedmann, Richard O’Neill and Robert deMaine) created an orchestral sonority in a reading that was full of zest and vigor. O’Neill’s gorgeous viola solo in the Adagio movement was a reminder of what a huge asset he is to every ensemble.

The finale, the Shostakovich E Minor Piano Trio (Op. 67), is one of the landmark works of the 20th century, searing in its impact: mournful, raucous, quietly despairing, and yet full of an almost frantic energy. From the hair-raising harmonics of the opening to the frenzied abandon of the final movement, this was an edgy performance that brought out the best in the three players (violinist Amy Schwartz Moretti, cellist Johannes Moser and pianist Craig Sheppard). The Scherzo movement shot past like a runaway train, as Moser launched himself at the cello, horsehair flying from his bow.

It was, in short, an evening few in the house will forget – proof again of the supreme power of music to jolt us out of our everyday lives, and into an entirely different world in which we are richly rewarded by the power of great talent.

REVIEW: Seattle Opera’s “Porgy and Bess,” July 30, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

Musicologists love to argue about the genre of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”: is it musical theater? Is it opera?

Seattle Opera’s new production of “Porgy and Bess” sweeps aside such questions with the real answer: it’s a fabulous show. And this production brings “Porgy” to life as never before in Seattle, with an ensemble cast that grabs your attention and your empathy, then knocks you out with the power of the singing and the acting.

Most of all, this is a show in which the all the singing actors, from the title roles right down to everyone in the chorus, work as a realistic unit under the guidance of stage director Chris Alexander, whose work at Seattle Opera just goes from strength to greater strength. No wonder the cheers rose loud and long from the audience when the chorus assembled on the stage after the final curtain; Beth Kirchhoff’s chorus is the backbone of this “Porgy,” and Alexander gives every one of those singers something meaningful and imaginative to do at virtually every moment. Nothing in all this activity, however, looks too busy or contrived.

And with John DeMain, a complete pro and an old hand at “Porgy and Bess,” leading the orchestra, the show had that enviable level of total musical security, beginning with the jazzy syncopations of the overture and extending to the uplifting finale. The orchestra played brilliantly for DeMain, from the brass to the banjo.

The set, a realistic and detailed evocation of Catfish Row, was designed by Michael Scott for the New York Harlem Theatre, and it was imaginatively lighted by Duane Schuler (never more so than in the opening scene, a tableau in which groups of singers suddenly “come to life” when they’re highlighted).

The cast, committed and energized and quite convincing, featured some imposing talent. Every once in awhile you hear a singer whose big aria hits you like a punch to the solar plexus; in this show on opening night, it was soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams, whose Serena was both vividly imagined and brilliantly sung. Her performance of the haunting “My Man’s Gone Now,” all passionate intensity and beautifully produced power, rocked the audience back in its seats. Williams is a former Seattle Opera Young Artist who has gone on to a growing international career, and it isn’t hard to see why she is in demand. She produces enough energy on the stage to light up a city’s power grid.

Gordon Hawkins is a familiar face on Seattle Opera’s stage, particularly in Wagner and Verdi roles, and the role of Porgy finds him at his best. He expertly conveys the character’s essential decency, his sadness and frustration, and his warmth that extends to almost every character on the stage. His Bess, Lisa Daltirus, has been heard here as Aida and Leonora (“Il Trovatore”); her voice has power, beauty and heft, though not always the ease that one would like to hear in this role. Daltirus does a great job of conveying Bess’ conflicting desires, her attempts to reform and to deserve the good opinion of the community. Together, Hawkins and Daltirus make a compelling couple.

Angel Blue’s Clara does a lovely spin on “Summertime,” and her Jake, Donovan Singleterry, has a lot of fun with “A Woman is a Sometime Thing.” They’re an appealing couple, and Alexander’s direction underscores this in a multitude of effective ways – making their death still more tragic.

As the action moves forward, you realize again how much tragedy weighs down the lives of these spirited Catfish Row neighbors. That’s why the earthy humor of Maria (Gwendolyn Brown) regularly brought down the house; she’s all about sass and attitude and the power of a woman who always speaks her mind.

This production’s Crown, Michael Redding, is a big jolt of testosterone, as the kind of guy whose sensuality Bess can never quite forget. Jermaine Smith’s Sportin’ Life is a wonderfully sleazy portrayal, full of sharp dance moves and cynical patter. The snappy choreography of Kabby Mitchell III gives the whole show a jolt of physical energy.

Appearing in minor roles, all excellent and all vividly characterized, are Michael Bragg, Michael Austin, Jimi Ray Malary, George Scott, Marlette Buchanan, Brian Simmons, Darren Stokes, Brandi Samuel, John Christopher Adams, Ibidunni Ojikutu, Ashley Faatoalia and Erik Anstine.

The production continues through Aug. 20 in McCaw Hall. Go, if you can; here’s betting tickets will be in short supply.

BOOK REVIEW:

“With Head to the Music Bent,” by Randolph Hokanson. Third Place Press, 5. Available at University Bookstore, Seattle locations.

By Melinda Bargreen

A 96-year-old emeritus music professor publishes his autobiography: highly impressive.

The autobiography turns out to be splendid, gracefully written, and full of telling details: an absolute miracle.

University of Washington emeritus piano professor Randolph Hokanson has accomplished just such a miracle, however, in his new book “With Head to the Music Bent.” The autobiography traces the pianist’s path from his early days in Bellingham, Everett, and Seattle through his enlightening years of study in England with Howard Ferguson, Harold Samuel, and Dame Myra Hess. There Hokanson watched a 24-year-old Alex Guinness play his first Hamlet; there he also attended concerts by Bartok and Rachmaninoff, and parties at which he chatted with George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton and Helen Hayes.

We see Hokanson in some highly dramatic contexts: in Germany just before the Anschluss, he attended a swastika-swathed performance of “Die Meistersinger” at which another of the patrons was Adolf Hitler. Heading back to the U.S. at the start of the war, Hokanson played a recital on a live NBC broadcast that opened more doors for him in New York. Soon, however, he was drafted into the Army in 1942, running an obstacle course and driving a Sherman tank, and climbing 35-foot telephone poles. Hokanson also trained as a French translator and was en route to that country when his ship was torpedoed out from under him.

It’s all highly dramatic stuff, filled with vivid details that will amaze the reader. Somehow Hokanson remembers how everything tasted and smelled and sounded; he remembers the dumplings in the kitchen and the linoleum on the floor, the tents near a pine forest in Marseille, and every hilariously inadequate piano he encountered on tour. He remembers the pianists he heard in concert, and what they played, and how it sounded. Throughout all this is a modest, even self-effacing tone to the narrative, leavened with plenty of humor (often at the writer’s own expense).

Seattle music lovers will be particularly interested in the section of the book devoted to Hokanson’s long tenure at the University of Washington, where he was hired by Dr. Stanley Chapple at a time when the School of Music was housed off-campus in an old colonial-style mansion. What followed is recounted in frank but fair fashion, including Hokanson’s estimation of Chapple: “He was a very gifted man, and one whom I came to think of as an amateur of genius, who had enormous enthusiasm for making music without a great professional drive for perfection, his motive being the immediate communication of joy to the audience.”

It was at the UW that Hokanson met the love of his life, the composer Dorothy Cadzow, whom he married in 1952. He gives the reader considerable valuable advice about teaching, and combining an academic career with professional engagements (Hokanson played 13 times with the Seattle Symphony, among many orchestral engagements up and down the West Coast, and regular recitals). Following his retirement from the UW in 1984, at 70, Hokanson continued his concert career, often also exercising his considerable talents as a lecturer and commentator.

After all these years, Hokanson is not only still an optimist, but also is one who has learned to distill and refine his good advice, and to appreciate fully the gifts he has received so many years ago from his mentors. Prepare to be inspired and delighted.

[Melinda Bargreen has been writing about classical music in the Northwest since 1975. She was classical music critic of The Seattle Times for 31 years, and contributes articles to that publication as well as to The American Record Guide, Symphony Magazine, KING-FM, TheClassicalReview.com, Seattle Opera’s program magazines.]

INTERVIEW: Toby Saks, founder/director, Seattle Chamber Music Society

By Melinda Bargreen

For the moment, all is quiet at Toby Saks' house, and the only sound is the gentle burble of the coffee maker as we grab some caffeine en route to an interview in the living room. But when it's festival time, the house is jumping day and night: Dozens of musicians stream in and out, practice their instruments in the guest rooms, rehearse chamber music together, gather around the dining-room table for meals, and whoop it up after yet another roof-raising concert down at Benaroya Hall.

It's noisy; it's hectic. But Saks, who founded the festival 30 years ago and is now celebrating her final season as its artistic director, truly loves the many sounds of her festival. That's why, when Saks' hand-picked successor, James Ehnes, takes over next year, there still will be lots of activity at the house Saks shares with her husband, the eminent gastroenterologist Dr. Martin Greene. She'll stay with the festival in an associate-director role, on hand for consultations and hosting and fundraising. And the house — where Ehnes usually stays when he's in town — will remain Command Central when it's festival time.

"I like round numbers," quips Saks. "I'll be 70 in January; this year is the festival's 30th season. I just felt it was the right time." (She will stay on at the University of Washington, where she is a cello professor and teaches music classes for non-majors.)

Meanwhile, Saks has programmed "lots of my favorite pieces" for this summer, the festival's second in the 540-seat Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall. It's a season that Ehnes describes as "a real blockbuster," containing iconic pieces like the Schumann Piano Quintet, Dvoøák's "Dumky" Trio, Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet, Brahms' C Minor Piano Quartet and Beethoven's "Archduke" Trio, plus a pair of premieres. An all-star artist lineup will include not only Ehnes and some spectacularly gifted fellow fiddlers (such as Stefan Jackiw and Augustin Hadelich), but also pianists Jon Kimura Parker, Anton Nel and Craig Sheppard. Saks will join in as cellist, but less than in the past.

"I'm not performing much anymore," said Saks, who originally founded the festival as a performance outlet to keep her connected to her many musical friends from the New York area. "My priorities have changed."

A musical journey

Saks, a prizewinning prodigy as a cellist and a student of the legendary Leonard Rose, has much in common with the Seattle Symphony's Gerard Schwarz, a former trumpeter who has just concluded a landmark era in 26 years as the orchestra's music director. Coincidentally, Saks and Schwarz were in the New York Philharmonic at the same time; their acquaintance goes back to their teens and continues in the present (Saks taught Schwarz's son Julian, now a successful young cellist).

Saks moved to Seattle a few years ahead of Schwarz, in 1976, joining the University of Washington music faculty and performing in some memorable recitals and chamber-music concerts. She raised two remarkable children, both successful novelists with wildly varying addresses: daughter Claire Berlinski, who has worked in Britain, Thailand, Laos and France, and who now lives in Istanbul; and son Mischa Berlinski, who has lived in Thailand, France and Italy, now a resident of Haiti.

Saks fell in love with her adopted city, but she also missed performing with her New York friends, a fact that was a major impetus for founding a festival here.

At that time, Saks says, she was "in complete awe" at the idea of putting on a festival with no prior concert-presenting experience. Board members stepped in to help, and "everything really fell together when "the incredible Connie Cooper [the executive director] came aboard." With the board and the staff taking on the fiduciary and organizational issues, Saks says, "all I've had to do is create programs and hire artists."

She has hired some 266 artists over the years, introducing to Seattle a cornucopia of talent that otherwise would not have been heard. Saks hired the young and relatively unknown pianist Jon Kimura Parker and encouraged him to enter the 1984 Leeds International Pianoforte Competition, which he won — launching a major career. Parker will be back for this year's festival on July 25, 27 and 29.

The Canadian-born Ehnes first came to the festival at the age of 19 in 1995.

"Right from the start, it was clear to me that this man is special," Saks explains.

"He has genuine charisma; he's sweet, honest, direct, tactful and also a well-organized businessman. If I could think of one person who could take this festival forward at least another 30 years, this was the one. I told him he'd make an amazing artistic director and he said yes. From that point on, it was a piece of cake. The board approved him right away."

A new era

The passing of the festival torch from Saks to Ehnes could serve as a model for all such transitions. It's not always this graceful; festival founders sometimes don't want to relinquish those reins. But Saks began planning her exit four years ago in favor of Ehnes.

A Grammy Award winner, Ehnes is so busy touring with his solo career that he says, "I've actually spent more days at Toby's house than at mine [in Florida] in the past year. I think it's going to be great to have something to anchor me, so I'm not just a wanderer. Being the festival's artistic director will provide artistic and physical roots for me and for [Ehnes' wife,] Kate. I'm very excited about all the possibilities for this festival, which already is one of the absolute premier chamber-music festivals in the world."

Ehnes is already busy programming works and artists for the next few years, but he admits he's very glad that Saks will continue to have a role in the festival she founded. "There is no need to reinvent the wheel," he says, "when it is rolling so smoothly."

Both Ehnes and Saks point to their audiences as their raison d'être. As Ehnes says, "The atmosphere at the festival is one of total audience involvement — they trust that they're going to love the music. So we have the luxury of programming interesting things because the audience is so invested in what they are hearing. Toby and I don't program anything we're not passionate about — and fortunately our audience also feels a passion for the music. I feel incredibly lucky to step into this situation."

And Saks, too, is happy.

"Life is rich now," she reflects. "I'm ecstatic that the transition has gone so well. Now I can be like a good mother-in-law, who encourages — but who also steps back.

REVIEW: The Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival in Seattle, Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., July 6.

By Melinda Bargreen

The musicians no longer wear white tux jackets, and the audiences no longer drift out into the lawns for lemonade at intermission.

But inside the concert hall, things are just the same: an exciting lineup of intimate and high-energy performances devised by artistic director Toby Saks, and an audience eager to appreciate them.

In those respects, it’s business as usual for the Seattle Chamber Music Society, which launched its 30th-anniversary Summer Festival this week in the Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall. This is the second year at Benaroya (the previous home was the sylvan Lakeside School), and clearly audiences are having no trouble making their way downtown.

