French Life and Death at the SF Symphony

There was a lovely concert in Davies Hall this weekend featuring the SF Symphony Chorus singing Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, marred only by the ugly war between management and the 32 paid choristers who are working without a contract. (The remaining choristers are skilled, unpaid volunteers accepted through auditions.) For a full account of the current mess, click here for Janos Gereben's recent wrapup at San Francisco Classical Voice.

The debuting guest conductor was Kazuki Yamada, a 46-year-old Japanese protégé of the late Seiji Ozawa. He is currently based in Berlin, conducting throughout Europe, and has always wanted to go up a hill on a cable car in San Francisco. In an opening speech, he mentioned that his cable car wish had finally been fulfilled. His entire program was French music except for the short opener, Entwine, written by Dai Fujikura, a 47-year-old Japanese composer based in London. The piece was commissioned by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and its moody astringency unfortunately took me right back to that time.

The pick-me-up immediately following was Ravel's 1931 Piano Concerto in G Major with Hélène Grimaud as the piano soloist, looking as French movie star as ever. She's a controversial musician because she plays with composers' phrasing and rhythms, but that's also what makes her fabulous as a live performer. You're never quite sure what you are going to hear. (For a fascinating 2011 New Yorker profile of the pianist by D.T. Max, click here.)

Though I do not have synesthesia like Grimaud, where music translates into visual colors, the concerto's soundscape was so colorful that hues were popping up in my brain throughout the performance. Grimaud gave a virtuoso performance and followed up with an encore by Valentin Silvestrov, a composer Grimaud is currently championing.

The second half of the program was devoted to Gabriel Fauré's 1890 Requiem, and at the entrance of the embattled SF Symphony Chorus, the audience rose in support and applause.

Fauré was an interesting working musician, toiling as a church organist, music teacher, and finally the head of the Paris Conservatoire where he was a progressive, nurturing mentor to Ravel, among other composers. His Requiem is an early work from his church organist days where he seemingly became sick of all the fire and brimstone Latin mass settings, and wrote a gentle choral work that emphasizes the opening lines "Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis (Give them eternal rest, Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them)."

Though the 40-minute mass is virtually all choral music, with a small orchestra, there are a couple of soloists who appear briefly. In these performances, it was soprano Liv Redpath and bass-baritone Michael Sumuel, who were both fine.

The chorus sounded a bit too forceful in some of the more delicate moments of the score, but they convincingly took the audience to heaven in the final movement, In Paradisum, where they sang "Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat (May a Chorus of angels welcome you)."

The Adler Fellows Concert 2024

The annual Adler Fellows concert on Friday featured nine singers in San Francisco Opera's elite apprenticeship program, and some of the voices were so huge in the small Herbst Theater that it became a bit overwhelming. Following are a few of my favorite things from the evening. (All but one of the photos by Kristen Loken.)

First off, the young conductor Benjamin Manis did a wonderful job leading the SF Opera Orchestra in a wide range of music, from Handel to Rachmaninoff, while being very attentive to his young vocalists. Manis is currently leading the orchestra in the current production of Carmen next door at the War Memorial Opera House. Secondly, stage director Omer Ben Seadia kept it simple and clean, without silly props or gimmicks. She concentrated on the singers' acting to convey the meaning of their arias since there were no surtitles, which was sort of refreshing.

Manis's conducting was particularly good in the selections by Mozart. The program started out with a lively performance of The Marriage of Figaro Overture followed by the first scene from the opera with soprano Arianna Rodriguez as Susanna and bass-baritone Jongwon Han as Figaro. They were delightful, vocally and theatrically, and Jongwon Han's rendition of the aria Se vuol volare was expert.

Mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz knows how to command a stage, and they were thrilling in the mad aria Where shall I fly? from Handel's oratorio Hercules. (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

They were also a sympathetic mezzo friend to soprano Caroline Corrales in Sorgi, o padre from Bellini's Bianca e Fernando. Corrales was a knockout earlier this year as Moira, the lesbian rebel in The Handmaid's Tale. Though I thought she was forcing her voice in the challenging Ernani, involami from Verdi's Ernani, a nearby friend who knows much more about voices than me predicted Corrales was going to be a serious star of the future.

Speaking of challenging arias, tenor Thomas Kinch sang Gott, welch Dunkel hier! from Beethoven's Fidelio with a huge voice and remarkably accurate pitch. He later sang Mamma, quel vino e generoso" from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana with soprano Georgiana Adams as Mamma Lucia.

Samuel Kidd has a bright, clear baritone and an innate musicality. When he appeared in a small role this fall as Christian the Sailor in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, I secretly wished he was singing the lead role of Renato instead. On Friday, he sang two obscure French arias, O Nadir, tendre ami de mon jeune age from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers and O vin, dissipe la tristesse from Thomas's Hamlet. Somehow, Kidd made them both interesting.

I also loved baritone Jongwon Han, returning for the little-known aria O tu, Palermo from Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani. He's another person who knows how to marry text and music with intelligence, and his voice is a joy to hear.

