Mary Cassatt At Work

San Francisco's Legion of Honor Museum is currently hosting an exhibit called Mary Cassatt At Work. It's an overview of the pioneering American feminist artist Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). She was born into a wealthy Pennsylvania family and managed to overcome innnumerable obstacles to becoming a working woman artist of the 19th century. One of those obstacles was her stockbroker father who refused to support her in her studies, which started at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when she was 15. (Pictured is Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878.)

She hated the dreary instruction and gender discrimination at the Academy (no live models for you, girl!) and decamped to Paris with her mother, who fiercely supported her daughter. She took private lessons from teachers at the Ecole de Beaux Arts because women were not allowed to actually attend the school. (Pictured is Portrait of Mrs. Robert S. Cassatt, The Artist's Mother, 1885.)

Mary bounced back and forth between Europe and Pennsylvania until finally moving permanently to Paris in 1874, with some of her family in tow, and she became a working artist. (Pictured is In The Loge, 1878.)

She had several paintings accepted to the prestigious annual Salon, but grew disenchanted with the sexist selection process and their stodgy aesthetics. (Pictured is Woman in a Loge, 1879.)

She fell in love with some pastels in an art gallery window by Edgar Degas, and the two artists soon became fruitful, friendly collaborators in oil painting, pastel drawing, and printmaking. (Pictured is At the Theater, 1879.)

She joined the plein air Impressionists, which was once a radical art movement before it became ridiculously popular in the 20th century. (Pictured is Woman at her Toilette, 1880.)

Cassatt was well represented in the famous 1879 Impressionism exhibit, and with the proceeds of her sales bought single paintings by Monet and Degas. (Pictured is A Goodnight Hug, 1880.)

Her subject matter from that time forward was almost invariably depictions of women and children. (Pictured is Children Playing on a Beach, 1885.)

They are not formal portraits because none of the women or children are ever looking at the artist or the viewer. It was also interesting to read that many of the doting mothers were actually models with borrowed babies. Cassatt never married or had children but she obviously had a fascination for the subject of womanhood and maternity. (Pictured is A Kiss for Baby Ann, No. 3, 1897).

While her brother Alexander became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Mary used her connections with American society friends to advise them on purchasing Impressionist works. Cassatt insisted the art should eventually be donated to American art museums, which is how New York's MOMA ended up with so many priceless Impressionist paintings. She also became a major supporter of the American suffragette movement. (Pictured is the only work depicting males in the current exhibit, Portrait of Alexander J. Cassatt and His Son Robert Kelso Cassatt, 1884.)

Cassatt's own tastes grew a bit stodgy after the 1890s and she rejected the crazy new movements of the 20th century like Cubism, Fauvism and Post-Impressionism. In 1910, she visited Egypt for the first time, and proclaimed "I fought against it but it conquered, it is surely the greatest Art the past has left us ... how are my feeble hands to ever paint the effect on me?"

Shostakovich and Brahms at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony presented two major works this weekend, conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The first half was Dmitri Shostakovich's Violin Concerto #1, composed in 1948 but unperformed until 1955 when Stalin was safely in a grave. Because my brain is a memory sieve these days, I couldn't remember if I had ever heard the piece before. Thanks to this blog's search engine it turns out that I had heard the awesome German violinist Christian Tetzlaff perform as soloist with Susanna Malkki conducting the SF Symphony in 2015. The forgotten review started with: "one of the most stupendous, virtuosic, soulful musical performances of my long concertgoing life."

Unfortunately, that was not the case with Saturday evening's performance where violinist Sayaka Shoji was the soloist. This was her debut with the orchestra, and for me it was disappointing. This is difficult, expressive music, and she seemed to play every note perfectly while missing the meaning throughout. (All onstage production photos, except for the final one, are by Stefan Cohen.)

The four-movement work starts with a long Nocturne, which should set a sad, meditative tone but instead felt like being stuck in a dull way station. Shoji handled the fast movements better, but completely missed the diabolical sarcasm of the second and the village fiddler joy in the fourth. The long, slow third-movement Passacaglia is the heart of the work, ending with an extended cadenza for the soloist which should make you want to stand up and cheer at the end, but that wasn't the case on Saturday.

I had been talking up the exciting violin concerto to Austin and James, above, and felt like a liar when they both came to intermission with a "meh" expression.

Shostakovich composed the concerto for the legendary Russian violinist David Oistrakh and there are a number of his great recordings of the work on YouTube. If you are interested, click here.

The second half of the program was devoted to Brahms' Symphony #4. After another blog search, I was reminded of a masterful rendition by Herbert Blomstedt and the SF Symphony in 2020, right before the pandemic. Salonen's Brahms was quite a different experience, but completely valid and interesting in its own way. He took the symphony at a much faster pace than I am used to, excepting the slow second movement, and it worked brilliantly.

