WALL-E

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

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

SF Zine Fest

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

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

Saturday in the City

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

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

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

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

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

The good life

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

So says the wall in the bathroom at Pasta Pomodoro.

Line for iPhone 3G on Chestnut Street

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

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

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

70mm at the Castro

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handel's Ariodante

San Francisco Opera
Tue Jul 1 2008 7:30 pm

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

Conductor: Patrick Summers
Director: John Copley

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

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

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

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

Lucia di Lammermoor

San Francisco Opera
Tue Jun 17 2008 8 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Jewish Museum

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

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

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

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

Striggio Mass in 40 parts & 60 parts

Davitt Moroney, conductor
Featuring
Magnificat (Warren Stewart, artistic director)
Philharmonia Chorale (Bruce Lamott, director)
American Bach Soloists (Jeffrey Thomas, artistic director)
Schola Cantorum San Francisco (Paul Flight, director)
Perfect Fifth (Mark Sumner, artistic director)
Instrumental group including His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts,
with Wim Becu, contrabass sackbut
7 June, 8 PM, FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH,

I was in Berkeley for the Saturday evening performance of Alessandro Striggio's Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno for 40 and 60 voices, led by Davitt Moroney, who re-discovered the piece after 4 centuries. Apparently this is the most extravagant choral piece every written, & it's such a novelty that I had to check it out.

For the full experience, I started by attending Moroney's afternoon lecture about the re-discovery & the historical & political context of the original performances of the Mass in 1567. Moroney thinks the piece was commissioned by the Medici family as part of an elaborate scheme to get the Habsburg Emperor to recognize the Medicis as first above all other Italian ducal families. If this was the case, the effort was a failure, but it makes for a good story of international intrigue surrounding the Mass. At the end of the lecture, someone jokingly asked Moroney when he would be writing "The de Medici Code", & he actually is thinking about writing a historical novel about Striggio!

The Mass is only 30 minutes long, & the program itself an intermissionless 80 minutes. It started out with a series of shorter pieces, mostly showing off the players of the ensemble His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts. The ensemble included a contrabass sackbutt, which looked like a 10 foot long trombone. It produced extremely low tones that were mellow, almost fluffy, in timbre & not at all brassy or raw sounding. The player manipulated it with impressive ease. It was impossible not to look & listen every time it was played.

The Mass itself was performed with 1 singer per part. The 5 double choruses stood on separate risers arrayed in a semi-circle. Choruses alternated wearing black or white shirts, so that they were easy to distinguish visually. Sometimes only 1 chorus is utilized, or 2 or 3. Sometimes the choruses answer one another. This adds a spatial element to the sound. When all 5 sing together, it is for special effects.

The climax is the Agnus Dei, when an additional 20 singers climbed onto the risers & joined the 40 already onstage. The voices have staggered entrances, so that the sound washes from the left to the right. One feels continuous pulses or waves of sound. It actually reminded me of the prelude to Das Rheingold.

The performance got an enthusiastic standing ovation from the sold out house. The audience even managed to get some rhythmic clapping going for a while. I think it's the first time I've ever witnessed that in this country, & it thrilled me almost as much as the concert itself. From the podium, Moroney told us, "Since there's only one piece with 60 vocal parts, we'll do it again." He encored the 60 part Agnus Dei so we could get another chance to savor this unique wash of sound.

The venue itself was a bit of a pain this evening. First of all for some reason there was a slow-moving line just to get into the church. Then there were rather desperate long lines for the very few restrooms. The audience was very attentive, but an older gentleman a few rows in front of me had a hearing aid that squealed several times during the performance. Each time, he corrected the problem by banging his hand against his ear.

Das Rheingold at SF Opera

Tue June 3, 2008 8 pm

Conductor: Donald Runnicles
Director: Francesca Zambello

Wotan: Mark Delavan
Loge: Stefan Margita
Alberich: Richard Paul Fink
Fricka: Jennifer Larmore
Erda: Jill Grove
Mime: David Cangelosi
Fasolt: Andrea Silvestrelli
Fafner: Günther Groissböck
Donner: Charles Taylor
Wellgunde: Lauren McNeese
Flosshilde: Buffy Baggott
Woglinde: Catherine Cangiano
Froh: Jason Collins
Freia: Tamara Wapinsky

We have to wait until 2011 for the full cycle, but Tuesday night we got a 1st look at what is being billed as an American Ring. The evening began Bayreuth-style. All the house lights went down, then the 1st low rumblings of the prelude began. No unseemly applause for the conductor!

