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Colleges and Schools Try to Do More With LessNEW YORK TIMES

2010-03-08T12:16:00.001-08:00

When San Francisco State University’s theater arts department commissioned Mark Jackson to adapt and direct a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” he came up with the unusual idea of creating a version of the tragedy for 14 actors, all cast in the role of Juliet. But because of budget cuts at the university, less money is available for items that affect the look of a production, like sets, lights and costumes. So to save on wardrobe, Mr. Jackson has had to readjust his core creative concept: now he has just eight actors for his new show, “Juliet.”

San Francisco State University is among several Bay Area academic institutions whose resources have been vastly reduced amid California’s fiscal crisis and the recession. A recent rehearsal there was one stop on a survey of artistic endeavors at local schools and universities. Taken as a whole, these works reveal that budget cuts have hardly dampened creative output. Even though the disastrous belt-tightening measures have put tremendous strain on teachers and students, these institutions are continuing to produce remarkable work.

San Francisco State University’s College of Creative Arts is typical of a performing arts institution grappling with reduced finances. Its operating budget has been cut by 15 percent over the last 18 months, and its staff has been thinned because of widespread furloughs, a hiring freeze and the dismissal of most of its temporary teaching staff, said Kurt Daw, dean of the College of Creative Arts.

Even Mr. Jackson, who graduated from San Francisco State in 1993, lost his salaried adjunct professor position in 2008 after a year and half in the job, and is now freelancing as a guest artist — at lower pay.

But you wouldn’t know it based on the quality of his work. Mr. Jackson’s 2008 productions of “Don Juan” (which he adapted from Molière and Pushkin) and Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal” remain among the highlights of my theatergoing career. They have eclipsed many professional productions I’ve seen, including those directed by Mr. Jackson at spaces like the Aurora Theater and the Ashby Stage.

The way the young cast handled the physically demanding and grotesquely witty sex scenes in “Don Juan” was particularly engaging: one hilarious moment involved the title character dueling with an enemy while enjoying a romantic tryst. And the student actors brought a canny 21st-century sensibility to Ms. Treadwell’s 1920s agitprop drama. The actors sent up the overblown mannerisms of expressionist theater through their physically extreme approach to mundane tasks like washing the dishes. The dehumanizing effect of their actions was at once chilling and comical.

Word has clearly been getting out about the high quality of performances at San Francisco State, where tickets range from free to about $15. So far, in the 2009-10 academic year, the College of Creative Arts has had a 46 percent increase in attendance at its performances over the previous year. Recent productions of “Twelfth Night,” directed by William Peters, and “High Fidelity the Musical,” directed by Stephen Brookins, had capacity audiences.

The Bay Area’s public schools show similar artistic excellence. The San Francisco School of the Arts produced a memorable Christmas concert last December in the face of falling budgets and run-down premises, where classrooms often lack basic supplies.

Parents are helping to keep the high school afloat by donating an average of $300 per year per student, said the principal, Carmelo Sgarlato, who added that some of that money helps to pay for guest artists.

Like many school concerts, the Christmas program was rather long. But the school’s music ensembles gave a polished and spirited performance of a diverse range of work. I was especially moved by the chamber choral ensemble’s spectral approach to plainsong during the opening candlelit processional, and the vocal jazz ensemble’s take on the Sting song “Fragile,” complete with a silken-toned 14-year-old male soloist. The full house responded enthusiastically.

Dynamic performances and creatively inspiring rehearsals are equally evident in Bay Area institutions that don’t specialize in the arts. A recent dance show at Berkeley High School featured a variety of genres, including hip-hop and contemporary ballet. The dancers executed the steps with passion and an engaging sense of ensemble.

The state now provides less money per student, and the school is facing potential cuts in the next academic year that may adversely affect two art courses. But many students have met the arts education shortfall by taking private classes.

The challenging financial climate is certainly forcing educators in the Bay Area to be more resourceful about creating art in schools. What our educational institutions are able to achieve in a time of financial disarray makes me look forward to the dizzy heights of artistic excellence that will be possible in a more prosperous climate.

But I can’t help wishing that the money were around right now to enable artists like Mr. Jackson to channel their entire creative energy into making art. He — and discerning audiences — deserve to see his original vision of 14 Juliets, rather than making do with 8.

Music Festivals Are Siblings, Invisibly BondedNEW YORK TIMES

2010-02-28T12:33:00.001-08:00

The British-born electronic composers Kieran Hebden, who performs as Four Tet, and Natasha Barrett are both in San Francisco for concerts. Although Mr. Hebden is closely identified with the indie-pop scene, and Ms. Barrett with the contemporary classical world, they could easily be on the same bill. These musicians, creators of spiraling musique concrète-infused compositions that veer between sound art and trance, allow us to pick out tiny textural details in their work while basking in the music’s overall ambience.

But instead of appearing on the same program, the composers’ music is reaching audiences in entirely different settings. Mr. Hebden’s scheduled appearance on Friday at the Independent was part of the Noise Pop Festival, an annual weeklong indie-rock music celebration, ending on Monday, that attracts around 20,000 people to more than 50 events.

Meanwhile, two of Ms. Barrett’s works will be performed this coming Friday at the Other Minds Festival of New Music, a yearly forum for contemporary classical composers. Its public performance series, held this year from Thursday through Saturday at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, features three concerts of nine composers’ works. Attendance is expected to total around 1,300.

Despite the obvious differences of size, scope and demographics (Noise Pop’s audience skews about 20 years younger on average than that of Other Minds), the festivals have much in common. The crossover potential of artists like Mr. Hebden and Ms. Barrett is just one similarity. Since being founded in the same year, 1993, the festivals have helped to shape the Bay Area music scene.

Each grew organically out of one person’s vision. Noise Pop began life as a one-night stand produced by a local promoter, Kevin Arnold. He was a booker for a small Emeryville agency when a San Francisco club (now the Independent) asked him to find bands to fill an empty January date.

“The original Noise Pop Festival was just a ‘five bands for five dollars’ show,” Mr. Arnold said in an e-mail interview. “But I called it a festival and silk-screened a poster to make it seem more exciting. It was way more successful than anyone expected.” The Other Minds Festival emerged from the composer Charles Amirkhanian’s experience producing a similar event in Telluride, Colo., from 1988 to 1991. When financing for that festival ceased, Mr. Amirkhanian recreated it with new backing in the Bay Area. Combining a private composers’ symposium (held under the auspices of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, of which Mr. Amirkhanian was executive director) alongside three days of public concerts and discussions, the inaugural Other Minds Festival featured Meredith Monk, Conlon Nancarrow and Philip Glass.

From the beginning the two festivals have shared a desire to bring together local, national and international artists at different stages of their careers. This year’s Other Minds Festival features work by young composers like Gyan Riley and Carla Kihlstedt of the Bay Area and Lisa Bielawa from New York, with more established names, like the American composer Tom Johnson, who is based in Paris, and Jürg Frey of Switzerland.

“By having different generations involved, we have a much livelier discussion and interchange of ideas,” Mr. Amirkhanian said in an e-mail message. “We also relish the opportunity to expose Bay Area composers to guests from outside California and vice versa.”

The current Noise Pop Festival lineup has featured international bands, like We Were Promised Jetpacks from Scotland; household names, including Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band; and Bay Area up-and-comers like Deerhoof, Thao Nguyen and Glaciers. It also included the innovative partnership of the Bay Area indie-pop band the Dodos and the Magik*Magik Orchestra, a San Francisco instrumental ensemble.

Both festivals pride themselves on spotting emerging talent. Julia Wolfe, a co-founder of the Bang on a Can ensemble, got a boost from meeting Mr. Glass at the first Other Minds Festival. The next year he invited her to put out her first solo CD on his Point Music label.

The Chinese composer Tan Dun, the Oscar-winning composer of the “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” score, appeared at the festival in 1995. And the Noise Pop Festival gave early exposure to well-known bands like the Flaming Lips, the White Stripes and Death Cab for Cutie.

Even the most balanced musical lineup isn’t enough to keep a festival bubbling for nearly two decades. Though serving different markets, the two festivals have devised remarkably similar strategies to enhance the standard concert fare. Each presents films and a visual arts component; broadcasts recorded music (Noise Pop offers podcasts, and Other Minds presents a weekly public radio show, “Music From Other Minds”); and runs live music events later in the year.

The Other Minds Festival presents fall concerts focusing on the music of past luminaries like Henry Cowell. Introduced in 2007, Noise Pop’s fall two-day Treasure Island Music Festival is fast becoming one of the most talked-about Bay Area music events, not least because of its rare location: an island in the middle of the bay.

Mr. Arnold and Mr. Amirkhanian have never met, but they really should; they could learn a great deal from each other. The Other Minds Festival could draw on the Noise Pop model to open up the insular world of contemporary classical music, while Noise Pop could look to Other Minds to build stronger bonds and unusual collaboration among artists. It may not be too long before the two festivals start seeing some audience and artistic overlap.

Two Cities, One Lasting Cultural ExchangeNEW YORK TIMES

2010-02-08T11:51:00.001-08:00

To many people who have never been to China, myself among them, San Francisco’s Chinatown — the oldest and one of the largest districts of its kind in North America — still largely represents Chinese culture, despite the popularity of films like Zhang Yimou’s “Hero”; international tours by the country’s top ballet, opera and circus companies; and the fame of Chinese composers like Tan Dun. Most Bay Area residents see beyond the usual representations of Chinese New Year parades, dragon dances and Ming Dynasty vases gathering dust behind glass in museums. But even so, when lipstick-colored pagodas, soggy dim sum and mass-produced, paw-waving porcelain cats come to represent an entire civilization, it’s time to take a step back and look beyond the Disneyland view.

For years organizations like the Chinese Culture Center and Chinese Historical Society of America have been working hard to change this image by demonstrating a sophisticated view of Chinese culture that challenges clichés and pushes us to think differently about the relationship between our two nations. And the conventional notions of Chinese culture will continue to be challenged as San Francisco begins Shanghai Celebration, a yearlong arts festival honoring the longstanding cultural connection between the two cities through concerts, films, exhibitions, discussions and other special events.

Inspired by the 30th anniversary of San Francisco’s sister-city relationship with Shanghai, as well as by the 2010 World Expo there, an event of this scope is a significant step forward.

Leading the effort is the exhibition “Shanghai: Art of the City,” opening on Friday at the Asian Art Museum. In contrast to that institution’s last major exhibition of Shanghai art in 1983, which focused strongly on traditional representations of Chinese heritage, the new show surveys the tension between the forces of outside influences and the push to stay loyal to Shanghai’s own visual culture. The work on display extends from 1850 (when Shanghai emerged as an international city as a result of clashes over trade between China and Britain) to the present day, and it reflects an artistic perspective that is at once intrinsically Chinese and more international in scope.

For instance, a bedroom suite from the 1920s demonstrates a strong European influence, with its Art Deco-inspired asymmetrical contours and use of bold geometric shapes. But the furniture reveals Chinese interests too: it is built out of a locally grown rosewood and inlaid with a typically Chinese bamboo design.

Works by the 20th-century Shanghai painter Liu Haisu suggest the tension between newer, more Western-influenced styles and time-honored Asian approaches. Mr. Liu’s ethereal “Blue-and-Green Landscape” (1978) depicts a traditional Chinese scene with craggy mountains rising out of the mist, and delicate trees in the foreground. It was created using the standard scroll and ink, but he eschewed longstanding ideas about Chinese composition by painting the trees in bright reds and greens rather than muted hues and by arranging the foliage in horizontal clusters instead of opting for the more typical zigzag pattern.

Other local arts organizations involved in Shanghai Celebration are taking similar approaches. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music will be cementing its ties with its Shanghai counterpart on Monday night with a concert featuring the acclaimed mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao, who is based in San Francisco, as well as faculty members, students and alumni from both schools.

A graduate of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Ms. Cao will perform new works composed by members of each institution. Instrumental pieces on the program include the United States premiere of “San,” a chamber music piece written for Western orchestral instruments that features Chinese elements like pitch-bending.

Later this month the Bay Area Chapter of the American Jewish Committee is mounting a photography exhibition, “The Jews in Modern China,” that will explore a little-known area of Shanghai’s heritage. It chronicles the lives of Jewish immigrants who came to Shanghai in the 1840s from countries as diverse as Russia and Iraq to avoid persecution.

In May the Chinese Culture Foundation is presenting a music festival in Chinatown that will combine traditional Shanghai opera with Asian-American jazz and, for an extra twist, Latin music.

Representations of Chinese culture in the Bay Area have come a long way since Chinese immigrants arrived in the middle of the 19th century to work the railroads and gold mines. The evolution in the understanding of Chinese culture in the Bay Area can be seen in, among other things, the changes that have taken place in the programming of art exhibitions and the developing relationships between arts organizations.

In previous decades the Chinese Culture Center imported works from China for display, like a 1979 exhibition of Chinese woodcuts; these days the organization is offering innovative exhibitions like last year’s “Present Tense” show, aimed at creating dialogue among the work of native Chinese, Chinese-American and non-Chinese artists.

“In the past, we were borrowing from museums in China for our exhibitions,” said Mabel Teng, executive director of the Chinese Culture Center. “Now the two cultures have merged, and the art reflects the old and new.”

Conservatory Theater Still Seeks Its OvationNEW YORK TIMES

2010-01-31T12:41:00.001-08:00

Like the thrill of settling into a plush seat as the curtain rises on a highly anticipated production, there’s the excitement over the announcement every March of the American Conservatory Theater’s coming season, with its promises of innovatively staged classic plays, bold new works by powerful writers and acclaimed productions imported from beyond the Bay Area.

Yet every year my expectations are dashed. More often than not, I feel emotionally disconnected from what’s on the American Conservatory Theater’s stage. (Engrossing productions brought in from the outside, like John Doyle’s Broadway staging of “Sweeney Todd,” are an exception.) This is troubling. A bustling cultural hub like San Francisco deserves a jewel of a flagship theater company, one that, like the San Francisco Ballet, attracts the attention of the broader arts world.

The company’s current production of “Phèdre,” Racine’s tragedy about a Grecian queen’s illicit passions, underscores the problem. On paper, the play looks promising: it’s the world premiere adaptation by the British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker featuring actors from the acclaimed Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada.

But Ms. Wertenbaker’s text, which retains all of the stiffness of Racine’s original but little of its lyricism, manages to excise much of the story’s poetic intensity and savage emotion. With a declamatory acting style and ponderous blocking, the work comes across as an intellectual exercise rather than a theatrical experience that engages both the heart and mind.

The same criticism could be leveled at many of the company’s recent productions, like “After the War” and “Happy End.” It took risks in staging these works, which all involved large casts and, in the case of “After the War,” significant development time. Although the productions featured impressive sets and lighting, the efforts did not pay off because of cumbersome mise-en-scènes and emotional flatness.

Founded in 1965 by the director William Ball in Pittsburgh before relocating to San Francisco a year later, the American Conservatory Theater became widely known for its expansive core acting company and dedication to training. During its first San Francisco season, the company staged 27 productions in two theaters to critical acclaim. Actors were sometimes cast in two productions at once and could occasionally be seen running from building to building between scenes.

The company’s fortunes have vacillated since. Initially, its work was well received; in 1979 the theater won a Tony Award for theatrical achievement and excellence in repertory performance. But eventually the resources dried up, the acting company faded out, and the theater’s reputation waned.

When the current artistic director, Carey Perloff, took over in 1992, she reinstated a small core acting company, expanded the educational offerings and earned praise, in particular, for her productions of Tom Stoppard plays. But other shows, like Mark Lamos’s deliberately shocking take on Christopher Marlowe’s “Edward II,” turned many people off. These days the smaller Berkeley Repertory Theater is doing more innovative work and gaining national attention.

Box office figures suggest the audience’s growing discontent with the American Conservatory Theater’s output. According to company officials, in the past five years subscriptions have fallen to 14,939, from 17,574.

But the organization is working hard to attract audiences. As part of the recent centennial celebration of the theater’s historic auditorium, it instituted a two-day $19.10 ticket sale.

One former subscriber I talked to said she canceled her subscription after seven years partly because she found many of the productions too avant-garde. No one could accuse Ms. Perloff of pandering to the masses. Despite bringing in stars like Olympia Dukakis (who is starring in “Vigil,” starting in late March), Ms. Perloff’s programming choices are often inspiringly risky — especially in the company’s grand home theater, which is ill suited to difficult, small-scale works.

This season features a formidable three world premieres: a dance-theater collaboration with the San Francisco Ballet titled “The Tosca Project”; a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” directed by Mr. Doyle; and “Phèdre.” The theater has eight playwrights under commission, including a local rising star, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb.

Meanwhile, the organization continues to grow its core acting company — a remarkable investment in Bay Area talent — and remains committed to importing foreign productions.

Balancing a quest for innovation with the realities of producing theater today is undeniably tough. But the American Conservatory Theater is making moves in the right direction. The company is searching for a more convivial second space to nurture new work. (Its current alternate site, Zeum, feels like a sterile lecture hall.) The theater is also sending its students out to perform in the community.

The future success of the American Conservatory Theater may also depend on the leadership’s ability to understand its patrons better. “Our audience over time has grown to hunger for challenging material,” Ms. Perloff said in an interview. “If you expose people to great storytelling told beautifully, they will respond to it even if they spend all day on Facebook.”

What Ms. Perloff perhaps fails to recognize is that as much as theatergoers like to be intellectually stimulated, first and foremost they want to be moved, whether to tears or laughter. Finding an additional space and reaching out to the community are both laudable steps. But the effort is wasted if the company fails to connect with the audience at the visceral level when the curtain rises each night.

Nonfiction Filmmakers Still Tell Rich StoriesNEW YORK TIMES

2010-01-25T10:43:00.000-08:00

The Bay Area has long been known as a center for documentary filmmaking. Many local documentarians have won or been nominated for Academy Awards, including Sam Green (“The Weather Underground”) and Robert Epstein (“The Times of Harvey Milk”). The area is home to the Independent Television Service, a major financer of documentary films, as well as some of the most respected film schools in the country.

But the success of local documentaries can’t be attributed to education and financing alone. The region itself seems especially tight-knit and supportive.

“The Bay Area is a very good place to be a documentarian because of the cooperative nature of the community,” said Janis Plotkin, a programmer for the Mill Valley Film Festival. “For a small city, San Francisco has amazingly supportive resources for independent filmmakers.”

But fundamentally, the success has to do with storytelling. Some local filmmakers, like Christian Bruno, are pushing the limits of narrative. Mr. Bruno’s jewel-like film “Strand: A Natural History of Cinema” mines the history of the region’s once-opulent movie palaces in a lyrical manner that makes it feel like an archaeological dig. He burrows through time with the aid of diverse interviews, archival footage and contemporary scenes shot on 16-millimeter film to convey the idea of cinemas as sites of social interaction and imaginative exploration.

But as three compelling new homegrown documentaries show, local filmmakers are also using more traditional storytelling techniques, like character-driven narratives with a strong three-act structure, in powerful ways. The Talbot Players’ “Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders” series; Katherine Bruens’s “Corner Store”; and David Silberberg’s “Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank!” tell engrossing tales by focusing on key characters.

