Belated Museum Mondays

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington, El Cid Campeador (Ruy Diaz de Bivar, 1040–1099), 1921

Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

August, 2018

 

SF Performances Announces Postponement of Stephen Hough; Castalian String Quartet

Veterans Building, with Herbst Theater, in the distance; War Memorial Opera House, foreground

Vintage post card, collection of Lisa Hirsch

San Francisco Performance sent out a press release this afternoon with postponements of two upcoming concerts:

Stephen Hough: was November 14, 20223, 7:30 pm; new date TBA

Castalian String Quartet: was November 15, 2023, 7:30 pm; new date TBA

Both concerts were at Herbst Theater. "Travel difficulties" is the reason for both postponements.

I was going to get a ticket to see the Castalian; they played a tremendous concert earlier this year at Cal Performances (Haydn, Saariaho, Schubert) and I was very much looking forward to the planned SFP program (Janacek, Beethoven, Turnage). Ah, well; later in the season, I hope.

Thoughts on Lohengrin

 

Judit Kutasi as Ortrud

Act 2, Lohengrin

Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

Since the SFO Lohengrin opened, I've been thinking a fair amount about the opera and some of the details in it; also, having the odd second thought about my review. I should have praised Simon O'Neill more than I did; he sang tirelessly and musically in a solid and Wagnerian-sized voice. I realize that I have internalized an ideal Lohengrin and he's not it.

You will understand this when I mention that my previous three Lohengrins were:

• Ben Heppner, who had a great voice and was an excellent physical actor.
• Brandon Jovanovich, who has a beautiful voice, is tall and handsome, and has a natural and confident masculinity. Honestly, this makes him just the kind of guy I would want to turn up to defend me if I had been falsely accused of murdering my brother.
• Klaus Florian Vogt, who is handsome in a completely different way from Jovanovich and who has a voice of unearthly beauty, of a type you rarely, if ever, find singing Wagner successfully. If you have not seen the video of the Neuenfels Lohengin from Bayreuth, I can't recommend it highly enough. It played better in the house than on video (friends found the video a little silly; on stage, it was weirdly beautiful) but whatever. It's an amazing production and accurately represents Vogt's Lohengrin.

The Alden production that SFO staged muted a couple of points that are in the libretto. One is that there are both Saxons and Brabantians in the crowd when the curtain goes up on Act 1. We are in the 10th century, when Heinrich der Vogler (Henry the Fowler) was Duke of Saxony; he's in Brabant to recruit an army to stand up to the Hungarians. (It's always the Hungarians coming after you.) 

A staging could reasonably distingush between the Saxons and the men of Brabant, in the opening and throughout. The King's men and the locals might just behave somewhat differently through the action of the opera.

Another point that comes out primarily in the text is that Ortrud's family, alone among those in the opera, is pagan. Her lineage is noted by Telramund when he's claiming that Elsa murdered her brother Gottfried: "Ortrud, scion of Radbod, Prince of Frisia." Radbod was King of Frisia in the late 8th and early 9th centuries. Wikipedia tells us that a predecessor of his brought Christianity to Frisia, but Radbod tried to extirpate the religion.

The entire opera has as a hidden theme the people of the old gods versus the Christians, which amounts to Ortrud versus everyone else. A production could very reasonably dress her completely differently from the rest of the nobles, and also give her a different bearing or manner from everyone else's. She has hardly anything to sing in Act 1, so it's an opportunity to do something interesting with her physically. Traditionally, the character mostly skulks around the stage. But she's an extremely powerful witch: she can change a child into a swan! That's a very real power in opposition to Lohengrin's power as a representative of the Grail. And yet, in the Alden production, she's reduced to being an anonymous briefcase-carrying bureaucrat, dressed like everyone else.

Previously: SF Opera's Lohengrin

Friday Photo

Pointy-headed cabbage

The last time I saw one of these it was an Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage.

Description: a pointy green cabbage sitting on a soapstone counter. Green subway tile and art tile on the wall behind the cabbage.

