San Francisco is in a golden age for contemporary music. Its current ecostructure of composers, performers, funders, writers, venues, and adventurous audiences is probably unrivaled in the world right now. Many of the artists live and work in the East Bay and Marin, though not so much the Peninsula where the major focus seems to be acquiring wealth while creating the sci-fi future that is bleeding into the present.
These thoughts were prompted by two different concerts on Monday and Tuesday at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. When the school moved from 19th Avenue into Civic Center in 2006, the institution initially seemed frightened of the neighborhood, but they have relaxed and become an integral piece of the Performing Arts Center that now stretches from their campus at Market and Van Ness to the Opera House five blocks north.
The recent closing of the Veterans Building and its Herbst Theatre for retrofitting has been something of a blessing, forcing musical groups to venture further afield in the neighborhood. The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (including left to right above Anna Presler, Kurt Rohde, Tanya Tomkins, and Leighton Fong) has long played in the second-story Green Room at the Veterans Building, which is a great site for a party but terrible for music due to the crappy acoustics. On Monday evening, they presented one of their mixed concerts of contemporary music with 19th century classics in the small (approximately 130 seats) Recital Hall downstairs at the Conservatory, and it was a delight.
The concert featured cellists Leighton Fong and Tanya Tomkins above in various configurations, starting with three wild "decimations" by Kurt Rohde of Bach Chorales for "Odd String Quartet and Electronics," odd in this case meaning that the usual second violin is swapped out for an additional cello. The odd quartet, minus electronics, finished the concert with the 1894 String Quartet #2 by Anton Arensky, a disciple of Tchaikovsky and a teacher of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff. There was also a world premiere of a short piece by Matt Schumaker called Nocte Luz for Two Cellos, Bass and Electronics that started off well but didn't seem to go anywhere.
The highlight of the concert was violist Kurt Rohde playing his own composition, ...maestoso...misterioso...for Amplified Violin and Assorted Objects with Ana Presler above. The Assorted Objects were tuned gongs, harmonicas, Chinese paper accordions, along with the players' own voices. There were also moments of live electronic looping, which seemed fraught with danger since there was a lot of unintended feedback in the first of the Bach chorales, and the tech guy had to replug and reorient the microphones on Rohde and his viola before he started playing the piece. I was close to the stage and started laughing, at which point Rohde broke the fourth wall and said to the audience, "You have NO idea." Even with all the electronics and Assorted Objects, the 12-minute piece was mostly soft and delicate while sounding simultaneously rich and complex. Rohde strikes me as one of the best composers in the world right now, and his performance with Presler was fearless.
There were two late additions to the program from composer John Adam's students at Crowden School, including the sophisticated and funny Jazz Parody by Theo Haber above. When I asked him to write down his name on the program, he asked me to take a photo of "the first time I've ever been asked for my autograph."
The following evening at the larger, upstairs Concert Hall at the Conservatory, clarinetist Brendan Guy above and his new concert series called Curious Flights highlighting "rare and seldom-played music." Tuesday's program was devoted to the music of the late Benjamin Britten, who is having a birthday boy centenary.
The first group at the roster was the Valinor Winds sextet that included Brenden on clarinet, joined by Sasha Launer on flute, Jessie Huntsman on oboe, Jeannie Psomas on bass clarinet, Alexis Luque on bassoon, and Caitlyn Smith on horn. The piece was a bit of juvenalia from 1930 called Movement for Wind Sextet and though Britten was a freakishly precocious musical genius, he hadn't come into his own compositional voice quite yet.
The same could be said about the 1932 Phantasy in F Minor for String Quintet. However, the committed performance was so good by the Friction Quartet above (Kevin Rogers and Otis Harriel on violins, Pei-Ling Line on viola, and Doug Machiz on cello, joined by Jason Pyszkowski on viola) that it was a pleasure to hear.
A late replacement on the program was a mature piece by Britten from 1954, the Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain from a poem by Edith Sitwell about the Blitz in London during World War Two. Written for a trio of horn, piano (Ulysses Loken, above center), and tenor, it was originally performed by Britten's tenor lover, Peter Pears. The performance on Tuesday was so striking that it actually managed to efface the original recording by Pears, Britten, and Dennis Brain, a major accomplishment. Tenor Brian Thorsett above right and San Francisco Opera and Ballet Orchestra horn player Kevin Rivard above left beautifully performed Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with the New Century Chamber Orchestra three years ago. Thorsett, in particular, seems to have become even stronger in Britten's music and it was a great rendition, sad and poetic.