The tried-and-true storytelling formulas clearly work. The slow-burning “Corner Store” follows the journey of Yousef Elhaj, owner of a Mission district corner deli, as he travels from San Francisco to his native Palestinian territories to be reunited with his family, which he hasn’t seen in 10 years. The film provides a moving insight into one man’s struggle to reconcile the kinship he feels for his adopted Bay Area home with his Middle Eastern roots.

“Corner Store,” which will be screened at next month’s San Francisco Independent Film Festival, trundles along languorously, with atmospheric shots of bustling Palestinian marketplaces and San Francisco streets.

Despite its meandering pace, the film is engaging because of Ms. Bruens’s deep, meditative portrait of the protagonist and the straightforward narrative arc. Moving from San Francisco to the Palestinian territories and back to San Francisco, the three-part structure makes viewers feel as if they were traveling alongside Mr. Elhaj.

The layout of “Sound Tracks” is equally pronounced. The documentary, which begins on Monday night on most PBS stations, comprises three distinct and fascinating narratives about the intersection of music, travel and politics. The segments provide fresh angles on relatively well-known subjects by offering miniature character studies.

The first story explores the genesis of the hit Russian pop song “A Man Like Putin,” a peppy piece of musical propaganda that has grown to be something of a calling card for Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin. The segment focuses on the song’s composer, Alexander Yelin, a rock music dissident turned promoter.

The next section delves into the legacy of the Nigerian music pioneer and political activist Fela Kuti. It centers on Mr. Kuti’s youngest son, Seun, who stepped forward as a teenager to lead his father’s band after Mr. Kuti’s death in 1997.

The third segment follows the Kazakhstani virtuoso violinist Marat Bisengaliev as he tries to recoup the battered reputation of his country in the wake of “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s blockbuster 2006 mockumentary that didn’t do much for Kazakhstan’s global reputation.

“Sound Tracks” makes a virtue of its three-part structure; the individual narratives come together cumulatively to make its resounding overall point: music is a powerful agent of community building and social change.

Meanwhile, Mr. Silberberg’s engrossing documentary “Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank!” explores the life and work of Mr. Blank, a Bay Area artist and filmmaker best known for building art cars (vehicles festooned with different objects) and documenting that scene. The film, also showing at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, not only creates a vivid, fond portrait of the eccentric Mr. Blank (a man who seems to love chickens more than people), but also provides a profound meditation on the pros and cons of rugged individualism. Although the film moves back and forth through time, it basically unfolds in three stages: Mr. Blank’s youth, his growing interest in art cars and his more recent activities.

All three films palpably demonstrate the power of traditional storytelling. But there seems to be a push on the local documentary scene for a more innovative approach, like Mr. Bruno’s, as well.

“There are many types of documentaries, and the form is not limited exclusively to stories driven by characters,” Michele Turnure-Salleo, the San Francisco Film Society’s director of filmmaker services, said in an e-mail message. “A compelling subject or inquiry can form the backbone of a nonfiction film, and funders are supporting work that extends beyond traditional character-driven storytelling.”

As long as the rich filmmaking community and resources continue in the Bay Area — and as long as the documentarians put their narratives front and center — the combination of experimental and trusted approaches should further the success.

Broad Minds Encourage Broad LaughterNEW YORK TIMES

2010-01-17T02:36:00.000-08:00

It’s often been said that stand-up comedy is the most subjective art form. What’s side-splitting to one person is seditious to the next. Yet while the evolving dynamics of the Bay Area entertainment scene have broadened traditional definitions of what constitutes comedy, some of the audience still takes a narrow view of what’s funny and what isn’t.

With its kaleidoscopic lineup, the SF Sketchfest comedy festival, which opened on Thursday, should help audiences understand that there are many paths to humor beyond the traditional setup-and-punch-line-centric patter. As in previous years, the program, which features some 200 artists of local, national and international prominence, stretches standard notions to their limits.

The festival includes the embattled talk show host Conan O’Brien (Sunday); impressionists, among them James Adomian (next Sunday); improv and sketch comedy troupes, like the San Francisco-based Kasper Hauser (Tuesday and Jan. 30); absurdist comedians like Animosity Pierre (Tuesday and Thursday); sitcom actors like Scott Adsit of “30 Rock” (Jan. 30); solo theater artists, including Sara Benincasa (Saturday); and even a comedic jazz outfit, the Be-Bop Heroin Hour (Jan. 29 and 30). The festival perhaps went a step too far by inviting the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, a musician whose plaintive ballads aren’t generally known for their laughter-inducing qualities.

Cultivating broad-mindedness toward these many forms of comedy is important. If audiences were open to a wider range of humorous performance, the demand for live comedy might grow. This would in turn lead to the rejuvenation of the once-lauded but sadly long-dormant San Francisco comedy scene, an arena that helped forge the careers of Phyllis Diller, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams.

If audiences were willing to expand their definitions of comedy, they might relax and enjoy themselves rather than fret about how what they’re seeing onstage doesn’t conform to their expectations. Their heightened pleasure would doubtless have an overall positive effect on the community. In these dark times we can use all the opportunities for laughter we can get.

Personal taste notwithstanding, the negative reaction to a recent show I attended suggests that some Bay Area audience members may not have caught up with the changes that have taken place on the local comedy scene over the past decade or so. Or perhaps they chose to ignore the words “unconventional” and “groundbreaking” on the flier advertising the “Not Your Normal New Year’s Eve” comedy night at the Herbst Theater.

“The worst comedy lineup ever, full of nonsensical stream-of-consciousness musings and pathetic revelations,” wrote one reviewer on the ticketing site Goldstar.com. Another wrote, “We only stayed because our car was not ready to pick us up.” Contrastingly, I was thoroughly entertained.

The comedy scene has transformed partly because of the shuttering of several Bay Area comedy clubs in the 1990s and early 2000s, which forced artists to develop their work in other settings, like theaters and the Internet. While many local stand-up acts once focused on observational or autobiographical material, these days the scene is much more fragmented.

But there are still plenty of observational comics around. Of those who performed on New Year’s Eve, many of whom are also on the SF Sketchfest roster, Brent Weinbach most closely reflects that tradition.

But the other acts demonstrated radically different approaches. Will Franken, named “Best Alternative to Psychedelic Drugs” by The San Francisco Bay Guardian, offers an erudite brand of stream-of-consciousness comedy that encompasses bits like a poetry slam match between George Milton reciting the opening of “Paradise Lost” and a poetically challenged modern teenager doing some rap.

Mary Van Note’s humor hinges on misplaced sexual advances; this comedian is best known for her 10-part online video series about trying to woo Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Meanwhile, the surreal theatrics of We Are Nudes balance the over-the-top physicality of a former Cirque du Soleil performer, John Gilkey, against the awkward introversion of his comedic sidekicks, Donny Divanian and Alec Jones-Trujillo. The group’s act reaches its zenith with a protracted tirade from a supposed audience member about the performers’ lack of comedic skill.

Of course, the many people in the Herbst audience who responded unfavorably to the entertainment may simply not share my sense of humor. It may be that people need to get out and see a diverse range of live comedy. But the incentive to do so lies partly elsewhere.

While the SF Sketchfest helps to expand an understanding of the art of comedy, local promoters and clubs need to play a role year-round too. Bay Area audiences are by and large enlightened. If they shy away from the stranger side of comedy, it may also be because of the local industry’s narrow approach to programming and reluctance to book any act that steps beyond conventional realms. The Bay Area’s eclectic landscape should operate along the same lines as many an effective comic act: with a good punch line set up to defy expectations.

When a Word’s Look Counted as Much as Its MeaningNEW YORK TIMES

2010-01-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

Typography is ubiquitous. A world without letters, numerals and symbols designed by skillful font makers would consist of boring billboards, pages and street signs. Yet unlike other forms of applied design, typography remains an obscure and little-understood field. When buildings are constructed, they make news. A new font barely registers in the public consciousness.

In the 1980s and ’90s, however, the Bay Area was at the forefront of a movement to change this reality. The work of the graphic design company Emigre, based in Berkeley, is the focus of an exhibition of artwork and artifacts at Gallery 16 in San Francisco. An accompanying book, “Emigre No. 70: The Look Back Issue — Celebrating 25 Years in Graphic Design,” further stresses the efforts of a group of graphic designers (mainly locals) to elevate design in general — and typography in particular — to an art form.

But over the years, frictions between the forces of art and commerce have hindered Emigre’s cause. In today’s environment, where fonts can be created and replicated by anyone with a personal computer (United States copyright law does not extend protection to typeface design), the idea that a font can be an objet d’art in its own right seems like a utopian reverie.

“Emigre was born out of a ‘digital dream,’ ” the graphic designer Erik Adigard, based in Sausalito, wrote in an e-mail message. “But it was short-lived. Emigre is history, even if still somewhat of a cult.”

Yet the marriage between a font’s beauty of form and the context in which it is employed is what makes the written word jump off the page. In striving to demonstrate this truth, Emigre deserves our attention.

Founded in 1984 by the husband-and-wife team of Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, Emigre was influential on the graphic design scene in the ’80s and ’90s. This was partly because of the company’s magazine, also called Emigre. First a quarterly and later a seminannual, it featured innovative typefaces and posters; eye-catching photography; offbeat profiles of writers and artists; and wide-ranging critical essays on subjects like the Bauhaus movement and the legibility of fonts. Although the magazine no longer exists, Emigre still operates as a font foundry; its library houses more than 300 typefaces.

From 1984 to 2005, Emigre magazine achieved cult status. With their unconventional and striking use of fonts, publications like Wired and McSweeney’s, both based in San Francisco, owe it a debt. In 2006 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the entire Emigre magazine canon for its permanent design collection, and put the magazines on display for a year.

“For me, like many others galvanized by graphic design during Emigre’s heyday, the magazine was the most consistently interesting design publication produced anywhere by anyone,” the design journalist Rick Poynor wrote in 2005.

Emigre chronicled a revolution in typography that went hand in hand with the birth of the personal computer, which brought new methods for creating type. (It’s perhaps no accident that Emigre and the Macintosh computer made their debuts in the same year.) The transformation also ran in tandem with the rise of postmodern theories then popular in art schools concerning the aesthetics of utilitarian design.

Such ideas helped to free font design from the constraints of functionality. Possibly for the first time since the elaborate but often illegible opening capital letters of medieval illuminated manuscripts, font designers didn’t have to worry about readability and reproducibility.

Going beyond the no-nonsense look of archetypal typeface families like Times and Helvetica, designers in Emigre’s orbit, like John Hersey, Joachim Müller-Lancé and Ms. Licko, saw font design as a form of creative expression. With its thick-contoured, cartoonish forms, Mr. Hersey’s Blockhead typeface won’t be used for street signs anytime soon, but the fonts are eye-catching. The same could be said of Ms. Licko’s aggressive and angular Oblong typeface.

For all the theoretical debate and creative output inspired by Emigre, the font-as-art movement seems to be over. The commercial interests in the fast-paced digital age have reduced typeface design to cookie-cutter templates and formulas. Unbridled innovation has largely been supplanted by nostalgic exhibitions and commemorative books.

Emigre magazine’s demise may be symptomatic of the fact that it was primarily a showcase for the company’s fonts. Its journalistic endeavors often supported the founders’ business goals, as is evidenced by its numerous articles denouncing designer-unfriendly typeface copyright laws. But Griff Williams, owner and director of Gallery 16, wrote in an e-mail message: “For me, the lesson learned from Emigre is that business and art can coexist. The typeface business was a guise to deliver content in profoundly interesting ways. Not the other way around.”

Mr. VanderLans was grappling with the tension between art and commerce while publishing his magazine. “The entrepreneurial element, which is crucial to the existence of any subculture, avant-garde or underground work, is largely overlooked when assessing the work, because to most people, whenever the commercial aspects become prominent, it somehow taints the work and renders it less pure or authentic,” he wrote in Emigre in 1995. “Yet it’s difficult to imagine how any movement can operate without a concentrated effort to make money.”

Voice Check: 10 Tips for Healthy SingingAMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE

2010-01-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

Voice therapists, trainers and performers give expert advice on how to protect and maintain your singing voice

Theatre lore is packed with horror stories about performers cracking or missing notes on stage or—even worse—losing their voices completely. Luciano Pavarotti had, near the start of his career, a disastrous concert in the Italian city of Ferrara around the time that a nodule first developed on his vocal chords; as a result, he gave up singing for a while. In 1997, Julie Andrews's voice was seriously damaged after she underwent surgery for polyps that developed on her vocal chords while she was performing in Victor/Victoria on Broadway. And Nathan Lane frequently missed performances of the Broadway production of The Producers owing to a polyp on his left vocal chord.

Without a doubt, the care of the voice is as essential to the business of being a professional actor or singer as remembering one's lines. But hectic schedules, smoky bars, flu season and countless other challenges constantly conspire to derail attempts to sing in public with confidence, comfort and ease. Here, a wide range of singing experts—voice therapists Joan Lader, Joanna Cazden and John Haskell; voice trainers Judith Farris, Kate DeVore, Joan Melton, Janet Rodgers and Scott Kaiser; performers Susan Graham and Kristin Chenoweth, as well as choral director Ian Robertson—impart their top tips for maintaining a healthy and successful singing career.

1. Technique is King

Maintaining great technique is without question the basis for a healthy voice. Good technique prevents injury and enables performers to sing at the top of their game every time. "With proper training, the singer/actor learns to release excess tensions in the body and throat muscles," says Rodgers. "This means that the vocal mechanism is sitting in a muscular environment that will allow it to function at its best. Proper vocal technique means that the singer/actor has learned to use 'diaphragmatic breath support' in singing. This moves the effort of support to the abdominal muscles and away from the muscles that are closest to the throat. Proper vocal technique means that the singer/actor has trained the vocal folds to respond to pitch changes and that the singer/actor can maximize the gifts that nature has provided."

"Improper technique can lead to vocal injuries, which can be annoying and limiting at best and career-ending at worst," says DeVore. "Most common vocal injuries (nodules, polyps, bruising, swelling) are caused at least in part by the vocal cords slamming together too hard when we speak, sing, shout, scream, wail, keen, sob and so forth. There are ways to do all of those things healthily, which ensures that a performer will have a flexible voice to last through his or her career."

Like many experts, Farris believes that proper technique begins with the breath. "The only physical part of singing should be breathing," she says. "That should be naturally obtained and constantly maintained. It is much like a violinist practicing bowing. I know a good violinist is always attentive to balancing the bow on the strings. In singing, if one's breath is balanced, it is nearly impossible to have any kind of strain on the vocal apparatus, and the easiest and most beautiful sound is achieved. Thus obtaining a correct vocal technique is the key to the prevention of vocal problems. The vocal cords themselves are muscles. Athletes and dancers know that any muscle that is used correctly gets stronger with use, not weaker or injured."

However, good technique cannot be gained through a "one-size-fits-all" approach, says
Cazden, who explains that "many vocal techniques work but for a different reason than the teacher proclaims. The field of voice is still emerging from centuries of speculation, guesswork and secretive folklore. A singer needs to trust his or her own experience, use what works and not get distracted by flowery explanations."

Adds Melton: "Each performer is unique, so the to-do list that answers all the issues does not exist. However, to quote Mary Hammond, head of musical theatre at the Royal Academy of Music in London, 'Technique frees the imagination.' The better, more solid and more unconscious the technique, the freer the performer is to grow, explore and mature."

2. It's All about Prevention

Prescription medications might get a singer under duress through a performance, but they are not the way to solve vocal issues in the long-term. "Many singers resort to doctors who fill them with cortisone shots to get through a performance or audition," says Farris. "But if the cause of the problem is not corrected, the issues continue and these so-called 'remedies' can cause additional problems of their own. At that point, the singer should have vocal rest and then seek out a good teacher to help correct the issue. Prevention, however, is key."

Cazden concurs: "The absolute biggest problem that singers have is not visiting a doctor soon enough. Financial pressures and a mistrust of mainstream medicine lead people to 'muscle through' or 'get by' for months longer than they should. This adds layers of bad technique onto the original injury, and delays recovery. Unless you have terrific insurance, set up a medical savings account and stash whatever you can every month so that when you need a voice doctor you can afford a good one. Plan ahead, and before you need help, locate a laryngologist with videostrobe exam equipment and experience working with singers. Exams without videostrobe are only accurate about one-third of the time. You might need to travel to get to a good clinic, but in the long run, the right diagnosis will save you time, money and anguish."

Warning signs can help performers identify and take care of potential problems early: "Missing warning signs of a vocal injury can be a problem," says DeVore. "Common warning signs include hoarseness in the absence of an illness (or hoarseness that hangs around after cold symptoms have cleared up); decrease in speaking or singing range; change in voice quality (breathiness, gruffness, a veiled sound); increased physical effort to speak or sing; physical discomfort or pain when voicing; something just not feeling right with the voice."

3. Calisthenics Count

Warming up the voice is absolutely essential to a singer's ability to prevent injuries. Just like going for a run without first stretching, the voice can easily strain if pushed too hard and without first being primed. "Develop a warm-up routine that slowly 'wakes' the voice and brings it into alignment with breath control and natural support," says Robertson.

4. Happy Talk

"A common mistake performers make is forgetting to have good technique not only when singing but when speaking," says Chenoweth. "That is a tough one for me, because the speaking voice I am most comfortable in isn't the best for my voice in general."

Haskell adds: "Most singers are talkers by nature. Their biggest mistake is talking too much before and after a performance. Talking in noisy environments can be a particular problem when a singer is on the road as producers often expect artists to meet patrons to talk about their work after they've performed. This is often part of a performer's contract, so it's hard to hold back."

5. Enlist the A-Team

Singers need to find the right teachers throughout their careers. Chenoweth, for instance, still takes voice lessons with teachers in New York as well as with Florence Birdwell, the performer's mentor and professor at Oklahoma City University, where she went to school. Haskell says that vocalists should "follow their instincts about what feels right and what doesn't with regards to voice training. Some voice teachers push students too much to point of discomfort or even pain. The muscles and coordination of the vocal mechanism can be achieved in a gradual way." According to Lader, the best teachers have a good grasp of how the body works from a mechanical standpoint: "A singer needs to find a teacher who is knowledgeable in anatomy and physiology, who has good eyes and ears and can direct the student in a healthy manner to achieve whatever it is the student has set out to accomplish."

Cazden adds: "Singers often make the mistake of staying too long with a teacher who is not taking their voice in a good direction. If the process or relationship doesn't feel right, you shouldn't feel obligated to continue with that person. Take sample lessons with a few other teachers for perspective. If you think something is medically wrong with your voice, but your teacher claims to be able to fix it, get a second opinion."

Singers, however, often need more than one expert to help guide their careers. Haskell believes that performers should surround themselves with a group of trusted professionals across a range of disciplines in order to develop performance skills, prevent injury and troubleshoot problems as they arise. "In addition to the voice teacher who concentrates on helping a performer to develop great technique," Haskell says, "a singer might also benefit from the services of a vocal coach, an acting coach, a voice therapist, a physical therapist, as well as an ear, nose and throat physician. There has to be communication between the different parties so that everyone is on the same page regarding the singer's issues and progress."

