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EVENT REVIEW
May 12, 2006
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Love Fest at Zellerbach By Mickey Butts
It was a night of worthy performances, for a worthy cause — the 100th birthday of Cal Performances, which helped transform Berkeley into the "Athens of the West" when it was founded in 1906 with a performance by Sarah Bernhardt at the Hearst Greek Theater. But Friday's performance, at three hours long (not including the elaborate gala dinner afterward produced by Alice Waters and Stanlee Gatti), provided a surfeit of worthiness to go around.
The eclectic smorgasbord of artistic and musical styles, a veritable spectacle of biblical proportions at times, left this witness with a bit of indigestion by the end. But the feast was at least delectable most of the time, even if the individual dishes didn't always complement each other.
The highlight of the first half of the performance wasn't simply the 14 dancers of the Mark Morris Dance Group, no matter how fluidly and effusively the dancers cascaded across the stage, alternately embracing and crawling around on all fours. The group has long been a fixture at Cal Performances ("We've been here a lot," deadpanned Morris with endearing casualness later, acting as an emcee). MMDG replayed the lyrical piece V, which previewed at Cal Performances in 2001. In an age when dance groups rely on canned music, Morris deserves kudos for not only offering the real thing in performance, but also for truly understanding classical music more than any choreographer alive, always melding the art forms of music and dance into a powerful unity of expression.
This time, Robert Schumann's Quintet for Piano and Strings in E-Flat Major, Op. 44, propelled the dancing and was performed with great sensitivity and expression by the MMDG Music Ensemble (Jesse Mills, Jennifer Curtis, David Cerutti, Wolfram Koessel, and Steven Beck). The string quartet and piano ensemble were shoved to the side of the stage but still managed to steal the show. This ensemble deserves to get its own chance in the spotlight one day soon.
Next up was an excerpt from John Adams' theater piece I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, which premiered at Cal Performances in 1995 (and has not aged well). New-music darlings Alarm Will Sound laid down driving synthesizer lines, syncopated wind musings, and the occasional Pink Floyd-esque electric guitar flashback moment, as an enthusiastic vocal ensemble shouted out banal, repetitive, and often oddly lewd and nonerotic lyrics. Mark Morris quipped that the group looked like it was in Radio City Music Hall when it rose up from the pit. Broadway is more like it. The less said about this insipid send-up, the better. Even Adams seemed sheepish about its inclusion in the evening as he made his longwinded introduction to Michael Tilson Thomas, who followed on stage. After a bit of crowd-pleasing shtick, MTT took to the piano with soprano and Phantom of the Opera star Lisa Vroman in a tongue-in-cheek act that reprised at least part of their performance, down to the slow striptease of Vroman's long black gloves, from a symposium during the San Francisco Symphony's "Beethoven's Vienna" festival in 2004. With a straight face, Tilson Thomas and Vroman romped through the ridiculous Bacchannal for Piano and Tambourine by the now-obscure pianist and composer Daniel Steibelt (1765-1823), inventor of the trembling keyboard tremolo technique and the one-time Beethoven rival who never set foot in Vienna again after suffering a humiliating defeat in 1800 in an improvisation contest with Beethoven. Vroman and Tilson Thomas continued in this vein with an amusing rendition of Cole Porter's songs, as imagined by Rachmaninoff, if that indeed can be imagined.
Following an impressive 11-minute film narrated by composer Jake Heggie, featuring interviews with dozens of the world's leading performers paying tribute to Cal Performances, the evening came to a close with a gargantuan chorus drawing from the UC Alumni Chorus, the University Chorus, the UC Choral Ensembles, the Piedmont Children's Choirs, and members of the San Francisco Symphony and Opera choruses, along with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and tenor Michael Hayes, performing Arrigo Boito's celestial Prologue to Mefistofele, and choral selections from Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. More than 200 singers were spread across every nook and cranny of the Zellerbach stage — two mighty phalanxes of tenors and basses on either side of the hall (with the children washing up a side tier), and a wall of women tall enough to stop the pharoah's army in its tracks behind the parted Red Sea. Cal Performances director Robert Cole marked his 20th year with the organization by conducting the combined forces with passion and a steady beat from the podium, leading his army, in thunderous crescendos, toward a unified and rapturous rush of sound. After such a circuitous musical journey, it took a few moments to regain my bearings under the full moon outside Zellerbach, as I pondered what new artistic forces this vital institution will unleash over the next hundred years.
(Mickey Butts is executive director, editor, and and publisher of San Francisco Classical Voice. His writing has appeared in Salon, Food & Wine, The Industry Standard, Wired, Parenting, Sunset, The Nation, and The San Francisco Chronicle.)
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