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What I did on my summer vacation, pt. 1

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New website coming next week!

It is only fitting for our 100th blog entry that we announce a new, redesigned website. Starting Monday, our homepage will look a bit more like this:

Loyal blog readers: Please be aware that our blog will also be shifting to this new site. Updates to this blog will cease at the end of August.

What I did on my summer vacation: Pt. 1

'What have your musicians and singers have been up to all summer?' you ask? Well, let's find out!

In June, Music Librarian and violist David Daniel Bowes (left) went on vacation with his partner Brian to the Pacific Northwest, where Brian was sick with flu the entire time! When David started to get sick too, “we paid the piper and came home early.” However, after all that, “bliss!” They planted heirloom tomatoes and the dahlias came up in full force and beauty. As he has for nearly 25 years, David played under George Cleve in the Midsummer Mozart Festvial. He is often working from home this summer since he is painting the walls of their Santa Rosa house, with Brian on “food and errand duty.” David says he is “looking very much forward to the start of the Philharmonia Baroque season!”

Angela Arnold, a soprano joining the Chorale this fall, made her first appearance with Open Opera in June, in a free, open-air concert of popular arias at Berkeley's Live Oak Park and has been preparing for a number of recitals in September. She has had a few brief getaways this summer: the Texas Panhandle, where she met some in-laws for the first time (!); her hometown Chicago, where she enjoyed “real summer weather,” including beautiful thunderstorms; and Washington, D.C., where she “baked for hours in the sun” for the chance to catch Gladys Knight and Reba McIntyre performing live on the Capitol's West Lawn for the 4th of July.

Violinist Carla Moore (left) performed with her chamber group, Music's Re-creation, and her new string band, Archetti Baroque Strings, at the Berkeley Festival. Soon after, she went camping in Canyonlands National Park, southeastern Utah with her family. “It was pure bliss-red rocks and hot sun!” After that she actually had to get back to work – performing J.S. Bach's Orchestral Suites at the Oregon Bach Festival with Monica Huggett and the Portland Baroque Orchestra and teaching at the Amherst Early Music Festival on the East Coast. She’s looking forward to her second camping trip to the Sierras in August, but first she is teaching the “wee ones” violin at the SFEMS Music Discovery Workshop in Berkeley.

Also new to the chorale, alto Jean-Paul Jones worked at a summer camp in the Mendocino Mountains for about three weeks with troubled youth from the Bay Area. “It was an interesting and rewarding experience, but also exhausting.” He is back in San Francisco playing viola with Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (and seeking employment as a bartender).

After what violinist Kati Kyme calls the “whirl-wind of Berkfest concerts,” she took a few days to unwind at Stinson Beach. Her family rented a house, where they were “spoiled to have only a few steps to the beautiful views of Stinson.” Since then, she’s been back working for upcoming performances of Don Giovanni with Open Opera and preparing two weeks of youth orchestra camps. “I am able to sneak in only a little pre-season practicing, but I'm almost ready, psychologically, for the new season to start.”

Meet Courtney

This past July, we were lucky to be joined by Courtney Stredder, who interned for us through Career Explorations. Soon to be a senior at Nampa High School in Idaho, Courtney helped us prepare for the upcoming 30th Anniversary Season. While with us, she wrote press releases, dove into the archives to research our history, helped with the season ticket mailing, and attended the Association of California Symphony Orchestra's Conference. Last year's #1 state finalist in the Keyboard Percussion category for marimba and also an alto saxophone player, Courtney is looking forward to her last year in high school and excited about pursuing music in college. Good luck Courtney and thank you for all of your hard work!

Many thanks!

We would like to thank all the volunteers who offered their time last week to help with the ticket mailings. Because of them, we were able to send out all the subscription orders by the end of the week! Many thanks to the following volunteers, we couldn't have done it without them:

Al and Natalie Davis
Luce Denney
Jubillee Gee
Ellen Thiel
Marcia Wire
Pat Wolf

A needed change of perspective

Most of our staff will be attending the Association of California Symphony Orchestras 42nd Annual Conference this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Much like the League of American Orchestras earlier this summer, ACSO is sounding notes of a minor key: "Orchestras and choruses are struggling. Slashed funding, declining attendance, and increased costs are just a few of the problems we have to wrestle with as a community. Join your colleagues... to learn new techniques and acquire new tools that are necessary to remain competitive and viable in this ever-changing world."

