Holiday Gaiety: The Music Still Holds its Own

Peaches Christ and Edwin Outwater (from the event page for last night’s performance)

One might say that Holiday Gaiety is the “adult entertainment” side of the eleven Holidays with the Symphony programs presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in Davies Symphony Hall. Conductor Edwin Outwater, who has become a familiar face in Davies since his debut in November of 2001, shared emcee duties with drag icon Peaches Christ. The SFS ensemble was relatively reduced but was joined by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, directed by Jacob Stensberg, and two vocalists, mezzo Nikola Printz, probably familiar to most opera-goers in this town, and Alex Newell. However, most of the show involved Christ’s encounters with four other drag performers: Latrice Royal, Lady Camden, Kylie Minono, and Sister Roma.

It goes without saying that this was not your usual “concert-going evening” in Davies. However, Holiday Gaiety was launched by Outwater and Christ in 2017, and it has been going strong as a “Holiday Standard” ever since then. Mind you, there was no shortage of opportunities just to enjoy the music, beginning with Leroy Anderson’s “A Christmas Festival” serving as overture, a brief excerpt from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 71 music for the ballet The Nutcracker, and the exquisite delivery of Adolphe Adam’s “O Holy Night” by Newell. However, the real show-stopper came from Printz, who delivered a spot-on account of “Casta diva,” from the first act of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma while executing a seriously jaw-dropping trapeze act.

Mine is the generation whose motto, back in the Sixties, was “Let it all hang out.” We grew up thinking that the world was our oyster, and the Vietnam War provided a reality check we had not anticipated. I suppose that is why a song like “I Will Survive” became a hit tune. Holiday Gaiety reminded me of the spirit with which we did survive. Thus, in the midst of all the corny jokes and bad puns (“Women’s Underwear” sung to the tune of “Winter Wonderland”), I realized that my own “spirit of survival” was being delightfully refreshed.

OFS Gets the Jump on Holiday Celebration

Last night at the Little Boxes Theater in Dogpatch, One Found Sound (OFS) revived its Holiday Spectacular with an evening of “Drinks, drag, and Mariah” hosted by Jessie Barrett. Music was provided by one-to-a-part winds and brass, a very modest string section, and a generous serving of percussion with an electric guitar thrown in for good measure. Drag performances were by Nicki J and Obsidenne Obsurd, making for a raucous occasion for both ears and eyes.

The music was seasonal but not strictly holiday oriented. The first half of the program served up a series of warped versions of popular standards. The high point had to be Barrett’s solo version of Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” (I was reminded of one of my favorite Anna Russell lines: “My quartet singing isn’t what it used to be.” Barrett should have been thankful that he had to account for only two voices, rather than four!)

Things sobered up a bit in the second half. Barrett set aside his MC duties to deliver an engaging account of “Greensleeves” on cor anglais. The early music offerings continued with an instrumental version of Thomas Morley’s “Now Is the Month of Maying” and John Dowland’s song “Flow, my tears.” The program then vaulted into the twentieth century for one last seasonal offering, Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride.” By this time the audience could expect anything from Barrett. He was, of course, ready to offer an encore at the drop of a hat; and he wrapped up the evening with “I’m Always Drunk in San Francisco” by Carmen McRae.

For those of my generation, this was definitely a let-it-all-hang-out evening. However, it was also one last hurrah before OSF has to get back to its usual business. Its next concert will be on March 2, and the second half of the program will be devoted entirely to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major. Presenting this music without a conductor will probably be OSF’s most ambitious undertaking to date. In the wake of all the pokes and prods that Barrett delivered, the Beethoven plan definitely has my curiosity piqued!

The SFS Holiday Brass Concert at Davies

Following up on this past Sunday’s Chamber Music Series program, last night’s program in Davies Symphony Hall was entitled Holiday Brass; and, as should be intuitively obvious, the program featured the brass musicians of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). They were joined by a few “guest artists,” also SFS players: Edward Stephan on timpani, percussionists Jacob Nissly, James Lee Wyatt III, Bryce Leafman, and Stan Muncie, and Principal Bass Scott Pingel. The conductor for this occasion was Edwin Outwater. The program featured one original composition and arrangements for different forms of brass ensembles, following up a basically “classical” repertoire with a jazz offering.

