Soul is dead

Sharon Jones

Soul music is dead.

Didn't see the obituary in the newspaper? That's because there wasn't one- the news was first announced on the Los Angeles radio station KDAY AM back in 1987. News of soul's death was soon heard coming from turntables all over the world, but nothing appeared in the papers- at least nothing directly stating the music had died, even though it went through a long, public demise. The news could only be read about in the charts, and then only if one was paying close attention, but few did. They were too busy following, or fearing, Soul's assassin to notice there was even a victim. Soul just quietly died one day, after playing host to the best party in the world for over 30 years, killed by a record called "Dopeman."

By the time people started to notice and began to ask the question, "Where did Soul go?" it was too late despite the efforts by some folks to resurrect it. The first to try were a few Brits, then D'Angelo. John Legend gave it a good shot, but R&B isn't the same thing as soul. Soul remained dead, but like I said, not everyone knew it.

Thankfully, in the mid-90s there were some New York City musicians who didn't get the news, or more accurately, willfully ignored it. These guys were into James Brown, the Philly sound, Stax Records, and were dedicated to the music to an obsessive degree, going so far as to perform and record it on old analog equipment so it would sound just right, as if it came from the music's heyday in the 60s and 70s. They started their own label, and released records only on vinyl. They even released 45s. Some people started to notice- the usual suspects of course- music geeks, collectors, aficionados, a few writers. There was a spat, and suddenly there were two labels. One one of them ended up being called Daptone, and they formed a house band called the Dap Kings. They soon found an extra singer to take care of a couple tracks. Legend has it she was a prison guard at the time, and her voice rivaled Tina Turner or Etta James in its power and passion. Eventually they made her the front woman for the band, and more people noticed. Her name is Sharon Jones.

In 2006 a skinny English woman named Amy hired the band to back her on her 2nd album, Back to Black, which turned out to be the best soul record of the last 20, maybe even 30 years. Amy, now dead, was young, white, provocative and as troubled as she was talented. She was a media sensation who couldn't handle success and self-destructed in the limelight. She seemed like the antithesis of Jones, who is older, black, and exudes discipline. The type of woman the limelight mostly shuns nowadays.  To decide which woman is the better singer is a wholly subjective, and I'd say pointless, exercise. Obviously the white girl got a lot more attention, which would have been the case even if Winehouse didn't self-immolate in public, but to be fair, she also released a masterpiece of an album, a feat Jones and the Dap Kings haven't (so far) been able to equal.

Which brings me back to the death of Soul. Is it back? Has it been resurrected?

Those who were in attendance at the sold-out Davies Symphony Hall last Saturday night to see Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings would likely say "Hell yes!" because it's a stone cold fact that Jones and the band  delivered a near-perfect show of living, breathing soul music, which has also been the case the previous two times I've seen them. In fact, as good as they were last week, I'd have to say this show only proved how consistent they are- it wasn't noticeably better, or any less entertaining, than the previous gigs I've attended. Just another excellent night from a hard-working, extremely talented band. There's a lot to be said for that- an awful lot actually, and the inclusion of a couple of songs from an upcoming album (including the excellent "Calamity") only bode well for what's ahead.

Daptone Records has a few other acts on its roster now (not all of them soul), so things seem to be brewing nicely. It looks like Soul is making a comeback from the dead. Still, I'm not certain this is true.

Performing at Davies under the presentation of the San Francisco Symphony is a prestige gig, and selling it out only adds to the luster, only slightly tarnished by some tickets appearing on Goldstar. But I've seen very few shows sell-out in the past couple of years without some form of discounted tickets- right now only the Rolling Stones, Yo Yo Ma and The Book of Mormon seem capable of it. But what's bugging me is that like the Blues, the audience for Soul is now mostly white, as are the majority of musicians playing it. And if the music is undeniably African-American, can it still be considered alive when African Americans have all but abandoned it?

