A Season of Awe and Empathy

No less an authority than the esteemed Mark Morris considers San Francisco Ballet the best ballet company in North America. Even allowing for overenthusiastic hyperbole, there's no disputing that this troupe is way up in the top tier. (Morris's own renowned Mark Morris Dance Group does modern dance; when Morris feels like creating a ballet, he mostly does so for the San Francisco company.) So it may not be too much to say that you can leave a performance--virtually any performance--by SF Ballet feeling admiration, amazement, awe, even joy at having seen such stellar work.

This season, though, the emotions often fall into the realm of sorrow, sadness, and compassion, too. For the season's eight programs, artistic director Helgi Tomasson has chosen several pieces--and choreographed one--that are less abstract, more narrative, and very moving. A highlight was Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Winter Dreams, which is based on Chekhov's 1901 play The Three Sisters. This hour-long dance doesn't retell the tale as much as convey the lives and feelings of each sister: the lonely spinster, Olga; the unhappily married Masha, who briefly finds passion with a military officer; and the flighty Irina, who toys with and is fought over by two suitors. You feel for all of them, not least for Masha's anguished husband. That's because Tomasson trains his dancers to be superb actors, too.

Tomasson created his own emotion-filled dance in "Nanna's Lied," nine short scenes set to nine songs (sung by soprano Melody Moore) by Kurt Weill and Friedrich Hollaender. The songs have that dark, lurid sound forever equated with the time and place in which they were written: 1930s Germany. So when the innocent Nanna first comes onstage with her little suitcase, hemmed in by cold, looming towers, as the orchestra plays "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" (The Ballad of Mack the Knife), you know she's not in for an easy time of it. And then an assortment of predatory men shows up.

The season started with the classic evening-length story ballet Giselle (peasant girl has her heart broken by a callous nobleman, goes mad, and dies) and will end with the contemporary evening-length story ballet The Little Mermaid (sea creature has her heart broken by a callous prince, suffers greatly, and dies). These aren't murder mysteries--there's no loss if you know how they end or have seen them danced more than once. One of the great things about SF Ballet is how strong the entire company is; you want to see what others will do in the same role or dance. With luck, we'll some of these dances performed again next year.

Photos c Erik Tomasson, SF Ballet

Dance, Dance, Dance

I don't know why, during my 10 years as the arts editor of San Francisco magazine, I never attended a San Francisco Ballet gala until last night. Especially because, unlike with SF Symphony and SF Opera's gown- and tux-strewn opening nights, SF Ballet's gala program is performed on that one evening only. The regular programs consist of either an evening-length story ballet (such as Giselle, which opens in a couple of days) or three short, more abstract ballets. At the galas, SF Ballet offers nine or ten dances or excerpts, to showcase the splendid company that artistic director Helgi Tomasson has built in his 26 years here.

On opening nights, all three of the city's major arts organizations tend to forgo challenging works for crowd-pleasers, and the ballet's are no exception. Not that there's anything wrong with crowd-pleasers when they are performed so excitingly well. And Tomasson is great at mixing it up, always putting on the bill both classical and contemporary works that vary widely in tone and approach. So last night, for instance, we saw a pas de deux from the 1869/2003 Don Quixote (loved that stunning red-and-black tutu) and the fourth movement and finale of Balanchine's 1947 Symphony in C (men in black, corps of women in white tutus).

We saw Tomasson's own 2009 divertissement from Swan Lake, with four dancers in Russian-style velvet costumes, fur hats, and boots. By contrast, we saw the U.S. premiere of the 2006 New Pizzicato Polka, about which let me just say that if Chaplin had been a ballet star, this is the dance he would have choreographed, for three dancers in pale suits and black bowler and top hats. It was so clever and fun, and so was the excerpt from the 1997 Alles Walzer, with music by Johann Strauss Jr. and dancing by two supremely gifted and charismatic dancers who were anything but formal or staid.

