Last Sunday was an exquisitely warm, still Northern California autumn day, so on a whim we pretended to be tourists and hopped on a Blue & Gold ferry boat from Fisherman's Wharf to Angel Island.
I had not visited Angel Island, a California state park one mile off the wealthy Marin enclave of Tiburon, since the 1980s, and the place was looking well tended.
We hiked up a set of steep stairs and onto the Perimeter Road where you can walk around the entire island in two to three hours, depending on your speed.
We walked to the U.S. Immigration Station, built in 1905 as a West Coast counterpart to Ellis Island.
As the remarkably honest entry on the California State Parks website states: "Surrounded by public controversy from its inception, the station was finally put into partial operation in 1910. It was designed to process Chinese immigrants whose entry was restricted by the Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882. A rush of immigrants from Europe were expected with the opening of the Panama Canal, but international events after 1914, including the outbreak of World War I, cancelled the expected rush, but Asians continued to arrive on the West Coast and to go through immigration procedures...During the next 30 years, this was the point of entry for most of the approximately 175,000 Chinese immigrants who came to the United States. Most of them were detained on Angel Island for as little as two weeks or as much as six months. A few however, were forced to remain on the island for as much as two years."
"Today, most visitors to Angel Island find the Immigration Station a place of reflection. While often called the Ellis Island of the West, the U.S. Immigration Station, was in fact quite different. Arrivals at Ellis Island were welcomed to this country by the near by Statue of Liberty and screened primarily for medical reasons leaving an average of 2-3 hours of arriving. At Angel Island, the objective was to exclude new arrivals, the memories of many returning visitors are therefore bittersweet."
The existing barracks turned into POW camps during World War Two, followed by the military using the island as home for Nike anti-aircraft missiles during the Cold War with Russia. The military finally ceded control to the State of California in 1962 and the place has slowly been turned into a recreational Shangri-La. When I went to the Angel Island Conservancy welcome hut to find a map, Italian opera was playing on the speakers which seemed unusual, until I looked up and saw that the greeter was none other than Chenier Ng above, a friend from Balcony Standing Room at the San Francisco Opera. It felt like serendipity and it was delightful seeing an immigrant as the welcoming concierge after all that ugly history.
We took the last, 4:25 PM ferryboat back to San Francisco.
On the way, we stopped in Sausalito where there were hundreds of people waiting to join us.
Most of them seemed to be tourists who had rented bikes and ridden over the Golden Gate Bridge.
In our current hideous bout of American political nativism, it was refreshing to see visitors from all of the world...
...including tipsy, giggling French women...
...and beautiful young people like the couple above who alternated between stealing kisses and taking selfies with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra opened its 26th season last week in Berkeley, San Francisco, and San Rafael with a concert called New Horizons led by their new "Artistic Partner," British violinist Daniel Hope. He first appeared with the ensemble last year, and I wrote: "The New Century Chamber Orchestra is looking for a new leader after announcing that Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg is leaving her music director post after the upcoming season. Daniel Hope is probably too busy to be interested in a job halfway around the world from his base in Vienna. Plus, he is taking over the Zurich Chamber Orchestra this year from Roger Norrington. Still, it was obvious that Hope worked beautifully with the New Century musicians, and it would be nice to see him return." See, wishes do come true sometimes.
The concert at Herbst Theatre on Saturday started with a misfire, Mendelssohn's 1825 Octet for Strings. "This was originally written for eight musicians, but we all wanted to play, just because..." Hope explained, and though the sentiment was lovely, the clarity of the original octet turned into sludge with double the amount of players, sounding more like Brahms than Mendelssohn at times.
The next piece was the world premiere of a three-movement violin concerto by composer Alan Fletcher above, written for Hope to perform with the New Century Chamber Orchestra, the Savannah Festival, and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. The composer rambled on a bit before the performance about its relation to water sounds and the seven miniatures constituting the slow second movement, but the music grew progressively more interesting as it went along, and Hope obviously loved playing the concerto.
After intermission, we were treated to Orawa, a wonderfully energetic, minimalist-tinged ten-minute piece by the recently deceased Polish composer, Wojciech Kilar. I had never heard the work before this week and it was a delightful discovery (click here for a fun YouTube version by a Polish youth orchestra). New Century played the heck out of it.
The evening ended with an emotional, beautifully performed rendition of Tchaikovsky's 1880 Serenade for Strings.
It's encouraging that Daniel Hope has signed on for three years as Artistic Partner. His energy and musicality are a delight, and the orchestra has never sounded better.
Last Saturday afternoon at Yerba Buena Gardens, a musical ensemble called Brooklyn Raga Massive performed a version of San Francisco composer Terry Riley's 1964 minimalist masterpiece, In C.
