An historic musical event took place Monday evening at Davies Symphony Hall, the first West Coast performance of Philip Glass' four-hour-plus minimalist work from 1974, "Music in Twelve Parts."
The 72-year-old composer himself (above right) was playing one of three synthesizers as part of an ensemble that included Michael Riesman and Mick Rossi on keyboards, with David Crowell (above left), Jon Gibson, and Andrew Sternan on various woodwinds and brass instruments.
They were joined by the thoroughly amazing Lisa Bielawa (above) who sang continuously for 10 out of the 12 movements, pacing the entire ensemble. My friend Sid Chen found himself twittering "LISA BIELAWA IS SUPERWOMAN."
The crowd was an odd mix of adventurous old classical music fans like Barbara Sherman above to younger people who looked like their musical tastes would be wildly divergent.
There was some kind of foul-up at the box office where too many people were waiting in line for will-call tickets, so unfortunately the first hour of the concert was a constant stream of patrons walking in late to find their seats. It felt like we were at The Warfield for a Yes concert, and the Right Terrace section behind the stage was a particularly distracting spot with traffic going back and forth like Grand Central Station.
After a brief pause, the second hour of the piece went much more smoothly with just about everyone in their seats. My friend Charlie and I were artistically disgraceful, however, and scooted out of Davies Hall with ten minutes left to go in Part 6 because we wanted to make it to Kebab and Hayes for an hour-long dinner break before the mobs arrived.
"You do know that there are going to be hundreds of people at your door in about ten minutes, don't you?" I asked the sweet Kurdish owner, and he had no idea what was coming his way.
The crowd around us at dinner couldn't have been more charming, and Tricia above had even heard "Music in Twelve Parts" when it premiered back in New York. "I did too," said her companion, "though if I remember correctly I was completely stoned at the time." We were very glad we hadn't pre-ordered the "box dinner" at Davies Hall which according to Patrick Vaz involved a long line, nowhere to eat, and a deeply unsatisfying sandwich.
We had the good fortune in sitting next to Eric Ross above who had flown in from Halifax, Nova Scotia for the performance. "Eric is the pre-eminent Glass admirer in all of Canada," is how a friend of his put it before he introduced Eric once to the composer. In any case, Eric owned both recordings of the piece and knew just about every note of the composer's music, so he was indispensable with information while being very funny.
"What are your favorite parts?" I asked him at the beginning of the concert, and after thinking a bit, Eric countered with "Two, seven, eight, and twelve," and by the end of the concert I was ready to agree with him. The most exciting aspect of the performance was that it literally was unique. The piece is structured out of musical measures that repeat for as long as Philip Glass wants them to, so when it was time to move on, he would very ostentatiously bow his head at the synthesizer to his colleagues. This meant that they were to go onto the next variation after repeating the present phrase two more times. (I think I've got that right.)
Since I have a low tolerance for boredom, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to survive this minimalist marathon but the longer it went, the more absorbing it became. I also liked how much of the piece sounded like a strange mixture of prog rock, East Indian music, and klezmer. The rest of the audience seemed to feel the same way because there was only a minor exodus during the intermission after Part 9.
The performance had become a serious event and it was fun to watch the serious Glass worshipers, such as the new head of the San Francisco Art Commission Luis Cancel (above), enjoying themselves so thoroughly.
Plus, everyone who was anyone seemed to be there, including Charlise the Opera Tattler who was not convinced. "It reminds me of cotton candy," she told her horrified companion.
My only complaint was that the sound mix was bad, with too much keyboard and not enough of the wind and brass instruments coming through. Also, the amplification was part of the soundscape but at times it was a bit hot and annoying. It didn't allow for any soft-to-loud dynamics at all.
I started to flag during Part 11, but Eric the Canadian was right. Part 12 was a stunning finale, and Lisa Bielawa (above) sang her twelve tones awesomely.
The entire ensemble, in fact, was superb. This music may sound simple but it's fiendishly difficult to play, and getting to watch its composer perform it with such an amazing musical group felt like a privilege. The piece itself felt like Ur-Glass, where he had finally found his voice and was experimenting with it fearlessly, and before his style became something of a formula. SF Performances should be thanked for not playing it safe and bringing it to San Francisco.
The Legion of Honor Museum opened on Armistice Day in 1924, dedicated to the dead California soldiers of World War One.
It was constructed on the highest hill of Lincoln Park, San Francisco's first municipal golf course, which opened with three holes in 1902 and expanded over the next 15 years to 18 holes. The course was free to the public, by the way, until it became too popular and a $2/month fee was initiated in the 1920s.
The golf course was built over Potter's Field, which was San Francisco's 19th century public cemetery, with ethnic enclaves from Serbian to Chinese. Supposedly, all the graves were transferred to Colma ten miles south, but when the museum went through a retrofit in the mid-1990s, hundreds of skeletons were uncovered. In other words, there are a lot of ghosts still hanging about.
The museum was built with money from the Spreckels robber baron family, by the low-born Alma Charlotte Corday le Normand de Bretteville from the Sunset district. She was a nude artist's model (she can still be seen on the top of the Dewey monument in Union Square) who managed to trap the syphilitic Adolph Spreckels, who was twice her age, into marriage.
The Spreckels fortune started with his father, German immigrant Claus Spreckels, who opened a brewery in 1856 in San Francisco where he made a bundle. This was invested in California and Hawaiian real estate that eventually turned into a sugar monopoly, after which the family interests spread octopus-like into railways, publishing, and oil companies.
The "Artistic Luxury" exhibit uses the 1900 World's Fair in Paris as an excuse to put together the Russian Faberge, the American Tiffany and the French Lalique, who were the period's pre-eminent creators of objects d'art for grotesquely rich people around the world. 1890-1910, which is the arbitrary time demarcation for this exhibit, was also the heyday of Anarchism where the restless masses were regularly assassinating industrialists and heads of state with abandon.
The exhibit doesn't acknowledge any of that latter history. On the wall signage about the various "patrons" of all this decorative art, we are told about the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, and also about "Gilded Age Americans," but there is no mention of the Potter's Field ghosts who died working to make these people rich.
About half of the pieces in the exhibit are extraordinarily beautiful, with one Art Noveau cigarette case making me want to take up smoking again. After encountering one too many tasteless incarnations of conspicuous consumption, though, the whole thing started feeling like silver-coated, jewel-encrusted shit. In that sense, it's a perfect show for Dede Wilsey, President of the Board of Trustees.