The Wednesday concert lineup was an unusual one, to say the least: a relatively unfamiliar work by Anton Arensky (the dark-hued Op. 35 Quartet, which employs two cellos instead of two violins), followed by a piece usually considered the “dessert” of a festival program: one of the big piano quintets, this time the Franck F Minor. You don’t usually get dessert before intermission, though few would complain, especially with a performance this good. The personnel (violinists Andrew Wan and James Ehnes, violist Richard O’Neill, cellist Bion Tsang and pianist Inon Barnatan) pressed forward after a rather rocky start, shaping a reading of considerable energy and finesse.

Then afterwards came a two-piano second half, with the husband-and-wife duo of Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky playing some well-mannered but uninspired Dvorak (Op. 72, Nos. 6 and 8) and some white-hot Ravel (the composer’s own reworking of his splashy orchestral piece, “La Valse”). This piece starts out with some “Jaws”-like rumblings, rising to a full-scale orgy for two pianos – glissandos and arpeggios and glittering cascades of chords. The page turns were almost comically fast, as if the pianists were speed-reading their way forward. So many notes, so little time!

Looking ahead: Friday’s concert offers more novelties, after an Andrés Díaz cello recital that pairs a Bach Suite and Xi Wang’s “Rhapsody.” Among the likely high points: the Dvorak Piano Quartet in D Major, with the excellent Augustin Hadelich as the violinist. And next week’s three concerts have plenty to offer, starting off Monday with Hadelich and the ultra-talented Stefan Jackiw in Schubert and Mozart.

On July 13, it’s Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, and July 15 presents one of the most venturesome programs -- the world premiere of Laura Kaminsky’s “Horizon Lines” (for oboe, bassoon and piano), funded by the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Commissioning Club as a tribute to Toby Saks in her 30th and final season as festival artistic director. Check out the pre-concert recital that evening to hear an introduction to the new piece, featuring the composer and the three performer

REVIEW: Gerard Schwarz Farewell Concert, Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. June 16, 2011.

By Melinda Bargreen

It’s no surprise: Gerard Schwarz is going out on a high note.

Lots of high notes, in fact – not only in his farewell concert as music director (and more about that one in a moment), but also in a round of kudos and commemorations that were launched with the renaming of a block of University Street (between Second and Third Avenues) in his honor as “Gerard Schwarz Place.” Amidst the round of celebrations and gala parties, a new formal portrait of Schwarz was unveiled, a musical tribute in the form of a witty song by famed songwriter Marvin Hamlisch was played, and there was enough toasting to cause a temporary champagne shortage.

The end of Schwarz’s 26-year music directorship in Seattle was an echo of his first season in Seattle 28 years ago (when he was music advisor, and had not yet stepped into the directorship). That concert season began with Mahler’s First Symphony and ended with Mahler’s Second (“Resurrection” Symphony), the very work that was played in the current farewell concerts.

Programming the Second is always problematic because it’s not quite hefty enough to stand on its own, as a concert program in itself – but it’s too lengthy and too significant to share a program with mere “filler” pieces. This time, the problem had at least one obvious solution: the final piece in a remarkable and unprecedented series of 18 “Gund/Simonyi farewell commissions” by eminent composers, who all penned short works (in the neighborhood of five minutes) in the maestro’s honor. The last of the farewell commissions, by Philip Glass, bears the title of “Harmonium Mountain,” a phrase that recalls famous pieces by two other prominent contemporary composers, John Adams (“Harmonium”) and the late Alan Hovhaness (“Mysterious Mountain”).

As Glass’ familiar minimalist oscillations and arpeggios rose from the orchestra, there was ample time to reflect on the fact that after all these decades of prominence, Glass should have been able to evolve a little. This piece might have been written in the 1970s. Still, it was pleasant enough, and might well be a draw for audiences leery of more challenging harmonic structure.

Added to the Glass in the first half of the program was Schubert’s “Rosamunde” Overture, a tuneful score that got a well-mannered performance.

The Mahler was worth waiting for. Here Schwarz was in his element, shaping the overall architecture of this monumental symphony with a thorough understanding of the score and its possibilities. It was a performance in which many telling details were illuminated, but the overall shape of the music never got lost in all those details. Nor did Schwarz push the music for maximum volume, except in those moments (notably in the finale) when it was really called for. The brass section, both onstage and offstage, was called upon for some heroic work, and most of the time the call was answered – particularly in the case of the mellow and powerful trombones, led by principal Ko-ichiro Yamamoto. The third-movement brass fanfares were viscerally powerful.

The “Resurrection” Symphony is a huge score of great gravity, but some of Mahler’s most important points were made in the quieter moments. The Seattle Symphony Chorale, prepared by Joseph Crnko, shone with almost lambent warmth in the perfectly judged pianissimo passages. The first entrance of mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke was so resonantly powerful that I looked around for evidence of amplification (and found none). Cooke and soprano Angela Meade sang their solos with great tonal beauty, projection, support, and artistry. It’s hard to imagine better soloists.

The roar that arose at the end of the performance eclipsed the already-warm welcome Schwarz got at the beginning of the program. Again and again, he was recalled to the stage as the ovation continued. The maestro’s many fans must be glad to reflect that although Schwarz is stepping down as music director, he will not be gone entirely; he will return for several weeks each season, starting in 2011-12 and continuing for the next few years, as conductor laureate. That position was funded by Jack and Becky Benaroya, whose generosity made Benaroya Hall possible.

Gerard Schwarz Profile, June 12, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

Special to The Times

Twenty-six years.

More than 2,000 performances, rehearsals, recording sessions.

More than 140 recordings; 14 Grammy nominations; two Emmy Awards; too many world premieres to count.

And no regrets.

Asked if there’s anything in his Seattle Symphony tenure he’d do over, Gerard Schwarz thought for a moment, and responded: “I don’t think about do-overs. Everything is not 100 percent successful, but it is all a part of your experience and your life. There’s really nothing I’d do over: the way things have evolved, I think I was right. Everything I’ve done has been in the service of great music.”

Looking backward is not Gerard Schwarz’s natural stance; he is more interested in what’s coming next. But in these weeks, as his long Seattle Symphony music directorship winds down, national and international publications are focusing on the history of this city’s man of music with considerable intensity. Those 26 years are among the lengthiest tenures in today’s major orchestras – though Schwarz is far from the longest-running maestro (the late Eugene Ormandy, for example, led the Philadelphia Orchestra for 44 years, and such conductors as Seiji Ozawa and Leopold Stokowski held 29- and 28-year music directorships).

So how did it all happen?

Schwarz sits back in his Queen Anne home with a cup of coffee and considers his answer.

“I always wanted to be a trumpeter when I was a kid,” he reflects, “not a conductor; that was never of interest to me. I wanted to be in the New York Philharmonic.”

And he was – becoming the youngest co-principal trumpet in the orchestra’s history. He rose to the top of his profession, making solo recordings that are still considered among the finest available. That’s why few in the classical music world could quite believe it when Schwarz left the Philharmonic in 1977, at the age of 30. His reasoning was simple: The music had become more important to him than the instrument, which had a limited repertoire. Schwarz wanted to “delve into the great 19th-century repertoire” – works by Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, and Beethoven, among many others. He didn’t hedge his bets by trying to be an instrumentalist/conductor, that hybrid career that was becoming popular in the 1970s.

“I wanted to be taken very seriously as a conductor,” he explains. “I continued teaching trumpet lessons for a time because I had to have some income. But I didn’t want to be a conductor/trumpeter. I wanted to make it very clear that I was a conductor.”

Schwarz rose quickly to podium prominence, and was already music director of six orchestras or ensembles when he was called in to conduct as a replacement for Seattle’s previous maestro, Rainer Miedel (shortly before Miedel’s death in 1983). Schwarz had no idea of taking a job in Seattle – much less staying here for 26 years as music director.

“I wasn’t into longevity,” he notes. “I was in the Philharmonic for four years, and in the American Brass Quintet for seven or eight years. I had no idea of the kind of tenure and impact I would have in Seattle; I didn’t think about it. When you’re young, you do what comes along: ‘Great, let’s go to Seattle.’ But you don’t always think in terms of your career, of what this means for the future.”

And, indeed, some of Schwarz’s other appointments have not been all that lengthy. He headed the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for seven years, for example; the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for five, and the Tokyo Philharmonic for a specific three-year appointment.

If he wouldn’t redo anything here in Seattle, which aspect of his career here makes him the happiest?

“So many things!” the conductor responds. “That I was able to be here and raise my family here, with all four kids with us; that Jody and I were able to make our home here and lead a normal life, which musicians rarely have the opportunity to do. That I was able to make repertoire the way I do – I must have conducted 50 or 60 Beethoven’s Fifths – and make every performance meaningful.”

Not everything, of course, has been rosy. Most observers think it was Schwarz’s appointment of John Cerminaro as principal horn, against the recommendation of the orchestra’s hiring committee, that started a groundswell of discontent among some of the players. Some also were perplexed when a three-year search for a new concertmaster ended in an unprecedented four-way tie, finally settling on a player who wasn’t a candidate in the first place (Maria Larionoff, who steps down as concertmaster at the end of this season).

“The Cerminaro appointment was among the most important artistic things I’ve done,” Schwarz says. “He has probably done more to help the artistic growth of this orchestra than anyone else. John is a good friend of mine, but I have never made musical decisions in terms of friendship. I wanted him here because he is one of the greatest horn players that ever lived. Now we are playing, as an orchestra, like John; we know what greatness is.”

For players like principal flutist Scott Goff, who joined the orchestra in 1969 and has sat in the first chair longer than anyone else in the Seattle Symphony, it is Schwarz himself who has lifted the orchestra to its current level.

“This man is one of the great conductors of the world, and so many in this city and this orchestra haven’t the confidence and the perception to realize the great artistry that has been in their midst for the past 28 years,” says Goff, who will retire this month at the top of his game. “This orchestra is now recognized as great outside of Seattle. Jerry’s legacy will be the recordings, which document his artistic achievement and what he has done.”

Cerminaro agrees: “Everywhere I travel, people talk about our terrific CDs and distinctive sound. Jerry will be enormously missed – his vision, enthusiasm, and devotion to the SSO for over a quarter-century have been truly awe-inspiring. I’m sure we will enjoy his continued participation from time to time as conductor laureate.”

Looking back on his years here, Schwarz says it has been “an amazing trajectory. It’s like watching a relative grow up, having more depth and becoming more interesting. As long as an orchestra keeps growing and adding depth, why would anyone want to end that? You can’t make a real artistic impact in five years, not even in ten. The growth in the audience, the interaction with the community, have both flourished in the past five years.”

In addition to his more public work on the podium, Schwarz has involved himself with the community in a wide span of educational and civic activities that don’t get as much notice. A tireless advocate for contemporary music, he has conducted more than 100 world premieres in Seattle, including this season’s unprecedented commissioning of 18 short works. And, of course, there’s Benaroya Hall. Schwarz “pushed long and hard,” he says, for a concert hall to allow the orchestra to take that great leap forward, and his close friends, philanthropists Jack and Becky Benaroya, made the hall possible with an unprecedented gift of more than 5 million – committed during a fateful lunch at the Rainier Club.

Now, as Schwarz begins his third career phase, he will wear several hats: conductor laureate in Seattle (he’ll return to the Symphony for several weeks each year); composer (currently working on a band piece for Cornell); and director/conductor of an upcoming educational TV/DVD series featuring an “All-Stars Orchestra” of the country’s best players in great concert repertoire, in eight hour-long annual programs with many other enhancements.

“I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to do what I have done,” Schwarz reflects, “and I couldn’t do it without a lot of people saying yes. It’s been a phenomenal time.”

1 * * * * * * *

2 *A SCHWARZ TIMELINE

1955: Gerard Schwarz goes to a music store, rents a trumpet, and begins playing six to eight hours a day.

1958: Schwarz conducts his first orchestra as an 11-year-old at Interlochen Academy.

1965: Schwarz joins American Brass Quintet.

1972: At 25, Schwarz becomes the youngest-ever co-principal trumpet of the New York Philharmonic. His solo recordings make him internationally famous as one of the world’s top trumpeters.

1977: Schwarz leaves the New York Philharmonic, one of the youngest players ever to resign, soon thereafter selling his collection of trumpets – to take up the baton instead. Over the next few years, he becomes music director of New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, New Jersey’s Waterloo Festival, New York’s “Music Today” contemporary music series, the New York Chamber Symphony (originally called the Y Chamber Symphony), Eliot Feld Dance Company, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

March 7, 1983: Gerard Schwarz conducts his first Seattle Symphony concert, taking over for the gravely ill music director Rainer Miedel (who was in the audience for the concert, only 19 days before his death). Schwarz becomes music advisor of the SSO during the search for Miedel’s successor.

1984: Schwarz marries the former Jody Greitzer, flutist and daughter of longtime New York Philharmonic principal violist Sol Greitzer.

1985: Schwarz is named music director of the Seattle Symphony. He begins conducting the orchestra in more than 125 recordings, 12 of which earn Grammy nominations.

1988: A tour of Southern California earns kudos in the Big Orange’s press. Acousticians, including Cyril Harris (later the acoustician of Benaroya Hall), go along to hear the orchestra in acoustical settings other than the Seattle Opera House.

1994: Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts names Schwarz “Conductor of the Year.”

1995: Schwarz takes a three-year post as artistic adviser to the Tokyu Bunkamura Orchard Hall, where he designs programming and conducts the Tokyo Philharmonic.

1996-97: Schwarz sidesteps the orchestra’s union contract provisions and hires John Cerminaro, former principal horn of the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, as Seattle’s principal horn, delighting audiences but angering a sector of the SSO musicians (whose audition committee opposed Cerminaro).

1998: Benaroya Hall opens, the culmination of many years of research, study and fundraising – and a crucial lunchtime conversation between Schwarz and philanthropist/donor Jack Benaroya.

2001: Schwarz steps down as music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival, after nearly 20 seasons. He becomes music director of England’s Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (through 2006).

2003-04: The Seattle Symphony celebrates its centennial, and Schwarz takes the orchestra on tour to Carnegie Hall – and a standing ovation. Schwarz is picked by President Bush to serve on the National Council for the Arts.

