I have been writing reviews for San Francisco Classical Voice since moving to the Bay Area. My latest is of Sunday’s concert of Bach and Mendelssohn at Davies Hall, conducted (and keyboard concertos played by) Sir András Schiff. You can check out NPR interviews with Schiff here.
Click here to read the review.
Review on San Francisco Classical Voice, Dec 4, 2018
Ann Moss as Della and Daniel Cilli as Jim in Solo Opera’s The Gift of the Magi | Credit: Solo Opera
If you think shopping for holiday presents is complicated, try it on a budget of $1.87. And on Christmas Eve, no less.
That’s the problem that Della and Jim face, in San Francisco composer David Conte’s short opera, The Gift of the Magi. The 1997 work, on a libretto by Nicholas Giardini and based on the famous old warhorse of a short story by O. Henry, was revived last weekend by Solo Opera at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.
Composer David Conte
In both the story and the opera, the nearly penniless young couple buy presents for each other, raising the cash by selling their proudest possessions, which ironically defeats the intention of each gift. You probably know how this comes about (it involves hair and a watch); if you don’t, read the story (you can read it for free here, and will take you about 10 minutes).
The opera, originally commissioned by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, is a pleasant Christmas ornament, decorated with a nice combination of humor and sentiment. The tuneful music is heartfelt and easy on the ears.
The production, spearheaded by Solo Opera’s producer and director Sylvia Amorino, was well suited to the small auditorium at the Lesher Center, but the set and costumes were too clean and too upscale for O. Henry’s shabby “furnished flat at $8 per week.”
The role of Della was beautifully sung by soprano Ann Moss, with clear, silvery tones and passionate sweetness. Her Della, at first glance shallow and vain, gradually revealed a more conflicted inner life, at once proud of her beauty and hesitant about its effects on her husband, and in the end surprisingly strong-minded.
Ann Moss and Daniel Cilli in a promo photo for The Gift of the Magi
Baritone Daniel Cilli brought an endearing awkwardness to Jim, a stiff young husband caught in his need to act “as a man.” Cilli sang with a winning combination of earnestness and comic self-deprecation, but I wished for more expression in his voice when Jim broke free of his shell in a couple of passionate moments.
The small chamber orchestra (three strings, three woodwinds, and piano) played with accuracy and brio. The opera was sensitively conducted by Alexander Katsman.
The opera expands O. Henry’s slight narrative by adding two new characters. Mezzo-soprano Lisa van der Ploeg memorably negotiated both comedy and pathos as Maggie, in the scene in which she at first confronts Della and, eventually, supports her wholeheartedly. Bass-baritone Ben Brady, as the gruff and good-hearted Henry, has a parallel scene as a voice of conscience for his friend Jim.
Curtain call for the cast of Solo Opera’s The Gift of the Magi | Credit: Lisa Fulmer
The title characters, the anachronistic Magi, were costumed as carolers, singing close-harmony, chorale-like admonitions about how gift-giving needs to come from the heart. Their solemnly moralizing music seemed out of sync with the more comedic and domestic aspects of the main action.
By the end, Della and Jim, even though their gift-giving has gone disastrously awry, are reunited in a heart-warming, moonlit embrace, with a sweet love duet in front of the Christmas tree. May all of our gift-giving come out as well, even if we only have $1.87 to spend.
I’m happy to be part of the East Bay Recorder Society — which had its annual members’ recital today, on St Patrick’s day.
Two special joys for the day:
#earlymusicmonth2018
and “Play the Recorder Day”
March is Early Music Month — a project of Early Music America (EMA). It’s about getting those of us who love baroque, Renaissance, and medieval music to share our stories and events. You can check it out through the hashtag #earlymusicmonth or #earlymusicmonth2018, or at EMA’s website.
Here’s a brief account of my life with early music over the past twelve days of March, 2018, in this early music paradise of the East Bay.
Wednesday, March 7. Played the concerto (on recorder) at Berkeley Baroque Strings concert, and played backup to all the others (on violin)—full house, lots of friends; a glitch where there had never been a glitch before, but kept going. Sue played the cello solos in a Bach aria and Brandenburg #6.Now it’s Monday and it’s just a practice day! More fun with early music to come!
Since moving to the Bay Area, I’ve been reviewing for San Francisco Classical Voice. Most recently was a fun trip to Alameda, a part of the Bay Area that feels very different from Berkeley or San Francisco — a kind of time warp old California town. The opera was presented in the ballroom of the grand Elks’ Lodge — another amazing vestige of the 20’s.
Here’s the ballroom, with a gorgeous Tiffany-style skylight containing, of course, an elk, which you can’t see in this picture.
