The 22nd annual edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival unspooled 18 films over four days last weekend. The festival seems to get bigger and better every year, with a rotating roster of musicians from around the world accompanying the films.
Somebody once described artistic director Anita Monga (above) to me as "The one person in the world who knows where the only existing print of an obscure film is hiding in someone's attic." As programmer of the Castro Theatre for decades during the 1970s through 1990s, she probably brought more joy and interesting movies to my life than anyone else. As programmer for the Silent Film Festival and Eddie Muller's annual Noir Film Festival, she continues as one of the reigning cultural treasures of San Francisco.
Saturday afternoon I saw a brand new restoration of the complete 1920 Outside The Law, a crime thriller set in San Francisco's Chinatown and Knob Hill (as the titles put it). Directed by Tod Browning of Dracula and Freaks fame, the film starred Priscilla Dean, his leading lady for nine movies that earned her the nickname, "The Queen of Crookdom." Her looks of contempt at her wannabe lover while holed up in the Knob Hill hideaway were almost the highlight of the film, but there was also Lon Chaney as an Irish crime boss and a Chinese servant, massive shootouts on the streets of San Francisco, a society ball with San Francisco swells, and a demented boy actor with a bowl haircut who would bounce into the hideaway and insist on kissing everyone repeatedly on the lips. The most interesting twist was that the Chinese characters, even though portrayed by white men, are presented as wise and judicious Confucian advisors to cops and criminals alike rather than the usual sinister Orientals.
What elevates this festival to another level is the musicianship of the accompanists, including my personal favorite Stephen Horne, who usually plays solo on a grand piano while occasionally pulling out a flute or an accordion.
He was joined by percussionist Frank Bockius on a drum set (above right) for Outside The Law, an inspired choice for the fast-paced scenes of mayhem.
The Other Minds Festival's 22nd annual edition offered a pair of concerts devoted to the music of Lou Harrison (1917-2003) on what would have been his centenary year. Executive Director Charles Amirkhanian wrote in the program notes that Lou was not only a composer, but a "poet, dancer, dance and music critic, playwright, Esperantist, builder of instruments, painter, calligrapher, essayist and teacher." He was also a shining prototype of a West Coast, gay, leftist, pacifist, multicultural hippie artist, and his music is aging well. (Pictured above is Amirkhanian in front of portraits of Harrison and his lover/partner Bill Colvig which were part of a silent auction benefiting the festival.)
The concerts were given at the Mission Dolores Basilica, a perfect location as it allowed for a large audience at a venue with surprisingly good acoustics, and it turns out that Harrison studied Gregorian Chant at the Basilica when he was a San Francisco teenager. Amirkhanian asked the audience to raise their hands if they had ever met Lou Harrison and half the crowd did so. This was probably the hippest crowd of old artists and their supporters I have encountered in one place.
Amirkhanian collaborated with Harrison on multiple projects, beginning in the late 1960s when Amirkhanian became musical programming director of Berkeley's KPFA radio during its glory decades. They continued as friends and admirers over the years at Harrison's Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz and Amirkhanian's Other Minds Festival in San Francisco.
I missed the first concert this winter but managed to catch the second on Saturday, May 20th. The program ranged from a pair of wild organ pieces, continued with delicate chamber music, and culminated in a huge mixed chorus singing in Esperanto over a gamelan percussion orchestra. Jerome Lenk, the Music Director and principal organist of the Basilica, started the concert with the 1946-47 Praises for Michael the Archangel for organ with a style derived from Schoenberg who was Harrison's teacher for a couple of years, and finished with the 1987-89 Pedal Sonata for Organ where no keyboards are harmed and all the sound is created with footwork on the pedals. Having a personal aversion to solo organ music, this wasn't my favorite part of the concert, but Lenk gave a virtuosic performance on a splendid sounding instrument. In between, Meredith Clark above played the 1990 Threnody for Oliver Daniel for Harp.
Clark was joined by cellist Emil Miland for the five movement, 1948 Suite for Harp and Cello in a lovely performance that underlined what is so special about Harrison's music: its distinct mixture of complexity and simplicity with a sheen of rigorous beauty.
The second half offered a performance of the 1974 Suite for Violin and American Gamelan, co-composed with Richard Dee who was in the audience. With his lover William Colvig, Harrison assembled an American Gamelan nicknamed "Old Granddad" in the late 1960s. According to the program, it was "based partly on traditional Indonesian designs and partly using found objects. Aluminum slabs, tin cans, electrical conduit and empty oxygen tanks, cut to various sizes and struck with sawed-off baseball bats, replacing the gongs of the Asian gamelan." The Original Granddad is still housed at UC Santa Cruz, and was reassembled on the Basilica pulpit where it looked right at home. Violinist Shalini Vijayan above was the soloist and the William Winant Percussion Group (with Winant pictured above) played the amazing instrument. Just when you think the five-movement suite can't get any more lyrically gorgeous, the final Chaconne takes you to another realm. It was a wonderful performance by percussionists and soloist alike, and when Michael Tilson Thomas reprises it later this month at one of his American Maverick concerts, I hope they play the whole thing instead of excerpts as was done at a SoundBox concert earlier this year. The piece deserves it.
The finale was the 1972 La Koro Sutro (The Heart Sutra), written for the Old Granddad gamelan, harp, organ, and a huge mixed chorus. From a prayer in the Bhagavad Gita, the text has been translated into Esperanto, the "constructed" language from the late 19th century which was meant to usher in world peace once everyone could speak to each other. At least half the words in the language end in an "o" or "a" which makes it perfect for vocal settings, and the live performance by the combined forces of the Mission Dolores Choir, the Resound Choir, and a few assorted guests exceeded all expectations.
