West Edge Opera Snapshot

West Edge Opera has a new program called Snapshot. Its mission is to "introduce work by both emerging and established Northern California composers."

Here's a good chunk of the press release announcing this:

Conceived and curated by composer Brian M. Rosen, Snapshot presents excerpts from eight previously unproduced operas over two programs performed in intimate concert settings in venues in Berkeley and San Francisco: the Goldman Theater at the David Brower Center at 2150 Allston Way in Berkeley and the historic and newly renovated Bayview Opera House at 4705 3^rd Street in San Francisco. ConductorsMary Chun and Jonathan Khuner lead an instrumental chamber group featuring members of San Francisco-based new music ensemble Earplay. 

On January 21^st at 8:00 p.m. at the David Brower Center and January 22^nd at 3:00 p.m. at the Bayview Opera House, Snapshot presents the work of David Conte, Stephen Eddins, William David Cooper and Alden Jenks: 

      ·      David Conte, Composition Chair at San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and librettist John Stirling Walker’s Famous opens the first     Snapshot program. Famous is an exploration of the life of Ultra               Violet (Isabelle Collin Dufresne), one of Andy Warhol’s “superstars.”        ·      Stephen Eddins’s big band, gospel and jazz-inspired music and Michael O’Brien’s libretto bring 20^th-century Southern novelist Eudora Welty’s story to life in Why I Live at the P.O.        ·      William David Cooper, a recent graduate of the PhD program at UC Davis, has received awards from ASCAP and the Academy of Arts and Letters. Snapshot presents a sample of Cooper and librettist Will Dunlap’s grand opera Hagar and Ishmael.        ·      Alden Jenks helped found and served as Director of the Electronic Music Studio at San Francisco Conservatory. Jenks wrote both the music and libretto for Afterworld, a “serious comedy” loosely inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Works by Carla Lucero, Allen Shearer, Linda Bouchard and Liam Wade comprise the second program of Snapshot, presented on February 25^th at 8:00 p.m. at the David Brower Center and February 26^th at 3:00 p.m. at the Bayview Opera House: 

         ·      Carla Lucero’s One O’Clock, an excerpt from her opera in  progress about Helen Keller, opens the second Snapshot program. Lucero has received awards for her previous operas from Creative Work Fund, San Francisco Arts Commission, Meet the Composer and OUT Magazine, among other organizations.          ·      Longtime collaborators Allen Shearer and librettist Claudia Stevens, whose Middlemarch in Spring was produced last year in the Bay Area to critical acclaim, present an excerpt from Howards End Again, based on the eponymous novel by E. M. Forster.          ·      Linda Bouchard’s The House of Words was composed in 2003. Snapshot presents excerpts from the opera which includes a libretto constructed of excerpts from The Book of Embraces by celebrated Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist Eduardo Galeano.          ·      Liam Wade and librettist Vynnie Meli’s The Stranger the Better closes the second Snapshotprogram. A farcical riff on A Streetcar Named Desire, the opera is Wade and Meli’s 2016 prize-winning submission to The Atlanta Opera’s 24-Hour Opera Project, where an entire opera is composed, designed and staged within twenty-four hours. 

Interesting range of works and composers; wish more than 2 of the 8 composers were women! I am sure it's all worth hearing.

It's a Wonderful Life Comes to San Francisco

Back in October, 2014, when David Gockley announced his retirement, the press release included the following:

In the near future, San Francisco Opera will see three additional new operas planned by Gockley including Marco Tutino and Fabio Ceresa’s La Ciociara (Two Women) in June 2015, Bright Sheng and David Henry Hwang’s Dream of the Red Chamber for Fall 2016, and a soon-to-be-announced commission from Jake Heggie for Fall 2017.

But, in fact, the new opera for fall, 2017, is John [Coolidge] Adams' new opera, Girls of the Golden West.

