Closing out 20 years: Nic and the Göttingen International Handel Festival

Today, our Music Director Nic (left) conducted the final performance of the Göttingen International Handel Festival – the dark opera Tamerlano (HWV 18). Nic has led the Festival as its Music Director for the last 20 years. In 1991, he was passed the baton (figuratively of course, Nic doesn't use a baton as you may remember) by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Next year, Nic will pass the honors of leading the Festival to (fittingly) yet another British conductor – Laurence Cummings. This year was the Festival's 90th year – to learn more about the festival, watch this video.

In related news, SFCV gave the Festival's new recording of Mendelssohn's arrangement of Handel's Dettinger Te Deum (left) a rave review today! This disc features Nic conducting many of Philharmonia Baroque's musicians in the FestspielOrchester Göttingen, as well as frequent collaborators Dominique Labelle and William Berger and recent guests Thomas Cooley (.pdf) and Colin Ainsworth (.pdf).

Dudamel on education

It's been a week since he swept through town, but we have Dudamel fever too! We were truly inspired when we watched him talk about helping to bring Venezuela's El Sistema music education program to the United States in this 60 Minutes segment. Thank you Janos Gereben at SFCV for keeping us in the know.

Musicianship, sensitivity, dramatic flair... grace, elegance, personal warmth

Joining us in March of 2011, Flicka has begun touring the country to say farewell to her adoring audiences before retirement. In case you missed it, here is the article about her Carnegie Hall farewell.

Congratulations SFRV!

Have you picked up your issue SF Weekly's "Your San Francisco?" We just wanted to take a minute to congratulate our early music colleagues San Francisco Renaissance Voices for winning "Best Classical Music – 2010." A few of our Chorale singers sing with SFRV, including Jeff Fields, Raymond Martinez, Kathy McKee (who is also the Assistant Music Director of SFRV - pictured) and Helene Zindarsian.

Glorious sounds of centuries past

On June 10-12, come say hello to us at our table at "BFX TEN" – the 10th bi-annual early music festival, conference and exhibition in Berkeley.

Presented by San Francisco Early Music Society and Early Music America, there will be beautiful performances both as a part of the festival and on "The Fringe" in conjunction with the main stage events. Don't miss members of the orchestra perform in their smaller chamber groups – Magnificat, Music’s Re-creation, Voices of Music, New Esterhazy Quartet, Harmonia Felice, Ensemble Vermillian, Les Violettes, Galax Quartet, Barefoot Chamber Concerts and many more. Click here for the full schedule of events.

Great photos from our March Concert with Jordi Savall!

Until last week, we didn't know that our friend Frank Wing stopped by in March to snap photos of Jordi working with the orchestra during rehearsal. Check them out.

An influential afterlife: Exploring Orlando Furioso Part 3

Michael Wyatt joins us for the final post on Orlando furioso (read Parts 1 & 2):

A mere summary does little justice to the dazzling linguistic and conceptual texture of Ariosto’s great poem, elaborated in almost 40,000 lines through a complex network of narrative threads and a cast of thousands.

"The Sorcerer Altante Abducting Pinabello's Lady" by Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665)

Orlando furioso was one of the run-away publishing successes of the early modern period. The poem appeared in almost fifty separate editions in Italian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (many of them reprinted many times over), but the Furioso has exercised an equally strong attraction translated into foreign languages. By the early twentieth century, there had been almost ninety versions – partial and complete – in French, twenty-nine in Spanish (it is one of the few books Don Quixote saves from his bonfire of the vanities), some twenty in Russian, thirty in German and eighteen in English. There have been translations of Orlando furioso into Czech, Latin, Hungarian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Hebrew; the first Asian translation seems to be the one published in Japanese in 2002.

En Espanol!

Ariosto’s poem has had an equally rich history of re-elaboration in other forms, giving rise to a veritable industry of literary imitations and responses, visual representations and adaptations for the theater, film, television and radio. Handel wrote three operas to libretti based on the Furioso – Alcina, Ariodante, and Orlando – and composers as varied as Francesca Caccini, Lully, Porpora, Vivaldi, Rameau, and Haydn have found in Ariosto a deep vein of inspiration. Ariosto’s enduring fascination is evident today in the chivalric repertory of the Sicilian puppet theater, the opera dei pupi, a tradition that emerged on the island in the early nineteenth century and continues to be practiced today by several companies in Catania and Palermo.