San Francisco Ballet closed out its season a fortnight ago with a week-long revival of John Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid, based of course on the famous Hans Christian Andersen story. I bought a ticket for the Friday performance, mostly lured by the thought of hearing Lera Auerbach’s score. I had the impression that the show itself would probably be more of a splashy spectacle and fun pantomime than anything else. It turned out to be unsettling, moving, profoundly searching, and in general astonishingly good. I’m sorry I only got to see one of the casts. The forthcoming DVD is sure to be worth a look (before its DVD release I think it’s being shown on Great Performances, but KQED will no doubt bury it at some inconvenient hour so they may continue to deluge us with superannuated baby-boomer rockers and overblown popera schmaltz).
The major change from Andersen’s story is the introduction of an Andersen figure, The Poet (Pascal Molat). In a reflection of Andersen’s own complicated sexuality (I mean, everyone’s sexuality is complicated, but Andersen’s was a bit outside the normal range of complicated), the Poet is mourning the impending loss to marriage of his beloved friend Edvard (Pierre-Francois Vilanoba). Much of what we see, except for Edvard’s love for his Henriette (Vanessa Zahorian), is a projection of the Poet’s wishes and fantasies – though perhaps all of what we see is the Poet’s projection; it’s certainly possible that part of his strange melancholy make-up is an underlying desire to be rejected and misunderstood. And the Little Mermaid, the personification of his feelings for Edvard, is definitely an odd being, far from Disney’s cheerful Ariel but also far from Andersen’s delicate devoted maiden. She’s a strange little creature (I mean, everyone is strange, but she’s a bit outside the normal range of strange).
Even underwater she’s not quite like her sister mermaids. We see her floating, her tail waving in the waters. This is accomplished by a simple but ingenious method: three male dancers, dressed in black like the kuroko (one of several influences from traditional Japanese theater in the staging), lift her and arrange her flowing blue-green dress to form the tail, and then carry her so that she swims. After her deal with the Sea Witch (danced by Garen Scribner, in black trousers and low-cut red shirt, with a small skull as a belt buckle, his dead-white face painted like a kabuki demon’s in black and red streaks) she lets him have her tail in exchange for legs. It’s done very simply – she’s rolled among the Sea Witch’s minions, and as she rolls her long flowing skirt comes off – but the effect is terrifying, like watching a rape, and it leaves her almost unclothed, and exposed.
Her movements on land are oddly froglike. She is never quite comfortable there, and never quite fits in. She mopes after the Prince/Edvard, even at his wedding, and clearly is never going to manage to behave like the normal people. In fact it’s not surprising that the Prince sticks with his sunny lovely Princess, who he thinks saved him from drowning (though it was really the Little Mermaid), rather than switching to the strange suffocating love of this amphibious girl.
Perhaps because I had recently seen Pascal Molat dancing Petrouchka, I was frequently reminded of the lovelorn puppet. Lisa saw the same program and wondered if a woman had ever danced Petrouchka. In a way, that’s what the Little Mermaid is. Like Petrouchka, she’s not a normal human; she moves awkwardly, shoulders hunched, feet pointed out, arms awkwardly crossed in front of her. In one vivid and painful moment, she’s sitting on the ground, grief-stricken, and she radiates the pain of rejection, down to each of her toes, splayed out and held unnaturally.
The movement throughout, not just in individual small moments like that one but in groups (ranging from the difference between the Prince’s strange contorted first pas de deux with the Little Mermaid, as contrasted with his more conventionally ballet-pretty first pas de deux with the Princess, to a psychologically probing pas de quatre for Poet, Prince, Princess, and Mermaid, to such ensemble numbers as the sailors exercising on deck) reveals so much that I can see why the show is sometimes criticized as repetitive – when you see the Poet at the very beginning, hunched under his book, you instantly can tell so much about him that further display might seem redundant.
I didn’t find the show unnecessarily repetitive, for the ironic reason that I had been sick enough to skip the play I was supposed to attend the night before and to stay home all day Friday (I’m better now, thanks, but it took a while). So instead of feeling emptied after working all day and irritated at having to kill three hours after work before the show started, I was comparatively rested and less likely to feel that they just really needed to keep the story chugging along: instead, I felt, it’s a dance, so let them all go ahead and dance.
So I enjoyed the scenes that were, strictly speaking, perhaps a bit extraneous, and mostly just to show dance, like the raucous exercises of the sailors on deck (though there were several things going on there as well: the sailors were following the movements initiated by the Poet, so we could see that the unfolding story was under his direction; the angular athletic moves on land contrasted with the undulant movements in the underwater scenes; and the score wittily undercut with gentle satire the land-world the Mermaid longs to join, quoting the Brecht/Weill Army Song from the Threepenny Opera and even in passing the famous fate theme that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony).
Since I had first decided to go based on the score, I should mention that it was wonderful and wide-ranging. There was a large and interesting orchestra. Beforehand (I was in the front row, very far over to the right, though only once or twice could I briefly not see the action) I watched one of the percussionists carefully fill glasses with enough water to create the right glass-harmonica-like ethereal wailing when he rubbed their edges. He would test them, hit the tuning fork, and then adjust the amount of water. I was right in front of the percussion section. A couple of times a sudden blow on a big drum or a cymbal crush would make me jump a little.
At the end there is an apotheosis, one that reminded me of Swan Lake and Mark Morris’s Romeo and Juliet: the Poet has been in frockcoat and formal wear throughout, but now we see him half-naked, wearing loose white pants. (We've seen the bodies of the other male dancers before, but not the Poet's until this moment.) The Mermaid is also in a flowing white garment, as when she was first transformed. They are alone, dancing together in the white box that had earlier held them individually, but now their movements are no longer frenzied but gentle and harmonious and in rhythm with each other. The violins fade to a whisper as the lights dim and they keep dancing together as darkness falls and stars come out around them.
Afterwards an audience member, who had been several times, said to me that she felt very privileged to have seen the performance, and I knew exactly what she meant, and felt the same way. It was one of those lucky nights when the audience is perfection – you only noticed them when you occasionally realized you weren’t noticing them. After a couple of days of unpleasant heat the weather had cooled down with a pleasant breeze and when I reached the BART station I only had to wait three minutes for a train, and instead of the usual jampacked four-car train they run at that hour, there were nine cars and plenty of space and quiet. These things all contribute to the experience of the evening, though the main thing is seeing an absolute knockout of a show. And to top it all off, my hair, which is longer than usual, was – though I should not be the one to say this, but no one else is going to – swirling perfectly.
These are the magic nights that keep drawing us back to the theater.
Showing posts with label San Francisco Ballet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label San Francisco Ballet. Show all posts
19 May 2011
12 April 2011
Program 7
I made my first trip this season to the San Francisco Ballet last Friday, for the opening night of Program 7. First up was Petrouchka, to Stravinsky’s music, staged by Isabelle Fokine with the choreography by her grandfather, Michael Fokine, and scenes and costumes after Alexandre Benois. Since I’d recently finished reading Apollo’s Angels, Jennifer Homans’s history of ballet, I was eager to see this landmark. It’s much more of a pantomimed play than the other more abstract pieces on the program. There’s a very specific story (it helps to read the synopsis beforehand) about the sad clown Petrouchka (the Nijinsky role, danced by Pascal Molat) and his hopeless love for the Ballerina (a peerlessly doll-like Clara Blanco), who is in love with the more vigorous Moor (Daniel Deivison, his face painted blue).
