Hayes Valley Fire

On Tuesday morning around 6AM, a large housing construction site at the corner of Octavia and Oak in the Hayes Valley neighborhood went up in flames.

According to a post at SFist, Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association president Jennifer Laska sent a letter a couple of months ago outlining the dangerous situation in the neighborhood: "Hayes Valley has suffered a series of dangerous fires along Octavia Boulevard that started around tent encampments," Laska's letter reads. "There is currently an encampment on Octavia at Hickory where many of these fires have started. [The encampment residents] have been tapping into power at sidewalk utility access points and the light poles along Octavia Boulevard."

The response from San Francisco's municipal bureaucracy and public safety departments has been a collective shrug as if to say, "What do you expect us to do about it?" Since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, the streets of San Francisco, particularly in certain neighborhoods like the Civic Center and environs, have been pockmarked with scenes that look straight out of the latest Netflix dystopian sci-fi series. People dangerously plugging into public utility lines, causing the occasional explosion, along with setting their tents on fire while getting sloppy with drugs, has become a common occurrence.

This isn't a problem that is unique to Hayes Valley or San Francisco. There are just too many people in California with too few affordable housing options. And any municipal response in San Francisco would probably be expensive and fruitless, rather like the current traffic rerouting from the Octavia Street freeway entrances to Page and Haight Streets, causing massive traffic jams throughout the entire neighborhood. As a Muni streetcar driver yelled yesterday to a traffic control officer after taking 20 minutes to drive two blocks down Market Street, "You're making it worse!"

In the meantime, the San Francisco Fire Department might want to get off their well-paid behinds and mitigate some of the more dangerous offenders and situations.

The Mozart of Mariachi at West Edge Opera

West Edge Opera opened its annual summer festival at the fabulous old Scottish Rite Temple on Oakland's Lake Merritt.

Sunday afternoon saw the opening performance of Cruzar la Cara de la Luna, which was billed as a Spanish-language "mariachi opera."

On the elevator to the upper floor theater, we rode with a member of Mariachi Azteca, a group from San Jose who were the orchestra for the show.

Onstage for a short mariachi concert and throughout the entire 80-minute opera, they were absolutely superb and a joy to hear.

The opening concert featured singers from the band itself along with soloists from the opera. Baritone Efraín Solís was raised in Santa Ana, California before making his way through the Merola-to-Adler training program at the San Francisco Opera. For the last six years, his performances around the Bay Area have been highlights of every production where he appeared. In Cruzar la Cara de la Luna, he plays the multi-generational lead character of Laurentino with a musical and Spanish language authenticity that adds immeasurably to the opera's impact.

The tenor Moisés Salazar was also raised in Santa Ana in a mariachi family, attending a rival high school from Solis. Salazar is currently an Adler Fellow at the San Francisco Opera, successfully stepping in this summer for Michael Fabiano in Madama Butterfly, and he has one of the most gorgeous young tenor voices I have ever heard. He has the makings of a superstar if all goes well. Salazar sang a few songs solo, a duet with Solis, and finally a duet with his own father who still leads a mariachi ensemble in Santa Ana. Unfortunately, an amplified sound system marred that sentimental moment with stretches of loud feedback.

The amplification was unnecessary with the powerful voices assembled, and it almost ruined the opera for me, but the extraordinary, heartfelt performances, the graceful direction from Kristina Gutiérrez, and above all the mariachi musical score by José "Pepe" Martínez had me dissolved into tears by the end.

Martínez was born in 1941 in the southern Jalisco village of Tecalitlán, Mexico to a poor household with a father who repaired musical instruments and played the harp with mariachi bands. After moving to Guadalajara, the freakishly precocious Pepe formed his first mariachi group with fellow elementary school students at the age of 12, studied on a scholarship at the University of Guadalajara School of Music as a teenager, and eventually became the most prolific composer and arranger of mariachi music in all of Mexico.

In the late 1960s, with his group Mariachi Nuevo Tecalitlán, he was commissioned to arrange a series of 50 bargain-basement LPs for Discos Sono-Mex in Monterrey of every genre of music imaginable. In a detailed historical post at mariachimusic.com, Jonathan Clark writes: His speed and prowess at composing and arranging caused Mark Fogelquist to dub him “the Mozart of mariachi.”

In 2008, Houston Grand Opera produced a major mariachi concert and was so impressed by the response that they commissioned a libretto by operatic director Leonard Foglia and a score by Pepe Martínez for Cruzar la Cara de la Luna, six years before the composer's death in 2016. The story is simple and effective, about a dying Mexican-American man in Texas longing for his late Mexican wife Renata and his estranged son Rafael, which his American family knew nothing about. (Pictured above are Bernardo Bermudez as his American son Mark, Aléxa Anderson as his American granddaughter Diana, Kelly Guerra as his Mexican wife Renata, and Sergio González as Mexican son Rafael.)

The work could be labeled a musical, with its short stretches of dialogue and stand-alone musical numbers. However, the arias, duets, and ensembles backed by the mariachi band have an operatic sweep to them, and the combination of simplicity and sophistication of the musical score is a rare achievement. (Pictured above are violinist Monique Valenzuela, Alissa Aguilar as Lupita, wife to Moisés Salazar as Chucho, who starts the male migration from their village in Michoacán to Los Estados Unidos.)

