Metallic Dreams

San Francisco City Hall on Wednesday was being gussied up for a Dreamforce convention party.

A major army of event staff were busy setting up for the VIP party later that night...

...which supposedly benefited Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's children's hospital charity.

The setup for the outdoor party in Civic Center Plaza for Salesforce conventioneers was ongoing through most of the week...

...which brought up the old controversy of using public space for private events.

The featured entertainment in the evening was the ancient heavy metal band Metallica, while Janet Jackson was simultaeously performing inside the adjacent Bill Graham auditorium.

Around 6PM they started sound checks with recorded music which was so loud that I walked through the neighborhood with fingers in my ears.

Meanwhile, the usually invisible SFPD was out in force all day in the neighborhood, rousting junkies and street people from their usual sidewalk hangouts.

The event was above all a major boost for the gig economy.

The Metallica concert later in the evening was loud enough to be heard miles away, according to an SFGate article. Even though our apartment is two blocks away, the sound wasn't all that bad because it kept traveling westward towards the ocean. If you were standing in front of a reflective surface, however, the cacophony could be deafening.

Sunny Stravinsky at SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony is presenting a two-week all-Stravinsky festival, with three of the usual suspects (Firebird, Petrushka, Rite of Spring) and a couple of rarer birds, including the 1934 mélodrame, Perséphone. It is easy to see why the nearly hour-long work is rarely done, since it requires a huge orchestra, a full chorus augmented by childrens' choruses, and in the original incarnation for ballet diva Ida Rubinstein who commissioned the piece, there were dancers too.

The story of Perséphone is sung by a tenor soloist and narrated by a woman speaking poetic lines from librettist Andre Gide over the orchestra. The tenor was Nicholas Phan who was his usual intelligent, pretty-voiced self, although he had some serious troubles with a half-dozen high notes at the final, Sunday performance. The French language narrator was none other than 87-year-old movie star Leslie Caron, and her contribution was exquisite. Narrators with music behind them often fall into sing-songy rhythms that sound dumb, but Caron was musical while avoiding that trap. Sounding a bit like an ancient grandmother telling an important fairy tale, she made Perséphone and her abduction to the underworld a surprisingly touching tale, even with the deliberate distancing devices of both Gide and Stravinsky.

The music itself was so amazingly beautiful I was surprised never to have heard it before last week. Though every note of the score is identifiable as Stravinsky, his characteristic astringency is swathed in delicate, gentle tunes. Even the Shades in Hades are less frightening than sweetly pathetic. The SF Symphony Chorus was fabulous as were the San Francisco Girls Chorus and the Pacific Boychoir, joined by the SF Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas at his best.

The second half of the program was the full ballet score for The Firebird, Stravinsky's 1910 breakout hit for the Ballets Russes. It could have been that I have heard this music one too many times, or the fact that the full score (and conductor MTT) dawdled interminably before the surefire, sensational ending that always brings on a standing ovation, but it felt like a letdown after the magic of Perséphone. I liked the descriptions on the supertitle screens letting us know where we were in the ballet, and the three horns doing Sensurround above the orchestra were terrific, but this may be one piece I don't need to hear again for a very long time.

Patriarchy Times Two: Cav/Pag at SF Opera

A lively, colorful production of two naturalistic Italian one-act operas, Mascagni's 1890 Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo's 1892 Pagliacci, has opened the San Francisco Opera season. There are three more performances in the run, including this Saturday evening, and the show is worth seeing, even though the murderous machismo running through both librettos eventually becomes revolting. This particular production, devised by the Argentinian tenor Jose Cura, has moved the action to an Italian neighborhood in Buenos Aires in the 1920s, and has combined the two different storylines into one, which sometimes works and sometimes just feels clumsy. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

The principal singers in the opening Cavalleria Rusticana are all superb, starting with (left to right) soprano Laura Krumm as Lola, tenor Roberto Aronica as Turiddu, and Ekaterina Semenchuk as Santuzza in a sloppy romantic triangle that involves adultery and an unmarried pregnancy. The singers were good enough that the three rather unlikable characters became sympathetic, nestled in among a village chorus which was a viable presence in itself.

