Favorite Musical Performances of 2019

In January, the composer Luciano Chessa presented a concert at Old First Church of music by the late Julius Eastman, climaxing with four pianists performing Crazy Nigger, a mesmerizing hour-long work that just kept getting better as it progressed.

Later in the month the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presented a fascinating concert at the SF Conservatory of Music, starting with Ingram Marshall's 1989 A Peaceful Kingdom and ending with composer Ted Hearne above singing his own 'The Cage' Variations.

West Edge Opera crossed the bay for their annual Snapshot of operatic works in progress, with the highight being Nathaniel Stookey's monodrama Ivonne, which was given a masterful performance by soprano Marnie Breckenridge.

I missed most of the American Bach Society's concerts this year, but did attend a February performance at St. Marks Lutheran Church of various J.S. Bach cantatas which was surpassingly beautiful.

The San Francisco based Friction Quartet began a series of commissioning projects this year with a concert at the Center for New Music in April. This was followed by another great concert at Old First Church with a starry cameo by pianist Sarah Cahill premiering Gila: River, Mesa, and Mountain, a piano quintet by Max Stoffregen. The Friction Quartet are the the most wonderful mixture of technically secure and wildly musical which was an interesting contrast to the Elias Quartet, a more buttoned up UK ensemble that gave a brilliant performance of Britten's String Quartet #2 the following week in April at Herbst.

San Francisco Performances presented the Tetzlaff Trio in April at the Herbst Theater. Consisting of my favorite violinist in the world, Christian Tetzlaff, the great pianist Lars Vogt, and Christian's sister Tanja Tetzlaff on cello, they played Shostakovich's Piano Trio in E Minor, Opus 67 in a breathtaking performance. Their Mozart and Dvorak were pretty good, too.

The SF Silent Film Festival features some of the most interesting live musical performances around, and their opening night presentation of Buster Keaton's The Cameraman featured an original 2010 score conducted by composer Timothy Brock with musicians from the SF Conservatory of Music. The experience was wonderful, and made me wish the SF Symphony would augment its movie series with great silent films that were originally presented with symphony orchestras. (Start with Wings, where the percussion section would get a serious workout.)

The Other Minds Music Festival gave the world premiere of The Pressure at Yerba Buena Center in June. A strange, ambitious oratorio/multimedia event featuring a micro-tuned chamber orchestra of 23 and five vocal soloists among its forces, it was composed by Brian Baumbusch to a poetic horror narrative written by his brother Paul with projected woodblock illustrations by Spanish illustrator Fede Yankelevich. The SF Silent Film Festival should consider reviving it sometime at the Castro Theater.

At the end of the 2018-2019 season, the San Francisco Symphony announced that Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas was taking a sabbatical for heart surgery, and replacement conductors would be found. Joshua Gersen and the audience lucked out with a wonderful Steve Reich premiere, Music for Ensemble and Orchestra, and Yefim Bronfman playing the stuffing out of the fiendish Prokofiev Piano Concerto #2. It was a thrilling concert.

Dvorak's Rusalka at the San Francisco Opera during the summer was the company's highlight of the year and its debuting conductor, Eun Sun Kim, was soon offered the post of SF Opera Music Director starting in 2021.

The SF Symphony imported a spectacular production of Ravel's one-act opera, L'enfant et les sortilège from Opéra National de Lyon, featuring a luxury cast, huge choruses, and magical projections by Grégoire Pont.

West Edge Opera's trio of Oakland warehouse operas this August was crowned by an incisively directed production by Mark Streshinsky of a great new opera by Missy Mazzoli, Breaking The Waves, with a taut libretto by Royce Vavrek from the dark Lars von Trier film. The soprano Sara LeMesh gave the single most impressive operatic performance I saw all year.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra under Music Director Daniel Hope has offered some strange programming this year, but one of the oddest was simply awesome, Ernest Chausson's 1891 Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet with the quartet's music beefed up for a string orchestra. Part of the fun was hearing a major work for the first time and another part was watching the 16-year-old wunderkind pianist Maxim Lindo infusing the hour-long piece with so much energy the audience walked out vibrating.

