Die Tote Stadt

Die Tote Stadt
Erich Korngold
San Francisco Opera
Fri Sep 26 2008 8 pm
Conductor: Donald Runnicles

Paul: Torsten Kerl
Marie/Marietta: Emily Magee
Fritz, Frank: Lucas Meachem
Brigitta: Katharine Tier
Juliette: Ji Young Yang
Lucienne: Daniela Mack
Victorin: Alek Shrader
Count Albert: Andrew Bidlack
Gaston: Bryan Ketron
Paul's Double: Ben Bongers

Original Director: Willy Decker
Revival Director: Meisje Hummel
Production Designer: Wolfgang Gussmann
Lighting Designer: Wolfgang Göbbel

Ever since a friend turned me on to this bizarre & beautiful opera a few years ago, I've been looking forward to seeing an actual production. Friday night's performance did not disappoint. It was excellent, & it makes me wonder more than ever why this work is not part of the standard repertoire.

The 1st thing to notice is the huge orchestra: I spotted 5 horns, 4 trumpets, 2 harps, 4 percussionists & even a piano. The next thing to notice is the great orchestral playing. It's an extremely colorful score, & Runnicles paid attention to orchestral details as well as the larger musical structures. There were excellent brass & woodwind solos. The flute soloist was a stand-out.

Emily Magee gave a tremendous singing & acting performance. She's a strong woman with a Wagnerian voice. She completely dominated her scenes with Paul, her voice riding over all the activity in the orchestra. I thought that she was going to kill Paul in the last act, instead of the other way around.

Torsten Kerl demonstrated terrific stamina. He is on stage the whole time, often singing extreme vocal lines, but he sounded equally strong from beginning to end. He handled soft falsetto passages very ably as well. He projected a character who is strangely passive & downright weird.

Lucas Meachen did a wonderful job with his wistful Act II aria. He makes a big, lovely sound. He's an athletic-looking guy, & the production gives him a lot of physical stunts to perform in Act II, such as riding on the roof of a moving house.

The staging really runs away with the dream aspect of the story. The action begins in a bare room, completely enclosed on all sides. Once Paul's hallucinations begin, the floor tilts, the walls fade away, the ceiling dangles at a dangerous angle. A pageant of nightmares follows. Sometimes there are 2 Pauls. Brigitta is carried to the convent on a crucifix, Fritz makes a maniacal cameo in Act III as the Pope, presenting Paul with Marie's hair as a holy relic. The tightly choreographed troupe of actors in Act II was effectively sinister.

I felt that the set & the staging made the singers seem far away. Much of the action happens upstage, & this makes for poor sight lines & poor balance between the singers & the orchestra. I was a little mad when Fritz began his famous Act II aria so far upstage.

More egregiously, Acts I & II have been combined, to shorten the over-all evening to about 2 and a half hours. This means we lose important & climactic orchestral music from the end of Act I & the prelude of Act II. I can't agree with this sacrifice of the artistic integrity of the work just so we can have a shorter evening.

Still, there were many times when I was transported to another world, such as toward the end of Marietta's visit in Act I, when Paul nearly kisses her while the orchestra makes an eerie, pitchless rumbling. Moments like this are what I come to the opera for.

Unfortunately, audiences must be staying away from this one anyway. I had a whole row to myself at the extreme side of the grand tier. There were plenty of empty seats in the dress circle as well.

P.S. I had the special treat of meeting Opera Tattler during intermission. I can attest that she has fine operatic tastes & parties at the Opera House in style.

Expo for Independent Arts

I went to Dolores Park on Saturday to check out the Expo for Independent Arts. They couldn't have asked for better weather for this outdoor event. It was a beautiful sunny day, so there were a lot of people, both for the expo & for the park. Exhibit tables were in one long continuous line that snaked through the lower area of the park near the basketball courts. There was a stage with live music. I saw part of a juggling act & heard a brass quintet.

This is the kind of thing I want to file under "too many art schools," though I did find some musical events I'd like to check out. I picked up a free sampler CD from the member-supported San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. The CD sounds pretty good, & the concerts are free. The San Francisco Civic Symphony, a community orchestra, needs string players, but their friendly representative couldn't convince me to think about picking up a violin again.

I had fun looking at sculpter William Slavis's miniature bronze men caught in a variety of crude, lewd or pleasant acts. He took the time to explain to me the process of casting them. He needs to get a Web site up for this funny work.

At another table, I got talked up about some less concrete concepts, such as the Official Business Lunch, which asks people to take a full lunch hour & use it for a personal project. SFZero seems to be about using the City as a setting for games that test creativity. It was nice to spend some time outside & pick up a few new ideas.

