I had been wondering when the Seattle Symphony would announce some big, audacious, splashy farewell for Gerard Schwarz’s final season. There was a two concert Hovhaness festival and the season finale is Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, but neither seemed a big enough way to say good bye to a conductor who oversaw the growth of the Seattle Symphony for 26 years. That was until I opened my email yesterday.

In partnership with two leading philanthropists — Agnes Gund and Charles Simonyi — eighteen (yes, eighteen!) new pieces, by American composers will be commissioned and premiered through out the course of the season. That is a new piece of music on every concert led by Schwarz. Suddenly, the season looks like a suitable send off.

The composers composing new works and a list of concerts where new works will be premiered follow the jump.

September 8–10: Beethoven & Wine Festival
World Premiere work by Augusta Read Thomas

September 23–26: Yefim Bronfman Plays Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2
World Premiere work by Joseph Schwantner

September 30, October 2–3: Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7
World Premiere work by Aaron Jay Kernis

October 14–16: Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 1
World Premiere work by Daron Hagen

October 23: An Organ Celebration
World Premiere work by Samuel Jones

November 4–6: Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with André Watts
World Premiere work by David Stock

December 7: Yo-Yo Ma
World Premiere work by Bernard Rands

December 29–31, January 2: Beethoven’s Ninth
World Premiere work by Gunther Schuller

January 6 & 8: Violinist Gil Shaham
World Premiere work by Bright Sheng

January 20–22: Mozart’s Requiem
World Premiere work by Daniel Brewbaker

February 3, 5 & 6: Violinist Vadim Repin Plays Symphonie espagnole
World Premiere work by Ellen Taafe Zwillich

February 17–19: Viola Spectacular with Pinchas Zukerman
World Premiere work by Robert Beaser

March 24: Hovhaness Festival with Cellist Lynn Harrell
World Premiere work by Chen Yi

March 26: Hovhaness Festival with Cellist Lynn Harrell
Featuring a new work by George Tsontakis

March 31: Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony
World Premiere work by David Schiff

April 2 & 3: Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony
World Premiere work by Richard Danielpour

June 2, 4 & 5: Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2
World Premiere work by Paul Schoenfield

June 16 & 18: Gerard Schwarz Conducts Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony
World Premiere work by Philip Glass

Summer is winding down, classical performance — with the exception of Seattle Opera’s head scratching new production of Tristan und Isolde – are more or less on hiatus until September. All of this leaves a blogger with little to blog about. Yet a few noteworthy bits have popped up here and there.

This Sunday George Shangrow will be remembered at a service held at the University Christian Church in the U District. The service starts at 2 pm and runs until 5 pm. Get there early. Seating is limited and because George’s presence was huge there will no doubt be an overflowing crowd.

Tristan und Isolde wraps up this weekend at McCaw hall. I saw the new production last weekend. The general consensus among critics has been reservedly favorable; consensus among the audience hasn’t been as generous.  Nearly everyone I spoke with thought the orchestra sounded spectacular. Fisch whipped the band into grand Wagnerian shape but it never missed a chance to embrace the score’s warmer moments. Most also liked Tristan’s cast as well. the golden age of Wagner singers is long gone but that didn’t stop Clifton Forbis and Annalena Persson from giving a memorable performance of Tristan and Isolde.  Once again, Persson started her Tristan performance with uncertainty in her voice and a wavering tone.  By the second act she had found Isolde’s voice; her arresting Liebestob provided a satisfying conclusion.

If the audience appreciated the musical qualities of the performance, production elements weren’t regarded as favorably. “The directing and set design were so bad I periodically closed my eyes to listen so I would not be distracted” read one comment posted on the Seattle Times web review.  The painted sets looked like cheap, grey particle board. A new projection system — written up extensively in the Tristan program — added little to the opera’s texture. Israel’s changing costumes were interesting, highlighting the opera’s mythology, but with very little else on stage, they seemed out of place. Kazaras looked to explore “Tristan time” and the idea that an event which takes a few seconds in real time might seem much longer in the mind. This is all well and good as an idea, but on stage it failed to translate, turning the opera into a series of incomprehensible moments.

