lies like truth

I was chatting with the executive director of a prominent music ensemble over coffee the other day. Her group often performs concert programs in Berkeley but, unusually, no East Bay performances were scheduled for the ensemble’s recent program of concerts.

I asked her why. Her answer surprised me:

“People in Berkeley like old music and new music but nothing in between.”

I know that there are lots of early and contemporary music fans in the East Bay. But it seems odd to me that the ensemble, which has an international reputation, couldn’t find enough of an audience for a program that features the “in between” repertoire in Berkeley. I’m curious to know if other groups presenting work around the Bay would agree…?

P.S. I, for one, would have gladly made the trip across the Bay to hear the concert as the San Francisco date didn’t work with my schedule. And I know from talking to music lovers around here that many San Francisco people prefer attending concerts in Berkeley venues than in San Francisco because they like the venues better.

San Francisco Opera‘s latest Opera at the Ballpark simulcast was, by most standards, an unparalleled success. 32,000 people — a record attendance in the five years that the company has mounted the program — flocked to AT&T Park to picnic and watch a live broadcast of SF Opera’s current production of Aida last Friday night.

As usual I very much enjoyed the event. (What’s there not to like about lying on the softest, cleanest grass in the world on a warm evening with friends, a bottle of wine, good cheese and bread and performances by some of the world’s top opera singers?) But the choice of opera left much to be desired.

Opera broadcasts are very unforgiving on performers’ physiques and SF Opera picked the one production in its season that has probably the most uncomely cast of all. Dolora Zajick is an incredible singer. And from a distance at the opera house itself, you can almost believe that she’s the teenage daughter of an Egyptian king. But up close when viewed on a screen, the fifty-something star simply doesn’t pull it off.

And the gaudy costumes and sets designed by Zandra Rhodes make everyone on stage without exception look like escapees from the Trannyshack pageant that also happened to be going on in San Francisco on Friday night. The low-cut square neckline of Marcello Giodarni’s costume as Radames was particularly unkind to the tenor’s generous thicket of chest hair.

A populist opera like Aida is probably the best choice for the ballpark event. But I think something stylistically lighter from the current season featuring more photogenic performers, such as The Marriage of Figaro starring the gorgeous Danielle de Niese and Ellie Dehn, would have been a better choice.

Still, once the stage darkened in the final scene, leaving Aida and Radames together to lament their untombely deaths, I couldn’t help but be moved. The garish set designs faded away and the singers lost us in Verdi’s climactic, soulful music. There was a full moon over the Ballpark that night. I will never forget it.

Days like I had on Saturday remind me of the sheer joy of living in this part of the world. There is no other place quite like it for off-the-radar cultural encounters and non-everyday experiences.

It all started at House of Air, a new trampolining park at Crissy Field. The company launched less than two weeks ago and I when I showed up, was packed mostly with children bouncing up and down to their heart’s content. In addition to keeping kids occupied, House of Air trains athletes to do aerial stunts on skis, snowboards and skateboards and accommodates adults too. The company allows people to team up and play bouncy versions of basketball and dodgeball — something that organizations might enjoy the novelty of when they go there for corporate meetings and events. One of these days, I might hit up one of HOA’s trampolining exercise classes which happens every morning at 7am. Trampolining is, somewhat surprisingly, very good exercise: I jumped for about 20 minutes and was completely exhausted by the time I staggered off to switch out of the special jumping booties I’d been lent and back into my sandals.

The day unfurled with an afternoon spent at the Polk Street Blues Festival. The event was bustling in the early afternoon with bands crafts merchants and food and beverage sellers all keeping people entertained. I was particularly impressed by the gravely voice of a female vocalist in a soul band and another ensemble’s crack harmonica player, who was just 12 years old and blew a mean harp.

Then I went to The Balclutha, an antique cargo vessel docked at Hyde Street Pier, for a concert featuring two important local chantey groups. Spent a merry couple of hours listening to old sea ballads and work songs performed by the Barbary Ghost trio and Salty Walt and the Rattlin Ratlines as well as exploring the bowels of the remarkable ship. A full moon was out, which made for an even more beautiful experience.

The adventure culminated with jazz at Ana Mandara, a lovely Vietnamese restaurant and lounge in Fisherman’s Wharf. Bassist Gary Brown, pianist Peter Horvath and their guests provided the perfect landing to a day that started up in the air.

Last night at the Berkeley Symphony, I was chatting to a patron about my new role as the organization’s resident dramaturg. He said: “Gosh, that means you won’t be able to write about the orchestra anymore,” in concerned terms.

Well obviously I won’t be able to write about the orchestra anymore. But his comment seems totally beside the point. In my twice monthly column about culture for the New York Times / Bay Citizen, I have to cover all the arts, and classical music is one of many fields to write about. If I ever did get to write about the Berkeley Symphony, it might be once every couple of years, if that, as the region is so rich with classical music material to cover. So it’s not like the orchestra would be losing out on any big media coups there.