Allegra Chapman and Laura Gaynon's third annual Bard Music West festival at Noe Valley Ministry focused for two days on the music of a mid-20th century Polish composer, Grażyna Bacewicz, along with her influences and colleagues. I made it for two of the three concerts and was completely impressed both by the quality of the composer's music and the quality of the performers assembled. This festival feels like a gift.

Speaking of gifts, Céline Ricci's Ars Minerva company has been offering an annual modern world premiere of 17th century Venetian operas for five years and it just keeps getting better. This year it was the 1680 Ermelinda, composed by Domenico Freschi with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piccioli that had a superior cast that included Nika Printz, Sara Couden, and Kindra Scharich who was also extraordinary in Breaking The Waves. Congratulations, everyone, on great work.

Cockettes Are Golden 2

The producer and director Russell Blackwood often cast himself in a small, juicy role in most of his revivals of Cockettes musicals that The Thrillpeddlers presented at the legendary Hypnodrome on 10th Street in San Francisco. In a recent interview, he told me his favorite was probably Madame Fu from Pearls Over Shanghai, the first, deliriously successful Cockettes revival the company presented for almost two years.

My favorite of his cameos was in the next Cockettes musical the group presented, Hot Greeks, an inspired mashup of Aristophanes' Lysistrata and June Allyson MGM college musicals. He played the oracle MataDildoes who sings one of Scrumbly Koldewyn's most perverse songs, The Hot Twat of Tangier. The lyrics and performer were a match made in theatrical heaven, and Mr. Blackwood will be pulling himself briefly out of retirement for a reprise on Saturday at the Victoria Theater where the Cockettes' 50th anniversary show will be held.

Just about everyone in the large troupe had day jobs, including one of my other favorite Thrillpeddlers performers, Eric Tyson Wertz, whose other identity besides bizarrely beautiful ragpicking peasant girl was as a physicist.

Wertz out of costume was a beefy, hairy-chested guy, but there was a goofy, delicate sweetness in his playing of innocent young girls with deadpan sincerity, as he demonstrated in Hot Greeks as a cheerleader withholding sex from her athlete boyfriend.

The Hypnodrome's building was sold in 2017 and the Thrillpeddlers disbanded, so even though this Saturday's event is not being billed as a reunion, it will be the first time that Blackwood has gotten together with the gang to perform since then.

"Why now?" I asked Russell Blackwood, above left in a fabulous outfit from Vice Palace, a reworking of Poe's Masque of the Red Death set in 1960s high-fashion, La Dolce Vita Italy. "Because I revived Pearls of Shanghai for the Cockettes' 40th anniversary and this will be the 50th year since their first performance. I like anniversaries," he replied.

Vice Palace, though it was basically a string of unrelated numbers in different colored rooms, was dark and bizarrely prescient about the AIDS plague that was coming in the next decade. Though the association was never made explicit, it suffused the whole show.

The score by original Cockette and surviving Music Director Scrumbly Koldewyn (above, dressed somewhat formally) was a marvel, incorporating sophisticated riffs on Nino Rota soundtracks.

And how can one resist a musical that includes a novelty number called A Crab on Uranus, which will also be performed at this Saturday's grab-bag spectacular?

Cockettes Are Golden 1

The Cockettes were a group of mostly gay male hippies in late 1960s-early 1970s San Francisco. They were a smart, arty, psychedelically druggy, genderfuck group of friends who for a short while were a theatrical sensation that influenced world culture in ways that are still being absorbed. (Pictured above left to right Pristine Condition, Marshall Olds, Miss Bobby, Danny Isley, Link Martin. San Francisco, 1971, photo by Fayette Hauser.)

