San Francisco Opera closed its fall season with a double-bill of one-act operas based on Edgar Allen Poe's short story, The Fall of the House of Usher. They were written by San Francisco billionaire Gordon Getty and early 20th century French musical genius Claude Debussy, respectively, and let's just say that most of the audience left the War Memorial Opera House whistling the amazing video projections. They were created by David Haneke for David Pountney's co-production with the Welsh National Opera which premiered the program last year, and almost compensated for the numbing banality of the music all evening. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)
Usher House, Getty's contribution, had a libretto written by the composer which was talky and ridiculous, starting with the tale's unnamed narrator transformed into none other than Eddie Poe, an Ivy League classmate of Roderick Usher. Roderick's crazy, cataleptic sister Madeline is written for a dancer (Jamielyn Duggan) who thrashes around and flops to the stage in between long monologues by Roderick (heroically performed by baritone Brian Mulligan) about the arcane knowledge within the libraries of the House of Usher from ancient times and how they need to be passed on, maybe to Eddie Poe. This dreary dialogue was presumably meant to evoke Goethe's Faust but was more reminiscent of the cheapie 1960 Roger Corman film with Vincent Price hamming it up as neurasthenic, epicene Roderick. As for the music, it was spare, unvarying, and extraordinarily dull, the work of an inferior composer who donates enough money to arts organizations to ensure performances of his work.
Gordon Getty is a more interesting character than the usual portrait of a music-loving philanthropist who happened to inherit billions from an oil dynasty. That corporation was headed by J. Paul Getty, an Oklahoma wildcatter who ended up unimaginably rich when he won the rights to oil patches in the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the 1950s. (For an interesting Forbes article entitled The Getty Family: A Cautionary Tale of Oil, Adultery, and Death, click here.) The miserly monster J. Paul Getty treated his five children from various wives with disdain, and most of his fortune went to a trust for his art collection and eponymous museums in Los Angeles, while the money that Gordon and his siblings finally inherited in the 1980s was from the Sarah Getty Trust (J. Paul's mom). Gordon showed his mettle when put in charge of the trust in the 1980s, and he sold Getty Oil to Texaco which put him into the middle of controversial litigation with what were left of his siblings and their heirs (drug abuse and premature death seem to be a recurring pattern in this clan).
After political maneuvering by his California State Senator friend John Burton and his Saint Ignatius classmate and longtime consigliere Judge William Newsom, California trust law was changed so that Gordon could break the Sarah Getty Trust and divide the money among remaining heirs. Retired Judge Newsom at 81 remains Gordon's investment advisor for the Ann and Gordon Getty Trust, while Newsom's son Gavin is subsidized in his political career through a series of businesses like Plump Jack Winery where the Trust is a major investor. (For a great 2003 article by Peter Byrne on the longtime Newsom/Getty relationship, click here). Reading all this history recently, made me realize the opera that I want to see is The Fall of The House of Getty, where the decadent title family becomes progressively more neurotic and macabre while the entire world is collapsing because of climate change brought on by greedy oil dynasties like them.
After intermission, the Debussy version of the same tale was performed, and though it was an incomplete set of fragments reconstructed by British musicologist Robert Orledge, the music was still more complex and fascinating than anything in the previous hour. Brian Mulligan as Roderick again and Edward Nelson as his friend were very good, but the entire effect was dispiriting. With all the good composers out there who would like a shot at a big-time opera house performance, why were resources being spent on this? The answer is obvious, and does no artistic credit to either the Welsh National or San Francisco Opera companies, although it is completely understandable and even financially prudent that they did so.
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presented a charming concert Monday evening at the International School's small black box auditorium on Fell Street. Called Broken Consorts, because the pieces all featured unusual mixtures of instruments, the concert followed the usual Left Coast pattern of 19th century chamber music combined with modernist works including world premieres. The latter were provided by composer Richard Chowenhill above, starting with Mirrored...Reflections on Machaut.
Chowenhill radically reworked two secular and two sacred songs by the medieval French poet and composer for baritone (Daniel Cilli, above), cello (Tanya Tomkins), bass (Michel Taddei, and percussion (Loren Mach). The 15-minute cycle was both delicate and dramatic, and I would gladly hear it again.
This was followed by Tomkins on cello and Taddei on bass, playing Rossini's Duetto, a substantial trifle from his music parlor years in Paris after Rossini had retired from the opera and could make music for the amusement of his own circle of friends at home. Tomkins and Taddei looked to be having a blast playing it together.
This was supposed to be followed by a Xenakis piece for oboe and percussion, but Andrea Plesnarski explained that she had fallen ill and wasn't able to learn the piece, so she would be playing Luciano Berio's Sequenza VII for oboe instead, with the assistance of John Schott droning on electric guitar, along with Loren Mach on percussion and Tanya Tomkins on cello. The seven-minute piece was lively and abrasive, and Plesnarski gave a stand-out performance. My only advice for her is to make sure that the introduction to a musical work isn't longer than the piece itself.
