The California Festival at the SF Symphony

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Music Director of the SF Symphony, doesn't usually talk to the audience before conducting, but during a Sunday matinee concert a couple of weeks ago, he gave a long, funny introduction to his own composition, the 2021 kinema. Salonen described how he was homebound in Finland during the Covid pandemic looking out at the Baltic Sea, feeling despondent, watching too many news channels on TV, and unable to work on anything. Eventually, he was contacted by a filmmaker acquaintance who asked him to write a score for a Finnish romantic film called Odotus, "which seemed like a good task to get my mind working again. The only problem was that about 40% of the movie was sex scenes for which my musical training had not quite prepared me."

Salonen refashioned the soundtrack into five movements for clarinet and a large contingent of strings, adding new music to what he had already composed. The soloist here was the SF Symphony's principal clarinet player, Carey Bell, and the moody 30-minute piece was surprisingly easy and beautiful to hear, especially considering Salonen's usual complexity when he composes for a large orchestra.

Carey Bell gave a virtuosic, seamless performance, though he seemed ill at ease whenever he was not actually playing his instrument, fiddling with the holes outside and cleaning out the interior between movements. At one point, he actually looked like he was going to hyperventilate, but the crisis was averted and he was greeted with a standing ovation when he finished the demanding assignment.

This concert was part of the first California Festival showcasing new classical music performed by 100 different ensembles throughout the state. The 28-year-old, Bay Area composer Jens Ibsen was commissioned for a work by the SF Symphony as part of its "Emerging Black Composers Project." In a long introduction, he talked about his love of "prog rock," and how he wanted to incorporate its sound and rhythms into a full orchestra. "I've often written music where I've had the orchestra sound like electronic music, but this time I wanted to integrate the real thing, so this is basically a concerto for electric guitar and orchestra." Composed this year, Drowned in Light is a fun, noisy ride that morphs into a serene, delicate twilight sound in the second movement.

The electric guitar soloist was hidden in the back of the orchestra below the percussion, which was too bad because Travis Andrews of the avant-garde The Living Earth Show duo, was fabulous and it would have been fun to watch him perform up close.

The final work was Stravinsky's 1942 Symphony in Three Movements, a short, hard-driving piece written during World War Two. Though I am loving Salonen as the new SF Symphony Music Director, his predecessor Michael Tilson Thomas made a better case for this gnarly symphony four years ago in 2019 (click here).

Omar at SF Opera

The San Francisco Opera is having an historic season. Among the eight operas they are performing this fall and next summer, three are new, written within the last five years and co-comissioned by the company. Omar, the second opera of this trilogy, opened last week and it's a stunning show about the physical and spiritual journey of Omar Ibn Said, a West African Muslim scholar at the beginning of the 19th century who is kidnapped into American slavery for the next 60 years. (production photos by Cory Weaver)

The composer and librettist is Rhiannon Giddens, a 46-year-old polymath musician from North Carolina. She collaborated in its orchestration with the 61-year-old Michael Abels who has been writing classical concert music for decades but only recently became well-known for his soundtracks for Jordan Peele's arty horror films. Besides being a successful pop singer, Giddens is a noted archaeologist of American folk music and its immigrant roots, convincingly evangelizing for the inclusion of Africa as a major source.

Omar contains a monster gumbo of different musical styles, from operatic to gospel to folk, but they work together smoothly and the music stays consistently engaging for three hours. Plus, it is such a welcome change to have black artists exploring black roots music for a classical music audience rather than white artists plundering the same mine for most of the 20th century.

The opera was commissioned for the Spoleto Festival 2020 in South Carolina but the pandemic upended everything so its premiere was at Spoleto Festival 2022. Afterwards, the opera traveled to the LA Opera where the production was super-sized, brilliantly. Another polymath artist, Christopher Myers, was the production designer and his work is masterful, some of the most striking designs I've seen on a stage. That goes for the rest of the production team too: Set Designer Amy Rubin, Costume Designers April M. Hickman and Micheline Russell-Brown, Lighting Designer Pablo Santiago, and Projection Designer Joshua Higgason.

I tend to avoid stories concerning the Holocaust and American slavery because they seem too massively horrible to be considered as entertainment. The first act of Omar, with its brilliantly staged Middle Passage sequence, should be rough on the conscience of any white American, particularly since this history is still being officially repressed here 200 years later. The second act is cheerier, however, with square dancing, a "good" plantation master, and lots of theology centering around The Word.

The cast is strong throughout, anchored by the young tenor Jamez McCorkle as Omar. He has been singing the role around the country since its debut in Spoleto, and he projects a spiritual stolidity throughout all his trials that feels genuinely powerful.

Taylor Raven was resplendent as Omar's mother Fatima, who is killed in the first scene but appears through the rest of the opera as a fabulous ghost...

...while soprano Brittany Renee brought some sunshine as fellow slave Julie who helps Omar survive.

The four roles for evil and good white characters were divided between two singers, tenor Barry Banks as the Slave Auctioneer/Liberal Friend and baritone Daniel Okulitch as the Evil Master/Good Master. They both did great jobs as characters who the audience couldn't help but despise, and appear in the penultimate scene where the "good master" is insisting that his new educated house slave, Omar, become a Christian and leave his "false god."

What nobody but Omar seems to realize is that Islam recognizes Moses and Jesus as true prophets, but that Mohammed had received the latest word from God. The opera begins with a long prayer to Allah that bookends a long finale where The Word of the Bible, Psalm 23, is transformed and superseded by a prayer from The Word of the Koran. The chorus meanwhile has spread itself throughout the auditorium, surrounding the audience in sound. The ensuing musical transcendence was real and well earned. Also, though there are many explicitly Christian scenes throughout the history of Western Opera, and a few Jewish ones, I have never heard Islam used positively this way in an opera house before. On the third, Saturday night performance, the house seemed to be sold out and the audience was liberally sprinkled with what looked like much of the Bay Area Muslim community. The word has gotten out.

