French Music at the SF Symphony

Last week's all-French San Francisco Symphony program on Thursday afternoon did not start promisingly. Just as the 51-year-old Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan was waiting for audience silence before the quiet opening of Debussy's 1894 Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, a cell phone rang. After another pause, somebody emitted an explosive sneeze and the audience started giggling. There were two more cell phone alerts before Jordan finally gave up and embarked on an exquisitely transparent performance of the Prelude.

Rebecca Wishnia at the San Francisco Classical Voice website gave the concert a dismissive review, but I had a different experience and thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon. Part of the reason was that I bought a last-minute rush ticket and was seated in the second row of the orchestra section, smack dab in front of the fabulous French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, complete with sparkly jacket.

He was the soloist in the 1896 Piano Concerto No. 5, "Egyptian" by Camille Saint-Saëns, with its evocative slow movement depicting a journey on the Nile. The concerto has been derided as kitsch over the years, but I loved every minute of it, and Thibaudet gave an awesome performance, modulating his dynamics from delicate to forceful throughout.

For an encore Thibaudet was joined by conductor Jordan for the final movement from Ravel's 1910 Mother Goose Suite, entitled Le jardin féerique: Lent et grave (The Fairy Garden). It could not have been more charming.

After intermission, Jordan led an exciting account of Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie Fantastique. The five-movement work filled with famous tunes is completely eccentric. I heard Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Symphonie Fantastique a couple of times over the decades, and it was always unsatisfying because he tended to smooth out the strangeness of the work, but that was not the case with Jordan. The concluding two movements, March to the Scaffold and Dream of a Witches' Sabbath were thrilling and weird, just as they should be.

Nocturnal Omissions with John Coons and Jonah Wheeler

On a wooden beach boardwalk in Puerto Vallarta this winter, I ran into the gay porn star Jonah Wheeler, who was handing out flyers for a cabaret show starring his partner John Coons. "You're my favorite actor on the internet," I sincerely gushed to Wheeler, which made him laugh. He introduced me to Coons, who happened to be sitting under an umbrella on the beach next to us, and I asked him what he sang. "My own material, mostly, but also everything from Broadway to classical." I jokingly asked him if he ever sang any Poulenc art songs, and the response was delighted, "Yes, and even Reynaldo Hahn, just to keep people on their toes."

I never did make it to the show in Puerto Vallarta, but six months later Coons and Wheeler brought their Noctural Omissions act for a sold-out, one-night stand last Sunday at the Oasis nightclub at 11th and Folsom. The show turned out to be musically sophisticated, silly, raunchy, funny, and politically acute. On top of it all, my experience with cabaret singers has been that they often have an unsteady relationship with pitch, but Coons's voice was lovely and true.

Broadway World published this entertaining bio of Jonah Wheeler, "Following a decade-long career as a theatrical music director and orchestrator (Sweeney Todd at Barrow Street, Gigi on Broadway, performances with Molly Pope), he pivoted during the pandemic into adult entertainment. Jonah’s video work is noted for genuine connection, goofy enthusiasm, and friendly authority role-play. He holds the questionable distinction of being the only person to work at both MormonBoyz [a gay porn site] and The Book of Mormon on Broadway."

There was no Poulenc at this particular show, but the "non-binary" Coons presented his own superbly witty songs and ended with a mash-up of the lyrics to the Gilligan's Island theme sung to the tune of Amazing Grace. Weirdly enough, it worked.

There was a genuine sweetness to the couple's interplay all evening, and it was refreshing to hear ribald humor that was less sniggering and more sex-positive. If you get a chance to see the show somewhere, it's highly recommended.

Bay Area Rainbow Symphony Concert

After a lovely day at the San Francisco No Kings march, we attended a Gay Pride concert at the SF Conservatory of Music given by the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony. The volunteer ensemble is sometimes overmatched by the serious music they are playing and sometimes they excel way out of their league. Saturday night's concert offered a bit of both. The great violinist and conductor Dawn Harms recently retired as Music Director and the orchestra has been auditioning different conductors throughout the season. Saturday night was the turn of Oakland-based conductor/composer/flautist Martha Stoddard who led the orchestra in the 1943 Overture by Grazna Bacewicz, and a 1941 Britten transcription of Mahler's second movement of his Third Symphony, entitled What the Wild Flowers Tell Me.

Neither piece made much of an impression, but that changed radically when the orchestra performed the American premiere of Juan Sebastian Cardona Ospina's 2022 Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra with professional soloist Jimmy Chan.

Chan gave a brief demonstration of the different pitches and sonic possibilities of the four timpani and then proceeded to play the heck out of the instruments, from delicate pianissimos to full-on pounding, in the three-movement concerto.

After growing up and studying in Colombia, the 33-year-old Ospina went to the University of Memphis for further composition education, returned to Colombia where his music was widely acclaimed, and moved to Emeryville in 2022. I heard his Concerto for Saxophone and Wind Instruments last year and was amazed at the sophistication, energy and sheer fun of the piece, and this Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra was just as thrilling.

For an encore, Chan played his own transcription for marimba of a familiar tune that I was on the verge of identifying but never quite did. It was a delicate, lovely sorbet after the wild main course.

After intermission, Stoddard conducted the 1902 Sibelius Symphony No. 3. She must know and love the work well because the performance was surprisingly good. The trombone and trumpet sections were having a rough time in terms of intonation all evening, but the rest of the orchestra did a splendid job. Especially impressive were the flute section of Linda Watkins, Alan Berquist, and Matt Opatrny, and congratulations to violist/president Laurence Lewis (standing next to Stoddard) for presenting such a challenging program.

