A little over three weeks ago police blocked sidewalk access on Larkin and Polk Streets surrounding the Bill Graham Auditorium, and huge air conditioning units were set up on the curbs.
Over the next month, there were a small phalanx of snarly private security guards and bored looking SFPD officers guarding the perimeter of the building, but none of them could say what they were doing. The SF Chronicle City Hall reporter Heather Knight's usual mode of investigative journalism is to play stenographer for official city spokespersons, but they stonewalled her when she asked what was going on, which seemed to arouse some vestigial journalistic curiosity. (Click here for the article.)
Ms. Knight finally printed unofficial rumors that the auditorium was to be closed for a month for a one-day product release by Apple Computer in early September, and wrote a few follow-up articles attempting to create a dust-up, but nobody cared.
At the blog 40 Going on 28, the Bill Graham closure struck the author as a perfect Allegory for the New San Francisco: "The tech industry so thoroughly owns and operates this town now that it can command total secrecy as it reconfigures a PUBLICLY OWNED THEATER and maybe even swaps out the fucking GLASSWORK to its own specs. We are all truly players on Apple's stage."
From every account I've read and trusted on the internet today, there was nothing particularly exciting about today's Apple product releases, but who knows what will emerge from today's showtime down the road? Everything feels anticlimactic after last week's Mr. Robot finale on television where the EVP of Technology for Evil Corp publicly told the truth for a change, then violently left the planet.
A month long survey of contemporary art owned by the Asian Art Museum has opened this weekend with the work of a couple of dozen artists, both local and global. The museum has free admission tomorrow (Sunday the 6th) and it is worth checking out.
At a press preview on Wednesday, one of my favorite painters in the world, Hung Liu, made an appearance along with a half dozen other artists.
I stumbled across a retrospective of her work earlier this year at the Palm Springs Art Museum, and was stunned by its combination of beauty and subversive power. Above is one of a 1996 triptych of paintings, The Long Wharf: Chinese Junks painted over archival photographs from 1885 of boats in San Francisco Bay.
Across from the Chinese junks are a collection of Japanese baskets brought down from the Lloyd Costen collection on the second floor. Yako Hodo's 1988 My UFO makes a great centerpiece.
The tour-de-force pieces in the exhibit are by Chinese artist Yang Yongliang. In one room, there is a huge, gorgeous scroll print on aluminum from 2010, Artificial Wonderland #1 that is an amazing collage of drawing and photography that creates an imaginary landscape.
On closer inspection, the magical landscape is infested with construction cranes and development, looking a bit like a modernized Gustave Dore illustration of Dante's Inferno.
In an adjoining cubicle, a four-screen, high definition video variation on the landscape after it has been built upon, is called The Night of Perpetual Day. The piece is animated with loops of streaming waterfalls on mountains, thousands of cars on elevated freeways, and the occasional blinking building light. Joni Mitchell's "they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot" comes to mind.
The English clarinetist and public relations maven Brenden Guy has resurrected his Curious Flights music series after a year's sabbatical. The opening concert last Saturday at the San Francisco Conservatory was devoted to British music from the first half of the 20th century, and it was splendid in its variety and choice of unfamiliar pieces by familiar composers. Brenden is in the blue tie above center, bowing after a sweet performance of Herbert Howell's 1919 Rhapsodic Quintet, surrounded by a quartet from One Found Sound, violinists Christopher Whitley and George Hayes, violist Danny Sheu, and cellist Laura Gaynon.
The concert started with the 1929-1931 Songs Sacred and Profane by John Ireland, who was the teenage Benjamin Britten's drunken, mildly abusive composition instructor at London's Royal College of Music during the same period. The two composers never got along personally, but had a grudging respect for each other's work. Soprano Julie Adams sang the six songs with a large, pretty voice that she needs to learn how to scale down for small recital halls. She was accompanied by pianist Miles Graber.
The first half of the concert ended with a trio of acapella songs by Gerald Finzi, Benjamin Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. They were beautifully performed by the St. Dominic's Schola Cantorium under Music Director Simon Berry. I had never heard them before, but they were so good it almost made me want to go to one of St. Dominic's Solemn Masses to hear them in action again. My Spirit Sang All Day by Finzi to a poem by Robert Bridges and RVW's Valiant for Truth from a poem about death by John Bunyan bookended one of the late, great Auden/Britten collaborations, The Shepherd Carol, which I didn't even know existed. Auden wrote the poem while they were both in the U.S. fleeing the onset of World War Two, and suggested it be set as either a jazz tune or a folksong, and Britten chose the latter for a 1944 BBC commission after he returned homesick to England. Soloists from the chorus sang four nonsense verses, such as:
If I'd stacked up the velvet,
and my crooked rib were dead,
I'd be breeding white canaries
and eating crackers in bed
followed by an exceptionally lovely chorus to the words:
O lift your little pinkie,
and touch the winter sky.
Love's all over the mountains
where the beautiful go to die
.
After intermission, we were treated to Arnold Bax's 1929 Sonata for Two Pianos, played by Peter Grunberg and Keisuke Nakagoshi in a rambunctious and exciting performance. I have listened to both pianists for years during rehearsals as accompanists for various groups including the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Symphony, and Opera Parallele. They were almost always the most interesting musical performers in the room.
Hearing them play together for the first time, in unfamiliar but intriguing music, was a complete treat. I hope they team up again, and their performance of the Bax made me want to listen to all his music, including the seven symphonies.
The final piece was Britten's Opus One, Sinfonietta, for five strings and five winds in a stirring performance conducted by John Kendall Bailey that underlined how gifted the composer was at a freakishly young age. In the Humphrey Burton biography of Britten, he explains the British music scene in 1931:
[William Walton]...seemed to bring a much-needed breath of modernism into a musical scene dominated on the one hand by Elgar and the Brahms imitators (the Parry–Stanford school) and on the other by the "English pastoral" composers led by Vaughan Williams and Holst, with Delius, Bax and John Ireland closely following behind. Sir Michael Tippett recalls that "Elgar was already an older figure, and the general critical view at the time was that Vaughan Williams was the way that English music should go–it was backed by the whole establishment, especially The Times."
Saturday's concert was a good reminder that many of the outmoded British composers from both schools wrote some gorgeous, interesting music, and that yes, Britten surpassed them all in a blaze of genius.