That night, after the rows of dancers and conductor Martin West took their bows, Tomasson came out for his own well-deserved cheers. But that's not really his style (he never does it after regular programs); I'll bet even in his years as a principal dancer with Balanchine at the New York City Ballet, he wasn't much of a divo. He seemed most comfortable slipping through the ranks of the white tutus and off to the side, where, as the curtain descended, you could see him applauding his wonderful dancers with the rest of us.

Photo: Sarah Van Patten and Tiit Helimet in the world premiere of Val Caniparoli's Double Stop, c Erik Tomasson

Nutcracker Season

The opera season just ended, and San Francisco Opera's Ring Cycle won't come around until next summer. I'll be spending the next six months looking behind the scenes when I can, and watching other music, theater, and dance performances. There are wonderful overlaps in the arts, especially in the Bay Area. But this post may be the first time anyone has linked the fearsome Richard Wagner with the Nutcracker.

That's because my French-horn-playing friend Bill performs with both the SF Opera and San Francisco Ballet orchestras. Two days after the season-ending opera, he began playing for the ballet's beautiful Nutcracker, which runs through December 27. I see it, live or on public television, almost every year.

I first met William Klingelhoffer when I went to the opera house to ask him about playing Wagner, whose operas are the world's longest (see August 3, 2010 post). With another horn player, Bill leads the opera orchestra's French horn section. As I explained a while back, Wagner demands eight French horns for the Ring--as opposed to the normal four--so when Bill is first horn, he's head of a section that includes four horn players who don't normally perform with his orchestra. He says it's like being a baseball pitcher, who's mindful of the whole game but also has to narrow his focus to simply getting those fastballs over the plate. Bill has to concentrate on making a big sound with all those other horns as well as on playing solos.

But a ball player sits in the dugout a lot. With Wagner, the horn functions as both woodwind and brass--a part of two sections of the orchestra--"so we're playing all the time," says Bill. "You have to pace yourself, like a pitcher paces himself over the game. You need something in reserve; I mean, the first act of Gotterdammerung is something like an hour and 45 minutes by itself."

So the two-hour-long Nutcracker is a piece of cake or candy (easy for me to say), although Bill knows how to challenge himself. "You know how a baseball player hits 'for the cycle,' meaning he hits a single, double, triple, and home run in the same game? Last year I played Nutcracker for the cycle: I played all four horn parts--first, second, third, and fourth--on various days in the same run!"

Bill says he's up to about 700 performances of Nutcracker all told. And you gotta keep things interesting. But he's sticking with first horn this year. "I'm imagining a more Zen approach: Nutcracker as meditation. Ohhhhhhmmmmmmmm....."




Nutcracker photo c Erik Tomasson, SF Ballet
Photo of Bill: me

How Happily My Heart Breaks

I saw Placido Domingo as Cyrano de Bergerac recently. What a thrill. Not that I'm star-struck; I've seen too many stars and been struck by how little they measure up to the hype. But it really is something to see a true superstar perform. Someone like Domingo brings such presence and charisma to the stage, you feel it immediately. The excitement is there before he ever opens his mouth.

And that Sunday at the War Memorial Opera House, it was certainly there afterward. As the stage went dark, people began moving down the aisles. At first I thought they were planning to throw bouquets--a now frowned-upon sign of enthusiasm that I haven't seen in years. There were too many people for that, though, and they were all holding up cell-phone cameras, not long-stemmed roses. The rest of us were applauding and cheering, and Domingo really looked happy, not at all like someone who--after singing 134 different roles in nearly 3,500 performances, more than any other tenor ever--might understandably be a tad jaded. As the curtain fell, he leaned down and out to the side as if to get one more look at the audience. Even if it was to give the audience one more look at him, it was a sign of enthusiasm you rarely see in a star.

For myself, I was still trying to reel in the tears I shed during the last scene, when Cyrano comes to see Roxane for the last time, and he reads aloud the final letter sent her by, she thinks, her long-dead husband. We all know that Cyrano wrote that letter, and that he remembers every word. When the perennially unobservant Roxane wonders how he can read anything now that it's dark, we see the letter lying in his lap as he speaks. Oh, the heavenly sorrow of (someone else's) unrequited, obsessive love!