Today came the press release for the Heggie opera, It's a Wonderful Life. It will be performed in the fall of 2018. It should not be a surprise that we got the information now, as the opera is about to open at Houston Grand Opera, one of the other co-commissioners. (The third commissioning organization is the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.) The opera is based on the famous Frank Capra film and on Philip Van Doren Stern's short story "The Greatest Gift."

Patrick Summers will conduct, with the cast to be announced at a later date. The production team is the same as for Moby-Dick, a previous Heggie opera, which has been quite a success:  director 
Leonard Foglia, set designer Robert Brill, costume designer David C. Woolard, lighting designer Brian Nason and projection/video designer Elaine J. McCarthy. The Houston cast is excellent and personally I hope that it comes here unchanged. 

Concert Pile-Up Weekend

Yes, it's the weekend after Thanksgiving and there are too many concerts (and other events) to attend.

• Adler Fellows Gala Concert (The Future is Now), Friday, Herbst Theater, SF; a chance to say "I knew them when...."
• SF Bach Choir, Christmas by Candlelight, with The Whole Noyse, Friday & Sunday
• Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Handel's Joshua; Dec. 1-4, SF, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Lafayette. Note that single tickets in Berkeley are not for sale in advance because of issues caused by the change of venue after the First Congregational Church fire.
• California Bach Society's Scandinavian Christmas, in SF, Palo Alto, and Berkeley, Friday, Saturday, & Sunday
• Day of Silents, SFSFF's one-day December extravaganza
• Joyce DiDonato at Cal Performances; War & Peace program with Il Pomo d'Oro
• Friction Quartet & Friends performing works by Benavides, Clay, Luna, and Winges; Sunday, 7:30 p.m. SF Women's Building
• SFS is just getting into the holiday season except for Sunday's chamber music program at the Palace of the Legion of Honor

California Bach Society Scandinavian Christmas

Cal Bach has a great-looking program coming up next weekend.

December 2-4, 2016

Jul, Jul—A Scandinavian Christmas

Music old and new, and traditional carols

Program:

Himlen mørkner stor og stum                                       Carl Nielsen (1865–1931)

Hjemlige jul

                  

Ave maris stella                                                                       Edvard Grieg (1843–1907)

Hvad est du dog skjøn

 

Ave maris stella                                                                       Trond Kverno (b. 1945) 

Corpus Christi Carol

 

There is no rose of such vertu                                       Fredrik Sixten (b. 1962)

Se, julens stjärne strålar klar                                          Hugo Alfvén (1872–1960)

 

Gläns över sjö och strand                                                 Ivar Widéen (1871–1951)

På krubbans strå

 

Guds Son är född                                                                     Otto Olsson (1879–1964)

 

Jul, jul, strålande jul                                                               Gustaf Nordqvist (1886–1949)

 

Jordens oro viker                                                                   Ludvig Norman (1831–1885)

 

Bereden väg för Herran                                                      arr. Anders Bond (1888–1980)

 

Kimer, I klokker                                                                      tune by Henrik Rung (1807–1871)

 

Staffan var en stalledräng                                                  traditional Swedish

 

Himmelriket liknas vid tio jungfrur                           traditional Swedish

 

Friday, December 2, 8pm, at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church 

1111 O’Farrell at Franklin, San Francisco 94109

 

Saturday, December 3, 8pm, at All Saints’ Episcopal Church 

555 Waverley at Hamilton, Palo Alto 94301

 

Sunday, December 4, 4pm, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church 

2300 Bancroft at Ellsworth, Berkeley 94704

 

Doors open 30 minutes prior to each performance. 

Tickets: $35 (discounts for advance purchase, seniors, students, and under 30)

650-485-1097  |  http://www.calbach.org  |  info@calbach.org

Germany Friday Photo

Signage for the blind, Munich S- or U-Bahn

Germany, 2015

Germany Friday Photo

Plaque in memory of homosexual victims of the Nazis

Dachau, Germany

August, 2015

Germany Friday Photo

Barracks Foundations, Dachau

August, 2015

Gods Help Us All

My personal election post-mortem is complicated. Trump won because of many and diverse reasons, including....the Electoral College. Hillary Clinton is currently ahead in the popular vote, and as absentee ballots are counted, her lead might increase. Yes, it is likely that more people want her to be president than want Donald Trump.

