Songs and Schemas

The reviews for the San Francisco Symphony production of Le martyre de Saint Sébastien are in:

• Joshua Kosman at the San Francisco Chronicle thought it was a “loving rendition” and that the chorus “sounded superb”, but had some qualms about the piece itself.
• Richard Scheinin at the San Jose Mercury News found the piece “quite strange and fabulously beautiful”, and that the chorus “shined throughout.”
• Lisa Hirsch at San Francisco Classical Voice enjoyed the “highly effective multimedia production” and thought the chorus “turned in another masterly performance.”

This was a tremendously fun gig for me – the music is glorious, I had a great spot to listen to it, and nothing was too terribly difficult to sing. After my previous post from the tech rehearsal, they switched the soloists around so that Sasha Cooke also sang her solo from the platform just 10 feet in front of me. All the soloists were up close now, much more so than in the usual Symphony Chorus gig where we are in the terrace and the soloists are on the floor. What great fun!

I also got to meet Sasha Cooke and tell her how much I admired her singing and energy. She sweetly said the chorus was the star of the show, but that’s not really true. This was the orchestra’s show, with the chorus and soloists in supporting roles.

After a non-stop sequence of Verdi, Brahms, and Debussy (not even counting the Mahler and holiday concerts that I didn’t sing), the Chorus finally gets to take a 6-week breather. Then we start rehearsals for the premiere of Mason Bates’ Mass Transmission during the American Mavericks Festival from March 15 to 17.

Mason Bates has some interesting things to say about the piece in an interview that the Symphony posted on YouTube:

I’m enjoying our break now, but really looking forward to the next gig too!

If you’re in San Francisco this weekend and love Debussy, you really should try to get to see and hear our production of Le martyre de Saint Sébastien at the San Francisco Symphony. We’re doing the full incidental music in a semi-staged production. The work becomes a multi-media pageant complete with narrator, soloists, chorus, and orchestra.

If you’ve seen SFS semi-staged productions before, you know they can make remarkable use of the Davies Symphony Hall space. You can see the projections in the publicity photo above, but there’s more to the staging than that. Anne Patterson is the director and designer; Michael Tilson Thomas is the conductor; Frederica von Stade is the narrator. Our vocal soloists are sopranos Karina Gauvin and Joanna Taber, and mezzo-sopranos Sasha Cooke and Leah Wool. Sasha and Leah sing a duet as twins at the beginning, from opposite sides of the stage, that is simply amazing.

The chorus doesn’t have a lot to sing in this work, but what we do sing is choice. This is Debussy in full impressionistic, romantic, whole tone glory. Because this was written as incidental music – a bit over an hour of music for a big five-act play – the narration and production provide some essential dramatic context to bring the work to life in a concert setting.

Another real treat for the chorus is that the staging brings the soloists up to our level. Usually the soloists for an orchestral work are front and center on stage, while we’re up in the center terrace quite far away. In this staging, though, Flicka is maybe 20 feet to my left, while Karina and Leah are maybe 10 feet in front of me; Sasha is on the other side of the stage. I was having a lot of fun drinking in their presence at tonight’s tech rehearsal.

Le martyre de Saint Sébastien was composed and premiered in 1911, the same year that the San Francisco Symphony started. So these performances really fit into the ongoing SFS Centennial celebration season. It’s rarely done, and MTT is one of its major champions today. The concerts start with Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta. Don’t miss it!

Performances are Thursday, January 12 through Saturday, January 14 at Davies Symphony Hall. Tickets are still available, though getting pretty scarce for Saturday.

Tonight begins our four-concert run of Brahms’ A German Requiem with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. The soloists Jane Archibald and Kyle Ketelsen have sounded fabulous in rehearsal. The program opens with the Chorus singing one of Heinrich Schütz’s a cappella six-part motets, Ich bin ein rechter Weinstock, conducted by Ragnar Bohlin. In between is Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. So there’s German music from the 17th, 19th, and 20th centuries all in one concert! Performances are Thursday the 17th through Saturday the 19th at 8:00 pm, and Sunday the 20th at 2:00 pm, all at Davies Symphony Hall.

Tickets are available online or at the box office. The San Francisco Symphony is running an amazing sale until 6:00 pm Pacific Time tonight, where nearly all seats are just $20! Use the SALE20 promotion code to get the special pricing online. The sale includes all our Brahms concerts, plus several other November and December programs.

I’ve sung the Brahms before, but it’s been a whole different experience than the Verdi Requiem. With the Verdi, the music pretty much came back into my voice instantly. When we started the Brahms, my voice was asking “Have you really sung this before?” There is a lot more for the chorus to sing in the Brahms than the Verdi. It’s pretty much continuous, with just a few passages for the soloists or the orchestra alone. It took more time to relearn the Brahms, but now it’s going very well.

The Schütz is a whole new world to me, having never sung any of his music before. Once it was added to the program, I purchased Emmanuel Music’s CD of six-part motets on the Koch International label – now out of print, but available from used stores at Amazon and elsewhere. What a beautiful recording, conducted by the late Craig Smith. It includes several motets composed to texts that Brahms also used in A German Requiem. It’s a fun challenge to combine the very different vocal and choral styles needed by Schütz and Brahms in the same concert.