Museum Monday 2024/Bonus Round

 

Rodin's The Age of Bronze, at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

Another Opening, Another Show: January 2025

It's the start of the calendar year, though the half-way point in the traditional performance calendar; time to dust off December's glitter & pack away its tinsel & accept the onrushing realities of 2025: let's all make sure that reality includes as much art as we can manage.

Theatrical

Robert Townsend’s Living the Shuffle, a one-person show written & performed by the director of the film Hollywood Shuffle, comes to The Marsh Berkeley from 3 January to 2 February.

BroadwaySF brings the touring company of the recent Broadway musical based on Some Like It Hot to the Orpheum from 7 to 26 January.

The Marsh Rising series presents Crush, a dance-comedy show about, you know, having a crush on someone, created & performed by Molly Rose-Williams, at the Marsh San Francisco on 8 January, & Don’t Mind Me (I’ll Just Sit Here in the Dark), an examination of the Jewish Mother stereotype written & performed by Lauren Mayer & directed by  Michael Mohammad, at the Marsh San Francisco on 15 January.

San Francisco Playhouse presents Exotic Deadly: or, The MSG Play by Keiko Green, directed by Jesca Prudencio, from 30 January to 8 March.

Berkeley Rep presents the world premiere of The Thing About Jellyfish, adapted for the stage by Keith Bunin from the novel by Ali Benjamin, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, from 31 January to 9 March.

Talking

The Contemporary Jewish Museum & the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco present The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik speaking on Cities & Jewish Life on 21 January.

Operatic

Undergrad Opera at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents The Magic Flute on 23 & 24 January.

Choral

The San Francisco Early Music Society presents the Boston Camerata, directed by Anne Azéma, in We'll Be There! American Spirituals, Black and White,  1800 - 1900, & that's 30 January at First Congregational in Berkeley & 31 January at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco; on 29 January, Azéma & the Camerata will lead a sing-along workshop at The Chan Center for the Arts, 170 Valencia St., San Francisco.

Vocalists

You can find a listing for Schubert's Winterreise as part of the Left Coast Ensemble's Winter Wandering Festival, listed (somewhat arbitrarily) under Modern / Contemporary Music.

Orchestral

Here's what's happening at the San Francisco Symphony this month: on 9 - 11 January (there is an Open Rehearsal on the morning of the 9th, as well as an evening performance), James Gaffigan conducts Missy Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto (with soloist Ray Chen), & the Prokofiev 5; on 16, 18 - 19 January (with an Open Rehearsal the morning of the 16th, as well as an evening performance), David Robertson leads the world premiere of an SF Symphony commission, After the Fall, a new piano concerto by John Adams, with soloist Víkingur Ólafsson, along with The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives, & speaking of unanswered questions, who thought the perfect item to round out Adams & Ives would be that overly frequent visitor, Orff's Carmina Burana (with soloists Susanna Phillips, soprano; Arnold Livingston Geis, tenor, & Will Liverman, baritone, as well as the San Francisco Girls Chorus & the regular Symphony Chorus); on 24 - 25 January, Mark Elder conducts Berlioz's Overture to Les francs-juges as well as his Le roi Lear Overture, Debussy's Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune, Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra, & John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine; & on 30 - 31 January & 1 February, Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt returns to lead the Schubert 5 & the Brahms 1.

Ming Luke leads the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra in Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, Haydn's Paukenmesse (Missa in tempore belli), & the Faurè Requiem at Hertz Hall on the Berkeley campus on 3 - 5 January.

Voices of Music presents works by Haydn, Joseph Bologne Chevalier de Saint-Georges, & Boccherini, on 10 January at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, 11 January at First Congregational in Berkeley, & 12 January at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Caroline Hume Concert Hall.

Daniel Hope leads the New Century Chamber Orchestra in Musical Diversions, a program featuring pianist Inon Barnatan performing CPE Bach's Keyboard Concerto #3 in D minor, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto #1 in C minor, Opus 35, For piano, trumpet and strings (with Brandon Ridenour on trumpet), & Bartók's Divertimento for String Orchestra, & you can hear it on 17 January at First Congregational in Berkeley, 18 January at the Green Music Center in Rohnert Park, & 19 January at the Presidio Theater in San Francisco.

Chamber Music

The Saturday morning lecture series at Herbst Theater, presented by San Francisco Performances,  featuring musicologist Robert Greenberg & the Alexander String Quartet (Zakarias Grafilo & Yuna Lee, violins; David Samuel, viola; Sandy Wilson, cello), continues its exploration of The String Quartets of Papa Joe & Wolfgang with two sessions this month: on 11 January, you can hear Haydn's String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Opus 33, #2, “the Joke” & Mozart's String Quartet #14 in G Major, K 387, the “Spring”; & on 25 January, you can hear Mozart's String Quartet #22 in B-Flat Major, K 589 & Haydn's String Quartet in D Major, Opus 64, #5, the “Lark”.

On 14 January, Noontime Concerts at Old Saint Mary's in San Francisco will present a Musical Tribute to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, featuring pianist (& program organizer) Carl Blake, soprano Hope Briggs, violinist Joseph Edelberg, pianist Daniel Glover, baritone Bradley Kynard, & flutist William Underwood III, who will perform works by Valerie Coleman, Serge Bortkiewicz, Leslie Adams. Garrett-Martin-Nicholson, Olivier Messiaen, William Grant Still, Roland M Carter, Undine Smith Moore, Blind Tom Wiggins, &  Bruce Starks (the rest of the month hasn't been listed on the website yet, but presumably they will resume their regular Tuesday lunchtime concerts).

Cal Performances presents the Takács Quartet, joined by pianist Jeremy Denk, at Hertz Hall on 25 - 26 January, when they will perform Beethoven's String Quartet in F major, Opus 18, #1, Janáček's String Quartet #1, The Kreutzer Sonata, & the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor, Opus 34.

On 31 January at the Barbro Osher Recital Hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Bowes Center, Philharmonia Baroque presents Bach in Bengal, featuring Arjun Verma on sitar, William Rossel on  tabla, & the Philharmonia Baroque Chamber Players performing original works for sitar, tabla, & strings, as well as variations on a Bach Bourée by Ali Akbar Khan.

Instrumental

Trumpeter Chris Botti plays the SF Jazz Center from 7 to 12 January.

On 17 January, Old First Concerts presents pianist Samantha Cho performing a world premiere piece by Monica Chew, as well as music by Mozart, Debussy, Takemitsu, & Jean Ahn.

Kodo, the Japanese drum troupe, returns to Cal Performances & Zellerbach Hall on 25 - 26 January, with their latest program, Warabe, the Japanese word for child; the program explores the “desire to play the drums with the simple heart of a child.”

Early / Baroque Music

On 19 January in Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances presents the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, joined by soprano Julia Bullock, in a program of arias & instrumental works by Handel, Vivaldi, Bach, Purcell, Pachelbel, Rameau, Strozzi, Telemann, & Lully.

On 19 January the Cantata Collective continues its survey of Bach's sacred cantatas, presented for free at Saint Mary Magdalen's in Berkeley, with Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, BWV 9 & Mache dich, mein Geist, bereit, BWV 115, with soloists Nola Richardson (soprano), Sylvia Leith (alto), Kyle Stegall (tenor), & Edmund Milly (bass).

