After 20 years as partners, the Cypress String Quartet played their last notes together on Sunday in a concert at the Veterans Building in San Francisco.
Though the Farewell Concert was structured as a celebration, complete with a catered reception after the music-making, the event still felt more than a little melancholy, rather like a party announcing a divorce.
It was not only the four musicians who are scattering, but an entire family of fans such as the couple above who have been following the quartet for two decades…
…and support staff such as Executive Director Maggee VanSpeybroeck above who is moving to Chicago to enroll in an MBA program.
The group specialized in Beethoven quartets, which is how they opened the program, with the composer’s Opus 95, the “Serioso.” (Violinists Cecily Ward and Tom Stone are in the photo above.)
This was followed by four movements extracted from works they had commissioned over the years as part of their “Call and Response” initiative where they asked living composers to respond to another work they had programmed. (Pictured above is cellist Jennifer Kloetzel.) The pieces were Elena Ruehr’s Clay Flute from her 2001 Third String Quartet, Quiet Art from Jennifer Higdon’s 2003 Impressions, Fantaisie from Philippe Hersant’s 2011 Quatuor A Cordes No. 3, and finally Unhurried from Benjamin Lees’ 2005 String Quartet No. 6.
In the Cypress Quartet concerts I have attended over the last couple of years, the most interesting music and performances have usually been these premieres, and it is probably what the ensemble is going to be remembered for in the historical record.
After intermission, the Cypress played Debussy’s 1893 String Quartet in G Minor in a beautiful performance, highlighted by the exquisite musicianship of Ethan Filner on viola above. He also introduced the three encores by Dvorak, Suk and Shulhoff that ended the concert.
At the reception afterwards, there was a video highlighting the quartet’s accomplishments over the last 20 years, and the feeling of being at a funeral wake was unavoidable.
May all four of them do well in the future.
Returning books to the Main Library on Saturday morning, I walked through preparations for the annual, weekend-long Gay Pride Festival in Civic Center where the Asian Art Museum had installed new signage for the occasion.
On the various stages scattered around the plaza, sound checks were being made on speakers and microphones, allowing for odd bursts of sound mingling in a Charles Ives kind of way.
The dirty little secret of the Gay Pride Festival in San Francisco is how much money is involved, particularly in selling crappy, overpriced cocktails all day from booths devoted to "charity."
In front of the library were a pair of booths that scraped some kind of low, hawking $9 Bud Lights and McDonald's corporate swag...
...including an astonishingly ugly T-shirt that urged one to Celebrate Lovin'.
The controversial new metal detectors were set up at the entrance to the plaza at Grove and Market, and in truth they are welcome. In recent years, the festival has become a magnet for young, mostly straight suburbanites looking for a free party in San Francisco, and the combination of alcohol and weapons has contributed to more than a few violent altercations, with bystanders caught in the crossfire.
The metal detection staff were mostly young and black, which is probably not what this year's slogan "For Racial and Economic Justice" was referring to, but it was nice to see this usually unemployed demographic being offered jobs. Meanwhile, the promised enhanced police presence seemed to consist of herds of 20-30 uniformed police officers wandering about Civic Center looking foolish, as if they were afraid of being attacked unless they stayed together as gangs. The Black Lives Matter group, which had been given an honored spot in Sunday's parade, pulled out at the last minute in protest, saying they were more afraid of the heavyhanded police presence than terrorists, and it's hard to blame them.
There is a famous quote from the composer Richard Wagner to his lover Mathilde Wiesendock after he had finished composing the opera Tristan und Isolde. "I fear the opera will be banned unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance: only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, I cannot imagine it otherwise." That quote came to mind last Sunday afternoon during the SF Opera production of Leoš Janáček's 1904 opera Jenůfa because the performance was so fine that the emotional power of the music was almost too much to bear.
The story itself is a simple Czechoslovakian village tale, taken from a naturalistic, unsentimental, late-19th century play by Gabriela Preissová, about a young woman who becomes pregnant before marriage by her handsome, wealthy boyfriend who turns out to be a drunken cad. Jenůfa's stepmother, the moral arbiter of the village, hides her away for a secret birth, and then tries to get someone to marry her. Tragedy ensues.
