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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.
Spectator
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Summer opera festivals have gone Wagner mad
Another week, another Wagner production at a summer opera festival. This never used to happen. When John Christie launched Glyndebourne in the 1930s, he hoped to stage the Ring. So he gathered a team of refugee musicians from Germany, who quickly assured him that it was impossible and he should stick to Mozart. The man who changed all that was Martin Graham, the plimsoll-wearing founder of Longborough Festival Opera, who died in April at the age of 83. Graham was irrepressible; a self-taught enthusiast. With no one around to tell him it couldn't be done, he pushed ahead regardless, staging the Ring cycle twice in as many decades. And now look. We've got Parsifal at Glyndebourne (its third Wagner staging), a chamber-sized Tristan coming up at Grimeborn and a full Ring cycle starting next year at Grange Park Opera – which, having built its own back-garden theatre, has followed the Martin Graham playbook still further by importing Longborough's music director Anthony Negus. Meanwhile in Notting Hill, Opera Holland Park has taken a first step into the Bayreuth club with The Flying Dutchman, Wagner's shortest opera, and the least Wagnerian that actually sounds Wagnerian, if that makes any sense. It certainly makes sense for OHP, which is still operating on a Covid-era stage that places the orchestra in the middle of the performance space. That's not invariably a bad thing: the orchestra is the sea on which this drama sails, and with Peter Selwyn conducting, the City of London Sinfonia went at Wagner's (moderately reduced) score with suitably salty vigour. The apron stage thrust the singers towards the audience, the roof of OHP's tent was configured to suggest sails, and out among the shrubs and the five-a-side pitches, the peacocks gave their best impression of seagulls. There was plenty to admire in Julia Burbach's production, too, plus a few things that weren't so great. Senta (Eleanor Dennis, bright and austere) was on stage almost throughout and her rusty skeleton of a house is tilted like a shipwreck. When Daland (a bluff Robert Winslade Anderson) brings the Dutchman (Paul Carey Jones) home to meet her, gravity propels her towards him – a neat visual metaphor. Neal Cooper as Erik, and Angharad Lyddon, as Mary, found more (both musically and dramatically) than you'd have thought possible in these thankless roles, while the masked ghost crew stalked the action in silence. The Holland Park set-up gives the big choral scenes a real physicality. The negatives? OHP performs the opera in its three-act form, which is unusual these days but valid enough. A pity, though, to lose the orchestral postlude that Wagner added in a later revision, and there was some curious textual jiggery-pokery at the end of Act One, introducing a female chorus into an act where Wagner's sonic palette is built around the darkness of male voices. Possibly it's authentic – Wagner tinkered with The Flying Dutchman a lot, and it'd take a musicologist to unpick all the variants – but it rang false, even if the score as presented was a better fit for Burbach's vision, which was more concerned with obsession and social isolation than transcendence. The City of London Sinfonia went at Wagner's score with suitably salty vigour Again, that's a valid approach, but it meant that the ending of the opera was confusing. Senta simply wandered off stage. And it was a bumper night for 21st-century-opera-director mannerisms (chilly, distant lovers; domestic violence; silent doppelgangers populating the overture) though if you're a regular operagoer, you price that in. Overall, though, the energy and atmosphere won through, crowned by Carey Jones's weatherbeaten Dutchman: rough in all the right places and positively sulphurous in the depths. Carey Jones was a formidable Wotan at Longborough. Clearly, a rising tide lifts all boats – even ghost ships. It's not every year, moreover, that the UK sees two different but comparably fine productions of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Close on the heels of Opera North's touring production, Grange Park Opera has opened its season with what turns out to be a revival of David Pountney's 1997 staging for Welsh National Opera; complete with costumes in the colours of renaissance frescos and shifting, sea-dappled abstract sets by the great Ralph Koltai. Insert your own bitter aside about how a national company has been defunded by the Arts Council (Welsh and English: both are culpable) to the point that only private festivals can now afford to revive classic productions that were once public property. What matters here is that Grange Park has done it proud, with excellent singing in every role. Otar Jorjikia, as a purposeful Gabriele, made a particularly strong pairing with Elin Pritchard's Amelia: a performance in which pathos burned as bright as passion. Gianluca Marciano conducted vividly, and Simon Keenlyside was a noble Boccanegra – by turns expansive, belligerent and vulnerable in one of Verdi's most Shakespearean title roles.
