ICE Vigil at 100 Montgomery

There are two sets of immigration courtrooms in San Francisco's Financial District, at 630 Sansome Street and at 100 Montgomery Street.

I had read there were day-long protests at the 100 Montgomery location every Friday so I checked them out at about three this afternoon.

There were about a dozen young people standing on the sidewalk wearing pandemic face masks and kaffiyehs on their heads to hide their identity somewhat, and when I asked to take a picture, they understandably said no.

The gentleman above was handing out tiny flyers that read: "Why Are We here? Since late May, ICE has arrested 60+ immigrants at the San Francisco Immigration Courts here and at 630 Sansome (source: Mission Local)...Initially there were 5-10 detentions here every Tuesday, but thanks to community resistance, there has not been another Tuesday detention since 7/8."

"ICE shifted focus to other days, so community has expanded our presence. RESISTANCE WORKS!" The new schedule is every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 8AM-4:30 PM at 100 Montgomery Street, just a block off of Market Street.

The signage in English reads: "Do you have a court hearing? We can accompany you. FREE!"

What has been happening to immigrants over the past year in the United States is unforgivable, our homespun version of Nazi fascism. It behooves all of us to put some sand in the gears of this atrocity in whatever way we can.

Merola Grand Finale 2025

The Merola Opera Program, a summer boot camp for young professionals at the beginning of their careers, concluded Saturday evening with its annual Grand Finale concert accompanied by the magnificent San Francisco Opera orchestra conducted by Kelly Kuo. Based on the earlier Schwabacher Concert and the fully staged Le Comte Ory, this year's crop of singers is the most consistently excellent I have ever heard at Merola. (All photos are by Kristen Loken.)

The Grand Finale programming was its usual potpourri of arias and opera scenes that sometimes worked well together and sometimes not. My favorite moments included an exquisitely beautiful duet from Handel's Giulio Cesare between soprano Ana Maria Vacca as Sesto and mezzo-soprano Sadie Cheslak as Cornelia.

Charlotte Siegel gave a few star performances this summer, continuing with the Io son l'umile ancella aria from Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur. Some of the performers understandably appeared a bit frightened holding the stage alone in the huge San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, but Siegel has a regal diva energy that grabs you immediately and the glorious soprano voice to back it up. She seems ready to hit the big time.

She was followed by a delightful quartet from Verdi's Falstaff, with Chea Kang as Nannetta, Alexa Frankian as Alice, Meg Brileslyper as Meg, and Sadie Cheslak as Quickly. The direction by Merola director Elio Bucky was funny and engaging, which was true for the entire concert.

Bass-baritone Wanchun Liang gave an amusing, resonant account of the title character conspiring in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi.

Another star of the summer program was Minghao Liu. His high, flexible tenor was amazing as the title character in Le Comte Ory a month ago, and so was his tackling of the impossibly difficult aria Ah, mes amis...Pour mon ame from Donizetti's La Fille du regiment.

When Sheri Greenawald was in charge of Merola Opera programming, a lot of obscure, mediocre 19th century French opera was represented, but the new Curator and Artistic Director Carrie-Ann Matheson seems to have a fondness for Gaetano Donizetti instead. Joshua Kosman, on his Substack site On a Pacific Aisle, wrote an amusing complaint about the 66% Donizetti count at the earlier Schwabacher concert, and the Grand Finale offered more of the same with three selections from old Gaetano. This included a beautifully sung duet from Lucia di Lammermoor, with soprano Eva Rae Martinez as Lucia and baritone Gabriel Natal Baez as a surprisingly sympathetic Enrico.

Then there were two songs orchestestrated by Berlioz, including the composer's La spectre de la rose performed nicely by mezzo-soprano Ariana Maubach, and Schubert's Erlkönig, with Benjamin Dickerson above doing a good, creepy job of telling the story of a boy stolen by the elf king.

The concert ended with a series of English language selections, starting with soprano Sofia Gotch singing the Willow Song from Douglas Moore's Ballad of Baby Doe. Tristan Tournaud sang well in Lonely House from Weill's Street Scene, and bass John Mburu did magnificent justice to Jerome Kern's Old Man River. The final number was the duet Wheels of a Dream from the musical Ragtime by Stephen Flaherty and Terrance McNally, and it was a disaster. This was through no fault of the performers, bass-baritone Justice Yates as Coalhouse and Charlotte Siegel as Sarah. The problem was that somebody decided to amplify the two singers' voices, Broadway style, and after an entire evening of listening to fabulous unamplified voices filling a 3,000+ seat opera house, it sounded awful. To add insult to injury, the entire cast finished the concert singing a choral arrangement of Golden Days from The Student Prince. I can deal with Donizetti but I draw the line at Sigmund Romberg.

