The Standing Room

Choices

[N]o demos al dolor más territorio:
     let's not give grief an even greater field.
no hay extensión como la que vivimos.
     No expanse is greater than where we live.

—from Sonnet XCII of Pablo Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets

The last iteration of "Amor... amor...", which closes Neruda Songs, had just faded when I reached my stop coming home tonight. I stepped out of the subway and found myself in a throng of protesters decrying our government's decision to escalate the war—against reasonable argument, against the clearly voiced desires of the electorate, against the wishes of those we claim to be helping, against common sense.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's voice singing her husband's music made me consider how hard these two people fought to hold onto the joy in their life, openly and honestly celebrating their love, delighting in living, caressing and savoring the limited time together that fate had offered them. Together, two people created in the Neruda Songs an artifact of beauty, of universal poetry.

Even though the piece had ended, I didn't take my earbuds out when I came out of the station. I didn't want to let the sharp shouts of the protesters remind me that somehow we have given power to a deluded, callous man who is completely comfortable allowing other people to die for a vain cause. For pride. For ideology.

Two people chose to create in the face of a death they could not avoid; one person chooses to chase destruction when given the opportunity to prevent death and suffering. No demos al dolor más territorio.

Overheard in San Francisco: NY Smackdown, Part II

Scene: Three guys standing at the bus stop outside Herbst Theatre following the Peabody Trio's impassioned and virtuosic performance, which included Thierry de Mey's fascinating hand-percussion piece Musique de Tables (must-see video).

Guy 1 and Guy 2: Clap clap clap, clap clap, clap, clap clap.
Guy 3: ... Clap clap, clap clap, clap, clap clap, clap.

Take that, New York and London, with your "City-wide Festivals" and your "4-hour Webcasts from the Whitney" and your "World Premieres of the Daniel Variations" and your "Remounting of The Cave"! We've got three guys standing on a sidewalk doing Clapping Music (must-see video #2, of a young Reich clapping) and me at home playing with giant Pez.

[Don't mind me; I'm still on hiatus]

Pez Phase (2006)

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole blog post.

TSR, Ernie and Ernie all wish Steve Reich a very happy 70th birthday

Season Opener

Somehow, delightfully, I have become a ticket magnet of late: thanks to the varied and generous machinations of M. A— and Mlle T—, I found myself last week with three orchestra seats, including one on the center aisle! You know I don't mind standing, but it sure is nice to sit on a cushy chair occasionally.

Regular readers also know by now that I don't do reviews (if I'm big on something I'll just say so; reviews I leave to those better qualified and better paid) and I don't go sniping unless something really deserves to be called out. So here we go...

Tuesday: Ballo

First, congratulations to soprano Erin Wood for a creditable showing as Amelia; I don't envy any singer who has to step in for Deborah Voigt, and especially when she has to step into a production as dreadful as this one.

Apparently in Sweden, entire rooms full of people stand in place for 20 minutes at a stretch without moving, regardless of whether they're singing. In Sweden, conversations with more than two people are held with everyone standing still in straight lines and facing in the same direction. In Sweden, the lack of sunlight has so sapped the energy out of its people that all tempos have become completely lifeless and bogged down, such that even passionate illicit secret love duets become opportunities to think about whether there's any fried chicken left in the refrigerator when you get home. In Sweden, all action stops not just for applause, but for the two seconds after the applause is over to ensure that all dramatic tension dissipates entirely.In Sweden, giant-flag-waving color guards wait in the wings of witches' dens just in case a King drops by for a reading. And in Sweden, witches wear wigs that make them look like Toni Morrison.

There's no point in talking about the singing, because I can't imagine that any of them were able to sing the way they really wanted to due to the lack of a rudder either on stage or in the pit. I couldn't really hear them anyway because the orchestra consistently overbalanced the singers and the singers were consistently placed too far upstage. But again, good on Erin Wood for her SF Opera debut; she has a Myspace page if you want to hear a respectable live Liebestod recording.

Thursday: Berlioz, Foss & Brahms

OK. If you're going to program a piece like Lukas Foss's Time Cycle, how on earth is that helped by introducing it with a ridiculous Berlioz overture? I hadn't heard Time Cycle before, and frankly I would have appreciated the chance to open up my ears before settling in with it. Surely there is something out there that could have led us into Foss's language better than Berlioz. Ives or Copland, maybe? Wagner or Strauss, even! Because poor Dawn Upshaw was up there trying to bring out as much lyricism as she could, sounding half a step removed from Berg, but meanwhile the orchestra's tick tocking away, pretty clearly just trying to play the dynamics accurately, and the audience's slouching grumpily about being ambused with modernism again.

