paths through a garden
slowly buried under leaves
drifting back to earth
27 October 2011
26 October 2011
25 October 2011
24 October 2011
North and South out west
Last Saturday I was at the first concert of BluePrint’s season. BluePrint, the new music ensemble at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, is headed up by ever-chic and adventurous Nicole Paiement, who also directs Ensemble Parallele; this very enjoyable concert offered (among other things) a preview of their February 2012 chamber-opera version of Harbison’s Great Gatsby. I was given a ticket to this concert, so thanks to whoever thought to include me. The box office was very nice about letting me switch the seat to one I preferred.
First up was another Harbison piece, North and South, a setting of six poems by Elizabeth Bishop (some of the poems were ones Bishop did not publish in her lifetime). On Saturday it seemed to me that I had lost whatever vague count of the songs I was keeping, but I see in the program that indeed the last song is not listed and was apparently dropped. I had heard the piece a few times in the recording by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (to whom the first three songs are dedicated; the second three are dedicated to Janice Felty). This was my first time hearing the piece live.
Julienne Walker, a tall, striking mezzo with short dark hair wearing a black ‘20’s style dress, was our soloist. She started off by dedicating her performance to her mother, who was in the audience, which was pretty disarming, not that her very fine performance needed the audience to disarm. Her diction was perfectly clear; I could make out every word of the poems without reference to the program. The first song in each half of the piece is from Bishop’s “Songs for a Colored Singer,” which she wrote thinking of Billie Holiday. These are by no means minstrel pieces, but when they’re sung as opposed to read on the page they do bring up the dicey question of how far a singer should go in imitating a “black” sound. Harbison’s music for those pieces doesn’t sound like a blues song, but the blues are clearly in evidence. On the recording Hunt Lieberson goes farther than Walker did in performance; each choice is defensible. Hunt Lieberson was, to say the least, a naturally soulful singer, and that keeps her performance from caricature; Walker sang them in a way more in line with how she sang the rest of the set, and I thought it worked very well. Her mother must have been proud.
That was followed by Kurt Rohde’s Concertino for Solo Violin and Small Ensemble, which is from last year, about twenty minutes long, and in three movements; Axel Strauss was the violin soloist. The words that occurred to me were charmingly mysterioso – charming not just in the sense of delightful but in the sense of putting us under a spell; in his program note Rohde describes it as “intricate,” which is an apt word, as if it were a very elaborately patterned knot garden, which means it wouldn’t wear out after a few listens but keep growing.
After the intermission we had Erwin Schulhoff’s Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra, Op. 43, which seemed quite glittery and abrupt but honestly though I enjoyed the piece I’m not sure I have anything to say about it since my mind was kind of zapping around as is its occasionally overstimulated sometime wont and I found myself going in and out of the moment – no reflection on the performance by the ensemble or soloist Keisuke Nakagoshi. These things happen, especially right after intermissions. Ah, poor Schulhoff! It was your moment, but I failed to pull myself into the moment.
The final piece was an excerpt from The Great Gatsby, in the new chamber orchestration by Jacques Desjardins: the quarrel between Myrtle (Erin Neff) and Wilson (Bojan Knezevic) that leads up to her death. (Interestingly, Myrtle was the role sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in the original production, so both vocal pieces on the program were ones written for the late mezzo.) It was very dramatic and exciting (and well sung), and the orchestration sounded rich and vivid and you don’t really need me to tell you to buy a ticket to this, do you?
The next BluePrint concert is November 19 and features the work of Parisian composer Philippe Hersant, who will be there in person. I am planning on being there in person as well.
First up was another Harbison piece, North and South, a setting of six poems by Elizabeth Bishop (some of the poems were ones Bishop did not publish in her lifetime). On Saturday it seemed to me that I had lost whatever vague count of the songs I was keeping, but I see in the program that indeed the last song is not listed and was apparently dropped. I had heard the piece a few times in the recording by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (to whom the first three songs are dedicated; the second three are dedicated to Janice Felty). This was my first time hearing the piece live.
