Biergarten World Cup

World Cup mania in the Americas has been a joy to watch and on Saturday afternoon I went to the outdoor Biergarten in Hayes Valley to cheer on the Norwegians in their quarterfinal match against England.

The screen showing the game was actually just a large TV set up in a shipping crate and the true fans were sitting on the ground right in front of it.

I despaired of finding a seat until spotting Kyle and other acquaintances from the Hayes Valley Saturday Morning Trash Pick-Up, and they invited me to join them.

Next to us at the picnic table were two San Franciscans who had played in adult soccer leagues and knew what the heck they were talking about.

Like most of the crowd, they were rooting for Norway too.

When the match went to overtime, we decided, "oh, hell, let's have another beer," and my new soccer mate bought us a round. Though Norway eventually lost to England, the afternoon could not have been more fun.

French Organ Music at the SF Symphony

In the SF Symphony's last subscription concert of their year-long season last Thursday, conductor Stéphane Denève led the orchestra in an all-French program that prominently featured Davies Hall's monster Ruffatti organ. In a charming speech introducing the program, we learned that the final "s" is NOT silent when pronouncing Camille Saint-Saëns and that the French music on the program was actually influenced by German models from Beethoven and J.S. Bach. The short opening work was Guillaume Connesson's 2012 Flammenschrift, which was described as a riff on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but it sounded more like Prokofiev's Parisian-era music to me, which is not a bad thing. (Photos, except noted, are by Brittany Hosea-Small.)

Though not marketed as having anything to do with SF's Gay Pride Weekend, the concert certainly could have been, since its two main composers, Poulenc and Saint-Saëns, were Gallic Friends of Dorothy. Poulenc's composition was his 1938 Organ Concerto in G Minor, a strange piece for organ, strings, and timpani that alternated between dour pronouncements from the organ soloist interspersed with flashes of witty, zippy music in the strings familiar from Poulenc's other compositions.

Afficionados of organ music are a select breed of their own, and they seemed to be entranced by the performance of Olivier Latry, Notre-Dame's titular organist since 1985. Though I know many organ music worshipers, I have never been a member of the organ cult myself, since the sound of it registers as trying to walk through liquid. The volume dynamics were odd, too, either soft or extremely loud and not much in between.

After a couple of curtain calls, the orchestra started to leave for intermission but sat back down quickly when Latry swiveled around onto the bench for a long, solo encore that was enjoyable and made me feel like a philistine for not appreciating his art. (Photo by Michael Strickland

The second half was Camille Saint-Saëns's 1886 Symphony No. 3, "Organ" in a punchy performance that rattled the hall during its famous last movement.

Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

A free concert by an all-volunteer orchestra pulled off a small miracle at Herbst Theater on Sunday afternoon. Though I usually avoid these kind of concerts because the audiences are often so unruly, I attended the second half of the program because the Mozart to Mendelssohn orchestra was performing Henryk Górecki's 1976 Symphony No. 3, which I had never heard live before.

John Kendall Bailey, the ensemble's Music Director, explained that Górecki (1933-2010) was a leading modernist Polish composer of the 1960s who turned to a "holy minimalism" in the 1970s, culminating in the hour-long, three-movement "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" for orchestra and solo soprano. His international serial music colleagues were appalled at the betrayal, with Pierre Boulez exclaming "Merde!" at the premiere, though Polish audiences quickly took the music to heart. In 1993, Nonesuch released a recording with David Zinman conducting the London Sinfonietta and soprano Dawn Upshaw singing the sad, gorgeous Polish folk songs about mothers separated from children. The recording received quite a bit of play on United Kingdom classical radio and became a viral sensation soon after, selling millions of copies. Bailey mentioned that the symphony had not been played in the SF Bay Area sice 1994 when David Zinman conducted a performance by the San Francisco Symphony, which seems a ridiculously long time for such a once-popular work to lie dormant.

The professional soprano soloist at Sunday's concert was Marnie Breckenridge, who was magnificent and intensely moving. The vocal line requires a certain purity of tone and expression, and Breckenridge nailed it.

The unexpected joy of the afternoon was twofold. First, the large, volunteer string orchestra gave a completely creditable performance. There were woodwinds that played briefly at the midpoint climax of the first movement, and they were fine too. Secondly, the audience fell under a trance-like spell in the slow, rising canon of the first movement and remained silently attentive for the entire symphony. Now that was a miracle, and congratulations to everyone involved.

Chiharu Shiota Exhibit at the Asian

San Francisco's Asian Art Museum is hosting Two Home Countries, an exhibit of the work of the 54-year-old artist Chiharu Shiota, who lives in both Germany and Japan.

The signage on entering the exhibit was amusing. Instead of "Don't Touch The Art!" we were offered positive reinforcement instead.

The caution was necessary because the first installation, Diary, surrounds the viewer in an 88-foot web of red yarn that feels magical.

Embedded in the thickets of yarn are pages from recovered diaries of Japanese soldiers in World War Two along with journals from post-war Germans.

The exhibit also features drawings...

...and a video of the naked artist being bound with strings, which is reminiscent of performance artist Marina Abramović, one of Chiharu Shiota's mentors.

This exhibit debuted last year at the Japan Society in New York City, along with a one-man, English-language stage show adaptation of Yukio Mishima's 1956 novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion). Reviews of the play were not particularly favorable, but the set design by Shiota consisting of strings transformed by lighting and projections were universally praised. You can see for yourself through July 27th at the Asian.