San Francisco Symphony: Runnicles conducts Berg & Mahler

Last Saturday I was at the second of three performances of Alban Berg's Seven Early Songs & the Mahler 1, with Donald Runnicles leading the San Francisco Symphony. It was a magnificent performance of an excellent program (such are starting to stand out on the Symphony schedule, crowded as it is with attempts to turn these superb musicians into a back-up band for pop groups or soundtrack-suppliers for recent movie hits that already come with perfectly fine soundtracks), & a welcome return to this area for Runnicles, fondly remembered by many (including me) for his work across the street at the Opera House.

The program opened, as you might expect, with the Berg songs, with mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts as soloist. She swept out looking exceedingly glam in her broad-hemmed pink gown. I don't know why the pink surprised me (pleasantly), but it did. Perhaps at some level I was expecting something more somber, for no particular reason. Roberts was in splendid voice, rich & intimate in these crepuscular & shifting songs. As anyone who has been in Davies knows, it is what is kindly called a barn: a vast, not very attractive space with notoriously iffy acoustics. The miracle of this performance was the intimacy Roberts & Runnicles with the orchestra created, the almost hushed immediacy of a direct, heart-to-heart communication, drawing in even those rows back from the stage. I always love the works of the Second Viennese School, but this was really a performance to cherish.

After the intermission we had the Mahler 1, sometimes still known as the Titan, though it's a nickname the composer jettisoned. The familiar music unfolded magnificently, implanting itself newly into my memory (I've been replaying parts of it in my mind for days). What struck me most about the whole thing was the flow & the timing: it never seemed too fast, too slow, too hurried, stretched out, but all perfectly balanced. I loved it, but I have to say, I preferred the Berg. Perhaps the triumphant overcoming of obstacles at the symphony's end, however inspiring to listen to & even theatrically thrilling to see (when the horn players stand), – the "Titan"-esque romantic heroness of it – that doesn't quite resonate with me, especially in this moment, so grim politically as well as in other ways. It is the questing, inclusive, neurotic Mahler that I respond to more, at least these days, & these are qualities found with greater strength, I think, in Mahler's other works.

My anxieties aside, I was deeply grateful to have heard this performance. And of course the subtext here is "the San Francisco Symphony is not doomed" (or maybe, "the San Francisco Symphony is not doomed – yet"); its current administration will forever be branded as the ones who didn't bother to keep Esa-Pekka Salonen,  & it remains to be seen where they'll steer this ship, but in the meantime, we are given this generous & triumphant performance.

Salonen's Last Stand, Mahler's Resurrection

Last night I was back at Davies Hall for the first in departing Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen's final run of performances, a three-concert run of Mahler's Second Symphony, the Resurrection. I was there once again courtesy of Lisa Hirsch, & I am particularly grateful as the Symphony's Uber-style surge pricing means single tickets for these concerts are going for astronomical sums, which is not surprising given this might be our last chance to hear what one of the great conductors of our time can do with our orchestra..

The Resurrection, a massive work, an emotional landmark for many symphony-goers, is always a special occasion, though of course as Salonen's last stand, these performances are particularly fraught. I assume the repertory was set before Symphony management made the unexplained & inexplicable decision to let their prize music director go, but the circumstances made the choice both ironic & hopeful.

The hall was packed & the audience vociferous in its applause & cheers for Salonen & Co every chance they got (not that there wasn't some of the usual bad behavior – very loud coughs, items dropped, & one man down front who had to be cautioned about his cell phone use during the performance by an usher with a sign; people are going to people, no matter how special the occasion). And this was a special occasion. The applause for the conductor's entry were in support; the applause & cheers for his final bows were in tribute. This was a stupendous performance on everyone's part: the orchestra, the chorus & their director (Jenny Wong), the soloists (soprano Heidi Stober & mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke), as well as Salonen. Given what I'll keep calling the circumstances, & despite or perhaps really because of the magnificent artistic achievement of all the musicians concerned, it was difficult not to feel that the performance was at some level the musical equivalent of the fuck-you dress.

As you can probably tell from my attempts to marshal praise-words into some sort of coherent form, this performance – strong, supple, soaring in its clarity & emotion – was a glowing one. I've been to other powerful Mahler performances that, while memorable, also left me feeling bludgeoned, not lifted up as this one did. This symphony is a tricky ship to sail! To switch metaphors, it was like seeing a familiar Old Master painting after a scrupulous cleaning, revealing shades of color & swathes of details that had been hidden under wax & varnish, waiting to be revealed. Particular instruments (the harps, the organ, the timpani) spoke with an invigorating clarity & force, but also with a tenderness, I hadn't recalled. The slow still entry of the chorus was like the first rays of sunlight after a stormy (picturesque, but stormy) night. Cooke, whom I believe I once described as "reliably radiant", came through as usual, with a voice like the warmth of a tender embrace. Stober soared along with the sinuous musical lines. The chorus ascended as one, & brought us with them. Requiems often try to duplicate the trumpets of the Last Judgment, but this was the thunderous opening of the final ascension. And this transitory & electric cathedral, with its vast perspective of arching architecture, its colors & pillars, &, this being Mahler, its gargoyles, had been summoned from the score as by a magician's wand by the conductor's baton, floating over us, suspended, giving us the usual dilemma: what do you do after hearing such a revelation?

I've read through what I've written a couple of times, wondering if I should tone it down, tamp down the extravagance, prune a few adjectives. But why? Ultimately, we go to live performances to have an evening like this, one that will live in memory as a justification for the time & money we spend on this strange hobby of going to sit in the dark, listening to sounds that will pass away just as we (often barely) comprehend them. So let my babbling stand as a monument to the why & wherefore of a concert-going life.

Enough of my raving. Re-entry has, as usual, been difficult. This was a great evening, & as for what happens to the Symphony after this, well, resurrection is always the hope.

Penultimate Salonen: Strauss, Sibelius, & Smith at the San Francisco Symphony

Thursday night I was at Symphony Hall for Esa-Pekka Salonen's penultimate stand as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. (I was there courtesy of Lisa Hirsch; check here for her review of this concert.) He was conducting a meaty program bookended by two Richard Strauss tone poems (Don Juan & Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks); in between came Sibelius's 7th Symphony to close the first half & then, after the intermission, the world premiere of a Symphony commission, Rewilding by local composer Gabriella Smith.

As locals are all too well aware, Symphony management made the boneheaded decision, for reasons never really stated beyond the usual "different artistic visions", to let their prize Music Director go. Overt demonstrations are not allowed, but the audience showed its support for Salonen with on-going applause & cheers for him every chance they got – as he walked on, as he bowed after a piece, as he walked off; when the concert ended, the applause extended well beyond the usual.

In recent years I've sort of lost my taste for Richard Strauss, but Thursday's performance made me wonder why, as the lush, dizzying strains of Don Juan unfolded (sounding occasionally like outtakes from Rosenkavalier, suitably enough given the eroticism pervading both works), with just enough of a zing of danger & a shot of the eerie to make it clear this was not just any lover's rhapsody but the story of a specific lover, the obsessive, haunted, & hunted Don Juan. Well, as they say, that's why they play the games. It's always good to give what we think we know a reality check.

That was followed by the Sibelius 7, a relatively compact piece. A few weeks ago at the Symphony, Dalia Stasevska closed her concert with a vigorous Sibelius 5, a work that rises majestically on muscular wings; the 7th, by contrast, seems rooted monumentally in place, like a vast granite mountain, undecorated by frivolous little flowers & suchlike; what chips & fragments skitter away from it come from the same substantial source.

That was a lot to mull over during intermission, with more to come – in fact, with a highlight to come, as a world premiere always strikes me as the highlight, or maybe I should say potential highlight, of a concert. But before we could hear the piece, the composer was brought out to talk.