On 25 January at Herbst Theater, San Francisco Performances, in association with the OMNI Foundation for the Performing Arts, presents guitarist Miloš in The Arts & the Hours, a program featuring baroque & baroque-inspired music by Weiss, Bach, Rameau, Barrios, Abel, Scarlatti, Couperin, & Duplessy.

Modern / Contemporary Music

On 5 January, Old First Concerts presents pianist Sarah Cahill in a program dedicated to the music of James Cleghorn, the long-time music librarian for 25 years at the San Francisco Public Library.

On 17 January at Herbst Theater, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players & the ARTZenter Institute Emerging Composer Program present another free concert featuring all-new scores for orchestra, this time featuring works by Peter Chatterjee, Daniel Cui, Gabriel Duarte DaSilva, Angel Gomez Ramos, James Larkins, & Benjamin Webster.

Other Minds celebrates co-founder Charles Amirkhanian’s 80th Birthday on 19 January at the Goldman Theater in the David Brower Center in Berkeley, featuring compositions by the honoree & on-stage discussions by friends of Other Minds.

On 25 January at the Center for New Music, Ensemble for These Times presents Midnight Serenades: Music by Women and Non-binary Composers, featuring works by Olivia Bennett, Gabriella Carrido, Devon Lee, & others, as well as world premieres by Lucy Chen & Madeline Clara Cheng.

On 25 January at the SF Jazz Center, pianist Gloria Cheng performs Root Progressions, a program featuring solo commissions by Anthony Davis, Jon Jang, Linda May Han Oh, James Newton, Arturo O’Farrill, & Gernot Wolfgang.

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble hosts a Winter Wandering Festival, which will include: the last works of Luigi Nono & Schubert (respectively “Hay que caminar” soñando & the String Quintet in C Major, D 956) on 24 January at the First Church of Christ Scientist (the Maybeck church) in Berkeley & on 2 February at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco; Echo Contest…Nearly on 25 January at the Maybeck Church in Berkeley, in which "Left Coast musicians join with community members to create two improvisatory works which explore the spatial dimension of music within Maybeck’s innovative architecture", featuring Raven Chacon's Echo Contest & Danny Clay's Nearly; On the Threshold of Dreamland, in which Volti joins with Left Coast to perform the world premiers of Todd Kitchen's Soprasymmetry IV, “as west and east in all flat maps are one” & LJ White's This Place, along with Huang Ruo's Without Words, Britten's Folk Songs, & Laurie San Martin's Witches, & that's 25 January at the Maybeck Church in Berkeley & 1 February at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco; A Dark Matter (Coffee Concert), a morning program featuring the world premiere of Addie Camsuzou's Unearth & Gilad Cohen's A Dark Matter (the 2023 LCCE Composition Contest Winner), as well as Tōru Takemitsu's Equinox, Jessie Cox's Afronaut, Thea Musgrave's Impromptu #1, Elliott Carter's Steep Steps, & selections from Britten's Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, & that's 26 January at the Berkeley Hillside Club & 1 February at the Noe Valley Ministry; & Schubert's Winterreise, with tenor Kyle Stegall & Eric Zivian on piano, on 26 January at the Berkeley Piano Club & 31 January at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco. You can buy festival passes to the whole series or tickets for individual concerts.

San Francisco Performances presents its annual three-day PIVOT festival at Herbst Theater, curated again this year by singer/pianist/composer Gabriel Kahane: on 29 January, he is joined by violinist/vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, the Del Sol Quartet, & members of Sandbox Percussion in Kihlstedt’s 26 Little Deaths, inspired by Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies; on 30 January, he is joined by singer/songwriter/guitarist Haley Heynderickx & brass quartet The Westerlies in an exploration of Heynderickx's songs; & on 31 January he is joined by Sandbox Percussion in a performance of Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars.

Jazz

Meshell Ndegeocello performs music from her latest album, No More Water/The Fire Next Time: The Gospel of James Baldwin, at the SF Jazz Center on 17 - 19 January.

Composer/trumpeter/SF Jazz Executive Artistic Director Terence Blanchard brings his E-collective & Turtle Island Quartet to the SF Jazz Center from 23 to 26 January; 23 January features music from his album Flow, 24 - 25 January feature music from A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina), & 26 January features special guest vocalist Dianne Reeves; there is also a Listening Party on 22 January.

Flutist Jamie Baum & her quartet play the SF Jazz Center on 24 January.

Bass player Jeong Lim Yang & her Trio play Mary Lou Williams' Zodiac Suite at the SF Jazz Center on 26 January.

Freight & Salvage presents a three-day Django Reinhardt Birthday Celebration, featuring the Hot Club of Cowtown, Christine Tassan et les Imposteurs, & the Hot Club of San Francisco (24 January); the Rhythm Future Quartet, the Hot Club of San Francisco featuring Cullen "Cujo" Luper on violin, & San Lyon (25 January); & Debi Botos, the Hot Club of San Francisco, & the Hot Club of Los Angeles (26 January).

Dance

San Francisco Ballet presents Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Manon, set to music by Massenet, from 24 January to 1 February.

The Japan Society of Northern California invites you to Theater of Yugen's NOHspace theater on 25 January to experience the Nihonbuyo style of traditional Japanese dance with professional dancer Ume Nakamura, who will perform & discuss the style.

Art Means Painting

You have until 12 January to see the Battle of Pavia tapestries at the de Young & until 26 January to see the Mary Cassatt show at the Legion of Honor.

MOAD (the Museum of the African Diaspora) offers free admission on Martin Luther King Jr Day (20 January).

On 26 January, the Berkeley Historical Society hosts The Life and Art of Chiura Obata, An Illustrated Talk by Kimi Hill (the artist's granddaughter), which will include discussions of the Japanese-born artist's long association with UC Berkeley & his time in the American internment camps during World War II.

Cinematic

On 11 January at Grace Cathedral, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents Hitchcock's The Manxman, with Ben Palmer conducting the Oakland Symphony in Stephen Horne's original score.

On 18 January in Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances screens Alejandro Iñárritu’s film Birdman, with Antonio Sánchez performing his score for the film live.

BAM/PFA launches some film series this month: Landscapes of Myth: Westerns After The Searchers begins 10 January (I'm not a fan of Westerns in general, but sure, this series looks interesting); Masc II: Mascs plus Muchachas: Butch Dykes, Trans Men, and Gender Nonconforming Heroes in Cinema, a second iteration of the popular series from last year, runs 17 January through 23 February; & Sergei Loznitsa: Filmmaker in Residence, will run, with screenings & talks, from 30 January through 8 February.

Friday Photo 2024/52

 

trees on the campus of UC Berkeley

Poem of the Week 2024/52

 On Christmas

With footstep slow, in furry pall yclad,

    His brows enwreathed with holly never-sear,

    Old Christmas comes, to close the waned year;

    And ay the shepherd's heart to make right glad;

Who, when his teeming flocks are homeward had,

    To blazing hearth repairs, and nut-brown beer,

    And views, well-pleased, the ruddy prattlers dear

    Hug the gray mongrel; meanwhile maid and lad

Squabble for roasted crabs. – Thee, Sire, we hail,

    Whether thine aged limbs thou dost enshroud,

    In vest of snowy white, and hoary veil,

Or wrap'st thy visage in a sable cloud;

    Thee we proclaim with mirth and cheer, nor fail

    To greet thee well with many a carol loud.