Here's everything that I believe had at least some influence on the outcome. They are not in any particular order.

1. Clinton has now won nearly 3 million votes more than DJT. So I take back what I said last month about turnout. Terrible, really terrible, turnout. I have not seen vote totals yet, but in 2008, there were 131 million votes cast and in 2012 about 129 million. This year, it looks like around 124 and a quarter million. So, five million fewer total votes. I haven't seen an analysis yet of where the missing votes are. I have heard that not nearly as many people volunteered for HRC as for Obama, which could certainly be the case. (I will have an update on this when the full vote count is known.)
2. Voter suppression efforts, starting with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by SCOTUS and laws passed in many states that made it harder to vote, by requiring ID that could be very difficult to obtain, by closing polling places or restricting early voting, etc. People who'd voted for 40, 50, 60 years had to obtain original birth certificates, which were sometimes unavailable owing to records destruction by fire, etc. This is partially responsible for the missing votes. For example, Trump's margin of 27,000 votes in WI vs. the 300,000 turned away for lack of voter ID.
3. White people and their racial resentments. If you don't think racism was a big factor in this election, you need to look at what Trump said during the campaign, at the targets of voter suppression, at the treatment of President Obama (birther lies), and at what people are actually saying about why they voted the way they did. Over at Whatever, John Scalzi's blog, a commenter (Layla Lawlor) notes that she has family and friends who voted for Trump, and they are saying things about returning to the way things were, when they were "nice for white people" and they didn't have to let black people and religious minorities into cultural institutions, etc.
4. Working-class people who've been deeply harmed by the destruction of decent jobs and who feel they've been ignored by Washington and people on the coasts. They are right to be resentful and to want more for themselves and their children. Their interests have been neglected by neo-liberals and trade pacts that moved jobs to Mexico and China, and it's not like they've gotten the help that, as our fellow Americans, they deserved.
5. Yes, sexism. Misogyny. 
6. People who voted for Trump thinking he couldn't possibly win. This happened with Brexit as well, where there was a fair amount of voters' remorse the next day / week / month. People your votes should not be cast as protests. Write letters instead.
7. Third-party votes. Again, I haven't seen numbers on Johnson and Stein, but....Okay, here's something. Short article quoting a FiveThirtyEight analyst on why J & S probably did not swing the election to Trump. You can read the article itself at FiveThirtyEight.com. electoral-vote.com claims today that Stein voters in WI could have swung the state to Clinton, and that appears true; however note that Trump's margin of victory, 27,000 votes, is dwarfed by the 300,000 turned away by bogus voter ID laws - voter suppression.
8. The Clinton baggage. In 2008, I supported John Edwards and, after he flamed out, Barack Obama. Part of the reason was fearing that Clinton had been chased around and investigated for so long that she was basically radioactive to a large part of the electorate. It turns out that perhaps I was right. I don't know why I thought this year might be different and I certainly don't know why the Democratic field was so small and uncompetitive. Thomas Frank makes the case that she was absolutely the wrong candidate for now.
9. Should we have nominated Bernie? Would he have done better? We can't know. I do not doubt that he would have been branded a Communist, which he isn't, and given the anti-Semitic communications from Trump and his campaign, and given the power of the alt-right just now, the anti-Semitism directed at Bernie would have been very, very bad. Was she a terrible candidate? No, she ran an excellent campaign and everybody, including Trump and his campaign, though she would win. I do think she might have been the Democratic version of Jeb Bush. I do not have any idea how much of the terrible turnout is attributable to her.
10. Totally unknown but might have made a difference: the email server and especially FBI director Comey's interventions.
11. The desire of people for someone likable over someone competent (see also: Gore and Kerry vs. Bush, although argh Bush v. Gore). Clinton is not seen as likable; not that Trump is! Some huge percentage of people who voted for him think he lacks the appropriate temperament for the Presidency, and hoo boy, are they right.

