Mark Streshinsky, the charismatic General Director of the East Bay's confusingly named West Edge Opera, introduced Donizetti's rarely performed 1838 opera Poliuto to a large and appreciative crowd at Rossmoor's new Event Center on Saturday afternoon in Walnut Creek.
This was the second installment in the company's Medium Rare season which features concert performances of obscure operas by famous composers. They are performed with a quartet of instruments (conductor on piano, violin, cello and clarinet), a small chorus, and supertitles by Music Director Jonathan Khuner explaining what kind of dungeon one of the principals might be entering, and why.
The singers were all based in the Bay Area, with soprano Elizabeth Zharoff above of Sunnyvale as the single female principal, Paolina. Zharoff just had a starry debut as Violetta in La Traviata at the English National Opera, and is about to take off on a top-tier international career. Her music sounded almost impossibly difficult, but she performed it with beauty and courage.
The story is basically a love triangle, with Christian religious martyrdom in 3rd Century Armenia thrown in for good measure. Paolina is married to Poliuto who starts off the opera as a newly baptized underground Christian when that religion was still considered a dangerous cult. Unfortunately, he's also an old-fashioned Italian opera husband who jealously suspects that Paolina is having an affair. Tenor Michael Desnoyers did a splendid job in the title role, with his voice cracking once at the end of the first half but otherwise sounding sweet and unforced.
The other member of the love triangle is Roman General Severo, who was Paolina's beloved before being left for dead on a battlefield. He somehow recovers and returns to Armenia with instructions from Rome to stamp out the pesky Christians. The role was sung by baritone Anders Froehlich with such soulful charm that you hoped Paolina would leave her jealous husband and run off with Severo instead.
In the end, Paolina takes the noble path of converting and joining her husband in the arena for martyrdom, as the lovestruck Severo commits suicide. The 1838 premiere of Poliuto at the San Carlo in Naples was banned by Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, supposedly because he thought the religious story an unfit subject for the stage. His objections might also have been linked to the libretto's fierce anti-clericalism. The High Priest of Jupiter-worshiping Armenians cynically details how to use a bloodthirsty mob's religious bigotry for personal power, in a move that clergy have continued to hone over centuries.
The evil High Priest was played by John Bischoff in a male-dominated, very well sung cast that also included Michael Jankosky, Sigmund Siegel, Jake Scheps and John Minagro. Jonathan Khuner (above left) conducted from the piano, and though the coordination between principals, chamber orchestra, and chorus occasionally didn't quite mesh in the large ensembles, it was close enough to give you an appreciation for the opera, which contains some of Donizetti's best music. There's another chance to catch Poliuto tomorrow evening (Wednesday, April 1st) at Berkeley's Freight and Salvage coffeehouse. The $20 ticket price is one of the best musical bargains in the Bay Area.
The Thrillpeddlers theatrical company has been reviving Cockettes musicals since 2009 in its tiny jewel box theater that hides under a freeway across the street from Costco. Starting with their breakout hit, Pearls Over Shanghai, they have been presenting these revivals in collaboration with the composer and lyricist Scrumbly Koldewyn above, who was part of the original late 60s/early 70s glittery, genderfuck hippie group. With Jewels of Paris, which opened last week, Scrumbly has written a new musical revue which is a cause for rejoicing. It very loosely focuses on Paris in the 1920s when Everyone's a Genius in Paree Today, as one of the songs proclaims.
The musical ensembles are all a rousing kick, such as The Jewels of Paris above with Michael Soldier surrounded by lovelies in the fabulous, outre costumes of Birdie-Bob Watt and Tina Sogliuzzo.
Birdie-Bob is one of the many jacks of all trades in the Thrillpeddlers troupe, alternating between onstage stints and being Scrumbly's musical assistant. He may have found his most perfect role ever, as Pierrot, the sad clown of French popular culture. With a shrug and a sigh, he takes us as a shy emcee from musical number to comic skit to torch song.
The three skits written by Rob Keefe, a frequent Thrillpeddlers contributor, were not clever or funny enough, but Bearded Assets was elevated by Bruna Palmeiro above. Playing a circus bearded lady caught en flagrante with her mute, indeterminate-gender lover played by Noah Haydon, she used her voluptuous naked body as a character in and of itself. Later in the show, she sang as Lezmerelda with J. Iness as Quasihomo in a duet that was funny and surprisingly poignant.
The skit by Alex Kinney, Cupid's First Flight was something of a mess, but a fabulous one. It harkened back to part of what was interesting about the Cockettes, the tossed salad of low and lewd mixed with sophisticated and erudite. In this skit, Jupiter (Kim Larsen) and Venus (Lisa McHenry) have just conceived Cupid, winningly embodied by Andrew Darling as the essence of an innocent one-day-old, about to take his first flight with love arrows.
Somehow Cupid ends up at the Comedie Francaise in the household of Moliere whose daughter is pierced by an errant arrow and falls in love with Reynard the Fox, perfectly embodied by Steven Satyricon who is flirting above with Dee Nathaniel as Tercelin the Crow. Having a classical education would probably help in understanding some of the jokes.
