Bartok and Ravel at the SF Symphony

It is a joy to hear a major work by a favorite composer performed live for the first time. Last weekend with the SF Symphony was my initial encounter with Béla Bartók's 1938 Violin Concerto No. 2, a thorny, 40-minute masterwork that plays like a dissonant traversal of Hungarian folk tunes. The conductor was the debuting 66-year-old German conductor Jun Märkl who did a fine job with the orchestra all evening.

Since the piece is complex, I listened to a number of YouTube versions featuring different violinists, ranging from old masters like Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern to more contemporary artists such as Patricia Kopatchinskaja who was my favorite (click here). Unfortunately, last weekend's soloist in Davies Hall was the famous Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos, who was note-perfect but didn't capture the Romani spirit of the music at all, flattening out much of the strangeness and excitement.

The best part was actually the encore, a Bartók violin duet entitled Melancholy where Kavakos was joined by SF Symphony concertmaster Alexander Barantschik.

The second half of the concert was the full, hour-long ballet score of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, which he wrote for Diaghlev's Ballet Russe in 1912. Ravel got pissed off at the Russian impresario when, at the ballet's London premiere, Diaghlev cut the wordless chorus that sings "oohs" and "aahhs." It's understandable why that happened because Ravel was already requiring huge orchestral forces for the simple story of boy loves girl, girl is kidnapped by pirates, and girl is saved by the god Pan for a happy ending bacchanale. What was irritating in this performance is that the SF Symphony cheaped out like Diaghalev and also omitted the chorus, which is a vital part of the over-the-top lushness of the musical score.

The orchestra under Märkl sounded superb, except for the horn section which featured a few off-pitch bloopers. This music is probably best heard in one of its two concert suite versions, because at an hour's length it becomes repetitive and a bit dull without beautiful ballet dancers and scenery to focus one's attention. Still, it was an enjoyable, stimulating program.

San Francisco No Kings 2 March

We took the Muni underground to the Embarcadero station Saturday morning with thousands of others.

The plan was to meet up with friends at the monster naked lady statue.

The crowds were huge and from every demographic imaginable.

Earlier anti-fascist demonstrations in San Francisco have been skewing older, but this march up Market Street was filled with younger people.

Nobody seemed to be sure whether the starting time was supposed to be 1:30 or 2:00 PM. In any case, the march started late, and the crowds surging from behind made us claustrophobic enough that we took a detour through side streets to the front, passing a few bands and drum circles along the way.

The weather was warm and the community spirit was joyful.

Being part of this huge mass of humanity joining together in public rather than stewing away in horror at home was exhilarating.

There were a wide variety of inflatables marching down Market Street, and it seems only a matter of time that this mendacious administration demonizes them, just as they did with stories of furries invading children's classrooms demanding kitty litter.

The homemade signage and costumes were amazing...

...the T-shirts appropriately profane...

...and even gym queens were representing.

I have a number of friends who would not attend the march because they or their foreign-born spouses are currently dealing with visa and green card issues, and who knows if they're going to be tackled by ICE goons at immigration court?

If you have not seen the recently released Paul Thomas Anderson movie, One Battle After Another, I urge you to do so. Loosely based on a Thomas Pynchon novel about retired youthful leftist revolutionaries who are forced to jump back into the fray in middle age, it captures our current moment with bizarre prescience. The movie does so with juvenile, absurdist humor that almost matches the grotesque insanity unleashed by the lunatics currently in charge of the federal government.

Samuel Adams at Other Minds

The Other Minds Festival describes itself in its beautifuly designed program as follows: "Founded in 1992, Other Minds is a leading organization of new and experimental music in all its forms, devoted to championing the most original, eccentric, and underrepresented creative voices in contemporary music." Though that mission statement makes for some uneven, hit-and-miss programs, last Friday's concert devoted to the 39-year-old composer Samuel Adams was very much a hit. (Pictured above at a panel discussion before Friday's concert are festival co-founder and artistic director Charles Amirkhanian and composer Samuel Adams.)

