Voyage to Mahagonny at the Old Exploratorium

The Exploratorium science museum left their old digs at the Palace of Fine Arts a couple of years ago for a state-of-the-art new museum on the waterfront, but it may have been a mistake. The 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition building is a wonder unto itself, something I finally realized after spending last weekend rehearsing Opera Parallèle's upcoming double-bill of Kurt Weill's Mahagonny Songspiel and Francois Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias.



The curving old warehouse is huge, with skylights, monumental statues and detailing galore. Everyone, including mezzo-soprano Renee Rapier above, wanted to move into the place forever.



Opera Parallèle started its career with a world premiere of the final version of Lou Harrison's opera Young Caesar at the Yerba Buena Theatre in 2007 in a surprisingly great production that featured exquisite music-making by conductor Nicole Paiement above, who was a friend of Harrison's in Santa Cruz.



Since then, the company has specialized in daring productions of little-performed contemporary operas, meaning the repertory of the last 100 years that doesn't include Puccini or Richard Strauss. They have mounted productions of a chamber-size version of Berg's Wozzeck, Philip Glass's Orphee, a condensed version of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby, Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, Golijov's Ainadamar, and a double-bill of Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti and Barber's A Hand of Bridge. All of them have been directed and conceived by Brian Staufenbeil above, talking to the most excellent soprano Rachel Schutz who is singing and playing Tirésias in a career performance.



The entire cast, through sheer providence, is an unusually good mix, and they play off of each other beautifully, including the talented baritones above: Gabriel Pressier from Florida in the red boots, and Hadleigh Adams from New Zealand as the Gendarme who becomes his gender-bender suitor in Les mamelles de Tirésias.



Another Florida baritone, Daniel Cilla above, is part of the rich stew of this production...



...along with Canadian/San Francisco tenor Thomas Glenn who is consulting above with musical assistant William Long and the virtuoso rehearsal pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi.



Though Opera Parallèle is financed on a shoestring by big opera house standards, they are seriously ambitious and extravagant which is in the very DNA of the art form. This weekend's production at the Yerba Buena Center Theater features a huge contingent from the SF Girls Chorus above...



...the dancers Joseph Hernandez and Vanessa Thiessen...



...and a full adult chorus including Cliff Reilly and Anne Marie Borch above.



Though it is impossible to know how a show is going to turn out before it is actually performed in front of an audience, this one feels special.

Herbst Theatre Diaspora: SF Performances and NCCO

Herbst Theatre closed its doors earlier this month for the next two years while the Veterans Building at Van Ness and McAllister undergoes a retrofitting and remodeling. This has sent a number of performing arts companies which used the theatre as their San Francisco home to wander elsewhere, and over the weekend I caught up with two of them.



Ruth Felt's San Francisco Performances has long presented touring artists in different venues around town from Davies Hall to Yerba Buena Center for dance programs. Next season (click here) they are adding the new SFJAZZ Center and the refurbished Nourse Auditorium on the corner of Hayes and Franklin to their roster, and it should be fascinating to hear how classical music sounds in both venues. Last week they presented the Philip Glass Ensemble playing the composer's live operatic replacement of the soundtrack to Cocteau's 1946 art film, La Belle et La Bete.



The music sounded strikingly similar to the same composer's other Cocteau movie turned into an opera, Orphee, which Opera Parallele presented a few years ago. I am not sure that the Glass music is an improvement on the original score by Georges Auric, but I was entranced by the dialogue being sung, especially with singers as good as Gregory Purnhagen, Hai-Ting Chinn, Marie Mascari, and Peter Stewart under Music Director Michael Riesman.



The New Century Chamber Orchestra above is also losing their San Francisco Herbst home for the next couple of seasons, and they performed their final concert of this season at the SF Conservatory. This will be one of their stops next year, along with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the SF Jewish Community Center (click here for a schedule).



The major excitement of Saturday's concert was the opening work, a world premiere by pianist, poet, and Composer of the Moment Lera Auerbach, a prolific young Russian woman (above, hugging Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg) based out of New York. She's written the scores for a number of full-length ballets (including The Little Mermaid at the SF Ballet), operas, string quartets, piano works, and now a string symphony for the NCCO. The music is spare, quiet, trancelike and deeply evocative until somewhere in the middle where it explodes into wildness and jagged rhythms before retreating into spareness again. It was very good music, and made me want to hear more.



