The 7th Annual Crunchies Awards, given to "recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year," took place at Davies Symphony Hall last night, with comedian John Oliver subversively hosting and masses of extra security to keep protestors away from the celebrants. There were awards given out to everything from "Sexiest Enterprise Startup" to "Venture Capitalist of the Year."
There was also a small protest in front of the Henry Moore statue at the corner of Van Ness and Grove where satirical "Crappies" were to be given out. Tommi Avicolli Mecca was giving a speech as we walked by decrying the subjugation of San Francisco by our techie overlords, pointing at a nearby Muni stop and announcing that $1 to use a public bus stop by private Google buses was an outrage.
Meanwhile, a long line of mostly white young men waited to enter the awards show and the after-party in the same location. There was no word on whether a mechanical bull was going to be part of the festivities (click here).
We all know that history repeats itself in cycles, but what feels new is how quickly this particular cycle has come full circle. San Francisco has gone from dot-com bust to overheated boom again within fifteen years, and the present moment is feeling very 1999 when the actual tech geniuses were suddenly outnumbered by newly arrived, affluent young people working in Marketing.
Shunted next to the protestors by security was the sweet young man above who wasn't part of either group. He was just trying to get word out about yet another startup, a website where you can organize your fabulous wardrobe online. Click here to check it out.
I went to Pebble Beach golf course for the first time on Wednesday, and the beauty of the place surpassed high expectations.
We drove down for the final practice round of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am tournament, a day before the heavens opened for the opening day of the event on Thursday. Its scheduling was probably the final, tipping event that caused the rain gods to finally give us precipitation this weekend.
The annual event started as a party hosted by Bing Crosby, whose Pebble Beach home above sat on the 13th fairway. A few years after his death in 1977, the tournament went corporate, and the Hollywood celebrities playing alongside golf pros were mostly replaced by CEOs.
There are still a few golf-mad entertainment figures who play, including saxophone player Kenny G above, who is standing in a sand trap on the 3rd hole above during a five-hole Wednesday "Celebrity Tournament."
Kid Rock, the Michigan rocker/rapper above, skipped the celebrity tourney and played a practice round alongside his pro partner John Daly below.
The two have been drinking buddies for over a decade, probably not the best pairing since Daly has spent his career in and out of rehab while Kid Rock has been arrested multiple times on alcohol-related assaults.
I spent most of the afternoon following Australian golfer Geoff Ogilvy above around the course, partly because he looks like a taller, lankier Jake Gyllenhall. In person, he turned out to be charming.
Ogilvy's practice group included Scottsdale real estate and golf course developer Gregg Tryhus above left and Fox TV newscaster Brett Baier above right.
Pebble Beach is a public place where the 1% can feel comfortable and their political brethren are welcomed with open arms, such as Jeb Bush and Condoleeza Rice, who both played as amateurs in the tournament.
I had always thought the buildings you see on TV broadcasts from Pebble Beach were part of the public Lodge facilities, but that was a mistake. There are 46 dwellings scattered along the course and they are all privately owned by a lucky segment of the superrich, including Charles Schwab. (Click here for a Golf.com profile of who owns them and click here for an amusing real estate tour by Deej.)
Walking along with me was a delightful couple in their 70s who were following their amateur son. I Googled the gentleman's name later and found that he had recently been accused of sexual molestation by teenage boys in decades past while he put them under sedation as a dentist. The state's Supreme Court threw out the lawsuit against him because it was past the statute of limitations, but it was still shocking to find out that the nice old heterosexual dentist/real estate developer was possibly a sexual stalker of underage teenage males in his spare time. By the way, Bing Crosby wasn't the nicest person behind closed doors either, if eldest son Gary Crosby's memoir is to be believed.
I don't care. The golf course is a marvel and if money ever enters my life again, I can hardly wait to play it.
Two different concerts at Davies Symphony Hall last weekend were infused with composers and musicians from the Baltic Sea. (Did you know that Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki and St. Petersburg are on the same latitude and are essentially Baltic Sea neighbors? Neither did I.)
Saturday evening the Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä above led the San Francisco Symphony in an eclectic program of Sibelius, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky. The concert started with a Technicolor tone poem, Night Ride and Sunset, from early in Sibelius' career, and finished with his late period Symphony No. 6. According to an interview with Vanska by Jeff Kaliss at SFCV, the programmers at the SF Symphony requested the latter since it had not been played at Davies for over 20 years. Vänskä described what the strange, fragmentary symphony sounds like to him:
"The music reminds me of clouds, which out there we can see very well; in a way, they’re very concrete, but we cannot touch them. They are going away with the wind, and we don’t have a real connection. There are many people who believe they are always seeing frozen lakes and snow and forests in Sibelius’ music, and I like to be polite and say, “That’s good to hear.”
Soon after writing this symphony, Sibelius went silent for thirty years until his death in 1957 at age 92. He had lost his muse, rather like Rachmaninoff after he emigrated from Russia to the United States after the Communist Revolution. Rachmaninoff only published six works from 1918 to his death from melanoma in 1943, and one of them is the popular blockbuster, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which was performed at Davies by the latest virtuosic wunderkind, the 22-year-old Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov (above right). I thought the performance was a bit chaotic, with the orchestra going in one direction and Trifonov another, but it certainly wasn't boring. My concert companion Charlie Lichtman, who actually knows something about playing the piano, wrote: "Brilliant rendition of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini last night. Trifonov nearly tore the ivory off the keys, demonstrating passion and artistry in his sublime and technically 'in the zone' performance. Hunched over the piano like the Peanuts character Schroeder, he wowed the audience, got an extended standing 'o', and proceeded to dazzle again with an encore (from The Firebird).
