This week's program at the San Francisco Symphony consists of three bombastic pieces of music, and if you like that sort of thing (and I do), it's outrageously fun.
First on the program is Liszt's "Totentanz," a demented set of variations for piano and orchestra on the "Dies Irae" theme that was played hell-for-leather by the Quebequois pianist Louis Lortie (above right).
Lortie returned for Beethoven's 1808 Choral Fantasy, which starts off as a piano and orchestra exercise that is strange enough it could be mistaken for early Liszt, which then morphs into a chorus-and-soloists ode to the power of music that sounds like a warmup for the finale of the 9th Symphony.
The conductor was the 80-year-old Kurt Masur, who used to be the music director of the New York Philharmonic in the 1990s and is now the Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I'd only heard him conduct once before in a wretched traversal of Britten's "War Requiem," which I walked out on midway, but he was in better form for last night's program.
The second half was Prokofiev's great movie cantata, "Alexander Nevsky," with its monster chorus and patriotic evocation of Mother Russia defending itself back in the 13th century from invading Germans. The 1939 Eisenstein movie was made as a propaganda piece to warn Germany not to attack yet again, and Prokofiev fashioned the concert piece out of his movie score later that year.
In 1988 at Davies Hall, there was an almost definitive performance of "Alexander Nevsky" under the baton of Libor Pesek (bring him back, please!) with the legendary Polish contralto Ewa Podles, and though Masur and mezzo Nancy Maultsby weren't in the same league, the performance was still completely thrilling. There are further performances Friday and Saturday night, and a matinee Sunday afternoon. This is some of the best music Prokofiev ever wrote, and hearing it live is a treat not to be missed.
Two new exhibits installed by the great Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto have just opened at the Asian Art Museum in the Civic Center.
One of the exhibits is dedicated to modern Japanese fashion and it's a stunner.
Japanese fashion designers exploded into worldwide consciousness in the 1980s, and I first saw their work in a 1988 Irving Penn art photo book about Issey Miyake.
After the first shocked reaction of "they can't be serious," rather like seeing one of Frank Gehry's buildings for the first time, the pleasures provided by these modern designers can sneak up on you.
Kenneth Baker, the art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, isn't convinced. In his review of the two Sugimoto shows, he ends by writing, "I consider Sugimoto a great artist - and connoisseur - but he loses me when his interest turns to contemporary Japanese fashion...Though diverting in their strangeness, and occasional elegance, the costumes arrayed here, with a handful of Sugimoto photos, distill the rage for novelty that has infected all the modern arts, mainly to their detriment."
Sugimoto had free rein to select about 30 dresses from the legendary Kyoto Costume Institute (click here for their digital archive), and he features the work of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Junya Watanabe, and Tao Kurihara.
The gorgeous black-and-white photos, by the way, are by Sugimoto himself and are being used courtesy of the Asian Art Museum.
The show is definitely worth checking out, especially since there are two, beautifully printed brochures, with great photos and graceful writing, that come with the price of admission.
Alongside the "Stylized Sculpture" fashion exhibit, Sugimoto has installed a show that's been traveling around the world for a few years, called "History of History."
It's an artfully displayed show of antiquities mixed in with a few modern photographs and artifacts, which are all owned by Sugimoto himself, who is obviously not in the "starving artist" category.
The entryway is filled with fossils, ranging in size from tiny to huge, and a large red fossil with vegetation (not pictured) may be my favorite object in the entire museum.
Sugimoto loves to play with "meta" ideas in his photography, such as photographing Madame Tussaud wax figurines of historical characters and somehow making them look bizarrely real. However, he's a good and simple writer who avoids nonsensical art writing, and again the brochure he and the Asian have produced describing all the works is wonderful and free.
I don't mean to pick on Kenneth Baker at The SF Chronicle, because he mostly avoids the worst of art-speak in his essays, but in his review of the exhibit he does give us sentences like this: "An array of proto-Noh theatrical masks, of folk origin, awakens the thought of any single facial disposition as a visible sliver of ineffable spiritual and human possibility." (For the whole thing, click here.)
In conjunction with these two shows, there's also a three-film series curated by Sugimoto on $5 Thursday evenings at 6:00 PM in Samsung Hall. It starts off tonight, Thursday the 18th, with a legendary erotic film from 1973 called "The World of Geisha" directed by Tasumi Kumashiro, which was banned for its sexual explicitness. Next Thursday the 25th it's "The Face of Another," the weirdly fabulous Kobo Abe/Teshigahara/Takemetsu follow-up to "The Woman in The Dunes." November 8 features Suzuki's "Tokyo Drifter," a 1960s mod gangster film that's almost pure fun.