Julienne Walker, a tall, striking mezzo with short dark hair wearing a black ‘20’s style dress, was our soloist. She started off by dedicating her performance to her mother, who was in the audience, which was pretty disarming, not that her very fine performance needed the audience to disarm. Her diction was perfectly clear; I could make out every word of the poems without reference to the program. The first song in each half of the piece is from Bishop’s “Songs for a Colored Singer,” which she wrote thinking of Billie Holiday. These are by no means minstrel pieces, but when they’re sung as opposed to read on the page they do bring up the dicey question of how far a singer should go in imitating a “black” sound. Harbison’s music for those pieces doesn’t sound like a blues song, but the blues are clearly in evidence. On the recording Hunt Lieberson goes farther than Walker did in performance; each choice is defensible. Hunt Lieberson was, to say the least, a naturally soulful singer, and that keeps her performance from caricature; Walker sang them in a way more in line with how she sang the rest of the set, and I thought it worked very well. Her mother must have been proud.
That was followed by Kurt Rohde’s Concertino for Solo Violin and Small Ensemble, which is from last year, about twenty minutes long, and in three movements; Axel Strauss was the violin soloist. The words that occurred to me were charmingly mysterioso – charming not just in the sense of delightful but in the sense of putting us under a spell; in his program note Rohde describes it as “intricate,” which is an apt word, as if it were a very elaborately patterned knot garden, which means it wouldn’t wear out after a few listens but keep growing.
After the intermission we had Erwin Schulhoff’s Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra, Op. 43, which seemed quite glittery and abrupt but honestly though I enjoyed the piece I’m not sure I have anything to say about it since my mind was kind of zapping around as is its occasionally overstimulated sometime wont and I found myself going in and out of the moment – no reflection on the performance by the ensemble or soloist Keisuke Nakagoshi. These things happen, especially right after intermissions. Ah, poor Schulhoff! It was your moment, but I failed to pull myself into the moment.
The final piece was an excerpt from The Great Gatsby, in the new chamber orchestration by Jacques Desjardins: the quarrel between Myrtle (Erin Neff) and Wilson (Bojan Knezevic) that leads up to her death. (Interestingly, Myrtle was the role sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in the original production, so both vocal pieces on the program were ones written for the late mezzo.) It was very dramatic and exciting (and well sung), and the orchestration sounded rich and vivid and you don’t really need me to tell you to buy a ticket to this, do you?
The next BluePrint concert is November 19 and features the work of Parisian composer Philippe Hersant, who will be there in person. I am planning on being there in person as well.
23 October 2011
22 October 2011
if this is how the world ends, I hope the Mayans were right about 2012
I was at last night's magnificent and thrilling San Francisco Symphony performance of the Verdi Requiem, the mightiest of all requiem masses. Sure, I could quibble about a thing or two, but don't want to; this was as good as it gets. Thanks to conductor James Conlon, soloists Sondra Radvanovksy, Dolora Zajick, Frank Lopardo, and Ain Anger, and most definitely to the SF Symphony Chorus and the Symphony itself, for a rendition that was awesome in both the slang and the strict senses of the word.
(The jaunty joints of this tall fellow were suspended above the staircase last night, but I suspect the Requiem was a coincidence and he is actually waiting for Halloween/the Day of the Dead.)
Haiku 2011/295
clouds in a clear sky
I garden in autumn heat
last night the earth shook
(3 palpable earthquakes in 2 days, here in earthquake country)
I garden in autumn heat
last night the earth shook
(3 palpable earthquakes in 2 days, here in earthquake country)
21 October 2011
20 October 2011
Richard Serra Drawings at SFMoMA
The fourth floor of SFMoMA, which was my happy summertime haunt while it housed the reunited Stein collection, now holds a new special exhibit, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective. It was a good idea to put in such a different show. I’ve wandered through the new exhibit twice so far, and I can't help remembering when that wall held Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein or Matisse’s Forest of Fontainebleau was around that corner. Those pictures are now gone, and soon their ghosts will be gone as well. The Serra drawings create their own mood and space. I tend to be indifferent to Serra's sculpture, those giant steel slabs that dominate and defy their environments; the environments I pass through are already so full of massive obnoxious forms and sounds and smells that I can't get too excited or outraged about one more. I think they might be good sculptures to live with on a daily basis, say in your backyard, if you have one, where you can note the slowly changing color of the oxidizing metal, the rain and the rust, the morning and afternoon light glowing and shining on it in their turn, the birds alighting or shitting on it, the squirrels running over the top. Seen in a museum, they’re more like: hey, look, a big slab of metal! What’s in the next gallery?
