Archives for 2010

The American rocker Rufus Wainwright stepped out before an expectant audience at Davies Symphony Hall for the world premiere of his new song cycle based on five sonnets by William Shakespeare dressed in a puffy, white Renaissance shirt embellished with what looked like a piece of squashed Victoria sponge cake, lilac taffeta trousers and patent black clogs. A silver chain-link necklace glistened between the dark hairs on his pale chest.

Fortunately, Wainwright composes better than he dresses.

Five Shakespeare Sonnets includes a part for solo tenor voice featuring jagged atonal hops, swooping highs and lows and emotional melodic lines. The orchestration has some beautiful colors in it. A grave viola solo and sparkling glockenspiel scales are just two of the details I picked out of the texture. And the San Francisco Symphony does a wonderful job of balancing turbulence and stillness.

The only other thing, besides the soloist’s getup, which bothered me about last night’s performance, was Wainwright’s voice. Wainwright’s nasal twang always has a hint of desperation about it. At Davies Symphony Hall, it sounded overbearing and whiney amplified as it was with the swirling orchestra behind it.

As I listened, I couldn’t help but imagine how amazing the piece would sound sung by a classically-trained or jazz singer. I hope the work gets future airings with different kinds of voices. On its maiden voyage, I don’t think the the composer does justice to his own composition by singing it himself.

On a related note, it’s curious to me that the San Francisco Symphony would go to the trouble of commissioning such a famous artist to create a new work and then fail to engage the organization’s main figurehead, Michael Tilson Thomas, to lead the world premiere. Concertmaster, Alexander Barantschik was also missing. Last night, a young Englishman, Michael Francis, made his San Francisco Symphony debut on the podium and associate concertmaster Nadya Tichman sat in the first chair. The absence of the two uppermost artistic personnel of the organization suggests a lack of interest or faith in its commissioning strategy and process.

Soprano Measha Brueggergosman performed her recital debut in San Francisco last night under the auspices of San Francisco Performances at the Herbst Theatre.

The audience was on the small side: Though the singer is a big name in her native Canada, she’s not so well known in the Bay Area right now. But I suspect that every person who heard her last night went home clamoring to hear her lustrous voice again.

Brueggergosman’s voice takes a little adjusting to. It doesn’t have a uniform, bell-like quality. It has many many colors, from voluptuous, velvety tones to glittering, on-the-edge-of-breathy edges. She’s also a performer who sings with her entire body. She bends her legs, moves her trunk and emotes with every ounce of her being.

There was something about the quality of last night’s recital with pianist Justus Zeyen, which featured songs by Mozart, Schubert, Duparc, Turina, Chopin, Strauss and Berg, that had the air of a jazz rather than a classical performance. It’s partly to do with the way that Brueggergosman sings — that breathy edge to her voice is very jazz — and partly to do with the way she stands (very close to the piano, with her hand resting on it) and sways. This gave the classical works she performed a slightly different tint which made us listen in a new way.

Speaking of brilliant stage performers who aren’t spring chickens anymore and yet hardly ready to screw the lids on their pots of greasepaint — as I recently did on this blog of Chita Rivera — Placido Domingo, who will shortly turn 70, shows very few signs of letting up.

As the title character in Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which is currently being produced at the San Francisco Opera, the great Spanish singer holds the audience in thrall. His voice is full fills the sizable War Memorial auditorium effortlessly. He is as comfortable bellowing war cries at the bottom of his register as he is hitting the high notes while singing about romance. Even under the weight of his floppy, feathered hat and prosthetic nose, Domingo manages to exude a virile presence. At 69, he is equally capable of embodying youth in the throes of ecstasy, as he is a sick, old man lamenting lost love at the end of the story.

Domingo doesn’t move around a great deal on stage. During the sword fights, other people move around him but he stays fairly still. This conceit works quite well from the point of you of conveying a sense of the character’s effortless power over his enemies. But it also gives the game away slightly: Domingo has a great deal of energy. But he’s perhaps not going to dart around the stage with a sword as much today as he might have done in years past.

If only the opera itself were more worthy of its star. There’s a reason why Alfano’s Cyrano isn’t performed very often: Musically, it’s fairly inert, with few remarkable instrumental passages and no memorable arias. It takes a performer of the caliber and reputation of Domingo to bring it to the stage and keep us glued to our seats.

