The Nutcracker at the San Francisco Ballet

My Civic Center neighborhood turns into a Nutcracker factory during the month of December, with two performances a day of the Tchaikovsky ballet.

Every day dancers stream in and out of the San Francisco Ballet building on the corner of Fulton and Franklin...

...along with confused ballet patrons who don't realize that the show is actually across the street at the War Memorial Opera House.

We went to the Monday, December 23rd evening performance and had a wonderful time.

Though there were a few children in Monday's audience...

...who were being bought souvenir nutcrackers for Christmas...

...most of the crowd were adults...

...seemingly on date nights...

...with many dressed to the nines.

The cast changes for every performance and are only announced via signage in the lobby since injury, illness, and artistic discretion are all involved in who appears onstage in any particular performance.

In Swan Dive, a frank, funny and profane memoir or her career at New York City Ballet, the ballerina Georgina Pazcoguin wrote: "Although there are many who love dancing the Nutcracker, I have done it for the last twenty years because it's my job. The Nutcracker represents the tradition of paying your dues and proving how tough, how compliant, and how impervious to exhaustion you really are. Each new corps member and apprentice is expected to perform in every performance. Every. Single. One. The first Nutcracker season is the ultimate rite of passage for a new dancer, and only the strongest survive. Over the course of the season, the theater itself becomes a cesspool of injury and sickness. Our ties with friends and family are pushed to the limit--and our undying devotion to the ballet comes into question. This is why I affectiontely call it the NUTBUSTER."

I have no idea whether conditions are similar at the San Francisco ballet, but it is a grueling schedule and the peril of routine is ever-present. However, we got lucky on Monday night with a fabulous, committed cast and a great, enthusiastic audience. The guest conductor was Marc Taddei, above, and he led the SF Ballet Orchestra in a smooth, beautifully detailed rendering of Tchaikovsky's musical score.

The Helgi Tomasson production is 20 years old but it was looking spruced up a bit, along with some of the choreography, presumably by the new artistic director Tamara Rojo. What really elevated the performance beyond the ordinary was the dancing of Nikisha Fogo and Max Cauthorn, above. Fogo in particular was breathtaking and took the final Grand Pas de Deux to a zone of pure excitement.

You can catch one of the remaining eight performances from the 26th to 29th at the War Memorial Opera House, and they even seem to be offering a Post-Christmas sale on tickets at their website here.

The Battle of Pavia Tapestries at the deYoung

A set of seven huge (28 feet x 14 feet) Renaissance tapestries have stopped by for a visit at the deYoung Art Museum, and they are spectacular.

On February 25, 1525, there was a tremendous one-day battle in the northern Italian town of Pavia near Milan which concluded the wrestling over European territory between the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the King of France, Francis I.

The French forces were laying siege to the city of Pavia but on that fateful day the multinational forces of Charles V routed the French and captured Frances I, imprisoning him in Madrid for the the following year.

To commemorate the event, the seven tapestries in this exhibit were created for Charles V by Bernard van Orley, the greatest tapestry artist of his time who worked out of Brussels.

The tapestries took six years to complete by a small army of craftsmen, and the exquisite detailing is mind-boggling.

Also part of the exhibit are weaponry and armor from the 16th century which makes one wonder how they ever managed to even move with their bulky, colorful uniforms and unwieldy swords and lances.

One interesting omission is gore of any sort, although people are murdering each other throughout.

The final section of the last tapestry shows the French forces being driven into a river in an inglorious triumph.

They will only be here in San Francisco until January 12, 2025, so do check them out.

The Pacifica Quartet and Anthony McGill

San Francisco Performances presented the Pacifica Quartet last Tuesday at Herbst Theater in a conservative yet stimulating program. The quartet started with Dvorak's 1893 String Quartet in F Major, "American", a charming piece incorporating a few "native" tunes and Red-eyed Vireo bird calls that Dvorak picked up during his three-year residency in the United States. I heard the Friction Quartet play this a couple of years ago and I wrote: "They gave an intense performance that was lively and interesting throughout, though I usually prefer my Dvorak a little gentler." The Pacifica performance was much gentler and if it leaned on the side of dullness, the playing and the music itself were genuinely beautiful. (Pictured are Simin Ganatra, violin; Mark Holloway, violin; Brandon Vamos, cello; and Austin Hartman, viola.)

The guest star of the evening was Anthony McGill (above), the principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic who has been performing and recording chamber music with the Pacifica Quartet for a few years. Composer Ben Shirley's 2020 High Sierra Sonata is one of the four pieces on their 2022 recording American Stories, and it comes with quite a backstory. Bassist for Epic Records for 25+ years, alcoholic and drug addict whose descent bottomed out in LA's Skid Row in 2011, marathon runner with a group from the Midnight Mission homeless shelter, scholarship student to the SF Conservatory of Music, Shirley finally became a working composer for film and concert stages and is currently living in Ohio.

