Friday Photo 2026/29

 

Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco

San Francisco Opera: Pride Concert

I did not attend last year's Pride Concert at San Francisco Opera, but I did attend this year's, which was announced as the second annual. The very full house was very full of enthusiasm, & if I didn't quite share it, well, that's pretty much on me, now isn't it?

I make a somewhat snobbish point of not going to Opening Night at the Opera, but I imagine it's similar to this concert: there's a packed house, & a lot of buzzy energy & excitement, but it's not really of the "here for the music" variety, but more about a hoped-for "scene"; also, there are speeches! For someone who has devoted so much life & love to the theater, I acknowledge that's it's weird that speeches from the stage cause me immediate distress, but, once again, that's pretty much on me, isn't it. So there were speeches. For anyone playing Buzzword Bingo, it took barely ten minutes before we heard "being your authentic self". Oh, & the performance start-time was 8:00 rather than the Opera's usual 7:30, for reasons unclear to me.

The performers were stellar: Robert Mollicone led the Opera Orchestra, with Sapphira Cristál as our masterly Mistress of Ceremonies, with vocal soloists Melody Moore (soprano), Nikola Printz (mezzo), & Reginald Smith Jr (baritone), along with a back-up trio (or, as I thought of them, the Pips), Sadie Cheslak (mezzo), Alexa Frankian (soprano), & Thomas Kinch (tenor). All were top-notch, & often even better than that. Their commitment & enthusiasm were palpable. There were many stylish & fun costume changes, especially from our Emcee, of course, & glitter & sparkles & vivid colors were everywhere – except, unfortunately, in the musical selections.

Not that things were all bad on that front. We started with a tribute to the late & much-loved Michael Tilson Thomas in the form of Agnegram, a lively & eclectic piece he wrote to honor a rich & I'm sure lovely Symphony patron, Agnes Albert. As with the other pieces I've heard by Tilson Thomas, it is entertaining but strikes me as a bit ramshackle & a bit derivative (in this piece I particularly heard echoes, of, though perhaps I should say "an homage to", Charles Ives). I enjoyed it but was mildly surprised to realize in retrospect that it would turn out to be one of the musical highlights of the evening.

Mme Cristál was tireless & I think accomplished what she set out to do, which was offer inspiration & uplift as well as introductions & context. It was all more high-minded than I was expecting; I never thought I would long for a drag performer to be snarkier & smuttier. I thought some of the context given was unnecessary, but then perhaps I am not understanding who exactly the target audience was. I do think that if a San Francisco Opera audience, particularly one gathered for a Pride Concert, really needs to be told who Sappho of Lesbos was & why she is significant, then we should just give up on humanity. That explanation came as an introduction to Ô ma lyre immortelle from Gounod's opera Sapho, which is based on the familiar story of Sappho ending her life by jumping from a cliff into the sea over despair for a male lover, Phaon. Our emcee seemed to suggest that this story was something invented by Gounod, or the nineteenth century in general, to cover up the truth of Sappho's love for women. It was all done in that very knowing, mmm-hmmm, right, we know the real story way.

But this incident has been part of Sappho's life (or, more accurately, legend) since classical times. Even Ovid, a "queer" author only in the broadest sense but one certainly open to sexual difference & aware of varied sexual options, gives us this story. I don't know offhand what the story's source is (it certainly predates Ovid) & I assume it's considered an embellishment rather than a biographical fact, insofar as we can determine what those are based on the fragments & remnants of such a different time & place, but in a way none of that matters: it has always been part of Sappho's story, & nonetheless she was still identified strongly & mainly as a lover of other women, lending her name & her island's name to all her daughters.

Why does this matter, & why did Cristál's approach depress me? Because it just illustrates our need to put people into boxes & to keep them there. Sappho could be mainly a lover of women but also have an affair with a man without betraying herself (or, for that matter, us, as if it's any of our concern anyway). Oscar Wilde, after all, was married & had two children. In both cases, their basic preference is clear & defining: but why dismiss their other experiences, unless it's our need to categorize, to classify, to limit? Despite all of our talk about embracing the variety of our feelings & the individual's right to choose his / her/ their own representation, we still crave definite & defining answers to the often irrelevant question, What's going on down there?

Having said all that: Printz gave a stunning, passionate performance of the aria, & at the end the singer (or director E Reed Fisher, or both) had the wonderful idea of having them extend their blue garment & cape out into a Loïe Fuller-style serpentine dance, illustrating the waters swirling over the poet's head. Very effective! I've heard Printz in several performances recently, & they consistently dominate the stage.

