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Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Esa-Pekka Salonen leaves the troubled San Francisco Symphony with Mahler's call for ‘Resurrection'
SAN FRANCISCO — Saturday night, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted his San Francisco Symphony in a staggering performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 2, known as the 'Resurrection.' It was a ferocious performance and an exalted one of gripping intensity. This is a symphony emblematic for Mahler of life and death, an urgent questioning of why we are here. After 80 minutes of the highest highs and lowest lows, of falling in and out of love with life, of smelling the most sensual roses on the planet in a search for renewal, resurrection arrives in a blaze of amazement. Mahler has no answers for the purpose of life. His triumph, and Salonen's in his overpowering performance, is in the divine glory of keeping going, keeping asking. The audience responded with a stunned and tumultuous standing ovation. The musicians pounded their feet on the Davies Symphony Hall stage, resisting Salonen's urgings to stand and take a bow. It was no longer his San Francisco Symphony. After five years as music director, Salonen had declined to renew his contract, saying he didn't share the board of trustees' vision of the future. 'I have only two things to say,' Salonen told the crowd before exiting the stage. 'First: Thank you. 'Second: You've heard what you have in this city. This amazing orchestra, this amazing chorus. So take good care of them.' Salonen, who happens to be a bit of a tech nerd and is a science-fiction fan, had come to San Francisco because he saw the Bay Area as a place where the future is foretold and the city as a place that thinks differently and turns dreams into reality. Here he would continue the kind of transformation of the orchestra into a vehicle for social and technological good that he had begun in his 17 years as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was to be a glorious experiment in arts and society in a city presumably ready to reclaim its own past glory. He had the advantage of following in the symphonic footsteps of Michael Tilson Thomas, who for 25 years had made the orchestra a leader in reflecting the culture of its time and place. Salonen brought in a team of young, venturesome 'creative partners' from music and tech. He enlisted architect Frank Gehry to rethink concert venues for the city. He put together imaginative and ambitious projects with director Peter Sellars. He made fabulous recordings. There were obstacles. The COVID-19 pandemic meant the cancellation of what would have been Tilson Thomas' own intrepid farewell celebration five years ago — a production of Wagner's 'The Flying Dutchman' with a set by Gehry and staged by James Darrah (the daring artistic director of Long Beach Opera). Salonen's first season had to be streamed during lockdown, but became the most technologically imaginative of any isolated orchestra. Like arts organizations everywhere and particularly in San Francisco, which has had a harder time than most bouncing back from the pandemic, the San Francisco Symphony had its share of budgetary problems. But it also had, in Salonen, a music director who knew a thing or two about how to get out of them. He had become music director of the L.A. Phil in 1992, when the city was devastated by earthquake, riots and recession. The building of Walt Disney Concert Hall was about to be abandoned. The orchestra built up in the next few years a deficit of around $17 million. The audience, some of the musicians and the press needed awakening. Salonen was on the verge of resignation, but the administration stood behind him, believing in what he and the orchestra could become. With the opening of Disney Hall in 2003, the L.A. Phil transformed Los Angeles. And for that opening, Salonen chose Mahler's 'Resurrection' for the first of the orchestra's subscription series of concerts. Rebirth in this thrillingly massive symphony for a massive orchestra and chorus, along with soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, was writ exceedingly large, transparent and loud. On Oct. 30, 2003, with L.A. weathering record heat and fires, Salonen's Mahler exulted a better future. The San Francisco Symphony has not followed the L.A. Phil example. It did not put its faith and budget in Salonen's vision, despite five years of excitement. It did not show the city how to rise again. Next season is the first in 30 years that appears to be without a mission. In Disney 22 years ago, Salonen drew attention to the sheer transformative power of sound. At the same time Tilson Thomas had turned the San Francisco Symphony into the country's most expansive Mahler orchestra, and it was only a few months later that he performed the Second Symphony and recorded it in Davies Symphony Hall in a luminously expressive account. That recording stands as a reminder of the hopes back then of a new century. Salonen's more acute approach, not exactly angry but exceptionally determined, was another kind of monument to the power of sound. In quietest, barely audible passages, the air in the hall had an electric sense of calm before the storm. The massive climaxes pinned you to the wall. The chorus, which appears in the final movement to exhort us to cease trembling and prepare to live, proved its own inspiration. The administration all but cost-cut the singers out of the budget until saved by an anonymous donor. The two soloists, Heidi Stober and Sasha Cooke, soared as needed. Salonen moves on. Next week he takes the New York Philharmonic on an Asia tour. At Salzburg this summer, he and Sellars stage Schoenberg's 'Erwartung,' a project he began with the San Francisco Symphony. At the Lucerne Festival, he premieres his Horn Concerto with the Orchestre de Paris instead of the San Francisco Symphony, as originally intended. Saturday's concert had begun with a ludicrous but illuminating announcement to 'sit back and relax as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts your San Francisco Symphony.' Salonen, instead, offered a wondrous city a wake-up call.