Here's some reading material for the day after a catastrophe. There is no doubt that we are in deep trouble, with a treaty-wrecking, climate-change-denying, isolationist in the presidency, a person who doesn't read, is deeply ignorant, and will appoint people like Scalia to the SC, and have in his cabinet the likes of Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani. I am deeply grieved and scared today and I'm sure many of you are as well. Read, take care of yourself, and act.

• Barack Obama's speech today (transcription)
• Hillary Clinton's speech today (transcription and video)
• Jon Chait on Republican authoritarianism (terrifying)
• Jon Chait on what happened yesterday (Turnout, basically)
• David Frum on a Trump presidency (A conservative, he held his nose and voted for HRC.)
• NY Times editorial
• Ross Douthat (I mostly can't stand what he writes, but he also held his nose and voted for HRC. He is also clearly terrified of Trump.)
• Ari Berman, The Nation: The GOP's Attack on Voting Rights was the Most Undercovered Story of the Election
• John Scalzi
• Charles Stross
• David Remnick
• Sator Arepo, anonymous musicologist/cultural historian
• Liz Henry, activist
• Ijeoma Oluo on white supremacy in the US
• Jamelle Bouie, Slate: White Won
• Jill Filipovic, CNN
• Mike the Mad Biologist
• Thomas Frank: Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there
• Mikki Halpin, When They Go Low, We Go Local
• Election Law Blog
• Rick Hasan: Did Restrictive Voter ID Laws and Other Voting Laws Matter to the Election Outcome?

(I am embarrassed at having only three female commentators listed above! What is wrong with me?)

What should we do now? Self-care, to start with. Donating to progressive or radical organizations you care about. (Jezebel has a list of such orgs. There must be others.) Working toward finding and electing Democrats to the Senate in 2018. (I don't know how Feingold and Bayh blew it. McGinty came amazingly close. Looks as though Maggie Hassan might pull out NH, but WTF 19,000 votes for the independent there.) Finding lots of younger people who want to hold elected office - remember, if millennials had been the only Americans who voted, we would be inaugurating our first female president, come January, and she would have won in a landslide.

Dear GOP:

Thanks for 30+ years of telling Americans how terrible government is; thanks for 50+ years of dog-whistling racism; thanks for the obstructionism of the last eight years; thanks for letting your members push the birther crap; thanks for not finding a way to stand up to Trump; thanks for the voter suppression. He's the natural culmination of the path you've been on for 50 years. Good luck in keeping him under control.

From the NY Times:

So who is the man who will be the 45th president?

After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain. We don’t know how Mr. Trump would carry out basic functions of the executive. We don’t know what financial conflicts he might have, since he never released his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of tradition in both parties. We don’t know if he has the capacity to focus on any issue and arrive at a rational conclusion. We don’t know if he has any idea what it means to control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

Here is what we do know: We know Mr. Trump is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history. We know that by words and actions, he has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people. We know he has threatened to prosecute and jail his political opponents, and he has said he would curtail the freedom of the press. We know he lies without compunction.

Sir John Falstaff in the Bronx

For its 50th birthday season, Bronx Opera - I did not know there was a Bronx opera - will perform RVW's Sir John in Love and Verdi's Falstaff. I wish they had the resources to throw in Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor, but you can't have everything.

I also wish I could get to Sir John in Love, an extreme rarity in the US!

