Handel's Hercules in Berkeley

Artists, have hope! Sometimes it only takes three centuries for your failures to turn into successes. Such is the case with Hercules, Handel's 1744 oratorio that bombed at its London premiere and then was revived to wondrous acclaim in the 20th century. On Sunday afternoon at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances hosted the beginning of The English Concert's short U.S. tour with the three-hour Hercules, which was a magnificent dramatic and musical success. (All production photos, unless noted, are by Kristen Loken.)

The English Concert is an early instrument chamber orchestra formed in London by Trevor Pinnock in 1972. In 2007 Harry Bicket took over as Music Director, and his interest in Handel's music has led to a recent series of global tours with the composer's Italian operas and English oratorios. Last year's Cal Performances visit featured the opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto , and everyone I know who attended raved about the experience. You can now add me to the bandwagon.

One element of the pleasure was the excellence of the chamber orchestra, anchored by keen conducting from Harry Bicket. He also played the harpsichord continuo during the many dramatic recitatives along with Sergio Bucheli on the theorbo and Jonathan Byers on violincello. (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

Another virtuosic element was The Clarion Choir, a 20-person ensemble out of New York City. They have collaborated with The English Concert before and their performance on Sunday included some of the best choral singing I've ever heard. They even contributed a couple of singers for smaller roles, including Jonathan Woody as The Priest of Jupiter, whose rich bass voice was so strong that he sounded as if he could step in and sing Hercules in a pinch. (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

Also noteworthy was Alexander Chance in the nondescript messenger role of Lichas. Chance has a sweet, non-hooty countertenor voice, perfect diction, and a confident stage bearing that draws attention even when he's standing stock still.

The bass William Guanbo Su, whose career is just taking off at major opera houses around the world, gave an excellent performance as the demi-god strongman who returns from conquest with the beautiful young Pincess Iola. Her presence literally drives Hercules's wife Dejanira into jealous insanity even though in this version of the tale Hercules is innocent of any hanky-panky.

Dejamira is the oratorio's major role, here embodied by the 58-year-old Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg in one of the most thrilling performances I have seen on a concert stage. (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

Hallenberg's English diction was exemplary and her acting so strong that it felt as if we were seeing a great actress attack a classic role like Hedda Gabler or Lady Macbeth. She was simply amazing.

The young soprano Hilary Cronin as Princess Iole was perfectly lovely and held her own when confronted by the jealous Dejamira. As my concert companion said at intermission, "Just let her keep singing one beautiful note after another at me, and I'll be happy." (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

The Harmonic Labyrinth with ABS

The American Bach Soloists presented an unusually rich program entitled The Harmonic Labyrinth on Sunday afternoon at St. Marks Lutheran Church. It started with a short secular cantata from 1747 by J.S. Bach, Non se che sia dolore, written as a goodbye present for a friend. The piece is essentially a flute concerto that turns into a soprano and flute duet. Soprano Maya Kherani was the lovely soloist while Bethanne Walker was mellifulous on her original instrument flute.

Next up was Pietro Locatelli's 1733 Violin Concerto in D Major, a virtuosic work with two fiendishly complex cadenzas. Violinist YuEun Gemma Kim was a joy to watch as she tore through the work under the baton of Music Director Jeffrey Thomas.

The second half of the program was achingly gorgeous, with a pair of vocal works devoted to the Virgin Mary. First up was Domenico Scarlatti's final composition, the 1756 Salve Regina for soprano and strings. Mezzo-soprano Sarah Coit sang the 15-minute work in a creamy, seamless fashion that had everyone in the church pews melting in pleasure.

The major work on the program was still to come, Pergolesi's 1736 Stabat Mater, which was the composer's final work before his early death at age 26. After the work was published, it quickly became a sensation all over Europe, and it's easy to hear why. The music for two sopranos, singing separately and together, is so beautiful that I'm surprised it hasn't been repurposed for commercial purposes everywhere, rather like the Flower Duet from Lakmé that British Airlines was using for years. I have only heard a live performance of this Stabat Mater a couple of times over the decades, and there was always something missing until Sunday's performance, when Maya Kherani and Sarah Coit interweaved their voices with such perfection that the audience floated out in pure happiness. As my late friend Jack Murray once said when handing me an LP of the work as a birthday present, "Don't worry. It's an 'up' Stabat Mater."

