Il Re Pastore

Last night I heard Nicholas McGegan lead the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & an excellent quintet of singers at Herbst Theatre in Mozart's teenage operatic effort, Il Re Pastore. I'd never heard it before, & if this is supposed to be a lesser work, none of the performers seemed aware of this. I was pleasantly surprised to hear truly operatic voices. The cast was uniformly excellent, though mezzo Margaret Lattimore stood out for the size & heft of her voice.

McGegan is the kind of conductor who directs every musical detail. He even plays the harpsichord continuo for the recitatives. He made clear all the rapid shifts in mood or the surprising little flourishes in the music. & there is much of musical interest here. It starts with a splashy overture, which one can't help imagining is the young Mozart precociously announcing his talented presence. The act 2 overture features a jangly Turkish percussion instrument that the player pounds on the floor. Aminta has a wistful 2nd act aria accompanied by English horns & a solo violin.

The performance was semi staged. The orchestra was in front of the stage. On stage were just had 2 benches & 2 potted plants at the sides. The cast wore contemporary concert dress. They acted out what little action there was, but also carried scores, which they referred to in order to get through the lengthy recitatives.

& this gets to what is probably the reason why this piece is fairly obscure. The performance lasted 2 1/2 hours, but there is basically just one aria in each act for each character, plus an extra aria each for Aminta & Alessandro, plus short ensemble numbers to end each act. The rest is filled with long recitative. I'm guessing that the recitatives gave time for the social activities of the original audience, who likely weren't paying much attention to the stage anyway. There's not that much actual music, as far as operas go. The modern audience has to pass through these desolate expanses of recitative to reach the occasional arias, brilliant though they may be.

Aminta -- Lisa Saffer, soprano
Elisa -- Heidi Grant Murphy, soprano
Agenore -- Michael Slattery, tenor
Alessandro -- Iain Paton, tenor
Tamiri -- Margaret Lattimore, mezzo-soprano

Brokeback Mountain Opera?

Via The Rest Is Noise (Gay 12-tone cowboys) I learned that Charles Wourinen is talking about writing an operatic version of Brokeback Mountain. I can't really imagine how such a thing would work, since the characters are so un-articulate. However, if they were to do this now, I would definitely want to see Nathan Gunn in it. I also thought about Rod Gilfry, but then both cowboys can't be baritones, can they?

Muni Shelter Tampering

It's 12:40am, & I can see 4 young people with video cameras, tripods & flashlights doing something with a Muni shelter located somewhere in the Marina. At one point they filmed someone flailing around in the shelter. Later on they removed then re-attached the bus map inside the shelter. What kind of mischief is this?

Rebel Without a Cause at Union Square

The San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation had an outdoor screening of Rebel Without a Cause in Union Square last night. Unfortunately I missed the 1st 10 minutes. It was a mild night, so it was actually kind of pleasant to be out there. Because of all the store lighting, it's really bright in the plaza. A lot of the movie takes place at night, so sometimes it was hard to see. It would be very cool if someone could get all the surrounding buildings to dim their lights for these events (How about the International Dark-Sky Association?).

It's hard to think that James Dean had already passed away when this movie first came out. That was over 50 years ago, & there's still nothing dated about his charismatic performance, both so strong & so vulnerable. He makes me feel that I want to be his best friend in the whole world.

SFS at Yerba Buena Gardens

This Friday at noon half my office went off to the Embarcadero to snap pictures of Barry Bonds, while I headed to Yerba Buena Gardens to hear the San Francisco Symphony. It was a send-off for their European tour. The weather was sunny, so there was a good sized-crowd, & a lot of them were wearing these bulky lime-green sun hats. I soon realized that these were not really hats but soft plastic lunch boxes that PG&E was giving away. To shade themselves from the sun, people were wearing them on their heads. The lids worked well as sun visors.

Anyway, when I arrived the symphony, under the direction of MTT, was already playing the scherzo movement from Shostakovich 5. It sounded pretty good. The playing was pointed & light. This was followed by MTT making some humorous remarks which I couldn't hear well. Then soprano Lise Lindstrom sang the final scene of Strauss's Salome. I've never heard of her before, but she has a beautiful tone & was obviously very technically assured. I couldn't see her from where I was sitting, but I assume that she is young as well. It was a solid performance. According to the Chronicle review, Deborah Voigt will be the soloist on the actual tour, so Ms. Lindstrom only got to sing here & in the "Bon Voyage" concert on Wednesday.

The 50 minute concert concluded with the last 2 movements of Tchaikovsky's 1st Symphony. The finale was loud, energetic & fun.

Library Branch Opening

Did I mention that my local Marina Branch Library finally re-opened August 4th, after being closed for something like 2 years? The opening ceremonies was quite the neighborhood occasion. Mayor Gavin Newsom, Assemblyman Mark Leno & State Senator Carole Migden showed up to speak. A youth group did a lion dance to bless the building. Free food & shoulder bags were distributed. There were so many people that I decided not to wait to try to get in once the doors were officially opened.

I did my own inspection of the re-opened branch a couple of weeks later. Even though there is clearly more floor space in the new building, it didn't really seem that much bigger. The most obvious improvement is the bright area in the front for circulating CDs & DVDs.

I expected that they would have a lot more computers, for both Web browsing & for accessing the catalog. Of course I prefer the on-line catalog to the old card catalog, but one problem with the on-line system is that there can sometimes be a wait to use the catalog terminal. One never had to wait to the use the physical card catalog.

Yoshitoshi Prints & Jason Shiga at the Asian

Visited the Asian Art Museum today to see the current survey of Yoshitoshi prints. I've been attracted to his nervous line & disturbing imagery every since I first found out about him. This particular exhibit has so many light-sensitive prints that only half are on display at a time. All the prints are in beautiful condition & have vivid, delicate colors. Because they are hung chronologically, we can see that his most characteristic works, the most controlled & refined, come at the end of his career. His best images have a psychological intensity to them that make me suspect he was a somewhat disturbed individual.

This visit was an extension of my earlier visit to see the opening of the Tezuka exhibit. I saw more of the video documentaries about Tezuka's career. No question that he wanted to be the Japanese Walt Disney. He even created his own version of Fantasia.

Also in the galleries today day was the local cartoonist Jason Shiga. He had on display his 5' x 5' matrix of his interactive comic Meanwhile. Seeing this thing in person is probably worth the museum admission price alone. Shiga was set up in the the lobby where visitors could watch him ink his latest work & have the opportunity to chat with this unique personality.

More Kiarostami at PFA

On Saturday, August 4th I was back at the PFA for a program of the 2nd & 3rd parts of the Kiarostami trilogy that started with Where is the Friend's Home? In And Life Goes On Kiarostami travels laboriously by car back to the village settings of Where is the Friend's Home? But now this area has been devastated by a real-life earthquake. The movie is a both a documentary & a fictionalized version of this trip. The deceptively simple story is full of small, meaningful gestures that reveal much about human nature, determination & how art manipulates reality.

The final film, Through the Olive Trees, seems to be a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the previous film, adding another layer of meta-fiction to the trilogy. It too is full of small but telling observations of human behavior. Both these films end with a culminating long take in long shot in which characters are reduced to abstract points of motion within a much larger natural landscape. In these last moments, the movies transcend the narrative, & we get an almost god-like perspective on acts of human striving. These have got to be classic film endings. I'm still wondering why I didn't know about Kiarostami years ago.

Mundane Journey: Sidewalk Garden

If you're hanging out near the Panhandle, check out the sidewalk on the SW corner of Hayes & Central. Someone has beautified it with planters, creating a sort of sidewalk garden. After enjoying the plants, repair to Central Coffee, a cool neighborhood cafe on the NE corner. It must be a hip place because there were 2 of those gearless bikes parked outside during my visit on Friday morning.

Alex Ross Book Tour

Alex Ross, the super-smart classical music critic for The New Yorker, has posted his book tour for his up-coming The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Now I can officially stalk him (& Linda Ronstandt!) here in my home town. Actually, I always thought that even I could be a classical music critic, until I started reading him in the New Yorker & in his excellent blog.

Revolution in the Streets

At lunchtime today, I stopped to hear a Latin dance band playing in the sunken plaza below The Wall on Sansome near Bush. They were basically singing The Communist Manifesto, telling us to leave our jobs for the rest of the day & walk out on The Man. The band was having a lot of fun performing & encouraging us to cast off our chains. I felt very receptive to their message today. They are Carne Cruda.

A co-worker told me that yesterday he ate lunch at the Cafe Venue in the Mills Building. While he was there a group of "revolutionaries", some of them masked, made their way into the Mills Building. Three minutes later they noisily ran out again, chased by a guard.

Last week I saw a group of costumed college students invade the Citicorp Center on Sansome & Sutter during lunch & perform a skit urging the corporation to go green.

Has the rebellion begun?

Kiarostami at the PFA

Saturday evening I saw 2 films at the Pacific Film Archive by the highly-regarded Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I knew nothing about him, other than that he was the teacher of Bahman Ghobadi, who may be the best director working today.

