San Francisco Opera: Pride Concert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

an Anniversary, a Remembrance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schwabacher Recital Series #3: Invitations

The third & final recital of this season's Schwabacher series took place last Tuesday, & it was all mostly marvelous (except for the venue, the Conservatory of Music's Barbro Osher Hall, which I will complain about below). The featured players were bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, currently slaying across the street as Orest in Richard Strauss's Elektra, & pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson (who is also Artistic Director of the San Francisco Opera Center, co-presenters with the Merola program of this recital series). Ketelsen  & Matheson were joined by several participants in this year's Merola program. Before the music started, Matheson gave us the key to the eclectic program: invitations, a theme malleable & capacious enough to provide a program of surprises & satisfactions. Surtitles were used for the songs as well as the opera excerpts, & I wish every recital did this.

The first piece was Là ci darem la mano, from Don Giovanni; as the recital took place on Bloomsday, this was a lovely but perhaps inadvertent homage to the day, as that duet is one of the musical notes ripping through Leopold Bloom's day in Dublin. Ketelsen was joined by soprano Shannon Crowley & they were accompanied by pianist Deven Shah. (stage director Claire Choquette supplied minimalist but effective movements for the dramatic pieces). Ketelsen as Giovanni (& later as Scarpia) is sexy & seductive; the commanding but nuanced authority of his voice is familiar but what struck me, seeing him at relatively close range, is how good an actor he is: convincing, insightful, nothing overdone; he could hold the stage even without his distinguished singing. Crowley was charmingly conflicted as Zerlina, & the next two numbers, L'invito by Rossini & Stornello by Verdi, for which she was accompanied by Matheson, confirmed her strength in the pert/perky/winsome repertoire; I'm sure there are sassy servant girls & clever peasant sweethearts in her future.

The next set had Matheson accompanying tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson in three Duparc songs: L'invitation au voyage, Chanson Triste, & Phidylé. He took these dreamy songs from a convincing ardent angle, which worked very well; there was a lot of youthful yearning there in songs that don't always sound as youthful as they should. There were lots of passionate, big voices on this program. After the Duparc, Ketelsen & Shah returned to the stage for Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, a loose cycle of three songs: Chanson Romanesque, Chanson épique, & Chanson à boire. In the latter Ketelsen gave clear but subtle, insofar as a drunk can be subtle, indications of the singer's inebriation; it was another demonstration of his skill in inhabiting the persona of a song, something also revealed by the switches in mood among these three very different pieces. Shah is a strong accompanist.

Two sets, both accompanied by Matheson, closed out the first half: a trio of Italian songs (Sognai by Schira, Il poveretto by Verdi, & Nebbie by Respighi) sung by tenor Chester Seungyup Han & a trio of Korean songs (San A / O Mountain by Dong Soo Shin, Ma Joong / Welcome by Hak Joon Yoon), & Mot I Jeo / Unable to forget by Hye-Young Cho) sung by baritone Paul Jang: powerhouse passions to send us into intermission. Han's rendition of Il poveretto was for me the highlight of his set, a song about an old soldier begging for any small coin so he could buy some sort of meal that turned out to be surprisingly touching. It made me think of beggars I had passed that day, particularly one lying on the sidewalk moaning that he couldn't even buy a cup of coffee. The three Italian songs were not ones I had heard before, but the Korean songs seemed a greater rarity & were a real treat; recitals so seldom step off the German-French-Italian-OK-maybe-some-English song path. Musically they sounded to my ears like American folk songs. The song to the mountain was particularly moving. Both Han & Jang really let it rip in their sets.

The entire second half was an excerpt from Tosca, with Ketelsen as Scarpia, soprano Charlotte Kelso as Tosca, Chester Seungyup Han as Cavaradossi, Paul Jang as Sciarrone, & Ryan Bryce Johnson as Spoletta, with Carrie-Ann Matheson as a fluid & evocative accompanist. Matheson started off by giving us a plot summary of what was happening. I'm not sure this crowd needed such a summary, but Matheson knows her audience better than I do.

(left to right: soprano Charlotte Kelso, bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson)

Even without a full orchestra, & even in excerpt, Tosca is a musically & dramatically powerful opera. It's one I have mixed feelings about, though: the only interesting (& even, in a weird way, sympathetic) character, as far as I'm concerned, is Scarpia, the reactionary head of the secret police: not the choice the opera or my heart would really want a listener to make. Cavaradossi is passionate & romantic & mostly a cipher. As for Floria Tosca, let's look at her behavior just in this Act 2 excerpt: Cavaradossi is the one tied up & tortured, with blood running down his face, but she insists she's the one who is being tortured & she is just too sensitive to take it. That's why, against Cavaradossi's wishes, she betrays his compatriot (& also, by association, him). Her lover can keep quiet under torture but she, under the mere thought of torture, breaks his confidence & betrays his trust. Then, during her big aria, she insists that she has never harmed a single person – really? I just heard you sell out Angelotti – & she doesn't deserve any of this anyway because she has brought flowers & jewels to adorn the church. (Do I need Latin Catholic trigger warnings?) Yet, despite her efforts to bribe the Creator with His own creations, bad things have happened to her (of course to her; forget Angelotti & even Cavaradossi). There are just too many bitch, please! moments with her.

