Mexico City Morning

We walked to the main drag of Mexico City, Paseo de la Reforma, this morning and were astonished to find that tens of thousands of bicyclists, rollerbladers and joggers had taken over the street while pedestrians walked alongside on wide sidewalks. We had stumbled onto Muévete en Bici, a car-free event on 55 kilometers of downtown Mexico City streets every Sunday from 8AM to 2PM. The separation of pedestrians (slow) and bicyclists/joggers (fast) made the whole event work in a way that San Francisco's occasional Sunday Streets do not.

Our destination was the Museo de Arte Moderno in Chapultapec Park...

...which was one of the most beautifully designed, medium-sized art museums I have ever encountered.

There was a special exhibit devoted to Remedios Varo, the Spanish surrealist who fled Nazi Europe for Mexico City where she worked until her death in 1963.

More impressive was their permanent collection of Mexican artists from the first half of the 20th century, including the great Juan O'Gorman's 1949 La Ciudad de México...

...and David Alfaro Siqueiros's 1947 El diablo en la uiglesia (The devil in the church)...

...along with José Clemente Orozco's frighteningly pertinent 1947 El tirano (The tyrant).

There was even a sweet 1953 Naturaleza muerta by Frida Kahlo to complement her 1939 keystone masterpiece in the collection, Las dos Fridas.

The painting traveled to SFMOMA in 2008 (which I wrote about here), but it was in a crowded, poorly designed Kahlo retrospective. At the Museo de Arte Moderno, the painting is given its own dark room which is hidden in plain sight so it remains uncrowded. There was a comfy bench to rest on in front of the painting, and some people sitting on the floor. Everyone was quiet as if we were all communing with a holy shrine. It was one of the great art museum experiences of my life.

Across the Paseo de la Reforma was the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo devoted to contemporary Mexican art.

The wild, wonderful architecture was more interesting than most of the exhibits. However, like the Museo de Arte Moderno, admission is free all day for everyone on Sundays, yet another example of how much more progressive Mexico is feeling these days in relation to the regressive United States.

We have been staying in the touristy, upscale Zona Rosa section of town but finally found a great, autentico Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood filled with locals. What made it even better was that the majority of workers and customers were gay, but we also saw cops, friends and lovers of every persuasion eating and drinking there.

I'm not going to name the place because United States hipster expats have been invading the city for the last decade and I don't want to add to the despoliation. Let's just say it's close to the Insurgentes metro station.

Austin finished the day's adventure at CHU-CHO, a dessert parlor that has put chocolate, ice cream, and churros together. As their signage states, "Un churro cada dia le da alegria" (a churro a day brings happiness).

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.