The Critical Ear

Craig Smith |

9/4/2008 - 9/5/08

The young person's guide to the orchestrator

During his 25-year tenure as head of the Santa Fe Concert Association, William Mullen did some very good things. He shepherded the organization out of its safe and fairly limited presenting paddock, across wider artistic countryside, and safely up to the open range of classical music, dance, cabaret, Broadway shows, opera, and performance art it now presents. In the process, he worked to appeal to a wide variety of tastes and broke new ground for a group that had gotten its start in 1937 as part of Columbia Artists Management's Community Concerts, which had a nationwide lock on presenting back then.

Not that Mullen tried to go it alone. In order to fill each year's roster, he built and came to depend on close relationships with several current management giants (some would say monsters) including IMG and CAMI, the contemporary incarnation of Columbia Artists Management. But he also worked with smaller and more concentrated agents (some would say jewels) such as California Artists Management, Frank Salomon Associates, CM Artists New York, and William Capone's Arts Management Group. Thus he was often able to get unusual or interesting ensembles and performers into Santa Fe as they went between bigger cities — in the biz, this is called "piggybacking."

In case you've ever wondered, that's why so many SFCA concerts took place on Tuesdays and Thursdays rather than on Fridays or Saturdays. Santa Fe is an ideal midway point between Phoenix and Dallas, Los Angeles and Denver, or even Albuquerque (and the Popejoy Presents series at The University of New Mexico Center for the Arts) and Oklahoma City. Companies are more than happy to break up the trip and get another night's gig along the way.

I don't know how well SFCA did financially during Mullen's tenure. I do know that not every act he presented turned out well in performance; but in general, the quality was on a national if not always international level. If the season's proportions tilted heavily toward CAMI and/or IMG artists, well, it was one of the necessities of doing business (though it did result in a run of pickup Russian ballet companies with performances that nowhere lived up to their hype).

Mullen never hesitated to bring in top-flight classical artists, regardless of whether they drew a relatively faithful few or a sold-out house. Among his best choices in the last few years were pianists Radu Lupu, Stephen Hough, Barry Douglas, Ruth Laredo, and Louis Lortie; the violinists Gidon Kremer, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Gil Shaham, Chee-Yun, and Philippe Quint; the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Emerson String Quartet, the Kronos Quartet, and a notably fine group of chamber musicians from the Spoleto Festival USA; Ballet Argentina with the dramatic Julio Bocca; and several tango ensembles of good-to-blazing quality.

Mullen regularly conducted Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve concerts for SFCA with the pickup Música de Cámara Orchestra. With players drawn from the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra, the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, other local ensembles, and The University of New Mexico's music faculty, plus soloists both young and vigorous or venerable and experienced, those concerts were community favorites from the start. As Mullen once remarked to Pasatiempo, the wetter or snowier or nastier the weather, the more audiences tended to pack the house for those year-end events. Neither rain nor snow nor dark of night ...

From the early 1980s on, the Christmas and New Year's Eve repertoire consisted of everything from light classics to masterworks thoughtfully designed to appeal to audiences at holiday time. In the early years, there was a special concentration on Bach, Vivaldi, and Mozart. Later on, the rep branched out to include big-orchestra pieces by a range of composers, which gave both players and soloists a chance to show off. The first venue was the Santuario de Guadalupe. After the concerts outgrew that place, they moved first to the St. Francis Auditorium in the New Mexico Museum of Art and then to the Lensic Performing Arts Center.

While Mullen is no longer associated with SFCA, he's reassembling Música de Cámara this week for a special benefit concert for the Santa Fe Youth Symphony. It's set for 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 9, at the Lensic. The soloist is violinist Chee-Yun, a frequent SFCA performer in recent years. All the performers are donating their services, and all proceeds support SFYS programs.

For this benefit, Mullen has programmed the overture to Beethoven's opera Fidelio; the orchestral interlude titled "The Walk to the Paradise Garden" from Delius' opera A Village Romeo and Juliet; Elgar's Variations on an Original Theme, nicknamed "Enigma Variations"; and with Chee-Yun, Saint-Saëns' Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso and Pablo de Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen.

Tickets range from $25 to $45, and students and those 18 and under get in for half price. Call 988-1234 or visit the Lensic box office at 211 W. San Francisco St.

Note: The Concert Association's 2008-2009 season, put in place by Mullen before he left the organization this past spring, opens at 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 20 at the Lensic with East Village Opera Company. For more information, visit santafeconcerts.org.

Big man, big heart, big voice

Whether he was rendering the greatest operatic and concert repertoire, the most extreme pop-rock crossover songs, or even lip-syncing his best-known hits, tenor Luciano Pavarotti seemed always to radiate joy in both singing and life. From his early years in his hometown of Modena, Italy, where he was born on Oct. 12, 1935; to his bronze, silver, and gold achievements in the theater and media; and through his few final years in retirement, "The Big P" was known for his smile, his huge security-blanket handkerchief at concerts, and of course, the often clarion and seemingly perfectly placed voice. When he died on Sept. 6, 2007, after an earnest fight with pancreatic cancer, it was indeed the passing of a giant — physically as well as artistically, for the tenor was known for his generous girth as well as his generous vocal achievements.

The PBS program Great Performances marks the one-year anniversary of Pavarotti's death with Pavarotti: A Life in Seven Arias. Locally, it airs at 8 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 7, on KNME-TV Channel 5; if you receive KNME through digital cable, you can access other broadcast times after that date.

The seven selections excerpted were all mileposts in the singer's life, and all but two are operatic. There are Rodolfo's "Che gelida manina" from Puccini's La bohème, with fellow Modena native Mirella Freni as Mimi; the tenor-killing "Pour mon âme" from Donizetti's La fille du régiment, the work Pavarotti memorably toured in as Tonio with Joan Sutherland as the camp-follower "daughter," Marie; "Questa o quella," the Duke of Mantua's first aria from Verdi's Rigoletto; Calaf's paean to love, "Nessun dorma," from Puccini's Turandot; and Cavaradossi's last-act anguished monologue, "E lucevan le stelle," from Puccini's Tosca. The two other pieces are religious music: Franck's "Panis Angelicus," sung in a duet with Pavarotti's father, a baker and amateur tenor; and the "Ingemisco" from the Verdi Requiem.

Filling out the tribute are interviews with soprano Sutherland; tenors Kim Begley, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Juan Diego Flórez; conductor Richard Bonynge; critics Rupert Christiansen and Norman Lebrecht; director John Copley; and former Royal Opera House Covent Garden wig and make-up master Ron Freeman.

Pavarotti's many appearances on Great Performances over the years included the Verdi Requiem from La Scala in 1978, with Herbert von Karajan conducting; Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's 1985 TV film of Rigoletto, led by Riccardo Chailly; and the 1998 Pavarotti & Friends directed by Spike Lee, with guests including Jon Bon Jovi, Stevie Wonder, and Natalie Cole. For more information, visit pbs.org/gperf.