SF Conservatory of Music: Handel's Serse

Last year the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Historical Performance Department gave us Handel's Flavio (my post is here), a rarity; this year it gave us his Serse, one of his more popular operas. Once again the performances were led by Corey Jamason from the harpsichord, leading the Conservatory's Baroque Ensemble. I heard the Saturday cast; I would have gone back for the Sunday afternoon cast but I had a conflict.

The Saturday performance was so enjoyable that I regretted not being able to go back & experience the production again through the prism of different performers. Once again, the staging is fairly minimal; the singers wear appropriate costumes & act out the roles in front of the orchestra, but the set is restricted to some large boxes that are useful for hiding behind, putting disguises in, & so forth. A witty touch in the costuming was that two lovers who will clearly end up together, Arsamene & Romilda, were both wearing purple; he was in a suit & she in a gown. So they were visually linked from the beginning, though the shades did not match exactly, reflecting the turbulent vacillations of their fancies.

The titular monarch, Serse (Xerxes), is the unstable core of a whirligig of romance. The opera famously opens with what used to be known as "Handel's Largo", the dulcet aria Ombra mai fu, in which the Emperor expresses his love for . . . a tree. It's apparently a very attractive tree. I think we can all sympathize, as spring is now bringing the fresh green leaves out on the twining branches. Most of the plot revolves around the Emperor's arbitrary decision to love or not to love, & the implicit threat to others in his power.

The other lovers are not really more stable, though less dangerous because less powerful. Serse's brother Arsamene is in love with Romilda, whom Serse decides he must have for his own (he thinks his brother's loves are as easily transplanted as his); Romilda is in love with Arsamene, but the two of them are subject to intense fits of jealousy, leading to much musical sniping. Romilda's sister Atalanta is in love with Arsamene, & tries to sabotage her sister's relationship with him whenever possible. There's also Amastre, a neighboring princess in love & promised to Serse, who arrives disguised rather dashingly as a man; Elviro, Arsamene's comic servant, & Ariodate, the well-meaning father of Romilda & Atalanta, round out the cast of characters. The sniping, the jealousy, the comical confusions about love, the underlying threat from an arbitrary power . . . despite baroque opera's reputation for rarefied silliness, the actions & emotional affects here strike me as much more life-like than the strained melodramas of the so-called "verismo" school of opera.

The whole cast was very strong. The title role was performed by mezzo-soprano Jordan McCready, with the confident air (& even physical aggression – s/he more or less playfully pushed people around physically as well as emotionally) of a supreme ruler. The exquisite lovers Arsamene & Romilda were performed by, respectively, countertenor Kyle Tingzon & soprano Camryn Finn. The conniving sister Atalanta was soprano Catherine Duncan. Mezzo-soprano Cambria Metzinger, looking stylish in her man's disguise of black leather boots & a hat with a large feather (quite jaunty for a despairing lover!) was the intense Amastre. Bass-baritone Joseph Calzada was quite funny as the servant Elviro, who would rather go off somewhere with a bottle of wine, & baritone Aaron Hong was the suavely blundering (to good effect) Ariodate. The orchestra gave lively shape to the music.

It's kind of amazing that so much work went into what was essentially a one-off performance (for the singers; the orchestra was of course the same for both performances). It's even more amazing that such a high level of performance was given to the public for free (as are many programs at the Conservatory): all you had to do to get a ticket was make a reservation. Kudos to the Conservatory for serving Handel & the public (& its students) so well.

SF Conservatory of Music: Handel's Flavio

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Historical Performance Department presented Handel's opera Flavio, rè de’ Longobardi this past weekend; I heard it on Saturday. There were different student casts for each performance but both were led by Department Chair Corey Jamason, & the ensemble was directed by Jamason, Elisabeth Reed, & Marcie Stapp.

The staging was minimal but effective: there were two stone benches on either side of the stage, in front of the orchestra, & surtitle screens let us know what the setting was. Unlike my René Jacobs recording, or the more recent one (which I haven't heard), this performance used female singers instead of counter-tenors; the women playing men were dressed in suits, & the directors had astutely advised them on how to sit in a masculine way, but there was no ungainly effort to hide the their essential femininity, which was not a problem. The women playing women wore stylish gowns.

