Ron Bierman - Page 6

“We love you, Poncho!” came a shout from the audience before the musicians had played their first note. And a few tunes later, even some silver-haired members of the La Jolla community were dancing in the aisles. The Poncho Sanchez Latin Jazz Band has that effect on people. It’s hard to keep your feet still and a smile off your face once Sanchez and his talented rhythm section start a salsa beat.

Mezzo Isabel Leonard and classical-guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas are stars in their fields. Leonard has sung on two Grammy-winning opera recordings and won a Beverly Sills Artist Award at the Metropolitan Opera--and even guested on Sesame Street. He's garnered 30 international awards, including the Segovia, which he won at age 15, and critics have compared him to that legendary guitarist. Understandably, their recital at the La Jolla Music Society's Conrad sold out more than a month before the performance. Chairs were added on stage for late ticket buyers.

What did our critic think of SAN DIEGO OPERA'S WORLD PREMIERE OF THE LAST DREAM OF FRIDA AND DIEGO at San Diego Civic Theater? ​ ​The San Diego Opera, reveling in modern phantasies, has followed its successful production of Aging Magician with El último sueño de Frida y Diego (The Last Dream of Frida and Diego). The former featured a mysterious chorus commenting cryptically on the Guadalupe Paz everyday actions of its maybe dying main character who, maybe while dying, ascends to join the chorus in a brilliantly staged finale. The more recent production is less ambiguous, but even more phantasmagoric. Semi-reality shares the stage with an underworld of the dead as Frida (mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz) decides whether to accept a one-day pass back to life, and Diego (baritone Alfredo Daza) laments his lost love. ​

On this storm-threatened evening, Symphony CEO Martha Gilmer was clad in a yellow rain-slicker worthy of a bout with a North Atlantic gale as she told a surprisingly full outdoor-amphitheater audience, 'Now I know how much you love your San Diego Symphony!' She went on to explain a late change in conductors. Principal Guest Conductor Edo de Waart, at the age of 81, was beginning to feel the effects of travel, and they'd agreed he would conduct the concert's second half, John Lidfors the first. After that announcement, she introduced a video of the always entertaining and informative Nuvi Mehta who gave a brief description of the flood of marvelous melodies to follow.

The opera El último sueño de Frida y Diego (The Last Dream of Frida and Diego) premieres in October at the San Diego Civic Center. I spoke with the work's composer Gabriela Lena Frank for more than an hour via Zoom while she was in Booneville, the rural area North of San Francisco where she lives. Although the opera is her first, her orchestral music has been performed by an impressive number of major orchestras including those of Cleveland, Philadelphia and Boston. And despite the challenge of a serious hearing deficiency from birth, she's produced music the New York Times described as 'brilliantly effective,' while the Los Angeles Times chimed in with 'glorious.'

Few composers reach the depth of emotions found in Tchaikovsky, and few conductors seem to react more passionately to musically expressed emotion than the San Diego Symphony's Rafael Payare. What better combination could there be for an outdoor waterfront concert at the Rady Shell.

What did our critic think of THE NEW ROMANTICS at The Conrad 's Baker-Baum Concert Hall?

What did our critic think of SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY CONCERT at The Rady Shell?

Musical impressionism ruled the San Diego Symphony’s early-evening Rady Shell concert this past weekend. First came conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen’s reaction to Nyx, a daughter of Chaos, the earliest Greek god. Nyx, rarely mentioned in extant ancient Greek-literature, is goddess of the night, mysterious but powerful. At one point in Homer’s Iliad, even Zeus changes his plans for fear of making her angry, and I get that. She was the mother of Death and Sleep.

'What the hell was that?' an opera fan asked her friend as we shuffled into a parking-garage elevator. Not an easily answered question after a viewing of AGING MAGICIAN. Ambiguity abounds and reality is mixed with fantasy. The reality side is clear, mostly. Harold is a middle-aged watch repairman who lives alone. Although repairs pay the rent, they've been neglected because he can't stop thinking about the plot of a book he's been writing in which an aging magician worries his marvelous tricks won't outlive him. As he seeks a capable heir for his book of secrets, he collapses and is rushed to a hospital.

The San Diego Symphony’s Music Director and Conductor Rafael Payare took up the notoriously difficult French horn at the age of 13. During an hour-long Zoom interview while he was in Montreal, I asked how he had managed to become a soloist less than six months later! “I have to admit it was a little bit fast,” he said. Not the haughty egotistical answer I might have gotten from film conductor-stereotypes. His local youth orchestra, a part of Venezuela’s extensive El Sistema program, needed horns, so he joined a few weeks after first picking one up. “For a couple of classes, I could only play one scale, but somehow something clicked, and I just started playing more.” Less than half a year later he passed an audition for the national youth orchestra, and later became Principal Horn with the prestigious Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, the one that first brought Gustavo Dudamel to the attention of the conducting world.