As I've often said, I dislike such talks from the stage, & though there is a Romantic interest in hearing an artist discussing his or her creation, their comments are as often as not partial, pale, even a bit misleading (pushing us to look for one element over other, potentially to us more interesting, elements). After all, if a piece could be summed up in words, why write the piece? If you're a composer, you must feel that music conveys things words cannot, & this would be true even if you were a composer also gifted in writing & speaking (& not all are, of course; the "talk to the audience" is a bit of outreach, like using social media, that gets foisted on all composers these days, regardless of their level of interest & skill in these tasks, which are tangential to their main interest, which is writing music). And most of the material given in these speeches is usually available in the program anyway, so it's a twice-told tale for me.

Smith started with a gracious thank-you to Salonen & the orchestra; as a local composer, she grew up hearing the San Francisco Symphony, so it was a particular thrill, she said, for her to work with them. For the rest of her speech, she rather brilliantly evaded any discussion of the music (which needs to speak for itself) by telling us what rewilding is. But – I already know what it is. And I'm all in favor of it! (In fact I wondered if I was more of a purist than Smith, who went on about bicycling, as bicyclists do, whereas I feel bikes are industrial products, mostly requiring paved roads, that, while not as bad as cars, are not as good as walking.) So all in favor, & that's all the more reason I don't need to hear about it when I'm in the cramped & uncomfortable seats of Davies Hall, feeling tired, & having already sat long enough so that my joints are hurting. And it's not Smith's problem that some words she emphasized (like "joy" & "community"), while important & powerful, are also trendy PR-ready buzzwords that set my teeth on edge.

Am I the only one who felt this way? Very likely. Is it a bit ridiculous that it took a while for me to let the music, once it started, get past my mild irritation with the speech? Again, very likely. But there it is. These things affect us, just as much as whether the seats are comfortable or how we're feeling physically. And though Smith did talk about a rewilding project she had recently worked on (converting an old airport runway up in Seattle – information which was also available in the program), she did not explain how the concept of rewilding affected the piece or her conception of it. I heard nature in the music, but not nature being reborn, or wilderness coming out of humanity's wreckage.

Not that that really matters. An arbitrary title can direct you for only so long before one's own reactions to the music take over. And once I got past my usual irritation at the talk, & my irritation that I was irritated, I loved the piece, a rich, striking profusion of sounds new & compelling. There is much frittering percussion, & then great swoops of sound, like a rushing strong wind, or maybe a warning siren. Some of the sounds are unusual – a percussionist was snapping twigs at some points. This made a noticeable number of audience members laugh – not in a derisive way, but in a way that still puzzled me. Snapping a twig doesn't seem particularly comical to me, though apparently it did to some in the context of a symphony orchestra, but haven't we learned from John Cage & Co that any sound from any source could be incorporated into performance?

According to the program, Rewilding is (this is very precise) 23 minutes long, making it the longest of the evening's four selections. The time flew by, as did the rich & redolent sounds. Though a made object involving an incredible degree of skill on the parts of both composer & performers, & sophisticated "technology" (in the form of musical instruments), the piece conveyed a refreshing sense of being out in nature, aware, taking in the nature-made sounds around us. Perhaps Rewilding isn't such an arbitrary title; maybe it refers to what happens in the soul of the listener.

Rewilding is exactly the sort of thing – a new, substantial, thoughtful, & gorgeous piece designed for a large orchestra – that I fear we will see much less of after Salonen goes, being swept aside by lush orchestrations of pop hits & live performances of film scores to currently popular movies that already have perfectly fine recorded soundtracks.

After Smith's powerful piece, it seemed like another of Till Eulenspiegel's pranks to detain us longer with his antics, but there it was, & it turned out to be giddy, zingy fun, kind of like (& I mean this as a compliment) the score of the most luxe Warner Brothers cartoon ever.

San Francisco Symphony: Adriana Mater

Last night I was at Davies Hall to hear the San Francisco Symphony in the first of a three-performance stand of Adriana Mater, the 2005 opera about war-time tragedy with music by Kaija Saariaho & libretto by Amin Maalouf. Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, a longtime friend & associate of the composer, conducted & the work was staged, as part of his multi-year association with the Symphony, by Peter Sellars, who was instrumental in the work's creation & to whom it is dedicated. This run of concerts was clearly going to be a jewel in the season's crown even before the 2 June death of the beloved & much-missed composer. The performances are dedicated to her memory & music.

There are four characters: Adriana herself (performed by mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron), her sister Refka (soprano Axelle Fanyo), the alcoholic drifter Tsargo (baritone Christopher Purves), & Adriana's son, Yonas (tenor Nicholas Phan). The action took place on several platforms jutting out into the first rows of floor seats & one in the middle of the orchestra stage itself; the characters are often isolated on the individual platforms. The costumes mostly look like street wear & are suggestive of a contemporary setting. Despite some strange vocal effects that I assume came from amplification (or possibly the odd acoustics of the always unsatisfactory Davies Hall – & by the way I had forgotten how excruciatingly uncomfortable the seats there can be), such as the voices suddenly sounding very different when a singer faced a different direction, or even sounding altered (though possibly that was intentional), all four singers were dazzlingly impressive: fully present in their intense & difficult vocal lines & their characters, & even the use of I guess iPads with (again, I guess) the music didn't undercut their effectiveness.

The music is magnificent, like some great mysterious beast rising up from the depths. I've heard recordings of other works by Saariaho, including her first opera, L'Amour de Loin (Adriana is her second opera) but I had never heard anything from this piece before. It's a very rich, dense score & Salonen led the band in a gripping account. The opera is in seven tableau, which were presented in two parts of about an hour or so each. There is a small chorus, set off to the side, who provided ghostly effects, giving the action a resonance beyond the four characters we were shown.

But all this splendid artistry is in the service of a surprisingly simplistic melodrama. Shorn of its artsy dream-arias & poetic repetitions, Maalouf's libretto is crude & clumsy in its characterization & story-telling. The setting is an unnamed country, soon to be engaged in a civil war. Adriana, while returning to her house, speaks with Tsargo, a weak drunkard. It is clear that she is Good & he is Bad, though no real reasons for these judgments are given. He reminds her that they once danced together (the music turned, briefly but enchantingly, to a dreamlike lovers' atmosphere). She rebuffs him, in the polite way of women to men they aren't romantically interested in. Refka reproves her for even speaking to Tsargo, who is beneath them & seems dangerous; Refka is also Good, but more cautious. When war begins Tsargo returns, suddenly a soldier carrying a machine gun. He demands entry to Adriana's house so that he can monitor enemy forces in the street. She refuses. He forces his way in & there is a very powerful orchestral interlude, during which, according to the plot summary in the program, "we deduce that he rapes her". (The rape is not staged.) She decides to have the child, but wonders which parent he will resemble: "Cain or Abel?" is how she puts it. & the lights go up.

I assume the lack of any political, cultural, historic, or social aspect to the war is deliberate, to give it a timeless, almost mythic feeling. But this lack also flattens the characterizations: would a more specifically situated Adriana & Refka really have no side they supported? Their neutrality, which is clearly meant to be seen as a good quality, since War is bad, could look like cowardice or opportunism if the stakes were spelled out. Tsargo is weak & ineffectual until the war starts: but once it does, he is suddenly a powerful & much feared mercenary. This makes him a useful allegorical figure representing the damages & terrors of War, but is less effective as a description of an actual human being, particularly as he dwindles right back into decrepitude when the plot requires his weakness rather than his strength. (There is also apparently no PTSD for this former soldier.)

