Working in Silicon Valley Monday through Friday has allowed me occasional blasts of natural Vitamin D over the last month, but for those stuck in the City of San Francisco, the sun vanished during August with a few cameo appearances in the eastern neighborhoods. There's no real reason for complaint since we're not surrounded by wildfires like much of the rest of California or broiling in extreme summer heat like much of the country.
Still, there's always been something sad about a Grey California Coastal Summer, so it was a joy last Tuesday and Wednesday when the fog miraculously retreated for a couple of days, and the fringe of a Pacific hurricane colored our skies.
There are a whole roster of interesting new musical events this coming month. Following are a few highights. This week brings four performances of Erling Wold’s UKSUS at the Oakland Metro Opera House on 2nd Street near Jack London Square. According to the website, this reprise of Wold’s surrealistic 2015 opera is “an autobiography of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, a narrative told through their stories and brief lives, as the OBERIU – The Association for Real Art – maintained their love of words and nonsensical art to their deaths in Stalin’s Great Purge.” One of the stars is Laura Bohn, who just knocked everyone out with her performance as the Duchess of Argyll in Powder Her Face with West Edge Opera, and the jazzy chamber orchestra includes the brilliant composers/instrumentalists Beth Custer and Lisa Mezzacappa. To see a YouTube version of an earlier incarnation in Germany, click here, and to buy tickets for this week’s performances, click here.
The following week, the San Francisco Symphony begins their season with a tribute to New York minimalist composer Steve Reich with a Copland/Reich program that will undoubtedly involve Jacob Nissly, above, the symphony’s great young percussionist who played a Reich piece during one of the Symphony’s SoundBox concerts last season. For tickets, click here. There will also be a special all-Reich concert on Sunday, September 11th at 7PM.
The Berkeley pianist Sarah Cahill has started a new duo with violinist Kate Stenberg. The pair will be performing Mozart, Brahms, Henry Cowell, Debussy, Lou Harrison and others in a series of concerts at “Music by The Mountain” at Mount Shasta on Saturday and Sunday, September 10th at 7PM and September 11th at 4PM. On Sunday, September 18th, they will be performing at Point Reyes Dance Palace at Point Reyes Station at 2PM and at San Francisco’s Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, 1750 29th Avenue, on Saturday, September 24th at 7:30 PM. On Thursday, September 29th at 7:30 PM, Sarah will be joining pianists Anton Batagov, Jenny Lin, Aaron Diehl, and Philip Glass at the opening of Stanford Live’s season at the Bing Concert Hall. The five performers will be performing the complete piano etudes by Philip Glass.
Speaking of Glass, the New Century Chamber Orchestra begins their season the week of September 15th in Berkeley with the composer’s Third Symphony, which was written for a chamber string orchestra. The program also includes music by Webern, Heidrich, and Mozart’s 13th Piano Concerto, and the concert will be repeated in San Francisco and San Rafael. For more info, click here.
The San Francisco Opera is opening on September 9th with Giordano’s Italian potboiler about the French revolution, Andrea Chenier, and on the following night, Saturday, September 10th, offering the world premiere of Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber based on a classic, extremely long, 18th century Chinese novel.
The San Francisco Symphony is offering a bizarrely interesting program September 22nd through 24th called An Italian Celebration, conducted by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. It starts with an oboe concerto by Marcello, continues with Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia for Eight Solo Voices and Orchestra (with The Swingle Singers!), followed by Italian arias sung by the young American tenor of the moment, Michael Fabiano. And if all that wasn’t enough, the concert concludes with Verdi’s Te Deum. I heard the Berio piece at UC Davis last year with soloists from the Volti chorus and it’s an amazing, wild ride, rarely performed in the United States and not to be missed. For ticket info, click here.
The second "opera-installation" by Bay Area-based, Italian-born composer Luciano Chessa above is having its site-specific world premiere from September 22nd to September 24th in a small castle in Bolzano, Italy. Entitled Cena Oltranzista nel Castelletto al Lago (Extremist Dinner in the Castle by the Lake), it is a three-day event presented as part of the TRANSART 2016 festival. It sounds fascinating, with influences ranging from the Italian Futurist Cookbook by Marinetti, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Pasolini’s film Salo. From an introductory description of the piece:
"In the capacity of master of ceremonies, Luciano Chessa will lead the ten guests to the castle to meet for a silent lunch and to then begin a symbolic journey. After the lunch, the group will in fact undertake a two-days fasting that will end with a multisensory ‘cena oltranzista’ (extremist dinner): a banquet of aural, olfactory, visual, tactile and finally gustatory sensations. A network of surveillance cameras and microphones will document and stream the whole experience on the web in real time. This opera deliberately merges heterogeneous influences: storytelling, folkloric-ritual art, body art, Medieval mysteries, peep shows, meditation, repurposed Big Brother-esque television references, and the style of ‘manor house mystery’, a classic narrative trope borrowed from the literary genre of mystery tales."