The group was an interesting looking and sounding mixture of traditional East Indian ragas and Western Jazz.
They were accompanied by the San Francisco hipster classical music ensemble Classical Revolution on various instruments, and they seemed to be most at home in the Riley work.
The idea of a raga-influenced performance of In C was interesting on paper, but the result sounded more like jazz than minimalism, with the leader of the ensemble directing instrumentalists and singers to quiet down when various instruments had a solo. Though there are plenty of performer choices involved with a live performance of the work, one of its major joys is as a communal experience, where a group of musicians play off and over each other, with no solos involved.
We did not stay for the whole performance, and darted across the street for more Edward Munch madness. James Parr is posing with Self-Portrait with Spanish Influenza.
Then we went to the 7th floor, looked at the strange new skyline South of Market from their terrace, and experienced Ragnar Kjartansson's hour-long The Visitors again, which was oddly closer in musical style, communal spirit, and emotional affect to In C than the live performance across the street.
The San Francisco Opera is presenting a very good production of Richard Strauss's shocking 1909 opera, Elektra, propelled by one of the best casts imaginable in the world, headed by Christine Goerke in the title role. The soprano is onstage from the pre-show open curtain to the final notes two hours later, singing the insanely difficult role with lyrical beauty, power, and intelligence. It is one of the greatest operatic performances I have heard at the San Francisco Opera over the last 40-plus years. (All production photos by Cory Weaver.)
The new production by the British director Keith Warner opened last year in Prague, where it received pretty dismal reviews, partly because it didn't have this astounding cast. The concept seems to be that the entire story is taking place in an unstable woman's mind after she remains behind after closing hours at a sleek, contemporary museum in a room dedicated to artifacts from Agamemnon and the cursed House of Atreus. Some ideas worked better than others, but the production didn't get in the way of the essential story, and the set design by Boris Kudlička and lighting by John Bishop was striking and visually engaging, with dioramas representing different rooms in the palace appearing and disappearing smoothly.
The murdering mom, Klytemnestra, a role that is usually assigned to legendary sopranos on their last vocal legs, was sung beautifully by the comparatively young mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens. Styled like an alcoholic, imperious housewife/queen, she was genuinely pitiful. I only wished there had been a more interesting staging of her terrifying entrance music, usually accompanied by bloody sacrifices to the angry gods who plague her dreams.
The sweet sister, Chrysothemis, who is given the most lyrical music, was sung almost perfectly by soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, and though she refused to help Elektra hack her mother to death with an axe, her delight at the murderous deeds during the finale was one of the high musical moments of the production.
Orest, the exiled brother in disguise, was well sung by baritone Alfred Walker and his horror movie rampage near the end of the opera was very satisfying.
The 100-piece orchestra, the largest ever assembled in the pit at the War Memorial Opera House, was conducted by the young Hungarian conductor Henrik Nánási, and he led the ensemble in an amazingly transparent rendition of the extraordinarily complex score which can easily turn into a muddy mess. The individual musicians should be proud of themselves because they sounded like one of the best operatic orchestras on the globe. There are only three more performances, tonight (September 19th), this Friday (September 22nd), and Wednesday, September 27th. Make sure you get to one of those performances if you can, and if you're feeling poor, standing room at the SF Opera is still an unbelievably inexpensive $10.
An old friend, Joshua Contreras, had left a pair of Stacy Adams wingtips in our closet for the last 10 years, lost and forgotten. Last month he sent an SOS from El Paso, asking if they happened to still be in the closet, and they were. Before sending them off to the Lone Star State, though, I took them out for a last spin at the San Francisco Symphony Gala Opening last Thursday.
I was joined by my friend Steve Susoyev above who was wearing the other pair of fancy footwear as he guided Frances Hsieh around the Prosecco Promenade in the Davies Hall lobby.
Frances managed to upstage us both.
The annual fundraising gala opens with a quintet of dinners and cocktails at City Hall, a party tent next door, and the tiny Wattis Room for the truly elite.
After dinner, the crowds join each other in the lobby to see and be seen.
This year's edition was younger and mellower than usual, and the people watching was perfectly delightful.
There was also an opening musical concert wedged in with music director Michael Tilson Thomas leading the audience in a sing-along Star Spangled Banner, a Happy 90th Birthday arrangement which he sang to Bernard Osher who was perched in a stageside box, and a quartet of classical music bon-bons with the orchestra.
