Götterdämmerung

Sunday morning, thanks to a mixture of coastal fog and ashy smoke from wildfires near Lake Berryessa, the morning light looked like the end of the world. The photo above is the San Francisco Opera House, sepia toned by nature. Sunday was also the final performance of Götterdämmerung, the last of four operas in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, and it seemed appropriate to attend a five-and-a-half hour opera that climaxes with the End of the World.

I joined 200 hardcore Wagnerites in standing room, including Charlise the Opera Tattler dressed as a Rhinemaiden above. She has now permanently won Ring Iron Woman status after attending all three cycles this month and in 2011.

I saw that entire 2011 cycle when the magnificent Nina Stemme gave one of the greatest performances in opera history during her role debut as Brunnhilde. The cast this time around was outstanding by all accounts, though nobody is ever going to replace Stemme in my memory. The production itself is aging well, visually striking and directed so you can clearly follow the characters. The real star was the entire orchestra led by former Music Director Donald Runnicles. Gosh, I miss him.

Orgasm Redefined

The oddest messages appear on Muni bus shelters in San Francisco, including this ad from Lioness touting their "smart" vibrators which sync to your mobile device. At least it sounds more fun than Fitbit.

René Magritte: The Fifth Season at SFMOMA

A surprisingly fascinating exhibit of paintings from the second half of Belgian artist René Magritte's career (1898–1967) has arrived at SFMOMA for the summer.

The show is already crammed with visitors, at least on weekends, and I thought my friends Barry and Grant were going to have an attack of agoraphobia trying to slide between bodies to get close to a painting.

Magritte had a youthful career in the 1920s and 1930s as a wallpaper draughtsman, Brussels ad agency owner with his brother, and a Surrealist painter. During World War II, he diverged from his old style and his paintings started looking like Demented Renoir, including weird details such as not coloring in the bouquet in the 1944 still-life with flowers above.

The 1944 painting above is called Image a la maison verte (Image with a green house), leaving out the fact that there's a Giant Violin hanging out next to la maison verte.

The combination of Impressionism at its cheery fuzziest and disturbing imagery is a singular reaction to World War Two.

Magritte also flirted briefly with Expressionism in the 1948 Famine above, where a group of men are biting off chunks of each other's faces.

At this exhibit, you can see Magritte regaining his equilibrium in the 1950s where he refines Surrealism, sleekly Modern ad graphics, and the metaphysical in images that are still being digested, reused, and inspiring graphic artists worldwide.

My favorite paintings from the 1950s are essentially visual practical jokes, rendering the impossible with naturalistic representations.

Like his contemporary Salvador Dali or one of his successors, Andy Warhol, he understood that artists are part of the brand, and he started wearing the bowler hat and suit on a daily basis as something of a uniform.

The late 1950s/early 1960s is when Magritte's reputation exploded, and his work from that period has a slightly kitschy aura about it, while still being genuinely weird.

The exhibit enhanced my opinion of Magritte and his art immensely, which is ideally what any art exhibit should do.

I even forgave him for the image above which was ubiquitous in the 1960s when I was a precocious, judgmental 13-year-old who thought it was silly hippie art.

Boris Godunov at the SF Symphony

Last week Michael Tilson Thomas led the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus, along with a cast of Russians and Bay Area locals in a "semi-staged" production of Modest Mussorgsky's sprawling 1872 opera, Boris Godunov. The locals did themselves proud, from Alexsey Bogdanov (above) as Andrei Schelkalov, who starts the opera off with an exhortation to the peasant chorus that they pray for Boris to change his mind and become Tsar. Also standing out from the crowd were Philip Skinner as the sadistic Nikitich and Catherine Cook as the Innkeeper, a role she has been performing since a 1992 SF Opera production. (All production photos by Cory Weaver.)

Rather like Boito's Mefistofole, the first two scenes are magnificently grand, employing many characters and a huge chorus, culminating in Boris's Coronation, but then the title character disappears for most of the first half and it turns into an episodic, chamber opera which meanders all over the place. There are many editions of the opera: the original two-act, 8-scene version that the San Francisco Opera produced in 2008 and a longer, three-act version that Mussorgsky created three years later that included a starring soprano role for a Polish princess. The opera has also been reorchestrated, first by Rimsky-Korsakov in the 19th century and also by Dmitri Shostakovich in the 20th century. Everyone seems to have their preferences, but they all have their strengths. The version used by the SF Symphony was Mussorgsky's original orchestration with the St. Basil scene removed and the later Kromy forest scene added on.

The Russian soloists were mostly very good, including bass Maxim Kuzmin-Karavaev as the monk Pimen, who knows the real story of murder in the Kremlin, and tenor Sergei Skorokhodov as Grigory the monk who spends the rest of the opera pretending to be the grown-up Prince Dmitri, who was probably murdered by Boris.

Vyachaslav Pochapsky as Varlaam, the thief masquerading as a monk, was great at the border inn scene, although the half-dozen supernumeraries/dancers employed throughout the evening by director James Darrah were not particularly convincing as a drunken crowd.

The reason this opera has been produced repeatedly over the centuries is that the music is so astonishingly rich, and also because it provides a role for the title character that's somewhere between Macbeth and King Lear in its depth. For the piece to really work, you need to care about the guilt-ridden monster, which requires a superior singing actor, on the order of a Chaliapin or Boris Christoff or Nicolai Ghiauroff. Though he has a fine voice, the young Stanislav Trofimov as Boris was nowhere near that league, creating a hole in the center of the production. It also didn't help that he was costumed most of the time to look lke he had wandered in from the Broadway production of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.

Still, it was wonderful to hear the music so well performed at the Sunday matinee, especially with the jagged strangeness of Mussorgsky's original orchestration. I was a supernumerary in Boris Godunov at the SF Opera in 1992 and 2008, and this was my first time actually watching the opera from the audience. Those two Boris productions also had less than ideal singers in the title role: James Morris in 1992 who was lacking in Russian soul and Samuel Ramey in 2008 whose voice was too shredded at that point in his career. The only time I have ever heard Boris's Coronation aria sung live, perfectly, was at an early rehearsal at the San Francisco Opera in 1992 before James Morris had arrived. The Russian bass, Vladimir Ognovenko, who was playing the minor role of Varlaam, stepped up to the piano during the rehearsal and sang the aria while the choral staging was worked out. By the end, the entire rehearsal room stood stunned by the deeply resonant performance we had just heard, and poor James Morris never stood a chance after that. There was another perfect performance in that production which never made it to opening night, the late countertenor Brian Asawa singing the Holy Fool. He was replaced at the last minute by conductor Runnicles because he thought Asawa's voice wasn't carrying, but it was the wrong decision. Asawa made me and just about everyone else cry during his beautiful, eerie laments about the soul of Russia. Stanislav Mostovoy did a fine job last week, but again, this is music that cries out for the otherworldly.