The Revelator: Gatsby Part 2, and almost everything else...

It started unraveling a month ago at the Kronos Quartet concert in Berkeley. Isabella and I were seated in front of a very odd couple. Everything they said, all of which was spoken quite loudly, was just off. She asked banal questions and made silly observations in a whining, Queens accent, which he answered with great pronouncements, of which half had little if anything to do with what she had said or asked. After a few minutes of this I had to turn around to see what these two looked like. She was slumping in her seat, almost to the floor, with her eyes closed. He was a bear of a man who looked like there was a large spring from the axle of an automobile stuck in his ass. They both appeared to be close to 70 years of age.

I whispered in Isabella's ear, "Just kill me now. Seriously."

Isabella, who has a way of silently mocking me with a look she perfected at some other time and place in her life, smirked, which meant she was mocking me with empathy.

The lights went down, Kronos takes the stage, and began an unnecessarily amplified performance of Michael Gordon's Clouded Yellow- a work for string quartet that could be a pop song if someone loaded a drum track behind it. It was catchy, it was pleasant, it was a pop confection. For a string quartet. I was a bit confused.

Then came something truly awful: an arrangement by Phillip Glass of Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," again amplified, with accompanying non-live accompaniment by a theremin, mandolin and harpsichord. The last time I heard something so completely dreadful in concept and execution was this.

That train wreck was followed by a piece called Oasis by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, which yes, was amplified- in fact everything was amplified in a hall that doesn't need it- and it was an interesting piece except for the canned drips of water that plopped all the way through it, making it sound like a jingle by Enigma for bottled water.

Now, during all of these pieces the two behind us kept on chattering to the point where I turned around and asked them to cease talking. The woman replied,"we're not talking." And then she said something to him about Bob Dylan, to which he replied he didn't like Dylan. All of this took place during the performance.
Then the Alim Qasomov Ensemble came out to accompany Kronos in the Azeri traditional Mahur Hindi Destgahi. Led by father and daughter vocalists Alim and Fargana Qasimov, this piece was interesting for the first five of its twenty minutes and then felt like an endurance test for both the performers and the audience.

Intermission.

The man behind us had been making strange, squeaking and chirping sounds for the last ten minutes. No one else in the full house seems to be disturbed by this. Isabella turns to me and says, "let's go outside."

We sit down and she says, "I need to talk to you about something important."

Inwardly I release a sigh. She's going to want to go home. She's tired and this is terrible. This is actually perfect, because it's exactly what I'm thinking. But it's not what she's thinking.

She tells me something else entirely which has nothing to do with the concert and doesn't mention wanting to leave.

So we go back inside and there's screaming and shouting coming from inside the auditorium. People are saying "Call 911!" I enter the hall to take a look (she doesn't want to see whatever is happening) and there's the man who was sitting behind us being wrestled to the ground by four or five men, somewhat unsuccessfully, since he keeps kicking them and shouting obscenities. The woman is beside herself and I expect her to start keening any moment. We decide to call it a night after 20 minutes of this and no ambulance in sight. I have no idea if the rest of the concert was as dismal as the first half.

The next night, Monday, Isabella and I have a major row.

Tuesday and Wednesday disappeared into a blur of the past colliding into the present and a desire to obliterate it all.

On Thursday I attended the Leif Ove Andsnes concert with The Swede, who had just returned that afternoon from his vacation in Pakistan. That's right- The Swede's idea of a vacation is to travel to Pakistan. Actually, our fine ally, harborer of terrorists and fanatics, was his second choice for a vacation spot, but he couldn't get a visa for North Korea without agreeing to such a rigid itinerary the whole idea became unpalatable to him. Nevertheless, he had a marvelous time celebrating the Prophet's birthday and eating ice cream with young, horny men and told me all about it over dinner and Manhattans before the concert.

I'll admit now that I did enjoy making him spit out a good portion of his drink through his nose when I timed an anecdote about my last visit to this restaurant with the Femme Fatale just right, causing him to exclaim afterward, wiping the bourbon from his chin, "That's why I love you. I thought only gay guys did that shit!"