The music is always paramount with an opera.  But for professional company’s like Seattle Opera the music can’t be everything.  Audiences already expect big things in the pit and on stage — for Wagner especially.  For a production to be successful then, the sets, costumes, stage direction, and everything else that isn’t musical must be good too.  Fisch’s orchestra and Jenkins’s cast were memorable, while Israel and Kazaras’s production forgettable.

Pianist Stephen Hough has weighed in on the vibrato debate. Frankly, I’m tired of the historic performance debate. Performance styles change; instruments change and so do the musicians who play them. Looking back has benefits: it gives a chance to hear what a performance might have sounded like when a piece of music was written. But just as valuable are musicians who today take chances with classic pieces of music, giving us performances suitable to the 21st Century.

Just as incomprehensible as the vibrato debate, is the back and forth between Greg Sandow and Heather Mac Donald, a writer with City Journal. Sandow has issued a barrage of defensive responses to Mac Donald’s argument that we are living in the golden age of classical music. She basis her thesis on a number of points which you can read yourself; all of them are valid observations. For instance, she states that there is more classical music available that is better played than ever before. Sandow’s counter arguments are equally compelling. However, Sandow loses me with his tone. He is dismissive and derisive. He pokes fun at her name — “that’s really how she spells her name; the space after “Mac” isn’t a typo” — which is a subject that should never come up if you are serious about having a debate.  Sandow defends his position, and the conventional wisdom of the classical music industry, that as an art form on the margins, classical music is in trouble.

His flurry of posts convey desperation, like a someone defending the notion the Earth is flat after being presented with incontrovertible proof the Earth is really round.  Mac Donald’s lengthy response is as convincing as her first.  The problem with conventional wisdom is that it changes. For the sake of classical music I hope Mac Donald is right.

By Philippa Kiraly

Time was, maybe 17 years ago, when Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival was full of well known classics. We could confidently expect to hear Brahms, Beethoven, and Schumann, Mozart and Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. Sure there was, is, plenty to choose from among much-loved works. Some amongst us grew restless, wanting to be more challenged by the music and have our minds expanded, and SCMS responded by building a program one year full of these more adventurous work. The audience stayed away in droves.

What a change nowadays!

Artistic director Toby Saks went back to the audience-getting programs, but increasingly began to slip in a work here and there by a less familiar composer, together with a little paragraph for the potential ticket buyer of how this was an eminently listenable piece s/he would enjoy.Also, she began to engage better and better performers to interpret them to the audience.

Fast forward to now, when the performers are as good as you will find at any chamber music festival worldwide, the audience doesn’t blink at attending concerts with less familiar works and receives them with enthusiasm.

Indeed, sometimes they are the highlight of the concert, performances which stay with you. Last Week, August 4, saw a memorable performance of a Shostakovich quartet. This Wednesday, Auguat 11, the work which stood out was Zoltan Kodaly’s Serenade for two violins (Joseph Lin and Lily Francis) and viola (Richard O’Neill).

It’s quite spare in its harmonies, allowing the individual instruments to shine while staying inside the group. Kodaly, a cellist, gave a major role here to the viola, the lowest instrument in this combination, and listeners had a chance to hear O’Neill’s expressive playing and tone unobscured.

Kodaly lures the hearer onward with new and unexpected ideas and harmonic combinations all within a firm open structure which in the hands of these three musicians was rock-solid. Their astonishingly exact synchronization made one feel that every connection was a joining together and a base for the next imaginative phrase.

At the same time the three played with closely similar style and tone, so that a phrase flowing from one to another to the third sounded as though it was played by one person on one instrument. That style fitted the music, and the tone of all three had depth and beauty as well as strength and vigor. The second violin, Francis, had the lion’s share of accompanying but this too required artistry in shaping to support the others.

Brahms’ Trio in C Minor for violin (Stefan Jackiw), cello (Robert deMaine) and piano (Anna Polonsky) sounded driven and a bit heavy in its outer movements, but achieved Brahms’ hallmark warmth in the middle ones.

Dvorak’s Trio in E Minor, the “Dumky,” for the same combination—violinist Scott Yoo, cellist Ronald Thomas and pianist Orion Weiss—was musically more satisfying. Six of these dumky, folk songs, make up the basis for the work, and the players made the most of the pensive, lyrical, sometimes mournful sections and the crazy wild parts which separate them. Dvorak gives the cello much of the lead in the slower parts, musically haunting in Thomas’ hands, while there were moments in Weiss’s playing where the pianos seemed to ring like a bell.