October, 2023

Oakland, CA

 

California Festival

I've only blogged once before about the California Festival, but it is upon us, starting this Friday, November 3. I'm not going to be able to get out of the Bay Area in the first two weeks of the month, owing to reviews the next two weeks and looming work deadlines, so it took until today for me to take a look at the Festival's web site. That was with prompting from a friend, who mentioned that he "was hoping [I'd] tell [him] there was some obvious way of sorting the California Festival events by location on their website."

Well, I looked, and I was appalled by what I saw. Let me count, er, bullet-list the issues: 

• There's no way to sort the events by location. This is a real problem with a festival that stretches from Fort Bragg to somewhere south of San Diego. (I think - the map to the left of the concert list is of dubious usefulness because you can't click on a location and see what's being performed there or when.)
• The address for each participating organization in the chronological listing bears no resemblance to the concert locations and in some cases to the physical location of the organization. I am highly dubious that 15 Van Ness Avenue is the, or a, correct address for the San Francisco Symphony, one of the three orchestras that organized the festival. That's not the address of Davies Symphony Hall, and in fact it's south of Market Street! What's with the Nordhoff St. address of the Colburn School of Music in LA? The school is across the street and down the block from Walt Disney Concert Hall. Nordhoff Street seems to be...in "Sherwood Forest"?
• You can't copy/paste from the concert list page.
• You can't do an effective search on the concert list page because the page doesn't scroll in response to a search in your browser.
• The site is slow, even on my M2 Mac Mini. Transitions from page to page don't actually take forever, but it seems that way: I'm counting between two and three seconds when you navigate from a details page to the list page. Whoever designed the site seems not to have tested on older computers.
• It's...ugly. Somehow there's enough contrast on the concert listing page even though I think that it features green type on a cream background. 
• All those exploding graphics do nothing for usability; they slow down the site; there are two of them every time you navigate from concert details to the concert listing.
• There is no persistence! If you view a particular listing, when you click Back, you are taken back to listings for November 3. That's right: view a listing for November 17, try to get back to the list page, and you'll be looking at listings for November 3.

Folks, web sites are about 30 years old. I created my person web site in 1996, with a copy of Laura LeMay's Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week. That web site is still posted, though I rarely update it. It is much faster to navigate than the California Festival web site, because it's as basic as you can get. Regardless, there is no damn excuse for a festival sponsored by three of the biggest performing arts organizations in the state to have such a very terrible web site.

Jake Heggie's Intelligence: Media Round-Up

I haven't seen this opera, though I can say that when I read about it a few weeks ago I was surprised and dismayed to see that two white men were telling the story of two women, one Black and one white, in a story set during the American Civil War. (Shades of Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison's Margaret Garner, which is based on the same historical incident as Morrison's novel Beloved.)  I am not the only person who had this reaction.

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle. This review also contains some comments on Heggie's first opera, Dead Man Walking, which I liked less than anyone I know.
• Ilana Walder-Biesanz, SFCV.
• Kendra Preston Leonard, Ph.D. (musicology), her blog.
• Molly Glentzer, Houston Chronicle (paywalled).
• Steven Brown, Texas Classical Review.
• Scott Cantrell, Dallas News.

Museum Mondays

Self-Portrait

Raphael

Palace of the Legion of Honor

San Francisco, August, 2018

 

Friday Photo

Painted Butterflies

Mural, Allée Verte or vicinity

Paris, February, 2019

 

Museum Mondays

Detail from "Marianna"

John Everett Millais

Palace of the Legion of Honor

August, 2018

 

Departures

Sigh:

• Stephen Rubin died last Friday, October 13, at 81, of complications of sepsis following an infection. He was an immensely successful publisher, a career he started at 43 after twenty years as a freelance journalist. We never met, but I knew him as the founder of the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism. The Rubin Institute has held alternate-years seminars for young classical music critics; the seminars moved around for the first few occurrences but now they are settled into the SF Conservatory of Music. Rubin has also funded music critic positions at several newspapers, at a time when journalism is in retreat and the number of such positions is greatly diminished. He was a smart guy with a great eye for a best seller and I'm grateful for his work on behalf of classical music journalism.
• The Emerson String Quartet is about to play its last concert, after nearly a half-century of standard-setting performances and recordings. They've played it all, from the earliest string quartets to recent works, including pieces they commissioned.
• Waltraud Meier is retiring from the stage; her last performance took place today. She sang Klytemnestra in Patrice Chereau's Elektra staging in Berlin. Ben Miller interviewed her for the Times.