After Jon Carroll, my favorite Chronicle columnist, saw the opera, he wrote about viewing a play or an opera for the first time--in this case, Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac, on which the opera is based, with his daughter. Having learned from movies and TV that the hero never dies, she was emotionally walloped by the ending. His column reminded me of the time I was watching the final scenes of a classic opera that does not end well for the principles. (Not that that's a clue.) Noticing the tears streaming down my cheeks, the woman next to me leaned over and asked softly, "Is this your first Tosca?"

And yet, as with Madama Butterfly or La Boheme, I still cry at the end of Tosca. With Cyrano, play or opera, I think knowing how it ends--not just knowing that all the words that made Roxane fall in love are Cyrano's, and that he has nobly kept the truth from her all these years, and that even now he is disregarding a fatal head wound, just to see her one more time--well, it makes that last scene unutterably more poignant. You might call it sentimental, and hyper romantic, and you could be right; but you'd still believe if you saw someone like Placido Domingo in the role. I could cry just thinking about it.

Music: Scenes from San Francisco Opera's Cyrano de Bergerac

My Afternoon with Domingo

I met Placido Domingo a couple of days ago. Wait, let me rephrase that. A couple of days ago, I met Placido Domingo! He is in San Francisco to sing Cyrano de Bergerac, by the undervalued Italian composer Franco Alfano. (Why this 1936 opera is performed so infrequently is a post in itself.) After rehearsal one afternoon, San Francisco Opera had a little "press chat" with Domingo in the red-and-gold mezzanine lounge at the opera house. SFO general director David Gockley did a fine job of interviewing him, both sitting on high stools against a long wall, our plush chairs in a semicircle around them.

Gockley reminded us of the heroic role Domingo played at the 1983 gala opening night. He'd been in Manhattan that day, preparing to sing at the Met; but when SFO's Otello lost his voice, Domingo was asked to step in. I just learned some of these details. The man was recently arrived from Europe yet. A helicopter took him to SF billionaire composer Gordon Getty's Lear jet, which happened to be in New York; Domingo flew across the country; the audience heard reports of his journey up the freeway (in a green Jaguar with police escort); and the show went on, just a few hours late.

Gockley told us that, in the '70s and '80s, Domingo sang in San Francisco about once a year. His appearances became more sporadic after he became general director of the Washington Opera and, now, Los Angeles Opera. He last performed here at a special tribute evening about 10 years ago, during which he sang one act each from Fedora, Samson et Dalila, and most wonderfully, Otello, one of his signature roles.

This week, I had a chance to remind Domingo of something unforgettable he did that evening. As he was taking his bows, the singers, some SFO luminaries, and several backstage staffers gathered soundlessly behind him. He did an impressive double-take when he saw them. And then, when Domingo noticed his longtime dresser, a distinguished-looking older man named Joe Harris, he brought him forward and introduced him. Harris was stunned and touched, and so was I.

When I shared this memory, Domingo looked at me sadly and said, "He died," and he squeezed my hands. "I know," I said. "I thought of you when I read his obituary."

When Domingo was here last, he received a San Francisco Opera medal, awarded from time to time to great performers, conductors, and others who've been important to the company. When Harris, who died three years ago, retired in 2004 after 44 years with the opera, he was presented one, too.

Music: Placido Domingo sings "Nessun Dorma," from Turandot.

Miners, Music, Machines

Not long ago, I went with San Francisco Opera French horn player Bill Klingelhoffer to A and G Music in Oakland--specifically to its vast downstairs repair shop, Best Instrument Repair Co. That's where I met Dick Akright, "a giant in the field of horn-crafting repair," according to a long article former San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ken Garcia wrote about Akright and his realm several years ago. At one point, Akright had a side business with trumpet player Doc Severinsen--that's right, the guy who led the Tonight Show band when Johnny Carson was the late-night king. Dick and Doc created custom Bel Canto trumpets.