Their midnight shows in a movie palace in North Beach, literally named The Palace, became an immediate cult hit, especially for audiences who were stoned on one psychedelic or another, and it attracted a few fabulous freaks from around the country, including John Waters' diva, Divine. (Clockwise from upper left: Billy Orchid, Divine, Scrumbly Koldewyn, Pristine Condition, Pam Tent, Mink Stole, David Baker, Jr. in "Vice Palace," 1972, Palace Theater in SF, photo by Clay Gerdes.)

This Saturday, January 4th, there will be a celebration at the Victoria Theater on 16th Street of the Cockettes' 50th Anniversary, in honor of their first performance on New Year's Eve in 1969. Saturday's event promises to be historic for a number of reasons, and if you take San Francisco culture seriously, you'll be there. I just went to the ticket site, however, and realize that everyone who is anyone knows about this already and it has sold out. Start begging friends for extra tickets.

The Cockettes only lasted about three years before imploding and splintering into other groups like the 1970s Angels of Light, which had fabulous sets and costumes but not much of the Cockettes' outrageous wit. The group became a distant legend until a 2002 documentary by David Weissman and Bill Weber told their story to a wider audience. The Cockettes' real revival, however, arrived at a little theater in the back of an antique store under the South of Market freeway next to Costco. Russell Blackwood was offered the space in 2004 for very little money by the owners of the building because they were fans of his theatrical work which at the time focused on a revival of French Grand Guignol.

In a never-used director's head shot for the 1991 Laboratory of Hallucinations, Mr. Blackwood is being serviced by a skeleton, while the gentleman on the left is Scrumbly Koldewyn, the composer and musical director for the Cockettes, when he was a young hippie performing in Pearls Over Shanghai as Lili Frustrata.br />

In 2009, the two seasoned theatrical geniuses gathered their varied groups of performing gypsies together and collaborated on a revival of a book-and-score musical performed by the Cockettes called Pearls Over Shanghai, which knowingly incorporated every Orientalist cliche from the 19th century through 1930s Hollywood about the Mysterious, Decadent East.

The show was supposed to run for two months at most, and ended up virtually selling out the place for the next 22 months. (Pictured above is the late-great Arturo Galster as Madame Gin Sling). More to come about the gay, leftist, hippie, all-gender-inclusive gestalt that characterized both the Cockettes and the Thrillpeddlers, who will be performing for the first time in three years together, and possibly the last time too.

Eun Sun Kim and the Adler Fellows

An email invitation to attend an onstage Major Announcement was sent out by the San Francisco Opera earlier this month.

The most viable guess for the drama was that the company was announcing a new Music Director. Lisa Hirsch (above right) speculated at the Iron Tongue of Midnight blog who the top four contenders might be (either Eun Sun Kim, James Gaffigan, Christopher Franklin, or Henrik Nánási), and one of her hunches was correct.

The 39-year-old Eun Sun Kim, who conducted Dvorak's Rusalka in her company debut last summer, was chosen, a decision ecstatically received by many in the orchestra, chorus, backstage crew, and management, not to mention the conductor herself.

San Francisco Opera didn't have a Music Director for its first sixty years, relying on guest conductors with overall music direction dictated by the company's two General Directors: founder Gaetano Merola (1923-1953), followed by Kurt Herbert Adler (1953-1981), with both conducting the occasional production. Merola died before I was born, but I did hear Adler conduct a number of times in the 1970s, sluggishly and with an authoritarian streak towards performers that became infamous. The Music Director position was created in 1985, filled by Sir John Pritchard, who was at the end of a long, distinguished career at Covent Garden and Glyndebourne. He seemed bored by most of his assignments at the SF Opera, with a few notable exceptions such as an electrifying Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk with Josephine Barstow, and he died in 1989 at the relatively early age of 68. The young, energetic and fabulously talented Donald Runnicles took the helm in 1992 for the next 17 years and the overall musical quality of both orchestra and chorus rose inestimably, while Runnicles' own conducting abilities seemed to grow with each year. His successor, Nicola Luisotti (2009-2018), was hired on the basis of a sensational conducting job on a production of Verdi's La Forza del Destino, but just about everything after that felt like a slide downhill or inappropriate for his particular musical affinities.

