The San Francisco Opera season came thudding to a close with a coarse, drab revival of one of my favorite operas, The Marriage of Figaro. I should point out that I saw the second cast (but if your marketing slogan is The Return of the Divas, shouldn’t there be fine print somewhere that says “except for Subscription Series G”?). I was sorry to miss Swenson as the Countess and particularly Relyea as Figaro, but usually I’m open to second casts; although I may not believe that a stranger is just a friend I haven’t met, I’m perfectly willing to believe that an alternate is a star just needing a break. In any event none of the singers particularly thrilled me, though all were good enough, even though the ensemble sounded off to me at several points.
And it wasn’t really the Opera’s fault that this was one of those evenings when I was surrounded by talkers (not whisperers – talkers). “Is that the Countess?” “Yes, that’s the Countess! There she is!” “And this is her first song?” “Yes! She’s singing it!” (dialogue not retouched for satirical purposes). Of course none of these observations, or any of the others I was treated to, could possibly wait until after the opera was over, possibly because it ended so late it would be difficult to remember that far back. Yes, after a brief lapse into reality which led the Opera to start Maid of Orleans (under three hours) at 7:30, they went back to presenting the almost-four-hour-long Marriage of Figaro at 8:00. I think that people who claim they can’t follow the garden shenanigans in Act IV are really just too tired by then to pay attention. (Does anyone else want to punch Cherubino in that scene, or at least send him for some “no means no” sensitivity training?) Even half an hour makes an enormous difference, but apparently the Opera feels that Mrs. Vanderbilt’s carriage can’t quite rumble up the walk before 8:00 and that anyone else who might be tired out from a week of work is probably an Irishman or some other sort of undesirable ethnic, who would be better off in a tavern or other low haunt, or at home beating his common-law wife and their thirteen grubby children.
You could certainly make an argument that Figaro is one of those operas that needs to be set in a very specific time and place (what with ordering the neighbor boy to join the military, let alone the whole “right of the first night” – another plot point that led to an extended discussion during the performance), though in that case it’s not clear to me why this production sets Act I not in a nice room conveniently located near the Count and Countess but instead in what is very obviously an open inner courtyard; it’s even less clear why all the characters have to behave in a way in which no human being has ever behaved outside of exhausted vaudeville sketches. Any moment of subterfuge (of which there are many) is accompanied by winks and grimaces and blinks that would tip off Helen Keller, but go completely unnoticed by the other party; all older women are rapacious man-eaters; stuttering is comedy gold; the mere sight of a chamber pot is not only comedy gold, but comedy gold covered with diamonds; any unwashed person (even better, an unwashed person who also has liquor on his breath – enter Antonio the gardener) causes everyone, even an aristocratic Spanish lady of a delicately melancholy disposition, to rear back in eye-rolling, hand-waving, gasping recoil. (This is the production, not the cast, and definitely not the opera; in fact I have to give credit to Twyla Robinson, who sang the Countess, for trying for some delicacy in portraying the attraction to Cherubino; when I saw this production a few years ago the woman singing the Countess gave a performance of unbelievable vulgarity, swooning and drooling over Cherubino in a way that rendered her protestations of innocence absurd and her forgiveness of the Count ridiculous and hypocritical. Yes, I know about La Mere Coupable, and I wish directors didn’t; that’s later in their lives, after she’s had to forgive more indiscretions and Cherubino has grown up some. In Marriage of Figaro he’s a boy who thinks he’s a man and she’s a woman who thinks he’s a cute boy – if she really took him seriously, she wouldn’t keep dressing him up like a girl; it’s a very delicately ironic relationship, which is why this heavy-handed production has to turn it into a Desperate Housewives moment that would presumably shock the “realism”-loving audience if they bothered to consider how old Cherubino actually is.)
Apparently many in the opera audience, not having been to any theatrical productions postdating the replacement of gaslights with electricity, eat this stuff up, but here’s what really bugs me about this production: if this had been announced as a vaudeville/Looney Tunes concept production there would have been predictable cries of outrage and further calls for the public execution of Pamela Rosenberg, but the only thing they would have had to change would be to brighten and simplify the sets, and maybe tone down some of the mugging. OK, Chuck Jones actually would have come up with better gags, but I stand by my point. Apparently there were sighs of relief at this “traditional” production; who was it who said tradition is just encrusted error?
About twenty years ago in Boston I saw Peter Sellar’s Marriage of Figaro, usually described as the “Trump Tower” production (the only one of his three da Ponte/Mozart operas that I saw on stage). The setting did create some incongruities (for instance, ordering the neighbor boy to join the military). And I disagreed with the decision to have the Count manhandle the Countess (to me his actions conveyed not aristocratic entitlement but bullying, and made him too unsympathetic), but it was a carefully thought-through decision, not one made for some spurious shock value, and although I disagreed with it I had to clarify in my mind why I disagreed and how I thought his behavior worked in the piece. In short, Sellars re-thought the relationships among the characters as if they were people with real emotions (I still think about his remark that Marzellina is obviously a lonely older woman looking for love and emotional connections, which is why she can switch so quickly from wanting to be Figaro’s wife and hating Susanna to being his mother and Susanna’s too), and that is why I remember the production so well after two decades.
(I had seen this production and this was my opinion before I heard of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s death, but I have to say, this is exactly the kind of – I was going to say dessicated shit, but instead I’ll say stale routine – that she would never, ever have appeared in.)
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28 July 2006
16 September 2009
you know you've been reading too much Greek tragedy when. . .
I had been re-reading some of the Grene/Lattimore translations of Greek tragedy, and I was just a couple of days in (seriously!) when someone came up to me with one of those "Figaro qua, Figaro la, Figaro su, Figaro giu" tasks that take up most of my hours, some silly thing that no one knows what to do with so they give it to me, and to which my usual response is (outwardly) a slight smile and "I'll take care of that for you," and inwardly, well, you probably don't need to know exactly what I usually think inwardly except that it involves a string of colorful cursewords but this time out of my lamenting-chorus-heavy mind like Athena from the head of Zeus sprang the thought, "Strange is the tale you tell me / And strange the terror that seizes my heart."
13 March 2006
All for Love
About a year ago I went up to Seattle to hear Florencia en el Amazonas. I had been up to Seattle twice before, both times for the Ring Cycle; this time I just went for the weekend, drawn by the casting of the redoubtable Nathan Gunn. I saw the first two performances. Nothing was on at the theaters that I wanted to see and it was too early for baseball, so then I came home. The opera (Florencia en el Amazonas by Daniel Catan, a contemporary Mexican composer) is sort of "inspired by" Marquez rather than "based on". Apparently he generally opposes putting his stories into other media (such as film or the stage) but he allowed them to borrow characters and situations as a starting point and the librettist is a pupil of his and was recommended by him (though since I saw Florencia I have heard an opera based directly on The Autumn of the Patriarch, so go figure -- maybe Marquez changed his mind; he's entitled to). The basic story is that a famous singer travels up the Amazon to sing at an opera house in her native place but also to find a butterfly hunter she had loved years before. It turns out he has died in the meantime but she realizes at the end that she is still singing to him and she mystically turns into a butterfly. This is right after a cholera epidemic is announced, so I think it's up to individual interpretation whether she lives and has had a spiritual moment, or dies and is reunited with her love, or even actually turns into a butterfly of the rare type he had been searching for. There's also a young couple (the captain's nephew and a woman writing a biography of the singer though she doesn't realize until late in the voyage that she has been traveling with the diva all along) who end up falling in love with each other and a quarrelsome middle-aged couple (to my amusement, the audience at both performances I heard clearly related best to them) that ends up rediscovering their love after he is swept overboard -- the wife realizes she did love him and the river returns him. And there's also a sailor, Riolobo, on board ship (Nathan Gunn), who functions as sort of a combination of Figaro (always arranging and commenting) and Ariel (a spirit connected to larger elements of Nature). He does get a kick-ass entry and exit during the storm that ends the first act, when he descends from the skies as a river god (dressed in a sort of Aztec loincloth and wings -- Gunn is very goodlooking and gets asked to strip a lot, something Pavarotti never had to do -- wow, I'm just trying to picture Luciano descending from the air -- that would be some harness -- talk about Supersize Me!), sings his aria, and then flies (literally) off stage. Pretty spectacular. But as beautiful and even moving as the work is, I can't help feeling the libretto has a major weakness: it's all about Love and how it affects the characters' lives, but Love is only presented as a positive force. The love affairs are happy, the quarrelsome get a second chance, even death can't divide lovers as they unite mystically. There's no one there who is destroyed or hurt or ignored by Love. This is where magical realism turns into wish fulfillment and becomes kind of a prettiness -- look! pink rain! and everyone's in love! The diva has a mystical reunion with her love, of whom she has only happy memories; the young lovers decide they will fall in love after all (as if they had a choice!); the quarrelsome middle-aged couple realizes in the face of death and separation that they really love each other -- and then death and separation are annihilated and they're reunited happily and magically. Everyone is happily united at the end except Riolobo, who's the best-looking guy anyway and also gets to be a river god. Where are the people destroyed by love? or even just ignored? What are probably my two favorite operas, Tristan and Nozze di Figaro, are both all about love also but it's very clear there's a price to pay. And you may feel it's worth paying, but you do pay. And even though characters like King Mark and Marzellina may enlarge their spirits by forgiving those in love who have betrayed or ignored them, it's clear Love hasn't given them what they wanted. So I couldn't help feeling that Florencia, beautiful and truly moving as it is, ends up avoiding the darker aspects of its subject. It's as if Das Rheingold ended just with the gods marching into Valhalla -- it would be beautiful and stirring, but when you also hear the cries of the Rhine Daughters and see Fasolt's dead body, it gives you a more complex view of the gods' triumph. But I would certainly be happy to hear Florencia again, which is not true of all other operas. The music is very attractive, but unfortunately it is the sort that gets described as "accessible," which is code for "no dissonance or other unseemly innovations will shock your 19th century ears." But I liked it anyway.
24 September 2019
fun stuff I may or may not get to: October 2019
Theatrical
Theater of Yugen starts the spooky season off early with Puppets & Poe: Devised Defiance, directed by Shannon R Davis, which combines several of Poe's poems and short stories using puppetry and traditional Japanese theater techniques; you can check it out from 3 October to 2 November.
Z Space presents its second annual Problematic Play Festival on 2 and 4 October, when you can hear readings of the new comedies Three Fat Sisters by Morgan Gould and Mediocre Heterosexual Sex by Madison Wetzell.
The Ubuntu Theater Project presents Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, directed by company Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran, from 4 to 27 October at the FLAX Building in Oakland (just a short walk from the 12th Street BART Station).
On 5 October the Douglas Morrisson Theatre in Hayward presents Brian Copeland's The Waiting Period: Laughter in the Darkness, a solo show about his struggles with depression and thoughts of suicide.
San Francisco Playhouse presents The Daughters, a look at the past 60 years of lesbian history in San Francisco, written by Patricia Cotter and directed by Jessica Holt, from 9 October to 2 November; performances will be at the Creativity Theater at Yerba Buena, as SF Playhouse's mainstage will be occupied by Clare Barron's Dance Nation until 9 November.
The African-American Shakespeare Company opens its season with Othello, directed by Carl Jordan and starring L Peter Callender, at the Marines' Memorial Theater from 12 to 27 October.
Shotgun Players presents Elevada, written by Sheila Callaghan and directed by Susannah Martin, from 17 October to 17 November.
JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the two-part sequel to her beloved series of novels, opens at the Curran Theater on 23 October.
Ray of Light celebrates Halloween with its fifth annual revival of Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror Show, this time with new sets, choreography, and direction (though as of this typing I don't see a director listed on the website), running 23 October through 2 November at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco.
ACT presents Kate Attwell's Test Match, a time-travel drama about cricket, directed by Pam MacKinnon, from 24 October to 8 December at the Strand Theater.
Operatic
Ars Minerva Artistic Director and mezzo-soprano Céline Ricci will be joined by mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich, soprano Aurélie Veruni, and harpsichordist Kelly Savage on 5 October at the 906 World Cultural Center (at 906 Broadway in San Francisco) for an evening of music and spoken texts exploring legendary and heroic women of the Mediterranean (women like Cleopatra, Dido, or Ottavia, and music by Monteverdi, Cavalli, Handel, Pietro-Andrea Ziani, and Giovanni Porta).
San Francisco Opera presents the Mozart / da Ponte Le Nozze di Figaro from 11 October to 1 November, and I am delighted that this is a new production, since I loathed the old one.
For some introductory thoughts on one of the fall season's upcoming productions, head to the Wagner Society of Northern California meeting at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on 19 October to hear Brad Wade on the topic What do Hansel and Gretel have to do with Siegmund and Sieglinde?
Choral
Cal Performances presents Trey McLaughlin & The Sounds of Zamar on 3 October at Zellerbach Hall.
Choir! Choir! Choir! comes to Freight & Salvage on 17 October, and you, the audience member, are the choir and will be taught/led in performance – this sounds like potentially a lot of fun for someone who isn't me.
The San Francisco Girls Chorus opens its season on 19 October at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, with conductor Valérie Sainte-Agathe and soprano and guest curator Nell Snaidas exploring Latin American baroque music and poetry, and in particular the celebrated Mexican nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Vocalists
Huun-Huur-Tu, a quartet of Tuvan throat singers, bring their ancient but ever-new music to Freight & Salvage on 1 October.
Soprano Renée Fleming with pianist Richard Bado returns to Zellerbach Hall on 5 October for a Cal Performances recital that will include works by Schubert, Hahn, Delibes, Liszt, Kevin Puts, Bernard Herrmann, Franz Lehár, André Previn, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and Adam Guettel.
Lieder Alive! presents tenor Pene Pati (recent, and universally praised, star of SF Opera's Roméo et Juliette) and pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg on 6 October in a program featuring Tosti and Strauss.
The SF Jazz Center presents Lila Downs and her celebration of the Día de los Muertos (with the participation of the Grandeza Mexicana Folk Ballet Company and the Mariachi Feminil-Flores Mexicanas) at the Paramount Theater in Oakland on 12 October.
Tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist-composer Brad Mehldau will perform Schumann's Dichterliebe and a new song cycle by Mehldau, The Folly of Desire, at the SF Jazz Center on 15 October.
Jazz singer Clairdee performs a program called The Thrill Is You on 19 October at the Rendon Hall/Fiddler Annex at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley.
On 20 October Old First Concerts presents mezzo-soprano Naama Liany with guitarist Robert Miller in Una Folía, a program about "wild passion and an impossible love" featuring music by Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Federico García Lorca, Joaquín Rodrigo, and Xavier Montsalvatge.
San Francisco Performances presents the eagerly awaited return of baritone Christian Gerhaher with pianist Gerold Huber in an all-Mahler program; that's 22 October at Herbst Theater.
Talking
SHN presents An Evening with Neil deGrasse Tyson on 14 October at Davies Hall; each ticket includes a copy of Tyson's new book, Letters from an Astrophysicist, redeemable at the talk.
Novelist Zadie Smith visits City Arts & Lectures on 16 October.
