Monthly Archives: November 2019

Artist in Residence: Dr. Leslie Friedman, Dancer, Choreographer, Writer

This is an article by author Don McPhail. It appeared in the November issue of OMVNA (vol. 31, Number 4) which covers the Old Mountain View, CA area.

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: Dr. Leslie Friedman, Dancer, Choreographer, Writer

With quiet energy and a generous nature, Leslie Friedman is a local treasure. Her willingness to share and motivate other is distinctive. Residents who have participated in Leslie’s dance classes or the International Dance Festival@Silicon Valley which she founded and directs may be surprised to learn that this same unselfish teacher is an award winning, world-renowned dancer and ambassador of art. All of Leslie’s classes, the Festival, and other Lively Foundation events take place at Mountain View’s Masonic Lodge, in the heart of Old Mountain View.

Leslie Friedman’s extraordinary background is documented on The Lively Foundation’s website/blog  www.livelyfoundation.org   Leslie’s remarkable career as a dancer and choreographer has earned her acclaim from audiences and critics alike on four continents. She has performed with the support of the US State Department and host countries in Russia, China, India,England, Spain, Poland, Egypt, South Korea, Japan, and more. A writer and former history professor, she received her Ph.D. in Modern British History from Stanford. She taught at Stanford, Vassar, and Case Western Reserve before returning to dance professionally.

An invitation to introduce American modern dance to the artists of India’s National School of Drama led to a Fulbright Lectureship to support her work and travel. Beginning at Viswa Bharati University, home of Tagore, India’s Nobel winning poet, she performed across India: new Delhi, Bangalore, Madras, Calcutta, and Jaipur. Her work was so well received that each place invited her back for more performances.

Representatives of Indian arts institutions, US consulates or Fulbright in India took her to the next plane or train, but she traveled as she danced: solo. She was welcomed by people with whom she maintains long friendships. On China or Bulgaria she says, “I met wonderful individuals and learned so much.”

The success of her first India trips led to more. She performed and taught in Sri Lanka, Egypt, and Tunisia on that journey. Word of her beautiful dancing and ability to relate to new people and places spread, leading to more journeys touring her art. Next: Budapest, Pecs, and Gyor, Hungary; Barcelona and Madrid, Spain; Moscow and Leningrad, USSR. She knew these were peak experiences and was thrilled to be doing what she loved for appreciative, knowledgeable audiences.

The US State Department and The Place, London’s foremost theater for modern dance, co-sponsored her performances there. She taught her choreography to London’s Ballet Rambert. In China, she taught modern dance and created choreography for the national ballet academies: Beijing, Shenyang, and Shanghai. She introduced modern dance to Poland’s national ballets, making four extensive trips to Poland and Romania performing and choreographing.

Lively Foundation Artistic Director Leslie Friedman

She continued performing concerts across the US and the Bay Area. She and her company performed education performances about the the Gold Rush for thousands of students from San Jose to Marin. She created several firsts: concerts honoring the many holidays at year’s end; benefit concerts for breast cancer patients; Heroic, Beloved, a concert for Women’s History Month performed in multiple states’ universities and arts centers.

For this writer, Leslie Friedman’s delight in sharing her art is most inspiring see in the context of tumultuous historic events going on around her as she keeps dancing.

Current book:  The Dancer’s Garden, published in April, 2019

Current project: International Dance Festival@Silicon Valley, Founder & Artistic Director

San Francisco Opera’s Manon Lescaut: Heartbreaking, Breathtaking Music

Tonight, 11/26, is (now “was”) this season’s last performance of Puccini’s first masterpiece, Manon Lescaut, at the San Francisco Opera. It puts the “Grand” in its rightful place in “Grand Opera.” The Hedgehogs attended the matinee, Sunday, November 24, and still think about it, hear it and see it in the minds’ eyes and ears. All of the performers were eye opening and heart rending in their characterizations and superb voices. The leads, Lianna Haroutounian, as Manon, and Brian Jagde, as Des Grieux, both made their role debuts. They were stellar. Ms Haroutounian captures the pathos, silliness, beauty, and tragedy in Manon while fulfilling all that Pucinni could desire through her voice. Mr. Jagde is ardent, naive, and heroic with a soaring voice and powerful presence.

Manon Lescaut (Lianna Haroutounian) meets Chevalier Des Grieux (Brian Jagde).

Brian Jagde

The Conductor was the first reason we chose to see this opera. Nicola Luisotti was SFO’s Music Director, 2009-2018. He is such an appealing artist: full of energy, radiating the joy of being in music, and able to summon the greatest music from his instrument, the SF Opera Orchestra. They made the music shimmer, explode, and embrace the voices. It was an extraordinary range of music and one felt as though Puccini was being channeled through Luisotti.

