a strange distant cry
low beneath dark thunderclouds
waking me from sleep
31 March 2011
30 March 2011
29 March 2011
28 March 2011
27 March 2011
Britten in Berkeley 2: Comedy
(Blogger seems to be removing all of my paragraph breaks today. I have no idea why. I hope I've managed to fix it.)
Last night I went to the Castleton Festival Opera's production in Berkeley of Albert Herring. The Rape of Lucretia, which I saw the night before, is (among other things) about the effects of male power on women, and Albert Herring is about the effects of female power on men. I had seen it on DVD but never on stage, and to my surprise when I looked for a copy this morning among my thousands of discs, I do not own it on CD. Premiered the year after Lucretia, it is a comedy, though I’ll say right now that when the third act of a comedy doesn’t even start until 10:30, my heart sinks and my spirits fail to lift.
During the second intermission, for reasons that will become clearer as I go on, I briefly considered just leaving, but luckily for me my ingrained habit of sticking it out to the end prevailed since otherwise I would have missed the evening's musical highlight, the threnody as the gathered village mourns Albert’s hat (and, they assume, Albert himself). It was profound and beautiful, one of those sudden moments of sorrow that give a comedy depth, though like much of the opera it went on a bit too long. It was past midnight before I got home. I would hate to lose any of Britten’s ravishing music, but I sure could take scissors to Eric Crozier’s libretto.
Like Lucretia, Albert Herring reflects its post-war period, but unfortunately it reflects not the great philosophical questions of the time, which have no answers and therefore tend to endure, but prevailing psychological theories, whose certainties come with a definite shelf-life.
Albert is a Momma’s boy, which means he is "repressed" by his mother (Oedipus and his famous complex undoubtedly hover over the relationship), and this repression (in this theory) inevitably ends in explosion: Albert, anointed the virginal May King by Lady Billows and her gang of do-gooders, goes out on a tear. In the morning he is missing and presumed dead, though in fact he is reborn: a night of drunkenness (along with fighting and perhaps a visit to a prostitute) establishes his independence. Oh, he’s still working for his mother in her shop, and still teased by the local children, but presumably he can handle all of them now.
As far as I know, this opera is usually presented as a straightforward, rather good-natured comedy, a form in which it doesn’t quite work for me: one night of drunkenness doesn’t do away with years of shyness (believe me, I know), and at the end when Albert kisses Sid’s girl Nancy (Sid and Nancy – a lovely coincidence!) I see it not as his cheerful entry into the world of normal guys but as a complex and troubling moment; he’s longed for Nancy but realized she has no sexual interest in him; it’s a strange moment for him and her and Sid. I think it’s high time to approach this opera in a darker and more ambiguous way (much as Cosi Fan Tutte has gone from frivolous farce about trivial people to haunting exploration of the ambiguities of identity).
This production, staged like the previous night's Lucretia by William Kerley, stuck to the shallow end throughout. There was way too much throwing of fruit (and I doubt that a prudent shopkeeper like Mrs Herring would be so cavalier about the stock her livelihood depends on). The three children (baldly and badly amplified) were never quite incorporated smoothly into the action (I assume they’re local and perhaps there wasn’t enough rehearsal time). There was, oddly, no attempt to make the older townspeople look older (the singers are mostly very young, at the beginning of their careers), so that you missed the whole sense of age versus youth.
Albert was played by Brian Porter, who is an immensely likeable performer – maybe too likeable for Albert, who has a strange side that causes children to ridicule him. Porter didn’t seem particularly shy; I didn’t see any of the deep stubbornness that shy people often have, or the deep anger and humiliation that Albert feels, particularly in the scene in the shop after the May Fair, when he overhears Sid and Nancy outside talking about him (and the way it was staged, it wasn’t as clear as it should be that he was overhearing them). When he returns in Act 3 and describes his night to the worried and disapproving townspeople, he seemed fairly sunny and cheerful – there was no edge as he told them how he had deliberately done everything they had just rewarded him for not doing.
