Critics on the grass alas

How pleasurable it is that the 1928 Stein/Thomson opera, "Four Saints in Three Acts," can still inspire both worship and outraged indignation. (Pictured above in the Ensemble Parallele production are left to right Michael Strickland, Heidi Moss, Eugene Brancoveanu, Charlie Lichtman, Joe Meyers and Maya Kherani.)



The longest, funniest, and best informed essay is by Patrick Vaz at Reverberate Hills where he coins the newly classic phrase:

"The St Ignatius of Eugene Brancoveanu...was particularly fine – vibrant and sensitive and pointed – in Pigeons on the grass, alas, which is the Nessun Dorma of avant-garde opera."

Also appreciating the recent production was composer and writer Charles Shere at Eastside View:

"It's one of the great operas not only of the 20th century but of any, and productions are rare, and this one is worth seeing."

(Pictured above are left to right Brendan Hartnett, Heidi Moss, Jonathan Smucker, and Eugene Brancoveanu.)



Two other writers were similarly amused by the production and the piece, Cedric at SFist and Charlise at The Opera Tattler. (Pictured above are Kalup Linzy and the ensemble in Luciano Chessa's prologue opera A Heavenly Act.)



Thankfully, it wasn't all kittens and roses. Joshua Kosman, the classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, was "livid" after Sunday's performance, according to a friend sitting nearby. He starts his review with:

"Four Saints in Three Acts," the cloying little theatrical concoction by composer Virgil Thomson and librettist Gertrude Stein, is the grade-school pageant of the operatic repertoire. You don't so much attend to it - at least not if you're an adult - as pat it on the head, coo indulgently and wait for it to be over already."

And though he bends over backwards to be kind to some of the singers and the production, it's clear Mr. Kosman doesn't quite get Gertrude Stein and hates the simplistic sounding music. He's certainly not alone in that view, and in fact half the cast felt the same way going into rehearsals, but the opera has an amazing, powerful charm when you live with it every day. Forty-eight hours after the last performance and I am still dealing with all the lovely earworms that arrive unbidden in my brain. Patrick and Charles are right, it's a great piece.

(Pictured above are Michael Strickland and Michael Harvey about to fry Eugene Brancoveanu in the electric chair.) The great production rehearsal photos above are by Steve diBartolomeo.

Summer of Gertrude Stein 4: Rehearsing Four Saints in Three Acts

Every day for the last week I have been surrounded by the music from Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's first opera, "Four Saints in Three Acts," as it is being rehearsed in the small Wattis Theatre at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. To say it has been undiluted joy is something of an understatement.



Two friends who know more about classical music than I do, Patrick Vaz and Sidney Chen, both told me that the opera ranked as one of their all-time favorites which struck me as weird since their musical tastes are so sophisticated and the Thomson score is so dull and simple on the surface, a succession of Southern Baptist and Methodist hymn tunes interspersed with an occasional dance set to Gertrude Stein at her most hermetic.



When conductor Nicole Paiement above was approached about doing the piece with her Ensemble Parallele chamber opera group for SFMOMA, she had a similar reaction. "That piece is so dull," she thought, but after studying and playing with the abridged (by Thomson) score, she has become a fervent convert and is leading a dozen singers through rehearals in a nuanced and outrageously enjoyable rendition of the opera.



It's also fun to watch the composer Luciano Chessa in the house following along at the rehearsals with the Thomson score, usually with a huge grin on his face. Chessa has written a half-hour prologue opera for the evening with video art contributions by Kalup Linzy, and the little I've heard sounds remarkable, with music that ranges in sound from the Ligeti "Requiem" to a hip-hop gospel chorus.



I have no idea how the actual show is going to turn out (click here for tickets), though there are some spectacular plans for staging, but I can confidently state that the music is going to be very special thanks to Ms. Paiement, who has her talented cast sounding better each day. For an interesting, long essay on the opera and this production, click here for Brett Campbell's essay at San Francisco Classical Voice. Janos Gereben at the same site doesn't get the music or Gertrude Stein's writing at all, so he had me write a defense of the opera, which you can get to by clicking here.

The Summer of Gertrude Stein 1: Useful Knowledge

The short introductory chapter "Before I Came to Paris" at the beginning of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas concludes with this statement:

"I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important people, I have met several great people but I have only known three first class geniuses and in each case on sight within me something rang. In no one of the three cases have I been mistaken. In this way my new full life began."

