Marine Ceremonial Band in Patricia's Green

The USMC 1st Marine Division Ceremonial Band showed up at Patricia's Green in the Hayes Valley at noon last Tuesday for a neighborhood concert during San Francisco Fleet Week.

According to a 2016 New York Times article, the U.S. federal government annually spends three times more on military bands than the entire annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts.

This seems absurd, but it is heartening to know the federal government is paying young people a living wage to perform music, even if they have to join the military to do so.

The young woman playing emcee was also a vocalist and she performed a nice rendition of America the Beautiful. The song always brings to mind going to Darcelle's drag nightclub in Portland in the 1970s and seeing her lipsync to the Kate Smith recording while wearing an outrageous red, white and blue outfit and snapping a bullwhip at the audience. (To my utter amazement, I just looked up Darcelle on Google, and found out she's still alive and performing six nights a week at the age of 90. Click here.)

In any case, watching handsome young men in uniforms walking through San Francisco all week is a pleasure. I just wish the event could excise the noisy Blue Angels air show which scares the crap out of animals and people like me.

New Century Chamber Orchestra Returns to the Herbst

Violinist Daniel Hope, leading the all-strings New Century Chamber Orchestra, returned to Herbst Theater last Saturday for the first performances with the ensemble since the pandemic began. Fittingly, they started with a co-commission from British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage called Lament, which did just that musically in a simpler style than I have heard from him, with a strain of Eastern European mystics like Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki in the 15-minute work memorializing the dead. It was surprisingly beautiful.

Speaking of Eastern European mystics, the next piece was the Concertino for Violin and Strings by Polish/Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996). It's a mostly sunny work by a usually dark composer who has finally been discovered by orchestras around the world over the last 10 years. It was a fine performance, and a reminder of how good Daniel Hope is as a violinist.

Hope talked about the final piece, Josef Suk's Serenade for Strings, Op. 6, with one of his usual smooth, pointed introductions. "Josef Suk was Dvorak's favorite composing student, and Suk eventually married one of Dvorak's daughters, keeping it all in the family. Dvorak encouraged Suk's talent, but noted that he wanted to see Josef write something with a smile rather than a frown for a change, because everything he had written before the Serenade was in minor keys. So Suk wrote this four-movement work in all major keys, but it still turned out to be sort of sad music."

The performance was lovely, and though the reopening of NCCO's concert season was happy, the musical program was streaked with sadness.

I look forward to hearing their upcoming concerts. Click here for details.

SF Giants at Red's Java House

For the first time since they won the World Series in 2012, I have been following the San Francisco Giants for a full season, and it's been a delightful distraction during this second pandemic year. The team was not predicted to be a contender for the playoffs, but somehow managed to have the best winning record in Major League Baseball this year.

We were disheartened by the penultimate game on Saturday afternoon where they lost to the San Diego Padres and failed to clinch the division. Austin was feeling too nervous to watch the final game of the season on Sunday, but I insisted it was our duty as faithful fans to make the effort.

So we walked to Red's Java Hut on the Embarcadero for burgers and beer, with a back bar featuring a single television and a few ardent fans.

Adding to the atmosphere was the presence of the Giants stadium a fifteen minute walk away where the game was being played.

The game turned into a blowout win for the Giants over the Padres and the rival Los Angeles Dodgers had their NL Western Division winning streak snapped after eight straight years. The ragtag baseball team had pulled off a small miracle, and there was joy at Red's Java House.

SF Symphony Gala Re-Opening

The San Francisco Symphony presented a Gala Re-Opening on Friday evening that was extraordinary in every sense of the word. I have been attending these lavish shindigs since 2009 when the arts publicist Louisa Spier (above left) invited me because she liked this blog. (To her right are our dates, my new spouse Austin and Louisa's Cal Performances colleague, Tiffani.)

The tented dinner party for wealthy donors in the adjoining Lake Louise parking lot was canceled this year on account of the pandemic. This allowed for the concert to take center stage for a change, which was serendipitous because it was exciting and filled with unfamiliar music.

Michael Tilson Thomas struggled with the formula for this event over the decades, sometimes programming "serious" music and other times veering towards light pops, usually with a superstar soloist as an anchor. Last night was completely different, starting with the setup of the orchestra, with all the strings on stage right and all the winds and brass on stage left, facing each other. Instead of beginning with long speeches followed by a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, we were offered a disarmingly short speech by a woman saying, "Hello, I am the Prin---," and she stopped, restarting with "I was about to say, I am the Princess of the San Francisco Symphony but I meant to say I am Priscilla Geeslin, the President of the San Francisco Symphony." The gaffe was met with laughter and applause.

The new music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, arrived onstage and without a word picked up a baton and launched the orchestra into Berkeley composer John Adams' 1996 Slonimsky's Earbox. It was a perfect 15-minute opener, in a great, propulsive performance.

Next up was Estancia, a 1941 ballet suite by the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera that was accompanied by dancers, a delight to see and hear. I sometimes wish every concert hall performance of ballet music would do the same.

The local modern dance troupe, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, performed on a thrust stage with choreography by the 69-year-old King.

The music is fun, sounding like a rowdier, Latin version of Copland's Rodeo, with a percussion section that made the audience want to rise up and dance like a gaucho themselves.

The bass player/vocalist/self-professed musical healer esperanza spalding has been collaborating with the octagenarian jazz saxophone player and composer Wayne Shorter, and their 2013 Gaia was the centerpiece of the evening, a 25-minute work that was sort of a concerto for jazz quartet and orchestra. Spalding not only played bass but sang throughout to her own libretto.

Unfortunately, amplification at Davies Hall has always had its issues, and not only was every word she sang unintelligible but the amplification was too hot. The other members of the jazz quartet were Leo Genovese on piano and Terry Lyne Carrington, with the uncredited Ravi Coltrane showing up to play saxophone. The jazz sections worked better for me than the orchestral, but it was an interesting oasis from the hard-driving Adams and Ginastera pieces.

The finale was Noche de endantamiento by the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. He wrote a score for the film La noche de los Mayas in 1939, a year before drinking himself to death. In 1960 a champion of Revuelta's work, Yves Limantour, created a four-movement suite from the film score and this was the wild, final movement. Besides having four different percussion ensembles at the back of the orchestra improvising off of each other, there was even a moment when one of the brass players rose to play a haunting solo on a conch shell.

The party afterwords on Grove Street and in the Lake Louise parking lot, renamed the Nosh Pit, was delightfully uncrowded compared to previous years, and still filled with beautiful young women in striking outfits.

The food was gorgeous and plentiful, including monster paella pans.

There were local minor celebrities galore, like the composer Nathaniel Stookey above and the singers Chung-Wai Soong and Sylvie Jensen below.

The evening felt like an authentic renaissance and a cultural rebirth of the neighborhood.