Nancy Gustafson gave what I felt was a misguided performance as Lady Billows. This was no grande dame, serene in the assurance that her morally correct attitudes entitle her to direct the lives of lesser mortals (a type not unknown in these parts). Instead she simpered and chortled and blinked and winked constantly, and was dressed oddly not in a dowager’s severity but in light and attractive colors; it was difficult to tell why everyone unquestioningly obeyed her, and why she held the dominant position she did.
The whole cast was up there trying (among those I haven’t mentioned yet, I found Adrian Kramer as Sid and Ashleigh Semkiw as Miss Wordsworth particularly appealing) but I found the whole thing unconvincing. If you’re going to treat something as light and frivolous, it really needs to come in well under three hours and ten minutes. And the story is too much of a stacked deck; we’re primed to ridicule the officious Lady Billows and to applaud Albert when he breaks free, even though, as I noted above, his actual position hasn’t changed much: he’s still sleeping alone.
As I trudged off to catch the train, I reflected that Lady Billows not only really is correct most of the time; in her own way she’s actually a progressive. The opera is set in a period before legal contraception or abortion, when job opportunities for women were extremely limited, and sexually transmitted diseases were not so easily cured: maybe it’s not such a bad idea for her to warn the village girls against sexual activity that could end up leaving them penniless or otherwise even more trapped than they already are. Can we really blame her for condemning excessive drink (I think it’s easy to forget at this point that prohibition was a feminist issue)? And if anyone is going to condemn her condemnation of tobacco, that person isn’t yours truly. (During both intermissions, one of the musicians must have gone out to smoke, because the smell coming from the pit right after was just as nasty as Lady Billows said it was).
I can't see Lady Billows as purely a ridiculous figure. And the terms of Albert’s liberation are presented in a very dated, mid-century way: smoking, drinking, and promiscuity are what mark the behavior of mature adults. It’s all presented as very healthy, even wholesome, and it must have seemed so as the first cracks started to appear in the oppressive gray façade of postwar propriety. I can't quite take it as intended, though, in this time and place.
Well, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. I thought of the young man near me on the BART ride home after Lucretia, who kept talking very loudly into his cell phone about how he "couldn’t find no job" because of that concealed weapons charge. He had decades ahead of him (assuming his life didn’t come to an early violent end) in which to be haunted by his high-spirited youthful excesses. Repression and propriety aren't always such bad things. I realize there are dangerous bigots and sexual prigs at large today, but such people are unlikely to attend, let alone be converted by, arty chamber operas presented in Berkeley.
I’m too much a combination of Albert and Lady Billows to find the ending of this opera convincing or even uplifting. There’s a famous anecdote about Garbo watching Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and murmuring at the end, “Give me back my beast.” Albert had been something out of the ordinary; one night of drunken fighting and suddenly he’s a regular lad, just like the rest. The true tragicomedy of the Good Boy remains to be written.
Last night I went to the Castleton Festival Opera's production in Berkeley of Albert Herring. The Rape of Lucretia, which I saw the night before, is (among other things) about the effects of male power on women, and Albert Herring is about the effects of female power on men. I had seen it on DVD but never on stage, and to my surprise when I looked for a copy this morning among my thousands of discs, I do not own it on CD. Premiered the year after Lucretia, it is a comedy, though I’ll say right now that when the third act of a comedy doesn’t even start until 10:30, my heart sinks and my spirits fail to lift.
During the second intermission, for reasons that will become clearer as I go on, I briefly considered just leaving, but luckily for me my ingrained habit of sticking it out to the end prevailed since otherwise I would have missed the evening's musical highlight, the threnody as the gathered village mourns Albert’s hat (and, they assume, Albert himself). It was profound and beautiful, one of those sudden moments of sorrow that give a comedy depth, though like much of the opera it went on a bit too long. It was past midnight before I got home. I would hate to lose any of Britten’s ravishing music, but I sure could take scissors to Eric Crozier’s libretto.
Like Lucretia, Albert Herring reflects its post-war period, but unfortunately it reflects not the great philosophical questions of the time, which have no answers and therefore tend to endure, but prevailing psychological theories, whose certainties come with a definite shelf-life.
