mass magnificence

Last Saturday I was at Davies Hall for the San Francisco Symphony's mass double-header: excerpts from Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli (the Kyrie, Gloria, and Agnus Dei) and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. I had heard the latter at the Symphony's most recent performance of it, which was, I am kind of horrified to realize, not last year but two years ago. My thoughts on that performance are here, in the second half of the entry. I think I have performances on my list of things to write up that are almost as long ago as that one. And the horizon keeps receding before us, ever azure in the distance, doesn't it?

There was a lot of discussion swirling around that earlier performance; I liked it more than some others did. But even so last Saturday's was superior: just a really magnificent display of flexibility and power – but technical details miss the point. A successful performance has to hit the heart, and elevate us towards an emotional – a spiritual – mood that seems like the place in which we should always dwell, no matter how quickly it slips away in the after-concert crush of aimless chatter and slow-moving patrons and the general dirt and noise of life. I'm sure there were things the performers wished had gone differently, but the onward struggle is part of the piece's magnificence.

The quartet of soloists was different from last time, featuring some lighter voices, particularly Laura Claycomb (two years ago the soprano soloist was Christine Brewer), though bass-baritone Shenyang also had a lighter voice than I had expected (I think this is the first time I've heard him). The mezzo-soprano was Sasha Cooke, who has been so good in so many things here, and the tenor was Michael Fabiano, last seen here in less spiritual circumstances as Lucrezia Borgia's long-lost son. All four were very fine, though maybe a bit recessive, but that might have been because I was sitting much farther back in the hall than I usually do, and Davies in my experience is not particularly kind to vocal soloists. I wondered what the effect would have been if I were closer. But in a way the slight recessiveness of the soloists added to the power of certain moments when they are highlighted, as in the Benedicturs with its accompanying violin solo (once again exquisitely played by concertmaster Alexander Barantschik), when the mighty chorus pauses around an oasis of meditative calm.

The chorus throughout was just stunning, as they were in a different way in the preceding Palestrina. There's something about Palestrina's music that just cuts through the frazzle. He reminds me of Gluck, in that both have a certain purity and clarity that admittedly some will find a bit dull but that for others will have the sort of strength and stripped-down beauty that Georgia O'Keeffe found in skulls bleached by the desert sun.

Poem of the Week 2013/20

No Swan So Fine

"No water so still as the
    dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
    as the chintz-china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
    candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
    it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers – at ease and tall. The king is dead.

Marianne Moore

[Moore's endnotes:]
A pair of Louis XV candelabra with Dresden figures of swans belonging to Lord Balfour.

Lines 1-2: "There is no water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles." Percy Phillip, New York Times Magazine, May 10, 1931.

The art-forged swan stands tall, and the earthly king lies low. I love the tangy shock of "The king is dead," coming in unexpectedly at the end, when we thought we were looking at a profuse description of a swan amid flowers, or rather, a profuse description of a statue of a swan amid sculptured flowers – a triumph of Art rather than Nature; or, to tighten our terms again, a triumph of Art over Nature, since the poem declares that no living swan (with its suspicious, slanted dark looks and its bandy legs working the water) could be as splendid as the one perfected by the artist. This may seem like a simple assertion of the lasting power and superiority of Art compared to haphazard Nature and ephemeral Kings. But this haunting poem offers more ambiguous suggestions. The presence of the king has been suggested all along: first, the appearance of Versailles, then the sculptured swan's gold collar "to show whose bird it was," and then the reference to the Louis Fifteenth style. Any mention of Versailles along with a later Louis is bound to bring to mind for a contemporary reader the world-historical convulsion of the French Revolution. Whatever your opinion of the ancien regime, even if you rarely spare it a thought, it does possess the poignancy of all vanished things – that's why no water is so still as the water that no longer sparkles through the great fountains of the empty palace; its presence is felt most strongly in its absence. It was Nature that inspired the candelabrum, and the King who, directly or indirectly, ordered the artist to create it, for his amusement and and as a display of power, wealth, and skill. The created object – Art – grows out of both Nature and political and economic systems, yet stands everlastingly outside of them. But the statue is also linked inextricably not only with the natural world but with the specific time and place and manner of its creation; it is a talisman of memory, nostalgia, and reverie, carrying an inseparable association with long-gone worlds.

The poem is from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore .

Poem of the Week 2013/19

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
    And finds too late that men betray;
What charm can sooth her melancholy,
    What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,
    To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
    And wring his bosom – is to die.

Oliver Goldsmith, from The Vicar of Wakefield

Recently, out of the blue, I had the admittedly bizarre urge to re-read The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel I had not read and had barely thought of for probably over forty years. All I remembered of it was that it contained a song that became celebrated on its own: "When lovely woman stoops to folly."

So I picked up a copy of the Oxford World's Classics edition, which was fine except the annotations give away, early on, a key point that a reader really wouldn't want given away. I understand that it's a bit silly to issue spoiler alerts for a novel first published in 1766 (and be warned I'm going to give away some plot points here), but it's all new if you've never read the book before (or read it over forty years ago and have forgotten most of it), and surprises should be revealed by the author, not the Kinbotish annotator. I'm still extremely bitter about reading the Penguin edition of Felix Holt the Radical years ago and having a crucial relationship revealed long before George Eliot wanted it revealed. This seems to be a thing academic annotators do, and seriously, what the hell?

Anyway, the tale of the Vicar Mr Primrose and his family is a very enjoyable and strange little book, part philosophical parable in the style of Rasselas or Candide, part nostalgic picture of country life, part protest against class and gender power inequities, part satire of the Vicar and his family, and part praise of them, and usually it's several of those things all at once.

The song is sung by the daughter Olivia, who has indeed stooped to folly, succumbing (partly through vanity and a desire to rise socially, and partly through genuine affection and interest) to the blandishments of wealthy and powerful Mr Thornhill, the local young rakehell. It seems a bit strange under the circumstances to have her sing such a song to entertain her family, but its gentle melancholy has a therapeutic effect on her spirits, much as if she were a young woman today encouraged to speak about her feelings by sympathetic or at least curious friends.

Through the machinations of Mr Thornhill (here come the spoilers) the Vicar is imprisoned, and his daughter does indeed go through a kind of death: while her father is imprisoned, he is told that his languishing daughter has died. He has never held the Thornhill episode against her, and is devastated, but it turns out that not only is she still living, but Thornhill was outwitted by one of his confederates, who wanted something to hold over him, and his marriage to Olivia is in fact legal. The accomplice confesses this out of affection for the naive goodness and spirit of the imprisoned Vicar (I'm sure that Dickens had these prison scenes somewhere in his mind when he wrote the great scenes of Mr Pickwick in debtor's prison at the end of The Pickwick Papers.)