6. The Power of Cross-training

Performers, who are often asked to sing in many different styles, frequently have to be as adept at singing numbers from the musical theatre repertoire as they are at performing opera arias, folk songs and jazz standards. Training to sing healthfully across multiple styles is even important to singers who specialize in just one genre.

"Cross-training across all styles is the key to being able to perform them in artistically coherent and safe way," says Lader. "If you sing opera you should also practice singing pop songs. This is important, because it prevents injury and strengthens, balances and coordinates the many parts of the laryngeal musculature. Plus, singing in a different style from what one is accustomed to can help to raise a red flag if there is something wrong with the vocal chords that needs special attention."

7. Salvation through Hydration

Drinking water is crucial to maintaining a healthy voice, because it prevents the delicate vocal chords from drying out. "Drinking about two liters of water a day is helpful for most people, but they need to compensate with extra water for things that dry them out (like caffeine, alcohol, smoke and certain medications)," says DeVore.

Proper hydration also means finding creative ways to counterbalance arid environments (caused by air-conditioning and hot climates) that can dry out the vocal chords. Steam inhalation, for example, moistens the vocal cords and thins out mucus. Graham proposes additional techniques for performers who travel regularly: "When I'm flying, I put a damp cloth on my face, because airplane air is so dry. I also keep a humidifier in my room."

Kaiser adds: "Drinking water to keep the folds of the vocal chords lubricated is important, but there are other things that performers should reduce such as the consumption of dairy products and cold and allergy medications, because they coat the vocal chords and dry out the voice."

8. Food Glorious Food

Acid reflux and other problems of the digestive system can cause serious issues for singers. "The acid that comes up through the stomach can literally eat away at the delicate tissue at the back of the larynx and affect the posterior part of the vocal chords," says Haskell. "If a singer gets a reflux diagnosis from an ear, nose and throat specialist, he or she has to start observing a reflux regimen. This may mean eliminating caffeine, carbonated drinks, citrus fruits, spicy foods and chocolate. Also, the evening meal should not be eaten too late or too close to bedtime, which can present a problem for performers who don't want to eat much before they go on stage."

9. Rest Up

The voice is a fragile instrument. Singers should be in touch with how they're feeling on any given day enough to know when to pull back or even take some time off. "If you're tired, ill or hungover, sing less," says Cazden. "If you feel great, don't be stupid and sing so much that you wreck your instrument."

Rodgers believes that rest is important even while an actor or singer is working. "During rehearsal breaks, avoid chitchat," she says. "Really rest the voice for those 10-minute breaks."

DeVore says that performing full-throttle with an illness rather than resting is one of the worst things a performer can do for his or her voice: "Succumbing to pressure (either internal or external) to 'push through' an illness is, unfortunately, a common mistake performers make. 'The show must go on' is so ingrained in a performer's psyche—and this belief is reinforced by the entire production team—that they forget that 'the show' doesn't have to include performing at every rehearsal at full tilt. Pushing through an illness is a textbook cause of vocal injuries, and many problems can be avoided if people take the time to rest and heal."

Getting good amounts of sleep is absolutely crucial to vocal health. "The most important thing for me—which I struggle with—is getting enough sleep: I need at least eight hours, but nine is best," says Chenoweth. "My friends and family understand that sometimes I can only converse via e-mail or watch a movie with them, because the voice is a muscle that must be rested!"

10. One for the Road?

The pressures of a life on the stage can lead to some unhealthy choices for performers. "The most common mistake you see in actors, particularly young ones, is that they don't know how to pace themselves," says Kaiser. "They'll rehearse till midnight, drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes and expect voices to respond. It doesn't take much to strain a voice—even talking over loud music in a dance club can cause damage."

That's why many performers avoid drinking, smoking and noisy environments. "I don't drink very much alcohol when singing, because it dries out the voice," confesses Chenoweth. "I do not smoke or use drugs. I sort of live like a nun."
Journalist and singer Chloe Veltman is the Bay Area culture correspondent for the New York Times and the host/producer of "VoiceBox", a new public radio series about the art of singing.

Biographies of the Experts:

John Haskell has maintained a private practice in speech-language pathology in New York City for more than 25 years. He has held faculty positions at Pace University, Rutgers University and William Paterson College of New Jersey and is co-founder and co-director of the New York City Voice Study Group.

Kate DeVore is a theatre voice, speech and dialect trainer, speech pathologist and personal development coach based in Chicago. She is the co-author of The Voice Book: Caring for, Protecting and Improving Your Voice with Starr Cookman.

Scott Kaiser is director of company devel-opment and head of voice and text at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he has spent 20 years as an actor, director and voice coach.

Judith Farris is a soloist, contralto and voice trainer who maintains a studio in New York. She is presently artist-in-residence in the theatre and music departments at Southeast Missouri State University.

Janet Rodgers, the editor of The Complete Voice and Speech Workout, is a past president of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association and an associate professor of theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Joan Lader is a voice teacher and therapist. Her patients and students include some of the world's leading performers, such as Patti LuPone, Madonna and Roberta Flack.

Joanna Cazden, the author of How to Take Care of Your Voice, is a speech pathologist, singer, voice coach and teacher.

Joan Melton is a voice teacher based in New York City. She is the author of Singing in Musical Theatre: The Training of Singers and Actors andfounded the voice/movement program for the Department of Theatre and Dance at California State University—Fullerton.

Susan Graham is a Grammy Award—winning mezzo-soprano who performs leading roles in some of the world's greatest opera houses, including the Metropolitan opera, the Royal Opera House and La Scala.

Kristin Chenoweth is a Tony and Emmy Award—winning singer and musical theatre, film and television actress. Some of her best-known Broadway roles include Sally Brown in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Glinda in Wicked.

Ian Robertson is the chorus director of San Francisco Opera and the artistic director of the San Francisco Boys Chorus and the San Francisco Festival Chorale.

Guerrillas of Agitprop Fight to Stay RelevantNEW YORK TIMES

2009-12-30T10:34:00.001-08:00

As part of its 50th-anniversary celebrations, the San Francisco Mime Troupe recently led its first “Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Consumption” street-theater workshop. That afternoon-long event culminated in a performance outside the flagship Old Navy store on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.

Pretending to be sales assistants and shoppers, troupe members led the workshop participants underneath a gaudy “Time to Shop” sign and then mechanically exchanged fake dollars for bits of cardboard with the word “stuff” scrawled on them. At the end of the sketch, counterfeit coins flew, as the performers engaged in a frenzied stampede for last-minute bargains.

Ed Holmes, the workshop leader and a longtime company member, said the three-minute “live political cartoon” attracted around 15 passers-by with an additional 5 to 10 stopping when the fake money started flying. “A few people got the point,” he said.

With television, blogs and social networking Web sites able to disseminate political messages far more widely than live theater, you have to question the relevance of the Mime Troupe’s polemical approach today. For the first three decades of its existence, this political theater group openly questioned United States policy and helped root out political hypocrisy.

But times have changed, and the company’s brand of broad political satire steeped in zany commedia dell’arte traditions feels outmoded. Theater can still be taken seriously as a medium for political discourse, but the Mime Troupe — with its limited reach, old-fashioned aesthetics and small budget — struggles to make a political and theatrical impact these days.

The dancer, director and mime artist R. G. Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1959 as a vehicle for radical political commentary and theatrical experimentation. Despite the word “mime” in its name, the group was far from silent. For a while its brand of guerilla theater, performed free in public spaces throughout its Bay Area home and as far away as Berlin, earned the company a reputation as a grass-roots political power. Troupe members were arrested on obscenity charges on more than one occasion in the early 1960s. The group was also one of the first American theater companies to perform in revolutionary Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua.

In 1967 the troupe caused an uproar when it traveled around universities in the Midwest presenting “L’Amant Militaire,” a Vietnam War satire adapted from an 18th-century Carlo Goldoni play, at the same time recruiters from a napalm manufacturer were visiting those campuses. Closer to home, the early troupe helped derail a proposal to use public funds to tear down a building that housed grass-roots community organizations for the construction of a parking lot for Davies Symphony Hall.

In recent years, however, the Mime Troupe’s efforts have had considerably less impact. It still performs free shows in parks around the Bay Area and other parts of the state, and its longstanding appearances in Dolores Park on the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends continue to attract hundreds. But many people seem to attend the productions these days to have their liberal political views confirmed or simply to enjoy a picnic and show in the sun.

Every now and then the company creates a production that engages the intelligence. In 2006 “Godfellas,” a show about the ills of spiritual dogma, married a wisecracking text with pithy musical numbers to examine not just religion but also blind faith in all its guises. More often than not, however, Mime Troupe productions end up subverting artistry in favor of left-wing dogma.

This year’s “Too Big to Fail,” about the implosion of the credit system, bashed audiences over the head with simplistic moral fables and told a tale of a greedy lion named Citibank. And the boringly liberal “Doing Good” (2005) was less effective as an agitprop pamphlet against American intervention in the third world. Meanwhile, a decade has passed since the troupe performed its last guerilla theater act: a version of “Ubu Roi” outside the Federal Building to protest cuts in arts financing.

It’s telling that the Mime Troupe is celebrating its golden anniversary with documentary screenings and exhibitions that focus on its early heyday; the company’s more recent history just isn’t all that enthralling.

Yet political theater is alive and well in the Bay Area, as proved by engaging productions like “This World in a Woman’s Hands,” Marcus Gardley’s drama for the Shotgun Players of Berkeley, about female workers in the Richmond, Calif., shipyards in World War II. And the Mime Troupe, with its intimacy, ability to respond quickly to current events and stealthy approach to infiltrating public spaces, can demonstrate that live performance is still, in some ways, an ideal medium for political commentary. Getting the message across, however, requires a level of subtlety and imagination that lies beyond the reach of many theater artists.

To survive, the Mime Troupe may need to find a new theatrical vocabulary for expressing its political viewpoints and work harder to question lazy liberal mores. The members may also have to take greater risks again. A three-minute sketch outside Old Navy might make an impression on just a few onlookers. But taking their antics inside the store would most likely get greater attention.

Seeking High Notes in Bay Area Concert HallsNEW YORK TIMES

2009-12-13T09:59:00.001-08:00

What would the holiday season be without classical music concerts? Bay Area residents who normally wouldn’t set foot in a concert hall find themselves irresistibly drawn at this time of year to places like Grace Cathedral and Davies Symphony Hall to get their seasonal music fixes.

Those concertgoers’ ticket-buying decisions are often influenced by recognition of the artists involved. Handel and Bach are big sellers at Christmas around the globe, as are the American Bach Soloists and Chanticleer closer to home. For Chanticleer, the all-male chorale, revenue from Christmas concerts represents a quarter of its performance income. The group’s scheduled appearance at Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland on Saturday was a sellout.

Far fewer people, however, make decisions based on the concerts’ locations. This is a shame. But in contrast to major cities like Los Angeles, New York and London, San Francisco (and the Bay Area in general) lacks a plentiful supply of first-rate spaces for experiencing live classical music.

Because these sites enhance their interiors with festive decorations, and people are generally in a holiday mood, it’s perhaps easier to tolerate poor acoustics, insufficient restrooms, nonexistent temperature control and a lack of nearby restaurants and bars. But if Christmas audiences, high in number, had a more all-encompassing experience with the music, perhaps they would come back in July.

These auditoriums certainly have positive aspects. Some are visually stunning. The Paramount Theater in Oakland, where the Oakland East Bay Symphony is leading a holiday concert on Sunday, is a gorgeous Art Deco building. Sweeping, gilded staircases; bold frescoes; and plush carpets make for a fairy-tale concertgoing experience.

A number of spaces, like the Herbst Theater, the site of the signing of the Charter of the United Nations on June 26, 1945, have a fascinating history. Others still, like Davies Symphony Hall, offer amenities like comfortable seats, a well-stocked bar and ample restrooms.

The Cathedral of Christ the Light is earning raves among musicians for its acoustics.

“The acoustics are for me the best in the Bay Area for Renaissance and Baroque choral and orchestral music,” said Vance George, director emeritus of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. “I heard ‘The Art of the Fugue’ played by a brass ensemble in the cathedral. I was amazed at the clarity of the musical lines. Each line had integrity but with added warmth and depth.”

But no single setting satisfies all of a concertgoer’s needs. The de Young Museum’s Koret Auditorium provides comfort and great acoustics, but its remote location in Golden Gate Park makes it difficult to reach. Davies Symphony Hall (whose Christmas events include Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and an appearance by the San Francisco Girls’ Chorus) is a great space to hear large orchestral works. But that 2,743-seat auditorium overwhelms smaller ensembles.

Sound quality is perhaps the biggest challenge facing Bay Area concert halls. For Renaissance and Baroque music, the Cathedral of Christ the Light might deliver fantastic results. But when I heard gospel music there, the sound was far from crisp. The lyrics were barely distinguishable above the rhythm section’s blaring reverberations.

Meanwhile, places like the Herbst, Old First Presbyterian Church (where the ensemble Golden Bough is performing a Celtic holiday concert) and Grace Cathedral (whose offerings include concerts by its resident Choir of Men and Boys) seem to have spotty acoustics.

Sitting front and center at a recent Trinity Choir of Cambridge concert at Grace Cathedral was, sonically speaking, a heavenly experience. Yet I had trouble distinguishing individual lines during a performance last summer of Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks” by the American Bach Soloists. Maybe the lack of auditory crispness had something to do with where I sat, toward the back and slightly to one side of the church. I find I obtain more clarity from the balcony than in the orchestra seats at the Herbst and Old First Presbyterian Church.

Of all the classical concert locales in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s 450-seat Concert Hall (where the Sanford Dole Ensemble will perform “Messyah,” a contemporary take on Handel’s famous oratorio) comes close to being ideal. The vibrant acoustics suit both large and small ensembles. With its symphony-size performance platform, tall windows and elegant Beaux-Arts décor, the auditorium feels intimate yet expansive. It helps that its location in the Hayes Valley puts it close to public transportation and great restaurants and bars.

Yet it doesn’t say much for San Francisco that its most enticing classical-music setting is part of a school. A great city needs great spaces for all art forms, including classical music. Maybe when the holiday concertgoing hordes start raising their voices and stop buying tickets, producers, building managers and civic leaders will take note.

A Vanished San Francisco, Black, White and ColorfulNEW YORK TIMES

2009-12-06T12:22:00.001-08:00

In 1952, when the budding photographer Gerald Ratto was a 19-year-old student at the California School of Fine Arts, he spent much of his time in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. Wandering around the neighborhood with his Rolleiflex camera and a bottle of brandy, he shared drinks and conversation with the residents and snapped pictures of the local kids as they played in the street.

Nearly six decades have passed since he photographed those children. Mr. Ratto, now 76, went on to lead a successful career as an architectural photographer. And the neighborhood, a bustling hub of black culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, underwent an ill-conceived redevelopment in the 1960s and then significant growth in recent years.

When viewed against the backdrop of that tremendous transformation, Mr. Ratto’s images poignantly recall a vanished landscape. Although the pictures demonstrate an artist’s promise, his photographs do not quite satisfy as either works of art or social documents.

On display in downtown San Francisco at the Robert Tat Gallery, a space specializing in vintage photography, the compact show “Children of the Fillmore, 1952” consists of 52 silver gelatin prints, 18 of which are on display. (The other 34 pictures can be viewed upon request.)

The quality most evident in Mr. Ratto’s photographs is their innocence. Images like one depicting three small girls cuddling and smiling at the camera in what looks like their Sunday best (No. 5 in the series) and another of a boy with a cardboard box on his head and a clownish, gap-toothed grin (No. 14) convey a sense of pure-spirited delight. Meanwhile, there’s an arresting candor and warmth to the photograph of a boy sitting on a staircase with his elbows propped up behind him (No. 20). His posture and face display unfettered openness.

Most of the pictures are posed. They are also uncompromisingly shot head-on and close to their subjects. Yet they refreshingly lack affectation. Clearly, taking the time to get to know the people he photographed paid off for Mr. Ratto. Using the kind of camera that could be operated down by his waist rather than in front of his face, thus allowing him to maintain eye contact with his subjects, doubtless also helped him to earn the trust of the local youngsters.

But pictures depicting the freshness of childhood, though they look great on kitchen calendars, can veer into cutesy cliché. There’s something static and lifeless about Mr. Ratto’s portraits that undercuts their artistic strength. The images of great chroniclers of urban life, like Helen Levitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson, avoid this problem. Levitt’s famous picture of two children, one white and one black, dancing in the middle of a New York street, and Cartier-Bresson’s image of a boy rounding a corner cradling two enormous glass bottles, possess a kinetic energy and distinct personality that ultimately tell the viewer much more about the lives — and environments — of their subjects than Mr. Ratto’s photographs.

The grown-up worldliness that tinges Ms. Levitt’s pictures of children sharply undercuts their sweetness. “In each child, from very early, the germ of the death of childhood is at work,” the author James Agee says of Ms. Levitt’s photographs in his preface to her 1965 book, “A Way of Seeing.” It is this germ that makes Ms. Levitt’s photographs so powerful from a social as well as an artistic perspective. Lacking this quality, Mr. Ratto’s pictures don’t carry the same weight.

If they don’t function completely satisfactorily as works of art, the “Children of the Fillmore” images similarly lack strength as social documents of a neighborhood’s lost heritage. To the extent that the figures depicted in Mr. Ratto’s photographs appear frozen in time, the series draws attention to the vast gap between the neighborhood’s glory days and now. But with their atmosphere of utopian innocence and no hint of foreboding for the neighborhood’s future fall, the images seem naïve when viewed with contemporary eyes.

Gentrification has changed the face of the neighborhood once again. Although the area has revived, thanks to the appearance of institutions like the jazz club Yoshi’s and the spruced-up Sundance Kabuki cinemas, the black population has dwindled, owing to steep rises in the cost of goods and housing.

The district has been trying hard to reconnect with its past in recent years, with the Fillmore Heritage Center at the forefront of the campaign. The center presents historically oriented art shows, like the current exhibition of photographs of musicians shot by Dan Dion at the famed Fillmore Auditorium and a recent show of Mr. Ratto’s work.

These exhibitions might pique the curiosity of a tourist, rock music fan or local historian. But nostalgia for a bygone era ultimately isn’t very helpful to a neighborhood like the Fillmore, which, like most communities, can never hope to recapture its past in any concrete sense.

“Children of the Fillmore, 1952” continues through Jan. 30 at the Robert Tat Gallery, 49 Geary Street, No. 211; (415) 781-1122, roberttat.com

Culture Clash of the TitansANGELENO MAGAZINE

2009-12-01T16:59:00.000-08:00

The rapid expansion of LACMA and the fall and rise of MOCA provide a drama-filled backdrop for the increasingly knotty relationship between hotshot director Michael Govan and uber-philanthropist Eli Broad.