The recital prior to the concert was of interest also. The two young pianists Weiss and Polonsky have both performed at the festival for some years. As Polonsky told the audience, last year he proposed to her during the festival and this June they married.
At this concert they performed works for piano four-hands, i.e. two people playing on one instrument. Pianists who successfully perform double works are often related and perhaps it needs that closeness to know intuitively how to fit with each other’s playing for it not to sound clunky, as so often two-person piano performances do. These two have been performing together for some time and it looks as though we may be seeing the early days of a fine performing duo.

Their playing of Mendelssohn’s Andante and Variations, Op. 83a and Schubert’s Andantino Varie, D.823 from his French Divertimento had that instinctive intuition for each other’s musical approach, and a feel for the music’s era resulting in a fine performance.

Conductor, composer, singer Jayce Ogren

Jayce Ogren is an example of what is happening in classical music these days. He’s a conductor who has stood before some of the finest orchestras in the world. Ogren finished a tenure with the Cleveland Orchestra in 2009. He has also conducted the Boston Symphony, LA Phil, and City Opera. Before that, he was a conducting apprentice with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic under the New York Philharmonic’s Alan Gilbert. With conducting bona fides like these, Ogren could easily stick to cultivating a career as a conductor. But, this Hoquiam native is plunging into composing, songwriting, and on Friday he and a new band of Seattle area musicians — Young Kreisler — debut at ACT with a program of Ogren’s own music, kindred depressants Kurt Cobain and Mahler, and Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union.

Can you talk about a piece of music that changed you — as a person, musician?
Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony taught me a lot about myself.  My life and work tend to be about reconciling the urban and the pastoral, the human and the spiritual.  Sibelius wrangled with many of these same issues, and to me his Seventh Symphony is his most beautiful, urgent and purely distilled expression of these ideas.  Falling in love with that piece helped me understand which qualities I can’t live without as a composer and interpreter.

Is there one piece of music you would like to play but haven’t?
I would love to conduct Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”.  It’s a tremendous challenge for an orchestra and a conductor, but when it works, it’s incredibly rewarding.  Despite the fact that the piece is nearly 100 years old and hundreds of composers have imitated its rhythms and orchestration, it still sounds incredibly fresh every time I hear it.  ”The Rite” was a milestone and a revolution, and someday I want to encounter it myself.

What piece of music defines you as a musician?
One of the new songs I wrote for Young Kreisler, “The Trail”, is a kind of musical autobiography.  It’s about struggles in love and work and the direction my life has taken over the last several years.  I’m trying to be as open as possible to my audience.  There’s pain and raw emotion, wistful sweet harmonies and searing dissonances, but an optimistic undercurrent is always present.  In the end the piece is about my drive to keep going, keep creating and keep loving.

Some people have strong memories associated with a piece of music; do you have a piece like this?
I wrote “Symphonies of Gaia” for my college wind band, and it was my first time conducting one of my own pieces with a full, virtuosic ensemble.  That first performance was–there’s no other way to put it–a catharsis.  I’d worked so hard and put so much love into that piece, and it was overwhelming when it all came to fruition.  From that moment on I knew that there was absolutely nothing in the world like having your own music performed.

Is there one piece of music more people should know?
Aaron Copland is known for his beautiful middle period works like Appalaichan Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man, but he started out as a modernist, and his Piano Variations is one of the great, thorny masterpieces of the 20th century.  It’s fiercely controlled, brash, strident, personal, passionate and wonderful.  He creates a complete emotional world out of 4 simple notes.  Go buy a recording and buckle-up.

Rimsky Korsakov. 1/5 of the original The Five

The Five is a feature I intended to start back in July. The feature was supposed to start with the musicians of the Seattle Chamber Music Society. It never able to take off because of the scheduling challenges presented by an always changing line up of musicians.

I wish I could say the idea for the Five is wholly mine, its not. One of my favorite sections in BBC Music Magazine is the column Music That Changed Me. Every issue ends with a musician — famous or not — sharing with readers the three to five albums or pieces of music that changed them.