Even at the time it was clear that woman, particularly lovely woman, had a few options other than death after she had stooped to folly; in fact, in Goldsmith's other famous work – though perhaps, like The Vicar of Wakefield, it's less famous than it once was – when she stoops, She Stoops to Conquer. I haven't seen or read that play in years, but if I'm remembering correctly, the plot concerns a woman who disguises herself as a barmaid because the guy she likes is free and easy with lower-class women but tongue-tied and bashful around women of his own more elevated social class. There's a lot of class and gender stuff in these works, but, you know, how could there not be?

This song, in the context of the novel, is an artistic expression of a simple, old-fashioned sort of morality, and as such is part of the novel's play on nostalgic longing for what was perceived as a simpler time, because there's always the impulse among us to consider the past a simpler time. In the nineteenth century, a novel such as Cranford filled this role, and in our own day, it could be filled by something like a BBC-TV adaptation of Cranford. It should also be noted that the song is presented not as the view of "Society" (those around Olivia take very different views, often of indignation against the wealthy and powerful man who abandoned her); it is Olivia expressing her own personal view of her condition. She is, of course, the creation of a male author, and the tendency nowadays would be to assume he's expressing some sort of patriarchal "male-gaze" blah blah blah, but there's really no reason besides our own preferred thinking to assume he's basing this scene on anything but accurate observation from life, and indeed Goldsmith is too eccentric and complicated a writer for any such simplistic theories. It's also useful to keep in mind that historically novel-reading, and this is particularly true of the eighteenth century, was seen as a (middle-class) female occupation, and there's no particular reason to think those women readers were so easily persuaded by male authority (just as in this novel, Mr Primrose's wife and daughters feel free to dissent from Mr Primrose's husbandly/paternal/clerical guidance).

Despite what she sings in her song, Olivia does not really die of her folly. Even so, twenty-first century readers are unlikely to be satisfied with her ultimate fate, though it occurs to me that my own preferred resolution, in which she grows into a cheerful and sturdy independence in a country cottage, raising chickens, vegetables, and bright flowers, is in fact more sentimental and less realistic than Goldsmith's ending, in which she lives apart from but pines for her seducer/husband, longing to return to him once he shows any sign of acceptable repentance, while he, having lost his money and social position due to his uncle's anger at his misbehavior, tries to ingratiate himself as a companion to another, still-wealthy, relation, and endeavors to learn the French horn.

This song was once well-known enough, and symbolic enough of an old-fashioned, sentimental morality, to warrant parody; here is TS Eliot to do the job. Before he gained his current world-wide renown as lyricist for the smash-hit musical Cats, Eliot was perhaps best known for a number of high-modernist poems, chief among them The Waste Land, published in 1922, from which this excerpt is taken. (To explain the reference to "the Bradford millionaire": according to a footnote in the Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land, "Bradford is a manufacturing town in the north of England. A millionaire from that town would have made his money in trade or manufacturing. Hence, nouveau riche.")

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
[...]
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit. . .

    She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

TS Eliot, from The Waste Land, Part III, The Fire Sermon

symphonic variations

I've been distracted for the past couple of months by a number of things that lie outside the purview of what I discuss in this space, so the strike at the San Francisco Symphony came and mostly went before I had a chance to post (for what they're worth) my thoughts. They've continued to swirl around in my head, along with other half-written entries I haven't had time to write yet, and so I figured I might as well unload them, since they are less about this specific strike than about things going on in America in general, and besides, as I implied above, I need some distractions.

I was initially surprised by the strike, and then by its bitterness, but sadly I was not surprised by the reactions to the musicians: mostly contemptuous dismissals and reprimands for being insufficiently grateful for management's gracious largesse (check any comments section for any story about the strike over at SFGate.com). They were told that their specialized skills and years of training could easily be replaced, that they'd be lucky to get a similar situation anywhere else, that they had no idea how lucky they were to get anything at all – the usual sneers and jeers that accompany any worker protests in the United States. The flip side of that was also depressingly in evidence, with management repeatedly congratulated for its wisdom, prudence, foresight, and so forth, in steering the symphony through these economically fragile times (you remember the crash the finance industry brought about, don't you? Of course you do! You're still suffering from it, even if those who caused it are not).

I have no doubt that the management of the Symphony has been excellent in many ways. I am sure Symphony management is made up of thoughtful, conscientious, and capable administrators (more or less). But the heart and soul of an orchestra is its musicians. And if you, as a manager, have reduced them to such a state of frustration and anger that they embark on a strike that they must know will be widely savaged, then – and this seems to me a really obvious point – when it comes to perhaps your most important responsibility, you, as a manager, have failed. (But perhaps I am underestimating management's passive-aggressive prudence; why shouldn't they sit back and count on the American public's bizarre CEO-worship to take over and eliminate the troublemakers for them?)

I understand that Symphony management plays a crucial role in making it all happen. I understand the poignancy of making it all happen and then watching others receive the applause, and the irritations and frustrations of dealing with temperamental, self-important people (according to your preferred prejudices and favorite stereotypes, you may take that to refer to wealthy patrons, headstrong artists, or anyone in between). But it's completely possible to have a rewarding artistic relationship with the San Francisco Symphony without having any idea at all who any of the managers are. If, as the musicians were often told, they could be replaced, well, so can management: that's how organizations work. Anyone can be replaced at any time. The replacement might be worse in some ways, or better, or just different, but the organization goes on. (If someone is irreplaceable, what you have is not an organization, it's a cult.) So why tell the musicians they can be replaced, and not tell the managers that? Why jump to attack them? Why not at least withhold judgment, on the assumption that maybe the musicians (who are competent adults, and live in the same world as the rest of us) are the best judges of what their particular situation is?

The deference to executive power shown in many of the strike-related comments is evident throughout American life. People love to sneer at "government bureaucrats" while allowing Presidents insane amounts of power and deference. Wages and benefits have stagnated or gone backwards for decades, while CEOs and others at the very top are given insane amounts of money. Think of all the tax breaks given to the obscenely wealthy in this country – and then we're told that their privileges must be paid for by slicing benefits to the poor and struggling or anyone else who can't buy political influence. During the latest crash you may have heard the expression "privatize profits, socialize losses." On a smaller scale, it looks as if this dreary pattern was also playing out at the Symphony: benefits and large bonuses (and, increasingly, press) go to those at the top, while sacrifices are demanded of those at the bottom (and what used to be the middle increasingly looks like part of the bottom).

Yes, the musicians are well paid (which is not at all surprising or unwarranted, given their years of training, exceptional skills, and the extremely expensive area we live in). But I think what we have here is one of those situations in which facts get in the way of the truth (that is, certain too easily understood and easily publicized facts, such as the players' salaries and benefits, overshadow less tangible but no less real matters of attitude, communication, and treatment – and when you try to explain those things, even you, as the words fly out of your mouth, realize how trivial and petty you seem when these tiny incidents are taken out of the vast and crushing and ultimately ineffable flow of circumstance and occurrence). What matters is not that the musicians receive salaries and benefits worth X number of dollars, but what percentage they receive of the total salary-pie (I didn't hear nearly as many attacks on management's large salaries and bonuses), and how much of the organization's income depends on them (nobody goes to the Symphony to listen to its management). And even more than the money, what matters is how they – as I said, the heart and soul of the organization – are treated.