That aside: the opera is, as I said, musically & dramatically effective, & the excerpt was gripping. Ketelsen is a superb Scarpia. Again, he doesn't overdo it, but he makes very clear the sadism, the sexual tingle, underlying the police chief's machinations. He doesn't indulge in snarling & bellowing (genuinely powerful people don't need to bellow); he even amuses himself with his sadism. Kelso was compelling & even touching (at least, as touching as I will find this character) as Tosca. with lovely rich tones for Vissi d'arte. Han really belted out his Vittoria! Vitorria! triumphantly, which is pretty much Cavaradossi's business in this act. The smaller parts were well taken; Jang portrayed amusing confusion on Sciarrone's part at the start again / stop again orders of the seemingly capricious Scarpia (the torturer, being in the other room torturing, of course doesn't hear the conversation with Tosca). It was quite a show, received very enthusiastically by the full house. Ketelsen & Matheson followed it with an encore, Cole Porter's very funny Tale of an Oyster, made even more hilarious by Ketelsen's commanding tones & authoritative stage presence. He also nicely delineated the oyster's different emotions at each stage of its journey, from Oyster Bay to high-society meal to being upchucked back into the Bay, sadder but wiser for his social-climbing adventure.

(left to right: tenor Chester Seungyup Han, pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson, bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, soprano Charlotte Kelso, tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson, & baritone Paul Jang)

Now I will complain about the venue. I have been to the Conservatory's Barbro Osher Hall several times. First something good: once you're up there, in a glass-encased room on the 11th floor of the Conservatory's new building, there are attractive views down Van Ness Avenue & across the street to Davies Hall & the Opera House, & it's very pretty at night, with all the lights of the city sparkling below you. When you see the room from the street, it glows like a jewel.

But: the room (it's not really a "hall") is described as "intimate", but I'd describe it as "small", which is not the same thing. The chairs, the cheap plastic kind that can be stacked up easily & moved out of the way, are not very comfortable. But the real problem is getting to & from the room. I've been to several concerts there & only once were people allowed up to wait when they arrived. Every other time, we have to collect in the lower lobby of the building, where there are not nearly enough seats, so concert-goers, who are often elderly, cranky people (& I include myself in that) have to stand, often for long periods, before we can get upstairs, where we have to stand waiting again. There is usually some sort of rough line that forms, with the policing that that involves (on Tuesday there was a man keenly invested in letting everyone know he was first in line; I had arrived at least 10 minutes before he did, but didn't bother disputing precedence with him, as I had taken one of the few seats available & preferred that to standing the whole time). And that line he was so intent on? It's just to get on the elevator! The audience has to be led up, one carload at a time, to the 11th floor. Once there, as I said, a line has to form again before we can get into the actual room (which, again, I'm not going to call a hall). There is lots of anxiety & fraying tempers, as seats are not reserved & so where you are when the doors open affects where you sit during the concert. And I am far from the only person who cares a lot about where he or she sits.

And then, after the concert, you have to do the same thing in reverse: line up by the elevators to be taken down one carload at a time. And if you need to use the restrooms before descending, because of course you do, you have to get through the crowd jammed up by the elevators, most of whom stand there staring like angry lumps even after you explain that you're not trying to cut ahead of them, you're trying to get past them to the restrooms. I don't really understand why a recital like this, which could have drawn a larger crowd, wasn't in a larger venue. Even if the size of the room weren't a problem, the logistics definitely are. Not sure what the Conservatory was thinking when they came up with this arrangement. But when I see the Osher Recital Hall as a venue, I definitely think twice about attending.

Schwabacher Recital Series #2: Paths of the Heart

The second Schwabacher Recital of the season, & the only one featuring only one vocalist, took place earlier this month (I am, as usual, perpetually behind on posting) at the First Unitarian Universalist Society, an unusual setting (I have only been there once before, years ago, for a Meredith Monk concert) but an attractive one. Pianist Tzu Kuang Tan accompanied baritone Gabriel Natal-Báez in Paths of the Heart, a thoughtful & poetic program taking as its theme journeys outward & inward.

The first set opened with six songs from Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel, settings of lyrics by Robert Louis Stevenson; we heard The Vagabond, Let Beauty Awake, The Roadside Fire, Youth and Love, Whither Must I Wander?, & Bright Is the Ring of Words. The titles tip you off to the mood: you have a sense of youthful springtime wanderlust, carefree adventuring in the face of the looming drudgery of adulthood, with the mood darkening towards the end into uncertainty & even, in the bittersweet final song, the suggested loss of life & life.

The second set was four Schubert lieder: Prometheus, Geistes-Gruß (Ghost Greetings), Wandrers Nachtlied II (with texts by Goethe), & Der Atlas (text by Heine): a different sort of wandering, more heroic in scale, featuring demi-gods & legendary knights, but also, in the Wandrers Nachtlied, what might be an old, or simply very weary, searcher, calmly awaiting the peace of night to fall on his restless life. These journeys were more in psychological & philosophical realms. It was clear from the start, & became even clearer as the tone & mood deepened & the theme shifted, that we were in very good hands with these performers. Natal-Báez has a rich, smooth voice, which might be enough, but he also uses it with thoughtful care & great expressivity. Tan was a strongly lyrical accompanist. Fortunately the audience was attuned enough to hold applause until each set finished, as requested in the program, so they were able to conjure their vistas without interruptions.