– John Codrington Bamfylde

This sonnet from 1778 comes by its antiquated language honestly. as well as its rustic presentation of Christmas, so different from the glittery festival we are maybe overly familiar with today: the holiday was often under Protestant suspicion, as being too pagan or too Popish; this poem dates from before the iconography of Santa Claus/Father Christmas was set, before the German Prince Albert popularized the Christmas tree in England, before Charles Dickens helped make the holiday a signal time of festive cheer, before Christmas became the linchpin of the capitalist year.

It does mark the closing out of one year, in the rural dead-time of winter; here, as so often with months, seasons, or holidays, the day is personified, as Old Christmas, & he does seem old, with his slow footsteps, wearing against the cold a furry pall (meaning a cloak or cloth covering, but the word is often associated with hearses & tombs, as well as with a feeling of gloom, or something that is losing its appeal), but also with evergreen (never-sear, that is, never browned) holly on his brow: an allegorical figure, & not just another old man suffering from the cold.

The close of the year is a time when farm-work is as much in abeyance as it's ever going to be, which is a good reason for the shepherd, his wandering sheep gathered safely home, to be glad. He has his roaring fire & his nut-brown ale (a type of brown ale made in northern England). One similarity with our current Christmas is that this is a family holiday; he watches his ruddy prattlers, that is, his children. Ruddy presumably because they are vigorous & healthy, prattlers because they are still young enough to speak in a childish, maybe even babyish, way. There is a young couple, or couple-to-be, flirting over roasted crabapples (the usual meaning of crab in early modern English). No sign of the shepherd's wife, who is possibly off somewhere keeping the household running, but otherwise a fun & festive holiday scene, though one devoid of our tinsel & the piles of presents.

The closing sestet hails Christmastime, vowing to greet it always with merriment & singing, no matter how it appears: in snowy white and hoary [frosty] veil, something like the White Christmas of our recurrent fantasies, even here in California, or wrapped in a dark cloud, preventing us from seeing his features. There's uncertainty here, as there always is about the future, but also a determination to greet whatever it is in an open spirit: not a bad resolution to keep, at any time of year.

I took this poem from A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, edited by Paula R Feldman and Daniel Robinson.

Museum Monday 2024/52

 

detail of The Adoration of the Shepherds by Joachim Anthonisz Wtewael, at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

Friday Photo 2024/51

 

San Francisco Bay, December 2024

Poem of the Week: 2024/51

The Faery Chasm

No fiction was it of the antique age:

\A sky-blue stone, within this sunless cleft,

Is of the very foot-marks unbereft

Which tiny elves impressed; – on that smooth stage

Dancing with all their brilliant equipage

In secret revels – haply after theft

Of some sweet babe, flower stolen, and coarse weed left,

For the distracted mother to assuage

Her grief with, as she might! – But, where, oh where

Is traceable a vestige of the notes

That ruled those dances, wild in character?

– Deep underground? – Or in the upper air,

On the shrill wind of midnight? or where floats

O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer?

– William Wordsworth

I was looking up a much better-known sonnet by Wordsworth, The world is too much with us, when I came across this one, which seemed connected in spirit, at least to the lines:

                                    I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

But here, the manifestations of the "creed outworn" are not classical deities but the native elves & fairies of Britain. The faery (to use the alternate spelling) chasm of the title refers not only to the fissure in the earth that, we are told, shows imprinted evidence of this secret world; it also refers to the deep division between our world, a "modern", industrializing world, & the ancient realms of Faery.

The first line asserts the reality of the old stories, & the proffered evidence, in the second line, is an eerie distortion of our normal perceived reality: there is the sky-blue color, but it doesn't belong to the sky, but to a stone hidden in a dark cleft in the rock, away from the sun's exposing glare. The oddity continues with the word unbereft, which is a strange way of saying that the footprints are actually there. But the strangeness is the point (& Wordsworth does need the word for the rhyme, but he makes the curious choice work as part of the unsettling opening description), & within unbereft is bereft, meaning a sad, lonely feeling due to the loss of a person, place, or thing – a reference to our alienation from the rich ancient world of folklore that helped bind us, in its attempts to explain otherwise inexplicable manifestations, to the natural world.

The description continues with another subtle distancing device, the use of a theatrical metaphor to convey the vanished scene: the stone is a smooth stage, & the now-unseen elves are brilliantly caparisoned, like some fantastical & vivid ballet. We tend to take theatrical spectacles, so easily available to us on our many screens, for granted, but in the early nineteenth century this sort of dramatic splendor would be a much rarer, & more treasurable, event, possibly available only in the larger cities. Again, the faery world is presented as similar to ours, but distorted, weird, at a slant.

And this slant & secret world is not necessarily benevolent, or guided by the principles that supposedly guide human society: the poet now references one of the familiar fairy tricks, swapping a changeling child for an infant – taking a flower & leaving a weed, as he puts it. The substitution is clear enough to the bereaved mother for her to be left struggling with a lifetime of grief at the loss, a struggle & an unending grief that don't matter to the trickster elves.

And, in a sort of unsettling way, it doesn't matter to the poet, either. He doesn't dwell on the maternal pain once he has pictured it so vividly, but immediately, & here is the turn of the sonnet to its final sestet, wishes he could, if not actually join the elves, at least hear the wild music (something obviously appealing to a poet) of their revels. There is perhaps a suggestion here that the poet (not just this poet, but any poet, as a poet) contains something inhuman, is somehow set apart from normal human society, suspended between that & the possibly more intriguing unseen antique world that is dismissed by rational modern society.

He seeks some trace, however fleeting, of the maddening missing music. But he is not even sure where to look for it; conspicuous by its absence is any attempt to find it among modern humans, or normal society; instead, he looks to nature, but not even the nature near at hand: deep underground – or perhaps in the upper atmosphere? In the cold howls of midnight winds? (In a time before electric lights, midnight was a much more significant & haunted time than it is in our artificially illuminated world.) Or somewhere in between, in a liminal world: at twilight, the period of transition from day to night's darkness, in autumn, the time when hot & fruitful summer moves towards the coldness & barrenness of winter, or in light & insubstantial gossamer, a substance associated with the natural world (spider webs, silk, little gatherings of dust) & with the faery world. Perhaps the longed-for & missing music is floating past us, unheard, in some in-between space just out of our reach. . . .

This poem is part of a sonnet sequence by Wordsworth titled The River Duddon, so I assume the sky-blue stone really exists, or existed. I took the poem from the Penguin Classics edition of William Wordsworth, The Poems: Volume Two, edited by John O. Hayden, which seems to be, sadly, out of print.

Museum Monday 2024/51

 

detail of Amy Sherald's What's different about Alice is that she has the most incisive way of telling the truth, currently on view at SFMOMA as part of the special exhibit Amy Sherald: American Sublime

Friday Photo 2024/50

 

San Francisco, Financial District

Poem of the Week 2024/50

 Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well that passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias, the person, was real; it is an antique Greek name for Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in the late eighteenth century, sending along artists, archeologists, & plunderers, it ignited a fascination among Europeans with Egypt, a civilization that had been old when Greece & Rome were young. But to say these things, to talk about the "reality" of Ozymandias himself, & the cultural & political context in which Egypt fascinated European writers, is to miss the point of the poem, with its layered dissection of what is really real, & what survives of that reality.

