Vote Fascists Out to End the Nightmare

During last weekend's very warm Saturday afternoon, I made my way to the top of Dolores Park to see about joining yet another No Kings march to Civic Center.

There were a number of delightful people who showed up for the same purpose, but compared to the tens of thousands at previous marches, the crowd was small.

Dolores Beach, however, was quite crowded...

...with sun worshipers showing off their beautiful young bodies.

Having too many skin cancers over the years after growing up on Southern California beaches, I decided to get out of the sun.

Besides, the fun protest looked like the concurrent human signage at Ocean Beach imploring us to VOTE! TO END THE NIGHTMARE.

A Superstar Piano Trio at Davies

In my experience, chamber music in San Francisco's Davies Hall tends to get overwhelmed by the largeness of the theater, but last Thursday there was a major exception. The Thibaudet/Batiashvili/Capuçon Trio consists of three global superstar soloists, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet on piano, Lisa Batiashvili on violin, and Gautier Capuçon on cello. Putting soloist egos aside, the three have been playing together since 2018 and their joy in collaboration is obvious to behold.

They started a cross-country tour of the United States last week with a delightful program, starting with the rediscovered Piano Trio No. 1 in C Minor that a lovesick 16-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich composed in honor of a beloved. What's amazing is that the 15-minute work is instantly identifiable as Shostakovich, and like most of his early compositions, it's a complete delight.

Next was another rediscovered Piano Trio in G Majorr by Claude Debussy, written when he was 18 years old, and it sounds nothing like the composer of La Mer and Pelleas et Melisande. Scott Foglesong, the program annotator, notes: "Anyone expecting to hear a lost Debussy masterpiece is likely to be disappointed, for this lovely trio evokes the pastel elegance of Massenet and Delibes." Thibedaut in particular was masterful on piano all evening, shaping the tempos and never drowning out his two string colleagues.

After intermission, they played a big, serious 45-minute work, Antonin Dvorak's 1883 Piano Trio No. 3, and it was such a gripping performance that the audience burst into applause after three of the four movements. Thankfully, they also remained silent at the end of the heavenly third Poco Adagio movement before exploding at the finale. The trio never played too loudly to fill up the hall, but their sound was forceful enough to be heard even at its softest.

I have somehow missed Gautier Capuçon's many appearances with the SF Symphony over the years, but was always amused by how his publicity photos made him look like the ultimate French matinee idol. To my utter surprise, he actually looked the same in real life, and both his solo moments and interplay with the luminous Lisa Batiashvili were sublime. If you have a chance to catch the trio anywhere on this stateside tour, do so.

Early Voting

Walking up Van Ness Avenue early Tuesday evening I heard loud chants echoing through the streets that sounded like a protest but turned out to be dueling electoral supporters of Scott Wiener and Connie Chan. The two Congressional candidates were scheduled for a debate that night at the Sydney Goldstein Theater at the corner of Hayes and Franklin. For a report on the actual debate, click here for Yujie Zhou's post on Mission Local.

Either candidate would probably be a fine congressperson, at least in comparison to the vast majority of their future colleagues, but there is a huge division in their local support. Wiener is the favorite for the local Democratic establishment and tech sector, raking in millions of dollars in contributions, while Chan is the upstart candidate from the neighborhoods. The most intriguing mystery of the race is why retiring congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, whose seat they are vying for, endorsed Chan rather than Wiener in the race. What did Wiener do that so pissed her off that she's bucking her own political allies? Nobody is saying.

Meanwhile, I received the above email from California's Secretary of State advising that my midterm ballot had been sent to the Post Office on October 2nd and that I should be receiving it in a mailbox between October 5th and 7th.

However, by Wednesday, October 14th, no ballot had appeared so I walked to San Francisco City Hall to vote with a new ballot.

Paranoid from multiple stories about the US Postal Service screwing with the elections for the criminal federal regime, I asked an elections clerk if there had been an uptick in "lost" ballots from the USPS, and she assured me that so far it was the usual amount of missing strays. There was hardly anyone beside myself at the City Hall basement Voting Center except for a male couple having a loud argument, ending with the older gentleman repeatedly screaming "Don't use my address!" before storming out of the building.

With its roster of judges, school board members, state and county propositions, local and state and federal candidates, the California ballot this year is overwhelming so I sat down with the printed guide at the disabled seating area and actually did a speed read through all the candidate statements before filling the ballot out.

One of the joys of visiting San Francisco City Hall is that there is a daily weddingpalooza occurring under the dome, and on Wednesday morning there were at least eight wedding parties scattered around stairways, balconies and alcoves.

I voted for Connie Chan, by the way, and realized after reviewing my finished ballot that most of the candidates I had chosen were Chinese-American, which made me feel mildly virtuous. Asians are a foundational community in San Francisco but they have been treated like crap by the presiding power structure for over a century. It's lovely to witness a sea change.

Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff at the SF Symphony

Last week's all-Russian SF Symphony program was an enjoyable grab-bag led by guest conductor Karina Canellakis. It started with a 15-minute tone poem from 2003 by Victoria Borislava-Oslos entitled The Kingdom of Silence, where presumably the Kingdom is Death. The piece begins delicately with a duet between celesta and glockenspiel, slowly involving the rest of the large orchestra, followed by a number of noisy episodes that didn't seem at all connected to each other. Finally, the music returns to the soft violins, celesta and glockenspiel, not leaving much of an impression.

The next piece was Prokofiev's 1935 Violin Concerto #2 with the Scottish soloist Nicola Benedetti in a bright red jumper on Saturday evening. Sergei Prokofiev is one of my all-time favorite composers, from his early avant-garde music in Paris to his later Socialist Realist music in the Soviet Union. This violin concerto is liminal, when Prokofiev was on the brink of returning to Russia after fleeing the country during the Revolution. It also has a collection of his finest melodies intertwined in interesting ways that sound extremely tricky to get right.

Nicola Benedetti was wonderful, dancing along while sawing away virtuosically, and she conveyed the sweetness in the melodies of the first two movements without overdoing it. Canellakis also did a fine job conducting, although she didn't quite manage to blend the medium-sized orchestra and soloist, with their devilishly competing rhythms. Still, the performance worked and the wild final movement with its slashing rhythms embroidered with castanets was a gas.

After intermission, Canellakis conducted the best live version I have heard of Rachmaninoff's 1940 Symphonic Dances, bringing out all the lushness and color of the music. Unfortunately, while my fellow audience members were swooning at the familiar melodies and rich scoring, the work has never done anything for me. My loss.