For the rest of the concert, the string symphony beefed up slightly with a brass and woodwind contingent, including the wonderful SF Opera horn principal, Kevin Rivard above center. They played fellow birthday boy Richard Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, which he wrote in 1870 as a birthday present for his second wife, Cosima. This was followed by a jolly and impassioned performance of Haydn's Farewell Symphony.

It's Washington's Birthday, Washington's Birthday

Well, that was some kind of fun.

After a four-month contract job in Silicon Valley ended, I was ready to embark on a new adventure, and fate happily intervened through an email from the San Francisco Opera asking if I wanted to be a supernumerary in the John Adams opera Nixon in China, followed by a rehearsal schedule that was essentially every day for the month of May. The immediate answer was "yes, yes and yes," because the music to this opera has been on my favorites list since it was first recorded 25 years ago.

There were sixteen supernumeraries, evenly divided by gender, with all four real Asians on the female side. Those four turned out to be part of the serious joy of this production, and being a unisex People's Army Soldier with them in matching overcoat, belt, combat boots, and fur hat erased any qualms about the Jonathan Pryce Miss Saigon minstrel show aspect of appearing as a Chinese dude onstage.



One of the Asian supers turned out to be a bestselling novelist out of Bernal Heights, Tess Uriza Holthe (above right with Veronique), who was researching the opera for her next novel, and lucked out in being slotted into this production as her first time onstage. Click here for her account of the experience at the San Francisco Opera Backstage blog.

Live theater, and opera is live theater at its most ambitious and extreme, has an alchemical element to it. Sometimes the combination of forces is magical and sometimes it's inert. San Francisco Opera got very lucky with its first production of Nixon in China, partly through General Director David Gockley's almost perfect casting, and partly just because everyone melded during this production in a manner that's rare, from orchestra to chorus to principals to dancers to stage crew to extras.

And of course it was also great because the The Three Ancient Supers in the photo at top (Charlie Lichtman, Michael Harvey, and yours truly) are seemingly the good luck token of just about every wonderful modern opera production over the last 18 months in the Bay Area, from Orphee at the Herbst, Four Saints in Three Acts at Yerba Buena, to Nixon in China at the San Francisco Opera. This has been quite a run, Musketeers.

BluePrint Concert Featuring Cwik, Rolnick, and Glass

Saturday night in San Francisco offered an unusually large array of New Music concerts around town. There was a choice of the final night of the Other Minds Music Festival at the Jewish Community Center, a concert by the New Century Chamber Orchestra at Herbst Theatre featuring a mandolin concerto premiere by Mike Marshall, and a BluePrint concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music conducted by Nicole Paiement above. I chose the latter, and was happy with the decision, since Paiement offered a swift, energizing concert of three living composers that was fun and engaging.



The evening started with Eight Miniatures for Chamber Ensemble (Hommage a Stravinsky) by the 25-year-old Stefan Cwik above. In the program notes, Cwik notes that "Stravinsky's music was the largest influence upon me as a young and developing composer...although his influence can be heard in most if not all of my music, this piece is a purposeful and direct assimilation of the Stravinsky chamber music style." It is written for a flute, bassoon, violin, and piano, and when I told the composer that the performers had just played the hell out of his music, he enthusiastically agreed.



The musicians were Paula Brusky on bassoon (above left), Michael Williams on flute (above right), and Stephanie Bibbo on violin along with the indispensable Keisuke Nakagoshi on piano. They were marvelous, and by the end of the twenty-minute piece, it sounded plausible that this was some seriously undiscovered work by Stravinsky himself.



The SF Conservatory has begun bestowing an annual Hoefer Prize to composition alumni that involves a cash prize, a commission, and a week-long residency at the music school. This year the winner was Neil Rolnick (above, performing with the orchestra at his laptop) in a piece for chamber orchestra, three singers, and electronics called Anosmia, about a man losing his sense of smell and realizing how much he loves his partner who in a sense becomes his surrogate nose. According to the program notes:

"The overall project, MONO, has its genesis in my own loss of hearing in my left ear in 2008. This loss, and the accompanying white noise tinnitus in the affected ear, have made me very aware of the relativity of our perception...I began to wonder just how many of us there were co-existing with compromised perceptual equipment. I sent out requests on the net and via email, for people to send me stories of experiences which were analogous to my own: not totally disabling or life threatening, but a change in the way they perceive the world, and something they needed to learn to adjust to. It turns out there are quite a lot of us."