Ozymandias himself does not appear in the poem, & the poet does not even see the statue of him. He's not even looking for it. He meets a traveler, who, in the time-honored way of travelers, tells him what he has seen on his trips to far-away & fantastical destinations. And what the traveler has seen is not, of course, the long-dead pharaoh, or anything he caused to be built; he's seen a statue of the ruler. The great political power of the ruler has survived only because of artists: the traveler, who functions as a story-teller, & the sculptor, who created the monumental stone portrait. But even their work has not come down intact: the traveler tells us very little about the ruler, & the statue is both broken & half-hidden by the shifting desert sands.

What survives is not actually flattering to the pharaoh; as the poem describes the sculptor' work, we see a not particularly appealing character: not a benevolent or merciful ruler, but the frown, the wrinkled lip, the sneer of cold command. Presumably the ruler not only accepted but wanted this brutal portrayal; it must have come across to him as conveying power & superiority, while the satirical possibilities would be hidden from his egotistic view. It makes me think of Goya's portraits of the Spanish royal family, in which, to our eyes, they look coarse & stupid – but they must have approved the portrayals &, coarse & stupid though they look, the portraits might actually be flattering. Centuries of entitlement & in-breeding will do that to a family.

So the sculptor is sort of an ambiguous figure: he saw these unappealing qualities in his ruler, yet he took the commission (possibly under duress; the traveler is not telling his tale, only that of his ruined work). Is he glorifying, or satirizing, or, in some way, both at once? (This is an eternal dilemma; think of composers like Shostakovich under Stalin's rule.) The sculptor's is presumably the hand that mocked these qualities, but what does his mockery come to? The statue was still erected, to the glory of the great ruler. The statue, even with its vivid portrayal of human passions, is a lifeless thing. Yet even in fragmentary form, this artwork is all that remains of the ruler's reign: there are no remaining laws, or customs, or even stories about him; only massive broken pieces of his celebratory statue, & a boasting epitaph: yet the only "works" that survive to be looked upon by "the Mighty", or even by a common traveler, are the works of the sculptor: the works of the artist, & even those are broken & uncertain in meaning.

We don't even know why or how the statue was broken: did time just move on & as people stopped caring about the pharaohs nature took its toll? Was it vandalized, and if so, was it part of the grave-robbing of ancient Egyptian monuments, or was it some sort of political or military act? We aren't told. The sculptor is as long dead as his ruler (the ruler who was his subject), & the traveler doesn't give us that part of the story.

Only art survives. But what is it telling us? And is its message the one that was originally intended? Beyond the intentional portrayal of great political power, & the subversively accurate portrayal of the ruler's cold arrogance, the very fragmentary nature of the statue tells us something unintended by either ruler or sculptor: something about the transitory nature of even the greatest, most frightening political power, &, what is more disquieting, the transitory nature of even the greatest art.

Only art survives, but only fragments of that art, fragments whose meaning has been changed by time. The blankness of the desert sands drifts over them, burying them, or revealing them if the wind changes direction. It was Shelley who claimed that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but there doesn't seem much reason to think their legislation is necessarily wiser & more far-seeing than the more political kind: it just has more of a chance of lasting. Shelley elegantly conveys the futility of power & permanence in his last lines, in which the colossal wreck is surrounded by the balanced alliteration of boundless and bare & lone and level: the words convey a vast yet unvarying expanse, something like a physical equivalent of endless time, stretching out flat & alone, an expanse of sand stretching endlessly on around the mighty but smashed fragments.

Like most people who know this poem, I came across it early on, in school, and it has floated for years in the back of my mind. Dread over the American disaster looming over us brought it back to mind. I took the poem from the Modern Library edition of The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Museum Monday 2024/50

 

detail of When One Sees a Rainbow, an installation by Leah Rosenberg at the CJM (Contemporary Jewish Museum); the museum is unfortunately closing on 12/16/2024 for at least a year, to regroup, but until then admission is free.

Friday Photo 2024/49

 

the Christmas tree in Union Square, San Francisco, from the 5th floor of Macy's

Poem of the Week 2024/49

Worship Service

In a snowfall

    that obscures the winter grasses

a white heron –

using his own form

    to hide himself away.

– Kigen Dogen, translated by Steven Carter

A few swift strokes, & an entire world is summoned. It is winter, obviously, as snow is falling. We are in a snowfall, but who is we? Is "we" even the right word there? The reader is not told who or what is in the snowfall: is it the writer, the reader, both of them, or just a place & moment we are suddenly being made aware of? "We" – poet & reader – are not actively present; this poem is about a level of perception that goes beyond (over or under) our conscious viewing.

The snow is heavy enough to obscure the winter grasses. It doesn't quite cover or obliterate them, but there is enough snow to make them difficult to see. Perhaps we simply know they are there, because we've seen them there before, though now the snow blankets them. Then in the middle of the poem, a striking appearance: a white heron. We are not told "then I saw" or "suddenly there was " or "and then I noticed" or anything like that: the heron simply appears. Again, neither poet nor reader is shown actively perceiving this relatively large bird: it simply manifests its presence. As something living amid the snowy scene, it catches our attention. Herons are graceful, striking birds. It must take a moment for "us" to realize it's there: the white bird against the white ground & the falling whiteness of the snow. There are fine gradations of white, little spots of color in the eyes, beak, & legs, even with snow falling around them.

After the perception that there is a heron there, we have a dash – that is to say, a grammatical break, which signals a change, a movement in our perception. The poem guides us to move from the scene itself to a realization about the bird: he is using his own form to hide himself away. What does this mean? On one level, it's just the camouflage effect of a white bird in a snowy landscape. On another, it's a comment on how we – poet, poem, reader – did not at first see, & then saw, & now perhaps are back to having trouble seeing, the bird in his stillness against the snow. But it's not just about our perception of the bird's existence, its aliveness in a chilly scene: the bird himself is trying to hide himself away. Why? How is he doing it by using his own form? Perhaps just by staying still, white against white, melding with the world around him. Why is the bird trying to recede from view? He doesn't seem to feel danger (if he did, he could fly away). The bird is simply being itself. There is a mystery in a living thing impenetrable by other living things. And this mystery becomes part of the landscape, & of our realization of our existence in the landscape.

Winter, snow piling up, whiteness: all frequent images of some sort of void, something beyond human life & even comprehension (think of Melville's chapter on the whiteness of Moby Dick). We have a living thing trying to hide his own individual existence in this mysterious void. By noticing & perhaps trying to understand what this alien form is doing, we also contemplate this void, this spiritual meaning that floats just above (or beyond or under or over) the surface of our world. This awareness of a spiritual significance to a pleasing but not unusual view is no doubt why the poem is titled Worship Service. Here we do not have a Mass or other ceremony; there are no official prayers being chanted, either by or to or for us; we are not in a church, or sanctuary, or even on some sort of sacred ground. There is only the ordinary (or "ordinary") world, & a moment of perception, that brings us beyond the visible world into a deeper consciousness.