The second half begins with a scene between an angry Yonas & his mother; he is now a young man & he has just discovered that his father was not the hero who died defending them that his mother had always described, but instead someone whom he repeatedly refers to as "a monster". We don't know how he's learned about his father – his mother asks, but he dismisses the question. But if, as he also says, everyone else knew the facts & has been laughing at him, why is he only discovering them now? It seems unlikely that no one would have taunted him with this knowledge before. & wouldn't it be obvious, even to an upset youth, why his mother didn't tell him he was the product of rape? But this knowledge comes now, out of the blue, because the storyline needs it to happen now; any questions about this particular situation are dismissed or ignored. We are given the scene, but no sense of a real life behind it. Yonas tells his mother, despite her protests, that he needs to kill that monster, his father. During the whole scene he has been brandishing a machine gun, just as his father did earlier, so clearly his anger makes him potentially Bad, like his father. But is this rage typical for him, or not? We have no way of knowing. He meets his father, now alone & blind, & Yonas can't bring himself to kill him – no reasons are given, he just can't do it. His mother is glad that he has not murdered his father, telling him, "We are not avenged, but we are saved" (which is indeed an effective line). He, Adriana, & Refka join in a group hug. Tsargo will, presumably, eventually die in his gutter.

But the crucial thing about this scene is that Yonas has not made a conscious moral choice not to kill: he simply finds himself unable to. It's been suggested all along that the mother's "good blood" is warring in him against the father's "bad blood", though, as mentioned, we don't know enough about Yonas to have any sense of his personality outside of this immediate situation. (There is also no examination of what it means, in a country subject to deadly violence, for a man to be unwilling, or unable, to kill). The retrograde & frankly dangerous implication here is that there is "good blood" & "bad blood" that determines our personality & actions, & Yonas's failure or inability to kill his father is due to the mother's "good blood" winning out. You have to reach pretty far into "this is all metaphorical" territory not to see the eugenicist views underlying the action here, & sure, you can do that, but it seems to me disingenuous not to see them as a clear implication. The attempt to create a (relatively) timeless story strips out the specific details & situations that would lead to moral complexity & ambiguity.  It's clear from the start which character is Bad & which ones are Good, there's no resistance or choice involved in the drama, & nothing that happens here is surprising or disturbing or discomfiting. As I said, the music is magnificent, & if a recording becomes available I would buy it in a minute. But I wouldn't read along in the libretto.

Gershwin & Kahane at the San Francisco Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony last Thursday gave us the first night of a two-night stand featuring Conrad Tao as soloist in the Gershwin Piano Concerto in F as well as Gabriel Kahane's emergency shelter intake form, an exploration of homelessness & inequality in America, so as a fanboy of both Tao & Kahane I went to Davies Hall for the first time since the pre-pandemic years.

Tao, a composer as well as pianist, threw himself into the Gershwin, which he obviously knows inside out (he played mostly with his eyes shut). The piece is not as familiar as Rhapsody in Blue but is in the same vein, with that piquant Gershwin combination of wistful romance & ultimately melancholy exuberance, all caught breathtakingly in this performance. I thought we were going to get an encore, but we did not (though I heard later that Tao played & sang Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life on Friday, which sadly we of the large & enthusiastic Thursday crowd were not given).

After the intermission came the Kahane piece. He is best known as a songwriter but the nearly hour-long emergency shelter intake form showed how well he can sustain a longer work, involving multiple forces (soloists & chorus as well as orchestra). The piece provides thoughtful, evocative, & sometimes comic answers to the bureaucratic boilerplate questions of the titular form ("Where did you stay last night?" "Have you received any income in the past thirty days?" "Have you ever been evicted?"). The answers are provided not only by a soloist (the elegant mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran) but by a Chorus of Inconvenient Statistics (Holcombe Waller, Kristen Toedtman, & Kahane himself), which chimes in with financial/political background, which is not as dry as it sounds; Kahane's text is often pointed, & some of these sections, like the "Can you hear the bull market roar?" refrain of Section XI, "A Brief History of the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis" are almost distressingly catchy, capturing well the heady appeal of boom times (& providing a thematic link to the Jazz Age Gershwin).

The soloists are amplified but the chorus (made up in these performances of the Skywatchers Ensemble & the Community Music Center Singers, led by Martha Rodríguez-Salazar), which enters at the end, is not; conductor Edwin Outwater kept all these forces balanced (something that doesn't always happen in Davies Hall when amplification is involved) & pulsing forward. The music ranges widely in mood; the opening lines ("What brings you here? / What happened? / Where did you sleep last night?"), smoothly & yearningly sung by Moran, might almost signal a work about an intimate romance. The instrumentation includes not only the usual symphonic suspects but also guitar, accordion, tin cans, & more, & Kahane's music is as adept at the poetic, the comic, & the heart-breaking as his words. Underlying it all is a generous impulse to resist the demonization of "the homeless", & there's always the thrill of experiencing a major new work by an artist I admire so much. So why did this piece leave me feeling dissatisfied?

The first pronouncement of the Chorus of Inconvenient Statistics is "We believe that the lifeblood of art is – How shall we put it? / Ambiguity", but that's exactly what I felt was missing. As I said, I admire the impulse to resist demonizing "the homeless", but there's an opposite trap which is not avoided here, & that's to portray them purely as victims – I mean in the sense of the perfect or ideal, the blameless, victim. Drugs, mental illness, really stupid life choices, aggression towards others are very fleetingly touched on in the work, & I'm not blaming, judging, or dismissing people who suffer from any of these things, but by eliding them from the world drawn here, we end up with a group of what the Victorians would have called "the deserving poor", the portrayal of whom verges at times on sentimentality – & that's not necessarily a bad thing; sentimentality is just heightening our pity towards those who deserve pity, & from pity can come action.

But it's also true that this sort of categorical compassion can lead to the overly easy satire of other groups, such as the NIMBY types portrayed in Section VI, "Certainly We Can All Agree"; there were appreciative chuckles from the audience at Davies Hall, but I seriously doubt any of them would be willing to live next to a halfway house, let alone a full-on encampment of the unhoused. & it's the NIMBY population, among others, you need to persuade in order for effective policies to gain traction, & lightly mocking & dismissing their concerns about having "our windows barred" is not going to win them over.

& that's why, I think, it matters that the more problematic, troublesome examples of the unhoused among us are not present in this particular work, which admittedly is already taking on several vast & intractable topics. But how can the audience connect what it just felt in the concert hall with what it experiences as soon as it leaves the hall, & how can political action be sustained in the face of this disparity?

The audience was very enthusiastic after Thursday's performance, but when we leave Davies & head to the Civic Center BART station or a parking garage, how are we going to make & sustain the connection between the moving stories of the people we have just heard about & the people we're crossing the street to avoid? (Any downtown SF arts administrator who claims not to be concerned about how the homeless population affects attendance at their expensive entertainments is, I will politely suggest, lying.) The hearts opened up by this work are going to slam right back shut in the face of the familiar & daily gantlet of hostile threats, aggressive panhandling, or even just offensive smells & noises. These too are part of the total situation.

I've been reading a lot of Dorothy Day lately, & one theme that emerged for me is that she didn't help people because they deserved it or because it made her feel virtuous to do so or anything like that; many of the people she helped were, & she knew this perfectly well & acknowledged it, in every sense hopeless: difficult, abrasive, dishonest, even dangerous, & certainly ungrateful. She persevered because of an overwhelming religious conviction – these people are part of the body of Christ, & she is here to serve that body – & whether you share that conviction, or some variant of it, or are just concerned about social stability or urban livability, you will need to make the leap to providing help to people who don't, in many eyes, "deserve" help. Unless you acknowledge that – that people can be undeserving, incorrigible, repulsive, but still deserving of generous assistance – you're not going to sustain the political will necessary to provide such help, or to persuade people to join you in working for it.

I say all this with great respect not only for what Kahane has achieved here, but the generous impulse underlying it: we live in a profoundly sick, mean-spirited country with twisted priorities, & making individuals out of its victims is valuable. But sustained action, action acceptable to a working majority of any country, can't shy away from the less touching aspects of this problem (this "problem"! this population, these people, these individuals).

I would encourage anyone interested in this piece to buy a copy of the original recording & explore the work for themselves.

UPDATE: For another perspective, here is Lisa Hirsch's review in the San Francisco Chronicle as well as her blog entry.

