Junk Mail Art at City Hall

On the fourth floor at City Hall, there's a new art show sponsored by Mayor Gavin Newsom's office and the Academy of Art University. This is the same school that's been gobbling up San Francisco real estate voraciously, and who have been accused of breaking every zoning and permitting law extant. But heck, why should the mayor care about that?



Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors was lifting a temporary development moratorium at the San Francisco Flower Mart which had been threatened by the university's latest acquisition plans.



It seems that the firestorm of bad publicity over the flower mart eviction finally stopped the plan in its tracks, and now they are taking a page out of Mayor Newsom's public relations playbook and are presenting a student exhibit displaying "environmental consciousness" called "Junk Mail: From Debris to Design."



The pieces look a bit strange on the ornate fourth floor of City Hall...



...but the whimsical junk mail papier-mache has its own charm...



...and the five artists, including Brett Mastaler (above) looked like they had a great time with the project. (Click here for more info on the show.)



Plus, having a postal monster greet one at the door to City Hall is certainly an interesting way to be introduced to the workings of San Francisco government.

Wade Crowfoot and The Supervisors

At Tuesday's weekly Board of Supervisors meeting, there was an interesting exchange between a few of the supervisors and Wade Crowfoot (below), Mayor Newsom's new "Director of Global Climate Change," or whatever they are calling his ridiculous new position that's being funded by Muni.



It seems a new solar panel slush fund is being set up by the Mayor through the Assessor/Recorder's office, even though this has traditionally been the province of the Public Utilities Commission, and nobody could quite explain why, or how much was involved. I almost felt sorry for the young, handsome and obviously intelligent Mr. Crowfoot, because he seemed to be carrying a pail of pure sleaze for his masters, and nobody seemed to be very convinced by his explanations.



Finally, Board President Peskin asked where the Assessor/Recorder might be, since the entire program was supposedly his initiative, and his aide (above) went to the podium and made some weak excuse about how Phil Ting was currently indisposed because of some personal matter or other, which just made everybody even more furious.



So she was sent to track him down, and Ting arrived about thirty minutes later.



As punishment, however, Mr. Ting had to sit through the next hour of public comment, including James Chaffee (below) denouncing the Friends of the Public Library and their outrageous slush fund.



What Chaffee and most of the crowd in the chambers didn't notice was a quick but momentous announcement by Aaron Peskin (below), in his last year as Board President, appointing his fellow supervisors to various committee assignments where many of the real decisions are made.



Newsom's thugs like Phil Ginsburg and Nathan Ballard, in concert with the San Francisco Chronicle, have been doing everything they can to smear Peskin and make him look like an unstable little hothead, so he gave them a little gift in return. The loathsome Newsom ally, Ms. "I-want-a-million-dollar-wheelchair-ramp-because-I-deserve-it" Michela Alioto-Pier, who doesn't even bother to show up to about a third of her meetings, was relegated to a single committee assignment, City & School District.



Newsom's nemesis, Supervisor Chris Daly, was put onto the three most powerful committees: Rules, Land Use & Economic Development, and the real biggie, Budget and Finance. (For a list of all the committee assignments, which the Chronicle didn't even bother to write about, check out Luke Thomas' thorough account at Fog City Journal by clicking here.) This should get interesting.

Judeo-Christian Architecture 1

On the south side of Market Street, between the Marriott Jukebox Hotel and the Four Seasons Modern Brutalism Hotel and Residences...



...a new walkway has opened that leads to Mission Street and Yerba Buena Center.



On the left it skirts by the dark cube under construction at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and also the side of St. Patrick's Catholic Church, which dates from 1851.



The weather turned beautiful on Monday. and since all my clients' work was finished over the weekend, I needed an excuse to get out of the house.



So I called my new friend Patrick Vaz to see if he wanted to be my host at the Museum of Modern Art during his Financial District lunch hour, and he agreed happily.