On another completely unrelated note: The School of the Arts in San Francisco, a fabulous and terribly under-funded public school which produces many fine young performers, is planning to undertake a tour with its choral ensemble to Chicago in 2011. The choir will be participating in master classes with renowned choral conductors and professional singers as well as presenting several free public concert collaborations with celebrated Chicago choirs. To raise the $75,000 necessary to send the students to the mid-west, SOTA is undertaking a big fundraising campaign. The school is selling CDs and greetings cards online. To find out how to donate to a worthy cause, please click here. “It’s a fantastic educational opportunity to build our repertoire and grow as artists,” says the head of SOTA’s choral program, Todd Wedge, about the upcoming tour. “Please help us realize our dreams.”

Journalists love interviewing people who don’t toe the party line, but give an opposing view on a subject. A detractor’s opinions provide that all-important bit of tension in a story that makes it more fully rounded and readable. This opposing viewpoint is particularly important (but hard to come by) in arts journalism, where most interviewees — not to mention the reporters themselves — tend to spend their time talking about how great an artist’s work is and how excited they are about it. This is why so much arts journalism is bland and expendable.

But what happens when you’re lucky enough to stumble on a person willing to state an unorthodox viewpoint on a subject but that person ends up making points that seem worthless, petty and ultimately unusable? Disappointment prevails.

This is the feeling I got yesterday while collecting insights on the work of a famous artist whom I am writing about this week for the New York Times. In preparation for the story, I talked to a number of people yesterday on the phone ranging from one of the artist’s project managers to curators at local museums who have worked with the artist on commissions in recent years.

With the exception of the detractor in question, everyone I have spoken with so far provided at least a few interesting insights.

Sadly, the one commentator who has an opposing view on the artist’s output said very little that is usable. A reputed expert in the particular field of art in which the subject of my article operates, the interviewee launched into a negative tirade about the artist’s work, but was completely unable to substantiate her feelings from an aesthetic standpoint. All I could glean from talking to her was that she objects to the artist on account of his fame and ability to command large fees for major commissions. She thinks that the money and commissions should be spread around and not automatically given to this particular artist.

Duh! Frankly, I would expect an expert of her caliber to provide me with insights that go beyond the blindingly obvious. That a few famous artists swallow up the lion’s share of the limelight and the corresponding accolades and monetary gains isn’t remotely interesting grounds upon which to base a critique of their work.

Oh well. On this occasion, I’ll be hard-pressed to use this detractor’s comments in my story.

The newly-reopened Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel was completely packed for Friday evening’s one-night-only performance by Broadway icon Chita Rivera. Bay Area Cabaret, the organization under whose umbrella the concert was taking place, was forced to turn people away.

And understandably so: The triple-threat stage diva displayed heart-palpitating emotional range in a show whose musical offerings ranged from songs from Westside Story to Bye Bye Birdie to the Kiss of the Spider Woman. Rivera moved like someone a fraction of her age. And her voice, if not quite as melodious as it once was, delivered the messages of the songs with a throaty and rich lyricism that made them even more meaningful than they might have otherwise been.

If I have even a fraction of the energy and joie de vivre that this consummate performer possesses at the age of 77 when I’m approaching her years, I’ll count myself exceedingly lucky.

It’s always exciting when a new cultural space opens up in a city, especially in tough economic times.

Holly’s, a new comedy club located in the same building that houses the multiplex movie theatre at 1000 Van Ness Avenue, launched last night with a lineup of comedians that included the San Francisco stalwart Michael Capozzola (who served as MC for the evening), a British ex-pat by the name of George Corrigan and headliner David Crowe (pictured) who hails from Seattle.

The space itself, which is a good, intimate size for comedy but lacks any individualizing details and feels a little bland with its non-descript cafeteria-style formica-topped rectangular tables and chairs, needs to be full of people to make it glow. The atmosphere in the room last night was lively and warm by the time the show started.

What I tasted of the menu, which offers shrimp cocktails, turkey and beef sliders, grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, fish & chips and other simple comfort foods, was delicious, despite the to-be-expected sluggish and erratic opening-night service standards. (I’m sure Holly’s will have no trouble ironing out this kink in time.)

I enjoyed parts of the show itself immensely: David Crowe is a comedian of quirky intelligence: His first appearance on stage came before Corrigan’s warm-up act as a “visiting” comedian and last-minute addition to the program named Lloyd Althauser. Lloyd, an efete and nerdy coin collector from the South, turned out to be an alter ego of David Crowe and a very funny one at that. The comedian’s characterization of the coin collector remains a highlight of the evening for me. I also loved the freewheeling nature of his humor during the main set. The comedian found refreshing ways to approach very familiar subjects such as pregnancy and online dating.