That offering was a brass-based arrangement by Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins of a “seasonal offering” from Duke Ellington’s book. In 1960 Ellington decided he would devote an entire program to the music of another composer for one of his Las Vegas gigs. That composer turned out to be Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Ellington worked with Billy Strayhorn to prepare arrangements of movements from Tchaikovsky’s score for The Nutcracker. The result amounted to a new Nutcracker Suite, complete with alternative movement titles. Higgins extended his brass arrangement of Ellington’s full-band instrumentation to include a rhythm section of bass (Pingel) and drum kit (Nissly).

Only four of Ellington’s nine movements were performed last night. The overture was followed by the “Dance of the Floreadores” (based on the “Waltz of the Flowers”), “Sugar Rum Cherry” (a new name for the Sugar Plum Fairy), and the “Peanut Brittle Brigade” march (mistyped in the program book as “Peanut Butter Brigade”). The original Ellington-Strayhorn version, of course, involved more than brass and rhythm; but Higgins had selected those particular movements for holding up to a brass-only version. This served as the final offering on the program, and it certainly involved performance at its liveliest.

Mind you, this conclusion complemented the program getting off to a lively start. As might be expected, this involved an overture performance; and the selection was Peter J. Lawrence’s arrangement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 96, entitled “Festive Overture.” This allowed listeners to adjust to the sonorities of brass and percussion in the absence of strings and winds, but there were no shortcomings in last night’s raucous account of this overture. The same could be said for Higgins’ arrangement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé suite (which gave trumpeter Mark Inouye a generous opportunity for exercise, performing offstage solos from the rear of the Terrace section).

Higgins’ arrangements of three movements from Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sacrae Symphoniae were not credited in the program. These selections were taken from Sacrae Symphoniae tracks recorded by the National Brass Ensemble, consisting of “26 busy musicians from the top nine orchestras in seven stages.” All three of the movements involved antiphonal exchanges between two brass choirs, each with its own unique complement of instruments.

The only one selection on the program that was not an arrangement a three-movement suite by Anthony DiLorenzo, who composed the music for the documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway. The title of last night’s suite was The Toy Maker, and one could easily associate each of the movement titles with the toy being depicted. As might be guessed, the enthusiastic audience demanded an encore after the “nutcracker sweets.” They got Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” complete with the final horse-neigh delivered by trumpeter Inouye while wearing a horse’s head. Those hi-jinks were followed by a more traditional conclusion with an arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne.” We then all filed out into the “cold winter’s night” warmed by the high spirits of the evening.

A Box of Leroy Anderson for Christmas

2016 photograph of Leonard Slatkin (photograph by KokotheDog, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Between April of 2006 and September of 2007, American conductor Leonard Slatkin engaged in a series of sessions with the BBC Concert Orchestra to record the “complete” works of Leroy Anderson for the Naxos American Classics series. About a month ago, the entire collection was released as a box set of five CDs. Since Christmas was one of Anderson’s favored topics (my high school band played his “A Christmas Festival” to death every December), there is at least some justification in justifying this collection getting wrapped with a bow and placed beneath a holiday tree.

Almost all of Anderson’s compositions fall into the category of “light music.” Each piece would fit comfortably on one side of a 45 RPM disc; and, during the Fifties, it would be almost impossible to find a juke box that did not include at least one Anderson disc. His music was also a favorite with audiences of the Boston Pops Orchestra when it was led by Arthur Fielder; and Fielder was responsible for world premiere performances (if that phrase is appropriate) of many Anderson compositions. By the end of the twentieth century, however, most of the Anderson catalog had lapsed into oblivion and would probably have stayed there had Mark Morris not created “Sandpaper Ballet” for the San Francisco Ballet (SFB), which was first performed in the War Memorial Opera House on April 27, 1999.

I have dropped enough clues about my age on this site that regular readers can probably guess that I was exposed to a fair amount of Anderson’s music. Indeed, when I worked as a classical music announcer at WTBS (back when those were the call letters of the campus radio station of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), one of our most brilliant technicians like to boast about his “Holy Trinity” of composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Leroy Anderson. I never had any reason to doubt that he was enthusiastic about all three of them in equal measure.

Some readers may also recall that, this past February, the second program in SFB’s Digital Season included a video of “Sandpaper Ballet” captured at the Opera House on February 16, 2020. While I was not particularly impressed with the choreography, there were quite a few twinges of nostalgia as I listened to Anderson’s music. Listening to the entire content of the Naxos box set revived those twinges more often than not. There were also a few belly laughs, the strongest coming from the loopy sound effects that Anderson summoned for his arrangement of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

Mind you, I am not recommending that listeners try to consume the entirety of this collection in a single sitting. Nevertheless, I came away more than a little impressed with the breadth of Anderson’s diversity. Yes, much of his rhetoric sounds as if it had been cultivated in a corn field; and his “juke box popularity” suggests that many preferred his offerings as background music. Nevertheless, more often than not, Slatkin’s interpretations tend to prompt the attentive listener to sit up and take notice.