During the prelude they projected a sort of cosmic fly-by on the scrim. Stars & planets flew by. The sets are pretty spare, other than Nibelheim, which is set in a deep mine. Instead of a backdrop, there are digital projections. Cascading water for the 1st scene, clouds for the Valhalla scenes. I have a feeling we're going to see a lot of these projections as the cycle progresses. My first impression is of a production designed under financial constraints.

As for the American theme, Alberich is a grimy prospctor, the gods look like they have been invited to play croquet on the Great Gatsby's lawn, the giants are construction workers, & Erda may be an Indian princess. But America is a place, & the settings & projected images are pretty generic, lacking any sense of a specifically American locale. I feel like they could have pushed the American imagery much further. A native American scenario would be pretty provocative.

As one expects in a Ring staging, there are plenty of directorial touches. Loge appears as a silent witness at the very end of scene one. Donner & Froh are on-stage for most of scene two & given a lot of stage business. Jason Collins was a great actor as Froh. His Froh was smug, juvenile & spoiled. If they ever do an opera about George Bush, he's the one to cast. Fricka came across as a somewhat silly, shallow woman. Even while she's scolding Wotan, he grabs her playfully & makes her laugh. This seems wrong for her character. The giants make an amusing entrance lowered by crane.

The Nibelheim is appropriately set in a dark but glowing mine shaft. The oppressed Nibelungen miners are terrorized children. When Alberich appears, they surround him, reaching out to him beseechingly, so it's clear that they are dependent upon him as well as in fear of him. I found it chilling. However, Alberich's transformation into a "Wurm" was lame. It's a huge projection of a slithering snake.

In the final scene, Alberich is led onstage with hands tied behind his back & a sack over his head, looking like a terrorist suspect. Wotan is brutal in wresting the ring from him, shoving him to the floor from behind, then crushing his hand with the spear. When the giants return with Freia, the implication is that a romantic relationship has developed between Friea & Fasolt. They did a similar thing in the Chicago Lyric Ring, & it adds an interesting layer of emotion to the action.

The rainbow bridge was a gangway lowered from the wings, so the gods looked like they were boarding a cruise ship. Having seen 5 different productions of this opera by now, I've given up the hope of ever seeing anything resembling a rainbow or a bridge here (well, actually there is a rear-screen projection of a rainbow). The Rheinmaidens appear on stage in the last moments to plead their case in person, but are left in a pose of despair. Loge does not join the gods in Valhalla, instead remaining onstage to set Wotan's building contract on fire.

I like Runnicles generally, but he occasionally turns in very sloppy performances like this one. The orchestra sounded under-rehearsed. Instead of moving from climax to climax, the music just kept flowing along, nothing standing out particularly from anything else. There were some intonation problems with the woodwinds as the evening progressed, as well as a few minor horn bloopers. Still, on balance I think the opera orchestra sounds as good as it ever has. The trumpet solos were spot on. I thoroughly enjoyed concert master Key Stern's gorgeous solos.

As for the singers, I liked Andrea Silvestrelli's deep, resonant voice & his portrayal of Fasolt, who is the only sympathetic character in the whole opera. Richard Paul Fink gave a great snarling, singing/acting performance as Alberich, especially in the final scene. He gives an over-all impression of great strength. I think Alberich is really the main character in this opera. Stefan Margita as Loge was a rock of vocal stability. He consistently produced a beautiful, focused, clear sound, always sounded in control, & was convincingly sardonic. Mark Delavan sounded lighter than one would expect for Wotan & paced himself well. His voice never flagged from start to finish.

I also have to note that the scene changes were very noisy. The audience was treated to shouting as well as clunks & thuds & scrapes. It gave the negative impression that the set design must be really clumsy. The anvil choirs seem to have been pre-recorded, which was very disappointing.

Computer History Museum

Today I ventured outside The City to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Being a techie myself, I've wanted to visit for some time. It's located in an impressively large new building.

The big draw for the next year is the modern incarnation of Charles Babbage's legendary Difference Engine No. 2, built by the Science Museum of London. Nathan Myhrvold is responsible for the version on display, which is destined for his private collection. If you want to see this, time your visit for one of the live demonstrations. The machine calculates 7th order polynomials to 31 decimal places & is cranked by hand! It's massive, & there's definitely a certain romance to it as you watch columns of disks rise & fall, hear rhythmic ker-chunks, & become mesmerized by the carry-over wheels, which corkscrew up like rotating DNA molecules.

