The principal pleasure of last Thursday's performance of Handel's opera "Orlando" at Herbst Theatre was running into writing colleagues who have become friends in the last couple of years. The Opera Tattler, above, was enjoying herself tremendously because "Early Music," and especially Handel operas, are some of her favorite repertory in the entire world. "I'm still trying to adjust to nineteenth century music," she confessed once, and her fresh ears mixed with keen intelligence are part of the fun of reading her.
Janos Gereben, above, possesses the opposite of fresh ears but through some alchemy, he is still genuinely excited and passionate about music and culture in all its varieties, even after writing about it for decades. He's also opinionated and funny as hell, with more than a touch of the friendly pedagogue. "Did you see how Nic had the orchestra sit sideways in that tiny pit so we could see conductor and musicians in profile -- something you could get only standing in the wings? It was brilliant. And so was the tallest mezzo-soprano in the world, Diana Moore. Wasn't she something? Or didn't you notice that either?"
The performance was being given by the 30-year-old local institution, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under the baton of Music Director Nicholas McGegan, a British early music specialist who splits his time between European gigs, guest stints around the world, and San Francisco. He was definitely the highlight of the performance, which was being billed as "Orlando's Madness." Unfortunately, I wasn't as thrilled as either the Tattler or Janos or Axel, and wondered if it was just my mood (exhausted).
However, I read grumpy Joshua Kosman's review at SFGate and agreed with every word so I guess it wasn't just me. (Photo above is the artist David Barnard rather than Mr. Kosman.) The tall, young British countertenor William Towers as Orlando was beautiful to watch onstage but the voice was of the occasional hooting variety which makes me not want to listen to countertenors. My favorite of the singers was the "world's tallest mezzo," Diana Moore as a Moorish man, Medoro, and would love to hear her again.
Civic Center Plaza on Wednesday and Thursday was the site of a publicity event called "The Forgotten Children" Campaign, consisting of 433 cardboard cutouts of children, representing the average number of kids who are put into San Francisco's foster care system each year.
Unfortunately, the central plaza in Civic Center is often a wind tunnel, particularly at this time of year, so the children were flying away, even with gallon plastic jugs of Crystal Geyser anchoring them to the ground.
By Thursday afternoon, the organizers had pretty much given up and were simply holding down the props horizontal to the ground with the Crystal Geyser anchors.
The national organization behind the event is called CASA, which is an acronym for Court Appointed Special Advocates. It was started in Seattle in 1977 by Superior Court Judge David Soukop:
"[He was concerned about trying to make decisions on behalf of abused and neglected children without enough information. He conceived the idea of appointing community volunteers to speak up for the best interests of these children in court. He made a request for volunteers; 50 citizens responded, and that was the start of the CASA movement. Today, there are more than 68,000 advocates serving in 1,018 state and local program offices nationwide."
The San Francisco branch started in 1991, and it consists of a professional staff enabling a network of trained volunteers who become individual advocates in court for children lost in a maze of police, social workers, foster parents, and problematic biological family.
Before its engagement in Atlanta next week, The "Forgotten Children" campaign moved on to Union Square on Friday, where there was perfect weather. I hope they picked up some new volunteers.
This Monday evening at the recently bailed out San Francisco Gay, Etc. Community Center at Market and Octavia, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club met for a members' election on their upcoming official election slate card.
You could vote for Option 1, which was the short slate already determined by the club, or you could vote for Option 3, which allowed you to make all your own choices in a very long form, and there was Option 2, which was some kind of mixture of both but nobody could quite explain it to me.
Part of the San Francisco election campaign process is meeting up with local Democratic clubs who represent niche political agendas for neighborhoods, ethnic/cultural assemblages, and affinity groups like the Alice B. Toklas Club which is currently claiming to represent gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders such as Keith Baraka (above right) and Theresa Sparks (above left). The two are running for the Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC, sounding like an acronym from the old Soviet Union) and Supervisor of District Six, respectively.
The Alice B. Toklas Club was formed in 1972 by the pioneering gay political junkie Jim Foster as the first officially chartered Democratic club to advocate for gay rights issues. The eponymous allusion to Gertrude Stein's lifetime lesbian partner, Alice B. Toklas, turned out to have very little to do with actual lesbians and more to do with a closeted name game for insiders.
