Flight from Redwood Shores

A month-long contract job consisting of twelve-hour days in Redwood Shores has just finished, which means I can finally sleep again.



The best part of this occasional gig, besides being able to pay bills, is eating lunch outside on the deck of the Redwood Shores Public Library above.



It overlooks a tidal slough from the San Francisco Bay which is a marvel for watching birds, with different species feeding depending on how much water is covering the mud flats...



...including improbably graceful cranes who look like imaginary creatures.

Noir City X and the Mirkarimi Mess

Noir City, the coolest film festival in San Francisco, is holding its tenth anniversary this week at the Castro Theatre. There are double bills and newly-struck, pristine prints of fascinating films, and a cheap admission price to one of the great movie palaces left in the world.



Festival founder Eddie Muller, above right, has created an interesting niche for himself as a film preserver, evangelist, writer and filmmaker focusing on the dark, fatalistic film genre from the late 1930s to early 1960s known as Film Noir.

I mentioned to him that somebody we knew in common had been caught in the maws of the Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi domestic violence inquisition. The scandal has become a tabloid sensation for the local media, partly out of political intent and partly because certain morality tales have their own celebrity momentum. "The entire story, with all its layers of corruption, is like one of your movies," I told Eddie, and he replied, "It's a demonstration of the maxim that in the world of Noir, there is no good deed that goes unpunished."

Music and Glamour at the Symphony

Last week's San Francisco Symphony program was delightful, with four 20th century pieces that featured two glamourous female soloists, all conducted by the 34-year-old Pablo Heras-Casado from Granada, Spain. Pablo is pictured above left with the chamber orchestra which started the program playing Stravinsky's concerto grosso from 1938, Dumbarton Oaks.



This was followed Ravel's jazzy 1931 Piano Concerto, in an amazing performance by another phenomenal young female pianist named Khatia Buniatishvili from the Republic of Georgia. She didn't efface the memory of Martha Argerich playing the same score back in 2009 with Tilson Thomas, but she was virtuosically splendid and Heras-Casado gave the accompaniment some real snap.



After intermission, there was another short bit of Italian serial music from Luigi Dallapiccola, the 1954 Piccola musica notturna, which was a reminder of how little most twelve-tone music connects with my listening brain. Thankfully, it was short, and we went on to the 1916 Spanish ballet El Amor Brujo by Manuel de Falla with the "flamenco singer" Marina Heredia above left on a microphone giving a sensational performance of the four songs given to Candelas, who is sort of a gypsy Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands character, with a dead lover whose ghost won't get out of the way for her new one.



You've heard the Ritual Fire Dance music from this score whether you know it or not since it's as ubiquitous as The Flight of the Bumblebee, but oddly I had never heard the music live before and according to the program notes, the entire 30-minute ballet with vocal soloist hasn't been played in San Francisco since 1958 which is shocking since the music is so fun and accessible.

When listening to classical LPs as a precocious pubescent brat with my own stereo, I used to drive my family crazy with difficult music like Mahler symphonies and Britten's War Requiem, so it always made my Spanish-born mother extremely happy when I put on a recording of El Amor Brujo. She did everything but get her castanets out of the closet. She would have loved this performance.

49er City Hall

San Francisco City Hall has been specially lit up this week in honor of the 49ers football team who are in the NFL playoffs for the first time in over a decade, and the lighting scheme is rather attractive. If only for the sake of the wonderful writer Jan Adams, who is a local, left-wing, lesbian, political organizing, Episcopalian football fan, may the 49ers prevail tomorrow afternoon against the New York Giants at Candlestick Park.

The Martyrdom of Saint Janacek

Everybody was at the San Francisco Symphony last week, including the operatic actors Charlie Lichtman and Ron Mann above. They were featuring Janacek's late, great Sinfonietta and Debussy's incidental music to a weird, five-hour, pretentious performance piece from 1911 about The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastien.



Sitting across the aisle from us was composer John Adams, seen above with fellow composer Mason Bates. The two are sharing world premieres at the upcoming American Mavericks concerts at the Symphony later in the season.



The short first half of the concert, with Janacek's brass-filled Sinfonietta, was sensational, with extra horn players ringing the sides of the stage. Poor Debussy in the second half hardly stood a chance after that mighty blast.



Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien sounds like one of those fabulous messes that could only be accomplished by putting together lots of talented people on the wrong project, and one of the major instigators for Debussy's participation was Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, who was the model for Proust's homosexual aristocrat in Remembrance of Things Past, the Baron de Charlus. The dancer and poseur Ida Rubenstein mimed the titular saint originally, and the playwright was the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, whose verse in translation is laughably terrible.



The performances in San Francisco were of the complete incidental music along with narration by recently retired mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, along with beautiful solo singing by Karina Gauvin, Joanna Taber, and Sasha Cooke, all of whom walked on and off tall platforms above the orchestra with the chorus sitting in between them. There were also groovy string cheese video screens of different shapes above the orchestra with video and still projections by Anne Patterson, who directed the show. Unfortunately, for all the talent and good work involved, the evening was something of a somnolent failure.

Whenever I shut my eyes, the Debussy music would be evocative and soothing, but when I would reopen my eyes they would be to some beautifully declaimed French phrase by von Stade that would be translated as "I love you, my brother, in God, as a lily" or some nonsense and you'd wish they hadn't bothered with projected titles at all.



Many of the video sequences featured the San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Damian Smith (above left) in some kind of loincloth but his talents were sadly wasted, in that the choreography by Myles Thatcher seemed to consist of a lot of stationary writhing, and the focus most of the time was on Damian's armpit. Mr. Smith is a very handsome man and has a handsome armpit, but he's also an excellent dancer and it would have been nice to see an actual dance to some of the score.

I have no clue what Anne Patterson (above center, with MTT on her right), the director and designer of the production, could have done with this strange piece, but her tasteful choices were dull, and one almost wished for an oratorio-style sit and stand performance that simply concentrated on the lovely, unfamiliar music. I'm glad I heard and saw it, though, and the performers were beyond reproach. Even just speaking in French, amplified, Frederica von Stade is still a vocal goddess.