lies like truth

Even the most lighthearted and confident stars of the opera stage suffer from moments of unconscious stress. The bubbly American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham is currently in rehearsals with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra for a series of six concerts of the music of Henry Purcell. She’s playing the legendary Queen of Carthage in Dido and Aeneas. The series begins at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre this Thursday before the artists take off to Palo Alto, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Davis for a couple of weeks.

Yesterday afternoon, while in conversation with Philharmonia Baroque’s director, Nicholas McGegan, Graham — a propos of nothing it seemed — shared the contents of a nightmare she’d had the night before:

“I had a dream last night that I looked at my contract and it read that I had been engaged to sing not only the role of Dido but three other parts too.” Graham’s smooth, powered brow furrowed slightly at the unsavory recollection. But McGegan quickly ironed out the creases on his leading lady’s face. “No, we’re saving you just for Dido,” he said, patting her shoulder. “There will be no costume changes for you. It’s a one-dress show.”

The San Francisco Public Schools commission is running a marketing campaign right now. The slogan on posters dotted in bus shelters and elsewhere around town is “The City is Our Classroom.” “That’s all well and good,” I thought as I walked passed a poster on a walk around the neighborhood this morning. “But that doesn’t make up for the fact that classrooms, in the conventional use of the word, aren’t necessarily doing their job anymore in this city.” I was thinking in particular of my recent visit to San Francisco’s rundown School of the Arts (SOTA) (see my blog entry of two days ago) which left a a bitter taste in my mouth.

In this pensive mood, I walked around the corner and came across Keith Sklar’s 1989 mural, “Learning Wall.” Sklar’s enormous, psychadelic triptych is looking really faded. I read somewhere online that the artist had scrubbed out some portions of it a while ago. Not sure if that’s true, or if it is, why he would have done such a thing.

I walk past Sklar’s mural almost every day as I live close by, but not until this morning did I really stop to look at it closely. It’s hard to figure out what’s going on as the work is so busy. The main theme (a popular one in Bay Area murals) seems to be cultural pluralism. There are Inca heads, Chinese stringed musical instruments, Ancient Egyptian effigies and all manner of patterns and people. At the top is a motif of people holding hands. The whole thing swirls with color and texture like a giant bubbling cauldron of knowledge and ideas.

I can’t say it’s beautiful to look at, especially in its current faded, grimy state. But it serves as a reminder that education was at one point prized in this city. The mural is painted, somewhat ironically, on the side of an old, vacant and rather beautiful Department of Education building. I heard rumors that SOTA is eventually supposed to move from its current location in the fog belt into these premises. Financing, I suppose, prevents this from happening any time soon (if indeed this plan is more than a rumor.) It would be great if SOTA would move downtown. That would put the arts high school right next to the Symphony, Opera, Ballet and Conservatory of Music, not to mention the New Conservatory Theatre Center, The Asian Art Museum, the main branch of the San Francisco Library, the Herbst Theatre and several private galleries.

I imagine Sklar’s “Learning Wall” is more likely to get a fresh coat of paint before that happens though.

It’s a wonder that I ever got sent to the US as a technology correspondent for a major British newspaper back in 2000, really. My lack of prowess at — and genuine interest in — figuring out the nuts and bolts of everyday applications I use is not something of which I’m proud. But there’s only so many things I can pay attention to on any given day, and worrying about which format I transfer audio files to and from my laptop sadly isn’t one of them.

I was made to feel the full force of my technophobia yesterday afternoon when I went across the Bay to Berkeley to guest-lecture for an hour at an adult “vocal music appreciation” class. Unlike many serious music fans (and most classical music journalists) I don’t keep my music library on CD, only digital audio files on my computer, even though most people in my line of work proselytize against this for reasons of quality. I don’t perceive a huge difference in the quality of a CD versus most of the audio files on my laptop. frankly. Then again, computer audio files do vary radically in quality, which is a detail I confess that I need to pay closer attention to.

So I turned up to class with a playlist in an embarrassingly motley range of file formats. Some of them were near-CD quality. Others, I must confess, I’d yanked off YouTube using AudioHijack, and the quality was far, far from perfect. One or two of the tracks sounded like they were being played at the bottom of a well.