2004: Concertmaster Ilkka Talvi’s contract is not renewed after more than 20 years, prompting a public spat (and private legal action). A subsequent three-year search for Talvi’s replacement ends in a four-way tie, which proves unworkable; acting concertmaster Maria Larionoff takes over the position (resigning in 2011).

2006: The Seattle Symphony board of directors votes to extend Schwarz’s music-director contract, which was due to expire in 2008, for three more years (through the 2010-11 season). Orchestra players opposing Schwarz express dismay and cite an unpublished musicians’ survey critical of his conducting. Two Schwarz loyalists in the orchestra report vandalism to their property. Meanwhile, violinist Peter Kaman sues the orchestra, saying Schwarz harassed and discriminated against him on the basis of a disability. (The case was dismissed by King County Superior Court in early 2008.)

2007: Schwarz and glass artist Dale Chihuly collaborate for a landmark Benaroya Hall production of “Bluebeard’s Castle” that draws raves from audiences and reviewers. Chihuly is later named the Seattle Symphony’s first “Artist in Association.”

2008: Schwarz announces that he will leave his Seattle Symphony post at the end of his current contract, returning for shorter terms as Conductor Laureate for three more seasons.

2010: Schwarz inaugurates the unprecedented Gund/Simonyi Farewell Commissions of 18 eminent composers, each writing a short piece to be premiered during Schwarz’s final season as music director (2010-11).

Review: Seattle Symphony with Gerard Schwarz and two world premieres (June 5, 2011)

By Melinda Bargreen

It was the first hot-weather weekend in Seattle for many months, and the Seattle Symphony was offering two world premieres. You’d figure the hall would be empty, right?

Wrong. A good-sized and very engaged audience showed up to hear the June 5 program, offering up enthusiastic applause for the premieres and a standing ovation for the newest work by resident composer Samuel Jones. This is the final month in an epochal change at the Seattle Symphony: not only Gerard Schwarz’s last month as music director, but also the retirement of Jones in his resident-composer post. The twinge of nostalgia in the air was amplified by the dedication of Sunday’s concert to the late Althea Stroum, a longtime patron of the orchestra.

Althea was funny, gracious, frank, strong-minded, and a genuine music lover. She and her late husband Samuel Stroum, a philanthropist and a larger-than-life figure whose financial savvy and business clout helped save the fiscally beleaguered Symphony back in the 1980s, were people who genuinely made a difference in this community.

The concert in her memory did Althea Stroum proud. It opened with one of the series of 18 short pieces in the Gund/Simonyi Commissions honoring Schwarz’s last season, by composer Paul Schoenfield, whose work has been often performed and much admired in Seattle. A jazzy, fast-paced work called “Freilach” (from the Yiddish word “freilech,” meaning “joyful”), the new pieces is squarely in the idiom that Schoenfield’s fans have grown to love: a combination of “serious” and decidedly “unserious” music, always rhythmically tricky and full of zest.

The new Jones work was commissioned by Charles and Benita Staadecker, David E. Gannett, Jerald Farley, Michael and Leslie Whalen, and Robert and Gail Stagman – a terrific way to get a new work off the ground, without the entire financial weight of a commission being borne by a single individual or couple. The commissioners requested a work describing the special relationship of fathers and their daughters, and Jones (himself the father of two daughters) responded with a five-movement orchestral suite of considerable beauty and distinction.

“Reflections: Songs of Fathers and Daughters” vividly depicts, through Jones’ command of the full orchestral palette, the various stages in the father-daughter relationship from birth to adulthood, with each vignette introduced by a glissando that feels like a “dissolve” of the previous picture into a new one. It’s artfully done, and extremely moving. Schwarz and the orchestra gave the music its full due.

Pianist William Wolfram, another artist who has become a fairly familiar figure in Seattle, took center stage for a competent and effective performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major. It’s a work full of big moments, and Wolfram rose to the occasion, but he made some of the best interpretive statements in the quieter and more delicate passages where Liszt forgoes the bombast and courts lyricism instead.

The finale was one of Shostakovich’s undisputed masterpieces, the Symphony No. 10 – a work that appeared not long after the death of the composer’s persecutor and near-nemesis, Josef Stalin. Shostakovich had incurred Stalin’s enmity on more than one occasion, and lived in constant fear of denunciation, so it is not surprising that there is a certain savage joy in this score as the composer marks the death of the dictator. Shostakovich returns over and over again to his musical “signature,” a series of four notes that spell out the German transliteration of his name as “D-S-C-H” (Dmitry Schostakowitsch, as it is spelled in German, a language in which “S” signifies E-flat and “H” means B-natural).

Schwarz and the orchestra gave a performance of tremendous intensity, marked by terrific solo work from John Cerminaro (horn), Laura DeLuca (clarinet), Ben Hausmann (oboe), Seth Krimsky (bassoon), Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby (piccolo) and Scott Goff (flute), among several others. It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast to the joyous Schoenfield opener, the radiantly reflective Jones piece, and the voluptuous romanticism of the Liszt concerto. This was a big, big program that hit many emotional and musical bases, and hit them right on target.

Review: Seattle Symphony with Gerard Schwarz and two world premieres (June 5, 2011)

By Melinda Bargreen

It was the first hot-weather weekend in Seattle for many months, and the Seattle Symphony was offering two world premieres. You’d figure the hall would be empty, right?

Review: Seattle Symphony Mainly Mozart Series, May 19, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

It was not “Mainly Mozart,” but “Mozart in the Minority,” at the Seattle Symphony’s series of the former name on May 19-21. The program offered Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave” Overture and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8, along with a single work of the divine Amadeus (the Violin Concerto No. 4, K.218).

But with such enticing Mozart as emerged from the bow of young violin soloist Alina Ibragimova, the large audience for the May 19 opener had little complaint. Indeed, Ibragimova got a standing ovation for her imaginative, occasionally quirky performance, where she seemed in excellent accord with the program’s conductor, Christian Knapp.

Now in her mid-20s, the Russian-born Ibragimova is an engaging figure on the stage, where she played with panache and every evidence of enjoyment. After a few ill-judged intervals in the opening statement of the concerto, Ibragimova found her stride, and gave a technically assured performance full of character and color. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that she’s also lovely to look at and fun to watch.

Conductor Christian Knapp is a familiar face to Seattle Symphony fans, who have watched him evolve from the rank of assistant to associate conductor at the Symphony, and finally on to a globe-trotting career that has spanned South Africa, London, Australia and Russia. (He recently conducted two operas at St. Petersburg’s famous Mariinsky Theater.) Knapp, too, is fun to watch, conducting with such swooping energy that you almost expect him to levitate to the Benaroya Hall ceiling.

Dealing with a smaller version of the Seattle Symphony (the rest of the band is across town playing Seattle Opera’s “The Magic Flute”), Knapp took a fleet, pliant approach to the concert’s opener, Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave” Overture. He changed the orchestra’s usual configuration, with the second-violin and cello sections trading places so that the first and second violins played side by side, and moved the double basses behind the cellos. The arrangement certainly worked well in terms of ensemble unanimity; the orchestra played with a responsive energy that gave Knapp plenty to work with, including some tremendous dynamics contrasts.

Knapp and the orchestra polished up that little gem, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8, with an attentive performance that reminded the listeners that Beethoven’s even-numbered symphonies (often neglected in favor of the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth) also have their charms.

Some of the finest moments came in the wonderfully buoyant opening Allegro vivace e con brio and the witty precision of the second movement. Nice solo work from John Cerminaro, Christopher Sereque and Paul Rafanelli added considerably to the performance. Knapp made the most of the contrasts, the accents, and all the quirky character of this score, and the orchestra followed him with alacrity.

Review: Seattle Opera’s “The Magic Flute,” May 7, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

Could it be any more charming?

Probably not. Seattle Opera’s production of “The Magic Flute” has a sky-high Adorable Quotient, with a visually delightful show that offers substantial musical rewards from both cast and orchestra.

The Mozart classic, which opened May 7 and runs through May 21 in Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, is another triumph for the popular stage director Chris Alexander. Clever, witty, brilliantly balanced between the stylized and the utterly fresh, Alexander’s staging has the Three Spirits zooming onstage on their silver skateboards, and a set of optical-illusion brooms sweeping the villains off into the wings. Alexander’s influence is everywhere, even in scenes where the usually static chorus of Sarastro’s noble order indicates heartfelt commitment by singing with real animation and gesture.

And near the end, when the bird-catcher Papageno and his female counterpart Papagena fall in love and plan their future family, the sequential arrival onstage of adorable feathered “offspring” raises such happy pandemonium in the audience that it almost overpowers the musical values going forward.

Almost, but not quite. That balance is one of the chief successes of this production, in which Mozart’s sublime music and sometimes-dotty libretto are performed with considerable flair by excellent musical forces. The conductor, Gary Thor Wedow, has done very fine work here before, but this is his most impressive Seattle Opera outing thus far. With a fleet, agile orchestra zipping along while solidly supporting the singers and chorus, “The Magic Flute” has never seemed so seamless and so speedy. (The running time is about three hours; the opening night curtain was delayed to accommodate traffic from the closure of Mercer Street ramps to I-5, many patrons’ usual access to McCaw Hall.)

Wedow has also researched the libretto (in which the spoken passages have taken various forms over the years) and made some changes in the version that is usually performed, even in some of the major arias. The biases of Mozart’s time and of Sarastro’s order – anti-Moorish, anti-feminist – come through loud and clear, though translated captions (by Jonathan Dean) such as “Women chatter much but accomplish little” are more likely to provoke laughter than dudgeon in today’s audiences.

Of course, the visuals of this production are enhanced in no small measure by the spectacular costumes of famous British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes. Vivid, iridescent colors explode all over the stage in the opulent gowns, bizarre headdresses and multicolored feathers that make a continual feast for the eye. Egyptian motifs (the plot revolves around a noble order of the ancient Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris) are suitably pervasive in pyramids, triangles, hieroglyphics, jackals’ heads (symbols of the Egyptian god Anubis) and the Eye of Horus, which is plastered across the bodices of the women choristers. Some of those choral costumes are a bit over the top, too, as if designed for a platoon from the planet Klunaad in a “Star Trek” episode.

Robert Dahlstrom’s ingenious and handsome sets, created with Robert Schaub, made effective use of pyramid motifs (with triangular openings and closings of curtains), and also set the storybook-fantasy tone of the production. You knew it was going to be a fun evening when the spectacular Act I “serpent” expires in a puff of smoke after comically protracted death throes.

All this sets the stage for a remarkably good cast, starting off with the adroit, assured Three Ladies (Anya Matanovic, Marcy Stonikas and Lindsey Anderson) and the stalwart Tamino of John Tessier. Tessier is a real Mozart tenor, with a clear, unfussy, beautiful timbre and an agility that navigates the tricky score with apparent ease. His more flawed (but more human) counterpart, Philip Cutlip as Papageno, was a comic delight on the stage, and just as easy on the ear as was Tessier. Ana Maldjian was a lovely Papagena.

Soprano Christine Brandes has made a large part of her career as an early-music specialist, and the purity of her vocal production serves her extremely well here as Pamina. Brandes has a big but supple voice with a ringing top, and an absolutely secure sense of performance style. She’s also a compelling actress.

Doug Jones is a vivid, energetic Monostatos (and he’s blue, just like the characters of James Cameron’s “Avatar”). Philip Skinner is a convincing Speaker; John Christopher Adams and Jonathan Silvia are quite good as the Armed Men. The charming Three Spirits are Casi Goodman, Benjamin Richardson, and Alissa Henderson – all three of them singing like angels. Ilya Bannik’s Sarastro was a bit uneven and underpowered in the deeper notes of the bass register, where so much of Sarastro’s music lies.

The audience went wild for Emily Hindrichs’ Queen of the Night – as well it might. A riveting actress, Hindrichs poured on the firepower in the terrifying pair of arias Mozart allotted to his most memorable villainess. Clear right up to the high Fs, powerful, accurate, and musical: the Queen doesn’t get much better than this.

If you can get tickets, this is a production not to miss, one that will delight all generations of the family.

Review: The Seattle Symphony Orchestra, with guest conductor Jakub Hrusa and piano soloist Vladimir Feltsman; Benaroya Hall, May 5, 2011.

By Melinda Bargreen

Three decades separate the young Czech conductor Jacob Hrusa and the veteran Russian-born pianist Vladimir Feltsman. But the expressive conductor and the exuberant soloist were certainly on the same page Thursday evening, in the first of four Seattle Symphony performances of a program featuring the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1. Brash, occasionally raucous, and undeniably challenging, this youthful concerto found Feltsman at his most expressive, and he played with evident enjoyment (as well as the occasional hamming-it-up gesture).

Feltsman plays just about everything brilliantly, from baroque to contemporary, but he has a special affinity for Russian repertoire. Here he got the balance just right between the acerbic quasi-military passages and the more tragic quality of the Lento waltz movement. The orchestra’s principal trumpet, David Gordon, shone in his prominent solo passages. And Hrusa impressively coordinated both featured players and orchestra in a score filled with manic passages that thunder off like a runaway freight train.

Hrusa, in fact, was impressive throughout the evening for his impeccable control, expressive interpretations, and colorful, detailed approach to the four works on the program. It was an unusual concert in that the orchestra was about half its normal size (the other players are engaged in Seattle Opera’s production of “The Magic Flute,” which opens Saturday). That’s just the right size for classical repertoire (like the finale, Haydn’s Symphony No. 60), and also for the picturesque works of two 20th-century composers, Bohuslav Martinu (“Toccata a due canzoni”) and Arthur Honegger (the sensuous, summery “Pastorale d’ete”).

The rarely-heard Martinu work was the curtain-raiser, composed with a full, rich musical palette in an assortment of historical styles. The “Toccata a due canzoni” features a prominent piano part, played so well by Kimberly Russ that the conductor dove into the orchestra during the final applause to propel her to the front of the stage.

The Haydn symphony – a work full of musical jokes -- got a precise, vivid reading, with Hrusa indicating a progressive diminuendo by drooping like a wilting flower. The players seemed to be having as much fun as the cheering audience.

