The San Francisco Symphony is winding down its long regular season with a Beethoven festival through the month of June, starting off with a multimedia staging of the composer's Missa Solemnis. The production is very divisive, with some people loving it like me, and others despising the movement, video, lighting, and spatial sound effects involved with performers positioned all over Davies Hall.
The staging by James Darrah offered non-narrative hints of Catholic processionals and recessionals that were graceful, mysterious and surprising. The scenic design by Darrah collaborators Emily Anne MacDonald and Cameron Jaye Mock was striking and effective, while the lighting design by David Finn was exquisite. The hyperactive video design by Finn Ross was fun, though the images occasionally devolved into the familiar trap of looking like antique screensavers, and it was a relief when the final third of the performance was accompanied by the single cross of light above.
I should probably mention here that Beethoven is not one of my favorite composers and the universal worship of his Great Artistic Genius leaves me cold. There are a few pieces of his that I love, though, such as his opera Fidelio which will also be part of this festival with soprano Joelle Harvey and tenor Brandon Jovanovich above in the cast. On Wednesday, their gorgeous voices projected easily through Davies Hall, and they moved elegantly while singing Missa Solemnis from memory.
I listened to various versions of Missa Solemnis on YouTube ahead of time (Thielemann the clear favorite) and was prepared for a revelation, but the live performance did not do it. For one thing, the marvelous San Francisco Symphony Chorus was too darned loud, and I started to feel bludgeoned about two thirds of the way through. This is a minority opinion, though, and the fault is probably mine. According to Georgia Rowe, Lisa Hirsch, and Janos Gereben, Michael Tilson Thomas offered one of the greatest conducting jobs in his 20 years as Music Director of the orchestra.
There is one more chance this Saturday evening to see and hear a performance, which also includes bass-baritone Shenyang and mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke above as two of the wandering soloists. Sasha's voice sounded so creamy it made you want to return across the street hear her again in Berlioz's Les Troyens at the Opera House. June is turning into a very rich musical month on Grove Street.
Well, that was fun, and less stressful than the previous three suspensefests. Since the Golden State Warriors only seem to win these Finals games when I am watching them live at the Pilsner Inn, I returned to the pub this evening, and it worked.
On the way home to Civic Center on Muni, there was a contingent of Cleveland Cavaliers fans being trash talked mercilessly by a friend who was holding up a "Cleveland Sucks" banner. As we all got off at City Hall, the Cleveland fan said, "Oh hell, they might as well change the colors on that building to black and orange tomorrow because that's just ridiculous."
The 78-year-old Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit brought along a new toupee and a wonderful musical program at the San Francisco Symphony last week, focusing on French composer Maurice Ravel sounding Spanish with his 1905 Alborada del gracioso and Spanish composer Manuel de Falla sounding French in the 1916 Nights in the Gardens of Spain.
After the sumptuous, short Ravel curtain raiser on Saturday evening, Javier Perianes above was the piano soloist for the three-movement impressionistic work by De Falla. A friend disparaged the piece by calling it a subpar Rachmaninoff Fifth Piano Concerto, but I enjoyed the music and the pianist.
The second half was devoted to Ravel's 1907 one-act opera, L'heure espagnole, based on a risqué French sex farce about a Spanish wife who needs to have a scratch itched by someone other than her husband, the clockmaker Torquemada. During the hour he is away on municipal duties, she tries to have an assignation with the poet Gonzalve but complications ensue when a delivery man/muleteer is told to wait around the shop for an hour, and a rich, lecherous old banker also shows up with sexual shenanigans on his mind. The gorgeous mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard above sang the unashamed wife lusciously while John Mark Ainsley on her right was amusing as the would-be lover more interested in reciting poetry than actually kissing.
The punchline and happy ending of the opera occurs when Concepcion, our heroine, finally realizes that the narcissism of a poet and the lechery of a fat old rich man is trumped by the muleteer Ramiro, with his beautiful biceps and sweet, accommodating soul. (Pictured above are Jean-Paul Fouchecourt as Torquemada, Jena-Luc Ballestra as Ramiro, and David Wilson-Johnson as the banker.) The cast projected well over the huge orchestra with wonderful French diction, and they were good, funny actors who seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. The orchestra accompaniment was consistently brilliant, with skittish parlando musical lines bursting into lyricism unexpectedly.
The next day, the San Francisco Opera opened its summer season with Hector Berlioz's five-hour, rarely performed masterpiece Les Troyens (The Trojans). I joined fellow musical blogging buddies Charlise Tiee and Terence Shek above in balcony standing room, and the three of us were enchanted and emotionally overwhelmed by the ambition and sheer beauty of the opera based on Virgil's Aeneid. The leading singers Bryan Hymel, Susan Graham, and Anna Caterina Antonacci were extraordinary, and Brian Mulligan and Sasha Cooke were luxury casting in smaller roles. They joined a huge, accomplished ensemble and a 90-person chorus who sang their hearts out. The orchestra under former SF Opera Music Director Donald Runnicles was astonishing all afternoon, making even the dumb ballets absorbing because the music was so well played. The David McVicar production from London's Covent Garden is surprisingly clunky, setting Acts 1, 2, and 5 in vaguely 19th century warlike settings and Acts 3 and 4 in a North African diorama that never made much sense. The intention seemed to be about "making a strong statement" that war is bad and love is good, but at least the production didn't get in the way of the characters and their stories.