Now let me clarify a couple of things before you get all squirmy and uptight about this. First, I want to emphatically state I am not saying nor implying that one must be of a certain race, heritage or whatever to be able to play or appreciate any art from. That would ridiculous to say of any genre of music. Soul has a long history of white musicians being an integral part of its heritage and development, and the white audience has always been there- but historically this part of the audience only arrived after an act achieved a certain level of success and recognition from within the African-American audience. Are there some exceptions? Sure, and in the case of Teena Marie, it can also happen that a white performer never makes the same impact with the white audience as they do with African-Americans.

But the crowd at Davies, as was the case the other times I've seen this band, was overwhelmingly white, and the black faces in the audience were all older. This was a casual observation- I didn't stand at the door watching everyone come in, but I don't think I saw a single black person in the audience under the age of 40, and most of the audience seemed to be on the "more mature" side. It's almost always the same thing at blues concerts, and to large extent the same can be said of jazz, but at least with jazz there's an undeniably vibrant contingent of young African-Americans performing the music, even if there is little corresponding presence in the audience. 

Is this just a matter of San Francisco/Bay Area demographics? I don't think so. I went to all three Prince concerts the last time he came through town and the audience was plenty diverse- everyone was there, and all age groups were well represented. The lines outside of venues featuring hip-hop shows and popular R&B artists give ample evidence of the black audience here, including younger people. 

But it's not at shows like this one. That doesn't mean that Jones and the Dap Kings are any less talented or that the show was somehow "unauthentic." Nothing could be further from the truth. The eleven member group was solid from the get-go and their signature song, "100 Days," performed as an encore, is a classic of the genre and Jones sings it as well as one imagines Etta James could have in her prime. I just wonder about the viability of a genre of music whose original audience and creators have abandoned it- can it be considered as more than a "museum piece" or a form of nostalgia? 

If you were at the show, probably none of this mattered, unless you, like me, wished the audience, the entire audience, were up and out of their seats, dancing through the entire set, instead of just toward the end. The confines of Davies probably had something to do with that- but I suspect the make-up of the audience was the more telling factor. Regardless, for two hours at least, Soul felt very much alive and well- and that felt awesome.

The Rolling Stones/ England's Newest Hitmakers

The first full-length Rolling Stones album, The Rolling Stones, was released in the U.K. by Decca on April 16th, 1964. The American version, England's Newest Hitmakers (on the London label) came out six weeks later on May 30th. The songs were recorded in five sessions produced by Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton during January and February of that year. Both versions feature 12 songs, of which 11 of them are the same, the difference being the U.K. version has Bo Diddley's "Mona" as the fourth track on Side 1, while the U.S. version leads off with Buddy Holly's Bo Diddley rip-off "Not Fade Away," which was a hit for the band in the U.K.. All of the other tracks follow the same listing on both albums.

The Stones at this point were essentially a cover band. Richards writes, "We were just playing American music to English people, and we could play it damn good..." It's a true statement on both counts  - ten of the thirteen tracks covering both versions were written by other people- mostly American blues men, but there's also Holland/Dozier/Holland's "Can I Get a Witness" and Bobby Troup's "Route 66" on the poppier side of things.

There's only one Jagger/Richards tune- "Tell Me," a straightforward English pop song reflecting the era. An obvious predecessor to "As Tears Go By," the prominence of the acoustic guitar comes as a surprise among the fuzzy guitars of the rest of the album, and there's some nice harmonies in the track, but one could just as easily imagine Lennon and McCartney penning the song.

The other two originals are the group instrumental "Now I've Got a Witness"- a blues romp displaying more chops than imagination, and the Jimmy Reed-inspired rocker "Little By Little" which went to the Top 5 in the U.K. (as the B-Side to "Not Fade Away"). Phil Spector had a hand in writing it and "Little By Little" features a great guitar solo by Richards and Jagger singing "My turn" before taking a harmonica solo firmly in the Chicago style. Buried pretty far down in the mix is Ian Stewart's rollicking piano which is really the tune's glue. There are a lot of great tunes on the album, but "Little By Little" may be the highlight for those seeking the seeds of what's to come.