Nicola Luisotti,Conductor, principal guest conductor at Madrid’s Teatro Real, recently conducted La Traviata, Aida, and Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera, La Forza del Destino at the Paris Opera, Il Trovatore at Milan’s La Scala

The story follows Manon from her arrival at a coach stop on her way to enter a convent to her death on the desert plain of Louisiana. (A program note reminds us that in 1731 when Abbe Prevost wrote the novel, Louisiana could refer to the whole Territory, not only to the swampy, hurricane prone state.) Chevalier Des Grieux falls in love with her on the spot. He invites her to stay with him. The innkeeper helps them escape because just a few minutes earlier he had arranged with Manon’s brother, Lescaut, to help Geronte de Ravoir carry her off to seduce her. This “seduce” is a euphemism for “rape.”

Anthony Clark Evans (L) was Lescaut; (R)Philip Skinner as Geronte de Revoir. Both were totally believable as they embodied their roles and created their complex characters through vocal power.

Lescaut first appears to be a bad brother. He is willing to help a wealthy rake abscond with his sister for the prestige and money to be gained. Later, he realizes his sister is terribly unhappy and yearns for the peaceful love she experienced with Des Grieux in their cottage. In Act II, he runs to tell Des Grieux to come to Manon at Geronte’s palace. Manon has indulged in jewelry and fashion but still loves Des Grieux. They decide to run away together. Lescaut will help, but Manon wants to take her jewels with her. In the minutes she spends scooping up pearls, Geronte and his guards capture them. Another plan goes astray as Manon, in prison wearing rags, awaits being branded and shipped off to the New World. Des Grieux demands to be shipped away with his love and other convicts.

Lianna Haroutounian, Manon, dances a minuet as Geronte and friends look on. Zhengyi Bai is the Dancing Master (above center).

As we near the year 2020, the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote in the USA, it is impossible not to notice Manon’s plight. A bit of a nit wit, she is also a teenager with no sign of education in a society with few alternatives for females. The convent. A financially secure marriage. Although women appear in the opening market scene and in Manon’s boudoir, Manon is the only named female character in the opera. There is no female friend, relative or rival. She is alone at the stag party that is her world. She introduces herself saying that her father dictated her fate. Through time, her life is molded by her brother, by Geronte, less so by Des Grieux, and quite a bit by her inexperience and ignorance. A painful moment for the audience came in seeing her dance a minuet for an audience brought together by Geronte. Bewigged older men watch her. She thinks she is dancing beautifully and proudly in her gorgeous gown. From the view of the rakes, she is a delectable performing monkey exciting their desires.

Brian Jagde, as Des Grieux, Lianna Haroutounian, as Manon, face death in the New World.

The lovers’ ends are inevitable. Their last acts show them wandering alone on a desert without food, water, or a sense of where they are. One line explains that they ran away from the others so that they would not be separated. Life: as Tina Turner’s song states, What’s love got to do with it? Better not to consider if she would have been happier safe in the convent. Abbe Prevost’s novel was immediately banned by the French. Even now there is a lot to object to in the story, though our objections come from other issues. As an opera, Manon defines the genre.

Photos courtesy of the San Francisco Opera. Brian Jagde by Liesl Kundert, Nicola Luisotti by John Martin, Antony Clark Evans by Simon Pauley, Philip Skinner unattributed, all scenes from the opera by Corey Weaver.

 

 

MIKA SHIGEMATSU: A Lively Tribute

The Lively Foundation salutes our friend, opera singer Mika Shigematsu. She passed away in October, 2019, so soon after receiving a cancer diagnosis, in September. A mezzo-soprano cheered in performances around the world, The Lively Foundation featured an interview with her in the first issue of The Hedgehog, the international arts review, November, 1996. Ms Shigematsu came to San Francisco early in her career and flourished in the Merola program and as an Adler Fellow of the San Francisco Opera. Here is the cover of the issue with the title article: NEW FACES OF OPERA, the introduction, and the interview. It brings tears to our eyes.

NEW FACES OF OPERA  That beautiful voice you hear singing in Italian may well have come from Osaka, Shanghai, or Atlanta. New voices are revising the operatic images of old: an enormous woman in blonde pigtails and brass breastplates or a handsome, but too well-fed tenor. Opera has grown more popular around the world and through the US. Accessibility through good recordings and TV has created an interest in the extravagant art form and led singers from diverse origins into major American opera companies. Leslie Friedman introduces you to three young singers to watch.*

MIKA SHIGEMATSU: Mika Shigematsu remembers the exact moment she decided to become an opera singer. Watching TV at home in Osaka, she turned the channel to NHK, the national station. The Japanese government broadcast Italian opera from La Scala once every four years, and she had switched it on at just the right time. There were no musicians in her family, no one knew opera, but she decided she must do it.

She played koto and sang in a choir, but she knew she had to learn more. Her school music teacher told her she would need to attend Osaka College of Music. Suddenly, she “needed voice lessons, piano, many tests to enter.” Her family “just hated it” and told her to forget it, but she was persistent. There was only one chance to pass for music college, and she made it.

