2026 SF Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival began at the Castro Theater in 1996 and over the last 30 years has blossomed into the largest silent film festival in the Americas. This year's five-day festival marked its return home after Another Planet Entertainment spent years and millions refurbishing the place and ripping out its tiered orchestra seating for a flat floor better suited to a stand-up music venue.

After much neighborhood pushback, a compromise was reached that included tiered temporary seating in the orchestra section with the balcony retaining the original movie seats. The new temporary seating downstairs has good sightlines but feels like stacked sports bleachers that make for human bottlenecks in every passageway. The seats only go halfway up someone's back, so some true devotees who would sit through five different films in a day were decamping to the balcony for posterior support. Still, it's a happy miracle that the theater has survived and is not only thriving but continues to work with film festivals.

Two of the most essential people at the festival are the British pianist Stephen Horne who accompanies films with a lyrical, quicksilver responsiveness to what's on the screen, and Artistic Director Anita Monga, one of the greatest film programmers in the world.

I started at the festival with a wild double bill, "erotic melodramas" from Denmark. 1910's The Abyss was the debut of 18-year-old Asta Nielsen as a piano teacher who runs off with a faithless circus dancer which does not end well for anyone. She became an instant global movie star on account of a five-minute "gaucho dance" with her tied-up lover that is one of the lewder things I've seen on film. (Click here for the YouTube excerpt.)

This was followed by 1917's The Clown, starring Valdemar Psilander, the biggest movie actor of early silent films. Officially, he had a heart attack and died at the age of 32, though he probably either drank himself to death or committed suicide by other means. The film was another story of a faithless wife whose lust sets the eventual tragedy in motion.

The next day brought two Hollywood comedies, starting with Clara Bow in the 1927 Hula. She plays a perky tomboy on Maui who sets her sights on handsome engineer Clive Brook. He's a hero with the least personal agency imaginable, between a socialite trying to woo him, a wife trying to get money out of him, and the indefatigable Clara Bow blowing up a mountain just to keep him around. The plot was utterly ridiculous but funny, and Stephen Horne's accompaniment was delightful.

The other comedy was 1926's The Caveman, with Marie Prevost and Matt Moore in a class-based reverse Pygmalion story set among the swells of Manhattan and the Irish slums of the lower East Side. The gender politics were a bit creepy throughout, but Marie Prevost's strength and charm mitigated some of it.

I missed the opening night showing of Queen Kelly, Gloria Swanson's unfinished 1929 film directed by Erich von Stroheim, but managed to catch her in The Humming Bird from 1924. It was a weird mixture of Parisian underworld capers, religiosity, and patriotism, and about one third of the movie has gone permanently missing.

My favorite movie of the festival was the 1930 Polish film, Janko the Musician, taken from an extremely depressing 19th century story about a holy innocent peasant child who has a sacred connection with music before being beaten and dying after he steals a violin. In this version, the tale has been Hollywoodized and thank the Holy Virgin Mary for that. The twelve-year-old Stefan Rogulski played the sacred child with such luminosity that the name Tadzio came to mind and his adult version is played by actor-violinist Witold Conti, a one-time lover of Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. The musical accompaniment was a mixture of musicaL numbers recorded after the silent film was finished, and a live trio of pianist/violinist Guenther Buchwald, Mas Koga on woodwinds, and Frank Bockius on percussion. They were magnificent.

My final film was Ernest Lubitsch's So This Is Paris, a 1926 infidelity farce based on an 1851 German play that was the source for Johann Strauss's opera Die Fledermaus. Among attempted racy dalliances between two couples, there is a famous Charleston dance sequence at the Parisian Artists' Ball that is completely berserk. (Click here for a YouTube clip.) It actually made you want to live in the 1920s.

Gabriel Natal-Báez Recital

The San Francisco Opera's young professionals training programs is two-tiered: the summer-long Merola Opera Program hosts a couple of dozen singers, directors, and accompanists under their own umbrella while the Adler Fellowship Program is like graduate school, where around ten singers at a time join the SF Opera Company for two to three years to be coached in singing, languages, and acting. The young artists also sing smaller roles on main stage productions and cover principal roles during the season. Last year's Merola Opera Program featured Malaysian pianist Tzu Kuang Tan and Puerto Rican baritone Gabriel Natal-Báez, and they were the stars of an art song recital on Cinco de Mayo this week at the Unitarian Church on Franklin Street. (Photo by Matthew Washburn)

It was a happy surprise when Gabriel Natal-Báez was selected to be in the Adler Fellowship Program after his summer stint with Merola. He seemed to have less experience in his bio than most of the other participants, and he wasn't given much to do onstage last summer, but his huge, gorgeous baritone and expressive features obviously stood out for the Adler jury. As part of that promotion, he was also offered a spot in the annual Schwabacher Recital Series. (Photo by Matthew Washburn)

Recitals of German lieder, French chansons, Spanish canciones, and English art songs are not really my thing, a serious failure of taste according to friends, but I wanted to see how Natal-Báez sounded solo and up close. He was triumphant, singing with beauty, expression, and a wide range of dynamics. The program selections were also interesting. The first half of the program featured six Songs of Travel by Ralph Vaughan Williams and four Schubert lieder with lyrics by Goethe, all filled with longing and stress. The second half featured Ravel's exquisite Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, followed by the contemporary composer Miquel Ortega's Dos Canciones del Romancero Gitano de Federico Garcia Lorca. Happily at home singing in Spanish, Natal-Báez finished with four Latin American songs by Luis Antonio Ramirez, Manuel Ponce, Astor Piazzolla, and Alfonso Esparza Oteo. (Photo by Michael Strickland)