Petrouchka in love is a bit of a sadsack, with his shoulders drooping and his big mittened hands often held in front of his crotch, suggesting the physical frustration behind his unhappiness. Though he is unhappy in love and subjugated by the Charlatan (Ricardo Bustamente), he is ultimately triumphant: a sadsack, but also a trickster. This was a treat to see, with colorful and elaborate sets and costumes in a folk Russian style; it’s interesting to get a glimpse of what it might have been like to attend the Ballets Russes.
Emil deCou conducted and the music was excellent, though what I remember most vividly is the sustained drumming between scenes. The second piece, Underskin, was set to Schoenberg’s elegant and mysterious Transfigured Night, choreographed by Renato Zanella in an elegant and mysterious way. I thought this was the most powerful segment. The setting is just some large shafts set leaning in the middle of the back of the stage. The lighting (designed by David Finn) is low throughout. A woman (Sofiane Sylve) enters, dressed in a tight black outfit that glitters like snakeskin. Her movements (she enters again past the halfway mark and then again at the end) are bold and outward in a way the movements of the others are not; even when there are six or seven couples on stage their movements are more intimate than hers, as they shift and struggle. There are suggestions of stories, but no specific plot. At the end, the dancers turn their backs to the audience and form a fist in their right hands, which are bent upwards at a 90 degree angle. They start moving towards the back, except for one woman, isolated in a spotlight to the left, who stands there, while the woman in black moves towards her. Large red petals fall on the woman in the circle of light. It’s very striking and enigmatic and powerful.
The third and final piece was the world premiere of Number Nine, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to Michael Torke’s Ash. This was the first time it had been danced in public, and even though I thought the piece wasn’t living in the dancers the way it would after further performances, it was still vivid and joyful and ended the evening on a high note. It’s fairly brief but packed full of moves that sometimes seem balanced between classic ballet poses and gymnastics. It’s vigorous and athletic as well as graceful. The backdrop is a series of bright jewel-like colors, and there are four main couples, each wearing matching bright colors, along with the corps de ballet. “I just love all the colors!” I heard one man exclaim, as the audience let out.
Petrouchka in love is a bit of a sadsack, with his shoulders drooping and his big mittened hands often held in front of his crotch, suggesting the physical frustration behind his unhappiness. Though he is unhappy in love and subjugated by the Charlatan (Ricardo Bustamente), he is ultimately triumphant: a sadsack, but also a trickster. This was a treat to see, with colorful and elaborate sets and costumes in a folk Russian style; it’s interesting to get a glimpse of what it might have been like to attend the Ballets Russes.
Emil deCou conducted and the music was excellent, though what I remember most vividly is the sustained drumming between scenes. The second piece, Underskin, was set to Schoenberg’s elegant and mysterious Transfigured Night, choreographed by Renato Zanella in an elegant and mysterious way. I thought this was the most powerful segment. The setting is just some large shafts set leaning in the middle of the back of the stage. The lighting (designed by David Finn) is low throughout. A woman (Sofiane Sylve) enters, dressed in a tight black outfit that glitters like snakeskin. Her movements (she enters again past the halfway mark and then again at the end) are bold and outward in a way the movements of the others are not; even when there are six or seven couples on stage their movements are more intimate than hers, as they shift and struggle. There are suggestions of stories, but no specific plot. At the end, the dancers turn their backs to the audience and form a fist in their right hands, which are bent upwards at a 90 degree angle. They start moving towards the back, except for one woman, isolated in a spotlight to the left, who stands there, while the woman in black moves towards her. Large red petals fall on the woman in the circle of light. It’s very striking and enigmatic and powerful.
The third and final piece was the world premiere of Number Nine, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to Michael Torke’s Ash. This was the first time it had been danced in public, and even though I thought the piece wasn’t living in the dancers the way it would after further performances, it was still vivid and joyful and ended the evening on a high note. It’s fairly brief but packed full of moves that sometimes seem balanced between classic ballet poses and gymnastics. It’s vigorous and athletic as well as graceful. The backdrop is a series of bright jewel-like colors, and there are four main couples, each wearing matching bright colors, along with the corps de ballet. “I just love all the colors!” I heard one man exclaim, as the audience let out.
01 May 2010
fun stuff I may or may not get to: May
Here it is May Day already. Do you know why America celebrates Labor Day in September? The capitalists had to give the workers something, but they didn’t want May 1 to be a worldwide day of worker solidarity. So into September it went, where it now mostly signifies the end of summer, as if summer matters in a country with criminally small amounts of time off for most workers. Years ago someone gave me that bit of information about the move to September – such casual mentions are what we used to have instead of Wikipedia, which I’m not going to bother to check. On past May Days I would occasionally wear a red tie and red socks to work; just another of my little jokes which no one realized I was making, which is probably just as well (though someone in Boston did once think the socks were a baseball reference, so I went with that). Anyway here's what I'm seeing or wouldn't mind seeing in May, and some of these are coming right up! Internet failure and migraines delayed my posting. So rush out there to celebrate the Art workers among us by purchasing tickets – remember, culture costs.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra closes its season with a world premiere violin concert, Romanza, by this year's featured composer, William Bolcom, with NCCO Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as soloist; the balance of the program features Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings and Copland’s ever-fresh Appalachian Spring in its original version, along with the Hoe Down from Rodeo. That program takes place May 6-9, four times in four different locations. There is also an open rehearsal on Tuesday, May 4, at 10:00 a.m. in Berkeley.
On May 2 and 4, the California Symphony in Walnut Creek presents Silicon Blues, a world premiere by Mason Bates, at the conclusion of his three-year tenure as the orchestra’s sixth Young American Composer-in-Residence. The program also includes the Beethoven 5 and Sarina Chang in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo Capriccioso for Cello and Orchestra. (Yes, she plays both piano and cello.)
The Oakland East Bay Symphony closes its season on May 14-16 with the Beethoven 9, featuring soloists Kristin Clayton, Layna Chianakas, Thomas Glenn, and Bojan Knezevic, along with Jake Heggie’s The Deepest Desire: Four Meditations on Love, based on poems by Sister Helen Prejean. Chianakas is also the soloist in the Heggie piece and Music Director Michael Morgan is the conductor.
Volti will close its season with Nocturnes, a new song cycle by Morten Lauridsen, who will accompany the chorus himself on the piano. These concerts also include works by Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, and Robin Estrada. There are two performances, May 14 in Berkeley and May 15 in San Francisco. Be advised that the May 14 concert also features a whole mess of high school choirs. You can also buy Volti's latest CD here if you can't make it to the concerts.
Cal Performances presents Laurie Anderson in Delusion on May 7-8, and jazz great Sonny Rollins on May 13, as part of his 80th birthday tour. I heard him at Cal a few years ago and he was amazing.
SF Performances presents baritone Eugene Brancoveanu on May 16, in works by Sviridov, Bellini, Schubert, Loewe, and Duparc.
Incidentally Cal Performances is announcing its next season on May 4, and San Francisco Performances makes its announcement on May 11. I’m hoping both of them will come through for local audiences – that is, the local audiences who go to the theater for something besides the bland comforts of familiarity. Everyone else seems to be dragging out every over-familiar standard they can, which wouldn’t be so annoying if they all didn’t keep insisting on how very innovative they are.
SF Ballet closes its season May 1-9 with Helgi Tomasson’s version of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which of course is based on what the Ballet’s website rather bizarrely describes as Shakespeare’s “phenomenally crafted tale.” By the way, I’m glad the Ballet is reviving The Little Mermaid next season, since I missed it due to poverty. Not that I'm expecting to be richer next season, but after hearing Lera Auerbach’s San Francisco Performances recital, I’m eager to hear more of her music. I’ve also heard knowledgeable friends praise the theatricality of John Neumeier’s choreography.