The second half of the program brought us to Spain & the Hispanic world, initially through the French lens of Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée; we were given all three numbers in the cycle (Chanson Romanesque, Chanson épique, & Chanson à boire, with texts by Paul Morand inspired by Cervantes's classic novel). The three songs are very loosely related, to each other & to the source material, but the idealistic / crazy figure of the knight errant encapsulates many of the themes of the program: wandering, both physically & psychologically & spiritually; the estrangement that comes from always moving on, as well as the desire to connect that keeps leading one on; a sense of adventuring among the elusive & fragile beauty of the world.

The final set was in Spanish, & included the sense of traveling back nostalgically to one's own past (Natal-Báez is from Puerto Rico). beginning with two songs by Miguel Ortega to poems by Federico Garcia Lorca – Romance de la Luna, Luna & Preciosa y el aire – followed by individual songs by Luis Antonio Ramírez (Lucero del alba / Morning song, with text by Luis Lloréns Torres), Manuel Ponce (Estrellita / Little Star, with text by the composer), Astor Piazzolla (Los pájaros perdidos / The Lost Birds, with text by Mario Trejo), & Alfonso Esparza Oteo (¡Dime que sí! / Say yes!, with text by Alfonso Espiriu). The two Lorca songs, beautifully fraught encounters of children with death & sex, hide their sophistication under charming, almost folk-tale-type, language. The four final songs seemed more like the journey through life, taking up birds, stars, love lost & gained, familiar inhabitants of Lieder-land & none the worse for that, of course.

This was an outstanding recital: the music was chosen with care & intelligence & well presented(Natal-Báez wrote the thoughtful program notes, as well as the translations of the Spanish lyrics) & Tan & Natal-Báez both operated on a consistently high level of artistry. There was one encore, To Dream the Impossible Dream from Man of la Mancha, which neatly tied up several themes of the program: Don Quixote, of course, & questing through life; Tan & Natal-Báez let it soar like the Broadway anthem it is, sending us out into our own starry nights.

Taking their bows: Tan on the left, Natal-Báez on the right

Schwabacher Recital Series #1: Italienisches Liederbuch

Yesterday at the Taube Atrium Theater, the Merola Opera Program & the San Francisco Opera Center presented the first of this season's three Schwabacher Recitals; this one, curated by Nicholas Phan, featured pianist Ji Youn Lee, soprano Mary Hoskins, & baritone Olivier Zerouali. The program had not been announced in advance, so the first pleasure was finding out that we would be hearing Hugo Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch, a collection of 46 mostly brief lieder to words by Paul Heyse "based on anonymous Italian poetry", which I've heard on recordings but which I've rarely (maybe never? unless it was decades ago, in another time & place?) encountered live. The second pleasure was how successful, how thoughtful, charming & moving, & inspiriting, the concert was.

I'm guessing that the "curating" part of Phan's role was not only in picking the repertory but also in directing the performers; the songs are not explicitly about an on-going story, but instead about many stories flitting in & out of possibility, & the two singers listened to each other attentively, with subtlety & care, to the apt, often dramatic or witty, accompaniment of Lee's playing. Her Steinway was to the center left (audience left) of the stage; to its right were two black chairs on either side of a small round café-like table with a black tablecloth, topped with two glasses of water (Zerouali drank more of his than Hoskins did of hers) & a few candles. Lee wore a stylish black ensemble; Zerouali wore a black tuxedo with an open-necked shirt, & Hoskins wore a velvety forest-green gown (one of her songs mentions wearing green, a possible inspiration). The large back wall featured a series of close-ups of paintings, some famous (Botticelli, Munch) & some not so much, a different art work for each song, printed in soft blacks & greys against a purple background, the art work reflecting & commenting on the content of the songs & the lovely shade of purple evoking the musical period in which Wolf worked; the effect was subtle & evocative. The words of the songs were displayed in large clear white type against the dark background of the art works.

I think I have only once before been to a recital which used surtitles, which have now become obligatory in opera houses. I am all in favor of using them in recitals, though I understand there are various difficulties, including cost, that prevent surtitles from becoming standard for recitals. It's worth the trouble, from an audience member's point of view, if only for sparing us the constant rustling & riffling & folding of programs with the words in them. (I'm always amazed by the number of habitual recital-goers who seem unable to figure out how the songs are arranged on the word-sheets, leading to endless flipping & scanning & searching, generally during the music). I was also grateful that in his brief opening remarks, Phan politely but clearly asked us not to applaud until the very end. I don't consider it the end of what passes for civilization if applause arrives at the "wrong" moment, but it is obtrusive, often feels merely de rigueur, & would be especially disruptive when the songs are all relatively brief (our 46 were covered in roughly an hour & 15 minutes).

The soprano is sometimes flirtatious, sometimes annoyed at her straying lover; the baritone is seductive, sometimes puzzled; both are sometimes angry, sometimes sweet. The later songs sometimes reference Paradise, in presence or in absence, a singular marker in Catholic Italy. Unlike lieder that expose the intimate feelings of a single heart, these songs are usually addressed outwards, to another (perhaps this is part of their extroverted "Italian" nature, in the eyes of an Austrian like Wolf), though there is not a clear dramatic arc or storyline in this cycle, but rather a variety of moods & situations; potent little dramas are implied, then slip away. The interplay between Hoskins & Zerouali reflected the on-going variety of the songs; nothing was overdone, nothing detracted from whichever was singing at the time, but both were at all times really present & responsive to the other. Both singers have appealing voices, Zerouali vigorous & forceful, Hoskins with a powerful but pure tone. Their attention to the words & their meanings was heightened by the audience's ability to follow along easily with the surtitles.