According to an extensive, wonderfully evenhanded history of the club by Nathan Purkiss:
"The original 20 members of the Club chose “Alice B. Toklas” because the name served as a code to protect the confidentiality of members. Saying you were a “member of Alice” was like saying “I’m a friend of Dorothy” – only gay people would know that the “Alice” club referred to gay people."
There were early alliances with California Assemblyman Willie Brown, Jr. and Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, and those relationships with those old, increasingly powerful and inevitably corrupt politicians have marked the group ever since as the Insiders' Club, as opposed to the Harvey Milk Democratic Club, which bills itself as "The home for SF's queer left."
In truth, there's quite a bit of crossover between both clubs, except when they're fighting furiously over a candidate (Willie Brown Jr. versus Tom Ammiano for Mayor, for instance). The Superior Court Judge candidate Michael Nava (on the right) is one of the few who has the early support of both groups in this June's election, and he was at the meeting to pay his respects after a very long work day.
Meanwhile, without knowing any of this history, I was asking random middle-aged men, "So, are you a conservative lesbian?" The first response to this question was hilarious: "We prefer to call ourselves moderates," he said, not objecting to the L-word for a second.
Just to clarify, the comment didn't come from either my public access TV buddy Glenn (above) or from Ron Dudum (pictured below), who was making a last-ditch attempt for an endorsement for the DCCC. Dudum is principally known for losing a recent Supervisor's election in a ranked-choice nail-biter to Ed Jew, who is currently in federal prison after extorting tapioca businesses. Dudum, meanwhile, is trying to overturn ranked-choice voting in the courts.
What I found most interesting was that the successful local politicians who were there to make deals and massage egos, besides the openly gay ones, were all Chinese-Americans.
Board President David Chiu (above) was present for a Q&A with the crowd as was the "moderate" Carmen Chu (below) from the Sunset.
Fiona Ma, promised for a celebrity appearance, couldn't attend at the last minute but her aide was stolidly handing out flyers extolling her gay rights credentials at the entranceway to the Ceremonial Room. I have long contended that if San Francisco's gays/lesbians and Chinese-Americans could partner up, they could easily wrest control away from the very old-fashioned mafia that has run San Francisco for decades. Whether they would be any better at governing things is a completely different question.
On paper, this week's program at the San Francisco Symphony looked iffy. The concert started with that overplayed warhorse, the Grieg Piano Concerto from 1869-1895, and continued with Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony, an hour-long mixture of grotesque bombast and depression written in the midst of World War Two. I had heard the latter live about thirty years ago performed by the Oakland Symphony conducted by the late Calvin Simmons, and so hated the experience that it put me off Shostakovich for years. People grow older, though, tastes change, and Shostakovich's music is getting better with each passing year, so I decided to give the piece another chance. The happy result was the best concert of the symphony season so far, and one of the greatest live performances I've ever heard.
This was due to a pair of young Eastern Europeans working mostly out of England, the 34-year old Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko (above right) and the 30-year-old Macedonian pianist Simon Trpceski (above left), who performed the Grieg poetically and without a trace of the humdrum. The music sounded fresh and surprising, which is saying something in a piece this familiar from daily broadcasts on classical music stations.
This still didn't quite prepare one for the superb conducting and playing in the Shostakovich symphony which could easily be an incoherent mess, but in this version had a dramatic pulse from the first note to the last. The long first movement starts with fifteen minutes of dark, melancholy music for strings that builds into a shrieking fortissimo midway through for the entire orchestra, and just when you don't think you can take the noise any longer, the music returns to the original quiet and melancholy, drifting off beautifully. This is followed by a short, lively fractured march, and a third movement that can only be called demented, with slashing minimalist rhythms bouncing from one part of the orchestra to another.
The fourth movement is a subdued reverie that sounds like a survey of the graves of the dead that morphs into a sweet final movement which basically seems to be saying "life goes on," not in any particularly triumphant way but in a savoring of life's small moments. Midway through this finale, the shrieking war theme returns, but subsides into one of the most beautifully performed quiet endings I have heard in Davies Hall. The audience, or at least those members who hadn't left during the difficult music, were also wonderful, letting the final pianissimos evaporate into pure silence for a good fifteen seconds at the end.
This was live music at its best, with dynamic contrasts that are impossible to capture on a recording, and a young conductor in Vasily Petrenko who could lead the music simply as music, without all the decades of World War II and Cold War historical baggage plastered upfront in the foreground. The performance was a revelation.