Details:

The Bronx Opera

50th SEASON - “THE FALSTAFF FIFTIETH”
50th Season Launch Event
Saturday, November 19, 2016 at 7:30 pm
Lang Recital Hall
Hunter College North Building, 4th Floor (enter 69th, near Park)
Bronx Opera will launch its 50th Season with a look back and a look forward, featuring singers from past productions as well as their January performances of Vaughan Williams' Sir John in Love.
Tickets: http://bxo50thopener.bpt.me/

SIR JOHN IN LOVE
Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams
Libretto by Vaughan Williams, based on The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare, with additional text by Philip Sidney, Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher

Saturday, January 14, 2017 at 7:30 pm • Sunday, January 15, 2017 at 3:00 pm
Lehman College’s Lovinger Theatre
250 Bedford Park Boulevard West
Bronx, NY
***
Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 7:30 pm • Sunday, January 22, 2017 at 3:00 pm
The Sylvia & Danny Kaye Playhouse
Hunter College, 695 Park Avenue (entrance on 68th Street)
New York, NY

FALSTAFF
Music by Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto by Arrigo Boito

Saturday, April 29, 2017 at 7:30 pm • Sunday, April 30, 2017 at 3:00 pm
Lehman College’s Lovinger Theatre
250 Bedford Park Boulevard West
Bronx, NY
***
Saturday, May 6, 2017 at 7:30 pm • Sunday, May 7, 2017 at 3:00 pm
The Sylvia & Danny Kaye Playhouse
Hunter College, 695 Park Avenue (entrance on 68th Street)
New York, NY

Tickets start at $20 and are available at www.bronxopera.org, and will also be sold at the box office.

Music for Biting Your Fingernails (Orchard Circle)

Zachary Woolfe of the NY Times tweeted earlier today that he was listening to Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, which seems to me to be perfect for today's election. However, if you happen to be in NYC, there's this fabulous Orchard Circle program:

Tuesday, Nov 8th, Election night, 2016 at 8pm
DiMenna Center, Cary Hall
450 West 37th Street, New York, New York

Election Night Bash
Berlin Philharmonic members
led by Marie-Pierre Langlamet

Music by Ned Rorem, John Harbison, Fred Lerdahl, John Corigliano,
Phillip Glass, Milton Babbitt,  Lowell Liebermann, Augusta Read Thomas,
Laura Schwendinger, Roger Sessions, Daniel Brewbaker, Virgil Thompson,
Eric Moe, Charles Wuorinen, Sebastian Currier, and Nathan Currier

Orchard Circle will have its inaugural concert, with leading members of the Berlin Philharmonic including their Concertmaster, on what is shaping up to be our nation's craziest night in recent memory - election night, November 8th, 2016.

Andreas Buschatz, Concertmaster
Marie-Pierre Langlamet, Principal harp
Mathieu Dufour, Principal flute
Matthew McDonald, Principal bass
Cornelia Gartemann, violin
Julia Gartemann, viola
Moky Gibson-Lane, cello
plus Emma Tahmizian and Eric Moe, pianists

Vote.

A non-partisan message: if you're a US citizen who is registered to vote, please vote. I say this to everyone, of all political persuasions.

I do not in any way speak for the company I work for, and I'm not a fan of everything we do, but do I ever think it is a good thing that for the last couple of days, I haven't been able to either open Gmail or start a browser window or go to google.com without being asked whether I know where my polling place is. I finally let Google tell me where it is just to stop the messages even though I know perfectly well where I vote. (I've lived more or less across the street from my polling place for 22 years, and I vote, that's how.)

So: do vote if you haven't already.

 UPDATED: with the photo showing I voted.

New Nymphet on the Block

Salome (Patricia Racette) performing the Dance of the Seven Veils. 

With her are (left to right) Attack Theatre’s Nick Coppula, Anthony Williams, and Dane Toney.

David Bachman Photography

Courtesy of Pittsburgh Opera

Received from the Met:

Patricia Racette will add a new role to her Met repertory as the title character in all performances of Strauss’s Salome this season, replacing the originally announced Catherine Naglestad. Ms. Naglestad was forced to withdraw from the performances, which were to be her Met debut, for medical reasons that will prevent her traveling to America as scheduled.  