Looking back, Shigematsu sees the evolution of her own voice. Her success came from working very hard, but also from a breakthrough in understanding how to use her body and voice together to build a new technique. She was not a star in college and took additional lessons to improve. She joined Kansai Nikikai Opera after graduation, but felt that her roles — major ones like Venus in Tannhauser –were not right for her.

She almost gave up. She told her mother she would enter a major competition and either win or quit. She recalls working terribly hard and being embarrassed because she did so poorly. In the process of preparing for the contest, she felt something entirely new develop between her “brain and body.” Rather than quit, she continued and won first prize the next year. She was the first mezzo-soprano to win in 24 years.

She came to the United States in 1989 on a Japanese government scholarship. She studied in New York, where she found part of her training came from hearing many fine artists in concert almost every day. She says her “ear was learning.” Although she was supposed to return after one year, she told her teacher and opera company she would become even better if she stayed longer.

An audition for the San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program was “the key,” says Mika, that opened many stage doors for her–not only to performance opportunities, but “letting me see what I need in the real world.” She was in the Merola training/performing program twice and became an Adler Fellow in 1994, performing the role of Emilia in Rossini’s Otello.

Mika feels that Japanese students may make a mistake by going to Europe for study instead of to the United States. This is where she found real opportunities “to grow, to have the water and sun I need to sing.”

Mika Shigematsu

This sprightly young woman with extraordinary vocal power walked through the huge hall of San Francisco’s Opera House before its closing. She claimed that when she first arrived she felt overwhelmed by the place. To Mika Shigematsu’s audience, it seems just the right size for her. (Future performances include debuts in Seattle as Cherubino in LE NOZZE DI FIGARO and in Genoa as Charlotte in WERTHER. She appears as Rosina in IL BARBIERE DI SEVIGLIA in Tokyo and San Francisco.)

*Pictured on the cover are Scenes from San Francisco Opera productions, clockwise from lower left: Zheng Cao as the Kitchen Boy in Rusalka, with tenor Michel Senechal as the Gamekeeper (1995); St Petersburg Maryinsky Theater Acrobatic Troupe in Fiery Angel (1994); Mika Shigematsu as Rosina in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia with tenor Roberto Sacca as Count Almaviva (1996); Pam Dillard as Mercedes in Carmen (1996). Interviews with Pamela Dillard and the late Zheng Cao also in The Hedgehog, Vol. 1, No. 1.

Photos courtesy of San Francisco Opera: cover page photos, upper & lower left, Marty Sohl; upper & lower right, Larry Merkle; Mika Shigematsu, Lisa Kohler.

 

The Dancer’s Garden: Great Review (first published review, too)

The Dancer’s Garden by Leslie Friedman (The Lively Foundation, 2019)

This is a wonderful, quirky, perky series of ruminations on gardens, flowers, plants, trees, cats, people, indeed life. It has magnificent photographs mostly taken by the author herself but also some by her husband, the distinguished photographer and printer, Jonathan Clark, the proprietor of that fine private press, appropriately named The Artichoke Press. Leslie herself, a member of the Institute, is well-known primarily as a dancer and choreographer but is also a fine historian. Some years ago, to an extent sidelined by hip problems, she decided to turn more attention to her garden in Mountain View. In this delightful book she tells us about the various growing things, mostly flowers, that she deals with, their characteristics, difficulties and rewards. She and Jonathan expand their horizons, coping with so many growing things, not only flowers but pine, apple, and orange trees. They rescue abandoned cacti from the neighborhood. The author has an amazingly direct way of dealing with what she is putting into the earth, the satisfactions and beauty (so wonderfully captured in the photographs) when they flourish; the sadness when they die. She makes being a gardener such an immediate, connected, and personal matter.

In the text, Leslie recounts her adventures with a wide range of growing things, most vividly oxalis, chrysanthemums, poppies, narcissus, camellias, primroses, magnolia, all beautifully illustrated. She is very insightful on how to deal with all these and other growing objects, and how they can be menaced by birds, notably crows, as well as by cats, humans, too much water and too little water. There is such a splendid sense of engagement with the ambitious enterprise of having a garden. As she writes towards the end of the text about fruit (but it may be about any of the myriad aspects of nature that she has nurtured): “When I had acquired my first new hip, my first foray into the garden was to see the apple blossoms. The apples would arrive later than the peaches. The oranges come when we run out of apples. We change partners, but it is the same dance.” Leslie Friedman has choreographed a garden and other growing things much as she has both performed and created dance. As she concludes her book: “It is a wonder.” It is an exhilarating read.   Peter Stansky, Frances & Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus, Stanford University. Professor Stansky is the author of many books, most recent is Leonard Woolf: Bloomsbury Socialist ( Oxford University Press, 2019) with co-author, Fred Leventhal This review appeared in the journal of the Institute of Historical Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, Fall, 2019

For information about purchasing the book, please contact The Lively Foundation, livelyfoundation@sbcglobal.net