The San Francisco Symphony has Dalbavie’s La Source d’un Regard, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and the Brahms 2 conducted by Eschenbach on May 5-8. The Dalbavie presumably takes the place of the Thomas Larcher commission announced in the concert schedule. The Symphony has an irritating way of disappearing pieces and performers from its website without even a note mentioning the substitution, so that, for example, if you had a vague memory that last year’s announcement included Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, you could gaslight yourself searching the website, because it’s gone without an explanation. The excellent young pianist David Fray is the soloist in the Beethoven. I heard him last December with the New York Philharmonic in an exciting performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and it’s to his credit that it wasn’t completely swamped by my memory of Martha Argerich’s performance of the same piece with the San Francisco Symphony earlier in the year (my post on that is here). His publicity photos are all male-model stylish angularity, but in person he’s quite tall and thin, with an endearingly bird-like gawkiness. Unfortunately the Friday concert is one of those silly 6.5 affairs, at which they drop a piece of music and substitute the conductor blathering from the podium, so that those who are there only for whatever fading social cachet attaches to “attending the symphony” are relieved from being forced to listen to so much actual music. I assume the Dalbavie is being dropped, but the website doesn’t specify that, so I’m just guessing based on past experience.
May 19-23 Tilson Thomas conducts Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe and Stravinsky’s Threni, Lamentations of Jeremiah. That looks promising.
UPDATE: I've just been informed that due to visa problems the Stravinsky is being rescheduled to some future season. Instead the Symphony and its Chorus will be performing Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. My excitement over this concert has just cooled considerably.
And May 27-29 he conducts the Schumann 3, the Rhenish, and then the orchestra is joined by soprano Erin Wall for Mozart’s Bella mia Fiamma – Resta, o cara, and Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence. I’m especially eager to hear the Holloway, since Clarissa is one of my favorite novels. (I’m still angry over the BBC dramatization from approximately twenty years ago, which was so awful I couldn’t get past the first hour. I took one look at the actors and knew they weren’t going to do it right.) The Symphony programmed the work a few years ago, but the singer got sick and unsurprisingly no one else knew the piece, so if I'm remembering correctly they tried substituting a solo violin for the vocalist, and the performance had a somewhat endearing yet disappointing air of the slapdash about it. The piece is drawn from Holloway’s opera, which I would love to see, but I’m not holding my breath. At this point I'd settle for a recording.
And I have to mention the New York Philharmonic’s May 27-29 performances of Ligeti’s opera, Le Grand Macabre, because it’s killing me to miss it. I considered going to New York to hear it but reluctantly had to abandon that plan. My reaction to the American premiere, back when San Francisco Opera used to be exciting, is here. This is really a piece to hear and see live – my only reservation was that the music was almost too sheerly gorgeous for the comic grotesqueries of the story. The performances coincidentally were right after the re-election of war criminal George W. Bush and his gang of thieves, and in the miasmic despair of those sickening days, only this wonderful piece of theater managed to lift my spirits even briefly.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra closes its season with a world premiere violin concert, Romanza, by this year's featured composer, William Bolcom, with NCCO Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as soloist; the balance of the program features Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings and Copland’s ever-fresh Appalachian Spring in its original version, along with the Hoe Down from Rodeo. That program takes place May 6-9, four times in four different locations. There is also an open rehearsal on Tuesday, May 4, at 10:00 a.m. in Berkeley.
On May 2 and 4, the California Symphony in Walnut Creek presents Silicon Blues, a world premiere by Mason Bates, at the conclusion of his three-year tenure as the orchestra’s sixth Young American Composer-in-Residence. The program also includes the Beethoven 5 and Sarina Chang in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo Capriccioso for Cello and Orchestra. (Yes, she plays both piano and cello.)
The Oakland East Bay Symphony closes its season on May 14-16 with the Beethoven 9, featuring soloists Kristin Clayton, Layna Chianakas, Thomas Glenn, and Bojan Knezevic, along with Jake Heggie’s The Deepest Desire: Four Meditations on Love, based on poems by Sister Helen Prejean. Chianakas is also the soloist in the Heggie piece and Music Director Michael Morgan is the conductor.
Volti will close its season with Nocturnes, a new song cycle by Morten Lauridsen, who will accompany the chorus himself on the piano. These concerts also include works by Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, and Robin Estrada. There are two performances, May 14 in Berkeley and May 15 in San Francisco. Be advised that the May 14 concert also features a whole mess of high school choirs. You can also buy Volti's latest CD here if you can't make it to the concerts.
Cal Performances presents Laurie Anderson in Delusion on May 7-8, and jazz great Sonny Rollins on May 13, as part of his 80th birthday tour. I heard him at Cal a few years ago and he was amazing.
SF Performances presents baritone Eugene Brancoveanu on May 16, in works by Sviridov, Bellini, Schubert, Loewe, and Duparc.
Incidentally Cal Performances is announcing its next season on May 4, and San Francisco Performances makes its announcement on May 11. I’m hoping both of them will come through for local audiences – that is, the local audiences who go to the theater for something besides the bland comforts of familiarity. Everyone else seems to be dragging out every over-familiar standard they can, which wouldn’t be so annoying if they all didn’t keep insisting on how very innovative they are.
SF Ballet closes its season May 1-9 with Helgi Tomasson’s version of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which of course is based on what the Ballet’s website rather bizarrely describes as Shakespeare’s “phenomenally crafted tale.” By the way, I’m glad the Ballet is reviving The Little Mermaid next season, since I missed it due to poverty. Not that I'm expecting to be richer next season, but after hearing Lera Auerbach’s San Francisco Performances recital, I’m eager to hear more of her music. I’ve also heard knowledgeable friends praise the theatricality of John Neumeier’s choreography.
The San Francisco Symphony has Dalbavie’s La Source d’un Regard, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and the Brahms 2 conducted by Eschenbach on May 5-8. The Dalbavie presumably takes the place of the Thomas Larcher commission announced in the concert schedule. The Symphony has an irritating way of disappearing pieces and performers from its website without even a note mentioning the substitution, so that, for example, if you had a vague memory that last year’s announcement included Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, you could gaslight yourself searching the website, because it’s gone without an explanation. The excellent young pianist David Fray is the soloist in the Beethoven. I heard him last December with the New York Philharmonic in an exciting performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and it’s to his credit that it wasn’t completely swamped by my memory of Martha Argerich’s performance of the same piece with the San Francisco Symphony earlier in the year (my post on that is here). His publicity photos are all male-model stylish angularity, but in person he’s quite tall and thin, with an endearingly bird-like gawkiness. Unfortunately the Friday concert is one of those silly 6.5 affairs, at which they drop a piece of music and substitute the conductor blathering from the podium, so that those who are there only for whatever fading social cachet attaches to “attending the symphony” are relieved from being forced to listen to so much actual music. I assume the Dalbavie is being dropped, but the website doesn’t specify that, so I’m just guessing based on past experience.
May 19-23 Tilson Thomas conducts Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe and Stravinsky’s Threni, Lamentations of Jeremiah. That looks promising.
UPDATE: I've just been informed that due to visa problems the Stravinsky is being rescheduled to some future season. Instead the Symphony and its Chorus will be performing Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. My excitement over this concert has just cooled considerably.