The teacher of the class was not impressed. He had the most staggeringly stagey audio setup I’d seen in a while, with speakers resting on ball-bearings. You couldn’t so much as breathe on the shiny black objects without causing him to get upset. I got a public dressing down for having some of the tracks as MP3 files rather than the more up-to-date AIFF files. “Did you rip some of this stuff off the Internet?” I was asked with a critical “tsk” halfway through the class.

I dunno. Of course it’s preferable to have optimal quality when you’re listening to music. It’s always better if you do. But having a slightly-less-than-perfect listening experience isn’t going to cause your eardrums to explode. And going with a not-extremely-good output is OK too if you’re under duress (ie you want to play something that is only available on YouTube) and using the music sample to make a general point rather than listening intensively in private.

The students in the class didn’t seem to mind all that much anyway. Many of them came up afterwards to say how much they’d enjoyed the lecture. And hopefully the teacher forgave me for my sin. Rest assured, though: I’ll be paying closer attention to audio file formats in the future. Lesson learned.

Articles about how the recession is affecting the arts in San Francisco are commonplace these days. Janos Gereben’s October 25 piece in The San Francisco Examiner brought the point home once again.

But it’s hard, as the article’s headline states, to think that “optimism abounds” when you visit a place like the San Francisco School of the Arts High School (SOTA.) I visited the school for the first time the other day for a meeting and was shocked by the state of the buildings. They were more run down than any other school I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen some pretty run down schools in the Bay Area.) The walls were dirty, many of them covered in graffiti. The corridors were grimy, the restrooms had dripping faucets and smelled bad. The classrooms were similarly derelict. The teacher with whom I had my meeting says he didn’t have a desk, chairs or pencils in his classroom for the first few weeks after he arrived. He had to beg, borrow and steal these basic items. In the middle of our get together, a rat scuttled across the room. We had to leave.

How have things gotten to this point? SOTA is an amazing institution which turns out incredibly accomplished students, some of whom go on to forge successful careers in the arts. The environment in which people are forced to learn and teach is scary, frankly. I’m amazed that anyone can learn to play a concerto on the cello or rehearse for a play in this setting.

We do not live in a third world country. We need to do something about this fast.

In the middle of the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum‘s (CJM) exhibition of works by the illustrator and children’s book author Maurice Sendak is a picture of one of the scariest looking chickens you ever saw. Painted in kaleidoscope colors with tail feathers more dense and intimidating than the flora of an exotic jungle, legs and claws as thick and gnarled as ancient tree trunks and an imperious look in its eye, the bird couldn’t possibly look less benign. You have to take a step away from the wall to remind yourself that you’re not looking at the globe’s next major global threat, but a cartoon drawing of livestock.

Many images in the CJM’s Sendak exhibition have this — or the opposite — effect on the viewer. The most benign creature has a sinister quality about it; and the most hideous of all ogres possesses an angelic soul.

Take the many illustrations of monsters on display. They have pointy teeth and enormous claws. They look like they should be able to eat a small boy for lunch. Yet there’s something so magnetic about the way in which the artist draws faces and creates poses for his characters, that even the scariest-looking beasties seem approachable. In one memorable image from the show, for instance, a couple of simple worry lines added below the eyes of a hairy monster gives the creature a human personality. People wear their concerns in this way.

The exhibition sets out to demonstrate the partially-hidden “other story” in Sendak’s work. Looking at the pictures is a game of trying to uncover the sub-meanings beneath the alternately cute- or cruel-seeming canvases.

Solving the puzzles is fun. But the lengthy and sometimes unhelpful descriptive plaques that explain the mysteries to museum-goers are rambling and heavy-handed in places. And the fact that the exhibition is curated within the walls of a Jewish museum also imposes meaning upon the images that may not necessarily be as overt a part of their makeup as the museum would have us think. References to the Holocaust and Sendak’s difficult childhood abound. Knowing about the influence of 20th century Jewish history on the artist’s work provides a fascinating context for the double meanings in his art. But the curatorial Holocaust descriptives are so over-labored that they come to define the pictures, in the end skewing our view of the artist’s legacy.

In the end, I found myself tuning out the Jewish stuff and simply enjoying Sendak’s sublime sense of the ridiculous. His pictures of kids in zippered wolf costumes and zany approach to child etiquette in the book What Do You Do, Dear? touched me most of all.

