After 20 years as partners, the Cypress String Quartet played their last notes together on Sunday in a concert at the Veterans Building in San Francisco.
Though the Farewell Concert was structured as a celebration, complete with a catered reception after the music-making, the event still felt more than a little melancholy, rather like a party announcing a divorce.
It was not only the four musicians who are scattering, but an entire family of fans such as the couple above who have been following the quartet for two decades…
…and support staff such as Executive Director Maggee VanSpeybroeck above who is moving to Chicago to enroll in an MBA program.
The group specialized in Beethoven quartets, which is how they opened the program, with the composer’s Opus 95, the “Serioso.” (Violinists Cecily Ward and Tom Stone are in the photo above.)
This was followed by four movements extracted from works they had commissioned over the years as part of their “Call and Response” initiative where they asked living composers to respond to another work they had programmed. (Pictured above is cellist Jennifer Kloetzel.) The pieces were Elena Ruehr’s Clay Flute from her 2001 Third String Quartet, Quiet Art from Jennifer Higdon’s 2003 Impressions, Fantaisie from Philippe Hersant’s 2011 Quatuor A Cordes No. 3, and finally Unhurried from Benjamin Lees’ 2005 String Quartet No. 6.
In the Cypress Quartet concerts I have attended over the last couple of years, the most interesting music and performances have usually been these premieres, and it is probably what the ensemble is going to be remembered for in the historical record.
After intermission, the Cypress played Debussy’s 1893 String Quartet in G Minor in a beautiful performance, highlighted by the exquisite musicianship of Ethan Filner on viola above. He also introduced the three encores by Dvorak, Suk and Shulhoff that ended the concert.
At the reception afterwards, there was a video highlighting the quartet’s accomplishments over the last 20 years, and the feeling of being at a funeral wake was unavoidable.
May all four of them do well in the future.
Returning books to the Main Library on Saturday morning, I walked through preparations for the annual, weekend-long Gay Pride Festival in Civic Center where the Asian Art Museum had installed new signage for the occasion.
On the various stages scattered around the plaza, sound checks were being made on speakers and microphones, allowing for odd bursts of sound mingling in a Charles Ives kind of way.
The dirty little secret of the Gay Pride Festival in San Francisco is how much money is involved, particularly in selling crappy, overpriced cocktails all day from booths devoted to "charity."
In front of the library were a pair of booths that scraped some kind of low, hawking $9 Bud Lights and McDonald's corporate swag...
...including an astonishingly ugly T-shirt that urged one to Celebrate Lovin'.
The controversial new metal detectors were set up at the entrance to the plaza at Grove and Market, and in truth they are welcome. In recent years, the festival has become a magnet for young, mostly straight suburbanites looking for a free party in San Francisco, and the combination of alcohol and weapons has contributed to more than a few violent altercations, with bystanders caught in the crossfire.
The metal detection staff were mostly young and black, which is probably not what this year's slogan "For Racial and Economic Justice" was referring to, but it was nice to see this usually unemployed demographic being offered jobs. Meanwhile, the promised enhanced police presence seemed to consist of herds of 20-30 uniformed police officers wandering about Civic Center looking foolish, as if they were afraid of being attacked unless they stayed together as gangs. The Black Lives Matter group, which had been given an honored spot in Sunday's parade, pulled out at the last minute in protest, saying they were more afraid of the heavyhanded police presence than terrorists, and it's hard to blame them.
There is a famous quote from the composer Richard Wagner to his lover Mathilde Wiesendock after he had finished composing the opera Tristan und Isolde. "I fear the opera will be banned unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance: only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, I cannot imagine it otherwise." That quote came to mind last Sunday afternoon during the SF Opera production of Leoš Janáček's 1904 opera Jenůfa because the performance was so fine that the emotional power of the music was almost too much to bear.
The story itself is a simple Czechoslovakian village tale, taken from a naturalistic, unsentimental, late-19th century play by Gabriela Preissová, about a young woman who becomes pregnant before marriage by her handsome, wealthy boyfriend who turns out to be a drunken cad. Jenůfa's stepmother, the moral arbiter of the village, hides her away for a secret birth, and then tries to get someone to marry her. Tragedy ensues.
