The San Francisco Symphony's program this week is a very hearty stew, with the first half devoted to Tchaikovsky's rarely heard Second Piano Concerto played in spectacular fashion by the 47-year-old British/Australian pianist Stephen Hough (above left) and conducted by David Robertson (above right), who is currently music director of the Saint Louis Symphony.
The program notes by Michael Steinberg start with, "I would guess that nine out of ten people at this concert are hearing Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto for the first time," and Steinberg was probably right. Charlie and Cedric (above) had never heard the huge, 50-minute piece before and neither had I, which just made the performance that much more exciting.
The long first movement was highlighted by some of the most virtuosic playing I've ever seen by a pianist. Hough's hands were moving so fast at certain points that they looked photographically blurred. From what I could hear and see on his amusing website (click here), he fully deserves his 2001 MacArthur Fellowship for "genius." The man is not only one of the greatest pianists in the world but he composes music, writes essays, poetry, scholarly books, and even an impassioned defense of being an openly gay Catholic.
The second half consisted of Sibelius' first tone poem, "En Saga," in a really marvelous performance by the orchestra. It sounded bizarrely modern at times, and you could easily make out what the contemporary composer John Adams has (admittedly) lifted from Sibelius over the years. This was followed by Scriabin's 1908 "The Poem of Ecstasy," which was fun but entirely too much after the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius. We left feeling thrilled but a bit overstuffed.
Pacifica consists of a dozen small coastal hamlets in San Mateo County that incorporated as recently as 1957, and though it's only about 10 miles south of San Francisco, the town almost feels as if it's in another country. A friend who used to teach high school there remarked that the place had something of the ingrown character of an Appalachian valley, with a number of his students never having even visited San Francisco.
Near the center of Pacifica is Sharp Park, a municipal golf course dating from 1932 that was designed by Alister Mackenzie (1870-1934), who was arguably the greatest golf course architect in the history of the game. He summed up his design credo with the following: ""In discussing the need for simplicity of design, the chief object of every golf course architect worth his salt is to imitate the beauties of nature so closely as to make his work indistinguishable from nature itself."
Sharp Park is named after George Sharp, a rich 19th century lawyer whose widow deeded their considerable estate to Reuben Lloyd and Adolph Spreckels in 1905 (click here for an expanded history). The latter were both San Francisco Park Commissioners, which is how Pacifica's downtown municipal golf course ended up in the hands of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. That dysfunctional body has been doing just about everything it can to destroy the place, starving it of money and resources while throwing millions of dollars into the money pit that is Harding Park Golf Course at Lake Merced, where the green fees on the weekend top out at $155 versus $38 at Sharp Park.
The place is well-loved by the town, however, and its old bar and restaurant are like walking into a time bubble, with inexpensive prices and working class people from all over the Bay Area enjoying each other.
They are going to have to put up a serious fight, however, because there are some formidable foes who would like nothing better than to shut the place down. There are the environmentalists who want Pure Nature (click here for "Sharp Park Golf Course Must Close"). Finally, there's Isabel Wade, who hates golf courses, and her Neighborhood Parks Council lobbying group who want to turn San Francisco's municipal courses into nature preserves, complete with dumb visitors' centers.
