Music of the Americas at the SF Symphony

The 68-year-old conductor Marin Alsop finally made her San Francisco Symphony debut on a subscription program last week that was dedicated to music from the Americas, North and South. It seemed a strange oversight that it took so long for Alsop to be invited to lead the orchestra, especially since she helmed the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz for 25 years and has recently been conducting prestigious orchestras in Europe. (All concert photos except the one below are by Brandon Patoc.)

The opener was a lively 2018 piece called Antrópolis by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz channeling the music of dance halls in Mexico City, punctuated by long solos for the timpani. It was ten minutes of fun, and a more auténtico version of Copland's El Salon Mexico. (Photo by Michael Strickland of the wonderful Associate Concertmaster Wyatt Underhill shaking hands with Marin Alsop.)

This was followed by the Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero playing her own 2016 Piano Concerto No. 1, Latin. Montero's pianism and charisma were a constant delight through the 3-movement, 30-minute piece, but the longer first two movements meandered between the moody and the highly rhythmic. The concerto didn't quite cohere for me until the short final movement whose dance music sounded like it could be appended to Antrópolis.

My concert companion, Chris Enquist, was a serious fan-boy at age 74 of Montero and had become entranced by her piano improvisations based on suggestions from audience numbers. Impromptu musical improvisation was a staple of 19th century pianist-composers such as Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt, while in the 20th century it has become the bedrock province of jazz. In an interesting profile of Montero in the program book, she talks about undergoing a neurological exam at Johns Hopkins: "What they found was really amazing. When I improvise, what I call 'getting out of the way' means that a different part of my brain is activated--one which doesn't really have anything to do with music. My visual cortex goes crazy, and that's what I improvise with. It kind of explains something: when I was a little girl, I would say to my father 'I have two brains.' "

For Friday night's encore, after asking for a tune to improvise on, a pitch-perfect soprano voice from a nearby balcony sang the first few bars of Unchained Melody. Montero didn't recognize the tune so she asked for a few more bars which the gorgeous sounding voice provided, and then the pianist turned to the audience and asked if we knew the song. There was general assent since everybody had seen Patrick Swayze at the potter's wheel with Demi Moore in Ghost, so Montero picked out the tune and spun out a fascinating five minutes of variations. My concert companion Chris stood up at the end and shouted, "YOU ARE AMAZING!"

After intermission, it became apparent this concert could have been called Time For Timpani as easily as Music of the Americas. Both Ortiz and Montero used the instrument extensively, as did the second half of the program. It opened with Copland's 1943 Fanfare for the Common Man and Joan Tower's 1986 feminist response, Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1 (the first of a set of six), which was dedicated to Marin Alsop. Both scores use only brass and percussion, with timpanist Edward Stephan above getting quite a workout.

The final work was Samuel Barber's 1936 Symphony No. 1 which coincidentally began with a soft introduction on the timpani. It's an exuberant, young composer's piece, and Alsop did a great job with it. Incidentally, I realized afterwards that all the works on the program were written by either women or gay men, and the concert was conducted by a lesbian. The fact that this was not mentioned anywhere in the marketing or program notes was odd, either a step forward where it wasn't worthy of special mention, or a step backward where we just don't talk about that kind of stuff in this political climate. In any case, let me leave you with Ms. Alsop's quote when she was asked by the The Times about the 2022 movie Tár: "So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”

Hans van Manen at the SF Ballet

Hans van Manen is a 92-year-old Dutch choreographer who I had never heard of before. After seeing four of his dances at the SF Ballet on Wednesday, I am now a total fan.

Hans van Manen began choreographing in the late 1950s for the Netherlands' one television station, then joined the Nederlands Dans Theater and the Dutch National Ballet where he has created over 150 dances in a very long career. Pictured above is from the first work on the program, the 1971 Grosse Fugue to string quartet music by Beethoven, which still looks startlingly modern. (Pictured above are Dores André and Fernando Carratalá Coloma. All production photos are by Chris Hardy.)

The choreography is arrestingly earthbound, with lots of squats, twirls, and angular extensions but not so much flying in the air as is usual for classical ballet. The movement is often similar for both men and women, anticipating and possibly influencing Mark Morris.

The newest work on the program was the 2012 Variations for Two Couples, a short 15-minute dollop of elegance danced to a conglomeration of modern string music. The finale had the two couples finally joining each other, rather like the ending of Gross Fugue where all the disparate groupings eventually join together in an abstract ballet version of a group hug. (Pictured are Aaron Robison, Frances Chung Joseph Walsh, and Sasha Mukhamedov.)

This was followed by the wildest and funniest piece of the evening, the 8-minute Solo from 1997, set to a recorded performance of an insanely fast J.S. Bach Partita for Violin. The title could have been Tag Team, since it actually consists of a trio of male dancers who form a relay onstage, performing one virtuoso feat after another. Rachel Veaujean, who was staging these works for the SF Ballet, stated, "Solo is very virtuoso, very grounded, and super fast. At the very first rehearsal, nobody can do it, it's a mad little marathon." On Wednesday evening, it was danced spectacularly by Lleyton Ho, Luca Ferro, and Archie Sullivan. (Pictured is Cavan Conley from opening night.)