Though it was not the final piece of the evening, All along? from Puts's The Hours should have been. The finale to that recently composed opera is a lightweight nod to the female trio in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, and Nikola Printz, Arianna Rodriguez and Olivia Smith did a lovely job with it.

Tchaikovsky and Elgar at the SF Symphony

Driving back to San Francisco from Palm Springs on the day after that disastrous U.S. election, we heard Dianne Nicolini on KUSC introducing some piece of light classical music "to help process our feelings," which made me laugh. In a similar spirit, I attended Thursday's San Francisco Symphony concert which was featuring a pair of popular favorites by Tchaikovsky and Elgar, the musical equivalent of comfort food, and it was thoroughly enjoyable.

The debuting guest conductor was the 41-year-old Nicholas Collon, who founded London's Aurora Orchestra 20 years ago. The concert actually started with an edge, the 2007 Three-piece Suite by Thomas Adès extracted from his scandalous 1995 opera, Powder Her Face. West Edge Opera offered a remarkable production in 2016 at the abandoned Oakland train station (click here for an account), and the suite brought back vivid memories of both its lewdness and inventiveness. The opera was written for a small, jazzy chamber ensemble where the sour tangos and frenzied sexuality are more potent than in this large reorchestration, but it was a fun reminder of the original.

Next up was Tchaikovsky's 1875 Piano Concerto #1 with the 30-year-old American pianist Conrad Tao as the soloist. The familiar, ultra-Romantic opening measures set the template for many other composers, including Rachmaninoff's subsequent piano concertos, and Tao attacked the keyboard with abandon. If he was trying to show that he could play the piano faster and louder than anybody else, he clearly succeeded. At moments, it felt like a punk rock version of the concerto, and though I wouldn't want to hear it performed that way all the time, the result was exciting and made the overplayed music sound new and unfamiliar.

After the usual standing ovation, Tao returned for an unusual encore, his own transcription of Art Tatum's 1953 jazz rendition of "that unfamiliar song, Over The Rainbow." It was a kick.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Edward Elgar's 1895 breakthrough compositon, Enigma Variations, a set of 14 orchestral miniatures depicting friends and family, including the composer himself. Collon's conducting was a bit of a mixed bag, but the central Nimrod movement, which Dianne Nicolini seems to broadcast every other day on classical radio stations, was exquisite perfection. It helped to process a few feelings.

Mary Cassatt At Work

San Francisco's Legion of Honor Museum is currently hosting an exhibit called Mary Cassatt At Work. It's an overview of the pioneering American feminist artist Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). She was born into a wealthy Pennsylvania family and managed to overcome innnumerable obstacles to becoming a working woman artist of the 19th century. One of those obstacles was her stockbroker father who refused to support her in her studies, which started at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when she was 15. (Pictured is Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878.)

She hated the dreary instruction and gender discrimination at the Academy (no live models for you, girl!) and decamped to Paris with her mother, who fiercely supported her daughter. She took private lessons from teachers at the Ecole de Beaux Arts because women were not allowed to actually attend the school. (Pictured is Portrait of Mrs. Robert S. Cassatt, The Artist's Mother, 1885.)

Mary bounced back and forth between Europe and Pennsylvania until finally moving permanently to Paris in 1874, with some of her family in tow, and she became a working artist. (Pictured is In The Loge, 1878.)

She had several paintings accepted to the prestigious annual Salon, but grew disenchanted with the sexist selection process and their stodgy aesthetics. (Pictured is Woman in a Loge, 1879.)

She fell in love with some pastels in an art gallery window by Edgar Degas, and the two artists soon became fruitful, friendly collaborators in oil painting, pastel drawing, and printmaking. (Pictured is At the Theater, 1879.)

She joined the plein air Impressionists, which was once a radical art movement before it became ridiculously popular in the 20th century. (Pictured is Woman at her Toilette, 1880.)

Cassatt was well represented in the famous 1879 Impressionism exhibit, and with the proceeds of her sales bought single paintings by Monet and Degas. (Pictured is A Goodnight Hug, 1880.)

Her subject matter from that time forward was almost invariably depictions of women and children. (Pictured is Children Playing on a Beach, 1885.)

They are not formal portraits because none of the women or children are ever looking at the artist or the viewer. It was also interesting to read that many of the doting mothers were actually models with borrowed babies. Cassatt never married or had children but she obviously had a fascination for the subject of womanhood and maternity. (Pictured is A Kiss for Baby Ann, No. 3, 1897).

While her brother Alexander became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Mary used her connections with American society friends to advise them on purchasing Impressionist works. Cassatt insisted the art should eventually be donated to American art museums, which is how New York's MOMA ended up with so many priceless Impressionist paintings. She also became a major supporter of the American suffragette movement. (Pictured is the only work depicting males in the current exhibit, Portrait of Alexander J. Cassatt and His Son Robert Kelso Cassatt, 1884.)

Cassatt's own tastes grew a bit stodgy after the 1890s and she rejected the crazy new movements of the 20th century like Cubism, Fauvism and Post-Impressionism. In 1910, she visited Egypt for the first time, and proclaimed "I fought against it but it conquered, it is surely the greatest Art the past has left us ... how are my feeble hands to ever paint the effect on me?"