The L.A. art world, it seems, is beginning to resemble one of Damien Hirst’s head-reeling spin paintings: The Broad Contemporary Art Museum debuts at LACMA. A financially hollow MOCA comes back from the brink. LACMA director Michael Govan ascends to stardom (with a few hiccups along the way). Art star-in-the-making Mark Bradford scoops the MacArthur genius grant. Wallis Annenberg launches Century City’s Space for Photography. Board members play musical chairs. And everyone, as always, is wondering what Eli Broad—a life trustee of both LACMA and MOCA—will do next. The guessing game du jour is predicting just where in L.A. Broad will build his own art museum (à la Armand Hammer) for spotlighting his blue-chip collection of Neshats, Warhols and Koonses.

Perhaps never before has L.A.’s art world enjoyed so much incredible growth as well as international attention. Just last month, the jet-setting Art Basel crowd descended on downtown for a star-studded gala thrown by MOCA for its 30th anniversary. The evening, which raised more than $4 million, was capped by the auction of a Damien Hirst-customized pink piano, on which Lady Gaga had just performed, for $450,000.

Yet as much as L.A.’s rise has provided a canvas for creativity, it has also unleashed a parallel amount of ambition. Power plays have been as much in the public eye as pointillism, pop art and steam punk.

At the center of it all is the complicated relationship between Broad and Govan. “There are two art titans in L.A. right now: Michael Govan and Eli Broad,” says ACE Gallery director Douglas Chrismas. “They are like our version of Nicholas Serota [the director of London’s Tate museum] and Charles Saatchi.”

Broad, 76, the co-founder of KB Home, is used to being L.A.’s unquestioned art oligarch. With an estimated net worth of around $5.2 billion, Broad—a voracious art collector whose air of Midwestern practicality is paired with a reputation for getting what he wants—has done more than any other individual to grow L.A.’s cultural scene, from serving as MOCA’s founding chairman to being instrumental in the construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Together with his wife Edythe, he has donated $60 million and numerous artworks to LACMA as well as raised $40 million for the museum to date. And, with his pledge last December of $30 million to MOCA, he has brought the museum back to fiscal health and even luster.

But Broad—who Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight has described as someone who “exchanges project involvement for near total control”—may have met his match in Michael Govan, age 46, the man whom the philanthropist for all intents and purposes hired to run LACMA in 2006. “We needed someone with energy and charisma who could bring younger people to the board,” Broad tells Angeleno of his decision to recruit Govan. “Michael had all of those attributes.” A passionate go-getter who offsets a driving sense of purpose with debonair looks and an affable chuckle, Govan has more than lived up to his reputation since arriving in L.A., both in terms of undertaking large-scale projects and building LACMA’s board. The former director of New York’s Dia Art Foundation (known for its innovative focus on contemporary art), Govan is intent on making the encyclopedic LACMA a major player in the contemporary field as well; he just hired the high-powered modern art curator Franklin Sirmans away from Texas’ respected Menill Collection.

Nowhere has the muscle of Broad and Govan been more on display than in the back and forth over LACMA’s newest buildings, both designed by architect Renzo Piano: the 72,000-square-foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), opened in 2008, and the forthcoming Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, situated directly behind BCAM. Broad donated a prodigious $50 million to build BCAM and personally lobbied Piano to design it. The building is nothing if not a statement of Broad’s power—after all, it takes a particular kind of audacity to name an exhibition hall that exists within the campus of a larger art institution a “museum.”

Famously, however, in January 2008, just before the building’s debut, Broad announced that, despite expectations, he wouldn’t be giving the bulk of his collection to LACMA after all and would offer up a majority of the works as a sort of international lending library. While Govan spun the news as a positive act, enabling the works to remain in the public domain, there was almost as much ink spilled over Broad’s latest maneuver as there was over the opening of BCAM itself.

Much of the drama has played out behind the scenes, however, such as over the completion of the Resnick Pavilion, due to open in fall 2010. According to a LACMA board member who wishes to remain anonymous, Broad was making arguments to the board that constructing the pavilion would strain the museum’s finances.

The prospect of a delay couldn’t have made Govan happy. Getting the Resnick up and running quickly was crucial to the director’s plans. The exhibiton hall promises to give him a 45,000-square-foot exhibition hall, open to easy reconfiguration, that can accommodate the sort of momentous contemporary art shows that generate serious buzz.

On top of that, the LACMA board member who spoke to Angeleno believes that Broad was also motivated by a more personal concern: that constructing the new building would steal some of the spotlight from the philanthropist’s own edifice.

Broad’s chief communications officer, Karen Denne, disputes that account and insists that Broad’s concern about the Resnick building being completed was only about timing. “Mr. Broad is fiscally prudent, and he was concerned that it was not the right time to move forward with a new building, given the amount of debt LACMA had and the state of the economy,” says Denne. Either way, the board wasn’t swayed.

Denne, underlining Broad’s commitment to the museum, adds that, “Mr. Broad was the largest donor and fundraiser in the history of LACMA.” But Lynda and Stewart Resnick—the mega-moguls behind such brands as FIJI Water and POM Wonderful—might just well break that record. Before BCAM opened, the couple had pledged $25 million to open a new visitors’ center on the campus. Ultimately, Broad solicited and persuaded British Petroleum to fund the visitors’ area.

To make the exhibition hall possible, the Resnicks raised their ante. At a splashy September 2008 press conference, Govan announced that the Resnicks had stepped up with a $45 million gift to erect the Resnick behind the Broad. Before 2010 is out, Govan will have a space on par with MOCA’s Geffen facility, where the museum has mounted such swarmed shows as Ecstasy and Murakami. Says Chrismas: “Michael needed a place you could drive a tractor through.”

Who gets the credit for pulling in the Resnicks’ largesse is a matter of dispute. “In fact, Mr. Broad solicited the Resnicks for their gift,” says Denne. But Resnick spokesman Rob Six as well as a LACMA spokeswoman insist that isn’t the case.

At the Resnick, Govan won’t have any restrictions when it comes to programming shows, which hasn’t been true at BCAM. Indeed, the Govan and Broad are, to this day, at odds over whether LACMA is honoring its contractual obligations over the display of art there. “When we opened BCAM, Michael met his obligations by contract,” says Broad. “Since then, we’ve been saddened that he hasn’t lived up to these obligations. The reason we funded BCAM was to show contemporary art, and have two-thirds of the building to show our collection. LACMA could do what they wished with the remaining third. That hasn’t been the case recently.”

But LACMA spokeswoman Alliston Agsten denies this claim: “There is no language whatsoever in the contract that refers to any amount of square footage, not to mention two-thirds of the space, that is to be devoted to the presentation of the Broad collection.”

For a time, LACMA’s director and Broad seemed to be in harmony. Govan inherited a $156 million museum redesign plan (which included BCAM) from his predecessor Andrea Rich and presided over its opening, a major symbol of Broad and Govan’s achievements as partners. According to KCRW art critic Edward Goldman, who spoke to Angeleno in 2008, Govan’s aesthetic sensibility made a big impression on Broad. “I think they collaborate very well, and I also think that it is because of Michael that the entire project has become more sophisticated.”

With all these ups and downs, it’s no wonder one of the L.A. art world’s favorite obsessions of late has been trying to decipher the dynamics of the Broad-Govan relationship. “A lot of controversy centers around whether Michael is happy with Eli and Eli is happy with Michael,” says collector Stefan Simchowitz, the stepson of former MOCA board member Jennifer Simchowitz.

Few would dispute that a genuine desire to improve L.A.’s cultural offerings and a belief in the power of art are the biggest motives behind the actions of the city’s two art barons. And Los Angeles’ museums often work together as much as they vie for visitors and resources. In 2011, for example, LACMA, MOCA and 23 other area arts institutions will join in mounting a citywide arts initiative, Pacific Standard Time, funded in large part by the Getty Foundation, which will take a sweeping look at the history of art in California since WWII. “The fact that our museums have great directors and are doing important exhibitions is what’s attracting the world’s attention,” says Elsa Longhauser, director of the Santa Monica Museum. “The brouhaha is not what brings people here.”

But underneath these laudable intentions may lie a craving for control. Being a potent force in the art world is first and foremost about influencing the caliber of the art that goes before the public. L.A. is still a young city and its museum landscape is still crystallizing. So the opportunities to impact the art world’s development here are enormous.

Across town, at around the same time LACMA was moving ahead with its grand building plans, MOCA was going through its own tumult. Over the three decades of its existence, the museum has built one of the foremost troves of postwar modern art in the world. Its special exhibitions, such as Wack! and A Minimal Future, have garnered the institution resounding critical acclaim.

But its finances had become increasingly dire, a situation that exploded in the press in December 2008. Unlike LACMA, which currently receives 38 percent of its operating funds from L.A. county, MOCA depends much more heavily on private donations and ticket sales with an average of 80 to 90 percent of its income coming from those sources. And, over the course of a decade, MOCA’s expenses had so far outgrown its income that the museum was forced to dip into its endowment. In 1999, MOCA had $38 million in invested assets and an $11 million budget. By 2008, those investments had dipped to $5 million, and the operating budget had swelled to $22 million. As the financial debacle came to light, nine trustees exited the board over a period of six months. Director Jeremy Strick resigned after nine years at the helm. The money troubles had been brewing for years. Two years earlier, Susan Bay Nimoy, the wife of Leonard Nimoy, and former UPN network CEO Dean Valentine had both left MOCA—decamping to the Hammer Museum—owing to concerns about the museum’s financial recklessness.

MOCA needed a savior. Not surprisingly perhaps, two men stepped forward with visions for the museum’s future. Govan proposed a merger with LACMA. “The civic responsibility was to offer options,” says Govan. “We talked about partnerships. I said, ‘We don’t want to be perceived as taking you over. But we can argue for the potential benefits of working together and presenting innovative ideas.’ We are proud that we were able to offer exciting options in a difficult climate. ‘Museum failing in L.A.’ is not a good headline. It was all in our interests that MOCA had alternatives to succeed.”

Broad came up with an alternate plan. He told MOCA’s trustees that he would pledge $30 million to replenish the museum’s sagging endowment and support exhibitions, thus keeping MOCA independent if they could come up with $15 million in matching funds. “I said, ‘We have to save MOCA,’” says Broad. “I got Disney Hall funded and built. I knew I could get MOCA back on its feet. It had to be right-sized expense- and staff-wise. I could see that MOCA was clearly worth saving. MOCA’s board members became very contentious, a problem that started between five and eight years ago in response to financial trouble. There was no unity of vision.”

There were pros and cons to both pitches, and wariness among the MOCA board of each man’s intentions. Were Govan and Broad motivated purely by a desire to save the institution? How much did the prospect of exerting control over one of the world’s finest modern collections influence them? Govan’s plan would have enabled MOCA’s collection to survive, albeit under LACMA’s roof and as just one part of its wide-ranging collection. A number of trustees got behind his idea, arguing for the merits of having MOCA and LACMA geographically close together on Wilshire Boulevard. LACMA already owned a good portion of the property surrounding its campus, which theoretically would create a highly desirable hub for art in central L.A.

But Broad doesn’t see Govan’s intentions so magnanimously. “Michael would have liked to have taken over the MOCA collection but we took a different view. It wasn’t a merger. It was simply a way for LACMA to get a great collection without paying for it. LACMA should have been supportive of its sister institution and help it to survive independently rather than take it over.” And The Young and the Restless co-writer and MOCA co-chair Maria Arena Bell (whose husband William serves on the board of LACMA) also had reservations: “I felt it was really important for L.A. to have a contemporary art museum that was thriving and separate from LACMA,” says Bell.

Broad’s strategy, meanwhile, would allow the museum to remain self-governing but it came with hefty conditions, including aggressive cost-cutting and fundraising demands. “Eli required that the museum get financially stable, cut expenditure, raise funds, not borrow from its endowment, limit expenses from the endowment, maintain a strong and vibrant exhibition schedule and bolster its capital campaign,” says MOCA CEO Charles Young.

MOCA’s choice to go with the Broad plan is mutually beneficial to both sides. Broad may have breathed new life into MOCA, but MOCA may have done the same for Broad: Becoming deeply involved with the museum’s regeneration campaign not only provided the philanthropist with the perfect escape route from LACMA, it also enabled him to stay on top of L.A.’s museum hierarchy. And while there’s no evidence this was in Broad’s mind, the stakes were high for another reason: If MOCA were to migrate to the Miracle Mile, its exit would come with terrible consequences for the ongoing regeneration of downtown L.A., where one of Broad’s biggest investments, the stalled Grand Avenue Project, is still trying to get out of the gate.

While Eli Broad is used to holding all the purse strings, Michael Govan answers to a board and must work within that context, an environment in which he, by all measures, excels. LACMA’s leader has arguably transformed art philanthropy in L.A. from the polite pursuit of a small and doddering group of lifelong local benefactors to the cause absolut for the hip, globally minded, jet-set crowd. In a city whose millionaires and billionaires tend to favor political and environmental causes over cultural ones, Govan’s appearance could not be more welcome.

Since arriving on the West Coast in April 2006 from New York (where he successfully created the critically acclaimed, nearly 300,000-square-foot Dia:Beacon museum in the Hudson Valley), Govan has raised the prestige level of the LACMA board to the point where Forbes now ranks it as the third most powerful billionaire board in the country, after MoMA and the Robin Hood Foundation.

Unlike other art museums in town like MOCA (whose trustees include John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha) and the Hammer Museum (whose board includes Lari Pittman and Barbara Kruger), LACMA’s current board lineup doesn’t boast a single visual artist. But it does read like a who’s who of the business and entertainment world. Additions during Govan’s tenure include Barbra Streisand, producer Brian Grazer, songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, television anchor Willow Bay, L.A. Dodgers ex-CEO Jamie McCourt, former Warner Bros. head Terry Semel, and billionaire art collector/investor Nicolas Berggruen. “Boards have become different organisms over the last 30 years. In the old days, entrepreneurship wasn’t part of a museum’s operational charge. Now, people critique organizations for their lack of entrepreneurship. So we’ve started to attach the language of corporate growth to museums,” says Govan.

But Govan has suffered a few setbacks. A decision earlier this year to shutter LACMA’s beloved 40-year-old classic movie screening program for financial reasons led to a huge outcry, with Martin Scorsese denouncing Govan in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. Soon after, information about the museum director’s hefty salary and perks amounting to $1 million leaked to the same publication, further angering film lovers. The film series has been reinstated for at least another year. Meanwhile, Govan’s plans to erect a Jeff Koons installation featuring a chugging, 70-foot replica of a 1940s locomotive suspended from a 161-foot-tall crane, may have hit an impasse. In a recent Vanity Fair profile, LACMA board member Wallis Annenberg, who donated $2 million to conduct a feasibility study for the sculpture, said: “I personally think Los Angeles deserves a much finer icon than a train hanging from a crane.” Annenberg reportedly intends to leave the rest of the funding of the $25 million project to other trustees. Seeking to clarify the situation, LACMA’s vice president of development, Terry Morello, has this to say: “Wallis Annenberg agreed to pay $2 million to get the drawings done. She didn’t make a commitment to pay for the train.”

Meanwhile, MOCA has recovered much of its former sheen since accepting Broad’s pledge. The museum’s white knight, whom Bell affectionately describes as “a demanding giver who insists that his money is being well spent,” coaxed Charles Young, UCLA’s no-nonsense chancellor emeritus, to shepherd MOCA through a huge recapitalization campaign. Says Young: “Eli made it possible for the museum to survive—not only to come out of the doldrums it was in but also to move to greater heights. He made the museum’s future possible but he didn’t ensure it.”

Young has since cut the institution’s annual budget from more than $22 million to $15.5 million (LACMA, by contrast, has an operating budget of $53.5 million.) At the same time, the organization has been working hard to rebuild its board. Broad, among others, persuaded music exec Gil Friesen and Hard Rock co-founder Peter Morton, who had previously resigned, to return as trustees. Five new members have joined up, including Sex and the City creator Darren Star. And MOCA’s board has started an international search for a new director aided by the recruitment firm Russell Reynolds Associates. “We’re looking for somebody who is extraordinarily dynamic with great vision and who is very charismatic and good at bringing people together,” says David Johnson, co-chair of MOCA’s board. “We’re not looking for somebody super young, but someone on the younger side.” In other words, MOCA is looking for someone who can take on Michael Govan. Says ACE Gallery’s Chrismas: “What MOCA will have to do is find a director who can be as creative as Govan—and as ambitious.”

A visionary and ambitious Govan-like operator is unquestionably what MOCA needs. But could Broad’s recent experiences color the process? What happened at LACMA has almost Oedipal overtones. Broad hired Govan, only to have his spiritual heir turn on him. In not leaving his art collection to LACMA, Broad in turn abandoned Govan. Will Broad want to recruit another person who might undermine his authority?

Meanwhile, Govan seems to be looking to take on the Getty as well. As he recently told the Los Angeles Times, he is intent on turning LACMA into a major tourist attraction: “The first on anybody’s list,” said Govan. Chris Burden’s already-iconic Urban Light sculpture, situated directly on Wilshire Boulevard, is only Govan’s first step. The museum’s website vaunts that the proposed Koons train sculpture—which would be visible from virtually all corners of the city—will be L.A.’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. Another showy art project-in-the-making is the installation of Michael Heizer’s Levitated/Slot Mass, a boulder weighing more than 400 tons that will be suspended on two concrete rails.

Not to be outdone, Broad is busy creating his own L.A. museum, which he hopes will rise as early as three years from now. The project represents the biggest chess move yet for Broad, whose plans envision a space of up to 43,000 square feet funded with a breathtaking $200 million endowment. Both Santa Monica and Beverly Hills are briskly working up proposals to win the project. But Broad, keeping his cards close to his chest, has also said he is discussing building the museum in a third location, which he declines to name. (Broad is also constructing an art museum at his alma mata, Michigan State University; Govan serves on the institution’s advisory board.)

Of course, the bigger each man’s ambition, the better for Los Angeles. By any measure, the developments of the last few years are stunning. Between 2008 and 2010, LACMA will have added 100,000 square feet of exhibition space to its campus. In November, MOCA debuted its blockbuster anniversary exhibit, Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years. Sprawling across the museum’s Grand Avenue and Geffen buildings, the show, which includes 500 permanent collection works, makes an inarguable case for L.A. as one of the world’s great art capitals. And Broad asserts that, with the addition of his own museum, L.A. will have more square acreage devoted to contemporary art than any place in America.

As L.A. comes into its own as an art town, Broad and Govan will doubtlessly continue to jostle for supremacy. Yet despite some bones of contention, the two men still hold each other in high esteem. “Michael Govan is a great asset,” says Broad. “We don’t agree on everything. Our relationship is not perfect, but nor is any marriage perfect. We all live in the same community and will work everything out.” Chuckles Govan: “I don’t think I can compete with Eli Broad. He’s a restless and never-satisfied philanthropist. He loves to provoke institutions to do better, bigger, more.”

An American Export Comes Home, Still PoppingNEW YORK TIMES

2009-11-29T09:48:00.001-08:00

Krumping, clowning, strobing, turfing, breaking, locking. Few art forms boast as many subgenres as hip-hop dance. Though the differences between its various styles may be inscrutable to most people, mavens like Popin Pete of the seminal West Coast hip-hop dance crew the Electric Boogaloos have been known to split hairs over its terminology. “There are people who wave, and there are people who tut,” he told Dance Spirit Magazine last year. “They’re not popping.”