Alex Ross Receives MacArthur Grant

Alex Ross, the author & super-smart classical music critic of the New Yorker, is receiving a MacArthur grant. I've become a big fan of his, so congratulations, Alex! His enthusiasm & breadth of knowledge have certainly encouraged me to listen to more music. It would be great to see him get involved in some sort of educational project.

Die Tote Stadt Insight Panel

Yesterday I made it back into the City from my outrageously inconvenient work location in Burlingame in time to attend the SF Opera's panel discussion on Die Tote Stadt, which opens tonight. On stage at Herbst Theater were

• San Francisco Opera's Music Administrator Kip Cranna
  
• Revival Director Meisje Hummel
  
• Baritone Lucas Meachem who sings Frank & Fritz
  
• Conductor Donald Runnicles

The one hour discussion was mostly unqualified admiration for Korngold's music & all aspects of this production. If the panel's job was to raise expectations, they succeeded. Mr. Meachem praised the production for engaging both the emotions & the intellect. Maestro Runnicles continually broadened the dicussion of the work, starting with the sheer technical difficulty of the score, due in part to Korngold's over-scoring of the orchestra. To illustrate the problem, he mimed a fish opening & closing its mouth with no sound coming out. So something to listen for is whether we can even hear the singers over the busy orchestration!

We learned from Runnicles that the opera's librettist, Paul Schott, was actually Erich Korngold's father, Julius, who was a feared, ultra-conservative music critic. He compared the younger Korngold's relationship with his father to that of Mozart's with his father, whom Runnicles further identified with the Commendatore. He then went on to claim boldy that the opera can be read as a commentary on post-World War I Austria, unable to come to terms with its fallen glory.

Korngold was acknowleged as a genius by 2 of the greatest musicians of that pre-war era, Mahler & Richard Strauss, & his musical style is rooted in that era, making him appear more backward-looking than 20th century modern. Ms. Hummel noted that Korngold's career in Europe was interrupted when he "had to leave" in the 1930's. He was then completely out of fashion in Austria until the 1990's. I only just learned about this opera a couple of years ago, turned on to it by a German acquaintance. When I bought a CD & started listening, I couldn't understand how I had never heard of it before. It would have been interesting to ask the panel why this opera isn't more well-known.

Runnicles ended the panel with a wonderful compliment to the orchestra. He has already conducted this production in the venerable locales of Vienna & Salzburg, but he said that in neither case did he get the performance he is getting from the orchestra here. He described himself as impressed & humbled by the commitment of the players to the difficulties & the details of the music. I'm looking forward to being at Friday night's performance.

Devine’s Jug Band

By chance I found myself at a comfy neighborhood cafe on Divisadero & Oak called On the Corner & ended up hearing part of a set by a very amusing ensemble called Devine’s Jug Band. It was an unexpected encounter. There was something very urbane about hearing this music in that setting.

Early Filmmaking in San Francisco

The Celluloid Era: Early Filmmaking in San Francisco
Tuesday, September 9, 7:30 P.M.
Kanbar Hall
Jewish Community Center of San Francisco

This lecture was sponsored by the San Francisco Historical Society. Stephen Salmons of the Silent Film Festival started by talking about film's early history & its historical roots in the Bay Area, including the famous Muybridge photos of Hearst's galopping horse. Salmons even staked the claim that San Francisco, not Berlin or Paris, held the 1st public exhibition of movies. Muybridge projected short clips of animals in motion using his zoopraxiscope in the 1880's. Admission was a whopping 50 cents.

Next David Kiehn from the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum gave a talk about the Essanay Studios set up in Fremont to take advantage of the Niles Canyon setting for making westerns. They built a glass-enclosed studio which was state of the art for the time. The studio churned out hundreds of short movies in the few years it was in operation in Niles. The people of Fremont must be quite proud of their movie-making heritage, as they have weekly programs devoted to silent films.

Salmons came back to the podium & showed more clips of silent movies shot on recognizable locations in San Francisco. We saw Fatty Arbuckle & Mabel Normand viewing the Pan-Pacific Exhibition, Charlie Chaplin driving along the Great Highway, Valentino about to be Shanghaied at Pier 43, & Lon Chaney on the steps of the Old Mint. Salmons included a great throw-away gag from Keaton's The Navigator, shot at the top of Divisadero St. in Pacific Heights, right up the hill from where I live.