New Japanese Clay at the Asian

A small new exhibit opened at the Asian Art Museum today.

Ten years ago the museum trumpeted a future donation from a married pair of San Francisco psychiatrists, Dr. Phyllis A. Kempner and Dr. David D. Stein.

Though there is no word on the current status of the promised donation of their contemporary Japanese ceramics collection, this current selection is tantalizing.

In the 2015 press release, Kempner is quoted: "When we started [collecting], we were mostly drawn to traditional forms.”

“But we’ve become increasingly interested in the more sculptural area. We tend to like either very expressionistic work or quite minimal reductive pieces.”

A few of the pieces look like Frank Gehry buildings in clay.

The show demonstrates once again that Japanese design is in a class of its own.

The World Premiere of "Dolores" at West Edge Opera

The 95-year-old labor organizer and feminist legend Dolores Huerta was in attendance last week at Dolores, an opera depicting her life in 1968 during the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott. The two-act work by composer Nicolás Lell Benavides was the opening production of West Edge Opera's 2025 summer season at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center, and the occasion was a huge, emotional success.

Soprano Kelly Guerra sang the title role with unflagging energy, acting as the ballast for a wide range of historical characters and incidents in Marella Martin Koch's libretto. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

The Delano Grape Strike began in 1965 after Larry Itliong and his predominantly Filipino-American farmworkers' AWOC (Agricultural Workers' Organizing Committee) staged a 10-day walkout over differing wages between Mexican braceros and domestic grape pickers in the Coachella Valley. When the same workers migrated north to the San Joaquin Valley for its grape picking season, they struck over the same issue. The Mexican-American NFWA (National Farm Workers Association), which had been formed in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, was faced with the decision on whether to join them and after a unanimous vote, they did so, eventally combining the two groups into the UFW (United Farm Workers).

An interesting account of this history was written in 1967 by John Gregory Dunne for the Saturday Evening Post magazine, with evocative black-and-white photography by Ted Streshinsky that was occasionally used as background imagery throughout the opera production. (Dunne is probably best known these days as the late husband of Joan Didion, and Streshinsky was also the father of West Edge Opera General Director Mark Streshinsky. Incidentally, to round out family connections, the composer Benavides is a third cousin to Dolores Huerta.)

In 1968, the strike was in its third year and according to Dunne, was "mired in quicksand," with violence breaking out on both sides of Highway 99 (east for the growers, west for the workers). Chavez, performed with grace and beauty by baritone Phillip Lopez, then initiated a personal hunger strike to reconfirm his commitment to non-violence, which turned into a huge media event. Dolores contacted Senator Robert F. Kennedy and pleaded with him to visit Chavez or the labor leader was going to die after subsisting on water for 20 days. Kennedy did so, breaking bread with Chavez on day 23 of the fast, and then announcing his candidacy for President of the U.S.

At this point, the narrative about Dolores veers into a story of gringo politicians, including tenor Sam Faustine as "Tricky Dick" Nixon, who sings a couple of insinuatingly comic arias about the deliciousness of grapes and the importance of law and order. His vaudeville style turns threaten to hijack the opera into a Brecht meets Nixon in China affair, and makes the ensuing, earnest scenes of Kennedy and Huerta look comparatively square. Although the material would seem ripe for simple agit-prop tunes, Benavides is an extraordinarily sophisticated composer and he offered up complex, varied music that was performed brilliantly by a 16-person chamber orchestra led by conductor Mary Chun.

The second act opens at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night that RFK wins the California presidential primary, with Dolores Huerta at his side after her tireless election organizing of Mexican-Americans. Tenor Alex Boyer was charming and convincing as Kennedy and soprano Chelsea Hollow was delightful in dual roles as The Wife of both Chavez and RFK.

1968 was a viciously ugly year in U.S. history, with the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the opera brought it all back.

Much of the second act is an extended elegy for RFK, highlighted by a touching aria from baritone Sergio González as the Mexican immigrant busboy who cradled the dying Kennedy after he had been shot.

This was followed by a confusing scene between Chavez, Huerta, and the wonderfully intense baritone Rolfe Dauz as Larry Itlion that involved an argument about future tactics without really explaining the issues.

