On the way home from the San Francisco Symphony on Friday night, I saw an excited audience spilling out of the Herbst Theatre in the Veterans Building, so I decided to check out what they had just seen, and ran into my friend Charlie Lichtman (not pictured here) who sent the account below.
In 1990, Norcal Waste Systems began its Artist In Residence program at the San Francisco Dump (click here for their site) which funds local artists to achieve the ultimate dumpster-diver’s dream, turning trash into art. On Friday evening at Herbst Theatre, a sample of the art was presented (“Music and Videos from the Dump”), which included a few installations in the lobby. Especially noteworthy was a full-length dress made from the recycled plastic bags in which various periodicals are delivered in the rain, and which was modeled by one of the moderators of the event.
Once inside the theater, the audience was treated to 7 short yet very entertaining videos, which ranged from the two-minute "Transformation" by Reddy Lieb (made in 2000), to Philip Bonner’s whimsical "An Excerpt from the Purpose Driven Life," which was completed at 5:30PM the evening of the presentation according to the moderator.
Following the videos, there was a tribute to Jo Hanson, the late founder of the Artist in Residence Program (click here for a nice bio).
The highlight of the evening came after the intermission, when Benjamin Shwartz (above on the left) conducted the 8-musician Junkestra in a short (15 minute) 3-movement piece in which all the instruments consisted of refuse found at the dump.
According to composer Nathaniel Stookey, above, who played the "musical saw obbligato" in the second movement, none of the pieces used as instruments were altered in any way. They were not even dusted off, and the musicians were therefore encouraged NOT to blow into any of them. The musicians were dressed in tuxedos, with yellow norcal reflective vests to add a bit of panache.
The piece itself was a study in percussion, and included one of the musicians smacking the open end of mutli-sized plastic tubes with his flip-flops, another playing glissandos on the side of a shopping cart, and others whirling lengths of tubing in big circles over their heads, creating soft "Doppler Effect" sounds.
The performance received a standing ovation from the sold-out audience, and when the composer offered to play the last movement as an encore, the audience cried out to play the whole piece again, which they then proceeded to do. Now that’s recycling in action.
Thanks to the goddess Louisa in the p.r. department, I was given a couple of great tickets in the "Premier Orchestra" section for the San Francisco Symphony's mostly Charles Ives program this week.
The concert started with a 15-minute Ives choral piece, "Psalm 90," that was all chorus and no orchestra except for an organ, a few bells, "and low gong." Though it seemed an odd way to open a concert, as if we were about to attend a Methodist church service, it was strange, craggy, and Ivesian music.
The second piece was the overplayed Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, which was being essayed by yet another young phenom, the 22-year-old Sergey Khachatryan.
His appearance brought out a large contingent of Armenians, and unfortunately all the female Armenians decided to douse themselves with copious quantities of their most beautiful perfumes, and after the "Psalms 90," my friend Ellen Toomey and myself moved to another row seeking an olofactory escape.
Foolish us. We ended up sitting directly behind three different Armenian ladies who were featuring even stronger scents, and one of them was even secretly videotaping the concerto performance. Ellen kept her shawl over her nostrils while I tried to breathe through my mouth, but it didn't matter, we were being poisoned no matter how we took in air.
As Ellen said at intermission over a beer, "I'm not usually so sensitive to that kind of thing, but I thought I was going to pass out." We found another section of the theatre for the second half.
Young Sergey was tiny and beautiful and dreamy playing the concerto with his borrowed Stradavarius, but I completely agree with Joshua Kosman at the Chronicle (click here for his review) that it was a boring, lackadaisical performance.
The second half was devoted to the chorus singing five hymns, and then the "Holidays" Symphony of Charles Ives. The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas decided to recite from memory long stretches of prose written by Ives to set the scene before each of the four movements, which became really annoying, as if we were at the "Peter and the Wolf" version of the "Holidays" Symphony. Plus, the musical performance was so astonishingly good there was absolutely no reason to interrupt it with narration, other than the fact that the performance was being taped for the "Keeping Score" series. I don't remember there being a chorus at the very end when I last heard this piece in April 2006 (click here for that post where I got into trouble for calling Ives "a rich insurance asshole in New York City"), but the chorus entrance at the end of the "Thanksgiving/Forefather's Day" section was literally transcendent, and I burst into tears, maybe from all the perfume.
While taking a short rest in the sweet desert air of Palm Springs this week, I put together a post about the late choreographer Agnes de Mille and her wonderful series of memoirs that start with "Dance to The Piper."
You can get to Agnes by clicking here.
The post was for a San Francisco group called 42nd Street Moon that has been mounting rare musicals for the last 15 years. They have just started a blog and it should be fascinating, because the Artistic Director of the group, Greg MacKellan, is an encyclopedic musical history freak who is also a graceful writer.
The show that just closed was Kurt Weill's 1943 Broadway musical, "One Touch of Venus," which made Mary Martin into a star playing the title role. The entire score, from what I could gather from the piano reduction, is amazing and it's sad there's no recording of the piece other than a few songs like "Speak Low" and "I'm a Stranger Here Myself."
Another show is opening up next week, the 1918 Jerome Kern/P.G. Wodehouse farce, "Oh, Lady! Lady!!" Click here for more info.