The entire production team, cast, and orchestra led by conductor Sixto Montesino Jr. all deserve the highest praise.There is only one more performance of this production on Saturday, August 5th at the Scottish Rite Temple. You can order tickets online for as little as $10 for decent balcony seats (click here).

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival opened last night at the Castro Theater for the next five days.

The festival is one of the cultural treasures of this city, with musicians specializing in live music to accompany silent films arriving from all over the globe.

The opening night film was The Iron Mask, a conglomeration of Alexander Dumas's Three Musketeers novels that ends with all our heroes dying while rescuing King Louis XIV from treachery. (They are rewarded with an arm-in-arm walk to heaven together at the end.) It was also the 45-year-old Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s swan song to silent films as a producer and swashbuckling actor. The production was lavish, with legions of extras on hand, and beautifully shot. Plus, the restored print was exquisite.

The theater was almost full with an attentive, appreciative crowd who gave a huge ovation to the Gunter Buchwald Ensemble. Their propulsive score for piano, percussion, and one musician on various wind instruments fit the movie well.

One of the great joys of seeing a silent film at the Castro Theater is being transported directly back in time. The theater was built for silent films (it opened with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse starring Valentino) and now the great old cinema palace is about to be turned into a concert venue for Another Planet Entertainment. The situation is a civic disgrace, and everyone involved in making that happen should be ashamed of themselves, but time and change are inexorable. You might want to check out a film this weekend before the festival is forced to go elsewhere. Click here for a schedule.

100 Years of the San Francisco Opera

The San Francisco Opera celebrated its 100th anniversary season with a gala concert last Friday that was unexpectedly emotional for both performers and audience as many of us realized how pivotal the company has been in so many of our lives.

Civic boosters often announce that something is "world-class" in San Francisco, which is usually a laughably provincial claim, but the San Francisco Opera has genuinely been one of the great opera companies of the world over the course of its 100 years. It helps that its performing home is an extraordinary theater, the 1932 War Memorial Opera House. The beautiful building resonates with the ghosts of rare, magical performances where singers, orchestra, and audience converged in sublime, shared musical experiences.

The Friday concert began with Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducting the Prelude from Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg while a slide show of archival photos were projected on an unobtrusive screen. There were no captions on the names of the operas or the performers which probably irritated some in the audience, but it drew me deeply into the memoryscape with such odd remembrances as: "Oh, there's that ugly set for Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani where Carol Vaness was so awesome."

Fifteen singers closely associated with the company sang a wide range of arias, from Monteverdi to John Adams, and the slide show mini-histories would shift with each performance. In the photo above, baritone Brian Mulligan offered a soulful account of Batter My Heart from Adams's Doctor Atomic, which had its 2005 world premiere at the San Franciso Opera with Gerald Finley (onscreen) as Robert Oppenheimer. The slide show continued with the five Adams opera productions that have been performed by the San Francisco Opera, from the 1992 original Peter Sellars production of The Death of Klinghoffer to this season's cententary commission of Antony and Cleopatra.

I first went to the San Francisco Opera in 1970, seeing Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, unusual fare for a teenager but I was freakishly precocious. Moving to San Francisco in 1974, I joined the wild, wonderful Standing Room crowd who charged through the doors with their $3 tickets like they were in the opening scene of the movie The Red Shoes, where everyone races up the stairs trying to snag the best spot.

In the 1980s I made enough money to buy a subscription in the last row of the top balcony where the sound is the best in the huge auditorium.

In 1991, there was an ad on one of the classical music radio stations announcing that the company needed non-singing extras, known as supernumeraries, for a massive production of Prokofiev's five-hour opera of War and Peace. Backstage turned out to exceed all expectations, and for the next 20 years I joined the circus, marching around with banners, dragging tenors off to execution, and playing with complicated props, all while listening to some of the greatest voices in the world singing straight into my ear.

Much of our supernumerary stage business involved the San Francisco Opera chorus, which is one of the greatest operatic vocal groups in the world. With the right directors, they are also one of the most skilled and flexible acting ensembles besides.

One of the joys of growing old is having generational memories, which means I was able to experience legendary vocalists at the end of their careers (Leontyne Price, Carlo Bergonzi, Birgit Nilsson, Alfredo Kraus, Beverly Sills), the whole length of a career (Carol Vaness, Placido Domingo, Montserrat Caballe, Luciano Pavarotti), and those just coming into their prime (Elza van den Heever, for example). Two of the greatest sopranos I have heard over the years in San Francisco, Nina Stemme and Karita Mattila (pictured above) sang in Friday's program, and it felt like a privilege to have such a history with them.

The San Francisco Opera Orchestra has only been getting better with each succeeding decade that I have been listening to them, and it was a particular delight to have former Music Director Donald Runnicles as part of the evening.

What made the concert so special, however, was the energy from the audience, a sophisticated group who all seemed to be feeling their way through their own individual histories with this company.

May the next 100 years be as wonderful as the first.