However, it looks like the great San Francisco movie of the silent era is mostly lost forever. Greed was Erich von Stroheim's meticulous adaptation of Frank Norris's McTeague. Of the original 9 hours, only 2 hours & 20 minutes survive. Salmons showed a tantalizing clip that was shot in a 2nd story building in Hayes Valley that still exists.

The presenters showed slides & about a dozen QuickTime movie clips from off a Mac laptop. Bruce Loeb accompanied the clips live from an electronic keyboard. As attendees of the Silent Film Festival already know, Salmons is an excellent speaker, with a distinctive voice & a desire to educate & amuse. His co-presenter was clearly extremely knowledgeable but unfortunately not such a successful speaker. This event really had more than enough content for 2 lectures. It started at 7:30pm & didn't end until almost 10pm, without a break & without any audience Q & A.

Moustafa Bayoumi at Stacey's

A nice perk of working in the Financial District is being able to drop in on Stacey's Bookstore events. This afternoon I heard part of Moustafa Bayoumi's presentation about his timely book How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America. In the book he explores how the lives of individual young Arab Americans have been affected by 9-11. About a dozen people showed up for the reading, & judging by the comments & questions, they were an unusually well-informed & thoughtful bunch. The reading prompted really interesting discussions of the importance of this book, of prejudice, of profiling, & of travel in the age of terrorism. A woman drew an apt parallel between the country's attitude towards Japanese during World War II & our attitude towards Arabs now. Bayoumi had good responses even for people who challenged him (Doesn't the title itself reinforce negative prejudices? Aren't you simply preaching to the choir? Isn't prejudice itself simply a constant in American society as we absorb new waves of immigrants?). Bayoumi opined that the single biggest issue for the people he profiles is their unequal treatment by the law. A serious topic, but nice to get a dose of intelligent discourse in the middle of the business week.

Wordless Music at Herbst Theatre

Magik*Magik Orchestra
Conductor: Benjamin Shwartz

John Adams: Shaker Loops
Fred Frith: Save As (Joan Jeanrenaud, Cello)
Arvo Pärt: Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten
Mason Bates: Icarian Rhapsody
Jonny Greenwood: Popcorn Superhet Receiver

My curiosity piqued by Opera Tattler's post, I attended the Worldess Music concert at Herbst Theater last night. It was a program of audience-friendly contemporary pieces. If these concerts are aimed at a younger audience, then they succeeded admirably. The house looked full, & I saw lots of untucked shirts & iPhones, & I overheard many conversations involving what people are doing next semester.

The evening started 10 minutes after the hour when the producer, introducing himself simply as Ronen, stepped on stage to say a few words. Besides the usual thank-yous, he made some remarks about there being no distinctions between genres in these days of the shuffle feature on iPod, & wanting to introduce indie rock audiences to classical music & vice-versa. Or something like that. His point wasn't clear to me. He also indicated that many of the musicians are freelancers.

The program started with Shaker Loops, performed by a string septet, led by Benjamin Shwartz. Everyone made it through this non-stop flurry of notes without undue effort. Frith's Save As for cello & percussion was the most entertaining piece on the program. It's a humorous dialog, requiring very tight interplay between the performers. There's a fair amount of extended cello technique & other antics for the duo to perform. They each send a tin can skittering off the stage. The percussionist got extra mileage out of his can when it did an additional fall off the stage after hitting the ground. At another point he takes a page of his score & rips it in half. This is answered later by the cellist, who slowly crumples one of her pages & tosses it away. Other sounds include hammering, a long chain dropping into a metal washtub, a ping-pong ball bouncing along the floor, & a deafening crescendo on bell-shaped sheet of metal. Toward the end there was a nice use of recorded playback, allowing the cellist to accompany herself. After all the mayhem, the piece ends on a calm series of descending notes, with the percussionist giving us a final reminder of the witty opening.

After intermission we had a full string orchestra on stage. Shwartz led them standing on the floor without a podium & without a baton. Everyone looked so young, & I ended up feeling like I was at a student concert. Visually Schwarz fits right in with the young performers, especially in his slim white jeans & black shirt, but I feel like he does not conduct far enough ahead of the orchestra. The Pärt piece is a lugubrious affair in which clusters of sound slowly descend in pitch. Popcorn Superhet Receiver has some fun parts where the orchestra slides together, sounding like that THX trailer with the tuning-up chord. There's also a jazzy section near the end where the orchestra strums, plucks & slaps their instruments instead of bowing.

