Blue and Gold City Hall for Game 4

Well, that was fun, and less stressful than the previous three suspensefests. Since the Golden State Warriors only seem to win these Finals games when I am watching them live at the Pilsner Inn, I returned to the pub this evening, and it worked.

On the way home to Civic Center on Muni, there was a contingent of Cleveland Cavaliers fans being trash talked mercilessly by a friend who was holding up a "Cleveland Sucks" banner. As we all got off at City Hall, the Cleveland fan said, "Oh hell, they might as well change the colors on that building to black and orange tomorrow because that's just ridiculous."

Hands Up, Public Defender

A protest vigil by the Public Defender's Office, headed by Jeff Adachi below, was held at noon on Thursday in front of San Francisco's Hall of Justice, the one-stop court and jail complex at 8th and Bryant Streets.



The protest was being held in conjunction with Public Defenders' offices throughout the Western states since they are in the front lines when it comes to witnessing institutional racism in the justice system.



Adachi noted that the problem was larger than bigoted police departments, declaring that "We are all complicit. We see judges and prosecutors routinely asking for higher bail and longer sentences for people of color for the same offenses committed by whites. And if public defenders' offices provide a lousy defense, that can be the worst thing imaginable to happen to a defendant."



He pointed out that San Francisco's population is 6% black while 56% of the jail population is black, before urging the small crowd to chant, "Black Lives Matter" for the inmates in the jail above us.



Adachi mostly played emcee for a series of smart speakers, including Oscar Grant's "Uncle Bobby" Johnson above. Johnson had just returned from Phoenix where they are having their own police shooting controversy. When I Googled "Phoenix Police Shooting" to see what the story might be, it turned out that the Phoenix police have shot and killed three different people this month, but the first one was a white cop shooting and killing the black, unarmed Rumain Brisbon.



As Adachi pointed out, the problem is structural and everywhere, not just Ferguson or Staten Island or Cleveland or San Francisco.



According to Yolanda Jackson above, the new Executive Director of the Bar Association of San Francisco, lawyers of all stripes need to be part of the effort to change the system, and quantifying the injustice is going to be a huge part of that effort.



The vigil ended with four and a half minutes of silence on the Hall of Justice steps, in remembrance of the four and a half hours that Michael Brown was left on the streets to die in Ferguson.



I used to write more about local politics on this blog but found the provincial, corrupt San Francisco City Family too depressing to think about after a while. There are a few exceptions among San Francisco's elected officials, and Public Defender Jeff Adachi is first in line, the most admirable local politician I have met since Harvey Milk. He's smart, compassionate, honest, an inspiring leader, and a great speaker. We would be lucky to have him as Mayor of San Francisco, but that will never happen, partly because he had the temerity to point out during the last mayor's race that the current municipal compensation and pension system is unsustainable, particularly among public safety unions. You don't say those kind of things and get elected Mayor.

Noir City Xmas: Blast of Silence

For the first time in my memory, the Castro Theater marquee is fully functional, with progressive lights spelling out C-A-S-T-R-O before blinking once and starting all over again. It's a veritable Christmas miracle.



Adding to the blessings Wednesday evening was Noir City Xmas under the directorship of Eddie Muller above, a new annual tradition that's a seasonal warm-up for late January's 10-day Noir City Film Festival.



Muller shared his excitement about this year's edition of the festival which is specializing in foreign films, including a pair of Argentine classics that have never been projected onscreen in the United States. He also put in a plug for Castro organist David Hegarty, above left, who is spearheading a rescue and restoration effort for the theatre's grand old Wurlitzer organ. (Click here for the SFCODA website.)



Muller apologized for stretching the definition of noir in recent Christmas programming to include a Deanna Durbin film two years ago, "but tonight, I promise, we are showing a film that is relentlessly bleak, brutal and noir." The film was the 1961 Blast of Silence, made for about $23,000 and a few prayers by Allen Baron above, who appeared in person at the Castro last night.



Baron wrote, directed, produced and starred in the cinema verite style film, after a young Peter Falk dropped out of the lead "for a paying job with a real salary." It was Baron's second movie acting job after a bizarre 1959 entry into the movie biz filming the washed-up Errol Flynn's last movie, Cuban Rebel Girls, with Fidel Castro's permission while the fighting was still going on. Baron isn't bad as the hit man from Cleveland whose last job in New York City spirals out of control. The striking film got him noticed in Hollywood which led to a television directing career that stretched for decades.