Each time I finished reading Music That Changed Me I felt like I had been exposed to the inner musical sanctum of whoever the BBC editors had chosen to pen the column that month. In April it was the conductor Antonio Pappano. He shared with readers the first time he ever heard Tristan und Isolde. Pappano described Tristan as a dangerous piece of music and like Liszt under your fingers. I think music lovers appreciate insights like this more than the same old profile pieces that you and I have read hundreds of times.

Named after the five Russian composers – Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky Korsakov, Borodin and Balakirev, The Five is a blog twist on BBC Music Magazine’s Music That Changed Me. Periodically, I will ask musicians five questions about pieces of music that are important to them or impacted them in some way. Their answers will be published here for your reading pleasure.

George Shangrow. Photo John Cornicello.

It’s been more than a week since we learned of George Shangrow’s untimely death. In that time the tributes for this Seattle original have been growing with each day. Orchestra Seattle’s website has been turned into a rolling memorial.

My favorite is from Kerry Fowler who wrote:

“I was a bit nervous the night before my audition for Orchestra Seattle, when I tuned in to KING-FM to hear the end of Beethoven’s Fifth. When it was over, I heard George announce, “Even after all these years, I still get tingles listening to that movement.” I thought, “Now that’s someone I want to play music with.” I wasn’t disappointed.”

On Saturday, the matriarch of Seattle’s critical class Melinda Bargreen, penned a tribute to Shangrow. It is well worth a read if you want a window into George’s essence as a person.

If you prefere to remember George in person, there is a memorial service scheduled for 2 PM August 22, 2010 at the University Christian Church which is open to the public.  I would suggest getting there early as more than 200 people have rsvp’d on the Facebook page for the event.

By R.M. Campbell

Memories can be short and distorted, but it seems to me, as the Seattle Chamber Music Festival enters its final week of the summer, this season has been if not the best than one of the best in its nearly 30-year history.

Two things are certain. The move from the dull acoustics of St. Nicholas Hall at Lakeside to Nordstrom Recital Hall has been an unqualified success, not only in terms of box office but musically, aided in part by the vastly improved acoustical presence of the hall. There is no question Nordstrom can turn shrill in the upper registers, especially the violin, if musicians are not careful. In the early days, they were not and the hall got a bad reputation. But other musicians, more capable and more sensitive, found ways to make the hall what it is today. All concert venues have their individual profiles which musicians must take into account. Festival concerts at Nordstrom had a ring of freshness, vibrancy and clarity they did not have previously. This improved acoustical status seemed to encourage musicians to play even better than they did at Lakeside.

Also, there have been quantum changes in the musicians who come to Seattle to play. Violinist James Ehnes, who succeeds Toby Saks next year as artistic director, is responsible for a lot of that. He is very much in tune with some of the best musicians today, and they have come here on his invitation. Most of them are inevitably young, but they are gifted and collaborative by nature. The result is in the music-making.

Concerts at Overlake School in Redmond are an innovation of a few years ago. Slowly they have grown in box office appeal. Always, they have been on a high level musically. The hall itself is acoustically attractive. Wisely, the programs are different than Seattle and the same mix and match of musicians continues. Some play in both venues, others do not.

Robert deMaine was the cellist in the Mendelssohn Second Cello Sonata, with Anna Polonsky as his pianist, in Monday night’s recital. DeMaine is the possessor of a huge sound, which the sonata did not always allow to bloom. But he is facile technician and major talent, so he gave a reading with a predictable deep focus and concentration. Polonsky also has a nimble technique and is a good partner, so she made for an excellent duo. That said, this is not one of Mendelssohn’s most ingenious works, although it provided an apt vehicle for deMaine and Polonsky.

Joaquin Turina’s B Minor Piano Trio was the only bit of adventure in the evening. Sort of. A 20th-century composer he may have been, but his music does not reflect much influence of the time. It is steadfastly conservative and conventional, despite its “exotic” sensibilities. The whole evening needed something more bracing. Nevertheless, its advocates — violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Edward Arron and Polonsky — did everything they could to make the work as vivid as possible. Jackiw has been coming to the festival for four years. He is both provocative and compelling, a brilliant musician. Arron is new to the festival. A widely experience cellist, he brings an acute musical sensitivity to all that he does and is a keen ensemble player, going forth as a soloist when needed and receding into the whole when required. He is both a passionate musician and a refined one. Polonsky was a good partner to both of them.

