Raymonda at the SF Ballet

Your chances of seeing a live production of the full-length, 1898 Russian ballet Raymonda, with choreography by Marius Petipa and music by Alexander Glazunov, are exceedingly slim. The SF Ballet is currently presenting a lavish production that was originally conceived and choreographed by Tamara Rojo for the English National Ballet in 2022, just before she arrived in San Francisco to become the company's new Artistic Director. It's easy to see why the ballet is so rarely performed anymore as it requires a huge cast and orchestra, and for the three principal roles, a level of dancing difficulty that ranks with some of the most demanding in the classical repertory. Plus, the characters are one-dimensional and the original storyline is casually Islamophobic, with the Saracen guest wanting to kidnap and rape the virginal heroine before being thwarted and killed by her Christian Crusader fiance. (All production photos are by Lindsay Thomas.)

Rojo changed the narrative for the better, though it sometimes doesn't make much sense. The time and setting was moved from medieval Hungary to 19th Century England and Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Instead of hanging out in a Hungarian castle for the first act, we watch Raymonda (Sasha De Sola) as she quickly leaves her upper-class British home and follows her soldier fiance John de Bryan to Crimea, where she joins a nursing unit a la Florence Nightingale.

The nurses and soldiers are given sensational dances, but the happy music did seem a bit odd in this context. As my companion Austin remarked, "Wow! I guess war is fun and there's lots of dancing."

The colorful musical score by Glazunov is considered one of his best works, and it's eminently danceable, but much of it sounded like second-rate Tchaikovsky to me. What was fabulous was the playing of the orchestra under conductor Martin West, not to mention the live cimbalom in the last act for Raymonda's final solo. (Pictured are horn players Logan Bryck and Brian McCarty in the orchestra pit.)

The hour-long first act tends to drag in any production (there are YouTube versions from the Bolshoi and La Scala), but things pick up considerably in Act Two when Abdur Rahman (an exuberant Fernando Carratalá Coloma), the exotic Ottoman officer, gives a party in a tent for the ailing soldiers and their attending nurses.

There are wonderful dances from various nations and quite a bit of seductive movement from Rahman and Raymonda. In other words, think of Rudolph Valentino as The Sheikh. As Rachel Howard points out in her SF Chronicle review, "like pretty much every full “Raymonda” production, it’s about sublimated sexual fantasies."

The final act, which is often performed as a separate chunk, is the wedding party with a lot of "character" dancing, which I am assuming means ballet versions of folk dancing. Cleverly, the revised libretto specifies "Hungarian Workers" at the English estate where Raymonda is to marry John de Bryan. However, in this version, Raymonda pulls a Nora in A Doll's House and abruptly exits at the end of the ballet, leaving her betrothed on the altar after dancing with him for 30 minutes. It doesn't really work but it doesn't matter.

Seemingly the entire company is dancing in this production, and they are looking great. Although the three principals on Saturday's opening were very good, there weren't any real superstar moments where the audience holds their breath and can hardly believe their own eyes. There are three other casts rotating into the roles and I am tempted to return to the opera house to check them out. (Click here for the SF Ballet casting site.)

Anxious Music at the SF Symphony

Departing SF Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led a smashing concert over the weekend that included a commissioned world premiere and two major, banging works by Prokofiev and Stravinsky that were composed just before World War One. The concert started with Strange Beasts, the 20-minute commissioned piece by a young black composer, Xavier Muzik, pictured above. (All photos are courtesy of Kristen Loken.)

Muzik gave a sweet, rambling intro that repeated the program notes where he mentioned that he suffered from anxiety attacks, particularly during the COVID pandemic while living in Los Angeles, and that one of his solutions was to photograph the world around him. Some of those photos were used as part of a quirky multimedia slideshow of skyscrapers looming like Godzilla and what appeared to be claustrophobic gatherings of fans during an LA Dodgers World Series parade. What set the visuals apart from other symphonic multimedia shows I've encountered was that the images were intermittent, appearing during less than half of the course of the music, and they mostly stayed up for less than a second in an anxiety-producing strobe effect.

The music took a while to gain traction, but once it did, with a woodblock propulsively driving the huge orchestra along, it was intermittently engaging, and yes, anxious-making. From the looks of his website, this was Muzik's first big orchestra commission, and it was impressive how well he composed for the entire ensemble. I'd like to hear it again.