And May 27-29 he conducts the Schumann 3, the Rhenish, and then the orchestra is joined by soprano Erin Wall for Mozart’s Bella mia Fiamma – Resta, o cara, and Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence. I’m especially eager to hear the Holloway, since Clarissa is one of my favorite novels. (I’m still angry over the BBC dramatization from approximately twenty years ago, which was so awful I couldn’t get past the first hour. I took one look at the actors and knew they weren’t going to do it right.) The Symphony programmed the work a few years ago, but the singer got sick and unsurprisingly no one else knew the piece, so if I'm remembering correctly they tried substituting a solo violin for the vocalist, and the performance had a somewhat endearing yet disappointing air of the slapdash about it. The piece is drawn from Holloway’s opera, which I would love to see, but I’m not holding my breath. At this point I'd settle for a recording.
And I have to mention the New York Philharmonic’s May 27-29 performances of Ligeti’s opera, Le Grand Macabre, because it’s killing me to miss it. I considered going to New York to hear it but reluctantly had to abandon that plan. My reaction to the American premiere, back when San Francisco Opera used to be exciting, is here. This is really a piece to hear and see live – my only reservation was that the music was almost too sheerly gorgeous for the comic grotesqueries of the story. The performances coincidentally were right after the re-election of war criminal George W. Bush and his gang of thieves, and in the miasmic despair of those sickening days, only this wonderful piece of theater managed to lift my spirits even briefly.
22 February 2010
fun stuff I may or may not get to: March
Lots of exciting new or newish music coming up in March. . .
starting on Monday, March 1, with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presenting Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura.
March 4-7, the New Century Chamber Orchestra presents an enticing program of Wolf’s Italian Serenade, Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings, Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, and Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. NCCO is participating in a food drive at these concerts, which you can read about here.
San Francisco Performances has some very exciting concerts: on March 9, violinist Jennifer Koh plays Bach, Ysaye, Saariaho, Carter, and Salonen; then on March 16, British composer Thomas Ades plays Janacek, Liszt, Prokofiev, Schubert, Beethoven, and the US premiere of his own Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face (his strange and strangely moving opera).
March 4-7 the San Francisco Symphony has Christian Tetzlaff playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, along with the world premiere of Victor Kissine’s Post-scriptum and works by Liszt and Ravel. March 11-14 Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the Mahler 2 with soloists Laura Claycomb and Karaina Karneus, but be forewarned that the Friday concert is one of those 6.5 things so presumably you’ll have to endure endless conductor-blather before you get any actual music.
San Francisco Ballet presents a mixed program featuring the SF Ballet premiere of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, and the US premiere of a new evening-length Little Mermaid.
On March 21, Ian Bostridge performs Winterreise in Berkeley; unfortunately it's in cavernous Zellerbach Auditorium, so take that under advisement.
Cutting Ball Theater has a new play by Marcus Gardley, . . . and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi.
And the third annual Switchboard Music Festival takes place Sunday, March 28. I went last year and it was a really fun day (and night), with an intriguing and eclectic line-up.
ADDENDUM: and a h/t to sfmike for reminding me that the Other Minds Festival is March 4-6.
starting on Monday, March 1, with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presenting Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura.
March 4-7, the New Century Chamber Orchestra presents an enticing program of Wolf’s Italian Serenade, Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings, Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, and Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. NCCO is participating in a food drive at these concerts, which you can read about here.
San Francisco Performances has some very exciting concerts: on March 9, violinist Jennifer Koh plays Bach, Ysaye, Saariaho, Carter, and Salonen; then on March 16, British composer Thomas Ades plays Janacek, Liszt, Prokofiev, Schubert, Beethoven, and the US premiere of his own Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face (his strange and strangely moving opera).
March 4-7 the San Francisco Symphony has Christian Tetzlaff playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, along with the world premiere of Victor Kissine’s Post-scriptum and works by Liszt and Ravel. March 11-14 Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the Mahler 2 with soloists Laura Claycomb and Karaina Karneus, but be forewarned that the Friday concert is one of those 6.5 things so presumably you’ll have to endure endless conductor-blather before you get any actual music.
San Francisco Ballet presents a mixed program featuring the SF Ballet premiere of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, and the US premiere of a new evening-length Little Mermaid.
On March 21, Ian Bostridge performs Winterreise in Berkeley; unfortunately it's in cavernous Zellerbach Auditorium, so take that under advisement.
Cutting Ball Theater has a new play by Marcus Gardley, . . . and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi.
And the third annual Switchboard Music Festival takes place Sunday, March 28. I went last year and it was a really fun day (and night), with an intriguing and eclectic line-up.
ADDENDUM: and a h/t to sfmike for reminding me that the Other Minds Festival is March 4-6.
30 January 2010
fun stuff I may or may not get to: February
San Francisco Performances has an evening of modern music with Midori on February 6, and their annual subscriber concert on February 9, featuring 2009 Naumburg Competition winners Trio Cavatina.
Cal Performances presents Ragnar Bohlin conducting the Swedish Radio Choir on February 28.
It’s a big month for choral concerts: Volti performs new music on February 26-28 and Magnificat performs old music on February 12-14.
The San Francisco Symphony presents Schubert’s Mass No. 2 with A Concord Symphony, Henry Brant’s orchestration of the Ives sonata.
Berkeley Opera presents Eugene Brancoveanu as Don Giovanni in its new venue, which has got to be an improvement over the Julia Morgan Theater.
ACT presents Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in a new production directed by John Doyle, who did the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd (you know the one: Patti Lupone plays the tuba!).
The San Francisco Ballet presents Program 2, a mixed program featuring works by Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, and Paul Taylor, and Program 3, which is all Balanchine.
Cal Performances presents Ragnar Bohlin conducting the Swedish Radio Choir on February 28.
It’s a big month for choral concerts: Volti performs new music on February 26-28 and Magnificat performs old music on February 12-14.
The San Francisco Symphony presents Schubert’s Mass No. 2 with A Concord Symphony, Henry Brant’s orchestration of the Ives sonata.
Berkeley Opera presents Eugene Brancoveanu as Don Giovanni in its new venue, which has got to be an improvement over the Julia Morgan Theater.
ACT presents Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in a new production directed by John Doyle, who did the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd (you know the one: Patti Lupone plays the tuba!).
The San Francisco Ballet presents Program 2, a mixed program featuring works by Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, and Paul Taylor, and Program 3, which is all Balanchine.
02 January 2010
fun stuff I may or may not get to: January
Some may consider this month the start of a new year, but theater-goers know that the year really begins in September and ends in June. So here we are, almost at the half-way point! Good for us.
I always seem to have more concerts presented by San Francisco Performances in the second half of the season, so I’m only slightly surprised that I have five in January:
On January 10, Steven Isserlis and Kirill Gerstein play music for cello and piano by Britten, Schumann, and Rachmaninov.
On January 12, Nathan Gunn is accompanied by his wife Julie in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.
On January 22, Richard Goode plays music by Bach, Haydn, and Schumann.
Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company appears Saturday and Sunday, January 23 and 24.
Violist David Aaron Carpenter plays music by York Bowen, Rebecca Clarke, Penderecki, Prokofiev, and Piazzola and January 24.
And on Sunday, January 31, there is a "Day of Exploration" of new music with Midori (schedule here).
Cutting Ball Theater has extended The Bald Soprano once again, until January 24. And their Hidden Classics Reading Series has a really interesting-looking program on Sunday, January 31: a Medea double-bill, featuring versions by Euripides and Seneca.
And speaking of the classics, ACT presents Timberlake Wertenbaker’s adaptation of Racine’s Phedre.
Ensemble Parallele presents a chamber-opera version of Berg’s Wozzeck on January 30 and 31.
George Benjamin is this year’s Phyllis C. Wattis Composer in Residence at the San Francisco Symphony, and is here for a couple of weeks of concerts.
And San Francisco Ballet opens with a revival of its new production of Swan Lake.