After intermission, Plesnarski returned to play the English horn with bassist Michel Taddei for another Richard Chowenhill world premiere, The Sensation of Disarray, a short, sweet duet for "unlike instruments."
The final piece was The Ghosts of Alhambra, a set of seven short Garcia Lorca poems set by American composer George Crumb for baritone, guitar, and an array of percussion.
They varied enormously in dynamics and mood, and the performance was expert and committed by all.
Baritone Daniel Cilli, with what is becoming his hallmark versatility, sang, whispered, shouted, played musical instruments, and sounded beautiful and compelling throughout the whole concert. Can't wait to see where he pops up next.
There are construction cranes all over Palm Springs these days, and the most alarming is the new shopping mall development by John Wessman on Palm Canyon Drive which is looking nothing like the original plans submitted to the voters four years ago. The two-term Palm Springs mayor, a handsome gay realtor named Steve Pougnet, was an honest broker for years in balancing development and preservation in the small city of 40,000, but he got greedy and began accepting "consulting contracts" in the six figures for unspecified services with more than one developer.
This was exposed by an investigative journalism series in the local paper, The Desert Sun, and eventually the FBI arrived in September and hauled away files from City Hall. Unlike San Francisco, where that kind of behavior is considered business as usual and the San Francisco Chronicle ignores institutionalized municipal corruption, Palm Springs voters recently booted out the old slate and elected a new mayor, Rob Moon above right, posing with my friend Cory Dingle.
We walked down Palm Canyon to the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Francis Stevens Park last Thursday, passing under banners created by local schoolkids who have an annual competition for the honor of having their painted signage flying over the main drag all December.
We also saw evidence of other holiday traditions, as evidenced by the Menorah bolted to the roof of the car.
At the tree lighting, there was a Palm Springs High School madrigal group singing carols...
...delicious cookies, and not-so-hot chocolate.
There are usually a bizarre selection of local celebrities in attendance, and this year it was (left to right) Palm Springs Councilwoman Ginny Foat with poodle who lost the recent mayoral election even though she was the clear favorite in money and name recognition, supermodel/actress/businesswoman Beverly Johnson, TV's Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner, Mayor Moon, and Linda Gray from the old Dallas TV show edging out of the frame.
Unusual for Hollywood and Palm Springs, the 66-year-old Bionic Woman Wagner looked like she was aging fairly naturally and well.
At the Palm Springs City Council meeting the night before, disgraced outgoing Mayor Steve Pougnet made a few remarks and then it was time for public comment. The final speaker was Frank Tysen, a small hotelier who was a onetime ally of the mayor and then an adamant critic. "You threw it all away, Steve, a promising career, political allies, the trust of this town." Let's see if the new regime can alter some of the recent dumb development deals that are already in place.
At the corner of Palm Canyon Drive and Baristo in downtown Palm Springs, a Midcentury Modern classic by architect E. Stewart Williams was built in 1960 for Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan. By the 21st century, it was a decaying mess that housed the offices of local real estate developer John Wessman who is now defacing another section of Palm Canyon Drive with a taxpayer-funded hotel and shopping mall complex.
Wessman's original plans for the historic building was to surround it with multi-story condos, which the Planning Commission and preservationists managed to prevent. About four years ago, the Palm Springs Art Museum bought the building and raised close to $4 million for its restoration as an Architecture and Design Center annex to the larger museum three blocks away.
The Center opened last year, and the place looks tremendous.
Currently on view is an exhibit called Seeing the Light: Illuminating Objects featuring "reflective, translucent, or highly polished" art works.
You are greeted at the door by Hess Light Bulb, a large prop from theater-opera director Robert Wilson's 1979 stagework Death, Destruction, and Detroit I.
Inventor Buckminster Fuller, another multi-hyphenate lionized in the 1970s, was represented by and his 1976 metallic Complex of Jitterbugs.
There was a section of the exhibit dedicated to powerful women's work, including Angela Ellsworth's Seer Bonnet XVIII (Ruth) from 2011. Ellsworth is a Church of Latter Day Saints apostate who is a descendent of Lorenzo Snow, the fifth Prophet of the Mormon Church.
Lorenzo had nine wives, and Ellsworth has created a series of sunbonnets representing all of them. The materials for Ruth are fabric, steel, wood, and 31,863 pearl corsage pins. It's outrageously beautiful and horrifying simultaneously.
Hanging hearby is Pat Lasch's 2006 A Couple's Prayer (from the Prayer Cloth Series), a series of gold leaf squares on netting backed by heavy Arches paper with Buddhist prayers sealed inside, meditating on her recently deceased parents.
The only walls in the exhibit are two panels displaying Jim Isermann's metallic decals.
The Center just announced that admission will be free every day for the next two years thanks to an anonymous donor. So if you are in Palm Springs, check it out, and maybe you will be greeted by one of the sweet museum "ambassadors" like Betsy above, who looked smashing in front of the fabulous blinds.