SF SoundBox

Lisa Hirsch left a comment on my December preview mentioning SF SoundBox, whose opening I had omitted. I started to reply to her comment and realized I needed more space, so here are my thoughts:

SF SoundBox. . . . I went back and forth on including that. My criteria for the things I list is: (1) something I'm going to or (2) something I'd like to go to, given world enough and time. In other words, this list is what they now call "curated." I have a number of swirling thoughts on Sound Box, some of which I will unload here, since you bring it up.

For those who don't know, SF SoundBox is a new initiative by the SF Symphony to create a small informal space for performances. It's in a former (maybe still current?) rehearsal room in Davies Hall. It will rely heavily on a Meyer Sound System. Programs start late in the evening and there will be drinks and snacks (excuse me, "small plates"). I think they also plan to incorporate audio-visuals into the shows. Basically, it's a night club.

I wish them well with it, but it's really not my thing, and not just because the late start times make it a non-starter for someone like me who thinks 8:00 PM is too late to start a show (ironically, I will be in SF that night, but it's much easier to get to Davies from my home in San Leandro than from where I'll be in SF).

I'm put off by the reliance on an electronic sound system. I know it's standard for certain styles of music, and it's creeping more and more into "classical" performances, but I think hearing music in the moment and without enhancement is worth the trouble and enhanced music maybe not so much (as with everything I'm saying, I realize that opinions and tastes will differ on this).

I'm really put off by the self-consciously cool vibe. I assume they're trying for an SF equivalent of NY's Poisson Rouge, which I'm sure is a fun place for many but I always imagine people sitting there self-consciously eating nachos (or other foods that crunch) and deliberately talking during the music to show they "get it." If you really want to listen to music, as opposed to basking in your own coolness, you are OK with sitting there silently. You are also OK with not imposing yourself on those around you. That's something that has evolved in concert halls. Night clubs are different. And that's great, but that's why I don't go to night clubs (or whatever the kids call them these days).

I wonder what kind of research they did on the potential of a place like this, or whether they're just dreaming of a cool involved late-night audience that would of course eat this up with a spoon. As ad agencies and politicians know, you can get awfully far by appealing to how people want to see themselves, as opposed to how they actually have to live, but how many people are going to show up often enough for late-night innovative concerts for this to be worth the expenditure?

Also: though I find it admirable of the SF Symphony to experiment with new types of concerts and concert presentations, I have to say I'm puzzled that most of these ventures, however interesting and worthwhile and fun on their own, do not involve major musical works for orchestra, which is the basic purpose of a symphony orchestra. It seems like an admission of defeat, in a way, as if they feel large orchestras just really aren't what people want these days. But what else are they for? There are already lots of groups that perform chamber music or have interactive concerts etc. (Contrast this with the Berkeley Symphony, which has a major commitment to big new works for orchestra, as opposed to the little tidbits the SF Symphony drops into its schedule).

So: I wish them well, I hope it's a big success, I'm sure I'm missing out, but: this is not for me.

Peter Grimes at the Symphony

Last Friday I was at the second performance of Peter Grimes, the San Francisco Symphony's spectacular season-ender. I've seen Grimes on stage, and I've heard recordings, and I knew the opera's role in Britten's life and in the history of British music. But on Friday I felt not only as if I were experiencing these things for the first time, but experiencing them with tidal-wave force. I almost don't know what else to say, so entire and complete was the performance.

The stage at Davies Hall had been altered with an extended performance area jutting out front and center into the audience and with wavy-shaped screens circling the back of the stage. Semi-abstract black-and-white videos of the sea and sea-side villages played on the screens, and the soloists were in costume and made entrances and exits. The chorus was mostly dressed in subdued black, as they usually are, and mostly seated above the action, like a community sitting in judgment (until the final scene, when they spread out through the aisles of the auditorium, making us part of the gathering mob). These simple, partially "realistic" but mostly stylized elements brought the village to vivid life. Here's my great compliment to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas: I didn't notice him. He was right before me, clearly visible and central the whole time (I was on the right, in the second row (first half) and first row (second half), but everything he and the orchestra did sounded so right and so elemental that I was barely conscious of them. And that's how it should be -- that's how emotionally compelling the performance was; I wasn't thinking, "nice solo there" or whatever, just "this is how this must sound"; "this is not a 'sea interlude,' this is the sea."

Stuart Skelton was a splendid and anguished Grimes, stubborn and awkward and yet lyrical in his visionary flashes and even in his heart-breaking attempts to fit in to the village he can't bring himself to leave (perhaps as with Hester Prynne, he has come to define himself by their rejection of him and his determination to show them up at their own game). Elza van den Heever, a voice as pure and strong as her presence, was the hopeful yet fatalistic Ellen Orford. The whole cast was superb: Alan Opie as the tough-minded, not unkindly Balstrode; Ann Murray as worldly-wise Auntie, with Nikki Einfeld and Abigail Nims as her nieces; Nancy Maultsby as the laudanum-addled, dream-befuddled hissing spinster, Mrs Sedley; Eugene Brancoveanu as lively Ned Keene, Richard Cox as Bob Boles, Kim Begley as Horace Adams, John Relyea as Mr Swallow, Kevin Langan as Hobson -- not a weak link anywhere. Even the non-speaking/non-singing role of the new apprentice boy was absolutely heart-breaking as played by Rafael Karpa-Wilson, and the smallest roles were performed with authority by members of the SF Symphony Chorus. Symphony audiences already know how superb the chorus is. The chorus members are particularly important in this opera, in which they play a key role as the villagers in opposition to Grimes. And they didn't just sing with abstract beauty, they embodied the village. (James Darrah was stage director and costume designer.)

I don't usually rave like this. It's exhausting!

I was struck by how nuanced the opera is, how ambiguous and troubling in ways not usually covered by the usual plot summaries and capsule descriptions. I was more impressed than ever with Britten's artistic vision and courage in creating such a work in the aftermath of England's victory in World War II, when he himself, fairly newly returned from the United States, was still looked upon with some suspicion for his pacifism, his homosexuality, and what was seen as his desertion of England in the early days of the war. He had to return, a permanent outsider, to the uncomprehending land he loved whose opposition defined him. This performance was part of the Symphony's celebration of Britten's centennial (which technically was last year, but symphony seasons overlap the calendar year). But what a reminder of Britten's continuing and growing relevance and power. The hall was packed.

A couple of minor things: sometimes the action was staged in the back, and even though the singers were on a raised platform they were sometimes difficult or impossible to see through the orchestra if you were in the front rows or the side seats. But you know what? Forget it -- even when I couldn't see the performers, I felt I was in the village with them. And, of course, it's ridiculous (from the point of view of many audience members, and potential members) to start a performance, especially one that lasts three hours, at 8:00 on a work night. But I've said enough about that sort of thing elsewhere. I did wonder beforehand, as I wasted the many hours between end of work and start of performance, if I should bother to go. Luckily I did. What a triumph for all involved. The ovations were long, enthusiastic, and well-deserved. Grimes will never be the same for me. This is why we keep going back to the theater.

at the Symphony: Copland, Britten, Shostakovich

Last night I was at Davies Hall for one of the San Francisco Symphony's Britten Centennial concerts, this one featuring the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, along with Copland's Danzón Cubano and Shostakovich's final symphony, No. 15 in A major, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.

The Copland piece was brief and fun, almost a fanfare sort of thing. It was enjoyable, but I'm not sure what the connection was with either of the other pieces, except that the program was officially called "Midcentury Masters" and Tilson Thomas likes Copland's music. The problem I have with pieces like this is that the audience has just barely settled in and then it's over and we have to sit there, mood disrupted, while they re-arrange all the chairs for the next piece. It hardly seems worthwhile breaking the flow like that.

