Saturday afternoon on Folsom Street Fair weekend, there was an afternoon party at the DNA Lounge which was spilling out onto 11th Street at its conclusion.
People were calling up ride services…
…and jumping into SUVs while I waited for a 47 Van Ness Muni bus to take me home to Civic Center.
It immediately felt like the opening scene of the Woody Allen movie, Stardust Memories, where all the beautiful people are riding on an adjoining train while Allen is trapped in a railway car full of grotesque, crazy people.
With the assistance of the wheelchair lift, a lady boarded the bus with seemingly all her worldly belongings, and the bus driver lifted a section of seating out for her to park them.
Soon after she was joined by another woman hauling innumerable bags in a rolling cart, and the driver put up the other wheelchair space so she could leave her stuff without blocking the aisle.
When I started groaning with dismay as each character appeared and spread out, the lady above burst into sympathetic laughter.
At Market and Van Ness, the lady with the most belongings departed and was replaced by a man in a wheelchair, a process that took another ten minutes.
In the 1970s, there used to be an employee recognition award where bus drivers would be nominated by passengers as the Muni Man of the Month, and the winners would appear on posters in the buses following a celebratory lunch. The SFMTA should bring back the tradition, minus the sexist name, because Muni drivers have the most difficult jobs in San Francisco. On an hourly basis they have to contend with terrible car drivers, entitled bicyclists, suicidal pedestrians, and completely crazy passengers. My first nomination for Muni Driver of the Month would be the gentleman above who dealt with all the madness on Saturday’s 47 bus with firmness, kindness and superhuman patience. “You can’t leave all that in the aisle, maam. Here, let me put these seats up for you,” was how he dealt with the mayhem.
The San Francisco Symphony presented a wonderful program last week that is part of what they are taking on the road for a six-city, ten-concert tour of Asia in November. The concert began with a commission from Bright Sheng of an overture from his opera, Dream of the Red Chamber, which just had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera. It’s a short, lively piece, starting with a big blast of percussion, and easing into the lyrical dance music which my friend James Parr called the “adolescent wet dream ballet.” For some reason, at the top of the evening Alisdair Neale above was announced as the conductor for this particular piece, and then music director Michael Tilson Thomas arrived to lead the rest of the program.
Next up was Shostakovich’s 1933 Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet, and Strings, with the Chinese piano soloist Yuja Wang in one of her trademark sexy dresses along with SF Symphony principal trumpet player Mark Inouye in a tuxedo. The wild, varied concerto is Shostakovich at his most delightful, brooding and moody one second and jazzy and sardonic the next.
Inouye (center, standing) and Wang managed the tricky feat of being completely virtuosic while musically sensitive, and the two played off of each other brilliantly. This was a great performance, and the string orchestra backed them up with style.
On Saturday evening, Yuja returned for a fun, demonic encore, which none of us could identify. According to Ms. Tatyana in PR at the SF Symphony, it was the final movement of Prokofiev's Piano Sonata #7. It made one want to listen to Yuja all night long.
But there were other pleasures in store, two early Asian-inflected ballet suites by Stravinsky: The Song of The Nightingale taken from his early opera based on a Hans Christian Anderson story about a Chinese emperor and a healing songbird, and the 1919 suite from The Firebird distilled from his complete ballet. I love The Nightingale as an opera but am not as enamored of this suite which meanders all over the place. I also wasn't particularly looking forward to the 1919 Firebird Suite, because it is so overplayed, but this was the best live performance of the music I have ever heard. Taiwan, Korea, China and Japan are in for a treat.
In 1975, during those years before opera supertitles, I attended the San Francisco Opera in Dress Circle standing room and watched a remarkable young Spanish tenor named Placido Domingo in a blood-and-thunder late 19th century Italian opera by Giordano about the French Revolution called Andrea Chenier. In the final act of Lotfi Mansouri's lavish production, as prison walls flew away to reveal a blood-red backdrop framing a guillotine, Domingo took the hand of his beloved, Maddalena, and they walked to their deaths singing a heartbreaking duet followed by a sudden blackout. Pandemonium and much applause ensued. As an opera newbie, little did I know that this was as good as it gets with Chenier: rare, golden age singing, and a libretto that is probably better when it is mostly unintelligible.