Because Baron had no money, the film was forced to use real locations around New York during the Christmas season, everything from the Village Gate jazz club to snowy tidal basins in Long Island. It was fascinating to see how much has and has not changed since 1960. The character who swipes the movie is the very strange Larry Tucker above playing a low-level criminal fixer, who lives in a tiny dump of an apartment filled with cages filled by rats. Tucker, who died in 2001 in Los Angeles, went on to write comedy for The Danny Kaye Show where he met Paul Mazursky. The two of them collaborated on scripts for two of the essential comedy films of the 1960s, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. With earlier acting cameos in Shock Corridor and Advise and Consent, that was one weird career.

Scenes from the SF Symphony Strike

The San Francisco Symphony has been working without a contract since last fall, and at Wednesday morning's rehearsal for a series of concerts featuring Mahler's final, Ninth Symphony under Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, they voted to walk out on strike. This forced the cancellation of Thursday's matinee performance, and potentially the remainder of the concerts for the weekend, plus a four-concert tour next week that includes New York's Carnegie Hall.



The Symphony PR Department quickly sent out a release yesterday morning, announcing there would be a press conference at 11AM in their Green Room. In a symbol of how bad communications are between the musicians and management right now, it took a while to realize that the musicians had also announced a press conference at the same time on the Grove Street outdoor stairs. Consequently, the press scrum was instructed to attend the musicians' event first and then return to the Green Room for a conference with Executive Director Brent Assink.



It was odd seeing symphony star players such as associate principal cellist Peter Wyrick above, wearing shades, in civilian clothes looking adrift. Plus, the strike seems so unnecessary because money does not really seem to be the major issue. The SF Symphony, in contrast to many other orchestras around the country, is in very good financial and artistic shape. They are sounding better than at any other time I've heard them over the last forty years, and just came off a 100th year anniversary that was a spectacular success.



According to an article by Janos Gereben at SF Classical Voice, "Ironically, it is exactly the Symphony's robust financial health that is a main issue for the musicians, who feel they are not getting their fair share." Gereben quotes the Players' Committee: "In the 10-year period from 2001 through calendar year 2011 top symphony leadership received salary increases in amounts substantially greater than the increases provided for musicians. The salary for the Executive Director Brent Assink increased by 79% — over 50% more than the increases for the musicians over the same timeframe. According to the latest IRS 990 forms, in 2010, the Music Director [Michael Tilson Thomas] was paid $2.4 million, 18.5 times more than the guaranteed base pay for musicians."

(Photo above is of Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, who made $518,197 last year, which is quite a bit more than the base pay for SF Symphony musicians that is somewhere between $140,000 and $160,000 depending on who is doing the averaging.)



Part of the public relations problem for the Symphony musicians is that they are already being paid very well, more than colleagues on orchestras in New York, Boston, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Houston among others. The only two orchestras paying more are Chicago and Los Angeles, so their rallying cry is pay parity with those institutions, which is not a particularly compelling message. And though he may be one of the nicest guys on the planet, violist and players' committee spokesman Dave Gaudry above looks like he was sent from Central Casting to play a union goon in an old Warner Brothers movie.



It would be difficult, though, to be receiving Grammy awards for your work and seeing everyone in the organization being rewarded but you. Giving the Executive Director "longevity" bonuses for his 17-year tenure of approximately $280,000 over the last couple of years was probably not the best idea when about to negotiate a contract with union musicians. This is especially true if you are offering a new "austerity plan" that includes a wage freeze in the first year, and 1% raises in the following two years, along with increased employee costs in health plan funding. Associate Concertmaster Nadya Tichman above has been with the Symphony since 1980 but it seems doubtful that she is being offered a similar "longevity" bonus.