The vocal lines, which are doubled and echoed by the composer at his laptop, were for a baritone narrating and singing the character Andy who loses his sense of smell, along with two female backup singers who literally sing a "do wah" chorus throughout while echoing the baritone's lines. Daniel Cilli, above left, was magnificent and touching in the role, and though the audience had been handed a printout with the text, it was completely unnecessary. Cilli's English diction was some of the clearest I have ever heard and you could make out every word. Carrie Zhang (above right) and the always extraordinary Maya Kherani (not pictured) were The 2 Scents in an amusing performance.

The loss of smell starts ironically, with Andy traveling with his partner on a New York City rush hour subway car that is not crowded, the reason being that people have fled the unbearable stink of a homeless man who hasn't washed in too long, but our narrator can't smell it. The piece then turns into a lament for his nose and his loss, finally evolving into "a love song...describing how loss can lead to a deepening and strengthening of the bonds between two people." The fact that the loving partners are of the same sex, which goes unmentioned as a dramatic detail, was immensely cheering, and the accessible, rock and Broadway tinged classical music built to a beautiful climax. My friend Patrick Vaz thought the piece was too long and he wanted to know more about the affliction and less about domestic bliss, but that may say more about him than the work, which I thought was perfect.



The second half of the concert was devoted to Philip Glass's 2002 Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra with Christopher D. Lewis above as the soloist. The first movement was filled with snatches of music that sounded straight out of Glass's opera, Orphee, but the self plagiarism disappeared for the second movement which was extremely beautiful. The final movement featured Glass's usual driving pulse, but with a hint of bass boogie-woogie in the harpsichord part which was very amusing. All in all, it was a lovely concert.

Ensemble Parallele's The Great Gatsby

Playing the non-singing part of the head butler at a 1920s Long Island estate (above) this last weekend in the Ensemble Parallele production of John Harbison's opera The Great Gatsby was great fun. It's my third production in a year with this interesting and intrepid troupe who do contemporary Grand Opera on a beer budget, brilliantly. The trilogy started with Philip Glass' Orphee last February and continued with Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts this summer.



The Boston-based composer John Harbison above right was present for the entire weekend run, hanging out mostly with Jacques Desjardins above left who reorchestrated the twelve-year-old opera to 30 instruments from close to 100. It was a skillful job, and I prefer the chamber version to the recording with full orchestra because the complex music sounds less muddy.

The reviews of the production pretty much reflected what I felt from day one, which was that the orchestral writing was interesting but the vocal lines were awful, a series of recitatives made up of awkward intervals that were difficult to sing and not particularly rewarding for either the performers or the audience. To make matters worse, Harbison also wrote a number of brand-new 1920s pop songs for an onstage band and singers for the two large party scenes that are so entertaining you wonder why he didn't just write the entire piece in that vernacular with ascetic, difficult recitatives as the seasoning.

The reviews were also unanimous in praising the production itself, which was a beautifully conceived piece of theatre. The cast was just about perfect, intelligent and great musicians besides, and it was a joy watching them work out their characters and the story amongst themselves during rehearsals.

For two of the most interesting accounts from the audience point of view, click here for Patrick Vaz and here for Axel Feldheim.

The Triumph of Ensemble Parallèle's "Orphée"

When you are working as a member of a stage production, it's almost impossible to predict how it will play to an audience. After three weeks in daily rehearsals of Philip Glass' 1993 chamber opera "Orphee" at various locations around San Francisco, we finally had three days of rehearsal in Herbst Theatre before a Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon run. (All production photos are by Steve DiBartolomeo and backstage photos by Mike Harvey.)



I was apprehensive about the show for a number of reasons, principally because the production conceived by director Brian Staufenbiel (above, surrounded by three supernumerary clowns from the Underworld) was so ambitious.



It involved complex video projections, scrims and props being flown in and out, a descending orchestra pit with a live orchestra playing on it, circus artists hanging from the ceiling and spinning on the floor, and a dangerous feeling set.



Plus, Herbst Theatre is a nice setting for music concerts and lectures, but in 30 years of attending chamber opera there, the theatre has always defeated any production I have seen with its lack of backstage and wings, along with a primitive lighting set-up.



Staufenbiel's solution was to use every inch of the stage, along with side exits to the left and right of the stage, and a few of the audience boxes for lighting and video, all of it orchestrated by stage manager Darin Burnett (above center) as the calm eye at the center of the storm.