I took this from Zen Poems, edited by Peter Harris, in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet series. It's interesting to contemplate the subtle ways a reading of a poem can be changed by the context in which we find it: read as part of an anthology highlighting Zen poems, spiritually inclined perceptions are going to be topmost for the reader. But there are other possibilities, other shades of emphasis: in an anthology highlighting poems celebrating the natural world, or even specifically birds, the emphasis might be first on the scene presented, on the life rather than emblematic significance of the heron in the snow. Or it could be presented & read as one of the "Eastern" poems that influenced in English translation the Imagist School of the early twentieth century, or the beats in mid-century. A poem can be held to the light at many different angles.

Museum Monday 2024/49

 

detail of Still Life with Lemons & Plate by Tamara de Lempicka, currently on view at the de Young Museum as part of the special exhibit Tamara de Lempicka

Friday Photo 2024/48

 

street & sky, San Leandro, California

Poem of the Week 2024/48

The Dimensions of the Milky Way

    (Discovered by Harlow Shapley, 1918)

Behind the men's dorm

at dusk on a late May evening,

Carver lowers the paper

and watches the light change.

He tries to see Earth

across a distance

of twenty-five thousand light-years,

from the center of the Milky Way:

a grain of pollen, a spore

of galactic dust.

He looks around:

that shagbark, those swallows,

the fireflies, that blasted mosquito;

this beautiful world.

A hundred billion stars

in a roughly spherical flattened disc

with a radius of one hundred light-years.

Imagine that.

He catches a falling star.

Well, Lord, this

infinitesimal speck

could fill the universe with praise.

– Marilyn Nelson

This is from a sequence of poems on the life of George Washington Carver, who was born enslaved and became a prominent scientist & educator in post-Reconstruction America.

This poem hovers between the factual, sometimes all too real world around us & one made up of the fancy & imagination inside us: a liminal space natural for a man sitting in the dusk after a long day of work. The opening lines give us time & place, & with the first mention of Carver, & his first action – lowering the newspaper he has been reading – moves us away from the workaday world, the world of work & journalism & the specific time & place one occupies, into a world more open to speculation: he watches the light change.

Light is a longtime symbol of wisdom (as in the term enlightenment) & even of God (who will make a reappearance at the end of the poem; we can infer that Carver was a religious man). It is also, of course, actual light, a phenomenon of interest to & subject to analysis by a curious scientific mind like Carver's. He knows the measurement of the Milky Way, but it's an imaginative leap on his part to take himself out of his evening seat, & even out of this planet, into a celestial vantage point: what is our home, the Earth, seen from afar? A speck, but significantly the tiny items it's compared to – a grain of pollen, a spore – are both, though tiny, generative, capable of reproducing or helping to reproduce much larger organisms. Even the presentation of the pollen, as a grain, adds to the sense that these miniscule, almost unseeable cells can be fructifying.

We are brought back to Earth by another action of Carver's: he looks around, but in his mind now is the immensity of the galaxy & the smallness of Earth. But what he sees may be small but does not come across as insignificant: shagbark (a type of large hickory tree), swallows, fireflies, a mosquito. And these are very individual things that he sees: that shagbark, those swallows, a mosquito: not generic "trees" or "birds" but specific examples of specific varieties. And from the human perspective, not all are desirable: trees, birds, & fireflies are lovely, but that blasted mosquito! The bloodsuckers are also part of this world, this beautiful world, as Carver thinks in an emotionally open & resounding way. (The political situation of Carver's time, one inimical to a Black man like himself, does not enter directly into this poem, but the reader would be conscious of it, & it provides the context for Carver's meditations on our place in the Universe & the beauties of our world despite all that humanity has done to make things ugly & dangerous.)

The poem then moves again towards the factual & scientific, yet it transitions with a "poetic" image: a hundred billion stars. This immensity both conjures up a striking picture & is a straightforward description of the Milky Way. Carver fits these sparklers into their appropriate geometric container, & considers the container's radius. Then we move into Carver's free-flowing inner thoughts, indicated in italic type. He begins with the phrase Imagine that. This is both a conventional thing to say, equivalent to "just think of it!" or "who would have guessed!" but it's also an injunction: imagine that, conjure up in your mind both the grand & particular realities of the universe &, at the same time, both the smallness & the immense beauty of the physical world we inhabit. Only a sense of sustained wonder can balance such disparate elements.

These final thoughts are interrupted by a final action on Carver's part: he catches a falling star. To catch can mean to observe something, often something that might easily be missed ("Did you catch that?", said of both words & actions) but it also gives us the suggestion that Carver has caught a falling star: a literal impossibility, of course, but a metaphorical reality. The phrase brings to mind Donne's famous song, opening Go, and catch a falling star, in which the catching is the first of a list of vivid & impossible tasks. A falling star is often considered a fortunate thing to see (hence the superstition that you should make a wish when you see one); it's certainly a lovely & encouraging image, thinking of a tired scientist & teacher, struggling to carry on despite the social system surrounding him, & despite human frailty & evil in general, managing to catch this marvelous Universal thing. The possibilities of our tiny Earth, already compared to a speck, but a generative one, fill Carver's mind as he thinks of it filling the Universe with praise, praise here directed to a creating Deity, but also capable of echoing, through the imagination, through the vast Milky Way. We know both the physical measure of the Milky Way, & its spiritual immeasurability.

I thought this would be a good poem for Thanksgiving week. I took it from Faster than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996 - 2011, by Marilyn Nelson.

Museum Monday 2024/48

 

detail of a quilt in the Joseph's Coat pattern, made by the Freedom Quilting Bee of Alberta, Alabama (piecers: Lucy Mingo & Nell Hall Williams; quilters: Ella Mae Irby, Doll James, & Sam Square), currently on view at BAM/PFA as part of Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection

Friday Photo 2024/47

 

San Francisco City Hall

Another Opening, Another Show: December 2024

We come to the end of another calendar year, & what can I even say? The recent election hangs like a poisonous miasma over our broken world, promising only further breaking. There have been some unexpected personal results: I find myself unable to read Whitman these days; his essentially optimistic & glowing view of human & specifically American possibilities just seems too bitterly ironic right now. Perhaps it's time to pick up Beckett or Primo Levi.

Here's an unclassifiable event that may be the best way to exorcise this year: the 39th Annual Japanese New Year Bell-Ringing Ceremony on 29 December at the Asian Art Museum: "Ring in the New Year by taking a swing at a 2,100-pound, 16th-century Japanese temple bell. Led by Reverend Gengo Akiba, this inspiring ceremony will include a purification ritual and chanting of the Buddhist Heart Sutra. Visitors will have an opportunity to ring the bell to leave behind any unfortunate experiences, regrettable deeds, or ill luck from the year. The bell will be struck 108 times to usher in the New Year and curb the 108 mortal desires (bonno) that, according to Buddhist belief, torment humankind."

You do have to make reservations to ring the bell, but even if you just go & sit in the room for a while, as I did last year it's a stirring experience. We should cherish whatever hope we can find, wherever we can find it, these days.

Merry Happy Whatever You Celebrate to You. . . .