I Gemelli : Performances I Wish I Could Get To

(Photo care of I Gemelli)

The Toulouse-based Baroque music group I Gemelli has a short North American tour next month, with a program called A Room Full of Mirrors. Based on their video preview, these concerts sound like a lot of fun. They'll be performing works by Castelani, Turini, Marini, Falconieri, Frescobaldi, Castello, Castaldi, Gregori, D’India, Notari and Sabbatini. Note that the Boston concert will be streamable for two weeks in December!

I Gemelli with Emiliano Gonzalez Toro and Zachary Wilder

• November 16 - New York City - Morgan Library (co-presented by the Boston Early Music Festival)  
• November 18 - Boston - Jordan Hall presented by Boston Early Music Festival (available to stream online December 2-16)
• November 22 - Montréal - Salle Bourgie

 

Friday Photo

 

At the grave of Charles Garnier

Architect of the Opéra Garnier, Paris

October, 2018

Why I Keep Wearing a Mask and Dining Outside at Restaurants

The Monday before last, that is, October 9, I had dinner with a friend - outdoors. On Friday, I emailed him to say it was great to see him (it was!) and he'd had a positive COVID test that morning. There was quite a lot of nail-biting on my part until I'd had two negative test and he had figured out that probably he and other friends, all testing positive, had been exposed the following night when they were out together. 

Whew.

But...on Sunday, I had lunch with a friend - again outdoors - and then we sat next to each other for a long, long opera. I wore a mast during the performance, but chatted with various people ummasked at intermission. And this morning my friend, who has been under the weather since yesterday, tested positive. This is a friend who has been extremely cautious throughout the pandemic and its current more endemic phase.

I am once again biting my nails, and once again urging people to wear masks when you're on public transit, in public places, in stores, anywhere where you don't know everyone else's status, etc. Masking is most effective when everyone does it, and I am doing my bit with the masking.

San Francisco Opera: The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs

 

Bille Bruley as Steve Wozniak and John Moore as Steve Jobs

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs

Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

Pushing this post, from September 26, to the top, now that I've seen it again.

I feel pretty much the same way as I did in 2017. I think there were some improvements: I am reasonably sure that an embarrassing line about how Steve and Laurene "adopted" Lisa Brennan-Jobs is now gone, and I think that Laurene has more music. But the opera still fails to show how Jobs evolved; he is awful throughout. Reviews of Brennan-Jobs's memoir, Small Fry, makes Jobs and Laurene both sound awful. And in 2023, it's hard for me to be anything but cynical about tech moguls considering everything that has gone on in the last few years (the destruction of Twitter; working for an extremely profitable company that overhired during the pandemic, then laid of 12,000 people while paying its CEO nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, etc.).

I still liked the music and the performers are fine, although Sasha Cooke's general artistic profile isn't glamorous rich lady, and that might affect how I see her performance. John Moore and Bille Burley are great as Jobs and Woz, and it was good to see Adler Fellow Olivia Smith in a larger role. 

I was given a nice seat upgrade to the orchestra section, Row J just off the center aisle, and I gotta say that the orchestra sounded amazing from there; I could hear more details than in Santa Fe, where who knows how much sound goes out the back and sides of the theater. 

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle
• Simon Cohen, SFCV
• Michael Strickland, Civic Center
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills. I admit to being a little surprised at Patrick's boredom, given the fast-moving libretto and bubbling music.
• DB, Kalimac's corner 
• Thomas May, Musical America
• 2017 media round-up (My blog post, linked here, consists of a lot of ranting about problems in the libretto.)
• Lisa Hirsch, Steve Jobs, the Man, and Steve Jobs, the Opera (2017)
• Lots more at this Google search

San Francisco Opera: Lohengrin

Lohengrin, Act III

David Alden production, staged at San Francisco Opera

Kristinn Sigmundsson as King Heinrich

SFO Chorus

Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

SFO's Lohengrin opened on Sunday, October 15, and I'd say they've got a hit. The production has its issues, discussed in greater or lesser detail in Joshua Kosman's review and mine. He's more positive about Simon O'Neill than I am. Let me note that O'Neill is fine; he sings musically and with a lot of power. But the three other principals are all outstanding and outshine him vocally and dramatically. Better direction would have helped, to be sure; I feel that he's underdirected. 