What it looks like from the outside is a Human Resources department working poorly with management in a manner that doesn't know how to make employees feel wanted, needed and respected. Tympanist David Herbert, who has just jumped ship for the Chicago Orchestra after 18 years in San Francisco, writes in an open letter: "Unfortunately there has grown, over time, a cultural disconnect between the San Francisco Symphony Management and the musicians of the orchestra who make the music come to life. The increased divide between my colleagues’ service to the music and the failure of the San Francisco Symphony Management to recognize such commitment has been disheartening." (Click here for the entire letter at the musicians' strike website here. Photo above is of principal trumpet Mark Inouye, who doesn't look very happy about the whole situation.)



The press scrum wandered back to the Van Ness Avenue Green Room for a reading of management statements by Executive Director Brent Assink (click here for the full text), followed by a Q&A. He claimed to be an "irrational optimist," and hoped it would all turn out well quickly, but the most telling moment arrived when a reporter asked if Assink had attended any of the negotiating sessions, and he replied, "No," adding weakly that he was busy with donors and such.



The musicians and management are meeting all afternoon today to try and work something out with a federal mediator, and I hope Assink shows up, and that his irrational optimism results in a win for everyone. When I asked one of the musicians outside why they were so angry, the response was interesting. "We're not angry so much as we are bewildered. Why are we being treated this way?" It seems time for some healing and less disconnect.

Finland Station at the San Francisco Symphony

Last week's San Francisco Symphony program was devoted to Finland and Russia, with Finnish conductor Osmo Vanska conducting Minea by Finnish composer Kalevi Aho, followed by music by Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Minea was written in 2008 for the Minnesota Orchestra where Vanska is the Music Director, and was meant to evoke the city of Minneapolis, but if you were given twenty guesses about which American city this music was meant to portray, the chances are that Minneapolis would probably not be one of them. The twenty-minute work for large orchestra builds to a loud climax about halfway through, and then just gets louder for the next half. Though I liked the bongo drums that kept popping up, Minea mostly sounded like particularly bombastic film music.



The Prokofiev First Violin Concerto, with the composer at his most gentle and lyrical, came as a welcome relief. Hilary Hahn, in one of the most beautiful concert gowns ever seen at Davies Hall, gave an amazing performance of the upside-down concerto which starts off ethereal and dreamy in the opening movement, turns spiky in what is usually the slow movement, and then drifts off softly and beautifully in the third.



Hahn has been commissioning 27 contemporary composers to write new encore pieces for the violin, which she has begun playing around the world. On Thursday afternoon, she played a new piece by Nico Muhly, and on Friday evening it was Tina Davidson and J.S. Bach. On the Saturday evening we attended, it was the turn of composer Lera Auerbach, whose encore piece didn't make much of an impression.



The second half of the concert was devoted to Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony, which I heard for the first time when the Cleveland Symphony brought it as part of its West Coast tour. At the time, I wrote that the Clevelanders' playing of the long, slow first movement was beyond compare, but that they didn't seem to get the wild, rhythmic pulses of the two short final movements.

With the San Francisco Symphony, the opposite was true. They played the first movement very well indeed but it didn't quite take one to the holy places where Cleveland had journeyed. San Francisco's playing of the final movements, though, was everything that the Cleveland performance was not: rhythmically precise, brilliantly fun, surprising and sarcastic all at once. So between the two orchestras, I have now heard a perfect Shostakovich Sixth Symphony.

New York Philharmonic Loses to San Francisco Symphony

Last weekend the New York Philharmonic came to town as part of the San Francisco's centennial celebrations, and the two orchestras played a softball game at Jackson Field in Potrero Hill. This was the first rematch of a tied series in close to 30 years, but it turned out not to be a contest, with the SF Symphoniacs beating the NY Philharmonic Penguins 34-4. The not-so-secret weapon was Mark Inouye above, who is not only one of the great trumpet players of the world but who also turns out to be a serious softball player. (Photo above by Chris Lee.)



The Sunday evening performances by the New York Philharmonic consisted of Dvorak's Carnival Overture and Tchaikowsky's Fourth Symphony sandwiching a new piano concerto by Magnus Lindberg with soloist Yefim Bronfman (above right, with music director Alan Gilbert). In the program notes, Lindberg writes about the piece, "The challenge was to stretch expression to the extreme. It includes some brutal music, like in Kraft, as well as very detailed and lyrical music." I whipsawed between enjoying the music and feeling brutalized, and the consensus in the press room at intermission was also passionately divided. Bronfman in any case gave an insanely virtuosic performance, and I only wished that he had been provided a page turner because there were lots and lots of notes.