Review: Yevgeny Sudbin, pianist, in Presidents Piano Series Recital, Meany Theater, April 20.

By Melinda Bargreen

Any pianist who packs his recital program with the likes of a Liszt Transcendental Etude and Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” is a pianist in full “take no prisoners” mode. In these works, plus two of Chopin’s beloved Ballades and other works of Shostakovich and Haydn, the Russian-born Yevgeny Sudbin displayed a technique more than equal to even the most fearsome keyboard challenges.

Fortunately, he had more than technique to display. This young Russian-born artist, who bears a slight resemblance to the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, is no stranger to Seattle concert halls (where he has appeared in a previous President’s Piano Series recital at Meany, and also with the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall), and each time he gives us more to discover. Sudbin’s April 20 program started off with a sparkling account of Haydn’s Sonata in B Minor (Hob. XVI:32), so full of inventive variety in phrasing and dynamics and pedaling that the attentive audience was stirred to more than the usual polite applause accorded to a Haydn sonata. (Sudbin has recently recorded a very successful Haydn album, not surprisingly.)

The four little Shostakovich Preludes that followed were almost a lampoon of the orderly harmonic world of Haydn; Sudbin gave them lots of character and bite.

The last two of Chopin’s four Ballades are large-scale, beautiful works that show nearly everything a pianist can do – and few do them as well as Sudbin. The problem with these readings, however, seemed to be an air of over-refinement and reticence, overcome only occasionally (as in the finale of the F Minor Ballade) with an explosion of aggressive speed that obscured many of the beautiful progressions and melodies in a mass of notes that were simply too fast to hear.

In the second half, Sudbin was at his best in Liszt’s Transcendental Etude No. 11, “Harmonies du soir,” which rose from a poetic opening to passages of genuinely titanic outbursts. In Ravel’s “Gaspard de la nuit,” Sudbin showed the tremendous control and incisive technique required to make a success of this devilishly difficult three-part work. By turns subtle and explosive, the performance was almost impossibly clean, even in the “Scarbo” finale, and it brought the Meany audience to its feet. Sudbin responded with two Rachmaninoff Prelude encores (a composer for whom he feels an obvious affinity). The second encore, the G Minor Prelude (Op. 23, No. 5), was a little hurried and careless, but that first encore – the G Major Prelude (Op. 32, No. 5) – was magical: glowing, lambent, subtle. This was Sudbin at his very best, laying aside that fabulous technique for a moment, and lavishing his attention on something simple but lovely.

Review: Seattle Symphony with Leila Josefowicz and Alexander Mickelthwate; Benaroya Hall, April 9.

By Melinda Bargreen

Every symphonic concert is like a recipe: change the ingredients, and you get an entirely different product. This is true with the current Seattle Symphony program featuring violinist Leila Josefowicz and guest conductor Alexander Mickelthwate. The conductor, who stepped in recently when the previously scheduled Mark Wigglesworth withdrew from all his April engagements, kept two-thirds of the original program, but swapped out the planned Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 3 for the same composer’s Symphony No. 2.

The results were interesting, to say the least. The first half of the evening was plagued by ensemble problems; the opening Ravel “Mother Goose” Suite had some lovely moments, but also passages where, for example, the first and second violins were so unsynchronized that parallel thirds sounded like syncopations.

The Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1, a youthful work full of exuberant energy, had a stylish and equally exuberant soloist in Leila Josefowicz. She has recorded this concerto, and it suits her aggressive, lively playing style quite well, though she had some difficulty keeping the double-stops in tune during Thursday night’s performance. She and Mickelthwate, however, seemed to have different ideas about tempo and ensemble, and for part of the concerto, it sounded as if Josefowicz was dragging the conductor and orchestra along with her, urging them to keep up.

The music director of the Winnipeg Symphony and a guest maestro of such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Toronto Symphony and Atlanta Symphony, this young German-born conductor is a graceful figure on the podium. He conducts in huge, circular gestures, with the left arm mostly mirroring the right (with occasional cueing and expressive gestures), and he is most effective in lyrical passages where he lets the orchestra soar. His approach worked less well in the Prokofiev Concerto.

After intermission, it was another story. The Rachmaninoff Second Symphony would seem to be one of Mickelthwate’s specialties; it’s a piece in which he seems perfectly at home, and he elicited a beautiful performance from the Seattle Symphony players. They played with considerable freedom, particularly in the third (Adagio) movement, the emotional heart of the work. The orchestra soloists rose to the occasion, with particularly nice performances from most of the principals; Christopher Sereque had some beautiful moments in the Adagio, and John Cerminaro’s horn solos were beyond praise.

The fourth and last movement of the Rachmaninoff sounds so much like the finales of all his piano concertos that you almost expect to see a nine-foot Steinway whisked in from the wings. Mickelthwate and the orchestra sailed through the grandiose, warm-hearted Allegro Vivace finale with an alacrity that brought the Benaroya Hall audience to its feet.

Review: “For A Look or a Touch,” one-act opera by Jake Heggie, presented by Seattle Men’s Chorus (Dennis Coleman, conductor), April 2-3, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

It’s been four years since Seattle’s Music of Remembrance commissioned a remarkable work from today’s hottest opera composer, Jake Heggie. “For a Look or a Touch” was inspired by the arrest and internment of about 100,000 homosexual men and women during the Holocaust (and the subsequent extermination of as many as 15,000 of them). The resulting chamber work , performed by baritone Morgan Smith and the late, unforgettable Julian Patrick, was a powerful piece based on the journal of Manfred Lewin, a gay German poet who was among those who were murdered.

Now, Heggie and his lyricist Gene Scheer have expanded the work into a one-act opera for the Seattle Men’s Chorus, which premiered the new version April 2-3. The stunned reception of the performance I heard (April 3) had the audience sitting in shocked silence for a few moments before the resounding standing ovation began.

The focus is still on the two central characters: Manfred, who appears one evening as a youthful ghost to his former lover, the survivor Gad, who now has grown old.

But now the work has grown larger and more complex, and even more affecting. Powerful as the original version of “For A Look or a Touch’ was, the new version is stronger yet, and -- of course -- the Seattle Men’s Chorus is the reason why. This huge group massed on the stage symbolically represents the thousands who disappeared (“one at a time,” as the libretto reminds us). Their voices, in new choral material added by Heggie, recreate the giddy pre-war “Cabaret” era when anything went (illustrated by the Captain Smartypants ensemble), and then the horrors of internment and torture.

New production values add tremendously to the overall effect. Andrew Russell’s canny stage direction hits all the right notes, and goes straight for the gut in harrowing effects (no one in the house will soon forget that giant hook slowly descending to the stage, slowly rising again with a prisoner in symbolic torture). Projected photos of the real imprisoned and murdered are gradually extinguished as the Chorus sings “one by one”; lighting designed by Peter Bracilano underscores the harsh and sinister milieu. Conductor Dennis Coleman leads the Chorus and the instrumental ensemble with a sure hand for balances, timing, and nuance.

It is hard to imagine anyone taking the role of the ghostly Manfred with anywhere near the success of baritone Morgan Smith, who has sung “Don Giovanni” for Seattle Opera and is now in demand all over the world. The sheer and absolute beauty of sound he produces commands the listener’s ear; he’s an intelligent singer, too, and a compelling actor. In the speaking role of Gad, actor David Pichette takes tremendous risks, and conveys the character’s weariness and torment while engaging in joyous flashbacks to a happier past.

If you were in the house, you won’t forget the occasion. As Morgan Smith sings Manfred’s repeated motif, “Do you remember?” the audience remembers, too.

Review: American Handel Festival, “Acis and Galatea,” March 25

By Melinda Bargreen

It was Handel Heaven.

The buzz was electric inside Town Hall Seattle, when an enraptured, near-capacity crowd heard, saw, and cheered the Boston Early Music Festival’s presentation of Handel’s “Acis and Galatea.” The event was presented as part of the American Handel Festival, a 17-day, 30-concert Handelpalooza that’s giving Seattle music lovers an opportunity to hear world-class performances of some great, seldom-heard works.

Is “Acis and Galatea” a masque, a pastoral, a chamber opera? It has elements of all three, but the terminology is not really important. What is important is that the music is as lovely as anything Handel ever wrote (which is saying something!), and this production was as delightful an evening as anyone could ask for. It was a show in which expert singing and graceful acting combined with top-flight instrumentalists, whisking the audience right out of the concert-hall milieu and into the more rarefied atmosphere of Cannons, the ducal estate where “Acis and Galatea” was first performed in 1718.

Created by the Boston Early Music Festival and presented here by Stephen Stubbs’ energetic Pacific Music Works organization, this “Acis” was fully costumed, semi-staged, and accompanied by a small baroque ensemble of unusual expertise and energy. (You don’t often find lutenists of the caliber of Paul O’Dette and Stubbs together on a players’ roster.)

According to director Gilbert Blin’s program note, his concept for the production was an imaginary rehearsal of “Acis and Galatea” in the midst of the Cannons art collection. It’s a concept that worked wonderfully well. The five singers, bewigged and costumed in 18th-century dress, moved among the instrumental players (attended by a gallery of six nymphs and shepherds), on a set that featured easels with beautiful pastoral-scene paintings.

And what singers! Stylish, agile, subtle – they all are steeped in period style, tossing off roulades and trills and ornaments of every kind without over-decorating the essential lyricism of the music. Each aria was a new pleasure.

Douglas Williams was the villain you love to hate, as the amorous and (eventually) murderous Polyphemus. His scene-stealing aria, “O ruddier than the cherry,” was among the production’s high points. Aaron Sheehan was a wonderfully lyrical Acis, and Teresa Wakim a warm, eloquent Galatea (though she could have used a bit more volume in the lovely “Heart, the seat of soft delight”). Zachary Wilder was a superb Coridon, and Jason McStoots a convincing Damon.

The instrumental ensemble, from top to bottom, produced such lively music in near-perfect synchronization (with leadership from violinist Robert Mealy) that the production acquired a compelling dramatic urgency. The players pounced on new musical phrases that signaled a turn in the plot, so that there literally was never a dull moment.

Bravi to the performers, the presenters, and the bravery of Marty Ronish (executive director of the American Handel Festival) for bringing this festival to Seattle for the first time. The crowds flocking to these Handelian performances might well echo the duet of Acis and Galatea: “Happy we!”

Review: Seattle Symphony Baroque Series, “Songs of Cleopatra.” Seattle Symphony Orchestra with Isabel Bayrakdarian, soprano soloist, and Nicholas McGegan, conductor. Presented as part of the American Handel Festival, in the Seattle Symphony’s “Baroque and Wine” series; March 11 (repeated March 12).

By Melinda Bargreen

It’s always a pleasure to see Nicholas McGegan come to Seattle. The charismatic British conductor seems incapable of leading a “business as usual” concert; instead, his readings are always spirited, sometimes humorous, and often surprisingly profound. McGegan can take an old chestnut like the Handel Concerto Grosso in G Major (No. 1 of that lovely set from Op. 6), polish it up, toss off a throwaway phrase at the end of one movement, and set off the interior voices of the ensemble in a way that completely transforms the shape of the music.

That’s just what he did, and a lot more, in the first of two “Songs of Cleopatra” Seattle Symphony concerts featuring the soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian. This program was presented as part of the American Handel Festival, which – lucky us! – has traveled to Seattle for its 2011 incarnation and is Handeling all over the place for the rest of the month. (Check out the astonishing variety of high-quality programming at www.americanhandelfestival.org.)

The “Songs of Cleopatra” title plays on our eternal fascination with this historical figure, whose life was recently the focus of a bestselling Stacy Schiff biography. Arias of four composers, all of whom wrote music for dramatized aspects of the Egyptian queen, were represented in the concert program: Carl Heinrich Graun (“Cleopatra e Cesare”), Johann Adolf Hasse (“Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra”), Handel (“Giulio Cesare”), and Johann Mattheson (“Cleopatra”).

And talk about “infinite variety”: these representations of Cleopatra were certainly different. The Graun aria was extremely florid, testing the limits of any singer’s alacrity (and here Bayrakdarian might have lightened her voice a little to good effect). The most famous of the arias, Handel’s impassioned “Piangere,” was considerably slower and more contemplative, with its lovely melody instead of the coloratura roulades that decorated the Graun.

For sheer drama, there was no surpassing the final “Cleopatra’s Death Scene, in which Mattheson’s libretto exhorts the asp to “beiss, beiss” (bite) over the course of a long decrescendo. McGegan hushed the orchestra for a compelling die-away finale.

The small baroque-sized version of the Seattle Symphony played extremely well for McGegan, and in these horn-heavy scores it was great to have principal horn John Cerminaro on hand for solid performances of considerable difficulty (the opening Graun work featured a particularly high and tricky first-horn part). The Handel Concerto Grosso offered delightful byplay between the evening’s concertmaster, Emma McGrath, and principal second violin, Elisa Barston.

Seldom do you see a dress designer credited in a concert program, but in this case, Atelier Rosemarie Umetsu was fully deserving of a mention. Bayrakdarian emerged from the Benaroya Hall wings attired in first a black-and-red flamenco-influenced gown with spectacular ruffles, and then (after intermission) in a black-lace affair with a low-cut back and a train.

This pair of concerts takes place in the “Baroque and Wine” series, with a wine tasting beforehand, but concerns that indulgence in wine might make the audience either bibulous or somnolent were misplaced. It was not a particularly rowdy audience (applause was somewhat muted), nor did any snores seem to erupt from the listeners. Snores, in any case, are possibly the last thing you expect to hear during a McGegan concert.

Review: Seattle Opera’s production of Massenet’s “Don Quichotte,” March 2, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

It’s a safe bet that nearly all the opera fans flocking to Seattle Opera’s new Don Quichotte are seeing a production of this seldom-staged work for the first time. Indeed, it’s the first time in Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins’ 27 years with the company that he had never seen an opera before staging it, which tells you how much Jenkins wanted to present a starring vehicle for the young bass-baritone John Relyea. A particular favorite in Seattle, Relyea won the company’s Artist of the Year award in 2005 (for his dazzling “Tales of Hoffmann” villains).