As an afterthought it may be worth remembering that Slatkin’s father was Felix Slatkin, a major figure in Hollywood during the Fifties. He conducted both his own Concert Arts Orchestra and the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. While his repertoire included “serious” compositions (such as Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht”), it is hard to imagine that his “pops” activities did not include a generous share of Anderson’s music. Slatkin-the-son planned his recording sessions with the BBC Concert Orchestra to honor the centennial of Anderson’s birth on June 29, 1908; but his interest in Anderson probably came from listening to performances by his father.

“Dancing About Architecture” Finds its Place

Frances Chung dancing Myles Thatcher’s “COLORFORMS” at SFMOMA (photograph by Ezra Hurwitz, © San Francisco Ballet)

Last night San Francisco Ballet began the second program in its 2021 Digital Season, the first of its “mixed repertory” offerings. The program was organized around the first world premiere of the season, “COLORFORMS,” choreographed by Myles Thatcher. Presumably the ballet was named for the creative toy, which consisted of sheets of vinyl pre-cut in such a way that one could lift off basic geometric shapes in different colors and sizes and lay them out on plastic-laminated paperboard to create whatever abstract images mind might imagine.

Thatcher’s “COLORFORMS” was more than just another abstract ballet. Most importantly, it was conceived to be realized as a film, rather than simply activity on a stage that one could view in a theater audience. Thus, “COLORFORMS” is very much a collaboration resulting from Thatcher working with cinematographer Ezra Hurwitz. Freed of the confines of the theater stage, Thatcher spent very little time in the War Memorial Opera House, working instead in and around the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Heroes Grove at Golden Gate Park.

For music Thatcher chose to work with Steve Reich’s “Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings.” Like many of Reich’s works, this is a rhythm-driven composition organized into three movements in a fast-slow-fast framework. The first two of the movements were, for the most part, based in SFMOMA, first the interior, followed by moving out to the sculpture garden. (There are also shots from Yerba Buena Gardens, showing the SFMOMA building in the background.) Golden Gate Park provided the setting for the final movement.

The opening movement established the ballet’s title, presenting dancers in single-color outfits observing art works created with basic colors, often in galleries in which the lighting was also colored. However, as the ballet progressed, the activity of the dancers extended from such elemental imagery to the diverse structural elements of the museum itself. Given what I spend most of my time doing these days, it was hard for me to avoid thinking about that quip originally attributed to comedian Martin Mull: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Thatcher’s choreography was as much a reflection on SFMOMA’s architecture as it was on the play of color in that space, shared among the dancers, the lighting, and what was hanging on the walls.

As the choreography extended its spatial framework, both the sculpture garden and Golden Gate Park provided more “concrete” elements; but the spirit of abstraction remained in the colors of the outfits and Thatcher’s choreography. Most interesting was the continuous sense of flow realized as that choreography peregrinated through the different physical setting established by Hurwitz’ camera work. The result was a thoroughly engaging experience, which never allowed eyes or mind to wander, since something new was always emerging on the horizon of the overall choreographic concept.

If “COLORFORMS” was the colossus of the program, it was flanked on either side by works of far lesser stature. The program began with Dwight Roden’s “LET’S BEGIN AT THE END,” captured on video at the War Memorial Opera House on May 5, 2018. The final selection was Mark Morris’ “Sandpaper Ballet,” captured at the same venue on February 16, 2020. Named after a composition by Leroy Anderson, Morris’ ballet was a suite based on a collection of short works that were favorites during the composer’s lifetime and have now become distant memories. Morris clearly captured the wit behind each of the selections. Sadly, however, his capacity for diversity was far less than Anderson’s. His approach to “Fiddle-Faddle” made for a satisfying grand finale; but it turned out to be only the half-way mark in Morris’ overall plan. When the final curtain descended, the attentive viewer was left wondering if there had been any plan at all.