First was the 1987 film Where Is the Friend's Home? A school boy sets out to accomplish the seemingly simple task of returning his friend's notebook & encounters a completely unhelpful, though never malicious, adult world. The story is straight-forward enough for a child to follow, but the movie itself is carefully constructed, poetic & incredibly respectful of the emotional lives of children. This is one of those films where every shot looks like a carefully composed photograph & every scene has a point to make.

Kiarostami has a wonderful way to end the movie. Once the main crisis has passed, the movie simply stops. There is nothing else that we need to see. Where is the Friend's Home? is the 1st part of trilogy which is concluded next weekend.

My party stayed to see the 1990 documentary Homework. This film turned out to be more for Kiarostami specialists. It is interviews with school boys about doing homework. It's evidently a social critique of the educational system in Iran. I did learn some shocking statistics about the illiteracy rate of the parents. However, I felt like I didn't have enough background about the school reforms in Iran to understand the importance of the issues raised.

Spider Pig

Like many people, I'm sure, I've been waiting for a Simpson's movie for years. So Friday night I was at the 10:30pm showing of The Simpsons Movie in the Westfield Mall. It was definitely an event. Best costumed audience member: The guy in the Duffman outfit, complete with cape, boots & beer can belt.

The movie has the jokes-on-top-of-jokes & subversive humor of the TV show, & I was not disappointed. However, I was expecting more cameos by the supporting characters who are such an important part of the texture of the TV show. Instead, it seems like the writers were determined to stick to the story line, so the focus was mainly the Simpsons family members. Not that that was a bad thing, but I'm guessing that when the DVD comes out, it will be full of random gags that didn't make the final cut. Still, Ned Flanders gets one of the funniest lines in the movie (something about the Devil's curly red hair).

Best audience moment: When it is revealed that Arnold Schwarzenegger has become President of the United States, this local audience went dead quiet. I guess no Californians find that funny.

Ingmar & Bill

News today of the passing of 2 greats: The masterful Swedish film & theater director Ingmar Bergman at age 89 & the beloved San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh at age 74. I don't suppose they had much in common, other than that they both lived full, productive & accomplished lives. A friend forwarded this link to a surprisingly humorous interview with Liv Ullman as a remembrance of Bergman.

Brits Off Broadway in NYC

This post is a month late, but let's put it here for completeness. Last month I was in New York City to see Alan Ayckbourn's Initmate Exchanges at the Brits Off Broadway festival. I saw 8 plays in 6 days! I wasn't sure how I would like it, but it's such a unique theatrical event that I did not want to miss it. Fortunately, I thoroughly enjoyed the plays. The 2nd act of the "Affairs in a Tent" variation was so funny that my jaw hurt from laughing so much. & I learned that acting is a very technical task. Because I saw so many versions, I saw some scenes 4 times, & the actors were very consistent from night to night. Part of the fun is that only 2 actors play all the parts. Bill Champion & Claudia Elmhirst did such a terrific job creating completely distinct characters that very quickly I forgot that each time one of them walked off stage they had to do a quick costume change. The trick became invisible.

Other highlights of my New York trip:

• The walk-through sculptures in the Richard Serra retrospective at the MOMA. Also the high-concept political cartoons of Dan Perjovschi drawn on the atrium walls.
  
• Rug crocheted out of Wonder Bread bags at American Folk Art Museum.
  
• The glass-topped Apple Store on 5th Avenue.
  
• The Saurischian Dinosaurs & 34-ton meteorite at the Museum of Natural History.
  
• Being taken to lunch by friends who are real New Yorkers.
  
• The MoCCA Art Fest in Soho's Puck Building. I wish I had had more time for it. Matt Madden showed me proofs of his soon-to-be-released book about creating comics. Matt Feazell showed me his sketch book. I picked up Will Dinski's beautiful silk screen print of his Scientology test results. The prolific Tim Fish sold me Strugglers, the (autobiographical?) prequel to Cavalcade of Boys. I made the mistake of passing up Andy Hartzell's wordless Fox Bunny Funny, but he lives here in San Francisco, so maybe I can cross paths with him again. Due to an unexpected personal connection, I got Free Shit from Charles Burns & an autographed copy of One Eye, his new book of photography.
  

Iphigénie & Don Giovanni at SFO

Still catching up with last month.

On the evening of June 26th I saw Iphigénie by Gluck at the SFO. This is an opera I had never seen or heard before, & I was a little apprehensive about it being too dry. It is very serious, no frills music, but it's also dramatic & direct. The stark, black-on-black production matched the music perfectly. There's been much commentary already on the luminous final moments of the staging; check out Opera Chic & Out West Arts. Susan Graham gave a totally commanding performance in the title role. She held my attention every moment. I was also very pleased to hear the solid-voiced Bo Skovhus as Iphigénie's brother Pylade & the lyrical Paul Groves as Pylade's friend Pylade.

Then on June 28th I was back in the Opera House for Mozart's Don Giovanni. I was disappointed that Donald Runnicles was not in the pit that evening. Instead the performance was led by Donato Cabrera, whom I had never heard before. My guess is that Runnicles would have led more vigorously. There were times in the 1st act when it seemed like the orchestra was not quite keeping up with the singers. The cast was uniformly competent & very even, & each singer did something to distinguish him or herself. Charles Castronovo as Ottavio has a light voice but is extremely musical. Kristinn Sigmundsson as the Commendatore is big in voice & stage presence. Luca Pisaroni as Masetto sings beautifully & is a terrific actor. His angry Masetto is no clown. Elza van den Heever was a huge-voiced Donna Anna. She appeared due to the puzzling, last-minute replacement of Hope Briggs.

Visually, it's a macabre production. The stage floor is fractured, revealing that the action is occurring over a field of buried skulls & bones. In the banquet scene the Commendatore is not a statue but a zombie with rotting flesh & exposed bone. Don Giovanni's death is presided over by a winged skeleton rising above the stage. I suppose it was a coincidence, but this production looked very similar to the Iphigénie. It was largely black-on-black, & in the finale the setting lifted to reveal a lit sky.

Sicko & Ratatouille

What could be more patriotic than to see Michael Moore's Sicko on July 4th? I was glad I saw it. There are no real surprises, though the movie is funnier than one would expect. In one scene, Moore plays at being an innocent abroad & wanders a National Health Service hospital looking for the place to pay the bill. He eventually finds a window labeled "Cashier", only to discover that this is where patients are reimbursed for travel expenses if they have to take a taxi to the hospital!

The same week I also saw Pixar's latest release, Ratatouille. Highly recommended. It looks gorgeous. The textures of the food are rendered in such detail that you feel hungry leaving the show. I loved the character of the funereal food critic Anton Ego. Half-way through I felt like I wasn't watching a movie for children at all. & if you're wanting even more, it comes with a dead-pan short subject about an inexpert alien abduction.

I saw both these movies at the remodeled Kabuki, which is now Sundance Cinemas Kabuki. I saw Ratatouille from the balcony of the large auditorium, which is very comfortable, very wide seats, each with their own side table. I saw Sicko in one of the smaller auditoriums, which now have stadium seating.

Beggars of Life

This weekend was the Silent Film Festival at the Castro. I love this festival, & I wish I had had time this weekend to see more screenings. It's the knowledgeable & enthusiastic audiences that really make it an event.

Last night I saw William Wellman's 1928 Beggars of Life. It's the picaresque story of a reluctant romance in the world of railroad hobos. It has a pre-Pabst apperance by Louise Brooks & a big, warm-hearted performance by Wallace Beery, but other than that it seems like a fairly typical late silent-era movie. William Wellman's son spoke briefly after the screening, & he implied that the mediocre material was given to Wellman in the expectation that he would create a flop. Instead, he crafted a decent movie.

Merola's La Cenerentola: Denied!

I showed up at the Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason to try to get a ticket for Merola Opera's La Cenerentola, but they were sold out. One lucky guy just ahead of me on the waiting list was the last one to get in. Rats!

4th of July Fireworks

It was actually a perfectly clear sky Wednesday evening for the Aquatic Park fireworks show. This made it a rarity! It was a spectacular show. I had a great view from the path atop For Mason.

City Lights at the Castro

As a run-up to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Castro is showing Chaplin's City Lights all this week. Went to see it last night. What can I say? It's a classic & perfect movie.

The audience was almost completely adults, & their response was subdued, I thought. I only saw one kid there. Maybe this movie is so old that it's just an art movie & not also a family classic.

First iPhone spotted in the wild

I was wondering how long before I started to seeing people using iPhones in the real world. Well, I just had my 1st iPhone sighting an hour ago. While in a neighborhood cafe in the Marina, I saw a young guy wearing a Google cap at the next table using his iPhone to surf the Web. He was showing it off to 2 friends.

