No Kings 3 in San Francisco

The most poignant moment I saw at the No Kings 3 march up Market Stereet on Saturday afternoon was a lone man holding a sign with a picture of Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis intensive care nurse murdered by federal ICE agents.

Most of the other thousands of Unpaid Protestors were either expressing rage or dark humor or both.

I ran into Jan Adams, my favorite political blogger, and after a hug we shrugged our aged shoulders together in a gesture meaning, "Well, here we are back on Market Street for the umpteenth time."

One of my favorite marchers was the gentleman above who had rigged up a portable sound system playing upbeat music ranging from Aretha Franklin's Respect to Queen and Davie Bowie singing Under Pressure.

There was lots of anger being expressed...

...at having a credibly accused pedophile rapist blowing up the world.

In a nod to conservation, Austin was recycling his homemade sign for the third straight No Kings march.

At the end of the march, many forewent the speeches in Civic Center and went to Hayes Valley for al fresco food and drink, where I spotted the signage, "IF KAMALA HAD WON WE'D BE AT BRUNCH RIGHT NOW".

Clara Bow as IT at The Castro

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival finally returned to its ancestral home at the Castro Theater last Sunday with a showing of the 1927 movie IT.

The huge theater was sold out and the line started forming along the sidewalk two hours before the screening.

There were many objections to Another Planet Entertainment transforming the 1922 Spanish Baroque masterpiece by architect Timothy Pflueger from a seated movie theater to a live pop concert hall, but the multi-year, $41 million makeover has turned out well. The compromise between temporary tiered seating for film showings and a flat dance floor for concerts has become a happy surprise.

Among the many improvements, the old basement bathrooms have now become gender-free and have plenty of stalls so the women's restroom line no longer stretches forever.

The real wonder is the interior restoration, an obvious labor of love, where decades of grime and cigarette smoke were scraped away and the brown ceiling has returned to its original red color with all its baroque illustrations gleaming.

IT was an entertaining bit of fluff comedy where Clara Bow as a shopgirl sets her sights on snagging the handsome young owner of the department store where she works.

Bow plays the personification of the 1920s flapper "IT" Girl who has ineffable sex appeal that can slay anyone, including the handsome Antonio Moreno, a Spaniard who was one of the first Latin lovers of American silent films.

The film was accompanied by a beefed-up Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, a music ensemble from Colorado that specializes in silent movies.

They will also be accompanying films, along with a roster of other musical artists, at the upcoming San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which will be returning to the Castro from May 6 to 10. There's no place like home.

Mozart and Dvorak at the SF Symphony

After conducting the San Francisco Symphony on Saturday evening in a zippy rendition of Carl Maria von Weber's 1823 Overture to Euryanthe, Andrés Orozco-Estrada grabbed a microphone and gave an antic lecture about the musical program and the excellence of San Francisco's symphony. The 48-year-old Colombia-born, Austria-based conductor was filling time while a grand piano was slowly wheeled onstage from the wings because the basement elevator which usually transports the instrument is currently broken.

The piano was for a performance of Mozart's 1777 Piano Concerto No. 9, his first adult masterpiece in the genre. The soloist was the 30-year-old Canadian Jan Lisiecki, who was signed to a recording contract as a young phenom at age 15 with Deutsche Grammophon.

He seems to have been performing around the world ever since, and if his Facebook page is any indication, his schedule looks something like The Amazing Race. (The photo above is Lisiecki enjoying San Francisco's Ocean Beach during last week's heat wave.)

Lisiecki is a technical wizard, and the first movement of the Mozart concerto was thrilling, but in the gorgeous andante middle movement, he reminded me of Víkingur Ólafsson's eccentric rendition of Mozart and Haydn, making the music sound Romantic and effortful rather than Classical and effortless. Still, there was nothing dry or dreary about the performance, and it was a pleasure to encounter Liesecki for the first time, including his encore featuring a wildly idiosyncratic rendition of Brahms's Waltz in A flat major.

We had prime orchestra seats but a pair of young women arrived at the last minute next to us and one of them promptly started recording the concert on her phone. After gently waving a finger at her to stop, she proceeded to spend the rest of the concert scrolling through her social media. Instead of making a scene or committing murder, we repaired to a top tier balcony for the second half of the program for Dvořák's 1885 Symphony No. 7.

By the composer's usual standards, it's a dark piece and one I had never heard live before. Orozco-Estrada has made a specialty of the work with many of the orchestras he's conducted over the years, recording it with Houston and videotaping it with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, which you can see on YouTube. The San Francisco Symphony, particularly the heavily featured woodwind section, shone in a wonderful performance.

New Century Chamber Orchestra Luminaries

The New Century Chamber Orchestra presented a very mixed bag of music last Saturday at the Presidio Theatre. The concert was highlighted by two commissions from local composers Jake Heggie and Nathaniel Stookey, seen above talking to Gordon Getty, the oil industry billionaire and composer who has been donating huge amounts of money to Bay Area music organizations for decades.

The opener was a short Overture by Jake Heggie, written for the string orchestra's 30th anniversary in 2022. The music was pleasant, but vanished from my consciousness as soon as it was over. The next piece was the wildly virtuosic 1775 violin concerto by the recently rediscovered Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The piece sounded a bit like Mozart meets Paganini, and was thoroughly enjoyable. The cadenza in the third, final movement was so crazed that the audience laughed when Music Director Daniel Hope finished sawing away, allowing the orchestra to rejoin him for the finale.

Daniel Hope's playing was fabulous, and so was the support he received from associate concertmaster Dawn Harms and principal violist Anna Kruger.

Nathaniel Stookey introduced his world premiere piece, Bubble Chamber, with a gracious speech praising Getty. Proclaiming himself a native San Franciscan, Stookey noted that every musical organization with which he's been associated, from childhood to middle age, has been supported on some level by Getty. His introduction to Bubble Chamber noted that champagne bubbles were his initial inspiration along with Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen with its many individuated parts for string orchestra. I was expecting something frothy but instead the ten-minute work was a dense, fascinating, swirling journey that ended in mysterious pizzicatos and transparent textures. I loved it and wished they had played it all over again immediately.

Instead, the final piece was a string orchestra version of Tchaikovsky's 1890 Souvenir de Florence, which was originally written for a sextet of two violins, two violas, and two cellos. I am not a big fan of beefed up arrangements of chamber music because the clear voices tend to turn into mush with more instruments, and this was no exception. Still, it was very well played, and the profusion of pretty tunes made everyone happy.