And here’s my review of the operas:
Our grandchildren in Arizona (3 months and 3 1/2 years) watch the occasional TV (well, the older one watches). One of the shows, which our son couldn’t believe we hadn’t heard of, is called Classical Baby, in which a diapered toddler takes on musical and 
artistic chestnuts. It is, I learn from Wikipedia, a Canadian show from about 2005, with separate episodes for Music, Art, Dance, Poetry, and Lullabies, available on DVD and HBO. The animations are clever and the pieces — Waltz of the Flowers, for example — are pleasant. Needless to say, a piece like the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto is massively shortened and simplified. Still, it’s there, and pretty cute — as are Bach’s Prelude to the first cello suite, Debussy’s Claire de Lune, and Appalachian Spring. The orchestra is made up of animals — as is the audience.
Here’s a collection of snippets. Notice how wonderfully the conductor raps his baton for silence, a toddler-Toscanini! O mio babbino caro (2:25) is one of my favorites!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIol0p5omXk
At the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, there are some mid-18th-century paintings from the 18th century that reminded us of Classical Baby — a series by Charles-André Vanloo featuring (slightly older) children as artists and musicians. Apparently they hung in the Versailles palace of Mme de Pompadour.
If Classical Baby is cute and amusingly Canadian, Vanloo’s seem just creepy.
These children are miniature versions of the court of Louis XV — overdressed and oversexed; pampered aristocrats, not music-lovers in Pampers.
Music and art are here laden with gendered sexual tension; girl-children are on display; semi-nude modeling is the equivalent of playing the piano, a louche entertainment in expensive silks.
I’m glad my grandchildren are watching Classical Baby!
We went to the Legion of Honor (that’s one of San Francisco’s art museums) yesterday for two exhibitions that are each closing soon, one on Klimt and Rodin, the other called “Gods in Color.” This one featured reproductions of Greek and Roman statues colored as current scholars think they would have been originally. It’s a shock to those of us brought up on the notion— derived largely from the 18th-century German art historian Johann Winckelmann—that the whiteness of Greek marble was part of its timeless significance.
In a postmodern age, that notion has (rightly, I think) been deconstructed: nothing is timeless, all is historicized; whiteness as eternal and eminently beautiful is, fairly obviously, a racialized construction.
The statues, and the research behind them, come from a group in Frankfurt called Liebieghaus. Check them out here.
The colored statues in the exhibition certainly do their bit in deconstructing that “classical” aesthetic of pure whiteness. I wish the curators had made more of a connection with the issues of race (they do note a gendered pattern, in that women are given whiter complexions than men).
My memory of art history classes about these statues is that they concentrate on aspects that are, for lack of a better word, statuesque: their sense of proportions, balance, posture. With the addition of color, surface patterns suddenly become much more important. The fabric on this statue (apparently Artemis, I think), for example, is fascinating and complex.
Narratives in the temple friezes, like this with Alexander the Great, in white armor, suddenly become intense and explicit with the addition of color: here he tramples on a Persian whose garb is “barbarian”—that is, garishly tasteless. Guess who’s winning this battle?
I just came across a beautiful Christmas song — thanks to my friend Jean who just performed it with Columbia Baroque! — it’s Monteverdi’s Puer Natus.
Well, actually it’s not quite that: it’s a modern reworking of his Chiome d’oro, a duet for two sopranos and instruments, a secular piece about a lovely someone with beautiful golden hair that dances about and entrances the poet/composer.
The Puer Natus is that piece with the words changed — instead of Italian, Latin; instead of amorous, religious. In the Renaissance, this was a typical way of “covering” a popular song and repurposing it — the whole deal was known as contrafactum — and it’s still done today. The Latin text, about the birth of Jesus, was added by Larry Rosenwald for a performance by Voices of Music. The result is as intricate, passionate, and swirling as the angels in this Botticelli Mystical Nativity!
Here it is, from the wonderful Voices of Music YouTube channel:
It seems fitting for the first blog post in my re-worked “World as Museum” website and blog to talk about a trip we made to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. If there’s a museum that encompasses “the world,” it’s surely this: rainforest, coral reefs, dark matter . . . .
And re-worked the museum also is: the new (well, pretty new) building by Renzo Piano that replaced an older one is spectacular — open, light filled, accommodating hordes of school groups dashing around without bumping into grandads like me; and most interesting, a public building that self-ventilates.
Skylights and big glass panels open and close; shades draw to keep the sun out; breezes lift and circulate with apparently minimal fossil fuel expenditure
.
Most cool of all is the enormous green roof, a garden of native plants draped around artificial hills that supposedly imitate the San Francisco landscape.
The planetarium is also pretty wonderful: we saw a show about the dark matter of the universe that was amazingly detailed and seriously scientific in its approach.
