Museum Monday 2023/17

 

detail of Mrs Robert S Cassatt, the Artist's Mother by Mary Cassatt, now in the de Young Museum of San Francisco

Friday Photo 2023/16

 

urban abstraction

Museum Monday 2023/16

 

detail of The Annunciation by the Master of the Retable of the Reyes Católicos, now in the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

Friday Photo 2023/15

 

shadows

SF Conservatory of Music: Handel's Flavio

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Historical Performance Department presented Handel's opera Flavio, rè de’ Longobardi this past weekend; I heard it on Saturday. There were different student casts for each performance but both were led by Department Chair Corey Jamason, & the ensemble was directed by Jamason, Elisabeth Reed, & Marcie Stapp.

The staging was minimal but effective: there were two stone benches on either side of the stage, in front of the orchestra, & surtitle screens let us know what the setting was. Unlike my René Jacobs recording, or the more recent one (which I haven't heard), this performance used female singers instead of counter-tenors; the women playing men were dressed in suits, & the directors had astutely advised them on how to sit in a masculine way, but there was no ungainly effort to hide the their essential femininity, which was not a problem. The women playing women wore stylish gowns.

The opera begins where many end, with two couples singing together about how complete & perfect their happiness is. Complications, of course, ensue, due to political rivalries, social tensions, & the wayward eye of the randy titular monarch. Sometimes the tone is lightly ironic, but there are also moments of genuine anguish & surprising violence – there's a duel that I thought would end in injury but instead (OK, spoiler alert for a 300-year-old opera!) ends in death. (In case you're wondering how I can have listened to a recording & not know this: I have a bad habit, due to limited time, of listening to things without necessarily reading along in the libretto; hence one of the revelations given to me by a live performance is often the plot.) Harmony is restored at the end, thanks to the benevolent monarch, who not only causes most of the problems but acts almost as a Deus ex Machina to resolve them.

The whole performance was a delight, from beginning to the end, almost three hours later: dazzling, moving arias followed one after another, all splendidly delivered by the young cast: mezzo Jaimie Langner as the arbitrary & self-amused Flavio; tenor Seth Hanson as the elderly counselor Ugone; bass-baritone Joseph Calzada as his seething rival counselor, Lotario; & then the four lovers, mezzo MonaLisa Pomarleanu as Ugone's son Guido, mezzo Cambria Metzinger as Ugone's charmingly flirtatious daughter Teodata, soprano Alissa Goretsky as Lotario's daughter Emilia, & soprano Hyesoo Kim as the courtier Vitige, in love with Teodata – all were excellent but I was particularly impressed with the two sopranos, Goretsky & Kim, who delivered their more emotionally wide-ranging roles with great depth & beauty.

The orchestra was also excellent (& I recognized some of the players, such as Yunyi Ji on harpsichord, from the Baroque Ensemble Concerto Competition concert in February). Like that concert, the opera was free to the public; all you needed was a reservation – it was a useful reminder that the Conservatory has lots of great offerings, freely available; if BART were running better, I would definitely be there more often.

SF Jazz: Vijay Iyer, solo & Trio

Pianist & composer Vijay Iyer came to town last week, specifically to SF Jazz, currently celebrating its 10th anniversary. He gave a solo piano concert on Thursday & performed with his Trio (Linda May Han Oh on double bass & Tyshawn Sorey on drums) on Friday, Saturday, & Sunday. I was at the Thursday & Friday concerts, & would happily have gone to Saturday & Sunday as well if life had allowed.

