As an antidote to the grey, foggy, and cold Memorial Day weekend in San Francisco where we probably won't see the sun for 72 hours, here are a few photos of the Patrick Dougherty sculptures in Civic Center on a sunny Thursday afternoon.
They are getting more enveloped with green every day, so of course they are being protested by San Francisco's metastatic Department of the Environment, via a professional consulting arborist with the Urban Forestry Council named Roy C. Leggitt III. (Click here for an article by Joshua Sabatini at the SF Examiner about the kerfluffle.)
Fortunately, Jill Manton at the San Francisco Art Commission wasn't buying it, and the artist chimed in with "haven't lost a tree yet" in the course of scores of outdoor sculptures he's created that involve living trees. Plus, if Mr. Leggitt had watched the sculptures go up in the middle of a two-week series of raging storms in February, he'd know that they were not risking the health of the sycamores in a high wind.
The loveliest part of living next to the tree houses is that they change their colors in every kind of light, and they are also being weathered by time and the elements. The new greenery feels like additional visual luxury.
This week's San Francisco Symphony program, with music director Michael Tilson Thomas back in the saddle, is a fascinating tour all over the map and emotional landscape. The first work was to be a world premiere by Mason Bates called "The B-Sides" followed by Sibelius' rarely heard Fourth Symphony, but for some reason their order was switched.
Though I'm a big Sibelius fan, this is a very gloomy, strange, inconclusive symphony and it seemed a depressing way to start a concert. The best parts were in the solo sections for cellist Peter Wyrick (above) who as usual was astonishingly good.
Both Cedric of SFist and Janos Gereben of the San Francisco Examiner (talking above) loved the performance, but that may just speak to their sophistication.
"The B-Sides" by Mason Bates (above) was a beautifully orchestrated set of five miniatures for large orchestra and electronics controlled by the composer's laptop which he was playing live. The piece sounded a bit like John Adams Goes to The Love Parade (dressed as an Astronaut), and it was thoroughly enjoyable, passing the only test I have for a new piece of music which is "Do I want to hear it again?"
After intermission, the 22-year-old Yuja Wang tackled Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto, which is fiendish in its demands. Next to me, Cedric whispered, "This is ridiculous," by which he meant amazing and flawless. Lang Lang better watch his back.
The program will be repeated Friday and Saturday evenings, and if you go tonight (Friday), there is going to be a post-concert birthday party in the upper terrace for me, with composer Mason Bates playing DJ. The symphony hasn't announced that this particular party is dedicated to yours truly, but that's only because they probably didn't want to embarrass me.
Two years after buying it, I have finally finished listening to the Brilliant Classics 155-CD box set of all the music written by J.S. Bach. The recordings are not only a major achievement, but they're also endlessly enjoyable, particularly the 60 CDs of the cantatas which were recorded in Holland over the course of two years.
According to a MusicWeb review of the set (click here for the whole thing):
In October 1999, the first boxes of these cantatas, each containing 5 CDs, appeared on the shelves of the Krudivat drug store chain in the Netherlands. Some 500 stores started selling Bach cantatas next to aspirin and film; on the surface, this can seem ridiculous. But, at the unprecedented price of DFL 14.95 per box - roughly $1.25 per CD - Dutch people became fans of Bach's cantatas. More than 100,000 copies of each box were sold in two years in the Netherlands alone, far more than most classical discs sell in the entire world. An amazing feat for such "obscure" music.
Pieter Jan Leusink, conductor of Holland Boys Choir and Netherlands Bach Collegium and artistic director of the Cantatas project, managed somehow, against all odds, to create a true best-seller out of what is arguably some of the finest music in the western world, but music which is generally considered to be "difficult".
So, after lending the Bach to my friend Ellen Toomey, it's time to listen to Stravinsky conducting all his music himself. Say what you want about cheap digital reproduction, but it certainly does allow for the distribution of amazing collections of music at insanely low prices. In that sense, we're in a new world.
