Rise for Climate March

A global, grassroots movement to address climate change and environmental degradation held marches in over 190 locations on Saturday, and the San Francisco edition had a remarkable 1960s look and feel to it.

Tens of thousands of people gathered at the Embarcadero for the 11AM march up Market Street to Civic Center.

Rather like the annual Gay Pride march, the event was divided into contingents, and you were welcome to march with any group you felt like joining, including queers...

...vegetarians...

...mothers and grandmothers...

...indigenous groups...

...peaceniks...

...and RuPaul's Drag Race fans.

We were going to march with the gay contingent...

...but the march monitors at the front were going impossibly slow...

...so we walked ahead and joined the Guardians of the Forest...

...and Spanish language revolutionaries...

...and Filipinos...

...marching in solidarity with Native Americans...

...some of whom were dancing in the streets.

By noon, the march had only proceeded about six short blocks up Market to the intersection with Third Street, and I confronted a middle-aged man who was one of the monitors at the front. "Why is this going so damned slow?" I asked him, and he replied that he had decided the march needed to proceed at a stately pace. "There are tens of thousands of people behind you who are still waiting to march. Pick up the pace, you fool, or everyone's going to peel off elsewhere." To my surprise, they seemed to do just that.

More to come from the rally at the Civic Center (and no, the gentleman pictured above is not the silly march monitor).

SF Symphony Gala Opening 2018

San Francisco socialites finally returned from their summer getaways and the Fall Arts Season officially opened last night with the San Francisco Symphony Gala Opening Night.

The evening begins with a quartet of fundraising dinners set variously in City Hall, a special party tent, and the Wattis Room, which funnel into Davies Hall for a champagne promenade where everyone can ogle each other's finery.

There were a few SF Symphony musicians roaming about the lobby talking to the patrons, including Nick Platoff with his trombone...

....and bassoonist Steven Dibner, above right.

Joining me for the parade was West Edge Opera Board VP James Parr, amused at attending his first SF Symphony Gala.

Leading the concert was Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas in his penultimate season before retirement, starting with the audience singing The Star Spangled Banner followed by the orchestra launching into Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No. 1, in a performance more sluggish than demonic. (All concert photos are from Drew Altizer.)

This year's classical music superstar was violinist Itzhak Perlman (Yo-Yo Ma was last year's celebrity performer). He runs a musical training program and brought along six students who performed in tag team style with Perlman over the course of the three movements of J.S. Bach's Concerto #3 in D Minor for Two Violins, strings and continuo. The format was a little weird, and so was the sound of modern instruments playing Bach after listening to so many Bay Area original instrument ensembles, but the performance itself was lovely. Even better was an encore of a double violin piece by Bartok that had been arranged for seven violins. It was spikey, folksy, and fun.

After playing Gershwin's Cuban Overture, the second half of the concert consisted of movie music themes (Amarcord, Out of Africa, Schindler's List, Scent of a Woman) that featured violin solos, played by Perlman. He and Tilson Thomas were then offered huge bouquets by Gala Committee co-chairs James Hormel and his spouse Michael Nguyen-Hormel.

We didn't stay for Gershwin's An American in Paris because we wanted to check out the after parties before they became too crowded.

The projections and lighting fixtures in the tent dance party were pretty...

Labor Day Rosé

The SPARK Social SF food truck complex in the new Mission Bay neighborhod has expanded to a stretch of undeveloped property across Fourth Street.

It includes teepee roofed party spaces groups can reserve...

...while playing at the adjoining, newly created Stagecoach Greens miniature golf course.

The theme of the 18-hole course is San Francisco's Boom & Bust history, and it provides many opportunities for staged selfies.

My spouse turned out to be a goofy golf shark, and beat me by four strokes.

We walked across Fourth Street for food and a pitcher of beer, and stumbled across a special event, the SPARK Social SF Rosé Soirée, which featured a bottomless rosé picnic all afternoon.

The large field used for sports events had been transformed into a picnic spot...

...complete with DJ.

The majority of rosé drinkers were female, some looking quite glamorous...

...which made for long lines at the women's fancy port-a-potty.

I am proud to report that the goofy golf shark took it upon himself to usher women into the men's stalls when they were empty because he was raised in a household of sisters and it only seemed fair.

Pelleas and Melisande on The Waterfront

The second of three performances of Debussy's 1902 opera, Pelleas and Melisande, was presented by West Edge Opera last Sunday afternoon in a makeshift theater in the Craneway Conference Center on the Richmond waterfront. The opera is one of those sophisticated works that you either get or not, and I confess to being one of the unenlightened, but have always envied friends who genuinely adored it for reasons they usually find hard to explain. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

Armen (above left) is a Pelleas worshiper from a young age, and it was fun posing him with his old buddy from UC Berkeley Chorus days, James Parr, who is currently VP of the West Edge Opera Board. The musical eco-fabric of the Bay Area in terms of composers, performers, and receptive audiences is an ongoing wonder, and both of them are exemplars.

I've seen the opera twice in my life at the San Francisco Opera, the last time in 1997 in a wondrous production with Fredrica von Stade, but going into the performance on Sunday I had absolutely no memory for the details of the gauzy, Symbolist narrative involving a family love triangle that ends in death in a gloomy castle surrounded by gloomy forests and caverns. For the first time at this production, I actually followed the story and on that level it was fascinating. (Pictured above are David Blalock as Pelleas and Philip Skinner as King Arkel.)

The cast was strong throughout, and Kendra Broom as Melisande and Efrain Solis as her abusively jealous husband stood out vocally and dramatically.

Her costumes and wig made her look a bit too much like a strong, healthy Californian girl version of the Brave heroine to inhabit the wispy, neurasthenic Melisande, but vocally she and Solis nailed it.

"What's your favorite part of the opera?" I asked Armen, and he rooted about before settling on Act Five, "the beginning and then the whole thing, where King Arkel sings...You need a great King Arkel or the whole piece doesn't work." Philip Skinner was a magnificent King Arkel, and his ode to the sadness of the eternal cycle of life left us both teary-eyed at the end.

The original scheduled opera for this West Edge Opera's season was a production of Britten's Death in Venice, but it proved to be expensive to produce, so Pelleas and Melisande became the late substitute. It was not only an inspired choice, but the planets aligned for a really lovely production. Major props to conductor Jonathan Khuner whose orchestra sounded exquisite in his reduction of the score, and director Keturah Stickann for her emphasis on narrative clarity rather than an interpretive gloss. And good job, supernumeraries, you provided visual interest and moved props well. There is one more performance this Friday evening and you can buy tickets by clicking here.