Angel Island Fire

I'm posting backwards through the past week here. On my way home Sunday night, I got off the bus near the end of Van Ness at around 10pm & saw a brilliant orange glow from the bay. I had no idea what it was. I walked down to Aquatic Park & saw it was Angel Island on fire. It had been burning for about an hour & looked huge even from that distance. 2 peaks on the island were burning, & I could see the fire spreading down the hills. Occasionally I could see huge flames spout up. The smoke was spreading high up & towards us. Small groups of people came & went. A woman let me look through her binoculars, & there were several people with good cameras taking pictures. It was beautiful & silent. I saw bits of ash floating down on the Marina as I walked home. It must have burned all through the night, because the next morning I could still smell the smoke.

Van Jones at Stacey's

Yesterday I was Stacey's Bookstore to see Van Jones promote his book The Green Collar Economy to an audience of about 60 people. He said this was his 1st event for the book, & he was thrilled by the turn-out. He's obviously an experienced speaker. He uses a lot of inspiring, grass-roots political oratory. He didn't read from his book but instead talked about some of the ideas. If I understand correctly, it's about how we can turn eco-friendly economic projects into make-work programs to help the poor & disadvantaged. It sounds like an optimistic, good news book.

Academy of Sciences: Denied!

Foolishly thinking I could take advantage of the free day today at the California Academy of Sciences, I got there at 9:10am this morning, a good 20 minutes before they open. There were so many people there already that I couldn't see the end of the line. It wound out to JFK Drive, past the 6th Avenue entrance. I'm sure I could have gotten in, but only after waiting a couple of hours. Maybe next year it'll be reasonable to get in. I really want to be on that roof too.

Siphon Pot

This past Saturday afternoon, I paid the most I've ever paid for a single serving of coffee. I was at the Blue Bottle Cafe in Mint Plaza. The cafe looks like a chemistry lab. I shelled out $6.51 for a siphon pot of Mexican coffee. It was the most elaborately prepared coffee I've ever seen. The water is heated in a globe-shaped beaker over a high-intensity heat lamp. It then percolates up a tube into another glass beaker where it is infused with the coffee grounds before being filtered back down. The best part is when the barista swirls the water in the bottom half to create a tornado-like funnel of water, into which the siphon part of the top part is inserted. Laughing Squid has some photos & videos of the process.

I can't imagine doing this very often, & the place is ultra-hip, but it was worth it as much for this show as for the very smooth, mellow & gentle cup of coffee that results.

Vertigo at Union Square

I went to Union Square Saturday night for the free outdoor screening of Vertigo. I think it's one of the most beautiful movies shot in San Francisco. There's even a shot of the statue in Union Square, where we were sitting watching the movie.

I couldn't help drawing parallels between the plots of Vertigo & Die Tote Stadt. In both cases, a man becomes obsessed with the image of a woman who is dead, & he wishes to resurrect her through another woman that looks like her. The man is on the edge of sanity, & the climax of the story is the doubling of the death of the 1st woman. Even the names of both of the dead women start with "M": Marie/Madeleine.

It got a little chilly out there, but it was tolerable, & San Franciscans can bundle up in style. A group nearby me was well prepared with blankets to wrap themselves in. They also had an ice bucket to chill their white wine & real wine glasses to drink it from.

Love Fest

I walked by Civic Center later Saturday afternoon while the Love Fest was fully underway. It was incredibly loud. All I was aware of was the pounding bass. It was like standing next to an airplane engine. I don't really understand this event, but I think it's cool that people dress up in costumes for it.

Epic Battle!

I showed up at Dolores Park on Saturday afternoon wearing a yellow t-shirt & armed with an umbrella & an uninflated balloon. At 2:00pm on the dot, I started up an MP3 on my iPod Nano & followed the voice in my head, along with about 2 or 3 hundred others. We did stretches, hugged, chased each other, jumped up & down, played human twister, & engaged in an epic battle. It was good clean fun.

Favorite moments:

• Trying to move around the field while being blocked by a guy yelling at me, "Don't move, you're my defender! Defend me!"
• When we gave up trying to synchronize our jumps & just kept jumping.
• When the 2 armies roared back & forth to each other.

This was Improv Everywhere's MP3 Experiment, sort of a flash mob taken to the next level. They had several video cameras going & even a helicopter taking aerial shots, so the event is going to be well-documented. My fear is that in a few weeks I am going to show up on their site looking very dorky.

SF Symphony at Justin Herman Plaza

Benjamin Shwartz, conductor
San Francisco Symphony
Bernstein: Overture to Candide
Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
Gershwin: An American in Paris

The rain held off Friday afternoon, so it was a fine day for the San Francisco Symphony to give its free noontime concert at Justin Herman Plaza. We had to sit through a few obligatory speeches & the national anthem, but we were rewarded with an all-American program of dance-inspired popular classics lead by Benjamin Schwartz.

The orchestra is just back from their New York tour, & the playing was very crisp. The amplified sound system sometimes made the oboe solos sound unusually prominent, but fortunately they were also beautifully played. I liked the trumpet soloist's tricky pitch pending in the Gershwin.

Classical music becomes very susceptible when performed outdoors. The Ferry Building clock struck the half-hour mark loudly & right on top of Nadya Tichman's delicate violin solo in the West Side Story suite. A trolley horn barged into An American in Paris. The musicians took it all in good humor.

The crowd of office workers eating their lunches was very large & quite respectful. This was good evidence for Loen Botstein's article debunking the death of classical music in that day's Wall Street Journal. The audience did interrupt the Gershwin with applause after a big climax, but this was quite acceptable given the setting.

After the concert, I visited the KDFC table & filled out a raffle entry. A tall man with a familiar voice was behind the table chatting with listeners. A man suddenly said to him, "Are you Hoyt Smith? It's so weird to see your face!" I, on the other hand, refrained from asking Hoyt why they only play 1 or 2 movements from a symphony.

La Scala at the Vogue

We can see La Scala Opera at The Vogue Theatre on Sacramento Street this month. Some of the casts looks great. I doubt that Roberto Alagna's walk-off from Aida is included, though.

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.