The opera begins where many end, with two couples singing together about how complete & perfect their happiness is. Complications, of course, ensue, due to political rivalries, social tensions, & the wayward eye of the randy titular monarch. Sometimes the tone is lightly ironic, but there are also moments of genuine anguish & surprising violence – there's a duel that I thought would end in injury but instead (OK, spoiler alert for a 300-year-old opera!) ends in death. (In case you're wondering how I can have listened to a recording & not know this: I have a bad habit, due to limited time, of listening to things without necessarily reading along in the libretto; hence one of the revelations given to me by a live performance is often the plot.) Harmony is restored at the end, thanks to the benevolent monarch, who not only causes most of the problems but acts almost as a Deus ex Machina to resolve them.

The whole performance was a delight, from beginning to the end, almost three hours later: dazzling, moving arias followed one after another, all splendidly delivered by the young cast: mezzo Jaimie Langner as the arbitrary & self-amused Flavio; tenor Seth Hanson as the elderly counselor Ugone; bass-baritone Joseph Calzada as his seething rival counselor, Lotario; & then the four lovers, mezzo MonaLisa Pomarleanu as Ugone's son Guido, mezzo Cambria Metzinger as Ugone's charmingly flirtatious daughter Teodata, soprano Alissa Goretsky as Lotario's daughter Emilia, & soprano Hyesoo Kim as the courtier Vitige, in love with Teodata – all were excellent but I was particularly impressed with the two sopranos, Goretsky & Kim, who delivered their more emotionally wide-ranging roles with great depth & beauty.

The orchestra was also excellent (& I recognized some of the players, such as Yunyi Ji on harpsichord, from the Baroque Ensemble Concerto Competition concert in February). Like that concert, the opera was free to the public; all you needed was a reservation – it was a useful reminder that the Conservatory has lots of great offerings, freely available; if BART were running better, I would definitely be there more often.

SFCM: Baroque Ensemble concert

Last Sunday I went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, to hear the winners of the Baroque Ensemble Concerto Competition doing their thing.

This was also my first time in the Conservatory's new building, a high-rise on Van Ness Avenue. The Barbro Osher Recital Hall is at the top of the building, a clean-lined room whose glass walls look out on panoramic views of San Francisco. It was lovely to see the seagulls wheel around during the music, though one did hit the glass with a thud. There is a disadvantage to the hall & its height, which is that getting up there is not a problem as people straggle in by ones & twos & threes, but when everyone leaves at the end there is inevitably a crowd that needs to wait for the elevator.

The Baroque Ensemble (headed by Corey Jamason & Elisabeth Reed) was all strings plus harpsichord. We had five concertos: in the first half, one each by Boismortier, John Garth (a British composer new to me), & Vivaldi, & in the second half, another one by Vivaldi & one by Bach. I was interested to hear the Boismortier & Garth, as they were less familiar to me, but (based on the music; this is not a comment on the performances) it was clear why Vivaldi & Bach are the better-known names; their pieces just sparked & dazzled in a way that outshone the more sedate elegance of the more obscure two.

The Boismortier (Concerto for Violoncello in D Major, Opus 26 #6, which is, according to the program note for this piece by Stella Hannock, "recognized as the first solo concerto for any instrument written by a French composer") featured Octavio Mujica on baroque cello; the Garth (Concerto for Violoncello in D Major, Opus 1, #1, & Isabel Tannenbaum's program note for this piece tells us it "is considered to be the first of its kind written by an English composer") featured Kyle Stachnik on baroque cello; & the Vivaldi that closed the first half, the Concerto for Two Violins in A Minor, RV 523, featured Annemarie Schubert & Eliana Estrada on baroque violins.

After the intermission, we had our second helping of Vivaldi, which this time was the Concerto for Violoncello in D Minor, RV 407, featuring Hasan Abualhaj on baroque cello, followed by the final piece, probably the best-known of the lot, Bach's Concerto for Harpsichord in D Minor, BWV 1052, featuring Yunyi Ji on harpsichord.