Part of what made this concert so enjoyable was the brilliant piano accompaniment by Tzu Kuang Tan, who masterfully evoked a whole world of musical styles. I look forward to hearing him in the future and seeing Gabriel on the War Memorial Opera House stage over the next couple of years. (Photo by Michael Strickland)

The Etruscans Visit the Legion of Honor

After visiting the Vatican Museums in Roma for the first time last December, with its fascinating treasures and horrifying mass tourism crowds, it was a joy to attend this summer's human-sized exhibit at San Francisco's Legion of Honor museum about the Etruscan civilization. The show, entitled The Etruscans: From the Heart of Italy, even includes quite a few pieces from the Vatican Museums, minus the hordes.

The Etruscans were an extraordinary civilization in northwestern Italy that lasted from about the 9th century BC to the beginning of the Roman Empire in the first century. It was a collection of city-states, sharing the same culture and language, that stretched from just north of present-day Rome to the top of Tuscany.

Some of the relics are so old that they feel like they are from another civilization altogether. (Pictured is Bronze Cauldron (lebes) with lion protomes, 675-650 BC.)

They are reminiscent of some of the ancient relics from China you can find at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, which are bizarrely sophisticated. (Pictured is Cauldron (olla) on stand (holmos) 675-625 BC.)

Most of the relics on display were taken from tombs, which were extravagant, jolly places with murals on the wall and happy looking statues of people who were waiting out the purgatory between this life and the afterlife. (Pictured is Sarcophogus lid.)

Besides having a vibrant religious and artistic culture, the Etruscans were also much more accepting of women as public figures than the Mediterranean cultures that came after them. (Pictured is Cinerary urn of the spouses, 520-500 BC.)

The exhibition is beautifully laid out with with a reproduction of a banquet mural in one room...

...and naked line drawings on another room featuring sculptured heads. (Pictured is Head of a young man, bronze, 375-350 BC.)

This painted sculpture reminded me of a better-looking Mike Pence. (Pictured is Portrait head of a man, terracotta with polychromy, early 1st century BC.)

Though the exhibit is small, there are strange treasures galore... (Pictured is Round boss with head of Acheloos, early 5th century BC.)

...including proto-Giacometti statues. (Pictured is Attenuated statue of priestess holding serpent, bronze, 2nd century BC.)

See it before the word gets out and Vatican Museums crowds arrive. (Pictured is Votive statue of a seated boy, late 4th-3rd century BC.)

Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Pocket Opera

Pocket Opera just successfully pulled off a seriously ambitious production last month: Benjamin Britten's 1960 adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. Britten composed grand operas like Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and Gloriana, while also composing chamber operas with small orchestras such as The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring, and The Turn of the Screw. A Midsummer Night's Dream falls somewhere in between in terms of orchestral size, so Pocket Opera commissioned an orchestral reduction from Liam Daley with the blessing of the Britten estate. Daley did a marvelous job, making me miss the full orchestra on only a few occasions. There was no editing, however, on the opera itself or the huge cast of characters, and somehow General Director Nicolas A. Garcia managed to stage the proceedings on the tiny Legion of Honor stage last Sunday without everyone banging into each other.

The standout singer of the production was countertenor Kyle Tingzon as Oberon, the King of the Fairies in the scary, enchanted wood. One of the greatest operatic performances I have ever seen was by the late Brian Asawa as Oberon when the SF Opera last presented the work in 1992, and Tingzon was as good as Asawa. He's ready to sing the role on any stage in the world. The role of Puck was originally written as a speaking role for a teenage acrobat, and here was charmingly performed by Atlantis Clay minus the acrobatic tumbling. Oberon and Puck spend most of the narrative concocting maliciously nasty pranks, but Tingzon and Clay played the duo as amiable characters just having a bit of fun.

The "rude mechanicals," workmen rehearsing a ridiculously terrible play, were a fun bunch, and didn't overdo their comic business. Kirk Eichelberger as the blustering, egocentric Bottom who wants to play every role, bellowed loudly and he was a fine ass.

The Pyramus and Thisbe troupe often steal the show, in the play and the opera, but in this production they were overshadowed by the quartet of quarreling lovers: a particularly fine Ellen Leslie as Helena, Leah Finn as Hermia, Kevin Gino as Lysander, and Spencer Dodd as Demetrius. Their interactions and their playing off of each other musically and dramatically was first-rate, and when all turns to cacophony among them at the end of Act Two, they were amazing.

I do have one serious complaint with the production, however. Britten specifically wrote the roles of individual fairies and larger chorus for boy sopranos. Unfortunately, only one boy soprano, the delightful James Coniglio, was cast as a Fairy and the rest were sung by adult women. They sounded all wrong. Britten composed some of the greatest children's music ever written, and knew what he wanted in terms of sound. The gender of the fairies isn't important, but a child's voice versus an adult's voice are two very different things, and part of what makes this opera so great is the ethereal sound Britten creates for fairyland. The finale, with the soprano voices of a countertenor, a silvery adult female soprano, and a chorus of child sopranos weaving in and out of each other, is one of the most beautiful things that Britten or any other composer has ever written. If and when Pocket Opera revives this production, and I hope they do, please cast the fairy roles appropriately. There are half a dozen great childrens' choruses in the Bay Area, so there's really no excuse not to do the music right.