Herbert Blomstedt (above right), the 85-year-old Conductor Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, started his annual two-week guest conducting stint Thursday afternoon. The large orchestra was playing together for the first time since their recent strike, with a new contract near but not yet ratified as of this writing. (Update: The 26-month contract was ratified this Saturday morning.) The program consisted of Wagner and Beethoven warhorses sandwiching a wild piece of music from 1963 called Poesis by the 92-year-old Swedish composer Ingvar Lidholm.
The Tristan und Isolde Prelude and Liebestod from the beginning and the end of that five-hour Wagner opera started the afternoon, and the Prelude was an exquisite reminder of how good Blomstedt is with this orchestra in certain composers' music. The Liebestod was similarly impressive, but an Isolde-less orchestral version doesn't work for me. The fat lady needs to sing, no matter how well the violins are taking her line in the reorchestration.
After the Wagner, the stage needed to be rearranged and a grand piano brought in from downstairs. This usually takes over fifteen minutes, which is not the stage crew's fault as much as it is the designer of the stage elevator which moves at a slow, Wagnerian pace. For the first time in my experience, the conductor used this down time to give an introductory lecture about Poesis that was equal parts amusing and instructive.
Though Blomstedt is known for his conservative style and choice of repertory, he also stays in touch with contemporary music and in fact conducted the premiere of Poesis in Stockholm in 1963. He started his introduction by telling us what not to listen for. "Do not expect any melodies, or pretty harmonies, or any identifiable rhythm. What you have instead are sounds that make interesting music." He then proceeded to imitate and sing all the strange sounds we would be hearing from the orchestra, and it was an extraordinary bit of mimicry. "The sandpaper percussion doesn't go whoosh-whoosh-whoosh like in a Latin dance band but is more like a stray mushroom in a forest that appears here and there without any discernible pattern. And I must warn you, near the end all the different sections of the orchestra build to a crescendo that is unbearably loud, but it doesn't last very long so don't worry about it."
During the introduction, he introduced the piano soloist Keisuke Nakagoshi above and said, "There is a long cadenza in the middle of the piece for piano that is mostly improvised, and Keisuke in rehearsal has been doing the most amazing things. He plays as much inside the piano as on the keyboard, and he can pluck a string in the piano and then echo it perfectly on the keyboard, which is almost impossible. I don't know how he does it."
The pianist and composer Keisuke Nakagoshi above was making his San Francisco Symphony debut after Robin Sutherland backed out of the assignment recently, and he was a perfect choice for music that requires a composer as much as a virtuoso pianist. I have been watching Keisuke for years at SF Conservatory concerts, as a rehearsal pianist with Opera Parallele, and as half of the twenty-fingered ZOFO duet. He's always struck me as something of a musical genius who can play anything and make it sound interesting. It was heartening to see such a successful debut on a large stage, as he let loose with forearm tone clusters, delicate piano string strumming, and everything in between. Plus, his modified Mohawk was rocking.
After intermission, the orchestra played a measured, beautiful version of Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Eroica. Though the predominantly elderly women who attend Thursday matinee concerts are a savvy, attentive audience, there are a few downsides, and one of them is the ubiquity of piercing little signals that are coming from hearing aids. As my friend Charlie wrote me, "The cacophony of hearing aid tones was unfortunate for the Wagner, actually fit right in for the Lindholm, but was downright maddening during the Beethoven, especially during the second funeral movement."
The Thrillpeddlers have revived another Cockettes musical, Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma, and the result is a piece of wildly entertaining, overstuffed fabulousness containing more glitter and upended 1930s movie cliches than seems possible. (Above are left to right Noah Haydon, Steven Satyricon and Dalton Goulette singing The Lunch Counter Song.)
The original hippie genderfuck troupe performed midnight shows briefly in the early 1970s at the Palace Movie Theatre in North Beach, whose empty husk is where the Central Subway dig is going to be disgorging equipment after the project burrows its way under Chinatown. Though most of the original Cockettes performers are dead either from AIDS, drug overdoses, old age, or other misfortunes, there are a few survivors, notably the three performers above (from left to right, Pam Tent, Scrumbly Koldewyn seated at the piano, and Rumi Missabu on top) who are all being featured in this revival.
Pam Tent above, playing Vedda Viper, published a well-received memoir in 2004 called Midnight at the Palace: My Life as a Fabulous Cockette. While with the troupe, she married the bisexual singer/composer Scrumbly Koldewyn in a famous Mount Tamalpais hippie wedding and they had a child christened Cactus, now in his early 40s. When the troupe went to New York with Tinsel Tarts in a legendarily disastrous attempt at being stars in the Big Apple, she was seven months pregnant. (Click here for a lovely article by Edward Guthmann from the SF Chronicle in 2004).