The soloists played as part of the Ensemble throughout, & there was a nice sense of camaraderie throughout the afternoon. As noted in the program book (the other two write-ups were by Samuel C Nedel for the Vivaldis & Clayton Luckadoo for the Bach) the pieces kept to the fast-slow-fast pattern of three movements that Vivaldi popularized for the concerto form, & it may seem as if there was a lot of cello going on, but it's a tribute to composers & performers that the music never lagged or seemed rote. As the last notes of Ji's harpsichord glittered down upon up, the ensemble joined the full house in applause all around for each other.

sketches for Gesualdo, Prince of Madness

Last Friday I went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for Opera Parallele's "opera lab" first public presentation of Gesualdo, Prince of Madness, based on the life of the Italian Renaissance composer, with music by Dante de Silva, libretto by Mitchell Morris, and graphics by Mark Simmons. The performance was held in the smaller recital hall there, which was packed. As usual with Opera Parallele, Brian Staufenbiel handled the staging and Nicole Paiement conducted. An electronic keyboard stood in for most of the orchestra, but there was also piano, percussion, and, for that distinctive Renaissance sound, a theorbo, along with a trio of women singers, to evoke the madrigals Gesualdo wrote for women's voices.

The opera is in two acts; the performance, which started late, lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. The first half tells the notorious story of Gesualdo's murder of his wife and her lover when he caught them in bed together. The second half shows the aftermath: Gesualdo, struggling with obsessive memories of the murdered pair, withdrawn into a private world of musical calculations, is married for political reasons to a different young woman, who, advised by a cunning old attendant, is plotting her own way to freedom. The plot is as lurid as anything John Webster might have come up with, complete with adultery, murder, mad scenes, cross-dressing, and deadly herbal poisons, and is a reminder of the reason so many Jacobean tragedies take place in Italy.

But the emphasis isn't so much on the violence as on Gesualdo's distracted mental state; there is frenzied music, but also disquieting, plinking sounds reminiscent of a brain being picked at and over obsessively. There aren't really stand-alone arias; the dialogue flows on as in Wozzeck. Complex ensembles evoke Renaissance madrigals, and the music sounds contemporary with both us and the characters on stage.

Opera Parallele's stagings are always stylish, adventurous, and experimental. The idea for this one is that the "staging" will actually be a projection done in the style of a graphic novel. I assume in the finished version the singers will be in the pit or otherwise out of sight, but I might be wrong about that. I also don't know if the finished version will have continuous movements (as in an animated film) or "panels" that give way to other panels, with some interior animation, which is what we saw on Friday.

It's an interesting idea, and in some ways is the ideal of a certain type of opera creator (or fan): the characters will always look as they do in the drawings, without the variations and chance qualities that you get with different individuals (particularly in opera casting, where voice and not appearance is the primary concern). But I like seeing the different qualities different performers bring to a role; I was thinking about this when Nikola Printz started singing Artemisia, the older lady-in-waiting – I could tell immediately from the way she darkened her voice not only that she was singing a different character from before, but the type of guarded, calculating character this woman was. It played off in interesting ways against the singer's youthful appearance and Louise Brooks-style hairdo. But on screen Artemisia will always have the same dour, dessicated look. The drawings are very well done but personally I prefer a more stylized look (the style here is similar to the fairly realistic style used by Dave Gibbons for Alan Moore's Watchmen).

In addition to Printz, the singers were Daniel Cilli as Carlo, impassioned and convincing as both killer and composer, Michelle Rice as his first wife Maria, Maya Kherani as his second wife Leonora, Andres Ramirez as Maria's lover, Chris Filipowicz as a male servant, and Sarah Eve Brand, Lora Libby, and Rachel Rush as the female trio. Though there were projections there were no surtitles (a printed libretto was provided). I had little trouble understanding the words, though, except for some of the ensembles and the higher-lying voices, which are where I usually have trouble. Keisuke Nakagoshi played piano, Adam Cockerham played theorbo, McKenzie Camp played percussion, and Eva-Maria Zimmerman handled the keyboard. It was difficult to believe they'd only been playing this piece together for a week or so.

The opera has been in development for several years, but the company has only recently started working on it as a group. I look forward to seeing the finished version, or other intermediate stages. There was a Q-and-A session afterwards with the artists, followed by a reception, but I was unable to stay for either. Perhaps if I had I would have seen Axel Feldheim, who was there, though sadly for me I missed him.

Marnie Breckenridge at the Conservatory of Music

Last Saturday I was at the elegant concert hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to hear an alumni recital featuring soprano Marnie Breckenridge (class of '96) and pianist Kristin Pankonin (class of '89). I've enjoyed Breckenridge before in several different roles with several local companies, and she is featured in Opera Parallele's upcoming production of Golijov's Ainadamar. The audience was obviously familiar with the performers and gave them prolonged and warm welcoming applause.