The special exhibits, however, turned out to be two extremely boring photography shows. One consisted of 400 modestly sized photos by Lee Friedlander and the other featured slightly larger photos of ugly buildings, freeways and industrial sadness by Gabriele Basilico entitled "From San Francisco to Silicon Valley."



With few exceptions, I prefer looking at photos online or printed rather than on museum walls, the exceptions being when the photos are huge or part of a larger conception. Besides, I'd rather take my own photos of ugly new buildings and show them to you instead. They are certainly not hard to find in this rapidly changing neighborhood.

Judeo-Christian Architecture 2

We didn't last long in the museum and walked back along Mission Street in front of the incongruous brick facade...



...wondering what "contemporary" meant in the context of a Jewish Museum.



"Does this mean old Jewish history is not allowed, or what?" I asked Patrick.



He was as mystified as myself, but when I asked if he'd ever been in St. Patrick's Church next door, he happily offered a brief tour of the place.



"They've stopped having their noontime concert series, which is awful, and I'm thinking of writing about it," he told me. (Check out his blog, "Reverberate Hills," by clicking here.)



"This church is VERY Latin," he told me, with a knowing smile, and I wasn't sure if he was referring to its Latino congregation and pastoral staff (their names seem all seem to be Filipino), or if they performed masses in Latin secretly, or if "Latin" referred to something else altogether.

Judeo-Christian Architecture 3

We walked up to Market Street via the new walkway, passing expensive sugar dispensers offering everything from cream puffs...



...to Swiss chocolates.



There was also a small museum devoted to crafts and folk art, which felt slightly incongruous.



Patrick didn't care because he adores "crafts" and happily pointed out his favorites in the window.



Still, the juxtaxposition between the homespun and the brutal modern architecture was bizarre, and it reminded me of what Liebeskind's dark cube unintentionally conjured.



It seemed an unconscious echo of the sculpture in front of the Shorenstein building at Kearny and California which used to be the world headquarters for Bank of America. The sculpture's local nickname for decades, appropriately enough, has been "the banker's heart."

National Identification

At the extreme eastern end of Golden Gate Park in the Panhandle, there is a huge commemorative statue to the assassinated President McKinley which I somehow have never noticed before, possibly because it's across from a building I'd never entered in my 30-plus years in San Francisco.



Because I haven't had a driver's license since the early 1970s, there was never any reason to go to San Francisco's Department of Motor Vehicles office, which has long been known as a legendary branch of hell on earth.



I've always used a United States passport for picture identification, but the document is about to expire and to have it renewed, you need to surrender the old one. I'm not particularly worried about having a passport to go to another country at present, since the American dollar is becoming more worthless with each day, but this would leave me without any ID to get on airplanes, not to mention all the places one is asked for a picture ID in our new national security state.



So I went to the DMV office to see about getting a California ID card and saw that the legends about the place were true. It really did look like hell. After about five minutes in the line with "non-appointments" people, I announced to everyone that I was leaving them to their sorry fate and was returning home to make an appointment. "Good luck, everyone," I said, and silently thanked my younger self for making the decision not to drive a car when I grew up.

Maria Kochetkova Gives Us The Wilis

The chances were slight that I'd be checking out the San Francisco Ballet's third program of the season this week, since it was the 19th century story ballet "Giselle" in a version by the company's director, Helgi Tomasson.



Plus, the first act is a bucolic peasant divertissement which can get old very fast, and the second act takes place in a forest filled with the ghosts of vengeful virgins who've died before they were wed. And they're called The Wilis. Still, there was an interestingly tart review on Monday by the San Francisco Chronicle's new dance reviewer, Rachel Howard (click here), about the miscast prima ballerina Yuan Yuan Tan who is technically awesome but can't act her way out of a paper bag. At the end of the review, Howard wrote: "The buzz among serious ballet watchers is for Maria Kochetkova, who will make her company debut as Giselle on Tuesday."



So I decided to give "Giselle" a chance, and was very happy I did so, since "the buzz" turned out to be correct. Maria Kochetkova, the company's new prima ballerina direct from Russia, turned in a company debut performance that was instantly legendary.