I do find the Taube Atrium Theater an odd space, with some acoustic peculiarities. There were only a couple of brief moments when the singers seemed to let the big size of their voices escape the reality of the room a bit. These were very tiny flaws in a collection of jewels. All concert-goers know the peculiarities of the interactions between the day they're having & the performance: does one lift or bring down the other, pull one somewhere else or seem like more of the same: each performance will be different for each audience member. So I'll just say I was having a fairly strange & not all that good day, & this concert was a welcome & delightful respite.

San Francisco Performances: Davóne Tines & Ruckus

Last Saturday I was back in Herbst Theater to hear bass-baritone Davóne Tines & Ruckus (who were joined by the Concert Choir of the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, directed by Michael Desnoyers), presented by San Francisco Performances, performing What Is Your Hand in This?, a program (to paraphrase the program notes) celebrating the tradition of dissent in American music, particularly as expressed through questioning this country's treatment of Blacks, from enslavement to Jim Crow apartheid to on-going racist attacks. So the program is a counter-narrative to the more jingoistic (& much more limited & historically blinkered, not to say blind) current celebrations of the founding 250 years ago of the USA. That the irony of the land of liberty holding (certain types of) humans as slaves has long been noted, even before the colonies broke away to form the United States (Samuel Johnson in 1775: "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?") does not make it less urgent to keep pointing out this irony; it seems in fact more pressing than ever, given our corrupt government's attempts to ignore long-time American realities. I had been looking forward to this concert. But what I experienced Saturday struck me as a mixed bag, & left me disappointed.

To start with more positive notes: Ruckus combines modern electric & early instruments, & I liked their free-wheeling approach to baroque music, which highlighted its connections with what is often called Roots music; they can switch easily from Handel to eighteenth-century hymns to Julius Eastman. Tines is always a commanding performer; he was elegantly dressed in a subtly mismatched suit of reddish brown, with a double-breasted jacket (with a very understated pattern of stripes formed by bouclé lozenges; not sure I'm describing this correctly, but the effect was very fine) worn in place of a shirt. He has an extremely expressive voice, & if there were a few rough patches, they passed quickly (he did seem to drink a lot of water during a performance that lasted only a little over one intermissionless hour, with no encore, despite enthusiastic applause; & a cold seemed to be afflicting members of Ruckus: one violinist in particular dropped a few tissues & had to cough into his sleeve a few times). The young chorus sang admirably.

The material was insightfully chosen, & I was delighted to attend a program that was entirely in English, allowing me to set aside (except for one or two brief moments) the printed words. The opening number, Stephen Foster's Beautiful Dreamer, was a particularly astute choice, nodding to the long-standing minstrel tradition exemplified by many of Foster's songs as well as to the dreamers of the beautiful dream of liberty & equality for all that floats, tantalizingly out of reach, over the American project. Tines sold the pretty & somewhat sentimental Victorian ornateness with smoothness & convincing conviction. Another superb choice, for me perhaps the highlight of the concert, was Handel's setting from Messiah of Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage Together? It was a choice open to multiple interpretations, & I loved the way Tines & Ruckus stretched & played with the lines, varying from baroque ornaments to modern vocal techniques, devolving into emotionally convincing sonic ruptures that caught the never-ending historical cycles of the nations dissolving, changing, & continuing to rage furiously.

So what went wrong, at least for me? To start with, the performers were all amplified. That amplification is an increasingly common & even unquestioned occurrence doesn't make it any better as an experience. Herbst is a small enough theater so that I always have to wonder why amplification is necessary: if your voice or your playing can't fill that space, you probably shouldn't be performing professionally, & if you're drowning out (or drowned by) other performers, you as a group need to work on balances. Ruckus did have some electric instruments, but I've heard those incorporated into ensembles without the need to jack up everyone & everything else (& if that can't happen, maybe just drop the electric instruments?)

Amplification flattens the sound & removes its spatial sense, distortions which, even when or if they're subtle, undercut the experience of live music, those elements of the chance & the human. I sit in the first row for my SF Performances concerts, & usually there's an immediacy & intimacy that comes from such proximity that makes it worth the trouble & expense of buying a ticket & going out, rather than just staying in & listening to a recording. On Saturday I felt the electronic pulpit raised above my head, the music & the words talking down to me.

But I've been to other amplified concerts at Herbst, & generally I can adjust. On Saturday, though, there was also a lot of the sort of obligatory audience participation that I – I'll go with dislike. After his opening song, Tines said Good evening & paused, then repeated a bit more firmly Good evening. Evidently we were supposed to respond, as if at a party. Enough did so that he gave a little smile & said he just wanted to see if we were alive. Is enforced participation genuine participation? Intent, silent listening is, I would think, all the sign of life a performer can really want (& more than many of them get). We were told, at times, to clap in rhythm. We were told to sing a chorus, then to sing it again. We were told to raise our hands if we thought we were living in – I think he said odd times? whatever the exact term, it struck me as a bit cutesy & entirely inadequate to the perilous times burning around us. It's been about a decade since the corruptions of American culture suppurated into our current President; did Tines think we hadn't noticed? that we weren't distressed? that we had never expressed our complicated feelings before we were asked to raise our hands? Why do performers so frequently use these coy evasions ("these days", "our times") instead of directly naming the fascist Republican Party? What was the point of making us literally raise our hands, as if most of us aren't thinking night & day about the rotten state of things? What does it accomplish if we raise our hands? We then just put them back down, & continue doing what we were doing before.