Orchestral
It's guest conductor month at the San Francisco Symphony: from 3 to 5 October, Marek Janowski conducts Hindemith's Concert Music for String Orchestra and Brass, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with soloist María Dueñas, and the Mozart 41, the Jupiter; from 17 to 19 October, Cristian Măcelaru leads Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (in the orchestration by Ravel), and the world premiere of SFS commission Losing Earth by Adam Schoenberg, featuring percussionist Jacob Nissly; and from 24 to 26 October Karina Canellakis conducts the Prokofiev Piano Concerto 1 with soloist Alexander Gavrylyuk and the Shostakovich 7, Leningrad.
Edwin Outwater leads the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra in Linda Catlin Smith's Wilderness, the Shostakovich 5, and Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (with piano soloist Jung-eun Kim) on 18 October.
Oakland Symphony Music Director Michael Morgan opens the season at the Paramount Theater on 18 October with a program titled Hot as Hell / Cool Jazz; the infernal heat in the first half is supplied by the Prologue to Boito's Mefistofele, featuring bass-baritone Cody Quattlebaum, the Oakland Symphony Chorus led by Lynne Morrow, and the Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir led by Eric Tuan; the cool jazz comes after intermission courtesy of an imposing selection of music new and old from trumpeter Josiah Woodson and pianist/composer Taylor Eigsti.
At the Berkeley Symphony, new music director Joseph Young opens the season at Zellerbach Hall on 24 October with the late Olly Wilson's Shango Memory (Shango is the Yoruban deity of thunder and lightning), the Ravel Piano Concerto in G Major with soloist Conrad Tao, and the Beethoven 5.
The San Francisco Chamber Orchestra will play Emilie Mayer's Faust Overture, along with a lecture-performance of the Beethoven 5, on 25 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 26 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, and 27 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.
Chamber
OcTUBAfest comes to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 6 October; the program is free (no reservations required).
Old First Concerts presents The Ives Collective on 13 October, playing works by Zoltán Kodály, Erich Korngold, and Peteris Vasks.
The San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, led by concertmaster Robin Sharp, plays piano quartets by Mozart and Fauré at Freight & Salvage on 14 October.
San Francisco Performances presents the Z.E.N. Trio playing Schubert, Brahms, and Shostakovich at Herbst Theater on 18 October (the Trio's name refers not only to the Japanese concept of Zen but to the players's names: pianist Zhang Zuo, violinist Esther Yoo, and cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan).
Starting 19 October and continuing for six other Saturday mornings into May, San Francisco Performances presents the Alexander String Quartet and musicologist Robert Greenberg in a lecture / performance series exploring the Beethoven string quartets.
San Francisco Performances presents the Calidore String Quartet, playing works by Haydn, Caroline Shaw, and Beethoven, at Herbst Theater on 21 October.
The San Francisco Symphony Chamber Players perform works by Bach and Schubert at the Legion of Honor's Gunn Theater on 20 October (matinee).
The Telegraph Quartet will performs works by Haydn, Berg, and Britten on 23 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; admission is free but reservations are recommended.
Strings & Keyboards
The SF Jazz Center presents pianist Kenny Barron, joined by pianist Benny Green and guitarist Miles Okazaki, celebrating Thelonius Monk at Herbst Theater on 10 October, which would have been the jazz legend's 102nd birthday.
Jonathan Biss continues his series of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas for Cal Performances at Hertz Hall on 12 and 13 October.
San Francisco Performances presents guitarist Manuel Barrueco at Herbst Theater on 13 October, playing works by Luis de Narváez, Héctor Angulo, Ignacio Cervantes, Julián Orbón, Enrique Granados, Isaac Albéniz, and Francisco Tárrega.
Pianist Neil Rutman visits Old First Concerts on 18 October to play music by Orlando Gibbons, Chopin, Lou Harrison, Frederic Rzewski, Fauré, and Ravel.
Organist Paul Jacobs gives a solo recital of Bach, Mozart, Ives, and Vierne on 20 October at Davies Hall (presented by the San Francisco Symphony).
Pianist Lang Lang returns to Davies Hall on 21 October (one night only), when he will join the San Francisco Symphony led by Ion Marin in the Beethoven Piano Concerto 2; also on the program are Glinka's Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila and the Tchaikovsky 4.
Pianist Martin Katz, one of the celebrated accompanists of our time, will offer a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 25 October; admission is free but reservations are recommended.
Under the auspices of San Francisco Performances, guitarist Jason Vieaux will play works by Scarlatti, Giuliani, Bach, Frank Martin, Barrios, Jobin, Ellington, and José Luis Merlín at Herbst Theater on 26 October.
I don't usually list "galas" but it looks as if there's an actual concert attached to this one, so here goes: San Francisco Performances presents pianist Richard Goode playing Janáček, Chopin, and Debussy at Herbst Theater on 29 October.
Early / Baroque Music
Paul Flight leads the California Bach Society in its season opener, Bach's Magnificat and Zelenka's Missa Divi Xaverii, on 4 October at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, 5 October at All Saints' Episcopal in Palo Alto, and 6 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music celebrates the 400th birthday of Barbara Strozzi with a concert of her vocal music on 26 October; the concert is free but reservations are recommended.
Modern / Contemporary Music
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble opens its season with Changing and Unchanging Things, a concert exploring the intersection between Japanese and western art music (the title comes from the Asian Art Museum's upcoming exhibit about Noguchi and Hasegawa, two visual artists who also played in that liminal field). You can hear the world premiere of Karen Tanaka's chamber piece Wind Whisperer, Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola, and harp, Dai Fujikura's Neo, and the world premiere of Hiroya Miura's Sharaku Unframed, a "micro opera" about the 18th century woodblock artist, on 5 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and 6 October at the Berkeley Hillside Club.
InterMusic SF presents the 12th Annual San Francisco Music Day on 6 October, from noon to 7:30, when you can wander among 32 different ensembles performing in the four performance spaces of the Veterans Building (adjacent to the Opera House, and the four spaces are: Herbst Theater, the Green Room, the Atrium Theater, and the Education Studio).
Ensemble for These Times performs Dracula Rising: Ghosts of Hollywood Past on 12 October at the Berkeley Piano Club; the program consists of chamber works and movie arrangements by Polish refugee composers of the 1930s and 1940s as well as Korngold and Castelnuove-Tedesco as well as contemporary works by David Garner, Lennie Moore, and Polish film composer Wojciech Kilar.
Pianist Sarah Cahill will be joined by Gamelan Sari Raras in a performance of the late great Lou Harrison's Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan on 13 October at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive; there are two performances, at 5:30 and 7:30; Gamelan Sari Raras will also perform traditional Javanese music (the performance will be repeated on 8 November at Hertz Hall, when the Javanese music performed by the ensemble will be modern rather than traditional).
Nicolas McGegan's farewell season at the head of Philharmonia Baroque kicks off with a world premiere by Caroline Shaw, The Listeners, a reflection on Carl Sagan's "Golden Record" and humanity's general interest in recording itself for what looks like an increasingly unlikely posterity; also on the program are Handel's Eternal Source of Light Divine and his Suite from Terpsichore; in addition to the orchestra and the chorus led by Bruce Lamott, the soloists are soprano Arwen Myers, contralto Avery Amereau, countertenor Reginald Mobley, and bass-baritone Dashon Burton, and you can hear it all on 17 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 18 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, and 19 and 20 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.
Bard Music West explores the world of Polish modernist Grażyna Bacewicz in three concerts over over two days (18 - 19 October) at Noe Valley Ministry.
Old First Concerts presents Orphic Percussion, in a program that includes four world premieres, on 25 October.
The Wooden Fish Ensemble celebrates the music (and birthday) of Hyo-Shin Na at Old First Concerts on 27 October with a concert that includes four world premieres.
Don't forget to check the constantly updated calendar for the Center for New Music; here are some things that strike me for this month in the current listings: Fay Victor and Myra Melford with a free-flowing words and music evening on 3 October; Burton Greene playing solo piano as well as the Dunkelman/Ackley/Fluke-Mogul Trio on 4 October: Slow Wave: New Music for Viola, Clarinet, and Piano on 5 October; the Friction Quartet with bass clarinetist Bruce Belton playing the Bay Area premieres of new quintets by Marc Mellits, Sebastián Tozzola, and Michael Torke on 17 October; Jesse Perlstein and Shinya Sugimoto along with Glenda Bates and Oboetronics on 25 October; and Neil Rolnick's Journey's End, a work for computer and piano inspired by his late wife's struggle with cancer, performed by Kathleen Supové, on 26 October.
Jazz &c
Madeleine Peyroux sings at Freight & Salvage on 3 October.
The Seventh Annual San Francisco International Boogie-Woogie Festival will take place at the SF Jazz Center on 20 October.
The SF Jazz Center presents the flamenco sounds of the Paco de Lucía Project on 23 October at Herbst Theater.
BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet will regale you with Cajun music at Freight & Salvage on 24 October.
The Vijay Iyer Trio plays the SF Jazz Center on 26 October.
The Myra Melford Platform at Cal Performances presents the David Virelles Trio featuring Marcus Gilmore and Rashaan Carter, and Spider Web, a piece by Nicole Mitchell and Josh Kun involving spoken word, electronics, musical instruments, and movement, at Hertz Hall on 27 October.
The UC-Berkeley Jazz Ensembles will hold their fall concert at Freight & Salvage on 29 October.
Visual Arts
Starting on 2 October and running until 2 February at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, you can see the first US exhibit focusing on Sakaki Hyakusen, the founder of the Nanga school of Japanese painting. By the way, if you haven't been to BAM/PFA lately, check them out! Located an easy block or two from the downtown Berkeley BART station, they offer more consistently interesting and surprising exhibits than any other museum I know of in this area.
The Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley hosts Object Lessons, an exhibit featuring Egyptian artifacts ancient and modern, including items from the Tebtunis Papyri Collection, from 11 October to May 2020.
James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, a rare look at the late-nineteenth-century painter (born in France but also active in England) opens at the Legion of Honor on 12 October and runs until 9 February 2020
There are a couple of interesting exhibits opening this month at the Oakland Museum: ¡El Movimiento Vivo! Chicano Roots of El Día de los Muertos, exploring the activist roots of the local celebration of El Día de los Muertos, opens on 16 October; and No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man, which is self-explanatory, opens on 12 October.
Dance
Tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd and pianist Jason Moran create their second commissioned score for a world premiere at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, which will also feature a light installation designed by Jim Campell, and that runs at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 1 to 6 October.
ODC/Dance and Volti revive KT Nelson's Path of Miracles, their very popular dance version of Joby Talbot's score, at the newly renovated Presidio Theater on 11 October (be aware that the theater is difficult to access without a car).
Renowned butoh troupe Sankai Juku visits Zellerbach Hall for Cal Performances on 12 and 13 October with Meguri: Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land, a work directed, choreographed, and designed
by Ushio Amagatsu.
Cal Performances presents dance troupe Hālau O Kekuhi performing traditional Hawaiian dances in honor of Pele, goddess of fire and volcanoes, at Zellerbach Hall on 20 October.
Dance/movement group MOMIX returns to Cal Performances and Zellerbach Hall on 26 - 27 October, with a sampler of movements from some of their more popular shows.
Cal Performances kicks it up old school with the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra (under artistic director Valery Gergiev) in La Bayadère at Zellerbach Hall from 30 October to 3 November.
Cinematic
The Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive launches some interesting film series this month:
David Thomson puts four films of the British New Wave into their cultural context, and that runs from 2 to 23 October; the Mill Valley Film Festival camps out in Berkeley, with various films scheduled from 5 to 12 October (of particular interest is Varda by Agnès on 12 October, in which the late filmmaker reviews her career); and the opportunity, beginning 3 October and scheduled through 16 November, to see new restorations of works starring or directed by Zheng Junli, dating from the early 1930s to the Cultural Revolution.
The SF Jazz Center presents Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi on 10 October, accompanied by GoGo Penguin in a live performance of their own original score.
On October 19 at the newly renovated Presidio Theater in San Francisco you can see the Silent Film Festival's latest restoration, Jane's Declaration of Independence, a 1915 two-reeler (that's about 30 to 40 minutes) that is the earliest surviving theatrical release actually filmed at the Presidio.
Face of a Stranger, a restored feature from 1977 by filmmaker and musician David Michalak inspired by German Expressionism and the silent films of the 1920s, plays at the Center for New Music in San Francisco on 23 October with a newly recorded score by Thollem McDonas; the showing is preceded by a short set from Bruce Ackley.
The SF Jazz Center celebrates Halloween with a special showing at Grace Cathedral of the 1920 John Barrymore Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, accompanied by organist Dorothy Papadakos. Let the holidays begin!
Theater of Yugen starts the spooky season off early with Puppets & Poe: Devised Defiance, directed by Shannon R Davis, which combines several of Poe's poems and short stories using puppetry and traditional Japanese theater techniques; you can check it out from 3 October to 2 November.
Z Space presents its second annual Problematic Play Festival on 2 and 4 October, when you can hear readings of the new comedies Three Fat Sisters by Morgan Gould and Mediocre Heterosexual Sex by Madison Wetzell.
The Ubuntu Theater Project presents Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, directed by company Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran, from 4 to 27 October at the FLAX Building in Oakland (just a short walk from the 12th Street BART Station).
On 5 October the Douglas Morrisson Theatre in Hayward presents Brian Copeland's The Waiting Period: Laughter in the Darkness, a solo show about his struggles with depression and thoughts of suicide.
San Francisco Playhouse presents The Daughters, a look at the past 60 years of lesbian history in San Francisco, written by Patricia Cotter and directed by Jessica Holt, from 9 October to 2 November; performances will be at the Creativity Theater at Yerba Buena, as SF Playhouse's mainstage will be occupied by Clare Barron's Dance Nation until 9 November.
The African-American Shakespeare Company opens its season with Othello, directed by Carl Jordan and starring L Peter Callender, at the Marines' Memorial Theater from 12 to 27 October.
Shotgun Players presents Elevada, written by Sheila Callaghan and directed by Susannah Martin, from 17 October to 17 November.
JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the two-part sequel to her beloved series of novels, opens at the Curran Theater on 23 October.
Ray of Light celebrates Halloween with its fifth annual revival of Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror Show, this time with new sets, choreography, and direction (though as of this typing I don't see a director listed on the website), running 23 October through 2 November at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco.
ACT presents Kate Attwell's Test Match, a time-travel drama about cricket, directed by Pam MacKinnon, from 24 October to 8 December at the Strand Theater.
Operatic
Ars Minerva Artistic Director and mezzo-soprano Céline Ricci will be joined by mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich, soprano Aurélie Veruni, and harpsichordist Kelly Savage on 5 October at the 906 World Cultural Center (at 906 Broadway in San Francisco) for an evening of music and spoken texts exploring legendary and heroic women of the Mediterranean (women like Cleopatra, Dido, or Ottavia, and music by Monteverdi, Cavalli, Handel, Pietro-Andrea Ziani, and Giovanni Porta).
San Francisco Opera presents the Mozart / da Ponte Le Nozze di Figaro from 11 October to 1 November, and I am delighted that this is a new production, since I loathed the old one.
For some introductory thoughts on one of the fall season's upcoming productions, head to the Wagner Society of Northern California meeting at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on 19 October to hear Brad Wade on the topic What do Hansel and Gretel have to do with Siegmund and Sieglinde?
Choral
Cal Performances presents Trey McLaughlin & The Sounds of Zamar on 3 October at Zellerbach Hall.