During the intermission I spotted MTT in the lobby, which I figure gives a stamp of approval to the event. A lot of people were clearly anxious to spot Jonny Greenwood seated in one of the boxes above me. The audience was very attentive & applauded enthusiastically for each piece, though without much stamina. No one got more than one call-back to the stage. There was an immediate standing ovation at the end that stopped as quickly as it started.

I like that the focus seems to be on the programming instead of personalities, though the music really wasn't anything more challenging than you'd find on one of the SF Symphony's more adventurous programs. The recent Alexander Quartet concert featured a George Crumb piece older than anything on this program & far less comfortable.

P.S. I made a special effort to write this up as soon as possible, but I see that Opera Tattler & Civic Center have already weighed in more articulately than me. Curses! I'm sorry that I did not get a chance to encounter Opera Tattler. She was clearly hard to miss in that lovely hat. But I feel we are fated to meet one day.

The Shifting Cornerstone

Joanna Haigood and Zaccho Dance Theatre
The Shifting Cornerstone

If you are near the corner of Mission & 3rd Street in the next few days between 12pm & 5pm, don't walk by too fast. Otherwise, you'll miss this smart & playful site-specific dance piece. I just hung out there for about 10 minutes on my lunch hour today, & it was very cool. Various characters occupy the sidewalk from the museum entrance to the corner. At 1st glance they could be ordinary people you would expect to see on the street: a gardener, a worried-looking woman in a long skirt, a street person in 2nd-hand clothes, smoking a cigarette stub. While there, I saw the gardener perch atop the wall at the corner, acrobatically balancing a planter. The woman in the skirt ran urgently along the building, clutching a set of large keys. I also spotted her standing watch above the museum entrance. Our street person wheeled around a huge empty picture frame, which had a tag reading "free" dangling from it. He caught me taking pictures of the event & cajoled me into taking pictures of him & then of other passers-by!

There's atmospheric music playing from hidden speakers. The poster frames in front of the museum display pictures of the performers themselves, so the dancers can interact with their own publicity images. There's also the fun of witnessing pedestrians taken unawares by the goings-on. I saw a homeless man settle himself down on a ledge, & I couldn't be sure that he wasn't part of the show. I think it's a pretty smart piece. One of the monitors encouraged me to come back, since the performance is on-going & different characters come & go. Another monitor admonished me to keep away from the curb, as earlier someone was almost hit by a bus. Such are the unexpected perils of sidewalk shows.

P.S. (08.21.2008)
I was by the corner again today with a friend who is studying film music composition, & he informs me that the music is from the soundtrack of To Kill a Mockingbird.

A Weekend in New York

I spent a rushed weekend in Manhattan, sampling some of the overwhelming amount of culture they are so lucky to have. Friday night I was at the South Street Pier to see Olafur Eliasson's New York Waterfalls. South Street Pier is a tourist trap on par with our Fisherman's Wharf, but I was there, & it was getting late, & the boat tour was sold out, so I had dinner & viewed the waterfalls from the pier. The Brooklyn Bridge one looked best, I thought, especially lit up. The water looks like it's cascading from the bridge itself. The Governor's Island waterfall was turned off. It was a beautiful night, & looking off in the distance, I saw fireworks behind the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge & a steady stream of dots of light coming from airplanes leaving JFK.

Saturday morning I made a brief visit to the Center for Book Arts to see an exhibit of DIY books. This looks like a great place to take classes. I then headed to the Whitney Museum to check out the Buckminster Fuller exhibit. I had no idea Fuller was such a wacko & a genius. They had a prototype for the Dymaxion car that looks more modern then any car today, & it's incredible to think that it was designed in 1933. Fuller was thinking outside the box in a big way.

Also at the Whitney is a room full of Paul McCarthy's punishing mechanical & video installations, where I experienced getting shut inside his Bang Bang Room.

From there I went to the elegant Fin de Siècle Neue Galerie. This museum may be modest in size, but it is full of distinctive items. I felt indulgent just to be standing before the decadent beauty of Klimt's famous Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, with its pair of accompanying sculptures. I discovered Max Beckmann's foreboding Self-Portrait with Horn & Schiele's emaciated Portrait of the Painter Karl Zakovsek. This place exemplifies to me New York's cultural resources. It may not be big, but what it has is first-rate.