I’m guessing — and hoping — that the Berkeley Symphony will gain a lot more from having me teach classes, organize interesting pre-concert programming and find other creative ways of connecting audiences to the music than it would by having me scribble an occasional half-baked commentary about its concerts here on my blog.

It’s an interesting experiment at any rate and I applaud the orchestra for going in this direction. We’ll see what happens.

A great playwright is like a puppet master: He or she subtly pulls the strings of character and action to make life seem larger than it is in reality. Ideally, he or she resides in the shadows and the puppet/play itself takes center stage.

Compulsion by Rinne Groff, which is currently receiving its world premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in a production starring Mandy Patinkin as an obsessed and egomaniacal writer and directed by Oskar Eustis of The Public Theatre, features puppets created by Matt Acheson and delicately manipulated by Emily DeCola, Daniel Fay and Eric Wright. It’s a chewy, sinuous, contemplative piece about the tension between the self and the community, personal and social politics and the commercialism that often gets caught up even the most heartfelt of artistic endeavors. But the dramatist, though ambitious, gets her dramaturgical strings tangled.

The various strands of Groff’s real-life historical content (to do with Anne Frank, the circumstances surrounding the adaptation of her famous Diary, the life of the writer Meyer Levin and the Leopold and Loeb murder case) all feel jumbled and like they should exist in separate plays, rather than feeling part of one work. The puppet metaphor doesn’t feel well-integrated into the storytelling, the material is repetitive at times (there’s only so much listening to a writer rant about his right to tell Anne Frank’s story as a Jew that I can take) and I found that I didn’t much care about the characters by the end of the play.

This is a shame as the acting from the three-strong cast, which features Hannah Cabell and Matte Osian alongside the excellently verkakte Patinkin, is sensitive and engrossing. There’s a gorgeous fragility to the way in which the puppeteers manipulate their marionettes. And the pacing of the action by Eustis is mostly electric.

Yet I felt disappointed. The play, with its magical realism mixed with Arthur Miller-like naturalism reminds me of Paula Vogel’s lovely puppet play The Long Christmas Ride Home. But it lacks the same authenticity and clever meshing of ideas.

…Why isn’t it ever any good?

A few days ago, the rules that govern the selecting of repertoire for an orchestral season came up for discussion at a dinner party with a couple of friends, one of whom happens to be the music director of a symphony orchestra.

When the idea of performing the music of Mahler came up, the conductor looked horrified. “I would never program Mahler in this town!” she said.

The reason for this comment wasn’t to do with the fact that she doesn’t like Mahler’s music. Quite the opposite: She loves the composer’s works. But because a conductor in the same region is particularly known for his Mahler concerts and recordings, she balks at the idea of attempting the same repertoire.

It makes sense for a conductor to cleave their own path and champion composers’ with whom they feel a particular affinity. And daring to program pieces that are considered to be the “territory” of another local maestro may be inviting harsh criticism.

But on the other hand, there’s part of me that thinks that my friend should go ahead and schedule Mahler if she wants to. It’s not like the other conductor owns the composer’s works. And I think my friend’s take on his music would be very different to her colleague’s. Why not show some chutzpah and do it?

Audiences might respond warmly to the challenge and critics will at least have something to chew on. I doubt that it would amount to professional suicide. And it might make Mahler — that most gutsy of composers — proud.

The culture column of the Bay Area section of the New York Times, which I write every two weeks, had been a bit of a moving target content-wise since I started the gig nearly a year ago. I’m often asked by arts organizations and independent PR people what kind of stories my editors and I are looking for on the culture front. Here are some pointers to help anyone who feels like pitching me:

1. The idea has to be arts-related. The mandate is broad — I’ve written about everything from the Burning Man Festival’s radio station to the San Francisco Ballet. But for some reason, my editors don’t seem to want to me to cover books. Also, generally (though not always), they have me try to steer clear of topics that are related to culture but don’t necessarily fall into the traditional “arts” categories e.g. dining, travel.

2. The idea must have a strong Bay Area focus. That is, it should not only mention upcoming events happening in the region, but also preferably point to local artists, organizations, trends happening around here etc.

3. The idea should have an interesting/new story to tell or insight to reveal on local culture. It’s not enough that an event is coming up that may be of interest to readers. There has to be a compelling reason in addition to the happening that is worth talking about. I need to have a clear idea of why my readers should care about the particular topic in question. 

4. The idea should preferably provide an opportunity to range beyond the scope of talking about one artist/event/organization and be something that is possible to contextualize and think of in terms of the broader cultural scene.

5. If possible (and this isn’t always possible) there should be more than one event of its kind going on at around the same time or organization / artist to talk about within the same story. This helps to provide a greater sense of context and gives readers more than one thing to go and experience.

