Archives for September 2009

I had the privilege of catching an hour or so of mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe’s masterclass at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music yesterday in between meetings and deadlines. Not only is Blythe one of the most versatile and stunning singers of today, but it also turns out that she’s a wonderful pedagogue with a lovely sense of humor.

I watched Blythe coach three of the Conservatory’s young female singers. The two sopranos sang arias from Italian operas (Verdi’s Rigoletto and Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi); the mezzo performed a Mahler art song.

Blythe has an immediate way of connecting with students. She corrected the shoulder-rolling posture of one of the sopranos by talking about the TV show Dancing with the Stars. “I’m addicted to Dancing with the Stars,” declared Blythe, before launching into a cautionary tale about the problems of wearing revealing clothing when your posture isn’t perfect. (The soprano in question had hunched, forward-rolling shoulders which were made all the more obvious by the fact that she was wearing a strapless black cocktail dress.) “When you sing, you lead with your sternum,” Blythe instructed, flowing across the stage in a voluminous black and white floral kimono, black slacks and opened-toed sandals. “My teacher used to say to me, ‘you’ve got big tits; stick ’em out and sing.'”

Besides discovering that Blythe is addicted to trashy TV (she’s also a fan of America’s Next Top Model) I also learned so much about the art of singing in that short hour. Here are some more of Blythe’s pedagogical pointers:

1. Stand in a three-quarter stance rather than face-on to the audience. In this stance you are balanced and no one can push you over. Plus the angle is flattering.

2. Let your hands go. Don’t hold them in front of you like you’re carrying a loaf of bread.

3. The motion of the sound should always move forward even in quiet passages. Always spin the tone.

4. For every aria you sing, you should sing five art songs. Although it’s not possible to make a career singing art song full time, art song is the best way of training the voice and developing communication / acting skills.

5. You don’t have to stand stock still by the piano when you give a recital.

6. Acting is connecting to a thought. Follow your instincts, commit to a thought, and move with purpose and direction.

As I walked out of the press screening of Richard Linklater’s excellent new film about Orson Welles and the build-up to his landmark 1937 Mercury Theatre adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar last night, it struck me that as engrossing as Linklater’s film is — and it is indeed worth seeing for the quality of the performances, the slick storytelling and the shabbily endearing 1930s New York aesthetic — in one respect it’s just like pretty much all of the films that are made these days about the world of the stage: It paints it in a twee and comedic light.

Where are the new films that treat theatre as a serious dramatic subject? Where is the 21st century’s version of Les Enfants du Paradis? It strikes me that films that include the theatre at all in their plotlines these days are mostly historical in context. Even the best of these, such as Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles mentioned above or Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy, look back at the stage as a medium of the past. Rose-tinted nostalgia and heaps of tweeness are often part of the cinematographic package.

Meanwhile, the films that portray theatre in the present day, such as Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, tend to make fun of the stage and the people involved in making theatre — it’s a subject ripe for ridicule rather than serious consideration. I don’t have anything against comedy. Let’s face it, there’s a lot about the theatre that’s pretty funny. But it would be great to see a different approach for once. I think there’s definitely a niche out there for some enterprising writer / director to create a movie about the theatre that’s contemporary and that doesn’t prettify, or otherwise condescend to the subject matter.

There’s been a vogue in recent years of opera composers attempting to blend western and eastern musical and performance styles in operas. One element which a lot of these operas have in common is a tension between achieving a perfect mix between vastly different cultural traditions while at the same time demonstrating how little they have in common. That the oil and water effect is ultimately the aspect of these operas that remains most powerfully in the memory after the opera is finished is telling.

Stewart Wallace’s 2008 opera The Bonesetter’s Daughter, based on the novel by Amy Tan and first presented at San Francisco Opera, brings traditional Chinese instruments and voices together with western orchestral and operatic traditions in a fairly seamless fashion. Yet the work’s greatest allure is the spine-tingling unfamiliarity to western ears of some of the Chinese instrumental passages and the sections featuring traditional Chinese Kunju opera singing, which vividly point to the chasm between the two worlds.