The Dvorak and Tchaikowsky didn't fare as well, sounding mostly loud and not very Slavic. In the competition for touring orchestras so far this year, I would rate Boston, Chicago and Cleveland at the top in terms of sheer sound and musicality, and I would put the San Francisco Symphony near that top tier too.

The Cleveland Symphony On Tour

The parade of major American orchestras touring through Davies Hall in honor of the San Francisco Symphony's centennial continued this week, with a two-night stand by the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra under their controversial music director, the 51-year-old Austrian, Franz Welser-Möst above.

His biography, according to Wikipedia, includes this detail: "In 1985, Möst assumed the stage name Welser-Möst on suggestion of his mentor, Baron Andreas von Bennigsen of Liechtenstein, thus paying homage to the city of Wels where he grew up. In 1986, he was adopted by von Bennigsen. In 1992, Welser-Möst married von Bennigsen's former wife, Angelika." This all sounds perilously close to a parody of a Luchino Visconti film.

When Franz Welser-Möst became the conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the early 1990s, the British press anointed him "Frankly, Worse Than Most," which has to be the unkindest classical music nickname since Monsterfat Cowbelly. In Cleveland over the last ten years, there has been further controversy, including the removal of Cleveland Plain-Dealer music critic Donald Rosenberg from the symphony beat in 2008 after one too many swipes in the newspaper at Welser-Möst.



Sunday evening's concert in Davies Hall turned out to be quite wonderful, though it started dully with Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3, The Scottish. The sound of the orchestra, in particular its strings, was amazingly beautiful, but the interpretation was way too Germanic and unvarying for my tastes. "Ponderous" is not a word I associate with Mendelssohn, but it's the best description of the performance I can come up with, which lacked both humor and poetry.



One of the incidental pleasures of the concert was running into everybody at intermission, including the Westphal brothers, Janos Gereben, Charlise the Opera Tattler above, and composer Luiciano Chessa. Most of us were there for the newer music, starting with Orion by the 58-year-old Finnish composer, Kaija Saariaho. She wrote it for the Cleveland Symphony ten years ago, before embarking on an ambitious trio of operas over the last decade. It's a weird, gorgeous, three-movement piece that often sounds like outer space music, with extreme dynamic contrasts, from the quietest to the loudest and the busiest to the sparest, co-existing comfortably side by side. The battery of percussionists running around the back of the stage were amusing to watch and sensationally good to hear, as was the entire orchestra.



The final piece was a Shostakovich symphony I had never heard before, the Sixth. The symphony is a strange duck, with a slow, contemplative first movement that lasts about twenty minutes, followed by two, short, rambunctious movements that showed off Shostakovich at his funniest and wildest. The performance of the first movement by Welser-Möst and the orchestra was beyond compare, with principal flute Joshua Smith sounding so lyrical it was hard to believe it was the flute he was playing. The final two movements were skillful and virtuosic, but they missed Shostakovich's sarcastic humor altogether.

The San Francisco Symphony is playing the same piece next month with guest conductor Osmo Vänskä, and it should be fascinating to hear what they do with the Shostakovich.

SF Symphony 100th Season Preview

The San Francisco Symphony, including publicist Louisa Spier above left, hosted a reception in the basement of the Main Library last Tuesday in honor of the publication of "Music for a City, Music for the World," an authorized history of the institution's first 100 years written by Larry Rothe (below).



Cedric Westphal had a funny distillation of the large, lavishly illustrated coffee table book at SFist (click here):

"...if there is a drinking game associated with the book, it is to gulp a shot every time a music director is said to have brought the orchestra up to national status and recognition. You'll drink to Alfred Hertz, Pierre Monteux, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt and MTT."

There is an associated exhibit at the Main Library which mainly served to remind me that I am old and have been listening to live concerts by the San Francisco Symphony for almost half of its century-old existence. As a teenage hitchhiker from Southern California, I remember buying a standing room ticket at the San Francisco Opera House for one of Seiji Ozawa's concerts in his love-beads and Beatle haircut first season. Ozawa announced that he was going to focus on Berlioz and Haydn that year, and that first concert consisted of Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms," one of Haydn's 100+ symphonies, and Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" in a sensational performance.