The new General Director Matthew Shilvock made the announcement of Kim's appointment and filled in her biography briefly. She was born in 1980 in Seoul, South Korea where she studied composition at the Yonsei University. A professor was so impressed with her coaching a student production of La Boheme that he encouraged her to focus on conducting. She continued her studies in Germany, with a doctorate from the University of Music in Stuttgart. Her apprenticeship in various European opera houses began at Madrid's Teatro Real in 2008, and continued in houses throughout Germany.

In an onstage interview, she recounted the difficulty of her U.S. debut with a production of La Traviata at the Houston Grand Opera weeks after Hurricane Harvey flooded the city in 2017. The production moved to an improvised pop-up theater in the George Brown Convention Center and Kim conducted the orchestra from behind the performers on a circular stage, rather like SF Opera's productions at Bill Graham during the opera house's 1996 earthquake retrofit. The experience went well enough that the company immediately named her Principal Guest Conductor.

During the audience interview portion, I asked her if she had any particular affinity for certain composers, and she declined to name any favorites. A few other questioners asked a variation on the same question and the response was the same, basically that whoever she is studying and conducting at the moment is her favorite.

The following evening, Shilvock introduced Kim to the audience at the annual Adler Fellows The Future Is Now concert, which she had long been scheduled to conduct. This grab-bag of scenas and arias seemed a good way to hear how she navigated composers from Handel to Bernstein.

Unfortunately, she was faced with the same dilemma as in Houston, conducting the large SF Opera orchestra on the small Herbst Theatre stage with singers at her back, which necessitated a lot of neck-twisting and contortions to keep everyone together. (Production photos are by Kristen Loken.)

Within these constraints, she did a remarkable job of conducting, starting off with the best live rendition of Bernstein's Candide Overture that I have ever heard, making it sound more seriously soulful than satirical hijinks. Her Verdi was very good, she doesn't get Mozart at all (it's surprising how many great conductors share that blind spot), her Handel was pulsing and sublime, and her Puccini was extraordinary. Tenor SeokJong Back sang a very creditable Recondita armonia from Tosca and the orchestral accompaniment was so richly colorful that it made me reassess my boycott of Puccini operas.

The Adler program is a two-year residency at the SF Opera, performing smaller roles and covering lead singers, for young musicians about to make their way into a professional career. My favorite performer of the evening was graduating baritone Christopher Pursell who was all Russian brooding in an aria from Rachmaninoff's obscure opera, Aleko, and then sang a funny, swaggering bit of bragadaccio about war and women from another obscurity, Thomas' comic French opera Le caïd.

The programming for these annual Adler concerts has always been weird, with operatic standards in every language surrounded by obscure French fluff. After intermission, for instance, we were offered arias from a Rossini French opera (Le Comte Ory), Massenet's Cendrillon and Le Cid, Berlioz's Les Nuits d'Ete, Thomas's Le caïd, and Donizetti's French opera La Fille du Regiment (pictured above, with soprano Natalie Image doing a good job rallying the troops).

Other favorite moments were first-year tenor Zhengyi Bai singing Le Postillon de Lonjumeau by Adam, a funny piece where a handsome young postman is plucked for his qualities by a queen to be king. First-year Adlers, soprano Mary Evelyn Hangley as Elisabetta and Christopher Colmenero as Don Carlo, have huge, rich voices which they demonstrated in a duet from Verdi's Don Carlo. Countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen astonished everyone the first time he opened his mouth as a Merolini three years ago, and he continued astonishing with a gloomy aria from Handel's Siroe.

Good luck to all of them in their careers, and welcome, Eun Sun Kim, to the San Francisco Opera. May the union between company and music director be a harmonious one.