The concert started with a rambunctious performance of Bernstein's overture to Candide, which the orchestra will be presenting complete in January. This was followed by the star of the evening, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, playing the Saint-Saëns Cello Conerto #1 and Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations. This was the first time I had heard Yo-Yo Ma play live, which felt a bit like checking off a box on a bucket list. Decades ago, I heard an older Isaac Stern make a mess of a Mozart violin concerto so I was a bit apprehensive about encountering another legend late in their career (Ma has been performing in public since child prodigy days in the early 1960s), but there was no reason to worry. It was easy to hear why he is a legend.
The concert ended with yet another traversal through Ravel's Bolero, followed by parties and dancing in the tent and outdoors on Grove Street. Even with our magic shoes, we were wimps and only lasted about an hour, but the food and drink and people were fun.
The Yerba Buena Gardens outdoor concerts all summer are an undiscovered treat, with small audiences and interesting artists from all over the world.
Last Saturday featured the Sudanese-born, Brooklyn singer Alsarah performing a mixture of new and traditional Nubian songs with her sister Nahid on backing vocals, Togo-raised Mawuena Kodjovi on bass and trumpet, Rami El Aasser on Middle Eastern percussion and Brandon Terzic on oud.
Next Saturday at 1PM, another multiculti Brooklyn ensemble, the Brooklyn Raga Massive, joins San Francisco's Classical Revolution for an East meets West version of San Francisco composer Terry Riley's minimalist classic In C.
After lunching and listening to the Nubatones, we crossed the street to SFMOMA where another African-born, New York artist, Julie Mehretu, has just unveiled HOWL, eon (I, II), a huge, two-panel commission from the museum. Charles Desmerais, the new art critic for the SF Chronicle, complained about their placement on the stairways in the main lobby entrance where it's just about impossible to make out any of the complex details and he has a point. We continued on and hung out with Ragnar Kjartansson and The Visitors on the 7th floor again.
Céline Ricci and her Ars Minerva company presented their third annual production of an obscure 17th century Venetian opera at the ODC Theatre on 17th Street, and once again it was a musical and stylistic triumph. The piece this time was La Circe, a 1665 opera by Pietro Andrea Ziani about the sorceress famous from her appearances in Homer's Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphosis. In this version of the tale, Ulysses has just dumped her and fled with his remaining sailors, which puts her into a very bad mood and leads to much manipulation, sorcery and malice towards those unfortunate enough to be sharing the island with her. These include (left to right, above) Kyle Stegall as Glauco who she wants as her boy toy; Jasmine Johnson as her gardener Egle; Aurélie Veruni as the virginal Scilla who Circe turns into a sea monster; Jonathan Smucker as Gligorio, a comic servant who has been shipwrecked with his mistress; Katherine Hutchinson as an aerial acrobat who fills in the dance sections of the opera; Céline Ricci as the sorceress Circe; Igor Vieira as a trio of characters; Ryan Belongie as Pirro, a shipwrecked aristocrat who Circe also lusts after; and Kindra Scharich as Andromecha, Pirro's wife who pretends to be his sister.
The entire cast sang superbly, including Kyle Stegall in his merman outfit above, and they were accompanied by a brilliant chamber orchestra consisting of Adam Cockerham (above right) on theorbo, Derek Tam conducting from the harpsichord, Gretchen Claassen on cello, Addi Liu on viola, and Laura Rubinstein-Salzedo and Nathalie Carducci on violins.
It is amazing that music as good as this has been left undiscovered for so many centuries. The duet which ended the first act between countertenor Ryan Belongie and mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich was so beautiful that it seems impossible it should be lost. Plus, the role of Circe is wild, incorporating just about every emotion imaginable.
There are plenty of instances of confusing gender in Renaissance and Baroque opera, but I was still unprepared for Jasmine Johnson's portrayal of Egle. The character is a woman pretending to be a man for most of the evening, and it wasn't until the last fifteen minutes that I realized the exquisitely beautiful voice was actually female rather than a male countertenor.
Jonathan Smucker as Gligorio was very funny as the down-to-earth servant who wants very much to live, thank you, while his mistress keeps imploring death to take her away from miserable misfortune.
His fondness for wine leads to unfortunate results, though, when he and Igor Vieira (below right) are transformed into swine. (The well-done projections were designed by Patricia Nardi.)
Matthew Nash (center, with Céline Ricci and Igor Vieira) designed the witty male costumes, including an Elvis ensemble for Kyle Stegall below.
Stegall's tenor was pure and plaintive, and he made for a funny, convincingly romantic cad, but again, all the singers were wonderful. Between Ars Minerva, West Edge Opera and Opera Parallele, the Bay Area has three of the most adventurous small opera companies in the world, and a large part of their current artistic success is the incredible roster of local musical talent, both vocal and instrumental. I can't wait to see what they unearth next.
