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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Leaded Stained Glass and Unled Brass
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By Robert Commanday
St. Patrick's Church, one of the city's historic treasures, on Wednesday, the second, began playing host to one of the more amiable musical traditions around, the weekly Noontime Concerts. These have been moved from Old St. Mary's Cathedral while it is being fitted out with a seismic corset. About 300 loyal lunchtime music lovers made the move as well and gave every evidence of being comfortable and contented in the new venue. That's testimony enough to the success of the 10 year-old series and its some 600 half-hour concerts to date.
The church's location on Mission Street, across from the Yerba Buena Center and its pleasant park, close by the Modern Museum of Art and the other new cultural and entertainment facilities, gives it a fresh prominence or rather, restores it to its historic place. In 1876, just four years after St. Patrick's was built, the Grand Opera House was opened a few doors away on Mission Street near Third. It was the second largest such auditorium in the country and said to be the most elegant. For 30 years until the Earthquake and Fire destroyed both structures, St. Patrick's was undoubtedly the church of choice for the visiting opera singers. While the records are lost of course, one can reasonably conjecture that the internationally renowned Adelina Patti came to mass there during her sensational visits in 1880 and 1884.
Other possible operatic visitors to the church might well have been the tenor Francesco Tamagno (the first to sing "Otello"), the soprano Emma Albani, baritone Giuseppe Campanari, the great Edouard de Reszke and conceivably,during the Metropolitan Opera's 1905 and 1906 visits to the Grand Opera House, Enrico Caruso and his friend, the great baritone Antonio Scotti. Who knows but that now and again one of these might have sung in St. Patrick's at some special service? Of course the "Irish Church of California" was then a different structure from the one that was rebuilt in 1914, the one we see today, with its cut-off tower replacing the original's lofty, slender spire.
Such speculating and the church's lost history were in any case not on the audience's mind Wednesday as the bright and shiny sound of the Bay Brass rang vibrantly among the gracile marble columns, echoing between the walls of the nave, the Tiffany stained glass windows illuminated by the noonday sun. The sonority as such was excellent, for these eight players are first-rate, drawn from the San Francisco Opera, Ballet, Symphony and San Jose Symphony. Their music-making however, was another thing, run-on, utterly lacking in character. The Bay Brass seemed not to be following any leader. They'd just start up a piece, stay in tempo, play to the end and stop. The phrasing had no particular definition, no clarifying accents, no preparation of the endings.
Although there wasn't much differentiation between the works in the playing, for the record these were Dukas' Fanfare from "La Peri," a Sonata (septet) by Buonamente, an unnamed aria by Handel (in a transcription for quintet), an unnamed Elizabethan madrigal (in a transcription for three trumpets), an arrangement for quintet of Ralph Carmichael's "A Quiet Place," richly harmonized, and Gabrielli's Sonata "pian' e forte."
The sonority was the thing and evidently satisfying to the audience. Music for brass after all makes a smart opener. The Noontime Concerts continue Wednesdays at 12:30 p.m.: September 9 - a male alto, cello and portative organ, the 16th - Arlekin String Quaret, 23rd - the harpist Anna Maria Mendieta, 30th - the San Francisco Saxophone Quartet, and on through the year.
(Robert Commanday, SFCV's Editor, is the former music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle.)
©1998 Robert Commanday, all rights reserved
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