We hear similar attacks whenever some young athlete complains that his multi-million dollar offer is "an insult" and that "it's about respect." Yes, most of us claim we'd love to be "insulted" in such a manner. But an offer, even if it looks generous to outsiders, really can be an insult, and it really is about respect. Don't most people know this, at some level? Is it that difficult, even given differences of scale, to make the connection between similar situations in our lives and the complaining athlete (or musician)? I was once asked at a job to pick up someone's dry-cleaning, but the executive was so apologetic and gracious, and so clear about the work-related reasons for the request, that I didn't mind going out (in the rain!) to help her out. On the other hand, I've been thanked in ways that left me seething with rage. It was the underlying attitude, of respect or of being considered a second-class citizen, that made the difference. Haven't we all been there?

Those complaining athletes are frequently young African-American men, and the Symphony musicians are artists, and neither group is much respected in American society, but I can't think of anyone who doesn't understand what it means to be taken for granted or treated with condescension. But instead of reacting with support, or at least indifference, people go straight into Day of the Locust mode: not just towards athletes and musicians, but increasingly towards teachers, firefighters, police, nurses, and others who used to be called public servants and are now seen as entitled and uppity because they fight back against the increasing consolidation of money and power. People who attack these workers are asking the wrong questions: instead of "Why should they get generous raises? Why should they get job security? Why should they get generous amounts of vacation time? Why should they get pensions?" they should be asking, "Why don't we have these things? Why have we allowed them to be taken away?"

Yes, I am fully aware that there are problems associated with unions (the BART union is an obvious case in point), but there are also problems, ones that affect more people more profoundly, with unopposed management power. Back when I worked in the dining commons at Cal someone explained to me that the reason I had a surprisingly decent salary for an unskilled student worker was that the full-time workers were unionized – and ultimately, we all benefited from the higher salaries their union had won. There were students who couldn't have put themselves through college on a lower wage. Sure, a few of the unionized workers were lazy, or seemed so to my eighteen-year-old eyes. So what? There are lazy and incompetent people all over (even in management). Most of the full-time employees were hard-working and conscientious and deserved everything they got and more. I wonder if their children have been able to make the same sort of life in this era when unions are regularly jeered at by people who don't realize how many union-related benefits they take for granted.

This dangerous trend of increasing money, power, and respect to the few at the top while life becomes more and more difficult for the growing number at the bottom has been going on for my entire adult life, but it is neither inevitable nor irreversible. That's why even though the striking musicians already made what most people would consider a very generous salary, I supported them, as a step, however small or insignificant, towards correcting the balance of American society. When the strike was settled, the musicians released a statement that was criticized for – well, I'm not sure what. I for one applaud their refusal to back down, to play nice, to pretend that they were bad children who didn't appreciate their wise and benevolent managers. I thought they very appropriately made it clear, in a professional and dignified manner, that management had failed in some key ways and they were holding them accountable for their mistakes. Good for them. Why do we attack people who stand up for the same things we say we want?

Ultimately we all benefit from the social stability and cultural ambition produced when people know they will be treated fairly and with respect. The song tells us that The People United Will Never Be Defeated, but I wonder if we'll ever start moving towards that sort of sympathetic solidarity, or if human nature dictates that that will remain yet another piece of difficult music wafting above a puzzled and resentful public.

Poem of the Week 2013/18

I hadn't intended to repeat a poet so soon, but here's Edna St Vincent Millay again, to close out April and the series of spring poems with a bleaker view of the subject:

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St Vincent Millay

"Maggots" can be obsessive fancies as well as the larva of some of the less popular insects, such as the housefly – a reminder that beautiful flowers are not the only things reborn in the spring, and also that our minds can be completely separated from the world around us, and mental rebirth can be difficult to the point of impossibility (contrast last week's poem by Richard Wilbur, in which the springtime rebirth of the natural world is linked to mental rebirth).

I took this poem from Millay's Collected Poems; it originally appeared in her 1921 volume Second April. The lines about life in itself being nothing, "an empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs" take on an eerie poignancy when you realize that almost thirty years later, in 1950, Millay's death involved falling down a flight of stairs, and though the official cause of death was a heart attack, there was speculation that alcohol played a part as well – like many of the blithe young writers who rose to fame in the 1920s, Millay struggled later in life with drunkenness and depression. Normally I resist autobiographical readings, finding them too reductive – yes, it all comes from a place in the poet's life, but it doesn't reach full meaning unless it goes to a place in the reader's life as well – but this accidental foreshadowing shades the poem towards a deeper sadness for me.

curiouser and curiouser

Last night I was at the first performance given by the new ensemble Curious Flights, held at the Community Music Center in the Mission District of San Francisco. I had heard warnings about various manifestations of urban blight on Capp Street ranging from heroin addicts to hipsters, but I bravely went forth and found it a quiet, mostly residential street and a pleasant walk from the 24th Street BART station once I figured out which direction to walk in. I had foolishly asked the station agent where Capp Street was and after a moment he gestured towards a distant wall and said, "There's a map over there," which is actually more help than the agents usually give. My Mapquest directions started out "walk east" which is to me a ridiculous instruction – I don't really have that kind of woodsman skill instinctively, though when I walked out of the station I realized the sun was low enough in the sky so that I could just walk in the opposite direction and be more or less going east. This was my first time at this venue and I was amused and surprised after what I had heard to find it a lovely, flower-bedecked old building.

Curious Flights founder and Artistic Director Brenden Guy gave a brief welcome, saying the purpose of this new group was to explore new music and lesser-known byways in older music, with an emphasis on cross-cultural currents (the title of this first program was "Cultural Fusion"). Profits would go to a fund at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music that helped foreign students afford their studies (Guy himself, who is British, was such a student, and he explained the restrictions the US government puts on foreign students and their ability to find work here). All the pieces were introduced by brief and unobtrusive comments.

There was quite a variety of music on display The concert opened with the only vocalist, soprano Indre Viskontas, accompanied by Ian Scarfe on piano, performing Updike's Science, four songs based on light verse about science by John Updike, set by San Jose composer Brian Holmes. (Viskontas mentioned that Holmes is a physicist; she herself is has a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience.) The four poems are "Lament, for Cocoa" (Thermodynamics), "Cosmic Gall" (Particle Physics), "The Descent of Mr Aldez" (Meteorology), and "VB Nimble, VB Quick" (Biology). I read them in the program beforehand and was entertained, but Holmes's music really did add or bring out both wit and poignancy, giving an extra dimension to the words, which Viskontas brought out in her clear singing and attentive phrasing.