That evening I attended a dance performance called Requiem, by Lemi Ponifasio and MAU Dance Company. I picked this performance just because it was part of the Lincoln Center Festival & happened to be playing on this particular weekend. I've had good luck with the Lincoln Center Festival in the past, but I thought this show was terrible. Everything takes place on a darkened stage. In the manner of performance art, we get something happening slowly or over & over again until we're tired of it, then another thing, until we're tired of that one, & so on for 90 minutes. It opens with a dancer's naked back twitching & ends with a little boy stacking up mats. A man walks while leaning back at an extreme angle, 3 men with white shirts shuffle around & move their arms in unison, a wild-eyed bird-like woman crosses the stage & shrieks, an old man strikes a suspended fuel cannister repeatedly, a row of men wash their hands, a boy becomes spotted with red drops of blood. Even with the help of the program notes, I couldn't figure out what it was about. The auditorium was perhaps half full, & the audience was very quiet & seemingly attentive, which really surprised me, since the show made me restless & annoyed. I took a chance on this one, & you win some, you lose some.

On Sunday I went out to the Noguchi Museum in Queens. It's famous for its sculpture garden, but of course I got there to find out that this is currently closed for major renovations. However, the pieces on display in the galleries are more than satisfactory, all very tasteful & refined. I also stayed to hear a recital of new music by ACME. This was quite good. The musicians are all very young & very proficient. I liked the sound & the bite of violist Nadia Sirota's playing. This recital also gave me my 1st hearing of the music of Nico Muhly, who I seem to keep reading about in The New Yorker magazine. His piece was in the minimalist style, though with more challenging harmonies. I was even able to discern some of the overall structure. I'm pretty sure I saw him hanging around the back the gallery after the recital. He fit right in with the musicians. They all look like college students.

That night I took the A train way uptown & took in Gorilla Rep's Hamlet on the lawn at the Cloisters. I was greeted by an enthusiastic member of the company who turned out to be Hamlet himself. He explained the concept, which is that the action unfolds continuously around the lawn, so we are encouraged, in fact required, to move around as well in order to keep up with the play. They do the whole text without a break, with the expectation that audience members come & go. The whole thing takes nearly 3 hours, even at the break-neck speed of this production. It felt refreshingly free of directorial concept. Hamlet was as much stand-up comedian as prince. The excellent Player King made me pay attention to his speeches more closely than I ever had before. Their good-looking & athletic Laertes had me thinking that perhaps he was nobler than Hamlet.

It had rained earlier that day, so the grass was really wet, & I was ill-prepared for the outdoor conditions, but I happily made it through the entire show. The Gorilla Rep actors & the audience together made up a pretty scrappy bunch. There were only 16 of us to watch the show & perhaps an equal number of performers & crew. It made me feel well-disposed toward the actors. I wanted things to go well for them. At the end of the evening I found myself on the subway platform next to Claudius, his costume in a garment bag slung over his shoulder. I told him I enjoyed the show, & he in turn expressed his relief that we didn't get rained on. Polonius & the Player King joined him moments later on the same train.

On Monday morning a big storm passed over New York. While I was packing I saw lightning & hail, but surprisingly my plane left the ground only 70 minutes behind schedule.

All that in 60 hours! No wonder I was sick from exhaustion by the time I got home.

Merola Opera's Don Giovanni

On yesterday's windy afternoon I was at Fort Mason for the 2nd performance of Don Giovanni by the Merola Opera. There's no pit in Cowell Theatre, so the orchestra is on the floor, quite exposed to the audience. I was seated in a row about mid-way to the back of the auditorium, & I probably wouldn't have wanted to be any closer. This is a good venue for Mozart, although one sometimes heard sea gulls squawking during the performance. It's nice to step onto the pier during intermission.

The entire cast was solid, all of them good actor-singers. Amanda Majeski as Donna Anna was a stand-out from the moment she opened her mouth in the 1st scene. She is a commanding presence both vocally & dramatically & already has a weighty sound. Her Act I aria "Or sai chi l'onore" was a highlight of the show. David Lomelí demonstrated great breath control, dispatching each of the long phrases of Don Ottavio's Act II aria in a single breath. Carlos Monzón had a warm stage presence as Leporello, & Joélle Harvey was a very cute Zerlina.

The orchestra was a bit less consistent. A couple of the violinists had persistent intonation problems. The 1st stand violinist doubled on the mandolin, with some difficulty. We had to forgo the-on stage bands in the Act I & II finales. We did have the necessary extravagance of trombones, though. The poor fellows crept to their seats half-way through Act II & sat with their heads down, looking asleep, as they waited for their assignments. The woodwinds sounded good, & I liked the flute.

The staging was pretty busy. I guess with young singers there is no problem having them run around, collide, wrestle, & roll around on top of each other. 4 supernumeraries were kept busy as the Don's abused servants. One of them was Civic Center blogger.

There were a lot of people waiting for returns, so this must have been a sold-out show. Merola only put on 2 performances, but I'll bet they could have sold a 3rd show easily.