Iyer came out, elegantly attired in a black suit & open-collared black shirt, & didn't speak much either evening, preferring, as he noted, to let the music do the talking. For the solo performance it wasn't until about halfway through that he said anything, in a somewhat hesitant, slightly gravelly voice. (Both performances I heard were over 90 minutes, maybe even closer to the 2-hour mark, with no intermission.) I am fine with the lack of stage patter, as I always feel if you're a musician, the music is, as Iyer noted, your way of communicating, & listeners can take from it what they take. (My heart always sinks at the Symphony when conductors put down the baton & pick up the microphone.) He did, of course, on Friday introduce the other members of the Trio. He noted there was "merch in the lobby"; before the concert I bought all four CDs that were offered, & some of those around me, obviously hipper than I, had bought the vinyl being offered (he did note that Universal Music had lost about a 100 of his vinyl recordings, but some of them made it through). He also noted that the Trio (&, separately, both Han Oh & Sorey) had recordings coming out in the next few months; the Trio's is titled Compassion, which, as he noted, is something our society is sorely in need of, which led him to interject "Trans rights are human rights" & in the face of the frightening & cynical attempts by the Republican Party to demonize trans people, it was nice to hear that simple acknowledgement. Most of the tunes went unnamed & there was no play list that I saw, but one number he did name was Children of Flint; social awareness & consciousness are woven into this artist's work.

Iyer did also mention how glad he was that SF Jazz was around, & provided a space for "this music", & then added, "When I say 'this music' I don't know what I'm talking about . . . " he stopped there, but of course jazz has always had a fluid & undefinable element to it, & that's its essence; as with the river that is never the same twice, even another performance of the same tunes by the same artists will have a different sound & effect on different nights (another reason I was sorry I didn't get to hear the Trio more than once on this visit). Of course for most audience members the one performance they go to "becomes" the music, & the artist, in the sense of defining them, in a way that, at least temporarily, pauses the fluid, transitory nature of the art, & this is even truer of recordings, which, through repeated listening, can become engraved on our minds as something definitive. 

The numbers often opened with a single, poetic piano line, which then developed into something alternately meditative, driven, coruscating . . . the sets, solo & Trio, never lagged; there was an astute sense of pacing, as the quieter, more reflective passages gave way to rowdier moments, often punctuated, in the Trio, by a sharp, even startling, drum thwack, as the bass danced up & down. . . . there were occasional projections during the music, random colored blobs & the occasional geometric shape wafting over stage & audience; I think this was not something that Iyer brought with him, as he looked at one & said, "What planet is that?" & someone shouted, whether authoritatively or speculatively I do not know, "It's a map of the brain", though perhaps Iyer's remark was metaphorical. . . . anyway: a wonderful two nights at the Jazz Center, & I will be on the lookout for Compassion, as well as compassion. . . .

The Triumph of Love at Shotgun Players

Marivaux, with his mixture of commedia-style tomfoolery, French philisophe musing, & subtle psychological/erotic annalysis, can be tricky to bring off, but Shotgun Players have succeeded splendidly with their current production of The Triumph of Love (in the Stephen Wadsworth translation, directed by company Founding Artistic Director Patrick Dooley).

The single set is the garden of Hermocrates, a philosopher living in the country who advocates capital-R Reason & vociferously opposes the whimsical vagaries of Love. It is a French-style garden, which means it is formal, ordered, & regular: Nature brought under control. But there are hints that Nature is not so easily controlled: the lovely fountain in the middle has a few tufts of grass growing up in the cracks, & the water is cloudy. Some of the hedges look, upon closer examination, as if they are starting to grow out of their trimming. You can see where this is going, but of course there are complications on the way to getting there.

There's no need to recite the whole plot; for one thing, there's a lot of it, & as is the case with baroque opera, it makes perfect sense as it unfolds in front of you but if you read a synopsis the story collapses into a confusing set of disguises, plots, & counter-plots. The basic story is a bit of a fairy-tale, & has some (I assume coincidental) similarities to As You Like It, which also involves usurpers, gender-swapping, & a restoration of order guided by Nature: the young Princess Leonide, heir to an usurped throne, disguises herself as a man so she can infiltrate the society of Hermocrates & his equally unmarried sister, Leontine, with the purpose of meeting & forming an alliance with the rightful heir, Agis, whom they have raised in secret, teaching him to hate both Love & the usurping Leonide. Achieving this end means Leonide, going under several different male pseudonyms as the occasions require, must verbally seduce both the spinster Leontine, who thinks she is speaking to a handsome young man, & the pompous Hermocrates, who recognizes that s/he is actually a young woman in disguise (it's surprising & refreshing to see the "no one will recognize me in these trousers" convention blithely upended like this, though throughout there are also teasing implications of confused same-sex attraction). In addition, Leonide has her maid, Corine, also disguised as a man, & there is a greedy & somewhat dim gardener, Dimas, & Harlequin, doing his Harlequin thing. That's a lot to keep spinning effortlessly in the air, in an elegant Watteau-style, but the cast beautifully keeps it all aloft.

