The Asian Art Museum recently opened a new exhibit about Shanghai's history over the last 150 years, and the reviews have been unkind, with most of them calling the exhibit an unfocused mess. It was definitely misconceived.
Think of a curator attempting to encompass the last 150 years of history in New York City, for instance, in four small rooms containing a selection of sculptures, paintings, furniture, clothing and signage, and you'll appreciate the absurdity.
The most powerful, and disturbing, aspect of the exhibit consists of maps showing the "foreign settlements" in the heart of the city that were imposed upon the Chinese in the 1840s after the Opium Wars by the British. These autonomous French, American and English enclaves lasted until the the Japanese invasion of World War Two chased them out, and the Communists never allowed for their return.
As Nancy Ewart points out in a post on the exhibit, "By the time Shanghai became a treaty port, it was the brothel capital of the world. One in every 130 women in Shanghai were prostitutes, making Shanghai also the V.D. capital of the world."
"Pearls Over Shanghai," the Thrillpeddlers' outrageously successful revival of the Cockettes musical extravaganza, is closer to reality than I ever imagined.
It is certainly closer to some kind of truth than the sanitized display of party dresses and magazine cover girls at the Asian Art Museum.
"Pearls over Shanghai" has been extended at least three times since I wrote about the show last October, and is currently slated to run through April 24th. Don't miss it or you'll be having to hear about the production secondhand from friends for the rest of your life. After a hiatus to produce another Cockettes revival, the Thrillpeddlers also plan to bring the show back next summer.
If the Asian Art Museum is smart, they would offer free admission to "Pearls Over Shanghai" ticketholders, because the exhibit and the drag musical about Shanghai brothels, opium dens, and white slavery are strangely complementary. There is also some fascinating art in the museum exhibit, though "Pearls Over Shanghai" definitely trumps them in the costume department.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra, under their energetic new music director, the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, gave a wonderful concert called "Serenades and Dances" that toured to four different spots around the Bay Area last week. Lisa Hirsch published an alert on Friday at the "Iron Tongue of Midnight" that the performance of Benjamin Britten's "Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings" was "stunningly great" so I snagged a pair of press tickets for the Saturday evening performance at Herbst Theatre. Happily, Lisa was right.
The first half of the concert was highlighted by that beautiful perennial staple of classical radio stations, Dvorak's 1875 "Serenade for Strings," which sounded less bland and pasteurized than usual because you could actually hear the various parts working with and against each other in the 20-member chamber orchestra.
Of all the composers with whom I've shared the planet on a contemporary basis, Benjamin Britten is definitely my favorite. (He died in 1976 at the age of 63.) Britten was one of those freaks of nature who were born musically gifted on the order of a Mozart. He grew up in middle-class England, became a pacifist in his youth while hanging out with best friends novelist Christopher Isherwood and poet W.H. Auden, and eventually coupled up romantically with a tenor who nobody though would amount to much named Peter Pears (pronounced "peers"). Britten and Pears ended up forming a creative partnership which has probably never been equaled in musical history, and fortunately for all of us the two of them recorded everything upon which they collaborated. There's a major role for Pears in all of Britten's great operas, from "Peter Grimes" to old Aschenbach in "Death in Venice" thirty years later. The two even collaborated on the reduction of Shakespeare for the opera "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which is a wonder.
In 1939, friends and roommates but not yet lovers, the two got on a boat for North America with World War Two looming in Europe, and they spent the next three years roaming America. The two fell in love and "consummated" the relationship in Grand Rapids, Michigan of all places (click here for a funny post on the subject with photo by the concert pianist Stephen Hough). However, they became homesick and heartsick, and returned to England in 1942, a homosexual pacifist couple in the middle of WWII.
They not only survived but thrived, and Britten wrote a pastoral song cycle to six English poems that focus on hunting horns, twilight, and death, with William Blake's "Elegy" to a dying rose as the sinister centerpiece. It's one of the most perfect pieces of music ever written, and reminds me of a quote from a letter Britten wrote to a friend after listening to "Das Lied von Erde" by Mahler. "It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love."
There are still too few performances of Britten's music, though it is aging brilliantly and more people with each decade are realizing how great a musician the world was given. For instance, I've never heard the "Serenade" before live, and the performance on Saturday night was overwhelming, with me dissolved into a teary mess about thirty seconds into the solo horn prologue. The local Kevin Rivard (above), who plays in the San Francisco Opera and Ballet Orchestras was the soloist, and he gave one of the greatest, most sensitive renditions imaginable. There were even a few glitches in all the perfection which paradoxically made the performance even better. The tenor Brian Thorsett wasn't in quite the same league, but he crooned beautifully in the high regions and worked together beautifully with Rivard in what is essentially a duet for horn and tenor. The third voice, the strings, were astonishing, and the sum of the parts created serious magic.
As an apertif, the orchestra played a few Romanian Folk Dances by Bartok, who is another 20th century composer whose music is sounding better with each passing year. There was a funny moment after the Maruntel movement when the audience couldn't contain themselves and started applauding between movements, though tentatively, and Nadja turned around and said, "It's okay. The piece is over," so the audience roared happily.
A couple of weekends ago, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music offered two free performances with alternating student casts of Handel's great 1724 opera, "Julius Caesar in Egypt," which involves lots of political machinations between Julius, Cleopatra, her brother Ptolemy, and various other characters who are either suicidal in despair or wildly in love with the wrong person.
This offers opportunities for hours of astonishingly beautiful music which was written primarily for castrati (gelded boy sopranos who grew up into superstars), and which is now performed mostly by sopranos and male singers with the score transposed downwards.
We arrived about forty minutes before the performance at the Conservatory's newish campus on Oak Street near Van Ness, and managed to get first dibs on seats in what turned out to be a full house.
The beautiful 450-seat concert hall used to be the Grand Ballroom of the old International Center, which was primarily used as an athletic club for decades. Though the acoustics are a little dodgy because of the high ceilings, the size and aesthetics are perfect for a small concert hall.
We only stayed for the first act because the costumes and and stage direction by Erica Schuller were hilariously awful, with some of the worst choral and supernumerary blocking I've ever seen on a stage. As my friend Charlie put it, Cleopatra performed as if she had wandered in from the "You've Gotta Have a Gimmick" number in a roadshow production of "Gypsy," and Tolomeo's bald pate along with his/her comically evil expressions were straight out of a Coneheads skit. Ms. Schuller might be wanting to consider a different career path.
In total contrast, the student orchestra known as the San Francisco Conservatory Baroque Ensemble were so good that they compared favorably to any Baroque musical performance I've heard up the street at the San Francisco Opera, Symphony, or Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. There was a liveliness and passion mixed in with exact playing that's rare to hear. The group is led by Elisabeth Reed and Corey Jameson, who conducted the "Caesar" performance magnificently. The ensemble will be playing a free concert on Wednesday, April 21st, at 8:00 PM (click here for more info), and I seriously recommend going out of your way to hear them.