The penultimate number involves the entire cast in L'hotel Dungereux, where it is explained that people are no longer coerced into dungeons but pay to experience them.
The players are all in a state of kinky dress and undress, singing liberté, égalité, fraternité while Scrumbly plays a sinister anthem on the synthesizer. It's a strange, sexy and transgressive sequence.
Director and Thrillpeddlers founder Russell Blackwood above announced there would definitely be no extensions to the run which ends on May 2nd so you might want to get some tickets now (click here). It's already a legendary show for Scrumbly's music alone.
The recently deceased Poruguese writer, José Saramago, published a short novel in 2005 called As Intermitências da Morte, or Death With Interruptions in English. The first half of the book is a social satire which concerns the political and economic implications for a country where the entire population suddenly stops dying (you can still expire if you are smuggled over the border). The second half describes death in the form of a woman returning in a gentler manner, now sending snail mail letters of warning to those about to die. One such letter, from a cellist in a local orchestra, is repeatedly returned to sender, so she investigates and unexpectedly falls in love with the musician. (Pictured above are soprano Nikki Einfeld as death and Daniel Cilli as the cellist.)
The UC Berkeley History professor, Thomas Laqueur, who wrote the definitive Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation in 2003, has now moved on to the subject of death. The Mellon Foundation awarded him a grant to study cultural conceptions around dying, and one of Laqueur's uses of the grant was commissioning an opera taken from Saramago's novel, with a libretto by Laqueur himself and music by San Francisco composer Kurt Rohde. (Rohde is above right, playing prepared piano strings, with tenor Joe Dan Harper singing as the grim reaper, among other roles).
I went to the dress rehearsal last Wednesday at the small ODC Theater in the Mission District, and though the one-act opera took about 20 minutes to get going musically and dramatically, by the gentle, romantic end of the piece, I was completely absorbed and moved.
The score called for piano, percussion, string quartet, and a solo cello played by Leighton Fong in his boxer shorts above, tangling with death. The music sounded spiky and disjointed during that first third, perhaps mirroring the libretto, but it was hard to tell because the staging by Majel Connery seemed more interested in obscuring the story with abstract gestures than clarity.
Once the opera started concentrating on its Orpheus story in reverse, as composer Rohde put it, with death becoming human through love, the music became more lyrical and the ritualistic staging focused. Cilli and Einfeld and Baker were all superb, with excellent diction, unforced beautiful voices, and a rueful sexiness to their performances.
There was also a great chamber chorus, sung by members of Volti, and Rohde's music for them and his three soloists demonstrated that he knows how to write for human voices, a rare gift not given to every composer (I am not naming names). The instrumentalists from the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, where Rohde is "composer/violist/artistic advisor" were integral members of the piece and played the complex music under the young conductor Matilda Hofman splendidly.
The two performances over the weekend sold out at the small ODC and I look forward to hearing the piece again in a larger space with reconceived staging. The music and performers deserve it.
For 15 years, the conductor Nicole Paiement above has been presenting concerts of contemporary music with the finest student musicians in a series called BluePrint at the San Francisco Conservatory. Last Saturday, in a completely unexpected announcement, she announced that this was to be the last one.
At least she went out with a good concert. It started with a reworked Gavotte for Elly by Kyle Hovatter, whose original version had been premiered at an earlier BluePrint concert dedicated to longtime composition teacher Elinor Armer (click here for an account).
Next up was the world premiere of Robin Estrada's Hoefer Prize winning Pagihip at Pagtaktak, a mingling of northern Filipino bamboo instruments and Western wind instruments that was surprisingly subtle given the instrumentation, evoking the plant and animal life of a jungle from an almost insect level. The piece wasn't my cup of tea, but all my smart companions loved it so the fault was obviously mine.
The Hoefer Prize goes each year to a Conservatory alumni who is a young composer, and one of the annual highlights of the BluePrint concert series has been the premiere performances of those works. In 2012, it was Neil Romick's Anosmia about a man losing his sense of smell. In 2013 they performed Ian Dicke's multimedia Grand Central, and 2014 brought Ryan Brown's theatrical oratorio, The Exact Location of the Soul. That's a remarkable track record, and it's a question if that success will endure without Paiement's genius for getting the most out of both modern scores and student ensembles.
After intermission, bassoonist Justin Cummings above, who has played with the New Music Ensemble for the last four years, was the soloist for Stephen Paulson's Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra. Paulson, a Conservatory professor, is the principal bassoonist at the San Francisco Symphony and this 1968 concerto was the only music other than a few songs that he ever composed. It wasn't very interesting except for the bassoon part, which Justin sailed through with brilliant aplomb.
The final piece on the program brought two of my favorite musicians in the entire world together for the first time. Sarah Cahill was the piano soloist while Nicole Paiement conducted the New Music Ensemble in Olivier Messiaen's 1956 Oiseaux exotiques, and it was a crisp, smashingly good peformance by all. A piano concerto mashed into an examination of the soundscape of "exotic" birds from Asia and the Americas, it's probably a good starter piece for Messiaen appreciation because it's both short and literally brilliant.