This is not to slight the other singers. Before the Gounod we heard Melody Moore give a touching performance of Lucky from Stephen Schwartz's opera Séance on a Wet Afternoon. He's known for musicals, particularly Wicked (as well as Godspell & Pippin) & based on this aria & what I know of his other works, he's more at home in the world of musical theater. After the Gounod, Smith gave a probing rendition of Peculiar Grace from Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones, an aria about the tricky expectations for & from a young Black man who is grappling with his sexuality. That was followed by Moore giving a wrenching performance of La mamma morta from Giordano's Andrea Chénier, which seemed to be on the program mostly because it appears in a pivotal moment in Philadelphia, a movie I had almost forgotten about (I've never actually seen it), about a man dying of AIDS. I wondered how many in the audience were familiar with this 33-year-old film. Like many of the pop-culture callbacks during the evening, this one seemed weirdly dated. Nonetheless I was glad to hear the aria, no matter what ushered it into the line-up. After that Moore & Printz gave us a lovely, lilting rendition of the Barcarolle from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, & I am always happy to hear Offenbach, especially performed so beautifully; the sensual languor of this particular piece stood out amid the uplift & the anthems.

After the Offenbach, things got even more pop-centric, starting with Be the Change by Michael Abels, who worked with Rhiannon Giddens on the opera Omar (my thoughts on that opera are here). Omar,  I thought, was trying to do some complex & subtle things; this song, which the program book described as "in the spirit of protest anthems & communal uplift songs", is not. It's like a campfire song that high-minded counselors urge on those who find Kumbaya too emotionally complex to deal with. This was the first song on which the Pips joined in. The two women, Cheslak & Frankian, were quite enthusiastic; Kinch seemed a bit off the beat & a bit more tentative in his gestures, which I found quite endearing. I enjoyed the trio, a feeling in line with my experience throughout this concert of enjoying the performances more than what was being performed.

The thing is, I mostly dislike (often verging, I will admit, on hate), pop / rock / rap, & I resent having it forced on me, just because I have to live in the world: going to the gym, the coffee shop, the grocery store, on public transit, walking down the street, even just sitting in my own residence: other people's boring trashy taste gets forced on me at inescapable volume. I hate the attitude that we all need to genuflect before the (corporate-sponsored) altar of pop culture. A few years ago I was at a piano recital in which the jazz-influenced pianist performed some wonderful pieces & then, for an encore, did a Michael Jackson song. It deflated my evening immediately. Musically it was the least interesting piece he performed. And the attitude seemed to be that now that we'd eaten our classical vegetables, we'd get the sticky sweet pop treat that we were truly craving. It had all been so enjoyable up until then! (It doesn't help that Jackson is one of those 1980s cultural figures whose popularity I did not get then & continue not to get, along with Madonna, Keith Haring, Princess Diana, & probably others I'm forgetting.)

I stopped listening to pop music in the early 1980s, because I found it increasingly vacuous & irritating, like trying to live on nothing but Doritos. Sure, the occasional bag is fun, & they do have different flavors thanks to the wonders of chemistry, but on the whole, there's a lot out there that's more enticing, complex, & interesting, as well as more nourishing to body & soul. But despite switching the station decades ago, I knew many of the songs performed during this concert, which made me wonder what was guiding the repertory choices. Even I know there are more current pieces that would be worth doing for a Pride concert (surely at least one of the 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields could have made the cut?). Couldn't the choices have reflected a wider range of moods & decades?

We were given The Joke by Brandi Carlisle (& three others, according to the program book), sung by Moore. It's pretty much an "it gets better" song, & the refrain ends "I have been to the movies, I've seen how it ends / And the joke's on them". Here's the thing: a movie, like any dramatic structure, including a concert program, is an artistic arrangement of the often perverse, nebulous, infuriating, & frustrating realities of life into a shape that we can find emotionally & morally satisfying. In other words, saying to me, "I've seen this movie & here's how it ends" is not persuasive, outside of the context of characters in a movie. The lyrics just don't hold up to even a cursory examination of how life really happens; they're about trying to jolly everyone into optimism by overlooking reality. We all know people who were bigots & bullied those who were seen as weak or different, & no, they did not always get their comeuppance, even in the form of a less than successful life. And anyone of a certain age knows people who made their little jokes & jabs about queerness when we were all young (& therefore more susceptible to jokes & jabs, & back when such remarks were more socially acceptable & prevalent), & now those same people, come each June, are wreathing their social media with rainbows & glittery unicorns & reposting Love Is Love memes. And they probably think they were with you all along. Sure, why not. Life is slippery & people are elusive &, as Didion reminds us, we all tell ourselves stories in order to live.