At the reception, we were joined by the Symphony's current principal trumpeter Mark Inouye above who turned out to be as charming as he is musically gifted. Inouye told a few stories involving his Giants Rally Rag and tuxedo, along with a recurring practical joke involving standing for applause with his brass section. I am not sure the tales were meant to be shared, so ask me in private if you're dying to know what he said.



After being wined and dined, there was a talk between the author Rothe and Symphony archivist Joe Evans (above) about the process of digging through a century's worth of ephemera to find historical treasures.



A couple of years ago, during the announcement of the programs for the 99th season, a number of writers complained about how boring most of it was and asked if all the exciting stuff was being held back for the 100th anniversary season. The answer then was "no," but they weren't really telling the truth, because this year is jammed to the gills with musical goodies.



I went to the opening concert of the season last Thursday with Yo-Yo Ma playing the Hindemith cello concerto in a great performance of music that doesn't do much for me, though it does for counterpoint enthusiast Jeff Dunn (click here) who thinks it is one of the greatest concertos of the 20th century. The second half of the concert had MTT conducting the Brahms First Symphony in a surprisingly good performance. I haven't been convinced by Tilson Thomas in a lot of 19th century music, so this felt like a good sign.



Here are a few of my favorite things, on paper, that are scheduled for this fall: Mahler's gargantuan 3rd Symphony is coming up this week (September 21-25); the Symphony-commissioned "Polaris" by British composer Thomas Ades with "moving images" by his partner Tal Rosner (September 29-October 1); the great young conductor Vasily Petrenko conducting Elgar's First Symphony and joining with Joshua Bell in the Glazunov Violin Concerto (October 5-9); James Conlon conducting Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14 (October 14-16) and then jumping in as a substitute for Fabio Luisi with Verdi's Requiem (October 19-22); a Symphony commission of a new work from the amazing composer Sofia Gubaidulina (November 17-20); and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Sibelius, his own Violin Concerto, and excerpts from Wagner's "Ring" (December 8-10).



This is without even mentioning the special party guests who will be playing in Davies Hall this year, which include the entire orchestras of Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, many bringing brand new music written for their respective ensembles. Click here to buy tickets or call (415) 864-6000. If you are feeling poor like me, Center Terrace seats behind the orchestra are a wonderful deal at $15 a ticket, and you are basically sitting in trumpeter Mark Inouye's lap.

SFMOMA's 75th Anniversary 2: Focus on Artists

On the fourth floor, there are a series of rooms ranging from claustrophobic to expansive, each featuring a single artist.



I was attending the museum as a guest of my friend Patrick Vaz, above, in front of a Robert Ryman painting. We happened to be sharing the room with a cluster of people experiencing the museum with a docent, who was asking them in her best schoolmarm voice, "And what quality is the same in every one of these paintings?" Patrick shot me a warning, evil eye to prevent me from blurting out, "THEY'RE ALL WHITE!" until we had moved into the next room. (I couldn't help myself.)



We went through the Richard Serra room (me: "hate him," Patrick: "I usually understand what he's trying to do, and it's interesting, but I'm not sure that's enough.")



One of the largest rooms was dedicated to Frank Stella, whose work doesn't seem to be aging very well.



Patrick confessed to loving the Sigmar Polke painting above the first time he saw it, but on the second time through the exhibit, it struck him as uncomfortably close to being a documentary rendition of a dirty oven, which reminded him of his own dirty oven at home, and all aesthetic pleasure was taken away.



We stumbled into another one of the exhibits, dedicated to multi-screen art movies by the recently deceased Bruce Conner.



Patrick was fighting a low-level migraine, and the quickly flashing images were threatening to set off a Pokemon level seizure, so we didn't stay long.



In a 1954 paean to Grace McCann Morley in "Time" Magazine, of all places, there is the following wonderful quote:

"But in trying to make San Franciscans bigger art buyers, Director Morley has run into one unmovable obstacle. "San Franciscans are spoiled by the view." she explains. "If they buy less than people in Cleveland, it is because they need it less. I only own a few pieces myself."