Bill and I were there to pick up the orchestra's two Wagner tubas (see previous post). Not every score calls for a Wagner tuba, so while Bill and the SFO orchestra were performing Aida, Werther, and The Marriage of Figaro lately--with Bill on co-principal horn, as usual--the Wagner tubas were getting the spa treatment in Oakland.

Lucky for me, only one of them was ready, because I got a great before-and-after view. One looked shiny and new. The other...you know how copper turns green when exposed to the elements? Brass turns orange with use, and the beautifully tarnished Wagner tuba that Ian Siverly showed us was solid tangerine around the valves and halfway down, trailing off into a scatter of paler fingerprints near the bell.

Siverly and his colleagues push something like a small metal balloon into the bell if they need to press out any dents, and use a soldering torch to fix broken braces. The cool thing, though, was seeing how these guys get the tarnish off instruments made of brass or a nickel-silver alloy: with an ultrasonic bath and a scratch brush. The bath entails filling a waist-high, rectangular metal sink with a gallon of biodetergent-acid concentrate and 90 gallons of water, then pulsing sonic waves through for a minute or two, max. "You could climb in there and get rid of all your gallstones," the deadpan Siverly said while showing us how it worked.

If the sonic bath is a kind of Jacuzzi, the scratch brush is the massage. It's a special mass of fine brass wire on the end of a long metal rod set in concrete; when you turn on a motor, the brush spins and buffs the brass instrument.

As I write this, the last miner has just emerged from that half-mile-deep pit in the Chilean earth. It's been amazing to see the technology developed to save these 33 men, especially that skinny steel pod and the pulleys used to lower it and haul the men up into sun- or moonlight. It's been so heartening to see how hard so many people have worked to save them. The human mind is shockingly adept at thinking up ways to inflict torture and death. But it can also create such beautiful, soul-healing art and such ingenious machines. Right this moment, I'm thinking of Wagner's operas, the unique musical instrument he envisioned, and the creative techniques someone invented to clean it. Not to mention an awe-inspiring rescue capsule that may--we hope--never be used again.

Background music: From Das Rheingold, Entry of the Gods Into Valhalla

The Music Goes Round and Round

It seems a little oxymoronic, putting Richard Wagner's name in front of a brass instrument associated with marching bands and Octoberfest. But as the people at wagner-tuba.com will tell you, the name of "one of the least well-known orchestral instruments in the world today" is "colourful yet ambiguous and causes confusion as to its true identify." In his operas, Wagner wanted to hear something bridging the tone between a French horn and a trombone, a smaller tuba that would integrate with the new (1835) bass tuba and better blend the sounds of the brass section.

When I tell you the Wagner tuba uses a French horn mouthpiece, you may--if you've been reading this blog and have a good memory--think of Bill Klingelhoffer, the San Francisco Opera's co-principal horn player (see August 3 post), who's the reason I'm writing this.

When a company performs the four operas in the Ring Cycle over the course of seven days, as SFO is doing next summer, the demands on the musicians seem almost unbelievable--especially when you multiply it times two more weeks. So you can imagine my lack of surprise when Bill told me that when he performed the Ring here before, the principal horn players divided the work. Bill played Das Rheingold, the other principal played Die Walkure, and they split up Siegfried and Gotterdammerung.

These days, though, Bill's co-principal is 20-something Kevin Rivard, who's so excited about playing his first Ring, says Bill, he wants to do the whole thing, with only an assistant to help out by...well, that's something I plan to talk to Kevin about. What will Bill be doing? Yep, he'll be on Wagner tuba.

So I guess you've figured out what's in the photographs. In the big one, you're looking at the intricate valve section with its seven tuning slides, each needing a separate adjustment. You have to take the whole thing apart to overhaul and clean it, and each tuning slide needs to be labeled first. The orchestra's two Wagner tubas have been getting spiffed up lately at A and G Music/Best Instrument Repair Co., "which, from its popularity over the years," the SF Chronicle noted a few years ago, "apparently lives up to its name." When Bill drove over there to pick them up, I went with him, and it was an unexpected glimpse behind the scenes.

Background music: Das Rheingold, Prelude-Act I