Theatrical

A Whynot Christmas Carol by Craig Lucas, directed by Pam MacKinnon, about a small-town theater troupe trying to stage a new version of A Christmas Carol, continues at ACT through 24 December.

BroadwaySF brings back Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton from 27 November to 5 January 2025. It would be interesting to see how this show, a modern classic, lands in a world very different from the one it premiered in nearly 10 years ago.

The Presidio Theater continues its annual holiday Panto in the Presidio series with a new version of Peter Pan, running 3 - 29 December.

Theater of Yugen presents A Noh Christmas Carol, directed by Nick Ishimaru, from 4 - 29 December; I saw earlier iterations of this show, & it's wonderful – Dickens' ghost story translates with great ease into the traditional Japanese form.

The New Conservatory Theater Center presents Deep Inside Tonight, by & starring The Kinsey Sicks ("America’s Favorite Dragapella® Beautyshop Quartet"), from 4 December to 5 January 2025.

BroadwaySF presents The Golden Girls Live: The Christmas Episodes at the Curran Theater from 5 to 22 December; directed by D’Arcy Drollinger, the show is a "drag send-up and heartfelt tribute" to the popular sitcom, featuring two parody Christmas episodes.

Oakland Theater Project will be presenting the world premiere of A Thousand Ships by Marcus Gardley, about the"friendship between two Black women and their families, from their wartime work in the Oakland shipyards to the fulfillment of a dream: their own hair salon", directed by Michael Socrates Moran, from 13 December to 5 January.

BroadwaySF presents Shrek The Musical at the Golden Gate Theater from 6 to 8 December.

The Jewelry Box: A Genuine Christmas Story, written & performed by Brian Copeland & directed by David Ford, about six-year-old Brian's attempts to earn enough money to buy his Mom a jewelry box as a Christmas gift, plays at The Marsh Berkeley on 8 December & The Marsh San Francisco on 21 December.

On 10 December, Theater Rhinoceros presents Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory.

On 10 December at the Golden Gate Theater, BroadwaySF presents A Drag Queen Christmas, hosted by Nina West, & these days supporting your local drag queen seems like a vital political act.

BroadwaySF presents Cirque Dreams Holidaze, a modern-circus Christmas extravaganza, on 13 - 15 December at the Golden Gate Theater.

The San Francisco Mime Troupe presents A Red Carol, "[w]ith music, joy, and plenty of harsh truths about his time and ours, A Red Carol is the demand for economic and social justice Dickens wanted then, and we need now" (in short, they are faithful to the message of Dickens' original), & that's at Z Space's Steindler Stage from 14 to 29 December.

BroadwaySF brings the musical Mean Girls back to the Golden Gate Theater on 19 - 22 December.

Eve. combining "dance, aerial, and a body of music written and composed by Andrea Densmore with her son, Tony Owen" that "shines a light on the cycle of domestic violence", plays at the ODC Theater on 20 - 22 December.

The African-American Shakespeare Company gives us its annual holiday production of Cinderella at Herbst Theater on 20 - 22 December.

Lorraine Hansberry Theater presents Soulful Christmas, with musical direction by Yvonne Cobbs & stage direction by Margo Hall, from 20 to 22 December at the Magic Theater at Fort Mason.

Talking

As part of its Unscripted series, on 4 December at the Golden Gate Theater BroadwaySF presents A Conversation with Cher, moderated by Joel Selvin, in which Cher will discuss her new book, Cher: The Memoir, Part One; attendees will receive "an unsigned copy of the book, included in the price of tickets", & apparently it will remain unsigned, as they note that "No Meet & Greet opportunities are available for this event". 

Choral

Sacred & Profane gives us Norden: A Scandinavian Holiday Celebration, featuring traditional songs & festive choral works from Scandinavia by Grieg, Sibelius, Otto Olsson, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Jón Leifs, Frida Johansson, & others; & that's 6 December at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco & 7 December at Saint Mark's Episcopal in Berkeley.

Former director of Pacific Edge Voices Lynne Morrow returns to the ensemble for Return to the Heart: The Promise of Peace, a program including works by Bernstein, Barber, Brubeck, & Meredith Monk, as well as African-American spirituals & traditional Afro-Cuban music, & that's 6 December at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco & 8 December at First Congregational Church of Oakland 

On 7 December in Hertz Hall, Wei Cheng leads the UC Berkeley University Chorus in Britten's Saint Nicolas & Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.

The Young Women’s Chorus of San Francisco, led by Matthew Otto & joined by harpist Molly Langr, performs Carols by Candlelight, featuring  Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols as well as traditional carols set for chorus & harp, at Old First Concerts on 7 December.

The SF Bach Choir joins with the Velocity Handbell Quartet in A Candlelit Christmas: Under Moon & Stars, offering "both joyful and contemplative music from around the world, the traditional-with-a-twist Boar’s Head procession, our beloved candle-lit carols, and much more"; & that's 7 - 8 December at Calvary Presbyterian in San Francisco.

The Golden Gate Men's Chorus (Joseph Piazza, Music Director) presents Gloria!, its annual holiday concert, on 12 - 17 December at Saint Matthew's Lutheran in San Francisco (near Mission Dolores).

Ragazzi Boys Chorus, led by Kent Jue, performs Sing, Choirs of Angels!, a program featuring holiday pieces by Erick Lichte, Schütz, Bach/Gounod, Sy Gorieb, Tim Hosman & Tim Sarsany, Stanley Thurston, Mendelssohn, Howard Helvey, & Dan Forrest (some of the names may be unfamiliar, but their titles are beloved), at Old First Concerts on 15 December.

Chanticleer brings us A Chanticleer Christmas, featuring "joy and transcendence through beautifully sung music of all centuries, from classical to carols", & the Bay Area performances are 13 December at Saint Vincent de Paul in Petaluma, 15 December at the Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, 16 December at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Sacramento, 19 December at Mount Tamalpais United Methodist in Mill Valley, 20 December at Mission Santa Clara, 21 December at First Church in Berkeley, 22 December at Saint Ignatius in San Francisco, & 23 December at Carmel Mission.

Kitka Women's Vocal Ensemble brings us its latest version of Wintersongs, this year following "the arc of the supra, a traditional Georgian ritual feast in which all present are encouraged to contemplate the things in life that uplift and connect us", & you can hear it all on 7 December at Saint Stephen's in Belvedere, 8 December at Saint Bede's in Menlo Park, 14 December at the Davis Community Church in Davis, 15 December at Peace United Church in Santa Cruz, 20 - 21 December at Saint Paul's Episcopal in Oakland, & 22 December at Old First Concerts in San Francisco.

Robert Geary leads the San Francisco Choral Society in the Festival of Carols, featuring Kirke Mechem's Befana, on 21 December at Trinity + St. Peter's Episcopal in San Francisco & 22 December at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley.

On 21 December in Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances presents the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus Holiday Spectacular! (their exclamation point).

The San Francisco Girls Chorus gives us A Celtic Winter, with guests Edwin Huizinga on violin & Ashley Hoyer on mandolin, on 23 December at Davies Hall in San Francisco.

Vocalists

The SF Jazz Center invites you to spend An Evening With Gregory Porter at the Paramount Theater on 8 December.