This was the stuff of countless women's melodramas on stage and film over the centuries, and there is no reason for the story to be so powerful except one. The music by Janáček, a provincial, barely successful Czech composer at the turn of the 20th century, is filled with such longing, sadness, beauty, and complexity that once you have absorbed it, the music of most other operas feels wan by comparison.
I first heard the opera in 1980 at the SF Opera with the incomparable Elisabeth Söderström as Jenůfa and Sena Jurinac as her stepmother Kostelnička in performances that I thought would never be equaled, but Malin Byström and Karita Mattila in this production have managed to do so, with glorious soprano voices and powerful acting abilities.
As good as the two principal singers are, what elevates this production to the stratosphere is the entire supporting cast, including Scott Quinn as the caddish Števa Buryja and William Burden (above) as his brother Laca Klemeň who is also in love with Jenůfa. Contributing to this holistic success were the SF Opera Chorus, who managed the very tricky rhythms of their folk-inflected music brilliantly, along with Adler fellows and choristers playing everything from the village Mayor to maids to extended relatives.
The opera premiered in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1904 but Janáček's original, eccentric orchestration with its surprising percussion and hairpin turns, was extensively revised for its Prague National Theater premiere in 1916 by the music director there, Karel Kovařovic. It wasn't until 1980 that the late, great conductor Charles Mackerras helped prepare an edition that respected the composer's original intentions. Mackerras also led a production of this score at SF Opera in 1986 with the wonderful Gabriela Beňačková and Leonie Rysanek in the cast. As much as I loved the conducting of Mackerras, the current job by Czech Philharmonic music director Jiří Bělohlávek (above) with the San Francisco Opera orchestra is stunning.
Six years ago at the San Francisco Opera, Bělohlávek conducted Janáček's The Makropolous Case, also starring Karita Mattila (above), in a production directed by Olivier Tambosi and designed by Frank Philipp Schlossmann, that was so good that I fell in love with the opera for the first time. The same conductor and diva soon took that show to the Metropolitan Opera in New York and I waited to hear the same kind of raving accolades which greeted it in San Francisco, but that didn't happen. A friend of mine who saw the production in both cities mentioned that the difference was in the supporting cast, which simply didn't gel in New York the way they did in San Francisco.
This same production of Jenůfa with Mattila will also be performed at the Metropolitan next season and let's hope they do it as well as San Francisco. In any case, there are has four more performances here, including one tonight (Wednesday), and I cannot urge you strongly enough to attend one of them.
Though I am not crazy about the heavy-handed stone symbolism of the set design concept by director Tambosi and designer Schlossmann, every other element of the production is perfection. Click here for tickets, or just walk to the box office on the day of performance and grab a standing room ticket for $10. This is one of those legendary productions people will be talking about for years. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)
The building boom continues unabated in the South of Market district, with cranes popping up everywhere.
This particular hole in the ground is on Folsom Street next to Brainwash between 7th and 8th Streets.
Watching workers assembling the monster crane over the weekend was quite entertaining.
Let us hope that the subsequent building is not as desperately ugly as the Trinity Plaza apartment complex which continues to malignantly sprout at 8th Street between Market and Mission Streets.
Over at the 40 Going on 28 blog, TK has sarcastically proposed that every San Francisco neighborhood should have at least one if not more of these monstrosities constructed so we can solve the housing crisis, complete with Photoshopped illustrations.
Maybe they can all have replicas of the 92-foot stainless steel statue, Venus, by Australian sculptor Lawrence Argent which was commissioned by the late real estate developer Angelo Sangiacomo.
Sangiacomo, long known as "the father of rent control" because his price-gouging ways in the 1970s prompted San Francisco City Hall to pass legislation protecting tenants, died last year at the age of 91. He leaves a mixed legacy of ugly buildings, this shiny, gargantuan version of the Venus de Milo, and rent control itself.