WALL-E

Saw the latest Pixar film on Saturday evening at the Westfield Mall. When we got there, the place was packed, but it turned out that the biggest crowd was there to see Mamma Mia. Anyway, I liked the 1st 3rd of WALL-E that takes place on a decimated Earth, but once the story left Earth & switched to the giant spaceship, I found it uninteresting. I also could not buy into the concept of robot love. But the early part of the movie is good stuff. It looks terrific & convincingly real, from the decaying cityscapes to the objects collected by Wall-e to the way the light filters through the thick air. It even questions what a life of purpose & self-sufficiency might still lack.

Once we're on the spaceship, things start to look conventionally cartoony & the plot becomes a predictable series of rescue scenes. I found it a little disjointed to see real human actors in the videos that Wall-e & the captain watch vs. the cartoon versions of humans on the spaceship. I'm also wondering if fat people might be offended by the movie's vision of generations of technology-enabled couch potatoes.

SF Zine Fest

For a good dose of alternative culture, on Saturday I checked out the SF Zine Fest at the Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. It felt larger & busier than the event last year in the Mission. I couldn't resist buying all 3 available issues of the lovely, playful & treat-filled zine All This is Mine. I met Michael Capozzola who draws the off-color Cheap City in the Chronicle. He worked so hard selling me that I would have felt mean if I hadn't bought his twisted & lewd Chubby Browne comic. I picked up the latest issue of Jason Martin's sensitive & affectionate Laterborn. He even took the time to sign it for me with a little cartoon.

Once I started handling Kelly Lee Barrett's palm-sized book of photographs of Clarion Alley, I had a hard time putting it down. It was out of my price range, but I so wanted to have it! It was also impossible not to stop for Jonathan Fetter-Vorm's gorgeous illustrations for Beowulf & Lucretius. I chatted with Mr. Fetter-Vorm briefly, & I think he is one smart guy. I was hoping to see Andy Hartzell there & harass him for Part 3 of Monday, but lucky for him I didn't find him.

Saturday in the City

I started out at the Renegade Craft Fair at Fort Mason. It took up most of one of those Fort Mason pavilions, & there was a sizable, mostly female, crowd. Lots of friendly people hawking various arts & crafts. Fun to browse. I think this is what happens when you have too many people graduating from art schools.

From the Long Now Foundation, I bought a ticket to the Mechanicrawl, which turned out to be a triumph of packaging over content. All the venues that the ticket supposedly allows you to access are generally open to the public & either free or cost about the same as the ticket. I toured the USS Pampanito, a restored submarine, & the Liberty Ship SS Jeremiah O'Brien. The engines were running on the Jeremiah O'Brien, so you could experience the heat & the motion of the gigantic crank shaft. It has a certain romance. They even pipe 1940's music on deck.

For me the most overwhelming part of the Mechanicrawl was the walk through Fisherman's Wharf. I'm an SF native, but I rarely find myself in Fisherman's Wharf. I could not believe how crowded it was & what an embarrassing tourist trap it is. I saw the Bushman, whom I'd never even heard of before, & he did not come across as a happy guy. We also saw an ambulance take away the victim of a cycling accident & passed by 2 teenage girl missionaries, whose hook was a sign reading "Free Encouragement".

In the evening I was in another crowd, this time at the Castro Theatre for the Silent Film Festival screening of The Man Who Laughs. I'd say this movie is an average product of the tail-end of the silent era, which is to say that it is well-constructed, has high production values, & has a full complement of pathos, drama, romance, humor & spectacle. It ends with a breathless, harrowing race against many obstacles to reunite the good guys. Conrad Veidt stars as a grotesque worthy of Lon Chaney. He looks like The Joker in Batman, except that the Joker was inspired by this movie.

Before the screening we got the usual festival line-up of obligatory speeches. Sadly, the representative from the Library of Congress referred to Conrad Veidt as "The Man of a Thousand Faces", which got an outraged response from the audience. Organist Clark Wilson was the true hero of the evening, though. He played non-stop for 2 hours, never flagging, & whipped up a symphonic sound that not only matched every dramatic climax of the film, but also made the dramatic structure clearer.

The good life

"If your life at night is good, you think you have everything".

So says the wall in the bathroom at Pasta Pomodoro.

Line for iPhone 3G on Chestnut Street

At 9am this morning, the Chestnut Street Apple store had a line all the way down the block & around the corner. I saw this while riding the bus to work, & a fellow passenger claimed that someone had actually been in line since last night!