A House in Bali, Evan Ziporyn’s new opera based on the experiences of three expat artists living in Bali during the 1930s (the composer Colin McPhee, the painter Walter Spies and cultural anthropologist and author Margaret Mead) which just had its American premiere under the auspices of Cal Performances, seems focused on achieving the same blend versus difference. Once again, the difference wins out. The score sets a western contemporary music group against a gamelan ensemble, in this case, the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Gamelan Salukat. Besides one or two shimmering, quiet passages in which solo players from both groups duet on marimba-like instruments from both traditions, the most memorable passages in the score occur when each group plays separately. When they come together, very often the sound approaches cacophony.

The power of difference and compartmentalization also comes across in the staging. The activity going on on the main part of the stage is set apart from hidden activities going on in box-like secluded rooms at the back of the stage. A movie screen provides a birds-eye view on what’s happening behind the compartment walls.

As a result, McPhee’s feelings of being an outsider in his beloved Bali surpass the idea that a westerner might become a truly integrated member of a foreign community. So what can we glean from the oil and water landscapes that these opera composers have been creating of late? Is the attempt to truly unite different musical traditions ultimately doomed? Or do these works point to a somewhat heartening social reality: that despite the sway of international travel, free market law and mass corporatization, perhaps the world is not quite as much of a global village as we would like to think?

The new vocal music media project, VoiceBox, which I host and produce, is ramping up for a January 1 launch on public radio station KALW 91.7 FM. The weekly series, which explores the art of singing and the best of the vocal music scene from the Bay Area and beyond, will also launch as a podcast and web portal.

At the moment, I’m in the throes of fund-raising for the project. VoiceBox is a fiscally-sponsored project of the media incubator Independent Arts & Media. So all donations to the cause — which are gratefully accepted and easy to make by clicking here — are also, happily, tax-deductible.

VoiceBox has received a few nice bits of media coverage so far. Early Music America, San Francisco Classical Voice and Scanning the Dial all covered the project. I would welcome any ideas for themes and artists to feature on the series next year, as well as any thoughts about potential fundraising sources.

To find out more about VoiceBox, click here. To listen to all five of the pilot episodes which ran earlier this summer, click here.

Also, for anyone reading this who lives in the Bay Area: Indy Arts & Media is hosting a big Arts Expo in Golden Gate Park tomorrow from 11am – 6pm. The event will feature stands by many local arts organizations. Worth a visit.

Although I didn’t realize it until intermission when artistic director Patrick Dooley made an announcement, I witnessed a small but significant historical occasion at the Berkeley theatre company Shotgun Players last night: For the first time in its history, the company added a Wednesday night performance. Shows now play from Wednesday to Sunday, instead of Thursday to Sunday.

This doesn’t sound like a big deal: Companies often extend their runs around here. But one rarely hears about theatre organizations adding extra weekly performances throughout a run in this way. The move seems especially bold during a recession. The house for Marcus Gardley’s new play about Rosie the Riveter, This World in a Woman’s Hands, was fairly full too. Go Shotgun.

People who go to recitals around the Bay Area tend to spend a lot of time complaining about the Herbst Theatre. The 928-seater hall (pictured left) has a noble history and is lovely to look at. It was the site of the signing of the United Nations Charter on June 26, 1945. Originally designed as the Veterans Auditorium, the theatre was refurbished and renamed Herbst Theatre in 1977. Eight large beaux-arts murals, created by Frank Brangwyn for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, adorn the walls while overhead five chandeliers hang from the blue and gold-leaf ceiling.

But as lovely and important as Herbst is, it’s a lousy place to put on a concert. The acoustic is bad, the place always feels empty (as it’s usually quite difficult to fill 928 seats for chamber music concerts) and the stage looks shabby owing to the cheap-looking sound dampening “wall” that always acts as a backdrop for performances. The space lacks a bar or cafe and the lobby feels chilly and unwelcoming and has nothing much in the way of seating.

Herbst ends up being the de facto choice for presenters because there really aren’t any other viable options in town. Sure, there are plenty of churches, but none of them feel like concert halls and elderly classical music fans don’t feel comfortable sitting in pews for long amounts of time. With the possible exception of the performance hall at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park (which sounds good and is all state of the art but feels claustrophobic and sparse and is difficult to access without a car in the evening) I’m hard pressed to think of a single other suitable space in which to present chamber music concerts.