Can a symphony orchestra have a role in solving problems like homelessness and global warming? If you don't think so now, you might change your mind after a conversation with Laura Reynolds, the San Diego Symphony's recently appointed Vice President of Impact and Innovation. In 2015, while she was the Seattle Symphony VP of Education and Community Engagement, both the city and the county decided the increasing number of homeless people had reached a state of emergency. CEO Simon Woods asked her, 'What's our role in this? What should we do?''

Gounod’s overture introduces ROMEO AND JULIET with a prophetic mix of lyrical romance and tragedy. Yves Abel, the Principal Conductor of the San Diego Opera, is an expert in French opera and made sure that resonant brass and lush strings produced the mood a Parisian composer of the time would have favored. The quick pace was especially important in a five-act opera some productions turn into a turgid ordeal. No chance of that with Abel leading the San Diego Symphony.

When he was four-years old Joshua Bell's parents found him making music by plucking rubber bands stretched to different lengths on dresser drawers. Clearly, he needed a real instrument. Fortunately, they bought a violin rather than a guitar. Ten years later he was the youngest ever to solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and went on to become one of the most successful violinists in the world. The 'Gibson' Stradivarius has replaced dresser and rubber bands. In his most recent San Diego appearance Bell stood as soloist while conducting the acclaimed Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chamber orchestra in concertos by Bach and Samuel Barber. After intermission he conducted Beethoven's third symphony, the 'Eroica,' from the first violin chair.

Conductor Yves Abel arrived in San Diego from Europe a few days ago to begin rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet by French composer Charles Gounod. The Maestro does get around a lot, even for an internationally in-demand musician. His wife and boys five and eight sometimes travel with him when he conducts but remain at home in Italy this time. Perhaps Abel’s wanderlust began in childhood. His family immigrated from France to French-speaking Quebec when he was young. His father couldn’t find work there, so it was off to English-speaking Toronto where he spent most of his formative years. Next stop New York City for study at the Mannes School of Music, and after New York frequent work in Italy, then Germany. Abel’s travel has resulted in fluency in French, English, Italian and German.

Jeff Thayer was at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Temecula when we spoke for an hour on Zoom. 'I'm usually here right before I have something big to do.' He was referring to upcoming performances of the ninth violin concerto of The Chevalier de St. George at The Conrad in La Jolla. As the San Diego Symphony's Concertmaster, Thayer has realized an ambition dating back to high school. To further his ambition, he went on to graduate from the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School's Pre-College Division.

The La Jolla Music Society has been bringing some of the world’s best string quartets into the Baker-Baum Concert Hall at The Conrad. With a little over 500 seats and acoustics that allow you to hear off-stage whispers, it’ a setting that could only be improved upon if the performing quartet visited your living room. But if The Conrad is a great place to hear one quartet, how about two at the same time? The Dover and Escher Quartets performed last weekend to prove, resoundingly, that is also a delight. Since they are two of the most highly praised string quartets in the world, the excellent sound and quality of playing was predictable, but good music for a string octet is rare compared to the cornucopia of quartets Available. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven combined wrote more than 100 string quartets, but not one for string octet.

In its most recent season, Classics 4 Kids reached nearly 37,000 people at 256 San Diego County schools, two thirds of them in lower income areas. You’d think Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber was performing the way more than 1000 young San Diego students cheer at a Classics 4 Kids concert. Music Director and conductor Dana Zimbric gets audiences young and old excited about great music. In an email interview she explained to me how she does that and how she became a musician.

I admire the plucky inventiveness of the San Diego Opera. On an annual budget of roughly three percent of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, it has managed to mount a consistently appealing and entertaining variety of productions, traditional and contemporary, in both good times and plague times. The latter even forcing an excellent performance of a much-edited La bohème in a hockey-rink parking lot with an audience seated in an armada of vehicles. But although it was an enjoyable performance over all, now and then I was glad to be wearing a California-mandated mask so that no one would know I was at the current Civic Center staging of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.

'I'm just Reggie from Atlanta' baritone Reginald Smith, Jr. explained during our hour-long discussion on Zoom. That may be how he would like to view himself, but it's hardly how most others do since he's also a Grammy winning opera star who's performed at the Met. Until high school, neither opera, much less the Met were in his plans. Then when 13 he saw an Atlanta Opera production of Tosca. 'A classical voice was not new to me.' But the spectacle of unamplified voices together with theatrical staging, an orchestra, and eye-catching scenery was a revelation. 'I vividly remember the show going along, the tenor comes out, the soprano. But when Scarpia made his first big entrance, I thought Whoa, that's a different voice. It just went, boom, you know, like, like an arrow right into my heart. And I thought, what is this person?'