I enjoyed the Serenade. I was in the first row, practically at the feet of the soloists, tenor Toby Spence and horn player Robert Ward, so my experience was probably better than that of someone placed in the far reaches of that intractable cavern, Davies Hall. Given the performance space (I have often wished that Davies, and also Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, could be blown up and rebuilt at no more than two-thirds of their current size, and perhaps made less 1970s-clunky as well) the ideally intimate atmosphere for this piece was just not going to be there. They compensated by going for more grandeur; each of the six songs, plus the opening and closing horn solos, felt like a separate monument placed before us, carved out of something solid, if not granite then oak. In case this makes it sound too forbidding, Spence was a sweet-voiced soloist and brought conviction to his numbers, particularly the more haunted middle songs (Blake's The Sick Rose and the fifteenth-century anonymous A Lyke-Wake Dirge). His diction was very clear, though once again I wonder why the Symphony doesn't use surtitles, which might have cut down on some of the endless program-rustling – the couple next to me, and keep in mind that if I'm right at the feet of the soloists so are they, had quite the mid-performance exchange about what was being sung (though as far as audience behavior goes, this was one of my better recent trips to Davies).

After the intermission came the Shostakovich 15 – this is the one that famously contains quotations not only from the composer's own earlier works but also Rossini's William Tell Overture and the Annunciation of Death from Wagner's Walkure. It's a somewhat strange, baffling, and haunting work, and it can be emotionally powerful in the way available only to things that express their emotions indirectly. Last night the first movement was terrifically convincing, mysterious yet bonkers, as is the way of this symphony. There was quite a spontaneous burst of applause when the movement ended, and it was deserved. After that – well, I just don't know. The pace slowed to a crawl, and I felt all urgency drain from the music, as it unfolded in a stately sweep that might have been better suited to Bruckner or indeed Die Walkure itself. Can something fall apart by congealing? To me it seemed that the frantic, quicksilver intelligence of the first movement had been replaced by a glacier. And whatever hushed mood of majesty the artists were trying to convey was lost on the audience, which suddenly was filled with dozens of coughers. The couple next to me imperturbably kept on reading their programs through the whole thing.

mass magnificence

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

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

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

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

symphonic variations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The San Francisco Symphony battles the Boyg

Last Thursday I was at Davies Hall for the first time this season, for San Francisco Symphony's Peer Gynt program, which combined actors and singers and video projections in a traversal of Ibsen's great play, along with some of the orchestral music written for it (including sections of Grieg's famous score, written at Ibsen's request, and more recent pieces by the late Alfred Schnittke and by Robin Holloway, who was there in person). This program had jumped out at me when the season was announced about a year ago. Ibsen's play, the last he wrote in verse before turning to the prose plays that helped create modern theater, isn't staged very often, mostly because (like its obvious model, Goethe's Faust) it's very long and very weird, combining realistic social drama, the supernatural, political satire, dream and fantasy sequences, myth-making and intimate psychological analysis, working as both biography and allegory.

Key Ibsen themes run through it: an intense examination of the roles men and women play in relation to each other (and how natural urges battle against social structures), the influence of one generation on another, the role of the dreamer or idealist in a workaday world, the danger and the necessity of one's illusions and delusions. Peer is a fascinating character: sort of an Everyman (which doesn't mean he's likable, exactly, though I don't find him unsympathetic) as well as an outsider; a dreamer who achieves (and loses) great worldly success; he's a habitual liar who spins out great fantastic adventures that enthrall his listeners, even those who realize he's repeating stories they told him, but he also can tell blunt and cruel truths that others don't want to hear (as when he runs off with Ingrid on her wedding day; shortly thereafter he tires of her and she berates him, but he points out that she was completely willing to run off with him and he doesn't owe her anything - if she expected him to turn into a solid bourgeois husband, well, who's the delusional dreamer in that pair?). He's a selfish man who is constantly, desperately, seeking to hold on to his self.

I have seen the play performed live: ACT did it some time in the early to mid-1970s. I believe it was either complete or nearly complete (I think it was around four hours, which was a bit much for the other high school students with whom I saw it). At this point I don't remember much about the production except for the scene in which Peer's mother Ase dies. And now available on DVD there's a version starring a seventeen-year-old Charlton Heston in his first film. Directed by David Bradley, it's mostly silent with Grieg as the soundtrack. It's an amateur film, shot in Michigan and featuring mostly local college students. It's surprisingly effective, and Heston is very good: lots of times I'd look at the other actors and think, you're really an American college student from the 1940s in fancy dress, but I always thought of him as Peer. There's also a ballet version, which is where the Schnittke music comes from. In short, it's a story that, for various reasons, mostly practical, is often shortened or adapted.

I re-read it before the Symphony show. I'm never sure if that's an advantage or not in these situations: it brings fresh knowledge and context to what I'm seeing, but also makes me maybe too aware of what's been cut or changed. Quite a lot was cut to fit the story within a normal symphonic evening of slightly over two hours. In the spirit of the original play, the Symphony's performance was wide-ranging and episodic, even a bit disconnected; disappointing decisions jostled next to brilliant successes; sometimes it seemed like a play with eruptions of music, and other times like an orchestral piece interrupted by dialogue. I gathered from those around me on Thursday that there was a wide range of reactions, from enthralled to appalled. I've dropped out of most discussions and held off on reading most  reviews until I posted this, but I gather that they cover as wide a range. On the whole I enjoyed the evening quite a lot, despite some reservations. But if the evening wasn't a total success, it was at least the right sort of failure (well, I didn't think it was a failure at all, but you see what I mean): ambitious, thoughtful, new, and creative. Peer Gynt was a particularly bold choice for the Symphony, since I suspect it appeals more to serious theater-goers than to symphony-goers, and there is less overlap among those audiences than one might expect or hope for.

The things I didn't like: the actors were brutally amplified. I've complained about amplification frequently; it flattens the sound and tends to make people sit back rather than lean forward. I do understand that Davies is acoustically tricky and there might be problems with unmiked spoken dialogue in that cavernous space, but two people talking in a normal tone should not be louder than a symphony orchestra. The smashing sound of a large orchestra is one that, sadly, we can't appreciate as much as nineteenth-century audiences did, since all you have to do now is turn the dial up. But at times the volume of the actors shoved the orchestra too far into the background.

Having embraced the evil technology of amplification, the Symphony really should embrace the good technology of surtitles. I've never understood why they don't use them regularly. When the chorus joined in as awesome trolls in Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, it was unclear if they were singing words that meant something or just troll-like sounds.The dialogue was in English, but when Solveig sang, as when the trolls sang, it's back to the original Norwegian, and - well, how many fluent Norwegian speakers are in the usual Bay Area audience? At least Joelle Harvey's lovely singing was not amplified. (Solveig is basically Peer Gynt's Marguerite, to continue the Faust analogy, with the added acerbic twist that at the end, during his ambiguous redemption (or, possibly, his indefinitely deferred damnation), it is strongly implied that the reason he has no Self is because he wasn't more like her - selflessly loving and giving; as several religious traditions hold, in order to gain yourself, you must lose yourself.)

I wish the play-pruning hadn't been so severe in some sections; in particular, Peer's dead father, a genial drunkard who pissed away the family fortune, is important to understanding him, and most of the references to him were gone. There was enough with his mother to give you a sense of their relationship, so Ase's death had the power it should have. But most of the play after her death up until the appearance of the mysterious Button-Molder was gone. It was replaced by what was basically a tone-poem by Holloway, which I enjoyed, but if the action is cut then the music makes its own journey, which may or may not be the journey on which Ibsen sent his protagonist. Having the play fresh in my mind, and assisted by the beautiful projections, I could tell when Peer was in the desert or on his ocean voyage, but Ibsen's words shape and suggest the meanings of those travels in a way you wouldn't necessarily get from the music unless you knew the play well. I enjoyed Holloway's piece, which slips easily among sounds and moods, but it was a bit out-sized: it replaced roughly a third of the play, and at around 25 minutes it was easily the longest single piece of music in the performance. There was a repeated melody that sounded to me like a bit straight out of Peter and the Wolf. When the Symphony performed excerpts from Holloway's opera Clarissa, the fire was represented by a very extensive quotation of Walkure's Magic Fire music, so that sort of quotation is a thing Holloway does, but I'm not sure what was going on there.