One more song from the latter half of the show: Gender Binary (F*ck You) by Ryan Cassata, performed by Nikola Printz. Why the dainty fig-leaf of an asterisk in the title (as printed in the program book)? If you're going to sing Fuck, why not print it in a straightforward way? The asterisk is a nod to a transgressive power that that word lost years ago. While agreeing wholeheartedly with the intent & spirit of the song (which fights back against all kinds of insistence on fitting people into pre-made gender boxes: so see my comments above on the story of Sappho & Phaon), the message, though Printz's fiery performance really put it across, is pretty basic & fairly crude & simple. It's coming from a punk-rock attitude, but, again, punk was around when I was still listening to what I'll just call pop music, & it all seems too dated to be genuinely shocking.

Most of the songs were enjoyable, though not really engaging to my ears: the ones I haven't mentioned so far were Constant Craving, made famous by k d lang, sung by Moore & Printz; How Will I know, made famous by Whitney Houston, sung by Smith & the Pips; I Can Only Be Me, made famous by Stevie Wonder, sung by Printz; Any Love, made famous by Luther Vandross, sung by Smith & the Pips; Let It Rain, made famous by Tracy Chapman, sung by Smith (this one stood out, in a good way); & a finale sung by everyone, a medley of Greatest Love of All, Everybody Rejoice (A Brand New Day), & I'm Coming Out.

The focus was solidly on songs that might be called "anthems", songs that offered uplift & positivity. These were songs in which uncertainty ends in true love & rejection is a fear but never a reality. This was not a night for ambiguity, broken hearts, & never ever quite fitting in. Sure, I get it: we're all under siege by the ascendant reactionaries & fascists & just by life in general, & maybe uplift is called for. I would have hoped that an audience at the Opera would be given repertory that is of greater musical interest, but perhaps others found this program just the thing to give them the strength to go out & fight, or at least to dance into Pride weekend in the rainbow-bedecked foggy city. I would have preferred another approach. I'm usually reluctant to say that an artist should have given us something different from what he / she / they chose to give, but: couldn't whoever put the program together find some material that was more interesting & varied? some standards to repurpose, something by Cole Porter, or Rodgers & Hart, or even Rodgers & Hammerstein (I'm thinking of We Kiss in the Shadows from the King & I)? A simple gender-flip in the singer can give a new & refreshingly queer slant to even a familiar song (here are links to YouTube videos of Aaron Tveit singing Mein Herr from Cabaret & As Long As He Needs Me from Oliver!). Couldn't we have had even one song, just one little number, by the late &, as is increasingly obvious, very great Stephen Sondheim?

After two solid intermissionless hours of uplift, I have to say the audience was as enthusiastic as ever, heading into the lobby for the after-party, the throbbing monotonous thumping of which further depressed me. Nothing can send me racing for the exit faster than the presence of a DJ.

I don't understand what it means to live "authentically" (before anyone tries to explain it to me: I understand what it means in this context; it means not hiding basic facts about your gender & sexual identities – but I find authentic & authenticity slippery & problematic words, &, particularly when it comes to our sexualities, I question how much we need or should show to others). I don't really like uplift: I just see too many other possibilities. I don't really believe in daily affirmations (maybe I should try them?). I dislike being told that I'm oh so special (or that, in a nod to the latest pop-culture inevitabilities, being different is my superpower), because that's just the nice way of telling me I'm a weirdo & a freak who doesn't fit in with others. I don't believe in "communities" based on coincidental characteristics. And as always when I say things like this, I need to add that I do not think that feeling this way makes me "better" than anyone else. I don't regret going to the concert. You go so you can know, & now I know. Many others seemed to be perfectly satisfied with the bill of fare, & I'm always glad when people enjoy themselves, as long as I can get to the exit.

Museum Monday 2026/28

 

detail of Snowy Morning from the series Among Snow, Moon, and Flowers by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, seen at the Legion of Honor as part of the special exhibit Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World

Friday Photo 2026/28

 

bird on a lamppost, Berkeley

an Anniversary, a Remembrance

As I slowly roused myself this morning I suddenly realized, out of nowhere or everywhere, that it had been exactly twenty years since the death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (or, more accurately, twenty years since I heard of her death; her actual passing was three days before, on 3 July 2006). I remember sitting at my dining room table with strong afternoon sunlight slanting in, feeling weirdly unmoored. Things suddenly crystalized inside me & I went to my then relatively new blog, begun earlier that year in February, & posted this, which I have just now re-read after twenty years.