And Relyea did not disappoint. Resonant, velvety and endlessly expressive, his voice rolled out into every corner of McCaw Hall. Relyea’s Quichotte was a well-judged balance between the doddering oldster and the dignified suitor; he moved like an old man, but never like a comic figure. The comedy was reserved for his expert sidekick, Eduardo Chama, who as the loyal Sancho Panza proved an ideal partner for Quichotte.

Seattle Opera has been particularly lucky with Polish singers (with memorable performances from the likes of Mariusz Kwiecien, Ewa Podles, and Aleksandra Kurzak), and Polish-born mezzo-soprano Malgorzata Walewska added to that string of successes with a remarkable Dulcinée. The object of Quichotte’s obsession, she first appears from a crowd of admirers in a Violetta-like turn, full of coloratura swoops and roulades, and these Walewska’s ripe, opulent voice produced with only moderate success. Later, however, her real strengths came forward: warm beauty of tone, an imposing and well-focused lower register, and acting skills that made the scene in which she rejects Quichotte’s suit deeply moving.

Indeed, for all the humorous touches, this is a show that has a surprisingly high handkerchief quotient. Those who didn’t sniffle a bit at the scene in which Quichotte commends his soul to God as he faces down a squad of brigands (who fall to their knees in respect), might well do so at the death scene, surprisingly low-key and touching.

All this was underscored by one of the finest opera conductors to arrive in Seattle in years: Carlo Montanaro, whose energy and musical sensitivity pervaded every line of the score and served the cast remarkably well. He knows right down to the sixteenth-note when to back off and when to surge forward as each singer moves through the aria.

The stage direction, in the secure hands of Linda Brovsky, has the cast and chorus moving over, through and out of stacks of enormous books on the otherwise spare Donald Eastman set – reminding us both of the Cervantes book (and a subsequent play by Jacques Le Lorrain) from which the opera takes its story, and of Quichotte’s own obsession with books. The choreography, by veteran dancer Sara de Luis, is imaginative and thoroughly redolent of Spain, and it’s also woven right into every aspect of the production. The dancers don’t just arrive onstage for “their number” here and there; they are an integral part of the cast, observing and participating in all the action, and then leaping forward for their own star turns. De Luis herself, who has been dancing professionally for about five decades, was a marvel to watch: pliant, fiery, energetic, and riveting.

Riveting, too, were the horse and donkey on which Quichotte and Sancho made their entrance. It was hard to focus on anything else when Millie the Donkey (as Sancho’s Dapple) and Desperado the Pinto (as Quichotte’s Rocinante) were on the stage, as they frequently were, tossing their heads and swishing their tails and munching on covertly-awarded treats. Fortunately they committed no indiscretions, but one was nonetheless reminded of the reason W.C. Fields warned fellow thespians against working with animals or children.

Seattle Opera presents Don Quichotte through March 12, at McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St., Seattle; tickets are 5-91 (800-426-1619 or www.seattleopera.org

Review: Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz, with violin soloist Vadim Repin (Feb. 3, 2011)

By Melinda Bargreen

Blink twice, and this overture was over.

The opener for the Seattle Symphony’s recent program featuring violin soloist Vadim Repin was the world premiere of a brief, high-powered fanfare by Ellen Taafe Zwilich, called “Avanti!” The latest in an ongoing series of Gund/Simonyi commissions marking the final season of Gerard Schwarz’s music directorship, the Zwilich piece was a cheery concoction of effervescent brass and a lot of timpani. The preponderance of brass, Zwilich has said earlier, was a nod to Schwarz’s earlier career as one of the world’s leading trumpeters.

After the final notes were sounded, and the audience (after a brief “Is that IT?” pause) finally responded with applause, the musical lineup continued with Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini” Overture, the Lalo “Symphonie Espagnole,” and the mighty Bruckner Symphony No. 6. It was a lengthy and highly varied program, full of works that are not considered top symphonic masterpieces but are still eminently worth hearing.

Take the Lalo piece, for instance: a five-moment episodic concerto that’s a seductive Spanish-accented gem in the right hands. And Vadim Repin indisputably has the right hands: he attacked the Lalo with a technical arsenal that made its considerable demands seem easy. The “Symphonie Espagnole” was an extended conversation between soloist, conductor, and the audience – especially in the charming second movement, full of subtle nuances and Spanish flavor. It was a performance of both zest and polish, with a clear rapport between Schwarz and Repin. The only distractions were the few passages in which Repin forced the tone, trying for maximum volume on the G-string and resulting in some fuzzy overplaying and a little carelessness about intonation. Otherwise, it was a performance to cherish.

The Berlioz overture found the woodwinds in some disagreement about ensemble and pitch, problems that certainly did not extend to the masterly oboe solo by principal Ben Hausmann. The winds were in much better shape in the more intimate passages of the Bruckner Symphony that followed the Lalo.

Bruckner is a symphonist who tends to polarize audiences, who both love and hate him (considerably more in the former category), and it’s easy to see why. Patience is required of the listener as the composer and the conductor begin to build the huge edifice of his symphonies, which emerge room by room and story by story until the whole “building” is laid out before the audience. At times the Sixth seems to meander a bit; at times, Bruckner pounds on the same theme and the same chords until you’re more than ready for a shift.

Yet the results, that solid and melodic symphonic sound, are deeply satisfying, and Schwarz and the orchestra gave the audience a memorable sonic experience. The Sixth is a trove of melodies that include some borrowed from elsewhere (most obviously from the “Liebestod” of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”), and others that were later borrowed by other composers (the main theme of Maurice Jarre’s “Lawrence of Arabia” film score, and the opening of Bernstein’s song “Somewhere”).

Bruckner is famous for brass thrills, and these were delivered in the best tradition by the Symphony’s brass sections. Principal horn John Cerminaro was in his element, combining power, nobility and accuracy in solo passages he was born to play.

Review: Seattle Opera’s “The Barber of Seville”

By Melinda Bargreen

When Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” is really cooking, the opera flies by so quickly that you feel it’s over way too soon. That is the case with Seattle Opera’s current production of this classic comedy about concealed identities, scheming young lovers, and the thwarted oldsters who try to ruin all the fun.

Full of telling details, this production zooms ahead on the baton of Dean Williamson, a conductor with a long Seattle history and a great sense for bel canto opera. His adroit continuo work at the keyboard (a charming fortepiano from the collection of George Bozarth and Tamara Friedman) is the musical oil on which this show glides forward, and the pace never falters from the overture to the finale.

Stage director Peter Kazaras puts the audience on notice right away that this is going to be a show with a lot of wry twists. After the famous overture is over and Almaviva has sung his serenade, the title character makes his entrance, emerging not from the wings but from the main floor of the audience, as if he too has been watching his own warmup act. Figaro himself (portrayed with considerable verve by José Carbó, in his U.S. debut) strolls to the stage to set the comedy into motion, a move that is highly appropriate considering his role as “factotum” in the affairs of all the players.

Handsome, charismatic, and utterly assured, Carbó displays a lot of stage savvy (he’s extremely funny), and also a voice with a brilliant top and plenty of resonance throughout his range. He also is just what Figaro needs to be: a person who makes you look and listen, and one who’s a great ensemble singer as well as a soloist in one of the world’s most recognizable arias (“Largo al factotum”).

Carbó has to be good to hold his own in the company of today’s leading Rossini tenor as Count Almaviva, Lawrence Brownlee. Brownlee, a familiar performer here, sang some of his earliest roles in Seattle. Since then he has acquired considerable polish and also has slimmed down; he now cuts a handsome figure on the stage, and his voice is refined to a level of sophistication and artistry few singers can attain. The incredibly florid passagework throughout the evening (and most particularly in Almaviva’s seldom-performed final aria) was delivered with a panache that was downright breathtaking. Along the way, Brownlee also has learned to develop his comic sense; his “singing lesson” scene with Rosina (Sarah Coburn) was hilarious.

Coburn matched Brownlee, roulade for vocal roulade, throughout a performance that featured more ornaments than the White House Christmas tree. Coburn, an adroit comedienne whose considerable beauty added to her impact as Rosina, also has a glittering high D which she employed to telling effect.

Patrick Carfizzi had a terrific time as the blustering Doctor Bartolo, whether mimicking the other singers’ lines in a stratospheric falsetto or interrogating Rosina. Burak Bilgili did nice work as his sidekick, Don Basilio, and Sally Wolf contributed an unusually good, vocally polished Berta. Daniel Scofield, David S. Hogan and Adrian Rosas all shone in supporting roles. And what a great idea to have a "real" guitarist -- Michael Partington -- on the stage to accompany a serenade. Chorusmaster Beth Kirchhoff's singers sang lustily and well.

Originally designed from the Canadian Opera Company by John Stoddart, the effective set revolves to display the exterior of Dr. Bartolo’s house, then the interior. Clever lighting by Duane Schuler gives us a storm scene in which projections show first an umbrella, then a bicycle, then a spotted cow flying by in the high winds.

With choreography by the imaginative Rosa Mercedes, Kazaras gave the cast plenty of challenges in terms of sharply executed, simultaneous maneuvers and gestures that added to the snappy comic timing and comic punch of the show.

The production continues through January 29, with an alternate cast (full of good singers) taking over the three principal roles on January 16, 21, 23 and 28.

Review: Lang Lang, pianist, in recital; Benaroya Hall, Jan. 7, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

As Lang Lang turned to his wildly cheering audience to bow and wave and smile, the interior of Benaroya Hall looked like the Fourth of July with camera flashes – hundreds of them – going off all over the packed house. Cameras are specifically prohibited inside Benaroya Hall (it’s noted in every program), and you never see those flashes at classical performances.

But then, Lang Lang is not any classical artist: he is a phenomenon, a rock star among pianists. After all, The New York Times has anointed him as “the hottest artist on the classical music planet.” His Benaroya Hall program, presented by the Seattle Symphony, may have looked pretty standard: two Beethoven sonatas (including the famous “Appassionata”), something a bit more colorful (the three pieces from Albeniz’s “Iberia.” Book I), and a contemporary warhorse (Prokofiev’s dynamic and often-programmed Sonata No. 7). The performances, however, were anything but standard.

Is this the greatest living pianist? Certainly not. But he may well be the most utterly dazzling technician, and the most entertaining to watch. Lang Lang possesses an otherworldly level of technique that pushes hard at the boundaries of what is biomechanically possible. In the finales of the “Appassionata” and the Prokofiev, the sheer hair-raising velocity of what he achieves – clean, clear playing at truly incredible speeds and volumes – just knocks over the listener.

Lang Lang is, of course, not just a technician; the Adagio movement of the opening Beethoven C Major Sonata (No. 3) was utterly spellbinding in its limpid smoothness and its quiet subtlety. But his audiences like fast and loud, and most of the time, fast and loud is what they get. The “Appassionata” found the pianist in full “Jekyll and Hyde” mode, exaggerating the highs and lows of the dynamics. He can draw a brash, brassy sound from the piano that works better in Prokofiev than in Beethoven.

And, of course, Lang Lang is the quintessential showman, with a behavioral repertoire familiar to his fans: leaning back on the bench and gazing skyward, extending his left arm out to “conduct” passages featuring the right hand alone, the occasional coy gesture toward the audience, the tossing of the head with that startled-looking hairdo, and that final explosive hands-in-the-air moment after the last acceleration to the finish. He connects further with his audiences by walking around the stage, waving to and acknowledging each section of the house: balconies, main floor, and sides. It’s an endearing practice, showing his obvious enjoyment in all those cheering fans.

On this occasion, many of the fans seemed more ready for the hospital than the concert hall, judging by the amount of downright operatic coughing fits that peppered much of the recital. The pianist waited for some of the coughing to diminish before starting to play, and sometimes he had a long wait.

Nobody, however, could have heard a cough over the “Precipitato” finale of the Prokofiev sonata. It was taken at a tempo that was indeed precipitous and at volume levels so high that you expected to see steam rising from the keyboard. At the final, impossible barrage of notes and the audience’s explosive ovation – and all those camera flashes – Lang Lang returned to the stage for his first encore. The hall quieted as he sat at the piano and flexed his fingers, suddenly addressing the audience: “Thank you!”

The “let’s calm them down” encore, Chopin’s limpid Etude in A-Flat Major (Op. 25, No. 1), was followed by more Chopin (the Etude in G-Flat Major, Op. 10, No. 5), and then by the pianist’s graceful exit, waving a handkerchief in apparent farewell.

Fans love him; classical purists, and many other pianists, loathe him. But I’ll bet there’s a teeny bit of sheer, raw envy amongst some of the players who sneer at Lang Lang as a mere showman: Wouldn’t we all love to have those fingers!

Review: Seattle Symphony Mainly Mozart Series, May 19, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

Review: Seattle Opera’s “The Magic Flute,” May 7, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

Could it be any more charming?

If you can get tickets, this is a production not to miss, one that will delight all generations of the family.

Review: The Seattle Symphony Orchestra, with guest conductor Jakub Hrusa and piano soloist Vladimir Feltsman; Benaroya Hall, May 5, 2011.

By Melinda Bargreen

Review: Yevgeny Sudbin, pianist, in Presidents Piano Series Recital, Meany Theater, April 20.

By Melinda Bargreen

The four little Shostakovich Preludes that followed were almost a lampoon of the orderly harmonic world of Haydn; Sudbin gave them lots of character and bite.

Review: Seattle Symphony with Leila Josefowicz and Alexander Mickelthwate; Benaroya Hall, April 9.

By Melinda Bargreen

Review: “For A Look or a Touch,” one-act opera by Jake Heggie, presented by Seattle Men’s Chorus (Dennis Coleman, conductor), April 2-3, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

The focus is still on the two central characters: Manfred, who appears one evening as a youthful ghost to his former lover, the survivor Gad, who now has grown old.

If you were in the house, you won’t forget the occasion. As Morgan Smith sings Manfred’s repeated motif, “Do you remember?” the audience remembers, too.

Review: American Handel Festival, “Acis and Galatea,” March 25

By Melinda Bargreen

It was Handel Heaven.