I was much less impressed with Corrigan, whose comedy revolved almost entirely around tired jokes about being a British person in America and the Anglo-American divide in general. And Capozzola, a comedian who is usually intelligent and daring, wasn’t very much of either last night. Perhaps he doesn’t enjoy playing the MC for these types of occasions.

If I have any criticism of Holly’s programming, it’s that there is not a single female comedian on the lineup between now and the end of the year. I hope that the club will rectify this issue in 2011.

P.S. Holly’s has a heartwarming story behind it which I’d like to relay by way of postscript: Holly Horn, the namesake of the club and a former salesperson at the luxury car dealership across the street from the new venue on Van Ness Avenue, had a long-time dream of opening a nightspot for comedians. Her boss, a 91-year-old luxury car salesman by the name of Kjell Qvale, was so impressed with Holly, whom he met in 1997 when she came to work for his company, that he decided to open a club with her. Qvale, who was holding court at a ringside table last night and even got up to do a sweet little standup routine himself, became the owner of Holly’s and Holly, the club’s proprietor. The rest, as they say, is history. Let’s hope that the club has a long a distinguished future.

I hate parades. Always have. I’ve avoided the Notting Hill Carnival back home in England and have been to Gay Pride, though of all the street parties in town, I imagine this must be the most culturally captivating and socially relevant. And I’d rather attend an insurance seminar than get behind Macy’s at Thanksgiving.

My bah-humbug aversion came to the fore yesterday when I was forced to battle the lunchtime baseball crowds at Civic Center on my way to teach a class in Berkeley. The train system (BART) was a mess. I ended up grabbing light rail (MUNI) to the Embarcadero and then hopping on BART across the water from there. Only too happy to escape to the sanity of the East Bay.

I am excited that the SF Giants won the world series. It was great to see so much euphoria in the city, especially since the elections had produced such lackluster results.

Yet the marauding, drunken crowds with their drunken shouts of “Go Giants!” and “Fock Yeah!” rang dull to my ears. The celebration spilled into trouble at various points with stories of people being beaten up and store windows smashed.

I don’t mean to be a killjoy, but all those people dressed in orange — the smell if not the full-on color of danger — make me feel nervous. There must be better ways to show civic pride than this.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that normal concert etiquette goes out of the window for lunchtime and commuter hour concerts?

I kind of think it’s a shame that the format allows people to wander in and out at will and read a book or take care of some work while having the live music on as “background” to their activities.

On the other hand, there’s something very special about being able to come in off the street for an hour and forget the crazy world outside while immersing yourself in gorgeous live music in a casual setting.

Though some people around me were only half paying attention to the music (they appeared to be working) I spent a wonderful 45 minutes or so in the company of the Cypress String Quartet yesterday as the group played at Old St Mary’s Cathedral in downtown San Francisco as part of the church’s “Noontime Concert” series.

But I broke etiquette rules in that I was very late in getting to the venue.

The roomy church was pretty full of people. The part of the program which I managed to catch, Stravinsky’s spiky Concertino and Elena Ruehr’s playful and kinetic String Quartet No. 3 (2001), a new discovery for me, lifted my heart. The Cypress Quartet played elegantly and with a pristine sense of ensemble. The articulation in the Ruehr was especially delicate and precise. The players seemed very serious though. Their mood seemed not to go with the laid-back atmosphere in the church.

As I slipped my suggested donation of $5 into a box on my way out, I made myself promise to seek out more of these lunchtime events. I’m sure they’re happening all over the city. I just don’t get away from my desk enough in the middle of the day.

And as for the debate about whether people should treat such events with the same reverence as they do evening concerts or eat their sandwiches throughout, I think there’s a case to be made on both fronts. By their very nature, these concerts are meant to be less formal. But there are limits. Audiences should at least have respect for the performers. Cell phone conversations should be banned. And in cases where tickets are not sold, everyone in the room should feel obliged to leave a donation.

It’s been hard to avoid baseball in San Francisco lately. Last night in particular was a symphony of blaring car horns and shrieking, gimme-five-slapping pedestrians as citizens made their excitement about the home team’s victory over the Texas Rangers strongly felt.

One of the things that’s kept me in a state of semi-attention in recent weeks has been the mid-game singing of “God Bless America.” Some of the performances have been tuneful (such as the wife of a soldier who sang the song last night in Dallas with soulful tones). Others have had the opposite effect (the actress Martha Plimpton’s rendition lacked basic intonation accuracy a few days ago.)