Her cad of a prince playing a pauper breaking her heart was the ridiculously handsome Joan Boada (above), and the corps de ballet were really wonderful all night, but the performance belonged to Kochetkova.



She's tiny, expressive, and actually made you care about the dumb girl. Best of all, in the second act, when she's supposed to be a weightless ghost, she literally floated across the stage more than once. She was getting some support from Boada but it really did look as if she were going to rise up and disappear at any moment. I've never seen anything like it.



The production is traditional and beautiful and the mid-19th century French ballet music of Adolphe Adam is fun stuff. You have one more chance to see Kochetkova in the role, this Saturday night.

Luis Cancel, San Francisco's New Culture Czar

The San Francisco Symphony sponsored a reception for the swearing-in of Luis Cancel, San Francisco's new "Culture Czar" who will be in charge of the San Francisco Art Commission.



It was held in the Wattis Room at Davies Hall, which is a lovely salon for the swells to have cocktails and meals before symphony performances. After being introduced by Art Commissioner PJ Johnston who was in charge of the search committee for a new "culture czar," Mayor Newsom gave a speech that rambled on about the incredible "diversity" of San Francisco.



The speech reminded me of my days working for a large financial institution where upper management would have day-long workshops for branch managers about how important "diversity" was to the corporation. Of course, the irony of upper management being almost universally gringo and the branch managers being almost universally "diverse" was not addressed.



Meanwhile, the various arts leaders in San Francisco were out in force this rainy evening to see which way the new political winds were blowing.



There was a funny moment during the ceremony, where Mr. Cancel was reciting the baroquely complicated swearing-in oath phrase by phrase after Mayor Newsom, and stopped dead in his tracks, confused, when asked to repeat the phrase "I have no mental reservations about taking on this task," and it was obvious he had misheard the phrase to mean "mental" something else.



Cancel was the head of New York City's Arts Commission under David Dinkins in the early 1990s, and then went on to refurbish the Bronx museum, meanwhile trying to keep some of New York City affordable for working artists, which was almost as impossible a task as trying to reproduce the same results here.



It's going to be interesting watching how this relationship plays out, as Cancel deals with a mayor who is big on populist rhetoric but short on any actual results. I wish him all the best of luck.

Transferring Is Easions

The Academy of Art University has slowly been swallowing up San Francisco since its inception in 1929 by founder Richard S. Stephens, accelerating its institutional real estate buying binges after the investiture of his granddaughter, Elisa Stephens, as president in 1992.



To see how extensive their holdings really are, click here for a map of the 30+ campuses around town. The building above at the corner of Washington and Van Ness is currently sporting signage so bright and neon red that it looks as if it could easily belong in Las Vegas.



Plus, the signage is misspelled and doesn't make any sense. What does "TRANSFERRING IS EASIONS" mean?



The saddest detail is that this building used to house the wonderful Copenhagen furniture store which furnished apartments in San Francisco with inexpensive Danish modern for decades. Now the ground floor is just filled with outrageously expensive antique cars, which I presume belong to Ms. Stephens. Her latest caper is buying up all the buildings at 7th and Bryant and turning them into sculpture studios while evicting the 300 employees who have been using the space as the San Francisco Flower Mart for decades.



The federal ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) was passed in 1990 and though it's made improvements in life for millions of people, there have been more than a few scams associated with its implementation, such as lawyers threatening to sue over disabled access to various businesses unless they are paid off. Another scam involves sending disabled people to schools for vocational training where they have no business being, or where there are really no jobs once they graduate. That's one of the ways Ms. Stephens became so gaudily rich. I knew a handsome construction worker from Maine in the early 1990s who'd become quadrapelegic when he fell off a ladder, and he was attending the school through a disability program. The place made him sad, though, because he knew the whole vocational aspect was as phony as could be.

Muni Icon of the Month

On the 5 Fulton bus going from downtown towards the ocean this afternoon, we sat across from one of the most charmingly iconic Californa figures I've seen in some time.