Angry Muni Driver

As anyone who takes Muni knows, the service has been getting worse by the day. There was even a recent Chronicle article about Muni troubles. I witnessed this Monday night: At around 10:10pm, I caught the 22 Fillmore northbound at California. There were only 3 passengers, including me. At Jackson Street, the bus stopped well past the bus shelter, at least 1 bus length, to pick up a passenger. The passenger was mad that the bus didn't look like it was going to stop at all. When he got on, he yelled at the driver, "Are you blind?" We all got to sit at the stop, not going anywhere, while the bus driver then turned around & yelled all sorts of abuse at the passenger, making insulting comments about the passenger's weight, demanding, "Do you know about driving a bus?" & so on. Fortunately the passenger did not respond. After a minute or so of yelling, the driver resumed his route but, still mad, muttered to himself for several minutes with comments like "Fucking job" & "I wasn't going to get mad today". I was scared. This guy probably shouldn't be driving a bus. He was a Caucasian in his 40's or 50's. The bus number was 5459.

It's too easy to find really messed up Muni stories. Just one brief Google search got me this accident & this bad behavior..

Tezuka; Take Me Out

This weekend I went to opening of the exhibit Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga at the Asian Art Museum. I really don't know much about Tezuka other than that he was the most famous manga artist & animator in Japan, so this show was somewhat educational for me.

On this opening day, they had 2 informative lectures about his work. The 1st speaker, Phil Brophy, pointed out that a frequent theme of Tezuka's work is survival through childhood without a parent. He interpreted this as a reaction to the difficult conditions of life in post-war Japan.

The 2nd speaker, Yoshihiro Shimizu, was a Tezuka associate. He gave a comprehensive overview of Tezuka's work, presenting it as a series of innovations in both the design & subject matter of Japanese comics & animation. Seeing the way Tezuka's story-telling spanned comic books, TV, movies & merchandising & became a cultural phenomenon, it was hard not to think of comparisons with Walt Disney.

Unfortunately, the presentation ran a bit long, since each of Shimizu's remarks was translated from Japanese into English by Fred Schott. I didn't have as much time as I would have liked afterwards to visit the actual exhibit, which consists of a survey of Tezuka comic books. The images on display include large reproductions of pages from the comic books, cover art & the camera-ready artwork. The books were produced by a studio, & there are no preparatory drawings or sketches in the exhibit, so I was never convinced that I saw anything that Tezuka himself actually drew.

The subject matter of Tezuka's manga can be very unexpected: gory tales of a renegade surgeon; aliens come to earth disguised as a duck, a horse & a rabbit; a life of Beethoven. He even did a comic book treatment of Crime & Punishment!

Supporting the exhibit is a "Manga Lounge", basically a reading room for teenagers, stocked with manga in English & a display of collectibles. Spending some time browsing here might be the best way to learn about Tezuka. The museum is also screening a documentary containing lots of clips of Tezuka's animation, such as the astonishing shorts Jumping & Broken Down Film. Unfortunately he never completed a project called Legend of the Forest. It is set to Tchaikovsky' 4th Symphony, & each section is done in a different animation style. The fragments shown in the documentary look stunning.

But I really didn't spend all the time I wanted to at the museum. I also had to skip the Yoshitoshi prints, so I'll have to come back for that one as well.

That evening I went to the New Conservatory Theatre for their production of Take Me Out by Robert Greenberg. I remember reading about this play when it was on Broadway a few years ago. The hook is that it requires an athletic, all-male cast, most of whom appear naked at some point during the show. The action takes place in a locker room, &, yes, there's even a dropping-the-soap-in-the-shower gag.

The play itself is both funny & tragic. From scene to scene some new theme is always coming up, but in the end it's not clear to me what the play is really about. Afterwards it didn't make sense the more I thought about it.

It's still very entertaining. It's performed here by a very lovable cast. Especially outstanding are Jeffrey Cohlman, as the uncomprehending bad guy Shane Mungitt, & Patrick Michael Dukeman, as Mason Marzac, the accountant turned baseball fanatic. It's the happiest character arc in the play.

iPhone Ad with a Local Angle

One of the commercials for the soon-to-be-released iPhone features one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants. We've been waiting for that one mobile device that does it all, & this is about as close as I've seen so far. My boss calls it an "object of desire".

Noontime Concert: David Requiro

Schumann - Adagio and Allegro, Op. 70o
Brahms - Sonata in D major, Op. 78
Gaspar Cassado - Dance of the Green Devil

A musical co-worker tipped me off to the noontime concerts at St. Patrick's on Mission. Even though they are called "noontime concerts", they start at half past 12. Anyway, I went Wednesday & heard cellist David Requiro accompanied by pianist Miles Graber. The very young Mr. Requiro was last year's winner of the Irving Klein Competition. Suprisingly, he's the 1st Bay Area winner of this local competition.

Despite his age, David Requiro is clearly a veteran perfomer. I really liked his intimate playing. He's the kind of performer who draws you in. He's very musical & phrases everything, & he's almost indulgent in the easiness that he has with slow movements. Since he's a competition winner, I take it for granted that his technique is nearly perfect. He has an effortless sound even when playing extremely high up on the instrument.

Unfortunately this church is a very poor venue for this kind of recital. The sound is extremely muddy & difficult to hear. Sightlines from the pews are poor. There are also the distractions of street noise & people moving around the church. & this being San Francisco, we had a fair share of institutional types, though the audience was entirely well-behaved.

Welser-Möst tries it again

A while back I got all pissy over MTT's Stravinsky mishap wherein he took 3 tries to get one of the movements started. Well, these things might happen more frequently than I thought. Here's Franz Welser-Möst having a Berg breakdown, via Opera Chic.

On the lighter side, here's Yefim Bronfman having mechanical trouble in Detroit, via The standing Room.

Zombies; Arab Photography; Political Cartoons

As I left work yesterday, I witnessed a zombie attack on Market Street. It was messy. I think these people are responsible.

This afternoon I visited the SF Camerawork gallery to see an exhibit titled Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women. It turned out to be a multimedia show of photographs from something called the Arab Image Foundation http://www.fai.org.lb/. This one was a bit too post-modern for me. The multimedia portion was 4 concurrently running slide shows of photos from the archive, grouped by search terms. I unfortunately remained unenlightened. I didn't understand the post-modern jargon of the wall text, & the photo selections seemed indiscriminate to me.

After my SF Camerawork visit, I went next door to the Cartoon Art Museum to see their provocatively titled exhibit Why Do They STILL Hate U.S.?. It's a collection of political cartoon about the Bush administration that appeared mostly in English-language newspapers outside the U.S. I like the idea of this exhibition, but my sense was that this was pretty much the same kind of criticism we already see here, only more blunt. The caricatures of Bush were very familiar: he's usually depicted as a big-eared hypocrite, ignoramus or tyrant.

The only cartoons that offered a new point of view to me were ones attacking Bush's stance against Iran as a nuclear threat. In these Bush rails against Iran, while ignoring a gleeful Korea, already holding a nuclear bomb. I don't think I've heard Korea come up here whenever we talk about the threat of Iran as a nuclear power.

Maker Faire

I'd never been to the Maker Faire in San Mateo before. I had no idea it was going to be so big & so crowded & such a family event. Definitely something for everyone, & probably the closest I'll ever get to Burning Man. If there's an over-all theme, it's something like "extreme arts & crafts". I never knew that welding could be a hobby.

The main ideas of the Faire come together in the many robotic exhibits: interactivity, recycling & repurposing of materials, customization, digital technology, playfulness, humor. I even took in racous round of Robo Games, in which a flame-throwing robot pursued a small beer keg on wheels & reduced it to a smoking shell.

I pretty much ignored the stage presentations, even though Steve Wozniak was a featured speaker. However, I was lucky enough to hear the awesomely retro Project: Pimento, who bill themselves as the only theremin lounge band. They totally convinced me that we don't hear enough of the theremin these days.

I also couldn't ignore the knitting drummer. I guess one way to creativity is combining existing skills in new ways.

Carnivorous Plants

Sunday was insanely warm in San Francisco. I even wore shorts! Went to Golden Gate Park to check out the special exhibit of carnivorous plants at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. Great stuff. The exhibit has healthy examples of all the major types of traps, many of them in bloom. Even though it's tough to refrain from touching the plants, it's a full sensory experience. You'll get sprayed with steam, & there is jazz music piped into the room! Can't fail to inspire a sense of wonder.

Steven Isserlis's Russian Program

SHOSTAKOVICH: Sonata, Op. 40
RUBINSTEIN: Sonata No. 1, Op. 18
GLAZUNOV: Two Pieces, Op. 20
PROKOFIEV: Sonata, Op. 119

Thursday night I heard cellist Steven Isserlis's Russian program at Herbst Theatre. I've never heard him before, but at least visually he is a pretty unmistakable performer. He has a huge mop of long curly hair, somewhat like Evgeny Kissin. He tends to look around while he plays, sometimes appearing to stare straight out into the audience. He also has a peculiar mannerism of occasionally flipping his left hand up & open at the end of a phrase.

He doesn't seem to have a big or weighty sound. Instead, his playing is very clean & adroit. Even when Shostakovich has him doing all sorts of wild strumming, sliding, pizzicato, or tearing through rapid passages, the sound was always precise & clear. He's a tasteful performer.