The debuts and the excellence of Eun Sun Kim's Wagner are the truly big stories here. After decades of mostly hearing the great Donald Runnicles in Wagner, with Nicola Luisotti dipping a toe only into the German romantic repertory, with Lohengrin and Salome, of course I wondered what she'd be like. By the end of the Act I prelude I knew all was well and that the opera was in good hands; the performance was truly magnificent.

More reviews to come, I'm sure:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Michael Anthonio, Parterre Box ("Swan's weh"!!)
• Opera Tattler
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
• Michael Milenski, Opera Today
• Caroline Crawford (Bay City News at SF Gate?)
• Harvey Steiman, Seen & Heard International
• Charles Lewis, 48 Hills
• Andrew Rombakis, Wagner Society of New York 

Previously:

• Mark Berry, Boulezian, 2018 staging in London
• Mark Berry, Boulezian, 2022 staging in London

 

Museum Mondays

Detail of the Virgin, Child, St. George, and an Angel, with a Donor

Hans Memling

Palace of the Legion of Honor

August, 2018

 

Friday Photo

English Garden, Munich

August, 2015

 

Adès Program Replacement: Concerts with Sting

Davies Sypmphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

                                        STING AND THE SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY

Wednesday, February 14, 2024 at 7:30pm

          Thursday, February 15, 2024 at 7:30pm        

Edwin Outwater conducts.

Subscribers can buy tickets now by logging in to their SFS account, non-subscribers on Friday. 

Uhhhhh, what?

Davies Symphony Hall

October, 2023

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

A few weeks ago, Thomas Adès withdrew from his planned February concerts at SF Symphony and SFSoundBox. At the time, the orchestra announced that there would be an announcement about replacements for February 15-16 and 18.

Now we've got the announcement that they're just cancelling. Ticketholders can do one of the following:

• Exchange the tickets for another concert.
• Exchange tickets for a San Francisco Symphony gift certificate, which can be used at any time.
• Donate tickets and receive a tax deduction for the total ticket value. 
• Receive a refund for the value of the tickets.

Color me befuddled. With more than four months notice, the orchestra was unable to find a conductor who could turn up for the rehearsal period and performance period with a program that would be within the means of a great professional orchestra? Really? Truly? There was no one available? 

The orchestra hasn't currently got an associate/assistant conductor, but it does have Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser (resident conductor of engagement and education), Daniel Stewart (music director of the youth orchestra), and Jenny Wong (chorus director), all of whom are competent to lead the orchestra in a range of repertory. (It's possible that Wong has a conflict with the L.A. Master Chorale, of course.) And I find it unbelievable that of the dozens of good to great conductors in the world, no one could conduct SFS that week. Not to mention, bring in the right soloist and you can sell out the hall. I see that Yuja Wang, for example, seems to be free from February 10 to sometime in March.

I'll just assume that this is a money-saving decision.

Okay, okay; in the press release, but not the customer announcement: "Alternate programming for this week will be announced at a later date." 

 

 

Museum Mondays

Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels (detail)

The Master of the St. Lucy Legend

Palace of the Legion of Honor

August, 2018

 

Vallejo Festival Orchestra: Three Tenors! The Next Generation

Thomas Conlin and the Vallejo Festival Orchestra have a concert coming up at the end of the month that looks like a lot of fun: three young tenors, an excellent orchestra and conductor, and a program of Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti, and other well-loved Italian composers. The singers are Taylor Comstock, Spencer Hamlin, and Alex McKissick. I checked out some of their videos, and there's lots of talent here! It's a special thrill to hear singers at the beginning of their careers, too.

From the web site:

Expect a night of vocal splendor as the Vallejo Center for the Arts brings together three extraordinary young tenors who are set to captivate audiences with their remarkable talent, soaring voices, and electrifying performances!