What Matters at SFMOMA

Two wildly successful Japanese artists are currently having exhibitions at different San Francisco museums this fall: Takashi Murakami at the Asian and Yayoi Kusama at SFMOMA.

We walked quickly through SFMOMA's Third Street lobby because there is a large screen installed over the coat check room showing Wu Tsang's 2022 video art piece Of Whales. From what I have seen of the looping, two-hour, digitally animated video over the last few months, it somehow manages to make whales boring which I had not thought possible. The real problem is an endlessly irritating musical soundtrack, credited to Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda, which sounds like a combo of Kenny G, electronic bloops, and banal film music.

When I asked employees if the new, recurring soundtrack for their work lives was annoying, the responses have ranged from diplomatic smiles to eyes rolling right out of their heads. There must have been staff pushback because there is now a small note on the SFMOMA website which states: "The volume of this work is lowered during non-peak hours. To experience it at normal volume, please visit between 1–4 p.m. Friday through Tuesday, or on Thursdays from 1–7 p.m." The installation is scheduled to remain in the lobby through December 2025, by which time a few front-line employees may have gone mad.

Upstairs on the fourth floor, there is a new curatorial concept called What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms, which the website blurb describes as "thought-provoking contemporary works from the museum’s collection that offer individual artistic responses to questions about life and art. These works propose engagements with both physicality and the ephemeral, addressing tangible matter of artistic media as well as urgent subject matters. Presented across eight rooms, What Matters addresses materials, conditions of space and architecture, and, most importantly, social relations."

It doesn't get more vague and artspeak than that, and the installations didn't spark much interest on their own, with the exception of ...three kings weep..., an eight-minute Jamaican video from 2018 by Ebony G. Patterson. Three men cry and get dressed in a backwards running, hypnotic film.

On the sixth floor, there is a huge Yayoi Kusama sculpture, Aspiring to Pumpkin's Love, the Love in my Heart, created this year.

Yayoi Kusama is 94 years old, and according to Hanna Schouwink of David Zwirner Gallery, Kusama is "officially the world's most successful living artist". I had never heard of Kusama before but her Wikipedia entry is astonishing. She left Tokyo in 1957 for New York City and was in the middle of every avant-garde art movement there for the next 15 years. Warhol and Oldenburg outright stole a few of her sculptural innovations, and upon her return to Tokyo in 1972, she was despondent and suicidal. Kusama then entered a mental institution for "art therapy," where she has been living and working for the last 50 years.

SFMOMA is exhibiting two of her Infinity Rooms, and the set-up for visiting them is a bit strange and rushed, with museum staff dividing the reserved ticket queue into groups of six to eight people.

You are then led into a small, cube-shaped room that is a conglomeration of mirrors and polka dots that do seem to stretch into infinity.

After two minutes in the first room, employees open the doors from the outside, and your group will be ushered into a second room with cooler colors and soft sculptures.

The museum might consider going full Disney and have their people movers wear polka dot uniforms during their shifts.

With only two minutes allowed in each room, the experience does not exactly make for contemplation of the infinite, but it's perfect for Instagram.

Down the hall on the sixth floor, Ragnar Kjartansson's nine-screen video masterpiece, The Visitors, continues to play on a loop in a room of its own. The Washington Post recently published a fabulous behind-the-scenes article about the making of the work with interviews of all the participants. They're calling it the ultimate zeitgeist artwork, on a par with Manet's Olympia or Picasso's Guernica. "The way Kjartansson’s immersive exhibit echoes and distills our gradual, vaccine-assisted transition from prolonged isolation to summertime resumption of social life is uncanny."

Murakami: Monsterized at the Asian

There is a smashing new exhibit at the Asian Art Museum by the contemporary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami called Unfamiliar People: Swelling of Monsterized Human Ego.

I had never heard of the artist before this exhibition, which just demonstrates how off-trend I am, because the 62-year-old Murakami has become a global sensation in the the last few decades. (Pictured above is the 2019 Bacon: Scream, a riff on a famous Francis Bacon portrait of his lover George Dyer.)

He wanted to become an animator but at art school he gravitated towards traditional Japanese art, earning a PhD before rebelling against the insular field. (Pictured above is 727 which is a 1996 pop takeoff on a famous 12th century Japanese painting, Illustrated Legends of Mt. Shigi.)

In 1994 he spent a year in New York City and learned a lot about the commercial art world which he put to good use on his return to Tokyo, eventually branching out into the worlds of fashion (Louis Vuitton and Issey Miyake), movies (the 2013 Jellyfish Eyes), music videos (with Pharell, Kanye West, Billie Eilish, and a Kirsten Dunst cover of Turning Japanese), and every other conceivable global branding opportunity.

Murakami has an entire army of young artists and assistants in his three production factories in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and New York, which allows him to create work like the 82-foot-long painting Judgement Day for this exhibit.

The size is astonishing...

...as is the detailing...

...and the occasional nod to erotica.

Like much Japanese pop art, the sensibility is a strange mixture of cute and weirdly disturbing...

...and after three years of a global pandemic, with much of the world going mad with fear and conspiracy theories...

...Murakami is presenting this exhibit as his response. (Pictured is the 2023 Unfamiliar People: Snow Crystals.)

The show is a kick and well worth seeing.(Click here for a charming YouTube video made by the museum with Murakami wearing a series of goofy monster hats while explaining stuff.)