The program was 2 weighty pieces sandwiching the relatively lighter pieces of Rubinstein & Glazunov. Before the Rubinstein, Isserlis spoke a few words about the composer's huge stature in his day, then commented that we were about to hear why this piece is unknown today. He finds the piece old-fashion yet still enjoyable. The piece also gave our page-turner extra duties. During a cadenza passage for the cellist, she stood up, walked carefully around the pianist, turned Mr. Isserlis's page for him, then returned to her seat.

The accompanist was the very young Kirill Gerstein, whose similarly precise & clear playing, complemented & supported Isserlis very well. As an encore they did a lyrical piece by Rachmaninoff, which Isserlis said is probably his earliest known piece.

Rheingold in Valencia

The Opera Chic blog posted some wacky photos of a production of Das Rheingold directed by a group called La Fura dels Baus in Valencia: We Got Teh *lolbombs* Up In Here. The SF Opera has a new Ring in the works, but somehow I doubt it's going to look anything like this.

Christopher Maltman

Sunday evening I heard English baritone Christopher Maltman's song recital at Herbst Theatre. It was a fully romantic program of songs by Peter Warlock, Debussy, Henri Duparc, Franz Schubert & Hugo Wolf.

Maltman is young, tall & slim, & he looked very happy to be with us. Both his voice & his stage presence are operatic. The different ranges of his voice had different colors. He made discreet use of falsetto when a song called for a quiet ending.

Maltman is also a great actor & can create a character for a song. For Warlock's Captain Stratton's Fancy, he becomes the boistrous, happy drunk. But for Wolf's Der Gärtner, he is the naive, shy gardener.

Even though this was Maltman's recital, it was the accompanist Julius Drake who really had my attention this evening. He is a fantastic pianist & musician. He could make such a tremendous amount of sound that I could feel the low notes through the floor. But he could also play beautifully quiet & fluid passages. Drake inhabited the music so fully that he did more than the singer to communicate the songs. In fact I'm afraid that I listened to him more than the singer. Several days later, the strongest impressions of this recital I have are of Drake's intense accompaniments for some of the Duparc & Wolf songs. At times he would rise off the piano bench while he played, & at the end of each set he would leap up immediately.

Unsurprisingly, Drake seems to be in high demand as a chamber music performer & accompanist. He is no doubt more than just a supporting player. Maltman often seemed to be conferring with him between pieces. At one point Drake even gave him a pitch before starting a song.

There were a couple of unfortunate technical difficulties during the 1st song. First, there was a sudden loud blast of something electronic, like feedback or an alarm, but it stopped almost as soon as it started. Then there was a softer electronic buzz that took a bit longer to go away. Maltman carried on completely unfazed by the distractions. Then to test Maltman further, a woman came down from the side boxes & sat herself in the front row, speaking to a couple of people nearby as she did so. She did all this while Maltman was singing, then she disappeared after intermission.

For his first encore Maltman did a Flanders & Swann number & instantly became outrageously charming. For the first time I focussed solely on his singing so that I could catch all the words. He followed this by a comic Debussy song, Ballade of the Parisian Women, also dispatched with appropriate theatrics.

Berlioz's Damnation of Faust

Thursday night I was at Davies Hall for the SF Symphony performance of The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz, led by Charles Dutoit. At over 2 hours with no intermssion, it's long for a symphony night but short for an opera. It's an extravagant show, with soloists, large orchestra & chorus, & it gets even bigger at the end when, in a theatrical moment, the boys & girls choruses enter & fill up the terrace for the final moments.

Very good performances from all the soloists. Willard White's Mephistopheles was the stand out. His voice is deep, large, round & slightly metallic, & he acts with both his voice & his movements.

The tenor Gregory Kunde was also very dramatic. At moments the part is very high, & I felt like he took risks to get those high notes out without belting. I saw mezzo Ruxandra Donose as Poppea at the SF opera several years ago. I remembered her as very attractive & very affecting, & I had the same reaction this night. Her singing of the story of the King of Thule was appropriately melancholy.

I liked Dutoit's conducting. I felt he was in control of the character of the music at all times. He's always well ahead of the orchestra. Sometime he shapes the orchestra's playing by not conducting at all. There were great solos from the English horn & the viola. The violas might be the best section in the orchestra these days. During the applause, I saw our English horn soloist get a pat on the back from her stand partner.

Though a few people bailed towards the end, the audience was very quiet & not at all restless. A couple of times there was applause during the performance from one or 2 patrons, but otherwise the audience withheld its reaction until the very end. I actually wouldn't have minded some applause during the performance. It would have made it feel more like an opera.

Marino Formenti

This past Saturday evening I was torn between 2 concerts: Bach's B-minor Mass performed in Berkeley by the Netherlands Bach Ensemble vs. the last installment of Marino Formenti's modern music recitals, "The San Francisco Piano Trips". These were obviously going to be very different experiences. I opted for Formenti, & it was quite a show, as much performance art as classical music recital.

It was held in the Koret Auditorium of the de Young Museum. I hadn't been there before. It's a very comfortable space below ground level. It probably holds around 400, has stadium-style seating & very wide seats. The performing area is on the same level as the 1st row of seats, so there is no elevated stage.

It was a very high-tech set-up. At one side of the stage a piano was surrounded by a half dozen or so portable radios. At the other side of the stage was a piano surrounded by jars & vases of various sizes, shapes & materials. Each had a microphone suspended inside it. Center stage were 2 pianos with the keyboards placed at 90 degrees to one another. The pianos were miked, & wires ran all around the floor.

At the start of the recital Formenti came out, looking serious & slightly sheepish, acknowledged the audience, & barely sat down before I heard a loud, sharply attacked chord. I wasn't prepared, & it was so startling I jumped in my seat. He had my attention for the rest of the recital.

I got to witness a lot of wild piano techniques. Each piece had its own peculiar technical challenges. Formenti often had to move abruptly between intensely loud & extremely soft. He made the jars sound by striking notes on the piano that caused them to resonate sympathetically. He taped small microphones to his index fingers & played the piano not by depressing the keys but by running his fingers rapidly over the keys, creating clattering glissandos. He played 2 pianos at the same time. He played exhausting passages of tone clusters with his fists & forearms. The John Cage piece, among other stunts, calls on the performer to the play the piano with a hammer!

The program had a lot of variety. It was clear that every piece had at least 1 interesting idea that was being explored. & it always felt like it was music, even during the Cage piece, when Formenti was scanning radio stations or striking the inside of the piano with a hammer. In fact, I'm still thinking about this Cage piece.

Of the 9 composers on the program, the only name I recognized was John Cage. Because the repertoire was so completely new to me, I felt like I couldn't really judge whether these were good interpretations or not, even though I liked Formenti's performance very much. I wish there were more opportunities to hear programs like this.

PS
Marino Formenti spoke to me! During the intermission many of us in the audience milled around the stage, examining the score on the piano & checking out the electronic set-up. The stage crew were having a job keeping people from going behind the pianos. At one point I looked around the back of a piano & discovered a stand with a small Chinese teapot with a wire going into the spout. All of a sudden Formenti was in front of me pretending to cover the teapot with his hands & saying "You discovered my secret!" I was too startled to respond. Formenti should be pleased to know that when he revealed the teapot's role at the recital's finale, it was still a surprise.

APE 2007

It was such a nice day on Sunday, but I spent most of it indoors at the Alternative Press Expo. This show gets bigger every year, & the stuff on display keeps looking more professional. A big draw was the chance to see Art Spiegelman & Gene Yang on a panel discussion. I came home with a handful of short comics, including the latest Optic Nerve, which I am looking forward to reading. I also bought the absolutely massive, 500 page Cavalcade of Boys by Tim Fish.

Ignite at Web Expo 2.0

Sunday night I checked out the Ignite event at Web Expo 2.0. Ignite events originated in Belgium & have been held in Seattle & now here. The task this evening was to select 3 keynote speakers for the conference on Wednesday. 16 speakers are each given exactly 5 minutes to pitch their company or concept. Each speaker comes armed with 20 slides, changing every 15 seconds. The slides prompt the speakers & keep them within time. At the end of each round of 8 speakers, the audience votes, via text messaging. I just checked the final results, & I have to say that I agree with our audience choices.

The topics ranged widely, though they were supposed to be more or less related to the Web & new technologies. I was impressed by author Timothy Ferriss. If he's not already a media darling, he soon will be. Jordan Schwartz gave a talk about beekeeping which is probably the ideal Ignite presentation. It was totally unexpected yet somehow relevant. Oh, & Justin of Justin TV gave a talk too, so I was probably on Justin TV that night!

Spring Chick at Marc Jacobs

The Marc Jacobs store in Pacific Heights currently has a window display that is way cuter than it sounds. On weekend afternoons, shoppers can have their picture take with a giant costumed yellow chick. The store puts the picture in the window. I sometimes wait for the bus in front of this store, & the pictures & the photo shoots are totally fun to see.

Cherry Blossom Festival

This weekend & next weekend is the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japantown. It was raining Saturday morning, so I put off going, but then it cleared up, so I went in the afternoon. The parade is next Sunday. I like to check out the origami exhibit. Very amazing transformer-like robot figures folded from foil paper. A lot of interesting things folded out of dollar bills, like a little model car.