By Melinda Bargreen

Review: Seattle Opera’s production of Massenet’s “Don Quichotte,” March 2, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

Seattle Opera presents Don Quichotte through March 12, at McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St., Seattle; tickets are 5-91 (800-426-1619 or www.seattleopera.org

Review: Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz, with violin soloist Vadim Repin (Feb. 3, 2011)

By Melinda Bargreen

Blink twice, and this overture was over.

Review: Seattle Opera’s “The Barber of Seville”

By Melinda Bargreen

The production continues through January 29, with an alternate cast (full of good singers) taking over the three principal roles on January 16, 21, 23 and 28.

Review: Lang Lang, pianist, in recital; Benaroya Hall, Jan. 7, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

2010

Review: Seattle Symphony’s “Messiah” (Dec. 16)

By Melinda Bargreen

Performances of Handel’s “Messiah” share one attribute with the snowflake: No two are ever exactly the same.

Fortunately, there were no snowflakes on hand for Thursday night’s first of five Seattle Symphony performances of the 18th-century classic. What the large and receptive audience got instead was a remarkably enjoyable “Messiah” with plenty of energy, strong soloists, and a Chorale that sang with zest and verve.

Sometimes, in the distant past, the orchestra has played this score as if under mild anesthesia; I can remember one performance back in the 70s when fellow audience members were betting whether the acting concertmaster would fall asleep. (He did not, at least not perceptibly.) That certainly wasn’t the case this time: the orchestra played with considerable involvement and impact under the baton of music director Gerard Schwarz. From the opening Overture, which got a fleet, light reading, all the way through to the grandeur of the final “Amen,” this was a deeply engaging “Messiah.”

One reason “Messiah” productions vary so much from year to year is the cast of soloists, who interpret the score in varying and often highly original ways. This year’s soloists included soprano Dominique Labelle, mezzo-soprano Mary Phillips, tenor Michael Colvin and bass-baritone Charles Robert Austin. Colvin initially sounded less than ideally solid and secure, but later he established better breath control and let the tonal beauty of his voice blossom. By the time the tenor got to “Thou shalt break them,” he was in terrific form, fully realizing the drama of the text.

Austin, who has been one of the Seattle Symphony’s most important soloists over the past several years, proved why he is such an effective singing actor in solos that rang with conviction. His recitative, “Behold, I tell you a mystery,” couldn’t have been better.

The distinctive voice of soprano Dominique Labelle was sometimes a little erratic in terms of pitch and focus, but at her best she was a wonderfully expressive singer who made even the most challenging music sound easy and unforced.

The mellow-voiced Mary Phillips was given the relatively thankless task of interpreting the mezzo-soprano arias, many of which are scored so low that it’s difficult to project. She and the other soloists might have benefited from a more forward placement on the stage.

This year’s chorus, trained by Joseph Crnko, was beautifully balanced with clear enunciation. David Gordon’s trumpet solos were immaculately embellished, and Schwarz’s clear overall vision for the overall shape of this baroque masterpiece was manifested in a remarkably fine performance.

Review: Yo-Yo Ma, cellist, with Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz conducting. Benaroya Hall, Seattle, Dec. 7.

By Melinda Bargreen

In the concert world of 2010, we’re spoiled by the excellence of great new and established soloists. One player, however, is in a category all his own, as we rediscover every time cellist Yo-Yo Ma comes to town.

Ma doesn’t just play his instrument; somehow he taps into some sort of celestial pipeline of exquisite inspiration. Whether he’s playing traditional concert repertoire, new music, early music, Appalachian-based Americana, or undiscovered world music from the ancient Silk Road routes, Ma seems incapable of playing a routine phrase or even a ho-hum note. Every note has its own shape and color; it’s always moving toward an expressive goal. The sounds he produces make it clear that his cello is talking to you, or more precisely, that Ma is talking to you through his cello.

In his latest Seattle appearance, he was talking Shostakovich – the despair, hope, and irony that infuse Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. This is a work of remarkable challenges, one requiring every kind of articulation along with a furious energy that makes the cello sound like a mini-orchestra. The first movement ended with such a burst of energy that many in the audience couldn’t help applauding.

But it was in the searing second movement, with meltingly lovely phrases that taper off into the concerto’s extended cadenza, that Ma and the orchestra (led by Gerard Schwarz) made their most remarkable impact. John Cerminaro’s all-important horn solos were beyond praise, in their virtuosity and an expressive range that rivaled Ma’s.

The ovation that followed the Shostakovich brought Ma to the stage again, this time for an encore: the Sarabande movement of the C Major Bach Suite for Unaccompanied Cello. It was like a final benediction for the audience – a moment in time away from all the stresses and concerns of life, when all you have to consider is the beauty before you.

Ma’s performance was wisely placed at the end of the concert program, because this is an act that’s impossible to follow. What came beforehand was an interesting assortment: two beloved arch-romantic bonbons, plus the opener – a world premiere by American composer Bernard Rands. The Rands piece is one of the Gund/Simonyi Farewell Commissions, an imposing lineup of new works composed to honor Schwarz in his final season as Seattle Symphony music director. Rands’ brand-new “Adieu for Brass Quintet and String Orchestra” includes lots of brass as a nod to Schwarz’s pre-conducting career as one of the world’s finest trumpet virtuosi. A high-energy, rhythmically tricky piece in two parts, the “Adieu” is permeated by fanfare motifs in triplets, often subsiding into big organ-like chords.

The limited repertoire of musical gestures, however, was made extra clear by what followed the Rands premiere: Tchaikovsky’s sumptuous “Romeo and Juliet” Fantasy Overture, and Strauss’ glittering Suite from “Der Rosenkavalier.” To be fair, these are works so chromatically opulent that almost any piece would sound a bit scrawny next to them. Schwarz gave an attentive and committed account of the Rands piece, but was in his most exuberant form in the “Rosenkavalier” Suite – aided by fine playing from the horn section and particularly nice solo work from principal oboe Ben Hausmann. Bravi

Review: Seattle Men’s Chorus “Holiday Glee,” Nov. 27-Dec. 20

Seattle Men’s Chorus presents “Holiday Glee”; Benaroya Hall, Nov. 27 (through Dec. 20).

By Melinda Bargreen

You’ll laugh; you’ll cry; you’ll sing along and jingle your car keys.

Yes, it’s the Seattle Men’s Chorus holiday concert, back in Benaroya Hall again for performances that tug the heartstrings – and push the envelope. Somewhere between the cross-dressing chorines, the “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” nativity scene, and the song about a young man notorious for relieving himself in the snow, the SMC somehow inserts musical selections of sober beauty spanning nine centuries and several continents.

Don’t ask me how it all works. It just does. And this show, which annually launches the holiday season for thousands of Seattleites, may just be experiencing its best reincarnation yet, under the steady hand of director Dennis Coleman. (This year it’s a leaner, trimmer Dennis Coleman, though his conducting has certainly lost none of its impact. He even gets the audience to sound good in the annual sing-along.)

The opening number is a dazzler. With the huge chorus split between the front and the back of the hall, the call-and-response opening of Todd Smith’s rhythmic “Noel” – sung in the African Kituba dialect – establishes an infectious atmosphere of celebration as the entire chorus reunites on the stage. Coleman has always understood how to use the Benaroya Hall acoustics, deploying “surround sound” effects in another terrific piece, Franz Biebl’s sumptuous a cappella “Ave Maria.”

As usual, the arrangements of assistant artistic director Eric Lane Barnes are an indispensable part of the show – this time ranging as far afield as medieval carols, a version of “Silent Night” based on a Bach Prelude, and parody lyrics to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It’s hard to imagine what the Chorus would do without Barnes, or without the smoothly versatile piano of Evan Stults, who is always in the right place at the right moment.

Some things invariably work better than others. A brief Las Vegas segment featuring the once-famous “Rat Pack” might be lost on younger audiences, and while I’m sure there are strong advocates for “The Davey Dinckle Song,” this writer isn’t one of them. But when the Captain Smartypants troupe launched their witty “Twelve Days of Christmas” (courtesy of the a cappella ensemble “Straight No Chaser”) that ended up in Toto’s “Africa,” they held the entire audience right in their smarty hands.

As the concert’s title suggests, several segments and references in the concert are related to the popular television show “Glee,” right down to some virtuoso cheerleading and an anti-bullying episode. Gay rights – particularly the right to marry – surfaced hilariously in a Beyonce parody that had everyone singing, “If you like it you should get to put a ring on it.”

For traditionalists, the annual “Silent Night,” complete with perfectly choreographed sign language, is always a high point. Watching the men’s white-gloved hands move through the sign-language motions in unison (as the stage darkened so those gloves were all you could see) was like seeing a flock of white birds flying in synchronized order.

An extra treat for first-weekend audiences only was the appearance of Broadway star Kelli O’Hara, whose pure and radiant voice was featured in “A Wonderful Guy” (from “South Pacific”) and “The Light in the Piazza” (from the eponymous musical). “O Holy Night” was beautifully sung to mostly wrong lyrics, but O’Hara brought down the house with her encore: a hilarious song about her own life experiences, from singing country-Western to singing opera and experiencing childbirth. Audiences for the rest of the run will miss O’Hara, unfortunately – but there’s still plenty to tempt everyone into Benaroya Hall for the rest of the run. This show’s a winner.

Review: Craig Sheppard, pianist, in “Mostly Brahms” Recital (Nov. 1)

Craig Sheppard, pianist, in “Mostly Brahms” recital; Meany Theater, Nov. 1, 2010

By Melinda Bargreen

Fans of the Craig Sheppard know that when they sit down to hear this pianist play, they will get a performance of rare depth and intensity. Sheppard seems incapable of playing an unexamined phrase, or tossing off a throwaway line. The pianist, who teaches at the University of Washington, also is well known for his thought-provoking programming, which in the past has presented great monuments of the repertoire: among his recital programs are enormous swathes of Bach (“Goldberg Variations,” Partitas, Sinfonias, Inventions, Well-Tempered Clavier); Beethoven (the 32 Sonatas and Diabelli Variations); Chopin and Scriabin (both composers’ 24 Preludes).

This year, Sheppard is undertaking another big project. In five programs, he will focus on the “third B,” Johannes Brahms – starting with the recital under consideration here, the Nov. 1 program called “Mostly Brahms.” Sheppard chose two early works of Brahms (the “16 Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann,” Op. 9, and the Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 1), and paired them with two early works of Schumann, Brahms’ great mentor (the “Papillons,” Op. 2, and the Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 11). It was impossible to miss the parallels between these two composers – as well as to note the very different ways the young Brahms was already choosing to develop his own compositional voice. (The remaining four concerts in this series will focus on Brahms’ works for solo piano.)

As is Sheppard’s usual practice, his own piano was transported to Meany Theater for the Brahms-Schumann opener, a huge program that (like most of this pianist’s recitals) was being recorded live for later release on disc. For some reason, the piano sounded extra bright that evening; was it the repertoire, the performance, the voicing of the instrument? In any case, I’ve never heard a piano more “present” in that usually mellow hall, and in the very big-moment sections of the music, the sound levels were surprisingly high. Sheppard’s playing, high-energy and of an almost febrile intensity, sometimes took on an aggressive, spiky quality; that was often balanced by sections of great sweetness and tenderness. There were some spectacular effects in the Brahms Variations, in which the languorous conclusion to one was offset by the high-voltage start of the next variation. Sheppard drew out some of the lyrical phrasing to the barest whisper of sound. These quieter moments were relatively rare, however, in a program that was full of big moments.

There were, not surprisingly, a few minor slips of concentration in a recital of this size and scope, but those were rare. Sheppard tackled the Brahms Sonata No. 1 in an all-out, take-no-prisoners mode, and inevitably there were a few casualties. It was not the cleanest playing we’ve heard from this artist, but it was a performance that gave this romantic work its full dramatic due.

The encore was an exquisite reading of the familiar Schumann Arabesque in C Major, a little miracle of a piece that has been so often played that it might seem to have nothing less to reveal to audiences. But Sheppard breathed new life into this classic, unfolding its melodies with a tender care that was all the more effective after the Sturm und Drang of the Brahms.

Review: Seattle Opera’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” (October 20)

By Melinda Bargreen

Sometimes a singer bursts onto the scene like an unexpected comet, with a burst of energy that lights up the opera stage as if it were the night sky. That is the case with soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, who made her Seattle Opera debut with her first-ever performances of the title role in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” No one who heard and saw Kurzak could have believed she had never done this before: she displayed both complete command and total abandon as Lucia.

A compelling actress, Kurzak demonstrated Lucia’s harrowing descent from the love-struck girl of Act I to the broken, possessed creature of the famous Mad Scene – all her sparkle gone, replaced by flights of frenzy in which she poured out coloratura roulades from every conceivable position on the stage. You could practically hear the seats creak as the audience leaned forward, waiting to see and hear what Kurzak would do next. Her performance was an uncanny mixture of the utterly polished and the completely spontaneous.

Her voice, supple and accurate and beautiful at both ends of her considerable register, ascends to the top E-flats with an easy assurance that completely dispelled the usual “will she make it” worries.

Fortunately, Kurzak is far from the only adornment of this production. Her Edgardo is William Burden, who was most recently heard as Dodge in Seattle Opera’s world premiere of the Daron Hagen opera “Amelia.” Here, however, he has transformed himself into the consummate Italianate tenor, with that subtle sob in the voice and those little embellishments that made him sound as if he hailed from the precincts of La Scala. Dashing and impassioned, Burden made his Edgardo’s passion and despair compellingly real. He and Kurzak sang extraordinarily well together, rising to a startling high C/high E-flat culmination of their first-act duet.

The production employs a Robert Dahlstrom set that was originally designed for “I Puritani,” but adapts very well to “Lucia” (where the extensive staircases are crucial to the staging). Kurzak’s remarkable descent in the Mad Scene made most effective use of those stairs. Director Tomer Zvulun took the always-questionable decision to stage the overture, but this time it worked admirably, introducing the ghost that later haunts Lucia, and briefly establishing the love relationship of the Lucia and Edgardo. The imaginative lighting of Robert Wierzel illuminates that ghost periodically throughout the opera, to telling effect: the ghost is not just a specter that Lucia imagines, but one that we also see. Zvulun’s treatment of the final scene is another applause-worthy coup, lightening the gloom of the deaths by suggesting the lovers’ reunion in a better world.