When the Woman in Green (the Troll-King's daughter, played by Peabody Southwell) re-appears with Peer's son, she is supposed to be an ugly old woman - that's why Peer doesn't recognize her at first. But on Thursday she was just as uber-hot as in her first appearance, so it didn't make sense that Peer claimed not to recognize her. I wouldn't have had the Boyg chuckle with horror-movie menace: that gives it a certain malevolent definition, and I think the enigmatic blankness of the formless, unseen Boyg is what makes it so terrifying and haunting. (Is it something inside Peer, or outside? Is it trying to destroy him with its advice, or help him?) The program note claims that the Boyg also appears as the Button-Molder, the lean priest, and the ghastly passenger on Peer's voyage home: it's unclear from the phrasing if this is specifically Schnittke's interpretation or is being put forward as inherent in Ibsen. I think it's a possible but not a necessary interpretation, and personally I feel the Boyg is separate in function and meaning from those other characters (the ghastly ghostly passenger, by the way, fell victim to the extensive cutting).

On to the things I did like. The actors, despite having to work against the amplification, were all strong. Ben Huber showed Peer's uncertainty and longing as well as his headstrong fantastical ways, and moved convincingly from wild boy to cynical man. Rose Portillo as his mother captured Ase's love for and frustration with and complaining about and defense of her wayward boy. In addition to the ones I've already named, there was also good work by Jesse Merlin as Solveig's Father and the Troll King, Brian Ruppenkamp as the Brat and the Lean One, Mark Deakins as the Boyg and the Button-Molder, Janice Lancaster Larsen as Ingrid, and Keith Perry, Alexandra Sessler, and Dianne M. Terp as wedding guests. James Darrah was director and production designer, and Adam Larsen was video designer.

I loved the chance to hear so much of the possible Peer music; I knew the Grieg but not the others. It was always immediately clear which of the three composers was being performed, and that eclecticism is very much in the spirit of the play. I loved Schnittke's eerie vaporous Boyg music. Grieg's Morning Mood sounded as fresh and lovely as sunrise on a spring meadow, the way it was meant to sound before it became a cartoon signifier of spring dawn. It was great to hear the Hall of the Mountain King with chorus. I loved the vast irregular white shape on which the projections were shown; it looked like both mountains and mist. The projections themselves were striking and well done, moving from black-and-white to color and from church interior to lush forest to vast ocean and many points in between. The long narrow stage space was used well, with the occasional addition of action up the aisles.

Mostly, I just really love that they did this at all.

we have always lived in the castle

Continuing my trip backwards through the San Francisco Symphony centennial season. . . .

My second-to-the-last Symphony concert of the centennial season (Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 and Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle) was just a week before the finale. I did not realize it at the time but - music aside, since in that regard both evenings were wonderful - it was going to be a complete contrast as an experience to the final concert, which was a nightmare: I write about that concert, quite entertainingly I must say - that's me, spinning my straw into gold! - here.

Back to my penultimate week. It was Thursday night so the Asian Art Museum was open late and fortunately hadn't scheduled anything that would sabotage the experience for people who were actually interested in Asian art, so I had the pleasure of meeting Lisa there for dinner and a look around the galleries. The Phantoms of Asia exhibit was spread over the whole building, though we ended up spending most of our time on the top floor, in the Indian galleries. I thought there was an intriguing idea behind Phantoms of Asia - asking contemporary artists to react to the various Asian traditions and beliefs around spirituality, the afterlife, and cosmic order - but despite a few striking pieces I found the older works on display much more interesting. Perhaps if I had been able to pay more than two fairly brief visits to the show I would have felt differently.

Anyway, on to Symphony Hall. The program opened with Jeremy Denk playing the Liszt, which seemed like luxury casting. Liszt often gets paired with Bartok, I guess because they're both Hungarian, though there is also the entertaining contrast between the former's heavenly rhapsodies (edging into that sort of ethereal spirituality which always seems really sexual) and the latter's more astringent and earthy sound. The Piano Concerto No. 1 is fairly short (about twenty minutes) with a cascading dazzle of sound that for me evoked heavy rain falling through leaves onto a window pane - and then persistently BEEP BEEP BEEP and what the hell is that? I half expected Tilson Thomas to stop the performance and wheel around like a hawk, only it didn't seem to be a device in the hall (and apparently people further back couldn't hear it at all). I think it was something - an exit or a smoke detector or wahtever- in the hall outside the auditorium. Too bad. This was one of the better audiences I've experienced in Davies (no one around me was talking, texting, unwrapping cellophane, flipping noisily through the program, kicking the back of my seat, or squeezing me in so I couldn't breathe) - how perverse of the cosmos to insist that something had to be disruptive.

They must have fixed the BEEP BEEP BEEP right before the intermission because there was no sign of it during or after the break. Denk was pretty wonderful, as was the orchestra, and I feel I should say something more perceptive, or at least appreciative, since obviously a lot of work and sweat and thought goes into tossing off Liszt with easy virtuosity, but honestly serving as the opening amuse-bouche for Duke Bluebeard's Castle is a thankless task.

Into the Castle. This performance included the usually omitted opening narration, spoken by Ken Ruta. The music begins before the narration ends, which means you mostly want the speaker to shut up so you can listen to the music - you know, the usual. I can see why this bit is usually omitted. I hardly remember what the speaker says, and that's not because I'm writing this a few months later; I had forgotten it by the time the concert ended. I just remember it had sort of an ooga-booga Grand Guignol tone that to me signaled "campy horror film" rather than "richly textured, thought-provoking music drama."

Alan Held and Michelle DeYoung were both in strong, striking voice, and the orchestra was both lush and crystalline. The production was semi-staged, but I have no comment on the staging since I couldn't see it. I was in the second row, and the singers were placed behind the orchestra, so given the height of the Davies stage compared to the front orchestra seats the singers were blocked from view except for a few occasions when I'd spot them through a thicket of violas like jungle cats through a tangled underbrush, but those sightings were only sporadic. There were some large vaguely triangular white shapes moving around occasionally above the stage and there were projections, generally of a pretty basic descriptive sort: fields of flowers, close-ups of water dripping down walls, blood, stuff like that. It didn't add a whole lot but it also didn't detract. The projections were kind of a stripped-down version of the visually richer ones that Berkeley Opera (now West Edge Opera) used in its production a few years ago.

This is a really wonderful short opera and should be done more often. For one thing, I take away different impressions every time I see it, which is a sign of a work worth revisiting. Usually I think of the Bluebeard story as very much the wife's story: her love for him, her fear and confusion over the castle's (and his) mysteries, her intellectual curiosity, her bravery in entering and confronting his world. This time it struck me as very much about him, very much the story of a man trapped inside his own mind (this should not be read as Held overpowering DeYoung dramatically, since both were perfectly matched; it's just a matter of noticing something different in a work). As with the protagonist of Die Tote Stadt, even Bluebeard's efforts to reach out only amount to drawing someone else into his painful psychic labyrinth, and there Judith remains with his other wives. Has he literally killed her? Has he psychically killed her? Does she sacrifice herself? Or is it merely an image of her, a memory of what she was to him, that remains? Over in the Indian art galleries before the concert we saw a manuscript painting showing Krishna as a cowherd. For reasons that currently escape me he has to prove to someone who he is. He opens his mouth and the person who demanded his identity staggers back, because inside Krishna's mouth, briefly, one sees the entire universe. And that was how Bluebeard struck me: as a man with the entire universe expanding inside him. What does that leave for those on the outside?