But good or bad, all the versions I have heard this year have one detail in common: An obsession with being melismatic.

The florid embellishments of R&B divas have a lot of show-off appeal and they help to spin out lines and make them sound fuller and more wave-like. But they sound horrible when they’re not done properly. And even if such ornamentation is handled skillfully, it’s kind of boring to hear this approach used constantly in all of the games.

There is more than one way to approach a patriotic song. Sounding like Whitney Houston isn’t a prerequisite for putting “God Bless America” across in a sports stadium. Next world series, should I choose to pay attention, I’d like to hear singers give the song a different spin. They might consider taking out all the curlicues and simply sing it straight like a shaker hymn or shape note tune. This might not help the teams to hit more home runes, but it’ll certainly make the song stand out.

There are few better ways to spend Halloween, culturally-speaking, than exploring ruins. But to get the most out of the experience, you ideally need to visit ruins that aren’t really designated as such. Because to feel a proper chill down your spine, it’s better to be alone than surrounded by hundreds of other thrill-seekers. 

A wander around the ghostly remains of Ponderosa Ranch above Incline Village near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, yesterday afternoon proved to be the perfect Halloween experience, particularly because it’s a forbidden one: The place, which was once a bustling tourist attraction, has been bereft of activity since it closed down in 2004.

Between 1967 and 2004, Ponderosa Ranch was a theme park based on the 1960s television western Bonanza. It was the home of the affluent Cartwright family in the series. Portions of the last five seasons of the TV series and three TV movies were filmed at the location.

Today, the shuttered theme park isn’t the sort of place that welcomes snoopers. Forbidding chain-link fences and signs at the entrance just off the freeway keep curious passersby out. But if you hike a trail around the back of the site up the mountainside, you can sneak in another way easily enough.

In the late October sunlight, Ponderosa Ranch was completely still and ever so slightly spooky. The skeletal forms of rusty old farm equipment resembled the remains of dinosaurs. Stacked picnic tables and benches appeared to be coffins in the lengthening afternoon shadows. Exploring the dusty barns and unswept trailers revealed a wealth of dormant treasures such as old wooden signs advertising horse rides and $2 cowboy breakfasts, defunct movie cameras and lights, heavy wooden wagon wheels and creaking ferris wheel horses and camels, their once-brightly painted coats peeling off.

I kept thinking that we’d come across a corpse amidst all that debris and quietude. Thankfully we didn’t. All in all, the clandestine visit still made for the ultimate off-the-beaten-track Halloween scare.

I’ve had the good fortune to experience so many cultural happenings this week that I’m quite behind on my commentary about them all. Just thought I’d use this opportunity to provide a quick roundup of three arts events that anyone in SF with a bit of cash to spend and some time on their hands should make a bee-line for:

1. Westside Story at the Orpheum Theatre: The new Broadway tour of the Bernstein classic is worth seeing simply as a reminder of the musical’s superiority to almost any contemporary counterpart. Almost every song is a hit. The choreography is virile and virtuostic. The orchestrations hit you in the gut. The characters are vivid. I only wish that the singing in this production were better. The nasal quality of Ali Ewoldt’s voice as Maria made my toes curl. And Kyle Harris, the production’s handsome Tony, could barely reach the many high notes in his songs.

2. Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and “Exposed”): The highlight of this major retrospective of the famed photographer’s career is the section devoted to the artist’s travels through American in the post-war years. This material isn’t as well known as much of Cartier-Bresson’s other works, but the images are as vivid as the best of his iconic street-life pictures taken earlier in the century in France and elsewhere. There’s a great photograph of a large family lounging all over a hatchback car in 1970 New Mexico. The car becomes the ultimate leisure vehicle. It’s like the family’s lounge. Another image I like is a photograph taken in San Francisco in 1960. It’s a view from above of ladies sitting next to each other with tightly-crossed legs. The legs look like features of the landscape rather than anatomical parts. Cartier-Bresson’s widow, the photographer Martine Franck, was at the opening at SFMOMA. There are two pictures of her in the exhibition. At one point, I noticed her stopping to steal a glance at one of her husband’s photographs of her. It was just a second’s pause. Then she moved on, spending much more time in front of the other portraits. A photography exhibition on the floor above the Cartier-Bresson show, “Exposed”, all about the different ways in which people see and are seen by the camera’s eye, is also very much worth a visit. The images range from the sexual (eg a Helmut Newton image taken through a mirror of him posing with a couple of naked female models and a clothed female) to the celebrity (eg an image of the Queen with her corgies) to the violent (countless horrifying pictures of lynchings, amputees, suicides and so on). The breadth and unflinching nature of the material make the show feel both compact and powerful.

