The new signage at the front of the Asian Art Museum is subdued, colorful and beautiful.
On Thursday evening Creative Impact, a newish organization combining professionals from arts nonprofits in the Bay Area along with arts educators, held their third annual networking shindig at Samsung Hall at the museum.
There were harried parents, a few cute costumed kids, earnest educators, government bureaucrats, and arts administrators all thrown into one room which could have been awful but was instead charming.
It was worth attending if only to see Rhodessa Jones in her red hat, posing above with the Bayview singer Martin Luther McCoy.
Part of the pleasure was that the event was a catered affair, with simple but delicious food, and there was also free wine. Quentin Crisp would have been seriously pleased. Plus, you didn't really have to listen to any of the boring speeches from the stage if you kept your voice down. There were plenty of smart, fascinating people to talk with, such as (left to right above) Lucy Lin, Interim Program Director at the SF Arts Commission, Christina Lim who is the Director of Education among many other duties at San Francisco Performances, and Charles McNeal of the San Francisco Ballet.
It was an interesting cross-pollination among people interested in playing creatively with art amongst children.
After the speeches, there was a variety of entertainment, including the talented student-recently-turned-professional tenor Brian Jagde above, singing the famous Act 3 aria from Puccini's Tosca, which he will be performing at the San Francisco Opera in November and December. Having recently decided that I am not going to hear, see or participate in another Tosca ever again, this was close to a cue for exiting.
The most publicly valuable manifestation of this initiative is a wide-ranging web calendar of various arts events that overlap with education, and it is already a fascinating compendium (click here). However, they are featuring my favorite typo in some time, advertising an event at SFMOMA on Saturday the 15th called Cindy Shermal Special Saturday for Teachers. It will be hard to look at any Cindy Sherman signage after this without pronouncing the name as Cindy Shermal and thinking, "they must have changed it at Ellis Island."
This year's edition of San Francisco Opera's free Sunday afternoon concert in Golden Gate Park was exquisite. The weather was beautiful, the music good, and the dozen singers excellent to fabulous. Even General Director David Gockley's plummy-voiced introductions were brief and to the point.
The SF Opera supernumeraries usually have their own large blanketed posse area close to the stage, headed by Sally Warren and Irene Bechtle who would show up early to snag the space, but they were nowhere to be seen this year. This meant there were beautiful strays such as Jenny Jirousek above wandering around looking for their gang who didn't seem to have shown up.
We arrived late for the concert, just as baritone Joo Won Kang was singing the Di Provenza il Mar aria from Verdi's La Traviata. Though it was hard to tell through the speaker system and wind, the aria sounded spectacular. Also taking top honors were the opening night Rigoletto stars Aleksandra Kurzak, Željko Lučić and Andrea Silvestrelli singing Una Voce Poco Fa from The Barber of Seville, a tragic aria from Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, and The Slander Aria La Calumnia from The Barber of Seville, respectively.
We were also homeless without Irene and Sally, so we found a spot of lawn near the back at the edge of the pavement walkway which provided some fascinating people watching. When we arrived, I asked a middle-aged woman if I could borrow her program, and she hissed, "You can buy them over there!" while pointing at a San Francisco Chronicle tentlet on the periphery. Thirty seconds later, the young woman above handed me her program with a smile, and in exchange I shared our bottle of white wine. She and her boyfriend were from Zurich, and she was doing research for her PhD thesis about English usage between different generations in San Francisco's Chinatown.
After intermission an open space was grabbed by the gay man above with his two little dogs and his two female friends, and they started jabbering in the most banal way imaginable through the rest of the concert. When the music became louder, their voices would do the same as if they were at a dance club, thoroughly missing the point of the afternoon. Not wanting to make a scene, or commit murder, or listen to Puccini, we left early, still vibrating with the loveliness of the day.
"You're looking great," I said to the woman above, after almost tripping over her dress at the corner of Grove and Gough on Friday evening. "And you've just made my night," she replied, telling me her name was Elizabeth.
"This has been on my bucket list for a long time," she explained. "Not going to the parties, but just attending the opera on opening night."
This was about the 30th San Francisco Opera season opener for me, either with a cheap standing room ticket or onstage as a supernumerary. From that long experience, I can confidently state that Opening Night is invariably a fun public party but tends to provide a reliably lousy audience for a full-length opera.
This is either because of unfamiliarity with the art form or because many of the society patrons are already tipsy on arrival from their pre-performance parties and are waiting impatiently for intermission and the post-performance parties to follow. (Opera House concierge Martin Dias is pictured above.) This was too bad for the performers at last night's Rigoletto, who were almost uniformly great, led by music director Nicola Luisotti in the best sounding version of the Verdi opera I have ever heard live.
Serbian baritone Željko Lučić has a perfect voice for the title role, and he was matched by the Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak who has a much darker, richer sound than is usual for the role of Gilda. Their duets were the highlight of the show. The Sardinian tenor Francesco Demuro playing that serial seducer, the Duke of Mantua, wasn't even remotely in the same league, but the great, growly Andrea Silvastrelli as the assassin Sparafucile almost made up for him. The male chorus of nasty courtiers was unusually sharp as were all the male comprimario parts sung by Robert Pomakov, Daniel Montenegro, Joo Won Kang, and Ryan Kuster.
The old Mark Lamos production designed by Michael Yeargan is still ridiculous, with the Duke of Mantua's court hanging out in what looks to be the middle of a street, and the interior of Rigoletto's house looking like an unfurnished Manhattan loft. The staging by Harry Silverstein was fairly clumsy, and the substitution of dancers for the traditional slutty supernumerary women was not an improvement, but none of that much mattered because the musical performance was so good.
The major amusement of the evening was bumping into acquaintances who were nearly unrecognizable in their fancy duds, such as Helen above who I had not seen since she was wearing a Red Army soldier's uniform next to me onstage in Nixon in China this summer.
There was also the dubious pleasure of bumping into Willie Brown, Jr. above, San Francisco's own version of the licentious, power-wielding Duke of Mantua, as he squired his companion Sonya around. La donna è mobile, indeed.
A second set of principal singers open in the same production tonight and alternate with this cast for the rest of September. There's a free live telecast on the big screen at the San Francisco Giants Stadium this Saturday the 15th, but for superb sound the San Francisco Opera House is the place to be.
San Francisco's late summer weather went from its usual freezing Pacific foggy blasts to a hint of tropical hurricane this afternoon, climaxing in a double rainbow over the Giants baseball stadium this evening. I have no idea how the game has turned out for our late season, division leading team, but the apparition definitely feels like a Wiccan omen of some sort.