Plus, the skateboard girl reading "Plato in 90 Minutes" was even sweet enough to pose for me.

Drama and Desire and Metal Rocks

Two new exhibits are opening on Friday the 15th at the Asian Art Museum, and on Wednesday the institution invited a large contingent of press for a preview presentation.



The museum fed and watered the crowd with a nice spread at 10 in the morning...



...and it was interesting to study the motley crew that showed up, confirming my observation that journalists/writers are a very odd lot indeed.



The highlight was meeting Clyde Steiner, who's been freelancing most of his life, including a stint for a British show business magazine when he was hanging out in Rome with his wife during the "La Dolce Vita" period of the early 1960s, and his stories were very amusing.



Also at our table was Kathy Aoki, who writes for the Nichi Bei Times, which is a national paper published out of San Francisco for the Japanese-American community since 1946.



The emcee was the Asian Art's public relations dude, Tim Hallman, who looks and acts like a slightly butcher version of Tim Gunn on "Project Runway," and that's in every way a compliment.



It wasn't easy herding around the eccentric group through the two exhibits, including the lady above who seemed to not care a whit about the what the tour guides had to say, keeping up loud conversations in an Asian language with various friends throughout the morning as everyone else looked scandalized.



"Drama and Desire: Japanese Paintings from the Floating World, 1690-1850" is a show put together by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston which has been touring the world for the last two years. This is the last stop before the treasures are put back into vaults to protect them from overexposure to light.



The show is fascinating, an evocation of Tokyo when it was a new boom city, with the aristocracy on the hills and the merchant section down below along the river, with "urban pleasure quarters of Kabuki theaters and high-class brothels." My favorite pieces in the show are huge theatrical advertisements from various Kabuki productions of the 18th century. They're wild and oddly modern, as is a series of scrolls depicting shape-shifting monsters threatening women in their homes, and there's even a single explicit porno scroll set up in the center of the second room.



The other exhibit was a "site-specific" installation by the Chinese artist Zhan Wang, which is high on concept, including everything from Chinese railroad laborers, the Chinese tradition of "scholar's rocks," and Sierra Nevada boulders recast in shiny metal.



It felt a bit silly while at the same time being visually fascinating.



And if this was too boring, Mr. Wang also offered up a vision of San Francisco made out of silver cooking implements that certainly was shiny.

The Poor Man's Pebble Beach

On an exquisitely beautiful Sunday afternoon, Mayor Gavin Newsom was absent from the city of San Francisco once again, this time enjoying the hospitality of Angelo Sangiacomo at his home on the golf course at Pebble Beach where the annual AT&T tournament was in its final day. Sangiacomo, by the way, is known as the "Father of Rent Control" in San Francisco, because the greedy real estate mogul was so outrageous in his rent hikes in the late 1970s that rent control legislation was finally voted in citywide.



Meanwhile, the poor and middle-class in San Francisco were enjoying themselves at Lincoln Park Municipal Golf Course in the Richmond District, where dozens of people were trying to qualify for the annual City Golf Championship that dates from 1917 (click here for their website).



Possibly on account of the upcoming tournament, the greens were in remarkable shape by Lincoln's usual standards, though the fairways were mostly a muddy, overgrown mess.



San Francisco's Rec and Park Department has long been criminally dysfunctional and nepotistic, with generations of goldbricking employees and management making life depressing and difficult for the many dedicated municipal employees who are doing their best with limited resources.



It also didn't help that millions of dollars were thrown away at the municipal Harding Park a few years ago to bring in a PGA tournament with Tiger Woods, and millions of dollars continue to be thrown away annually to a shady outside contractor running Harding Park, who is bilking the city treasury outrageously.



Now the powers that be want to take the inexpensively priced Lincoln Park and give it to private interests who will turn it into another rich person's playground. If Newsom or District Supervisor Elsbernd or the Rec & Park had an ounce of shame, they would actually be doing their best to provide recreational activities for ALL of San Francisco's citizens, but instead they are too busy eating real estate gangsters' hors d'oeuvres in Pebble Beach.