The final ballet was the 1977 5 Tango's set to a score by Astor Piazzola that was also danced to a recording rather than a live orchestra, which robbed the piece of a lot of its impact. The five-movement ballet is mostly amusing for not actually having a tango onstage, but instead approximations and variations on the Argentine national dance.

The fourth movement starts as an erotic duet for two male dancers before two women arrive on the scene. As there was no real biographical information about Hans van Manen in the program, on returning home I asked Google, "Is Hans van Manen gay?" and found a link to an article in the Holland Gay News entitled Hans van Manen, Streetwise Gay Icon. A biography in Dutch of van Manen was recently published and the article summarizes the wild life of a starving, post-World War Two teenager who made his way in Amsterdam's dance world while being publicly open about his abundant gay sex life during the 1960s and 1970s, before it was safe to do so. (Pictured are Fernando Carratalá Coloma and Victor Prigent.)

Although Hans van Manen is a venerable Queer Icon who I should have known about earlier, the real discovery is his marvelous choreography. There are four more performances of the program at the SF Ballet, including tonight (Friday, April 11), and you can get tickets by clicking here. (Pictured is a young Hans van Manen.)

Stripped Down Bach with ABS

The American Bach Soloists completed their season last week with performances of three early church cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach. The composer wrote more than 200 of these short (20-30 minute) pieces for small orchestra, a few soloists, and chorus, and they can be performed with any number of musicians. For instance, there are close to a dozen renditions on YouTube of the first piece on the program, the 1707 Christ lag in Todesbanden (Cantata 4), and they all sound very different depending on the size of the chorus, whether the instruments are period or modern, and the age and gender of the soprano soloists in music that was originally written for boy sopranos.

ABS Artistic Director and conductor Jeffrey Thomas went with a pared down ensemble consisting of less than a dozen instrumentalists supporting four soloists for both individual arias and as the chorus besides. Personally, I missed the pleasing mixture of soloists, chorus, and instrumental interludes, but seemed to be in the minority on that account because I heard a number of audience members exclaiming how wonderful it was to hear the choral vocal lines being so transparent.

It helped that the four soloists for the program were all very good, including baritone David McFerrin (top left) and tenor Steven Soph (top right).

The real stars, though, were soprano Elijah McCormack (top left) and countertenor Kyle Sanchez Tingzon (top right), whose voices had a plaintive beauty that was remarkable.

The transgender Elijah McCormack was especially notable, with a small, pure but resonant voice that sounded something like a cross between a boy soprano and an adult female soprano. For early music, which was written when women were forbidden from performing in public, McCormack's voice is just about perfect. My only complaint is that there were no solo arias for him in the three cantatas because we all wanted to hear more.

The second cantata on the program was the 1708 Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (Cantata 106), which treated the usual small subjects of God and Death. (Pictured is violinist Toma Iliev getting a breath of fresh air at intermission.)

After the break, there was a performance of the Brandenberg Concerto #6, which sounded a bit anemic with the small forces.

However, the concert ended triumphantly with the 1714 Himmelskonig, sei willkomen (Cantata 182), depicting Jesus on his donkey entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, a very happy affair.

Saying Thanks to a Federal Worker

This January I visited the Social Security Administration offices at San Francisco's strange looking federal building on 7th and Mission.

There was misinformation on file about previous "credible" health insurance when I applied for a Medicare Part D prescription plan with Cigna, so in order to straighten things out, I waited with dozens of others for two hours to seek assistance from an SSA employee. Unfortunately, the situation was beyond the agent's capabilities so she set up an appointment with a specialist who could help. However, the first available date was three months later, April 7th, and this was before the Elon Musk DOGE slasher show had even begun.

After signing an online attestation form, the issue was mysteriously resolved with Cigna in late March. So even though there was no need to keep the appointment with Social Security, I went through the abusive, heavyhanded security gauntlet anyway.

The reason was to thank the beleaguered federal employees whose jobs are currently in peril and who are having to pick up the slack at a decimated organization.

Only people with appointments were being allowed to enter, so the large waiting room was emptier than usual.

When I was called to Window 8, the gentleman behind the bulletproof glass with wary, weary eyes asked for my birthdate. I explained that the issue had been resolved and I just wanted to thank him and his colleagues for continuing to help others in this time of chaos. The look on his face quickly went from confused to flabbergasted to smiling as I handed him a thank you card for the office. This might be a good time for you to also say thanks to a federal worker if you get a chance.

A Kickass Performance of John Adams's Chamber Symphony

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music offers free concerts for the public almost every day of the week and you can get tickets by making reservations at their website (click here). On Saturday evening, I was drawn to an orchestral concert led by student conductors because one of the pieces was the wild, rarely performed 1992 Chamber Symphony of local composer John Adams. Along the way, I ran into Chenier Ng, one of the most dedicated music lovers in the world.