We recently read two articles that suggest that we need to shift our perspective a bit to realize just how vital classical music is to our world today.

In 66 days...

... we'll get to see our Nic conduct Mozart here in the Bay Area. For now, we'll just have to read about him conducting Mozart elsewhere.

For you impatient fans out there, subscribers will begin to receive their tickets this week(!) and single tickets go on sale in 15 days on August 5.

Japanese Handel?

Is of course courtesy of our Music Director! Who else did you expect!

Read more.

FREE-harmonia Baroque Orchestra...

Don't miss a FREE performance by a small ensemble of musicians from the orchestra. On Sunday, September 26,  at 5 p.m. the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Ensemble performs at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley Campus. Part of the Cal Performances Open House "Free For All," the ensemble performs Haydn's Quartet for Oboe and Strings in C major and String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 64, No. 6, as well as Mozart's Quintet for Oboe and Strings in C minor. The event is free and open to the public. This will be the perfect way to warm up for our all-Mozart concert with fortepianist Robert Levin later that evening.

TRIVIA: Austrian composers Haydn and Mozart were contemporaries – though there was a substantial age difference (Haydn being 24 years older than Mozart). Were the two friends? Find out here.

Hint: The above engraving is supposed to be a portrait of Mozart & Hadyn in Mozarteum, Salzburg.

Gonzalo in the Wall Street Journal

One of the volunteers who is helping us with our season ticket mailing mentioned this morning that Gonzalo Ruiz is featured in today's Wall Street Journal. He talks about transcribing Bach's "Orchestral Suite No. 2," with it's famous flute solos, for oboe. We played this back in October 2008 to rave reviews.


Hear for yourself: 

Speaking of jokes...

Alex Ross posted (and Scott thankfully forwarded) this hilarious spoof radio commercial from 1977 that ever so gently jibes the more contemporary compositions that you will probably never hear our orchestra perform, not even on period instruments.

Fun — and fart jokes — in classical music

That was the sub-headline of the great feature in The Aspen Times this weekend on our Music Director.

That's right, so soon back from Oregon and Nic's off in Aspen (and we wish we could go see him conduct, but we'll have to wait until September when our 30th Season kicks off).

Here's a bit of our favorite part from the article:

"McGegan believes that injecting that sort of jollity into classical music is hardly a radical notion, or even a departure from early concert-going.

"'Mozart loved it when people clapped in the middle of a movement,' he said. 'I have no problem with people clapping between movements. If you're playing Mahler Nine, it's a different atmosphere than [Mozart's] 'Jupiter' Symphony, or Haydn, which had genuine jokes in it.' McGegan mentions a Haydn passage in which two bassoons play some loud, rude notes: 'It could only be associated with the back end of a cow. You can be sure the original audience laughed their asses off.'

"The notion that classical music is strictly serious business wasn't around at the birth of concert music. McGegan imagines a dinner party where the guests are all noted composers, and he believes there would be plenty of drinking, laughter and off-color behavior.

"'Haydn would be delightful, charming. Mendelssohn — wonderful,' he said. 'Mozart would probably tell naughty jokes and fart and throw bread rolls at the women. He wasn't well-trained for the house. Poor Beethoven — he'd probably be tortured, because he couldn't hear the conversation. Wagner would just talk about himself.'

"A review of a recent concert McGegan did with the Philadelphia Orchestra referred to McGegan and Robert Levin as 'the two naughty boys of early music.' But McGegan finds nothing inappropriate about his approach to music. When the music calls for an austere respect, he has no trouble moving into a more solemn mode. In any event, his credentials as a proper gentleman were solidified last month, when he was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

"But McGegan sees his role not so much as standing erect next to the queen, but in getting the classical music world off its high and mighty throne."

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Kick off the year with Intrada

We are pleased to announce “Intrada,” the our 30th Anniversary Opening Night Celebration, which takes place on Friday, September 24, 2010, in the Green Room at the War Memorial Veterans Building (401 Van Ness Avenue), across from City Hall. The Opening Night Celebration begins at 6:00 p.m. with a delicious strolling supper and concludes with the first concert of our 2010/11 Season, an evening of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart featuring fortepianist and Mozart scholar Robert Levin.