The Blake Works at the San Francisco Ballet

Everything was beautiful at the SF Ballet last Friday.

There were bon vivants sipping champagne on the outdoor balcony on the mezzanine level...

...along with couples of all sizes, shapes...

...and gender identities.

The San Francisco Ballet continued its season last Friday with The Blake Works, an evening-length set of ballets by the 76-year-old choreographer William Forsythe set to music by the 37-year-old English pop singer James Blake.

My favorite section was the 20-minute Prologue, where a Blake song was deconstructed into halting musical snippets sandwiched between silence, with principal dancers moving frenetically across the minimalist stage, led by the incomparable Joseph Walsh. (All production photos are by Chris Hardy.)

The second section, The Barre Project, was created during the COVID pandemic, and featured one great dancer after another, like Cavan Conley above, attached to the barre and eventually freeing themselves to encompass the whole stage.

After intermission, there was a reprise of Blake Works I, seen here in 2022, which Forsythe set for individuals such as the enthralling Nikisha Fogo along with complex dances for the entire ensemble.

The ballet was set to seven songs by Blake, whose recorded music eventually became irritatingly boring to me over the course of a whole evening. In her rave review of Blake Works in the SF Chronicle, Rachel Howard maintains: "I’d argue that whether you like the music itself is immaterial. To witness the depth with which Forsythe listens is the point." Half of the joy of going to the SF Ballet for me is hearing their excellent orchestra performing live music rather than prerecorded tracks, so I am not convinced, but as a showcase for exciting dancers, the evening does its job.

Magnificent Magnolias

After a week of rain while being laid out on a couch with a bum leg, I finally ventured out on this exquisitely sunny, beautiful afternoon to the San Francisco Botanical Gardens.

February has been Magnolia Month at the Gardens, featuring maps and lots of decorative and explanatory signage.

On our way to the featured attraction, we stumbled across camellias galore...

...not to mention slightly wilting rhododendrons.

The magnolia blooms are near their expiration, with many of them decorating the ground, but they were still a spectacular sight.

According to signage, magnolias are magical medicinal plants which the Chinese have apparently known about for centuries.

There are benches situated throughout the Gardens, and they all seem to have commemorative plaques on them. This one is my favorite.

Martha Graham Dance Company at Cal Performances

Like Pablo Picasso or Igor Stravinsky, the dancer/choreographer Martha Graham's name permeated the 20th century cultural landscape as an artist who fundamentally changed their art form. Though there have been plenty of chances to see Picasso's work or listen to Stravinsky's compositions, I realized that I had never seen a Martha Graham dance performed live before a couple of weeks ago, when Cal Performances hosted the Martha Graham Dance Company on their national 100th anniversary tour.

Graham was born in Pennsylvania in 1894 to open-minded parents who moved the family to Southern California 14 years later. As a teenager, she studied with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts before decamping to New York and founding her own company in 1926. It was an all-female troupe until 1938 when Erick Hawkins joined the group. Graham and Hawkins married in 1948 after the New York premiere of Night Journey, starring the two of them in a dance depicting the Oedipus story from Jocasta's point of view after discovering that her son is her husband. Hawkins left the company three years later to start his own, and the marriage was over in 1954.

The 30-minute work features angular movement and Graham's famed contraction/expansion movement vocabulary. I loved the Chorus in their Graham-designed costumes looking like extras from a Cocteau film, and Ethan Palma hopping about on his walking stick as Tiresias the Seer, but overall I was a little underwhelmed. Part of it was that the William Schuman score was in a dull, mid-century academic style and it was played too loud over the speaker system. Also, sculptor Isamu Noguchi's original set looked a little lost on the very wide Zellerbach stage. Anne Souder as Jocasta and Lloyd Knight as Oedipus are fine dancers, but didn't project the complex passions required for the roles.

Though Graham famously refused to have her dances filmed, believing in the sanctity of live performance, there are a few exceptions, including an experimental 1956 film of Night Journey made by Alexander Hammid, with a 62-year-old Martha Graham as Jocasta and a young Bertram Ross as Oedipus, along with Paul Taylor as Tiresius. It is amazing (click here).