Frankenstein at SF Ballet

Late to the party again, I finally saw the San Francisco Ballet production of the full-length, story ballet version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein last Saturday evening. Created in 2016-17 by British choreographer Liam Scarlett as a co-production of London's Royal Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet, it's an ambitious, colorful, striking work. Scarlett was a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet before retiring in his mid-twenties to become a full-time choreographer. Frankenstein was his first full-length ballet which was an immediate, popular hit with audiences but left a lot of critics kvetching. (Click here for the late Alan Ulrich's review of the SF premiere.)

Scarlett proceeded to create ballets all over the world for the next four years until accusations of "sexual impropriety" involving male dancers surfaced in 2019. The British tabloids were at their worst and implied that he'd been molesting minors, which turned out to be bunkum. The succeeding, years-long investigation cleared him of all charges, but it was too late. Scarlett resigned his position with the Royal Ballet and companies around the world dropped his ballets from their repertories. With his career over, and after a year of hiding away during the COVID pandemic, Scarlett hung himself in his own flat, dying at the age of 35. Tamara Rojo, SF Ballet's Director who was in charge of the English National Ballet at the time, was quoted in Dance Australia: "The world is a much darker, uglier, nastier place without you [Liam] in it."

In the Ulrich review, he noted that "Scarlett has said how eager he was for San Francisco Ballet to have the piece because of dancers Joseph Walsh and Frances Chung." Eight years after the premiere, the two dancers reprised their roles as Victor Frankenstein and his doomed fiance Elizabeth Valenza, and it was an absolute treat seeing this dynamic duo from the original cast dancing on Saturday night. (All production photos are by Lindsey Rallo.)

Before his suicide, Scarlett left a bequest naming five "trustees" to oversee his legacy, including Joseph Walsh and his wife Lauren Strongin, a recently retired soloist at the SF Ballet who danced in a number of Scarlett ballets. So on top of performing Victor Frankenstein, Walsh along with Strongin have been staging the four different casts that have been performing Frankenstein earlier this year and in the final "encore" week to end the season. Walsh is one of my favorite dancers, with an ability to go from utter stillness to fluid motion without any visible transition, a skill that reminds me of Buster Keaton at times. (Click here for an interesting interview with Walsh and how crazy it has been trying to be both dancer and stager at the same time.)

The original production by John Macfarlane is both spectacular and stark, with the medical students anatomy theater looking like something out of the recent film Poor Things. The ensemble dance with students waving around body parts was a bit bizarre, but it effectively takes the audience from the opening scenes of genteel Swiss aristocracy into the realm of horror. The reanimation of The Creature at the end of Act One was a genuine coup de theatre and it packed a jolt.

This is the third time Wei Wang has been in this production as The Creature and he owns the role. Creepy, alluring, pathetic, and frightening all manage to come across in his performance, and the scene where he accidentally kills the 7-year-old William Frankenstein is the most powerful in the ballet. On Saturday night, William was danced by the extraordinarily precocious Bode Jay Nanola, who was amazing.

The huge musical score is by New York composer Lowell Liebermann, whose music I had never heard before. His template seemed to be the late ballets of Prokofiev (Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella), and though Liebermann doesn't have the melodic and rhythmic genius of Prokofiev (few composers do), the score was colorful, attuned to the action, and eminently serviceable. My hope is that Ms. Rojo brings back more of Liam Scarlett's ballets, some of which he created for the San Francisco Ballet, especially since the company already has two official "stagers" in Lauren Strongin and Joseph Walsh.

May Day Protest in SF Civic Center

Various protest rallies and marches took place in San Francisco on May Day, and I walked to the one scheduled for 4PM in Civic Center Plaza, which was to be followed by a march down Market Street. There were lots of plainclothes police parked around the neighborhood but overall the law enforcement presence was deliberately low-key with no street closures in front of City Hall.

Upside down American flags of distress were omnipresent.

Various labor union groups were also represented although they were overshadowed by strident speakers ranting on a portable speaker system.

Some of the signage was profane...

...and delightfully homemade.

Of all the current protests in San Francisco against the oncoming of fascism, the weekly gatherings from 12 to 2 on Van Ness in front of the Tesla showroom are the most fun.

They even have free red, white and blue popsicles.

My favorite sight was on an adjoining lawn where a quartet were practicing a dance routine...

...in front of a sign reading "BE FABULOUS / BAN FASCISM".

San Francisco Rites of Spring

The rites of spring in San Francisco were in full flower on Sunday, starting with the annual Cherry Blossom Parade from Civic Center to Japantown.

Japanese-American firemen were representing...

...along with San Francisco County Sheriffs.

There were taiko drummers on a float...

...and junior drummers on the street...

...along with a gaudy collection of cars.

There weren't as many participants as usual this year...

...possibly because they instead attended the annual Easter Party in Dolores Park hosted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Everybody else in San Francisco seemed to be there on Sunday afternoon.

This is the celebration that begins with an Easter Bonnet Contest and ends with a Foxy Mary and Hunky Jesus Contest

Former winner Rockstar Jesus was accompanied by Bong Hit Jesus who was channeling San Francisco's annual 4/20 celebration, which happened to fall on Easter Sunday this year.

I met up with my friend Grant Wilson who hadn't attended a Sisters Easter in 30 years, back when the event was held in tiny Collingwood Park in the Castro neighborhood.

It has grown a bit larger since then.

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.”