Choir! Choir! Choir! comes to Freight & Salvage on 17 October, and you, the audience member, are the choir and will be taught/led in performance – this sounds like potentially a lot of fun for someone who isn't me.
The San Francisco Girls Chorus opens its season on 19 October at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, with conductor Valérie Sainte-Agathe and soprano and guest curator Nell Snaidas exploring Latin American baroque music and poetry, and in particular the celebrated Mexican nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Vocalists
Huun-Huur-Tu, a quartet of Tuvan throat singers, bring their ancient but ever-new music to Freight & Salvage on 1 October.
Soprano Renée Fleming with pianist Richard Bado returns to Zellerbach Hall on 5 October for a Cal Performances recital that will include works by Schubert, Hahn, Delibes, Liszt, Kevin Puts, Bernard Herrmann, Franz Lehár, André Previn, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and Adam Guettel.
Lieder Alive! presents tenor Pene Pati (recent, and universally praised, star of SF Opera's Roméo et Juliette) and pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg on 6 October in a program featuring Tosti and Strauss.
The SF Jazz Center presents Lila Downs and her celebration of the Día de los Muertos (with the participation of the Grandeza Mexicana Folk Ballet Company and the Mariachi Feminil-Flores Mexicanas) at the Paramount Theater in Oakland on 12 October.
Tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist-composer Brad Mehldau will perform Schumann's Dichterliebe and a new song cycle by Mehldau, The Folly of Desire, at the SF Jazz Center on 15 October.
Jazz singer Clairdee performs a program called The Thrill Is You on 19 October at the Rendon Hall/Fiddler Annex at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley.
On 20 October Old First Concerts presents mezzo-soprano Naama Liany with guitarist Robert Miller in Una Folía, a program about "wild passion and an impossible love" featuring music by Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Federico García Lorca, Joaquín Rodrigo, and Xavier Montsalvatge.
San Francisco Performances presents the eagerly awaited return of baritone Christian Gerhaher with pianist Gerold Huber in an all-Mahler program; that's 22 October at Herbst Theater.
Talking
SHN presents An Evening with Neil deGrasse Tyson on 14 October at Davies Hall; each ticket includes a copy of Tyson's new book, Letters from an Astrophysicist, redeemable at the talk.
Novelist Zadie Smith visits City Arts & Lectures on 16 October.
Orchestral
It's guest conductor month at the San Francisco Symphony: from 3 to 5 October, Marek Janowski conducts Hindemith's Concert Music for String Orchestra and Brass, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with soloist María Dueñas, and the Mozart 41, the Jupiter; from 17 to 19 October, Cristian Măcelaru leads Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (in the orchestration by Ravel), and the world premiere of SFS commission Losing Earth by Adam Schoenberg, featuring percussionist Jacob Nissly; and from 24 to 26 October Karina Canellakis conducts the Prokofiev Piano Concerto 1 with soloist Alexander Gavrylyuk and the Shostakovich 7, Leningrad.
Edwin Outwater leads the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra in Linda Catlin Smith's Wilderness, the Shostakovich 5, and Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (with piano soloist Jung-eun Kim) on 18 October.
Oakland Symphony Music Director Michael Morgan opens the season at the Paramount Theater on 18 October with a program titled Hot as Hell / Cool Jazz; the infernal heat in the first half is supplied by the Prologue to Boito's Mefistofele, featuring bass-baritone Cody Quattlebaum, the Oakland Symphony Chorus led by Lynne Morrow, and the Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir led by Eric Tuan; the cool jazz comes after intermission courtesy of an imposing selection of music new and old from trumpeter Josiah Woodson and pianist/composer Taylor Eigsti.
At the Berkeley Symphony, new music director Joseph Young opens the season at Zellerbach Hall on 24 October with the late Olly Wilson's Shango Memory (Shango is the Yoruban deity of thunder and lightning), the Ravel Piano Concerto in G Major with soloist Conrad Tao, and the Beethoven 5.
The San Francisco Chamber Orchestra will play Emilie Mayer's Faust Overture, along with a lecture-performance of the Beethoven 5, on 25 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 26 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, and 27 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.
Chamber
OcTUBAfest comes to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 6 October; the program is free (no reservations required).
Old First Concerts presents The Ives Collective on 13 October, playing works by Zoltán Kodály, Erich Korngold, and Peteris Vasks.
The San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, led by concertmaster Robin Sharp, plays piano quartets by Mozart and Fauré at Freight & Salvage on 14 October.
San Francisco Performances presents the Z.E.N. Trio playing Schubert, Brahms, and Shostakovich at Herbst Theater on 18 October (the Trio's name refers not only to the Japanese concept of Zen but to the players's names: pianist Zhang Zuo, violinist Esther Yoo, and cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan).
Starting 19 October and continuing for six other Saturday mornings into May, San Francisco Performances presents the Alexander String Quartet and musicologist Robert Greenberg in a lecture / performance series exploring the Beethoven string quartets.
San Francisco Performances presents the Calidore String Quartet, playing works by Haydn, Caroline Shaw, and Beethoven, at Herbst Theater on 21 October.
The San Francisco Symphony Chamber Players perform works by Bach and Schubert at the Legion of Honor's Gunn Theater on 20 October (matinee).
The Telegraph Quartet will performs works by Haydn, Berg, and Britten on 23 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; admission is free but reservations are recommended.
Strings & Keyboards
The SF Jazz Center presents pianist Kenny Barron, joined by pianist Benny Green and guitarist Miles Okazaki, celebrating Thelonius Monk at Herbst Theater on 10 October, which would have been the jazz legend's 102nd birthday.
Jonathan Biss continues his series of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas for Cal Performances at Hertz Hall on 12 and 13 October.
San Francisco Performances presents guitarist Manuel Barrueco at Herbst Theater on 13 October, playing works by Luis de Narváez, Héctor Angulo, Ignacio Cervantes, Julián Orbón, Enrique Granados, Isaac Albéniz, and Francisco Tárrega.
Pianist Neil Rutman visits Old First Concerts on 18 October to play music by Orlando Gibbons, Chopin, Lou Harrison, Frederic Rzewski, Fauré, and Ravel.
Organist Paul Jacobs gives a solo recital of Bach, Mozart, Ives, and Vierne on 20 October at Davies Hall (presented by the San Francisco Symphony).
Pianist Lang Lang returns to Davies Hall on 21 October (one night only), when he will join the San Francisco Symphony led by Ion Marin in the Beethoven Piano Concerto 2; also on the program are Glinka's Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila and the Tchaikovsky 4.
Pianist Martin Katz, one of the celebrated accompanists of our time, will offer a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 25 October; admission is free but reservations are recommended.
Under the auspices of San Francisco Performances, guitarist Jason Vieaux will play works by Scarlatti, Giuliani, Bach, Frank Martin, Barrios, Jobin, Ellington, and José Luis Merlín at Herbst Theater on 26 October.
I don't usually list "galas" but it looks as if there's an actual concert attached to this one, so here goes: San Francisco Performances presents pianist Richard Goode playing Janáček, Chopin, and Debussy at Herbst Theater on 29 October.
Early / Baroque Music
Paul Flight leads the California Bach Society in its season opener, Bach's Magnificat and Zelenka's Missa Divi Xaverii, on 4 October at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, 5 October at All Saints' Episcopal in Palo Alto, and 6 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music celebrates the 400th birthday of Barbara Strozzi with a concert of her vocal music on 26 October; the concert is free but reservations are recommended.
Modern / Contemporary Music
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble opens its season with Changing and Unchanging Things, a concert exploring the intersection between Japanese and western art music (the title comes from the Asian Art Museum's upcoming exhibit about Noguchi and Hasegawa, two visual artists who also played in that liminal field). You can hear the world premiere of Karen Tanaka's chamber piece Wind Whisperer, Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola, and harp, Dai Fujikura's Neo, and the world premiere of Hiroya Miura's Sharaku Unframed, a "micro opera" about the 18th century woodblock artist, on 5 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and 6 October at the Berkeley Hillside Club.
InterMusic SF presents the 12th Annual San Francisco Music Day on 6 October, from noon to 7:30, when you can wander among 32 different ensembles performing in the four performance spaces of the Veterans Building (adjacent to the Opera House, and the four spaces are: Herbst Theater, the Green Room, the Atrium Theater, and the Education Studio).
Ensemble for These Times performs Dracula Rising: Ghosts of Hollywood Past on 12 October at the Berkeley Piano Club; the program consists of chamber works and movie arrangements by Polish refugee composers of the 1930s and 1940s as well as Korngold and Castelnuove-Tedesco as well as contemporary works by David Garner, Lennie Moore, and Polish film composer Wojciech Kilar.
Pianist Sarah Cahill will be joined by Gamelan Sari Raras in a performance of the late great Lou Harrison's Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan on 13 October at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive; there are two performances, at 5:30 and 7:30; Gamelan Sari Raras will also perform traditional Javanese music (the performance will be repeated on 8 November at Hertz Hall, when the Javanese music performed by the ensemble will be modern rather than traditional).
Nicolas McGegan's farewell season at the head of Philharmonia Baroque kicks off with a world premiere by Caroline Shaw, The Listeners, a reflection on Carl Sagan's "Golden Record" and humanity's general interest in recording itself for what looks like an increasingly unlikely posterity; also on the program are Handel's Eternal Source of Light Divine and his Suite from Terpsichore; in addition to the orchestra and the chorus led by Bruce Lamott, the soloists are soprano Arwen Myers, contralto Avery Amereau, countertenor Reginald Mobley, and bass-baritone Dashon Burton, and you can hear it all on 17 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 18 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, and 19 and 20 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.
Bard Music West explores the world of Polish modernist Grażyna Bacewicz in three concerts over over two days (18 - 19 October) at Noe Valley Ministry.
Old First Concerts presents Orphic Percussion, in a program that includes four world premieres, on 25 October.
The Wooden Fish Ensemble celebrates the music (and birthday) of Hyo-Shin Na at Old First Concerts on 27 October with a concert that includes four world premieres.
Don't forget to check the constantly updated calendar for the Center for New Music; here are some things that strike me for this month in the current listings: Fay Victor and Myra Melford with a free-flowing words and music evening on 3 October; Burton Greene playing solo piano as well as the Dunkelman/Ackley/Fluke-Mogul Trio on 4 October: Slow Wave: New Music for Viola, Clarinet, and Piano on 5 October; the Friction Quartet with bass clarinetist Bruce Belton playing the Bay Area premieres of new quintets by Marc Mellits, Sebastián Tozzola, and Michael Torke on 17 October; Jesse Perlstein and Shinya Sugimoto along with Glenda Bates and Oboetronics on 25 October; and Neil Rolnick's Journey's End, a work for computer and piano inspired by his late wife's struggle with cancer, performed by Kathleen Supové, on 26 October.
Jazz &c
Madeleine Peyroux sings at Freight & Salvage on 3 October.
The Seventh Annual San Francisco International Boogie-Woogie Festival will take place at the SF Jazz Center on 20 October.
The SF Jazz Center presents the flamenco sounds of the Paco de Lucía Project on 23 October at Herbst Theater.
BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet will regale you with Cajun music at Freight & Salvage on 24 October.
The Vijay Iyer Trio plays the SF Jazz Center on 26 October.
The Myra Melford Platform at Cal Performances presents the David Virelles Trio featuring Marcus Gilmore and Rashaan Carter, and Spider Web, a piece by Nicole Mitchell and Josh Kun involving spoken word, electronics, musical instruments, and movement, at Hertz Hall on 27 October.
The UC-Berkeley Jazz Ensembles will hold their fall concert at Freight & Salvage on 29 October.
Visual Arts
Starting on 2 October and running until 2 February at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, you can see the first US exhibit focusing on Sakaki Hyakusen, the founder of the Nanga school of Japanese painting. By the way, if you haven't been to BAM/PFA lately, check them out! Located an easy block or two from the downtown Berkeley BART station, they offer more consistently interesting and surprising exhibits than any other museum I know of in this area.
The Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley hosts Object Lessons, an exhibit featuring Egyptian artifacts ancient and modern, including items from the Tebtunis Papyri Collection, from 11 October to May 2020.
James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, a rare look at the late-nineteenth-century painter (born in France but also active in England) opens at the Legion of Honor on 12 October and runs until 9 February 2020
There are a couple of interesting exhibits opening this month at the Oakland Museum: ¡El Movimiento Vivo! Chicano Roots of El Día de los Muertos, exploring the activist roots of the local celebration of El Día de los Muertos, opens on 16 October; and No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man, which is self-explanatory, opens on 12 October.
Dance
Tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd and pianist Jason Moran create their second commissioned score for a world premiere at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, which will also feature a light installation designed by Jim Campell, and that runs at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 1 to 6 October.
ODC/Dance and Volti revive KT Nelson's Path of Miracles, their very popular dance version of Joby Talbot's score, at the newly renovated Presidio Theater on 11 October (be aware that the theater is difficult to access without a car).
Renowned butoh troupe Sankai Juku visits Zellerbach Hall for Cal Performances on 12 and 13 October with Meguri: Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land, a work directed, choreographed, and designed
by Ushio Amagatsu.
Cal Performances presents dance troupe Hālau O Kekuhi performing traditional Hawaiian dances in honor of Pele, goddess of fire and volcanoes, at Zellerbach Hall on 20 October.
Dance/movement group MOMIX returns to Cal Performances and Zellerbach Hall on 26 - 27 October, with a sampler of movements from some of their more popular shows.
Cal Performances kicks it up old school with the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra (under artistic director Valery Gergiev) in La Bayadère at Zellerbach Hall from 30 October to 3 November.
Cinematic
The Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive launches some interesting film series this month:
David Thomson puts four films of the British New Wave into their cultural context, and that runs from 2 to 23 October; the Mill Valley Film Festival camps out in Berkeley, with various films scheduled from 5 to 12 October (of particular interest is Varda by Agnès on 12 October, in which the late filmmaker reviews her career); and the opportunity, beginning 3 October and scheduled through 16 November, to see new restorations of works starring or directed by Zheng Junli, dating from the early 1930s to the Cultural Revolution.
The SF Jazz Center presents Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi on 10 October, accompanied by GoGo Penguin in a live performance of their own original score.
On October 19 at the newly renovated Presidio Theater in San Francisco you can see the Silent Film Festival's latest restoration, Jane's Declaration of Independence, a 1915 two-reeler (that's about 30 to 40 minutes) that is the earliest surviving theatrical release actually filmed at the Presidio.
Face of a Stranger, a restored feature from 1977 by filmmaker and musician David Michalak inspired by German Expressionism and the silent films of the 1920s, plays at the Center for New Music in San Francisco on 23 October with a newly recorded score by Thollem McDonas; the showing is preceded by a short set from Bruce Ackley.
The SF Jazz Center celebrates Halloween with a special showing at Grace Cathedral of the 1920 John Barrymore Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, accompanied by organist Dorothy Papadakos. Let the holidays begin!
22 December 2007
confusion now hath made his masterpiece
Back to David Poutney’s Macbeth, and I’ll start off by saying something nice. I really liked the sickly radioactive-green slime in place of blood. It’s startling, it’s unearthly, it’s viscerally disgusting in a way that stage blood usually isn’t. (And there’s Shakespearean precedent for using the blood’s color as a metaphor: “his [Duncan’s] silver skin laced with his golden blood”.) The green is unfortunately less effective when shining on the typewriter after Banquo’s murder (see my previous entry). Green slime works as blood, but the color itself has too many positive and soothing connotations to be effective as a general symbol of death and horror.