Their version of Berry's "Carol" is a classic and the English version of the album is worth seeking out for "Mona"- not only is the Diddley riff done with a vengeance, but Jagger stamps his own personal attitude on the track more forcefully here than anywhere else on the album.

Here I Go Again

No, it's not about these guys.

"Well, I'm sure this was better than the band would have been..." Isabella said as we were seated at the bar of Revival.

It was around 11:00 PM. She was drinking rye, I was enjoying a phenomenally good cup of Blue Bottle's Belladonna, and we were sharing a pear crisp, trying to figure it out. It wasn't the script, which she thought had some really strong elements, and it certainly wasn't the staging, which was effective, and at moments, I found quite beautiful. But despite some strong individual elements, taken on the whole The White Snake left both of us somewhat baffled. Sometimes disparate elements make sense when considered within the whole of something, as they do in Einstein on the Beach- which is a ridiculous comparison, I know, but the only one I can think of at the moment. They can also be a huge distraction, pulling one out of experiencing something which at least seems on its surface meant to be a unified whole.

The White Snake, adapted and directed by Mary Zimmerman and now showing at Berkeley Rep (it's a co-production with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), is an old Chinese fable/fairy tale/legend about a snake who falls in love with a human and adopts human form to live as his wife. In this version the White Snake (Amy Kim Waschke) has a friend, the Green Snake (Tanya Thai McBride), who accompanies her (presumably- it's never explicitly stated the snakes are female) into the human world as her companion. The object of White Snake's affection and desire is Xu Xian (Christopher Livingston), an affable guy but not exactly a dream boat. Lurking in the background and knowing the truth about White Snake's identity is Fa Hai (Jack Willis), a nasty Buddhist monk who would fit right in with the more extreme elements of the Republican party. If that sounds like an implausible description, and it should, you have an inkling of what I found difficult about the play, which is that the main characters all seem to be inhabiting their own worlds. That would be fine if this were Chekov, but it's not, and the inability of the characters to create cohesion within the narrative framework constantly distracts, leaving the impression that everyone has memorized their lines and mastered the blocking, but for four different plays. Add Cristofer Jean's magnetic, imperial presence to the mix as an occasional narrator/commentator and the effect is only magnified.

Greenie (Tanya Thai McBride). Photo courtesy of mellowpix.com.

Just as I began to fall under the spell of the effective, visually alluring puppetry, beautiful costumes (Mara Blumenfeld, and clever set design (Daniel Ostling), a hip-hop flavored song and dance number appeared from out of nowhere, causing Isabella to clutch my arm in disbelief. Still, Andre Pluess' music, performed by Tessa Brinckman, Ronnie Malley, and Michal Palzewicz, is one of the strongest original scores I've heard in a long time. The Green Snake, aka Greenie, has the energy and vocal mannerisms of a manic cartoon character, which clashes with the elegant grace and naivete of White Snake. When Willis enters, with his booming, distinct voice to execute his character's most un-Zen-like intentions, the story line seems to suddenly become a stand-in for the debate on gay marriage. The script references many "forks in the road" but provides no moments at the crossroads. Having said all that, there were folks seated around us who laughed with amusement all the way through it, and if you read the reviews of others it seems Isabella and I are certainly in the minority of people who were left out in the cold of its appeal.

The White Snake plays at The Roda Theater through December 23rd.

Einstein on the Beach

"I don't know. What do you think it means?"