Albert is a Momma’s boy, which means he is "repressed" by his mother (Oedipus and his famous complex undoubtedly hover over the relationship), and this repression (in this theory) inevitably ends in explosion: Albert, anointed the virginal May King by Lady Billows and her gang of do-gooders, goes out on a tear. In the morning he is missing and presumed dead, though in fact he is reborn: a night of drunkenness (along with fighting and perhaps a visit to a prostitute) establishes his independence. Oh, he’s still working for his mother in her shop, and still teased by the local children, but presumably he can handle all of them now.
As far as I know, this opera is usually presented as a straightforward, rather good-natured comedy, a form in which it doesn’t quite work for me: one night of drunkenness doesn’t do away with years of shyness (believe me, I know), and at the end when Albert kisses Sid’s girl Nancy (Sid and Nancy – a lovely coincidence!) I see it not as his cheerful entry into the world of normal guys but as a complex and troubling moment; he’s longed for Nancy but realized she has no sexual interest in him; it’s a strange moment for him and her and Sid. I think it’s high time to approach this opera in a darker and more ambiguous way (much as Cosi Fan Tutte has gone from frivolous farce about trivial people to haunting exploration of the ambiguities of identity).
This production, staged like the previous night's Lucretia by William Kerley, stuck to the shallow end throughout. There was way too much throwing of fruit (and I doubt that a prudent shopkeeper like Mrs Herring would be so cavalier about the stock her livelihood depends on). The three children (baldly and badly amplified) were never quite incorporated smoothly into the action (I assume they’re local and perhaps there wasn’t enough rehearsal time). There was, oddly, no attempt to make the older townspeople look older (the singers are mostly very young, at the beginning of their careers), so that you missed the whole sense of age versus youth.
Albert was played by Brian Porter, who is an immensely likeable performer – maybe too likeable for Albert, who has a strange side that causes children to ridicule him. Porter didn’t seem particularly shy; I didn’t see any of the deep stubbornness that shy people often have, or the deep anger and humiliation that Albert feels, particularly in the scene in the shop after the May Fair, when he overhears Sid and Nancy outside talking about him (and the way it was staged, it wasn’t as clear as it should be that he was overhearing them). When he returns in Act 3 and describes his night to the worried and disapproving townspeople, he seemed fairly sunny and cheerful – there was no edge as he told them how he had deliberately done everything they had just rewarded him for not doing.
Nancy Gustafson gave what I felt was a misguided performance as Lady Billows. This was no grande dame, serene in the assurance that her morally correct attitudes entitle her to direct the lives of lesser mortals (a type not unknown in these parts). Instead she simpered and chortled and blinked and winked constantly, and was dressed oddly not in a dowager’s severity but in light and attractive colors; it was difficult to tell why everyone unquestioningly obeyed her, and why she held the dominant position she did.
The whole cast was up there trying (among those I haven’t mentioned yet, I found Adrian Kramer as Sid and Ashleigh Semkiw as Miss Wordsworth particularly appealing) but I found the whole thing unconvincing. If you’re going to treat something as light and frivolous, it really needs to come in well under three hours and ten minutes. And the story is too much of a stacked deck; we’re primed to ridicule the officious Lady Billows and to applaud Albert when he breaks free, even though, as I noted above, his actual position hasn’t changed much: he’s still sleeping alone.
As I trudged off to catch the train, I reflected that Lady Billows not only really is correct most of the time; in her own way she’s actually a progressive. The opera is set in a period before legal contraception or abortion, when job opportunities for women were extremely limited, and sexually transmitted diseases were not so easily cured: maybe it’s not such a bad idea for her to warn the village girls against sexual activity that could end up leaving them penniless or otherwise even more trapped than they already are. Can we really blame her for condemning excessive drink (I think it’s easy to forget at this point that prohibition was a feminist issue)? And if anyone is going to condemn her condemnation of tobacco, that person isn’t yours truly. (During both intermissions, one of the musicians must have gone out to smoke, because the smell coming from the pit right after was just as nasty as Lady Billows said it was).
I can't see Lady Billows as purely a ridiculous figure. And the terms of Albert’s liberation are presented in a very dated, mid-century way: smoking, drinking, and promiscuity are what mark the behavior of mature adults. It’s all presented as very healthy, even wholesome, and it must have seemed so as the first cracks started to appear in the oppressive gray façade of postwar propriety. I can't quite take it as intended, though, in this time and place.