Last week’s column about the Oakland Museum’s new exhibition by Mark Dion is a good example of the kind of “ideal” Bay Area arts column for the NY Times. It has the local news peg, leverages not only event/organization but several in order to shed light on a current trend in museums, and even includes a bit of room for critical insight. You can read the piece here.

Watched the second installment in what’s beginning to look like a fab series of educational films about the works of William Shakespeare. This Is Hamlet follows on from This Is Macbeth, which I blogged about in January of 2009 here.

The Hamlet DVD, like its predecessor, is cheeky and irreverent but very informative, though the central conceit is slightly difficult to make sense of at first: The drama’s characters comment on their own behavior in the play, sometimes while they’re supposed to be in an actual scene. But the illogical nature of the denouement soon stops being a problem because the film is otherwise so engaging.

The producers make the play appealing to a young audience (Hamlet spend much of his time sitting in a jerkin checking his text messages) while at the same time homing right in on the poetry, the philosophical, social and political ideas behind the play and the characters’ often complex motivations.

Both movies are the work of Greg Watkins and Jeremy Sabol and include fine performances from a cast of Bay Area actors.

I would heartily recommend the DVDs to any high school English lit or drama teacher. And they make fun viewing for general Shakespeare and theatre buffs too.

The only thing that seemed slightly remiss to me is the costuming. Hamlet and Horatio are in doublet’s and Renaissance shirts, Polonious wears a stuffy Victorianesque tweed suit and Ophelia sports a long, white floral peasant blouse, which wouldn’t look out of place on Haight Street in the 1970s. Not sure what’s going on there.

Werther, the central character in Jules Massenet’s four act opera of the same title based on The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe is an emotional yo-yo. He experiences soaring highs and wallowing lows. If he were alive today, medics would brand him as being bipolar.

Francisco Negrin’s new production, which opened last night at the San Francisco Opera, is similar in character. The singing and acting is all-round superlative. I was extremely taken with the drama and dexterity of mezzo-soprano Alice Coote’s performance in particular in the role of Charlotte, Werther’s paramour. The tenor Raon Vargas was also superb at the titular moper. He combined lightness and gravity in equal amounts. He seemed extremely human.

But the mise en scene left much to be desired. The set, in particular, looked like it had been designed by IKEA, with its brushed steel walls and veneery-looking pale wood. When an oversized, overstocked bed was trundled on stage behind Coote, I almost lost it. And heavy-handed yet obscure symbolism abounded in the fussy use of angry red lighting and video. The design was screaming at us to read meaning into its various fussy details. But what exactly we were supposed to read at any moment, I wasn’t completely sure.

Still, the singing and acting carried Goethe’s yearning tale for me. I left feeling moved.

An interesting question came up over tea this morning with Helene Whitson, the creator of the useful and exhaustive Bay Area Choral Archive and one of the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable choral bods I’ve ever met. The subject under discussion was to do with professionalism in choral singing, but you could just as easily apply the same thoughts to professionalism in any field really.

What makes a choir “professional”? For Chorus America, and many other organizations and individuals, the distinction between amateur and professional choirs is largely related to finance. If you get paid for what you do, you’re pro. If not, that makes you am.

Helene fervently disagrees with this definition and is in the process of trying to come up with a better way of categorizing choirs. “For me, professionalism is defined not by the amount of money that a chorister makes, but by his or her abilities as a singer,” she says.

Helene’s ideas come from years of watching choirs in action. She thinks that there are many paid choral singers who don’t deserve to be paid and many others who don’t get a dime for what they do, but are worthy of being compensated for it. It is this discrepancy which makes her want to change the way in which her own organization categorizes vocal ensembles.

I agree with Helene. I sing in a volunteer chorus. Many of its members are as good as anyone that gets paid to sing in, say, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. But at the same time, I wonder if it’s time to do away with the professional/amateur categories entirely. They’re just not all that useful anymore. And even if Helene changes her definition in the Choral Archive database, it doesn’t mean that the people who use her resource will adhere to her meaning.

A question I’ve been asking myself lately is this: Why is it that so many choral conductors treat their singers like children? I’m talking adult ensembles here, not ones composed of minors.

I don’t want to over-generalize as I know that the field has conductors that do not behave in this way. But judging by what people who’ve sung with a number of groups over the years have told me, the trait among music directors of patronizing their singers runs strong. It must be part of the job description.

I wonder whether the reason for this (or part of the reason at least) stems from the fact that choral singing is in many cases a pedagogical activity. It’s the one music-making format with universal application possibilities. Many choral directors experienced singing in choirs as kids and many of them have directed ensembles of children, youths, students or maybe adults with no musical training whatsoever. The pedagogical aspect of the job mistakenly makes them think that they can talk down to the vocalists.

But the habit is exceedingly counter-productive, not to mention denigrating and annoying: As far as I can tell, music directors get better performances from singers when they don’t harangue them as one might a naughty schoolchild. Plus, good singers are more likely to stick around than seek other opportunities if they feel like they are being treated like normal human beings.