MTT Embarrassed

The San Francisco Symphony had a mini-Stravinsky festival the past 2 weeks. I attended the program on Wednesday night which consisted of Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Apollo ballet music & the Symphony of Psalms, as well as a clarinet concerto, Fantasma/Cantos by Takemitsu.

MTT likes to talk before the pieces, & he spent a good 8 minutes before the Apollo enthusiastically explaining how full of "delights" it is. He had the orchestra play excerpts to demonstrate how some of the part writing works. One of the excerpts was Barantschik's lyrical violin solo, & this amounted to a kind of musical spoiler.

Midway through the Apollo there was a false start to one of the movements, signaled by tentative notes from some violinists. After a pause, there was another false start, then MTT saying "sorry" to the orchestra & flipping pages of his score. At this point everyone in the audience could tell that something had gone wrong. MTT made a joke of it by making a show of shuffling the papers on the podium. He appeared to have lost track of which movement to start. On his third try, he got the next movement going.

I've never seen such an obvious flub occur on the podium before, & it was a bit heart-stopping to witness the performance come to a halt. I didn't feel safe or confident for the rest of concert after that. Joshua Kosman's review of the concert in the Chronicle referred to it as a "mishap".

Happier moments of the Apollo included Barantschik's beautiful violin solo & then a duet with Mark Volkert(?). I hadn't realized what a deep, mellow tone Volkert has.

After intermission, MTT had the soloist Richard Stoltzman speak about the Takemitsu concerto & play the prinicpal theme, which again was a spoiler. For me Stoltzman's playing was the highlight of the evening. He has an incredible sound, almost piercing. There are brillant high notes, mellow low notes, a big dynamic range. The piece is meditative, wandering, & has a dense orchestral texture. The clarinet plays almost continuously, & Stolztman was expressive throughout.

Woyzeck

Friday night I was at the Exit Theatre to see a production of Woyzeck by The Cutting Ball Theater. I've been to this venue for fringe shows, & it's a pretty scrappy operation. Before they open the theater doors, we're crammed into a small lobby, then when they let us in, we're crammed into 4 tight rows of chairs. There's a lot of crawling over people to get to a seat. I overheard someone remark that it's like getting on an airplane.

The show is performed by a committed cast of 9 young actors. The action moves very quickly. It's a spare, expressionistic production. It takes place against a white-washed wall of cubbyholes, filled with ordinary & not so ordinary house-old objects. There are lots of lighting effects & sound effects coming from different parts of the theater. The sounds are not quite noise & not quite music. The show has a hallucinatory feeling, like perhaps some of it is only happening in Woyzeck's head.

I'm seen Woyzeck in its operatic version, & I expected the Woyzeck character to be this bluff ox of a man. Instead, our Woyzeck (Chad Deverman)is tall, slim, sensitive & exceptionally good-looking. His scenes with Marie then became very sensual & sexy.

The murder scene was especially powerful. We know what's going to happen, but Marie is entirely unaware. When Woyzeck embraces Marie & they take a few dance steps together, we seem to get a peek into an earlier, more tender phase of their relationship. This makes it all the more terrible when he pulls out his knife. Unfortunately it's not a swift death. Woyzeck discovers that it takes a lot of stabbing to kill Marie, & he eventually has to slit her throat, at which point she becomes a wide-eyed corpse, her eyes rolling back into her head.

Woyzeck is a grotesque play & must be very challenging to produce. It's clearly fragmentary, though every scene just as clearly raises an important issue. & it's hard to feel positive about any of these issues raised. When the performance ended in a sudden black-out, the audience sat in still silence for several seconds before someone started the applause.

KDFC SF Opera Broadcast

Last night was the first broadcast of the SF Opera by KDFC Classical 102.1 FM. On the 1st Sunday of the month for the next several months KDFC will be broadcasting previously recorded performances from the current SF Opera season. This is another of General Director David Gockley's innovations, & I approve.

This first broadcast was Puccini's Manon Lescaut, led by Donald Runnicles & with Karita Matilla in the title role. The program was all meat. There were just short breaks between acts to give the plot summaries & the cast, & there was minimal advertising.

In a brief interview before the broadcast, Gockley said he chose this performance to open the series because he wanted to start off with his best. No kidding. I hadn't heard this opera before, & its sensationalism grabbed me immediately. Manon is transported to a prison in Louisiana in the 3rd act, only to die on a plain outside New Orleans in the 4th act! (Made me wonder what an opera Puccini could have made out of McTeague.) The orchestra sounded great, Matilla is a dramatic powerhouse, & I'm sorry I missed it.

R. Crumb at YBCA

Yesterday I went to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to check out the R. Crumb exhibit. I really like his drawing, though, I've never been much interested in the content itself. I think this is because I don't share any of his obsessions. Nevertheless, I like the idea of a museum exhibit about his work, & I definitely wanted to see it.

It's a fun show, & the work itself needs no explication. However, the exhibit doesn't have an organizing principle. Perhaps this is because Crumb's sensibility appears to have been fully-formed from the start. Even though the works are from several decades, they reveal no obviously stylistic development or chronology. Perhaps the curators could have provided a background or context. I came away mainly with an aesthetic appreciation of his work.

Looking at his drawings confirmed my suspicions about Crumb's virtuosity as a draftsman. It's unusual to see any kind of under-drawing or corrections. Even the pages from his sketch book show that he rarely has to restate any line he puts down.

The wall text seems a bit defensive at times. It makes the point that Crumb's becoming mainstream is not indicative of him "selling-out". He is positioned as someone who was an artist in his own right starting in the 60s, a complement to the abstract & formalist art movements of his time.

The wall text accompanying a cartoon with explicitly racist content states that Crumb is demonstrating the prevalence of racism in American society. I'm less convinced by this explanation. Of course the black female in the cartoon is an obvious caricature. But I don't think that we are meant to see it with any sense of distance. To me it looks like Crumb just found the caricature very attractive & accessible. He liked it.

Appropriately, a lot of the visitors were baby-boomers who were no doubt Crumb's original audience back in the 60s. There was even a family with their college-age son.

Vänskä conducts Sibelius

On Thursday night I was at Davies Hall to hear the SF Symphony lead by guest conductor Osmo Vänskä. The program started with a show piece for orchestra called Louhi, written by Finish composer named Kalevi Aho in 2003 for a Finish youth orchestra. It's only about 10 minutes long, but lots of things happen. You feel like you are exposed to lots of different moods & orchestral colors, but none of them linger for long. The piece ends quietly & ominously.

Emanual Ax played the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat. Ax is one of those famous artists that I don't think I'd ever actually heard before. He has a very low musical profile. He's not flashy & doesn't try to make big points, but his playing is efficient & serves Mozart very well. This is an amazing concerto, by the way. There's as much interest in the orchestra as in the solo part. In the 2nd movement there's a section for woodwinds only. It's like all of a sudden we're listening to the Gran Partita for 2 minutes!

Ax is clearly a well-loved artist. There was a big turn-out to hear him, & he received a bouquet of flowers on stage.

After intermission we heard the Sibelius Symphony No. 1 in E minor. It's standard, un-challenging Romantic fair, & I enjoyed the performance thoroughly. Vänskä has ideas, & he works hard to get them across. His cues look very clear, & he'll shake his arms at the musicians, encouring the most vigorous playing. At times he looks like he's wrestling with the orchestra. I like his conducting. I was originally interested in this concert because of Emanuel Ax, but it turned it out that Vänskä left the bigger impression on me.

American Bach Soloists: Early Bach Cantatas

This Sunday evening I heard American Bach Soloists in a program of early Bach cantatas at St. Mark's Lutheran Church. This turns out to be a very good venue for this program. The church interior is bright & not too large. I overheard people commenting that the new organ had been inaugurated on this day's service.

The American Bach Soloists are an early music group. The ensemble plays Baroque instruments, & they employ the economical practice of one performer per part (though they double the bass line with a sort of double bass listed in the program as a violone grosso). This extends to the vocalists as well, so even the choruses are sung by just the quartet of soloists.

Besides translations of the text, my program included music for some of the hymns. At the start of the concert the conductor explained that for the cantatas with final chorales, these chorales would be repeated, with the audience joining in. & indeed, after the 1st chorale, the conductor turned around, there was a blast from the loft organ, & just about everyone in the audience sang. I found that there was a particularly enthusiastic tenor right behind me.

I don't know enough about the development of Bach's music to understand the programming, but this is incredible music. Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt BWV 18 makes one feel the rightness of putting ones faith in God. The wedding canata Der Herr denket an uns BWV 196 manages to be both joyful & solemn, as befits the occasion. Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen BWV 12 says everything there is to know about anguish.

For me Baritone Jesse Blumberg was the star of the show. He has a voice that sounds strong & large enough for opera. I felt like he was always making a point when he sang. & he seemed very happy to be there. Also exceptional was Stephen Hammer, playing the Baroque oboe. This must be a demanding instrument, & he had surprisingly full sound that was never pinched or squeaky. The program gave him many opportunities to display his evident musicality. I also liked the tenor Aaron Sheehan. He has a clear, clean, high sound that is well-suited to this music.