The concert began with Haydn's Symphony No. 59, nicknamed "The Fire Symphony," in a surprisingly vivid performance conducted by Donald Lee III, who brought passion, interesting dynamics, and a liveliness that is often absent when San Francisco's professional ensembles play the composer's music.

According to the program notes, Lee is a multi-hyphenate musician: pianist, conductor, and vocal accompanist. If he can conduct Haydn this well, he can probably do anything.

This was followed by Adams's Chamber Symphony conducted by Chih-Yao Chang from Taiwan in an astonishingly accomplished, kickass performance. There is a well-known anecdote Adams tells about the genesis of this work. He was studying the score of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony at home while his 7-year-old son Sam was watching TV cartoons with their manic musical soundtracks, and the two merged in his mind like a surrealist Looney Tunes animation. He also notes that "Despite all the good humor, my Chamber Symphony turned out to be shockingly difficult to play." No kidding.

Young musicians are often quite brilliant with contemporary music that confounds their elders and this performance was a good example, a more exact and exciting version than I heard 10 years ago at the SF Symphony. Concertmaster Aleksy Aretsky (above) was superb in both the Haydn and this outing, and Diego Rodriguez (above, back left) miraculously made my least favorite instrument, the piccolo, sound varied and gorgeous. This was especially important because at times the three-movement symphony sounds like a concerto for piccolo and chamber orchestra.

Conductor Chih-Yao Chang kept all the competing musical threads and cross-cutting time signatures clear, even when the score sounds like it's about to be a car wreck. He's got a bright future. I didn't stay for the second half of the concert, which was Beethoven's Egmont Overture and Piano Concerto #1 because no matter how good the performance, it would have sounded like weak tea after the Chamber Symphony.

Cathedral City Tesla Protest

We went to the weekly Cathedral City Tesla protest today...

...and joined a group of about 300 people lined along the sidewalk of Perez Road, a huge boulevard with no legal parking...

...many with signage.

This was all taking place in front of the only Tesla showroom and service station in the Coachella Valley.

"Chinga Tu Maga" is my new favorite tagline/T-shirt.

Palm Springs real estate has become too expensive so most of the new gay immigrants are moving into neighboring Cathedral City,

The area is feeling very much like an oasis for people fleeing the oncoming fascist Gilead.

This Sunday's weekly protest featured counterprotestors across the street for the first time, with idiotic signage that included "TESLA OWNERS LIVES MATTER".

My friend Rob McCann, a Canadian who worked for NASA and gained American citizenship years ago, made an appearance.

And so did innumerable fellow citizens who are doing their civic duty by saying pubicly, "No, I protest."

The Great Yes, The Great No

The Great Yes, The Great No, William Kentridge's new multimedia mixture of actors, dancers, singers, instrumentalists, animated projections, films, masks, drawings and stagecraft, was presented by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall last weekend. (All production photos are by Monika Rittershaus.)

The loose, wandering narrative depicts a real-life surreal Atlantic Ocean voyage in 1941 from Marseille, France to the colonial Caribbean island of Martinique, with refugees fleeing the Nazis and the collaborationist government of Vichy France. For good measure, other historical figures joined the transatlantic voyage, with everyone from Frantz Fanon to Josephine Bonaparte making appearances. The major presiding spirit was the French Surrealist poet Suzanne Césaire (embodied here by Nancy Nkusi reciting her poetry) and her husband Aimé Césaire who had taken an earlier voyage back to their native island.

There was a panel discussion before Friday night's premiere with the South African artist William Kentridge who conceived and directed the two-hour spectacle with a small army of collaborators. He spoke of his influences, ranging from a Mayakovsky play that he'd forgotten and unconsciously reproduced to an a capella lament he heard at a South African funeral that struck him deeply.

There were so many unfamiliar references and digressions that I found it impossible to make much sense of the theatrical work, but it did not matter because there was so much to absorb and enjoy.

A few of my favorite things included the flat, black-and-white masks that were miraculously enlivened by the dancers Thulani Chauke and Teresa Phuti Mojela. In the photo above, they are twin representations of the Surrealist poet Andre Breton, who was actually on this voyage of the cargo ship Capitaine Paul-Lemerle. My favorite of the cartoonish historical figures come to life were Diego Rivera dancing daintily while Frida Kahlo swings a sledge hammer next to him, an apter symbol of their respective impact than is usually offered onstage.

I also loved the musical backbone of the evening, a seven-woman chorus with music composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu, along with the animated supertitles that were wittily integrated into the extraordinary animated projections of archival photos, Kentridge's drawings, and surrealist films.

The entire cast was superb without exception.

A quartet of instrumentalists played incidental and accompanying music onstage, with Music Director and percussionist Tlale Makhene brilliantly driving the score along.

The narrative was not only about the transatlantic refugees from World War II France, but the underlying history of transatlantic voyages from Africa to the colonial sugar slave plantations of Martinique. Though not explicitly underlined, the parallels between the present-day fascist takeover of the United States and its own history of slave plantations were everywhere.

Cal Performances was one of the many commissioners of The Great Yes, The Great No, and it felt like a rare honor to experience this show on its worldwide tour.