I took the tour of Visible Storage, which is a large warehouse space filled with all sorts of calculating machines, from abacuses & slide-rules to Crays & microcomputers. The layout is wonderfully informal & has lots of random surprises. I saw core memory for the 1st time. There's a rack of hilariously sagging motherboards from an early Google server. A tangle of wires used to program an early IBM plugboard gives a new meaning to the phrase "spaghetti code." The whole thing tells the story of the rapid replacement of old technologies by new ones. As the tour guide said, "Electronics constantly eats its young."

It also inspired a certain amount of nostalgia in me. I saw a teletype machine, which took me back to my 1st contact with computers, back when I was about 12. Visible Storage starts with a huge shelf full of microcomputers dating back to the 70's, & I was surprised by how many of these machines I had once used. & now they are museum pieces!

Octopus at The Magic

I was at the Saturday night performance of Steve Yockey's new play Octopus at the Magic Theatre in Fort Mason. It's a joint production with Encore Theatre Company. First things first: the big attraction of this show is the 1st scene, depicting some serious group sex flippantly orchestrated by the play's anti-hero. 4 male actors appear completely naked, & the foreplay is explicit. Fortunately our cast is fit, trim &, in at least one case, unusually pretty. It does the shower scene from Take Me Out one better. Come to think of it, Take Me Out was the last play I saw, so I guess we now know what it takes to get me out for an evening of theater...

The come-on of this 1st scene quickly gives way to catastrophic consequences. More likely to be talked about than the sex scene are the increasingly fantastical turns the action takes. A telegram delivery boy shows up dripping wet for no apparent reason. Characters vanish. Water seeps into apartments from no discernible source. A fearful monologue is set at the bottom of the sea. & the water in this production is real. As if we were about to see Shamu the Killer Whale, a sign at the box office warns us that the first row is likely to get wet.

It's an angry story about gay relationships, AIDS, simple consideration for others & love. The tone & focus sometimes shift strangely, but the dramatic situations always had my attention. The play feels like it's one re-write away from being brilliant.

There's a lot of physicality, & the characters' distress quickly becomes extreme. The cast does a terrific job with all this. I liked Patrick Alparone's pretty boy looks & expressive face. It's perfect casting. Rowan Brooks is at first lightly comic but then frighteningly potent.

During the curtain calls, they announced that the run has been extended, so check it out. It's a compact, intermissionless 80 minutes, & it will give you something you'll want to talk about.

SFS Brahms Festival

San Francisco Symphony Brahms Festival
Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 8:00pm

Pre-concert Chamber Music
Brahms String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat major, Opus 67
Chen Zhao violin
Amy Hiraga violin
Nancy Ellis viola
Peter Wyrick cello

Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor
Laura Claycomb, soprano
Matthias Goerne, baritone
SFS Chorus

Brahms Geistliches Lied
Brahms Four Songs for Women's Chorus
Brahms A German Requiem

When I purchased my ticket early in the day, the box office told me that there would be chamber music at 7:00pm, so I returned in time for this very nice extra. We were asked to sit as close to the stage as possible, & the house lights were kept up for the 1/2 hour performance. The quartet sounded great. There was good communication between the players, the ensemble was taut, & they looked like they were having a great time. It even managed to feel intimate, as chamber music should. I ended up enjoying this unexpected treat more than the concert itself. The quartet seemed to like it too. We heard one of them give a victorious whoop once he was off-stage.

The concert itself belonged to the chorus. Indeed, for the short 1st half, MTT was standing in front of a nearly empty orchestra. The contrapuntal Geistliches Lied was an appropriate mood-setting curtain-raiser. The Four Songs for Women's Chorus, however, seemed not quite a good fit for the rest of the program. They are a bit frilly, & the music didn't seem to match the melancholy texts. The women's chorus is accompanied by 2 horns & a harp, all nicely played.

The Requiem had 2 excellent soloists. Laura Claycomb was steely voiced, & Goerne gave us his smooth, solid sound. Aside from a chance to hear the Requiem, he was the main reason I attended, even though I knew his contribution would be brief. Goerne was confident enough to use no music. There was some beautiful orchestral playing as well, especially from the woodwinds.

I sat in the side terrace, overlooking the orchestra. I'd never sat here before. The balance was sometimes odd, but it was fun to see the conductor from the orchestra's point of view. I felt like I was a behind the scenes. I was also close enough to wave to someone I recognized in the chorus.