The clapping, the singing, the hand-raising: maybe that sort of group activity works more effectively on other people than on me. (I'm not implying that this makes me superior in any way; it may well be a drawback of mine). I do not identify with groups, maybe in particular with other members of an audience. (This audience was actually better than many, but as usual, a woman sitting near me created dazzling amounts of noise shuffling her program during the performance, & a trio of annoying children not only rustled & whispered during the show, they got up, walked out, & then returned disruptively.)

I'd say I have an instinctive aversion to this sort of forced audience participation, but on Saturday I realized that maybe it is learned, as the on-going instructions from stage flashed me back to school days, particularly to the cheerful coercion of post-1968 high-school civics teachers, expecting us, as students & therefore idealists, to produce the correct, high-minded answers to whatever social question was posed. And I basically agree with all those high-minded liberal pieties. But I couldn't help noticing, as a student, that many of my fellow students who were readiest to produce the acceptable answers (the loudest yelps for liberty. . . ) were the same ones who, an hour later during lunch or recess, were going to continue to ridicule & pick on me. I was given frequent reminders of the disjunction between what people feel they need to say to please their teachers & how they actually treat others when the teachers are away. The appropriate & bien-pensant & regurgitated replies seldom connected with anyone's actual actions.

I felt that again on Saturday, the sense that we are there to hear information & to react in a certain way as if we'd never heard it all before, repeatedly, & that this is all sort of a ceremony that we go through that is set apart from what we mostly do in our lives. Tines introduced some songs with a bit of a lecture about the conditions of slaves & slave-owners (as a side note, I was mildly surprised he said "slaves" rather than the more nuanced & nowadays more frequently encountered term "enslaved people"). Of course we've all heard this before. It doesn't get less horrifying, & the ironies don't lessen. As I said at the beginning of this post, these things still need to be said. Repetition is emphasis, & some things need to be emphasized. Are the people who need to hear these reminders, though, the ones who go to art-song recitals in San Francisco?

As a thoughtful & sensitive Black artist, Tines is almost obliged to say these things. And we, as an audience (mixed, but mostly white) attempting to be thoughtful & sensitive, are almost obliged (&, let me add, also often sincerely willing to) react in a certain way. But it all ends up feeling a bit . . . comme il faut? ceremonial? performative? ritualistic? a Dantean whirlwind we can never escape? a Beckett scene of rote statements & standard responses that will play out endlessly in an unchanging landscape? What was new here? (Did anything need to be new here?) Was I just put off by the amplification, & the silly attempts to get the audience "involved" in a way other than by paying attention? Was I just having an off day for some unrelated reason? Had my anticipation been high enough so that disappointment was inevitable?

Another highlight was the song that provided the program's title: What Is My Hand in This? Tines wrote the lyrics, & before the performance started I had read the program note (the notes in general were attributed to Tines & Ruckus) on this song:

"The idea for the song 'What is My Hand in This' came from an invitation to be part of the entertainment at a Christmas party in one of New York City's wealthiest neighborhoods. Davóne took this as an opportunity not to entertain, but to speak directly and imploringly to a room of the 1% with the subtext 'You in this room have the power to affect great change, so what is your hand in contributing?'. The tune borrows from Black American folk tradition." 

With that context in mind, I was surprised at how effective the song was. Because while it was bold of Tines to add this questioning number to his Christmas program, it was perhaps part of the effect, to be expected, if you are the sort of extremely wealthy person who can hire professional singers for your holiday parties, & you choose to hire a Black singer celebrated for his unconventional, thoughtful & often politically conscious choices, that he is going to bring some of the fire next time directly to your hearth. After all, a reminder no matter how subtle that you should, as they say, check your privilege is a reminder that not only are you, compared to most, incredibly privileged, you might even be the gold standard for privilege. There's a subtle, if unintended, form of flattery there. I thought the song might land a little differently at a public concert of miscellaneous schlubs, some of whom had made a financial sacrifice to buy a ticket.

So, as I said, I was surprised at how effective the song turned out to be. In its simple, direct words, it asks us to consider, as we go about our business, what part we play in what's going on around us: what is our responsibility, or our role, or our connection? Questions, not answers, about our individual share in our collective existence. Unlike the clapping in rhythm, the singing along, & other mandatory fun-type activities imposed on us, the audience, as an undifferentiated group, this song asked us to examine, as individuals – the only way in which such questions can be seriously considered, as the answers will be different, often profoundly different, for each of us – how we are linked to our world & our times, & what can we do about it. I think about this topic a lot, & have come up with little in the way of a satisfactory response. Perhaps there is no satisfactory response, & the continuing questioning is the best we can do (or is that just another excuse?)