That was followed by the world premiere of Fantasy Pieces by Joseph Stillwell, who was in the audience. It's a bright piece of many moods; the four movements are Overture, Scherzo, Lamentation, and Finale. My favorite was the keening lamentation, which figures. The piece was commissioned and performed by the Valinor Winds (Sasha Launer, flute; Jessie Huntsman, oboe; Brenden Guy, clarinet; Alexis Luque, bassoon; and Caitlyn Smith, French horn). The first half concluded with Paul Schoenfield's Cafe Music, performed by the Aleron Trio (Solenn Seguillion, violin; Anne Suda, cello; and Sophie Zhang, piano). In her introduction Seguillion noted the jazz and Broadway influences, but the piece also has a certain fleeting, Gatsbyesque sadness, of the sort you feel when you look at photos of parties from the 1920s. The evening's performers, almost all of whom are young and connected to the SF Conservatory of Music, were all excellent.

After the intermission came some older music: the Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano by Aram Khachaturian and Nonet by Arnold Bax. Khachaturian was an Armenian composer who was more or less labeled by Stalin the official musical voice of Soviet Armenia. He's probably best known today for his score for the ballet Spartacus, which is, depending on your point of view, a pinnacle of Soviet male dancing or fun kitsch or somewhere in-between. The trio is less grandiose in tone than the ballet, burbling along among various influences from various lesser Soviet republics. It was hearty and springlike. Brenden Guy was on clarinet, Kevin Rogers on violin, and Miles Graber on piano.

Since I've read Gramophone magazine for many years, British composers like Bax are familiar names to me and I've heard quite a bit of his music over the years. The two-movement Nonet was new to me, though. He recast it from a violin concerto. In his introductory remarks Guy said that it had no program except the one individual listeners create for it. It fit in well with the Khachaturian, sharing a similar expansive playful mood. It was performed by the Curious Flights Chamber Ensemble (Sasha Launder, flute; Jesse Barrett, oboe; Dan Ferreira, clarinet; Emily Laurance, harp; Kevin Roger, violin; Tess Varley, violin; Tracy Wu, viola; Michelle Kwon, cello; Eugene Theriault, double bass; and Brenden Guy, conductor).

All in all, an extremely enjoyable concert and an auspicious inauguration for the new series. Your next chance to hear them is Tuesday, 4 June, at the Conservatory, in a program of lesser-known chamber works by centennial birthday boy Benjamin Britten. If you want to check them out before then, a note in the program said that last night's concert will be made available on CD and DVD; for more information on that, contact Curious Flights at 415-640-3165 or info@curiousflights.com.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: May 2013 (with a little bit of April)

As noted here and elsewhere, the last weekend in April has quite the abundance of performance possibilities; nonetheless, here are a few more, before we move on to May:

The Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble presents Current Events, new live music and "electro-acoustic structured improvisation" to "motion picture montages exploring the Flight AF447 disaster, drone warfare, Futurist Cities, Polar Ice Caps, and the Desert." That's Sunday 28 April at the Berkeley Arts Festival. Jack & Co. will also be back in the area on 23 May, at the Luggage Store Gallery (which does not sell luggage).

And over at the San Francisco Symphony, Christoph Eschenbach conducts the Dvorak New World Symphony on a program that also features Matthias Goerne in a couple of Wagner selections: Die Frist is um from Dutchman and Wotan's Farewell from Walkure; that's 25 - 27 April. On 28 April Goerne and Eschenbach return for Schubert's great song cycle Winterreise. It's too bad this is in the barn that is Davies Hall, but, still, I wouldn't want to miss this. And normally I'm not all rah-rah Bay Area but Cal Performances announced its new season yesterday, and it includes Gerald Finley and Julius Drake performing Winterreise (on 2 February 2014), and I just have to say I feel very fortunate to live in an area in which, in the span of a few months, I can hear two great artists like Goerne and Finley sing Winterreise.

The Symphony also has a lot going on in May, including Michael Tilson Thomas leading a festival focusing on early Beethoven; Tilson Thomas conducting the Beethoven Missa Solemnis with soloists Laura Claycomb, Sasha Cooke, Michael Fabiano, and Shenyang; and, at last, some Elliott Carter at Davies Hall: his Variations for Orchestra are on a program with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Ravels' La Valse and his Piano Concerto in D Major the Left Hand; that's 22 - 25 May, conducted by David Robertson with Marc-Andre Hamelin as soloist. There's other great stuff too, so check out their full May calendar here.

Continuing with the symphonic:

The Oakland/East Bay Symphony closes its season with a program called Saints & Sinners, conducted by Michael Morgan, featuring the Magnificat by Bach; Piano Concerto No 5, the "Emperor," by Beethoven; Le Chasseur Maudit by Cesar Franck; and Mysterium by Daniel Ritter. Terrence Wilson is the soloist in the Beethoven. The Bach features soprano Shawnette Sulker, countertenor William Sauerland, tenor Trey Costerisan, and baritone Nikolas Nackley, along with the Pacific Boychoir. That's 3 May at the Paramount in Oakland.

And from the combo platter presenters:

Cal Performances presents Canadian nouveau circus troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main, 3 - 5 May; the Eifman Ballet of St Petersburg in Rodin, 10 - 12 May; and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, conducted by Nicola Luisotti, performing the Brahms 3 and orchestral works by Puccini and Nino Rota, 17 May.

San Francisco Performances closes its season with soprano Jessica Rivera and Gabriela Lena Frank at the piano on 1 May (that's part of their Salon at the Rex series, so it's 6:30 at the Rex Hotel), the Paul Taylor Dance Company in three different programs, 1 - 5 May at Yerba Buena, and a celebration of Philip Glass at 75 with the Philip Glass Ensemble accompanying Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, 23 - 25 May at Yerba Buena, and Koyaanisqatsi, 26 May, at Davies Hall.

For fans of the baroque:

American Bach Soloists presents baritone Mischa Bouvier and soprano Mary Wilson in a program of arias for bass by Bach, Silete venti by Handel, and Apollo & Dafne, also by Handel, with Jeffrey Thomas conducting; that's 3 - 6 May in various venues.

Chamber music and chamber orchestras:

New Century Chamber Orchestra closes its season with the world premiere of Lera Auerbach's Sinfonia for Strings (Memoria de la luz), birthday boy Richard Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, and (appropriately enough) Haydn's Symphony 45, the "Farewell"; that's 23 - 26 May in their usual various locations.

Earplay closes its season on 20 May at the ODC Theater with chamber music by Alexander Elliott Miller, Richard Festinger, Ton-That Tiet, Patricia Allesandrini, and Arnold Schoenberg.

Some opera and some Lisztomania:

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents, among other things, Adamo's Little Women, 3 May.

Also at the Conservatory is a three-day festival of Franz Liszt, also featuring works by Wagner and Verdi (the theme is "Anniversaries and Connections"), with a full line-up of lectures and recitals; that's 30 May to 1 June, co-hosted by the American Liszt Society and the Wagner Society of Northern California. More information may be found here.