Well, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. I thought of the young man near me on the BART ride home after Lucretia, who kept talking very loudly into his cell phone about how he "couldn’t find no job" because of that concealed weapons charge. He had decades ahead of him (assuming his life didn’t come to an early violent end) in which to be haunted by his high-spirited youthful excesses. Repression and propriety aren't always such bad things. I realize there are dangerous bigots and sexual prigs at large today, but such people are unlikely to attend, let alone be converted by, arty chamber operas presented in Berkeley.
I’m too much a combination of Albert and Lady Billows to find the ending of this opera convincing or even uplifting. There’s a famous anecdote about Garbo watching Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and murmuring at the end, “Give me back my beast.” Albert had been something out of the ordinary; one night of drunken fighting and suddenly he’s a regular lad, just like the rest. The true tragicomedy of the Good Boy remains to be written.
Britten in Berkeley 1: Tragedy
Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Festival Opera paid a visit to Berkeley this week, bringing two of Britten’s chamber operas for two performances each: The Rape of Lucretia (I was at the Friday performance) and Albert Herring (I was at last night’s performance). I had been looking forward to these performances, but found them both a bit disappointing, and not just because I was apparently one of the few in attendance who paid anything close to full price (and not just because Zellerbach is exactly the wrong hall for chamber opera, which matters less when you sit as close as I like to).
I had seen Lucretia a few years ago in a knock-out performance in Philadelphia (my reactions are here). I saw it twice and could happily have sat through it a third time. The intensity was much less at the Berkeley performance, and to make comparisons easier, it turned out this was exactly the same production (stage direction by William Kerley) that I saw back east. The first-act close, the menacing and ritualistic repetition of “good night” by Tarquin and Lucretia and her attendants, which was so powerful in Philadelphia, seemed – not quite redundant, but certainly less harrowing.
Some of the business has changed – the Female Chorus no longer glares angrily so often at the Male Chorus, for one thing. The unfortunate idea of dressing the Male and Female Chorus as sort of television evangelists was retained, though the Male Chorus (Vale Rideout, with Arianna Zukerman as the Female Chorus) threw the Bible around more than a preacher should.
I would have preferred seeing the Male and Female Chorus treated with more depth because the double narration of the opera – the Christian framework around the classical tableau – is one of the most fascinating aspects of this opera, and one of several dichotomies (male/female, Etruscan/Roman, military camp/domestic life) that the viewer has to bridge. I had some thoughts on this in my Philadelphia entry, so I won’t go into it much here. But the basic question of why good people suffer was clearly ripe for renewed interrogation in 1946, when this opera was written, and Britten and his librettist, Ronald Duncan, give us the opportunity by uniting the two main cultural traditions of Europe, the Classical and the Christian, which had either culminated in or been perverted by the murderous violence of the two world wars, and having each tradition confront a terrible act of violence.
The singers were mostly very good. Vale Rideout and Arianna Zukerman as the Male and Female Chorus were both committed, and Michael Rice as Lucretia’s husband, Collatinus, brought a lot of depth and anguish to his part. Michael Weyandt as Junius and Matthew Worth as Tarquinius were both very good, but the latter was not as subtle or complex as Nathan Gunn was in Philly. Both female attendants were also excellent – Alison Tupay was Bianca and Marnie Breckenridge, fresh off her local triumph as the Princess in Glass’s Orphee, was Lucia.
That brings us to Ekaterina Metlova as Lucretia. I thought she was the weak link in the cast, which is obviously a problem in an opera called The Rape of Lucretia. I feel the same pain in disliking her that I felt when discussing Jane Eaglen: much as I dislike what she’s doing, she’s clearly committed and trying her best; it’s just that she moves clumsily and is not a very good actress. The simple dignity and depth that Tamara Mumford had in Philadelphia were replaced by acting that was ostentatiously “operatic” in the wrong way: outward and self-dramatizing. Metlova played the first half like Dalila and the second half like Lucia; at no point did I feel she was like Lucretia.