The director also draws first-rate, highly dramatic acting from the principals and from the chorus. Enrico (Ljubomir Puskaric) is a real brute as Enrico, bullying and manhandling his sister Lucia, and Raimondo (Arthur Woodley) is artfully placed to illustrate his commanding presence in the action. Both Puskaric and Woodley are strong singers. Eric Neuville made a good impression as Normanno; Lindsey Anderson (Alisa) and Andrew Stenson (Arturo) made effective contributions in supporting roles.

Hats off, once again, to Beth Kirchhoff, the admirable chorusmaster, and to the chorus that sang so lustily and acted so commendably. They looked great in Deborah Trout’s opulent, detailed period costumes.

In the orchestra pit, Bruno Cinquegrani presided over a generally excellent orchestra that sometimes was encouraged a little too eagerly toward higher volume levels than were being produced on the stage (especially in Act I). Cinquegrani proved a sensitive and pliant accompanist to the singers, letting them take their time as they embellished their way through their arias. Flutist Scott Goff and harpist Valerie Muzzolini Gordon made important contributions.

Finally, a note on the dedication of this production to the late Craig Watjen, who was one of Seattle’s great patrons of the arts – and a terrific guy. Optimistic, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and well versed in everything from opera and symphony to technology and baseball, Watjen and his wife Joan have made possible such cultural icons as Benaroya Hall’s Watjen Concert Organ and Seattle Opera’s “Ring.” He will be greatly missed.

Review: Seattle Symphony’s Beethoven Ninth

By Melinda Bargreen

Many celebratory choices await Seattle revelers as they say goodbye to 2011 and hello to 2012.

But for many music lovers, the inspiring sounds of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” certainly trump drinking too much alcohol and wearing funny hats. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s artistic leadership presents Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (which concludes with that choral “Ode to Joy”) each year at this time, and on Wednesday evening a happy and near-capacity crowd showed up for the first of four performances led by the Symphony’s conductor laureate, Gerard Schwarz.

For these occasions, the orchestra is now re-seated in Schwarz’s preferred configuration, with first and second violin sections on opposite sides of the stage, and the cellos to the conductor’s left. (Schwarz’s successor as music director, Ludovic Morlot, prefers a different lineup.) It was a responsive and polished orchestra that awaited Schwarz’s downbeat and played for him with both alacrity and finesse. Several principal players made particularly strong impressions: Mara Gearman’s impassioned and lovely viola, Dan Williams’ fluent and warm-toned oboe, Laura DeLuca’s expert clarinet, Alexander Lipay’s clear and lyrical flute, and Efe Baltacigil’s powerful, artful cello.

Over the years, Schwarz has tried several different programming options to pair with the Ninth; this year’s suite from Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” is a winner, with a holiday feel and lots of colorful scoring.

Schwarz led off the Ninth with a sharply focused, taut first movement, and then a surprisingly relaxed reading of the usually-frenzied “Molto vivace” (there were a few rocky moments with the tempo in mid-movement). The horns played beautifully in the Adagio, and Schwarz went for the big contrasts in the finale – an unusually quiet opening statement of the big theme, followed by a dramatic and powerfully effective crescendo.

The excellent Seattle Symphony Chorale, prepared by Joseph Crnko, enunciated the German text so clearly that the consonants appeared to be issued from staple guns. It worked: no mushy diction here. The quartet of vocal soloists, all experienced opera singers who’ve sung Wagner, gave a heroic account of Beethoven’s awkwardly-scored solos (top marks to soprano Christine Goerke and bass-baritone Greer Grimsley).

The audience roared to its feet with a “Twelfth Man” ovation. Once again, the mighty Ninth and its joyous message have worked their familiar magic.

Review: Seattle Symphony “Messiah,” Dec. 17, 2011

By Melinda Bargreen

You can see in photocopies of Handel’s “Messiah” manuscript the furious speed at which he composed his masterpiece. Slashed with crossed-out passages and smears of ink, the 260 pages were completed in just over three weeks – one of the most spectacular compositional feats in music history. (See the original manuscript for yourself in this cool British Library website: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/virtualbooks/viewrecadd/index.html#)

This year, the Seattle Symphony’s production of the “Messiah” is just as speedy as the composer. Canadian guest conductor Jean-Marie Zeitouni – who conducted the oratorio as if his life depended on it – provided blazing tempos and mercurial twists in one of the most memorable “Messiahs” this city has seen.

Zeitouni took lots of chances. The “Hallelujah” Chorus, for instance, began not as the usual grandiose declaration, but instead rather quietly – the better to build the drama into a gradual crescendo of considerable impact.

Zeitouni’s interpretive choices were underscored by his decision to have the strings play without vibrato, in a modern interpretation of 18th-century style. There was no sense of the routine or humdrum; instead, there were huge, dramatic pauses (notably at the ending of the “Hallelujah” Chorus) and movements taken at warp speed (such as “He Trusted in God”). It was an edgy and exciting reading, with a responsive orchestra and an eager Chorale following Zeitouni’s every sweeping gesture. The life-and-death drama of the score was fully realized in this performance.

The trimmed-down Seattle Symphony Chorale, prepared by Joseph Crnko, provided a fleet, light sound with considerable dynamic and expressive range and a lot of tonal variety.

The four soloists were all well chosen. Tenor Thomas Glenn led off with a lyrical, clear-voiced account of “Comfort Ye”; Nathalie Paulin gave an agile and imaginative account of her skillfully ornamented soprano solos. Countertenor Ryan Belongie (a late replacement for Matthew White) showed an expressive range almost as wide as his vocal range in some remarkable solo work; the emotional honesty of “He was despised” was especially telling. The bass-baritone soloist, Stephen Hegedus, sang with commanding lyricism.

The orchestra players, particularly the continuo ensemble, were in terrific shape, with the versatile harpsichordist Jillon Stoppels Dupree and organist Joseph Adam providing beautiful moments. Despite the four “Messiah” performances sandwiched into the weekend, nothing about this exciting show suggested “business as usual” -- for which audiences may well shout “Hallelujah.”

Review: Seattle Men’s Chorus Holiday Show, Dec. 11

By Melinda Bargreen

Okay, the holidays can start now.

The Seattle Men’s Chorus is in residence at Benaroya Hall, purveying their annual seasonal treasury of the sublime and the ridiculous. Over the years, this Christmas tradition has marked the official start of the holiday season for the audiences who love the SMC’s message: peace, all kinds of love, tolerance, wacky humor, and lots of great music.

And every year, music director Dennis Coleman and his production team come up with a new and uniquely entertaining show, one that makes the audience think and ponder as well as laugh. Coleman doesn’t take shortcuts; this year there was an especially nice 11-piece combo with snazzy brass underscoring the “Cool Yule” theme. (Visitors to the opening shows also got to hear performances by Megan Hilty, soon to be featured in February’s premiere of the new NBC TV series, “Smash.”)

What really makes the SMC holiday shows work is not just the musical values, the comedy skits, the fun of dressing up, or the evocation of Christmases past – though all those factors are there in good measure. What whaps the listener right over the head is the sudden segue from the enjoyable silliness of a Captain Smartypants skit to the celestial a cappella harmonies of Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium.” Coleman blended the choral sections like an expert winemaker, adding a little extra oomph to an interior dissonance here and there, and somehow keeping this enormous group from sagging in pitch – a minor miracle in itself.

On the side of levity, the SMC staged a reprise of the earlier “Winter Wonderland” parody, “Walkin’ Round in Women’s Underwear,” in which the sheer exuberant joy of doing so was made clearly evident (much to the audience’s entertainment).

The SMC is nothing if not timely, with nods in the program to everything from current political candidates and Broadway shows to the talking muse of the Apple iPhone 4S, Siri. (She responded to a query from four techno “researchers” in one skit with a deadpan “You are such a geek.”)

It wouldn’t be the Christmas show without an audience sing-along, where Coleman proved once again that he can make even an audience sound good. (His own tenor voice from the stage was a reminder that Coleman is a terrific singer, too.) And the group’s signature sign-language “Silent Night” appeared in yet another telling incarnation, in an inspired arrangement from Eric Lane Barnes.

Some of the arrangements, from a source identified in the program as “Sinozich” (most likely Patrick Sinozich, artistic director of the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus and a prolific arranger), were more variable in quality. Jackson Berkey’s creative arrangement of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” got a nicely nuanced performance.

There’s always an encore, and this year’s is literally a showstopper -- a version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” that starts off as barbershop, and turns into something considerably snappier and more exciting. But this one you’ll have to see and hear for yourself, and luckily, there are plenty of chances to do so. The shows continue on Sunday, December 18 (7:30 p.m.);

Monday, December 19 (7:30 p.m.);

Thursday, December 22 (7:30 p.m.);

and Friday, December 23 (2 p.m. and 8 p.m.).

Review in Brief: Ludovic Morlot with Boston Symphony Orchestra (McCallum Theatre, Palm Desert, Calif.)

The weather is balmy, the palm trees are swaying, and Seattle Symphony’s new music director is in Palm Springs – on a California tour with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Before he arrived in Seattle, Ludovic Morlot was the BSO’s assistant conductor (2004-07), and he maintains close ties with this Big Five orchestra. His rapport with the Bostonians was evident in an exciting concert Friday afternoon at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert (a neighboring community to Palm Springs).

The Bostonians produced a big, bright sound in the McCallum, where the acoustical ambience leans more toward the crisply dry than the reverberant. With the revered pianist Richard Goode, Morlot and the orchestra gave a silky, flowing account of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 (K.503), but the big guns came into play in the Mahler Symphony No. 1 – a sonic spectacular in which the responsive and malleable orchestra gave Morlot everything he asked for, and then some. Impressive indeed!

-- Melinda Bargreen

Review: Seattle Symphony with guest conductor Robert Spano, Nov. 10, 2011.

By Melinda Bargreen

Robert Spano is one of those rare conductors who seem to do everything remarkably well: orchestra building (10 seasons as Atlanta Symphony music director), opera (a highly successful Seattle Opera “Ring,” among other coups), teaching (Aspen Music Festival, Emory University), and guest conducting (from New York and Chicago to Amsterdam, Tokyo and Berlin).

A longtime Seattle Symphony favorite, Spano returned to Benaroya Hall Nov. 10-13 to guest conduct a trio of Symphony performances that underscored the many virtues of this maestro. The program offered an unusual starter – the Poulenc “Gloria” -- along with the standard fare of concerto (Rachmaninoff’s familiar “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini”) and symphonic finale (the tuneful Sibelius Second).

The Poulenc “Gloria” is a flawed but nonetheless evocative and entertaining work, mixing Poulenc’s usual buoyant style with some plangent, otherworldly harmonies. It is sometimes written very ungratefully for the choral voices, who are asked to sing lines that sometimes sound as if they were written for random instruments instead of for voices. The Latin text is set as if it were French, with many accents shifting to the final syllable (e.g. “glorificaMUS”), and some entrances (like “Qui sedes”) seem designed to stress singers. But when the “Gloria” is done well, it sounds delightful – and that was mostly the case in the Nov. 10 concert, aside from a few minor coordination problems.

The Seattle Symphony Chorale, prepared by Joseph Crnko, coped with the Poulenc challenges remarkably well, and sang responsively and accurately for Spano.

The soloist, soprano Julianne Gearhart, soared through the lyrical lines, but the placement of her frequently-consulted score (on a stand off to the side) was sometimes awkward, giving the impression she was not quite at ease with the music.

The evening’s second soloist, 32-year-old Russian-born Kirill Gerstein, won one of the keyboard world’s top accolades last year (the Gilmore Artist), and his Rachmaninoff performance left no doubt why he won. There could be few pianists today who can match Gerstein’s incredible technique, which is so fast and so blazingly forceful that you almost expected to see clouds of steam rising from the keyboard. The flurry of thundering octaves in the final variation of the Rachmaninoff arrived with a machine-gun precision – unbelievably clean and accurate.

The performance was a little short, however, on poetry and mystery, two aspects of interpretation that this score also requires (though not quite as often as it demands fabulous technique). Gerstein was less effective in rendering the shimmering colors and subtler effects of some of the earlier variations in the “Rhapsody.”

The program’s finale was the often-heard Sibelius Symphony No. 2, and here Spano earned top marks as an inspirer and shaper of great symphonic sound. The opening string chords were warmly beautiful; the reading was vigorously expressive, with crisp articulation. There’s often a temptation to create long, continuous lines and chords that lead endlessly into yet another Sibelius phrase, but Spano isn’t afraid to delineate phrases with a lot of separations and spaces. The result is more distinctive and effective playing from the orchestra.

Spano also knows how to create a long, long crescendo in that exciting fourth movement, gradually building the sound over a longer time than you’d think possible. When the top of the phrase finally comes, it is quite memorable. The orchestra performed admirably, following Spano’s clear phrasing with an alacrity that showed the players’ deep involvement in his interpretation of the score.

Review: Craig Sheppard, pianist, in “Happy Birthday, Franz!” Liszt recital. Meany Theater, Oct. 21.

By Melinda Bargreen

The 200th birthday of Franz Liszt, that rock star of the 19th-century keyboard, has just passed (he was born Oct. 22, 1811 and died 75 eventful and occasionally scandalous years later). The Liszt bicentennial has not gone unnoticed; here in Seattle, the University of Washington faculty pianist Craig Sheppard presented a phenomenal all-Liszt recital on the eve of the composer’s birthday.

Like Sheppard’s other Meany Theater concerts in the past several years, this one was recorded live for Romeo Records, so those who missed the recent concert will still have a chance to hear him play some of the most challenging repertoire ever composed for keyboard: Books I and II of Liszt’s “Les Années de Pèlerinage” (The Years of Pilgrimage). The substantial succession of 16 separate pieces (nine of them in Book I, “Suisse” or Switzerland, and seven in Book II, “Italie”) presents vignettes of lakes, valleys, atmospheres, recollections, and readings from Liszt’s travels abroad with his mistress Marie, Comtesse d’Agoult. (Marie bore Liszt three illegitimate children, one of whom grew up to marry the composer Richard Wagner in equally scandalous circumstances.)