Watching Verdi's epic opera Don Carlo on Sunday afternoon at the San Francisco Opera, a few hours after learning of the Orlando gay bar massacre, was an unusually rich experience. The opera is based on a long, complex 1787 Friedrich Schiller play which is an Age of Enlightenment examination of power, politics, unrequited love, religious intolerance, and state violence in 16th Century, Inquisition-era Spain. Parallels to our current crazy moment in time were unavoidable, and though the piece is a tragedy with most of the major characters dead or in exile by the end, the overall effect was oddly consoling and healing. (Pictured above are fellow music lovers Chung Wai Soong, Chenier Ng, and James Parr waiting at the stage door after the performance to congratulate the cast.)
Even by Verdi's lofty standards, Don Carlo is a special achievement. The piece has come into its own over the last 50 years as various scholarly editions have appeared, differentiating between the different versions of the opera which started off in 1867 as a five-hour-plus Paris Grand Opera complete with ballet. It was then translated into Italian and condensed into more digestible sizes for smaller houses in Italy and throughout the world. On Sunday, the San Francisco Opera went with the five-act 1884 Modena version which includes the original first act in the Fontainebleau forest where the young, betrothed Elizabeth de Valois and Don Carlo meet by accident, are overwhelmed with love and happiness, and soon find out that Carlo's father King Philip II has changed his mind and decided to marry the young woman himself. Much misery for everyone ensues.
The staging by Spanish director Emilio Sagi on Zack Brown's dark, serviceable sets was clunky and sometimes silly, but it didn't matter that much because the cast from top to bottom was so good, and they were all fine actors besides. Michael Fabiano (with the shaved head above) made his Don Carlo role debut as a neurotic, tormented character which worked fine, and his tenor voice was remarkably beautiful. Ana Maria Martinez as Queen Elizabetta did not have the vocal heft to soar over the large choral ensembles but when she sang softly over a muted orchestra, such as her great Act V aria Tu che le vanità conosce, the sound was magical.
Princess Eboli, the Bad Girl at Court who is in love with Don Carlo but also secretly sleeping with King Philip II, was sung by the Bulgarian mezzo-soprano Nadia Krasteva, and it was a sensational SF Opera debut. She even mimed playing castanets while dancing and singing The Veil Song aria without looking ridiculous, which is a feat in itself.
Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa is one of the most admirable characters in all of opera, pleading for an end to the bloody persecution of Protestants in Flanders by the King and the Spanish Catholic Church. The Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien above was magnificent in the role, standing up to King Philip at one moment, advocating for his best friend Don Carlo the next, and playing intermediary in the tormented mess of the Elizabeth and Carlo relationship. When he sacrifices himself for his friend Carlo and dies in his arms singing a reprise of their friendship duet, there was hardly a dry eye in the opera house, particularly after the news from Orlando.
That event also reverberated during the huge spectacle at the center of the opera, an auto-da-fe where heretics are burned alive for an appreciative public. Unfortunately, the staging of the scene by Sagi was dull and tasteful when it should have been dramatic and frenzied, but the music is so great that it overcame any dramatic deficiencies, particularly under the inspired conducting of Music Director Nicola Luisotti and the massive sound of the enlarged opera chorus.
Last but not least, the great German bass Rene Pape (above near the stage door) sang King Philip II in a marvelous performance. After behaving like an authoritarian villain for most of the opera, there is a wonderfully Shakespearean moment at the beginning of Act IV where he is humanized in the aria Ella giammai m'amo. "She doesn't love me," he sings to himself about Elizabetta, "she's never loved me," as he pours his soul out to the accompaniment of a cello. He is then confronted by the horrifying old Grand Inquisitor, sung by the bottomless bass Andrea Silvestrelli, who demands that Rodrigo along with Carlo be murdered for their liberal heresies.