The backstage conversations were clearly audible through much of the performance. And there was weirdness going on in the audience, too, particularly in the second half, and particularly in the front row of the far right. A large woman came and sat down in the aisle seat and a man in the row kept saying something loudly to her (this was during the performance). She kept getting up and then coming back. And during the rape scene, the blubbery child in the row – I’m guessing she was around 11, and I’m guessing it was a she based entirely on the white sweatshirt with a large picture of a patchwork heart and teddy bears that she was wearing – started laughing very loudly, and then slowly and solemnly took her right index finger and thrust it up each of her nostrils, one after the other. Shortly after that they stormed out, appalled by either the rape or their own behavior, and the rest of us could be disappointed in the performance in peace. I can’t imagine why they were there in the first place – why would anyone bring a child of that age and maturity level to something called The Rape of Lucretia?
I had seen Lucretia a few years ago in a knock-out performance in Philadelphia (my reactions are here). I saw it twice and could happily have sat through it a third time. The intensity was much less at the Berkeley performance, and to make comparisons easier, it turned out this was exactly the same production (stage direction by William Kerley) that I saw back east. The first-act close, the menacing and ritualistic repetition of “good night” by Tarquin and Lucretia and her attendants, which was so powerful in Philadelphia, seemed – not quite redundant, but certainly less harrowing.
Some of the business has changed – the Female Chorus no longer glares angrily so often at the Male Chorus, for one thing. The unfortunate idea of dressing the Male and Female Chorus as sort of television evangelists was retained, though the Male Chorus (Vale Rideout, with Arianna Zukerman as the Female Chorus) threw the Bible around more than a preacher should.
I would have preferred seeing the Male and Female Chorus treated with more depth because the double narration of the opera – the Christian framework around the classical tableau – is one of the most fascinating aspects of this opera, and one of several dichotomies (male/female, Etruscan/Roman, military camp/domestic life) that the viewer has to bridge. I had some thoughts on this in my Philadelphia entry, so I won’t go into it much here. But the basic question of why good people suffer was clearly ripe for renewed interrogation in 1946, when this opera was written, and Britten and his librettist, Ronald Duncan, give us the opportunity by uniting the two main cultural traditions of Europe, the Classical and the Christian, which had either culminated in or been perverted by the murderous violence of the two world wars, and having each tradition confront a terrible act of violence.
The singers were mostly very good. Vale Rideout and Arianna Zukerman as the Male and Female Chorus were both committed, and Michael Rice as Lucretia’s husband, Collatinus, brought a lot of depth and anguish to his part. Michael Weyandt as Junius and Matthew Worth as Tarquinius were both very good, but the latter was not as subtle or complex as Nathan Gunn was in Philly. Both female attendants were also excellent – Alison Tupay was Bianca and Marnie Breckenridge, fresh off her local triumph as the Princess in Glass’s Orphee, was Lucia.
That brings us to Ekaterina Metlova as Lucretia. I thought she was the weak link in the cast, which is obviously a problem in an opera called The Rape of Lucretia. I feel the same pain in disliking her that I felt when discussing Jane Eaglen: much as I dislike what she’s doing, she’s clearly committed and trying her best; it’s just that she moves clumsily and is not a very good actress. The simple dignity and depth that Tamara Mumford had in Philadelphia were replaced by acting that was ostentatiously “operatic” in the wrong way: outward and self-dramatizing. Metlova played the first half like Dalila and the second half like Lucia; at no point did I feel she was like Lucretia.
The backstage conversations were clearly audible through much of the performance. And there was weirdness going on in the audience, too, particularly in the second half, and particularly in the front row of the far right. A large woman came and sat down in the aisle seat and a man in the row kept saying something loudly to her (this was during the performance). She kept getting up and then coming back. And during the rape scene, the blubbery child in the row – I’m guessing she was around 11, and I’m guessing it was a she based entirely on the white sweatshirt with a large picture of a patchwork heart and teddy bears that she was wearing – started laughing very loudly, and then slowly and solemnly took her right index finger and thrust it up each of her nostrils, one after the other. Shortly after that they stormed out, appalled by either the rape or their own behavior, and the rest of us could be disappointed in the performance in peace. I can’t imagine why they were there in the first place – why would anyone bring a child of that age and maturity level to something called The Rape of Lucretia?