I wonder whether some of the auditoriums used for jazz, rock and folk music gigs might fit the bill? I love Yoshi’s as a space. The Great American Music Hall might also be a fun (albeit perhaps not sonically terrific or particularly comfortable) place to experience a classical music concert. Or perhaps it’s about time that San Francisco invested in a great new recital hall?

What happens when a choral ensemble from one country attempts to sing the music of another tradition? Sometimes being an outsider brings a whole new perspective on the culture of a different place and fireworks ensue. Sometimes the effort, though well-intentioned, results in a complete misfire.

I experienced both of these outcomes over the weekend at a pair of choral concerts by two fine choirs, The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge from the UK and the Bay Area’s Clerestory ensemble. Both groups feature terrific singers and perform a fairly wide repertoire. But while Clerestory managed to pull off many of the English works it performed in its concert of music dating from the Middle Ages to the present, Trinity College Choir ‘s concert of mostly liturgical works fell flat when the group attempted to sing American songs.

The globe-trotting Trinity Choir, one of the best mixed choirs in the UK, is currently on a US west coast tour. The group performed an eclectic mix of music by composers as diverse as Arvo Part, J S Bach, Henry Purcell and Pawel Lukaszewski at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral on Friday night. Music by English composers dominated the evening’s lineup and the group brought richness and feeling to all the music in the first half. I was particularly moved by the shimmering performances of Thomas Tallis’ “O Nata Lux”, Purcell’s “Hear my Prayer” and William Byrd’s “Civitas Sancti Tui”.

But in the second half, Trinity Choir’s attempts to sing negro spirituals were pretty laughable. The singers tried their best to loosen up and get into the “hallelujah” spirit for arrangements of “Way Over in Beulah-lan'”, “Goin’ Home to God” and “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” arranged by Joseph Jennings, Steve Barnett and Jonathan Rathbone respectively. But they were way too stiff and seemed pretty uncomfortable with the music’s showy high notes and ecstatic exclamations. No amount of technical perfection helped their cause. I’m not sure what it would take to get these buttoned-up, Cambridge-educated, young singers to access the energy needed to pull off this kind of repertoire. More of an immersion in the spiritual tradition is necessary for sure. As it was, the effect was rather like watching a Monty Python skit.

The Bay Area-based members of Clerestory fared a lot better at the English repertoire in their concert at St Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco. The eight-strong all-male ensemble took an unusually democratic approach to programming. Each of the singers simply picked a song that he loved and the group performed the selection. The singer responsible for each selection wrote about the piece in the program, providing some background on the work as well as his own personal interest in and history with the music. Rarely have program notes been so interesting.

I rarely read program notes during a concert, so I tried to figure out from looking at the performers’ faces which of the songs each one selected. In some cases, this was clear. There was a particularly rapturous look in one of the performers that gave the game away. Sometimes, though, it was harder to tell. In general, the technical proficiency of the singing sometimes led to a certain flatness of emotional communication. The sound was clean and bright. Each individual voice could be heard in the texture. The blend was generally smooth. But on some occasions, the overall effect was sparse and a little under-emotional. I couldn’t tell if any of the singers were actually enjoying certain pieces at all, much less pick out the person for whom the song held particular weight.

Among my own personal favorite works of Clerestory’s concert were a little-performed but extremely vivid motet — “Memorare Christ a 7” by Mattheus Pipelare (c1450 – c1515) — and Josquin Desprez’s haunting “La Deploration sur la Mort de Jean Ockeghem”. But I was probably equally swept away by the group’s cool, clean approach to pieces by such British composers as John Tavener (“The Lamb”), John Rutter (“Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron”), Peter Warlock (The Shrouding of the Duchess of Malfi”) and Byrd (“Gloria” from the Mass for Five Voices.)

I wonder if Clerestory’s success and Trinity’s failure suggests that Americans are more steeped in British musical traditions than Brits are in American traditions? I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case — after all, there are several more centuries of history behind the English choral tradition than the American one. Or is it that English church songs are simply easier to sing than African-American ones?