Red was reserved for the witches. You’d think this would be effective, but it’s not. The witches in the Washington National Opera production (directed by Paolo Micciche) I saw last spring were also color-coordinated; they were all in white, and, like these red witches, some of them carried hula hoops. The white gave them an unearthly apparitional look, and they reminded me of Goya’s Caprichos. The red chorus, I’m sorry to say, kept reminding me of the ladies of the Red Hat Society, who are frightening in a very different way. I did like the one who kept turning the crank on her manual eggbeater, thereby adding an eerie touch to the orchestration, one that Verdi had sadly neglected. It reminded me of hearing Henze’s Fifth Symphony many years ago; as I was reading down the list of instruments, I came upon "bullwhip". I think it got cracking in the third movement. One witch in particular, wearing a going-to-church-extravagant red chapeau and strolling around with a red walking stick, made me think, The Red Brigade of Women present . . . Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience! You see how the mind wanders when the staging is ineffective. The sisters were indeed weird, but they were weird in the same way as the rest of the staging. It’s important that they be strange in a different way. Otherwise they seem like more of the same rather than an eruption from either another world or the subconscious.
I will mildly disagree with those who were horrified that the Opera bought this production, meaning we’re going to have to see it again. I thought the sets were OK. It’s what happens on and around them that is a mess, and that can be changed. There’s the big box with one or two glass sides that gets moved around and represents various things, from Macbeth’s castle to his isolation, and it’s set under a curved dome with a big cracked hole in it. It’s banal to put it into words – see, the natural order has been damaged! – but visually it’s quite effective, though perhaps not enough so to last for the entire opera.
Just about every scene cries out for change. Let me use the sleepwalking scene as an example. Jeremy Galyon, valiantly playing the doctor, is led in blindfolded by Elza van den Heever’s admirably committed Lady-in-Waiting. I assume the blindfold is because Lady Macbeth is sequestered and he’s not supposed to know where she is. But she’s not supposed to be that gaga. They have her already acting crazy by the banquet scene, so her attempts to force Macbeth to behave normally when he sees Banquo’s ghost no longer make any sense. The Macbeths present a façade of normal kingship that hides an increasingly sinister world of fear and surveillance, an effect that is completely lost when you turn Lady Macbeth into the madwoman in the attic. So she does her handwashing thing and the doctor takes notes. The only reason the doctor should be taking notes in this scene is so that he can be shown stopping his note-taking when he realizes what exactly is making Lady Macbeth feel so guilty. In this production, it’s probably needless to say, he writes the whole time, which makes even less sense than you might think because the Lady-in-waiting angrily snatches the paper from him when he finishes and either tears it or hides it away in her pocket (I forget which and it probably doesn't really matter). Maybe it’s meant to be a prescription, because she then produces a huge hypodermic needle, and the two of them run off stage, presumably to give Lady Macbeth the injection that causes her death. It’s hard to tell because they aren’t shown actually doing anything with the needle. But the death of Lady Macbeth is rumored to be at her own hand – again, under the façade of a normal, natural occurrence, bloodthirsty ambition causes its own destruction, a point that is lost completely if she dies through a lethal injection given by her servants.
I know lots of people found Hampson’s Macbeth riveting. I thought he initially was disengaged and not nuanced enough, which surprised me in an artist noted for his commitment and intelligence. He has a beautiful voice, and it’s one that carries especially well in the War Memorial Opera House. He has great stage presence: if he were a scholarly book, he would not only be regularly referred to as a tome, but inevitably as a magisterial tome. So I might just have heard him on an off night, possibly for both of us. At one point I thought, there’s no erotic charge between him and Lady Macbeth; you don’t get the feeling that their ambition and their guilty complicity excite them in any way. Right after that we got to see a flash of him humping her during Banquo’s murder, but that’s the sort of thing that is better conveyed in nuanced gestures during the performance rather than in an over-obvious tableau.
Georgina Lukacs as Lady Macbeth seemed like a wildly variable performer. I gather she was much better the night I heard her than in earlier performances. I sometimes wonder how much what I expect from voices has been affected by beginning to listen seriously in the early white-sound days of the first generation of HIP singers (long before they were called that). So after this performance I listened to recordings of Verrett and Rysanek in the role. Nope, it’s not me. Lukacs has a wildly undulating wobble, which she managed to control better in some of the later scenes. Just as I wish opera directors didn’t know about La Mere Coupable, knowledge of which has coarsened and distorted many a staging of Nozze di Figaro, I also wish they didn’t know about Verdi’s letter stating that Lady Macbeth needs an ugly voice. Whatever his motive in writing that, it’s clear what he meant: he wanted a striking and unusual type of character, from a singer who could give an actual performance, one that went beyond making the pretty canary-bird sounds. But too much that is inartistic is covered over by the whole “ugly voice” excuse.
Even the orchestra disappointed me. When I went to the WNO production last spring it was mainly because that happened to be what they were doing when I was in town (I was more focused on Titus at the Shakespeare Theater and on hearing Racette in Jenufa later that week), and I walked in wondering if I should have gone to the Nationals game instead. (If you’ve been to RFK Stadium, or seen the Nationals play lately, this is a pretty big indication that I was not that excited about Macbeth.) I walked out so glad that I had gone, and thinking that I had really underestimated the fascinations and effectiveness of the score. I took that to be because I hadn’t heard the piece in a while, but now I’m giving lots of credit to the magic stick of conductor Renato Palumbo. Massimo Zanetti conducted the San Francisco performance. We started off with a slack, enervated prologue, and I hoped for improvement that never came. There was no tension or forward drive, and the weird parts sounded pretty much like all the rest. Zanetti did have great conductor hair, though, a poufy backward sweep of silvery gray that bobbed up and down as his arms waved energetically about. I should point out that from my seat I normally can barely see the conductor.
So I walked out of this performance with renewed retrospective admiration for the one I heard last spring. Eventually the BART train showed up, and as usual I had to move at least once because someone was blasting her iPod at an ever-increasing volume. It amazes me when I think how much reading I used to get done on the trains, before the invasion of the inadequately silenced electronic devices. Since it was a short train, there was little choice where to go. I ended up in a seat near two spherical sisters. As teenage drunks go they were fairly innocuous, and I would salute them for not driving in that condition except I suspect it was just because they didn’t have a car. I was only about a stop and a half away from home by this time so I didn’t bother moving again (where would I go anyway on a short train?) when the younger one started vomiting, choking out apologies while splattering the window near her and the floor under her seat. “It’s OK, bitch,” her sister kept murmuring. “Bitch, it’s OK. We’ve all been there.” That might have been the truest performance I heard all night.
Red was reserved for the witches. You’d think this would be effective, but it’s not. The witches in the Washington National Opera production (directed by Paolo Micciche) I saw last spring were also color-coordinated; they were all in white, and, like these red witches, some of them carried hula hoops. The white gave them an unearthly apparitional look, and they reminded me of Goya’s Caprichos. The red chorus, I’m sorry to say, kept reminding me of the ladies of the Red Hat Society, who are frightening in a very different way. I did like the one who kept turning the crank on her manual eggbeater, thereby adding an eerie touch to the orchestration, one that Verdi had sadly neglected. It reminded me of hearing Henze’s Fifth Symphony many years ago; as I was reading down the list of instruments, I came upon "bullwhip". I think it got cracking in the third movement. One witch in particular, wearing a going-to-church-extravagant red chapeau and strolling around with a red walking stick, made me think, The Red Brigade of Women present . . . Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience! You see how the mind wanders when the staging is ineffective. The sisters were indeed weird, but they were weird in the same way as the rest of the staging. It’s important that they be strange in a different way. Otherwise they seem like more of the same rather than an eruption from either another world or the subconscious.
I will mildly disagree with those who were horrified that the Opera bought this production, meaning we’re going to have to see it again. I thought the sets were OK. It’s what happens on and around them that is a mess, and that can be changed. There’s the big box with one or two glass sides that gets moved around and represents various things, from Macbeth’s castle to his isolation, and it’s set under a curved dome with a big cracked hole in it. It’s banal to put it into words – see, the natural order has been damaged! – but visually it’s quite effective, though perhaps not enough so to last for the entire opera.
Just about every scene cries out for change. Let me use the sleepwalking scene as an example. Jeremy Galyon, valiantly playing the doctor, is led in blindfolded by Elza van den Heever’s admirably committed Lady-in-Waiting. I assume the blindfold is because Lady Macbeth is sequestered and he’s not supposed to know where she is. But she’s not supposed to be that gaga. They have her already acting crazy by the banquet scene, so her attempts to force Macbeth to behave normally when he sees Banquo’s ghost no longer make any sense. The Macbeths present a façade of normal kingship that hides an increasingly sinister world of fear and surveillance, an effect that is completely lost when you turn Lady Macbeth into the madwoman in the attic. So she does her handwashing thing and the doctor takes notes. The only reason the doctor should be taking notes in this scene is so that he can be shown stopping his note-taking when he realizes what exactly is making Lady Macbeth feel so guilty. In this production, it’s probably needless to say, he writes the whole time, which makes even less sense than you might think because the Lady-in-waiting angrily snatches the paper from him when he finishes and either tears it or hides it away in her pocket (I forget which and it probably doesn't really matter). Maybe it’s meant to be a prescription, because she then produces a huge hypodermic needle, and the two of them run off stage, presumably to give Lady Macbeth the injection that causes her death. It’s hard to tell because they aren’t shown actually doing anything with the needle. But the death of Lady Macbeth is rumored to be at her own hand – again, under the façade of a normal, natural occurrence, bloodthirsty ambition causes its own destruction, a point that is lost completely if she dies through a lethal injection given by her servants.
I know lots of people found Hampson’s Macbeth riveting. I thought he initially was disengaged and not nuanced enough, which surprised me in an artist noted for his commitment and intelligence. He has a beautiful voice, and it’s one that carries especially well in the War Memorial Opera House. He has great stage presence: if he were a scholarly book, he would not only be regularly referred to as a tome, but inevitably as a magisterial tome. So I might just have heard him on an off night, possibly for both of us. At one point I thought, there’s no erotic charge between him and Lady Macbeth; you don’t get the feeling that their ambition and their guilty complicity excite them in any way. Right after that we got to see a flash of him humping her during Banquo’s murder, but that’s the sort of thing that is better conveyed in nuanced gestures during the performance rather than in an over-obvious tableau.
Georgina Lukacs as Lady Macbeth seemed like a wildly variable performer. I gather she was much better the night I heard her than in earlier performances. I sometimes wonder how much what I expect from voices has been affected by beginning to listen seriously in the early white-sound days of the first generation of HIP singers (long before they were called that). So after this performance I listened to recordings of Verrett and Rysanek in the role. Nope, it’s not me. Lukacs has a wildly undulating wobble, which she managed to control better in some of the later scenes. Just as I wish opera directors didn’t know about La Mere Coupable, knowledge of which has coarsened and distorted many a staging of Nozze di Figaro, I also wish they didn’t know about Verdi’s letter stating that Lady Macbeth needs an ugly voice. Whatever his motive in writing that, it’s clear what he meant: he wanted a striking and unusual type of character, from a singer who could give an actual performance, one that went beyond making the pretty canary-bird sounds. But too much that is inartistic is covered over by the whole “ugly voice” excuse.
Even the orchestra disappointed me. When I went to the WNO production last spring it was mainly because that happened to be what they were doing when I was in town (I was more focused on Titus at the Shakespeare Theater and on hearing Racette in Jenufa later that week), and I walked in wondering if I should have gone to the Nationals game instead. (If you’ve been to RFK Stadium, or seen the Nationals play lately, this is a pretty big indication that I was not that excited about Macbeth.) I walked out so glad that I had gone, and thinking that I had really underestimated the fascinations and effectiveness of the score. I took that to be because I hadn’t heard the piece in a while, but now I’m giving lots of credit to the magic stick of conductor Renato Palumbo. Massimo Zanetti conducted the San Francisco performance. We started off with a slack, enervated prologue, and I hoped for improvement that never came. There was no tension or forward drive, and the weird parts sounded pretty much like all the rest. Zanetti did have great conductor hair, though, a poufy backward sweep of silvery gray that bobbed up and down as his arms waved energetically about. I should point out that from my seat I normally can barely see the conductor.
So I walked out of this performance with renewed retrospective admiration for the one I heard last spring. Eventually the BART train showed up, and as usual I had to move at least once because someone was blasting her iPod at an ever-increasing volume. It amazes me when I think how much reading I used to get done on the trains, before the invasion of the inadequately silenced electronic devices. Since it was a short train, there was little choice where to go. I ended up in a seat near two spherical sisters. As teenage drunks go they were fairly innocuous, and I would salute them for not driving in that condition except I suspect it was just because they didn’t have a car. I was only about a stop and a half away from home by this time so I didn’t bother moving again (where would I go anyway on a short train?) when the younger one started vomiting, choking out apologies while splattering the window near her and the floor under her seat. “It’s OK, bitch,” her sister kept murmuring. “Bitch, it’s OK. We’ve all been there.” That might have been the truest performance I heard all night.
29 January 2013
Birtwistle weekend in Berkeley
Cal Performances had a lot going on this last Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and though I was tempted by the Joffrey Ballet down in Zellerbach Hall I ended up at two mostly-modern music concerts up at Hertz. Both of them featured works by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, whose music I had previously only heard on CD.
The Eco Ensemble, conducted by David Milnes, played Saturday night. I felt some trepidation as I saw many students filling up the seats, having vivid and unpleasant memories of the weird rude audience at the first Eco Ensemble concert, but this time, at least from where I sat (I slipped into the front row right before the concert started), the audience was attentive and appreciative. The Ecos ambled out and there seemed to be some mix-up or mishap with the set-up, since there was some low-key discussion back and forth and one of the players turned to us and suggested we talk among ourselves. They got it straightened out shortly whatever it was and launched into Birtwistle's Secret Theatre. It's a rich, dense, fun thirty or so minutes. About five wind instruments stood off to the right and jetted and fluted about above the thick, slower flow of the strings. At times I was reminded of some great slow river-beast crawling forward while the bright birds swooped above and around. Layering seems to be a major technique for Birtwistle, in ways that are easier to appreciate during a live performance as opposed to a recording.
After the intermission came a showing of Jean Epstein's 1928 French silent film La Chute de la Maison Usher, with a new score by Ivan Fedele (who came up afterwards to take a bow). The film is pretty artsy and weird and wonderful, as befits both experimental silent films and anything based on Poe, who has always been admired by the French (sometimes more than he was in his own country). Oddly and amusingly, though the very brief English synopsis at the beginning of the movie referred, as in Poe's original story, to Roderick Usher and his sister, the film changed her into his wife; according to the program, this was to avoid the overtones of incest, which I thought were kind of the point. (In fact I wonder if one reason Debussy was drawn to this story for his unfinished opera was because of such hidden links to Wagner's Ring: incest, complications of love, betrayal, and degeneration, followed by a cataclysmic finale.) The intertitles were in the original French. It would have been helpful to have a print with English subtitles as well; I got the gist of each title, but sometimes there were too many words and too little time. But that's a small matter.