Was that the sort of direct, individual, thought-provoking moment I needed more of? Was I just a bit burnt out by the burning dumpster fire of our moment? Did the gimmicky participation stuff & the distancing amplification undercut the good moments too much for me? My reaction to this concert bothered me. I feel I should have liked it more, if only out of solidarity & respect with what the artists were trying to do. Did it just hit me at a certain point of information overload? I have struggled with finding & expressing the sources of my disappointment. I can't say Saturday's concert, despite my anticipation, really brought anything new to my thoughts or feelings. I emerged neither energized nor inspired, but exhausted & (more) depressed.  The fault may, of course, be mine.

Benjamin Appl & James Bailieu: Homage to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Baritone Banjamin Appl & pianist James Bailieu recently made a return visit to Herbst Theater & San Francisco Performances with their latest program, For Dieter: The Past and the Future: Homage to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Appl was one of the great lieder singer's final pupils, & considers him a mentor, & he has put together a substantial & rewarding CD set to celebrate his centennial, filled with photographs & information about Fischer-Dieskau & including Appl's renditions of songs associated with different phases of the older baritone's often difficult life. The program at Herbst is similar to that on the recording, but with some differences in arrangement& repertory.

Usually the Herbst stage is, Steinway aside, bare for these recitals, but in this case there was the addition of a stand holding a copy of one of Fischer-Dieskau's self-portraits. Appl & Bailieu both came out, dressed with an unusual formality these days in white tie & tails (though Bailieu was also wearing some stylishly striped socks, though in muted colors). I wondered if the somewhat old-fashioned attire was part of the tribute to a giant of an earlier era.

Between the carefully selected songs, Appl & Bailieu gave us the basic facts of Fischer-Dieskau's life. As he came of age during the Second World War, we obviously start in tumultuous & troubled times; I did not know that he had a disabled brother who was murdered under the Nazi's eugenics policies. Fischer-Dieskau, always a musical child, began singing frequently when he was a prisoner of war in an American-run camp in Italy, after the collapse of the fascist regimes.

Fischer-Dieskau's musical achievements approach the legendary; though I never heard him sing live, his recordings of lieder & opera formed a basic part of my musical self-education. I can't even remember how or where I first heard of him; I just knew that his name on a recording was basically a seal of artistic integrity & therefore the disc would be worth buying & listening to repeatedly. These achievements were, it seems, not mostly mirrored in his private life, which seems to have been marked by depression, self-doubt, & other emotional struggles. He seems to have used such emotions as a spur to keep working & refining his art, though perhaps I should say his arts, as, in addition to singing, he produced an astonishing number of paintings. (Sometimes I think that good time management might be the key skill in life.)

Appl related several of his personal encounters with his mentor, including the last time the two met; I will quote Appl's words from the CD set: "The last time I visited Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in his house on Lake Starnberg was just a few weeks before his death on 18 May 2012; it was important to him to explore Schubert's Hafner-Lieder once again, The themes of these songs include a longing for death, isolation, and reproaches to the gods after a tragic life. He was depressed and his mood was dark; he often fell asleep briefly during the lessons or began to cry. I sensed that this was the last time I would be able to see him."

There were also less somber stories, including one about Appl arriving for a lesson & Fischer-Dieskau coming out to meet him & announcing that he & Julia [Varady, the soprano who was his final wife] had been discussing it at breakfast & they had decided that "Benjamin Appl" was too complicated a name for an international career, & he should now go by "Ben Appl". Appl told us he refrained from responding, "Very well, Mr Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau." What struck me as very amusing about this story was that Fischer-Dieskau's objection was to the younger man's first name, which is fairly common in the English-speaking world & in any case not very difficult, instead of to his last name, which computers struggles with, as it seems to lack the final e necessary for autocorrect's acceptance. People do get hung up on funny things.

Appl sang with a velvety warmth & an attention to meaning that would have given satisfaction to his mentor. The whole recital was clearly sincere & loving & deeply meaningful to the performers, emotions they conveyed to the audience (which thankfully refrained from unnecessary applause that would interrupt the flow of song & anecdote). Most of the pieces were in German, as you might expect, but as we neared the end there was one item in English, the mysterious & evocative setting by Fischer-Dieskau's friend Benjamin Britten of William Blake's Proverb III: "The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship." It's a sentiment that may give some insight into how Fischer-Dieskau managed through life, though the delicately suspenseful, even eerie, music undercuts any possible sense of hearty comradeship.

One interesting bit of information is that the most significant lieder set for the baritone was not Winterreise, as you might expect, but the Brahms Vier ernste Gesänge Opus 121 (Four Serious Songs), a meditative setting of Biblical texts from Ecclesiastes, Sirach, & First Corinthians. (We were given a lovely Der Lindenbaum from Winterreise earlier in the program.)

One significant different between the order of the night's program & that of the CD was the placement of Schubert's An die Musik; this act of profound thanksgiving for the "Blessed Art" opens the recording, but closed the concert. It was preceded by Schubert's Litanei auf das Fest Allerseelen (Litany for all Souls), a prayer for rest for the weary who have passed through life. Together the two songs acted as a summation of the often anguished, always dedicated musician whose art & life we had spent the evening exploring; these two last songs spread over the auditorium like a final benediction. I thought of Larkin's famous lines about the jazz trumpeter Sidney Bechet: "On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes. . . ."