Breckenridge is a beautiful Hitchcock blonde and wore a peacock-blue sheath of Grecian pleats. She opened with two Strauss songs from the Brentano Lieder, giving us an ecstatic An die Nacht and a flirtatious Amor. The entire rest of the recital featured American composers (many living, and in the audience) and so it was in English, which was great; it's surprisingly rare for an American audience to hear a recital where they don't have to keep checking what the words mean. Nonetheless there was more program-rustling and, even more annoyingly, program-folding than there should have been; other than that the audience was fairly well-behaved, though there was one rude idiot who brought her dog. This is not the first time I've seen this happen, and I wish concert halls would crack down on admitting those annoying creatures (you can take that to refer to either the dogs or their owners).

I had thought that the entire recital was going to be built around the theme of a woman's emotional journey (like the recent Kate Royal recital), but officially that was only the second half. Well, that's what happens when you only skim concert announcements, but such skimming has lately been my wont, since after all these years of concert-going I like an evening to hold as many surprises as possible. After the Strauss lieder there were four songs by Henry Mollicone from Seven Songs, setting playful and meditative poems by Walter de la Mare, David McCord, and Emily Dickinson (twice). Breckenridge was very charming as de la Mare's melting snowflake. It's material well-suited to her voice, which is large and pure with an agreeably frosty sparkle to it. I had moved to a vacant seat in the front row, my row of choice, but I did sometimes wonder, given the size of the voice, if I should have stayed further back.

The first half ended with a moving rendition of Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. I had coincidentally heard it with piano rather than orchestra for the first time that morning, as one of three versions on the last disc of the set Samuel Barber: Historical Recordings 1935-1960. I do miss in the piano version the flowing lilt given by the string instruments, but Pankonin really brought out the gentle moodiness and deeper uncertainty of the piece, which showed excellent control on her part since she was clearly close to tears at the end. I liked the very slightly astringent quality Breckenridge brought to the words, which emphasized the questioning and uncertainty of Agee's narrator ("but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am"). It's very easy to get lost in the lushness of the piece and the picturesque word-painting otherwise.

After the intermission we had the woman's emotional journey, though truthfully the whole recital could have fit into that theme. As with Royal's recital, there were different groupings; this time it was Longing, Chaos, and Transcendence, which I thought were well-chosen categories. The first poem was Carl Sandburg's I Sang to You and the Moon, set in a longing and mournful style by Kurt Erickson, but all the other poets were women: Edna St Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton, Dorothy Parker, Emily Dickinson again (of course!), and Gini Savage. (There is, just to be accurate, a tiny scrap of Lewis Carroll amid the Dorothy Parker in David Garner's wistful and amusing Star Light, Star Bright.) All of the composers, though, were men. And all are local: in addition to Erickson and Garner, they were Jake Heggie, David Conte, and Gordon Getty. Not to belabor the comparisons with Royal, since both methods were rewarding, but in contrast to her more detailed, novelistic development, a sort of bildungsroman in song, Breckenridge's choices reflected more general states; I felt the moods in her categories could erupt into each other: a burst of transcendence during longing, for instance.

Chaos, not surprisingly, was represented by Anne Sexton (Her Kind and Ringing the Bells), though she also appeared in Longing (Us). I've occasionally dipped into Sexton the past few years, and I am not sure her work is aging well. It definitely suffers when paired with the acerbic wit and crystalline skill of Dickinson, who can turn a feather duster into a query into the existence of God. But Conte's Sexton settings (from Sexton Songs) brought out the best in the poems; I found them much more convincing when sung than when I read them beforehand in the program. I particularly liked Ringing the Bells, which uses sort of a "this is the house that Jack built" rhythm to describe a handbell chorus in a mental asylum for women. Breckenridge brought out the emotional turmoil just below the narrator's deadened surface.