1976. Troy Glaus, Reese Witherspoon, Audrey Tautou, Matthew Shepard, Elīna Garanča and Apple Computer are born. Chairman Mao, Agatha Christie, Martin Heidegger, Howard Hughes, Lotte Lehmann, Bob Marley and Benjamin Britten die. The first albums by The Ramones, The Runaways and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are released. "Dancing Queen" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" are the year's biggest hits. "Anarchy in the U.K." is released as a single, as is "Beth."  Jimmy Carter is elected president. My friend Mike and I spend our lunch period walking around the campus of our junior high school bumming change with the goal of buying tickets to see Blue Oyster Cult. When we've collected the needed $7.50 apiece, we head out to the school playground and get stoned on Colombian. An "opera" called Einstein on the Beach is performed twice to sold-out audiences at the rented-out Metropolitan Opera House in New York after debuting in various European cities. I am fourteen years old and have never traveled further east than Phoenix, Arizona. I remember the opera was a big deal, because I read about it in the paper.


1984. Troy Glaus' father and I are housemates, living in the San Fernando Valley. I purchase his 1981 Honda 900 Custom from him. Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Prince Harry, Katy Perry and Scarlett Johansson are born. Ethel Merman, Tito Gobbi, Marvin Gaye, Andy Kaufman, Meredith Wilson, Michel Foucault, Truman Capote, Francois Truffaut and Indira Ghandi die. British radio refuses to play "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. "Purple Rain" is released. Michael Jackson's hair catches on fire during the shooting of a Pepsi commercial. Reagan is re-elected in a landslide. Desmond Tutu wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Ricky Martin joins Menudo. Elton John marries a woman. My friend Mike marries a woman, too (both marriages will end in divorce). Run-DMC release their first album and I become huge fan of rap music. Einstein on the Beach is performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I am twenty-two years old. Salt Lake City, Utah is now the furthest distance from my home to which I have traveled. Most of my weekends are spent at Venice Beach. I have no idea about what is happening in Brooklyn unless it involves graffiti art or hip-hop music.


1992. Troy Glaus is old enough to drive. His father is now married to another woman and lives with her and their daughter. Boxxy, Miley Cyrus, and Frances Bean Cobain are born. Francis Bacon, Willie Dixon, Albert King, Eddie Hazel, Benny Hill, Marlene Dietrich, Robert Reed, Cleavon Little, Lawrence Welk, John Cage, Eddie Kendricks and Shirley Booth die. My friend Mike, now divorced, moves to Birmingham, Alabama. Charles and Diana separate. Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown get married. Bill Wyman quits the Rolling Stones. I quit Los Angeles and move to the Bay Area, taking my 1983 Moto Guzzi V65 C with me. The cops who beat Rodney King are acquitted and L.A. erupts in riots. George H.W. Bush barfs in the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister. Bill Clinton is elected President. The Euopean Union is founded. Yugoslavia falls apart, then into war. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is unveiled. Pope John Paull II apologizes for the inquisition against Galileo. Both Jeffrey Dahmer and Mike Tyson are sent to prison. Nirvana top the charts with "Nevermind." Dr. Dre releases "The Chronic." Einstein on the Beach opens with previews in Princeton before performances in Brooklyn, Melbourne, and four European cities. I visit New York City for the first time, at the age of thirty. It is the furthest point east I have been, and a chance encounter on the Staten Island Ferry will prove to have great ramifications in my future. I take in a Knicks game and see Miss Saigon. I don't make it out to Brooklyn, but do I see Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono get into a limo at the Dakota.


2012. Troy Glaus is a retired Major League Baseball player, after a career which included being named MVP of the World Series in 2002. He was an All-Star four times and hit 320 career home runs. Last I heard, his father still lives in Southern California. We haven't spoken in many years, but his second ex-wife resides in Atlanta. We keep in touch via Facebook. They are grandparents. Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Johnny Otis, Etta James, Duck Dunn, Adam Yauch, Gore Vidal, Helen Gurley Brown, Adrienne Rich, Dick Clark, Davy Jones, Jacques Barzun, Ray Bradbury, Gore Vidal, Earl Scruggs, Maurice Sendak and Whitney Houston die. Elton John is now married to a man. Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain just led their team to the World Series Championship. My friend Mike and his second wife have three children and the eldest recently celebrated her Bat Mitzvah. Now at age fifty, I have traveled as far east as Rize, a small Turkish town on the Black Sea coast, but that feels like a long time ago. It was just one ramification of that ride on the Staten Island Ferry back in 1992. I have been to Brooklyn. I have a 1992 Yamaha Seca II which once belonged to an ex-girlfriend, which I rode over the Bay Bridge to see Einstein on the Beach in Berkeley. This time I was well aware of its recent return to Brooklyn, for I had read all about it online. I am attending the performance with a woman named Sheila, whom I know as a result of writing this blog. Two things haven't changed since 1976: Mike and I are still friends, and Einstein on the Beach is still a big deal.