I've spent so much of my life sitting in the dark, watching & listening to performers. Like any of the strange breed that finds some sort of pleasure, solace, meaning in such activity, I have, as a counter-history to the life I'm supposedly living, an existence through the art of others (&, honestly, through irritations with others: not so much with artists who don't quite, in my opinion, succeed, because no matter what, they are out there trying, & trying to give, but with fellow audience members I have to share space with; it's always struck me that one of the powerful things about theater is that it gives us the best of humanity, in the art & generosity on stage, & shows us the worst, in the stupidity, selfishness, & lack of consideration that, too often, we find down below the stage).

There is a golden age in that counter-history, & for me that would be the start of my concert-going, when I was young & had moved to the other side of the country, to Boston. (A few years ago I listened to a recording of Handel's wonderfully named Occasional Oratorio, & listening by myself to an unfamiliar Handel oratorio was for me weirdly like dipping a madeleine into the lime-flower tisane, bringing up a flood of memories, of ornate concert halls & crowded theaters & the sun descending through stained-glass windows in dim stone churches with hard cold benches, & I'm listening, listening, anxious not to miss a sound.) I liked early & baroque music & also modernist & contemporary music (I gradually worked my way towards the creamy center of western music history) & so it was inevitable that eventually I would stumble across a performance by, as she was known at the time, Lorraine Hunt, a violist who had started singing soprano roles. (She switched to mezzo somewhere along the way, & added Peter Lieberson's name to hers after she married the composer.)

She soon became a favorite of mine. A few years ago I was looking through some old playbills (I have piles & piles of them, & keep reminding myself I should probably sort through them & toss some before my eventual executors have to) & realized I had heard her in roles I had forgotten about: I heard her in Idomeneo, & Handel's Belshazzar. What a strangely extravagant thing memory is, profligate & wasteful, that I should forget such things, while carrying for decades incidents of far less importance! It's a perverse sort of wealth that can toss such jewels aside.

When I moved back to California I heard her in person less often, though there were still some memorable moments, notably an incendiary Ottavia in L'incoronazione di Poppea at San Francisco Opera. Her Addio, Roma was so intense that it burned the place down, & in my memory her face as she sings it is impossibly large, in cinematic close-up, though such a thing could not of course have been possible on stage. Her performance was so all-consuming & magnificent that it actually threw off the balance of the opera, & I felt sorry for the other performers: the exquisite duet Pur ti miro, which usually climaxes the evening, felt like an after-thought, something to get through so that we could wander out in the dark, reeling from the Empress's farewell to her native city & to life. My last attempt to hear Hunt Lieberson was at the SF Symphony, where she had been scheduled to sing in the Mahler 2, the Resurrection. By then there had been a worrisome pattern of cancellations on her part & I remember asking when I bought my ticket at the box office if she was still scheduled to be one of the performers. The man shrugged mildly & philosophically & said, "Yes, she's still on the schedule, but . . . you never know."

As it turned out, she was not one of the performers. You never really do know, but what you never really do know about certain things is not their if but their when. If I'd known her end would have come so much sooner than expected (she was only 52 when she died of cancer), I would have traveled more to hear her: or, at least, that's what I tell myself now; at the time, lack of the usual lack of money & time often prevented travel; it's the dailiness of life, the things we forget, that in the moment often redirect us from what we would end up truly valuing). So here we are, twenty years later. Later today I may put on one of her recordings, but it's not quite, as those of us who seek out live performances know, the same. The usual clichés still apply: value what you have when you have it, be grateful, keep going into the uncertain fog of the future, keep going, keep going, as long as you can, keep going, keep going. . . .

Museum Monday 2026/27

 

detail of Tiepolo's Punchinello Collapses at the Walls of a Villa, #83 in his series Divertimento per gli ragazzi (Entertainment for Children), seen at the Legion of Honor as part of the special exhibit Drawn to Venice

Friday Photo 2026/27

 

downtown Hayward, California

Museum Monday 2026/26

 

two fish at the California Academy of Sciences

Friday Photo 2026/26

 

downtown Hayward, California

Museum Monday 2026/25

 

detail of an Etruscan bronze sculpture of Veiovis (Jupiter), seen at the Legion of Honor as part of the special exhibit The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy