New banners with the cosmos pictured on them have gone up on poles around town proclaiming "DISCO" and "VERY" are THE SF STATE OF MIND. It took a while to realize that the two banners with the pole in between were trying to spell out "DISCOVERY."
How that is an SF State of Mind and how it relates to the cosmos, let alone to San Francisco State University, which is what it is being advertised, is a graphic design mystery. However, it will be difficult to read the word "Discovery" from this moment on without thinking "Disco Very, it's The San Francisco State of Mind."
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The San Francisco Symphony's long season is finally ending this week with an all-Berlioz program that was programmed at the last minute after a proposed Berlioz "Romeo and Juliet" was scrapped. This didn't augur well for the actual concert but in a happy surprise, it turned out to be an exquisite Friday night of music at Davies Symphony Hall thanks mostly to two young soloists.
After the "Roman Carnival Overture," which Berlioz cobbled together from his "Benvenuto Cellini" opera failure, the young mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke sang "Les Nuits d'Ete" ("Summer Nights"), which is four orchestrated poems by Gaultier about death and absent lovers bracketed by two lively poems about traveling off on adventures. Except for her deeply unflattering concert dress, 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. Cooke was great in Stravinsky's "Pulcinella" earlier in the season, but this was a revelation.
After intermission, they played "Harold in Italy," which is a wonderful, weird symphony in four movements for viola and orchestra. It's not a traditional concerto since the viola soloist is representing "Harold" wandering dreamily around 19th century Italy while stumbling across religious pilgrims and bacchanalian orgies represented by the orchestra. The soloist was Jonathan Vinocour, who was appointed at the start of the season as the new Principal Viola for the orchestra. I'm still not convinced by Michael Tilson Thomas as a Berlioz conductor, but Vinocour like Sasha Cooke before him, understood and conveyed the eccentricity of the music perfectly.
The fact that he looks and moves like a geeky Princeton chemistry graduate, which he was in 2001, only added to the complete charm of the performance. He's a major addition to the orchestra.
Bob Fisher, one of the sons of Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher, addressed the cultural press on Wednesday morning at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
He was there as the Fisher family representative for a major, hastily assembled exhibition, "Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection," which is opening on Friday the 25th.
Donald Fisher, in one of many pugnacious moves over the course of his lifetime, was insisting until recently that his 1,110 piece modern art collection should be housed in a modernist building to be constructed in the middle of Presidio Park.
The idea of a massive new development in a national park didn't go over so well with many San Franciscans, some of them fairly rich and powerful themselves. However, it seemed a done deal because of Fisher's massive wealth and political connections, not to mention the fact he was the first Chairman of the Presidio Trust when the military base was transformed into a supposedly self-sufficient national park.
People wondered why he didn't just donate his collection to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he and his wife had long been trustees, and from reading between the lines the issue was one of control. Fisher demanded it and the museum wouldn't cede it, so Fisher decided to build an institution in what he probably considered "his" park.
In September of 2009, the 81-year-old patriarch Donald Fisher died of cancer, and the next day there was an announcement in the San Francisco Chronicle that the entire Fisher Collection had been donated to SFMOMA after all.
There were some conditions, including building a huge addition to the 10-year-old museum, which is supposed to be completed in five years or so if the money is raised.
The cliche "Behind every fortune lies a great crime" is pertinent in Mr. Fisher's case. Besides being a union-hating, right-wing Republican, his corporation's subcontractors routinely used child slave labor (click here for a 2007 U.K. Guardian article) and along with son Bob, he formed the Humboldt Redwood Co. which specialized in clear cutting old growth redwood trees in Mendocino County (click here for the gapsucks.com website).
Like many malevolent robber barons before him, Donald Fisher laundered the fruits of his capitalism into art treasures, and the impressive result now belongs to the people of San Francisco.
The current exhibit on the top two floors of the museum is only displaying 160 out of the 1,100 piece collection, and you can see why.
They are all huge.
No wonder he wanted his own monster museum.
When Donald Fisher died in 2009, there were respectful obituaries in all the local media with the exception of Matt Smith in the SF Weekly who had just read a ghost-written autobiography of Donald Fisher, where he brags about his union-busting and support of charter schools where he was an early investor (click here).
One of the most damning quotes from the book is about his art collecting methods:
"One of my principles is to never buy an artist that I can't sell at auction... Buying art pieces in [the $5,000] price category means I might hit one out of 20, where the artist becomes very valuable. So what do I do with the other 19 that are worth only $5,000 each or less? I don't like those odds. I'd rather spend more money on an artist who is worth something right now and figure that piece has a good chance to appreciate. Then, if I don't like it later, at least I can sell it. Good modern art and the business of fashion make great style-mates."
In other words, he went for the blue-chip artists of his time, like Gerhard Richter (above) and Frank Stella (below).
There are a lot of wonderful works, though, that have probably bolstered the museum's permanent collection by an order of ten.
A few of my favorite things are some Martin Puryear sculptures...
...a trio of major Chuck Close portraits...
...a gorgeous Diebenkorn...
...and one of the sweetest and smallest (in context) paintings, a Hockney double portrait.
I look forward to getting to know them.
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Last week's penultimate concert of the San Francisco Symphony season was an overstuffed smorgasbord of High Modern Music from Paris in the early 20th century, starting with an early piano piece for four hands by Francois Poulenc from 1918. It was performed by Music Director Michael Tilson-Thomas in partnership with the evening's superstar soloist, Yuja Wang. He started off in the treble lead in the first movement, then they switched benches, and she took over and hijacked the entire concert.
Next up was Stravinsky's 1929 Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, which I expected to recognize as it was used in the Balanchine "Jewels" ballet which was performed last year by the San Francisco Ballet, but it sounded completely new, possibly because the performance was so radically different in the symphony hall. The 23-year-old Yuja Wang is an authentic phenomenon, a tiny, gorgeous young woman who plays with astonishing percussive power and whose innate musicality seems to be literally at her fingertips. She also sounds quite bright, as you can see in an interesting interview with Cedric at SFist.
After an unnecessary palate cleanser of a string orchestra playing Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras #9 (why not more Poulenc or Satie?), Yuja Wang returned for the formidable Ravel Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, written for the rich, one-armed Paul Wittgenstein in 1930. Wittgenstein didn't like a lot of the music his mostly famous composers wrote for him, and often put it into a drawer, usually after fights with the creators. It would be interesting to hear all the music he commissioned, which is still being found in back drawers by old relatives, such as Hindemith's concerto which was just discovered in 2002.
Janos Gereben paternally worries that Yuja Wang is burning herself out with too many engagements in an otherwise gushing review of her recital at Herbst Theatre on Sunday, where he basically calls her the love child of Argerich and Horowitz.
The second half of the concert was Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," which sounded like Mannered MTT. All the individual moments were great, it just didn't make much sense together. Plus, as pianist Sarah Cahill pointed out, all the good tunes are in the first half, "just like 'The Sound of Music,' where they're singing 'My Favorite Things' in act one, but the second act is just running away from Nazis over the mountains."
The Day Two crowd on Saturday morning for the Civic Center simulcast of the World Cup numbered in the thousands rather than the dozens of the previous day.
This was because it was Saturday, the matchup was between England and the United States, and the day was stunningly beautiful.
Though the Rec & Park flyers warn that NO ALCOHOL is allowed, a number of people had brought along packs of canned beer.
This was a welcome sight in that watching a World Cup game, unless one is a teetotaler, without a beer or glass of wine, seems somehow incomplete.
I went with my Census Bureau colleague Jose Perez (above) who not only knew all the intricacies of futbol but who possessed a pair of folding beach chairs.
There was a large bicycle contingent in the back of the dirt plaza next to the newly fenced Buddha with Three Heads and Six Arms. According to the San Francisco Art Commission, the statue is going to be disfigured by the fence until mid-July because there are too many large events being held in the plaza until then. Not only are there fears of soccer hooligans but the Gay, Etc. Pride Parade and Non-Stop Festival is moving into the neighborhood in a couple of weeks.
If you have a choice and want to watch the games at home, I cannot recommend the telecasts from Univision enough. You don't need to understand a word of Spanish to understand everything that's going on, and they are much more excited and interesting than their gringo ESPN counterparts, especially when yodeling out "GOOOOAAAAALLLL!" in the style of Andres Cantor.