I'm pretty sure Epstein took a very good look at Murnau's Nosferatu before making this film; there was a similar eerie carriage ride to a haunted destination, with the local villagers reluctant to go anywhere near; waving bare tree branches scraping like fingers across the gray skies; a soft ghostly grayness playing between the light and shade. There are abrupt transitions and unsettling cuts in the editing and sudden close-ups of hands or faces and pale candles dripping down low. Fedele's music is moody and circular and fits the film very well. Oddly there was less overt drama in this score for what is after all an intensely dramatic plot than in the Birtwistle piece, the theatricality of whose secret theater was very evident.
I was back up at Hertz on Sunday afternoon for pianist Nicolas Hodges. It was a recital of high virtuosity, but it's a virtuosity of a deeper dazzle than the flash and fireworks usually associated with the term. Though he is now bearded and therefore looking a little more Bohemian than the last time I saw him, he is still completely no-nonsense in his presentation: he strides out quickly, sits down and starts playing immediately, without swaying or rocking or humming or any kind of drama outside of the music he's making. He started off with Debussy's Etudes, Book 1, starting from the simple exercises with the amusing dissonant note insisting on inserting itself and then shimmering and dazzling through to the end. That was followed by Elliot Carter's tuneful Two Thoughts About the Piano, like a clear river.There was extremely enthusiastic applause from the audience when he finished and when Hodges came out for the third bow he extended his arms to each side to still the clapping and told us that that was the first time he had played Carter's music since his death late last year, making it the first time he couldn't call the composer up to the stage, so he asked us to give a round of applause "for Elliott." We obliged. I love it when artists do generous things like that. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Rolando Villazon because after he sang Dichterliebe at Cal several years ago he picked up the score and gestured to it, directing the applause towards Schumann.
After the intermission Hodges played Busoni's Giga, Bolero e Variazione, Study after Mozart, from An Die Jugend, Book III. It's based on a little dance tune from Nozze di Figaro. This twentieth-century spin on an older form led suitably up to the west coast premiere of Birtwistle's Gigue Machine (which was co-commissioned by Cal Performances and Carnegie Hall). As with the Secret Theatre, a bright, sharp set of high notes dart above a deeper, smoother, steadier base. The piece starts slowly with sort of a stuttering note and rapidly grows in complexity only to die back down and then start up again before dying back down for the final time. A lot of simultaneous motion is packed into a relatively short time (between ten and fifteen minutes). It actually sounded more organic than machine-like to me. I hope I'll get to hear more live Birtwistle soon. Debussy book-ended the recital, with Etudes, Book II following the Birtwistle. It was an excellent Sunday afternoon.
The Eco Ensemble, conducted by David Milnes, played Saturday night. I felt some trepidation as I saw many students filling up the seats, having vivid and unpleasant memories of the weird rude audience at the first Eco Ensemble concert, but this time, at least from where I sat (I slipped into the front row right before the concert started), the audience was attentive and appreciative. The Ecos ambled out and there seemed to be some mix-up or mishap with the set-up, since there was some low-key discussion back and forth and one of the players turned to us and suggested we talk among ourselves. They got it straightened out shortly whatever it was and launched into Birtwistle's Secret Theatre. It's a rich, dense, fun thirty or so minutes. About five wind instruments stood off to the right and jetted and fluted about above the thick, slower flow of the strings. At times I was reminded of some great slow river-beast crawling forward while the bright birds swooped above and around. Layering seems to be a major technique for Birtwistle, in ways that are easier to appreciate during a live performance as opposed to a recording.
After the intermission came a showing of Jean Epstein's 1928 French silent film La Chute de la Maison Usher, with a new score by Ivan Fedele (who came up afterwards to take a bow). The film is pretty artsy and weird and wonderful, as befits both experimental silent films and anything based on Poe, who has always been admired by the French (sometimes more than he was in his own country). Oddly and amusingly, though the very brief English synopsis at the beginning of the movie referred, as in Poe's original story, to Roderick Usher and his sister, the film changed her into his wife; according to the program, this was to avoid the overtones of incest, which I thought were kind of the point. (In fact I wonder if one reason Debussy was drawn to this story for his unfinished opera was because of such hidden links to Wagner's Ring: incest, complications of love, betrayal, and degeneration, followed by a cataclysmic finale.) The intertitles were in the original French. It would have been helpful to have a print with English subtitles as well; I got the gist of each title, but sometimes there were too many words and too little time. But that's a small matter.
I'm pretty sure Epstein took a very good look at Murnau's Nosferatu before making this film; there was a similar eerie carriage ride to a haunted destination, with the local villagers reluctant to go anywhere near; waving bare tree branches scraping like fingers across the gray skies; a soft ghostly grayness playing between the light and shade. There are abrupt transitions and unsettling cuts in the editing and sudden close-ups of hands or faces and pale candles dripping down low. Fedele's music is moody and circular and fits the film very well. Oddly there was less overt drama in this score for what is after all an intensely dramatic plot than in the Birtwistle piece, the theatricality of whose secret theater was very evident.
I was back up at Hertz on Sunday afternoon for pianist Nicolas Hodges. It was a recital of high virtuosity, but it's a virtuosity of a deeper dazzle than the flash and fireworks usually associated with the term. Though he is now bearded and therefore looking a little more Bohemian than the last time I saw him, he is still completely no-nonsense in his presentation: he strides out quickly, sits down and starts playing immediately, without swaying or rocking or humming or any kind of drama outside of the music he's making. He started off with Debussy's Etudes, Book 1, starting from the simple exercises with the amusing dissonant note insisting on inserting itself and then shimmering and dazzling through to the end. That was followed by Elliot Carter's tuneful Two Thoughts About the Piano, like a clear river.There was extremely enthusiastic applause from the audience when he finished and when Hodges came out for the third bow he extended his arms to each side to still the clapping and told us that that was the first time he had played Carter's music since his death late last year, making it the first time he couldn't call the composer up to the stage, so he asked us to give a round of applause "for Elliott." We obliged. I love it when artists do generous things like that. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Rolando Villazon because after he sang Dichterliebe at Cal several years ago he picked up the score and gestured to it, directing the applause towards Schumann.
After the intermission Hodges played Busoni's Giga, Bolero e Variazione, Study after Mozart, from An Die Jugend, Book III. It's based on a little dance tune from Nozze di Figaro. This twentieth-century spin on an older form led suitably up to the west coast premiere of Birtwistle's Gigue Machine (which was co-commissioned by Cal Performances and Carnegie Hall). As with the Secret Theatre, a bright, sharp set of high notes dart above a deeper, smoother, steadier base. The piece starts slowly with sort of a stuttering note and rapidly grows in complexity only to die back down and then start up again before dying back down for the final time. A lot of simultaneous motion is packed into a relatively short time (between ten and fifteen minutes). It actually sounded more organic than machine-like to me. I hope I'll get to hear more live Birtwistle soon. Debussy book-ended the recital, with Etudes, Book II following the Birtwistle. It was an excellent Sunday afternoon.
26 June 2007
stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
The San Francisco opera season resumed (for me, at least; I think Don Giovanni actually opened first) with Der Rosenkavalier. Lovely sets, excellent singers, new insights into the work, and I kept thinking, My God, this is so long. First the good stuff: I liked the recreation of the original Alfred Roller designs, though as always I wish directors were a little more conscious of sightlines – the opening scene had everyone in my left-hand side of the orchestra straining to see the Marschallin and Octavian tucked away in the left-hand corner of the stage. Everyone has justifiably been crazy about Joyce DiDonato’s boyishly manly Octavian, one of the more convincing trouser-role performances I’ve ever seen, but the ones who really caught my attention were Sophie and Baron Ochs. Sophie was performed by a gorgeous young Swede, Miah Persson, who was exactly the right combination of naïve and imperious; I especially liked the way she sang her part of the Presentation of the Rose as if she had carefully memorized it and was proud of herself for performing it flawlessly, as indeed Sophie would have done and felt. Baron Ochs was Kristinn Sigmundsson, who brought out the Falstaff in Ochs rather than reducing him to the usual crude country cousin. He physically towered over everyone on stage until Jeremy Galyon showed up as the notary and then the police commissioner, though it’s hard to tell if it’s because he’s especially tall or if the rest of the cast is fairly short. I especially liked the way he listened attentively and started applauding naively halfway through the Italian tenor’s aria; after the Italian signals disapproval, he shrugs and goes back to his negotiations; usually Ochs is entirely unmoved by art. Of course, making Ochs more sympathetic makes the third-act shenanigans even less amusing and more drawn-out than they already are. I never find pranks very funny, and they pall on repetition – the thought of having to sit yet again through the bohemians’ antics is just another reason for me to avoid La Boheme. Like it or not, most of us are closer to Ochs – buffoonish, status-anxious, oblivious – than to anyone else on stage, which brings us to the Marschallin, who of course is the character every audience member likes to think of him- or herself as being. Soile Isokoski, who is much better looking than her head shot suggests, was good if a bit subdued, and I give her full credit for pulling off the difficult task of performing a “wise” role and seeming actually wise instead of condescending – maybe the secret is to perform from a place of love rather than power (Hans Sachs is similarly difficult to pull off). But though her foresight and compassion with Octavian are what grabs the audience, it should be noted that at some level the audience is also taking in that, first, she has no problem finding younger lovers on whom to lavish the aforesaid foresight and compassion (which is a form of controlling them), and, second, she has an absolutely unassailable social and economic position – it’s all very well to sneer at Ochs, but his snobbish insistence on his social status comes from ignorance and lack of sophistication and a fear of being slighted, and is sadly where most of us find ourselves, much as we might like to pretend that we are immovable jewels in the crown of Maria Therese. I find the Marschallin a bit too much a wish-fulfillment figure (as opposed to her obvious model, the delicately sorrowful Countess Almaviva in Nozze di Figaro, the gently ironic treatment of whose relationship with Cherubino keeps her in a more realistic perspective). By the second or third time the Marshallin declares that “she had had enough of men, just then,” I started to find her renunciation a bit self-dramatizing. I also started wondering if her cuckolded husband had had enough of women, just then. Which brings us to one of my problems: there are so many beautiful moments in Rosenkavalier – I can put up with the third-act pranks knowing that they culminate in the trio, for example – but everything seemed to happen about twice as many times as it needed to. Four hours is a long time to sit through a domestic comedy; I can sit through Parsifal or the Ring or Tristan without a thought for time, because those stories demand the extraordinary, but it’s relevant to my point that the only Wagner opera where I go in thinking about how long it’s going to last is Meistersinger. I’ve always enjoyed Rosenkavalier, and its pre-postmodern play with parody, identity, and pastiche is something that would appeal to me. So what was my problem? I’m really not sure. I wasn’t in the mood to go to the theater (which is why I buy tickets in advance; if I depended on going when I felt like it I’d leave the house about twice a year). Usually a performance puts me in the mood, but this time, despite its many excellences, it didn’t. I was surrounded by talkers and felt tired. My failure to respond whole-heartedly could be my fault. I might have felt differently on another night. I might also have seen Rosenkavalier once too often for the glorious moments to overcome the sense of familiarity.
22 February 2019
fun stuff I may or may not get to: March 2019
Theatrical
Custom Made Theater presents the Bay Area premiere of Bess Wohl's American Hero, directed by Allie Moss, from 7 March to 6 April. I saw Wohl's Small Mouth Sounds at the Strand Theater last year and enjoyed it very much.
Cutting Ball Theater stages Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde in the Eric Bentley translation, directed by Ariel Craft, from 14 March to 14 April. Two actors are performing all the parts, so add that layer to the drama's roundelay.
The African-American Shakespeare Company presents Leslie Lee's Black Eagles, about the famous Tuskegee Airmen, directed by L Peter Callender, from 16 to 31 March at the Marines' Memorial Theater.
At the SHN Golden Gate Theatre from 19 March to 14 April you can see the Lincoln Center Theater production of Falsettos, the musical by William Finn and James Lapine.
The Curran Theater presents The Jungle by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, from 26 March to 19 May; it's an immersive play about a refugee camp in Calais.
Helen, an adaptation of Euripides by Ellen McLaughlin directed by Shannon R Davis, plays at Theater of Yugen from 28 March to 27 April.
Operatic
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents a concert version of Handel's Tamerlano on 9 and 10 March; the performances are free but reservations are recommended.
Paul Flight leads Chora Nova in A Gilbert & Sullivan Evening on 16 March at First Congregational in Berkeley.
The Wagner Society of Northern California presents a special showing of Birgit Nilsson: A League of Her Own, a documentary on the late great Wagnerian by Thomas Voigt and Wolfgang Wunderlich, on 23 March at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco.
Smetana's The Two Widows gets the Pocket Opera treatment on 24 March at the Hillside Club in Berkeley and 31 March at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
Opera Parallèle stages the world premiere of Today It Rains, a new chamber opera about Georgia O'Keeffe with music by Laura Kaminsky and libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed; Brian Staufenbiel directs and Nicole Paiement conducts. You can experience the results from 28 to 31 March at Z Space.
Vocalists
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music will present soprano Deborah Voigt and pianist Steven Bailey in recital on 11 March, though the program has not been listed. The concert is free but reservations are recommended.
SF Jazz presents singer-guitarist Jeremiah Lockwood and vocalist Jewlia Eisenberg as Book of J, their duo project, on 17 March.
Arlo Guthrie and his daughter Sarah Lee Guthrie visit Freight & Salvage in Berkeley from 22 to 24 March.
Lieder Alive! presents baritone Eugene Villanueva and pianist Peter Grünberg performing Brahms, Strauss, and Tosti on 24 March at the Noe Valley Ministry.
Choral
Artistic Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe and the San Francisco Girls Chorus have two programs this month: Modern Masters on 3 March at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, when they will perform works by David Lang, John Zorn, Steve Reich, Fred Frith (a Chorus commission and world premiere), Kaija Saariaho, Lisa Bielawa, and Vaughan Williams (the latter two pieces also feature contralto Kirsten Sollek); and a joint concert with the Copenhagen Girls Chorus on 22 March at Herbst Theater, for which the program has not yet been announced.
Orchestral
Christian Reif leads the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and some of the Adler Fellows in music from Le Nozze di Figaro, Debussy's Ibéria, and Bizet's L'Arlésienne Suite No 2 on 3 March (matinee) at Davies Hall.
Mikhail Pletnev leads the Russian National Orchestra, presented by the San Francisco Symphony on 3 March at Davies Hall, in an all-Rachmaninoff program, featuring Vocalise, Symphonic Dances, and the Piano Concerto 2 with soloist George Li.
Urs Leonhardt Steiner leads the Golden Gate Symphony in the Tchaikovsky 5 and the Schumann Cello Concerto (with soloist Angeline Kiang) on 10 March at Herbst Theater.
SF Jazz presents Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester, re-creating Weimar Berlin in Davies Hall on 12 March.
Cal Performances hosts Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London at Zellerbach Hall for three different programs: on 15 March you can hear Sibelius's The Oceanides, Salonen's own Cello Concerto with soloist Truls Mørk, and Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra; on 16 March you can hear Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) and the Bruckner 7; and on 17 March (matinee) you can hear Stravinsky's Firebird (complete) along with the world premiere of Dreamers, a Cal Performances co-commission, with music by Jimmy López, libretto by Nilo Cruz, soprano soloist Ana María Martínez and local chamber chorus Volti,
Dawn Harms leads the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony in David Conte's A Copland Portrait, Copland's Our Town, Rodrigo's Guitar Concerto (with soloist Alec Holcomb), and Florence Price's Symphony No 1 in E minor in the Taube Atrium Auditorium on 16 March. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in Price and this is a good chance to hear one of her works live.