This was followed by the agonizingly slow Ascent of the Grand Piano from the basement, whereupon Daniil Trifonov stormed his way through Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2. Prokofiev composed the piece in 1912, fresh from the St. Petersburg Conservatory at age 21, then lost the score in a fire before fleeing the Russian Revolution and literally traveling around the world for the next decade. He reconstructed the concerto from memory in Paris in 1923, and it's an insanely difficult, complex piece to play.

This was my first time seeing Trifonov play after reading about him over the last decade, and he didn't disappoint in terms of virtuosity and an idiosyncratic musical intelligence. However, he didn't seem to be doing the score many favors with some of his musical choices, and the concerto started to sound more wildly eccentric and unfocused than it actually is. In contrast, Yefim Bronfman played the same work with the SF Symphony in 2019 and it was such a perfecly calibrated performance that the audience applauded after each movement, usually a no-no, but in that case well deserved (click here).

Still, it was fascinating to see Trifonov in person, looking like one of those classical music "long-hairs" that were featured in movies from the 1920s onwards. And in his encore, where he played with a gentleness that was absent in most of the Prokofiev, he was exquisite.

After intermission, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Igor Stravinsky's still-shocking 1912 ballet score Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) in a brightly colored performance that had the orchestra playing at its best. It was also a delight to hear the new principal bassoon player, Joshua Elmore, playing the famous opening strains of the score.

Thanks to Disney's Fantasia, I long associated The Rite of Spring with dinosaurs stomping around, but the ballet is actually depicting the ritual sacrifice of a young woman. That's always anxious making.

Honk If You Hate Elon

On a #49 Muni bus this afternoon I sat next to a gentleman holding a homemade cardboard sign.

We were both on our way to a protest taking place in front of the Tesla showroom at 999 Van Ness.

The signage was mostly direct and to the point about the fascist coup currently taking place in the U.S. federal government...

...led by the malignant Trump and the ketamine-addled Elon Musk.

This was one of hundreds of protests taking place nationwide in front of Tesla dealerships...

...which is one prong of the rapidly building resistance to authoritarian rule by the racist, misogynist South African, Elon Musk.

Though the protest was serious, the crowd was joyous...

...which was brightened by a lively band that played continuously for two hours.

There was even a celebrity sighting of writer Rebecca Solnit (the Woman in Black) holding a #DefendDemocracy banner on a median strip in the middle of Van Ness Avenue. She's been an invaluable online presence since the January 20 inauguration, doing just that, defending democracy.

Shostakovich and Mahler at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony offered a meaty program this week that started with the Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein playing Shostakovich's 1957 Piano Concerto #2 in a buoyant, joyful performance. The work was written for Dmitri Shostakovich's son Maxim for his Conservatory final, and it's a delightful outlier in the composer's later compositions, sounding a bit like early Prokofiev.

The guest conductor was Estonian-American Paavo Järvi who matched the pianist in both the brightness of the outer movements and the meditative beauty of the Andante in the center.

Gerstein seemed to be having a ball playing the piece and he was brought back three times by the audience on Friday evening before playing an encore by Rachmaninoff, the Mélodie from his Salon Pieces.

After intermission, Järvi conducted a huge orchestra in Mahler's 1905 Symphony #7, a sprawling behemoth in five movements that is the least popular and performed among the composer's nine symphonies. Usually, the work lasts about 80 minutes but there's a recording by Otto Klemperer that is 100 minutes long and a recording by Hermann Scherchen that is 68 minutes long. Paavo Järvi's account was closer to the Scherchen, which worked well for the hard-driving first movement, but was less effective in the three "night music" movements in the middle, where the bright lights stayed on and there was no mystery or darkness. After a while, everything started to sound the same.

In any rendition, what is most remarkable about the symphony is how every instrument or grouping of instruments has its solo moments, as if this were a chamber work. At times, it sounded like The Old Person's Guide to the Orchestra (apologies, Benjamin Britten), and the various sections were sounding fabulous, including the trumpets led by principal Mark Inouye.

Also impressive were the contributions of all the wind instruments throughout, and the rondo finale where all heck breaks loose was a joy.