Arabella at the San Francisco Opera

The San Francisco Opera is presenting the 1933 Richard Strauss operatic rarity, Arabella, in a production that I enjoyed much more than expected. Set over the course of one day and night in Vienna on Shrove Tuesday, the libretto is a bizarre German comedy featuring disagreeable Austrian aristocrats, including a compulsive gambler count and his silly countess wife who are trying to marry off their daughter Arabella to somebody rich so they can pay their bills. Richard Paul Fink gave an amusing, amiable performance as the paterfamilias as did Michaela Martens (above right) as the Countess who religiously consults with a fortune teller played by Jill Grove, as well she should since the entire plot is accurately foretold in the first scene. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

Arabella (Ellie Dehn) has a sister, Zdenka (Heidi Stober), who is being raised publicly as a boy to cut down on debutante costs for the family. This leads to all kinds of complications, and an exquisite duet between the two sopranos in Act One as they both imagine Mr. Right.

Imagine if Cyrano de Bergerac was actually a woman who was secretly in love with the soldier Christian who then pretends to be Roxane in a darkened bedroom for a sexual tryst, and you have some idea of how bizarre the plot becomes in Arabella. Daniel Johansson above is the lovesick young officer, Matteo, who longs for Arabella while being best buddies with the phony transgender Zdenka who is lovesick for him.

There are reworkings of scenes and characters from earlier Strauss operas, including a sequel to the stratospheric soprano role of Zerbinetta in Ariadne aux Naxos. Hye Jung Lee, who has been so spectacular as Madame Mao in Nixon in China, Olympia in Tales of Hoffman, and Ah Sing in Girls of the Golden West, had another great turn in the absurd role of "The Fiakermilli, a cabaret singer" at the Coachman's Ball where Arabella has been named The Queen.

The star of the show was the orchestra under debuting conductor Marc Albrecht, weaving in and out of quick conversational modes with full-out arias and duets. The singers were all very strong, and worked well together, but the role of Arabella is purposely written for a genuine opera star. As lovely as Ellie Dehn sounded most of the time, she doesn't quite have that charisma which would make you believe she would be worshiped by suitors and strangers every time she enters a room or descends a staircase. In fact, I kept waiting for the chorus to burst into "Hello, Dolly!"

Mandryka, the rich country heir from the Austro-Hungarian provinces, was sung by baritone Brian Mulligan in a richly sympathetic performance of a role that can be oafish and repellent. You could believe he would wrestle with a bear in the forests of his vast estate, and that he would make a good husband for the young prima donna that is Arabella. There are two more performances, one on Sunday the 28th at 2 PM, and the finale on Saturday, November 3rd at 7:30 PM. Chances to hear this opera live in English speaking countries are fairly rare, so it's worth seeking out.

Mayya & The Revolutionary Hell Yeah!

The Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library has a display case in the atrium with posters and zines from the city's late 1970s/early 1980s punk rock scene...

...focusing on female performers...

...raising the roof at the Mabuhay Gardens restaurant, among other locations.

One of the founding mothers, Penelope Houston of The Avengers, actually works at the library and she introduced an hour-long live concert held on the Larkin Street steps of the main branch.

The opening band was Mayya & The Revolutionary Hell Yeah!

The music was loud, tuneful, sexy, and full of energy.

You can hear and download the songs on Bandcamp (click here).

At the site, there's a short bio: "Diminutive in stature, Gargantuan in spirit". Mayya was born in Russia, grew up in the Tenderloin in SF. she is inspired by david bowie, gogol bordello, iggy pop, funk music, george harrison, pretty much anything w energy and good melodies...

Even the crazy street people hanging outside the library seemed to enjoy the music.