Rumi above plays Brenda Breakfast who is discovered with fellow waitress starlets in Hollywood, and is then cast as a scary old witch doctor in a big-budget South Sea Islands film.
The heart and soul of the show is composer, accompanist and singer Scrumbly Koldewyn above right, dancing with Michael Soldier as "Auntie Social" while singing the duet When Petals Fall in Petaluma. The original show was a four-page outline with a few original songs by Koldewyn and "sampled" period songs. For this reimagining, Koldewyn has excavated his extensive songbook and inserted a couple dozen of his own choral production numbers, ballads, and novelty songs that are half worshipful and half parodies of 1930s standards.
The show starts off self-referentially with references to the 1971 New York disaster, and then jumps right into its first Ensemble production number, Ain't We Deluxe? As you might gather from the photo above, this reconstruction follows the Cockettes credo that there is no such thing as too much glitter or a costume that is too over-the-top.
The plot has something to do with the thespian Madge The Magnificent (above, played by Raya Light) and her mistreated personal servants who want to break into showbiz themselves.
Madge stomps off a movie set in Hollywood and after a magnificent cross-country Choo-Choo Train production number, goes to a party at Auntie Social's Manhattan penthouse where she insults Salvador Deli (Jim Toczyl) above.
This is probably a good place to mention that the show is so completely surrealistic that altering your consciousness with psychedelic drugs before attending might not be a bad idea. The original audiences certainly did so. Above is Steven Satyricon, one of the chorus boys in Banana Song, a filthy version of the same Carmen Miranda number used in Busby Berkeley's The Gangs All Here.
The climactic Pele Melee, slyly sending up both Throw a Virgin into The Volcano movies and Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, is an hilarious scene that is trumped by the finale where everyone goes to hell and sings and dances, naked and clothed, The Hades Lowdown. You can't ask for much more than that.
The San Francisco Symphony strike was over almost before it seriously began, and I am not sure who is more relieved: the musicians, the support staff and management, or the listening public. (Editor's note: In fact, the musicians have not yet ratified their new contract, so this may be a temporary bit of good news.) Their first concerts this weekend since their three-week work stoppage began was a serendipitous bit of programming, starting with Ave verum corpus, a three-minute prayer for chorus, strings and organ that Mozart wrote in the last months of his life in 1791. It was a gift for Anton Stoll, the choirmaster and organist at Baden where Mozart's wife Constanze was taking the waters at the local spa.
This was followed by Mozart's Symphony #39, in a beautiful performance conducted by the French Canadian Bernard Labadie. If you are an artist and not feeling particularly appreciated, consider the case of Mozart's last three symphonies, which he whipped out in succession during the summer of 1788 in the hope of performing them at a new casino, a concert series that probably never materialized if his letters of the period confessing total monetary indebtedness are any indication. In other words, the three works that are the linchpin symphonies in Western musical history between Haydn, who created the form, and Beethoven, were probably never heard live by their own composer.
Mozart is tricky, in that you either understand him instinctively as a listener and musician, or you don't. His music is deceptively simple, simultaneously breezy and deep, and it requires a sympathetic performer to bring out both sides at the same time. Labadie fulfilled that description, and even more excitingly, so did the reduced orchestra, who don't often work under great Mozart conductors. (As much as I admire music directors Tilson Thomas and Blomstedt before him, Mozart was never one of their strengths.) Most of Symphony #39 sounds like Haydn or early Beethoven, but the second slow movement is both so simple and so unearthly beautiful that it reminds you in a good performance why Mozart is in a special category of his own.
The second half of the concert was Handel's hour-long, 1739 Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day for orchestra, organ, large chorus, and a tenor and soprano soloist. Saint Cecilia was a local cult among English poets who competed with each other in writing odes to the Patron Saint of Music in lyrics that were meant to be sung. John Dryden's version is the one that Handel used. It's almost an Adult's Guide to the Orchestra in that the vocal soloists interact explicitly with different individual instruments as they extol their particular powers, punctuated by exciting moments for the chorus and full orchestra.
It was joyful hearing the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus in action again because in my 40 years of listening to this ensemble, they have never sounded better, and their possible long absence felt like a serious loss. (Above is Ragnar Bohlin, chorus director.)
Saint Cecilia wasn't blessing everything about the performance because the soprano soloist Lydia Teuscher, who has the most to sing in this cantata, cancelled at the last minute with unspecified illness and was replaced by Cyndia Sieden. Though Ms. Sieden deserves every thanks for rushing in and saving the day, her performance was seriously inadequate next to the excellence of the orchestra, chorus and the tenor Nicholas Phan above. He was so good, and filled Davies Hall so easily with his small frame and huge voice, that we didn't want him to stop singing. He'll be performing as Fenton in Falstaff at the Portland Opera in May along with Susannah Biller and Thomas Glenn, two of my favorite former Adler artists, so if you're the Northwest, don't miss it.