I always seem to have more concerts presented by San Francisco Performances in the second half of the season, so I’m only slightly surprised that I have five in January:
On January 10, Steven Isserlis and Kirill Gerstein play music for cello and piano by Britten, Schumann, and Rachmaninov.
On January 12, Nathan Gunn is accompanied by his wife Julie in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.
On January 22, Richard Goode plays music by Bach, Haydn, and Schumann.
Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company appears Saturday and Sunday, January 23 and 24.
Violist David Aaron Carpenter plays music by York Bowen, Rebecca Clarke, Penderecki, Prokofiev, and Piazzola and January 24.
And on Sunday, January 31, there is a "Day of Exploration" of new music with Midori (schedule here).
Cutting Ball Theater has extended The Bald Soprano once again, until January 24. And their Hidden Classics Reading Series has a really interesting-looking program on Sunday, January 31: a Medea double-bill, featuring versions by Euripides and Seneca.
And speaking of the classics, ACT presents Timberlake Wertenbaker’s adaptation of Racine’s Phedre.
Ensemble Parallele presents a chamber-opera version of Berg’s Wozzeck on January 30 and 31.
George Benjamin is this year’s Phyllis C. Wattis Composer in Residence at the San Francisco Symphony, and is here for a couple of weeks of concerts.
And San Francisco Ballet opens with a revival of its new production of Swan Lake.
08 May 2009
Haiku 128
3 Haiku for Balanchine's Jewels
1. Emeralds
Verdant the river
Flowing shaded, soft and sad;
(Why did you leave me?)
2. Rubies
Jump up like a flame!
Jazzy jaunty pelvises!
That's romance! Grab it!
3. Diamonds
Snow-white swan's down, glide
Down to cape and crown the head
Of my beloved
1. Emeralds
Verdant the river
Flowing shaded, soft and sad;
(Why did you leave me?)
2. Rubies
Jump up like a flame!
Jazzy jaunty pelvises!
That's romance! Grab it!
3. Diamonds
Snow-white swan's down, glide
Down to cape and crown the head
Of my beloved
19 February 2009
fun stuff I'm probably going to miss
There seems to be a critical mass of interesting stuff I’m most likely going to miss in the next couple of weeks, thanks to previous commitments or general exhaustion, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take advantage of what's being offered. Some of this is stuff I’ve wanted to see since I first heard about it, like the new Swan Lake at the San Francisco Ballet or Sofia Gubaidulina’s residence at the San Francisco Symphony (I’m hearing at least one of these concerts, but I might miss the first one and the chamber performance), so too bad for my poor planning and poverty generally.
The Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble is performing live music to experimental films tomorrow night, Friday February 20, at Artists' Television Access at 992 Valencia Street. I heard Dubowsky's Eisenhower Address last fall and was really impressed by it and would love to hear it again. Go see what he does with Genet, Jarman, and company.
The excellent local chorus Volti is presenting another intriguing program chockfull of world premieres, at St Mark’s (2300 Bancroft Way, Berkeley) on Friday February 27 and at St Gregory of Nyssa (500 De Haro Street, San Francisco) on Saturday February 28. If you too can't make these performances, you can always go to their website and buy their CDs.
The California Symphony is presenting a new orchestral work, White Lies for Lomax (as in Alan Lomax), by their Young Composer in Residence, Mason Bates, who also has a work coming up with the San Francisco Symphony later this season. Also on the program is the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with a young soloist, Stefan Jackiw, and the Brahms 4. That’s Sunday March 8 and Tuesday March 10 at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.
And the next Other Minds Festival starts Thursday March 5 and continues for the next two days at Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (3200 California Street at Presidio).
So go, defy the Republican reactionaries by spending what money you have to support the arts, and enjoy. Tell me what I'm missing.
The Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble is performing live music to experimental films tomorrow night, Friday February 20, at Artists' Television Access at 992 Valencia Street. I heard Dubowsky's Eisenhower Address last fall and was really impressed by it and would love to hear it again. Go see what he does with Genet, Jarman, and company.
The excellent local chorus Volti is presenting another intriguing program chockfull of world premieres, at St Mark’s (2300 Bancroft Way, Berkeley) on Friday February 27 and at St Gregory of Nyssa (500 De Haro Street, San Francisco) on Saturday February 28. If you too can't make these performances, you can always go to their website and buy their CDs.
The California Symphony is presenting a new orchestral work, White Lies for Lomax (as in Alan Lomax), by their Young Composer in Residence, Mason Bates, who also has a work coming up with the San Francisco Symphony later this season. Also on the program is the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with a young soloist, Stefan Jackiw, and the Brahms 4. That’s Sunday March 8 and Tuesday March 10 at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.
And the next Other Minds Festival starts Thursday March 5 and continues for the next two days at Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (3200 California Street at Presidio).
So go, defy the Republican reactionaries by spending what money you have to support the arts, and enjoy. Tell me what I'm missing.
31 August 2008
gotta sing, gotta dance
As a dear friend of mine once noted, poverty sucks, and so last spring I had decided I couldn’t buy any tickets to the ballet. But much as I hate benefiting from the misfortunes of others, I ended up with several tickets from surgery-bound friends of friends (I’m happy to report that everyone is fully recovered). I would not have chosen the Jerome Robbins program myself, but charity boys don’t get to choose.
I probably wouldn’t have chosen a Sunday matinee either, having had some especially bad experiences in previous encounters with the home-before-dark crowd, but there I was, seeing the Opera House in afternoon light for once. The lobby is quite attractive, with its cool marble floors and the light glinting off the golden rosettes in the ceiling and dappling the sand- and wheat-colored stone of the columns and arches, and I watched for a while as the audience gathered; mostly crowds of middle-aged women wearing artistic scarves and traveling in groups, with a few trim and stylish enough to be obvious as former dancers themselves, and lots of dowager grandmothers towing along excited little girls who were actually wearing velvet dresses as if it were Easter Sunday, and the occasional woman by herself staring blankly at the occasional male couples, who seemed to come in two types (both too thin, or both too fat); altogether a scene crying out for the fluid brush of a Singer Sargent, or a Warhol, or Grosz.
It’s a bit different from the opera crowd, though perhaps the difference is because it was a matinee, so there were more women traveling alone or with children. I went up to the gift shop to see how it had changed from opera season, and I have to say, given the warm spring weather, what was up with all the scarves? Opera-season clothing doesn’t get past a few logo T-shirts (or sweatshirts for those chilly simulcast nights), but there were racks of scarves, gauzy, silky, flowered, shiny, and sometimes downright architectural. And there was lots and lots of pink stuff, and lots of items aimed at little girls. It’s odd that such a physical and erotic art should be conceived of as a dream for little girls, but then that's true of a lot of stuff considered suitable for little girls; even a demonic tale like Wuthering Heights is considered nice for girls, and clearly there’s a dark pull behind the prettiness. Whatever it is, the ballet sure doesn’t shy away from the precious little ballerina stereotype.
The program opened with Fancy Free, which struck me as even more grotesque than it did the first time I saw it last year, but then we’ve had an entire extra year of the Iraq war since then. Remember the Iraq War? It's getting even less coverage these days, what with high gas prices and all, plus the presidential election (though you'd think the election might actually lead to more discussion of the on-going war, not less). In light of what we’re doing in Iraq, it seems unbelievably perverse, or callous, to revive twice in two years this wartime propaganda pastoral of carefree and flirtatious sailors on leave. I can’t believe there aren’t other pieces more suitable for revival, even in the possibly limited genre of Cute and Innocent Americana. I did amuse myself during the irritating episode in which two of the men take that one woman’s purse and play keep-away with it by wondering how long it would take a woman nowadays to call the police – though I can’t believe that even then such bullying was really the best way to meet a girl. Whatever happened to Hi, I’m new in town, care to show me the sights?
