My favorite box-office person in the Civic Center, Meredith Clark (above), has set up shop in the lobby of Davies Symphony Hall and it was a joy as usual to see her on Sunday afternoon. It's too bad the San Francisco Ballet, where she worked for 17 years, has decided that the internet should be the only way people get tickets rather than providing a fully staffed box office. (Note to Ballet: It doesn't work.)
Alex Ross at "The New Yorker" has written an amusing account of how audiences have behaved over the centuries at music concerts and notes that serious, quiet and rigid routines are of recent vintage. He describes the usual cookie-cutter approach to programming a classical music concert as the following (click here for the whole article):
"The modern classical-music performance, as audiences have come to know it and sometimes to love it, adheres to a fairly rigid format...The evening falls into two halves, each lasting around forty-five or fifty minutes. An orchestral concert often proceeds from overture or short tone poem to solo concerto, and then to a symphony or some other major statement."
That sums up last week's San Francisco Symphony concert perfectly, except the formula felt fresh and exciting because the music and the performances were so good. The "short tone poem" was the 1967 "Lontano" by Ligeti, which was beautiful and hugely delicate. Unfortunately, the music barely survived the Sunday matinee crowd's incessant coughing which sounded like a tuberculosis ward.
This wasn't a problem for the 1932 concerto for two pianos by Poulenc played by Katia and Marielle Labeque (above). They performed the same piece in May 2006 and I'd be happy to hear it again in 2010 as it is Poulenc at his very best -- by turns witty, mysterious, and exuberant.
The sisters returned for an encore of some delightful bit of nonsense which nobody at intermission seemed able to place.
The second-half symphony was Prokofiev's #5, written at the end of World War Two, and I don't think I've ever heard it before which is a bit like saying you know most of Beethoven's music but have never heard the Fifth Symphony.
Though the music isn't to everybody's taste (Lisa Hirsch wrote "Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony is about the most clattery, repetitious, overlong excuse for a symphony I have ever heard"), I loved every moment of it, and the performance reminded me that Prokofiev is one of the oddly underrated composers of the 20th century. Bring back his operas, San Francisco Opera, please.
Streams of women wearing pink were walking through the Civic Center neighborhood on Sunday....
...as part of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure 3-Day Breast Cancer Walk.
The annual San Francisco charity event, which also takes place in various cities throughout the country, consists of a 60-mile hike spread over three days...
...with the participants camping for two nights at Crissy Field in the Marina.
99% of the walkers seemed to be women, though there was an occasional male fairy joining them.
Civic Center's pit stop on the final day was basically set up for the porta-potties...
...along with a medical tent to help those who were having a hard time walking those last four miles back to Crissy Field.
To be part of this extravaganza, participants needed to each raise at least $2,200 which goes to a big, moneygrubbing charity in Dallas, Texas (click here for their website) which was started by Nancy G. Brinker in 1982 after going through hell with her sister Susan G. Komen's three-year losing battle with breast cancer.
Though I'm not fond of charities that siphon money from people based on their fear and sadness surrounding a particular disease, the walk itself looked like an interesting empowerment event, with groups of women of all ages forming teams with punning names: "Kindred Soles," "Save Our Tatas," "Walkers For Knockers" and "Operation Save a Rack."
In fact, I think the entire event would be even more moving if the charity fundraising aspect were thrown out altogether. People could instead make new friends, push each other towards physical goals, and meet a network of breast cancer survivors and caretakers, all without having to hit up their friends for donations.
The San Francisco Opera Company opened its 86th season on Friday night with Verdi's "Simon Boccanegra" and a line of valet parkers on Van Ness...
...who were actually running to their proffered vehicles.
"Simon Boccanegra" is probably my favorite Verdi opera, along with "Don Carlo."
Both operas are heavily involved in questions of politics, ethics, and the intersection of the personal and the public.
"Simon Boccanegra" has the added advantage of featuring extremely sympathetic characters who are all at each other's throats because of family feuds and the war between the nobles and the plebians in 14th century Genoa. Its charistmatic title character Simon starts off as a hot-blooded pirate in the prologue who has impregnated his true love, loses the baby somehow (it's a long, offstage story), and then is elected the plebian Doge of Genoa at the same moment his true love dies. Her noble father then proceeds to curse Simon with every fiber of his being.
The next scene is the lost daughter 25 years later, alive and in love and adopted by a noble family, along the waterfront of Genoa at dawn. Her aria is one of the most beautiful things Verdi ever wrote, which is saying something, and the scene culminates in just about my favorite duet in all of Verdi, when Simon and Amelia realize that they are the long-separated padre e figlia (father and daughter).
From that moment on, Simon does his best to promote peace and love between the two warring factions, most notably in the great choral Council Chamber scene, but the wounds run too deep and he's finally poisoned by his own version of Karl Rove after Simon won't let his political deputy marry his (secret) daughter. The sad, reconciliation finale among all parties as Simon dies is one of the most powerful in all of opera.
It almost makes one envy a place and time when there were actual statesmen rather than people like the Pelosi family (above) pretending to be our noble rulers.
This year's production of "Simon Boccanegra" is from London's Covent Garden and it's the same serviceable but clunky set as they used in 2001 when the lead roles were sung by Paolo Gavanelli and Carol Vaness
I walked out of the opera in 2001 because Gavanelli was way off-pitch and Vaness, who I had worshiped for decades, was starting her inevitable vocal decline which was painful to hear.
This time around the cast could hardly be any better, starting with Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Simon and the debuting Barbara Frittoli as Amelia. They both ran into a few rough patches on opening night but overall they were splendid.
Another oddity of "Simon Boccanegra" is that all the roles in the opera are for men except for the single soprano, and the subsidiary characters were all sung beautifully. Marcus Haddock has a gorgeous tenor as the young lover Gabriele Adorno, Patrick Carfizzi as the villain Paolo was simply sensational in a part that can easily be boring and one-dimensional, while Vitalij Kowalijow as the vengeful father took full advantage of the great music Verdi gives the old man, and basically upstaged everyone.
The chorus and orchestra under Donald Runnicles were fabulous, as usual, and my only real criticism is with the staging which was clunky and unimaginative.
Each of the five scenes are supposed to be in separate locations, and a drop curtain came in between each one, but each time the thing was lifted we were back on the same set with monster pillars on the left and a big wall with doorways on the right.
I was assured by friends in the cast that the stagehands were very busy during each interval moving benches and other bric-a-brac around, but from the top balcony standing room, the set looked the same for every scene. At least the floor was pretty.
This is too bad because the opera is all about the intersection between public and private spheres, with lots of offstage and onstage choruses representing the "popolo," and it would be wonderful to see those contrasts interestingly staged.
None of that really matters, however, because this cast is a powerhouse ensemble, singing a rarely heard, immensely beautiful masterpiece and they are only going to get better as the run continues through September.
Plus, though the opening nighters certainly know how to get dolled up and drink, they tend to be a dreadful, unappreciative audience.
The ensuing performances should be better for everyone.