Nevertheless, Morris always managed to come up with at least a few memorable moments. “LET’S BEGIN AT THE END” was a far drearier affair. For the most part Roden drew upon film music by Michael Nyman, taken from both The End of the Affair and A Zed and Two Noughts. He then injected one of Philip Glass’ piano études (the second), as well as Glass’ third symphony, scored only for strings. There was also a “guest appearance” of the opening Allemande movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor. This wide diversity of music provided the setting for an almost mind-numbing sameness in the choreography with absolutely no sense of the ballet involving any sort of journey from beginning to end. To the extent that the music “came to the rescue,” Mariya Borozina provided a satisfying account of Bach’s Allemande; but, sadly, Natal’ya Feygina overdid the expressiveness in her approach to Glass’ étude, missing the whole point that the composer had in mind.

Remembering the Concert Band

If the second volume of the Mercury Living Presence: The Collector’s Edition reminded me of that MIT student who numbered Leroy Anderson among the great composers, I have to say that there is a generous share of Frederick Fennell conducting the Eastman Wind Ensemble. (Fennell was also the conductor on the Anderson CD.) Having played in my high school's concert band, I had a great interest in "serious" wind ensemble music. Fennell gave exposure to a broad repertoire that seemed to be ignored by just about every other label. The significance of the legacy restored by this collection reaches far back into my personal youth.

"Great" Composers

Back in my undergraduate days, one of my fellow students declared that, in the history of music, there were only three great composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Leroy Anderson. I never expected "Holy Ghost" of that trinity to make it into my collection. However, readers of my national site for Examiner.com probably know that I have been working my way through the second volume of the Mercury Living Presence: The Collector’s Edition. This is the first time I have encountered a collection in which all three of those composers are included. Having already found myself in the situation of having to write about an encore by Anderson (twice, as I recall), I now find that he is part of my collection!

Was Leroy Anderson Banned by the Soviet Union?

That may be the best explanation for why Alexander Vereshagin seems to take such delight in offering his compositions as encores at performances by the Russian Chamber Orchestra. A year ago the encore was "The Typewriter," leading me to go off on one tangent about the "authentic instrument" problem in an age where typewriters are rarely (if at all) manufactured and another on my surprise at writing anything about a composer whose primary claim to fame lay in the number of television programs that used his music for opening and closing theme songs. Today in the Noontime Concerts™ offering at Old St. Mary's Cathedral here in San Francisco, the concert concluded with "Plink, Plank, Plunk!," which contributed to the television panel show, I've Got a Secret. Written strictly for pizzicato strings, this work did not present any demand for period instruments! There was even a certain logic to a twentieth-century encore, since the program began with the third (G major) suite in the eighteenth-century Water Music collection by George Frideric Handel and continued with Franz Schubert's nineteenth-century D. 438 rondo for violin and string orchestra! Furthermore, it is possible that the Soviets had banned Leroy Anderson on the grounds that his music tended to glorify the values of bourgeois capitalism!

Anachronistic Nostalgia

Yesterday I was at a noontime concert by the Russian Chamber Orchestra at which the formal program of Vivaldi and Borodin was followed by Leroy Anderson's "The Typewriter" as an encore. It was hard to listen to this without a sense of nostalgia, even if, back in my days as a card-carrying music theorist, any mention of Anderson's name amounted to a gesture several levels beneath the absurd. Nevertheless, it was impossible to grow up with television in the Fifties and not be aware of Anderson; so, by all rights, we should be able to speak of him now without feelings of guilt!

I am not quite sure why conductor Alexander Vereshagin chose this as an encore, but I have to wonder how he came to know the piece in the first place. It certainly made a nice "fit" to his small string ensemble; but it was more than a little odd to hear the typewriter part being played on the snare drum. This set me to wondering how many people in the audience, let alone the ensemble, had any sense of the sound of a typewriter (and, of course, Anderson had a manual model in mind)! I remember the days (or at least recordings from those days) when the Budapest String Quartet used to perform in Washington on instruments owned by the Library of Congress and wondered if now we would have to draw upon the Smithsonian if we wanted to give an "authentic" performance of this work! (Actually, when I visited Cambodia my entry visa was prepared on a manual typewriter; but that is now more than a decade ago!)

Of course Anderson is not the only "victim" of this new "challenge of authenticity." Erik Satie's ballet Parade also requires a typewriter for the "Petite fille Américaine" scene. I assume there are still a few dance companies around trying to maintain that work in repertoire. It may be harder for a ballet orchestra to come by a manual typewriter than it is for an opera orchestra to borrow a Wagner tuba! Perhaps I should start asking questions about these problems over at the San Francisco Conservatory!