But at this year’s San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest, an annual festival held last weekend that showcases the work of dance crews worldwide, being able to tell “tutting” apart from “waving” hardly matters. Instead of compartmentalizing the myriad subgenres that fall under the hip-hop dance umbrella, the event, in its 11th year, illustrated just how easily all the different styles bleed into one another — even across geographic boundaries.

If this year’s event is anything to go by, what sets a Bay Area dance crew apart from, say, a South Korean one doesn’t really have much to do with the local group’s immersion in turfing — a hip-hop dance genre that started in Oakland and stresses theatricality and gliding footwork. The South Korean crew Last for One makes as much use of these elements as regional ensembles like Funkanometry and the DS Players. It is the level of artistic finesse versus attitude that seems to be the greatest differentiator between American groups and those from abroad.

Just as the music that accompanied the festival’s acts fused rap staples like Lil Wayne and the Wu-Tang Clan with Beethoven, Bjork and Britney Spears, among others, the choreography brought together steps from the different subgenres. “Invasion Involved,” a piece from New Style Motherlode of Oakland includes a heady array of hip-hop and hip-hop-derived movement. The dancers shake their bodies intensely, execute machinelike robotics, zoom around on skateboards and perform kung fu-inspired kicks and jabs.

Loose Change, a San Francisco ensemble, combines earthy, contemporary dance choreography with steps informed by funk and jazz. In his Michael Jackson tribute, Kenichi Ebina, a Japanese dancer based in New York, pushes Mr. Jackson’s signature steps like the moonwalk and the slide to their aesthetic limits.

A presentation by ILL-Abilities, a Chilean-Californian-Canadian break-dance crew whose members have a variety of physical impairments, powerfully demonstrated the innovative, inclusive and international state of hip-hop culture today. At one point, the dancer Lazylegz (who has arthrogryposis, a joint deficiency that affects his legs) leapt on his crutches over the prostrate frames of his cohorts Guns (who spins on his head with the ease of revolving vinyl though his right leg is amputated at the knee) and Kujo (whose deafness doesn’t prevent him from bouncing around the stage on his forearms with the rhythmic precision of a jackhammer).

Hip-hop dance is of course an urban art form that came of age on the streets, not in the studio. Improvisation and aggressive competition is a central component; it grew out of 1970s New York gang culture, after all. So many of the American groups in the Hip Hop DanceFest take a scrappy-streetwise approach to their art.

The Los Angeles crew One Step Ahead’s playful yet formless piece “Escalate” riffs on classical music themes. The three performers wear mismatched orchestral conductors’ coattails and dance to a distorted version of Pachelbel’s Canon, among other standards of the classical repertory. Their movements have a roomy, improvisatory feel but lack focus. Meanwhile, the raunchy “Final Call,” from Mind Over Matter of San Francisco, recalls the steamy videos of Madonna’s “Erotica” period. Dressed in assorted ’80s-style street clothes, the dancers perform simulated sex routines under sultry red lights. These efforts, though brimful of attitude, feel obvious and canned.

In contrast, the international groups have among the most technically precise and artistically imaginative performances at the festival. The six members of the Norwegian dance crew Deep Down Dopeizm move in perfect synchronicity in their playful piece “The Cube.” Their bodies morph together at various intervals during the work to create a compact human cube. This recurring motif is as visually arresting as it is physically demanding.

Last for One builds its piece, “Soul River,” on standard break-dancing and popping moves. But the physical agility, ball bearing-like bounce and showmanship of the six-strong group outpace similar pieces by others on the festival program. And in the London group Plague’s “Embodiment of MUSIC!” a reeling, kinetic tap-dance sequence performed in sneakers, sometimes on tiptoe, to Ray Charles’s “This Little Girl of Mine,” reinvigorates an old dance form. The performers in these three groups wear loose hip-hop clothes. But unlike the American ensembles, their Adidas and Pumas match perfectly.

Synchronized footwear isn’t terribly important though. What matters most is innovation. It’s telling that in this respect, the United States, though the originator of the art of hip-hop dance and its many subgenres, could learn something from the rest of the world.

In Chant, Listening and Singing Become OneNEW YORK TIMES

2009-11-22T10:43:00.000-08:00

Chant, the practice of intoning sounds or words rhythmically and repetitively, has been a staple of spiritual systems for millenniums. Owing to the popularity of recordings like the 1993 album “Chant” by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain, and Enigma’s 1990 crossover hit, “Sadeness (Part I),” which juxtaposed chant with a dance beat, Westerners have become familiar with Gregorian chant, the early Christian liturgical genre.

But chant exists in many forms — including mantras, hymns, prayers, Shigin (a form of Japanese chanted poetry) and plainsong — and can be found in religions as diverse as Judaism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Hinduism.

Perhaps in response to the growing velocity and techno-centricity of daily life, more people have sought out chant. The sounds of “om” and “kyrie” are filling Zen meditation centers, Buddhist retreats, plainsong-infused candlelit church services, and yoga studios around the Bay Area and beyond.

Meanwhile, chant has been on the rise as an artistic pursuit. Vocal ensembles like Anonymous 4, Sequentia and Cappella Romana have garnered critical acclaim for their concerts and recordings. The field is clearly evolving. But is chant as engrossing to hear as it is to sing?

In theory, listening to a chant should be roughly the same as singing it. In practice, however, most of us aren’t relaxed, psychologically present or in tune enough with ourselves to be mindful of this effect, which is, after all, quite subtle. As a result, listening to chant, especially without the aid of a religious framework to guide your engagement, can be frustrating.

This was certainly the case last weekend during the Sabbaticus Rex performance at Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco. The three-member ensemble, which is based in the Bay Area, lays deep, throat-sung mantras over dense instrumental layers created by a bazantar (a five-string upright bass fitted with 33 extra sympathetic and drone strings), Japanese bamboo flutes and gongs.

The group’s anti-melodic, seemingly directionless soundscape drove my guest to the point of distraction. She called the music “primitive” and “annoying.”

I didn’t entirely share her feelings. Perhaps it’s all the yoga I’ve been doing lately, but by concentrating on my breath and listening for subtle textural and rhythmic changes, like the quiet roar of a gong or the interjection of a rippling flute motif, I was intermittently able to climb inside the ensemble’s musical meditation.

The vocalist Cornelius Boots’s occasional bouts of chesty, resonant chanting helped immensely by bringing much needed focus to the meandering instrumental lines. Still, my mind wandered often, and it was ultimately quite a relief to leave the church.

The next morning, I visited the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church across town, where I participated in the Medieval Sarum Chant workshop led by Susan Hellauer and Marsha Genensky of the New York all-female a cappella quartet Anonymous 4. In contrast to the previous evening’s experience, I didn’t want to leave.

This all-day class — open to anyone, even those who can’t read music, at an affordable rate — was surprising in some ways. From an aesthetic standpoint, our attempt to sing “Ave Maris Stella,” an English liturgical chant composed in honor of the Virgin Mary, left much to be desired, even though producing a pitch-perfect performance was not the aim of the day.

We weren’t particularly in tune or in step with one another. And learning the chant by rote (as the monks would have done in medieval times), rather than by reading music, added an entirely new level of complexity.

But as we were singing together, time vanished. I had no idea what “Solve vincla reis, profer lumen caecis” meant, but the act of chanting these words en masse had the same effect on my mood as eating good, dark chocolate. (By the way, it means “Dissolve these earthly chains, give light to the blind.”)

By relating these contrasting experiences, I don’t wish to imply that chant isn’t worthy of performance. Listening to Anonymous 4 sing “Ave Maris Stella” on its “Four Centuries of Chant” CD (released this year on Harmonia Mundi) or in concert demonstrates just how sublime chant can sound to the listener’s ear when the performers follow the contours of the language, flow through the lines and generally possess what Ms. Hellauer calls a “unity of intent.”

Listening to the great Lebanese vocalist Sister Marie Keyrouz intone Middle Eastern Christian chant or Tina Turner sing a Buddhist chant has a comparable effect.

As the Oakland Nada yoga (yoga of sound) expert Ann Dyer put it in a recent phone interview: “Fundamentally, chanting and listening are not that different in terms of how we respond as organisms. Even when you’re listening to chant, the whole body is responding, experiencing the vibration, and the vocal cords will vibrate in sympathy if relaxed. It’s a very kinesthetic response.”

But inasmuch as any activity in life tends to be more meaningful than experiencing it from the sidelines, chant derives much of its power from active participation.

“There is a difference between listening to someone chant and actually making those same sounds in your own body,” Ana Hernández writes in her 2005 book, “The Sacred Art of Chant.” “There’s a difference in the way the vibrations affect you, depending on whether they come from outside or within you.”

A Fulbright in Nigeria That Turned Into a ShowNEW YORK TIMES

2009-11-15T07:23:00.001-08:00

Many things have happened since Dan Hoyle performed in the premiere of “Tings Dey Happen,” his incendiary and brilliant solo show about Nigerian oil politics, nearly three years ago at the compact theater the Marsh in San Francisco.

His career has been on the rise. “Tings Dey Happen” won the Will Glickman Award for best new play in the Bay Area and was featured, to critical acclaim, in 2007 at the Culture Project in New York. (Wilborn Hampton in The New York Times called Mr. Hoyle “a first-rate reporter and actor.”) Last month the State Department invited Mr. Hoyle to return to Nigeria to perform “Tings Dey Happen” as part of an official diplomatic tour. Now back in San Francisco, he is reprising his production at the much grander Marines Memorial Theater.

Meanwhile, Nigeria — the land where Mr. Hoyle spent 10 months in 2005-6 as a Fulbright scholar researching his project — has spiraled downward. Known as much for its corruption, kidnappings and violence as for its ample oil reserves (Nigeria is the fifth-largest oil supplier to the United States), the country has been hemorrhaging blood and money like crude from a plundered pipeline. In the most recent wave of unrest this summer, clashes between Islamic militants and the police led to dozens of deaths. Olabode George, a prominent figure in Nigeria’s ruling People’s Democratic Party, was convicted of corruption charges in October.

Bizarrely, few of these events make it into the latest iteration of “Tings Dey Happen.” Besides the slicker lighting and sound effects, minor textual cuts and the addition of supertitles to help audiences understand some of the Nigerian characters’ Pidgin, the present production is pretty much like the past. Getting the most from this latest version requires attending a post-performance discussion or reading an as-yet-unpublished essay by Mr. Hoyle. But he misses an opportunity to address the inadvertent impact of well-meaning outsiders like himself on the lives of the Nigerian insiders.

As a performance, Mr. Hoyle’s theatrical journey through the Niger Delta’s remote and lawless hinterlands continues to arrest audiences, even in this less intimate setting. Over 90 minutes he embodies a variety of African and other foreign characters with warmth and energy.

Foremost among his sharply drawn creations are a warlord who wields multiple cellphones and whose Jabba-the-Hutt-like aspect belies a sentimental side (he keeps a photo album); a loutish Scottish oil industry worker; and a physically awkward, slow-spoken 23-year-old sniper who dreams of going to a university. Mr. Hoyle captures these characters so vividly that he seems to disappear inside their stories, much as Anna Deavere Smith (“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” “Fires in the Mirror”) does in her stenographically precise reproductions of real-life characters.

Yet Mr. Hoyle still maintains a shadowy presence onstage despite a desire to remove himself from the narrative. When asked in a 2007 interview with The Huffington Post about the most important decision he had made while creating the work, he replied, “Taking myself out of it.” His characters address their invisible interlocutor directly and even poke fun at him: “No, Dan, please sit down. Let us dance for you,” some Nigerian characters jovially insist when this Westerner takes ham-footedly to the dance floor. Try as he might to remain an outside observer, Mr. Hoyle can’t help putting himself in the frame.

His relationship with his interview subjects is particularly complex in the case of Okosi, the young sniper. Okosi is based on Williams Ajayi, a real-life militant whom Mr. Hoyle befriended during his first visit to Nigeria. In the play Mr. Hoyle grippingly recounts Okosi’s decision to throw his guns away to pursue his undergraduate ambitions. What Mr. Hoyle doesn’t address onstage is the impact he himself has on the character’s life. Only one desperate utterance from Okosi — “Dan, please, when are you coming back?” — hints at the American’s influence on the Nigerian.

Only beyond the realm of the play do you start to get a sense of Mr. Hoyle’s true agency in the Niger Delta. In prose and conversation he tells of being reunited with Mr. Ajayi in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, during his recent visit. At the meeting Mr. Hoyle learned that the real-life Okosi narrowly escaped being killed by gang members for turning his back on a life of crime. These days, Mr. Hoyle said, the former militant lives a life of poverty, “a sometime day laborer, sometimes just wandering the streets hoping to run into old friends who will buy him a meal.”

As demoralizing as this story is, discovering Mr. Hoyle’s role in shaping Mr. Ajayi’s life is even more unnerving: “When he met me,” the performer writes in his essay of being reunited with Mr. Ajayi, “it was like a light to his life. After hundreds of performances in the U.S., I couldn’t really point to any impact my show had made on the Niger Delta. But during my research I had impacted Williams enough to change his life.”

The fortunes of individuals and nations rise and fall every day. The genius of “Tings Dey Happen” is its ability to help us understand how filling the tanks of our cars here in the United States might spark countless wars in a far-off land. If only Mr. Hoyle, full of fresh insights from his recent trip, would confront the consequences of his presence in Nigeria more openly, instead of through his characters’ oblique references to an invisible white guy named Dan.

Correction: November 16, 2009
In a previous version of this article, a quote was incorrectly attributed. The playwright, Dan Hoyle, did not say, "When he met me, it was like a light to his life." The man he was writing about, Williams Ajayi, said it. Also, a passage may have left the incorrect impression that the author interviewed Mr. Hoyle about his reunion with Mr. Ajayi. The author heard the story at a post-performance discussion, not in a personal conversation with Mr. Hoyle.

Susan Graham experiences Dido's hard life with a lounge lizardLOS ANGELES TIMES

2009-11-08T17:57:00.000-08:00

The mezzo-soprano and conductor Nicholas McGegan discuss the challenges of Henry Purcell's opera.

Susan Graham and Nicholas McGegan have never collaborated before. But when they get together, the Texas-raised mezzo-soprano and British conductor behave like an old married couple. On a recent afternoon in Berkeley, the home base of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, a leading period performance ensemble that McGegan has directed for many years, the duo engaged in lively banter about their first artistic partnership -- a six-concert California tour of works by the 17th century English composer Henry Purcell.

Graham is known as much for her pants roles in Baroque operas as for her championing of French and contemporary American song. Celebrating Purcell's 350th birthday, the Baroque Orchestra's "Passion of Dido" program features the versatile mezzo as the ill-fated heroine in "Dido and Aeneas" (1689). Joining Graham, McGegan, the orchestra and the Philharmonia Chorale are soloists William Berger, Cyndia Sieden, Céline Ricci, Jill Grove and Brian Thorsett.

Graham often performs in L.A, including headlining Los Angeles Opera's 2006 production of Monteverdi's "L'incoronazione di Poppea." However, the singer's visit Wednesday represents her first Disney Hall appearance. We caught up with Graham and McGegan during rehearsals to discuss, among other topics, the challenges of performing Purcell, Los Angeles music audiences and the correct way to pronounce "Purcell."

You've known each other for years. What brings you together as collaborators now?

Susan Graham: I've always wanted to work with Nic. I've long been a fan of his musical aesthetic. I love this piece we're doing together now.

Nicholas McGegan: And I always want to work with the best singers.

SG: Unfortunately, you got me instead.

NM: Ha-ha. Now you get to die six times on stage over the course of two weeks.

SG: I'm excited about that, as I don't usually get to die -- or get the guy.

NM: Usually you are the guy.

SG: That's true. In "Rosenkavalier," which I did recently at the Met, I am the guy.

What's the significance of performing "Dido" on Purcell's 350th birthday?

NM: It makes me wish the composer had lived to 50 instead of dying at 34. Apparently his wife locked him out one night when he was late back from the pub. He caught a cold, and that was the end of him.

SG: Mrs. Purcell was a serious lady.

NM: Yes. Mind you, I don't think Mr. Purcell was a first-time offender. He wrote about 50 drinking songs, most of which are unprintable.

Why do people respond to "Dido" so strongly today?

NM: "Dido" moves from comedy to tragedy so fast. It achieves in just 50 minutes what it takes most other operas three of four hours to do.

SG: Purcell wrote "Dido" for students at a girls' school in London. Is it true or apocryphal that he composed the piece as an admonition to the young ladies -- as a warning to be wary of men, that they'll break your heart and leave you to die?

NM: He mainly wrote it for money. But it's true that Aeneas is an amazing lounge lizard.

How do you ensure that period performance is alive and vibrant?

NM: We don't bring our treatises on stage. We simply focus on moving people. We're entertainers. Certain academic ideas do matter. For example, if you're going to perform a minuet, it helps to know how fast people danced minuets.

NM: Right. The period instrument thing is nice. But I've also performed "Dido" on modern instruments. I've even done it with Mark Morris dancing the role of Dido in a muumuu. It was quite beautiful.

SG: Morris is multitalented.

NM: But a femme fatale he is not.

SG: As much as he'd like to be.

Please talk about the work's final famous aria -- "When I Am Laid in Earth." How do you make this aria your own, Susan?

SG: By the time this aria occurs, it sings itself. The song is so loaded with everything that has come before, yet its purity is its driving force. All I have to do is sing it true.

What are the biggest challenges in performing "Dido"?

SG: There's no place to hide. You don't have a raucous orchestra disguising your flaws. You have under an hour to tell a huge story. Capturing big emotions in a tight time frame is hard.

What do you think about the way in which Purcell sets the story to music?

SG: There's so much truth to Purcell's vocal writing. Take the part where Dido and Aeneas sing this incredible battle duet. They're playing a game of one-upmanship. He cuts her down. Then she mocks him and calls him a "deceitful crocodile."

NM: No one but Purcell would use the word "crocodile" in an opera. There really are only three composers who set the English language well -- Purcell, Britten and Sullivan.

You've both been involved in notable recordings of this work before -- Susan under the baton of Emanuelle Haïm and Nicholas with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. How do your past experiences inform your collaboration?

NM: I've got a completely blank score for this one, and I'm going to start all over again.

SG: Me too. I can't tell you how many times I've had videos thrust at me in rehearsal and been told: "Do it like her!" Invariably, she's a foot shorter than I am and I have bigger feet, so this approach doesn't work. You always go into a new project wondering what the maestro is going to expect. We're just the hired help, after all.

NM: She said with a grin.

SG: Everyone works within the circumstances of the specific production. The dynamics are always different.

NM: In this run of "Dido," Performance One will be radically different from Performance Six.

SG: Things will get trillier.

NM: And faster.

SG: The witches will become sillier.

Please tell us about the other works in the program.