Telegraph
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park: Wagner's elemental tale is given a progressive spin
Pity Wagner's heroines, always having to save some errant man from hell or a guilty conscience. In his early masterpiece The Flying Dutchman, the male hero is a sailor, unwise enough to curse the Almighty when He sends him an unfavourable wind. And so he's doomed to sail the seas until a good woman saves him and sacrifices herself in the process. It's 19 th -century patriarchy on steroids, as Julia Burbach's intelligent new production for OHP makes abundantly clear. As is the fashion nowadays, the opera's essential theme is presented before the curtain officially opens, during Wagner's overture. A troop of pining blonde girls in nighties and macs drifts into Naomi Dawson's cleverly designed set, roaming up the narrow and alarmingly tilted platform behind the orchestra on which is the modest bric-a-brac of the heroine Senta's home – bed, table, hard chair. They continue around the orchestra to what seems like a beach at the front of the stage. They are the Eternal Feminine, anxiously looking for a man to rescue. Soon uncanny masked figures appear, premonitions of the supernatural Dutchman's ghostly crew. It's this elemental world of the sea the production stresses, while the solid bourgeois world of Senta's sailor father Daland – who's keen to marry Senta off to the rich, roving Dutchman – is barely hinted at. Senta, touchingly played by Eleanor Dennis, is the very submissive centre amidst the swirling sailor activity and orchestral din, singing of her obsession with a picture of the Dutchman in a voice of such pearly delicacy you could hardly hear it. Her father Daland is somewhat blandly characterized by Robert Winslade Anderson, and the Dutchman played by Paul Carey Johnson is frankly a bit wooden and formal when he first meets Senta. One felt his suffering but not his uncanny power. All this meant the production – suggestive though it is of the opera's underlying themes, and buoyed by sensitive playing from the City of London Sinfonia under conductor Peter Selwyn – needed a dramatic shot in the arm. That was delivered not a moment too soon by Neal Cooper as Senta's betrothed Erik. His aria where he laments Senta's obsession with the Dutchman was truly agonised. He paced about like a tormented caged bear, his voice cracking with emotion. Senta, who until that point had seemed rather milk-and-water, her annoyance with her teasing friends a bit too schoolgirls-larking-in-the-dormitory, suddenly discovered her true stature. In the final scenes the opera really caught fire. The sailors' terrified discovery of the cursed Dutchman's ship was a superb swirl of movement, lit with lurid effectiveness as if from the pit of hell by Robert Price. In the final scene, where Senta promises to go with the Dutchman to the ends of earth, Eleanor Dennis unleashed a vocal power one had never suspected. The orchestral din was thrilling, as were the chorus's terrified outbursts. Nature obligingly lent a hand, rattling the walls of Opera Holland Park's canvas venue with a strong wind. So a wonderful elemental ending, which really got to the heart of Wagner's drama. It's just a shame the production took a while to reach it.