At intermission the Swede hit the wall and had to leave, which I understood, as I was already surprised and impressed that he even wanted to go in the first place, since he had just got of the plane hours earlier. After he left I spotted Patrick in his usual spot in the front row and went over to say hello. Patrick wrote a most brilliant post about the concert wherein he wonders at one point if he was coherent while we were talking, completely unaware that I was thinking exactly the same thing, but for different reasons.

On the walk home I noticed the Chevy's on Van Ness had called it quits, and this surprised me for some reason, though it probably shouldn't have- after all, who wants to eat at a Chevy's when you're in San Francisco?

The next night was Gatsby.

Now I must confess to a dilemma concerning how much of this story I want to reveal. On the one hand, I'd like to put it all out there in an effort to be done with it, as it's colored (and explains) so much of the last eighteen months. On the other hand, the last time I wrote something like I've intended to post here, it seemed to freak some people out- some actually stopped talking to me and I felt a frost for months afterward. Apparently I had crossed a line by revealing too much of the backstory of my relationships to the characters found here. And what I wrote back then is nothing compared to what I've detailed about what went on at the Gatsby performance, and other things I've considered writing and then thought better of it, realizing it belongs in a different blog, if not another medium entirely. Conflicted, I asked two people whose opinions I trust- Isabella and Lily Bart, if I should write it and they both said write it, but don't publish it. Isabella felt even more strongly about this after I let her read the finished piece. So what follows is only the beginning of what I originally wrote and intended to post, and that's all there's going to be.


Isabella and I had really been looking forward to attending this performance together but the row dashed that plan. CC couldn't make it, so I ended up going stag. I picked up my ticket and as I was making my way toward the door the I saw the Femme Fatale ahead of me in all of her carefully constructed glory- a sight I had come to expect, since it was recurring with an ever-increasing frequency. I quickly looked around for the Cuckold and spotted him ten feet ahead of her.

I came up behind her shoulder and said quietly into her ear,  "Why don't you just introduce us?"

She looked at me steadily, as if she had expected this to happen.

"Okay, I will," she said, with an unsettling coolness in her voice and expression- as if this was all going exactly according to her plan....

She caught up to him and turned him around by the shoulder,
"I want to introduce the two of you," she said...

Use your imagination to fill-in the gaps from there. Was it ugly? Yeah, it was. If you think about what happens in Gatsby, add a heavy dose of adulterous noir, you'll have a pretty accurate picture of what followed. At the conclusion of the show, they went one way and I went another- just as we have for the past year, except for the brief interludes when she left his house for mine.

The next day I went to see the broadcast of Gotterdammerung- another outing planned with Isabella which I was now doing solo. Afterward I ran into Jim, an old theater guy from New York whose niece I dated shortly after I first moved here in 1992 and for another stretch a dozen years ago. I expected to see him, as he had also attended the other three installments of the Met's Ring broadcasts, and I was glad he was there. He's full of amusing anecdotes and strong opinions. We went for coffee after the broadcast and chatted for a couple of hours. It was the first time in the nearly twenty years I've known him we didn't talk about opera or theater and on that afternoon I couldn't imagine better company than that 80 year old man.

At this point I'm beginning to feel like Corky Corcoran- not the musician, but the character in the Joyce Carol Oates novel (read it if you haven't- it's a marvelous book).

Two days later it was Valentine's Day and Isabella and I decided to stick with a slightly modified version of our original plan, which was to go hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who were visiting town for the first time in over 20 years. The concert began with Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231, a six minute piece ostensibly about locomotives which was thoroughly delightful in its chugging glory, but when the train reached the station, the subtlety of the "locomotive" euphemism disappears completely into an orchestral orgasm more obvious than the trombone exhalation ending the rape scene in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Some enterprising stripper should use the piece in a routine.