From my vantage point, I caught the Mark Ruffalo lookalike violinist, though hidden behind the organ console, getting lost & bowing the wrong way in the final bars of Herr, lehre doc mich. He seems to be a chatty guy too.

Michael Chabon at Stacey's

At lunch time today local literary rock star Michael Chabon gave a reading at Stacey's Bookstore. I'd say there were about a hundred fans in attendance, half of us standing & jockeying for viewing spots. He read 2 selections from his new book of essays, Maps and Legends. He'll be happy to know that I found both his readings entertaining.

There's something very engaging about him as a person. He's funny & even a bit sweet. You feel like he would make a good friend. The first thing he said was, "I hope you all had lunch already!" Obviously he's done a million of these readings, so before taking questions, he preempted the most obvious ones by first giving us the "The Author's FAQ", stuff like:

• Status of the Kavalier & Clay movie: unplugged by the studio at the last minute.
  
• His process: he writes 5 days a week, 10am - 3pm & 10pm - midnight.
• Favorite authors: Poe, Raymond Chandler, Roth, John Cheever.
• Advice to young writers: live now, write later; read everything, even stuff you don't want to read, if only to prove your judgment correct.
• The movie version of Wonder Boys: liked it.

He described his own reading tastes as catholic, & indeed seems to read & enjoy everything from comic books to Proust. He gave a nice remembrance of the recently passed Oakley Hall, who was his teacher at Irvine. At the end of the Q & A session, a woman got a laugh when she commented, "I didn't realize you were so funny." She then got a bigger laugh by asking him if he had chosen his own shirt or his wife had picked it out for him. Chabon pulled at his shirt with white & pale pink stripes & admitted that he liked pink. He recounted how he had once gone out wearing a shirt that contained a pink stripe, & a woman came up to him & told him he was "brave." I don't think anyone could have scripted such an endearing way to end the event.

Matthias Goerne Recital

Saturday, May 17, 8:00 pm
Herbst Theatre
Matthias Goerne, baritone
Alexander Schmalcz, piano
SHOSTAKOVICH: Suite on Verses of Michelangelo, Op. 145 (Truth, Morning, Love, Separation, Anger, Dante, To the Exile, Creativity, Night, Death, Mortality)
WOLF: Michelangelo Lieder (Wohl denk' ich oft; Alles endent, was entstehet; Fuhlt meine Seele)
BRAHMS: Four Serious Songs, Op. 121

I was back at Herbst Theatre for this much-anticipated song recital. This time they didn't open the doors until 8:15, reportedly because they were still tuning the piano. I wonder if the late start in the morning had pushed everything back, like a late patient at the dentist's office causing a back-up for the whole day.

I'm not an aficionado of song recitals or even that knowledgeable, but Goerne is one performer who makes it easy to appreciate this rarefied art form. For me, his appeal starts with the beauty of his sound. I have some recordings of him, but there is something about that voice that does not come across in recordings. It flows out of him like it's a viscous material. & then there's the way he gets to the heart of the emotion so quickly. I feel like I barely need to refer to the texts to understand what's going on. As soon as he launched into the Wolf songs that began the 2nd half, I got so swept up in the music that it was impossible for me to be critical of the experience. I was discretely wiping away tears during the Brahm's song "Ich wandte mich".

Goerne gave his accompanist a big hug when he was done, & he had good reason to be so appreciative. Schmalcz was a truly supportive collaborator. He would set up the mood for each song efficiently, stay close to Goerne, then maintain the mood at the close, all without drawing particular attention to himself.

Our audience reaction was far too subdued, I thought. This was an exceptional evening, but the applause didn't last long enough for Goerne to give us an encore. Perhaps part of this is due to Goerne's austere stage presence. He simply walks out on stage & does his thing without attempting to be charming or wanting to win us over. He gives us the illusion that we are being moved solely by the music.

Mission Bazaar

Since I was in the neighborhood, after the previously reported concert, I walked to the other side of Market Street to check out the Mission Bazaar. Actually what I really wanted to do was get inside the Armory building The place is pretty run-down, in a romantic kind of way. The entry-way made me think of a 1950's high school. Some of doors still have the old signage on them, which is pretty cool. The fair was held in a huge indoor space like an airplane hangar that probably takes up half the building. It definitely has performance space possibilities.

I wasn't interested in any of the clothes or jewelry on sale, but I did have a nice chat with a woman involved in creating these beautiful crop-circle-like Playa Paintings with Andres Amador on Ocean Beach.