String quartets are not programmed on festival concerts with any regularity for all sorts of very good reasons. For this outing was one of Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” quartets, the C Major, Op. 59, No. 3. Its group of advocates were first-class: Augustin Hadelich and Scott Yoo, violin; Richard O’Neill, viola, and Ronald Thomas, cello. If these four superb musicians played together all the time, the performance would have been a remarkable one. But for an ad hoc group, it was even more so. The performance had a great verve, sublime expression and pinpoint ensemble. They played as if they played together all the time, even in the fastest, more difficult sections, they played as one. Even in the furious fugue of the final movement when O’Neill’s string broke and they had to stop playing in order to give him time to change it, the four gathered their resources when he returned to his seat and played with equal fervor and togetherness. This was an exciting reading, a revelation as well.

The evening came to a close with Josef Suk’s Piano Quintet in G Minor. Again, this is not a piece with consistent gestures of inspiration, but the five musicians — Joseph Lin and Ehnes, violin; Lily Francis, viola; deMaine, and Orion Weiss, piano — played it as such, with vigor, attention to all sorts of details and flair. The audience, for the second time, rose to its collective feet to show its appreciation.

James Ehnes

By Philippa Kiraly

Seattle Chamber Music Society’s summer festival has headed to The Overlake School in Redmond for its final five concerts, the first of which took place in those beautiful surroundings Wednesday night.

But first, the Society’s associate artistic director, James Ehnes, came out to give a tribute to the late George Shangrow, citing his long time support for the festival. In his honor Ehnes then played the largo movement from Bach’s Sonata No. 3 for unaccompanied violin.

The concert following was one of those superb performances which live in the memory. The centerpiece was Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 8 in C minor, “To the Memory of the Victims of Fascism.” It’s always been my view that Shostakovich’s work, and this quartet in particular, can only be played with full impact by those who have lived and suffered under dictatorship. I was dubious, beforehand, that these four young men—violinists Augustin Hadelich and Stefan Jackiw, violist Richard O’Neill and cellist Edward Arron—could bring the necessary depth of experience and insight to make this work a success.

I was wrong. Technically, they caught the harsh richness, the downright ugliness, the moments of beauty and artful shaping, the bonding. Emotionally, a well of sadness returned continually with unplumbed grief, alternating with bouts of fury, rage, and frustration, and the sense of helter-skelter panic and fear, bound together with unremitting tension. The triple chords in the third movement felt like prison bars, coming back over and over to remind the hearer of their overwhelming presence.
It was a riveting performance, holding this listener frozen.

Finding the right work to perform after this, something of a musical stature to lift the hearer away from jangled nerves and with its own nobility, could have been hard, but Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio in B Flat Major was exactly the right choice. As performed by violinist Scott Yoo, cellist Ronald Thomas and pianist Anton Nel, it was sheer pleasure. The three are veterans of the festival, their musicmaking together an unspoken cameraderie, their interpretation classical and elegant. The sound bloomed with a warmth and tenderness it was not difficult to attain in this fine little auditorium. The piano was a much better instrument than had been available for the last month at Nordstrom, and it showed.

The concert had begun with Elgar’s Sonata for violin and piano in E Minor, with Ehnes and pianist Anna Polonsky. There is sadness here too, as the composer faced the terminal illness of his wife, so it was a fitting opener before the Shostakovich, but it is a much more civilized piece of music. Ehnes and Polonsky covered its range of feeling from vigor and questioning to gentleness and yearning with lovely tone and expressive playing.

All in all, a night to remember.

Four more concerts remain, through Friday August 13. For tickets, go to seattlechambermusic.org.

George Shangrow, one of Seattle’s finest musicians and musical personalities, died last night in an auto collision.  Shangrow was driving to give a talk at the Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival when a teenager crossed the center lane of the highway, crashing into Shangrow’s car, killing him.

This is a tremendous loss for Seattle’s classical music community.  Shangrow was a charismatic, sometimes awkward advocate for music that wouldn’t make it to the concert stage otherwise.  His performances of Bach, Monteverdi, and Handel’s Messiah with Orchestra Seattle drew a cult following.

Rest in peace, George.  You will be missed. Orchestra Seattle has posted a statement on their web page. KUOW has a nice piece on Shangrow.

A clip of George doing what he did best: conducting Handel’s Messiah.

