For sheer, ultra-intellectual multiculturalism, it would be hard to top last Friday's concert at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. The music was by John Cage, the recently deceased, gay philosopher/composer whose legacy is still being figured out. The piece was taken from an overarching work well-described by New York writer Richard Kostelanetz (click here for the whole essay):
"The masterpiece, which is really one of the most extraordinary books of its kind produced by any composer ever, is Song Books. Published in 1970 in three volumes (the first subtitled “Solos for Voice 3-58,” the second “Solos for Voice 59-92,” and a third of “Instructions”), 8 1/2” high and 11” wide, spiral-bound, it is available from Cage’s principal music publisher C. F. Peters for the curious sum of $207.05."
The evening's music was the American premiere of Cage's "Solo for Voice 58: 18 Microtonal Ragas" which was assembled by Amelia Cuni (click here for her website) from a series of musical notations and "directions." The Italian singer is an expert in Indian classical music "dhrupad vocals," and also makes music with contemporary European composers. On this project, she was joined by percussionists Raymond Kaczynski (American) and Federico Sanesi (Italian), along with Werner Durand (German) on "drones/electronics."
The 80-minute performance, which included theatrical "directions" from elsewhere in the Song Books, was alternately totally fascinating and excruciatingly boring, which certainly gave it an authentic 1960s avant-garde happening event feel. At one point, Amelia stopped singing or dancing or whatever she was doing, put on a black sleep mask, and laid down onstage to nap for a couple of minutes. The musicians, however, were exquisite, particularly Ms. Cuni who could make microtonal sounds seem beautiful rather than "off-pitch." Her percussive colleagues were also extraordinary.
The piece was being performed in conjunction with the release by Other Minds (click here) of a studio recording of the music, complete with an extensive program book that explains Indian classical music and its resistance to multicultural incursions, how John Cage felt about improvisation, how the piece was assembled by Cuni and her collaborators over the last four years, and quite a bit more. Above all, the music itself is fascinating, and sounds better in my living room than in a stuffy, though beautiful, church in Berkeley. Check it out.
My favorite concerts at the San Francisco Symphony for decades have been the weekday matinees.
The audiences are about 90% women of a certain age, and only about 10% of the male attendees are under the age of 60.
Above all, they're a great audience, both sophisticated and adventurous after having heard so much different music over the years.
This week's program started with a few incidental pieces from Moussorgsky's great unfinished opera "Khovanschina," which I hope Gockley at the Opera will present soon (in the Shostakovich orchestration, please), and then continued with that almost archetypal Romantic piano concerto warhorse, Rachmaninoff's Second.
Every time I see James Gaffigan, the Associate Conductor of the symphony, he seems to be accompanying a different young female pianist with a blonde ponytail in a Rachmaninoff concerto (click here).
This time the soloist was a 19-year-old French girl named Lisa de la Salle, who has started recording for the aptly named "Naive" label. She's probably a wonderful pianist, but the performance was something of a mess, with the orchestra drowning her out too often, and without that layer of Russian schmaltz that can make this music so irresistable.
The second half was a 15-minute piece called "Si Ji (Four Seasons)" by the contemporary composer Chen Yi, who is originally from China and now lives in New York and Kansas City (talk about cultural fusion). Though the piece didn't seem to be the audience's "cup of tea," as my seatmate put it, I thoroughly enjoyed the strange, propulsive tone poem and would happily listen to it again. The final piece was Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" overture, which Sid Chen of "The Standing Room" (click here) can't listen to without thinking of Russian ice skaters flashing lots of sequins.
The only distressing aspect to these matinee concerts is at the end, when a mass of older women, many with "memory issues," attempt to find their buses that will take them back to the Peninsula or Rossmoor or wherever. Not helping matters is that all the damned buses look the same.
Most people have a primal need to dress up in costume and playact on occasion, and though San Francisco has many such occasions, from the Bay to Breakers footrace to Zombie flash mobs, the Monster Costume Ball for the last thirty years has been Halloween.
The current overblown incarnation started on Polk Street in the early 1970s, when drag queens would cavort around the sidewalks, and gawkers would arrive to watch them from around the Bay Area. This blossomed into a huge street party, with Polk Street closed to traffic for a good ten blocks, but the event quickly degenerated into too many people and too many troublemakers. So one year in the late 1970s, the unofficial word went out that the party was moving to Castro Street, and not to tell any of the gawkers. It was probably the most exquisite, spontaneously fun, outdoor party I've attended in San Francisco, partly because everyone was in costume. Of course, by the next year, the word did get out to the gawkers and thirty years later, it looks time to migrate again.
This year Mayor Newsom, in concert with Supervisor Bevan Dufty and the lazy San Francisco Police Force, decided to threaten everyone with arrest, parking tickets, and general unpleasantness if they dared to show up in the Castro on Halloween so people sensibly avoided the place. Still, this seemed like a crappy way to deal with the situation, particularly in a city that relies so heavily on local tourism. Tom Meyer, the San Francisco Chronicle editorial cartoonist, actually wrote the best essay on that subject a couple of days ago (click here). Plus, the word I've been hearing for a number of years is that Halloween in the Castro is over for hipsters. Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) in the Mission is where it's at.
Thanks to Mike Harvey for the cool backstage photos from "The Magic Flute" at the San Francisco Opera on Halloween night with the amazing Erika Miklosa as the Queen of Night (click here for her website), the fabulous Elza van den Heever as The First Lady, Charlie Lichtman as a mangy lion, and yours truly as a silly slave.