The only other music by Getty that I've heard was a section of Plump Jack performed at a Merola Concert several years ago. It was based on the "we have heard the chimes at midnight" scene of Henry IV part 2, and I did not like it at all. There are subtle quicksilver emotions throughout that scene, and I thought the music flattened out all of them. But I very much liked the Dickinson songs from his White Election, The going from a world we know and, particularly, Beauty crowds me. Not surprisingly Heggie's songs had the richest and most sensuous settings; under Longing we had his setting of St Vincent Millay's generous Not in a silver casket; Transcendence and the formal program ended with his setting of Joy Alone (Connection) by Gini Savage; the ecstatic thrill of voice, piano, and setting more than made up for what I felt were fairly uninteresting words. Then there was much applause and the handing up of several beautiful bouquets to both women and then there were two encores: a return to Barber and Agee for Sure on this shining night and a setting of Dickinson's If I can stop one heart from breaking, / I shall not live in vain, which I think is, however touching and true its sentiment, not one of her greater aesthetic successes. I'm afraid I don't know who did the setting, which I liked.

I very much enjoyed both Royal's and Breckenridge's different approaches, both of them rich and deeply personal, to portraying a woman's emotional life. It's a great way to use the intimacy of the recital form. And I hope some baritone or tenor will now feel inspired to create a similar program exploring the emotional journey of men.

BluePrint

Some more from last season, with a look forward as well. . . .

A few years ago the San Francisco Conservatory of Music moved from wherever it was before to Civic Center, close to the Opera, the Symphony, Herbst Theater, and public transportation. One beneficial result is that it's become much more a part of the performance scene in San Francisco. (Another beneficial result is that it provides a beautiful and intimate new performance space, the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall.) One series I've grown particularly fond of is BluePrint, the new music ensemble, led by Nicole Paiement, who also leads Ensemble Parallele, whose aweseomeness I cannot extol enough. I went to three of their concerts last season; the first one I wrote about here, and the other two I am writing about right here.

The first of the two was "Musical Humors: Discover Philippe Hersant." The very French name (though in fact the composer was born in Rome) and the mention of musical humors led me to expect the sort of music we might typically think of as "French": clear, light, elegant, witty, with clarity of rhetoric taking precedence over sturm und drang. That would have been enjoyable, but his music turned out to be much richer, drawing on a wide variety of sources, musical and literary (his undergraduate degree was in literature). The pieces we heard drew on Basho, Bruce Chatwin, Goethe, and Kafka, and the musical influences he mentions include Heinrich Schutz, Bartok, and Tobias Hume, who published in 1605 a collection of viola da gamba pieces entitled Musical Humors (so what I had read as humor in the sense of comedy was really a reference to the four humors that were thought to control our moods and personalities). The first half of the program consisted of 11 Caprices (each with a title taken from Kafka), a powerful choral setting, conducted by Ragnar Bohlin, of Psaume 130 (Aus Tiefer Not), using Martin Luther's German text (as did Schutz, who inspired this piece), and an instrumental piece, Song Lines. The second half gave us Sonate pour violoncelle seul, Wanderung (using a Goethe poem also used by Schubert and Schumann), and Musical Humors. There are a lot of different influences mentioned here, but the music doesn't sound derivative at all. This was a really fun and effective composer portrait and the name Philippe Hersant is one I now look for.

The other BluePrint concert from last season featured Eight Miniatures for Chamber Ensemble (Hommage a Stravinsky) by Stefan Cwik, Anosmia by Neil Rolnick, and the Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra by Philip Glass. Cwik is a young composer (born 1987) and he spoke to the audience before his piece opened the concert, telling us that his piece was inspired by his formative love of Stravinsky's music. I thought he sold himself a little short in emphasizing his debt to Stravinsky; the piece, for an ensemble of flute, bassoon, violin, and piano, stood up beautifully on its own and certainly didn't come across as the work of a too-ardent disciple.

As for the next piece, Anosmia (the name means the loss of the sense of smell), here is where I am going to mention that Mike Strickland was at the same concert, and I will refer you to his write-up (with lovely photos) here, because he accurately summarizes both my feelings and his contrasting opinion. As he notes, I "thought the piece was too long and [I] wanted to know more about the affliction and less about domestic bliss, but that may say more about him than the work, which I thought was perfect." Yep, that's accurate, even no doubt the part about my reaction saying more about me than about the music, which was indeed fairly light and boppy and pleasant. But I felt it went on about twice as long as it needed to, and I thought Rolnick completely evaded the challenge of presenting loss of smell musically - hearing loss, sure, that you can do, but smell is possibly the most evanescent and subtle of  the senses, which may be one reason it's so linked to memory. So how do you portray its loss, outside of simply describing it? Here it's simply described, only the text didn't really even deal in any serious way with the issue. We have a man who loses his sense of smell, but he has a loving male partner who takes care of him. So lots of the piece is taken up with what seemed sort of smug self-congratulation on having this wonderful partner. I'm happy for him, but it's not much use to the rest of us. The singers were good though (baritone Daniel Cilli, along with soprano Maya Kherani and alto Carrie Zhang). I was much happier with the Glass Concerto for Harpsichord in the second half. The young soloist, Christopher D. Lewis, was just dazzling, and when he finished and jumped up to enthusiastic applause his more concentrated demeanor gave way to a huge relieved grin.

