The San Francisco Conservatory of Music Baroque Ensemble gave a pair of performances of Henry Purcell's 1692 "semi-opera" The Fairy Queen last weekend, and the Saturday evening rendition was utterly delightful. In late 17th century England, there was a vogue for spoken plays interleavened with musical masques involving song and dance that commented on the play allegorically. In the case of The Fairy Queen, this involved an abridged version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream with musical interludes after each of the five acts.
The Act 1 interlude featured Conservatory students Ashley Valentine and Jarrett Porter (top) singing Come, let us leave the town, followed by a funny Scene of the Drunken Poet with Justin Bays as the soused scribe being confronted by Tatiana's fairies sung by Jessica Biano and Cara Gabrielson.
Purcell's music is just about perfect for a student performance, as the songs are short and offer a wide variety of opportunities for different voice types. The concert style staging was unfussy, with individuals stepping to the front of the stage from the chorus and then rejoining their fellows when their soloist duties were complete. The student voices ranged from adequate to extraordinary, and if there were a competition between genders, the women would have won on Saturday evening. Pictured above left to right are Jie Pan, Erin O'Meally (who was spectacular all night), Whitney Steele, and Elizabeth Dickerson.
I have noticed at previous Conservatory performances that voices tend to take longer attaining professional maturity than instrumentalists. For instance, Michael Minor on double bass and Eugenio Solinas on cello sounded ready for prime time duties with the American Bach Soloists or the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.
Dominic Favia above also gave a splendid performance on the insanely difficult Baroque trumpet.
Baroque Ensemble Director Corey Jameson, who plays in most of the original instruments ensembles around the Bay Area, led the two and a half hour performance, and it never flagged. This is in part due to Purcell's music itself, which is one surprisingly delightful tune after another, and partly because Jameson is a lively conductor and great harpsichord player.
By the way, the performances were free to the public if you reserved a seat ahead of time. Check out the SF Conservatory calendar for further delights by clicking here. (Pictured above are Meagan Rao and Cara Gabrielson with Mariya Kaganskaya and Justin Bays below.)
Approximately once a week we will hear a crash outside of our living room windows at the corner of Franklin and McAllister Streets.
Franklin Street has timed lights for a more thruway-like experience driving north towards the Marina and Marin County, but people often take the risk of plowing through the intersection just as the light turns red, and disaster ensues.
Between the SF Opera House, Davies Hall, the SFJAZZ Center, Nourse Theater, the two theaters in the Veterans Building, the SF Conservatory of Music, and the occasional rock concert at Bill Graham auditorium, there are lots of confused motorists converging on the area. This is in addition to the many commuters and visitors driving to and from City Hall and adjoining government offices and courthouses.
There are also thousands of new residents in the neighborhood who have moved into recently constructed luxury condos and rentals which have been sprouting like huge mushrooms in the rain.
This week new, more prominent stoplights are being installed on Franklin Street intersections in the neighborhood. This could be ecological (the new lights have a solar energy component), or it could be for safety.
Whatever the reasons, it's good to see because the daily mayhem is completely out of hand.
The opening night concert of last weekend's 21st annual Other Minds Festival featured a starry group of composers from around the world: Lasse Thoresen (Norway), Cecilie Ore (Norway), Gavin Bryars (England), Phil Kline (USA), Michael Gordon (USA), John Oswald (Canada), Larry Polansky (USA), Oliver Lake (USA)...
...along with Nicole Lizee (Canada) and Meredith Monk (USA) above, with the latter "National Treasure" being given a career retrospective of her own on the third and final concert of the festival.
Friday's opener at the SFJAZZ Center, hosted by Festival creator Charles Amirkhanian above, was in many respects a typical Other Minds Festival concert: filled with fascinating new sounds and performers, overlong, interesting, boring, and everything in between.
The first half of the concert featured the Norwesgian a capella sextet Nordic Voices. The first two short 2012 pieces were by Lasse Thoresen. Solben was a sun prayer that sounded like a spectral Scandinavian folk hymn, and it was marvelous. Equally wonderful was his Himmelske Fader, another folk based prayer, this time to the Heavenly Father, and the Nordic Voices for whom it was written gave a shimmering performance. This was followed by Dead Pope on Trial!, a world premiere cantata by Cecelia Ore, written by the Norwegian composer in English. The half-hour piece is something of a ghoulish shaggy pope story depicting the true story of Pope Formosus (891 to 896) who had enough political enemies that his corpse was exhumed and put on trial before his mutilated remains were thrown into the Tiber River, not once but twice before being restored to rest in St. Peter's. The piece sounded a bit like David Lang in its insistence on repeated words and syllables, but it was absorbing, amusing, and the English diction of the Nordic Voices was amazingly clear.
Clarity was not the case for the five madrigals by Gavin Bryars from poems by Petrarch where not a single syllable (in Italian, no less) could be discerned. The music was monotone and dull, and I bailed after the second one. The final madrigal was a world premiere written in honor of Benjamin Amirkhanian's 100th birthday, which was a lovely gesture, but it was very long and the audience stumbled out to the bar after a one-and-three-quarter hour first half.
Charles Amirkhanian acknowledged the lateness of the hour at the beginning of the second half, which he noted was "mercifully short, you should be getting out of here before 2AM." In truth, the second half consisted of two substantial pieces for recorded text and string quartet played by the Flux Quartet above.
They started with Last Words, a world premiere by Phil Kline, using an assemblage of public pronouncements by William Burroughs, which was successful if you were a Burroughs Junky and not so much if you were not.
The final work of the evening, taking us past the 11PM mark, was Michael Gordon's 2006 The Sad Park, a four-movement, miminalist tinged work for string quartet and modified recordings of children's reactions to seeing the 9/11 attacks from their school in Battery Park. Reading a description in the program, I thought to myself, "Be ready to flee. Sentimental 9/11 porn, with children," but the music itself was captivating and I happily, grudgingly stayed to the end.