Reviewing the opening performance for the SF Chronicle, Joshua Kosman slagged the music and dramaturgy of Cavalleria while praising that of Pagliacci, which led to an amusing Facebook thread where opera fans were choosing which side of the Cav/Pag divide they preferred. I confessed to being a Cav fan, mostly for its gorgeous music, which was played sumptuously by the SF Opera orchestra under debuting conductor Daniele Callegari. (Pictured above is baritone Dimitri Platanias, playing the cuckold Alfio who murders Turiddu in a duel.)

The clown who cries on the inside is the theme of Pagliacci. For the opera to work you need to feel some sympathy for Canio the Clown, but the character struck me as such a classic domestic violence abuser that it was impossible to feel anything other than disgust and horror. It also didn't help that tenor Marco Berti as Canio sang and played him thuggishly while his wife Nedda is performed by Lianna Haroutounian as a supremely sweet, radiant soul.

I stopped going to Puccini operas a while ago, so only read the glowing reviews for Haroutounian in her earlier performances as Tosca and Madama Butterfly at SF Opera. It turns out she really is that good, vocally and dramatically, which only made her predicament in Pagliacci that much more awful.

Baritone David Pershall as her young lover who wants to help Nedda escape the tyrannous old clown gave yet another strong performance after standout cameos in Andrea Chenier and Manon in the last couple of years, and tenor Amitai Pati (below left) was a delight as Beppe.

With the war on women constantly in the news these days, Pagliacci's libretto felt dated in an unpleasant way. In a director's note, Cura writes: "The relevance of Canio's character to today is overwhelming: an artist in decline, crushed by life and alcohol. Never before today have we seen so much talent thrown away once its "novelty" has worn off: actors who fall from grace after two films, or worse, giants of the stage and screen being relegated to play bit parts..." That's a bit like saying the theme of a Jack The Ripper tale is the tragedy of a doctor with diminished surgical skills from alcohol. Forget the stabbed women. They are relegated to playing bit parts.

The Great Debate Cabaret at C4NM

On Sunday evening, September 9th, at the Center for New Music in the Tenderloin neighborhood, a theatrical event rook place which was billed as "Erling Wold's Fabrications: The Great Debate Cabaret. Political Debate 2018 as Subtext Wrestling Match/Genderbending wrestling love orgy. Featuring Nikola Printz and Laura Bohn (pictured above) as the contestants, Hadley McCarroll as the master, Erling Wold master of ceremonies."

I arrived about 15 minutes late and missed the concept explanation from composer/MC Erling Wold, but my friend James Parr filled in for me: "Nikola (pictured above) represented the far left and did her dialogue in a convincing Bernie Sanders-esque accent while wearing a dowdy, ill fitting suit. Laura represented the far right and put on an excellent southern-drawl ala Jeff Sessions, although I'm pretty sure she's considerably taller than Mr. Sessions."

I arrived as the narrative was unraveling, as were the costumes.

I sat back and made up my own story, which was easy to do, because the performers were so committed, talented, and daring that the air was ripe with references and suggestions. The music set list ranged all over the Western musical universe, from the Adler/Ross Whatever Lola Wants above...

...to songs and arias by Korngold, Berg, Weill, Bernstein and Britten.

There were also a quartet of pieces by the composer and ringmaster Erling Wold from operas old and brand new: UKSUS, Rattensturm, and She Who Is Alive.

As the two performers became less confrontational and more worshipful with each other, the music selections veered towards the French: Massenet, Saint-Saens, and Delibes.

Their exit music that stuck in my head for the next 4 hours was the instant earworm that is The Flower Duet. The show was put together quickly and on a whim by musicians who love to work together, and it felt like one of the hippest, playfully artistic occasions in the world.