Alexander String Quartet & Robert Greenberg

Alexander String Quartet & Robert Greenberg
Saturday, May 17 10:00 AM
Herbst Theatre
Franz Schubert, String Quartet No. 14, “Death and the Maiden”
George Crumb, Black Angels (Images I) for electric string quartet

I think 10:00am is too early for audiences & musicians, & apparently it's too early for the venue as well. The doors to the auditorium didn't open until barely 5 minutes to 10:00, due to "technical difficulties". The stage was encumbered by microphone stands, extra chairs, a huge tangle of power cords, 2 gongs & a grand piano, most of this clearly for the Crumb piece. Already it made me think that what was state-of-the-art & avant-garde in 1970 now looks quaintly dated.

The format is for Greenberg & the quartet to come on stage together. Greenberg speaks for about 25 minutes before each piece. The quartet provides musical excerpts at appropriate moments. There was a grand piano on stage for the 1st half, just so Greenberg coudd play a few chords from the lieder version of Death & the Maiden. The entire concert lasted almost 2½ hours, including intermission, so it's perhaps a bit longer than a typical chamber recital.

For the Schubert, Greenberg provided a brief biographical sketch of the composer & related the quartet to the context of Schubert's long illness & death. For the Crumb, Greenberg pointed out the quartet's explicit connection to the Vietnam War, its long quotation from the Schubert quartet, & some of its unusual performance requirements.

The quartet's ensemble certainly feels like a conversation among equals. I liked the bite of the 1st violinist's playing. A quartet has to be pretty game for the Crumb piece, & one is kept busy just watching them. The are asked to hit gongs, bow on tuned glasses, play maracas & do left hand pizzicato at the same time, shout & play at the same time & even bow on the fingerboard on the "wrong" side of the fingering hand. This last effect is supposed to sound like a concert of viols. There's also selective amplification of the instruments. The quiet end of the piece left the audience uncertain it was safe to applaud until the 1st violinist closed his music.

This was definitely an older audience. I was in the middle of a row that had an elderly woman seated at each end. Since neither one of them seemed inclined to moved after the end of the performance, we were trapped for a considerable amount of time afterwards.

Greenberg himself is very much the image of the New York baby-boomer. He made a parallel between the Vietnam War era & today, & he got applause for expressing an election-time wish for a new administration based on truth & decency. As far as his musical commentary, I think I got just as much background from the printed program notes. I was glad to have a chance to hear the Crumb piece, though. It's wide-ranging in both its technique & emotional range, going from the strident & violent to the eerily beautiful.

Raj Patel at Stacey's

There was a sizable SRO crowd at lunch hour at Stacey's Bookstore today to hear Raj Patel. With the global food shortages recently in the news, his new book about the global food economy, Stuffed and Starved, has good timing. He's a terrific speaker, lively, funny, full of ideas, a little indecent & happily on the side of the working class. Plus he's good-looking & has a great English accent. He's got the kind of personality that can make communism seem sexy again.

I was laughing out loud at times. He compared the World Bank to John Cleese's patronizing & malicious Robinhood in The Time Bandits, performing his own rendition of this scene from the movie. He finds the Slow Food movement a bit too bourgeois, describing it as an "olive oil circle-jerk." He told us about bunny chow, a South African convenience food consisting of a loaf of white bread hollowed out & filled with Indian curry. He interprets this as a "miscegenated" food. He slammed fair trade goods for reducing democracy in this country to the conceit that we can make this a better world by shopping. He reminded us that in a democracy we own the political system.

Patel had me completely fired up to buy his book, only Stacey's hadn't anticipated such a big turn-out & actually ran out. If you get a chance, check him out.

P.S. (05.15.2008)
He's appearing at Cody's Books in Berkeley on Friday, May 16th at 7:00pm. You can see the man in action on CBC television here & here.

Transforming Art

Today I walked through the small exhibit at the Presidio Officers’ Club entitled Transforming Art Exhibition: The Art of Chris Hardman. The exhibit is presented by Antenna Theater. Mostly stuff with mirrors & wood & the modest use of optical illusions. It's nothing earth-shattering, but it's free & part of a visit to the building.

I knew that the Officer's Club building was old, but I didn't realize it dated to the 1st decades of the 19th century. I also learned that part of the motivation for building these garrisons in the 19th century was that the Russians also had colonies on the West Coast then (hence the name of Russian River). I had no idea there were Russian settlements here way back then. What were they doing? What happened to them?