The result, to everyone's intense relief and happiness, was a complete triumph. Audience members whose opinion I trusted were glowing after Saturday night's premiere, and confirmed that the show was special.



Though Allan Ulrich didn't like the opera itself and Georgia Rowe was wishing the production was closer to the mood of the Cocteau film, the remainder of the reviews have been ecstatic.

Steven Winn at the San Francisco Chronicle started his rave with "Ensemble Parallèle, a San Francisco company devoted to contemporary chamber opera, scored a full-on triumph over the weekend with two performances of Philip Glass' "Orphée" at the Herbst Theatre. Ravishing and delicate, haunting and playful, somber and romantic, the production fused story, music and stagecraft into an engrossing evening of music theater."



The best unpaid arts writer in the Bay Area, Patrick Vaz, wrote "there’s a good chance that this production is theatrically and conceptually more striking than any other operas we’re going to get around here." Axel Feldheim wrote, "The entire cast was great, & anytime anyone opened their mouths a beautiful sound came out."

Also adding to the chorus of acclaim were Charlise at The Opera Tattler, Emily Hilligoss at SF Weekly, and Cy Ashley Webb at Stark Insider.

Riding the Elevator Into the Sky

The ninth season of Blueprint, a "new music project," opened Saturday evening at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, with its artistic director Nicole Paiement (below) conducting.



I went to the concert with some trepidation, because brand-new, modernist "classical" music is something of a crapshoot. Some concerts are excitingly revelatory, others are excruciatingly boring, while most are somewhere in between. The happy news is that Saturday's concert was on the exciting and revelatory side of the spectrum.



This was due primarily to a hugely ambitious, 40-minute violin concerto called Chiaroscuro Azzurro by Laura Schwendinger (above), which is the work of a brilliant composer coming into her own. It's also very difficult music, densely packed with ideas going in all directions, but the lyricism of the solo violin writing keeps one focused. The fiddling by Wei He (above), by the way, was beautiful and heroic.



There are three expansive movements in a traditional fast-slow-fast progression, and though it's just about impossible to absorb on first listening, the concerto passes my personal new music test, which is "Do I want to hear it again?" Ms. Paiement has just recorded the piece with an ensemble on the East Coast, and you can hear bits of Ms. Schwendinger's music on her website, including excerpts from this concerto (click here).



The second half of the concert started with a minimalist palate cleanser in the form of a teaser for Ms. Paiement's other performing group, Ensemble Parallele, which focuses on modern opera. This February they are presenting Philip Glass' opera adaptation of the Cocteau film, Orphee, in Herbst Theatre, and Saturday's concert started with pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi playing four selections from a suite of piano transcriptions from the opera created by pianist Paul Barnes. (Click here for a YouTube clip of Barnes playing one of the excerpts. It's very pretty, though Nakagoshi's playing was even lovelier.) This was followed by a suite of five songs by composer David Conte to Anne Sexton poems, with Marnie Breckinridge (above) as the soloist.



Sexton is almost a character from Mad Men, a 1960s housewife who drank too much, smoked too much, was clinically insane, and who wrote aggressively confessional poetry before killing herself at age 46 in 1974. (An interesting take by Patrick Vaz on Sexton in yet another contemporary music piece can be found here.) For some reason, Sexton has been a beacon to contemporary composers, with Conrad Susa writing his most successful opera, the 1973 Transformations, based on her twisted fairy tale versions of the Brothers Grimm. The David Conte (above left) Sexton Songs started out with a recorded version of Anne Sexton reciting one of the poems herself (click here for another YouTube of Ms. Sexton in an early video sounding like a cross between Suzanne Pleshette and Tallulah Bankhead). As Sexton finished, there was a dramatic singing entrance from the back of the stage by soprano Marnie Breckenridge as she made her way to the front of the orchestra.



Unfortunately, none of Mr. Conte's musical settings was more interesting than the opening recording of Sexton simply reciting her poetry in her booze-soaked baritone. This wasn't at all the fault of soprano Marnie Breckenridge, who is smart, has an exquisitely beautiful voice, and is great on stage. Mr. Conte's music was actually sort of fun (you can hear more of it on his website), bouncing back and forth between jazzy cabaret and Samuel Barber English declamation style, but it was wrong for the material.

It didn't matter, though. This was a great concert and I look forward to Blueprint's next interesting production, the Tom Stoppard/Andre Previn 1970s play for seven actors and an onstage orchestra, "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour," a major rarity that's playing two performances on November 20, 2010. Click here for more details.