I had the impression that most of the audience are regulars & fans of this group, so there was a nice rapport between audience & performers the entire evening.

Blomstedt leads Mendelssohn's Elijah

Last Friday night I was at Davies Hall to hear Blomstedt lead the SF Symphony & Chorus in a beautiful & absorbing performance of Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah. Blomstedt maintained a dramatic flow over this huge 140 minute piece & made it as good as a night at the opera.

It's a big cast. There was a large chorus that spilled out of the terrace onto 2 additional rows on stage, plus 2 quartets of singers representing angelic voices, plus 4 principal soloists, plus a boy soprano in a small but pivotal role.

The slightly reduced orchestra put the balance in favor of the voices, as it should be. The most dependable performance of the evening was from baritone Alan Opie. He has a thick, somewhat Wagnerian voice. I quickly learned to be confident of hearing expressive & sustained singing every time he stood up. The tenor Christoph Genz was also remarkable. He had a wonderfully clear, bright sound that must be fantastic for Mozart.

I felt swept along by Blomstedt's even pacing. The performance never dragged, yet every number was given proper weight, & often one number simply flowed into the next one. The audience expressed their involvement by their silences between numbers.

During the ovations at the evening's end, Blomstedt demonstrated extra gratitude to the players by wading into the orchestra to acknowledge solo work by the principal by cellist (Peter Wyrick?) & oboist Bill Bennett.

Now holding auditions

"Now holding auditions for the boyfriend position" -- Announcement on T-shirt worn by weight-lifting jock at the gym today.

Stuff I should have blogged in February 2007

The Cartoon Art Museum had a very clever exhibition of rejected New Yorker cartoons. As one would expect, the cartoons are off-color, inappropriate, tasteless & very funny. But then, it must be quite demoralizing to have your work rejected from the rejected cartoons exhibit.

I was an innocent bystander at the pillow fight in Justin Herman Plaza on Valentine's day.

Stuff I should have blogged in January 2007

The Painted Veil isn't a bad movie, but it felt like an extra-long episode of Masterpiece Theatre. In the next week I heard Lang Lang's recital at Davies Hall. As an encore, he performed a piece from the sound track of The Painted Veil, which he is on. Lang Lang is kind of a cross between a classical musician & a pop star. Of course his playing is technically very proficient, & he has very fast fingers.

Jennifer Koh & Reiko Uchida recital at Herbst. Both are exceptional young players, each with a distinct musical personality. I liked the Jennifer Higdon premiere. It used a very cool technique where the pianist imitates the violin pizzicato by reaching into the instrument to stop the strings.

The Children of Men was an unpleasant & very well-done science fiction thriller.

I heard my favorite pianist Radu Lupu give an ethereal performance of the Mozart d minor concerto with the SF Symphony.

Stuff I should have blogged in December 2006

Saw 2 programs at the SF Silent Film Festival at the Castro: Silly Symphonies (1929 - 1935) -- Hey, these aren't silent at all. Anyway, these must have been real novelties when they 1st started appearing. Instructive to see how quickly they evolved technically & artistically, with Fantasia being the culmination of the series. Chicago (1927) -- A typical product of the era, showing that cynicism & tabloid journalism are hardly contemporary obsessions.

Carmen at the SF Opera. An unexceptional performance, & I've seen this production many times before, but this is such a perfect opera that I can always find things to enjoy in it.

Russian language production of Twelfth Night from the Chekhov International Theatre Festival at the Zellerbach Playhouse. Beautiful, luminous, this was the kind of performance that really draws you in. I was practically weeping for joy. It was a real shame that the house was only about 2/3 full.

Attended the Conservatory Orchestra's 1st concert in their new hall. Very exciting & very loud! Very nice moment in the Saturn movement of The Planets when the conductor Alasdair Neale put down his baton & used his hands to elicit lush, romantic playing from the student orchestra.

I haven't seen the Nutcracker at the SF Ballet in decades probably. New production set in Edwardian San Francisco. Watching all those women standing on their toes got a little tiresome for me. I guess ballet is not really my thing. The pit orchestra has some really good players nowadays, though.

Yundi Li at the SF Symphony

I attended this subscription performance on Wednesday evening. The conductor was James Gaffigan, who was a new name to me. He's the new associate conductor of the SF Symphony, so I suppose I will be getting to know him much better.

The 1st half of the program was Brahms 3, which I am always happy to hear. Bill Bennett did a beautiful solo in the 3rd movement. However the orchestra seemed kind of detached from the conductor. I felt that Gaffigan was conducting along with the piece instead of leading it.

After intermission Yundi Li played the Liszt Concerto in E-flat major. Of course he's another technical prodigy. In one of the lyrical sections, he played the fastest trill I think I have ever heard on the piano. In passages with rapid chords his hands were just a blur. His understated, delicate style of playing was at odds with the virtuoso character of the piece, & this made it a very interesting interpretation. For instance, the 1st movement has some of those extravagant runs that you would expect to be played with a big flourish. Instead, Yundi Li executed them lightly & evenly, in a more Mozartean way.

The program ended with Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2, which is fun to listen to (2 harps & 9 percussionists!), but also always reminds me of when the plane lands in the opening of Fantasy Island.

I sat on the last seat at the left hand end of the row, half way down the orchestra section. The sound was fine & I had a good view of the keyboard.

Rules of the Game at the Castro

On Monday night, I did one of my favorite things to do in the City on a weekday. After work I went to the Castro, ate a quick slice of pepperoni pizza at Escape from New York, then saw an old classic at the Castro Theater. This evening was Renoir's Rules of the Game, which I had never seen before. In fact, I didn't know anything about it, other than that it is supposed to be a genuine classic.

It's about a bunch of horrible French aristocrats in 1939 attending a hunting party. The sequence that surprised & impressed me the most was the actual shooting party, which lays out the hunt in clinical detail. We see how the hunters are stationed, how the game is flushed out of the woods, even the death throes of the unlucky animals. It is also the backdrop for a key recognition scene & a set-up for the fatal climax of the story.

I enjoyed the movie very much. The story unfolds so logically & inevitably that you feel like the director didn't do anything but just tell the story in the most straightforward way. But of course it takes a lot of art to make something this seamless. I felt that even though it was old & potentially very dated, it still evoked exactly the audience reactions that the director intended. I suppose that's what being a classic is all about!

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)

I read several reviews of this movie, & it kept sounding like something I would like. It's a damning look at how the Stasi destroyed the lives of innocent citizens. At first, I thought I could see exactly where the story was going, but then it went into unexpectedly deep territory. Instead of a cat-and-mouse game between the spies & the spied-upon, we see how the spy Wiesler is changed when he comes to identify with the famous playwright he is conducting surveillance on. The movie is long & humorless, yet I was completely engrossed. You feel dismayed by the fatal climax, but then there follows a 3-part epilogue that leads to a surprising & emotional moment of redemption. The ending might even make you sniffle a bit. I think I will remember Ulrich Mühe's performance as Wiesler for a long time. His character never betrays any outward emotion, but Mühe must be acting from deep inside, because you can always tell what Wiesler is feeling.

Stuff I should have blogged in November 2006

On the 11th heard the San Francisco Choral Society perform the Mozart C Minor Mass at Calvary Presbyterian. Another of my favorite pieces, & I enjoyed hearing it in this setting with a big community choir.

Gidon Kremer gave an incredible "After Bach" recital at Zellerbach Hall on the 16th. It was all pieces by Bach & 20th century works that related to Bach in some way. He performed with a young pianist & an amazing vibraphone player that I remembered hearing with the Kremerata Baltica. Kremer is one of my favorite performers. His playing makes me feel nervous, but in a good way. This was a program with pieces in widely different styles, yet somehow it all went together perfectly. Highlights of the evening were impressive solos by each performer. Kremer did the Bartok Solo Sonata. The pianist gave a profound intepretation of 2 Bach Choral Preludes. The percussionist Pushkarev performed clever jazz arrangements of 3 Bach Inventions & flirted shamelessly with the audience. I was thinking about this recital for days afterwards.

I checked out the Art of Gaman exhibit at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art. I'd never been to their little space right near Moscone Center. This was an exhibit of arts & crafts done by inmates of the Japanese American Internment camps of WWII. I was especially glad to see Obata's drawings of daily life in camp. It's a compact exhibit, easy to take in within a half hour. It's also very educational & seems geared for school groups. For example, to demonstrate how small the living quarters were, they erected an open room in the center of the exhibit space that has the dimensions of a typical barracks occupied by 1 family. I liked the window display for the exhibit. It is an installation of strings of paper cranes that form the design of the American flag & behind it an evacuation poster.

I saw the latest Aardman/DreamWorks animated feature Flushed Away. I was in a theater with mostly mothers & their young children, & I think I found it funnier than most of the kids. I loved the character Sid & his shirt that seems to be made from Y-fronts. & the Ninja frogs with their mime. But what about those slugs singing "On the dock of the Bay"? Who is this movie really for? Kids aren't going to get that!