Dance:

The San Francisco Ballet closes its season with the US premiere of Christopher Wheeldon's setting of Cinderella (music by Prokofiev), 3 - 12 May.

On the stage:

Cutting Ball Theater has the world premiere of Andrew Saito's Krispy Kritters in The Scarlett Night, directed by Artistic Director Rob Melrose, 17 May to 16 June.

Shotgun Players has extended Stoppard's Shipwreck, directed by Artistic Director Patrick Dooley, to 5 May (this is the second part of his Coast of Utopia trilogy, and it is not to be missed) and then opens Lauren Gunderson's By and By, directed by Mina Morita, which runs from 22 May to 23 June.

If you want more Stoppard, and why wouldn't you, ACT has Arcadia, directed by Carey Perloff, 16 May to 9 June.

Berkeley Rep continues Pericles, Prince of Tyre, directed by Mark Wing-Davey, through 26 May, and incidentally its running time, previously listed on the site as 90 minutes, no intermission, is now 2 hours and 15 minutes with one intermission. This month they also open Dear Elizabeth, by Sarah Ruhl based on the correspondence of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, directed by Les Waters, 24 May to 7 July.

The Playground Festival of New Works, which features new short films and full-length plays from local authors, runs 1 - 26 May; check here for more information.

Jazz:

Highlights at the SF Jazz Center include Regina Carter on 11 May, the Carolina Chocolate Drops on 12 May, and Dianne Reeves on 24 - 25 May, but check out their whole schedule here.

Visual arts:

At the DeYoung Museum, Vermeer's famous Girl with a Pearl Earring and other Dutch paintings from the Mauritshuis are on display until 2 June.

And the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be closing on 3 June for approximately three years, when it will re-open in expanded form, so this is the month to pay them a visit if you have any favorites you'll miss seeing. There's a new and very nicely done three gallery exhibit on the second floor highlighting the gifts of Elise Haas, including my favorite work from their collection, Matisse's iconic Femme au Chapeau.

Poem of the Week Bonus: 23 April 2013

This is Shakespeare's birthday (in 1564, and also his death day in 1616, so gear up for quadricentennial of that in three years). So here's some Shakespeare:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enameled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
And with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes,
And make her full of hateful fantasies.
Take thou some of it, and seek through this grove.
A sweet Athenian lady is in love
With a disdainful youth. Anoint his eyes;
But do it when the next thing he espies
May be the lady. Thou shalt know the man
By the Athenian garments he has on.
Effect it with some care that he may prove
More fond on her than she upon her love:
And look thou meet me ere the first cock crow.

This is spoken by Oberon the Fairy King in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I chose it for a couple of reasons. First, it fits in with the springtime theme of this month's poems (Midsummer Night is actually linked to the summer solstice and is usually celebrated on or near the feast of St John the Baptist on 24 June, but, you know, it's close enough to spring at least in mood).

The second reason is that when I was an English major at Cal I took a two-quarter survey course in Shakespeare from Janet Adelman, in which we read all of the plays except for The Merry Wives of Windsor, which she hated, which is not uncommon among those who love the Falstaff of the Henry IV plays. (She told us we could read it over the winter break if we wished.) When we read Midsummer's Night she recited this speech and paused and then said (I'm paraphrasing) that Shakespeare sometimes makes huge mistakes like putting a seacoast in Bohemia in The Winter's Tale and she and other professorial types always jump on those things, but it's because they could never produce a passage like this one, and the sheer stunning beauty of these passages is why the plays are still read and performed. And she paused again and then went on with her analysis of the play. And that moment is always in the back of my mind when the greatness of Shakespeare comes up.

Poem of the Week 2013/17

April 5, 1974

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter's giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.

Richard Wilbur

I thought I'd continue the spring theme with this April-specific poem by Richard Wilbur. Though different in subject from his last appearance here, it's similar in tone, with wit and lightness of touch, expressed elegantly in formal though easy-flowing meter and rhyme (notice how the rhyming couplets generally overlap rather than coincide with individual sentences, giving forward movement and a sense of sophistication to a very simple aabbcc rhyme scheme), He is skeptical without cynicism, open to the world's occasional wonders. I love the specificity of the title: he may or may not have had this actual experience on that particular date, but you can't help feeling it's all grounded in a particular time and place.

This is from New and Collected Poems by Richard Wilbur.

in which I salute San Francisco Performances

San Francisco Performances announced their upcoming season today. Their offerings are varied and interesting and high-quality as usual (check them out here), but right now that's not my reason for saluting them. My reason for saluting them is their new start times for evening performances: check them out; nary an 8:00 start in the bunch, but all 7:00 or 7:30.

I have already mentioned before and described at length why I feel the once-standard 8:00 evening start time is outmoded, at least in the Bay Area, so I won't rehearse all that again here except to say that BART's recent announcement that for the next year and a half or so, due to retrofitting in the tube, all transbay trains after 10:00 PM on weeknights would be delayed by an extra fifteen-twenty minutes added some urgency to my feeling that weeknight 8:00 start times just weren't working for me anymore (most people I know had given up on them years ago). An 8:00 start time puts all the BART riders right into the delays; with 7:30 starts the problem is avoided.

Live performance is up against a lot of competition in this age of downloadable and otherwise instantly available entertainment, so organizations need to cast as wide a net as possible for their audiences. Forget the social-media flavor-of-the-month; this move to a more accommodating hour is the sort of innovative approach and fundamental rethinking (and the sort of adaptation to present realities) that organizations need.

So San Francisco Performances, consider yourself saluted. I look forward to seeing who else follows their lead.

Teseo, take two

Sunday afternoon I went to First Congregational Church in Berkeley to hear Philharmonia Baroque's performance of Handel's opera Teseo, conducted by Nicolas McGegan, with Amy Freston as Agilea, Dominique Labelle as Medea, Amanda Forsythe as Teseo, Drew Minter as Egeo, Robin Blaze as Arcane, Celine Ricci as Clizia, and Jeffrey Fields as the Priest of Minerva.

I had seen Teseo on stage once before, in 1985 at the Boston Early Music Festival, with McGegan conducting and staging the work (Drew Minter was also in that production, though he has risen in rank from the confidante Arcane up to King Egeo). I have some vivid memories of the show, even though it was almost thirty years ago. It was staged in the baroque style, with elaborate period-appropriate machinery carrying chosen characters on and off and up from the scene, and with sudden transformations (from garden to desert and back again), and supernatural apparitions (the cast in the playbill includes Gale Ormiston as a Horrid Monster). It was the first time I saw a baroque wave machine in action. But though a baroque audience might have seen something that looked similar, the context is different, and what looked striking and magical to them tends to look charming and quaint to us. I recall the Globe review criticizing a certain - I believe the word used was "campy" - quality, though that may have been directed specifically at the Medea, Nancy Armstrong, who had a lovely crystalline voice but was not a physically imposing stage presence; I think her efforts at stylized eighteenth-century gestures did not quite succeed in conveying danger and menace. And these operas, despite their fanciful plots, do contain real dangers and real menaces, and unless you convey those qualities seriously the operas don't quite come through. But on the whole I found it a very enjoyable evening, and it's remained such in my memory.