It’s a curious and not always desirable thing when an artist becomes so closely identified with one canonical work that the rest of their work gets ignored.

On Friday, I had the honor of spending a little while in the company of composer Terry Riley up at his home on the Nevada border. (I didn’t file a blog entry on Friday because I was traveling all day; sorry, dear readers, usually I’m much better at letting you know in advance that I’ll be out of town.)

During the course of conversation over herbal tea on the soft-spoken composer’s rustic wooden wraparound porch, Riley talked about his seminal minimalism movement-inspiring ensemble work, In C. He touched upon everything from how the work came to be and what the legendary opening night performance at San Francisco’s Tape Music Center in 1964 was like, to his feelings about different performances and recordings over the years and the work’s reaction against the overly-intellectual serialist fashions of the mid-20th century.

With regards to a question about the potential future of In C, Riley, who has this Buddha-like presence about him, became slightly piqued for the one and only time in our interview. When I asked the composer: “what are your wishes for the future of In C?” he responded that he hoped people would start paying attention to some of his other music for a change.

As beloved as the work is — and as much as it has helped to pay the bills — I can imagine how frustrating it must be for the composer to mostly only ever get to talk about and hear this one work. There are dozens of recordings of In C on Amazon.com, (four pages worth!) but relatively few of Riley’s other works. Rainbow in Curved Air comes in second with two pages of CDs. 

I imagine F Scott Fitzgerald had a similar problem with The Great Gatsby and George Lucas, similarly, with the original Star Wars trilogy.

I guess that’s where critics can make a difference. In cases where an artist deserves to be known for more than one project (which isn’t always the case, though it is when it comes to Riley) let’s try to expose our audiences to a broader variety of an artist’s output so that his or her legacy isn’t forever associated with just one canonical work.

Ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro has made a name for himself for pushing the ukulele to its aesthetic limits. But is it necessary to push the instrument so far that we don’t get to hear the uke at all? Shimabukuro’s San Francisco Jazz Festival concert last night at Davies Symphony Hall started off as a bit of a letdown, frankly, primarily because the performer seemed intent on having us forget that he plays the uke at all.

The instrument was miked, completely ruining its delicate sound. Thanks to this and long sections of rock-style strumming, the uke sounded more like a guitar than anything else. At times, such as when he played a song in the style of a koto (a Japanese 13-stringed instrument), the effect was mesmerizing. More often than not though, I got bored by the performer’s endless attempts to look and sound like a member of Nirvana or the Black Eyed Peas.

In the second half of the program, things picked up. Shimabukuro started plucking his instrument with much more regularity. Intricate finger-work, passionate delivery and wide-ranging dynamics infused all the pieces he played. I particularly loved his use of harmonics. He made his instrument sing and for the first time in the evening’s program, he showed us what the ukulele really sounds like when it’s played damn well. At last, I felt like I was listening to the instrument I came to hear.

By the time the finale rolled around, the musician’s never-before-performed take on Queen’s schizophrenic idyll, Bohemian Rhapsody, (you have to hear Shimabukuro play this song to understand what an amazing musician he is) I was a complete convert to his sound.

A question to all you culture writers and artists out there: How do you cope with the guilt of not getting to experience even a fraction of your city’s arts offerings? It’s an embarrassment of riches.

Times are hard. But people are harnessing their creative energies as much as they’ve ever done. If only I could find a creative solution to the problem of there not being enough days and nights in the week to see all the work being produced. Did I say “all”? If I went out to experience a performance every single evening of the week, caught gallery shows and other daytime activities in the light hours and saw all the matinees I could, I still couldn’t hope to cover the Bay Area’s cultural scene at the most basic level.

Quick: Someone invent a drug that will allow me to be in 19 places at once.

Sick of boring standing ovations and polite clapping? Wish audiences would show their feelings about a performance in a more visceral way? The San Francisco-based theatre company PianoFight has the answer: Have audiences throw vegetables at the performers at curtain time.

PianoFight, which should consider renaming itself “FoodFight”, presented its inaugural Throw Rotten Veggies at the Actors Night immediately following a performance of its latest production S.H.I.T. Show Deluxe last Friday night at Studio 250 / Off-Market Theatre. You can find out more about the event here and watch a short YouTube video here.