After intermission we had In the Night, in which three different couples expressed their three different relationships in dance form. It was generally pleasant, though it struck me as a bit thin; but then, at least one couple was usually so far back and to the left that I simply couldn’t see them from my seat. No doubt an unobstructed view would have enriched my viewing considerably.
Before the third piece, the SF Ballet premiere of West Side Story Suite, I was earwitness to the following exchange among one of those groups of women who made up most of the audience. There were some younger women, daughters or possibly granddaughters and even great-granddaughters, and their mother (or grandmother), who must have been at the very least in her late 50s/early 60s, and then her mother, who looked extremely old and was almost bent double. So the mother says to the old lady, “Oh, Mother, next is West Side Story!”
The Old Lady: “What’s that?”
The Mother: “It’s about gangs.”
The Old Lady: “The gays?”
The Mother: “No, mother – gangs. In New York City. It’s Leonard Bernstein, so it’s very fast.”
The Old Lady: “Never heard of it.”
The Mother: “Oh, Mother, sure you have! Don’t you remember when [the name of her future husband] took me on our first date? We went to see the movie and I was all dressed up in that blue dress with the white sweater, and he stopped by the house first and we took a picture of it, and we had the picture hanging up in the living room?”
The Old Lady: “Nope. Never heard of it.”
To answer the obvious query, the old lady, though physically frail, seemed to be quite sharp mentally. So I have absolutely no idea how she managed to be the sort of person who takes family trips to ballet matinees yet had managed to avoid all knowledge of West Side Story. I know it’s beloved, but not particularly by me. Candide is one of my favorite musicals, but I’m pretty indifferent to just about everything else Bernstein wrote. And you know why I missed the traveling Dudamel concert last November that everyone has been talking/raving about ever since? Because the program featured Dances from West Side Story and I just didn’t feel like sitting through that, much less paying for the privilege (see note above about poverty sucking). I have a subscription ticket for the Symphony’s upcoming Bernstein program, and if Upshaw weren’t on the program I’d probably have switched it to something I was more interested in.
You can probably divide the world into West Side Story people and Candide people, just as you can divide them into Rodgers and Hammerstein people or Rodgers and Hart people. I’m always amused by those who say that the reason the great days of the musical are over is that audiences these days are “too sophisticated” to accept people bursting into song, as if acceptance of the stylized and artificial were not the essence of sophistication (or as if the audience that listened to Cole Porter and Gershwin were somehow less “sophisticated” than the audience that thinks Madonna is a singer). And I don't even take the slightly embarrassed tone some have these days towards West Side Story’s earnest and dated “relevance” or its fancy-stepping gang-bangers. I just don’t really connect with these stories of young love against the odds, I guess. I mean, they’re fine, but I really need something more. (So I’m especially curious to see how my favorite Mark Morris handles his new version of Romeo and Juliet at the end of September, and how I like it).
If you tell me that some guy is going to be haunted by the ghosts of dead virgins who plan to dance him to death, or that a guy falls in love with a swan, I’m totally there. But two crazy-in-love kids making beautiful love against the odds in this crazy old world, which is so filled with hate – meh, not so much. Anyway the dancing was very nice, though as sometimes happens in these slice-and-dice versions, the remaining story was so episodic – really not much more than the essential big hits strung together – that I wondered how anyone not familiar with the musical could figure out what was going on. Of course, the old lady next to me was undoubtedly the only person in that position, and she seemed to be having a pretty good time, so no harm done I guess. The ending does veer off into some Balletic Land of The Apotheosized Lovers, so all of a sudden the music starts sounding like Appalachian Spring and the young lovers walk off together, or something like that. But the really weird staging decision was to have the dancers do their own singing. I’m sure it was fun for them, in a high-school musical kind of way, and it might even have been fun for some of the audience, like their parents. I didn’t hear anything that made me think the opera world had lost any future stars.
And speaking of the opera world’s future stars . . . I heard a bunch of them at the Merola Grand Finale. I had missed the Merola productions of Albert Herring and Don Giovanni, not just because – here comes a recapitulation of the first theme – poverty sucks, but because they were at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason, and it is a pain in the ass to get to. But I’d been hearing great things about this group. I’m not going to go on too much about individual performers, except to say I was particularly struck by Renee Tatum and Nathaniel Peake in Werther, mostly because it was an opera I was pretty much indifferent to, despite lines such as “It’s on the table where you left your translation of Ossian,” until I heard their intense performance of “Ah, mon courage m’abandonne.” (Check out sfmike’s write-up – with pictures! – here.)
What I would like to do is suggest to the Merola folks that if they included surtitles with the name and composer of the opera and the name(s) of the performer(s) before each excerpt, they would have cut down on the brain-dead chatter during the performance by about 90%. You’d think the people who would go to something like this are the sort of seasoned opera goers who wouldn’t need to play name that tune with Trovatore or Rosenkavalier. Perhaps being seasoned opera goers means they have lost the sort of common sense that would tell them that if one character addresses another as “Arabella” (or “Vanessa”), the opera in question most likely is Arabella (or Vanessa). I don’t really understand the panicked need to know right away what opera is being sung, anyway, since the words are there and you know what is being sung – do you really need to know the composer right then? If the piece is really that good, you'll still remember at intermission, when you can look at the program book, though apparently even that was just too difficult to follow for some, such as the decrepit old man (and this one really did seem to be slipping into that good night) and his daughter/caregiver on the other side of my compatriot (who was heroic in his forbearance – if I’d been next to them I wouldn’t have been so nice). They were particularly and perpetually nonplussed, except for the strange interlude during the excerpt from Pelleas et Melisande that opened the second half, when I heard a weird tuneless humming near me and realized that the old man was releasing his inner Mary Garden into the auditorium and singing along with Melisande. Ah, and who among us has not felt exactly like Melisande? But one is well-advised to keep that sort of thing to oneself.
Most of the staging was minimal, but for some reason the two Mozart excerpts (“La mia Dorabella . . .E la fede delle femmine . .. Una bella serenata” from Cosi and what was delightfully titled “Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm” from the Magic Flute, and I’ll bet you know what part that is) were apparently meant to prepare the singers for careers in the regie theater strongholds of state-subsidized houses. I kind of liked having Gugliemo and Ferrando playing with Barbie dolls when they sing about their perfect mistresses, though it's fairly obvious, but having the Three Ladies smoking, and using a gun as the magic flute and a bag of cocaine as the glockenspiel, were all silly and terrible ideas.
So some moments of bad staging, many moments of thrilling singing, and an utterly clueless audience, and that’s a night at the opera. There was one more odd thing about the program, and I think it must have been deliberate, but I have absolutely no idea what the motive was, and I can’t say I’m really complaining, but: it is really strange that in an almost three-hour program of excerpts from (by and large) famous and beloved composers and operas, there was not a single note by Puccini played or sung. Why revive Boheme on the main stage, when these young and hopeful performers are the only ones who should be singing it?
I probably wouldn’t have chosen a Sunday matinee either, having had some especially bad experiences in previous encounters with the home-before-dark crowd, but there I was, seeing the Opera House in afternoon light for once. The lobby is quite attractive, with its cool marble floors and the light glinting off the golden rosettes in the ceiling and dappling the sand- and wheat-colored stone of the columns and arches, and I watched for a while as the audience gathered; mostly crowds of middle-aged women wearing artistic scarves and traveling in groups, with a few trim and stylish enough to be obvious as former dancers themselves, and lots of dowager grandmothers towing along excited little girls who were actually wearing velvet dresses as if it were Easter Sunday, and the occasional woman by herself staring blankly at the occasional male couples, who seemed to come in two types (both too thin, or both too fat); altogether a scene crying out for the fluid brush of a Singer Sargent, or a Warhol, or Grosz.