The piano fantasia on Stravinsky's Firebird ballet was completely sensational, and thoroughly upstaged a performance by the orchestra's wind and brass sections of the same composer's 1920 Symphonies of Wind Instruments, with its ten minutes of Debussy style austerity.
The following evening, on Super Bowl Blowout Sunday, there was a performance by Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica. Kremer is a legendary, 66-year-old Latvian violinist who left Russia for Germany in 1980, before perestroika. In 1996, he formed a young persons' chamber orchestra consisting of some of the best string players from the small, newly independent Baltic republics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuiania. They tour the world and record extensively, concentrating mostly on 20th century and contemporary music.
Their program of Weinberg, Shostakovich and Britten sounded fascinating on paper, although Shostakovich's Anti-formalist Gallery was canceled because of the sudden death of the young wife of the bass soloist Alexei Mochalof. This made for some last-minute shuffling and the concert started with an orchestration of Shostakovich's Violin Sonata with Kremer as soloist in an exquisite performance by the entire ensemble. They followed with Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, which is a piece I thought I knew but obviously didn't, since I mistook it for Weinberg's Symphony No. 10. Never having heard any of Weinberg's music, I was amazed at how sophisticated and lively it sounded until Janos Gereben clued me in to my mistake.
Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) was from a Polish Jewish family that mostly perished in the concentration camps during World War Two. He fled Warsaw for the Soviet Union in 1939 and eventually became a friend and disciple of Shostakovich in Moscow. The second half of the concert started with his Concertino for Violin and Strings, with Kremer above as soloist again, and the performance was so rich and perfectly satisfying that we left before the Symphony No. 10 began, feeling musically stuffed. Reading between the lines of Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman's review, we probably made the right decision.
The Magik*Magik orchestra was conceived over five years ago by Minna Choi as a classically trained ensemble to work as a studio group for rock musicians at singer/songwriter John Vanderslice's Tiny Telephones recording studio in the Mission District. However, they jumped into live performance soon after their formation with a concert in Herbst Theatre in August 2008 above, playing the music of John Adams, Arvo Part, Fred Frith, and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, who was in the audience.
Since that concert, various configurations of the Magik*Magik orchestra have performed on over 100 projects. According to their website, "Our varied collaborations include: 30+ recording projects, 40+ live performances, 2 film scores, 3 dance projects, 1 video game score, 5 weddings, 10+ fundraiser galas, 2 national tours, 3 online features, 6 children's programs, and 4 festival appearances." To celebrate all that successful activity, the group held an anniversary concert at Oakland's downtown Fox Theatre above last Friday called When We Were Young.
The rich evening was structured in three sets, with the orchestra accompanying a long list of rock stars they have worked with in the last five years. They were joined by the Oakland-based Pacific Boychoir Academy who were used for almost half the song arrangements, and whose brilliant musicianship and enthusiasm under director Kevin Fox just about stole the show.
The concert started with the chorus singing along with cellist Zoe Keating and the orchestra conducted by Oakland Symphony Music Director Michael Morgan in a beautiful arrangement of the Tears for Fears song, Mad World. The orchestra then showed off their classical chops with an excerpt from Terry Riley's In C. "These are the children of Terry Riley and John Adams" popped into my head more than once during the evening, as the amplified orchestra played brilliantly in just about every style imaginable.
In a 2011 interview by Ben Van Houten with Minna Choi at BayBridged (click here), she responds to his question about the challenge of collaborating with rock bands:
"The biggest challenge that we had to find a solution to early on is that most of the bands we work with don't read music, and most of the classical musicians we work with, don't improvise. So my job was to create systems that made it easy for both types of musicians to work together as seamlessly as possible. I'm happy that we've developed some really great tricks to help each group record together super efficiently and musically. I think bands have to be eased into the orchestral thing kind of in stages. There's a level of trust that has to be built up between the band, the arranger and the players."
Choi has certainly been successful in creating that trust. As the Magik*Magik website notes: "To date, we have worked with 61 artists; of those, 41 had never worked with orchestra before. Of those 41 new artists, half returned within one year to work with the orchestra again [including The Dodos rock group above]."
John Vanderslice cohosted as an entertaining emcee, where he announced, "there is a terror for an indie rock band to work with Magik*Magik Orchestra, we’re all talking about it offstage.” Tom Krell of the band How To Dress Well above left used his near-falsetto to magical effect in Suicide Dream I and continued with a sweet cover of Janet Jackson's Again.
Joining Krell as an audience favorite was Diana Gameros (above center) singing a Spanish language set and Zach Rogue (above right) of the indy band Rogue Wave whose gentle, slowed-down cover of the Buddy Holly song Everyday was possibly my favorite moment of the evening.
We didn't stay for the final set because it was 10:45 and BART beckoned, but for a detailed account of the concert by Mike Frash with a host of great photos by Sam Heller and Sterling Munksgard, click here for a post on the Showbams site. And if you'd like to see the orchestra in action, they will be playing a classical program of premieres by young composers at Old First Church this Saturday evening (click here for more info).