For the encore, Appl first read a long passage from the diaries of Fischer-Dieskau's wife about his first visit to San Francisco (I think this was in the 1950s), a narration of outward triumph but inward risk & uncertainty, as Fischer-Dieskau suffered a few vocal blips but nonetheless triumphed with critics & audience, though he was distressed & anxious enough to leave the theater while the German Consul was looking for him. The final song was another item in English, the folk song The Foggy, Foggy Dew (I assume in Britten's setting, as tribute to their association). Appl's English diction is remarkable, & his telling rendition of the song was both witty & mournful. I wondered if the choice of that particular piece as the encore was a tribute to the celebrated fogs of San Francisco.

San Francisco Performances: Mark Padmore & Paul Lewis perform Schumann

San Francisco Performances opened its season with an all-Schumann program, performed by tenor Mark Padmore & pianist Paul Lewis. I am always happy to hear all three gentlemen.

The first half opened with the Four Hans Christian Andersen Lieder, Opus 40, followed by Liederkreis, Opus 39; after the intermission (which Padmore charmingly referred to in the British way as "the interval"), we had Dichterliebe, Opus 48 – as the opus numbers might tell you, all 33 songs we heard were composed in roughly the same period: according to the program, 1840, the year Schumann finally managed to marry Clara Wieck. Despite the officially happy circumstances of the composer's life at the time, many of these songs are haunted & afflicted with loss. Make of that what you will; of course there is the old warning about answered prayers, but the inner creative impulses of the artist don't always reflect his outer circumstances, even for the Romantics. How could anyone expect something titled Dichterliebe – poet's love – to be straightforwardly happy?

After the opening Andersen lieder, Padmore spoke briefly about the affinity Schumann felt for the writings of that odd spinner of tales. He also mentioned that Schumann was basically a pianist, & we should think of the songs not as verse set to music but as music with words attached. The pellucid playing of Lewis was indeed a highlight of the evening, sparkling & insightful.

With his finely etched features & patriarchal silver beard, Padmore looks like a High Gothic sculpture of one of the prophets, which lends an interesting dimension to some of the songs, such as the solemn conjuration of Cologne Cathedral in Dichterliebe. It seemed to me, with my very limited knowledge of German, that he pointed the words with expressive power, plaintive when needed, thundering on occasion. (I would very much like to hear him sing a program entirely in English.)  The usual adjective applied to British tenors, reedy, doesn't seem out of place; I find it a pleasing quality. And though I have heard these songs sung with more plush tones, given the intellectual & aesthetic integrity & emotional commitment displayed here, the merely plush can seem almost a limitation of what the music contains.

As Padmore pointed out, it's difficult to come up with an encore that could follow Dichterliebe, so he sang one of the four songs that were strangely omitted form the official compilation: Dien Angesicht.

I found it all very satisfying, though the woman behind me managed to make astonishing amounts of noise with her program. I really don't understand this. All the songs are printed there, in the order in which they're sung. Why the endless flipping, folding, searching, creasing, crackling? What is so hard to find? As I was leaving, I heard her say to someone, "That was a nice way to end the week" so I felt kind of bad about my irritation.

San Francisco Performances: Ilker Arcayürek & Simon Lepper

Last Thursday I was back at Herbst Theater for tenor Ilker Arcayürek's all-Schubert recital for San Francisco Performances, with pianist Simon Lepper accompanying him. The repertory was similar to his recent recording The Path of Life, & as explained by the singer, the songs were chosen to illustrate the arc of a life: from Love to Longing (I appreciate that that is the order there) to The Quest for Inner Peace to Resignation to, as a final touch, Redemption. In the Before Time I heard a number of recitals by women that traced the arc of a woman's life & I wanted a man to do something similar, & that was the tenor's plan here.

Arcayürek did an excellent job darkening his voice as the arc progressed, starting with the lively initial numbers, several of which centered around fishing, for some reason (I suppose it is a bucolic & sporty activity; the songs certainly sounded youthful & optimistic), then moving on to the more spiritually searching numbers as well as the emotionally wrenching discovery that one is not loved. There was an intermission, but I wish there hadn't been, as it would have been wonderful to experience the emotional journey straight through. Redemption was a single song, sort of an afterlife lagniappe, Des Fischers Liebesglück, which neatly ties back to the theme of fishing, as well as love & transcendence; the song leaves us "up above / on another shore".

The first song of The Quest for Inner Peace, Die Sterne (The Stars), was particularly touching in its serenity. Of course someone in the audience had to intrude on the moment by applauding (even though the program clearly asked us to hold our applause until the end) & whoever it was didn't even have the respect or taste to wait until the last notes of the song had died away. The one encore, Nacht und Träume, was another inward & contemplative number; as Arcayürek said to the audience while introducing it, the end of The Path of Life is . . . the end (meaning, of course, death) so he wanted to leave us on a more uplifting note.

A very satisfying recital! It was interesting to note that for the second performance in a row (I was at Herbst a week earlier for Jonathan Biss's Schubert concert), a lot of the intermission talk I overheard concerned the SF Symphony's failure to sign Esa-Pekka Salonen for another term. It was understandable the first time, as the news had broken just a day or two before, so it was interesting that it continued into another week. It is a mistake on the Symphony's part that is going to keep on rippling outward for quite some time, I fear.