François-Xavier Roth leads the San Francisco Symphony in Schumann's Manfred Overture, Liszt's Piano Concerto No 1 (with soloist Cédric Tiberghien), and the Brahms 2 on 7 - 9 March.
Michael Tilson Thomas leads the San Francisco Symphony in Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, the Mozart Violin Concert No 3 (with soloist Christian Tetzlaff) and the Sibelius 2 on 14 - 17 March.
Michael Morgan leads the Oakland Symphony on 22 March at the Paramount Theater in I Raise Up My Voice, featuring Banner, Jessie Montgomery's variation of and comment on the Star-Spangled Banner, Louise Farrenc's Symphony No 3 from 1847, and Bernstein's Songfest, featuring some of the Adler Fellows. I think Bernstein is now the most exhaustingly overprogrammed composer around, which is too bad as the rest of this program looks so enticing.
The Berkeley Symphony, led by Guest Conductor Christopher Rountree, plays the Dvořák 9, From the New World, Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige (with the Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble), and Gubaidulina's Concerto for Two Orchestras, on 24 March in Zellerbach Hall.
New Century Chamber Orchestra, led by Concertmaster Daniel Hope, plays music written under repressive regimes, featuring works by Mendelssohn, Shostakovich, Krasa, and Schulhoff (his Double Concerto for Violin, Piano, and Orchestra, featuring Hope and pianist Vanessa Perez) on 21 March at First Congregational in Berkeley, 22 March at the Oshman Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto, 23 March at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, and 24 March at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael.
SF Jazz presents Red Baraat and Vidya Vox celebrating Holi, the Hindu festival of spring (famous for its liberal use of colored powders thrown on celebrants, though I have no idea if that will happen at this performance), on 30 March.
Chamber Music
The Telegraph Quartet performs works by Weinberg and Beethoven at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 2 March; the concert is free but reservations are recommended.
Cal Performances presents the Takács Quartet at Hertz Hall on 3 March, playing works by Haydn, Bartók, and Mendelssohn.
The San Francisco Symphony chamber musicians have two performances this month, both of them matinees on 10 March: there will be piano trios by Mozart, Schubert, and Smetana at the Legion of Honor and works by Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, and Timothy Higgins at Davies Hall.
Chamber Music San Francisco presents two programs at Herbst Theater with the Pacifica Quartet: a talk on Shostakovich on 15 March, featuring String Quartets 1, 2, and 8, as well as excerpts from other works; and a concert on 16 March featuring works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Shulamit Ran.
Early / Baroque Music
I'm not sure whether to put this here or under Modern / Contemporary Music, but mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and countertenor Daniel Moody are visiting Nicholas McGegan and Philharmonia Baroque to sing Handel, Purcell, Carolyn Shaw, and Arvo Pärt on 6 March at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford, 8 March at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, and 9 - 10 March at First Congregational in Berkeley.
The Cantata Collective performs BWV 125 and BWV 78 with alto Robin Bier and tenor Michael Jankosky and the Pacific Boychoir, led by Andrew Brown, on 17 March at St Mary Magdalene in Berkeley.
Jeffrey Thomas leads the American Bach Soloists in the St Matthew Passion (with soloists Guy Cutting, William Sharp, Hélène Brunet, Katelyn Aungst, Agnes Vojtko, Nicholas Burns, Steven Brennfleck, Matthew Hill, and Jesse Blumberg) on 22 March at St Stephen's in Belvedere, 23 March at First Congregational in Berkeley, 24 March at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, and 25 March at Davis Community Church in Davis.
You can hear Bach's other passion setting, the St John, on 30 March at the San Francisco Symphony, when Ragnar Bohlin leads soloists Ross Hauck (tenor), Michele Kennedy (soprano), Silvie Jensen (alto), Michael Jankosky (tenor), Clayton Moser (baritone), Matthew Peterson (baritone), and Mitchelle Jones (baritone), the Symphony Chorus, and baroque ensemble Voices of Music.
Speaking of Voices of Music, this month they are also presenting As Steals the Morn, a program of instrumental and vocal music by Bach and Handel, featuring singers Amanda Forsythe and Thomas Cooley along with Emi Ferguson on baroque flute and Marc Schachman on baroque oboe; you can hear the results 28 March at All Saints Episcopal in Palo Alto, 29 March at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, and 31 March at St Mary Magdalen in Berkeley.
Modern / Contemporary Music
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble plays works by Rebecca Clarke, Tina Tallon, Elainie Lillios, Peter van Zandt, and David Conte; the Clarke is from 1919 but the Tallon, Lillios, and van Zandt pieces are world premieres. The concerts are 3 March at the Berkeley Hillside Club and 4 March at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
The Eco Ensemble returns to Hertz Hall under the auspices of Cal Performances on 2 March to play a program of mostly US or world premieres by Sivan Eldar, Carmine Cella, Amadeus Reguceraraw, and Matthew Schumaker.
Cal Performances presents pianist Nicolas Hodges, violinist Jennifer Koh, and cellist Anssi Karttunen playing works by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Betsy Jolas, Kaija Saariaho, and Magnus Lindberg at Hertz Hall on 10 March.
Nomad Session offers the premiere of Ocho Bendiciones, a new piece by Nicolas Benavides (his second piece for them, after last year's beautiful Cool Grey City) on 15 March at the Noe Valley Ministry.
The Tenth Annual Hot Air Music Festival is scheduled for 17 March at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; as usual it will be a full day of free concerts but I have no other information as of this posting.
As always, check the calendar at the Center for New Music, which is updated frequently; some things that jump out at me from the current listings for March are: Kurt Rohde's Farewell Tour Part 2, featuring many new works for viola and electronics, on 1 March; Latitudes, by Ashley Bellouin and Gabriel Mindel Saloman on 8 March; the Looney / Mezzacapa / Nordeson Trio on 9 March; piano duo Zwischenspiel (Rachel Breen and Kelsey Walsh) playing Philip Glass and David Lang and pairing them with photography and video, on 10 March; guitarist David Tanenbaum's seven world premieres on 15 March; pianist Clare Longendyke playing music by Vivian Fung, Brent Miller, Mason Bates, Elinor Armer, and Michael Gilbertson on 24 March; and the Friction Quartet playing Abaciscus by Geoffrey Gordon and the premieres of two quartet commissions, Two Hearts by Sarang Kim and El Correcaminos (The Roadrunner) by Nick Benavides, on 29 March.
Keyboards & Strings
Old First Concerts offers its annual Chopin birthday concert on 3 March; Kenneth Kenner will play mostly Chopin, of course, as well as a few pieces by Paderewski.
Chamber Music San Francisco presents cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Connie Shih at Herbst Theater on 3 March, playing works by Clara and Robert Schumann, Vítězslava Kaprálová and Bohuslav Martinů, and Augusta Holmès and César Franck (the program's theme is love relationships between composers). Isserlist will also be giving a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 4 March.
San Francisco Performances presents cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist/composer Vijay Iyer playing works by Iyer, Zakir Hussein, John McLaughlin, JS Bach, Ravi Shankar, Billy Strayhorn, and others at Herbst Theater on 9 March.
The San Francisco Symphony presents violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter with pianist Lambert Orkis in recital at Davies Hall on 10 March, when they will play works by Mozart, Debussy, Ravel, and Poulenc.
San Francisco Performances presents pianist Benjamin Grosvenor at Herbst Theater on 13 March, playing works by Schumann, Janáček. Prokofiev, and Bellini (via Liszt).
On 28 March at Herbst Theater, Garrick Ohlsson continues his multi-concert exploration of the complete piano works of Johannes Brahms for San Francisco Performances.
The San Francisco Symphony presents pianist Marc-André Hamelin in recital at Davies Hall on 31 March, when he will play music by Bach, Schumann, Weissenberg, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Chopin.
Chamber Music San Francisco presents pianist Nikolay Khozyainov at Herbst Theater on 31 March, performing pieces by Debussy, Stravinsky, and Chopin.
Dance
British/Bangladeshi dancer Akram Khan comes to Cal Performances on 2 - 3 March to perform his solo work Xenos, which combines the myth of Prometheus with the story of an Indian soldier fighting in the British Army in the First World War. Khan is planning to retire as a performer after Xenos. Be advised that this solo dance work is taking place in cavernous Zellerbach Hall.
The San Francisco Ballet has three programs in March: Sleeping Beauty (music by Tchaikovsky, choreography by Helgi Tomasson after Marius Petipa) returns from 9 to 17 March; Program 5, Lyric Voices, runs from 27 March to 7 April and consists of Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem (music by Chris Garneau, choreography by Trey McIntyre), Bound To (music by Keaton Henson, choreography by Christopher Wheeldon), and the world premiere of ". . . two united in a single soul . . ." (music by Handel and Daria Novo with countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and choreography by Yuri Possokhov); and Program 6, Space Between, runs from 29 March to 9 April and consists of Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes (music by Aaron Copland, choreography by Justin Peck), a world premiere from choreographer Liam Scarlett (no other details available at this time), and Björk Ballet (music by, perhaps obviously, Björk Gudmundsdottir, as well as Alejandro Ghersi, and Sjón, with choreography by Arthur Pita).
Cinematic
There's a cinematic cornucopia starting up this month at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive: Afterimage: Ulrike Ottinger runs from 1 March to 7 April; Painters Painting runs from 1 March to 28 April; the African Film Festival runs from 2 March to 10 May; Delphine Seyrig: Resistant Muse runs from 8 March to 27 April; In Focus: Hirokazu Kore-eda runs from 13 March to 24 April; Remembering Nelson Pereira dos Santos runs from 15 March to 8 May; and the GLAS Animation Festival runs 23 - 24 March. (It's probably something obvious, but I have no idea what GLAS stands for and I didn't see it spelled out during my admittedly cursory look at their website; the festival looks interesting though.)
Custom Made Theater presents the Bay Area premiere of Bess Wohl's American Hero, directed by Allie Moss, from 7 March to 6 April. I saw Wohl's Small Mouth Sounds at the Strand Theater last year and enjoyed it very much.
Cutting Ball Theater stages Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde in the Eric Bentley translation, directed by Ariel Craft, from 14 March to 14 April. Two actors are performing all the parts, so add that layer to the drama's roundelay.
The African-American Shakespeare Company presents Leslie Lee's Black Eagles, about the famous Tuskegee Airmen, directed by L Peter Callender, from 16 to 31 March at the Marines' Memorial Theater.
At the SHN Golden Gate Theatre from 19 March to 14 April you can see the Lincoln Center Theater production of Falsettos, the musical by William Finn and James Lapine.
The Curran Theater presents The Jungle by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, from 26 March to 19 May; it's an immersive play about a refugee camp in Calais.
Helen, an adaptation of Euripides by Ellen McLaughlin directed by Shannon R Davis, plays at Theater of Yugen from 28 March to 27 April.
Operatic
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents a concert version of Handel's Tamerlano on 9 and 10 March; the performances are free but reservations are recommended.
Paul Flight leads Chora Nova in A Gilbert & Sullivan Evening on 16 March at First Congregational in Berkeley.
The Wagner Society of Northern California presents a special showing of Birgit Nilsson: A League of Her Own, a documentary on the late great Wagnerian by Thomas Voigt and Wolfgang Wunderlich, on 23 March at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco.
Smetana's The Two Widows gets the Pocket Opera treatment on 24 March at the Hillside Club in Berkeley and 31 March at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
Opera Parallèle stages the world premiere of Today It Rains, a new chamber opera about Georgia O'Keeffe with music by Laura Kaminsky and libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed; Brian Staufenbiel directs and Nicole Paiement conducts. You can experience the results from 28 to 31 March at Z Space.
Vocalists
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music will present soprano Deborah Voigt and pianist Steven Bailey in recital on 11 March, though the program has not been listed. The concert is free but reservations are recommended.
SF Jazz presents singer-guitarist Jeremiah Lockwood and vocalist Jewlia Eisenberg as Book of J, their duo project, on 17 March.
Arlo Guthrie and his daughter Sarah Lee Guthrie visit Freight & Salvage in Berkeley from 22 to 24 March.
Lieder Alive! presents baritone Eugene Villanueva and pianist Peter Grünberg performing Brahms, Strauss, and Tosti on 24 March at the Noe Valley Ministry.
Choral
Artistic Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe and the San Francisco Girls Chorus have two programs this month: Modern Masters on 3 March at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, when they will perform works by David Lang, John Zorn, Steve Reich, Fred Frith (a Chorus commission and world premiere), Kaija Saariaho, Lisa Bielawa, and Vaughan Williams (the latter two pieces also feature contralto Kirsten Sollek); and a joint concert with the Copenhagen Girls Chorus on 22 March at Herbst Theater, for which the program has not yet been announced.
Sacred & Profane performs American Landscapes, a concert of traditional American music from Amish folk songs and African-American spirituals to excerpts from Paul Chihara's Folksong Mass, on 8 March at St Francis Lutheran in San Francisco, 9 March at St Mark's Episcopal in Berkeley, and 10 March at First Presbyterian in Alameda.
The San Francisco Choral Artists perform outdoorsy nature songs by Britten, Schumann, Delius, Ligeti, and others on 9 March at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, 10 March at St Mark's Episcopal in Palo Alto, and 17 March at St Paul's Episcopal in Oakland.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo visits Freight & Salvage in Berkeley for three performances on 9 - 10 March.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo visits Freight & Salvage in Berkeley for three performances on 9 - 10 March.
Paul Flight leads the California Bach Society in The All-Night Vigil by Rachmaninoff on 1 March at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, 2 March at All Saints' Episcopal in Palo Alto, and 3 March at St Mark's Episcopal in Berkeley.
Chanticleer presents Spacious Skies, a celebration of American music; 16 and 21 March are the San Francisco performance dates.
Orchestral
Christian Reif leads the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and some of the Adler Fellows in music from Le Nozze di Figaro, Debussy's Ibéria, and Bizet's L'Arlésienne Suite No 2 on 3 March (matinee) at Davies Hall.
Mikhail Pletnev leads the Russian National Orchestra, presented by the San Francisco Symphony on 3 March at Davies Hall, in an all-Rachmaninoff program, featuring Vocalise, Symphonic Dances, and the Piano Concerto 2 with soloist George Li.
Urs Leonhardt Steiner leads the Golden Gate Symphony in the Tchaikovsky 5 and the Schumann Cello Concerto (with soloist Angeline Kiang) on 10 March at Herbst Theater.
SF Jazz presents Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester, re-creating Weimar Berlin in Davies Hall on 12 March.