Some of my patience and stamina have vanished over the years, and honestly as I walked into an overly warm First Congo on Sunday, with the late afternoon sun striking directly into my eyes when I sat in my otherwise very fine seat, I wasn't sure, although Handel has always been one of my favorite composers, that I was really up for three and a half hours of him. Well, this is why we show up for these things: the performance was Philharmonia Baroque at its best. The sun sank low enough to spare my eyes and the time flew by, with consistently rich and intent playing from the orchestra and exceptionally fine singing all around; aria after aria flashed by like jewels tumbling from a dropped box.

The acoustics for singers can be tricky in that space but this time they seem to have found the sweet spot. There was an elevated platform (I think it was constructed over the altar) where the action took place, and the orchestra was clustered below and in front of the platform in a cohesive group, with the front row turned toward the conductor at the harpsichord (rather than to the audience). Sometimes I have felt that the staging at PBO can become too jokey, in a way that mocks the material; I don't really understand laughing at a literary/musical/theatrical style just because it's different from ours. This time around that problem was generally avoided, and the staging mostly fit the sophisticated humor of the piece (though there was the occasional bizarre moment - did Teseo really offer Medea some cash when he thought she was helping him to win his beloved Agilea? Or was the sun dazzling my vision?). The comic by-play was mostly charming and appropriate, as when Agilea swung her elaborate gown in gentle time with her woodwind obbligato.

The story certainly has its comedy, but it's a sophisticated Ariosto-style comedy, to go with the Ariosto-like plotline; it's a tale of romantic confusion, longing, faith, and jealousy among kings, heroes, and enchantresses, and though love ends up fairly triumphant, first the lovers must survive the horrid monsters and other malevolent spirits summoned up by the spiteful Medea. The various enchantments were left to our imagination, which was probably just as well. But the scenes were otherwise all vividly acted out, with entrances and exits (as opposed to singers sitting in a row, rising when their roles called for it). The men wore black suits and open-necked white shirts, and the women eighteenth-century-looking gowns, with Agilea and Clizia in soft patterned shades and Medea in severe scarlet. Amanda Forsythe in the castrato role of Teseo wore white pants with a long white tunic over a white shirt. She was obviously a woman, but you got the point.

The singers were uniformly strong. Jeffrey Fields was commanding in the small deux ex machina role of Minerva's priest. I had not been crazy about Celine Ricci's voice last time she was with PBO (possibly in Athalia?); I found something metallic about it; but this time I found it beautiful. Robin Blaze lived up to his surname, particularly in his first aria in the second half, Benche tuoni e l'estra avvampi (Although it thunders, and the sky is lit up, a lover's heart will not be afraid). I used to hear Drew Minter fairly often when I lived in Boston, but I have not heard him live for a very long time (though I did enjoy his recent CD). I was pleased to hear that the years had darkened a bit but not diminished the beauty of his voice. Amanda Forsythe was graceful and appealing as Teseo, and Dominique Labelle was vivid and forceful as Medea. But Amy Freston made perhaps the deepest impression as Agilea, with her sensitive and deeply felt portrayal of a woman struggling towards her love.

My program from the 1985 production, which McGegan signed for me during the intermission of this performance (it reads After 28 years I finally get to sign it / very best wishes / Nicholas McGegan)

All in all, one of PBO's more memorable performances, and quite an end to their season; check here to see what they have planned for their next one.

I have now seen Teseo live more often than I have seen Ariadne auf Naxos, Manon Lescaut, or Otello; such are the vagaries, wonders, and byways of a life spent viewing performances.

Poem of the Week 2013/16

The Pear Tree

In this squalid, dirty dooryard
   Where the chickens squawk and run,
White, incredible, the pear tree
   Stands apart, and takes the sun;

Mindful of the eyes upon it,
   Vain of its new holiness, -
Like the waste-man's little daughter
   In her First Communion dress.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I was flipping through Millay's Collected Poems looking for something else when the title of this one caught my eye, since I had just planted several pear trees in my yard, and I thought I would keep up the springtime theme with this lovely lyric, which I had never seen before. Millay is usually thought of as the glamorously louche laureate of the jazz age, which like most labels is initially helpful but ultimately useless. I'm guessing that when she wrote this she was doing some creative remembering/reimagining of Housman's "Loveliest of trees"; both feature a narrator who is struck by the sight of a seasonal flowering tree which is linked not just to rebirth and renewal but to sacred celebrations of them. I love "takes the sun," which implies not only a leisurely luxuriant basking in the sun amid the dirt and the frantic chickens, but also that the tree is taking the sun into itself (which is actually a scientific fact), almost to the exclusion of the rest of the shadowed yard. But the character I find most memorable here is one that exists only in metaphor and memory: the little girl charmingly proud of having what is rare in her life, some beautiful new finery and some momentary glory.

This is income tax due day, so here's a bonus poem: Philip Larkin's Money.

By the way, can anyone tell me how to get an em-dash in Blogger? I've tried creating them in Word and pasting them in, but it throws off the leading. Is there some code in Blogger that summons them up?

Poem of the Week 2013/15

This week let us praise the piebald:

Pied Beauty

    Glory be to God for dappled things --
      For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
  For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
    And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                          Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins was a Jesuit priest in late Victorian England, which may indicate some of the emotional dislocations and discontents of his life. Here he writes a psalm of praise to what he sees as God's abundance: the perfection of the unchanging reflected not just as it usually is, in variety and in abundance, but in things that might seem imperfect or flawed: the weird, the crooked, streaked, and mottled. Hopkins darts back and forth between the large and small (skies, fish,  birds, landscapes), giving them all the ultimate praise of exact and accurate observation (the reason the rose-moles are upon "trout that swim" rather than simply "trout" is that trout lose these rose-colored marks when they die, at least according to the footnote in the edition I used, the Oxford World's Classics Selected Poetry, edited by Catherine Phillips).

For a long time I would look into Hopkins occasionally and I didn't quite "get" his way of doing things. Then I read somewhere that he was very influenced by Anglo-Saxon poetry and suddenly it all fell into place: the heavy reliance on alliteration, the compound words (couple-colour, fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, fathers-forth), the oddly marked accentuation (I have omitted his accent marks, due to technological limitations). Sometimes one little remark will be the key that opens a new world to us.

Poem of the Week 2013/14

Here, for the start of National Poetry Month, is the start of one of the great works of English poetry:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour,
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open eye -
So priketh hem nature in hir corages -
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kouthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martyr for to seke
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, lines 1-18

Yes, it's Middle English! Don't freak out! I've put a paraphrase below. And if you have no idea how to pronounce the passage, check out this page, which also includes audio of these lines read by Larry D. Benson, General Editor of the Riverside Chaucer. (I took the text from the Penguin Classics "original spelling" edition, which I see differs a bit in spelling and punctuation from my Riverside edition.)