Update: At 2pm this afternoon, I walked by the Union Square Apple store, & their line is up the block & around the corner too. People were cheering when they were let in.

Update: At 8:30pm, there was a line of about 50 people outside the Chestnut Street Apple store.

70mm at the Castro

The Castro Theatre is in the midst of mini-festival of 70mm films. On Friday night I saw Little Shop of Horrors, the musical version. I remember seeing it when it first came out & being totally impressed by it, even though musicals are not generally my thing. The movie is now over 20 years old, & I think it completely holds up. I had a great time seeing it again. The tunes are still catchy, the performances brilliant, & even the puppet plant doesn't look hokey yet. Despite the happy ending mandated by the box office, it's still a cruel critique of the post-war consumer society. It was a pleasure to encounter something I hadn't seen in a long time & to discover that it's still good.

There was definitely a crowd at the 9:00pm show, so I'm wondering if this movie has become a cult classic. The lively Castro Theatre audience applauded the musical numbers & the star cameos. Some patrons thought it was a sing-along as well. Unfortunately there was a young lady in the row behind me who was a just a bit too lively. I got to listen to her running commentary throughout the entire show. Well, at least I wasn't going home with her afterwards.

I was back the next afternoon to see Tron. I'm a techie guy, but for some reason I had never seen this movie before. There was an even bigger turn-out for this showing. Unfortunately Tron is a pretty bad movie. I suppose it's a clever conceit to have the action take place inside a computer, & there are definitely foreshadows of The Matrix, but there are way too many lame moments.

I couldn't help noticing that in Tron world, bad guys are red & good guys are blue. When the world is freed from the evil Master Control Program, blue beams of light replace red ones. One can only hope.

The movie shows how quickly the aesthetic of CGI evolved. The look of Tron is based on early video arcade games, & the computer-generated imagery is meant to depict an artificial world. Nowadays, the computer-generated worlds look more real than the real world.

At both shows, the sound system was cranked way up. I sat through Tron with my in-ear headphones on just to cushion my ears.

Handel's Ariodante

San Francisco Opera
Tue Jul 1 2008 7:30 pm

Ariodante: Susan Graham
Ginevra: Ruth Ann Swenson
Polinesso: Sonia Prina
Dalinda: Veronica Cangemi
Lurcanio: Richard Croft
Odoardo: Andrew Bidlack
The King of Scotland: Eric Owens
Polinesso's Squire: Anders Froehlich

Conductor: Patrick Summers
Director: John Copley

If opera is supposed to be about singing, then this was a great performance all around. Ruth Ann Swenson got us off to a strong start with her bold sound & high-hitting cadenza. The dramatic situations are pat at best, but after each shuffle of the personnel on stage, I was looking forward to hearing the next spectacular bout of singing. Sonia Prina could cram so many notes into a phrase that it was both gasp-inducing & ludicrous. Richard Croft's sweet & lyric singing was an unexpected pleasure. The centerpiece of the evening was Susan Graham's extended Act II aria of despair. On stage alone, she completely commanded us with her heart-breaking acting & a sound that was rooted deep in her core. She even sang from a twisted position on the floor!

Patrick Summers led a reduced orchestra that included a baroque lute & 2 harpsichords but was otherwise modern. It was a good compromise between historical accuracy & modern performance practice. He accompanied the recitatives himself on one of the harpsichords. He took generally fast tempos. In numbers that seemed headed towards a forte at the conclusion, he sometimes suddenly pulled back & landed lightly on the last chord. Fleet instead of heavy.

The period costumes were colorful, opulent & fun to look at. The set was a shiny black floor that unfortunately squeaked & 4 walls that reconfigured themselves between scenes. The staging was of the kind that makes opera so easy to make fun of. There are 2 prancing ballet numbers for no apparent reason. During the instrumental passages of the arias, characters stalk around the stage, as if looking for an exit. Then as soon as a character finishes singing, he or she immediately walks out on us, leaving us to applaud an empty stage or a bunch of people who haven't done anything for the past several minutes but stand around. One character did nothing but follow the bad guy Polinesso around. Another character did nothing but follow the King around, but at least he got a few lines of recitative.

There was at least one nice directorial moment, though, when Polinesso stroked the King's throne as he walked by it, revealing his political aspirations. It got an appropriate laugh of recognition. But the main attraction of this production is the singing. There's only one performance left, & I'm considering standing room this Sunday for another chance to take in those great voices.