PS This just in from Clerestory founder (and former Chanticleer member) Jesse Antin which I thought might be of interest — thanks Jesse for allowing lies like truth to post your comments:

“I’ve always thought that choral arrangements of negro spirituals are a tough thing to ask of any white choir. We had some success in Chanticleer thanks to [ex-Chanticleer music director] Joe Jennings’ inspiration and background, which contributed some integrity to our attempts. Still, even for us there was some self-consciousness. For an English cathedral choir, that much further removed from African American traditions, it might be too much to ask. This taps into two other pet peeves of mine. #1: why do choirs touring internationally try to sing music native to the place they’re visiting? This is a terrible and overrated idea. The audience may appreciate the thought or the effort, but they can’t have paid to hear a foreign choir sing (possibly butcher) their own music, which they probably hear all the time anyway. Bringing the choir’s *own* native music, I can understand. #2: why do choirs (or their directors anyway) insist on adhering to the score note for note? Is it our classical music hang-up? I ask because what the Trinity director should have done — if he insisted on performing spirituals at all — is modify or leave out the parts that his choir couldn’t do effectively. This is completely within a director’s discretion and it makes for a performance with more integrity, not less. The idea of insisting on a rigid adherence to an arrangement of an African American style is particularly ironic.”

The initial feeling that hit me when I walked into the 3A Gallery in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, was how picture postcardy the first massive image I came across in Oakland photographer Jonathan Ball’s Great Wall of China exhibition looked to my untrained eyes.

The panoramic photograph in question depicts a verdant, bumpy landscape of peaks and valleys with the famous wall snaking its way across the terrain. It’s obviously a beautifully-composed picture, but there’s nothing particularly unusual about it. I’ve never been to China but I feel like I’ve seen this image or one very like it hundreds of times before.

But then when one starts to read the backstory behind the image, it comes to life in a new way. All the photographs in the exhibition depict sites of historical significance, where important Manchu and Mongol raids occurred in the 15th – 17th centuries. The images capture the points of view of the defenders or raiders involved in the skirmishes and were taken on the anniversaries of the raids, as close as possible to the time of day when the battles took place.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Ball and Great Wall specialist David Spindler. Spindler is an American citizen and one of the world’s leading Great Wall specialists. He lives in China and was the subject of a New Yorker profile a couple of years ago by Peter Hessler.

The stories of the raids can be read in an accompanying pamphlet. They provide a small but vivid insight into the raids which took place centuries ago. It’s hard to imagine the horrors that occurred at the sites depicted in Ball’s photographs. The images are so open, spacious and bright. In one picture, a shepherd herds a woolly blur of sheep; in another castle battlements tower benignly over a sun-lit courtyard. In a third, light snow sparkles on a rugged hillside. The fun of this exhibition is therefore very much in the contrast between the photographs and the unflinching-dry reportage of Spindler’s text.

The significance of taking these photographs on the anniversary of the raids doesn’t quite come across as you walk through the exhibition. It seems like a sense of chronology is important to Ball and Spindler. They even took care to bear witness to the actual time of day when the raids took place. as such, I would have liked to know more about the circumstances under which the photographs were taken — perhaps a description of why each site was chosen, what the hike to the site was like, and what time of day the photograph was taken. In any case, I left the gallery feeling like I’d stepped into a different world for a couple of hours.

Berkeley isn’t known for its fashion prowess. Most of the residents of this sunny, west coast university town schlump about in ill-fitting jeans or baggy shorts, flip-flops and old T-shirts. To dress up in Berkeley is to put on a hoodie.

Last night was therefore completely out of the ordinary, as hundreds of people rocked up to Berkeley Repertory Theatre dressed to the elevens (forget the nines and even tens) for opening night of the world premiere of American Idiot, a new rock musical directed by Michael Mayer based on the songs of punk band Green Day.

It was quite a scene. There were girls in figure-hugging, hot pink leather dresses and four-inch stiletto heels and plenty of spiky-haired guys wearing eye-liner, tight jeans, jackets and hastily-knotted ties. In the midst of it all was Berkeley Rep’s formidable artistic director, Tony Taccone, looking like a Green Day groupie in a punkie black ensemble offset by a gamine red, shiny, skinny tie. Only his chipmunk grin and slightly sheepish air set him apart from the too-cool-for-school crowd hanging out outside the theatre before curtain.