Rivard's accompaniment was so good that at times one wasn't sure where Thorsett's voice ended and the soft horn playing began. Here's a suggestion for San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley. Would you please stage Gloriana, Britten's Elizabeth II coronation opera from 1953? And while you're at it, put Mr. Rivard into an Elizabethan costume onstage and have him lead the horn fanfares with which Gloriana is filled. He will certainly steal the show.
After intermission, the stage was set up for a huge, 50-person ensemble to play Movements for a Clarinet Concerto (1941-42), a piece that started off as a commission for Benny Goodman but which was interrupted by World War Two and never completed. Britten's young assistant Colin Matthews has "Devised & Orchestrated" the first movement written by Britten and added two more movements via a pair of Britten's incidental pieces reorchestrated for clarinet and orchestra. Matthews created the piece in 2007 and this was the West Coast premiere, with artistic director Brendan Guy as clarinet soloist.
The revelation was the playing by the pick-up Curious Flights Orchestra under conductor Alasdair Neale, with second violin principal Kevin Rogers grinning in the background. They gave a sensationally good performance of difficult music that often sounded like lost scenes from the opera Peter Grimes. Now, will one of our extraordinary Bay Area ensembles please perform Britten's Church Parables, such as Curlew River and Saint Nicholas and The Burning Fiery Furnace? I promise to play publicist for free.
The first Sunday of every month at the Asian Art Museum features free admission, and now that the Terracotta Warriors have gone home to China, the crowds have dwindled too.
On the second floor, just off the escalator, the Japanese basket room has a small but sensational exhibit dedicated to The Lineage of Hayakawa Shokosai, the first bamboo artist to sign his work in the 19th century. The above Portable Basket for Tea Utensils from 1883 looks like it could be sold at Gump's today.
The Shokosai name was handed down to a single, designated heir over the next two centuries, ending with Japanese "National Living Treasure" Hayakawa Shokosai V (1932-2011) whose Flower Basket from 1997 is pictured above.
In order to mitigate light damage, much of the deep Asian Art Museum permanent collection is rotated approximately every six months, so there are newly installed Japanese screens nearby...
...along with an exhibit of a dozen beautiful early 20th century prints by Torii Kotonda (1900-1976), including the 1929 Snow above.
In a small, square room dedicated to special exhibits that I call the Korean Strait since it divides the Japanese and Korean wings at the museum, another attempt at forging a younger, hipper identity for the institution is taking place. Proximities is the overarching title of three successive exhibitions curated by local "writer, critic, curator, and educator" Glen Helfland. It could just as accurately though more crudely be called Honkies and Gringos and a Few Asian Hyphenates Respond to the Question: what is Asia.
Part I: What Time Is It There runs through July, to be followed by Part 2: Knowing Me, Knowing You from October through December, and the final installment Import/Export December through next February. Helfland was given an impossible task, to reduce a response to "what is Asia?" into a single, small exhibit room, so he can't really be blamed for the skimpy content and unconscious condescension of much of the work, including a wall of primitive drawings and paintings of bottles, vases, rocks and branches by Tucker Nichols above.
Andrew Witrak's contribution, Trouble in Paradise #2, involves a wide-screen TV showing screen captures from a four-star resort in Bali next to a styrofoam mattress obsessively covered with tropical cocktail paper umbrellas. The piece is insulting in its view of Asia as nothing more than a tropical resort for white people while being formally very beautiful, so in that sense it's a success.
In the Korean wing next door, there is a newly reinstalled Guardian King of the West, painted for the Asian Art Museum's celebration of its move to the Civic Center a decade ago from Golden Gate Park. It was created by a Korean nun named Jae-u, and maybe it will help keep the Foreign Demons at bay.
Last week's concerts at the San Francisco Symphony were infused by Eastern Europe, with Dvorak's Cello Concerto, Kodaly's Dances of Galanta, and Bartok's Suite from The Wooden Prince being conducted by the Slovakian born conductor Juraj Valcuha (above left). The French cellist Gautier Capucon above right was the soloist in the Dvorak.
Though the cello concerto is an overplayed staple of classical radio stations, this may be the first time I have ever heard the piece live, and it was impressively beautiful, even in a performance that felt a bit amped up by both soloist and orchestra. In fact, it left my concert companion James Parr slightly overwhelmed.
