Welcoming Elim Chan at the SF Symphony

A sold-out Davies Symphony Hall greeted the newly designated Music Director Elim Chan last Friday with a standing ovation before she uttered a word or began conducting. Her response was heartfelt and adorable. (Photo by Christopher M. Howard.)

The concert itself began with two greatest hits from Wagner's 1859 opera Tristan und Isolde, the Prelude and the Liebestod. The former was beautifully hypnotic while the latter was longingly ecstatic, although it was missing a soprano looking towards her love-death. (Photo by Stefan Cohen.)

The reliably exquisite mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke did appear to sing the six songs in Berlioz's 1841 song cycle Les Nuits d'été. Sixteen years ago a scheduled performance of Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette was scrapped at the last minute and was replaced by newly appointed principal viola Jonathan Vinocour performing the composer's Harold in Italy and Sasha Cooke singing Les Nuits d'été conducted by the late Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, who was one of Cooke's earliest champions. I wrote at the time: "Ms. Cooke was perfection, giving one of the most beautiful performances I've ever heard. She is also one of the few vocal soloists at Davies who somehow manages to fill the hall with sound when singing softly." The same was true sixteen years later. (Photo by Christopher M. Howard.)

At the end of that long-ago concert, MTT kissed the hem of Sascha's dress, and on Friday she played turnabout and kissed the hem of Elim Chan's dress. The two obviously adored working with each other. Then they performed an encore of an orchestratal song composed by MTT from the Rilke poem Widening Circle. (Photo by Stefan Cohen.)

The second half of the program was Debussy's 1905 La Mer in a satisfying performance by the full orchestra. (Photo by Stefan Cohen.)

After the concert, the entire audience was invited to an outdoor party on Grove Street with complimentary food and drinks.

The orchestra musicians showed up for the party too...

...along with Elim Chan who sweetly surged into the crowd and signed autographs. (Photo by Christopher M. Howard.)

We didn't stay long because a cold Pacific Ocean wind was tearing down Grove Street, but it was a joy to see such a celebration.

Shawn Ying, a volunteer SF Symphony chorister, wrote the following on his Facebook page after the concert, which sums up well the general feeling about Elim Chan's appointment: "The welcome to the Maestra was so enthusiastic and warm. At the end of of the performance, I felt that we had turned the page and finally the symphony family can move on and welcome the future. It has been quite a few bad years for the symphony family and the people who love and support them." Let us look to the future with anticipation and hope. (Photo by Stefan Cohen.)

SF Porchfest in the Mission

The rush of youthful energy at Saturday afternoon's SF Porchfest in the Mission district just about bowled me over after spending three weeks of geriatric serenity in Palm Springs. (Click here to see the band Kiori who were playing on somebody's porch near 20th & Valencia.)

The homespun music festival began in Ithaca, New York in 2007 and has since sprouted local variations in over 100 locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. The basic concept is for community members to host a musical act on their front porches, and yesterday's version in San Francisco was utterly delightful. (Click here for a Dozee video.)

On Valencia Street the remarkable young singer/songwriter Seth Kaminsky held court on the sidewalk while spectators stood on the stoops of a Victorian porch. (Click here for a Seth Kaminsky video.)

The smooth Latin band Los Rasquaches were esconced in a restaurant parklet playing to a large, appreciative audience on the sidewalk.

A half-block away on Bartlett there were a series of bands spaced out along the road closed to traffic, starting with the great sounding Spanish band Rumbahia. (Click here for a taste of Rumbahia's music.)

Further down, a duo of old pros flanked a young man in a loud, propulsive rock band called GENII that had the crowd going.

On 21st Street there was a wildly entertaining set by Wave Wise, a duo consisting of Doug French on drums and Nick Semansky on guitar and vocals. (Click here for a Wave Wise video.)

Semansky was not only shredding his guitar but was looking like sex incarnate and the crowd of dancers on the sidewalk were reflecting the vibe.

Of course, it wouldn't be a San Francisco event if it didn't include a Waymo nervous breakdown. The bulging crowd spilling from the sidewalk in front of Wave Wise stopped a pair of the robotaxis to a standstill. It was not a good day to be anything other than a pedestrian in the quadrant between 20th and 23rd Streets and Mission and Valencia.

Die Walküre at Disney Hall in Los Angeles

The Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by the recently deceased starchitect Frank Gehry for the LA Philharmonic, opened its doors in 2003. The building became an instant icon at its Bunker Hill location in downtown Los Angeles, background for a billion selfies, and it's aging beautifully.

Gustavo Dudamel, the Venezuelan wunderkind conductor replaced Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2009 as Music Director of the LA Philharmonic. He is decamping for the New York Philharmonic next year, and his last season with the LA orchestra is wrapping up with a series of special concerts, including Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, the second installment of the composer's monumental Ring Cycle.

In a strange bit of scheduling, each of the three acts of the four-and-a-half hour opera were being performed on three consecutive nights in two cycles. I attended Act One in cycle two, and it was my first time in the hall after reading extensively about the place for the last 23 years.

After the juggernaut of stainless steel and titanium on the exterior, the interior surprises with wood finishes everywhere.

There was a Friday evening reception before the concert where the audience was offered a free glass of wine, somewhat ameliorating the fact that most of the tickets to these concerts were selling for $350 a piece, meaning it would cost over $1,000 to see the entire opera.

The concert hall is striking, with great acoustics, but some weird sightlines. We were seated on a side terrace balcony that faced the opposite side of the hall rather than the stage, which necessitated a lot of neck turning while watching the stage action and trying to read the supertitles. (All production photos are by Elizabeth Asher, courtesy of the LA Philharmonic.)

The star of the evening was the huge orchestra, including six harps. The stage setup at the rear of the hall included huge chunks of crumpled paper designed by Frank Gehry himself, which was used as the backdrop for color projections. The back of the elevated stage hosted a Gehry-looking wooden hut while the front of the orchestra featured a raised catwalk which was used extensively by tenor Jamez McCorkle as he related his tale of lifelong woe.

McCorkle, who was the eponymous star of Omar, the recent opera by Rhiannon Giddens, was fantastic throughout, triumphing over the rather dull staging.

Perhaps through the fault of director Alberto Arvelo and dramaturg Cori Ellison, the customary romantic and erotic heat between incestuous twins Jamez McCorkle as Siegmund and soprano Jessica Faselt as Sieglinde felt lukewarm rather than incendiary.

Bass Solomon Howard as Hunding portrayed the usual loutish brute but was reduced to sitting at a table for most of his time onstage.

The beautiful voices of all three singers were strong and easily soared over the large orchestra throughout the hour-long performance. For a comprehensive review of all three evenings, click here for Michael Anthonio's account at Parterre Box and Harvey Steinem's review at Seen and Heard International.

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.