Los Angeles Times
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The late Pauline Oliveros is having her moment. How Long Beach Opera is making it even bigger
'Here's our slogan,' Long Beach Opera's interim managing director proudly announces during a recent conversation about the company's upcoming season, 'We're not the Met!' For an art form hardly accepting of understatement, such a slogan is insurgent understatement. The oldest opera company in the Los Angeles area and America's oldest purveyor of consistently progressive opera is about to embark on the most uncompromising season of any company of its size or supposed mission anywhere. Ever. Marjorie Beale may be interim in her role as managing director, but she had been board president before she stepped down to help find a new course for the company, which had gone through administrative turmoil over the last few years. A former professor of European intellectual history and critical theory at UC Irvine, she is now a revolutionary opera empowerer. I'm meeting with her, LBO artistic director and chief creative officer James Darrah and music director Christopher Rountree over a boisterous lunch, and my first question is: So whose idea was it to devote an entire season to Pauline Oliveros? Rountree: 'I don't know the answer.' Darrah: 'I don't know that there is an answer.' Beale: 'It's like it came from deep inside all of us.' Rountree: 'But there was a moment where it was in the air. And then Jim said to me, 'What if it's all Pauline and nothing but Pauline?' That would be a dream for me.' Darrah: 'Weirdly it felt like what we should be doing. It's why I came to Long Beach.' Beale: 'I was overjoyed.' Another question for Beale: So how many board members has she enraged when even a single production by so experimental a composer surely alarms even the most courageous opera board in this artistically and financially cautious day and age? 'We've only lost one board member,' Beale answers sunnily. She also notes that she spent the holidays sweet-talking patrons and donors with her Christmas cards. Many have apparently come around. 'I would say our board is pretty hardy,' Beale adds. The LBO team, moreover, is convinced that since Oliveros' death in 2016 at age 84, her relevance has grown to the point where we are in an obvious Oliveros moment. She was a pioneer composer of electronic music. She was a pioneering, shamanistic accordionist. She was a pioneering feminist and lesbian composer. She was a pioneering professor at Mills College in Oakland, at UC San Diego and elsewhere who inspired a significant number of today's venturesome musicians. She has such acolytes as star flutist Claire Chase, who will be music director of this year's Ojai Music Festival. A one-time outsider, Oliveros is taken seriously throughout the musical world. But opera? Oliveros was in no way, shape or traditional form an opera composer. She was, though, a brilliant maker of acoustic spectacle. Galvanized by sound in yawning subterranean caverns, she made her calling 'deep listening' as a way to overcome the world's ever-increasing surface noise. She discovered that once drones — be they calming or grating — resonate within our bodies they have the urgent power to alter our very sense of being. She further instructed us to tune into the little sounds of nature. By exploring situations in which musicians share their profound awareness of how these sounds operate, how they reach others and the pleasure gained from their response, her work proves startlingly dramatic in performance. Given Oliveros' delight in outrage, fine sense of humor, obsession with process and ability to anthropomorphize all sounds, no matter the source, it doesn't take much to turn works, especially those with texts, into full-blown theater. When Oliveros titled a piece 'Beethoven Was a Lesbian,' as she once did, she wonderfully stimulated (and stymied) the imaginations of performers and audiences alike. The next step becomes opera, whether she called it that (only a couple of times) or not. It's the kind of magical musical thinking, in fact, that led Rountree to form his revolutionary new-music ensemble Wild Up 15 years ago. It's exactly what Darrah, who also heads UCLA's opera program, believes opera needs to move forward. Beale's response to anyone who says this isn't opera: 'It doesn't matter.' She says that recalling the startling, sheer beauty of Oliveros' works at the Ojai festival nine years ago, when Peter Sellars programmed them at Meditation Mountain. She realized how much they said about healing, about coming together, about recovery. 'I knew we need to do something like this right now,' Beale said. That same sense of coming together and healing made Oliveros a favored composer among far-flung musicians for Zoom performances during the COVID-19 shutdown, as it did when Oliveros' 'Ringing for Healing' once became part of a street agitprop in New York. What does matter to Darrah and Rountree is the discovery of potential for opera. 