A paraphrase: When April with its sweet showers has pierced the dryness of March to the root, and bathed each root and leaf in that liquid by whose power the flowers are born; when Zephyr (the gentle West Wind) has also with his sweet breath breathed life into the tender crops in every grove and field, and the young sun* is halfway through the constellation Aries, and small birds sing and sleep with open eyes all night (so Nature inspires their hearts): then folks long to go on pilgrimages, and palmers [pilgrims] seek strange shores, and distant shrines known in various lands - and especially from every shire's end of England they make their way to Canterbury, seeking the holy blissful martyr [St Thomas a Becket] who helped them when they were sick.

* "Young" since it has just passed the vernal equinox.

Chaucer died over 600 years ago but these lines are as fresh and dewy-green, as essentially spring-like, as when he first wrote them. Despite changes in language and circumstance and custom we can still recognize the signs he notes of the earth's annual rebirth: the gentle winds and rains bringing forth tender new buds and shoots, the birds returning to caroling life, the restless stirring that urges us out into the world after gloomy sickness.

About National Poetry Month: I was hoping to post a daily poem as I did last year, but for a number of reasons I am not going to be able to do that this year. So feel free to re-read last year's poems - they're still good! And, remembering the economic basis of our culture, if you read a poem you like, click on the link (there's one in each of these entries) and buy the book(s).

Also, the Knopf publishing house will e-mail you a poem each day in April if you like; you may sign up on their homepage. Again, if you like the poem . . . support the arts and buy the book.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: April 2013

There's a lot going on in the cruelest month, even with the San Francisco Symphony still on strike. (Apparently the strike ended about the time I hit "publish" on this, so here's one case in which instant obsolescence is good news. I'll probably do an addendum later with the Symphony highlights. Right now I need to stop staring at computer screens. For the record, I supported the musicians all the way.)

First up, there's a new performing ensemble in the area: Curious Flights, the brainchild of clarinetist (and Artistic Director) Brenden Guy, is dedicated to performing new and rare works from the solo, chamber, and orchestral repertoire. The inaugural concert is 26 April at the Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, in San Francisco. The program features Updike's Science by Brian Holmes, Fantasy Pieces (a world premiere) by Joseph Stillwell, Cafe Music by Paul Schoenfield, Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano by Aram Khachaturian, and Nonet by Arnold Bax. Read more about this new group here.

There's definitely a lot of opera going on for a month when the San Francisco Opera isn't performing:

Opera Parallele presents Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti along with Barber's A Hand of Bridge 26 - 28 April at Z Space.

Philharmonia Baroque presents Handel's Teseo, with Nicholas McGegan conducting, featuring Amanda Forsythe, Dominique Labelle, Amy Freston, Celine Ricci, Robin Blaze, and Drew Minter, on 10, 11, 13, and 14 April, in their usual various locations. Please note that the evening performances start at 7:30 and the Sunday performance at 4:00.

West Edge Opera presents the American premiere of Fabrizio Carlone's Bonjour M Gauguin at the El Cerritto Performing Arts Theater (conveniently near the El Cerritto BART station) on 6, 12, and 14 April.

This certainly sounds operatic: awesome local chorus Volti joins with the SF Choral Society, the Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir, and the Leah Stein Dance Company to present the west coast premiere of David Lang's Battle Hymns 26-28 April out at Kezar Pavilion; the unusual locale is to accommodate the large forces required for this site-specific commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial.

My usual criteria for including things here is (1) it's something I'm going to or (2) it's something I would like to go to, given world enough and time, and though Die Fledermaus doesn't qualify on either count (let me quote myself: watching it is like being clubbed to death with meringues), what does qualify is opera at the San Francisco Conservatory's own theater, rather than off in the inadequate and hard-to-get-to Cowell Theater at Fort Mason. So if the opera in question is acceptable to you, you can see it in the Conservatory's beautiful theater 4 - 7 April; call the Box Office at 415-503-6275 or purchase online (and find more information) at the Conservatory's website.

If you're looking for theater where people speak rather than sing their lines, Cutting Ball has extended The Chairs to 7 April and Shotgun Players continues voyaging through The Coast of Utopia. Then there are some new things starting:

Aurora Theater presents Max Frisch's The Arsonists, translated by Alistair Beaton and directed by Mark Jackson, 5 April to 12 May.

Berkeley Rep presents Pericles, Prince of Tyre, by Shakespeare (mostly), directed by Mark Wing-Davey. The website says the performance is 90 minutes, straight through, so clearly it's a shortened version. I'm intrigued! This is the play that inspired Eliot's Marina ("What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What water lapping the bow / And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog / What images return / O my daughter").That's 12 April to 26 May on the main stage.

Cal Performances highlights this month include harpsichordist Davitt Moroney playing Bach's Art of the Fugue, 7 April; pianist Simon Trpčeski playing Schubert and Liszt, 14 April; the return of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, 23 - 29 April; and Boston's Handel and Haydn Society, 26 - 27 April (the 27 April program features my favorite Handel oratorio, Jeptha).

San Francisco Performances highlights include jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, 10 April (Salon at the Rex); pianist Martin Helmchen playing Bach, Webern, Schubert, and Brahms, 14 April; pianist Andras Schiff playing Bach's French Suites, 14 April, and English Suites, 21 April; dancer Shantala Shivalingappa, 16 April; and pianist Till Fellner playing Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Schumann, 29 April.

New Century Chamber Orchestra presents works by Golijov, Mozart, and Chausson, featuring pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, 3 - 7 April in their usual various locations.

San Francisco Ballet has two different programs running: Program 6, 9 - 20 April, features Raymonda, Act III (choreographer Rudolph Nureyev and composer Alexander Glazunov), Ibsen's House (choreographer Val Caniparoli and composer Anton Dvorak), and Symphonic Dances (choreographer Edwaard Liang and composer Sergei Rachmaninov); and Program 7, 11-21 April, features Criss-Cross (choreographer Helgi Tomasson, composers Scarlatti and Schoenberg), Francesca da Rimini (choreographer Yuri Possokhov and composer Tchaikovsky), and Symphony in Three Movements (choreographer George Balanchine and composer Igor Stravinsky).

The California Bach Society is joined by cornett and sackbut ensemble The Whole Noyse for selections from Heinrich Schutz's Symphoniae Sacrae, 26 - 28 April in their usual various locations.

Highlights at the SF Jazz Center include a mini-festival devoted to the Weimar Republic, featuring Ute Lemper (11 April), Max Raabe & Palast Orchester (12 - 13 April), and Lang's Metropolis with live music by the Club Foot Orchestra (14 April); and also Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish, set by Bill Frisell and with visual design by Ralph Steadman (18 April).