The three-movement High Sierra Sonata is a consistently pretty, tuneful work that sounded a bit like an extension of Dvorak's American scene painting. Lisa Hirsch at SFCV liked it a lot while Stephen Smoliar at The Rehearsal Studio did not. I was in the proper mood and enjoyed it thoroughly, especially the opening sound effects that sounded like wind going through pine needles.

After intermission, the Pacifica Quartet and Anthony McGill gave a masterful performance of the 1891 Brahms Quintet in B Minor for Clarinet and Strings. The quintet is one of the last things Brahms ever composed, and it's long, serious, utterly gorgeous, and ultimately sad. I had a recording as a teenager and have heard it on classical radio for decades but this was the first ever live performance. It did not disappoint.

Tamara de Limpecka Retrospective at the deYoung

The late artist Tamara de Limpecka (1894-1980) is having yet another moment. She was the bisexual Art Deco It Girl of 1920s Paris; the subject of an interactive play that ran for years in 1980s Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York; and was the title character in Lempicka, which opened and closed on Broadway this year. Simultaneously, the deYoung Museum in San Francisco is giving the painter her first American museum retrospective.

Just reading the Wikipedia entry on her, it's easy to see why her life has been such an object of fascination. She was born into an upper class Polish Jewish family who converted not to Catholicism but to the Calvinist Polish Reformed Church. After her parents' divorce, Tamara and her mother moved to moved to St. Petersburg in 1910 where Tamara met her first husband, Tadeusz Łempicki, a Polish Catholic lawyer. (Pictured is the 1923 painting, The Bohemian Woman.)

During the Russian Revolution, her husband was arrested by the secret police in the middle of the night, and "Tamara searched the prisons for him, and with the help of the Swedish consul, to whom she offered her favors, she secured his release." (Pictured is the 1925 Portrait of Marquis Guido Sommi Picenardi.)

They fled Russia, finally reuniting with Tamara's family in Paris in 1919 at the end of World War One. Tamara had always been interested in art and she studied seriously before embarking on a career as a portrait painter of the rich and famous over the next two decades. Since her husband refused to find work, this turned out to be a financial necessity. (Pictured is the 1925 Portrait of Prince Eristoff.)

She divorced Limpecka in 1928 and became a mistress to the Austro-Hungarian baron Raoul Kuffner, marrying him in 1933 after his wife died. (Pictured is the 1932 Portrait of Baron Raoul Kuffner.)

Meanwhile, Tamara was engaging in public, scandalous love affairs with women, and many of them appeared in her paintings. (Pictured is the 1927 La Bella Rafaela in Green.)

Her lifelong lover, Ira Perrot, was the model for an entire series of paintings. (Pictured is the 1931 Portrait of Ira P..)

In 1919, she gave birth to her only child, a daughter who she used as a model for a series of famous paintings while not identifying herself as the model's mother. (Pictured is the 1927 Kizette on the Balcony.)

In 1929 she visited New York on a commission to paint the wife of an American oil millionaire, Rufus Bush. Alert to the oncoming disaster of the Nazis, she had her husband sell his properties in Hungary during the 1930s and they eventually emigrated to the United States in 1939. She bounced between New York and Hollywood, where she hung out with movie stars and exiled aristocrats. (Pictured is the 1929 Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush.)

Her artistic career as "The Baroness with the Brush" waned as her style of Cubism meets Art Deco suddenly felt old-fashioned, particularly when depicting more serious themes such as starving refugees and penitent Madonnas. (Pictured is the 1931 The Refugees,)

There is an amusing wall sign describing Tamara's foray into San Francisco for a 1941 gallery show at Courvoisier Galleries. "While Lempicka's flawless pictorial technique received praise at the time, the sentimental pauperism and overly religious nature of her subjects was deemed insincere and passe by the press. The mild reception the artist received was counterbalanced by the social excitement with which she was welcomed by local high society, including Helen de Young Cameron...who threw cocktail and dinner parties for the mysterious baroness." It only seems fitting that the deYoung Museum should be the site of her posthumous retrospective. (Pictured is the 1937 Madonna,)

Mozart Matinee at the SF Symphony

The all-Mozart concerts at the San Francisco Symphony last week were a successful, joyful surprise. I went to the opening on Thursday afternoon, where the audience demographic skews heavily towards elderly women, a sophisticated bunch who know their classical music.

Incidentally, in years past the men's bathroom on the Van Ness side of Davies Hall was turned into a women's bathroom for these matinees to alleviate long lines, but this year there's a new policy where anyone can use any bathroom they want, since stalls are stalls no matter the gender.