NM: We're interested in showing Purcell's range as a sacred and secular composer. The concert includes the joyful sacred anthem, "O Sing Unto the Lord a New Song," Chacony in G minor, a misfit but lovely instrumental piece, the heart-wrenching sacred lament written for eight-part choir and organ "Hear My Prayer, O Lord," and music that Purcell wrote for the 1695 revival of Aphra Behn's grisly play, "Abdelazer." Today, Purcell's incidental music is better known than Behn's drama, in which nearly everyone dies apart from the person responsible for lowering the curtain at the end. Many people know the "Rondeau" because Britten used it in his "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra."

You've performed at Disney Hall before, Nicholas. But next Wednesday's concert marks your premiere at the venue, Susan. What are your thoughts about the space?

SG: I've performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion many times. As I've pulled into the parking lot, I've had an eye on Disney Hall and thought to myself, "I want to sing there." I hear the acoustic is spectacular. For a piece like "Dido." where clarity is an asset, it will sound brilliant. I'm hoping the space will help us play with lots of colors and textures.

NM: Disney is one of the world's great concert halls. It's a big space, but because of the steep rake of the seating, the audience never feels far away. I've done chamber music at Disney, and it's felt intimate. I've also conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic there, and we made a hell of a racket. The other great thing about the hall is the backstage area. It's like a five-star hotel.

What do you think of L.A. audiences?

NM: I was recently in L.A. conducing an all-Mozart program at the Hollywood Bowl. I like Bowl audiences because they don't behave like they've been recently starched.

SG: L.A. audiences aren't afraid to be surprised. For example, they loved "The Coronation of Poppea."

Please, can you settle the confusion about how to pronounce the composer's name?

NM: For some reason, people often mispronounce Purcell's name. It's "PUR-cell." It should rhyme with "rehEARsal".

SG: It's not supposed to rhyme with "DuraCELL" or "PurELL."

RivetingSF WEEKLY

2009-09-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

The Rosies of Richmond make riveting subject matter in This World in a Woman's Hands

The image of a strapping white woman in a headscarf and overalls flexing her guns under the slogan "We Can Do It!" has become a cultural icon in this country since graphic artist J. Howard Miller created the poster bearing the figure in 1942. Strongly associated with an important piece of history, this picture of "Rosie the Riveter" represents the women who worked men's jobs during the Second World War, making ships, airplanes, and ammunition while the men were away fighting.

What many people beyond the Bay Area don't realize is the image's close association with Richmond. The careworn East Bay town betrays little of its heroic past. But during World War II, Richmond was the site of four huge shipyards. Manned — or, rather, womanned — by vast production lines of female workers, these manufacturing centers were responsible for building more vessels during the war effort than any other shipyard in the nation. Today, they are part of the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park. That the women managed to build a staggering 750 ships in the Richmond shipyards during the war testifies to their teamwork. Though social and political challenges threatened to derail their efforts, the Rosies stuck together to support the war effort.

It is this spirit of togetherness that comes across most powerfully in Shotgun Players' riveting new play, This World in a Woman's Hands. Marcus Gardley's world premiere drama draws on the real-life stories of the women who worked in the Richmond shipyards during wartime. Set in the early 1940s, with flash-forward sequences to the present, the story centers on a poor, black Louisianan, Gloria Cutting (the mercurial Margo Hall), who abandons her child to try her luck out west. Gloria hopes to earn a living as a welder and eventually send for her young daughter.

The characters prize solidarity and teamwork above all else, even in the face of racial inequality, blackmail, unionization, financial woes, and the eventual dissolution of the work teams following the return of their male counterparts. Powerfully led by director Aaron Davidman, Shotgun's creative team also embodies this spirit of togetherness. Rumor has it that the play's two-year development wasn't exactly smooth. But the bumps, such as they were, don't show. The plot might be full of dramatic tension, but harmony rules onstage: The nine-strong, all-female cast collaborates in seamless synchronicity to make Gardley's play sing.

Literally. Music welds the characters and scenes together to give This World an irresistible flow and feeling of communion. Composed by jazz vocalist Molly Holm (a longtime member of Voicestra, Bobby McFerrin's improvisational ensemble), the show's mostly a cappella score mixes close-knit jazz and blues harmonies, playful scat singing, and blazing spirituals to create a sonic landscape that evokes the 1940s while feeling contemporary. Live accompaniment by jazz bassist Marcus Shelby counterbalances the women's high voices.

Even the script has its own internal music, which further enhances the teamwork onstage. Gardley combines percussive nonsense words like "oonka chica" and "bup kee up," which convey a feeling of a production line, with regular language that is alternately gritty and lyrical. When shipyard worker Eva offers a hungry yet standoffish Gloria an apple, the warm body language of the other women as they encourage Gloria to accept Eva's gift belies the coarse exchange:

Eva: Here. You look hungry enough to eat corns off a toe.

Gloria: Don't worry 'bout how I look. I ain't yo' husband. 'Sides, I ate 'fore I got here.

Eva: Course you did. That was called breakfast. This here's lunch —

Gloria: I know what it is. I just ain't hungry.

Eva: Course you ain't. You just shakin' 'cause you cold ... though it's hot as the devil's breath out here. It's no wonder you're skinny as a skate; you ain't eatin' enough.

Gloria: I eats plenty.

Eva: That's piss. I done seen more meat on a neck bone. You swallow your pride, woman, and eat this apple.

Gloria: You eat it. I don't know where your hands been.

Elsewhere, in a scene set in contemporary Richmond where a group of local women stage a protest in the wake of the murder of a local teen, a sudden, comical outburst of poetry-slam–style rap from one of the characters helps galvanize the group's collective feelings about street crime. "Yo, breezees, be easy," the hoodie-wearing hip-hop proselytizer says. "We holdin' this down for the 'hood, fo' sheezy. Just be cheesy; it's all good."

A sense of ensemble is an elusive but crucial component of the performance-making process. The longstanding success of some of the world's most iconic theater companies, such as Russia's Moscow Art Theatre, England's Complicité, Germany's Berliner Ensemble, and the U.S.'s Living Theatre, owes much to their collective approach. Shotgun's production epitomizes what can be achieved when a group of like-minded artists overcomes adversity to present a unified and deeply creative front.

The same rules that apply in theater often apply in life. Just as Rosie the Riveter declared "We Can Do It!," so the Obama presidential campaign intoned "Yes We Can." Individual inspiration can get a person only so far. It takes extraordinary teamwork to build ships, win elections, and put on captivating plays.

Dirty BlondeGRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE

2009-09-02T12:58:00.001-07:00

Chloe Veltman reviews Paul Moravec and Terry Teachout's new opera noire at this year's Santa Fe Opera Festival

While developing a new opera for this year’s Santa Fe Opera Festival, librettist Terry Teachout came across a comment of George Bernard Shaw’s regarding Il Trovatore which summed up what he and composer Paul Moravec hoped to achieve with their own project: “It is swift in action, and perfectly homogenous in atmosphere and feeling. It is absolutely void of intellectual interest: the appeal is to the instincts and the senses all through.”

Running at just 90 intermission-less minutes and opening to the sound of a series of gun-shots and the sight of the protagonist clutching a smoking revolver over her dead lover’s corpse, Teachout and Moravec’s adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 play, The Letter, certainly assaults the senses. Based on a true-crime narrative about a woman who gets away with murder despite lying about her motives, The Letter enjoyed successful runs on Broadway and was adapted twice for the screen – most famously in a 1940 Bette Davis vehicle. The Santa Fe re-telling, which stars James Maddalena as a conscience-stricken lawyer and a fiery Patricia Racette and brooding Anthony Michaels-Moore as an unhappy expatriate couple -- Leslie and Robert Crosbie -- whose life in the jungle is ransacked by passion, violence and revenge, retains all of the melodrama of Maugham’s terse play while considerably heightening its emotion.

Moravec’s muscular score is as hammily reminiscent of 1940s film noir as the vampiric shadows of Duane Schuler’s lighting design with its use of swooping vocal lines, tremolo violins, shrill piccolos, honking trombone ostinati and heart-battering timpani. It nevertheless emphasises the high-stakes atmosphere, sometimes even undercutting the emotion of Maugham’s scenario. In a scene that takes place in Leslie’s prison cell, for instance, a sweet harp and flute line ironically suggests the murderess’ innocence before a flashback scene portrays what really happened on the night of the assassination. The unexpected appearances of the ghost of Leslie’s deceased lover, Geoff Hammond (an innovation not present in Maugham’s original and chillingly executed by Canadian tenor Roger Honeywell) contribute an arresting layer of Grand Guignol tension to the action.

Director Jonathan Kent’s staging of Hammond’s death in the opening beat misses a prime opportunity for melodrama as a result of being obscured by a set of flapping muslin curtains stage-left. And the production’s intermittent set changes hamper the pace. Yet this steamy-sepulchral operatic potboiler set in colonial Malaya between the world wars holds our attention throughout – and not simply by appealing to our senses. Far from being “absolutely void of intellectual interest,” The Letter inadvertently engages the brain with its seething study of the blurred lines between friendship and duty, love and madness and civilization and savagery.

THE LETTER
SANTA FE OPERA FESTIVAL
JULY 25 - AUGUST 18, 2009
MUSIC BY PAUL MORAVEC
LIBRETTO BY TERRY TEACHOUT
DIRECTION BY JONATHAN KENT
CONDUCTOR PATRICK SUMMERS
STARRING PATRICIA RACETTE, JAMES MADDALENA, ANTHONY MICHAELS-MOORE
WWW.SANTAFEOPERA.ORG

Too Much of a Good ThingSF WEEKLY

2009-08-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

So what if August: Osage County won a Tony? It’s still boring and bloated.

The young Thomas Mann learned a lesson about overindulgence when his father took him to a patisserie and told him he could stuff his face with as many cream puffs as he liked. "He led us into a sweet smelling Paradise, and let the dream become reality," the German author wrote in his diaries, "and we were amazed how quickly we reached the limit of our desire, which we believed to be infinite."

I was reminded of this anecdote as I dragged myself back to my apartment just shy of midnight the other evening after sitting through the excess that is Tracy Letts' August: Osage County. It wasn't the length of this soap-opera–like domestic drama (three and a half hours including two intermissions) that left me feeling I'd been deep-fried, rolled in powdered sugar, and served up with whipped cream. I was simply worn out by the soul-numbing force with which the playwright, director, and cast shoved this completely hackneyed story of human indulgence down my throat. The experience made me want to go on a strict diet of minimalist puppet theater and mime.

Premiered in 2007 by Chicago's lauded Steppenwolf Theatre, August: Osage County isn't your average touring Broadway show. It isn't a musical. The sets don't revolve. And unless you count the play's trio of loud-mouthed sisters, there are no chorus girls. Yet far from being hampered by these "shortcomings," the play has done phenomenally well. It won a slew of awards, including a Pulitzer and a Tony. Audiences flocked to see the play at London's National Theatre last year. The Weinstein Company is working on a movie adaptation.

It's easy to see what draws audiences to Letts' high-stakes drama, which depicts a particularly disruptive period in a large Oklahoma family's life following the disappearance of its hard-drinking patriarch, Beverly Weston. Here's where I agree with the popular vote: Some of the performances in director Anna D. Shapiro's punctiliously executed production are deeply engrossing. The touring troupe doesn't include a single member of the original Chicago or New York cast, which starred the playwright's father, Dennis Letts, as Beverly, and Deanna Dunagan as his drug-addicted, erratic spouse, Violet. Yet the touring actors all embody their parts as if the author had written the roles specifically for them. Chief among these is the formidable old-timer Estelle Parsons, who slurs, swaggers, and slashes her way through the play as if she's a pirate on very potent painkillers. Violet has all the best lines, and Parsons delivers them like a great orchestra playing the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. All growling bass and ominous tonality, she's on the attack.

The other reason people get sucked into August: Osage County is the storytelling. I don't want to spoil the climax by summarizing the play's many predictable twists and turns. Besides, the program notes helpfully include a family tree illustrating the relationships among the members of the Aeschylean Weston family and their various hangers-on. Let's just say that regarding the denouement, regrettably, the popular vote and I must part.

Letts' drama comes across like a bloated Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill play, but with more shit going down and much less depth. Over the course of this long, long, long day's journey into night, the playwright piles on the thrills. He uses incest, infidelity, child molestation, addiction, violence, dispossession, and several other tired devices as an excuse for a plot. The drug-addled mother, the wounded children, and the absent father are all staples of the classic 20th-century American drama. It's tempting to think that Letts might be making some kind of comment about the genesis of this country's theatrical aesthetic and its reflection of the rotten state of society by so explicitly reverting to old tropes and presenting the many faces of human decrepitude in surfeit. But if that's the case, his meaning is obscure.

The play has the unfortunate effect of overstuffing us with its overbearing storyline, while at the same time leaving us unfulfilled. Letts misses enormous opportunities to plumb the profound. For instance, the gentle, shadowy presence of the family's live-in housekeeper, a young, hard-up Native American woman by the name of Johnna Monevata, begs for development. Johnna (played with sensitivity and grace by DeLanna Studi) is an outsider in more ways than one. But we never find out what drives her to stay with this godawful family besides financial need, and the playwright offers no commentary on her status as a hard-working native in the employment of a dissolute white family in a postcolonial world. Throwing in a few quotes from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" and references to Emily Dickinson don't seem to provide the metaphoric depth necessary to lift the play beyond mere gladiator sport. Add to this the intermittent shouting and screaming of the actors and Todd Rosenthal's ungainly naturalistic set depicting the inside of the Westons' house, which leaves little to the visual imagination, and you have a bad case of boredom on your hands. In short, it's all too much.

What does "all too much" really mean today? Thomas Mann knew when to curtail the cream. But these days, our desire for more frequently overrides common sense. "Nothing makes people more excessive than talking about excess," wrote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in a recent article for the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper. "If the 20th century was, in the title of Eric Hobsbawm's book, the Age of Extremes, then the 21st century looks like being the Age of Excess." Ah. Now I understand why August: Osage County is such a stampeding success.

After Rain ManBRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL

2009-08-21T10:51:00.001-07:00

Chloe Veltman considers the latest in a run of Asperger’s-centric movies from Hollywood

Asperger’s syndrome has become a pop-culture fetish lately. The hazily understood autism spectrum disorder has become a common plot device in such television shows as House, Bones, and Law & Order. The protagonists of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Stieg Larsson’s thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008) are affected by the syndrome. It is the subject of a slew of new non-fiction titles including 22 Things a Woman Must Know If She Loves a Man With Asperger’s by Rudy Simone, The Love-Shy Survival Guide by Talmer Shockley, and Christopher Babcock’s The Imprinted Brain. Hollywood has also picked up on the trend with a growing pile of Asperger’s-centric films including 2005’s Mozart and the Whale, which stars Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell as two Asperger’s syndrome sufferers, and the recent animated feature Mary and Max, centering on the relationship between a middle-aged New Yorker with the condition and a lonely Australian child.

More than two decades have elapsed since director Barry Levinson first brought autism to broad public attention with his 1988 movie Rain Man, which starred Dustin Hoffman as an autistic savant and Tom Cruise as his selfish, yuppie brother. If the newfound appeal of Asperger’s in mainstream culture points to anything, it’s the growing awareness and acceptance of high-functioning autism in society—a trend that Max Mayer’s new feature film, Adam, particularly underscores. Far from depicting its protagonist, a painfully gauche 29 year old electrical engineer played with limpid-eyed sensitivity by Hugh Dancy, as a freak, the movie strives to demonstrate just how little distance separates the so-called "neurotypical" population from the "neurodiverse."

A bittersweet romantic comedy, Adam takes place at a turning point in the titular character’s life. Soon after the death of his father, with whom he shared an apartment, Adam meets Beth, a young schoolteacher and aspiring children’s book author (played by Rose Byrne) who’s just moved into his building. The two develop an idiosyncratic romance that takes an intense turn when events over which the lovers have little control threaten to unbalance their relationship with each other and with the world around them. Adam loses the job that his father got for him years before—a serious problem for someone who’s never sent out a curriculum vitae, much less had to pay a Manhattan mortgage solo. Beth, meanwhile, finds herself caught in the middle of a courtroom scandal concerning her well to do accountant father and his business partner’s daughter. As both characters struggle to makes sense of their lives, they grow together, then apart. Circumstances divide them, but the spark that kindled their relationship at the start of the film still flickers at its end.

Perhaps the most palpable quality of this boy next door romance is how normal and relatively well-adjusted its protagonist seems. Dancy’s performance refreshingly lacks the Hoffmanesque physical ticks normally associated with the portrayal of autistic characters on screen. Although his serious expression and permanently furrowed brow convey a state of general malaise, we very rarely see him lose control completely.

Uncomfortable situations frequently make his shoulders shake and his breath run short. But his inability to cope takes a truly dark turn only once. When Adam discovers that Beth told a tiny white lie in order to engineer a meeting between her father and her new socially awkward beau, he bursts into an uncontrollable, violent rage. His condition apparently renders him unable to distinguish between a harmless fib and a serious perjury, such as that committed by Beth’s father.

Mayer mostly plays Adam’s syndrome for laughs, viewing it more as an adorable quirk than a debilitating illness. In the movie’s opening sequence, the filmmaker offers us close ups of the protagonist’s obsessively tidy New York apartment, with its kitchen stuffed with rows of neatly stacked provisions and and closets hung with monochrome sports jackets of an old fashioned cut. Adam’s social ineptitude is similarly a cause for comedy. When Beth, laden down with groceries, accosts him on the stairs outside their building near the start of their relationship, he fails to help her with her load. At a party, he abruptly says "no thank you" when the host asks him and Beth if they’d like to meet her baby girl, and proceeds to talk some poor girl’s ear off about Dobsonian telescope lenses. Like many people with Asperger’s syndrome, Adam has an encyclopaedic knowledge of one or two subjects. Astronomy is his chief obsession, with New York theatre history running a distant second.

The result of playing down Adam’s condition while playing up the drama and emotional turmoil going on in Beth’s life further helps to "normalise" Asperger’s for the cinemagoer. This sweet if not emotionally or intellectually penetrating film is more about how people learn to cope with what life throws at them than it is about living with an acute developmental disorder.

Adam
Directed by Max Mayer
On general UK and limited US release
Rating: ***

Chloe Veltman talks about Adam in a BMJ Podcast at
http://podcasts.bmj.com/bmj.

¡Bienvienido Gustavo!BBC CLASSICAL MUSIC MAGAZINE

2009-08-13T10:46:00.001-07:00

What the Los Angeles Philharmonic's new maestro means for Tinsel Town

When the Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel made his U.S. debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in September 2005, the habitually fidgety Hollywood Bowl audience reacted in a surprising way. “With the opening bars of Silvestre Revueltas’ La Noche de los Mayas, the party sitting next to me put aside its just-opened giant bag of Cheetos and forgot about it until intermission,” reported the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Swed. “The crowd clapped and whooped. That's not just rare but a downright wonder at the Bowl on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's classical Tuesday and Thursday programmes.”