Behind The Iron Curtain at the SF Symphony

This week's program at the San Francisco Symphony was wonderful. The guest conductor Ingo Metzmacher annually arrives with fairly obscure music programs and makes a case for the music through beautiful performances. Last year he conducted Stravinsky's "Orpheus" and a Mozart "Mass in C Minor." The year before that he came with a full-length, fascinating Schumann oratorio about fairies.



This year he programmed Ligeti's 1974 tone cluster poem written for music director Seiji Ozawa and the San Francisco Symphony entitled none other than "San Francisco Polyphony."



It has only been played here once since its premiere, and that was twenty years ago, so it was a more than welcome return. It's beautiful, difficult, fascinating music written by one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century specifically for this city's symphony, and the ensemble is so technically adept these days, that the music sounded both insanely hard and simultaneously like child's play for the orchestra. As my friend Charlie (above) stated, they really should play it live once every couple of years and maybe it will become a perfect corollary to Jeannette MacDonald warbling "San Francisco" as a civic theme song.



Also on the program was one of Bartok's last compositions, his Third Piano Concerto, which he wrote to be a popular success so his wife wouldn't starve in New York after he died in 1945. I didn't know the work at all so it came as a revelation, my favorite new Bartok piece after the "Concerto for Orchestra" written around the same time. Kosman in the "Chronicle" and a few friends weren't that impressed with the performance on Thursday, so Helene Grimaud and the orchestra were either massively better on Friday or I was just in the mood. The performance struck me as extraordinary.



By perfect chance, all the cool musical cogniscenti of the Bay Area had consulted the same astrological chart and seemed to be in attendance on Friday evening, including Sid Chen from "The Standing Room" (click here) who is studying jazz singing and finding it outrageously difficult.



Also attending was Patrick Vaz, who writes the cultural essay blog "Reverberate Hills" (click here) who was attending on his first press ticket with yours truly, and the fact that the seats were so awesome put us both into a bit of a Wayne and Garth haze. The Shostakovich Sixth Symphony after intermission did nothing to dispel my ambivalence about the composer, which basically boils down to loving the Bad Boy Shostakovich ("Lady Macbeth," the First Piano Concerto, a bunch of other music) and being bored by the tragic and serious Shostakovich. The Sixth Symphony couldn't have been a better demonstration, in fact, with its long, sad first movement (spiked by a rhythmic cougher in the audience for its final hushed notes) and the two final movements which couldn't have been more amusing and lively. The orchestra played great throughout.

The Urban Transformation of Hayes Valley

A large, abandoned corner grocery near the corner of Hayes and Laguna has been the site of a number of group art shows over the last six months before the owner demolishes the building to use the land for purposes that are uncertain.



The exhibits started with a three-man show that included the artwork of former San Francisco Supervisor and mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez. The show wasn't particularly interesting and neither were the subsequent attempts, but a fun and interesting exhibit has just opened called "Ancient City: The Art of Urban Transformation" for the month of February (click here for their nicely designed website).



It was curated by Daniel Newman (above) who specializes in beautiful, arty photos of San Franciscan industrial decay.



The idea of the show started with a simple desire to display his own work in the big, beautiful, inexpensive space in the fancy new Hayes Valley neighborhood, but he decided to include others as well, and curated the entire show himself, doing extensive research on local artists on the internet before coming up with his group.



The opening night party was Friday evening, and it was a very jolly one, especially since every other person seemed to be related to Louisa Spier (below), my new friend from the San Francisco Symphony's public relations department.



The delicious wine for the event was being provided by one of Louisa's cousins, Mel Knox (click here for his great website about his oenophile obsession).



Her husband was there providing hipster cred before taking her out for a fancy meal commemorating the ninth anniversary of their initial meeting in a Tenderloin dive.



And radiating light in all directions was another one of Louisa's "cousins" through her parents, Liz Mamorsky (above). Be sure to click here if you want to get to "Lizland" on the web.