I was surprised to find out from PianoFight’s artistic director, Rob Ready, that “lies like truth” had played a role in bringing about this auspicious occasion. A blog entry I wrote a year ago about the ongoing progress of Free Night of Theatre, a nationwide audience development concept that was piloted in San Francisco five years ago, prompted an exchange between Rob, Brad Erickson (the head of Theatre Bay Area) and I in the comments area of the blog, which in turn inspired Throw Rotten Veggies Night.

In response to Brad’s comments to my blog post, Rob (writing under the moniker Carl Benson) wrote:

“I guess my over all point is this: instead of giving away the product to find new audiences, why don’t we have National New Play Night/Week/Month/Year? Or how about National Throw Veggies at the Actors Night? I would totally get on stage for that, and I guarantee most of my friends would be there in the audience, hands full of rotten tomatoes. Really, all I’m saying is for theater to create new audiences, in a world where it’s easier to access an audience using technology, theater has got to start having more fun. That’s what people generally want when they go out, fun. Hard hitting is good, politically charged is good, socially conscious is good, but if they’re not balanced with being entertained and having a good time, nobody is coming to the theater, especially in a time where spending cash is sparse and the TV is free.”

To which I responded:

“The idea of holding a National Throw Veggies at the Actors Nigh is intriguing. Why not start one up locally?”

To which Rob replied:

“You got it.”

And the rest as they say, is history.

PianoFight is hoping to expand Throw Rotten Veggies Night to other companies in the future. Says Rob: “I actually pitched the idea to a theater company at Queens University in Canada, called the Queens Players. My goal was to get a company in another country so we could dub the event “International Throw Rotten Veggies at the Actors Night” — a bit of a one-up on TBA’s “National Free Night of Theater” — but they apparently weren’t into the idea.” Undaunted, PianoFight still aims to get more theatre companies involved. The group has apparently written a 20-30 minute set of “veggie tossing tailored sketch comedy” which other ensembles can use as a basis upon which to build a soiree of turnip and carrot lobbing.

I couldn’t get to the event last Friday, but Rob says it went down quite well. “Even a couple girls who were sitting in the front row and got pelted in the back of the head with veggies throughout the set were all smiles afterwards and came out to the bar with the cast afterwards. I overheard one woman remarking to her husband with a big grin on her face, ‘That was complete mayhem.'”

As every understudy knows, it’s very difficult stepping into a star’s shoes when you know everyone has paid to see someone else in the role — not you.

Diana Damrau is no understudy. The German soprano made Metropolitan Opera history in the 2007-2008 season when she appeared as both Pamina and Queen of the Night during the same run of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. This season she will undertake four debuts, as Marie in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment at both San Francisco Opera and the Met, the title role in Massenet’s Manon at the Vienna State Opera, Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet at the Washington National Opera and Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Grand Théâtre de Genève. The soprano will also perform the title role of Aminta in a new production of Strauss’ Die schweigsame Frau at the Munich Opera Festival.

Yet it must be strange for this performer, as accomplished as she is, to step into the role of Marie in a production of La Fille at San Francisco Opera which previously carried so much star power at The Met and London’s Royal Opera House.

In its previous iterations, Laurent Pelly’s production featured two of the biggest stars in the opera world — Juan Diego Florez as Tonio and Natalie Dessay as Marie. Most people I know in San Francisco who have seen or are going to see the current run are going primarily to see Florez. I’ve even heard some patrons say how much they wish they could experience the chemically-combustive combination of Florez and Dessay like those lucky opera goers in New York and London. In short, say the name “Diana Damrau” in these parts and you’re likely to get a blank stare.

So it was terrific to see Damrau not only do Marie justice but also make the character completely her own — quite a feat considering that she was dressed in exactly the same gamine outfits complete with Pippie Longstocking-like wig as her predecessor in the role, Dessay.

Damrau isn’t as waifish as Dessay, but she’s slim, light on her feet and full of gumption. Her willfulness and strength of character come through strongly in both acts. She’s a great stage comic but also brings incredible sensitivity to her role. I believed completely in the mutual adoration between her and Florez’s character.