This was the first time I had heard the opera live after listening to the Colin Davis recording for 40 years, and the music sounded even better in the opera house than I had hoped. In fact, I am still vibrating from the performance two days later. The last 30 minutes of Act IV, starting with a tenor's paean to the goddess Ceres and ending with the gentlest, sweetest and sexiest love duet ever written, had me dissolved in blubbering tears, barely able to make it down the stairs to intermission. For once, the marketing slogan "once in a lifetime" is not hyperbole because Les Troyens is a grand, rare, intense undertaking. So I will be returning again on Friday evening when there is a new singer rotating in as Cassandra, and you will probably see me there during other performances too if you are lucky enough to snag a ticket.
An exhibit of 28 contemporary Chinese artists collected by the Rubell Family out of Miami has just opened at the Asian Art Museum. The Rubells are an odd, interesting clan who have been buying art from mostly undiscovered contemporary artists since the 1960s, and who now have their own museum in Miami to house it all. (Photo above is from the press preview on Wednesday morning, where Mera Rubell was being greeted by Museum Director Jay Xu in the foreground while guest curator Allison Harding is with Don Rubell in the background.)
If the last name sounds familiar, it is probably because Don's late brother, Steve Rubell, founded the infamous, celebrity-studded Studio 54 discotheque in New York with Ian Schrager in the 1970s. Those two eventually went to prison for tax evasion in 1980, and bounced back onto the scene as hipster hoteliers in Manhattan before Steve died of AIDS at age 45 in 1989. In a great article by Diane Solway at W Magazine, she quotes the patriarch, “Everyone thinks our inheritance from Steve accelerated the collecting,” Don said. “But he died during a recession, so it’s not the amount people think.”
In the early 1990s, the clan which included son Jason and daughter Jennifer, made their way to Miami. Jason became a hotelier and was joined in the business by his father Don, who had retired from his medical practice. Meanwhile, Mera became a commercial real estate broker and they bought a 45,000 square foot warehouse that previously belonged to the US Drug Enforcement Agency which they turned into a public museum for their growing art collection. (Photo above is of Mera Rubell talking with Museum Deputy Director Dr. Pedro Moura Carvalho.)
According to Don and Mera, all art buying decisions have to be met with unanimous consensus within the family, or the sale is vetoed. At the press preview, Don sheepishly mentioned that the only time he ever bought something without asking anyone else in the family, "I had to return it two days later which is the only time that has ever happened." Daughter Jennifer dropped out of the art buying family cartel in 2009 to become a conceptual artist herself in Manhattan, while the hotel business continues to fuel Don, Mera and Jason's art acquisitions.
Don and Mera made their first visit to China in 2001. "We came down to the hotel lobby to speak with various writers and intellectual friends of our Chinese host, and we saw a plane crashing into the World Trade Center on the television. We honestly thought it was a movie at first." They weren't impressed with the art they saw and bought nothing, but returned in 2006 and visited the studios of over 100 Chinese contemporary artists during five separate buying sprees over the next six years. (Photo above and below are of Huang Yong Ping's 2007 Well and what's inside one of them.)
In the W Magazine article, Solway writes:
"The visibility they give artists strengthens the Rubells’ bargaining power, because their exhibitions can raise profiles and prices. Since the Rubells rarely sell works, they are not the immediate beneficiaries of artists’ increasing values, but the family is sometimes criticized for the kind of bartering it does. Young artists are eager for the Rubells’ imprimatur, which can put pressure on their gallerists to agree to the Rubells’ requests to buy in bulk or at steeply discounted rates. “Young dealers are afraid to say no to them,” a veteran said.
Whatever their methods of collection, two years ago the Rubell Family Collection in Miami put together the fruits of this Asian project and gave it the prosaic title of 28 Chinese, for the simple reason that there were 28 Chinese artists represented. "If we had put it together now," Don added, "the number could be 29 or 31." The results are scattershot, but there are some great pieces in the show, above all the exquisitely large sculpture in the North Court made out of paper, bamboo and cotton thread called Boat by Zhu Jinshi.
You can walk through the sculpture and the temptation to touch the huge, delicate piece is almost overwhelming. The beleaguered security guards are being quite gentle in telling people, "we want to touch it too, but please don't," even though the cotton strings sustaining the piece look like harps that demand to be fondled and played.
There are also a number of disturbing photographs, including 1/2 by Zhang Yuan and Tattoo II by Qiu Zhije...
...along with a whole series of alienated individual guys by Chen Wei, including Honey in the Broadcast above (detail).
A large gallery has been modernized and is devoted to up-to-the-minute abstractions that could come from anywhere in the world, including the gorgeous, computer-generated Liberation No. 1 by Liu Wei.
In a welcome development, various pieces have been stealthily installed in the ancient Chinese art galleries and they work wonderfully, including The Death of Marat above by He Xiangyu, which is a sculpture of the artist Ai Weiwei with his face on the floor. The room surrounding the piece is filled with artwork excavated from Chinese tombs, which only adds to the shock value of the prone figure.
History Observed: Joseph Bueys & Mao Zedong by Li Zhanyang also looks perfectly happy in the ancient Chinese lacquered furniture room. There is no extra charge to attend the special exhibit, and Sunday the 7th is a free admission day, so get yourself to the Asian Art Museum. The exhibit is well worthwhile.