San Francisco Performances: Lawrence Brownlee & Kevin Miller

It's always a pleasure to welcome Lawrence Brownlee back to the Bay, particularly in recital (this is his third for San Francisco Performances), as I believe his most recent appearance at the Opera (just across the War Memorial complex from Herbst Theater, where he performed on Thursday) was in that unworthy vehicle Don Pasquale, which is my nominee for Worst Opera Libretto of All. Brownlee was accompanied by pianist Kevin Miller, & provided a wide-ranging evening with a dazzling number of long-held as well as soaringly high notes. He must have been exhausted by the end, particularly as he mentioned jet-lag from just flying in from the United Arab Emirates, but he gave no signs of any exhaustion, physical or vocal, & the enthusiastic audience was clearly energized by the art & athleticism on display.

He opened with a set of five lieder by Joseph Marx, one of those late Romantic composers who eschewed Modernist innovations, preferring to dwell among the increasingly old-fashioned (at the time) dappled uncertainties & tumescent longings of the last century's turning. The songs were lovely & unfamiliar, though their subject matter was certainly reminiscent of Lied-Land: linden blossoms & longing, nights of love perfumed by roses, dell-dancing sprites, nostalgia & hope. The set opened with Nocturne, proceeded to Selige Nacht (Blissful Night), then Die Elfe (The Elf), Christbaum (Christmas Tree) – a recollection of childhood memories of Christmases past, with a delicately icy accompaniment reminiscent of traditional carols hovering over it – & finally Hat dich die Liebe berührt (If Love Has Touched You), ending on a note of personal affirmation.

After this set Brownlee spoke to the audience; he is a genial & chatty host. He gave us the background for the second set of songs, which would complete the first half: during the pandemic, as he considered new projects, & in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, he conceived the idea that became his recent album Rising, a collection of new songs by Black American composers based on Harlem Renaissance texts (at least, those in the public domain; for copyright reasons, he wasn't able to include Zora Neale Hurston). For Thursday's concert he added a number related to but not officially part of the project, a setting by Jeremiah Evans of Langston Hughes's April Rain Song, a lyrical evocation of Spring showers that formed a nice aesthetic contrast to the sloppy weather that has been sweeping through the Bay Area the past few days.

We also heard Peace, an imploring invocation by Jasmine Barnes to a text by Georgia Douglas Johnson, I Know My Soul, a stirring setting by Brandon Spencer of a text by Claude McKay, Vocalise III by Carlos Simon, a lively & tricky number that Brownlee introduced with a pause, saying he needed to start counting; Beauty That Is Never Old & The Gift to Sing, two settings by Damien L Sneed of texts by James Weldon Johnson, the first an intimate evocation of the sheltering strength of personal love & the second a hopeful proclamation of the power of art, in this case song, to see us through life & its many difficulties. Then we had Romance by Shawn E Okpebholo, a setting of sweet & erotic words by Claude McKay, which Brownlee introduced by saying that while tenors like him can vocally go high, they don't always live high, but this song required him to live up there: again, there was no sense of strain as he stayed up in those heights, & that elevated tessitura gave a heady & on-rushing sense of romantic passion to the setting. Finally we had a setting by Joel Thompson of My People by Langston Hughes, a Whitman-like celebratory catalogue celebrating Black American life that included a wonderful sort of laughing chorus at the end. It wasn't necessary to follow along in the texts, so exemplary & telling was the singer's diction.

It was during one of the quieter moments of  this final set that someone in the audience dropped I don't know what, but it made a very loud sound as it landed. Other than that audience annoyances were mostly of the "very excited" variety, as in the two old biddies a few rows behind me who kept squealing at the long-held high notes. The most egregious audience offense, though, was the old clown who tried to sneak into the seat behind me during intermission with his dog. Yes, a goddam dog. & no, this was not a service animal (he didn't even claim it was an "emotional support" animal, not that I accept that that is a real thing that needs to be foisted on other people, particularly in a concert hall). I cannot even begin to understand the sense of entitlement there. I made it clear that his goddam dog was not welcome near me.

So now we reconvene for the second half of the recital, in which Brownlee explored the Italian operatic repertory for which he is famous. He coupled an aria with a song by four composers: Verdi, Donizetti, Rossini, & Bellini. Brownlee of course is celebrated for his mastery of the bel canto line; he has amazing breath control, but he also can summon an expressive quality, often plangent, that shapes the virile core of his sound. I should also mention the attentive & powerful accompaniment by Miller throughout; there was a lot of byplay between the two performers & they clearly have a simpatico working relationship. From Verdi we had Ad una Stella (To a Star), followed by a ringing & witty version of La donna è mobile, the Duke's ironic aria from Rigoletto. From Donizetti we had the song Me voglio fa'na casa (I Want to Build a House), followed by Allegro io son (I'm so happy) from Rita. Before introducing the Rossini duo, Brownlee noted how important that composer has been to his career, &, as it was Leap Day, wished him a happy birthday. The Rossini song was La lontananza (The distance), one of Rossini's Sins of Old Age, & the aria was D'ogni piu sacro impegno (Then, let all faith be broken) from L'occasione fa il ladro; as with the Donizetti, it was enjoyable to hear something a bit unusual rather than one of the more obvious greatest hits from this composer. The final numbers from our Italian quartet were Bellini's La ricordanza (Recollection) & Nel furor delle tempeste (In the fury of the tempests) from Il pirata. Brownlee & Miller reminded us why Bellini was famed for flowing & beautiful melodies. There was one encore, Someone's Crying Lord, Come by Here, whose pleas for heavenly help for the afflicted are accompanied by a surprisingly jaunty tune. It was a rich & generous evening that Brownlee & Miller gave us.