Next came Mason Bates' Alternative Energy. It's easy to be skeptical about seeing Bates as a serious composer. First, he comes off too easily as an orchestra's dream of who could lure in a younger audience- he's young, good-looking, and cool (lives in Oakland, and he's also a club DJ as well as a composer). Second, he incorporates electronic elements into most, if not all, of his compositions. But I really enjoyed his B-Sides, commissioned by SFS a couple of years ago and I was looking forward to hearing this new work, commissioned by Chicago, where he's currently one of two young composers-in-residence.

Don't let anyone tell you differently- Bates is the real thing. Alternative Energy turned out to be one of the most interesting and engaging contemporary works I've ever heard and if one were available, I would buy a recording of it tomorrow. The twenty-five minute, four movement piece was engaging from the first note, moving from Coplandesque hoedown to thumping beats that caused 70 year old conductor Ricarrdo Muti to show us his disco moves from the podium, baton in hand, as Bates' work stopped in four distinct places and times during an aural history of how things will fall apart in the future.

Sadly, Cesar Franck's Symphony in D didn't have the same impact after the intermission.

The next night I returned to see Chicago's next program, this one featuring Night Ferry, a work by their other composer-in-residence, Anna Clyne. Again, this proved to be the highlight of the evening. Clyne's work begins with the most evocative musical rendering of the sea I've ever heard and just grew more interesting as it went along. By turns hypnotic and violent, it ends with a gong being struck which dissipates into nothingness like a black sea left behind at night on a moonless night. I'd like to thank whoever decided to bring Bates and Clyne to Chicago- their works were wonderful to hear.

Again, as it was the night before, what followed was decidedly less interesting- Schubert's The Great Symphony, with its endless repeats, just felt tedious after Clyne's piece. This made it hard to really come to a conclusion about the Chicago orchestra- they gave excellent performances of works no had yet heard, but the familiar didn't leave much of an impression. I was seated next to Axel that second night, who marveled at what he described as their "blended" sound, but I found it more difficult to get an impression of what made the orchestra unique beyond the obviously high-caliber playing from every section.

Two nights later I was back at Davies, this time with Lily Bart, to hear former music director Edo de Waart conduct a program that proved to be much better in the house than it looked it on paper, which was a strange brew indeed.

It began with the Prelude of Franz Schreker's marvelous opera Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatized), which in de Waart's hands sounded even lusher than I had remembered it when I saw it performed by LA Opera under James Conlon a couple of years ago. Schreker's music nods to Wagner, but the debts to Mahler and Strauss were what really came through in de Waart's hands. One can only hope the glory of this music encourages the company across the street to one day bring the whole thing to town.

This was followed by Simon Trpceski as the soloist for Rachmaninoff's fourth piano concerto. Trpceski gave a magnificent performance of a difficult but flawed piece- the fourth lacks almost everything which makes the second and third concertos so thrilling and absorbing- the decadent, lush melodies and over-the-top solos. Still, his jazz-influenced playing style was impressive and I look forward to his return. de Waart and the orchestra sounded fantastic alongside him.

The last piece was Saint-Saens Symphony No. 3, Organ, featuring Jonathan Dimmock as the soloist- an almost ridiculously over-stuffed work that was delightful to hear and played with serious earnestness. It worked remarkably well. de Waart hasn't been on the stage of Davies in a very long time, and I hope this strong performance, and the justly tremendous reception it received from the audience, causes the powers that be to bring him back again soon.

The next night Lily took me to a small salon out in the avenues, where we were part of a tiny audience watching two performers doing a spin on the theme of "Death the trickster"- one by a singer-songwriter whose cycle had a decidedly David Lynch-like quality to it, the other by a marvelously gifted magician with a flair for the dramatic and theatrical. The theme struck a chord with me, and a couple of days later, taking in everything that happened in those previous two weeks, and how it felt like the culmination of the past two years had just been bluntly pushed through the end of funnel lined with razor blades, something shifted inside my mind and I went undergound for awhile. But I'm back. And that's all there is.