Broadway SF brings Leslie Odom Jr. & The Christmas Tour to the Golden Gate Theater on 29 November.

On 15 December in Hertz Hall, Cal Performances presents soperano Asmik Grigorian with pianist Lukas Geniušas performing songs by Tchaikovsky & Rachmaninoff.

Holiday Concerts

The San Francisco Symphony is devoting most of the month to its annual holiday programming: on 1 December, Mariachi Sol de México® de José Hernández gives us A Merry-Achi Christmas (the Symphony hosts this show but does not perform); on 2 December, Ming Luke leads the orchestra as Troupe Vertigo performs dazzling feats; on 3 - 4 December, Gail Deadrick leads The Colors of Christmas, featuring vocalists Peabo Bryson, Jackie Evancho, Jennifer Holliday, BeBe Winans, & the Bay Area Super Choir (Jeffrey Williams, Director); on 8 December, Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser leads the Symphony, joined by the Young Women’s Choral Projects of San Francisco (Matthew Otto, Director), the San Francisco Boys Chorus (Ian Robertson, Director), the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir (Terrance Kelly, Director), the San Francisco Ballet Training Program, the Kugelplex Klezmer Ensemble, & members of Troupe Vertigo in Deck the Halls, a family-oriented concert of holiday classics & sing-alongs; on 11 December, Edwin Outwater leads members of the Symphony in Holiday Brass; on 13 December, Outwater is back with Holiday Gaiety, featuring, as co-emcee, Peaches Christ, joined by performers Alex Newell, Latrice Royale, Lady Camden, Kylie Minono, Sister Roma, mezzo-soprano & aerialist Nikola Printz, & the SF Gay Men’s Chorus (Jacob Stensberg, Director & Conductor); on 15 December, Radu Paponiu leads the SF Symphony Youth Orchestra in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, as well as other seasonal classics; & on 17 - 18 December, Outwater leads the Symphony, joined by Boyz II Men, in a concert of their hits & Christmas classics.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, joined by singer Ekep Nkwelle & singer/pianist Robbie Lee, bring their holiday program to the SF Jazz Center on 7 December.

The effervescent Pink Martini, featuring vocalist China Forbes, celebrates the holidays at the SF Jazz Center from 10 to 15 December.

At Old First Concerts on 13 December, Golden Bough (Margie Butler, Paul Espinoza, & Kathy Sierra) perform their annual celebration, Christmas in a Celtic Land.

On 15 December at the Paramount, Kedrick Armstrong leads the Oakland Symphony in their annual holiday concert, Let Us Break Bread Together, which this year is A Tribute to the Legends of Disco!; featured artists include vocalists Tiffany Austin, Maiya Sykes, & ChristoPHER Turner, the Oakland Symphony Chorus, the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, The Best Intentions, the Napa High School Chamber Choir, as well as Kev Choice on keyboards, Dame Drummer on drums, Uriah Duffy on bass, & Kelyn Crapp on guitar.

On 11 December at Saint Joseph's Arts Society in San Francisco, One Found Sound presents its annual Holiday Pop Rox!, featuring "classical arrangements of your favorite holiday pop songs sung by oboist and charismatic singer Jesse Barrett, along with performances by nationally renowned, award winning drag queen Nicki Jizz. The show is a parody mash-up of "A Christmas Carol" and "Rocky Horror Picture Show", featuring a visual experience that interacts with the audience as part of the show, designed by visual director Max Savage" (that "interacts with the audience as part of the show": don't say I didn't warn you!)

Jung-Ho Pak leads the Bay Philharmonic in their Holiday Spectacular, featuring dancers, singers, & seasonal hijinks, on 14 - 15 December at Chabot College Center for the Performing Arts in Hayward.

Cyrus Chestnut plays A Charlie Brown Christmas at the SF Jazz Center on 20 December.

George Cole plays Nat King Cole's The Magic of Christmas at the SF Jazz Center on 20 - 22 December.

The Spanish Harlem Orchestra brings Salsa Navidad to the SF Jazz Center on 20 - 21 December.

The Marcus Shelby New Orchestra plays the Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker Suite,  featuring vocalist Tiffany Austin, at the SF Jazz Center on 22 December.

Orchestral

David Milnes leads the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in Perú Negro by Jimmy López, the Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2 by Ravel, & music from Studio Ghibli films by Joe Hisaishi, & that's 12 - 14 December at Hertz Hall.

Jessica Bejarano leads the San Francisco Philharmonic in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (with soloist Wyatt Underhill) & the Tchaikovsky 6 at the Taube Atrium Theater on 14 December.

Jory Fankuchen leads the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra in Grażyna Bacewicz's Concerto for String Orchestra, the Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso in A minor, Opus 28 & his Havanaise in E major, Opus 83 (featuring Hiro Yoshimura on violin) & the Haydn 103, the Drumroll, & that's 30 December at the Taube Atrium Theater at the War Memorial Complex in San Francisco, 31December at First Congregational in Berkeley, & 1 January 2025 at First United Methodist in Palo Alto (these concerts are free but it is appreciated if you RSVP).

Chamber Music

On 1 December at the Gunn Theater at the Legion of Honor, a chamber group of San Francisco Symphony musicians will perform an all-Beethoven program: the Violin Sonata #1 in D major, Opus 12, #1, the Cello Sonata #1 in F major, Opus 5, #1, & the Piano Trio in E-flat major, Opus 70, #2.

The Chamber Music Society of San Francisco (Natasha Makhijani & Jory Fankuchen, violins; Clio Tilton, viola; Samsun van Loon, cello) perform Mozart's String Quartet in D Major, K575 & Beethoven's String Quartet in E-flat Major, opus 127 at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley on 2 December.

Noontime Concerts at Old Saint Mary's in San Francisco presents the Magritte Trio (Elektra Schmidt, piano; Sarah Elert, violin; Lewis Patzner, Cello) in Beethoven's Piano Trio in C Minor, Opus 1, #3 & his Piano Trio in D Major, Opus 70, #1, the "Ghost" on 3 December.

On 3 December at Herbst Theater, San Francisco Performances presents the Pacifica Quartet (Simin Ganatra & Austin Hartman, violins; Mark Holloway, viola; Brandon Vamos, cello), joined by clarinetist Anthony McGill, to perform Dvořák's String Quartet Opus 96, the “American”; Ben Shirley's High Sierra Sonata for Clarinet and Quartet; & the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Opus 115.

On 3 December, Berkeley Chamber Performances presents San Francisco Chamber Musicians at the Berkeley City Club, performing Schubert's D 471 Trio, William Grant Still's Lyric Quartette, & Schubert D 803 Octet.

A chamber group of Berkeley Symphony musicians (Dan Flanagan, violin; Evan Kahn, cello; Rufus David Olivier, bassoon; Elizabeth Dorman, piano; & Roman Fukshansky, clarinet) perform Tradition, a program curated by Fukshansky, featuring the Brahms Clarinet Trio in A minor, Opus 114, Glinka's Trio Pathétique in D minor, & Srul Irving Glick's The Klezmer’s Wedding; & that's 8 December at the Piedmont Center for the Arts & 9 December at Freight & Salvage.