Mozart, Thomson and Stravinsky at the Ballet

The last time my friend Charlie Lichtman (above) went to the San Francisco Ballet was many years ago when he was dating a dancer who took him to see Frederick Ashton's full-length bucolic ballet, "La Fille Mal Gardee." Charlie thought maybe it was his own "visceral" New York upbringing that made him feel like he was going to lapse into a coma, but I assured him that was not the case.



He decided to try the institution once again, and joined me for $10 standing room tickets in the orchestra for "Program 2." of the season. It's a mixed bag of Balanchine's 1956 "Divertimento No. 15" to music by Mozart, Mark Morris' 1988 "Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes" to 13 unrecorded piano etudes by Virgil Thomson, and Yuri Possokhov's version from last year of the 1910 Stravinsky "Firebird." It was a great program, and Charlie even said he'd come back for more.



The conductor for the evening wasn't the usual music director, Martin West, and the deluxe substitution was George Cleve, who conducted the San Jose Symphony for decades along with the San Francisco Midsummer Mozart Festival. The orchestra's account of the Mozart Divertimento was wonderful and even better was the entire troupe of dancers who danced the ascetic, difficult architectural stylings of Balanchine with real brilliance.



Even better was the early Mark Morris ballet, which started with Natalya Feygina seated onstage at a huge grand piano all by herself playing a "modern" sounding piece by Thomson called "Chromatic Double Harmonies." It wasn't until the final notes that a pair of dancers finally ambled onto the stage in front of the pianist, letting the audience know that this was going to be about the music.



The San Francisco Ballet has worked enough with Mark Morris over the last decade that they're almost like a second company for him, and they dance his pieces with extraordinary affection and expertise.



Competing with George Balanchine and Mark Morris isn't really fair, particularly with one of the most famous ballet scores in history, but Possokhov's choreography of "Firebird" and the production by Yuri Zhukov were both silly and confusing, and the piece doesn't get better with repetition. Still, after all the aesthetic perfection of the first two-thirds of the program, sending the audience out with some crowd-pleasing kitsch probably wasn't a bad idea.

Election Day

Late last year, I put out a wish for more freelance work and money on this very blog, and magically a new client appeared who has been keeping me very, very busy...



...so this Tuesday's election I resigned from my precinct "inspector" post, and felt guilty about abandoning the sweet poll workers, even though the 18-hour gig is grueling and requires a couple of days to recover.



Instead, I went to the precinct and filled out a ballot, voting similarly to my fellow San Franciscans but not my fellow Californians, which is nothing new (click here for San Francisco's Department of Election website).



At around 9:30 on Tuesday evening I headed over to City Hall to see if there were any election results being reported...



... while passing a small army of sheriff's deputies and parking control officers in charge of delivering the physical evidence of the voters.



To my surprise, there was hardly anyone in City Hall, with only two political junkies sitting in front of a large-screen TV in the North Light Court.



Who knows what was actually happening to the ballots in the basement below? In Willie Brown, Jr.'s mayoral days, they tended to end up in the bay if there was an inconvenient result, but during this election cycle, everything seemed to go as the powers that be planned, meaning such drastic measures were simply not necessary.

Thomas Glenn Sings Vaughan Williams

Making a career as an opera singer is an insanely tricky, difficult business. In fact, it might almost be easier to just make up one's mind to become an internationally famous movie star instead. The San Francisco Opera has a series of professional coaching programs for auditioners from around the world, and the most prestigious is the Adler Fellows, who stick around San Francisco for two years singing large parts in small productions and small parts in large productions, which is how I discovered the Canadian tenor Thomas Glenn (above).