It’s a bit different from the opera crowd, though perhaps the difference is because it was a matinee, so there were more women traveling alone or with children. I went up to the gift shop to see how it had changed from opera season, and I have to say, given the warm spring weather, what was up with all the scarves? Opera-season clothing doesn’t get past a few logo T-shirts (or sweatshirts for those chilly simulcast nights), but there were racks of scarves, gauzy, silky, flowered, shiny, and sometimes downright architectural. And there was lots and lots of pink stuff, and lots of items aimed at little girls. It’s odd that such a physical and erotic art should be conceived of as a dream for little girls, but then that's true of a lot of stuff considered suitable for little girls; even a demonic tale like Wuthering Heights is considered nice for girls, and clearly there’s a dark pull behind the prettiness. Whatever it is, the ballet sure doesn’t shy away from the precious little ballerina stereotype.
The program opened with Fancy Free, which struck me as even more grotesque than it did the first time I saw it last year, but then we’ve had an entire extra year of the Iraq war since then. Remember the Iraq War? It's getting even less coverage these days, what with high gas prices and all, plus the presidential election (though you'd think the election might actually lead to more discussion of the on-going war, not less). In light of what we’re doing in Iraq, it seems unbelievably perverse, or callous, to revive twice in two years this wartime propaganda pastoral of carefree and flirtatious sailors on leave. I can’t believe there aren’t other pieces more suitable for revival, even in the possibly limited genre of Cute and Innocent Americana. I did amuse myself during the irritating episode in which two of the men take that one woman’s purse and play keep-away with it by wondering how long it would take a woman nowadays to call the police – though I can’t believe that even then such bullying was really the best way to meet a girl. Whatever happened to Hi, I’m new in town, care to show me the sights?
After intermission we had In the Night, in which three different couples expressed their three different relationships in dance form. It was generally pleasant, though it struck me as a bit thin; but then, at least one couple was usually so far back and to the left that I simply couldn’t see them from my seat. No doubt an unobstructed view would have enriched my viewing considerably.
Before the third piece, the SF Ballet premiere of West Side Story Suite, I was earwitness to the following exchange among one of those groups of women who made up most of the audience. There were some younger women, daughters or possibly granddaughters and even great-granddaughters, and their mother (or grandmother), who must have been at the very least in her late 50s/early 60s, and then her mother, who looked extremely old and was almost bent double. So the mother says to the old lady, “Oh, Mother, next is West Side Story!”
The Old Lady: “What’s that?”
The Mother: “It’s about gangs.”
The Old Lady: “The gays?”
The Mother: “No, mother – gangs. In New York City. It’s Leonard Bernstein, so it’s very fast.”
The Old Lady: “Never heard of it.”
The Mother: “Oh, Mother, sure you have! Don’t you remember when [the name of her future husband] took me on our first date? We went to see the movie and I was all dressed up in that blue dress with the white sweater, and he stopped by the house first and we took a picture of it, and we had the picture hanging up in the living room?”
The Old Lady: “Nope. Never heard of it.”
To answer the obvious query, the old lady, though physically frail, seemed to be quite sharp mentally. So I have absolutely no idea how she managed to be the sort of person who takes family trips to ballet matinees yet had managed to avoid all knowledge of West Side Story. I know it’s beloved, but not particularly by me. Candide is one of my favorite musicals, but I’m pretty indifferent to just about everything else Bernstein wrote. And you know why I missed the traveling Dudamel concert last November that everyone has been talking/raving about ever since? Because the program featured Dances from West Side Story and I just didn’t feel like sitting through that, much less paying for the privilege (see note above about poverty sucking). I have a subscription ticket for the Symphony’s upcoming Bernstein program, and if Upshaw weren’t on the program I’d probably have switched it to something I was more interested in.
You can probably divide the world into West Side Story people and Candide people, just as you can divide them into Rodgers and Hammerstein people or Rodgers and Hart people. I’m always amused by those who say that the reason the great days of the musical are over is that audiences these days are “too sophisticated” to accept people bursting into song, as if acceptance of the stylized and artificial were not the essence of sophistication (or as if the audience that listened to Cole Porter and Gershwin were somehow less “sophisticated” than the audience that thinks Madonna is a singer). And I don't even take the slightly embarrassed tone some have these days towards West Side Story’s earnest and dated “relevance” or its fancy-stepping gang-bangers. I just don’t really connect with these stories of young love against the odds, I guess. I mean, they’re fine, but I really need something more. (So I’m especially curious to see how my favorite Mark Morris handles his new version of Romeo and Juliet at the end of September, and how I like it).
If you tell me that some guy is going to be haunted by the ghosts of dead virgins who plan to dance him to death, or that a guy falls in love with a swan, I’m totally there. But two crazy-in-love kids making beautiful love against the odds in this crazy old world, which is so filled with hate – meh, not so much. Anyway the dancing was very nice, though as sometimes happens in these slice-and-dice versions, the remaining story was so episodic – really not much more than the essential big hits strung together – that I wondered how anyone not familiar with the musical could figure out what was going on. Of course, the old lady next to me was undoubtedly the only person in that position, and she seemed to be having a pretty good time, so no harm done I guess. The ending does veer off into some Balletic Land of The Apotheosized Lovers, so all of a sudden the music starts sounding like Appalachian Spring and the young lovers walk off together, or something like that. But the really weird staging decision was to have the dancers do their own singing. I’m sure it was fun for them, in a high-school musical kind of way, and it might even have been fun for some of the audience, like their parents. I didn’t hear anything that made me think the opera world had lost any future stars.
And speaking of the opera world’s future stars . . . I heard a bunch of them at the Merola Grand Finale. I had missed the Merola productions of Albert Herring and Don Giovanni, not just because – here comes a recapitulation of the first theme – poverty sucks, but because they were at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason, and it is a pain in the ass to get to. But I’d been hearing great things about this group. I’m not going to go on too much about individual performers, except to say I was particularly struck by Renee Tatum and Nathaniel Peake in Werther, mostly because it was an opera I was pretty much indifferent to, despite lines such as “It’s on the table where you left your translation of Ossian,” until I heard their intense performance of “Ah, mon courage m’abandonne.” (Check out sfmike’s write-up – with pictures! – here.)
What I would like to do is suggest to the Merola folks that if they included surtitles with the name and composer of the opera and the name(s) of the performer(s) before each excerpt, they would have cut down on the brain-dead chatter during the performance by about 90%. You’d think the people who would go to something like this are the sort of seasoned opera goers who wouldn’t need to play name that tune with Trovatore or Rosenkavalier. Perhaps being seasoned opera goers means they have lost the sort of common sense that would tell them that if one character addresses another as “Arabella” (or “Vanessa”), the opera in question most likely is Arabella (or Vanessa). I don’t really understand the panicked need to know right away what opera is being sung, anyway, since the words are there and you know what is being sung – do you really need to know the composer right then? If the piece is really that good, you'll still remember at intermission, when you can look at the program book, though apparently even that was just too difficult to follow for some, such as the decrepit old man (and this one really did seem to be slipping into that good night) and his daughter/caregiver on the other side of my compatriot (who was heroic in his forbearance – if I’d been next to them I wouldn’t have been so nice). They were particularly and perpetually nonplussed, except for the strange interlude during the excerpt from Pelleas et Melisande that opened the second half, when I heard a weird tuneless humming near me and realized that the old man was releasing his inner Mary Garden into the auditorium and singing along with Melisande. Ah, and who among us has not felt exactly like Melisande? But one is well-advised to keep that sort of thing to oneself.