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Flying Dutchman review – terrific cast and hurtling momentum in OHP's first ever Wagner
Opera Holland Park opens this year's season with a new production of The Flying Dutchman, directed by Julia Burbach and conducted by Peter Selwyn. The company's first ever Wagner staging, it aims high and doesn't always succeed, though the best of it, both musically and theatrically, is unquestionably impressive. Burbach essentially stages it as a psychological horror story (which it is), making Eleanor Dennis's Senta the central protagonist rather than Paul Carey Jones's charismatic Dutchman, and heightening the opera's sense of the uncanny by blurring the lines between reality and illusion as she dreams of escaping the normative confines of the world around her. Using both auditorium and stage for her setting, Burbach hauls us into Senta's vivid imagination. Holland Park theatre's tarpaulin roof has been extended to form the backdrop for the vertiginous platforms of Naomi Dawson's set, so we seem to be sitting beneath the unfurling sails of some monstrous ship ourselves. Sailors haul ropes through the aisles and doss down on staircases, while ghostly, faceless figures move wraith-like among the audience. Not all of it works. Burbach is strong on Senta's increasing disquiet at the erratic behaviour of Neal Cooper's Erik, whose bristling resentment marks him out as potentially abusive. Yet her relationship with her equally dangerous father Daland (Robert Winslade Anderson), who would gladly sell her to the Dutchman for the latter's wealth, is under-characterised and doesn't hit home as much as it should. During the overture, Burbach confusingly and unnecessarily fills both stage and auditorium with women who may be Senta's predecessors in trying to save the Dutchman's soul. And the ending, deliberately enigmatic as to what redemption might consist of, or indeed whether it is even possible, is anticlimactic after what has gone before. A couple of tweaks to the score are odd – a choral refrain from Senta's ballad transferred to the close of Act I, and Daland's crew and the Norwegian women are missing from the final scene. But there are some terrific performances. Dennis, radiant in tone, is outstanding and entirely convincing as a restless visionary in the grip of forces beyond reason. Carey Jones captures the Dutchman's spiritual and moral anguish with singing of great emotional depth and verbal subtlety. Cooper makes a fiercely intense Erik, less lyrical than some, which works well with Burbach's view of the character. Winslade Anderson, meanwhile, sounds suave, tellingly masking ambition behind glibness. Conducting a reduced orchestration by Tony Burke, Selwyn took time to settle on opening night, though the gathering tensions and hurtling momentum of the final two acts were superbly done. There was fine playing from the City of London Sinfonia, and the Opera Holland Park Chorus, sensational throughout, have done little finer. Until 14 June
Daily Mail
08-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Paul Vander Haar: Footy legend who can't walk more than a few metres reveals the bizarre way he keeps breaking his ribs as he opens up about horrible toll the game has taken on him
Essendon Bombers premiership hero Paul Vander Haar has revealed injuries he suffered during his stellar AFL career have left him a broken man as he opened up about the shocking toll the sport has had on him. The 67-year-old, celebrated for his courage, high-flying marks and huge contribution to Essendon's 1984 and 1985 premierships, has spoken candidly about his physical and mental struggles since retiring. Vander Haar, known as The Flying Dutchman during his playing days, suffers from chronic back pain which has left him unable to walk much further than a couple of metres for the last 18 months. He also suffers from random drops in blood pressure that have seen him black out and collapse - with one of those episodes ending with him waking up in hospital with a broken leg. 'I've had a hip replacement and seven operations on my right knee and it's still not good,' he told News Corp. 'I've had four pass-outs, where I've just been walking along or just sitting down and all of a sudden I just pass out and end up in hospital. 'It's just a loss of blood where your blood pressure drops. I'll just be sitting there and all of a sudden I'll fall off the chair. 'The last one I had, I'd just started walking up the driveway and passed out and broke my femur, the main part of the leg just under the hip. I was on crutches for six or seven months. 'My whole body aches. I wake up every day and it feels like I've played 10 games of footy in a row and I can hardly move. 'I've had a really bad back and I keep breaking ribs just leaning over the cabin of my ute, grabbing my toolbox. 'I'm trying different medications, but just getting sick of going to the hospitals and doctors and getting referrals and all that crap.' Vander Haar admitted that he is 'struggling' with his mental health too, acknowledging that he received plenty of head trauma during his footy career. 'I had heaps of them (concussions) over the years,' he said. 'I copped plenty, but you kept going not realising what the consequences were.' The Bombers great also suffers from random drops in blood pressure that have seen him collapse several times Vander Haar, and two former teammates - Simon Madden and Terry Daniher - are speaking out to back the FifthQtr Foundation, a new not-for-profit group that helps ex footy players. The footy legend says the AFL Players' Association and AFL needs to step up and do more for players who have retired. 'It's not the money that I'm after, I'm just trying to find somebody who can come up with some solutions,' he said. 'I just want to find a remedy. I'm just getting sick of it.'