Annalena Persson (Isolde) and Margaret Jane Wray (Brangäne). Rozarii Lynch Photo

By R.M. Campbell

Wagner’s monumental “Tristan und Isolde”  is not a stranger to Seattle Opera: it has never been approached lightly. The opera is too important, too central to the Wagner canon, too demanding to be treated with anything less than awe and respect. The last time the company mounted the opera, in 1998, it had an all-star cast (Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner singing the roles for the first time together ) and a production team, headed by stage director Francesca Zambello. The set, designed by Alison Chitty, was as massive as the opera itself. Magnificent really, especially the first and second acts.

Unfortunately, the set had a short life. Normally when an opera returns to the repertory after its inaugural outing, the old set is revived, unless, of course, it was a disaster like the “Aida.” That was not the case with this “Tristan.” It was scratched because it was too expensive to move about the stage. So, Robert Israel, with a long association at the opera company who designed its “Parsifal,” which opened McCaw Hall in 2003, was called upon, not only to do the decor but also the costumes. By the looks of what he designed it would appear he was given a very small budget — a pity because the 1998 “Tristan” was so visually compelling.

This “Tristan” is not compelling in that sense. Israel and stage director Peter Kazaras came up with a concept production, allied with some high technology equipment newly purchased, that is more confusing than enlightening. There are slabs of rock, a thin red rope that stretches across the stage in every scene, large pale colored pieces of fabric that hang here and there, isolated bits of furniture and so on. None of it makes any immediate sense. The inspiration for the concept, according to the program, comes from Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 short story, “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which a Confederate gentleman-farmer is tricked into an act of sabotage by a Union soldier for which he pays with his life. It is an exploration of time, not real time but inner time.

If ever a production needed some explanation, this “Tristan” is it. But there is none except to go online and read the story and hear Kazaras talk about the ideas expressed by Bierce, but even that is not especially enlightening. What needs to be said, to be explained should be in the program, not located in some other venue which will be searched by only a fragment of the audience.

What is remarkable is that is that as irritating as the concept is, or perhaps confusion over its meaning, it does not intrude on all the other aspects of the production– musical and dramatic — which are extraordinary. The driving forces are the conducting of Asher Fisch — how well the orchestra played — and Kazaras, who is given more and more responsibility at the company.

The Israeli-born conductor is well-known in Seattle, both at the opera and the Seattle Symphony. He never disappoints in elucidating the music. His palette seems immense, his range of dynamic variation equally large. He has full command of the line, which never seems to end, and produces tremendous beauty of tone. He gets the best of this orchestra. But why was the mysterious and haunting English horn solo that opens the third act — so superbly played by Stefan Farkas — so buried in the pit? The sound had no presence in the house. What a miscalculation. The French horns, led by Jeff Fair, that play an important role in the opera, were in excellent shape.

Since his debut in “Norma” a few years ago, Kazaras has grown considerably. “Tristan” is long but one is never aware of its length with Kazaras. He keeps the action moving surely and without any silly gestures and useless movement. He listen to the music the way some directors seem not to and devises his action to suit whatever the opera at hand. He has a vivid imagination that he puts to good use. Only occasionally does it lead him astray. Kazaras is not afraid to let the music have its say.

The combination of Kazaras and Fisch shaping the whole of the opera gave the production both the strength and suppleness on which the singers could do good work, which they did. Clifton Forbis was Tristan. He is a good Tristan, among the best on the international stage today. His voice is warm and yet strong, able to sustain the long passages Wagner wrote for the character. Annalena Persson made her American operatic debut as Isolde. With her blonde hair and tall figure, she is both imperious and sympathetic. Her voice is powerful, able to do all that Wagner asks. If she has any weakness, it is probably her lyrical sensibility, but that is a minor one. A Brunnhilde perhaps in the future? Margaret Jane Wray sang Brangane with dramatic emphasis and keen focus. Greer Grimsley’s Kurwenal was good, a faithful soldier and friend, but it was Stephen Milling as King Marke who provided both gravitas and depth of emotion. Jason Collins did the most with Melot as did Barry Johnson with the Steerman.

I liked Israel’s costumes and the lighting design of Duane Schuler, who now lives in Seattle. The latter had flair and was always apropos to the action. Jonathan Dean’s subtitles are, of course, apt and eloquent.

Performance runs for three weeks, until August 21.