The effective finale featured the chorus led by Dolores continuing on with the strike, which lasted another two years, while singing "Si, se puede." The stage was framed by video imagery from the recent "No Kings" protests over Trump's horrific, racist policies towards immigrants, bringing history full circle. Dolores Huerta came onstage with composer Benavides at the curtain call for a short speech, reiterating "Yes, you can" in the fight against injustice. It was an amazing moment, and you can catch the final performance next Saturday, August 16 at 8PM.

Michael Franti & Spearhead at Stern Grove

A meteorological miracle occurred last Sunday when the fog disappeared after a month of unrelenting grey gloom and the sun shone down on Stern Grove for a free concert by Michael Franti and Spearhead.

I had won tickets in the lottery and even managed to find a patch of ground to sit on, where I was joined by this woman...

...and her dog whose ears were protected by headphones, though the sound system was actually at a pleasing volume.

With three days of Grateful Dead concerts taking place nearby in Golden Gate Park, we thought Stern Grove might not be too crowded which was an incorrect assumption. The place was packed to the top of the hillside.

The 59-year-old Franti is a local musical hero who started out as a politically progressive rapper and hip-hop musician in the 1980s and moved into a more mellow, reggae-influenced sound in the 1990s and beyond.

Between the weather, Franti's lyrics that reference sunshine repeatedly, and an extraordinarily happy crowd, the afternoon concert felt like a love-saturated oasis.

As concert buddy Craig Minich put it, "The earnest joy of the performers was something I needed to experience in these dire times."

Rossini's "Le Comte Ory" at Merola Opera

Le Comte Ory is a rarely performed Rossini opera from 1828 that is based on a very naughty French sex farce, and it has some of the most sophisticated music the composer ever wrote. It was a complete treat to hear the work live for the first time last Thursday thanks to the Merola Opera Program which presented an extraordinarily accomplished production at the SF Conservatory of Music. The generously-sized orchestra, conducted by the Met conductor Pierre Vallet, required the removal of a few rows of audience seating, and was probably too large for the space as they were very loud through most of the evening.

It didn't matter much as the "emerging artists" onstage all had strong voices that easily carried over the orchestra. That was particularly true of tenor Minghao Liu in the challenging title role. He already sounds ready for big time stages. (All production photos by Kristen Loken.)

Though the music is Rossini at his best, it's easy to see why the opera is rarely performed. The plot is both blasphemous and risqué, set in a 12th century French town where most of the men are away fighting in the Crusades. The town's women have locked themselves away with the virtuous Comtesse Adele, who is waiting for her brother to return home. Le Comte Ory dons a number of disguises while trying to seduce the Comtesse and is repeatedly unmasked by Meg Brilleslyper as his male page Isolier and Wanchun Liang as his tutor/babysitter. Pictured above, they were both strong-voiced delights.

For the first act, Ory posed as a wise, holy hermit dispensing advice to credulous women in his quest to gain access to the Comtesse Adele.

The ruse works and the depressed Adele is given license by the fake wise man to open up and love a little. This induces a series of arias sung spectacularly well by Eva Rae Martinez. Also noteworthy was the rich, warm voice of mezzo-soprano Ariana Maubach as the Comtesse's best friend.

The opera has a lot of echoes of both Don Giovanni, with its rapey protagonist, and The Marriage of Figaro, except in this version the Cherubino pageboy character ends up happily ever after with the Countess, and the sexually foiled youg aristocrat slinks away rather than being dragged to hell.

In the second act, Ory disguises himself as a female religious pilgrim caught in a Rossini storm who asks for hospitality from the Comtesse.

He's brought along some bad boy pals and they ransack the wine cellar during a wild scene that alternates between solemn prayers and raucous drinking songs. The chorus has a lot to do in this opera, and the small contingent from the Merola Opera Program did such a wonderful job that they deserve to be named individually: Alexa Frankian, Chea Kang, Anna Maria Vacca, Christopher Oglesby, John Mburu, Joeavian Rivera, and Jim Yu. Also noteworthy was the straightforward direction of Garnett Bruce and the simple, flexible set of scenic designer Miriam Lewis.

The penultimate scene depicts the tenor Count in nun drag trying to sexually assault the soprano Countess who has switched clothing with the mezzo-soprano male page Isolier. What makes this outrageous, gender bending scene amazing is the the vocal trio, which is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music Rossini ever composed.

Over the last few years, the SF Conservatory of Music has made major improvements in their main concert hall. Productions have advanced from bare-stage affairs with a few props to elaborate, fully staged operas with sophisticated lighting and projection setups. It was a pleasure to see it being used so well for this Merola production.