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,)