There are five more performances of the opera, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. A cast this uniformly good in an opera this ambitious doesn't come around often. Standing room tickets at $10 for orchestra and balcony spots in the back of the opera house are still the best deal in the entire Bay Area, and seated tickets can be found by clicking here. (Pictured above are choristers Buffy Baggott and William Pickersgill flanking James Parr and bass-baritone Mark Doss who is covering the role of King Philip. All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)
The San Francisco Symphony produced a magical performance of the 1944 Leonard Bernstein musical On The Town last week. Intelligently staged by the LA-based Chromatic creative collective, it starred most of the New York cast from a well-reviewed 2014 Broadway revival, and the orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas gave one of the best performances of popular showtune music I have ever heard. Listening to the ambitious score played live, with the orchestra surrounded by brilliant dancers and singers, was an unusual treat that gave the musical an unexpected depth I never suspected.
The biggest problem with the show is the book by the writers/performers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who starred in the original 1944 production. The tale of three Navy sailors on a 24-hour leave in New York during World War Two is told as a series of cartoonish revue skits that have not aged particularly well. In the SF Symphony production, the solution was to have Amanda Green (the daughter of Adolph) and David Garrison (above) as narrators and occasional bit part players, dispensing with most of the corny dialogue altogether. Green and Garrison were terrific, the meandering plot stayed clear, and the music was allowed to shine.
The musical started as a wildly successful ballet called Fancy Free by Jerome Robbins for the New York City Ballet with music by Bernstein. I saw Fancy Free a few years ago at the San Francisco Ballet and found it appalling because the sailors trying to get laid came across closer to sexual harassers and borderline rapists than seductive sailors. On The Town upends that dynamic with strong women characters who choose which sailor they want, including Alysha Umphress as the taxi driver Hildy who grabs Jay Armstrong Johnson as the sailor Chip for a tour of the town and her bedroom (dancer Justin Genna on the floor is playing the taxi).
The 2014 Broadway revival was well reviewed, though a few critics noted that the production didn't allow for any darker shades, in a show whose subtext is three young men who are essentially cannon fodder, trying to cram a bit of life in before they are possibly killed. That omission was addressed head-on in this production, with the audience being greeted on entering Davies Hall by video projections of World War Two sailors loading battleship cannons, and the show started with the chorus on either side of the stage singing part of the National Anthem, which Amanda Green informed us was the custom before every Broadway performance during the war.
The set by MacMoc design was a stylized synthesis of New York skyscrapers and a battleship with characteristically brilliant, understated projections by Adam Larsen. The direction by James Darrah (above, talking to composer John Adams) was as good as his work on Peter Grimes for the SF Symphony a couple of years ago, which seemed hardly possible.
Chromatic's co-director, Peabody Southwell, not only designed the witty costumes for this production, but also played the chanteuse who appears in a succession of different nightclubs. In a funny running gag, everywhere the sailors and their girlfriends go over the course of a late night, she is singing a blues song, I Wish I Was Dead, in various musical styles depending on the theme of the club. Southwell looked like she was having a ball and did a great job with the musical parodies.
Besides the 2014 Broadway cast, there were a couple of luxury replacements, including Merola Opera Director Sheri Greenawald above as the venal, alcoholic singing teacher Madame Dilly and the great mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard as the anthropologist Claire who ditches her rich fiance for a day and night with the sailor Ozzie played by Clyde Alves. As that rich fiance who keeps being stuck with their nightclub tabs, the bass-baritone Shuler Hensley was funny and sounded superb.
Best of all, this production made clear what an exciting dance show On The Town can be. Megan Fairchild as Ivy aka Miss Turnstiles is a ballerina from the New York City Ballet and she was ably supported by Tony Yazbeck as her wooing sailor Gabey and a squad of five male dancers who were superb. It was so much fun to hear the Symphony play ballet music, which they do quite often, and actually see dancers on the stage for a change. It would be interesting seeing these creative forces tackle something like Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. (Pictured above left to right are narrators Amanda Green and David Garrison, Tony Yazbeck as Gabey, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, Megan Fairchild as Ivy, Alysha Umphress as Hildy, Jay Armstrong Johnson as Chip, and Isabel Leonard as Claire. All photos are by Stefan Cohen except for Darrah/Adams and Sheri Greenawald which are mine.)