There are also two widely held beliefs regarding Einstein on the Beach with which I disagree: that it's an opera, and that it's not really about "anything."  Its composer Phillip Glass has said before that he and co-creator Robert Wilson decided to call it an opera because what else do you call something that has singing, theater and music and is performed in an opera house? Well, that does make a certain sense, but it doesn't necessarily make it so. Opera does indeed have all of those things, but so does Disney On Ice, and even if the stage of the Met was covered with ice... well, I don't even have to say it, do I? However, I don't mind that it's considered an opera. I'm just pointing out that it's not. It's greater than that, and yet smaller at the same time.

And it most is certainly about something, though not in the ways we commonly define what a thing is "about." The narrative is the experience of the performance itself, and how individual moments, or chunks of time, and what occurs within them, become something greater when their relationship with each other is considered from a distance, or more precisely in this case, the cumulative effect of those events, and how what may seem random and unrelated becomes part of greater whole and begins to make sense, even if it's intuitive rather than direct, over the course of time. And on that score, Einstein is brilliant.

The singing of Lisa Bielawa, the tenor sax solo of Andrew Sterman, and Jennifer Koh's insanely focused solo violin performance are individual elements which linger in the mind with the most presence long afterward. As for the rest of it- the music, dancing and theatrical elements, some felt familiar through recent Bay Area performances of Glass' Music in Twelve Parts (its immediate musical predecessor) and Lucinda Childs' Dance (created shortly afterward), and much of it felt new. Some things (the lyrics to Carol King's I Feel the Earth Move and the references to Patty Hearst,  brought on unexpected feelings of nostalgia for the past. As I said to someone only yesterday who asked me what Einstein was like, I clutched at adjectives to describe it, to try to give a sense of its enormity, to try to explain what it was like to experience it- to immerse one's self into a performance for four and a half hours, in which any single component of it may have its own distinct pleasures, but only becomes significant, understandable, and satisfying when considered as part of the greater whole.

Esa-Pekka Salonen in Berkeley

Is this guy the world's greatest living musician?  Probably.

Well-sung versions of "Si. Mi chiamano Mimi" aside, I've only been to two musical performances which brought me to the point where I found myself fighting back tears. The first was The Tristan Project- a multimedia, semi-staged version of Tristan und Isolde which I saw when it was revived at Disney Hall in 2007. At the conclusion of the first act, I sat there in my seat, completely blown away, demolished, really, fighting back tears and unable to speak to my date. I remember thinking to myself I'm not sure I'll be able to take two more acts of this. When I finally I did speak, after waiting to make sure I could do so without a sob in my throat, I said out loud to no one in particular, "How the fuck are they going to top that?" My girlfriend agreed, though she had only a minimal appreciation for Wagner at the time. Thankfully, the intermission gave me enough time to steel myself for the rest of it, and by the time the Liebestod unfurled a couple of hours later, I was ready.

The second time was yesterday (Sunday as I write this) in U.C. Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, listening to the closing minutes of the fourth movement of Mahler's 9th. After it was over, the feeling that if I spoke aloud I would lose it stayed with me for a good ten, possibly fifteen minutes after the performance. After I could no longer remain silent without seeming rude to my companion, I spoke, and found I still couldn't choke it back. How silly I thought I must have looked, but in hindsight I suppose it's better to be moved by such beauty than to be immune to it. To experience such things, rare as they are, is the reason we pursue art, isn't it?

