Beautifying the Neighborhood

Last Saturday morning we woke up to a small tent city being constructed in the parking lot of a school building on McAllister Street.

San Francisco's Department of Public Works was sponsoring the event which was being billed online as the "Arbor Day Fair," although national Arbor Day is actually April 25th.

Volunteers and city workers were joined for neighborhood tree planting events and spread themselves throughout the Civic Center neighborhood.

I didn't join them but continued on to Hayes Street instead for the Saturday morning trash pickup in Hayes Valley which has turned into quite a lively scene.

After completing my civic duty, I stopped by the "eco-fair," which was charming.

There were bucket rides being offered to kids and their guardians on two towering cherry pickers.

In the back of the schoolyard...

...there was a tiny petting zoo with grass-eating goats.

If you volunteered in the morning, there was a box lunch as reward...

..along with free ice cream.

My favorite giveaway was a make-your-own wooden planter tent...

...with helpful city carpenters showing you how to assemble a square planter box...

...and other city workers helping you transplant live herbs.

It was one of the sweetest city-sponsored events ever.

Handel's Alceste with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra

Maybe it was just because I was in the mood, but the Handel concert by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale last Friday at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre felt like an utter delight.

The organization has been auditioning various conductors this season to be their new Music Director, and last week's candidate was the 47-year-old Irishman Peter Whelan, an energetic live wire who introduced the program with warmth and wit. He was last seen here in 2022 conducting San Francisco Opera's production of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice and he is also the Artistic Director of the Irish Baroque Orchestra.

The concert opener was Handel's Concerto Grosso in G major, Op. 6, No. 1 which was a lovely 15-minute starter.

The was followed by the major work of the evening, Alceste, which was incidental music written by Handel in 1749 for a Smollett play turned extravaganza that was never produced. Most of the music was recycled by the composer for other works, but hearing the original music together is a rarity. As Whelan stated, we don't really know what the music is referring to, "so you can just make up your own drama in your head."

One of the joys of the Bay Area classical music scene is the deep roster of singers who have been performing early music choral pieces together for years.

Whether singing with the Philharmonia Baroque, the American Bach Soloists, the SF Symphony Chorus, or other early music groups, there is a level of professionalism and knowledge that has taken years to coalesce, something that exists in very few places in the world.

The 90-minute suite of sinfonias, arias, dances, and choral numbers were given expert performances.

The tenor soloist was Aaron Sheehan, a specialist in Baroque music who sings sweetly while looking like a movie star.

The real revelation for me was the soprano soloist, Lauren Snouffer, who created such delicate shadings in the ornamentation of her arias that it was transporting.

May she return to San Francisco again soon because she is special.

Beatlemania at the deYoung

Another dollop from the seemingly inexhaustible well of Beatlemania has arrived at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco for the next four months.

In 2020 Paul McCartney rediscovered old pictures he had taken as an amateur art photographer for three months that spanned December 1963 through February 1964.

The settings are Liverpool, Paris, New York, and Miami just when their international fame was exploding, much of which was featured in the 1964 Richard Lester movie A Hard Day's Night.

The photos are often prankish...

...when the quartet were in their early 20s.

It is also a reminder of the delicate beauty of John Lennon at that age.

There is a brief video of their epochal appearance on the weird old variety show hosted by Ed Sullivan...

...complete with shots of the screaming adolescent girls in the audience, a bizarre 20th century version of Euripedes's The Bacchae.

The exhibit is aptly titled "Eyes of the Storm" as the observed watch the observers...

...including mobs of fans rushing down a New York street.

The most poignant character among the photos is Brian Epstein, their closeted homosexual manager who died at age 32 in 1967 after getting sloppy with too many strong pills and liquor a la Valley of the Dolls.

The only color photos are from a Miami resort where they taped another appearance for the Ed Sullivan Show.

If you have a membership to the Fine Arts Museums, the exhibit is well worth a visit. Otherwise, the hefty single ticket price is probably not worth it unless you are a Beatlemaniac yourself.

Raymonda at the SF Ballet

Your chances of seeing a live production of the full-length, 1898 Russian ballet Raymonda, with choreography by Marius Petipa and music by Alexander Glazunov, are exceedingly slim. The SF Ballet is currently presenting a lavish production that was originally conceived and choreographed by Tamara Rojo for the English National Ballet in 2022, just before she arrived in San Francisco to become the company's new Artistic Director. It's easy to see why the ballet is so rarely performed anymore as it requires a huge cast and orchestra, and for the three principal roles, a level of dancing difficulty that ranks with some of the most demanding in the classical repertory. Plus, the characters are one-dimensional and the original storyline is casually Islamophobic, with the Saracen guest wanting to kidnap and rape the virginal heroine before being thwarted and killed by her Christian Crusader fiance. (All production photos are by Lindsay Thomas.)