The Friction Quartet (Otis Harriel & Kevin Rogers, violins; Mitso Floor, viola; Doug Machiz, cello) perform John's Book of Alleged Dances by John Adams, Canções da America by Clarice Assad, & Family Group with Aliens (a Friction commission) by Piers Hellawell on 12 December at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco & 13 December at Saint Mark's Episcopal in Palo Alto.

Early / Baroque Music

Voices of Music presents virtuoso concertos by Corelli, Sammartini, & Vivaldi along with dance music by Telemann, Praetorius, & Purcell, with soloists Manami Mizumoto, Isabelle Seula Lee, William Skeen and Hanneke van Proosdij, & that's 6 December at First Congregational in Berkelely, 7 December at the Taube Atrium Theater in San Francisco, & 8 December at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto.

On 8 December at UC Berkeley's Hertz Hall, David H Miller leads the University Baroque Ensemble in In spite of cold weather, a program featuring 17th & 18th century music for winter from England, France, & Italy.

Guest conductor Ruben Valenzuela leads Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale in A Bach Christmas, featuring soprano Sherezade Panthaki in the cantatas Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 62 & Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147a, along with Christopher Craupner's Reiner Geist, lass doch mein Herz, GWV 1138/11 & his Overture in F Major, GWV 445, & you can hear it all on 11 December at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford, 12 December at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, & 13 December at First Congregational in Berkeley.

On 12 December at Grace Cathedral, Jeffrey Thomas leads the American Bach Soloists in A Baroque Christmas, with soloists soprano Mary Wilson, countertenor Eric Jurenas, tenor Jon Lee Keenan, & baritone Jesse Blumberg in Part 1 of Bach's Christmas Oratorio & his Gloria in excelsis Deo & the Christmas section of Handel's Messiah as well as the Hallelujah Chorus.

Guest conductor Derek Tam leads the California Bach Society in Gaudete: A Christmas Dialogue Across Centuries, featuring nativity texts from Praetorius, Victoria, Clemens non Papa, Schütz, Britten, Poulenc, Thad Jones, & Francis Melville; the concert is "framed by two Ave Marias, one a medieval chant, the other a ravishing setting by the 20th-century German choral master Franz Biebl", & you can hear it all on 13 December at Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal in San Francisco, 14 December at First Presbyterian in Palo Alto, & 15 December at First Congregational in Berkeley.

On 15 December the Cantata Collective continues its traversal of Bach's cantatas, presented for free at Saint Mary Magdalen's in Berkeley, with Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt, BWV 68 & Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV 80, with soloists Jennifer Paulino (soprano), Heidi Waterman (alto), Brian Giebler (tenor), & Harrison Hintzsche (bass).

On 31 December at Herbst Theater, Jeffrey Thomas leads the American Bach Soloists, with guest vocalists Maya Kherani (soprano) & Eric Jurenas (countertenor), in A Baroque New Year's Eve at the Opera, featuring arias, duets, & overtures from Handel (Riccardo primo, Partenope, Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Flavio, Rinaldo, Ariodante, & Giulio Cesare), Rameau (Naïs, Platée, & Les indes galantes), & Graun (Cesare e Cleopatra).

Messiahs

On 6 - 7 December at Davies Hall, Stephen Stubbs leads the San Francisco Symphony in Messiah, with soloists Amanda Forsythe (soprano), John Holiday (countertenor), Aaron Sheehan (tenor), & Douglas Williams (baritone).

Urs Leonhardt Steiner leads the Golden Gate Symphony Orchestra & Chorus & you in their annual Sing It Yourself Messiah!, on 8 December at Herbst Theater in San Francisco & 15 December at the Benicia Clock Tower in Benecia.

On 13 December at Grace Cathedral, Jeffrey Thomas leads the American Bach Soloists in Messiah, with featured soloists soprano Mary Wilson, countertenor Eric Jurenas, tenor Jon Lee Keenan, & baritone Jesse Blumberg.

Nutcrackers

San Francisco Ballet, the big powerhouse among Bay Area Nutcrackers, presents its version (choreography by Helgi Tomasson), at the Opera House from 6 to 29 December.

On 14 - 15 December in Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances presents tap-dancing Dorrance Dance in The Nutcracker Suite, a contemporary version of the ballet using the Ellington / Strayhorn version of Tchaikovsky's score.

If you can't sit still while the sugarplums are waltzing, the San Francisco Pride Band gives you the Dance-Along Nutcracker, "Part comedy musical, part dance-it-yourself ballet, and part symphonic concert", on 7 - 8 December at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco.

The Oakland Ballet presents Graham Lustig's production of The Nutcracker, with Tchaikovsky's score performed by the Oakland Symphony & the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, on 21 - 22 December at the Paramount.

Dance

ODC/Dance gives us its annual holiday performances of The Velveteen Rabbit, choreographed by KT Nelson, at the Yerba Buena Center from 30 November to 8 December.

Smuin Ballet continues its run of The Christmas Ballet on 5 - 8  December at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, & 13 - 24 December at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco (20 December is LGBTQ+ Night with special guest Lady Camden).

Art Means Painting

In a year full of bad news, here's some more: the CJM (Contemporary Jewish Museum) has announced that it will be closing for at least a year, beginning on 15 December (admission is free until then, & they have some interesting exhibits on view). You can read the whole message here. It's not unprecedented for a local museum to close for an extended period – both SFMOMA & the Asian Art Museum have done so – but that was during renovations or while moving to a new facility. Here's hoping the CJM will come through in good shape.

Qi Baishi: Inspiration in Ink, an exhibit of the 20th century painter "whose work revitalized traditional Chinese ink painting", opens at the Asian Art Museum on 12 December.

A couple of new shows are opening at SFMOMA: on 14 December, the 2024 SECA [Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art] Art Award Exhibition features Rose D’Amato, Angela Hennessy, & Rupy C Tut; & on 21 December, New Work: Samson Young features Intentness and songs, a multimedia installation.

Cinematic

On 11 December, the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco screens a restored version of the 1937 classic The Dybbuk, with live music by Yenne Velt & an introduction by Nathaniel Deutsch.

As part of its holiday programming, the San Francisco Symphony is performing a live score to a couple of films: Susie Benchasil Seiter leads Miles Goodman's score to The Muppet Christmas Carol (starring Michael Caine &, of course, the Muppets) on 12 & 14 December, & John Debney leads his own score to Elf (starring Will Farrell), a movie many people liked a lot more than I did, on 19 - 21 December.

BAM/PFA has its usual enticing line-up of film series launching this month (please note that the museum will have modified hours starting on the 14th, closing at 5:00 rather than 7:00, & will be closed entirely from 23 December through 5 January 2025):

* G. W. Pabst: Selected Films, 1925–38 opens 7 December & runs through 28 February 2025; if you need a reminder of why you'd want to see his films, here are some titles: Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl (both with Louise Brooks, of course), The Threepenny Opera. . . .;

* To Exalt the Ephemeral: Artists on Screen, in conjunction with the museum's current exhibit To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection, showcases films by & about artists like Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin, Jay DeFeo, & Eva Hesse, & that runs 8 to 22 December;

* Marcello Mastroianni at 100, which is self-describing & self-recommending, runs from 15 December to 27 February 2025.

BAM/PFA is also showing Chaplin's Modern Times on 21 December.

Find some joy where you can, & to all a good night.