Now the interesting thing to me is this- though the orchestras were different, the conductor for both of these performances, separated by five years and what feels like a lifetime to me, was Esa-Pekka Salonen.

I'm struggling to avoid hyperbole here, but after spending four consecutive nights listening to the results of the man's work, I can think of only a small handful of living musicians who may be Salonen's peers. It's one thing to create one's own dazzling, substantial body work and quite another to display a complete mastery of the works of others from the past two hundred years. Yet Salonen, over the course of four nights sponsored by Cal Performances, did just that. It's easy to name individuals who can do one or the other, but try naming musicians who can do both, and with such impressive results. I can only come up with one other name.

The first night, held in the smaller Hertz Hall, was a "Composer Portrait" dedicated to Salonen's own compositions, featuring four pieces of distinctly different character, all satisfying and exceptionally played. Salonen spoke at length with Cal Performances' Director Matias Tarnopolsky before cellist Kacy Clopton took the stage to perform knock, breathe, shine (2010), a three part solo work which starts off with unusual strains of jazz and rock woven into a pizzicato tapestry before the bow interrupts, as if answering the knock, then replaces the fingers as the means of expression, as if to answer "Who's there?" breathe possesses a plaintive tone that seems at once foreign yet familiar in its ability to transcend the boundaries of is commonly looked at as "classical music" (misnomer acknowledged), and shine is a bright and vigorous conclusion, during which Clopton used a number of playing techniques I've never seen to execute the piece, validating Salonen's comment that he seeks to challenge musicians while pleasing the audience with his compositions.

Next came the Calder Quartet, who stuck around town after performing a brilliant program of Nancarrow, Ades, and Bartok last Saturday night. They took the stage in their matching Beatle-esque suits (which prompted Isabella to exclaim how cute they were) to perform Homunculus (2007). Salonen describes the work as a miniature string quartet, containing everything usually found within the form's more traditional length, only smaller and more compressed, like the being referenced in the piece's title- a fully-formed, yet tiny little man inside of a single sperm cell (this was a very amusing description to hear, by the way). My favorite moment of this was when the Homunculus breaks free and takes its first tentative steps into a new existence. The Calders, over the course of their local performances this week, have proven themselves to be virtuosos of the highest caliber.

Salonen and Tarnopolsky chatted some more, and Salonen grew a bit rambunctious during this second exhange, exhibiting a wry sense of humor, especially with an anecdote about Mahler. Pianist Glora Cheng then performed Dichotomie (2000), a two-part work comprised of mechanical and organically inspired halves, which ends with the marvelous sensation of having a light extinguished and everything swallowed by darkness. The University's own Eco Ensemble, led by conductor David Milnes, performed Mania (2000), a chamber-sized cello concerto with Clopton as soloist. I didn't envy Milnes position here, conducting the work with Salonen seated in the audience, but the group pulled it off with aplomb, Clopton especially, who handled the almost ridiculous technical challenges (Salonen's titles aren't randomly selected) with consistent fluidity while the ensemble rocked repeating blasts of tripled notes which give way to icy, creepy slower parts.