The SF Symphony had a really fun holiday subscription concert. They screened Chaplin's City Lights with the orchestra playing the original score live. Darned impressive feat, though in the end I'm not sure that having a live orchestra improves the experience of seeing this most perfect of classic movies.

Thanksgiving weekend I was in Los Angeles, & I dragged my host to the newly refurbished Griffith Park Observatory. Very cool historic building & lots of exhibits, but we both agreed that the planetarium show, which I expected to be the highlight of the visit, was incredibly lame.

I generous acquaintance brought me to Herbst Theatre on the 28th to hear the Rossetti String Quartet's program of Mozart, Debussy & Dvořák. This was an odd act. The members are all tall young men, & they looked like they were trying to be the boy band of string quartets. My concert companion referred to the seemingly muscle-bound violist as "The Boxer". In the 1st half he wore a big gold chain & a shirt unbuttoned at the top. When he came out for the 2nd half, he was wearing a bandana. They each play well, though their individual styles are mismatched.

Stuff I should have blogged in October 2006

October 6th to the 11th, I attended the Ring Cycle at the Orange County Performing Arts Center featuring Gergiev & the Kirov Opera. The orchestra was the real star of the show. It's full of young, amazing musicians. This is one of those orchestra where everyone really plays out. The singers, with the exception of Domingo, were Russian, & all were terrific actors, which really went a long way, because this was the worst staging I'd ever seen for an opera. No director is credited. Apparently there was originally a German production team, but something must have gone horribly wrong, & they dropped out.

I'm a big fan of Gergiev, & he did not disappoint. His conducting is so muscular & exciting. He led a very speedy Ring, especially the Siegfried. None of the singers were Wagnerians in the traditional sense, so it was instructive to hear everything actually sung instead of declaimed or "barked". I was even happy with the two Siegfrieds we heard. Their competent singing & exuberant acting showed me that it is just possible to have a dramatically convincing & even likable Siegfried.

I was astounded by Domingo. He must be in his late 60s, but his singing was so romantic & ardent & his acting so convincing that there was no need to make any concessions for his age.

Incredibly, on one of their days off from Ring pit duties, Gergiev & the Kirov Orchestra gave a concert of Shostakovich Symphonies 6 & 5 across the street in the newly inaugurated Segerstrom Concert Hall. Their performance was strong & exciting. They have some really terrific players. At times I felt like I was hearing one outstanding solo after another. Still I can remember the beautiful harp solo & the piercing trumpet solo.

It is too disconcerting to record that the day after Götterdämmerung I drove to San Diego to spend the afternoon at Legoland marveling at incredible Lego models?

Attended a book event in the Haight on the 21st for the release of Best American Comics 2006 published by Houghton Mifflin. Local artists Justin Hall, John Porcellino & Esther Watson showed slides & talked about their work. It was nice to have something to look at. Comic book authors are not quite the same as literary authors, & it isn't always enough to hear them just talk. Harvey Pekar was also there to talk about editing the collection. As far as I can tell, he is exactly the cranky curmudgeon he appears to be in the American Splendor movie!

I heard Midori play the Britten Violin Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony on the 25th. Her playing was as moving & exciting as always & showed off her gasp-inducing technique: Passages very high up, double stopped harmonics, left-hand pizzicato, left-hand pizzicato plus artificial harmonics...The piece doesn't miss a trick. Every time I hear her play a concerto, that piece instantly becomes my favorite violin concerto.

Sat in the dress circle at the San Francisco Opera for Tristan on the 27th. Runnicles was the star of this show. He lead a fluid & tender interpretation, & the orchestra played beautifully for him. I was disappointed by the aimless staging. The only directorial idea occurred at the very end when the already "dead" Tristan got up, walked over to Isolde & embraced her as the lights went down. I guess this is one way to give the story an uplifting ending, but the moment was unprepared for. I had high expectations for Christine Brewer's Isolde, but both she & the tenor Thomas Moser seemed to conserving their voices throughout the entire evening. It felt like they were singing with only a fraction of their true powers.

Saw the Silent Theatre Company's Lulu at the Victoria Theatre on the 28th. This was very cool. It was a staging of Wedekind's Lulu, inspired by the Louise Brooks movie. There was no dialog. Instead, the young & athletic cast mimed the action in the style of a silent movie. The costumes & settings were all various shades of white, black or gray, & the actors faces were painted silver. A pianist at the side of the stage provided a driving musical accompaniment that was in a modern jazz idiom that evoked the 1920s. They even had inter-titles that were projected above the proscenium. In fact, I think I spent a lot of time marveling at the precision of the timing of these titles. There would be a black-out on stage, the actors would freeze, & the titles would appear, all at the same time. & sometimes there were a lot of titles within a scene!

They had a very convincing Lulu who exuded a feeling of sex & flesh. The whole production had a strong physicality to it. The characters danced with each other, tussled with each other, made love to each other, abused each other. Lulu's murder was a visceral horror. Best of all, the cast seemed to be having a lot of fun. When the audience left the theater, they were waiting outside on the sidewalk to thank us for coming! At that moment I noticed a school bus, painted with signs for the show, parked in front of the theater. Did they tour with that bus?

On Halloween night, I had an orchestra seat for the SF Opera's revival The Barber of Seville. I'd seen this production when it premiered a few years ago, & I thought it would be fun to see that big, spinning 2-story house again. I'm a sucker for spectacle like that. I'm also a sucker for Nathan Gunn & his athletic stage presence. This time around I was impressed by the singing of a young baritone called Eugene Brancoveanu in 2 small roles.

Conservatory Baroque Ensemble

This past Saturday evening there were probably too many choices for things to do in the City: The Chinese New Year's Parade, the last performance of John Adam's A Flowering Tree at the Symphony, a city-wide scavenger hunt starting at the Embarcadero. For my fun I dropped into the Conservatory of Music's new concert hall to hear a chamber-sized performance of Handel's Ode for St. Cecilia's Day & the Bach Magnificat done by the Conservatory's students. The new space is very comfortable & ideal for small ensembles. When I heard the official opening concert with the full Conservatory Orchestra, at times it seemed like actually too much sound.

The performance was along the lines of John Eliot Gardiner's performance practice: A small but focused chorus of 18 with about the same number of instrumentalists. I'd never heard the Handel before, & I really enjoyed this piece. It's so Baroque. Every number has a different, distinct mood, with different instrumental accompaniments. I especially liked hearing the guitar accompanying one of the arias.

Of course the Magnificat is such a magnificent piece, it's always good to get a chance to hear it.

Murray Perahia at Davies Hall

Monday night I sat in the 1st tier of Davies Hall to hear Murray Perahia's very classical recital program: Bach Partita No. 2, Beethoven Sonata No. 15, Schumann Fantasiestücke Op. 12 & Chopin Ballade No. 4. I'd never heard him before, although I see his name on dozens of recordings every time I am shopping for CDs. He is a very technical performer. Everything is incredibly crisp, even & clear. He has an amazing portamento. I was impressed by his controlled technique & classical restraint, but I wasn't very moved by the recital. He made everything sound almost too even. There isn't much difference between the way he plays Bach & the way he plays Chopin. I enjoyed his Schumann Fantasiestücke, though. The wild contrasts of mood came across very well in his playing. But overall I was more impressed by his technique than his musicality.

The hall was nearly full, including the terrace seating, so Perahia clearly has a following. He got a very warm response from the audience the moment he stepped on stage. He is one of those performers that needs very little preparation time. He walks on stage, bows briskly, sits down, & starts playing. At the end of the program he got an immediate standing ovation. He returned twice to play Chopin encores.

A Flowering Tree at Davies Hall

I was very excited to be at the U.S. premier of John Adams new opera on March 1st at Davies Hall with the SF Symphony. Alex Ross has already given a perceptive account of the premier production in Vienna. The SF performance got the same soloists, conductor & director. Having the conductor at the podium made it even more of an occasion. This was one of those few times when at the first hearing of a serious work, I found it accessible & interesting & wanted to hear it again.

The work is supposedly inspired by Mozart's Magic Flute, though in this production it was a mix of cultural traditions: American minimalism music, Tamil love poetry, Javanese ceremonial dance, & more. It has a libretto that is in English for the soloists & in Spanish for the chorus. The music had a lot of ethereal orchestral colors & evoked Debussy, Stravinsky & Wagner, especially his Parsifal. The 2nd act even opens with a parody of the overture to the Ring. The critics are also
hearing major references to Sibelius, but I don't know his symphonies well enough to get these.

The music is based on repeating, pulsing, vibrating rhythms & tonal harmonies. Scattered among the constantly moving orchestral background are melodic solos, sometimes for unusual instruments. In particular there were solos performed beautifully by Barantschik & by the trumpet. But there were also striking solos for bass clarinet, bassoon (in a very high register), contrabasson, French horn & recorder. I had expected some electronic instruments, but Adams uses a traditional orchestra, with the addition of lots of percussion & 2 recorders.

Despite being in Davies Hall & having the Orchestra cover 3/4 of the stage, the evening was quite theatrical. It started when the chorus entered the terrace. Instead of black concert dress, each chorus member wore a different brightly colored shirt or blouse. The over-all effect was pretty & very festive. Musically the chorus turns out to be very important. They have some of the best music in the opera. The lively & boisterous choruses are the 1st things that really catch your attention.