I’m not surprised that Taccone’s face registered both pride and a measure of embarrassment — I reckon the event was quite unlike anything that the city of Berkeley has seen in quite some time, both from a commercial and creative perspective. The paparazzi was out in full force, snapping the Green Day boys at all opportunities. Corporate sponsorship e.g. in the form of huge Levis’ signs projected on the sides of buildings, was rife. The post-show party didn’t remotely resemble the kind of affair one usually sees in the non-profit theatre world, namely a few white-haired people chatting for half an hour over a sweaty cheese plate and plastic tumblers of cheap red wine. The “heroine chic” decor was inspired by the show. There was tons of classy food. One of Berkeley Rep’s stages had been take over by a DJ who span punk and garage rock music before a mosh-pit-filled huddle of sweaty bodies. There were swag bags with stuff people actually might want in them (such as Green Day’s new album on CD), old-fashioned pinball machines and a fussball table. You could even get a free haircut and have your photo taken as if standing on the show’s set.

The soiree basically smacked of two things: 1. A desire to impress, and 2. A desire to impress enough to get American Idiot to Broadway.

I don’t doubt that the man in the skinny red tie knows what he’s doing. Following the success on Broadway of Passing Strange and various other New York-bound missives sent by Berkeley Rep in recent years, Taccone appears to have his eye on the ultimate prize: a commercially triumphant musical of Spring Awakening proportions. He looks like he wants to be the Des McAnuff of Northern California.

I didn’t personally like Spring Awakening — found it very derivative and the songs didn’t inspire me at all. American Idiot, though cliche-ridden and lacking in a storyline, has one great advantage over director Michael Mayer’s previous Broadway hit: the soundtrack. Green Day’s music hits you in the gut and tears a big hole in your spleen. The kids’ll really go for it in New York, I think. It won’t be too long before that skinny red tie gets a second airing on the other side of the country.

Every few months, myself, another Bay Area theatre critic, two directors, an actor and a producer get together to host what we call a “theatre salon” — an evening involving anything between 12 and 50 people, food, wine and conversation about a specific topic to do with the performing arts. Past themes have included the San Francisco Fringe Festival, theatre-makers’ relationship with audiences and theatre and the (ailing) economy.

This time around we decided to spend an evening with a smallish group of colleagues (some new to the salon concept and some old hands) to talk about theme of elitism. Our original intention was to discuss whether a fear of seeming too elitist and not being “accessible” and “inclusive” enough makes artists fearful of actually discussing their work and their aesthetics.

But we never really ended up talking about that topic. Instead, we got mired in a semantic discussion about the definition of elitism and other related words such as “artist” versus “craftsman”.

I usually have no trouble contributing to our salon discussions. But for some reason I found myself completely tongue-tied on Monday night. I kept thinking I had something important or at least valid to say, but then the moment would pass and I’d find myself looking in on myself wondering why I ever thought that my thought would be worth articulating.

The topic of elitism completely confounded me. I walked into the room thinking that I had a clear stand on the subject at least from a personal perspective as a critic: Namely, I try to approach every production I see in a similarly open and hopefully intelligent way. I’m not afraid to bring Heidegger to bear in an essay about Point Break Live or Dangerous Housewives into a discussion about Miss Julie if doing so makes sense. I imagine my readers to be interested in theatre and reasonably well-informed. At the same time, I don’t engage in dry academic discourse.

But as the evening progressed I got quite confused and knotted up in the discussion. Pretty soon, I couldn’t get much of a footing at all. I think I uttered about two sentences the entire evening.

That being said, I relished the discussion going on around me as frustrating as it was at times. My colleague Mark put the feeling very eloquently in an email he sent out to our small group last night: “It seems that ultimately we must be comfortable with a certain amount of unruliness to the Salon discussions, and accept that the most interesting stuff, if it gets said at all, will more often then not get said in wee groups at the end of the night, or the next day, or a week later. In other words, the Salons are an unwieldily leaping off point, a party-ish beginning, to a longer, ongoing discussion of the theater.” Here, here.