This year's festival took place over four evenings at the Brava Theater in the Mission District for the first time, and the 24th Street location felt warm, cozy and perfect. The concert began with Adams's 2020 Violin Diptych. The first half is a long, lyrical solo for the violin in an enchanting performance by Helen Kim, and in the second half pianist Conor Hanick joins in with a raucous accompaniment.

Pianist Hanick was back performing the 2023 Études, seven short studies played without pause. The piece was originally written for six different pianists at the Music Academy of the West and also designed to be played in one continuous swoop. I would rather have heard the pieces with pauses in between because it was easy to get lost and at first hearing, about halfway through, I thought, "Is this still the first Étude?"

At intermission, the audience was advised to climb the stairs to an installation by Pamela Z with layers of music and spoken word layered onto 30 different speakers. Pictured is R. Wood Massi blissing out in the middle.

The concert continued with the 2021 Sundial for string quartet and percussion. The strings were played by the fabulous Friction Quartet (Kevin Rogers and Otis Harriel on violins, Mitso Floor on viola, Doug Machiz on cello) and the metallic marimba percussion was played by Haruka Fujii. The sound of the piece was gorgeous and the Friction Quartet Plus gave a passionate performance.

Samuel Adams came onstage to reminisce about his recently deceased godfather, composer Ingram Marshall. He was a buddy of Samuel's famous composer father John Adams when the two were teaching at the old SF Conservatory of Music on 19th Avenue, two East Coasters plunging headlong into the California hippie experimentalism of the 1970s. Samuel talked about his earliest gobsmacking cultural moment at age nine when he was taken to some "small black box theater" by his parents where there was a multimedia performance of Alcatraz, an hour-long conglomeration of minimalist music, speaking, and sound effects by Ingram Marshall accompanied by slides from photographer Jim Bengston.

Woodwind legend Libby Cleve performed Ingram Marshall's 1995 Dark Waters, an English horn solo played in tandem with a fragmented, sampled old 78rpm recording of Sibelius's The Swan of Tuonela. The Finnish version of the River Styx is Tuonela, where the dead cross the water from the land of the living to the shore of the dead, and its evocation of spirits moving on was a perfect preamble for the final piece of the evening.

This was the world premiere of Adams's memorial piece for Marshall, Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright. Written as a commission from pianist Sarah Cahill, the eight-minute piece started as a simple, minimalist hammering on the keys that morphed into something more mysterious and evocative, with sampled sounds of foghorns and bay emanating somehow throughout the piano.

Twenty years ago, at a fundraiser for Other Minds at the Swedenborgian Church, Sarah Cahill played Henry Cowell's The Banshee, which also involved strange sounds coming from the inside of a piano, and I actually saw the spirit of a friend who had died the night before leaving the mortal plane. Something similar happened at the Brava Theater on Friday.

Though Samuel Adams lives in Seattle with his wife and young kids, his San Francisco Bay Area roots are deep, and the concert felt very much a friends and family affair among performers and audience. It could not have been lovelier.

Palm Springs Homecoming Parade

My current life is a geographic yo-yo between San Francisco and Palm Springs.

In contrast to the hard-edged city, Palm Springs often feels like a friendly village, where civic leaders annually shut down the main drag for the high school homecoming parade.

Hispanics are under violent attack from the federal government now, but the young parade marchers looked proud of their culture.

Palm Springs's population is currently 62% white and 25% Hispanic, but the next generation looks to change that ratio.

During the 40-minute parade, there were brightly dressed dancers making their way down Palm Canyon Drive...

...preceded by a young male contingent doing ornate step dancing.

Other local school groups...

...who had a football team...

...and a cheering organization...

...were also included.

Markus Crouse, a longtime friend, who taught high school in San Francisco, Pacifica, Hollywood, and the Palm Springs area, once mentioned that the desert kids were the sweetest group of any of them.

I can confirm that from observations on the Coachella Valley public bus system. There are as many crazy and down-and-out characters riding them as on San Francisco's Muni system, but the teenage passengers are consistently kind and helpful to everyone.

May they continue to march forward.