3. Kronos Quartet at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: The Bay Area’s preeminent experimental string quartet is embarking on a long-term partnership with YBCA. The group kicked off the relationship with a concert of short works featuring live string music set against a backdrop of ambient recorded and electronic noise and a new production of a spellbinding 1970 work by George Crumb entitled Black Angels. The first half of the program felt quite samey to me, even though there are great contrasts in mood between Bob Ostertag’s furious “All the Rage”, a piece about homophobia, Ingram Marshall’s creeping “Fog Tropes II”, the Middle Eastern-inflected lines of Sahba Aminikia’s “String Quartet No 3: A Threnody for Those who Remain” and Aleksandra Vrebalov’s stormy “Spell No 4 for a Changing World.” But it was the second half that really entranced me. The theatricailty of the new staging was startling, with its ceremonial hanging of the string instruments on bungies that look like tiny noose. I was also enraptured by the diversity of the musical influences which ranged from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet to a Renaissance sarabande to Asian scales. I’m not sure why, but as the musicians glided through this piece, I felt like I was receiving information about a variety of ancient and now lost, dormant cultures. I listened like a sleepwalker.

I like seeing performances in languages I barely understand or don’t understand at all.

This feeling came back to me a couple of nights ago when I was in Berkeley seeing a great interpreter of Anglo-Saxon stories and music, Benjamin Bagby, perform Beowulf in the  old English in which the epic poem was originally set down in writing centuries ago.

Supertitles are obviously helpful. But, just as with some of the best theatrical productions I’ve experienced in my time in Russian, German and a variety of Indian tongues that didn’t provide assistance with translations, I don’t believe the supertitles  significantly increased my enjoyment of the show.

Bagby is such a consummate storyteller: The intensity of his gaze and his delicate harp accompaniment, speech modulations and emotional, lusty singing voice conveyed a great deal of meaning. It is sufficient, I think, to go into the theatre with a general understanding of the plot of Beowulf. Parsing every word isn’t necessary for one’s enjoyment. I was completely transported by the performer’s narrative.

In other news: A friend of mine who lives on the other side of the country saw my recent New York Times piece about the Bay Area cabaret scene and was inspired to write to me about his experiences in a not-very-authentic martini bar in Traverse City. I’m hopeless on the theme of cocktails. I’m a wine drinker almost exclusively, so asked for John’s help in knowing how to order a martini next time I go to the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel to see Chita Rivera — and what to expect.

John’s advice was so artfully articulated that I asked him if I could share it on my blog and he agreed. Here it is:

A real Martini is not made with strawberry juice or Cointreau or as in any other of the frou frou girly monstrosities.  If you go into the Cabaret in the Fairmont and ask for a classic martini with Bombay Sapphire gin, Tanqueray,Hendricks or one of the other top shelf gins and you want it say 10:1 or 16:1 you will get a classic martini. Vodka came much later in Martini history.  Many persons who say they want a martini really only want gin or vodka straight, with the garden vegetables. They will only allow vermouth in the same room, but no closer. Try it in the above proportions and you will find a very nice blend of flavors ( but see below).  Observe the bartender. If she/he macerates the lemon peel ( no flesh) and rubs it on the rim and puts a tiny bit of the juice from the olive jar in the drink with the olive, you will get a sense that she/he knows how to make one. If you ask for just a drop of single malt scotch in with the gin and vermouth, you will be noted as a cognascente. It should be served very cold.  If you have your 3″ stilettos on and one leg over the other on a stool at the bar make sure you get it “up”, that is in a icy chilled conic section stem glass. If you are going to hunch over the bar or be at a table, then I guess an old fashion glass will work. In any event don’t chug it but drink it while it is still cold. Warm martinis are deathly. The drop of single malt came from the bartender at the Oak Bar, or so my father said. It really rounds out the taste. The limit on Martinis is well established at 2, that is 2. Beyond that you are asking for trouble.  I recommend that you round out your education in Britishness by hieing yourself to the library and borrowing a copy of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. Therein lies the origin of the phrase “Shaken not stirred”. Martinis are delicious with a doz. raw oysters. Life just cannot get much better.