This Year in Classical Music, Midsummer Feels Like Midseason
The timbre of this week in music, from sfcv.org
By Michael Zwiebach, senior editor
It’s the end of July, and things feel as if we’re in midseason.
In preparation for West Edge Opera’s two-week festival, SF Classical Voice previewed the company’s new production of The Turn of the Screw. The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra made an unusual foray into the midsummer calendar with a terrific production of Handel’s Tolomeo. Music@Menlo, now in its second week, pitched in with a chilling premiere of a new work by composer/pianist Stephen Hough.
But wait, there’s more! The tiny, Berkeley-based Midsummer Mozart Festival scored with a concert of Mozart’s works for Paris. SF Playhouse opened a winning production of the musical Hairspray, and Pocket Opera closed out its season with a strong performance of Giacomo Puccini’s La Rondine.
Meanwhile, in Santa Barbara at the Music Academy of the West, Tom Jacobs spoke with Conor Hanick, a pianist who turns the art of interpretation into an adventure.
Amid a welter of summer recording releases, SF Classical Voice writers reviewed countertenor John Holiday’s Over My Head, Claire Chase and the JACK Quartet’s premiere of Terry Riley’s The Holy Liftoff, and The Young People’s Chorus of New York City’s This Time Round, a compendium of new music commissioned during the COVID pandemic.
And a reminder: Nominations are being accepted for SF Classical Voice’s annual Audience Choice Awards. Don’t miss the chance to add your top group, artist, or performance to the list to ensure that your favorites make it through to the final round of voting.
The Excerpt
An article to spark this week’s conversation
Hairspray Gets a New Spritz of Life at SF Playhouse
By Andrew Gilbert
John Waters has described Hairspray as his “gift that keeps on giving.” While the director presided over the punk-inflected Mosswood Meltdown festival in Oakland, the Broadway smash musical delivered another uproarious triumph with San Francisco Playhouse’s winning production.
Based on Waters’s 1988 film of the same name, Hairspray is a locomotive that draws power from Marc Shaiman’s irresistible score. Running through Sept. 12, SF Playhouse’s production boasts a cast brimming with talent equal to the demands of a musical in constant motion.
Even with a last-minute substitution in a major role, the July 21 performance was polished and punchy. Barely contained by the intimate Union Square-adjacent theater, Director Bill English and Choreographer Phoenyx Rose effectively stage the major numbers with brio and commitment, starting in the first moments with the giddy opening “Good Morning, Baltimore.”
Set in Waters’s beloved hometown in 1962, Hairspray tells the story of the dauntless and zaftig teen Tracy Turnblad — played by Playhouse newcomer Ella Ruth Francis with all the requisite heart, moxie, pipes, and dance moves required — seeking to join the dance troupe on the local Corny Collins Show. Her personal campaign quickly grows into a civil rights struggle to integrate the broadcast, which has relegated Black dancers to a monthly “Negro day.”
Waters’s genius for marrying corn and camp to genuine affection for outsiders and underdogs comes through brightly in the musical version, which avidly promotes Black liberation, and allyship, through music and protest.
This cast is fully committed to celebrating this liberation. There really wasn’t a dull passage in the production, but some pieces like “Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now” soared above the rest.
… Read the full article on sfcv.org