Poem of the Week 2013/13

Here's one for Holy Week:

The Heavenly Aeroplane

One of these nights about twelve o'clock
The old world's going to reel and rock,
The sinner's going to tremble and cry for pain
And the Lord will come in his aeroplane.

[Refrain]
O ye thirsty of every tribe
Get your ticket for an aeroplane ride,
Jesus our Savior is a-coming to reign
And take you up to glory in His aeroplane.

Talk about your joy-rides in automobiles,
Talk about your fast time on motor wheels,
We'll break all records as we upward fly
For an aeroplane joy-ride through the sky.

There will be no punctures or muddy roads,
No broken axles from overloads,
No shocks to give trouble or cause delay
As we soon will rapture up the narrow way.

You will have to get ready if you take this ride,
Quit all your sins and humble your pride,
You must furnish a lamp both bright and clean
And a vessel of oil to run the machine.

When our journey is over and we'll all sit down
At the marriage supper with a robe and a crown
We'll blend our voices with the heavenly throng
And praise our Savior as the years roll on.

Anonymous

This anonymous hymn dates from around the mid-1930s, from the Ozark Mountain region of the United States: a time and place in which air travel was no longer experimental, but still glamorous and thrilling and almost as if from another world (so put today's cramped, horrible flights and security-theater shenanigans out of your mind for now). The use of an older form of airplane - the three-syllable aeroplane - helps establish this mental  distance (and as in some older English verse, the rhythm won't sound right unless you use the old-fashioned form of the word). The writer deftly and ingeniously combines long-standing Biblical imagery (the vessel of oil, Heaven as a marriage feast) with current, mundane technology (the broken axles, the shocks - I love the offhand pun on that word). It may seem odd to use an airplane/aeroplane in this context, but it's actually a wonderful contemporary equivalent of the fiery chariots that appear in the writings of the Biblical prophets. What was the chariot to the Prophets but a dazzling example of the latest technology available to the rich and powerful? As for the fiery part of the chariot, concepts exist before they are named, and though "totally cool" and "wicked awesome" are not how the prophets would have expressed it, I think that was the underlying feeling behind the flames.

I took this from The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, compiled by Donald Davie. According to his footnote on this poem, he took it from Volume 4 of Ozark Folksongs, collected and edited by Vance Randolph, and published originally by the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Poem of the Week 2013/12

Here's another villanelle:

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! My last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not to hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

More and more this has become the Elizabeth Bishop poem, the one people know if they know just one, kind of like Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is for Frost or This Be the Verse is for Larkin. The title of this poem was even used as the title for a collection of her letters. And it's very characteristic of Bishop in its refined craftsmanship, its unsentimental specificity and clarity, and its sense of something profound and painful handled with strength and grace. Those familiar with Bishop's life could probably link each line to an event in her life, but that's missing the point; it might add some poignancy to realize that the mother whose watch she lost was herself lost to Bishop through mental illness when the future poet was five, but the real meaning of that line comes when you think of something you've lost of your own mother's, or father's, or grandparent's. She starts out with the everyday loss of little things and then moves out to bigger things: the loss of what you meant to do with your life, and your connection to your past (the mother's watch); then she moves from things that are small or intangible to physical locations, again starting small with houses, then cities, then continents - the losses seem larger, but then in the last stanza the dash signals an abrupt change in focus, shifting from large land masses down to one particular individual whom she loves, and that one person seems like a larger loss than any continent or river. But even the loss of that loved one can be survived, though in the final line the parenthetical exhortation as well as the repetition of "like" after it subtly suggests the emotional cost she pays as she steels herself to survive this final loss. The exhortation "(Write it!)" and the "One Art" of the title point out the connection between our inevitable losses and the creation of art as a way of offsetting them: her loss is something we've all experienced (and that's one reason why interpreting a poem like this purely as autobiography is too reductive to be useful). I'm reminded of Heine's magnificent quip, "Out of my great sorrows I make my little songs."

I took this from my copy of The Complete Poems 1927 - 1979, but that appears to be out-of-print and superseded by Poems.

Poem of the Week 2013/11

Here is a villanelle: that is, a nineteen-line poem (five tercets and a concluding quatrain) that uses only two rhymes throughout and that uses the first and third lines of the first tercet as alternating stanza refrains, bringing them both together in the last two lines of the quatrain. If that sounds confusing, just read the poem and you'll see how it works. This is by Mark Ford, a contemporary British poet.

A few weeks ago, we saw Housman extending a fragment of Sappho into a new poem. This week, Ford also uses the ancient Greek poet, ingeniously incorporating several of her surviving fragments into a modern structure, much as some medieval builders incorporated random blocks from classical ruins to create something new. Housman's and Ford's poems are both openly derived from Sappho, but a subtler version of her influence is built into the DNA of most European-language lyrics (especially love lyrics), even though much of her work, like that of most classical authors, is now lost: her influence on the subsequently influential, particularly such Roman poets as Horace and Catullus, makes her one of the great if sometimes indirect well-springs of world poetry.

Fragments

When dawn, wearing golden sandals, awoke me,
I began to crawl, burning, shivering, to my uncurtained window;
Migrating birds streamed over the dark sea.

Who can quench the ingenious fires of cruelty?
I was dreaming of white-fetlocked horses conferring in a meadow
When dawn, wearing golden sandals, awoke me.

On my stopped loom, a sort of landscape: icy
Peaks, serrated as daggers, a corpse, and beside it a crow,
And migrating birds streaming over the dark sea.

Fat, autumnal flies alight on my sheets, rainbow-hued, dizzy;
This one on my wrist - its mandibles quiver, its gibbous eyes glow. . . 
Then dawn, wearing golden sandals, awoke me.

Merciless daughter of Zeus, immortal Aphrodite,
Come to me, sing to me, low-voiced, in sorrow
Of migrating birds that stream over the dark sea.

Cast aside your spangled headband: in my mirror I see
You beneath these stringy locks, puckered lips, and tear-stained cheeks . . . go,
Migrating birds, stream over the dark sea;
And dawn, wearing golden sandals, awake me.

[Author's] Note: "Fragments" makes use of a number of images from the poetry of Sappho.

Mark Ford

Ford strikingly captures that half-waking, half-dreaming state as we move towards dawn, where one thing slips into another and then back again, and the menaces of the night give way hazily to the menaces of the morning. The repetitions inherent in the structure of a villanelle work brilliantly to bring out the obsessive, circular nature of this state. There is a pervading sense of loss and threat; the migrating birds definitely seem to be fleeing rather than just migrating; strange, surreal landscapes appear, icy, with a corpse and a crow; flies seem lazy and colorful and then as if in close-up we see their horrible jaws and bulging eyes. The appearance towards the end of Aphrodite, who is merciless yet sorrowful and who melds with the poet's haggard image, implies that it's erotic loss and failure haunting these dreams.

This is from the anthology Villanelles, edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali, from the Everyman's Library Pocket Poetry series. Amazon has other Mark Ford books here.