The individual soloists in the orchestra were a continuous delight, from Eugene Izotov on oboe to Ed Stephan on tympani, who led the orchestra's muscular, driving rendition with ferocious energy.

The Handmaid's Tale at SF Opera

The 2000 English-language opera The Handmaid's Tale by Danish composer Poul Ruders and English librettist Paul Bentley, just finished its seven-performance run this week at the San Francisco Opera. Based on Margaret Atwood's prophetic 1985 novel depicting patriarchy gone full authoritarian in the United States, it was yet another triumph in General Director Matthew Shilvock's championing of contemporary opera, which seems to be in a new golden age right now. For most of the 20th century, you would be lucky to hear a new opera once in a decade at the big opera houses of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and they would usually be one-off affairs that were never produced after their premieres. (Andrew Imbrie's 1976 Angle of Repose at the SF Opera is a good example.) Two former San Francisco General Directors are partly responsible for reinvigorating the art form in this country: Lotfi Mansouri with his introduction of supertitles in 1983, and David Gockley who gave the world premieres of 35 operas during his tenure at Houston Grand Opera, including John Adams's seminal Nixon in China. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

I saw the final performance on Tuesday evening, while the U.S. Vice Presidential debate was happening, featuring Republican JD Vance who seems like a character straight from this war on women narrative. The opera's action is graphically violent and horrifying, with onstage depictions of rape and execution by hanging for various crimes such as "gender treachery" (think homosexuality). Rouder's complex musical score complements and intensifies the sheer awfulness of this Christian-based fascism.

Recorded history and its operatic depiction is usually a man's world, so it was gratifying to see such a huge cast where only a few of the characters were male. This allowed for a wide range of female singers to shine on the War Memorial stage, and there was not a weak performance in the bunch. Sarah Cambidge was appropriately terrifying as Aunt Lydia, who seemed to be channeling Evelyn Dockson in the 1950 women's prison film Caged. Katrina Galka was poignant as the half-mad Janine who thinks she's still a waitress in the Before Times, and Sara Couden's astonishing contralto voice was a highlight as she played a sympathetic maid in the Commander's home.

Musically, my favorite moment of the opera was when the Commander's wife Serena Joy is seen on video singing Amazing Grace while at least two or three other things are going on in the orchestra and onstage, creating an eerie cacophony. Lindsay Ammann made a striking SF Opera debut as Serena, a former Christian singing star relegated to a shunned, venemous, stay-at-home wife for the Commander.

The childless Serena is forced to participate in the breeding of our heroine, Offred, a ritual rape by the Commander modeled on a tale in Genesis. "Rachel was unable to get pregnant, so she offered her handmaid, Bilhah, to Jacob to have children for her. Leah, who had no trouble conceiving, gave Jacob her handmaid, Zilpah." Bass John Relyea was handsome and oddly sympathetic in the role, even though the character was one of the founders of Gilead's dystopian universe (JD Vance came to mind yet again).

A secret cadre of resisters pops up throughout the opera, including Ofglen, sung gorgeously by soprano Rhoslyn Jones (above right). Mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Beteag as the ultra-liberal Offred's Mother gave a fine, funny performance as the ultimate I Told You So matriarch. Tenor Brenton Ryan continues to make a big impression in small roles at the SF Opera (Janek in The Makropulos Case, the Novice in Billy Budd, and Eros in Antony and Cleopatra). As Nick, the Commander's chauffeur who becomes our heroine's lover and possible rescuer, he brings some welcome kindness and sensuality to the harsh narrative.

Adler Fellow Caroline Corrales (above left, with the bunny ears) was sensational as Offred's lesbian feminist friend who manages to escape from handmaid hell, but who is caught and brought back to a bordello where the unsurprisingly hypocritical male elite has their sexual fun away from the rigid Christian doctrines they are enforcing on everyone else.

Finally, mezzo-soprano soprano Irene Roberts as Offred was magnificent in very challenging vocal music while onstage for almost every moment of the three-hour opera. The last time I saw her was as the adorable Dorabella in the great 2021 production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, and this was quite a stretch. She is seen above with her Before Times double, the French mezzo-soprano Simone McIntosh.

The constant flashbacks were the weakest dramaturgical moments for me and the sentimentality around Offred's longing for her kidnapped daughter felt out of place in such a rigorously unsentimental work. It didn't matter. The conductor Karen Kamensek and the SF Opera Orchestra did a fabulous job with what sounded like difficult music, although I would have to hear the opera again to make any pronouncements about the score itself. The staging by English director John Fulljames was clean and persuasive, and the set design by the English artist Chloe Lamford was hyper-functional for the 30+ quickly changing scenes. (Lamford also created the revolving two-story set for Saarijaho's Innocence this summer and she is my new artistic heroine.) Finally, the sound design and mixing engineer Rick Jacobsohn pulled off a small miracle. According to program notes, the entire opera was amplified but I didn't hear any evidence of that, which is the highest possible compliment.