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 Jamison. 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.)

An Homage to Sarah Cahill

The pianist Sarah Cahill has been thinking about grief over the death of loved ones and a sense of loss as the United States government dismantles its already threadbare support of the arts with the closing of the Kennedy Center, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other cultural institutions. For Monday's SF Conservatory of Music Faculty Artist recital on the 11th floor of the Bowes Center, she performed a recital entitled No Ordinary Light consisting of a series of homages to various dead people. Looking at the program, I feared it was going to be a succession of dirges, but instead the selections were extremely eclectic, ranging from the 17th century harpsichord piece Tombeau de Mr.de Chambonnieres by Jean-Henri d'Anglebert to the 2025 Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright by Samuel Adams commemorating composer Ingram Marshall, complete with a recording of wind and foghorns nestled in the piano strings.

Also on the program: the 1972 Hommage à Fauré by Robert Helps (click here for the wonderful Robert Helps Web Monument created by adoring colleagues); the 1990 Homage to William Dawson by Zenobia Powell Perry, the evening's audience favorite with its jazzy rhythms; two pieces by Lou Harrison, the 1952 Fugue to David Tudor written in an uncharacteristic twelve-tone style and a lilting tune for the 1948 Hommage à Milhaud.

Cahill commissioned both the Samuel Adams piece and the 2001 Holding Pattern by composer Maggi Payne in honor of Ruth Crawford Seeger. It involved putting small battery-powered devices called e-bows to rest on the strings which are then somehow manipulated into strange tones operated through the pedals. "I can't believe they still work after all this time," Cahill told us. The piece was very strange but sort of fabulous.

The finale was Maurice Ravel's 1917 Le tombeau de Couperin, with each of its six movements dedicated to friends who had just perished in World War One. The orchestrated version seems to be on the program at the SF Symphony every other month, but this was the first time hearing the original piano version. Though I still don't quite get the work, it is obviously a favorite piece of music for Cahill and many others. Maybe one day I'll feel it.

Davóne Tines & Ruckus: What Is Your Hand in This?

I went to operatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines' performance at Herbst Theatre on Saturday evening expecting an ascetic art song recital and was instead happily astonished by a brilliantly conceived concert that included a seven-piece band and a huge amateur chorus. The San Francisco Performances show was entitled What is Your Hand in This? and it often felt like a distilled, 80-minute version of Taylor Mac's 24-hour extravaganza, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.

Tines is an interesting artist who was one of the major highlights of the 2017 SF Opera world premiere production of the John Adams opera Girls of the Golden West. Playing the escaped slave Ned Peters, he sang the aria What to a Slave is the Fourth of July? taken from the famous speech by Frederick Douglass. Besides appearing in other mostly contemporary operas, Tines composes and creates thematic musical programs of his own, including a Paul Robeson tribute that has been touring the world. Robeson could and did sing everything from Jerome Kern to Mussorgsky, and the same seems to be true of Davóne Tines.

His collaborators for the evening included the Julliard professor/poet/composer/bassist Douglas Balliett (with the frizzy hair above), who composed and created most of the musical arrangements for the show, and played electric bass. (Also pictured are Paul Holmes Morton on guitar and Clay Zeller-Townson on winds and percussion.) The band is part of a New York City group called Ruckus that specializes in lively, reworked arrangements of early music composers such as Handel, who also made his way onto this program as a foundational inspiration for many of the gospel tinged songs. At first, it was a disappointment that Tines and the band were amplified since Herbst Theatre is on the small side and Tines's voice is capable of filling the Metropolitan Opera House, but the sound mix was good and it allowed for Tines to speak and croon softly. When opera singers try to cross over into popular songs, it usually doesn't work well but Tines seems to have no difficulty singing in a multitude of styles.

In each of its stops on the show's national tour, which is celebrating and examining this nation's 250th anniversary, they have invited a local amateur chorus to join them. In San Francisco it was the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts Concert Choir, led by Michael Desnoyers. They were fabulous, especially in an improvisatory, aleatory account of Julius Eastman's Buddha led by Tines.

Elsewhere they helped to provide the sensation of being at a congregational church where everyone in the pews knows someone in the chorus. Tines also had the audience join in as the congregation with the title song, What is Your Hand in This?, composed by Tines himself and arranged by Baillett, It is very much a call-and-response gospel sermon that's probing in its simplicity. What is my hand in this? / While you listen to this song, / Will you try to right your wrong, asking, / What is my hand in this?

The program notes explain: "America's music at the founding of the country was the music of dissent. We celebrate this tradition." Early in the show Tines introduced The Liberty Song from 1770 by John Dickinson, which contains the lyrics: In Freedom we're born and in Freedom we'll live. / Our purses are ready. Steady, friends, steady. Not as slaves, but as Freemen our money we'll give.

The irony, Tines noted in his narration, is that Dickinson actually owned slaves when writing The Liberty Song. Attending this concert and watching the Bad Bunny Super Bowl event the following afternoon were similar, powerful cultural events. Without hammering obvious political points, both shows were profoundly political, complex, and hopeful, amazing feats while a racist madman currently steers our unsteady ship of state.

Mozart at the SF Symphony

An utterly delightful all-Mozart concert is taking place this weekend at the San Francisco Symphony. It was conducted crisply and with verve by Harry Bicket, who leads the early music group The English Consort and is also the longtime music director of the Santa Fe Opera. The program began with the 1776 Serenade No. 6, Serenata notturna for a small complement of strings and timpani. Coming onstage with Bicket as soloists were four members of the orchestra: violinists Alexander Barantschik and Dan Carlson, violist Yun Jie Liu, and bassist Scott Pingel, who all had amusing solo outings during the serenade.

I have heard enough deadly dull live Mozart performances over the years that it always feels like a small miracle when musicians perform him well. Bicket's conducting style was crisp and transparent, which worked well, and the musicians seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely while playing the 1780 Symphony No. 34, the last symphony Mozart wrote before ditching small-town Salzburg for big-city Vienna. (Pictured above are violinists Wyatt Underhill and Jason Issakson.)

After intermission the South African soprano Golda Schultz sang arias from the three famous operas with libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte: Deh,vieni, non tardar from Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Come scoglio from Cosi fan tutte, (1789), and Or sai chi l'onore from Don Giovanni (1789), with a Mozart concert aria as an encore. The arias proceeded from yearning to defiant to vengeful, and Schultz's glorious voice and presence was a pleasure to experience.

The concert ended with a wonderful rendering of the 1786 Symphony No. 38, Prague. I snagged a $30 Rush ticket at the box office on Thursday, and they are also available tonight (Friday). Considering that general admission Chris Stapleton tickets for a Super Bowl concert at Bill Graham Auditorium are currently selling for $810, the SF Symphony feels like one of the best deals in town.