Lightning round
It’s time to clear the decks in rapid fashion
It’s been a busy couple of weeks around the Bay. There was a profusion of music, theater, and dance events tumbling all over one another to remind everyone what a luxuriant cultural utopia we inhabit here, and in the middle of everything, Michael Tilson Thomas died. I don’t know about you, but I’m still acclimating to the loss of both him and his husband Joshua Robison. On her blog, Lisa Hirsch has curated an excellent and extensive roster of obituaries, tributes, and more.
The result is that I’m sitting on a backlog of half-baked writeups that I think, realistically speaking, are unlikely to achieve full bakehood in the near future. Better, perhaps, to just clear them out in quickstep and come back later with the critic’s version of inbox zero achieved.
• Hamnet at A.C.T. Oh, I was looking forward to this one. In preparation for this import from the Royal Shakespeare Company, I did the remedial work of reading Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel and catching up with last year’s popular film adaptation. I was grateful for those prods; both are deeply engrossing and rewarding works. For all its overly perfumed prose, O’Farrell’s fictionalized re-imagining of the Shakespeare family and the death of their young son is a haunting, wondrously humane invention. Director Chloé Zhao’s movie is, if anything, even more probing in its treatment of grief.
But Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation, which runs through May 24, has inherited none of those virtues. In part that’s because it adds material that was nowhere in the source material, and has no business being there. One of the great charms of O’Farrell’s novel is that it never treats the father in the family as The Great William Shakespeare. His name is never even mentioned (he’s identified as “the Latin tutor” or as someone’s son, husband, or father); in O’Farrell’s imagining, he’s a sort of directionless slacker who falls into the acting game and develops a knack for it. I think he gets called “Will” once or twice in the film, but the general drift remains the same. This allows his wife Agnes (better known to posterity as Anne) to take center stage and finally have her story told in full.
When you’re the RSC, though, Shakespeare the playwright is the brand, and can’t be treated that casually. So we get plenty of tedious and unwanted glimpses of his career — discourses on the economics of playwriting, introductions to members of his company, rehearsals of Romeo and Juliet and A Comedy of Errors replete with good old diarrhea humor. It all plays like outtakes from a stage version of Shakespeare in Love. The upshot is that Agnes gets pulled out of historical obscurity just so she can take a back seat to her more eminent husband yet again. Why bother?
• Simone Young at the San Francisco Symphony The pleasure of Young’s guest appearance in Davies Symphony Hall earlier this month was her decision to program more than an hour’s worth of orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s Ring Cycle as the concert’s second half. Wagner’s music is the biggest slice of the repertoire that members of a symphony orchestra never get to engage with. Yet it’s some of the most important orchestral writing of the 19th century, and any chance to hear the Symphony players tackle it is a gift.
Young is a proven Wagnerian, on opera stages elsewhere and in Davies in 2019, when she conducted a first-rate concert version of Act 1 of Die Walküre. This appearance was no exception. The selections were the basic “bleeding chunks” (to use Donald Francis Tovey’s classic phrase) ripped from the four scores — the opening of Das Rheingold, the “Ride of the Valkyries,” “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” and so forth — but all of them felt as dramatic and forceful as they would have in context. And there was a terrifically crisp and heroic contribution from the orchestra’s new principal horn, Diego Incertis Sánchez, who continues to promise wonderful things. I know the Wagner slot is spoken for, but surely our friends at the San Francisco Opera could find something for Simone Young to conduct here?
• Claire Chase We simply don’t talk enough about the brilliance and inventiveness of this maverick flutist. Understand that we talk about her technical and artistic prowess all the damn time, and yet it’s still not enough. Chase’s solo recital with San Francisco Performances on April 18, part of her ongoing Density 2036 commissioning project, was yet more evidence of that proposition, a stream of exciting, incendiary, and beautiful music executed with extraordinary flair.
One of the fascinating things about this event was the way it traded in sounds, not notes. Sure, Chase plays the flute in a more-or-less traditional way, but the contributions of sound engineer Jacob Felix Heule, whom she credited after every selection, were essential to the evening’s artistic workings. Every musical utterance existed in the context of an entire sonic landscape.