Kronos Plays Reich

Sunday was a difficult day. Amid the glory of the weather and the Blue Angels thundering overhead across the City, I was just trying to sort out the pieces of something smashed and move forward, knowing I wasn't going to be able to put it back together. I was glad when the day began to dim and the time came to make my way to the BART station to meet Chad Newsome in Berkeley to see the Kronos Quartet perform an all Steve Reich Program. The streets were clogged with people who had come into the City for the airshow. Cars filled the streets and the sidewalks were full of people who have no idea what to do with themselves outside of their cars, exposed in the big city where everything is dirty and noisy. They looked warily at all the other people. I just wanted them to get out of the way

Down in the station, the platform was packed, as were the cars, but everyone seemed relaxed about it all and I thought it ironic I was going to hear "Different Trains" in a couple of hours.

Chad and I met at the Berkeley station and walked through campus, up to the the Bear's Lair, and had Lagunitas IPAs before the show. I think in the back of both our minds lurked thoughts of how different our lives seemed when we were students there, and what now seems, to me at least, like another life altogether.

Kronos Quartet: Photo by Michael Wislon

A full house showed up to the unusually dark (and pleasingly so) Hertz Hall. The performance began with 1999's "Triple Quartet," dedicated to Kronos. The title refers to the whole being comprised of three distinct quartets, the second and third playing "interlocking chords" in a "kind of variation form" off one another, while the first "plays melodies in canon between the first violin and viola against the second violin and cello" according to Reich's own program notes. The second and third quartets were pre-recorded by Kronos, so in essence they were playing with themselves, though not in the way usually commonly assumed. The work's movements alternate fast-slow-fast and unless one had a deep familiarity with it, or was distinctly trying to parse out the differences between each quartet, I think it would have been hard to follow which quartet was playing what by listening to a recording, so being able to watch the musicians was immensely helpful. It was an impressive performance.

Excerpts from "The Cave" came next, which left me feeling like I was back in the Middle-East, wandering through Wadi Rum, as Reich's music fully evoked the hard realities of the region. As Kronos played the slow, agonized score, the taped component featured people answering basic questions on their thoughts of biblical characters. The words don't come through necessarily, but become a wall against which the musicians constantly push against through the work's three movements. It was the least impressive score of the night, perhaps because it was the quietest, but it was still quite effective,

"WTC 9/11" begins with the disturbing, highly amplified sound of a phone off the hook. It's the sound of something dreadful, and it sets the tone for what's to come for the next fifteen minutes. I find something incredibly powerful about this piece, though at times I've wished it was longer and at others shorter. Live, it's even more powerful, as Kronos played bathed in deep blue and red lights, a projection on the wall behind them of two massive forms colliding. Again, with two recordings accompanying their own amplified instruments. The three sections move from panic of the first with its voices of air traffic controllers and fire department archives, with the musicians performing jagged, piercing lines, reminding me of a cross between the soundtracks for Psycho and Requiem for a Dream (which Kronos recorded and was heavily influenced by Reich). In the the second the tempo slows as the voices of Reich's friends and neighbors recollect the day, haltingly and repeatedly, as if no one can really even believe their own words, while the sound of the phone off the hook pulses in quietly in the background, performed by the viola.  Certain phrases are punctuated with sharp jabs from the violin, the words elongated into notes performed by the instruments. The third part is evocative of loss and remembrance, slower still, featuring more recollections and closes with a cantor singing prayers before the musicians bring a sense of halting confusion before the amplified phone returns to bring it back to its terrible beginning. It's an incredibly effective work.

The second half of the performance was the brilliant "Different Trains," a meditation on destiny developed in a sound prism of trains carrying people to their destinations- in this case out west to Los Angeles and to the gas chambers of the concentration camps. Kronos performed it with an urgency which brought a thrilling pulse to it all, even during the slower passages, creating a hypnotic effect.

There was an encore of a work by Perotin, an 11th Century composer Reich admires, entitled "Viderunt omnes." It sounded amazingly fresh for something composed 900 years ago.

Afterward we walked back through campus with Patrick, who was unusually seated in the rear of the house. We discussed the idea of using tapes and if that negated the authenticity of what constitutes a live performance. Patrick and Chad felt this was the case. I disagreed and though I didn't quite realize this part  at the time, have come to find it largely beside the point, because what we had just experienced wasn't something I could recreate at home. And that's why I wanted to get out of the house to begin with.