Four years later and about to begin his tenure as the L.A. Philharmonic’s music director, Dudamel continues to engender whoops. When the 28-year-old conductor made his New York Philharmonic debut in 2007, the audience gave him a five minute-long standing ovation. “We have certain baseball players whom we call naturals, who enter the game and make everything look effortless,” says composer John Adams. “Gustavo possesses this quality.” Meanwhile, critics have noted Dudamel’s dynamic approach to performing both canonical staples and contemporary works. “I’ve heard Dudamel conduct the New York Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra,” says New York Magazine’s Justin Davidson. “These ensembles are all quite different, yet in each case the concerts were explosive, visceral and communicated an ecstatic energy.”

Dudamel is undeniably a rock-star within classical music circles. Yet in a city as celebrity-saturated as is L.A., what impact can a symphony orchestra conductor hope to achieve beyond the rarified enclaves of the concert hall? Dudamel made Time Magazine’s 2009 “100 List” and has been the subject of a 60 Minutes television documentary. A well-known Hollywood hotdog stand, Pink’s, even named one of its offerings after the maestro. But according to Angeleno Magazine deputy editor and L.A. native Jade Chang, most locals still think that the Walt Disney Concert Hall (the Philharmonic’s iconic, Frank Gehry-designed homebase) exists primarily to “show the latest Pixar movie” – hardly a promising start for inspiring “Dudamania.”

Yet if anyone is capable of opening the U.S.’s mass media-controlled citizenry up to the social, educational and artistic possibilities of orchestral music today, it’s probably “The Dude.” Dudamel, for his part, is optimistic about moving to California. As he explained via email: “In a city like L.A., where they have the ‘anything is possible’ attitude, I truly believe the reach of the L.A. Phil will only grow the more time I spend there and get to the know the depth of the artistic community.”

L.A. was primed for Dudamel’s arrival long before he first appeared at the Hollywood Bowl. During Esa-Pekka Salonen’s 17-year tenure, the L.A. Philharmonic became one of the most progressive orchestras around. The Finnish composer-conductor introduced 54 commissioned works and another 120 world or American premieres. The niche “Green Umbrella” new music series grew into a popular mainstream event. Pieces by DJs and film composers regularly appeared alongside canonical works. The Philharmonic increased its outreach offering to include a high school composers programme, mentorships with local youth orchestras, public school residencies and free community concerts – important developments in a region where, according to a 2007 survey by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, nearly 40% of residents are unable to meet their basic needs and more than 20% of children live in extreme poverty.

As culturally-diverse and youth-oriented as it is sociologically- and fiscally-challenged, L.A. is in many ways an ideal match for Dudamel. The fact that the maestro kicked-off his tenure by hiring Adams as the orchestra’s creative chair demonstrates his commitment to Salonen’s new music legacy. Contemporary works featured in the upcoming season include Unsuk Chin’s Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra, Salonen’s LA Variations and the world premiere of Adams’ City Noir. Meanwhile, the Esa-Pekka Salonen Commissions Fund, a resource currently worth more than $1.5 million, will redouble the Philharmonic’s focus on new music going forwards.

Beyond emphasizing modern repertoire, Dudamel’s greatest focus will be on outreach. A product of Venezuela’s “El Sistema” system, a nationwide programme which provides free music training to children, Dudamel seems committed to making music education part of everyday life for L.A.’s youth and developing the careers of talented newcomers.

To that end, the Philharmonic established a conducting fellowship programme and Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA), which provides free instruments and instruction to schoolchildren, many of them living below the poverty line in L.A.’s predominantly Latino neighbourhoods. To enroll, students are required to take care of their instruments, practice for at least 20 minutes a day and attend lessons and rehearsals several times a week. “With Gustavo’s arrival we have flipped the relationship between professional and youth orchestras on its head,” says the Philharmonic’s education director, Gretchen Nielsen. “Youth orchestras are usually comprised of the crème de la crème. But here we’re saying anyone who’s interested can play an instrument and we’ll provide opportunities for creativity and development. Whether the kids decide to become professional musicians or not is beside the point.” YOLA is already impacting youngsters’ lives. “Now that we have our kids in the Philharmonic, they are developing a greater sense of responsibility and discipline,” says Gregorio Morales, whose three children play in the EXPO orchestra.

Despite these positive signs, Dudamel faces significant hurdles in reaching out to L.A.’s underserved youth. With music education almost non-existent in many California schools (according to a study by the Music for All Foundation, participation in general music courses declined statewide by nearly 90% between 1999 and 2004) there is a need for organizations like the L.A. Philharmonic to provide pedagogical support. Scaling up to meet demand is an issue; there is now a waiting list to the join YOLA.

Notwithstanding cheerleaderly assertions like, “I am quite certain that Dudamel will be welcomed by our city’s vibrant Latino community as an inspirational role model,” by Los Angeles Opera general director Placido Domingo, awareness of the orchestra and its education programmes remains questionable. Sonia Marie de León de Vega, the music director of the L.A.-based, Latino community-oriented Santa Cecilia Orchestra, has a different perspective: “I am not aware of any special initiatives the LA Phil is undertaking to reach the Latino community.” YOLA parent Bertha Banuelos concurs: “I do not think that most Latinos know who Dudamel is or what the L.A. Philharmonic is. There should be more promotion in inner-city schools and through fieldtrips.”

With Dudamel’s Venezuelan heritage and close to 50% of the L.A. population being Hispanic or Latino, communication with the Central and South American community has nevertheless become core to the Philharmonic’s outreach effort. Through the Philharmonic’s new “Americas and Americans” festival, Dudamel is programming works by Latino composers such as Carlos Chávez and importing artistic ensembles like the Schola Cantorum of Venezuela. Two of the orchestra’s conducting fellows, Diego Mathuez and Christian Vasquez, are products of El Sistema. The Philharmonic is also partnering with L.A. supervisor Gloria Molina on promoting its free “¡Bienvienido Gustavo!” musical celebration on October 3 to the Latino community and is working with a specialist communications agency to connect with ethnic media outlets.

If there’s one sector of L.A. society whose attention the Philharmonic is not actively soliciting, it’s Hollywood. The Philharmonic has close links with the local film industry, from former music director André Previn’s film score writing endeavours to its long collaboration with composer John Williams. Despite these ties, Philharmonic President Deborah Borda is keen to distance Dudamel from Tinseltown. “Because Gustavo has so much charisma, it’s tempting to think of him as a Hollywood animal,” Borda says. “It’s fair to say that Gustavo is wary of Hollywood. He’s not looking to have his picture on the front of People Magazine.”

As protective as Borda is of her new maestro, Dudamel doesn’t seem averse to bringing mass entertainment to Disney hall when doing so makes artistic sense. On a trip to L.A. with the Simon Bolivar Orchestra a while back, Dudamel asked Williams, whom he had never met before, to conduct his famous Star Wars film score with the ensemble. “Rehearsal was due to begin at 10 am. But, oddly, Gustavo didn’t seem to want me to start on time,” recalls the composer. “Then, when we went on stage to meet the orchestra for the first time, he gave a signal and the entire brass section stood up and played one of the pieces I composed for the Olympics from memory in an arrangement made specially for me. It was so moving. I couldn’t believe it. Then the rehearsal started.”

Paying Tribute to the Grateful Dead in SymphonyLOS ANGELES TIMES

2009-08-04T17:12:00.000-07:00

The Cabrillo Festival Orchestra will commemorate the death of Jerry Garcia by performing Dead Symphony no. 6.

When Blair Jackson first heard that the Georgia-based composer Lee Johnson had written a suite for symphony orchestra based on 10 songs by the Grateful Dead, he was unimpressed.

"There is a long and ignoble tradition of butchering rock songs by rearranging them in lame and unimaginative 'classical' settings. If you've ever heard some of the patently mediocre symphonic tributes to bands such as Pink Floyd, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, you know exactly what I'm talking about," fumed the biographer of the Grateful Dead's frontman, Jerry Garcia, in a fan-site article.

But upon hearing the Russian National Orchestra's recording of the piece on CD in 2007, Jackson's cynicism faded. Calling Johnson's Dead Symphony no. 6 "a work of great passion, depth, subtlety and imagination," the writer praised the composer for using such Dead favorites as "Mountains of the Moon," "Stella Blue" and "Sugar Magnolia" as jumping-off points for an original musical riff on the band's sound rather than slavishly arranging the famous tunes in the classical idiom.

On Sunday, classical music lovers and Deadheads will unite when conductor Marin Alsop leads the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in the fourth live performance of Dead Symphony no. 6, the cornerstone of a concert commemorating the 14th anniversary of Garcia's death. The 12-movement work, which features improvisation and in-jokes such as a reference to the Dead's favorite warm-up song, the Italian ditty "Funiculì, Funiculà," will be performed alongside Australian composer Matthew Hindson's techno music-inspired Rave-Elation (Schindowski Mix). The concert will be followed by a discussion with Johnson, longtime Dead publicist and biographer Dennis McNally (pictured) and David Gans, host of the nationally syndicated Grateful Dead Hour radio show.

Over four decades, the Dead garnered a vast global following for its unorthodox approach to music. The group wove rock, folk, blues, reggae, gospel, bluegrass, psychedelic rock, jazz and country elements together and laced its concerts -- which it freely allowed fans to record -- with spiraling improvisations. Owing to its popularity, range and experimentalism, the Dead has spawned a thriving cover industry, with tribute albums existing in myriad genres including jazz ("Dark Star," "Swingin' "), a cappella ("Might as Well . . . The Persuasions Sing Grateful Dead") and reggae ("Fire on the Mountain: Reggae Celebrates the Grateful Dead").

Until Atlanta producer Mike Adams commissioned Johnson to turn the Dead's music into a piece for classical orchestra in 1995, no composer had published a symphonic homage to the band.

"I figured if it was going to be a real symphony I had to do something creative. So I really studied," says Johnson, who knew little about the Dead when he received Adams' commission but was determined to avoid a Muzak-like approach. "I bought every CD that existed and carried them around in a shopping bag. That was my 'graduate studies' time you might say."

The Dead Symphony has been performed live three times before. The inclusion of this populist orchestral work on the Cabrillo Festival's otherwise heady roster of compositions (including music by Osvaldo Golijov, Ingram Marshall and Enrico Chapela) is significant.

With the exception of the band's hometown of San Francisco, no other city can claim as close an allegiance to the Dead as the hippie seaside city of Santa Cruz, home of the Cabrillo Festival. "The spirit of the area is in keeping with the band's philosophy and it is a newly created work in keeping with our commitment to new music," says Cabrillo music director Alsop.

Santa Cruz's connection with the Dead runs even deeper. The band's Rex Foundation helped to fund the preservation of composer Lou Harrison's archives at UC Santa Cruz. Last year, the university announced the acquisition of the Dead's own archives -- a sprawling collection of memorabilia featuring correspondence, photographs, fliers, posters, televised interviews, stage backdrops and concert props. The university, which offers well-attended Grateful Dead courses taught by music professor Fred Lieberman (who has also collaborated on two books with Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart) as well as a weekly campus radio show dedicated to the band's music, will house the collection in a purpose-built room of its new library. Also, Garcia's family vacationed in the Santa Cruz Mountains for years.

Despite the close links between the band and Santa Cruz, and positive responses from some of the group's most prominent supporters, Johnson's Symphony may prove contentious in local Deadhead circles.

"The Dead and their audiences were known for being open-minded and trying new things," says Gans. "But there is a certain kind of dogma in the Dead world. The fans are fiercely protective of the music as they understand it and can be hostile to other interpretations."

McNally trusts that concert audiences -- festival subscribers and Deadheads alike -- will leave their preconceptions behind. "People tend to forget how finely composed the songs are. There's an underlying beauty to their structure and content that makes them malleable to be recast while still maintaining their own integrity. Hearing a song like 'Mountains of the Moon' adapted for full symphony gives you a heightened impression of that fact."

For a blog entry I wrote for the Los Angeles Times about the Grateful Dead and the potential impact of Johnson's symphony on audiences, please click here.

Pushing Opera's EnvelopeAMERICAN THEATRE

2009-07-06T20:41:00.001-07:00

Santa Fe Opera Festival premieres an "opera noire"

In April, Twitter organized a contest inviting opera geeks to “tweet” an opera synopsis in 140 characters or less. Inspired by the concept, Terry Teachout jotted-down the following denouement on his blog: “Adultery, murder, lies, blackmail, confession, trial, hallucination, acquittal, confrontation, disaster, blood, blackout.” The Wall Street Journal theatre critic had no intention of actually entering the competition. But in the case of The Letter, a new opera composed by Paul Moravec with libretto by Teachout, Twitter might be an ideal communications platform.

Running at just 90 intermission-less minutes – concision rarely heard of in the opera world – and opening to the sound of gun-shots followed by the sight of the protagonist clutching a smoking revolver over the body of her dead lover, The Letter promises to pack the no-nonsense punch of a 140-character communiqué. Based on Somerset Maugham’s 1927 stage adaptation of one of his stories, (which in turn became a Bette Davis movie in 1940) Teachout and Moravec’s “opera noire” receives its premiere this July at Santa Fe Opera in a production directed by Jonathan Kent. The opera stars Patricia Racette and Anthony Michaels-Moore as an unhappy expatriate couple whose life in the Malayan jungle is ransacked by passion, violence and revenge.

From the outset, Moravec and Teachout wanted to create a work as fast-moving and emotionally-intense as Alban Berg’s Wozzeck or Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. “We had talked early on about the possibility of writing a Raymond Chandler opera, and Paul also suggested that Casablanca would make a perfect libretto,” says Teachout. “I nipped those ideas in the bud, knowing that we could never get the rights to adapt Casablanca. But the idea of writing a “film noir” opera was still very much in our minds when I suggested “The Letter” to Paul.”

Yet for all the subject matter’s populist appeal, the creative team has strived to emphasize the lyrical qualities of Maugham’s pot-boiler. “I wouldn't want anyone to get the idea that The Letter is, in the oft-quoted phrase with which Joseph Kerman amusingly (and wrongly) dismissed Tosca, ‘a shabby little shocker,’” says Teachout. “Paul and I have gone to considerable trouble to heighten the emotional climate of the play, in the process turning it from a neatly turned thriller into a full-fledged piece of lyric theater. Our characters, unlike Maugham's, are concerned not just with their own desires but with the state of their souls.”

American IdyllSYMPHONY MAGAZINE

2009-06-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

Music Director searches conducted in open view aren't new. But orchestras are increasingly using them to connect with their communities, some taking their cues from reality TV.

Joana Carneiro didn’t appear even remotely frazzled as she strode across the U.C. Berkeley campus on a rainy mid-December morning in search of a cup of coffee. The 32-year-old Portuguese conductor should have been exhausted. It had, after all, been a grueling week. As the last of six guest conductors summoned to the Bay Area by the Berkeley Symphony with the aim of finding a successor to the internationally renowned Kent Nagano—whose departure from the position of music director following three decades of service the orchestra had announced in January 2007—Carneiro was kept busy from the moment she deplaned. Over the course of seven days, the conductor led five rehearsals and two performances, gave one pre-concert talk, attended several receptions and countless breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, underwent a formal interview, and appeared on a local radio show.

Yet far from yearning for a few hours of well-earned sleep on the flight back to her home in Lisbon, Carneiro seemed to take a week’s worth of heavy scrutiny at the hands of the Berkeley community in stride. Dressed in black slacks and a sweater with her straight, shoulder-length dark hair clipped neatly back from her face, the conductor looked as relaxed and alert over coffee on the final morning of her Bay Area sojourn as she did while conducting a program of Beethoven, Adams, and Lindberg for an audience of 2,000 the night before. “I’m not worried about being evaluated. Every time a conductor gets up on the podium it’s an evaluation; there are reviews in the media and audience feedback forms. This process is no different,” says Carneiro, who served as assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 2006 to 2008 through the League of American Orchestras’ American Conducting Fellows program. “There were many interviews, meetings, lunches, and dinners, but they all felt like a conversation,” she says.

That a music director search process might be viewed as a “conversation” between many different stakeholders is a concept that orchestras have taken a long time to embrace. The active inclusion of instrumentalists in scouting out new music director talent is now common practice among many orchestras, both in this country and abroad. But despite the much-publicized efforts of institutions such as the Berlin Philharmonic to involve their musicians in music director appointments in recent years, the world’s bigger orchestras continue to observe relatively closeted hiring traditions.

The situation at hundreds of smaller U.S. institutions couldn’t be more different. Instead of leaving the business of engaging an orchestra’s central figure to a mysterious group of internal custodians, orchestras in such diverse parts of the country as Eugene, Oregon; Fairfax, Virginia; and Augusta, Georgia are increasingly looking for ways to make the hiring process as transparent and inclusive as possible. More than that: Some organizations are even going as far as to view the conductor search as show biz.

Buzz and Buy-In

Fueled by the confluence of Web 2.0 and the popularity of reality TV, a number of U.S. orchestras are emphasizing the competitive nature of the search process in an attempt to heighten audience buy-in and create media buzz. Developed in collaboration with an advertising agency, the Reno Philharmonic’s recently completed search featured an American Idol-inspired “Last Conductor Standing” strategy that gave concertgoers a vote on which of the five shortlisted guest conductors should win the music director job. By following a link to the Reno News & Review website, ticketholders could watch video footage of each finalist in action, and—above a slogan that reads, “Who will prevail? Your vote counts!”—click on another link to cast a ballot. “We wanted to make as much of the search process as we could by playing up the competitive aspect and tying it in with popular culture,” says Reno Philharmonic Executive Director Tim Young. “The engagement is terrific. People are really excited about what’s going on.”

In addition to using audience surveys, orchestras such as the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra (which conducted a music director search during the 2008-09 season) generate interest by reaching out to constituents through YouTube videos depicting guest-conductor performances posted on the orchestras’ websites. Other orchestras are putting a competitive spin on the music director search through bold communications campaigns with dramatic wording and images. The splashy homepage of the Augusta Symphony’s website features large pictures of outgoing Music Director Donald Portnoy and the four conductor candidates accompanied by the teaser: “After Donald Portnoy’s Grand Finale, who will be maestro? Who’s your favorite? We want to know. Email Us.” The homepage of the Richmond Symphony website similarly hopes to turn heads with its attention-grabbing “Our New Musical Director Search Begins” headline. Meanwhile, the Saint Joseph Symphony in Missouri referred to its shortlisted conductors as “finalists” rather than the less competitive-sounding “candidates.”

Unsurprisingly, this interactive, high-stakes approach to communicating details about the conductor search to the general public has been garnering a great deal of media attention for orchestras. Media outlets seem to respond particularly strongly to the American Idol-like nature of some orchestras’ campaigns, even co-opting phrases from the hit reality-TV show in their copy. “It’s not quite San Antonio Symphony Idol,” wrote Deborah Martin in the San Antonio Express-News. “But patrons will have a chance to weigh in on next season’s guest conductors.” In the Charlotte Observer, reporter Steven Brown played up the competitive nature of the selection process by rechristening the local orchestra’s search for a new music director as “So You Think You Can Conduct?” and peppering his text with words like “contest,” “climax,” “vying,” and “tryout.”