Graham underwent a personal crisis in the late 1960s after she left the stage. In her autobiography, Blood Memory, she wrote: "I believe in never looking back, never indulging in nostalgia, or reminiscing. Yet how can you avoid it when you look on stage and see a dancer made up to look as you did thirty years ago, dancing a ballet you created with someone you were then deeply in love with, your husband? I think that is a circle of hell Dante omitted...[When I stopped dancing] I had lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded...Finally my system just gave in. I was in the hospital for a long time, much of it in a coma." But she survived, got sober in 1972, and proceeded to choreograph another dozen or so dances before her death in 1991. After her demise, there was a messy battle of succession that did not work out well, but the company has been revived under Janet Eilber, a former Graham dancer and teacher who has been the company's Artistic Director since 2005.

One of Eilber's achievements has been the commissioning of new dances over the last decade by a roster of some of the best young choreographers of our time. The second piece on the program was Cortege, created by Amadi "Baye" Washington and Sam "Asa" Pratt who have been playing with each other since they were six year olds in Brooklyn together.

The 2023 Cortege is Baye & Asa's riff on Graham's antiwar Cortege of Eagles with a dynamic musical score by Jack Grabow and dramatic lighting by Yi-Chung Chen. It starts off as a centipede of dancers is revealed and then reconfigures as duos, trios, quartets, and group scenes. What it has to do with war I have no clue but it was a great vehicle to demonstrate how accomplished all the company's dancers really are.

After intermission, there was a performance of the once-lost, politically charged 1936 Graham work, Chronicle. Two of the movements from the original piece are still missing but films of three of the other movements have turned up and been reconstructed. It started with Spectre--1914 (Drums, Red Shroud, Lament), a solo dance in a spellbinding performance by Leslie Andrea Williams. Using only the simple prop of a two-toned cape, she mesmerized us to extraordinary music by Wallingford Riegger, a buddy of Henry Cowell who also wrote dance scores for Graham.

The all-female dances in Steps in the Street (Devastation, Homelessness, Exile) and Prelude to Action (Unity, Pledge to the Future) looked surprisingly contemporary, as if they could have been choreographed yesterday. Graham's legacy looks to be in good hands and I look forward to their Cal Performances return.

Weekly Resistance

The weekly protest against the U.S. fascist federal regime takes place at the intersection of O'Farrell Street and Van Ness Avenue every Saturday afternoon from noon to two.

The homemade signage is sincere...

...angry...

...and sometimes misspelled.

Mark your calendars for March 28th when there will be another mass protest across the country and the world against the sociopaths in charge of the U.S. government. Doing something rather than stewing in despair is good for your mental health.

Balanchine at the SF Ballet

An all-Balanchine program being performed this week at the San Francisco Ballet is all about big ballets with lots of dancers in each of the trio of works. It started with the 1967 Diamonds which is usually performed as the finale to Jewels, right after the dreamy Emeralds and the jazzy Rubies. (All production photos are by Lindsay Thomas.)

The ballet evokes the dazzling luxury of Imperial Russia to the music of Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony, minus the first movement. What stood out was the joy of simply watching Balanchine's use of bodies as architecture, and also how peerlessly he married music and movement. The dancing by everyone was first-rate and so was the orchestra under conductor Martin West.

Balanchine's first ballet created in the United States, the 1934 Serenade, is a calmer beauty for many women and a couple of men. Set to one of Tchaikovsky's loveliest set of tunes, the Serenade in C Major for Strings, the ballet started off with a large group of motionless women with their right arms outstretched to the horizon before moving into more abstract physical architecture and a yearning story that is not explicit.

The one male-female duet was danced by Wei Wang and Jasmine Jimison. Wang has become one of my favorite dancers in the company, and in this performance I realized he may be the best partner in the whole company, lifting women effortlessly in the air as if they were a delicate feather rather than visibly gearing up for a heft.

The final ballet was the 1958 Stars and Stripes, orchestrated by Hershey Kay to music by John Philip Sousa. Kay was an indespensable figure in New York City, orchestrating ballets and musicals, including Bernstein's On The Town and Candide.

The ballet is meant to be comic and lightly ironic, with one amusingly uniformed regiment after another taking the stage. However, with fascist politics presently dominating the country, presenting a United States flag-waving romp does feel a bit tone deaf, as does the company's continuing plans to perform at the Kennedy Center in May. Check out Rachel Howard's well-written review and discussion of the topic at the SF Chronicle.

When a black curtain was raised near the end of the piece, revealing a huge United States flag, for some in the audience it felt a bit like watching Springtime for Hitler. (The above photo is by Austin Newsom.)