Most of the action took place on three roughly circular platforms, painted like the insides of a geode, on the right of the stage. There was also a platform at terrace height in the back left corner of the stage. It was a small space, though, & it was a little scary to watch the male dancer up there as he went through intricate moves balancing on one leg or doing a momentary one-handed hand-stand.

There were 3 singers, one acting as a narrator, the 2 others portraying the lovers of the story. They shared the stage with 3 dancers from Indonesia. I think that part of the concept was to have something on stage that countered the restless movement of the music. So these dancers performed in what is apparently a traditional Javanese dance style that moves very slowly & deliberately. The women seemed incapable of making an awkward or ungraceful motion. They often gave the feeling that they were moving underwater. It was very mesmerizing to watch.

The singers were great & very well matched. The soprano Jessica Rivera sang particularly beautifully & expressively. She was also a great actress. Even when she had to roll around on the stage intertwined with the dancer to represent Kumudha as a stump, she managed to sing wonderfully. It was a complete performance.

I'm not a fan of Peter Sellars as a director, & this staging was typical of his style. He always keeps you very busy trying to keep track of what is happening on stage. There were many moments when I couldn't decide what I wanted to focus on. At other times the staging just looked really awkward, as when he had the large tenor bent over the small male dancer to represent the Prince's misery.

I'm not sure what to make of the story yet. It was a sadistic fairy tale. It doesn't have a conflict in the classical sense, though there is an over-all arc having to do with loss, suffering & reunion.

Reminiscent of Dr. Atomic, it ends spectacularly with an extended orchestral crescendo depicting Kumudha's final transformation. For a moment there is a major chord, then there is a long suspension in the chorus & orchestra, & finally only the notes of a major triad sounding. This was followed by a loud & enthusiastic ovation that was clearly for Adams, though he modestly refused to take a solo bow during the curtain calls.

Travesties at ACT

I caught the Sunday matinee of Tom Stoppard's 1974 Travesties at ACT. I'm not a big fan of ACT, but curiosity about the play got the better of me. The play is pretty crazy. It's a debate about the role of the artist in society in the form of a theatrical farce. It seems like to get anything out of it, the audience has to be very familiar with The Importance of Being Ernest, James Joyce's Ulysses, Shakespeare, Dada, the history of the Russian Revolution & World War I. & I'm sure there were other ideas in there that went right over my head!

The production was somewhat abstract. It starts with a completely blank, white stage. Props & sets fly in, glide in from the wings or rise from the below. From time to time a large circular map of Europe slides along suspended from the procenium. The library has book shelves floating in space at improbable angles & upside-down. Cartoon sound effects might accompany a bit of business. I'm not sure that this struck the right note, though. I suppose that this all reflects the highly artificial construction of the play, but I wonder if it would have been more interesting to stage it as if it were in fact a traditional farce. Then there would be the tension between the apparently conventional trappings of a drawing room comedy & the highly charged political & philosophical themes of the play.

Whenever I go to an ACT show, I'm struck by how the audience seems somewhat elderly. I also find myself wishing the performances were crisper. It's like I want to tell the actors, "Wake up! There are people out here!"

Dawn Upshaw at the SF Symphony

On Saturday night I was at Davies Hall to hear Dawn Upshaw. She sang an atonal song cycle called Time Cycle by Lukas Foss. I'd never heard her before, & I was at this performance with a friend who is huge fan of hers. She has a very easy-going, down-to-earth stage presence & a very pleasant, even voice, so it is easy to see what her appeal is all about. With unfamiliar music like these songs, the only comment I can make about this performance is that she sang absolutely everything, & this went a long way towards selling the songs. The piece itself is not obviously lyrical & has the disjointed lines characteristic of serial music, but Upshaw made everything sustained & connected. It never came out declamatory or sounding like sprechstimme, which is another way that the songs could have been delivered.

The rest of the program consisted of Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Berlioz Benvenuto Cellini Overture & Brahms 4. I like MTT's programming, but as usual I did not find him a very interesting conductor. He wanted a lot of sound for the Berlioz, but the brasses were too loud & covered the strings whenever the played. I've heard MTT conduct Brahms 4 before, & I think his loud opening for the 2nd movement completely strikes the wrong mood.

Voices of Kurdistan

On Friday night, went to Cowell Theater, Fort Mason for a concert of Kurdish music sponsered by the San Francisco World Music Festival. This was the 1st of 3 concerts of Kurdish music. This night featured a singer from Turkey called Aynur. She sang 2 sets, backed by 4 musicians: a violist, a lutist, 2 percussionists. I'm completely unfamiliar with this music, but it seemed to be a combination of folk songs & original songs written in the folk tradition. The songs varied from sorrowful to angry to humorous to defiant. Aynur is a powerful singer who grabs your attention & refuses to let go.

The theater was perhaps less than 3/4 full, but the audience was very enthusiastic. I heard a lot of Turkish spoken in the lobby before the show.

The only thing I really disliked about the performance was that all the musicians were amplified electronically. When Aynur was belting into the microphone, the sound was so loud it was painful. I don't understand why the amplification was necessary. My feeling is that the instruments & her voice are plenty loud enough to be heard in that hall without any artificial amplification.

Quinceañera

Saw this new indie movie at Embarcadeo Cinemas last night. It's an earnest & affectionate portrait of a working class Hispanic family in LA's Echo Park. The movie is nearly plotless & is done in the neo-realist style, with many of the performances apparently by non-professionals. I got the idea from the movie that gays are the "bad guys" in the gentrification of the Echo Park neighborhood.

Super Vision

Last night I attended a performance of Super Vision at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Going in, I didn't know anything about it other than that it looked very high-tech. And indeed this was probably the most high-tech multimedia show I've ever seen. The actors perform between 2 screen which move & have computer generated & real-time images projected on them. The technicians controlling the visual & audio effects sit in darkness on stage, making the process look somewhat transparent. 2 other actors perform to video cameras at the edges of the stage & interact with the "real" characters via their projected performances.

The show was often stunning to watch, but the script was thin. The script raises issues rather than developing characters or a compelling story lines. The only character that came across as a warm human being was the sassy Sri Lankan grandma who appears on a Web cam. Actually I thought the most powerful part of the show was its opening monologue. With the help of the Claritas database, an actor profiled the audience using information gleaned from credit cards used to pay for tickets for the show. This was a truly vivid illustration of the issues of data privacy.

An Inconvenient Truth

Finally saw the Al Gore movie about global warming. It's a film of him delivering his illustrated talk to a studio audience, interspersed with his personal reflections about his family & growing up on is father's ranch. No new information here, though the movie is not the downer that one would expect. The facts are grim, but at least the information is out there. Gore's criticism of the present administration's environmental policy is not stated nearly as strongly as it might have been. Probably he's trying not to offend anyone.

Woman's Will presents 12th Night

Saw Twelfth Night at Dolores Parkin the afternoon. & what a beautiful day to be in the park too. Production was put on by the cleverly named "Woman's Will", which is an all-female company. I didn't feel that having an all-female cast necessarily made for a revelatory production, but this was a very enjoyable performance, regardless of the gender casting. Each character was made distinct, & the action never lagged. The performances were all strong. In particular, the Feste, Samantha Chanse, was an amazingly confident performer.

There was something very solid about the direction. I felt everyone really understood the play & that none of the main themes had been neglected.

It was a completely actor-driven event. You got the feeling that a dozen actors just showed up, pitched their set & got to it. Even the stage manager stepped in to play an officer & supplied stage music.

The main drawback was just that it was outdoors in Dolores Park, so the performance had to compete with traffic noise, a stray dog trotting through the playing area, a birthday party with screaming kids, & even a domestic argument. & unless you are very close & the actor is speaking right in your direction, you can't hear a thing. I was very sorry not to be able to hear Feste's singing.

Iridium Flare 65

Last night I walked out to the Marina Green, found a spot away from street lamps, & was able to see this Iridium Flare as it went by:

Date: 05 Aug
Local time: 21:13:12
Intensity: -2
Alt.: 62°
Azimuth: 93° (E )
Distance to flare center: 24.3 km (W)
Intensity at flare center: -8
satellite: Iridium 65
East of zenith
East of Vega (brightest star near zenith)
West of Milky Way

It looked about as bright as the nearest bright star, which I'm told was Vega. I spotted it for about 8 seconds as it slowly brightened then dimmed.

Anniversary Year

It seems like every month I'm reading about another anniversary celebration for this year.

• Mozart: 350th birthday


• Nikolai Tesla: 150th birthday


• Dmitri Shostakovich: 100th birthday


• Janet Gaynor: 100th birthday


• Rembrandt: 400th birthday


• San Francisco Earthquake & Fire: 100th anniversary


• San Francisco Japantown: 100th anniversary


• Samuel Beckett: 100th birthday


• John Huston: 100th birthday


• George Bernard Shaw: 150th birthday


• Bertolt Brecht: 50th anniversary of his death

Is this really such a big year, or are people just in the mood to commemorate?