Bali/Josefowicz
One advantage of Thursday night concerts in Civic Center is that (depending on the time of year) the Asian Art Museum is open late. About once a month they have some sort of irritating event with loud bad music and crowds milling around drinking and other things I try to avoid. But if you go on a regular Thursday night, it's ideal. 
The museum's holdings are much larger than its building, so the permanent exhibits are not so permanent and change often. There are also special exhibits; the current one is Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance.
There is also a handy restaurant. Above is the pork stew, with decorative coriander.
Photography is not allowed in the special exhibits, which seems to be a universal museum rule, so all of the pictures here are from the lobby, the gift shop, or the permanent collection.
The other main point of the exhibit is how the Dutch, after violently colonizing Bali, then promoted its image as an island paradise. Nothing like palm trees and bare-breasted women to make you forget the sordid economics of exploitation.
Well, Bali: what's not to love? gamelan, ancient dances, shadow puppets! The three pictures of fabulous shadow puppets above, by the way, are from the gift shop, which means you could walk out of the exhibit with your own work of art. I love how they are elaborately colored, even though they are used mostly to create shadows. I was very tempted to buy one, but I was on my way to Leila Josefowicz's recital at Herbst Theater and it didn't seem like a good idea to carry a delicate and elaborate paper puppet through the rain to a concert and then home on BART. The exhibit runs until September 11, so I guess I have time for puppet-purchases under more auspicious circumstances.
The museum's holdings are much larger than its building, so the permanent exhibits are not so permanent and change often. There are also special exhibits; the current one is Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance. 
There is also a handy restaurant. Above is the pork stew, with decorative coriander. 
Photography is not allowed in the special exhibits, which seems to be a universal museum rule, so all of the pictures here are from the lobby, the gift shop, or the permanent collection. 
As is true of many African cultures, until the twentieth century these elaborate and beautiful works were created for use in rituals, sacred and social, rather than as stand-alone art objects. There are several fascinating videos built into the exhibit, showing dances, shadow puppet shows, and even cremations, which take place in animal-shaped coffins under elaborate palanquins, which are then set aflame. Unfortunately the video I saw did some editing on the actual burning, so you couldn't watch the whole progress of the fire, which I have always found maybe too fascinating.
The other main point of the exhibit is how the Dutch, after violently colonizing Bali, then promoted its image as an island paradise. Nothing like palm trees and bare-breasted women to make you forget the sordid economics of exploitation.The art of Bali has been very influential, particularly on musicians; gamelan has fascinated and inspired composers from Debussy and Britten to Lou Harrison. The fascination with Bali has itself become an object of study and fascination; Evan Ziporyn recently wrote an opera called A House in Bali exploring the sojourns there of Colin McPhee, Walter Spies, and Margaret Mead (I wrote about the opera here).
Well, Bali: what's not to love? gamelan, ancient dances, shadow puppets! The three pictures of fabulous shadow puppets above, by the way, are from the gift shop, which means you could walk out of the exhibit with your own work of art. I love how they are elaborately colored, even though they are used mostly to create shadows. I was very tempted to buy one, but I was on my way to Leila Josefowicz's recital at Herbst Theater and it didn't seem like a good idea to carry a delicate and elaborate paper puppet through the rain to a concert and then home on BART. The exhibit runs until September 11, so I guess I have time for puppet-purchases under more auspicious circumstances. This was my first time hearing Josefowicz. She was in recital with pianist John Novacek. It was very enjoyable, once I adjusted my expectations. Josefowicz is a MacArthur fellow, primarily for her advocacy of new music, so I was expecting something wilder than we got: there were five composers, and four of them were from the pantheon (Brahms, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Schubert), with Estonian Erkki-Sven Tuur (there should be an umlaut over each of those u’s) as the only contemporary. His piece, Conversio, was very attractive, sort of a minimalist hoe-down that ends in icy shrieks. Josefowicz is an astonishing virtuoso who can summon up all sorts of sounds, but (here comes the other expectation I had to adjust) warmth and lyricism were missing, at least in this recital. I don’t know if she felt the program simply didn’t call for them, or if the program was chosen specifically because it didn’t call for them. The playing was dazzling, like sun on a glacier, but I felt we were in a fairly restricted emotional world.