After the concert, I asked Nicole if the demise of BluePrint was because she was finally becoming a famous conductor (she's just been appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Dallas Opera among other worldwide invitations) and she professed that it wasn't the case. She was still very much a part of the SF Conservatory.
From what I could make out, this was more a case of academic politics than anything else, which is egregiously dumb on the Conservatory's part. Half the genius new music instrumentalists who populate the Bay Area right now, such as Weston Olencki above, have gone through Paiement's exacting, exhausting, exciting tutelage in the New Music Ensemble. And for audiences, it was probably one of the best contemporary music series in the world, although too few people knew about it. Bring back BluePrint!
After walking upstream on Market Street through the St. Patrick's Parade, we walked west on the Embarcadero to the Exploratorium science museum while dodging fake Buddhist monks asking for donations.
The Exploratorium was offering free admission in honor of Pi Day, but the line stretched all the way to the end of an adjoining pier so we kept walking.
Adding to the day's amusement was a contingent from the World Naked Bike Ride.
The gent above was on roller skates making his way through the crowd of tourists, who seemed to be pleasantly shocked by the spectacle as they gasped in surprise, laughed, and pointed.
The saddest part of Supevisor Scott Weiner's War on the Nudists in the Castro was that tourists getting off the F streetcar line loved them. Plus, the naked people have been replaced by feral street punks who have proved to be even more of a neighborhood nuisance.
Further down the block, people were drinking at a pop-up beergarden attached to the Pier 23 restaurant while being framed by a gigantic cruise ship.
A new cruise terminal for the industry opened last September at Pier 27 where the America's Cup complex once stood.
According to one of the traffic monitors in the parking lot, the cruise season has just begun and they are expecting over 100 of these ships to berth between now and November.
Saturday's boarding was for a 7-day trip down the Pacific coast to Ensenada and back.
Though I love boat rides, I prefer when there's an actual destination, but everyone to their own pleasure.
Irish-American families from throughout the Bay Area streamed into San Francisco on Saturday for the annual St. Patrick's parade, and kids in cute costumes were once again the highlight.
Not so delightful were the multitude of local politicians being driven in convertibles up Market Street to McAllister and then to the Civic Center. "Caretaker" Mayor Ed Lee, above with his wife and an Irish dignitary, inaugurated the political parade, genuflecting to one of the major pillars of traditional power in the city.
The gay, Jewish San Francisco Supervisor Scott Weiner, who consistently aligns himself with that same power structure over the interests of most of his constituents, was a typical example of the political representatives who showed up.
The first large contingent in the parade, even before most of the politicians, was the San Francisco Police Department, which just had a bomb dropped on it Friday afternoon by federal prosecutors. The feds had recently convicted Sgt. Ian Furminger and a few of his colleagues of corruption on duty (they were caught on video stealing from drug dealers while freely roughing up whoever they wanted). Furminger was requesting bail before an appeal, and the feds decided to get nasty, releasing a slew of racist and homophobic texts Furminger had been passing around with fellow SFPD officers. Click here for a KQED story about the scandal, which is getting wilder every day.
From the size of the firefighters contingent, it looked like nepotism and ethnic clannishness has not completely disappeared from our post-racist society when it comes to public safety hiring.
San Francisco Fire Department Chief Joanne Hayes White led the firefighting contingent, and she was beaming while marching up Market Street. It's too bad she has been so demonstrably incompetent in her position over the last decade, stumbling from one stupid scandal to another, but she cannot be fired because she's about as politically connected as they come.
Finally, there were marching bands with bagpipes and drums and kilts...
...and serious faced young Irish step dancers jumping into the air on Market Street.
Two hours later, lower Polk Street saloons had lines outside...
...while young people who didn't know how to drink slumped on the sidewalk in the protective embrace of friends.
On a recent Sunday morning, a Department of Public Works employee was cleaning up trash around the San Francisco Superior Court building at Polk and McAllister.
Her job was complicated by a quartet of street people who had spread across the Polk Street sidewalk with piles of belongings which they were casually tossing into the gutter beside them.
This did not amuse the trash collector, and after she asked the quartet to pick up their things and leave, they started screaming at her.
She screamed right back, telling them how sick she was of picking up their garbage every single day...
...and then they started yelling threats at her.
Meanwhile, a dog walker and a wheelchair user got stuck in the melee trying to pass in different directions on the sidewalk.
A police patrol car stopped at the light going south on Polk Street and I told the policeman, "I think she needs some support over there. Those people are threatening her." The policeman pointed his finger at the back seat which was occupied and said he was busy but that he'd "call it in."
About ten minutes later a paddy wagon arrived, but the policemen inside never ventured out of the vehicle, merely telling the sidewalk sprawlers to move along. The police didn't even stick around to see if they complied, leaving the DPW worker alone to receive more screaming abuse from the slowly exiting quartet. Most of us have become immune to how unconcerned the SFPD is for the safety and welfare of the average San Franciscan who is neither wealthy or connected, but it was shocking to see how little they seemed to care about the safety of a fellow city employee.