Beethoven waves us off

Running in place trying to keep up though always falling behind as usual, I might as well start with the final concert I heard in the San Francisco Symphony's centennial season and work backwards through some symphonic nights. . . .

My ticket for the big season finale was for the Thursday performance, so my original plan was to spend the time after work and before the concert at the Asian Art Museum taking a closer look at the Phantoms of Asia show. Unfortunately for me, that Thursday turned out to be one of the museum's silly and annoying monthly party nights, though I guess it was fortunate I found out beforehand so I could give the museum a very wide berth, since this particular party featured (1) "litquake," (2) Trannyshack, (3) some tattoo thing, and (4) a DJ. Any one of those four elements would have sent me screaming into the dark night, but the combination of all four promised to fill the museum with enough smug self-regard and general hipster-douchebag-asshattery to reach suffocatingly toxic levels. In fact the slightest event - a carelessly dropped name, the fizz when some inked hackjob popped open his ironic Pabst Blue Ribbon - could easily react with some dragonish drag queen's acid "Oh honey" or the shrill relentless thumping of trendoid world music to trigger an implosion in the building that would bring it crashing down (as Samson brought the temple crashing down on the heads of the Philistines), with nothing surviving in the wreck except perhaps some fragment of an unobserved impassive Buddha, his hand raised in ambiguous blessing, his lips curved in an enigmatic smile.

So anyway the need to avoid the Asian Art Museum meant I had to rearrange my plans for the hours before the start of the concert. I did go to the SF Museum of Modern Art for a while, even though I had already been there earlier that day during my lunch hour. I don't like the cafeteria there, so I left after about an hour and walked up Market Street to Pearl's Deluxe Burgers, which I had never been to before and which is in the area of Market Street that the city has been desperately trying to gentrify for years. They're not quite there yet. My food was perfectly acceptable but the tables were surprisingly grimy and the generic loud music was irritating though not unexpected. A couple of street people talked loudly in the back, their possession-stuffed handcarts leaning against their table. Glassy-eyed and angry-looking folks, some street people, some office workers, floated by right outside the window. My dinner started to sit heavily in my stomach. I thought despondently of the healthier, tastier, and less expensive dinner I would have had at the Asian. I glumly wondered if I should bother renewing my museum membership. The best time for working people to visit there is Thursday evening, but they don't even have the late hours during the winter months (prime concert-attending season) and the rest of the year they frequently sabotage Thursday nights with their attempts to turn themselves into a ghastly third-rate nightclub, something I can easily get elsewhere were I so minded, unlike the chance to look at Asian art, which I can only get there. It's part of a sad trend among cultural institutions to throw away what they're actually good for in favor of interchangeable, irritating parties aimed at people who aren't really much interested in art. I'm not sure I'm really getting value from my membership.

Eventually I headed out into the drifting crowds, back down Market Street to Davies Hall, with hamburger, onion rings, and milkshake heavy in my stomach, still with well over an hour before the concert was to start, and nothing much to do. The big item on the program was the Beethoven 9, one of those pieces whose very greatness has led to a sort of cynical ennui among concert-goers who roll their eyes at riding such a familiar warhorse. But for me at least it's not something I've heard live that often (recordings are something else). In fact the only other time I remember hearing it live was for the centennial of the Boston Symphony, in a big free public concert on Boston Common. The park was mobbed, of course, and I ended up stuck next to a woman who talked loudly during the entire performance. She could not restrain her laughter and gleeful horror at the terrible gaucherie of those who applauded between movements. "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black," muttered a man next to me, so I was not the only victim of her presence who noted the irony in her mocking disapproval of bad concert behavior.

I was quite excited to hear this symphony live, perched as it is on the summit of several traditions, like some fantastical composite beast, lashing its strange choral tail toward heaven. The first part of the program was two short pieces by Ligeti and Schoenberg, both of whom I love, and both performed by the Symphony's superb chorus. I thought the pieces were very well chosen to complement the Beethoven: Ligeti's Lux aeterna, using the ancient words from the requiem mass, and Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, mixing an eyewitness account from the Holocaust with the ancient prayer Shema Yisroel, look both backward and forward, combining daring musical invention with humanity's oldest and most basic questions about justice and meaning in the universe; they memorialize yet also move us forward: perfect accompaniments to Beethoven's final symphony.

There I was in my front row center seat, excited about the program, and pleased to see that the program-rustlers who usually sit next to me for this subscription series were nowhere in sight, and then, right before the lights dimmed, an incredibly enormous man sinks slowly into the seat on my left, and even though there is a double armrest on my right I am pinned to the far side of my seat by this meat-mountain and his swollen fleshbag limbs. Since I am very careful about not imposing on the space of others I felt equally constricted on my right side, since I'm pushed all the way over there, though the little old woman sitting on my right seemed cheerfully oblivious, humming a bit and tapping along to the more sombre moments in the Schoenberg and the Beethoven. Now instead of being a bit peeved that the first half is so short I am deeply grateful, since I cannot move. The Ligeti is dense yet ethereal. I think that Shuler Hensley's narration in the Schoenberg is not the way I would have done it - it's maybe a bit too obviously dramatic - but that's how Schoenberg wrote it, and the ultimate effect is very powerful, and I'm having trouble breathing since I don't even have room to cross my arms over my chest, my usual space-saving expedient, because I am so crammed into this seat by the vast implacable imperturbable wall of flesh beside me.

During intermission I look around and there are no empty seats, so I have no choice if I want to hear the Beethoven but to sit back down in what is available of the seat I paid for. Again, I can't move; I can't even put both arms by my sides because there's no room. I have to let my right arm hang down onto my lap, with my left hand holding on somewhere near my bicep to keep my left arm out of my neighbor's way, and I can't move from that position. I realize at one point that my eyeglasses have become smeared (most likely by my eyelashes) but I can't move my arms well enough to wipe them off. I really hate it when my glasses aren't clean. I'm feeling very claustrophobic, pinned in by a solid wall of inert flesh, seeing the orchestra through a misty smudge on my lenses. I hear the music as in a dream. I have an impression of a very fine performance of the familiar strains. The soloists (Erin Wall, Kendall Gladen, William Burden, and Nathan Berg), are all very fine, but long before Joy, the daughter of Elysium, spread her soft wings I could feel my entire left side slowly but surely going completely numb.

I have sat through more physically excruciating concerts at Davies Hall than anywhere else I've ever been. And it's not like Bayreuth, where you suffer on those hard seats but the sound is incomparable. You will not be compensated for your steerage-quality seating by beauty of either sound or surroundings. I just don't know what it is about that place (besides poor design). Maybe I just have bad luck there? Sometimes you'll read someone (usually someone associated with the Symphony) talking about what a wonderful hall it is, and I am befuddled and bemused and touched and saddened.

I had the feeling that the symphony was flashing before me the way a vast golden sun might finally flash setting on a sparkling green sea in a drowning man's last vision, only I was being drowned in enclosing suffocating waves of encroaching human flesh. The last note of the music had barely sounded when the man behind me immediately leaned forward and loudly screamed bravi! right in my ear. (I'll give him credit, though: he only kicked the back of my seat a couple of times. At least the kicks indicated I hadn't lost all feeling back there.) I leaned forward in my turn and suddenly realized I could take advantage of the tumultuous applause to jump to my feet, which I promptly did, joining the sincere ovation with special gratitude for my release. But I still felt so clamped in and claustrophobic that I couldn't even stand there applauding; usually I'm one of the last to leave the hall but I was so anxious for movement that as soon as Michael Tilson Thomas and the soloists left the stage I bolted to the side aisle and practically ran to the back of the house before the aisles were crammed with the lumbering herds and I was trapped again. I think only once before in my whole concert-going life have I left before the house-lights were turned up, and that was after a very long opera when I would otherwise have missed the last train. So I felt troubled by fleeing but also compelled to escape.