A final on thought on the Kronos Quartet: in the last year and a half I've seen three performances by them and each one has been radically different than the others, including one of the best shows I've seen all year (which, damn, I never posted about)- their concert with Wu Man for her hyper-creative "A Chinese Home." Always adventurous and into doing something new, stretching way beyond the traditional confines of chamber music, these are brilliant, exciting musicians. If you've yet to see them, make it a point to attend one of the upcoming concerts. Cal Performances will bring them back in February and they'll be in Santa Rosa on December 2nd with another interesting program featuring "WTC 9/11" and other works by Jewish and Muslim composers. They are also in a residency with YBCA, so there are plenty of opportunities in the months ahead.

All of the Reich compositions mentioned in this post can be heard on MOG.

Kronos: Fenced In, Bowing Out

Thursday night I went to hear the Kronos Quartet at the Z Space @ Atraud- which may have the most uncomfortable seats of any venue in San Francisco to put your butt in for a 90-minute performance. Kronos, subject of an interesting article appearing in today's New York Times, was putting on a four-night, sold-out run of performances featuring Jon Rose's Music From 4 Fences, along with works by Terry Riley, John Zorn, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Felipe Perez Santiago, Amon Tobin and Scott Johnson (a full set list can be found here). The works by Rose, Ali-Zadeh and Tobin were the highlights. The others, especially Riley's piece, I found less than interesting, though overall the program had a variety and intensity that kept my attention focused through it all.

The show began with Ali-Zadeh's Mugam Sayagi, as cellist Jeffrey Zeigler sat alone onstage playing an evocative theme with other instruments accompanying him offstage. Then the rest of Kronos came onstage to deliver one of the most satisfying pieces of music I've heard at first hearing. Essentially spinning an Azeri folk tale in music, this piece transported me to a different place altogether. It was by turns lighthearted, touching, adventurous, melancholy and consistently engaging. Written for Kronos, it's a work I would love to hear again.

Amon Tobin's Bloodstone featured recorded music (as did many of the pieces performed this night) with the quartet accompanying it, sometimes in front, sometimes from behind. I'm ambivalent about this kind of performance because when the rhythm of a piece is dictated by a recording and not by the musicians onstage, I feel a sense of discovery and spontaneity inherent in the best lives performances is curtailed, if not rendered impossible to achieve through a kind of tyranny imposed by a beat that won't/ can't be altered once it's begun. In this instance though, it worked for me on the strength of the composition itself, which at times reminded me of the work Kronos did for the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack. Accompanied by a video backdrop and atmospheric lighting, the piece had an amplified force to it that I found quite satisfying.

The highlight of the evening, which definitely falls under the "and now for something completely different" category, was Rose's fence music. As Rose writes in the program, he usually has his pieces composed for fences performed in situ and one of the challenges was constructing the fences and delivering for the performance. Each member of Kronos had their own fence to play, using electrified bass bows. The fences stood about six feet tall and were perhaps about eight feet across. Composed of five wires, like a staff, only the top three lines of wire were played and attached to pick-ups. The uppermost wire was barbed and there were lights and cameras attached to the top which caught the musicians in action and projected their hands on a screen at the back of the space.

The first note was a shock. Loud like a shotgun blast, some people visibly jumped in their seats. Imagine the whomp heralding Ulrica's entrance in Verdi's Un Ballo en Maschera played by Hendrix and you'd have something approximate. Disorienting and thrilling, it only got more interesting from there, as the quartet beat, drummed, sawed and bowed their way over, against and through the fences. As much a performance piece as a musical one, whether intended or not, it was unforgettable.

I attended the concert with Axel Feldheim, who wondered afterward whether or not 4 Fences was a notated score. Fortunately, as we were leaving we espied Jon Rose standing outside so we asked him. His response, one of the most amusing things I've heard in a long time, can be read at Axel's account of the performance.

Photo by Christina Johnson