Orchestra personnel are understandably excited about the level of media interest. “We’ve garnered three articles about each of the candidates—a preview feature, a concert review, and lastly a follow-up story that segues into what’s going to happen next,” says Jonathan Martin, president and executive director of the Charlotte Symphony in North Carolina, which currently is in the middle of a music director search. “The exciting thing is the amount of publicity we got and the interest all the buzz sparked in our community,” says Rhonda Hunsinger, executive director of the South Carolina Philharmonic, which conducted a music director search for two years, eventually deciding on Morihiko Nakahara in April 2008. “We talked to the local radio and TV stations and convinced them that this was the top arts story of the season, and they all embraced it,” Hunsinger continues. “We got live TV and Internet coverage, not to mention newspaper articles prior to each candidate’s visit. We had several reviews following every concert. Critics attended rehearsals and wrote feature stories. While the candidates were in town, we were careful to have them interact with the media. A few days after the last concert, we selected Morihiko Nakahara as our new music director and secretly brought him into town. We planned an event around the announcement and gave the state newspaper a front-page, above-the-fold exclusive.”

Even those orchestras less driven to create a publicity campaign around the search process are striving to use it as a way to reach out and interact with audiences. The La Crosse Symphony in Wisconsin—which began its music director search in the fall of 2007 and recently selected six finalists—keeps concertgoers informed about its music director search by publishing an online newsletter every six weeks. Orchestras also routinely use Web-based and paper audience surveys to get feedback about guest conductor appearances. The Charlotte Symphony reports unprecedented levels of audience engagement as a result of soliciting concertgoers’ opinions through surveys. “The amount of return has been extraordinary,” Martin says. “We get hundreds of responses on each of the guest conductor concert weekends.” According to Berkeley Symphony Executive Director James Kleinmann, around 10 to 15 percent of Berkeley Symphony audiences complete post-concert surveys online. But the range of responses testifies to the impassioned engagement of ticket-buyers in the selection process. “During the performance of each piece, with her face as well as with her body, the conductor expressed feeling for the music as well as appreciation for the musicians, and the musicians responded,” wrote a concertgoer in response to one of Berkeley Symphony’s guest conductors. Another audience member wrote: “If I were a member of the orchestra, I would have not noticed any indications of dynamics. The scores must have indicated fortissimo but the conductor’s gestures didn’t seem to. Range of conducting gestures seemed limited.”

Pros and Cons

“Before we launched our music director search, a lot of people in the area knew there was an orchestra here, but they didn’t really know,” says South Carolina’s Hunsinger. “We got the media involved early and as a result, community awareness has risen and people are asking a lot of questions.” Kleinmann believes that the Berkeley Symphony’s search has played a major role in uniting the many disparate parts of the orchestra’s constituency. “The most exciting thing that’s come out of the search has been the emergence of community and leadership,” Kleinmann says. “In what could have been a vacuum created by Kent Nagano’s departure, I am amazed at how everyone, from funders to board members to audiences, has come together to demonstrate how the orchestra impacts their lives. This transcends the business of choosing who the next music director will be.”

Many orchestras are also quick to point out the financial advantages that have emerged from taking a more open approach to the music director search. Some groups are reporting increased or steady ticket sales—no small feat during a recession. And the bump can last after the search is over: According to Hunsinger, the South Carolina Philharmonic has almost sold out every concert so far this season since hiring Nakahara. The Richmond Symphony reports box-office sales that are similar to last season. But the orchestra’s director of marketing and communications, Bob Halbruner, notes: “If there was no economic downturn, we would expect to see a spike in ticket sales.” The excitement generated by the newly visible music director search process has also helped some orchestras with their fund-raising activities. Borrowing an idea from the Eugene Symphony, the South Carolina Philharmonic raised $60,000 by inviting donors to a private party at $1,000 a ticket in honor of each of the orchestra’s guest conductor candidates. The donors received “insider” information on the search process, including an invitation to the press conference announcing the selection of the new music director.

Such highly publicized music director hiring practices are not without their drawbacks. Some organizations are concerned about the implications of placing too great an emphasis on audience participation during the selection period. “We haven’t resolved yet to what extent the audience will have input in the process,” says Jim Gallagher, chairman of the music director search committee at La Crosse Symphony. “We’re not going to have an audience ballot. Apart from the fact that giving concertgoers votes would be a logistical nightmare, we don’t want this to end up being a popularity contest with people voting for the wrong reasons.”

All the excitement about the winner doesn’t really change the fact that the candidates were originally selected to fill a job opening and that the non-winning candidates will still be looking for a job. Some of them may have to get out there and do it again and again. So sensitivity is key when it comes to figuring out just how far to take media and audience involvement. David Fisk, executive director of the Richmond Symphony, says: “We genuinely find it useful to get audience feedback about such things as a conductor’s chemistry with the players and audience. But this isn’t the same as giving concertgoers a vote; it’s giving them a voice in the process to help inform our decision.” When we spoke this winter, San Francisco Chronicle classical music critic Joshua Kosman shared similar reservations about seeking inspiration from reality TV in the appointment of new music directors. “The audience’s enthusiasm is nice, but audiences don’t always know what’s best,” he says.

Then there’s the problem of sustaining the level of engagement in the months and years following the media hoopla. The Reno Philharmonic is hoping to leverage information gathered about its audiences during the search process to find new ways to involve concertgoers in the future. “The energy and excitement of the search process is going to be hard to continue in exactly the same way,” says Young. “But it’s up to us to look for new ways to involve the community.”

Not all regional orchestras see the hiring of a new music director as a giant publicity opportunity. The Utah Symphony, for one, eschews the idea of a public search. According to a November article in the Deseret News, William H. Nelson, the chairman of Utah’s search committee, took exception to the way in which the orchestra handled its previous music director search, just over a decade ago. “We don’t want the guest conductors to appear as if they’re auditioning,” Nelson is quoted as saying of the latest conductor hiring process. “They are of the stature that they don’t want to be perceived as wanting a job.” The Berkeley Symphony, for all its interest in reaching out to audiences, is similarly keen to play down the competitive aspect of the search. Candidates like the New York-based conductor Paul Haas may have viewed the entire week in Berkeley—“every interaction, from meetings to rehearsals,” he says—as part of an audition process, but the selection committee shunned the term, instead choosing to frame the search as a concert season featuring six guest conductors, rather than a contest aimed at securing Nagano’s successor.

Eyeballing the Guests

Even for orchestras intent on steering clear of the American Idol model, practical realities nevertheless encourage a highly transparent and inclusive approach. Unlike their more prominent counterparts, smaller orchestras don’t have the luxury of auditioning potential music directors on the quiet. The country’s largest-budget orchestras present upwards of 200 performances annually, many of them led by guest conductors, and it’s relatively easy for these institutions to assess visiting maestros without announcing that they might be on the lookout for someone to fill the top artistic position. Maintaining face is key. “If an orchestra lets it be known that it’s interested in conductor X but conductor X doesn’t show, it can’t look good for the orchestra,” says the San Francisco Chronicle’s Kosman. “Similarly, the top conductors can’t afford to be seen looking for a job in public.” But for smaller orchestras, the logistics of bringing in a slew of guest conductors makes the search process practically impossible to disguise. “For an orchestra of our size it’s difficult to do a covert search,” says Richmond Symphony’s Fisk. “We have a limited 38-week season, and under normal circumstances our regular music director and assistant conductor dominate the schedule. Suddenly having a season full of nothing but guest conductors makes it pretty obvious that we’re looking for a successor.”

The average music director search panel might consist of a mixture of orchestral musicians, staff, board members, and even one or two major donors and external stakeholders, allowing smaller groups to maintain a high level of interaction with their close-knit communities. “Management is interested in what we have to say,” says Berkeley Symphony viola player Darcy Rindt. “There’s a strong sense of everyone being in this process together.” The Charlotte Symphony’s Martin believes that reaching out to the orchestra’s many different constituencies will lead the search committee to make a better-informed decision. “We’re not running a popularity contest,” he says. “Weighing lots of criteria based on feedback from donors, audience members, musicians, and others can only help us get the right result.”

This desire on the part of orchestras to engage with the outside world speaks to a heightened awareness of the evolving role and responsibilities of a music director working in the U.S. today. These days, waving a baton is considered to be only part of the job; being an arts advocate in the community is also extremely important. The Berkeley Symphony, for instance, currently works with the city’s eleven public elementary schools. The orchestra required all guest conductor finalists to write essays outlining their approach to civic engagement as part of the application process. Meanwhile, in La Crosse, Wisconsin (population 50,000), the orchestra’s music director is regarded as a prominent local figure. “In a city this small, the orchestra’s music director is the artistic leader of the community,” says Gallagher. “The search for a new leader is a big event, and we want to involve the various stakeholders in the process as much as we possibly can.”

The effort to be as inclusive as possible, coupled with the logistical challenges of parachuting in a cavalcade of guest conductors during the average orchestra’s limited season, has turned the music director search at many institutions into a highly formal, complex, and costly business. Orchestras typically spend two to three years, and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, diligently transitioning between maestros. The process involves such tasks as assembling a cross-functional search committee; drawing up a detailed job description and procedural guidelines; reaching out to suitable candidates; vetting anywhere between 100 and 300 applications; following up on references; digesting applicant essays, videos, and audio recordings; creating a shortlist; flying finalists in to spend a week or two with the orchestra; nailing down concert repertoire; organizing and publicizing meetings, events, and performances during each conductor’s stay; providing feedback systems for all stakeholders; soliciting media coverage; and announcing the final decision. The selection panels of some orchestras, such as the South Carolina Philharmonic and Reno Philharmonic, even traveled around the country visiting shortlisted candidates before inviting them back to home base. Others, such as the La Crosse Symphony, hired a consultant to help guide the orchestra through the process.

The open approach to procuring the right music director may be time-consuming, resource-heavy, and fraught with challenges—from complex scheduling logistics to losing worthy candidates to other jobs during the typically long vetting period. Yet the difficult process seems to make sense for many orchestras. “The appointment of a music director is such an important decision,” says Kosman. “It has a huge bearing on what your orchestra is going to become in years to come. The decision-makers must have the information they need to make the right choice.”

Sometimes, however, even the best intentions and most diligently run searches can go awry, as the story of one orchestra interviewed for this article shows. The orchestra in question approached the appointment of a new music director with dedication and rigor. But the selection panel, ignoring negative feedback from its core constituents, began negotiations with one finalist on the basis of his reputation. “The conductor had the right profile but the players didn’t like him,” a search committee member confides. “When the panel traveled to meet him for primary negotiations, he didn’t seem at all excited about the job.” Fortunately, the committee eventually came to its senses and hired a different conductor, one who clicked perfectly with the orchestra and helped re-energize ticket sales and fund raising.

“I don’t know if there’s a right way or wrong way to conduct a music director search,” says the Charlotte Symphony’s Martin, who, as a former general manager of The Cleveland Orchestra, has glimpsed the pros and cons of both “open” and “closed” methodologies and describes himself as a “convert” to the open way because of the opportunities it provides to build community and generate buzz. “You need a process that works for your orchestra and your city.” Ultimately, though, the success of any music director search seems to hinge on one crucial factor: the personal connection between a candidate and an orchestra. That ephemeral feeling of “rightness” cannot be quantified or ascertained from a resumé, but orchestras and audiences know it straight away when they see it. As Carneiro put it over coffee that December morning: “If it’s a good fit, it’s fantastic.”

As it happens, the fit between the Berkeley Symphony and Carneiro appears to be just right. On January 15, just four weeks after the Portuguese conductor’s appearance on the podium at U.C. Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, the Berkeley Symphony board announced Carneiro’s appointment as Nagano’s successor. “Her interaction with the musicians, and the level to which she brought them in four rehearsals, was remarkable,” says Berkeley Symphony board President Kathleen G. Henschel. “She made just the right match with all the constituents.”

Female Conductors Crack the Glass Podium LOS ANGELES TIMES

2009-05-08T09:18:00.001-07:00

Though women are making progress, music directors of big-league orchestras still are overwhelmingly male.

In March, Xian Zhang made history: The Giuseppe Verdi Orchestra in Milan appointed the 35-year-old conductor to the position of music director, making her the first woman to earn that title with an Italian symphony orchestra. Pope Benedict XVI attended her inaugural concert at the Vatican alongside Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, and afterward compared the music to prayer.

Zhang has been associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic, won awards and appeared with major orchestras around the world, including the L.A. Philharmonic at Disney Hall, where she is leading a program of works by Bartok and Prokofiev this weekend.

But opinions about Zhang's new role bouncing about the blogosphere most frequently commented upon her gender. Music aficionados even posted close-up photographs of the Chinese-born and educated Zhang's glitter-painted lips on the Web. It's hard to imagine Gustavo Dudamel receiving the same treatment.

The appointment of a female music director in a country as conservative as Italy has generated considerable buzz and again focused attention on the progress women have made toward taking their place on the podiums of major orchestras -- and the stubborn forces that prevent more of them from getting there.

Classical music institutions throughout the world are embracing the notion of female conductors more than ever. In addition to appearing regularly as guest conductors and in assistant conductor positions with top orchestras, women are now commonly in the running for -- and occasionally winning -- music directorships.

Recent appointments in North American orchestras include Joana Carneiro at the Berkeley Symphony, Laura Jackson at the Reno Philharmonic, Anne Manson at the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Teresa Cheung at the Altoona Symphony, Elizabeth Schulze at the Flagstaff Symphony and Antonia Joy Wilson at the Midland Symphony.

The nation's most established female music directors are proving successful at their jobs. Over the course of JoAnn Falletta's 11-year directorship of the Buffalo Philharmonic, the orchestra's budget has grown from about $7.5 million to $10 million. The orchestra has won two Grammy Awards, made 14 recordings and boasts record subscription levels. Meanwhile, in 2008, the Baltimore Symphony announced its first balanced budget in five years, which observers attribute in part to enthusiasm surrounding the appointment of music director Marin Alsop in 2007.

It couldn't have been more different only a few decades ago. "It is safe to say that until the past 15 or so years, there simply was no woman with an important international conducting career," wrote Henry Fogel, the League of American Orchestras' former president, on his blog in 2007. Despite inroads by such early pioneers as Antonia Brico (1902-89), Sarah Caldwell (1924-2006) and Judith Somogi (1941-88), women rarely appeared on the podiums of major orchestras in the first half of the 20th century.

The 1980s saw a small surge in female conductors, with Alsop, Falletta and the composer-conductor Victoria Bond leading the pack.

These conductors had to fight hard for their success. When Bond was conducting the Pittsburgh Youth Orchestra early in her career, a doorman tried to prevent her from entering the rehearsal studio because he couldn't find her name on the orchestra's list of players. "I looked like a youth orchestra musician, not the conductor," recalls Bond, who is conducting the premiere of her own composition, "Frescoes and Ash," at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Monday evening.

"Then a newspaper guy got hold of the story and ran with it, saying, 'She's no bigger than a bass fiddle, but she's in charge of the orchestra,' " Bond said. "That was all very flattering, but it undermined my sense of authority."

Faletta has an alarming experience in her past as well. "When I was conducting a major symphony on the East Coast, one of the older members of the orchestra said he hoped he would die before seeing a woman on the podium."

The new generation of female conductors don't report the sort of skepticism encountered by their forebears. "I don't feel like I am being held back because of my gender," says Jackson. "I can continue to excel."

They are also reluctant to attribute professional difficulties to their gender.

"The chemistry between an orchestra and its conductor is very subtle. There are times where I feel that there is something not quite right, but I can't be sure why. Is it because I'm a woman or Asian or young or something else?" says Zhang. "I try not to be too sensitive to the fact that I'm a woman. The majority of my experiences have been very positive. I haven't felt any prejudice so far."

There seem to be several reasons for the growing self-confidence and prevalence of female conductors. Female instrumentalists are no longer a novelty in the country's top orchestras, which has helped audiences and industry insiders to accept that women are as capable of the highest levels of musicianship as their male counterparts. The increased visibility of women in leadership positions in politics and government as well as in key orchestral management positions, like L.A. Philharmonic President and Chief Executive Deborah Borda, also has had an impact.

"In the past, people saw leadership as a quality connected solely with men," says Boston Symphony assistant conductor Shi-Yeon Sung. "But now women like [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel hold very important positions, so people see that there is no limit to what women can do."

The increasing availability of training opportunities for women has also helped to attract more aspiring female conductors. Since its inception in 2002, the League of American Orchestras' Conducting Fellows Program has offered nine fellowships to up-and-coming conductors. Four of the recipients have been women.

The Taki Concordia Fellowship, founded by Alsop in 2003, exclusively supports the development of female conductors through mentorship and providing professional conducting opportunities with major orchestras alongside established musical directors such as Alsop.

"The fellowship provided me with a unique experience both in terms of the significant podium time as well as one-on-one coaching with Marin," says recipient Jackson. "I learned a ton from her. She was able to say things to me that no man would have dared to say. Once, when she was watching my left hand, Marin shook her head and said, 'Your left hand is way too girly.' We laughed. Her comments cut to the chase."

In the past, a conductor's job was largely wielding a baton from on high. These days, the role demands a more collaborative, nurturing approach. Orchestras expect their conductors to work as partners with the musicians and the community rather than be aloof artistic dictators.

"The old idea of the autocrat who led by absolute authority has fallen away," says Jesse Rosen, president of the League of American Orchestras. "The qualities of leadership have changed, enabling different types of people who possess strong partnering and nourishing skills, many of them women, to inhabit leadership roles."

If today's up-and-coming female conductors are able to ignore gender issues, it's partly thanks to their forebears.

"Without these amazing women, I know history for my generation would have been very different," says Carneiro. "I feel a deep sense of gratitude towards pioneers like Marin and JoAnn who have made it possible for my generation to have full access to all the opportunities we have. I have never felt I won or lost an audition or competition because of the fact that I am a woman. It was always based on musical reasons. This is a very profound gift and a privilege when we think of our recent history."

Yet the podium still remains largely male territory. Women head up only 11.9% of the country's symphonies, according to the latest data from the orchestra league. While female conductors are now more regularly ascending to music director positions at small and midsize orchestras, only two women in this country -- Falletta and Alsop -- run big-league institutions.

Conductor training programs continue to be dominated by male students. Tanglewood's three conducting fellowships all went to men this year. The Los Angeles Philharmonic's new conducting program offered four fellowships, all of them to male conductors; of the 26 conducting students enrolled on the Juilliard School's prestigious program since 1990, only four have been women.

And some people's minds change slowly. "A while ago, I auditioned for a music director position and was one of two finalists," recalls Sarah Ioannides, music director of the El Paso and Spartanburg, S.C., symphonies. "I didn't get the job. Later, I found out from a board member that the executive director didn't want a woman on the podium for its 50th-anniversary season."

Still, it may not be too long before the world's most august classical music institutions hire female music directors.

"I think we'll see a woman at the top within a decade," says Alsop, who hopes that there will be enough professional female conductors working in the world some day to open the Taki Concordia fellowship up to male applicants. "Then again, I might have said the same thing 25 years ago and would have been proved wrong. Hope springs eternal for me."