Lucia di Lammermoor

San Francisco Opera
Tue Jun 17 2008 8 pm

Lucia: Natalie Dessay
Edgardo: Giuseppe Filianoti
Enrico: Gabriele Viviani
Raimondo: Oren Gradus
Alisa: Cybele-Teresa Gouverneur
Normanno: Matthew O’Neill
Arturo: Andrew Bidlack

Conductor: Jean-Yves Ossonce
Director: Graham Vick
Production Designer: Paul Brown

Lucia is not a favorite opera of mine, but I was looking forward to seeing & hearing Natalie Dessay, who was such a sensation at the Met in this role. She's a small woman, very fit & 100% comfortable on stage. She made her entrance running across the stage, & in this scene she was an innocent, playful & sensual Lucia. She's a great physical actor. In the scene where she is confronted by her brother Enrico, she starts off defiant & proud, then is gradually broken down, & she communicated all of this through her body as much as her singing.

Dessay doesn't have a huge voice, but it sounds very easy & natural. She never made it sound like she had to strain to hit those high notes & or do those vocal acrobatics in the mad scene. In fact, she gave the impression that she could go on like that indefinitely. She was very effective in the cadenza, when she let her voice gently float fragments of melodies that would suddenly trail off. In that moment I truly felt like I had no idea what she was going to do next. It was a convincing sensation of being unmoored from reality.

In the mad scene we got the novelty of a glass harmonica in the pit instead of the usual flute. That ethereal, disembodied sound moved the scene in the direction of the eerie. Dessay added her own disturbing element by interpolating a scream & later by laughing to herself as she ended her aria.

I also enjoyed the performance of the tenor Giuseppe Filianoti, a very different kind of singer from Dessay. His sound is a bit raw, & he often sounds like his voice is on the edge of breaking. I found this very exciting, especially in the Act II finale when he denounces Lucia. The anguish was palpable. I thought he was consistently vocally dramatic.

The opera orchestra sounded great, & there were a lot of details & clarity of texture. My biggest reservation about the performance was the lack of big climaxes in general. This is a pot-boiler of an opera, with one show-stopping aria or chorus after another, but I never felt like these big numbers really caught fire. Not enough build-up or something.

The staging just barely told the story & seemed disjointed to me. The costumes all looked very Scottish, what with all the tartans, so the national setting does come through. Most of the action takes place within a frame, on a stage floor dressed like a heath. It was not always clear whether scenes were supposed to be inside or outside. During the confrontation between Lucia & Enrico, a gap in the wall moved slowly from right to left. But why? It was just distracting. At the start of the mad scene, walls split apart to reveal Lucia standing in a bed of red flowers. It looks like an interesting start, but then the imagery never goes anywhere from there. I often expected the staging to go Euro-trash on us, but instead nothing much happens. Perhaps it's better this way.

Contemporary Jewish Museum

Yesterday I paid my 1st visit to the newly opened Contemporary Jewish Museum. I've been watching the construction for months, so I was curious to finally get a chance to check out the building, designed by celebrity architect Daniel Libeskind. There is a nice spacious open plaza in front, with running water & a few manicured grassy areas. The most striking feature of the building is of course the giant black cube sticking out at an angle from the side. A sign inside explains that the shape is based on a Hebrew letter, but it's not possible to see this unless you are looking down on the building from above. Perhaps it can be read from one of the office buildings or hotels nearby, but otherwise it just looks like a great big cube at a scary angle.

Building security didn't like the water bottle in my shoulder bag & made a point of walking me to the coat check a few yards away. The interior of the building feels very modern. There seem to be very few right angles. Sometimes even the walls have a slope. The ceilings are mostly exposed, so you can see ducts & pipes & such. There's a long gallery space on the 2nd floor that looks well-suited for contemporary art & installations. It's kind of dark up there at the moment for the current exhibition organized around the theme of Genesis. The exhibit includes a beautiful etching by Chagall & a fantastic drawing by Tiepolo.

There's also a fun exhibit of the work of illustrator William Steig. I recognize his drawing from the New Yorker magazine, but I had no idea that he wrote a children's book that was the basis for the Shrek movies. I think it's impressive that even his finished drawings maintain the freshness of his doodles & sketches. I liked that they used some early pages from the New Yorker to establish a context for his work. His Small Fry cartoons made me think of Peanuts, though the earliest of them easily predate Peanuts & L'il Folks by a decade. I wonder if this was a source for Peanuts. There's no mention of Steig in the index of the recent, controversial David Michaelis biography of Charles Schulz.

There were a lot of visitors yesterday, so I'd say that they are having a successful opening. Plus they have some worth-while exhibits going on. I came for the building & then stayed for the shows.