A few of the singers, such as the recent graduate Elza van den Heever, have a freakish vocal talent that is soon recognized by powerful music agents, but for the most part the Adler Fellows are on their own after their two years in the program. Their careers after that point are very much at the mercy of "la forza del destino" (the force of destiny), with timing, luck and connections usually making all the difference. In Thomas Glenn's case, his bit of karmic luck was covering the part of physicist Robert Wilson in the John Adams world premiere, "Doctor Atomic," in 2005. Not long before the opening, the singer essaying the part was "sadly and reluctantly" dismissed, and Glenn went on instead, where he had a great success. Two years later, the opera has just been performed in Amsterdam and Chicago, and later this fall it will be given its second staging in a new production being shared by the Met in New York and the English National Opera, and Glenn is very much part of the cast in a role he originated.



Glenn was the star at Friday's tribute to the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams on the anniversary of his death 50 years earlier at the acoustically beautiful Old First Church on Van Ness and Sacramento, which was sponsoring the 11th in a series of concerts called "Basically British." The concerts are the musical inspiration of the San Francisco Opera's Head of Music Staff, John Parr (above), who loves 20th Century British music.



According to the two gentlemen in the pew in front of me, the entire series has been beyond exquisite, and I feel slightly guilty about not having attended any of the earlier installments because I'm also partial to modern British music, particularly Benjamin Britten who has been a mainstay of the series. My excuse is that going to a chamber music concert in a church all by oneself feels more than a bit lonely, especially when one has a partner and friends who could care less about this kind of music.



Though I have an aversion to classical "art song" concerts, Friday evening turned out to be exquisite, partly because Thomas Glenn has such a distinctive voice, a very high and almost otherworldly tenor, and also because the half-dozen performers from the San Francisco Opera orchestra played chamber music with a passion that took my breath away.



They played the "Fantasia" movement from the Piano Quintet in C Minor with such beauty and passion that I put the music on my Amoeba list immediately, while wondering why they didn't play the entire piece. The performance was extraordinary, with extra props to the wildly expressive and sexy bass player Michael Taddei.



The program started off ascetically with "Six Studies in English Folksong" which the program warned us were "very melancholic," continued with a song cycle for violin and tenor called "Along the Field" to poems by A.E. Houseman, and finished off the first half with insanely Pre-Raphaelite lushness to a song cycle set to Dante Gabriel Rosetti poems called "The House of Life." The second half included the quintet excerpt and another Houseman song cycle for a piano quintet and tenor called "On Wenlock Edge" that was really wonderful. We all floated away from the church quite content.

Ashkenazy at the San Francisco Symphony

Vladimir Ashkenazy (above), who debuted with the San Francisco Symphony as a piano virtuoso 50 years ago, turned to conducting in 1990 and this week is offering a mixed bag of works that were for the most part lovely and bland until the end of the program.



First up was a new piece written by the 79-year-old Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (try pronouncing that name quickly) which was commissioned by the Julliard School in New York for their hundredth anniversary in 2005. It was a three-movement work called "Manhattan Trilogy," which was a pleasure to listen to, though it certainly didn't invoke how I envision Manhattan. Rautavaara started off writing twelve-tone serial music, but made a switch later in his career to more conservative, tonal music with a slight edge to it. In the program notes, there's a great quote from him: "If an artist is not a Modernist when he is young, he has no heart. And if he is a Modernist when he is old, he has no brain."



Next up was the beautiful 1880 Scottish Fantasy by Max Bruch, which is essentially his third violin concerto. It was being played by a tall, handsome young Canadian violinist named James Ehnes.



He played with taste and sensitivity throughout, which is unfortunately not what this schmaltzy, fabulous music requires.



I moved to the Center Terrace from the Orchestra section after intermission because the troll pictured above was sitting next to me and kept shining his penlight on his program throughout the concert which was totally annoying. When I asked him to please stop doing it, he mumbled, "Shut up! You talk too much!" in an accent that was straight out of "Eastern Promises."



The second half started with Respighi's "Fountains of Rome," a warhorse I never really need to hear again, followed by the French composer Albert Roussel's suite of music from the second act of his full-length 1930 ballet "Bacchus and Ariadne." The latter was sensational music, beautifully played, and made me want to hear the entire score, preferably with ballet dancers flying through the air. How about it, San Francisco Ballet?