Early this Tuesday morning I was walking to a temp job in the suburban industral park wilds of Redwood City and passed by the Oracle "campus." The entire Redwood Shores slough was experiencing a low-lying tule fog and the dawn light was manufactured by god.
Wednesday afternoon at 3PM, San Francisco City Hall will play host to an extravaganza celebrating Larry Ellison, the litigious CEO of Oracle, and his awarding of the America's Cup race to San Francisco in exchange for a lifetime's worth of free ownership rights on various sections of the waterfront.
According to John Upton at The Bay Citizen, "The public is welcome to attend, but organizers warn that seating will not be available and admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis."
Workers were putting up the outrageously elaborate staging in City Hall's rotunda today, which I noticed while leaving the Board of Supervisors meeting this evening. The Board was trying to pick an interim mayor for Gavin Newsom, who doesn't seem to want to leave San Francisco for Sacramento where he's supposed to be Lieutenant-Governor. The "moderates" pulled off a coup and drafted City Administrator Ed Lee for the job, but the "progressives" pleaded for a chance to at least talk to Lee before anointing him mayor. Their pleas were spurned, but they managed to squeak through a vote to reconsider the issue this Friday afternoon.
After the concert, the tipsy, hungry crowds posed in the lobby...
...and indulged in serious people watching...
...while dancing to bands that were situated on various lobbies of Davies Hall...
...and mingling with performers from the evening's performance like the dancer above.
After a short interval, the Davies Hall stage was taken over by a dance band led by Peter Mintun...
...and the audience was invited to dance onstage.
The band was joined by The Jesters, a singing trio anchored by the hardest working man in San Francisco showbiz, Scrumbly Koldewyn (above left), the composer and music director of the long-running "Pearls Over Shanghai" and the upcoming "Vice Palace" at the Hypnodrome.
Rather like the recent San Francisco Opera production of "The Makropulos Case," the stage was dominated by a large clock ticking off the minutes to midnight.
At twelve, there was a balloon drop from the ceiling, after which we crawled home to bed, leaving the more energetic revelers to their dancing.
The music for the evening was was essentially a pops concert of dance music from the Austro-Hungarian empire, with the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Eve concerts as the template. Conducted by Dmitry Sitkovetsky, the music was unexpectedly wonderful, with the conductor stepping in as violin soloist in his own arrangement of Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances and Kreisler's "Liebesleid."
Sitkovetsky (above) was also an amiable host, explaining that he was born in Azerbaijan, studied in Moscow and New York, and conducts everywhere in the world with London as home base, "which I suppose makes me perfect for a Viennese concert in San Francisco." Strauss waltzes and polkas, along with Dvorak and Brahms Slavonic/Hungarian dances, are light, idiomatic music that can easily fall flat like a souffle, but the orchestra was superb and made one want to dance.
There were four pairs of dancers from a group called "Dance Through Time" (above) who appeared sporadically to demonstrate complicated waltz patterns on the stage apron. Though the women seemed a bit clumsy at times in their huge ball gowns on the limited space, the dancing was perfectly pleasant and didn't get in the way of the music.
The only real disappointment was the soprano soloist Katie Van Kooten (above), who sang "Csardas" from Strauss' "Die Fledermaus," Richard Strauss' song "Morgen," and "The Jewel Song" from Gounod's "Faust." It may have just been the huge Davies Hall defeating yet another vocal soloist, but the hilariously charming old German couple sitting behind us gave her a definite thumbs down.
On entering Davies Hall, I consulted the indispensable fountain of information Meredith Clark (above) for advice on how to navigate the evening, and as usual she knew all.
"Be sure to quickly get to the food and drink tables in the lobby at the end of the concert," she advised us, "because it turns into something of a crush."
We did just that, not staying for the encores in the auditorium, but sneaking out to the delicious finger food instead where we could eat and drink in civilized peace...
...joined by the delightful Denver couple above who were celebrating Bob's 70th birthday in San Francisco that evening.