Man Ray, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, 1922, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Isabel Wilder, ©2010 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

The punchline, of course, is that the writer of those words is not Alice B. Toklas but her lesbian partner of 25 years, Gertrude Stein, extolling her own genius. A further joke is that she may even be right, as the book itself aptly demonstrates. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published in 1933 and became a huge, Book-of-the-Month Club best-seller, marking the first time Stein's work had earned her any money, at the ripe old age of 60 after having written on a daily basis for close to 40 years.



This is the Summer of Gertrude Stein in downtown San Francisco, with major exhibits devoted to her family's art collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and her life at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Four Saints in Three Acts, Stein's surprisingly successful 1934 operatic collaboration with Virgil Thomson, will also be performed in a newly configured production by Ensemble Parallele in late August at Yerba Buena Center.


George Platt Lynes, Gertrude Stein, Bilignin, 1931, toned gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection, Gift of Adelyn D. Breeskin BMA 1985.3, © Estate of George Platt Lynes

Until recently, all I knew about Gertrude Stein was that she was an iconic stout lesbian who had once lived in Oakland, and then lived in Paris with her partner Alice B. Toklas. I also vaguely knew that she was acquainted with every famous painter and writer in Paris during the first half of the 20th century since she pops up in historical anecdotes continually, even making a cameo in the latest Woody Allen movie in the person of Kathy Bates. After seeing her two Thomson operas with their nonsensical librettos, I had a vague sense that her writing was simple words used repetitively in a singsong fashion that was essentially incomprehensible.



"How do you feel about Gertrude Stein?" I asked my extremely erudite friend Patrick Vaz, shown above eyeing his favorite painting in the SFMOMA permanent collection, Matisse's 1905 Woman with a Hat. "I love Gertrude Stein," he replied, "and I've read quite a bit of her work, including the major pieces."

"You mean to tell me that you've read the entire, thousand-page-plus The Making of Americans?" I asked. "Every word, and with pleasure" was his answer. "Did you ever skim through sections?" "And what would be the point of that?" Patrick countered.



Asking where I should start with Stein's work, he suggested The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas since it is so accessibly written. Patrick didn't let on just how funny, gossipy, and plain brilliant the book is, with stories of a young Picasso and Matisse and a huge cast of eccentric, legendary characters in turn-of-the-century Paris. There is an amazing section recounting World War One, where Gertrude became a truck driver with Alice at her side, delivering relief supplies throughout France. In the 1920s, even though major publishers wouldn't touch her work, she was a cult figure among young American writers who would visit her in Paris. This is when she became guru and godmother to Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom are profiled.

The book is so perfect in its own way that I was worried whether Stein could sustain it up to the end, but she does, confessing in the last paragraph her elaborate joke:

"About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this it."

I had heard that a number of the stories in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas were not exactly reliable, so I read a pair of biographies on Gertrude. The 1975 Everybody Who Was Anybody by Janet Hobhouse clears up many of the distortions from Stein's own autobiographies and features a huge number of wonderful illustrations. The 1995 "Favored Strangers" Gertrude Stein and Her Family is a Jewish, feminist academic look by Linda Wagner-Martin at Gertrude and Alice and the entire Stein clan. The writing's not particularly graceful, but the research is superb.

There is more to come on the Stein family, their years in the Bay Area and Paris, and how Gertrude manifested her "genius."

Four Saints and a Cop in Three Acts

"To know to know to love her so" is the first line of Four Saints in Three Acts, the 1928 opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein. Getting to know the opera after two weeks of daily rehearsals with Ensemble Parallele and the director Brian Staufenbiel (above center) has fulfilled the predictive nature of that opening line. Hearing this opera sung repeatedly by a superb cast of a dozen singers over and over has been an immersive education and a joy.



We moved from our rehearsal space at SFMOMA to the surprisingly lavish Novellus Theatre at Yerba Buena Center across the street this week, and opened with a sold-out preview performance on Thursday evening and an official opening on Friday. (Left to right above, Brooke Munoz, Nicole Takesono, Joe Meyers, Eugene Brancoveanu, and Brendan Hartnett.)



The production design is about as far as can be from the cellophane original but it's elegant, beautiful and fits the piece perfectly. (Dancing the tango above are Eugene Brancoveanu with Heidi Moss, and Nicole Takesono with Joe Meyers.)



I am one of two evil supernumeraries (above left, with Mike Harvey on the right and Eugene Brancoveanu as Saint Ignatius in the center) who move furniture and singers around while occasionally playing a cop and a baliff and, during the tango, an Isadora Duncan dancing male couple. Yes, I am having too much fun.

The great production rehearsal photos above are by Steve diBartolomeo.

It's Washington's Birthday, Washington's Birthday

Well, that was some kind of fun.

After a four-month contract job in Silicon Valley ended, I was ready to embark on a new adventure, and fate happily intervened through an email from the San Francisco Opera asking if I wanted to be a supernumerary in the John Adams opera Nixon in China, followed by a rehearsal schedule that was essentially every day for the month of May. The immediate answer was "yes, yes and yes," because the music to this opera has been on my favorites list since it was first recorded 25 years ago.

There were sixteen supernumeraries, evenly divided by gender, with all four real Asians on the female side. Those four turned out to be part of the serious joy of this production, and being a unisex People's Army Soldier with them in matching overcoat, belt, combat boots, and fur hat erased any qualms about the Jonathan Pryce Miss Saigon minstrel show aspect of appearing as a Chinese dude onstage.



One of the Asian supers turned out to be a bestselling novelist out of Bernal Heights, Tess Uriza Holthe (above right with Veronique), who was researching the opera for her next novel, and lucked out in being slotted into this production as her first time onstage. Click here for her account of the experience at the San Francisco Opera Backstage blog.

Live theater, and opera is live theater at its most ambitious and extreme, has an alchemical element to it. Sometimes the combination of forces is magical and sometimes it's inert. San Francisco Opera got very lucky with its first production of Nixon in China, partly through General Director David Gockley's almost perfect casting, and partly just because everyone melded during this production in a manner that's rare, from orchestra to chorus to principals to dancers to stage crew to extras.

And of course it was also great because the The Three Ancient Supers in the photo at top (Charlie Lichtman, Michael Harvey, and yours truly) are seemingly the good luck token of just about every wonderful modern opera production over the last 18 months in the Bay Area, from Orphee at the Herbst, Four Saints in Three Acts at Yerba Buena, to Nixon in China at the San Francisco Opera. This has been quite a run, Musketeers.

Voyage to Mahagonny at the Old Exploratorium

The Exploratorium science museum left their old digs at the Palace of Fine Arts a couple of years ago for a state-of-the-art new museum on the waterfront, but it may have been a mistake. The 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition building is a wonder unto itself, something I finally realized after spending last weekend rehearsing Opera Parallèle's upcoming double-bill of Kurt Weill's Mahagonny Songspiel and Francois Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias.



The curving old warehouse is huge, with skylights, monumental statues and detailing galore. Everyone, including mezzo-soprano Renee Rapier above, wanted to move into the place forever.



Opera Parallèle started its career with a world premiere of the final version of Lou Harrison's opera Young Caesar at the Yerba Buena Theatre in 2007 in a surprisingly great production that featured exquisite music-making by conductor Nicole Paiement above, who was a friend of Harrison's in Santa Cruz.



Since then, the company has specialized in daring productions of little-performed contemporary operas, meaning the repertory of the last 100 years that doesn't include Puccini or Richard Strauss. They have mounted productions of a chamber-size version of Berg's Wozzeck, Philip Glass's Orphee, a condensed version of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby, Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, Golijov's Ainadamar, and a double-bill of Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti and Barber's A Hand of Bridge. All of them have been directed and conceived by Brian Staufenbeil above, talking to the most excellent soprano Rachel Schutz who is singing and playing Tirésias in a career performance.



The entire cast, through sheer providence, is an unusually good mix, and they play off of each other beautifully, including the talented baritones above: Gabriel Pressier from Florida in the red boots, and Hadleigh Adams from New Zealand as the Gendarme who becomes his gender-bender suitor in Les mamelles de Tirésias.



Another Florida baritone, Daniel Cilla above, is part of the rich stew of this production...



...along with Canadian/San Francisco tenor Thomas Glenn who is consulting above with musical assistant William Long and the virtuoso rehearsal pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi.



Though Opera Parallèle is financed on a shoestring by big opera house standards, they are seriously ambitious and extravagant which is in the very DNA of the art form. This weekend's production at the Yerba Buena Center Theater features a huge contingent from the SF Girls Chorus above...



...the dancers Joseph Hernandez and Vanessa Thiessen...



...and a full adult chorus including Cliff Reilly and Anne Marie Borch above.



Though it is impossible to know how a show is going to turn out before it is actually performed in front of an audience, this one feels special.

The Twin Barbers of Seville

San Francisco Opera's Merola summer training program is presenting Rossini's "Barber of Seville" at Herbst Theatre with two separate casts in four total performances, ending tomorrow on Sunday afternoon. The press was strongly encouraged to attend Thursday and Friday evening's performances so they could write about all the student singers, but I was busy rehearsing for the upcoming production of "Four Saints in Three Acts," and wasn't able to make it to the opening.