Racette is currently singing Salome with Pittsburgh Opera, and has previously sung the role with San Antonio Opera and in concert at the Ravinia Festival. Later this season, she will sing the role with Los Angeles Opera. She has sung 170 Met performances of 19 different roles over the course of her career with the company, in a varied repertory that has recently included Nedda in the new production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci; Maddalena in Giordano’s Andrea Chénier; the title role of Puccini’s Tosca; Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites; Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly; Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore; and the three principal soprano roles in Puccini’s Il Trittico. This spring, she will make another Met role debut when she sings her first company performances of Roxane in Alfano’s Cyrano.   

Salome, conducted by Johannes Debus in his Met debut, will also star Nancy Fabiola Herrera as Herodias, Gerhard Siegel as Herod, Kang Wang in his Met debut as Narraboth, and Željko Lučić as Jochanaan. The revival opens December 5, with additional performances on December 9, 13, 17 matinee, 24, and 28.

This is a bit of a surprise; I did not expect this assumption to go further than LA! Here's a review of the just-opened Pittsburgh production.

Changes, Part 2

I worked in downtown San Francisco from 1983-88 and again for a few months in the fall and winter of 1997-98. Boy, have things changed.

• Lots more people living downtown in big high-rises.
• Lots fewer women in heels and power suits.
• Lots fewer men in suits.
• Lots more nerds like me.
• More and better choices for eating out.

When I started working in high tech nearly 20 years ago, there were almost no companies with SF offices. Now....I would have absolutely no difficulty finding work if I were to decide to leave Google.

Tristan und Isolde, Met HD Broadcast

I had planned to go to NYC for the Met's new productions of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Rossini's Guillaume Tell, both ground-breaking works at the summit of the repertory. (Yes, there's a lot more to Guillaume Tell than the justly-famous overture.) The rest of my life intervened: while I could work from my company's NYC office, I'd have had to cancel jujitsu classes to do that, and for various reasons I'll only be teaching about half the usual number in November. And going for a long weekend seemed like asking for a head cold or worse.

So, to the HD production, which meant that I spent three concerts plus one long opera broadcast sitting on my butt that weekend. Yes, I had tickets to the Salonen/Philharmonia programs, too.

First, a non-musical note. I hope Deborah Voigt, hosting the telecast (but no longer singing at the Met), was reading from a teleprompter when she tossed off before Act II that "Tristan and Isolde are now madly in love because of the love potion." No, Debbie, that isn't the case, and since you've sung the opera, I assume you know it. I wish she'd nixed that line when she saw the script; Isolde's narration, which we heard an hour or so before she said that, makes it completely clear that they are in love before he leaves Ireland. They are released from their guilt and shame and free to be in love because they think they have drunk poison and are going to die.

Musically, I can't fault a darned thing in the Tristan. Simon Rattle, as I'd already learned from writing a review of his recorded-in-concert Rheingold, is a terrific Wagner conductor. He's got a superb sense of pacing and balance, the ebb and flow of the work, all heard to good effect in the HD broadcast. He recorded Das Rheingold with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, a great group, and as you know, the Met Orchestra is also a great group. So you can imagine. It sounded pretty darned good even with the compression and other issues of the broadcast.

Same for the singers. Nina Stemme is a tremendous singer and an overpowering actor; see also her work earlier this year in the Chereau Elektra. I feel she has one tiny vocal flaw, in that her voice speaks rather slowly, which weakens her legato. It's something in her attack - I do not have the vocabulary to describe what is happening technically, but it's certainly audible, especially when everyone around her, as in this cast, sounded vocally smoother.

She was in great company: Stuart Skelton has a beautiful voice, stamina, musical intelligence, and vivid theatricality. I never did a full review of his 2014 SF Symphony Peter Grimes, but it was one of the greatest assumptions I've ever seen, up there with Stemme's Isolde and Elektra and other great performances. He was a moving Tristan and a great match for Stemme here.