The next three nights featured Salonen conducting London's Philharmonia Orchestra, of which he's been Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor since 2008. The first program began with his own Helix (2005)- a kind of Bolero-esque number which weaves two threads together for nine minutes of propulsive fun until they climax in an elongated, bright crescendo (Helix, Mania and Dichotomie have all been recorded, and a video featuring segments of knock, breathe, shine can be found here). He then led the orchestra through a rousing version of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 (1812) and a flawlessly delineated rendering of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830). This particular Berlioz composition is one I've never warmed to, and though oddly enough I had some rather strange dreams paralleling its plot earlier during an afternoon nap that day, it left me more admiring of the execution than the work. My companion, however, who has experienced countless performances of it during her lifetime, was deeply impressed by it, as was a certain music critic seated directly in front of me who quite uncharacteristically bobbed and weaved to much of the music in obvious delight. However, the Beethoven enthralled me with its transparency and brilliant sense of pacing, which illuminated everything without once flagging during the slower sections, and maintained a sense of rhythmic vitality without ever feeling hurried during the fast ones. Of the half-dozen times I've heard it performed in concert, this was easily my favorite, in no small part due to the thrilling clarity of the Philharmonia's string section. There were two encores- a work of Boccherini's arranged into an elegant waltz by Berio called Ritarata, followed by the prelude to the third act of Lohengrin, which oddly enough was probably being played at the exact same time across the Bay in the War Memorial Opera House. Salonen introduced the latter by saying "How about some Wagner- quickly!" to the amusement of the thrilled house.

The second night featuring the Philharmonia was a semi-staged version of Berg's Wozzeck and of the four evenings this was the one I was looking forward to the most. An exceptional cast of singers was assembled, all of whom acted out their parts at the lip of the stage in front of the orchestra, with the chorus placed at the rear. The limitations of this kind of presentation can be severe but that wasn't the case here. Although the dread and unease which builds over the course of the opera in a typical staging was largely absent, the cast's consistent efforts brought forth most of the story's drama. Johan Reuter was magnificent in the title role, perfectly capturing his character's confusion and anguish. Angela Denoke's Marie, sung with piercing clarity came off with unexpected depth and nuance. As the Drum Major, Hubert Francis turned the secondary role into an equal of the guinea pig soldier and cuckolding common law wife with his combination of excellent tone and dominating stage presence. Peter Hoare and Joshua Ellicott were strong in the supporting roles of the Wozzeck's goon-like tormentors the Captain and Andres. Only Tijl Faveyts had difficulty making himself heard over the orchestra, though he had a commanding physical presence. Some of the children in the chorus of at the end were spookily spot-on, especially a little blond boy who spat out his lines in perfectly enunciated German and looked like a tyrannical homunculus of Dolph Lundgren.

However, all of these pluses notwithstanding, it was the music that made the performance something extraordinary. Each of the five scenes of the three acts were clearly articulated, and the quasi Rondo music for Marie and the Drum Major at the end of Act 1 was gorgeously played, transforming a work thought (erroneously) widely considered musically difficult to fathom musically into something quite clear. I'll admit to being slightly disappointed Salonen took a brief break between acts to sit for a moment and take a deep breath, but only because it stopped the momentum which he was constructing. Listening to the performance was like looking at a German Expressionist painting, (Otto Dix especially comes to mind)- one can't help but feel slightly repulsed by the subject matter but the attention to detail and the art of its construction it makes it something not easily turned away from. Salonen and the orchestra let the entire score breathe, the individual moments all came through distinctly, as they had the night before, unexpectedly turning Wozzeck into an extended symphonic delight, except of course when the orchestra pummels the audience with one of the loudest, most horrific moments in all of the operatic repertoire, which was a visceral thrill.

The next afternoon, Sunday, came the Mahler and I was surprised to see so many empty seats. Salonen took everything he'd already shown us he and this orchestra could do- masterful pacing, an almost incredible level of detail without any hint of fussiness, complete openness of expression within each section of the orchestra, and then essentially turned it all up to 11. If you missed it, it really was everything anyone who was actually there said it was, and easily one of the finest orchestral performances I've had the pleasure of attending- even if it did bring tears to my eyes.

Thankfully there was no encore, but Salonen returned to the stage an hour later to lead the UC Berkeley Orchestra through a master class in Debussy's La Mer. Working with the students for about an hour and a half, and only leaving because he had to get to the airport, Salonen, in this more relaxed atmosphere, (for him at least) proved that all the strengths exhibited in the previous four performances were no fluke. The students soared under his direction and keen observations.