Rojo changed the narrative for the better, though it sometimes doesn't make much sense. The time and setting was moved from medieval Hungary to 19th Century England and Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Instead of hanging out in a Hungarian castle for the first act, we watch Raymonda (Sasha De Sola) as she quickly leaves her upper-class British home and follows her soldier fiance John de Bryan to Crimea, where she joins a nursing unit a la Florence Nightingale.

The nurses and soldiers are given sensational dances, but the happy music did seem a bit odd in this context. As my companion Austin remarked, "Wow! I guess war is fun and there's lots of dancing."

The colorful musical score by Glazunov is considered one of his best works, and it's eminently danceable, but much of it sounded like second-rate Tchaikovsky to me. What was fabulous was the playing of the orchestra under conductor Martin West, not to mention the live cimbalom in the last act for Raymonda's final solo. (Pictured are horn players Logan Bryck and Brian McCarty in the orchestra pit.)

The hour-long first act tends to drag in any production (there are YouTube versions from the Bolshoi and La Scala), but things pick up considerably in Act Two when Abdur Rahman (an exuberant Fernando Carratalá Coloma), the exotic Ottoman officer, gives a party in a tent for the ailing soldiers and their attending nurses.

There are wonderful dances from various nations and quite a bit of seductive movement from Rahman and Raymonda. In other words, think of Rudolph Valentino as The Sheikh. As Rachel Howard points out in her SF Chronicle review, "like pretty much every full “Raymonda” production, it’s about sublimated sexual fantasies."

The final act, which is often performed as a separate chunk, is the wedding party with a lot of "character" dancing, which I am assuming means ballet versions of folk dancing. Cleverly, the revised libretto specifies "Hungarian Workers" at the English estate where Raymonda is to marry John de Bryan. However, in this version, Raymonda pulls a Nora in A Doll's House and abruptly exits at the end of the ballet, leaving her betrothed on the altar after dancing with him for 30 minutes. It doesn't really work but it doesn't matter.

Seemingly the entire company is dancing in this production, and they are looking great. Although the three principals on Saturday's opening were very good, there weren't any real superstar moments where the audience holds their breath and can hardly believe their own eyes. There are three other casts rotating into the roles and I am tempted to return to the opera house to check them out. (Click here for the SF Ballet casting site.)

Anxious Music at the SF Symphony

Departing SF Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led a smashing concert over the weekend that included a commissioned world premiere and two major, banging works by Prokofiev and Stravinsky that were composed just before World War One. The concert started with Strange Beasts, the 20-minute commissioned piece by a young black composer, Xavier Muzik, pictured above. (All photos are courtesy of Kristen Loken.)

Muzik gave a sweet, rambling intro that repeated the program notes where he mentioned that he suffered from anxiety attacks, particularly during the COVID pandemic while living in Los Angeles, and that one of his solutions was to photograph the world around him. Some of those photos were used as part of a quirky multimedia slideshow of skyscrapers looming like Godzilla and what appeared to be claustrophobic gatherings of fans during an LA Dodgers World Series parade. What set the visuals apart from other symphonic multimedia shows I've encountered was that the images were intermittent, appearing during less than half of the course of the music, and they mostly stayed up for less than a second in an anxiety-producing strobe effect.

The music took a while to gain traction, but once it did, with a woodblock propulsively driving the huge orchestra along, it was intermittently engaging, and yes, anxious-making. From the looks of his website, this was Muzik's first big orchestra commission, and it was impressive how well he composed for the entire ensemble. I'd like to hear it again.

This was followed by the agonizingly slow Ascent of the Grand Piano from the basement, whereupon Daniil Trifonov stormed his way through Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2. Prokofiev composed the piece in 1912, fresh from the St. Petersburg Conservatory at age 21, then lost the score in a fire before fleeing the Russian Revolution and literally traveling around the world for the next decade. He reconstructed the concerto from memory in Paris in 1923, and it's an insanely difficult, complex piece to play.

This was my first time seeing Trifonov play after reading about him over the last decade, and he didn't disappoint in terms of virtuosity and an idiosyncratic musical intelligence. However, he didn't seem to be doing the score many favors with some of his musical choices, and the concerto started to sound more wildly eccentric and unfocused than it actually is. In contrast, Yefim Bronfman played the same work with the SF Symphony in 2019 and it was such a perfecly calibrated performance that the audience applauded after each movement, usually a no-no, but in that case well deserved (click here).

Still, it was fascinating to see Trifonov in person, looking like one of those classical music "long-hairs" that were featured in movies from the 1920s onwards. And in his encore, where he played with a gentleness that was absent in most of the Prokofiev, he was exquisite.

After intermission, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Igor Stravinsky's still-shocking 1912 ballet score Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) in a brightly colored performance that had the orchestra playing at its best. It was also a delight to hear the new principal bassoon player, Joshua Elmore, playing the famous opening strains of the score.

Thanks to Disney's Fantasia, I long associated The Rite of Spring with dinosaurs stomping around, but the ballet is actually depicting the ritual sacrifice of a young woman. That's always anxious making.