Prokofiev and Dvorak at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony last week presented a Prokofiev and Dvorak program featuring Austrian guest conductor Manfed Honeck and Norwegian cello soloist Truls Mørk that looked wonderful on paper, but was disappointing in real life. Six years ago, after conducting a rehearsal of Prokofiev's oratorio from Eisenstein's three Ivan the Terrible films, Vladimir Jurowski gave an interview where he noted: ""Prokofiev is still being discovered. There are a handful of his pieces that get played all the time, but there is so much wonderful music that nobody knows." Case in point, Prokofiev's 1950 Sinfonia concertante in E minor for Cello and Orchestra, which I had never even heard of before last week's Symphony performance.

The three-movement work is a dense grab-bag of styles from Prokofiev's entire career, spanning his astringent modernism of the 1920s through his Soviet Realist lyricism of the 1940s, and to make the disparate elements work, it needs a great conductor like Jurowski who can make the most jarring segues in the composer's music sound inevitable. Manfred Honeck was not up to that level, and never resolved Prokofiev's tricky rhythms, so the piece sounded even more disjointed than it really is. Truls Mørk gave a heroic performance in the fiendishly difficult solo cello role, which barely allows for a break in the 45-minute piece, but there was a tentativeness to his playing where the work seemed to be owning him rather than the other way around. It probably didn't help that I had been listening to cellist Mstislav Rostropovich's version on YouTube all week. Rostropovich helped commission and shape the Sinfonia with the composer for its debut, and his version is both authoritative and astonishing, which is almost unfair to later cellists.

After intermission, Honeck conducted the orchestra in Dvorak's Symphony No. 8, which has almost as many recognizable tunes as his New World Symphony No. 9. Though it is played on heavy rotation in broadcasts from classical music radio stations, this was the first time I was hearing the symphony performed live, and was looking forward to it, but Honeck led a rendition that was loud, flashy, and bludgeoning.

The four-movement work is essentially pastoral, with one of the most beautiful slow second movements in the symphonic literature, but you would not know it from last week's performance. In James Keller's program notes, he writes: "I shall never forget [the Czech conductor] Rafael Kubelík in a rehearsal when it came to the opening trumpet fanfare, say to the orchestra: ‘Gentlemen, in Bohemia the trumpets never call to battle–they always call to the dance!’" Though the San Francisco Symphony sounded great, by the end of the evening, it felt like a bloody war had just finished, which made much of the audience excited enough for a standing ovation, but which left me feeling battered.

Thiebaud at SFMOMA

The 97-year-old California painter, Wayne Thiebaud, has a sweet pair of exhibits on the second floor of SFMOMA, divided between his own works along with his selection of favorite paintings from the museum's permanent collection.

I often mistake his landscape paintings with those of Richard Diebenkorn, who was a longtime friend and mutual admirer, although Thiebaud's tend not to be quite as abstract.

Living in Sacramento and teaching at UC Davis for decades, his landscapes embody California in a vivid, vertiginous way.

There are also many figure drawings and paintings, mostly of women...

...including the 1973 Girl with a Pink Hat above.

His most identifiable work are the simultaneously abstract and realistic depictions of pastries, pies, cakes, gumball machines, and other colorfully manufactured food on neutral backgrounds.

The Artist's Choice exhibit features Diebenkorn and Matisse paintings, in an echo of the blockbuster Diebenkorn/Matisse exhibit at the museum last year.

Thiebaud's other choices are idiosyncratic and interesting, including Tamayo's 1932 The Window.

About one third of the selections have descriptions of the works by Thiebaud himself, which are fascinating and blessedly free of artspeak.

Both exhibits are well worth visiting.

Upstairs on the fourth floor, the great Magritte exhibit is heading into its final two weeks, and because it was so crowded I spent most of my time looking at the people looking at the paintings, except almost everyone did so through an intermediary, whether it be the phones on their cameras, the museum-provided audio tours, or studying the signage.

One middle-aged woman was a complete anomaly as she actually engaged with the paintings themselves, looking at each of them closely, from a distance, and from different angles. I complimented her near the end of the exhibit on actually looking at the paintings rather than through her phone, and she burst into laughter. "It is crazy, isn't it?" she replied.