'We need to build the Black Mountain College of opera in L.A.,' Darrah says, referring to the experimental North Carolina college that hosted noted artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. 'It's like Jamie Barton comes to us and doesn't sing Azucena but Oliveros,' Darrah says. Lest LBO be mistaken for New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Met mezzo-soprano who starred as the gypsy in Verdi's 'Il Trovatore' will sing whatever animal is needed in Oliveros' 'El Relicario de los Animales,' which will be mounted at Heritage Square Museum on Feb. 15 and 16. A graphic score for female vocalist and 20-member instrumental ensemble invites musical gestures for channeling the sonic wonderland of animal life and nature into mystical harmonic space. Darrah has added a second singer, Brenda Rae, a soprano also noted for her performances of more standard repertory, who will double as a percussionist. 'Relicario,' which was first given as a concert work at the 1979 CalArts Contemporary Music Festival, will be the first of LBO's so-called three Oliveros operas. As a preseason tryout of the Oliveros idea last summer, the company presented one of Oliveros' best-known works, 'bye bye butterfly,' a haunting eight-minute electronic piece from 1965 that uses a recorded bit of Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly' and is often interpreted as a metaphor for women's place in society. Puccini's heroine here is overwhelmed by oscillating sine waves. LBO turned this into an enthusiastically engaging group improvisation. In December, as a preview to the season, LBO staged 'Earth Ears' in San Pedro at the Angels Gate Cultural Center. It began outdoors, and the first thing Darrah and Rountree discovered was an amazing five-second echo in which instruments resonated from the cliffs of Rancho Palos Verdes miles away. For the performance inside, the room was decorated with shredded paper (Prairie T. Trivuth will be designer for all the Oliveros productions), and instrumentalists scattered about the room and among the audience interacted in rigorous ways indicated by the score but also with just enough freedom that anything could happen. Rountree says he was confronted with figuring out what Oliveros' rules allow. 'Do they force musicians toward introversion and introspection or push back against that? Is that tension even allowed to exist?' he asked himself. 'At the rehearsal, everyone was doing the rules, and the effect was a kind of shimmering. It felt like night music, like the piece was going to a place. But when we finished the rehearsal, it could not go to that place. I thought, if it does, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. It would go where it wanted or always stay on the horizon.' But during the performance, a jazz-like solo here, a different kind of response there, led to what became a grand theatrical moment. You could feel a collective awe from the audience. 'The work is about commitment and presence,' Rountree concludes, 'so why not just commit completely to the work. The only way to engage is to go fully underwater.' The other two productions will be 'The Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts,' a collaboration from 2001 with poet Moira Roth, more a concert piece to be turned into an opera in April on the Queen Mary in Long Beach; and 'The Nubian Word for Flowers: A Phantom Opera' in July (venue still to be determined). This is Oliveros' most operatic piece and was given as a work in progress by Yuval Sharon and the Industry at the Hammer Museum in 2013, when Rountree and Wild Up participated. The LBO production will be the West Coast premiere of a chamber (or pocket) version with a libretto by Oliveros' partner, Ione. Beyond that in the next two seasons, Beale says, the company will present the premiere of an opera by Shelley Washington as well as some traditional opera. Darrah is eager to stage Mozart's 'Così Fan Tutte.' There had been some talk of including 'Cosi' this season with Oliveros additions, but the company didn't want to compete with Los Angeles Opera's production of Mozart's opera in March or Yuval Sharon's Detroit Opera staging in April. Darrah promises his own innovations. In the meantime, Beale says she is determined to use Oliveros as 'a kind of giant reset.' Walking out of 'Earth Ears' with Darrah and Rountree, she saw the sun set over the ocean, and the three of them just stood and looked. 'I thought to myself, this is the first time that we've done something that wasn't in some way influenced by what was in the past,' she says. 'Now we're looking forward to what we're going to do together. 'We're really doing what we say we're about. We're not holding back. We're not hiding in the corner. We're just going for it.'