I would definitely go hear her again, but I just didn’t have that “oh, wow, she can do anything!” reaction I had when I first heard Hilary Hahn or Jennifer Koh live. It was the Stravinsky, of all things, that came the closest to an emotional connection; the Eclogues in the Due Concertant went to the heart. Novacek was a hard-driving accompanist. The first half was the Brahms Scherzo in C minor for Violin and Piano and the Shostakovich Sonata for Violin and Piano, Opus 134. After the intermission came the Stravinsky, the Tuur, and Schubert’s Rondo brilliant in B minor for Violin and Piano, D. 895. The encore was, of all delightfully unexpected things, Charlie Chaplin’s Smile (I didn’t catch the name of the person who did the arrangement – Haussman? – and I don’t see it listed on the San Francisco Performances site). The familiar song was not only free of schmaltz, it was oddly free of sentiment – like a pure unworldly shaft of icy light. I would never have guessed it could sound that way, but it was very refreshing and beautiful.
26 March 2011
fun stuff I may or may not get to: April (with a tail-end of March thrown in)
Monday, March 28, Earplay offers works by John Cage, Elliott Carter, Jonathan Harvey, Mei-Fang Lin, and Michelle Lou, at Herbst Theater, with tickets at the bargain price of $20 and the sensible start time of 7:30 (pre-concert talk at 6:45).
SF Conservatory of Music’s Opera Theater presents Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites in English at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason, March 31 through April 2; tickets are available through the Cowell Theater Box Office at 415-345-7575.
On April 1, Old First Concerts presents the Del Sol String Quartet in music by Zhou Long, R. Murray Shafer, Elena Kats-Chernin, Ben Johnston, and Reza Vali.
The Aurora Theater presents Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale, starting April 1.
American Bach Soloists present secular works by Bach and Telemann April 1-4, in various locations.
Cal Performances presents Jessica Rivera on April 3 at 3:00 in Hertz Hall, singing Schumann’s Frauenliebe und leben, Debussy’s Ariettes oubliees, and Mark Grey’s Atash Sorushan (Fire Angels), a new song cycle commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11, written for Rivera and also featuring Molly Morkoski on piano and MEME (the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble from the University of Chicago).
Also on April 3, at 1:00, Cutting Ball Theater Hidden Classics Reading series presents Marivaux’s The False Suitor in a new translation by Ann and George Crowe, directed by Cutting Ball Artistic Director Rob Melrose.
San Francisco Contemporary Music Players present their fortieth anniversary gala concert, featuring music by Terry Riley, Beat Furrer, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Charles Boone, at Herbst Theater on Monday April 4 at 7:30. The Riley work is the famous In C. There is a reception afterwards.
ACT presents Sartre’s No Exit, in case you needed a reminder that hell is other people, starting April 7.
Berkeley Rep offers Chekhov’s Three Sisters, in a version by Sarah Ruhl, starting April 8.
April 8 at the Community Music Center (544 Capp Street in San Francisco), new music ensemble Redshift and percussion trio Rootstock present music by Marc Mellits, Derek Bermel, Belinda Reynolds, Ryan Brown, Steve Reich, John MacCallum, Guo Wenjing, and Chilean folk music.
Between the Lines, the new music ensemble at the SF Conservatory of Music, presents Homage to Andrew Imbrie, featuring Chicago Bells, from Time to Time and String Quartet No. 5, plus Gunther Schuller’s String Quartet No. 4, on April 9.
Philharmonia Baroque closes its season with Haydn’s Creation, April 8-13, in various locations.
SF Conservatory of Music presents An Evening with Frederica von Stade, in which she will offer coaching, career advice, and stories from her career to voice students, on April 12 at 7:30. Admission is free but tickets are required; contact the box office at 415-503-6275.
San Francisco Ballet offers two programs; Program 7 offers Stravinsky’s Petrouchka.
The San Francisco Symphony presents Osmo Vanska conducting the world premiere of Red and Green by Thomas Larcher, the Ralph Vaughn Williams Symphony No. 2, A London Symphony, and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, with soloist Alexander Barantschik playing the same violin (presumably) used at the work’s world premiere in 1845. That’s April 8-9; on April 14-17, Charles Dutoit conducts the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique and Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lontain (with cello soloist Gautier Capucon).