The first time I went through the exhibit I was accompanied by SFMike. We had gone into the museum during my lunch hour and stumbled onto a member preview, which I could bring him into, since I am a member. I felt like Virgil guiding Dante, except the galleries were very much less crowded than hell. They were also much less crowded than the member preview for the Steins, so that was actually pretty nice, since space is very important to the effect of these drawings, many of which are large enough to cover almost an entire gallery wall. They are black with sometimes some gray (as in a wash or a roller running out of black ink). Mike wanted to know why they are called drawings instead of paintings, since most of them are done with paint stick and what looks like black paint put on thickly enough to create subtle textures. I couldn’t answer him then, and still can’t now even though I’ve since read the Exhibition Guide available in the galleries (a pamphlet which is printed in tiny gray type on white, with Serra’s direct quotations in black – I know I need new glasses, but the guide really does seem designed more for appearance than legibility).
So you can walk into a room and see a wall-sized sheet of hand-made paper, covered with black paint, stapled (with black staples, so they’re barely visible) to the wall. Otherwise the gallery holds nothing but the blonde wood floors, the white walls, and the natural light filtering through the louvers in the ceiling. As you walk through several rooms each containing a similar large black drawing (I will use their nomenclature, but feel free to call them paintings), perhaps differing from the last one in being rectangular rather than square, or on a back rather than a side wall, you can see how the differences change how the space comes through to you. The spareness, the ambiguous black shapes (both graceful and massive), the sense of space, and of space being emptied out and carefully but subtly arranged, and of high-minded if obscure philosophical purposes, all reminded me of the ink drawings of Zen monks. Given the reputation for brutality and sheer mass that Serra’s sculptures have, it’s sort of surprising to find in the drawing exhibit the peace-inducing atmosphere of a Japanese garden. And if, as you and your mind wander through the rooms, your thoughts stray occasionally towards the unseen owners of these works, people who can afford to spend probably the equivalent of my annual salary on a large sheet of hand-made paper entirely covered with black paint, and the murmur of mental streams gives way temporarily to the gentle lapping sound of the Art World sucking up to the Very Rich, well, that too has its purpose, and it's easy enough to move on until the light falls differently.
The first time I went through the exhibit I was accompanied by SFMike. We had gone into the museum during my lunch hour and stumbled onto a member preview, which I could bring him into, since I am a member. I felt like Virgil guiding Dante, except the galleries were very much less crowded than hell. They were also much less crowded than the member preview for the Steins, so that was actually pretty nice, since space is very important to the effect of these drawings, many of which are large enough to cover almost an entire gallery wall. They are black with sometimes some gray (as in a wash or a roller running out of black ink). Mike wanted to know why they are called drawings instead of paintings, since most of them are done with paint stick and what looks like black paint put on thickly enough to create subtle textures. I couldn’t answer him then, and still can’t now even though I’ve since read the Exhibition Guide available in the galleries (a pamphlet which is printed in tiny gray type on white, with Serra’s direct quotations in black – I know I need new glasses, but the guide really does seem designed more for appearance than legibility).
So you can walk into a room and see a wall-sized sheet of hand-made paper, covered with black paint, stapled (with black staples, so they’re barely visible) to the wall. Otherwise the gallery holds nothing but the blonde wood floors, the white walls, and the natural light filtering through the louvers in the ceiling. As you walk through several rooms each containing a similar large black drawing (I will use their nomenclature, but feel free to call them paintings), perhaps differing from the last one in being rectangular rather than square, or on a back rather than a side wall, you can see how the differences change how the space comes through to you. The spareness, the ambiguous black shapes (both graceful and massive), the sense of space, and of space being emptied out and carefully but subtly arranged, and of high-minded if obscure philosophical purposes, all reminded me of the ink drawings of Zen monks. Given the reputation for brutality and sheer mass that Serra’s sculptures have, it’s sort of surprising to find in the drawing exhibit the peace-inducing atmosphere of a Japanese garden. And if, as you and your mind wander through the rooms, your thoughts stray occasionally towards the unseen owners of these works, people who can afford to spend probably the equivalent of my annual salary on a large sheet of hand-made paper entirely covered with black paint, and the murmur of mental streams gives way temporarily to the gentle lapping sound of the Art World sucking up to the Very Rich, well, that too has its purpose, and it's easy enough to move on until the light falls differently.
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