There was a revival of the same production in 1992, looking tattered and worse for wear after touring for two decades, with an inadequate cast and silly staging by a hack assistant director. Flash forward another twenty years and the Italian melodrama has returned to the War Memorial Opera House in a sumptuous new co-production with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden from director David McVicar. It would be nice to report that this month's run of performances reignited my enthusiasm for the opera, but instead it confirmed that I never need to see Chenier again unless the voice and charisma of a young Domingo is somehow reincarnated. Korean tenor Yonghoon Lee above as the French Revolutionary poet certainly has a lovely voice but he was a complete cipher onstage. Half the time you couldn't even tell if he was present among all the production bric-a-brac, with seemingly dozens of subsidiary characters running around advancing the absurd, complicated plot. Even with all the activity going on, the love-at-first-sight of Chenier and Maddalena should be made clear and compelling at all times, something McVicar and his singers failed to accomplish.
It was a bit sad because there was so much wasted talent onstage. Mezzo J'Nai Bridges above was very good as the heroine's servant who becomes a prostitute so they can eat. In the first act, Catherine Cook as Contessa di Coigny, the subject of Maddalena's big aria, La Momma Morta, gave one of her reliably funny, dramatic performances. Baritone David Pershall as Chenier's friend Roucher was always a welcome presence, and a whole host of Adler singers took up small roles with gusto, but the entire production was polite, unconvincing, and finally ridiculous. Even supernumerary Charlie Lichtman, with two named parts in the program, couldn't save it.
The SF Opera Chorus as bloodthirsty revolutionaries were fun to watch and hear but were not particularly credible, and the orchestra under Music Director Nicola Luisotti played with passion and fire but too often overwhelmed the singers.
The most interesting performance and the best singing was by baritone George Gagnidze as Carlo Gerard, who goes from disgruntled butler to revolutionary ringleader to Scarpia-style villain who wants to despoil Maddelena to honorable mensch in the finale. It wasn't his fault that the character makes no sense.
The Italian soprano Anna Pirozzi as Maddalena also has a lovely voice, but there was so little chemistry between her and Yonghoon Lee that it eventually became comical. "Hold me!" the supertitles proclaimed as she sang in prison before her self-sacrificing death with Chenier, but Lee stood upstage ignoring her while looking like he was ready to wander off to dinner. The whole sorry spectacle felt like Opera as Kitsch. (All production photos by Cory Weaver.)
The San Francisco Symphony offered a wacky program last week that they were marketing as An Italian Journey. In its jumps through centuries and musical genres, from Baroque chamber music to a 1960s avant-garde symphonic masterpiece to Verdi choral music to old-fashioned solo arias, the program could have been a disaster or a major success. It's a treat to report that the latter was the case. The concert started off with new principal oboe Eugene Izotov giving a superb, soulful account of Marcello's early 18th century Oboe Concerto in C Minor. He also lead a chamber ensemble of first-chair players and it was one of the better Baroque performances I've heard from the SF Symphony at Davies.
This was followed by the forbidding, insanely difficult (to play and absorb), amusing, and endlessly interesting Sinfonia by Luciano Berio, written for the New York Philharmonic in 1969. The soloists are eight amplified singers, and the original vocalists were the Swingle Singers, which has to be the greatest chamber chorus name ever. The English ensemble still exists with replacements from the current generation, and they were the soloists at Davies Hall on Saturday evening.
My only complaint is that Davies Hall has some of the crappiest amplified sound systems in San Francisco, and the definitive sound of the Swingle Singers was muted and a bit muddy when it should have been thrust much further into the foreground. When I heard this piece live last year for the first time at the UC Davis Mondavi Center, the vocal soloists were a much more important part of the texture. As good as the student orchestra was at UC Davis, hearing the expert Mahler orchestra that is the SF Symphony play the third movement of Sinfonia, with Mahler's Scherzo from his Resurrection Symphony sliced and diced, was an exquisite treat. The crazy music has been running through my head for the rest of the week.
After intermission, the great San Francisco Symphony Chorus sang Verdi's Te Deum, a short (13-minute) sacred choral piece that the anticlerical composer wrote near the end of his life. I had never heard it live before and it instantly became one of my favorite Verdi pieces ever.
The programming for this concert, in fact, felt a bit like the SoundBox concerts, with their surprising mixture of short musical styles and repertory discoveries, impeccably performed.
The finale of the evening involved young tenor superstar Michael Fabiano singing a trio of Italian opera arias, including Donizetti's Una Furtiva Lagrima and an aria from Verdi's Simon Boccanegra and Il Corsaro, the latter ending the evening with the urgent backing of the men's chorus. My favorite was Luciano Berio's orchestration of Il Poveretto, a song by Verdi about a poor person on the street.
Though Fabiano is not my favorite current tenor, he's got a lovely, forceful voice, and has some of the best Italian singing diction around. My companion for the evening drooled over his performance, by the way, as did many others in the audience.