Most of the staging was minimal, but for some reason the two Mozart excerpts (“La mia Dorabella . . .E la fede delle femmine . .. Una bella serenata” from Cosi and what was delightfully titled “Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm” from the Magic Flute, and I’ll bet you know what part that is) were apparently meant to prepare the singers for careers in the regie theater strongholds of state-subsidized houses. I kind of liked having Gugliemo and Ferrando playing with Barbie dolls when they sing about their perfect mistresses, though it's fairly obvious, but having the Three Ladies smoking, and using a gun as the magic flute and a bag of cocaine as the glockenspiel, were all silly and terrible ideas.
So some moments of bad staging, many moments of thrilling singing, and an utterly clueless audience, and that’s a night at the opera. There was one more odd thing about the program, and I think it must have been deliberate, but I have absolutely no idea what the motive was, and I can’t say I’m really complaining, but: it is really strange that in an almost three-hour program of excerpts from (by and large) famous and beloved composers and operas, there was not a single note by Puccini played or sung. Why revive Boheme on the main stage, when these young and hopeful performers are the only ones who should be singing it?
26 March 2007
dance to the music of time
As we get older, most dance becomes a form of nostalgia. Not only are dancers, by the nature of what they do and why they do it, generally young and attractive, with a physical and emotional flexibility long past most of the audience (except the eager students standing in the back), but the stories tend toward first love or beloved nursery tales. Even abstract ballets usually have a subtext of early romance or of primitive emotions we start controlling once we’re out of the nursery. I went to SF Ballet’s Program 5 because of the Mark Morris/Lou Harrison Pacific, but it was the closing SF Ballet premiere performance of Fancy Free that weirded me out and made me wonder about dance and the past and present.
This isn’t a comment on the performance – the boys are charming, the girls are charming, the music is peppy and American in that Bernstein way – but on the fact of the presentation of this work. For one thing, and the Bush administration would like us to forget this except when it’s convenient for them, we’re at war right now. When I think about our fighting men, I’m not thinking of three sailors from the heartland wowed by the big city and hoping to meet a girl. I think about immense damage, both physical and mental, about Pentagon attempts to prohibit any footage of the coffins coming back, and of a peculiar hysteria that claims to support the troops but wants them invisible (as with the memorial crosses put on the Lafayette hillside, which have been attacked as an attack on the troops – I don’t even want to understand the thinking there). I’m sure the Ballet didn’t present this piece as propaganda, but that’s exactly why it seemed so weird to me. Here the fighting men are three nice young guys having a dance off to impress the two girls, and about a block away the Quakers are holding weekly peace vigils while the death tolls mount. The only hint in the program of this irony is the aside that Fancy Free is a period piece. But whose period nostalgia is this? Most of the audience did not participate in World War II, or even Korea, I would guess, based on simple mathematics. This is not a past that most of us had, though perhaps it’s the past most wished they had had, when they imagined that life was young and fresh and you'd dance to get the girl (though, in a further example of how the past is a different country, I thought at first that the girls were hookers – the set designer may want to move that lamp-post). That may actually not be any more of a phantom than my memories of a youth filled with loneliness, isolation, and humiliation. Perhaps my angsty self should be watching anguished modern dances in small, inconvenient venues, but then I really don’t like the audiences there either.
To move backward through the program, we had The Fifth Season to music by Karl Jenkins, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson. I enjoyed the music. I enjoyed the dancing too, but throughout there was an air of the expected about the movements. That was preceded by Carousel (A Dance), which hints at the musical's story in its fairly brief running time. It’s very beautifully done, but I think the real star is Rodger’s music – I don’t think it’s a stretch to call Carousel beloved. (I do absolutely hate “Soliloquy” – I once decided not to buy a Thomas Hampson CD because, according to my calculations, it took up at least one-fifth of the running time – but “If I Loved You” is probably my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein song, though to be honest I’m more of a Rodgers and Hart guy.) The aging cherub next to me was not the only audience member humming tunelessly along and patting his plump thigh in approximate time.
The evening opened with Pacific, which is the reason I was there. It’s hard to explain why Morris’s dances look so spring-green to me, even as I get older. It might be because he avoids the usual subjects I mentioned earlier – first love, nursery stories. In her excellent biography of him, Joan Acocella mentions that most of his work, unlike that of most choreographers, is not based on the male/female pas de deux, and her subtle point is that it’s easy to assume this is because Morris is gay, but the deeper reason is that he came to dance through flamenco, which is largely solo, and folk dancing, which is usually in groups. In other words, his wellspring is not ideology but artistic structure and logic. The freshest artists tend to be those obsessed with form.
This isn’t a comment on the performance – the boys are charming, the girls are charming, the music is peppy and American in that Bernstein way – but on the fact of the presentation of this work. For one thing, and the Bush administration would like us to forget this except when it’s convenient for them, we’re at war right now. When I think about our fighting men, I’m not thinking of three sailors from the heartland wowed by the big city and hoping to meet a girl. I think about immense damage, both physical and mental, about Pentagon attempts to prohibit any footage of the coffins coming back, and of a peculiar hysteria that claims to support the troops but wants them invisible (as with the memorial crosses put on the Lafayette hillside, which have been attacked as an attack on the troops – I don’t even want to understand the thinking there). I’m sure the Ballet didn’t present this piece as propaganda, but that’s exactly why it seemed so weird to me. Here the fighting men are three nice young guys having a dance off to impress the two girls, and about a block away the Quakers are holding weekly peace vigils while the death tolls mount. The only hint in the program of this irony is the aside that Fancy Free is a period piece. But whose period nostalgia is this? Most of the audience did not participate in World War II, or even Korea, I would guess, based on simple mathematics. This is not a past that most of us had, though perhaps it’s the past most wished they had had, when they imagined that life was young and fresh and you'd dance to get the girl (though, in a further example of how the past is a different country, I thought at first that the girls were hookers – the set designer may want to move that lamp-post). That may actually not be any more of a phantom than my memories of a youth filled with loneliness, isolation, and humiliation. Perhaps my angsty self should be watching anguished modern dances in small, inconvenient venues, but then I really don’t like the audiences there either.
To move backward through the program, we had The Fifth Season to music by Karl Jenkins, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson. I enjoyed the music. I enjoyed the dancing too, but throughout there was an air of the expected about the movements. That was preceded by Carousel (A Dance), which hints at the musical's story in its fairly brief running time. It’s very beautifully done, but I think the real star is Rodger’s music – I don’t think it’s a stretch to call Carousel beloved. (I do absolutely hate “Soliloquy” – I once decided not to buy a Thomas Hampson CD because, according to my calculations, it took up at least one-fifth of the running time – but “If I Loved You” is probably my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein song, though to be honest I’m more of a Rodgers and Hart guy.) The aging cherub next to me was not the only audience member humming tunelessly along and patting his plump thigh in approximate time.
The evening opened with Pacific, which is the reason I was there. It’s hard to explain why Morris’s dances look so spring-green to me, even as I get older. It might be because he avoids the usual subjects I mentioned earlier – first love, nursery stories. In her excellent biography of him, Joan Acocella mentions that most of his work, unlike that of most choreographers, is not based on the male/female pas de deux, and her subtle point is that it’s easy to assume this is because Morris is gay, but the deeper reason is that he came to dance through flamenco, which is largely solo, and folk dancing, which is usually in groups. In other words, his wellspring is not ideology but artistic structure and logic. The freshest artists tend to be those obsessed with form.
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