Damrau matches Dessay equally in her vocal abilities. There’s evenness and strength throughout her range. Her ornamentation is light and pure. She enunciates clearly and manages to convey the meaning of her words deeply through the quality of her singing.

Damrau doesn’t yet have the star power of Dessay. San Francisco audiences are more excited at the prospect of Florez hitting his standing ovation-prompting nine high c’s in “Ah Mes Amies” than hearing Damrau ace “Il Faut Partir.” But it’s probably only a matter of a couple of years before this superlative soprano’s name is on everyone’s lips — even out here on the west coast.

Had an unusual performance experience yesterday which threw up some thoughts about the nature of the exchange that happens between performers and audiences. I was part of a small group of singers drafted under the auspices of a current member of the University of California at San Francisco medical faculty to perform songs for patients on the wards of the university cancer center. I jumped at the chance to sing with this group because I have been interested for a while in the efficacy of arts programs in hospitals and heard great things about the uplifting effect that singing can have on the spirits of people in poor health.

We spent a couple of hours in the afternoon wedged first in the corner of a waiting room and second in a small lounge area where we performed a selection of a cappella songs — madrigals, show tunes and standards mostly.

What was strange about the experience from a performer’s perspective was how seemingly disinterested or even absent our target audience was. In the waiting room, the listeners were all lined up against a wall wearing protective face masks. Hardly any of them looked our way and no one applauded. When we were done, we just shuffled out without a word. Everyone in the room stared blankly ahead of them. We did get an appreciative nod from one or two nearby staffers though. I was happy to sing, but I couldn’t help wondering if the patients would much rather we hadn’t been there interrupting their peace. After all, we were intruders; they couldn’t leave the room. The situation in the coffee lounge was possibly even weirder. The nurse seemed happy to see us and said she’d send word around. But for the first 15 minutes of our set no one came so we sang for ourselves. Eventually three people turned up but none of them were patients. I think one was a nurse and the other two, visiting relatives of a patient. They seemed to enjoy the music. But, again, these were not the people we had been drafted in to perform for.

Now, I don’t mean to sound like all I care about is audience attention. But it does seem a little odd to rehearse for weeks within the framework of an organized hospital arts program only to fail to connect in any way with the target audience. Perhaps patients who heard our singing down the hallway did get something (hopefully positive) out of the music. Maybe the fact that we showed up is all that matters. It’s not about us, after all; it’s about them. On the other hand, might our efforts be more useful to the hospital if we actually got to sing in front of patients, preferably ones who knew we were coming and wanted to hear us?

I’m going back to UCSF next Tuesday. I hear from our industrious and dedicated music director, Debbie, that every performance that the group has undertaken so far at the hospital is different. (I was in Los Angeles for the first few outings, so yesterday was my debut as part of the ensemble.) So maybe next time we’ll have a genuine audience. But here’s a question: Is it enough simply to show up and sing on a cancer ward? Or is the exercise pointless if your target audience is seemingly disinterested or completely absent?

Real sorrow is very hard to pull off on stage or screen. I often think that if you want audiences to feel the weight of a character’s woes as a screen or playwright, you’re usually better off getting them to do something funny, rather than give them a crying scene. It’s just really hard to act sadness convincingly. Even if we can see that a character is deeply upset about something, it’s a rare actor who can make us actually feel their pain.

Abbie Cornish, the young British actress who plays Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, Jane Campion’s new movie about the relationship between Fanny and the Romantic poet John Keats, somehow manages to take the audience to this place of absolute, gut-wrenching empathy. Despite positive reviews in the mainstream media, I found the film to be rambling and pretentious in general. But the one scene in which Fanny collapses at the news of her lover John’s death made me sink so deeply into my seat that I thought I was descending into a premature grave myself.

Cornish doesn’t simply sob and get a little moist around the eyes. What she does is not in the least bit pretty. Cornish convulses with uncontrolled grief. The noises and bodily fluids coming from the actress’ mouth and nose are not the sort of thing starlets typically allow. She snorts and snots and dribbles and hyperventilates.

This might all sound over the top as I describe it in cold black and white text. But, believe me, this sadness is as real as I have ever felt someone else’s trauma to be. In that moment, I understood how it could be that a person could love someone so completely unsuitable, and continue to wear his ring and walk the heath in remembrance of his name long after his death.