The work will be live-streamed and you can be a viewer/participant by clicking here.
The Merola Program, San Francisco's summer opera boot camp for aspiring young professionals from around the globe, wrapped up its season with their annual Grand Finale concert at the San Francisco Opera House last Saturday. 23 vocalists sang arias and duets over a professional orchestra, and as usual the event felt like it went as long as Wagner's Götterdämmerung, but at least it was a fun Götterdämmerung. The talents onstage ranged from the good to the not-quite-up-to-snuff to the spectacularly talented, and half the fun was making up your mind which was which, a completely subjective endeavour. Following are a few of my favorite people. (All photos by Kristen Loken.)
Countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen gave a ravishingly beautiful account of Orfeo's scena with Eurydice (the lovely soprano Teresa Castillo) when he unfortunately looks back during Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurice. Cohen has a great future ahead of him in the odd repertory for male sopranos that includes early music and contemporary operas.
New Zealand tenor Amitai Pati, as he demonstrated during his wonderful performance as Ferrando in Cosi Fan Tutte earlier this summer, has a smallish, exquisitely on-pitch tenor that is unforced and beautiful. The selections for the various performers are always weird, a mixture of old chestnuts and total obscurities like the scene from Berlioz's Beatrice et Benedict above with Pati and mezzo soprano Alexandra Schenck as the quarreling Shakespearean lovers.
Pati returned for one of those old chestnuts with baritone Andrew G. Manea, singing the famous bromance duet, Au fond du temple saint from Bizet's Les Pecheurs de Perles. There is certain operatic music that benefits from young, unhardened voices while others profit from an older, more developed edge, and the Bizet duet turned out to be a perfect vehicle for the former. This was the most beautiful rendition of the duet I have ever heard live, and much of the reason was the sense of innocence and the sheer beauty of Pati's voice and phrasing.
Mezzo-soprano Taylor Raven and soprano Mary Evelyn Hangley sang a long scena from Donizetti's Anna Bolena, and this was a case of an opera that profits from older, more seasoned singers. I liked the voices of both sopranos very much, especially during an earlier Schwabacher concert, but this difficult piece didn't particularly bring out the best in either of them.
Soprano Yelena Dyachek with tenor Brian-Michael Moore sang a duet from Flotow's Martha, which was depressing because Dyachek has one of the most extraordinary young voices I have ever heard and Martha, at least from the evidence of this scene, is dreck. She was also in the earlier Merola production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, in the lead role of Fiordiligi, a performance that reminded me of Carol Vaness in her early 20s singing Vitellia in Mozart's La Clemenza de Tito. What both performances shared was an ability to sing fiendishly difficult music as simply and naturally as if one was warbling to oneself before breakfast. I envy everyone at the Houston Opera, where Dyachek is headed to join their young artist program, because she has what can be called a porno voice. There are plenty of singers with pretty voices and plenty of singers with huge voices, but they very rarely coincide in the same person. Dyachek is one of those special combos, and her musical instincts are good besides.
Tenor Kyle van Schoohoven sang a huge aria from Wagner's early opera Rienzi, and though he's not quite ready for heldentenor prime time, he's just about there. Plus, the student stage director Aria Umezawa gave him six supernumerary women with candles to do fun movement around him, and it worked well as did most of the rest of her staging with minimal props, schtick or sets.
Baritone Cody Quattlebaum sang Guglielmo in that already legendary Merola Cosi Fan Tutte this summer with Dyechka and Pati. In the Grand Finale, he sang There's a law, a weird, sexist aria from Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti that he managed to fill with charm. He arrived onstage with a manbun and halfway through pulled out the restraints and let his long hair down. Quattlebaum has a lovely baritone and stage charisma to burn.
Long ago in 2010 I wrote a post about a photography exhibit at SFMOMA devoted to Henri Cartier-Bresson, and received an email from the museum requesting that I take down a few photos which were under some serious copyright restrictions from the Carter-Bresson estate. They also informed me that SF MoMA was the wrong way to refer to the museum, and that the correct branding was SFMOMA, all caps, no spaces. Having worked in corporate graphics departments most of my life, I was sympathetic, and the lowly person in the P.R. department who sent that email was sweet and charming in the wording of their request.
The huge new building addition at SFMOMA necessitated by the donation of the late Donald Fisher's massive modern art collection just reopened this year in May, and it looks as if the reconstituted P.R. department is no longer engaging in due diligence. A new signage campaign has just been installed on MUNI buses encouraging people to take the 14 Rapid bus from the Mission downtown to the newly reopened SFMOMA. The only problem is that somebody not only got the SFMOMA branding wrong, but they forgot the word "Museum." Happy Mission District families of color are being encouraged to take the 14 Rapid to the "New San Francisco of Modern Art." That should be the name of a local art movement.