The theme for this year's BluePrint series is Latin America, and the first concert is this Saturday, 6 October. I'm already committed to the Schumann series that Jonathan Biss is running for SF Performances, so sadly I will miss this first concert, but that shouldn't stop you from going (more info here), and I've already marked my calendar for 17 November, 2 March 2013, and 13 April 2013.

North and South out west

Last Saturday I was at the first concert of BluePrint’s season. BluePrint, the new music ensemble at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, is headed up by ever-chic and adventurous Nicole Paiement, who also directs Ensemble Parallele; this very enjoyable concert offered (among other things) a preview of their February 2012 chamber-opera version of Harbison’s Great Gatsby. I was given a ticket to this concert, so thanks to whoever thought to include me. The box office was very nice about letting me switch the seat to one I preferred.

First up was another Harbison piece, North and South, a setting of six poems by Elizabeth Bishop (some of the poems were ones Bishop did not publish in her lifetime). On Saturday it seemed to me that I had lost whatever vague count of the songs I was keeping, but I see in the program that indeed the last song is not listed and was apparently dropped. I had heard the piece a few times in the recording by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (to whom the first three songs are dedicated; the second three are dedicated to Janice Felty). This was my first time hearing the piece live.

Julienne Walker, a tall, striking mezzo with short dark hair wearing a black ‘20’s style dress, was our soloist. She started off by dedicating her performance to her mother, who was in the audience, which was pretty disarming, not that her very fine performance needed the audience to disarm. Her diction was perfectly clear; I could make out every word of the poems without reference to the program. The first song in each half of the piece is from Bishop’s “Songs for a Colored Singer,” which she wrote thinking of Billie Holiday. These are by no means minstrel pieces, but when they’re sung as opposed to read on the page they do bring up the dicey question of how far a singer should go in imitating a “black” sound. Harbison’s music for those pieces doesn’t sound like a blues song, but the blues are clearly in evidence. On the recording Hunt Lieberson goes farther than Walker did in performance; each choice is defensible. Hunt Lieberson was, to say the least, a naturally soulful singer, and that keeps her performance from caricature; Walker sang them in a way more in line with how she sang the rest of the set, and I thought it worked very well. Her mother must have been proud.

That was followed by Kurt Rohde’s Concertino for Solo Violin and Small Ensemble, which is from last year, about twenty minutes long, and in three movements; Axel Strauss was the violin soloist. The words that occurred to me were charmingly mysterioso – charming not just in the sense of delightful but in the sense of putting us under a spell; in his program note Rohde describes it as “intricate,” which is an apt word, as if it were a very elaborately patterned knot garden, which means it wouldn’t wear out after a few listens but keep growing.

After the intermission we had Erwin Schulhoff’s Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra, Op. 43, which seemed quite glittery and abrupt but honestly though I enjoyed the piece I’m not sure I have anything to say about it since my mind was kind of zapping around as is its occasionally overstimulated sometime wont and I found myself going in and out of the moment – no reflection on the performance by the ensemble or soloist Keisuke Nakagoshi. These things happen, especially right after intermissions. Ah, poor Schulhoff! It was your moment, but I failed to pull myself into the moment.

The final piece was an excerpt from The Great Gatsby, in the new chamber orchestration by Jacques Desjardins: the quarrel between Myrtle (Erin Neff) and Wilson (Bojan Knezevic) that leads up to her death. (Interestingly, Myrtle was the role sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in the original production, so both vocal pieces on the program were ones written for the late mezzo.) It was very dramatic and exciting (and well sung), and the orchestration sounded rich and vivid and you don’t really need me to tell you to buy a ticket to this, do you?

The next BluePrint concert is November 19 and features the work of Parisian composer Philippe Hersant, who will be there in person. I am planning on being there in person as well.