San Francisco Performances is taking up a lot of real estate on my April calendar, with the Paul Taylor Dance Company in three different programs (March 30-April 3); the much-praised Pavel Haas Quartet playing Schulhoff, Debussy, and Haas himself (Quartet No. 2, Op. 7, From the Monkey Mountains; that’s on April 3 at 7:00); Dubravka Tomsic playing Chopin and Beethoven (April 9); the Tetzlaff Quartet playing Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Schoenberg (April 16); Lucinda Childs recreating Dance, her 1979 collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt (April 28-30); and Philip Glass playing solo piano works by himself (April 30).
SF Conservatory of Music’s Opera Theater presents Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites in English at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason, March 31 through April 2; tickets are available through the Cowell Theater Box Office at 415-345-7575.
On April 1, Old First Concerts presents the Del Sol String Quartet in music by Zhou Long, R. Murray Shafer, Elena Kats-Chernin, Ben Johnston, and Reza Vali.
The Aurora Theater presents Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale, starting April 1.
American Bach Soloists present secular works by Bach and Telemann April 1-4, in various locations.
Cal Performances presents Jessica Rivera on April 3 at 3:00 in Hertz Hall, singing Schumann’s Frauenliebe und leben, Debussy’s Ariettes oubliees, and Mark Grey’s Atash Sorushan (Fire Angels), a new song cycle commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11, written for Rivera and also featuring Molly Morkoski on piano and MEME (the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble from the University of Chicago).
Also on April 3, at 1:00, Cutting Ball Theater Hidden Classics Reading series presents Marivaux’s The False Suitor in a new translation by Ann and George Crowe, directed by Cutting Ball Artistic Director Rob Melrose.
San Francisco Contemporary Music Players present their fortieth anniversary gala concert, featuring music by Terry Riley, Beat Furrer, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Charles Boone, at Herbst Theater on Monday April 4 at 7:30. The Riley work is the famous In C. There is a reception afterwards.
ACT presents Sartre’s No Exit, in case you needed a reminder that hell is other people, starting April 7.
Berkeley Rep offers Chekhov’s Three Sisters, in a version by Sarah Ruhl, starting April 8.
April 8 at the Community Music Center (544 Capp Street in San Francisco), new music ensemble Redshift and percussion trio Rootstock present music by Marc Mellits, Derek Bermel, Belinda Reynolds, Ryan Brown, Steve Reich, John MacCallum, Guo Wenjing, and Chilean folk music.
Between the Lines, the new music ensemble at the SF Conservatory of Music, presents Homage to Andrew Imbrie, featuring Chicago Bells, from Time to Time and String Quartet No. 5, plus Gunther Schuller’s String Quartet No. 4, on April 9.
Philharmonia Baroque closes its season with Haydn’s Creation, April 8-13, in various locations.
SF Conservatory of Music presents An Evening with Frederica von Stade, in which she will offer coaching, career advice, and stories from her career to voice students, on April 12 at 7:30. Admission is free but tickets are required; contact the box office at 415-503-6275.
San Francisco Ballet offers two programs; Program 7 offers Stravinsky’s Petrouchka.
The San Francisco Symphony presents Osmo Vanska conducting the world premiere of Red and Green by Thomas Larcher, the Ralph Vaughn Williams Symphony No. 2, A London Symphony, and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, with soloist Alexander Barantschik playing the same violin (presumably) used at the work’s world premiere in 1845. That’s April 8-9; on April 14-17, Charles Dutoit conducts the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique and Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lontain (with cello soloist Gautier Capucon).
San Francisco Performances is taking up a lot of real estate on my April calendar, with the Paul Taylor Dance Company in three different programs (March 30-April 3); the much-praised Pavel Haas Quartet playing Schulhoff, Debussy, and Haas himself (Quartet No. 2, Op. 7, From the Monkey Mountains; that’s on April 3 at 7:00); Dubravka Tomsic playing Chopin and Beethoven (April 9); the Tetzlaff Quartet playing Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Schoenberg (April 16); Lucinda Childs recreating Dance, her 1979 collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt (April 28-30); and Philip Glass playing solo piano works by himself (April 30).
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