As for Brahms 4, it was curiously aggressive and bland at the same time. The third movement was pumped up so out of proportion to everything around it that it was more manic than giocoso, yet the harrowing silences that should have followed the braaass-TRI-PL-ET! figures in the fourth movement carried no weight at all. Oh, and this note at the end of the second movement?

Um, that needs to be a little bit higher. No, higher still. Closer... Um, it's still not quite lining up... Just a little bit oh never mind, the movement's over.

A warm welcome to our new principal flutist (my concertmate Hannibal mentioned something about having you over for dinner)

Saturday: Rigoletto

And now that I've used up all of my bile, listen up: it's worth your time to hear Paolo Gavanelli and Mary Dunleavy as Rigoletto and Gilda. Their scenes together are lovely, if you can get past the shoebox diorama set. Dunleavy is a charming and affecting Gilda whose acting never slipped into melodrama, and who sang with the light of a young woman in love yet still with plenty of heft. If I go back for another show, I'll look forward to hearing her correct that little bit of pitchiness, as the kids say, in the stuff above the staff, which I'm guessing was just due to opening-night jitters.

As for Gavanelli: bravo, signor. The role sounds like a natural fit, and he sang powerfully, consistenly and richly throughout. This guy, I'd like to hear more of, and you should try to catch him before he finishes his run on October 15. Now, if we could just find a Duke who sounds as virile as Rigoletto, we'd have a cast...

Three Places in New Mexico

I. A Land that I Heard of Once
An enchanting fairy-tale moment before an enchanting fairy-tale opera, amidst tailgating operamanes quaffing dolcetto and chowing on caprese salads (but those tomatoes sure were tasty) [Santa Fe Opera parking lot]

II. Clouds for Detective L- (A Tempest before The Tempest)

Am I a purist?
I guess that's the surest
Explanation for why
That libretto set my
Poor teeth a-grindin',
With rhymes you might find in
A middle schooler's cahier.
For more fun, try my way:
Come on-a my place
To watch Powder Her Face.

[At the crest of Ten Thousand Waves]

III. Georgia on My Mind
"It's my private mountain. God told me if I painted it often enough, I could have it." -Georgia O'Keeffe [view of Pedernal from Ghost Ranch]

Stockhausen [NSFW]

Photo of Stockhausen at Disneyland (1966) by Betty Freeman

In memoriam György Ligeti

Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes (score)

Video via The Rambler

Googlers of the Week

Monday:
john adams composer tedious
Now, now.

Tuesday:
john adams tedious composer
Yes, you made your point yesterday.

Wednesday:
john adams tedious music composer
OK, who's the tedious one now?

ewa poodles
Hey, that's my joke!

nathan gunn gay
Sorry.

sherrill milnes gay
(Really?)

And my fave, from someone at Juilliard:

michael jordan merkin concert hall decasia

Song Lyric of the Day

EFFIE:
What about the buns!
What about the buns!
What about the buns!
Tight and High like African Suns!

—June Jordan
from the Dreamgirls sequence of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Buns

(I sure hope they do this Friday night)

[X-Post] SFIFF: Drawing Restraint 9

We (that is, I) were/was dispatched last week by SFist to check in on a midnight showing of Drawing Restraint 9 at the San Francisco International Film Festival. We found it an enjoyable change of pace to write in -Ist's Royal First Person Plural "We" and with their trademark breeziness. If time allows later, we may try to add some additional thoughts on the film, which some days after the fact we still find ourselves contemplating. Original post here.

TSR's previous contribution to SFist on the documentary film Ned Rorem: Words and Music here.

While mainstream America's attention has been focused on TomKat's recent offspring and Brangelina's pending progeny, we joined San Francisco's arthouse hipster crowd at the Kabuki late Wednesday night for the local unveiling of Drawing Restraint 9, the creative brainchild of Matthew "most important American artist of his generation" Barney and the inimitable Björk. It was screened as part of the SF International Film Festival in collaboration with SFMoMA, which mounts a major solo exhibition of Barney's work on June 23.

We were quite excited about the event, not just because we're Björkophiles and longtime Barney followers, but because it's an exceptionally well-suited creative pairing: two artists who both think unflinchingly about sexuality, who are meticulous in their opulent choreographing of sight/sound, whose consciousnesses seem to be completely unaware of any boundary separating reality and mythology, and who are real-life lovers playing out the consummation of a relationship.

A full house settled into the theater at 11:30PM to listen to Matthew Barney introduce the film, which runs just under 2 1/2 hours. After the lights came back on around 2:10AM, we overheard one attendee say, "Yo, wake up. That was some fucked-up shit."

More about whale intestines, clowns, cannibalism and Matthew Barney's penis, as well as some viewing tips, in the second part of this post.