Wines are provided by board member Randall Grahm, founder and owner of Bonny Doon Vineyard.

Tickets are $85 per person (event only) or $110 per person (includes balcony seating for the concert performance in Herbst Hall). Purchase tickets now using PalPal:

Intrada

Intrada Event $85.00 Intrada Event + Concert Balcony Seat $110.00

Or contact Jeff Thomas, Associate Director of Development, (415) 252-1288 x312.

If you're wondering what an "intrada" is, we'll quote our Grove for you: "an instrumental piece used to accompany an entrance, to inaugurate some festive event or to begin a suite [of dance music]" that was very popular in the Baroque era. What a great name for our 30th Season kick off party!

Nic in Oregon this weekend!

Nic flew up to Eugene, Oregon, this morning just in time for rehearsal for tomorrows’s 40th Anniversary Gala Concert at the Oregon Bach Festival. He probably thought he'd be having a nice, quiet long weekend in Berkeley, however pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane just had to cancel his appearances at the festival because of illness.

Learn more about this concert.

John Prescott leads SFEMS summer adult course

On August 2-6, our pre-concert lecturer John Prescott (right) will once again lead a series of morning classes for adults in Berkeley at the Crowden Center for Music in the Community. The theme this year will be the music of one of the most prolific and influential of Baroque composers (he's also one of our favorites): G. F. Handel. Presented by the San Francisco Early Music Society, this interactive course entitled "Handel and his World" is intended for curious adults who want to broaden their musical horizons and deepen their listening pleasure. Learn more.

Historically-informed summer camp!

Our friends at the San Francisco Early Music Society just let us know that there is still space in their summer youth day camp program. At this year's "Music Discovery Workshop," youths ages 7-15 can "swashbuckle their way through life and music in 17th century France and England," learning recorder, harpsichord, strings, chamber music and musicianship, while also participating in other activities like crafts, costume making, and outdoor games. The camp takes place in Berkeley at the Crowden Center for Music in the Community from August 1-6, 2010. Download a brochure.

Soccer: Baroque? Classical? Romantic?

Do you have soccer (ahem... football) fever like many of us in the office? Maybe you can answer this bit of trivia:

Which piece of orchestral or operatic music was published the year that the first official rules of soccer were agreed upon and first "Football Association" was founded in a tavern in London?

A: John Blow's Venus and Adonis (1683)

B: Joseph Haydn's Symphonies No. 12 and 13 (1763)

C: Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens (1863)

And now, in anticipation of tomorrow's elimination round game:

UPDATED 6/28: We guess we'll have to hang onto that memory. Good effort, USA!

Meet Scott!

Scott broke the news last week and now it's our turn: We have engaged Scott Foglesong to write all of our program notes for our 30th Anniversary Season, as well as give three of the eight sets of pre-concert lectures. Chair of the Department of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory and one of the San Francisco Symphony's program annotators and pre-concert lecturers, Scott will also serve as our Scholar in Residence, assisting in our artistic planning.

Why is this so exciting for us? Well, not only is Scott a respected musicologist and a great writer whose name many of our staff members look for in the concert hall and on the web, but his roots are entangled deeply with the orchestra's – Scott was a student of Laurette Goldberg, the founder of our orchestra!

More Nic News

Last week, Juilliard's Historical Performance program announced that Nic will conduct Juilliard415 on Saturday, November 20 at 8 PM in Alice Tully Hall. The program includes a rare Handel cantata, Clori, Tirsi, e Fileno, and Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Flutes in C Major. Having only just debuted in December of last year, Juilliard415, the music school's new period-instrument group, will perform a series of seven concerts next season that features not only Nic, but also Jordi Savall and William Christie. Watch them perform with Artistic Director Monica Huggett below.

McGegan has long relationship with Juilliard, including a teaching residency and has regular appearances conducting the Juilliard Orchestra. He returns to conduct the Juilliard Orchestra that same week on Monday, November 22 at 8 PM in Alice Tully Hall.