William Winant recorded the 30-minute work in 1988 and I have been listening to that CD as meditative morning music for decades. It was a rare treat to have him leading his percussion ensemble on the original instruments.
The wonderful young percussionists playing with Winant all deserve recognition: Sarong Kim, Ed Garcia, Jon Meyers, Sean Josey, and Henry Wilson.
Imagine the combination of a Balinese gamelan orchestra mixed with a 100-person Gregorian Chant chorus and you will have some idea of what this magical piece sounds like. There have been a number of attempts at synthesizing Western classical music traditions and Eastern classical music traditions, but none quite as perfectly integrated as this strange masterpiece. The pop-up chorus was also unexpectedly great in very exposed music.
Credit for that should probably go to conductor Nicole Paiement, who I had seen earlier in the day rehearsing her Opera Parallele company in the Philip Glass opera Les Enfants Terrible. Where she gets her energy is anybody's guess, but there could not have been a better leader for these two gamelan pieces. She was a friend and mutual admirer of Harrison in Santa Cruz, and though she is always a great conductor, I think even she was surprised at how well this performance of La Koro Sutro turned out. Everybody on the pulpit looked rather dazed at the end, where the extremely delicate, trancelike music finished with an uproarious blast of cacophonous energy from everyone. There was an air of, "What did we just do? That was amazing." And it was.
This weekend Opera Parallèle is presenting the Philip Glass opera based on the Jean Cocteau film Les Enfants Terribles, about a strange pair of teenage orphans whose incestuous fantasy games expand into a quartet of mismatched lovers. Playing the brother Paul, with whom everyone becomes infatuated, is baritone Hadleigh Adams above.
Last Saturday, at the Unitarian Church on Franklin, press and supporters were invited to a preview/open rehearsal of scenes from the opera led by Artistic Director Nicole Paiement who will be conducting, and Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel who explained how the elaborate production involving a mixture of film and static projections is supposed to work.
Earlier in the week, Philip Glass accepted an invitation to check out the production, and he spent an entire day as a member of the rehearsal team before being the guest of honor at a gala concert that evening at the Gordon Getty mansion with the Opera Parallèle company. After flying back on a red-eye to New York that same night, he called and said that he was so delighted with what he had seen of the production so far that he would be returning this weekend to see it onstage. Now that's a testimonial.
Hadleigh Adams and soprano Rachel Schultz as his manipulative sister Elisabeth were sounding in very good voice, and according to Paiement the score written for three pianos is a colorful wonder.
Schutz above (seated next to musical assistant William Long) mentioned in a Q&A session at the end of the rehearsal that, being a high soprano, she is usually cast as a goody-goody ingenue, but playing a more twisted character has turned out to be an unexpected pleasure.
It is too bad that I won't be in town for any of this weekend's performances, but if you are interested, click here to buy tickets. You may end up sitting next to Philip Glass.
The soprano Vanessa Langer offered an adventurous, brilliant concert at the Center for New Music a couple of Saturdays ago. Collaborating with pianist Allegra Chapman, flautist Elizabeth Talbert, and sound designer/composer David Coll, Langer sang two chansons about birds by Messiaen, a five-movement song cycle by George Crumb using phrases from Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, and two works by David Coll himself. There was even an added duet for flute and piano by the contemporary Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu.
The 1979 Crumb piece, Apparition, is a virtuosic seven-movement marvel for the pianist who plays inside and outside of her instrument, sometimes simultaneously. The vocal lines are all over the place, from tender and delicate sighs to what are almost shrieks and Langer made all of it beautiful and compelling. I can't imagine a better performance.
The first David Coll piece was Refuse Collection, a work in progress setting of poem by the British poet Jeremy Prynne, written in 2004 in response to the Abu Ghraib horrors coming to public light. The poem and the musical setting are like one of Trump's word salads, a surreal mixture of disquieting specificity overcome by a torrent of banalities. Vanessa used just about every type of voice, speech, whisper, and cry imaginable in the short excerpt, and it made me look forward to hearing the completed work.
The 1982 Digital Bird Suite by Yoshimatsu is "extracted from fictitious music for a fictitious ballet, the hero of which is a mechanical bird named Digital Bird" and a conceit doesn't get any more Japanese than that. The music was sprightly, strange, and enjoyable, particularly the performance by Elizabeth Talbert on flute.
The finale was David Coll's Position, Influence, a setting of a speech given by Charles de Gaulle after the 1968 Paris protests, which Coll has collapsed and fragmented in an amazing sounding piece for a soprano who is orating, singing, screaming, and somehow guiding a whole wall of sheet metal pieces into action with her voice. I heard the piece a couple of years ago, without knowing about the political oration subtext, and was stunned by the excitingly different and expressive work. Hearing it a second time only confirmed how good it is, a French Political World Salad on steroids.
The level of musicianship all evening was extraordinary, and the playing of pianist Allegra Chapman, looking and sounding like a junior Sarah Cahill, was particularly astonishing.
Though I hate walking through the Tenderloin neighborhood on Taylor Street, the Center for New Music is one of the coolest spots in the entire world. For $15, we heard music that was basically all new for most of the audience, performed at a level of accomplishment that was dazzling. The space that Adam Fong and Brent Miller have built is a small miracle, and a template for others around the globe.
Vanessa Langer moved from the Bay Area to Italy on Thursday to live with her Milanese husband, but her career is international and I can't wait to hear what she does next when she returns.