Three Tenors! – The Next Generation is a tribute to the iconic “3 Tenors” concerts that have captivated the world for decades. Building upon the legendary legacy of Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras, this concert celebrates the new generation of talented tenors who are poised to carry the torch forward.

Grammy award-winning conductor Thomas Conlin will direct the magnificent Vallejo Festival Orchestra in a program of popular songs and arias by Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti and other well-known Italian opera composers, along with overtures and choice orchestral excerpts from Tosca, La traviata, La bohème and other audience favorites.

Featuring a wide-ranging repertoire that spans the Golden Age of Italian Opera, this concert will delight opera lovers as well as music lovers from all walks of life. Our three tenors, selected for their exceptional vocal prowess, stage presence, and their ability to seamlessly blend traditional operatic technique with contemporary styles, will create a mesmerizing and unforgettable musical experience.

Empress Theatre,  Vallejo

Saturday, October 28, 2023, 7:30 PM; Tickets $35-$95

Friday Photo

Courtyard of the Louvre

Building, pavement, lamps, people, a corner of the pyramid

Paris, February, 2019

 

Belated Museum Mondays

Dog

Detail of a painting at the Musée du Louvre

Paris, February, 2019

 

Missed Opportunity, or, I Can't Believe I'm Writing This in 2023.

The Alexander String Quartet almost always has a Saturday morning series at Herbst, accompanied by talks by composer/musicologist Robert Greenberg. This year's series is called Music as a Mirror of Our World: The String Quartet from 1905 to 1946. The title is....partially correct. It's a mirror of our world if you think only white men compose string quartets.

Here's the programming for the full series. For each concert, I've suggested an alternative quartet they might have programmed.

Program 1: Austria. Quartets by Schoenberg and Webern. Add Johanna Beyer String Quartet 1 or 2.

Program 2: Russia. Quartets by Stravinsky and Prokofiev. No obvious pick here, so let's go for the unknown-to-me Varvara Adrianovna Gaigerova, who wrote two strings quartets.

Program 3: Czechoslovakia. Quartets by Haas and Janacek. Vítězslava Kaprálová wrote eight string quartets; take your pick.

Program 4: United States. Quartets by Barber and Piston. Add Ruth Crawford Seeger's sole quartet.

Program 5: Austria. Quartets by Zemlinsky and Korngold. The loveliest girl in Vienna didn't get to write a string quartet, so let's move on to Johanna Müller-Hermann, who wrote two.

Program 6: United Kingdom: Quartets by Walton and Britten, both English, so "United Kingdom" isn't exactly accurate. Let's take any of Elizabeth Maconchy's superb quartets that were written in or before 1946.

My article Lend Me a Pick Ax was published in 2008, and I'm still having to write blog posts like this.

 

Can't Anyone at the Times Count?

Found in The NY Times this morning:

When she won a sixth term in 2018, she was already the oldest member of the Senate, having outlasted four presidencies and seen the beginning of a fifth, that of Joe Biden.

The 2018 election was for Feinstein's fifth complete term; her first was a stub in a special election to replace Pete Wilson, who had been elected governor. But in 2018, she also had not outlasted four presidencies because the 45th president was still in office and somehow managed to serve a full term.

The Times tried to correct the above and failed:

When she won a sixth term in 2018, she was already the oldest member of the Senate, having outlasted four presidencies. She went on to see the beginning of a fifth, that of Joe Biden.

Again, in 2018, she had outlasted three presidencies, and went on to outlast four and see the first two years of Joe Biden's term. 

Updated: The Times also somehow thinks she had shingles last year. Sorry! It was this year!

Ms. Feinstein’s frail appearance was a result of several complications after she was hospitalized for shingles in February 2022, some of which she had not publicly disclosed. The shingles spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome.

I am happy to admit, by the way, that I was one of the people calling for her resignation; I phone her local office multiple times to ask her to resign. No, Rep. Pelosi, it's not sexist to want the people of California to be represented in the Senate by someone who is mentally competent. It is extremely sad that such an important and effective politician as Dianne Feinstein (and her supporters) couldn't see this.