The "West Coast Premiere" of a new orchestral work by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg (above right) took place at a Thursday matinee, led by the young Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo (above left). The Symphony had co-comissioned "Seht die Sohnne" ("Behold The Sun") with the Berlin Philharmonic, which last year not only gave the 30-minute piece its world premiere, but took it on tour to the BBC Proms in London and Carnegie Hall in New York where it was very well received.
I'd never heard anything by Lindberg before (above, in the middle) but his name has been appearing everywhere as one of the "cool kids" composers (he's 50 years old), so I was genuinely curious, and am happy to report that "Seht die Sohnne" is an absolutely spectacular piece of music, sounding as if Sibelius had somehow managed to absorb Messiaen, Ligeti and John Adams into his palette.
Though the huge orchestral forces are almost relentlessly loud during the first half, the piece suddenly turns into a work for solo cello midway, which was played fearlessly and beautifully by Peter Wyrick (above), before building into another huge, false climax reminiscent of Sibelius' Fifth Symphony, and then gearing down into a soft, troubled conclusion. What it all means I haven't a clue, but it passed the new music test with flying colors. In other words, I immediately wanted to hear it again.
The "Rhoda Goldman Matinee Series" of mostly old ladies tend to be good, sophisticated audiences, but my friend Charlie Lichtman and I were sitting behind an exception. The lady in red (above) decided she hated the Lindberg piece from the get-go and spent the entire time talking to her husband or shaking with laughter so violently that we thought she was having a stroke. She so thoroughly pissed off one of her neighbors two seats away that he leaned over in the middle of the music to tell her to be quiet, which didn't do much good.
After this volcanic opening, we were offered a set of seven early Debussy "art songs" orchestrated by the conductor and sung by his soprano wife, Anu Komsi.
Unfortunately, European art songs tend to bore the bejesus out of me, and this performance did nothing to alter my prejudices. Komsi has an absolutely beautiful voice except when she doesn't, shrieking a few notes into the large Davies Hall that were surely not intended.
The second half of the concert was devoted to Charlie's favorite Beethoven symphony, the Seventh, conducted by Oramo with really eccentric tempos that didn't work at all. Most of the first three movements were way too slow and emphatic while the final movement was taken at supersonic speed as if to make up for the bizarre lethargy that preceded it. The performance brought to mind Benjamin Britten's unkind remark about Beethoven's music as "just like sacks of potatoes...it's all so obvious."
"Greater Tuna," the comic play about a tiny town in Texas, was written by the two actors Joe Sears and Jaston Williams along with its director Ed Howard, and after debuting in Austin in 1981, the play has never left the stage. In San Francisco during the 1980s, for instance, it ran for seven straight years at the Marines Memorial Theatre. The play spawned two sequels, "A Tuna Christmas" and "Red, White and Tuna," which were also quite successful, and now after a long pause, a fourth installment has hit the Curran Theatre for two weeks with its original actors/writers, entitled "Tuna Does Vegas."
The plays' greatest novelty were their succession of quick costume changes which magically allowed Sears and Williams to play at least 20 different characters in the town, including all the women. In fact, the backstage dressers should have an onstage bow of their own.
Another part of their appeal is that though there is a sophisticated, gay sensbility at work among the creators, they also stay completely true to the sheer eccentricity of their racist, narrow-minded and just plain weird characters who have taken on a life of their own and seem to inhabit the actors rather than the other way around, all overlaid with florid, rapid-fire Texan speech peppered with regional insults that are hilarious. Anybody who has grown up in a small town can generally relate, so that the audiences for the plays tend to be an unusual mixture of gay men and heterosexual couples of all ages.
On the basis of the $40-for-any-seat "preview" I saw on Tuesday night, "Tuna Does Vegas" is the weakest play in the quartet, but it does have its moments and seeing Joe Sears and Jaston Williams play these characters is a bit like seeing National Living Treasures performing their art, which is frankly not to be missed. The production should have the sound mix fixed by that time, too, which was pretty terrible for the preview.
Joe Sears (the Oliver Hardy to Jaston Williams' Stan Laurel) was always the better and more relaxed actor of the two, slipping into Bertha Bumiller's pantsuits with perfect ease, but the years have taken their toll, and Mr. Sears seemed to be having trouble remembering his lines during the preview. Also, his nimbleness has been slowed down by the fact that he's become hugely obese, something he seemed to share with everybody in our row at the Curran Theatre, which was designed for much skinnier people than myself, let alone our seatmates. Still, Jaston Williams has picked up the slack and his Didi Snavely (the gun saleswoman), a character I'm not usually crazy about, almost stole the show. Check it out.
I managed to erase the Frida Kahlo post I put up earlier, so here's an approximation of what was in the original. Yikes, it's going to be one of those days.
The big summer show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is devoted to Frida Kahlo, whose face is all over town on shiny, ubiquitous signage.
I was an early Kahlo cultist from the time I stumbled across "Las Dos Fridas" (above) in a Mexican art history book in 1973, and was amazed that it was not already an iconic image worldwide. On a subsequent trip to Mexico City, I asked about the artist but nobody seemed to know anything about her beyond her identity as the eccentric woman dressed in outlandish Indian peasant outfits who was married to the famous artist/muralist Diego Rivera.
In fact, when I went to visit the suburban Mexico City house Kahlo and Rivera lived in which had been turned into a museum, I was the only person in the place on a Saturday afternoon besides an elderly security guard who was surprised that I was interested in looking at Kahlo's work rather than that of Rivera. My, how times have changed in 35 years.
Frida Kahlo died in 1954 and was "discovered" by an odd combination of gay men and feminists in the 1970s. Since that time, there have been books, operas, and multiple films made about her to the point where her pain-filled life threatens to become a cliche in the same way as Vincent Van Gogh. Still, her cryptic gaze in her many self-portraits will probably always retain its power, and her art has an integrity and eccentricity that is singular and real.
The exhibit at MOMA consists of three or four small rooms with too many people (even with timed tickets) trying to see the mostly small and medium-sized paintings. There are also another trio of rooms with tiny personal photos of Frida and Diego and their friends. It's worth going, however, just to see the huge 1939 canvas, "The 2 Fridas," and also to check out the proto-hippie paintings of her last decade where everybody seems to be sporting a third eye in their forehead.
The exhibit funnels into a gift shop that mirrors the one on the ground floor, and they are both appalling. My host for the afternoon, Patrick Vaz, was most enamored of the "Frida Kahlo Business Card Holder" for $12.00, since Frida was an avowed Communist her entire life. I was most amused by the Frida Shrine Kit which were next to rag dolls that looked to be repurposed Astro Boy souvenirs tarted up with a wig and a dress and a unibrow.