Cal Performances hosts Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London at Zellerbach Hall for three different programs: on 15 March you can hear Sibelius's The Oceanides, Salonen's own Cello Concerto with soloist Truls Mørk, and Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra; on 16 March you can hear Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) and the Bruckner 7; and on 17 March (matinee) you can hear Stravinsky's Firebird (complete) along with the world premiere of Dreamers, a Cal Performances co-commission, with music by Jimmy López, libretto by Nilo Cruz, soprano soloist Ana María Martínez and local chamber chorus Volti,
Dawn Harms leads the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony in David Conte's A Copland Portrait, Copland's Our Town, Rodrigo's Guitar Concerto (with soloist Alec Holcomb), and Florence Price's Symphony No 1 in E minor in the Taube Atrium Auditorium on 16 March. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in Price and this is a good chance to hear one of her works live.
François-Xavier Roth leads the San Francisco Symphony in Schumann's Manfred Overture, Liszt's Piano Concerto No 1 (with soloist Cédric Tiberghien), and the Brahms 2 on 7 - 9 March.
Michael Tilson Thomas leads the San Francisco Symphony in Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, the Mozart Violin Concert No 3 (with soloist Christian Tetzlaff) and the Sibelius 2 on 14 - 17 March.
Michael Morgan leads the Oakland Symphony on 22 March at the Paramount Theater in I Raise Up My Voice, featuring Banner, Jessie Montgomery's variation of and comment on the Star-Spangled Banner, Louise Farrenc's Symphony No 3 from 1847, and Bernstein's Songfest, featuring some of the Adler Fellows. I think Bernstein is now the most exhaustingly overprogrammed composer around, which is too bad as the rest of this program looks so enticing.
The Berkeley Symphony, led by Guest Conductor Christopher Rountree, plays the Dvořák 9, From the New World, Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige (with the Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble), and Gubaidulina's Concerto for Two Orchestras, on 24 March in Zellerbach Hall.
New Century Chamber Orchestra, led by Concertmaster Daniel Hope, plays music written under repressive regimes, featuring works by Mendelssohn, Shostakovich, Krasa, and Schulhoff (his Double Concerto for Violin, Piano, and Orchestra, featuring Hope and pianist Vanessa Perez) on 21 March at First Congregational in Berkeley, 22 March at the Oshman Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto, 23 March at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, and 24 March at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael.
SF Jazz presents Red Baraat and Vidya Vox celebrating Holi, the Hindu festival of spring (famous for its liberal use of colored powders thrown on celebrants, though I have no idea if that will happen at this performance), on 30 March.
Chamber Music
The Telegraph Quartet performs works by Weinberg and Beethoven at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 2 March; the concert is free but reservations are recommended.
Cal Performances presents the Takács Quartet at Hertz Hall on 3 March, playing works by Haydn, Bartók, and Mendelssohn.
The San Francisco Symphony chamber musicians have two performances this month, both of them matinees on 10 March: there will be piano trios by Mozart, Schubert, and Smetana at the Legion of Honor and works by Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, and Timothy Higgins at Davies Hall.
Chamber Music San Francisco presents two programs at Herbst Theater with the Pacifica Quartet: a talk on Shostakovich on 15 March, featuring String Quartets 1, 2, and 8, as well as excerpts from other works; and a concert on 16 March featuring works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Shulamit Ran.
Early / Baroque Music
I'm not sure whether to put this here or under Modern / Contemporary Music, but mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and countertenor Daniel Moody are visiting Nicholas McGegan and Philharmonia Baroque to sing Handel, Purcell, Carolyn Shaw, and Arvo Pärt on 6 March at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford, 8 March at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, and 9 - 10 March at First Congregational in Berkeley.
The Cantata Collective performs BWV 125 and BWV 78 with alto Robin Bier and tenor Michael Jankosky and the Pacific Boychoir, led by Andrew Brown, on 17 March at St Mary Magdalene in Berkeley.
Jeffrey Thomas leads the American Bach Soloists in the St Matthew Passion (with soloists Guy Cutting, William Sharp, Hélène Brunet, Katelyn Aungst, Agnes Vojtko, Nicholas Burns, Steven Brennfleck, Matthew Hill, and Jesse Blumberg) on 22 March at St Stephen's in Belvedere, 23 March at First Congregational in Berkeley, 24 March at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, and 25 March at Davis Community Church in Davis.
You can hear Bach's other passion setting, the St John, on 30 March at the San Francisco Symphony, when Ragnar Bohlin leads soloists Ross Hauck (tenor), Michele Kennedy (soprano), Silvie Jensen (alto), Michael Jankosky (tenor), Clayton Moser (baritone), Matthew Peterson (baritone), and Mitchelle Jones (baritone), the Symphony Chorus, and baroque ensemble Voices of Music.
Speaking of Voices of Music, this month they are also presenting As Steals the Morn, a program of instrumental and vocal music by Bach and Handel, featuring singers Amanda Forsythe and Thomas Cooley along with Emi Ferguson on baroque flute and Marc Schachman on baroque oboe; you can hear the results 28 March at All Saints Episcopal in Palo Alto, 29 March at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, and 31 March at St Mary Magdalen in Berkeley.
Modern / Contemporary Music
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble plays works by Rebecca Clarke, Tina Tallon, Elainie Lillios, Peter van Zandt, and David Conte; the Clarke is from 1919 but the Tallon, Lillios, and van Zandt pieces are world premieres. The concerts are 3 March at the Berkeley Hillside Club and 4 March at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
The Eco Ensemble returns to Hertz Hall under the auspices of Cal Performances on 2 March to play a program of mostly US or world premieres by Sivan Eldar, Carmine Cella, Amadeus Reguceraraw, and Matthew Schumaker.
Cal Performances presents pianist Nicolas Hodges, violinist Jennifer Koh, and cellist Anssi Karttunen playing works by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Betsy Jolas, Kaija Saariaho, and Magnus Lindberg at Hertz Hall on 10 March.
Nomad Session offers the premiere of Ocho Bendiciones, a new piece by Nicolas Benavides (his second piece for them, after last year's beautiful Cool Grey City) on 15 March at the Noe Valley Ministry.
The Tenth Annual Hot Air Music Festival is scheduled for 17 March at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; as usual it will be a full day of free concerts but I have no other information as of this posting.
This year's Other Minds Festival explores the microtonal work of Ivan Wyschnegradsky; the first concert will take place 23 March at the Taube Atrium Theater and will feature the Arditti Quartet playing works by Wyschenegradsky and Georg Friedrich Haas. (The other Festival concerts will take place in June.)
Old First Concerts presents the Mobius Trio on 29 March; the classical guitar trio will perform three world premieres, by Ryan Brown, Ian Dicke, and the Trio themselves.
Bard Music West offers Games and Revolutions, a program featuring music by Danny Clay and Gabriella Smith, on 28 March at the Center for New Music in San Francisco, 29 March at the Fireside Room of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, and 30 March at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Bard Music West offers Games and Revolutions, a program featuring music by Danny Clay and Gabriella Smith, on 28 March at the Center for New Music in San Francisco, 29 March at the Fireside Room of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, and 30 March at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Keyboards & Strings
Chamber Music San Francisco presents cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Connie Shih at Herbst Theater on 3 March, playing works by Clara and Robert Schumann, Vítězslava Kaprálová and Bohuslav Martinů, and Augusta Holmès and César Franck (the program's theme is love relationships between composers). Isserlist will also be giving a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 4 March.
San Francisco Performances presents cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist/composer Vijay Iyer playing works by Iyer, Zakir Hussein, John McLaughlin, JS Bach, Ravi Shankar, Billy Strayhorn, and others at Herbst Theater on 9 March.
The San Francisco Symphony presents violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter with pianist Lambert Orkis in recital at Davies Hall on 10 March, when they will play works by Mozart, Debussy, Ravel, and Poulenc.
San Francisco Performances presents pianist Benjamin Grosvenor at Herbst Theater on 13 March, playing works by Schumann, Janáček. Prokofiev, and Bellini (via Liszt).
On 28 March at Herbst Theater, Garrick Ohlsson continues his multi-concert exploration of the complete piano works of Johannes Brahms for San Francisco Performances.
The San Francisco Symphony presents pianist Marc-André Hamelin in recital at Davies Hall on 31 March, when he will play music by Bach, Schumann, Weissenberg, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Chopin.
Chamber Music San Francisco presents pianist Nikolay Khozyainov at Herbst Theater on 31 March, performing pieces by Debussy, Stravinsky, and Chopin.
Dance
British/Bangladeshi dancer Akram Khan comes to Cal Performances on 2 - 3 March to perform his solo work Xenos, which combines the myth of Prometheus with the story of an Indian soldier fighting in the British Army in the First World War. Khan is planning to retire as a performer after Xenos. Be advised that this solo dance work is taking place in cavernous Zellerbach Hall.
The San Francisco Ballet has three programs in March: Sleeping Beauty (music by Tchaikovsky, choreography by Helgi Tomasson after Marius Petipa) returns from 9 to 17 March; Program 5, Lyric Voices, runs from 27 March to 7 April and consists of Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem (music by Chris Garneau, choreography by Trey McIntyre), Bound To (music by Keaton Henson, choreography by Christopher Wheeldon), and the world premiere of ". . . two united in a single soul . . ." (music by Handel and Daria Novo with countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and choreography by Yuri Possokhov); and Program 6, Space Between, runs from 29 March to 9 April and consists of Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes (music by Aaron Copland, choreography by Justin Peck), a world premiere from choreographer Liam Scarlett (no other details available at this time), and Björk Ballet (music by, perhaps obviously, Björk Gudmundsdottir, as well as Alejandro Ghersi, and Sjón, with choreography by Arthur Pita).
Cinematic
There's a cinematic cornucopia starting up this month at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive: Afterimage: Ulrike Ottinger runs from 1 March to 7 April; Painters Painting runs from 1 March to 28 April; the African Film Festival runs from 2 March to 10 May; Delphine Seyrig: Resistant Muse runs from 8 March to 27 April; In Focus: Hirokazu Kore-eda runs from 13 March to 24 April; Remembering Nelson Pereira dos Santos runs from 15 March to 8 May; and the GLAS Animation Festival runs 23 - 24 March. (It's probably something obvious, but I have no idea what GLAS stands for and I didn't see it spelled out during my admittedly cursory look at their website; the festival looks interesting though.)
02 October 2011
drink to me only with thine eyes
The John Pascoe production of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, staged as a vehicle for Renee Fleming, was so thoroughly trashed when it played in Washington a few years ago and again Friday before last when it opened here (in this work’s first appearance at San Francisco Opera) that last Monday I went into its second performance with very low expectations, which may have been a good thing because I found myself enjoying the evening thoroughly.
This is not to say that the production or the opera itself is particularly good, though approached in the right way it is entertaining and very effective. I’m the first person to sneer coldly at people who discuss all opera as if it’s silly inane camp (“but of course the music,” they always simper condescendingly, “is simply gorgeous!”), but if I were a lawyer arguing that case I’d do my best to have Lucrezia ruled inadmissible as evidence. You may well spend a lot of time trying to piece together the haphazard plot, but this is I think the wrong approach. What we have here is not Lulu; it is not even Lucia. What I realized during an early scene in which a suddenly unmasked Lucrezia is confronted with four or five men who take turns announcing which of their relatives she has murdered, while La Lucrezia makes an anguished but exculpatory little backward sweep of her hand, as if to say, “Well, yes, I did poison all those people – but what else was I to do?!?” – what I realized then is that what we have here is a Joan Crawford movie.
I need to point out that I was not one of those jackasses who feel the need to laugh at something other people are taking seriously, in order to show how superior they are to it (and to those taking it seriously). I need to point this out because I despise people who impose their reactions on others during a performance, or who feel the need to assert their superiority to something they’re enjoying (I have no guilty pleasures, at least aesthetically), and I realize I’m coming about as close as I can imagine coming to saying an opera is best enjoyed as camp. It’s just that I realized that if I approached this the way I would something like Le Nozze di Figaro, or some similarly deep and, you know, coherent work, then I would miss the very different pleasures provided.
So I sat silently and in perfect attendance, as did those around me, and perhaps I would have enjoyed myself less if the audience had been more annoying, or if the opera had started at 8:00 rather than 7:30, as I was pretty much done by Act 3: the experience of live theater is so fragile and fraught with peril! – much like life in Renaissance Italy, as portrayed in Lucrezia Borgia. I’m used to such a portrayal in Shakespeare, but it seemed a slightly odd approach for an Italian to take to an era in his country's history that is one of the glories of this world. I kept thinking of Shakespeare because watching Lucrezia was a bit like watching Two Gentlemen of Verona, in that there are situations that are quite enjoyable and satisfactory, unless you know some of the later plays in which similar situations are elevated far beyond the earlier work; I kept thinking of Verdi, in particular Un Ballo in Maschera, and how much more effectively he had treated some similar situations (or something like Macbeth, in which both Shakespeare and Verdi achieved something deep and unified, as Donizetti didn't with his heroine).
As for following the plot, the opera gods forbid that five minutes of stage time be taken from the inevitable drinking song or the chorus’s umpteenth repetition of such relevant sentiments as “Venice is awfully nice!” or “We like to party!” in order to clarify such questions as why young soldier Gennaro (tenor Michael Fabiano) was raised by a fisherman instead of his mother Lucrezia, why he has never been told that she is his mother, why she never tells him she is his mother when she runs across him in Venice (allowing him instead to proclaim himself in love with her, and not in a brunch-and-corsage-on-the-second-Sunday-in-May way, either), or – and this is the question that nagged at me the most – why she simply doesn’t tell her husband Duke Alfonso (Vitalij Kowaljow) that Gennaro is not her lover but her son, when such information could save Gennaro’s life, which seems to be her general goal. Yes, I can assume it’s a shocking or shameful secret, but what’s the point (other than providing a smashing final curtain, of course) of announcing it only when it is most obviously way too late?
You see that making sense of the plot is not the way to go here. You talk about tabloid operas – this is the mother of them all, steeped in gossip so sordid and scandalous it was whispered down the generations. Lucrezia Borgia is like Salome without the philosophical underpinnings. You can feel Donizetti straining to fit this wild, shocking Romantic-movement fantasia into the theatrical restrictions of the early nineteenth-century Italian stage, and not quite succeeding. It’s all about what is most vivid and sensational and depraved from moment to moment, and if that means a certain overall incoherence, or a lack of such niceties as plausible characterization, then so be it.
It’s all about the moment, and isn’t that where live theater exists, only in the vanishing moment? But I don’t want to make it sound like a philosophical exercise, or too aesthetic and rarefied, as if you were reading Mallarme or holding an opal up to the sun to watch it flash its dazzling colors; what watching Lucrezia is like is standing in the supermarket check-out line and reading contradictory tabloid headlines about the same star (the most relevant star in this case would be Angelina Jolie) and realizing that in that universe there is no contradiction.
The heroine is both a powerful, vindictive woman and a heart-broken mother; there are intimations of betrayal and lurid crimes of all sort; the plot is convoluted and elliptical to the point of incomprehensibility; and of course it’s all very noir, not only in style, but quite literally – whether a scene takes place in a secret dungeon or in a public square during what was later, to my great surprise, announced as “broad daylight,” the stage is plunged in unrelenting night – I might as well enter into the extravagant spirit of the thing and call it Cimmerian gloom. I assume this is a deliberate, if slightly puzzling, artistic choice, and not an attempt by the Opera company to cut down on its no-doubt expensive utility bills, but it sure doesn’t help when you’re trying to figure out which interchangeable minor courtier is doing what to another interchangeable minor courtier.