The Symphony was recording the performances for a future CD release, so perhaps I'll get to hear the performance under less grueling conditions, though given the several loud coughs during the quietest sections I'm not sure they'll use the performance I heard. And the Symphony continues its inexplicable policy of not using surtitles for the vocal parts, so of course during the Ode to Joy there was much rustling of programs among those who could actually use their arms.

And here's my little O Henry ending: the train home was a long time coming, but at least it was a full-length train. I took my seat in the first car, grateful to have no one beside me, but after two stops the entire train filled up with people returning from the Giants game, so there was no place to move to, and another, even fatter, man plopped down next to me, pinning me into my seat. Once I managed to get off the train even the empty nighttime sidewalks seemed barely enough restorative space, and I longed to be alone on an endless silent prairie under the canopy of stars that Schiller and Beethoven had been trying to point out to us.

pass

As part of its centennial season, the San Francisco Symphony is reviving the American Mavericks festival it last held in 2000, and they're keeping the name despite the Palin taint still lingering over the word "maverick," and why shouldn't they, since they were there first. It's coming right up at Davies Hall, starting this Thursday 8 March, before traveling on to Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Carnegie Hall. SFMike previews it all for you, knowledgeably and enthusiastically, right here. (Though also click here for Joshua Kosman's skeptical take on the programming.)

These are exciting concerts, and I had missed the earlier festival, so it's all new to me. I was picking up the phone to buy the $100 pass, which (potentially) gets you into all of the concerts, and which comes with the DVD Copland and the American Sound, as well as the Symphony's just-released CD of John Adams's Harmonielehre, when I thought to check ticket availability.

I think the pass is a great idea, but I don't understand why it wasn't made available much earlier and publicized more. If I'd known about it earlier, I would have bought one right away and arranged some of my precious few vacation days to take advantage of all the concerts. I didn't hear about the pass in anything I received from the Symphony; I heard about it when Lisa mentioned it as part of her on-going series of ticket frustrations with the Symphony (if the pass had been available, she would have bought that instead of more expensive subscription tickets). After I read Lisa's account, I went to the Symphony's website, and if I hadn't been deliberately looking for information on the pass, I would have missed it entirely: there was a little box of information off to the side, among other similar-looking boxes of information. As far as I could see, if I were buying tickets to the Maverick concerts, nothing would stop me and let me know there was a potentially better option.

I go back and forth on buying tickets in advance and subscribing. On the one hand, I do care a lot about where I sit, though for different reasons in different venues. Davies is not Carnegie Hall; there are lots of seats where the sound is dead and distant and you might as well be sitting in the lobby listening. Buying in advance reassures me about where I'll be sitting. And generally, on the actual day of the performance, I'd rather just go home, especially when it means killing three plus hours after work waiting for 8:00 to roll around. If I've already spent the money, and I have it in my mind that I'm going, then I'll go, and usually find it worth the trouble. On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for flexibility, and leaving space for other things that come up, and not overbooking the calendar or spending too much money and time, both of which are of course always in short supply.

OK, so as I said I was all set to call and get my pass when I checked ticket availability (this was several weeks ago, so I assume even fewer tickets are available now). The two concerts with Jessye Norman were almost sold out, as far as I could see. (By the way, I'm calling them the Jessye Norman concerts since I suspect she's the reason tickets are so scarce; no disrespect to Joan La Barbara or Meredith Monk.) I had conflicting concerts on several of the dates. And since I must, alas, work a steady job to pay for all my concert-going, the Symphony's sclerotic insistence that 8:00 is the only possible start time for a weeknight concert was, uh, problematic. I guess the music can be fresh but the outer rituals of concert-going must stay petrified.

So it was increasingly clear that my $100 might get me a great bargain, but was just as likely not to. I really wanted to hear Meredith Monk. I had heard her live only once before, and it was basically my first exposure to her music, and I felt very lucky to have had the chance. So I ended up buying a ticket to the Sunday 18 March concert that featured her. It's billed as a chamber music concert, and Davies is not a chamber music hall, but I found a great seat for $36. Except, of course, it wasn't $36; it was $46, since a $10 charge for "handling" or who knows what is tacked onto all ticket prices, in a fairly obvious and stupid bid to make ticket prices look lower than they actually are. Seriously, do they think I won't notice? Just tell me up front that you're going to charge me $46. If it didn't stop me at the end, it wouldn't have stopped me at the beginning.

So here's my frustration: I now have an incentive not to buy tickets to these concerts. Rush tickets are $20, if they're even available, so I figure I can buy at most two (again, if they're even available) before I will have reached a point where the pass would have been a better choice.

Why wasn't the pass available when subscriptions were first sold?

death becomes them

I went out to Davies Hall a week or two ago to hear Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the German Requiem. As I entered the lobby I noticed a number of strikingly beautiful young women in semi-exotic Arabian/stewardess garb (and yes, I mean Arabian as in the Nights, and I mean stewardess and not flight attendant). I cast my eyes downward with appropriate and becoming modesty and made it through unscathed in my self-created burka-aura, though the ladies didn’t seem particularly interested in offering me what they were offering everyone else who passed, which was a chance to win two round-trip Emirates Business Class tickets from San Francisco to Dubai. I know this because the programs contained annoying little red drop-in cards with an entry blank and the news that this was how the Symphony was welcoming Emirates as their official airline. I have no idea what the duties of an official airline are, or how they concern the audience. I was bemused at the thought that a group of people excited about hearing the Brahms Requiem would also be excited about the prospect of a trip to Dubai, which sounds as if it's just a tacky giant mall in the middle of nothingness. “For here we have no continuing city” indeed. For that I can stay in America.


The original plan was for the concert to open with a new piece by Sofia Gubaidulina; sadly she was not able to oblige, but the excellent substitutes were a short choral piece (Ich bin ein rechter Weinstock/I am the true vine) by Heinrich Schutz and Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. Since Schutz was on Brahms’s mind in the Requiem, and since Schoenberg admired Brahms, it all tied together nicely, and I am always happy to hear either Schutz or Schoenberg, let alone both, though it was a little difficult to hear the Schoenberg since the dowager behind me crinkled a plastic bag on her lap for the entire duration of the piece. I had mixed feelings about having an intermission after two short pieces – it would have been interesting to plunge right into the Brahms, I thought, and cumulatively not much longer than some of Mahler’s symphonies – but at least the break gave her a chance to put the bag under her chair, where it should have been all along. There was a young woman behind me with Chica Loca tattooed in sweetly flowing script across the tops of her sweetly flowing breasts. She behaved impeccably, which did not surprise me, since anyone with a Chica Loca tattoo who shows up for Brahms is unquestionably really into him.

I thought the Brahms was magnificent. This piece can seem so familiar, but the performance managed to make it sound new and even strange without taffy-pulling it into pointless eccentricity. I particularly liked the faster tempo for the second movement (Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras/For all flesh is as grass, which might be my favorite movement anyway), which gave it a glowing, lilting, dance-like quality, like some mystical moonlit processional swaying past in the night, mourning with a mysterious joy. The handsome bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen was the male soloist, and there was an extra dimension of poignancy in hearing his supple virile young voice singing of the brevity of life. Jane Archibald was gleaming and evanescent in her movement, as if she were singing to us from a dream. And the chorus was stupendous, as they so regularly are.


Death seems to bring out the best in the Symphony these days: there was their mighty Verdi Requiem, the revelatory Shostakovich 14, and, because he’s always death-haunted, the epic Mahler 3, and this German Requiem joins that company in my mind.

I wanted to go back for another helping of Brahms (Gil Shaham playing the Violin Concerto) with a side of Schoenberg (his orchestration of the Brahms Piano Quartet) the week after, since it was the Friday after Thanksgiving and I had to work anyway and the concert was at 6:30 so I wouldn’t have to wait around too long, but there were no rush tickets available, which might have been just as well since I was so tired that day I didn’t even re-heat turkey when I got home, I just ate pie all evening, and so another day passed.