I had never heard mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova before, and she is a real find: a beautiful voice and great acting, she made a strong and sympathetic Brangäne. Yes, it should be a soprano role, but who knows when that will ever happen? (The Met did have a soprano in 1999, when Katarina Dalyman sang the role to Jane Eaglen's Isolde.) Evgeny Nikitina was a strong and sympathetic Kurwenal, and I probably don't need to tell you how good René Pape was as King Marke. Yes, he was great.

The production. Well, the production has come in for some criticism, and I consider it deserved.

I have no objections to the cold chill of the warship in Act I or the hospital room of Act III; they both seem appropriately bleak for the mood and the music.

As for Act II, I wish directors would take their production design cue from the score. The libretto is explicit about the setting, which is a garden, at night. Isolde mentions the sound of a brook, and the music is such that you can feel the heat and humidity of a summer night on your skin.

As of now, I've seen this act set in the dead of winter (Zambello, Seattle, 1998), in a torture chamber (K. Wagner, Bayreuth, 2015), an industrial storage space (Trelinski, Met, 2016), and a garden (Dorn, Met, 1999; Mansouri, SF, 1998; Hockney, SF, 2006? 2007?). The Mansouri production, which was shared with DC, was plug-ugly, the Dorn austere, the Hockney cartoonish.

I dunno; I'd like to see something sensuous enough to match the blazing music - of all of these productions, Zambello's gorgeous lovers-in-the-sky setting was the best, despite the snow on the ground (and the on-stage Bragäne.

I am not asking for a literal garden. I am asking for a set that isn't completely at odds with the music.

Changes!

I learned recently that not everyone is aware that as of September 19, I'm working at Google's San Francisco offices, in the old Hills Brothers Coffee building on the Embarcadero. I'm now writing documentation for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which is our equivalent of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. I'll be working on networking documentation. 

Yes, this means I can talk about what I do again. It's a public project with world-readable documentation. Yes, this means it's a lot easier to have lunch with me, because you do not have to schlep to Mountain View or my most recent South Bay location, Sunnyvale.

Career development and that schlep were the primary reasons I transferred. My commute had gotten to ninety minutes to two hours door to door each way, up from around an hour and ten minutes each way when I started and during the Great Recession. I realized I had to get out of the commute back in August when I found myself making up a spreadsheet of companies I'd be willing to work for. If a suitable position hadn't opened up in S.F. this year, I would have left Google.

Now I stroll down to the major intersection nearest my house, get on an AC Transit bus, get off a while later, and stroll a few blocks to my office. It's taking less than an hour and is a lot more pleasant than BART is these days. Boy, is it ever nice to sleep until 7 a.m. again.

The view above is not from my desk, although I am sitting by a window. It's the view from one of the cafés in my building. Here's the view from my desk, along with a neighbor:

Really?

Garrick Ohlsson is giving a recital at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the press release includes this:

The program opens with Sonata Op. 13, "Pathétique," a piece that was a major early success for Beethoven and established him as a significant composer, not just a pianist. Following are Op. 57, nicknamed "Appassionata," and Op. 53, the "Waldstein," the latter of which is considered the most technically challenging of all the composer's sonatas.

The Waldstein? Really? I thought it was Op. 106, für das Hammerklavier, that most struck terror into the hearts of pianists.

Germany Friday Photo

Firehouse, Munich

August, 2015

New! Improved! Publicity Basics!

I wrote the Publicity Basics page at least six years ago, and last made significant changes to it in 2012. It's intended for organizations and publicists, and it's based on my experiences on the receiving end of an awful lot of publicity email and badly-formatted brochures.

I've just re-organized and updated it. Most of the content is the same, but I sorted all of the tips out into logical categories. Take a look and post any comments or suggested changes!