But, again, legibility is not the point. Given this approach, it was easy to enjoy the show without worrying too much about why the courtiers were occasionally elaborately choreographed and why they sometimes moved like regular human beings; or why people kept giving the Nazi salute (I don’t care if this salute was customary in Renaissance Italy; if you put it on stage in 21st-century America, it reads as a Hitler reference); or why – well, why bother listing? I stopped dwelling on such things. I even consented to pretend that the leather-clad jailer desultorily whipping a thin nervous dancer as the dungeon scene opened was the height (or depth) of titillating depravity, even though the newspaper that morning had far more explicit photos and descriptions from the previous weekend’s Folsom Street Fair (a major San Francisco tourist attraction), complete with a report from a nice middle-aged lady visitor that she hadn’t seen much like this up in Eugene, Oregon. The signifiers of depravity have their iconic functions.
The homoeroticism was not limited to leather-clad jailers. In Act 3 Gennaro, after spending the first two acts falling in love or at least horniness at first sight with beautiful women (even if they turned out to be his mother), was suddenly smooching in the piazza with his compatriot Maffio Orsini (mezzo Elizabeth DeShong). Usually this sort of shoe-horned same-sexiness irritates me, because you can tell the directors feel smug about how “honest” they are (when what they’re really doing is messing up the psychological relationships among the characters) and how “bold” they are (when instead they are simplistically reducing all relationships among men to purely sexual ones). But I entered into the anything-goes spirit of sensationalism so fully that when I realized that Orsini was not Gennaro’s pageboy, as I had initially thought (DeShong is quite short and youthful-looking, and her part kept reminding me of Oscar in Ballo, hence my pageboy assumption), I was mostly disappointed that the sulfurous whiff of pedophilia wasn’t adding to the heady tabloid brew.
I also loved the much-mocked costumes, which I found sumptuous, lurid, and slightly ridiculous, and therefore perfectly suited to the staging. It makes sense in the terms of this production that Lucrezia would visit her husband’s dungeon wearing a glam chiffon-and-shimmer ballgown in russet and green-gold, with her hair done up in a Dairy Queen swirl which was slightly off-center, no doubt to express inner anguish. In the grand finale, she bursts into the party room like the Red Death, wearing black tights and an elegantly cut (or hammered) silver breastplate, her hair now done in a severe and punitive shag, looking totally ready for Joan of Arc night at the dance club. She enters with sword grandly drawn, which may seem quite literally like overkill, as she has already poisoned the drinks of everyone in the room, but it is undeniably a kick-ass entry, and who am I to deny a diva her accessories in the name of some dramatic or logical principles that clearly had been set aside when the curtain first ascended?
Meanwhile Gennaro is rocking a pair of tights with broad vertical stripes in muted and blended shades of green – nothing too bright or primary, which is good because such shades really don’t work for the portrayal of overripe decadence, which is why I feel designers of Salome should reach for olive-green and purple and not crimson – topped by a golden pec-baring tunic perfectly suited for watching the tenor’s chest rise and fall as his last aria pours forth in the sweet anguish of death. I don’t usually react this way to costumes, but in this case I really had some sartorial envy: I thought, My God, if I were a Renaissance mercenary who smooched boys in the alley and fell in love with his own Mom, that is exactly what I would want to wear! My own costume of black pants and long-sleeved black T-shirt (long sleeves: the secret of elegance, or at least presentability!) seemed in comparison like a utilitarian failure to truly live.
I have no idea how the costumes read farther back in the barn that is the War Memorial Opera House. As I said, the lighting was notably dim throughout.
This was all a reminder that the pleasures of the opera house are not only musical. As for the actual musical pleasures . . . well, that was a mixed bag, though Donizetti had certainly supplied some promising raw materials. I have seen Carol Vanness carry roles that weren’t really suited to her through sheer force of personality; if Fleming didn't quite achieve that, seeming more disengaged, more a visiting celebrity than an engine of the story, well . . . as I mentioned earlier: Joan Crawford. Under the circumstances it didn’t seem entirely unsuitable for her to stand there smiling vaguely amid the destruction. She is more engaged and convincing in some aspects of the part than others – she’s much better at the suffering mother than the tempestuous temptress. Vocally some parts were rougher than others, but then there were moments of astonishing beauty, in particular one long sustained anguished note as her Act 1 unmaskers accuse her to her son, which may have been one of the most memorable purely vocal moments I’ve experienced recently in the opera house.
Clearly Fleming was the selling-point of the evening (quite literally; she’s been ubiquitous in the Opera’s marketing materials, and we were urged to subscribe before her appearances sold out), but on the whole the other singers provided more consistent pleasures; in particular Michael Fabiano made an excellent debut as Gennaro, with a strong and flexible voice that was always pleasing, and Vitalij Kowaljow was a thunderous and authoritative Alfonso.
As I said, I enjoyed my evening thoroughly, though I understand why the performances have gotten mixed and often negative reactions. The audience the night I went seemed generally quite enthusiastic, culminating in the now perhaps inevitable standing ovation. But when it came to that – well, so soon after we all stood for the SF Symphony’s epic and blazing Mahler 3, it just didn’t seem right to me to give the same tribute to the lurid pleasures of Lucrezia Borgia. But I’m not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy it all quite a lot, and I’m not going to sneer at what I genuinely enjoyed.
This is not to say that the production or the opera itself is particularly good, though approached in the right way it is entertaining and very effective. I’m the first person to sneer coldly at people who discuss all opera as if it’s silly inane camp (“but of course the music,” they always simper condescendingly, “is simply gorgeous!”), but if I were a lawyer arguing that case I’d do my best to have Lucrezia ruled inadmissible as evidence. You may well spend a lot of time trying to piece together the haphazard plot, but this is I think the wrong approach. What we have here is not Lulu; it is not even Lucia. What I realized during an early scene in which a suddenly unmasked Lucrezia is confronted with four or five men who take turns announcing which of their relatives she has murdered, while La Lucrezia makes an anguished but exculpatory little backward sweep of her hand, as if to say, “Well, yes, I did poison all those people – but what else was I to do?!?” – what I realized then is that what we have here is a Joan Crawford movie.
I need to point out that I was not one of those jackasses who feel the need to laugh at something other people are taking seriously, in order to show how superior they are to it (and to those taking it seriously). I need to point this out because I despise people who impose their reactions on others during a performance, or who feel the need to assert their superiority to something they’re enjoying (I have no guilty pleasures, at least aesthetically), and I realize I’m coming about as close as I can imagine coming to saying an opera is best enjoyed as camp. It’s just that I realized that if I approached this the way I would something like Le Nozze di Figaro, or some similarly deep and, you know, coherent work, then I would miss the very different pleasures provided.
So I sat silently and in perfect attendance, as did those around me, and perhaps I would have enjoyed myself less if the audience had been more annoying, or if the opera had started at 8:00 rather than 7:30, as I was pretty much done by Act 3: the experience of live theater is so fragile and fraught with peril! – much like life in Renaissance Italy, as portrayed in Lucrezia Borgia. I’m used to such a portrayal in Shakespeare, but it seemed a slightly odd approach for an Italian to take to an era in his country's history that is one of the glories of this world. I kept thinking of Shakespeare because watching Lucrezia was a bit like watching Two Gentlemen of Verona, in that there are situations that are quite enjoyable and satisfactory, unless you know some of the later plays in which similar situations are elevated far beyond the earlier work; I kept thinking of Verdi, in particular Un Ballo in Maschera, and how much more effectively he had treated some similar situations (or something like Macbeth, in which both Shakespeare and Verdi achieved something deep and unified, as Donizetti didn't with his heroine).
As for following the plot, the opera gods forbid that five minutes of stage time be taken from the inevitable drinking song or the chorus’s umpteenth repetition of such relevant sentiments as “Venice is awfully nice!” or “We like to party!” in order to clarify such questions as why young soldier Gennaro (tenor Michael Fabiano) was raised by a fisherman instead of his mother Lucrezia, why he has never been told that she is his mother, why she never tells him she is his mother when she runs across him in Venice (allowing him instead to proclaim himself in love with her, and not in a brunch-and-corsage-on-the-second-Sunday-in-May way, either), or – and this is the question that nagged at me the most – why she simply doesn’t tell her husband Duke Alfonso (Vitalij Kowaljow) that Gennaro is not her lover but her son, when such information could save Gennaro’s life, which seems to be her general goal. Yes, I can assume it’s a shocking or shameful secret, but what’s the point (other than providing a smashing final curtain, of course) of announcing it only when it is most obviously way too late?
You see that making sense of the plot is not the way to go here. You talk about tabloid operas – this is the mother of them all, steeped in gossip so sordid and scandalous it was whispered down the generations. Lucrezia Borgia is like Salome without the philosophical underpinnings. You can feel Donizetti straining to fit this wild, shocking Romantic-movement fantasia into the theatrical restrictions of the early nineteenth-century Italian stage, and not quite succeeding. It’s all about what is most vivid and sensational and depraved from moment to moment, and if that means a certain overall incoherence, or a lack of such niceties as plausible characterization, then so be it.
It’s all about the moment, and isn’t that where live theater exists, only in the vanishing moment? But I don’t want to make it sound like a philosophical exercise, or too aesthetic and rarefied, as if you were reading Mallarme or holding an opal up to the sun to watch it flash its dazzling colors; what watching Lucrezia is like is standing in the supermarket check-out line and reading contradictory tabloid headlines about the same star (the most relevant star in this case would be Angelina Jolie) and realizing that in that universe there is no contradiction.
The heroine is both a powerful, vindictive woman and a heart-broken mother; there are intimations of betrayal and lurid crimes of all sort; the plot is convoluted and elliptical to the point of incomprehensibility; and of course it’s all very noir, not only in style, but quite literally – whether a scene takes place in a secret dungeon or in a public square during what was later, to my great surprise, announced as “broad daylight,” the stage is plunged in unrelenting night – I might as well enter into the extravagant spirit of the thing and call it Cimmerian gloom. I assume this is a deliberate, if slightly puzzling, artistic choice, and not an attempt by the Opera company to cut down on its no-doubt expensive utility bills, but it sure doesn’t help when you’re trying to figure out which interchangeable minor courtier is doing what to another interchangeable minor courtier.
But, again, legibility is not the point. Given this approach, it was easy to enjoy the show without worrying too much about why the courtiers were occasionally elaborately choreographed and why they sometimes moved like regular human beings; or why people kept giving the Nazi salute (I don’t care if this salute was customary in Renaissance Italy; if you put it on stage in 21st-century America, it reads as a Hitler reference); or why – well, why bother listing? I stopped dwelling on such things. I even consented to pretend that the leather-clad jailer desultorily whipping a thin nervous dancer as the dungeon scene opened was the height (or depth) of titillating depravity, even though the newspaper that morning had far more explicit photos and descriptions from the previous weekend’s Folsom Street Fair (a major San Francisco tourist attraction), complete with a report from a nice middle-aged lady visitor that she hadn’t seen much like this up in Eugene, Oregon. The signifiers of depravity have their iconic functions.
The homoeroticism was not limited to leather-clad jailers. In Act 3 Gennaro, after spending the first two acts falling in love or at least horniness at first sight with beautiful women (even if they turned out to be his mother), was suddenly smooching in the piazza with his compatriot Maffio Orsini (mezzo Elizabeth DeShong). Usually this sort of shoe-horned same-sexiness irritates me, because you can tell the directors feel smug about how “honest” they are (when what they’re really doing is messing up the psychological relationships among the characters) and how “bold” they are (when instead they are simplistically reducing all relationships among men to purely sexual ones). But I entered into the anything-goes spirit of sensationalism so fully that when I realized that Orsini was not Gennaro’s pageboy, as I had initially thought (DeShong is quite short and youthful-looking, and her part kept reminding me of Oscar in Ballo, hence my pageboy assumption), I was mostly disappointed that the sulfurous whiff of pedophilia wasn’t adding to the heady tabloid brew.
I also loved the much-mocked costumes, which I found sumptuous, lurid, and slightly ridiculous, and therefore perfectly suited to the staging. It makes sense in the terms of this production that Lucrezia would visit her husband’s dungeon wearing a glam chiffon-and-shimmer ballgown in russet and green-gold, with her hair done up in a Dairy Queen swirl which was slightly off-center, no doubt to express inner anguish. In the grand finale, she bursts into the party room like the Red Death, wearing black tights and an elegantly cut (or hammered) silver breastplate, her hair now done in a severe and punitive shag, looking totally ready for Joan of Arc night at the dance club. She enters with sword grandly drawn, which may seem quite literally like overkill, as she has already poisoned the drinks of everyone in the room, but it is undeniably a kick-ass entry, and who am I to deny a diva her accessories in the name of some dramatic or logical principles that clearly had been set aside when the curtain first ascended?
Meanwhile Gennaro is rocking a pair of tights with broad vertical stripes in muted and blended shades of green – nothing too bright or primary, which is good because such shades really don’t work for the portrayal of overripe decadence, which is why I feel designers of Salome should reach for olive-green and purple and not crimson – topped by a golden pec-baring tunic perfectly suited for watching the tenor’s chest rise and fall as his last aria pours forth in the sweet anguish of death. I don’t usually react this way to costumes, but in this case I really had some sartorial envy: I thought, My God, if I were a Renaissance mercenary who smooched boys in the alley and fell in love with his own Mom, that is exactly what I would want to wear! My own costume of black pants and long-sleeved black T-shirt (long sleeves: the secret of elegance, or at least presentability!) seemed in comparison like a utilitarian failure to truly live.
I have no idea how the costumes read farther back in the barn that is the War Memorial Opera House. As I said, the lighting was notably dim throughout.
This was all a reminder that the pleasures of the opera house are not only musical. As for the actual musical pleasures . . . well, that was a mixed bag, though Donizetti had certainly supplied some promising raw materials. I have seen Carol Vanness carry roles that weren’t really suited to her through sheer force of personality; if Fleming didn't quite achieve that, seeming more disengaged, more a visiting celebrity than an engine of the story, well . . . as I mentioned earlier: Joan Crawford. Under the circumstances it didn’t seem entirely unsuitable for her to stand there smiling vaguely amid the destruction. She is more engaged and convincing in some aspects of the part than others – she’s much better at the suffering mother than the tempestuous temptress. Vocally some parts were rougher than others, but then there were moments of astonishing beauty, in particular one long sustained anguished note as her Act 1 unmaskers accuse her to her son, which may have been one of the most memorable purely vocal moments I’ve experienced recently in the opera house.
Clearly Fleming was the selling-point of the evening (quite literally; she’s been ubiquitous in the Opera’s marketing materials, and we were urged to subscribe before her appearances sold out), but on the whole the other singers provided more consistent pleasures; in particular Michael Fabiano made an excellent debut as Gennaro, with a strong and flexible voice that was always pleasing, and Vitalij Kowaljow was a thunderous and authoritative Alfonso.
As I said, I enjoyed my evening thoroughly, though I understand why the performances have gotten mixed and often negative reactions. The audience the night I went seemed generally quite enthusiastic, culminating in the now perhaps inevitable standing ovation. But when it came to that – well, so soon after we all stood for the SF Symphony’s epic and blazing Mahler 3, it just didn’t seem right to me to give the same tribute to the lurid pleasures of Lucrezia Borgia. But I’m not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy it all quite a lot, and I’m not going to sneer at what I genuinely enjoyed.
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