The guest conductor was Bernard Labadie, an early music specialist who in 1984 founded Les Violins du Roy, a celebrated chamber orchestra in Quebec City. In a 2023 article by Kyle MacMillan for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: "Even though the CSO performs on modern instruments, Labadie will nonetheless bring a historically informed sensibility to his approach to these works. "That’s what I do for a living," he said. “Orchestras that invite me are willing to go down that path. Otherwise, there’s no point to have me and have the Chicago Symphony play this repertoire the way they would have played it under Georg Solti 40 years ago. So, yeah, I will definitely bring my own signature. At the same time, the purpose has never been and never will be to try to turn the Chicago Symphony into a period-instrument band.” Last week Labadie performed similar miracles with the San Francisco Symphony, and I don't think I have ever heard them play Mozart so well.

The first half of the program was a grab-bag of obscure Mozart pieces, starting with a bracing account of the overture to his final opera, La Clemenza di Tito. This was followed by two concert arias sung by the splendid British soprano Lucy Crowe, who had the audience instantly entranced with her crystalline, colorful, flexible voice. Al desio, di chi r'adora was written as an alternate aria for the character of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro for a singer who wanted something flashier than the original Deh vieni, non tardar. Then she sang Ruh sanft, mein holdes Leben from the unproduced 1780 escape-from-the harem, German-language opera Zaide. It turned out to be one of the most gorgeous arias Mozart ever wrote and Crowe did it full justice. After a respite with five minutes of Masonic Funeral Music which the program notes called gloomy, but which were actually enjoyable, Crowe returned with a bravura aria written for a soprano to interpolate into Paisello's 1782 The Barber of Seville, 35 years before Rossini's version wiped all others out of the repertory.

After intermission, Ms. Crowe returned with Non temer, amato bene, another interpolated aria from Mozart's opera Idomeneo, accompanied in passages by Alexander Barantschik on violin. It was an exquisite performance.

The concert finished with Mozart's Symphony No. 39, a favorite, especially for its Andante con moto movement where a simple melody is repeated, expanded, and becomes heartbreakingly rich by its end. In the MacMillan article, he writes: "For Labadie, a historically informed tack primarily centers on texture and articulation. “Textures will be more transparent,” he said. “It’s not about heft, it’s not about weight. It’s more about having a sound that allows us to hear through the music, to hear through transparency how the music is built and look at it from a different angle. So the sound cannot be thick. It has to be pliable.” Such transparency then allows the conductor to focus on articulation, which he called “the absolute essence of this music.” The idea is not to re-create the past but to use every bit of knowledge that is available about how this music was written, performed and received to shape a fresh way of performing it for contemporary audiences."

Virtually all of San Francisco's principal players were present in this reduced size orchestra, and they were listening keenly to each other while looking energized and happy throughout. It was a treat to experience, and a fitting finale for the ensemble before Davies Hall turns into a Christmas factory for the month of December.

Carmen, For The Very First Time

I took my spouse Austin to see his first Carmen at the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday, advising him beforehand that there were more recognizable hit tunes in this opera than anything he had ever seen. Austin loved it and so did the sold-out audience around us. The feeling was infectious, even though this jaded old operaphile was not particularly impressed by the cast or the production. What saved it for me was Bizet's 1875 musical score itself, a true marvel that somehow never gets stale, especially in this well-conducted performance by the young Benjamin Manis, who was making his house debut.

Let's start with the problems. Francesca Zambello's production, which dates from 2006, is minimalist, well-worn, and downright ugly. The role of Micaela, the good village girl who the hero is supposed to marry, is a dull stock character but she is given two of the loveliest soprano arias in the repertory. However, debuting Welsh soprano Louise Alder's voice was distinctly unlovely and one wished she'd just go back to her village. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

Act One is a tricky business to stage, with a garrison of soldiers next to a tobacco factory filled with cigarette girls, along with a children's chorus, multiple Sevilla residents, and the introduction of most of the main characters. It was a constant traffic mess and felt unconvincing in every detail.

Worst of all, the debuting French mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux was a dud as Carmen. For some reason, she played the character as a bullying Mean Girl, and any seductive allure was sadly absent. Musically, she was fine, but it was difficult to believe that every man wanted to throw themselves at her feet.

Let's finish with what went right. Act Two outside of Lillas Pastia's tavern was well-staged, and the dance sequence choreographed by Anna Maria Bruzzese was delightful. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn was a relaxed, convincing stud as the toreador Escamillo, and he even got to arrive onstage on a real horse, which excited the audience immensely.

I loved tenor Jonathan Tetelman in La Traviata a couple of years ago, and enjoyed him again as the sad sack soldier Don Jose who falls under the spell of Carmencita.

The final act, which starts with a parade coming into a bullfighting ring, was actually the best staging of the evening. Though it's an awful ending, with yet another man murdering a woman because she wants to leave him, the scene felt honest and Tetelman finally let loose with the best singing of the night.

My first Carmen, by the way, was the 1981 Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production at the San Francisco Opera when it was new, starring the legendary Spanish mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza, which set me up for a lifetime of disappointment. If this is your first Carmen, you might love it like Austin too.