The commedia elements were, to me, surprisingly successful: I love the look of commedia, & I love the thought that I'm watching something that I could have seen in 18th-century Naples, but honestly, as theater, it doesn't quite work anymore: scheming servants getting beaten, attempts to swindle "old" people out of their money so young people can get married . . . they may have worked when the theater audience was made up of frivolous young people while the old people stayed home counting their money, but nowadays the theater audience has reversed, & is mostly made up of the prosperous & aged – don't they see where they fall in this schemata? OK, bit of a digression there on my commedia issues, so let me bring it back to the Ashby stage by saying that Jamin Jollo as Harlequin (complete with facial half-mask, the only one in the cast, & the traditional diamond-patterned outfit) is, unlike most Harlequins, genuinely funny, both in his actions & his line readings, & Dimas the somewhat dim gardener (Wayne Wong) also goes beyond the stereotypical low-comic countryman to achieve a genuine personality. Susannah Martin as Corine the maid mostly gets to provide exposition & otherwise move the plot along with Harlequin & Dimas but she manages all that so that it seems effortless & natural, rather than mere plot scaffolding.

The central quartet is also strong. As Hermocrates, David Boyll brings humanity to the overly self-certain philosopher, a role that could easily become too much of a caricature. Mary Ann Rodgers as his sister brings off a difficult role with aplomb: there's a touching longing (or longing to touch) in her slowly opening to the unexpected love she thinks is being offered to her by the handsome young stranger. Both of these roles, but particularly that of the sister, could come dangerously close (in the commedia manner) to callously mocking an "older" (read: middle-aged) person for daring to think that Love might still be a possibility for them. As the end of the play approaches, it becomes clear that there isn't going to be an overly neat solution: too many people are in love with one person. There is just the right amount of bittersweet at the end: Hermocrates has been embarrassed, as is to be expected from the Enemy of Love in a play called The Triumph of Love, but his situation is not irreparable, & perhaps his philosophy will be broadened by the chastisement. The last moments of the play are Leonide apologizing for misleading the sister, realizing that her necessary plot has upset the sister's quiet life, but also acknowledging that perhaps Leontine will not be entirely unhappy to have her life upset. It's a poignant, ambiguous finale.

But I've leapt ahead to the ending without mentioning the other two members of the central quartet! Veronica Renner, looking dashing & convincingly androgynous in her masculine attire, keeps the whole thing running with clarity & warmth, switching seamlessly from one persona to another. By the end, she too has learned something about the power of Love, as we can see in her final remarks to Leontine. Edward Im as Agis, the isolated, therefore socially awkward, rightful heir, is both funny & ultimately deeply touching as a lonely young man desperately trying to find friendship & then love.

The set is by Malcolm Rodgers, & I wished I had booked one of the seats on stage, in the garden, even over my front-row seat. Ashley Renee designed the handsome costumes, basically 18th-century in style with modern touches. Spense Matubang designed the lighting & Michael Kelly the sound. The show runs through April & is well worth seeing (even more than once), though Shotgun often extends their shows so it's worth keeping an eye out for that.

(The mural outside the Ashby Stage is by graphic artist R Black; the painting right above is a detail of Watteau's The Foursome at the Legion of Honor.)

Museum Monday 2023/15

 

detail of Ceylon, a cyanotype by Anna Atkins from around 1850, now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Friday Photo 2023/14

 

a doorway in Berkeley

Museum Monday 2023/14

 

detail of The Crucifixion by the Le Nain Brothers, as seen in the special exhibit The Brothers Le Nain: Painters of 17th-Century France at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco