Palm Springs Homecoming Parade

My current life is a geographic yo-yo between San Francisco and Palm Springs.

In contrast to the hard-edged city, Palm Springs often feels like a friendly village, where civic leaders annually shut down the main drag for the high school homecoming parade.

Hispanics are under violent attack from the federal government now, but the young parade marchers looked proud of their culture.

Palm Springs's population is currently 62% white and 25% Hispanic, but the next generation looks to change that ratio.

During the 40-minute parade, there were brightly dressed dancers making their way down Palm Canyon Drive...

...preceded by a young male contingent doing ornate step dancing.

Other local school groups...

...who had a football team...

...and a cheering organization...

...were also included.

Markus Crouse, a longtime friend, who taught high school in San Francisco, Pacifica, Hollywood, and the Palm Springs area, once mentioned that the desert kids were the sweetest group of any of them.

I can confirm that from observations on the Coachella Valley public bus system. There are as many crazy and down-and-out characters riding them as on San Francisco's Muni system, but the teenage passengers are consistently kind and helpful to everyone.

May they continue to march forward.

Donald Runnicles Conducts Mahler First at SF Symphony

The magnificent 70-year-old Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles returned to the San Francisco Symphony for the first time in years with a program that was pure fin-de-siècle Vienna: Alban Berg's Seven Early Songs and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1. Runnicles was the Music Director at the SF Opera for 17 years (1992-2009) and has repeatedly returned there for large, ambitious productions such as Berlioz's Les Troyens and Strauss's Die Frau Ohne Schatten. On Friday evening's opening concert, Davies Hall was only about two-thirds full but seemingly all my classical music-loving friends were in attendance along with half of the administrative staff of the SF Opera from across the street. The concert was a triumph for the conductor and all the SF Symphony musicians, and if you would like a detailed account of the music, check out Lisa Hirsch's ecstatic review here. (All photos are by Kristen Loken.)

The Berg songs were written for voice and piano between 1905-1908, but when he went to study with Arnold Schoenberg, the older composer told him to stop writing art songs and concentrate on instrumental music. Twenty years later, Berg took a selection of seven of these early songs and rearranged them for a soprano and large orchestra. The soloist was American mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts, who was last seen in San Francisco as Offred in the operatic version of The Handmaid's Tale last year. It was a treat to see her looking so glamorous instead of being in the punishing outfits of Gilead, and she was in great voice, soaring easily over the large orchestra.

The Berg piece was less than 20 minutes long, followed by a 20 minute intermission, which felt a little weird. However, nobody felt cheated because the Mahler Symphony No. 1 that followed was deep, dense, and meaty enough to fill out a program on its own.

Runnicles seemed to be enjoying himself immensely and the same was true for the instrumentalists who all had their moments to individually shine in this intricate, eccentric, revolutionary score, composed in 1888 and then revised in 1906. Let's hope Runnicles returns again soon, both to the SF Symphony and the SF Opera, because he seems to be one of those conductors who only get better as they grow older.

Rigoletto at SF Opera

A splendid revival of an old Mark Lamos production of Verdi's Rigoletto opened the San Francisco Opera season this month, and I saw the penultimate performance on Wednesday, where the cast and orchestra under Music Director Eun Sun Kim gelled for a gripping musical evening. The libretto is adapted from an 1832 play by Victor Hugo, Le roi s'amuse, which was immediately banned in France after one performance and not revived in that country until 50 years later. Verdi's closely adapted 1851 opera version ran into its own censorship problems as it also featured the real-life licentious 16th century French king, Frances I, and his hunchbacked jester Triboulet. In a compromise with the censors, Verdi and his librettist Francesco Maria Piave moved the story to Mantua, Italy, demoted the king to a Duke, and changed all the names to protect the guilty. (All production photos by Cory Weaver.)

The opera was an immediate global success with audiences but not with professional critics, including one Venetian who decried its "deformed and repulsive" story inspired by "the Satanic school." The narrative certainly is dark and brutal throughout, but is brightened by some of the most gorgeous music ever composed by Verdi. The title role of the hunchbacked jester (a disabled detail that tends to be jettisoned in modern productions) is one of the pinnacles of the baritone repertory, and Mongolian singer Amartuvshin Enkhbat has been one of its musical masters for the last two decades.

Musical appreciation for operatic voices is completely subjective, as a glance at any operatic chat room online will attest (click here for Parterre Box). For instance, some people hate the voice of Maria Callas while others worship it, and there's no right or wrong reaction. Enkhbat doesn't do enough for me in terms of characterization with his acting and his voice, but everyone whose musical opinions I respect absolutely adore him, so the problem is mine. I did love baritone Aleksey Bogdanov (pictured above behind Rigoletto) as Count Monterone, whose curse on the jester and the duke sets the tragedy in motion.

The bass Peixin Chen, another wonderful low voice, played professional assassin Sparafucile, and his scene offering his services to Rigoletto shared the same dark moodiness as the King and the Spanish Inquisitor duet in Verdi's later Don Carlo.

Rigoletto is almost completely a masculine opera, including the depraved courtiers sung superbly by the SF Opera Chorus, and it has only two female roles. The Romanian soprano Adela Zaharia played Gilda, Rigoletto's teenage daughter who has just been retrieved from the convent, and she was absolutely spectacular.

This character is often played as so innocent that she seems like a nincompoop, particularly when she sacrifices her life for the Duke in the final act, but Zaharia played her as a strong-willed young woman who has found love for the first time. Her famous Caro Nome aria, where she muses on the fake name that the Duke has given her while posing as a poor student, was the best version I have ever heard, and the orchestra supported her beautifully.

After being kidnapped by the courtiers and delivered to the duke as a new sexual treat, rather like Epstein and Trump in our own time, Zaharia convincingly conveyed Gilda's mixture of shame and romantic longing after she's been used and tossed aside.

The musical and emotional heart of the opera is in the duets between father and daughter, rather like Simon Boccanegra, and Zaharia's incredible voice was heartbreaking.

The other female character is Maddalena, sister and accomplice of the assassin Sparafucile, sung by J'Nai Bridges in an amusing, sexy performance. The Duke of Mantua is written to be charismatically handsome, and he gets most of the hit tunes, including the irresistable, sexist La donna è mobile. Though perfectly adequate, tenor Yongzhao Yu's portrayal did not come across as charmingly attractive at all, so it was hard to believe in Gilda's and Maddelena's desire to save him. It was a minor hiccup, though, and if you get a chance to make it to the final performance on Saturday the 27th, do so.

Dead Man Walking Returns to SF Opera

Like a virgin, I saw Dead Man Walking at the San Francisco Opera for the very first time last Saturday. I never read the 1993 bestselling memoir by Sister Helen Prejean detailing her work with Louisiana death row convicts, nor the Oscar-winning 1995 film with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, nor the 2002 play written by actor/director Tim Robbins, nor any production of the 2000 opera composed by Jake Heggie to a libretto by playwright Terrence McNally. (Click here for an interesting essay by Heggie about their collaboration.)

The work was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera under General Director Lotfi Mansouri who loved turning his favorite movies into operas, for instance A Streetcar Named Desire and Dangerous Liaisons. This season's return is a triumphant homecoming after its San Francisco Opera premiere 25 years ago and innumerable productions around the world. The current production is a flashy, Broadway-style staging with lots of scenery flying in and out by director Leonard Foglia that has been touring the country for years. Unfortunately, I didn't care for the opera at all. (All production photos by Cory Weaver.)

The problem certainly was not the singers, because there was luxury casting throughout, starting with mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton as Sister Helen. Barton currently has one of the richest voices in the operatic world and it's a pleasure to hear her sing just about anything, but Heggie's vocal lines were so dull that her gifts felt wasted.

The divine mezzo-soprano Susan Graham performed Sister Helen at the 2000 premiere, and she returned to play the mother of the convicted murderer, a role originated for another legendary mezzo-soprano, Frederica von Stade. She was ably supported by Nikola Printz, Caroline Corrales, Samuel White, and the great veteran baritone Rod Gilfry as the grieving parents advocating vengeful justice.

Gilfry also appeared in last year's SF Opera co-commission, Kaija Saariaho's Innocence, which dealt with a community destroyed by a school shooting. Dead Man Walking's libretto is filled with out-of-place Broadway humor, platitudes about grief, and moral transcendence cliches while Saariaho's masterpiece was filled with nuance, ambiguity, and genuine power. Innocence also had an amazing, interesting musical score while Heggie's music sounds like background for an old-fashioned movie, except for the prison choruses which sound like they were lifted directly from Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd.

The convicted rapist/murderer Joe De Rocher, sung beautifully by baritone Ryan McKinny, is a fictional composite of two death row prisoners that Sister Helen wrote about (the same is true of the film). He's written as a weak, manipulative man drowning in lies who needs Sister Helen's spiritual advice in order to face the truth and take responsibility for his misdeeds.

This role has become something of a homoerotic barihunk showcase, since the singer spends most of the opera in a tank top and underwear, which feels a little jarring. So does the nudity of the two teenagers who are raped and murdered in the opening prologue of the opera, which felt gratuitously shocking. This is the third time I have seen a naked man onstage in a Terrence McNally play (after The Lisbon Traviata and Love! Valour! Compassion!), and it has always come across as prurient rather than theatrically relevant.

The final scenes have De Rocher finally telling the truth to Sister Helen Prejean, apologizing to the grieving parents of his victims, and ends with an interminable scene where he is given a lethal injection by a supernumerary. Sister Helen Prejean has changed much public sentiment and official Catholic attitudes over the last three decades towards capital punishment, and more power to her. I'm sorry that I didn't like this paean to her work better.