The young conductor seemed more suited for 20th century music, and the orchestra gave the best performance of Kodaly's 1933 Dances of Galanta that I have ever heard. The fifteen-minute suite of five Hungarian Gypsy tunes is one of the most perfect pieces of folk music translated into classical concert forms ever written. It's tricky to play well, though, because the rhythms are slightly off beat and most American orchestras smooth out the strangeness. Valcuha and the orchestra did a marvelous job accenting the odd rhythms instead, and it was a triumph.
The suite from Bartok's 1917 ballet The Wooden Prince is more of a gorgeous mess, with snatches of Wagner, Ravel and Stravinsky popping up here and there. The performance on Friday evening was completely absorbing, particularly in the final half where Bartok lets loose on eccentric folk dance rhythms. Somebody should write an opera or make a movie about the period where Kodaly and Bartok explored obscure, tucked away villages in Hungary during World War One. As ethnomusical historians, composers, and good friends, they recorded dozens of villages' individual music repertory before those microcultures disappeared.
June this year is filled to the brim with interesting music and dance concerts, so for your possible viewing pleasure, here is a shorthand guide to the next three weeks. This Monday, June 3rd at 8PM in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble is worshiping the cello in general and cellists Leighton Fong and Tanya Tomkins in particular. (Click here for details.)
In the same hall the following evening, Tuesday the 4th, clarinetist Brendan Guy (above left, with conductor Alisdair Neale) is presenting an all Benjamin Britten concert in his Curious Flights chamber music series. (Click here for more details.)
A highlight will be the West Coast premiere of Colin Matthew's reconstruction/invention of a clarinet concerto that Britten started writing for Benny Goodman when the composer was in his American exile during World War Two. (Click here for a post by Molly Colin at SFCV about the genesis of the piece.) I stopped by for a rehearsal last week and was amazed to find a large orchestra playing music that sounded like it was from the opera Peter Grimes.
Also at the Conservatory on Friday the 7th at 7PM, Opera Parallele will be presenting a free workshop (first-come, first-served) of a new "graphic novel" opera by Dante De Silva about the murdering composer Gesualdo, Prince of Madness. (Click here for details.)
The San Francisco Opera opens its three-opera summer season on Wednesday, June 5th with Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffman in a new production by Laurent Pelly who created the imaginative 2009 production of the The Daughter of the Regiment. This was initially being sold as a diva showcase for Natalie Dessay in all four female roles, but Ms. Dessay is now only singing the role of Antonia and the other parts have been divvied up, most notably the demon doll Olympia being sung by last summer's Madame Mao herself, Hye Jung Lee.
Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte is returning for seven performances in the very good John Cox production set in Monte Carlo during World War One. Finally, there is the world premiere of Mark Adamo's The Gospel of Mary Magdalene on June 19th, where the Jesus story is told through MM's point of view. The composer has written his own libretto, and I wonder if Jesus and Mary will get married and have babies like they did in The Da Vinci Code. The cast assembled for the premiere is extraordinary, including Sasha Cooke, William Burden, Maria Kanyova, and Nathan Gunn. (Click here for more details.)
On Friday, June 7th at noon, there is a free opening dance concert in San Francisco City Hall by the Ethnic Dance Festival. This will be followed by a Sunday concert at the Legion of Honor museum, and then three ensuing weekends of overflowing dance programs at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Click here for more details.)
The San Francisco Symphony is currently presenting an Eastern European program of Dvorak, Kodaly and Bartok that is smashing. I heard the concert last night with Juraj Valcuha conducting and Gautier Capucon as cello soloist in the Dvorak, and you can hear it yourself this Sunday afternoon the 2nd. Next week there is an interesting sounding program conducted by Kirill Karabits of Britten's Double Concerto and Sibelius' Second Symphony. On June 19th through June 22nd, Tilson Thomas and the orchestra will be playing Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, alternating between the same composer's Violin Concerto with soloist Gil Shaham, and Stravinsky vocal music including Les Noces with the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble. (Click here for more details.)
Also tackling The Rite of Spring is choreographer Mark Morris, starting on June 12th. Morris is in charge of the Southern California music festival in Ojai this year, and the festival is essentially being repeated the following week on the campus at UC Berkeley. The programs sound fabulous, with a heavy emphasis on the great, underplayed West Coast composers Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison. As part of the festival, there are two free outdoor concerts of "environmental" music by John Luther Adams. His percussion piece Iniksuit above during last year's Ojai North! festival was one of the coolest things I have ever experienced.