That turned out for the best since "Barber of Seville" is an opera that has become boring through repetition for me, and the production design was literally painful to look at, with a full wall of green glitter tinsel replaced at times by a wall of gold glitter tinsel, a decorating scheme that wouldn't be out of place in an Eastern European brothel. The singers were mostly wonderful and rose above the production, including Mark Diamond as Figaro in the first photo and Renee Rapier as Rosina above.



There were however music writers with infinitely more dedication and stamina than myself who saw both casts on Thursday and Friday evening, including Axel Feldheim above who warned me cryptically at the beginning of the evening that looking at the stage might be "painful," but that he loved the opera and some of the performances. Click here for an account of the first cast and here for the second cast.



Charlise the Opera Tattler also wrote about Thursday and Friday as did the Beast in the Jungle.



Cedric Westphal above was also a Barber completist, and though his thoughts on the two casts haven't been posted yet at SFist, the review by Janos Gereben, the fastest deadline writer in the West and quite possibly the East is up already at San Francisco Classical Voice. The consensus seems to be that both casts were unusually strong, and views about the production varied according to taste. (Production photos by Kristen Loken.)

Scenes From a BART Non-Riot

A pair of us were let out early from a "Four Saints in Three Acts" rehearsal at SFMOMA on Monday afternoon because there were reports of a riot and mayhem coming to the BART system at Civic Center Station, where a street drunk was gunned down by a BART policeman last month.



This prompted a protest in the Civic Center BART station a week ago that was raucous, disruptive and very theatrical, staged for a media swarm who were loving every minute of it while officially tsk-tsking the protestors.



Blowing up this tiny incident into an international news item was the unintended fault of BART spokesman Linton Johnson who came up with the bright idea to turn off all mobile device service in the station so the protestors couldn't communicate with each other digitally. This is the kind of action the United States has been officially condemning when it happens in Egypt and China and other occasionally authoritarian regimes.



The action also got the serious attention of the worldwide hacking community, and so Anonymous and its loosely allied group of friends online have started attacking the BART bureaucracy until they apologize and make it official policy that they will never pull something that authoritarian again.



Walking through the middle of United Nations Plaza, I saw a few young protestor types in red T-shirts and a few V for Vendetta masks and also saw a large, fairly relaxed crew of police sitting and standing, waiting for orders.



There were also tour buses gliding through which added to the surreal feeling.



By the time I got home at 5:30, the police and protestors started a cat-and-mouse game down Market Street and it was the police who shut the four downtown San Francisco stations for two hours, bringing on BART commuter hell. And it looks like the hackers are just getting started (click here for the latest from the Bay Citizen).

An Afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum

Yesterday, on a warm, clear New York afternoon, we hopped over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a whirlwind tour.



The Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian wing always seems to be closed when I visit this museum, and Thursday was no exception as the glass-enclosed atrium was being set up for a huge, fancy dinner event that evening. "Look, another party we're not invited to," I told my friend Jay.



A crew chief walking by said, "You're welcome to work it if you want," since there seemed to be a few no-shows, and I was half tempted to take him up on the offer. Instead, we wandered into a small set of galleries dedicated to American paintings from the first half of the 20th century, including the Edward Hopper canvas above.



The spirit of my friend Patrick Vaz seemed to be hovering over the afternoon, as there was a Georgia O'Keefe sun-bleached bone painting...



...hung next to large panels above by Florine Stettheimer, the eccentric New York artist who designed the original cellophane sets for the Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera, Four Saints in Three Acts.



Picasso's early portrait of Gertrude herself was on the second floor, surrounded by an amazing assortment of iconic European paintings such as the Van Gogh below that are part of the museum's permanent collection.



Next to a silly, claustrophobic exhibition devoted to Punk Fashion, there was an extraordinary special exhibit of French Impressionist paintings from museums all over the world, focusing on depictions of what people wore. There was added attraction of displays in the middle of each gallery of actual clothing from the period, in a few cases echoing the exact dresses and suits that were being depicted on the walls. This sounds like it could have been one of socialite Dede Wilsey's Expensive Paintings and Fancy Frocks exhibits that keep popping up at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, but instead the effect was scholarly, fascinating, and transported one into late 19th Century France in a surprisingly powerful way. Plus, there were about a dozen huge Manet paintings among all the Degas and Renoir and Tissot works that I had never seen before, and the exhibit was surprisingly uncrowded so you could easily stand right in front of everything.



Unlike San Francisco museums, the security guards were helpful and unobtrusive, and also allowed artists to sketch and paint within the galleries themselves. The place almost made me want to move to New York.