This was the stuff of countless women's melodramas on stage and film over the centuries, and there is no reason for the story to be so powerful except one. The music by Janáček, a provincial, barely successful Czech composer at the turn of the 20th century, is filled with such longing, sadness, beauty, and complexity that once you have absorbed it, the music of most other operas feels wan by comparison.
I first heard the opera in 1980 at the SF Opera with the incomparable Elisabeth Söderström as Jenůfa and Sena Jurinac as her stepmother Kostelnička in performances that I thought would never be equaled, but Malin Byström and Karita Mattila in this production have managed to do so, with glorious soprano voices and powerful acting abilities.
As good as the two principal singers are, what elevates this production to the stratosphere is the entire supporting cast, including Scott Quinn as the caddish Števa Buryja and William Burden (above) as his brother Laca Klemeň who is also in love with Jenůfa. Contributing to this holistic success were the SF Opera Chorus, who managed the very tricky rhythms of their folk-inflected music brilliantly, along with Adler fellows and choristers playing everything from the village Mayor to maids to extended relatives.
The opera premiered in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1904 but Janáček's original, eccentric orchestration with its surprising percussion and hairpin turns, was extensively revised for its Prague National Theater premiere in 1916 by the music director there, Karel Kovařovic. It wasn't until 1980 that the late, great conductor Charles Mackerras helped prepare an edition that respected the composer's original intentions. Mackerras also led a production of this score at SF Opera in 1986 with the wonderful Gabriela Beňačková and Leonie Rysanek in the cast. As much as I loved the conducting of Mackerras, the current job by Czech Philharmonic music director Jiří Bělohlávek (above) with the San Francisco Opera orchestra is stunning.
Six years ago at the San Francisco Opera, Bělohlávek conducted Janáček's The Makropolous Case, also starring Karita Mattila (above), in a production directed by Olivier Tambosi and designed by Frank Philipp Schlossmann, that was so good that I fell in love with the opera for the first time. The same conductor and diva soon took that show to the Metropolitan Opera in New York and I waited to hear the same kind of raving accolades which greeted it in San Francisco, but that didn't happen. A friend of mine who saw the production in both cities mentioned that the difference was in the supporting cast, which simply didn't gel in New York the way they did in San Francisco.
This same production of Jenůfa with Mattila will also be performed at the Metropolitan next season and let's hope they do it as well as San Francisco. In any case, there are has four more performances here, including one tonight (Wednesday), and I cannot urge you strongly enough to attend one of them.
Though I am not crazy about the heavy-handed stone symbolism of the set design concept by director Tambosi and designer Schlossmann, every other element of the production is perfection. Click here for tickets, or just walk to the box office on the day of performance and grab a standing room ticket for $10. This is one of those legendary productions people will be talking about for years. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)
The building boom continues unabated in the South of Market district, with cranes popping up everywhere.
This particular hole in the ground is on Folsom Street next to Brainwash between 7th and 8th Streets.
Watching workers assembling the monster crane over the weekend was quite entertaining.
Let us hope that the subsequent building is not as desperately ugly as the Trinity Plaza apartment complex which continues to malignantly sprout at 8th Street between Market and Mission Streets.
Over at the 40 Going on 28 blog, TK has sarcastically proposed that every San Francisco neighborhood should have at least one if not more of these monstrosities constructed so we can solve the housing crisis, complete with Photoshopped illustrations.
Maybe they can all have replicas of the 92-foot stainless steel statue, Venus, by Australian sculptor Lawrence Argent which was commissioned by the late real estate developer Angelo Sangiacomo.
Sangiacomo, long known as "the father of rent control" because his price-gouging ways in the 1970s prompted San Francisco City Hall to pass legislation protecting tenants, died last year at the age of 91. He leaves a mixed legacy of ugly buildings, this shiny, gargantuan version of the Venus de Milo, and rent control itself.
