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.

Tianyi Lu Conducts the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony program last weekend was trashed by two critics I admire, Steven Winn at SFCV and Joshua Kosman at On a Pacific Aisle, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Maybe I was in just in the mood, but I thought the conducting of the young conductor Tianyi Lu was remarkable, The program started with Zhiân, a 2023 piece by the Iranian-Canadian composer Iman Habibi. The work for large orchestra was written in solidarity with the women of Iran protesting against their theocratic government, and it bounced all over the place, but by the end of its 13 minutes I was enjoying its sound world. (All photos by Brandon Patoc.)

This was followed by Korngold's 1945 Violin Concerto, the composer's return to "serious" music after writing innumerable Hollywood film scores over the last decade, some of which are classics on their own terms. The critical reception of the violin concerto was dismissive at the time, but it's a fun piece with some enchanting tunes repurposed from Bette Davis movies and adventure epics. The young Spanish soloist María Dueñas was a disappointment in her solo role, recessive when the music required more assertion, but the orchestra under Lu was doing all kinds of interesting things with Korngold's score.

After intermission, Lu conducted the best version I have ever heard of Rimsky-Korsakov's 1888 symphonic suite, Scheherazade. The piece can be a long slog because it's basically a few catchy tunes repeated over and over for 45 minutes without much variation.

Last Saturday, though, I was entranced by the Technicolor spectacle throughout, and was impressed with the conductor's ability to keep a musical line drawn through the entire piece while playing around with soft and loud dynamics in unusual ways that kept the music interesting. I hope Tianyi Lu is invited back again.

Elektra at the SF Opera

There are a few operas that demand a legendary performer at the top of their game to be effective. Bellini's 1831 opera Norma is one and Richard Strauss's 1909 Elektra is another. For instance, in 1991 the San Francisco Opera presented Welsh soprano Gwyneth Jones as Elektra in a great, terrifying production by Andrei Serban which stunned audiences, but five years later the exact same production was revived with the soprano Elizabeth Connell and the opera fell flat. Similarly, in 2017 soprano Christine Goerke let loose dramatically and vocally in a new production from Keith Warner that was electrifying, but the same show in a current revival with Russian soprano Elena Pankratova also deflates in comparison. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

Warner's concept production with a handsome set by Polish designer Boris Kudlička is set in a modern museum of antiquities where a museumgoer hides out after closing time and proceeds to have a nervous breakdown while reflecting on her own personal family trauma. Goerke managed to power through most of the absurdities of the conceptual staging, but Pankratova seems to be channeling a middle-aged museumgoer rather than the vengeful bundle of rage that drives this opera's title role.

It's too bad because the contributions of everybody else involved in this production are stellar, starting with the outrageously huge orchestra led by Music Director Eun Sun Kim, who coaxed a performance that was an extraordinary balancing act between transparent clarity and loud, thunderous climaxes. After seeing the opera on a Thursday night from the orchestra section, I returned for the Sunday matinee and stood in the balcony where the sound is amazing, which confirmed the dullness of Pankratova's singing and the excitement of Kim's conducting.

The star of the show was soprano Elza van den Heever as Elektra's sister Chrysothemis who is trapped in the cursed house of Atreus with her murderous relatives. Elza may be the most celebrated Strauss soprano in the world right now, particularly after her recent Salome performances at the Met. It was a special treat hearing her large, gorgeous soprano sailing over the orchestra, an offstage chorus at one point, and the titular heroine. The performance was a complete triumph, and at a certain point I wished the opera had been about Chrysothemis.

One of Strauss's most endearing compositional habits is how he creates soprano roles for every stage of a career. There are a few singers who have sung Chrysothemis, graduated to Elektra, and ended with Klytamnestra, the murderous mother. It's a juicy role that can steal the show, and Michaela Schuster sang it well, but she didn't have much to work with when interacting with Pankratova, so her scenes didn't generate much excitement.

Over the first half of the one-act opera, there are no male voices at all, so the arrival of brother Orest, sung here by bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, always comes as a sonic relief. Ketelsen sounded great and was convincing as a cool, professional killer bent on vengeance for the murder of his father Agamemnon.

In a bit of luxury casting, tenor William Burden appears briefly as Aegisth, Klytamnestra's lover and co-conspirator in Agamemnon's murder. The role often goes to famous old tenors at the end of their careers, but Burden looks and sounds like he's ready to keep singing for decades.

The first time I went to Elektra at the SF Opera in the late 1970s, I walked out after 30 minutes because there were no supertitles and it just seemed to be three women screaming in German over a monster orchestra. In 1991, I volunteered as a supernumerary slave in that legendary Serban production, and once the score of Elektra gets into your neural pathways, it never leaves. So even with subpar casting it was a pleasure to return to that overheated, decadent, maximalist music again.