The “Années de Pèlerinage” are such huge, difficult pieces that they usually make their way only singly onto recital programs, usually as the grand finale to an evening that has perhaps started with some decorous Mozart and gone on to some Chopin or Schumann. Hearing 16 enormous Liszt works back-to-back is an experience audiences almost never get, because few pianists have the energy, the technique, and the focus to present an evening like that.

Sheppard is legendary for all three of those attributes. This is the thinking man’s Liszt player, but he’s also long on sheer drama. His playing etched every detail with razor-sharp intensity, rising to the grandiose statements of “La Chapelle de Guillaume Tell” and relaxing into the cascading delicacy of “Au bord d’une source.” “Les Cloches de Genève” emerged with an almost lambent warmth.

Even better known were several of the works from Book II, particularly the three “Petrarch Sonnets” and the grand finale, “Après une Lecture de Dante” (usually called the “Dante Sonata”) – which got an absolutely cataclysmic performance. Sheppard attacked the work with hair-raising firepower, his huge technique covering the keyboard with thundering octaves and also a delicate filigree of overlaid chords. The audience erupted into cheers, but even an ovation did not bring on an encore: how could you possibly follow up a performance like this one? Anything else would be anticlimactic.

Sheppard pays further homage to Liszt on Jan. 26, when he performs the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the University of Washington Symphony under the direction of Jonathan Pasternack.

Review: Seattle Symphony presents the Mariinsky Orchestra with conductor Valery Gergiev, and cello soloist Ivan Karizna; Benaroya Hall, October 19.

By Melinda Bargreen

Sometimes an orchestra is a group of about seven or eight dozen instrumentalists.

And sometimes it is a single living, breathing organism of overwhelming artistic purpose, united by the hand of a great conductor.

The Mariinsky Orchestra and conductor Valery Gergiev are emphatically in that latter category, as was amply clear in Wednesday evening’s all-Russian program for the Seattle Symphony Visiting Orchestras Series. Gergiev has been at the helm of the 229-year-old orchestra of St. Petersburg’s legendary Mariinsky Theater since 1988, and their partnership is in a category all its own.

Gergiev doesn’t need a podium, or a baton, or even a recognizable beat. He choreographs the music by striding almost into the orchestra, urging the players on with gestures and expressions, sculpting the direction of the music with odd little fluttery gestures of hands and wrists. Gergiev bent and shaped the big piece on the program – Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony (No. 6) – in unique directions, making us wait for the sublime D major theme of the first movement, indulging the brass in huge slow statements of doom, changing the tempo to new extremes of speed and languor. It’s as if Gergiev were driving the Almighty’s new Lamborghini, accelerating like crazy, zooming around the corners, then suddenly braking to appreciate a great view.

And there is plenty of horsepower in this finely tuned vehicle. The opening selections from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” Suites featured thick, dark orchestral textures punctuated by terrifying brass climaxes, as Gergiev and the players explored some interpretive extremes. Nothing seemed routine all evening; the music was always going somewhere, waxing and waning, leaping ahead or drawing sorrowfully back. Sometimes it was so spectacularly triumphant that the audience couldn’t help applauding prematurely, as at the close of the third movement in the “Pathétique.”

The players, who seemed quite delighted to be there, were remarkable for their strongly characterized sound: the plangent woodwinds, the unanimous horns, the unusually rich-toned cello section, and the principal clarinet who did a diminuendo as soft as a hummingbird’s breath.

The evening’s soloist, in Tchaikovsky’s challenging “Rococo Variations,” was the teenaged Ivan Karizna (born in 1992), whose warm, unforced beauty of sound was as impressive as his impeccable technique. Nothing was exaggerated or driven; virtuosity has never sounded so easy. It’s inspiring to hear someone so young and so gifted.

[Melinda Bargreen also reviews concerts for 98.1 Classical KING FM. She can be reached at mbargreen@aol.com.]

Review: Seattle Symphony presents Hilary Hahn, violinist, with pianist Valentina Lisitsa, in Distinguished Artists Series recital; Benaroya Hall, Oct. 17.

By Melinda Bargreen

When Hilary Hahn made her first sensational recording of unaccompanied Bach violin works, music-industry pundits were flabbergasted: If she could command this challenging repertoire at 16, what could she possibly do as an encore?

In the succeeding 16 years, Hahn has given music lovers plenty of great answers to that question. In fact, her latest coup involves encores – 27 new ones, from eminent international composers in response to Hahn’s groundbreaking commissioning project. More formally dubbed “In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores, ” this collection of short commissioned pieces is still a work in progress. A good-sized, responsive, and lucky audience of Seattle-area music lovers got to hear the first performance of the first 13 of the encores in Hahn’s creative program configuration of old and new works.

This may be the first recital program in history to balance the three Bs – Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms – with 13 short brand-new pieces. Hahn originally planned the encores as the program’s last half, but changed her mind, placing them instead in smaller groups throughout the program. Her own commentary and introductions (as she noted, the first time she had ever used a microphone in Benaroya Hall) added considerably to the listeners’ understanding of the new repertoire.

Hahn and her pianist, the admirable Valentina Lisitsa, demonstrated incomparable teamwork in moving back and forth from familiar repertoire to new works that were challenging in many different ways. Somehow Hahn always seems to surpass herself, with playing of such astonishing strength, purity and accuracy that you marvel at the mighty music produced by such a deceptively fragile-looking musician. In Lisitsa she has found a player of such similar artistic temperament – lyrical, clean, intense, technically fearless – that they appear to inspire each other.

It was surprising to hear how many of the 13 encore pieces – from eminent composers hailing from New Zealand, Finland, Israel, and many points in between – were more or less variations on a similar theme. Many were essentially mournful in mood (perhaps in response to the current economic and political climate?), alternating propulsive passages with more wistful ones. At the same time, there was infinite variety, from Jennifer Higdon’s virtuoso “Echo Dash” to the more conventionally lovely “Whispering” of Einojuhani Rautavaara. Christos Hatzis’ “Coming To” featured very high harmonics and sliding passages in thirds that sounded like the Doppler effect of a passing train. Max Richter’s “Mercy” was all elegant simplicity and beauty.

With all the new pieces, Hahn fans also were grateful for the nobility of the Bach Violin Sonata No. 1, the exciting rush of the Beethoven Sonata No. 2, and the warm-hearted Brahms “Sonatensatz.” Hahn gave the program one last twist by playing an encore – not a new one, but Charles Ives’ 1901 “Largo.” The kicker here is the fact that the Ives sounded just as modern as any of the 2011 encores.

Review: Seattle Opera presents Bizet’s “Carmen,” Oct. 15

By Melinda Bargreen

When a singer makes her debut as Carmen at La Scala Opera at the age of 25 – opening the company’s season, no less – it’s a safe bet that she has something very special to offer.

Seattle Opera’s Carmen, the Georgian-born Anita Rachvelishvili (pronounced, according to Seattle Opera, “Rotch-VELL-esh VEE-li”) not only starred at La Scala in 2009, but also went on to the New York Metropolitan Opera as Carmen in the following year. In both cases, she received respectful and positive reviews, though critics were not shouting, “Stop the presses! A star is born!”

Here in Seattle, one could see the reason for some reservations at the same time that it was impossible not to be wowed by the power and beauty of her voice. Rachvelishvili is a fairly stolid actress for this tempestuous role, but when she unleashes that mezzo-soprano, you’re just blown back in your seat. The voice is not merely loud; it has color and shape as well as amplitude. She is great at presenting the implacable, fatalistic side of Carmen; less so in portraying the sheer life force and the irresistible sensuality. Her death is almost anticlimactic.

The production’s Don José, Luis Chapa, is a Mexican-born tenor making his U.S. debut in this role (he’ll return next summer as the Calaf in “Turandot”). Chapa may possibly have more rough edges than any singer Seattle Opera has presented in a leading role thus far, but he is quite riveting in his own way: a huge and often beautiful voice that sometimes veers out of control but is consistently exciting, and the overwhelming sense that he’s giving the role everything he’s got. (Also on the plus side: the technique to go for the diminuendo Bizet wanted on that high-B-flat in the “Flower Song,” instead of bellowing it as many tenors do.) Don Jose has to be terrifying in that last act; Chapa made you want to triple-check the prop knife to make sure Carmen wasn’t getting stabbed for real.

As Escamillo, Michael Todd Simpson made all the right moves, but at least on the evening in question, his mellifluous baritone lacked that heroic quality that is essential to the strutting toreador. Norah Amsellem’s Micaëla was beautifully sung in every detail.

Stage director Bernard Uzan gave the audience plenty to look at, though the sets (by R. Keith Brumley for the Lyric Opera of Kansas City) were sometimes restrictive – reducing the town square of the opening scene, for instance, to a relatively small enclosure that cramped some of the action. And action there was: a pack of wonderfully noisy, fractious children, and a dreamy, evocative corps of cigarette girls in which pliant dancers mixed with the women of the chorus. Throughout the production, the dancing was marvelous – integrated into the action, arising almost casually and spontaneously instead of as formal “set pieces.” Top marks to choreographer Peggy Hickey, principal dancer Lisa Gillespie, and the troupe.

There were some oddities in the staging, to be sure. One example: After Don José stabs his inamorata, he calls to the spectators to arrest him because he has killed her – only there is nobody on the stage to hear him. Usually the crowds are pouring out of the arena at this point, stopping in horror at the scene before them; sometimes the scene is presented with a single officer emerging to see the murderer and his victim. With no one else present, Don José’s last lines don’t make much sense.

The lighting, by Donald Edmund Thomas, seemed a bit abrupt in the first scene, but later there were some wonderful effects (the disembodied lights of the smugglers moving in the darkness, for example). Beth Kirchhoff’s chorus sang with considerable style, vigor, and accuracy.

Cheers to the supporting cast members, whose ranks include several Seattle Opera Young Artists who did the program proud (Joseph Lattanzi’s Morales, David Krohn’s Dancaïre, Andrew Stenson’s Remendado, Amanda Opuszynski’s Frasquita, Sarah Larsen’s Mercédès). Donovan Singletary, who charmed Seattle audiences as Jake in last summer’s “Porgy and Bess,” provided an incisive Zuniga.

Orchestral musical values were more equivocal. Conductor Pier Giorgio Morandi seemed to have a tough time getting together with Rachvelishvili and Chapa, who wanted to stretch out their arias to greater length. The singers won. Usually “Carmen” feels speedy, but this performance felt a bit desultory. An unusual succession of bloopers from the orchestra indicated that all was not well in the pit.

The production continues through October 29, with an alternate cast (Malgorzata Walewska, Fernando de la Mora and Caitlin Lynch) taking on the respective roles of Carmen, Don José and Micaëla.

Compared with Seattle Opera’s last production, which drew some protests from parents who had brought young children, this “Carmen” is less overtly sensual, but the basic facts of the opera haven’t changed (lust, betrayal, lawlessness, murder). Carmen will always be Carmen.

Review: Seattle Symphony/Morlot, “Rite of Spring” (Sept. 29)

Review: Seattle Symphony “Rite of Spring,” with Ludovic Morlot, conductor (Sept. 29).

By Melinda Bargreen

From France to America, from America to France: no wonder these musical themes intrigue the Seattle Symphony’s new music director Ludovic Morlot, a Frenchman who has moved to Seattle. Each of the concerts he has conducted this season has dealt in some way with Franco-American themes, but none to quite the extent of the Sept. 29-Oct. 1 program centering around Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”

No one could call it a restful concert. Not when you start right out with the “Rite,” a forceful and brilliantly primitive ballet score that created a scandal at its 1913 premiere in Paris and still can make the earth move. And not when you conclude the evening with Edgar Varèse’s “Amériques,” an even more forceful (though less brilliant) work that was apparently designed to surpass the “Rite” in volume levels, if not quality.

In between came Gershwin’s peppy, jazzy “An American in Paris,” a piece that reverses’ Morlot’s path across the Atlantic by representing an American’s first impressions of the City of Light. (Curiously, the Gershwin work also was heard on the Sept. 17th opening night gala; it seems odd to schedule a repeat performance so soon, before an audience many of whose members had already heard the Gershwin at the gala.)

A few weeks into the season, it’s already clear that the orchestra and the audience are galvanized by the energy Morlot brings to the podium. At each program thus far, the maestro has taken up the microphone to address the listeners. Some people like this practice, as a way to see more clearly into the conductor’s view of the music. Others don’t, preferring that the conductor get on with the business of conducting. Wherever you stand on the issue, there’s no denying that it is fairly unusual among major American orchestras to have remarks from the conductor as a standard feature of subscription programs.

The concert’s high point, not surprisingly, was the Stravinsky, all sharp edges and dramatic pulses conveying the unmistakable energy this landmark score. Here Morlot was right at home, changing rhythms and meter as smoothly as an expert racecar driver changes gears. There were a few intonation problems, a few false starts and wrong entrances, but these receded to non-issues in comparison with the overall effect of the reading. The guest concertmaster, Yang Xu of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, made a strong impression here, and an even finer one in his “American in Paris” solos.

The Varèse “Amériques,” conveying that composer’s impressions of America, did not show to advantage following the “Rite of Spring” – of which “Amériques” seemed a noisy and less effective imitation. Only cowbells and Wagner tubas, it seemed, were missing from the personnel list; there even was a heckelphone, a bass-toned member of the oboe family played by one of the world’s few recognized heckelphonists, Seattle’s Arthur Grossman. The percussion section included a deep-toned and exceedingly loud siren that sounded like the moos of a bellowing Holstein (periodically inducing titters in the audience).

“You’ll love it for its passion,” Morlot said of the Varèse from the podium, “or you’ll love hating it.” The “Amériques” made the “Rite of Spring” sound positively lyrical by comparison, but the performance – culminating in a musical cataclysm of paint-peeling volume – nonetheless found favor with the audience – whether for Morlot’s former or latter reason.