Much of the music was specifically designed for that, of course, including an excerpt by Annea Lockwood and Chase that combined the flute with recorded environmental sounds. But even more traditionally conceived repertoire leapt off the stage in three dimensions, including excerpts from Marcos Balter’s magnum opus Pan and others from a recent work by Terry Riley, The Holy Liftoff. For a taste of Chase’s genius as an interpreter, you could hardly have done better than Pauline Oliveros’ Thirteen Changes, which called for her to transmute poetic prompts like “Standing naked, moonlight washes the body” or “Elephants mating in a secret grove” into richly expressive performances.
• Yuja Wang and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra As so often with this preternaturally gifted and exuberant pianist, the concert presented by the San Francisco Symphony on April 26 was a twofer. Before intermission, Wang played Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, which may well be the finger-bustiest of the five finger-busters he wrote in the genre; the evening ended with the Jazz Suite for Piano and Orchestra composed in 1945 by the Soviet composer Alexander Tsfasman.
The latter work was square-cut and drab, a flurry of notes adding up to little more than empty display. But the Prokofiev was breathtaking. The harder a piece like this is to play — by which I mean simply getting your fingers on the right keys at the right time — the harder it becomes to convince a listener that there’s any more to the music than that. Wang’s greatness lies in her ability to do both. We marvel at her dexterity, which really is close to superhuman; at the same time, she guides us through the composer’s resplendent harmonic imagination, his rhetorical fervor, and his remarkable sense of humor. You’re always in good hands with Wang.
• Come from Away at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley I recently read somewhere that David Hein and Irene Sankoff’s Tony-winning musical, about the small Newfoundland town that hosted thousands of international passengers pulled suddenly out of the sky on September 11, was the show most frequently performed last year by American regional theaters. That surprised me a little, because it’s such a razor-sharp piece of theatrical clockwork, with cast members whirling tirelessly around the stage to become dozens of different characters, sometimes for just a few seconds at a time.
Or at least, that’s what it was in the tightly choreographed Broadway touring production that I saw and fell in love with at the Golden Gate Theatre in 2019. It turns out that you can also do the piece with less polish, making up for it with enthusiasm and commitment, and the result is…just fine. Director Robert Kelley’s game production, playing through May 10 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, hits all the show’s major points — the corny jokes, the Norman Rockwellesque brand of tart sentimentality, the sheer logistic complexity (of both the show itself and the operation it depicts) — and it never entirely disappoints.
But it doesn’t quite quicken the pulse, either. Without that much-needed layer of pure artifice — without the kind of acrobatic energy you get in a circus or cabaret or Broadway extravaganza — the show’s threads begin to show. The moral lessons come to feel soft, the jokes wear thin. Like the jet planes that figure in it so prominently, Come From Away needs a full arsenal of gleaming stage machinery to really take off.
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #317 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Pear gene mutates into vegetable (5,3)
Last week’s clue:
Annual salary’s ending in advance (6)
Solution: YEARLY
Annual: definition
salary’s ending: Y
in advance: EARLY
Coming up
• Santa Rosa Symphony: If music be the food of love, music director Francesco Lecce-Chong and the orchestra have it going on with a Shakespeare-themed concert program. Two of Tchaikovsky’s orchestral treatments of the Bard — the fantasy overtures on Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet — are joined with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s incidental music for Otello. Mozart’s non-Shakespearean Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466, rounds out the program with Claire Huangci as soloist. May 2-4, Weill Hall, Green Music Center, Rohnert Park. www.srsymphony.org.
• Renée Fleming: One of America’s most prominent and well-beloved vocal artists — a true populist on the model of Beverly Sills — returns to Cal Performances for a recital with pianist Inon Barnatan. The repertoire is characteristically far-reaching, from operatic excerpts by Handel and Puccini to songs by Cole Porter and Lerner & Loewe, and Barnatan takes solo turns in music by Mendelssohn and Earl Wild. May 3, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. www.calperformances.org.
green pea