Chapter 64 - San Francisco
December 24, 2000
11/26 We arrived in San Francisco this afternoon, after a lovely ride up Interstate 280 from San Jose. Traffic was surprisingly light, and we enjoyed the views along one of the prettiest suburban expressways in the country. We usually stay on the ocean at Pacifica, but this time we chose Candlestick RV Park, in San Francisco, to be a little closer to the museums and concerts in central San Francisco - perhaps even within reach of public transportation, since parking is almost impossible to find in some central areas, particularly for our big truck.
Candlestick is a mixed bag. It's neat and well-maintained, conveniently located, and even fairly quiet by urban standards. But the sites are very cramped - only 15 feet wide, with insufficient space to park our truck. Fortunately, the park is only about half full this week, and there is no game at 3COM Stadium on the first weekend we'll be here. (The park tends to be fully reserved far in advance for football weekends, since it is right across the street from the stadium.) It's also very expensive - $45/night (although a temporary "4 nights for the price of 3" deal helps a bit). One plus is that the RV Park is adjacent to a State Park which provides hiking and biking trails along the bayshore.
11/28 Helen went to the Asian Art Museum. Dave went for a bike ride. The bike ride didn't last long. Perhaps half a mile from the campground, I ran over some broken glass in the road, ruining a tire. The tire held together long enough to ride back, but needs replacing.
The Asian Art Museum included a roomful of ancient Korean works. In other rooms, a tour guide emphasized the propagation of Buddhism from its origin in India east through China to Korea and on to Japan. She highlighted features of the Buddha images from the early times in each nation show modifications that reflected the esthetic taste of the new culture.
11/29 Dave had a talk with the campground manager about where to find various stores. As we looked through the Yellow Pages listing, he would glance at an address and mumble "too far", then another and say "closer", and then would recommend the "closest" place. But I gradually realized that his concept of closeness had little to do with actual miles and much more to do with driving time and parking. Addresses in central San Francisco (about 7 miles) were "too far", while Redwood City (25 miles down the expressway) seemed reasonable to him. Having tried to find parking in the central city in the past, I mostly agreed with his assessment. I ended up finding the stores I needed (bike shop, hardware, post office, grocery) in Brisbane, South San Francisco, and San Bruno, five to eight miles south of the campground. The hardware store owner in Brisbane directed me to a bike shop in "South City" (which I discovered meant the city of South San Francisco), and his directions for getting there were simply "go around the mountain" (San Bruno Mountain).
Brisbane is a sleepy little village in the middle of the megalopolis - cut off by being tucked into a valley surrounded on three sides by San Bruno Mountain, and mostly cut off on the east side by railroad tracks and Highway 101. Parking was abundant and free along the main streets. I was delighted to find that the hardware store is one of the few survivors of the kind of hardware store that existed 50 years ago - crammed full of every conceivable kind of hardware and tool, uneven cement floors narrow aisles, with an old proprietor who knows exactly where everything is located. The customers (except for me) all seemed to be locals, known by name, and all having old-fashioned charge accounts, maintained in penciled notations on a yellowed, dog-eared card file kept conveniently on top of the counter. This kind of store doesn’t send you a bill. Rather, you stop in every once in a while, check your account, and pay whatever you can afford toward the outstanding balance.
San Bruno and South San Francisco are bigger and busier, but still provide relatively easy driving and parking.
12/1 We left for Berkeley in mid-afternoon, hoping to avoid the commuter rush. We still sat in stop-and-go traffic for 10 minutes or so on the approaches to the Bay Bridge. In Berkeley, we felt fortunate to find a parking place on the street where we could walk just a few blocks to both the museum and the concert venue, near the south edge of the UCB campus.
The UCB Art Museum building is architecturally interesting, with galleries on cantilevered balconies thrusting out into large open spaces under a high ceiling. But the construction material is straight from the "Modern American Bombshelter" school of industrial design - consisting entirely of bare discolored concrete, decorated with the knotholes and cracks of the plywood forms into which the concrete was poured. With limited time, we concentrated on two galleries. The first was an exhibit of California landscape painting from the late 19th and early 20th C. This included several huge landscapes by Gottardo Piazzoni, an artist previously unknown to us. His muted colors and somewhat abstract style effectively captured the feel of the grass and live oak-covered California coastal hills. Earlier works by many other artists were more representational, including a big romanticized view of Yosemite Valley by Bierstadt.
The Asian display had very nice pottery, bronzes, and screens.
The concert, by an East Bay group called Soli Deo Gloria, was held in the First Congregational Church. The mixed chorus of about 35 voices, and small orchestra (12 strings and woodwinds) gave a competent, enjoyable rendition of four works that were all unfamiliar to us - Vivaldi's Magnificat, Bach's Cantata 36, Buxtehude's Das Neugeborne Kindelein, and Michael Haydn's Lauft, ihr Hirten.
12/2 Tonight's concert was by Slavyanka Russian Men's Chorus. This San Francisco-based group performed at St. John Baptist Serbian Orthodox Church, and we looked forward to seeing an exotic church as well as listening to exotic music. We were disappointed to find that the concert was held in a general-purpose assembly room on a lower level, not in the sanctuary. The audience of about 100 appeared to be mostly from the local ethnic community. When we arrived, refreshments were being served to everyone, and we felt like we were crashing a family wedding reception.
But the music was wonderful - interesting arrangements of both secular and liturgical music from Russia and Georgia. The concert opened with a guest appearance by Boyan Knezevich, a wonderful young bass from the San Francisco Opera.
Most of the music was unfamiliar to us, although a couple of pieces were unusual arrangements of familiar songs (Meadowlands and Song of the Volga Boatmen). The 22-man choir was competent and versatile, and had the requisite section of deep Russian basses. (Actually some of the basses had Scandinavian surnames - we've known that the genes for those deep voices were found all across northern Europe). A couple of the men were singing low notes that I didn't believe were humanly possible. The shortest, smallest man seemed to have the deepest voice. What a delight!
It was a special treat to find that two of the singers were skilled in Mongolian Hoomi throat singing - humming a bass note and simultaneously picking out melodies by selectively amplifying and controlling very high harmonics of that note - far above the normal range of the human voice.
12/3 Tonight's venue was St. Gregory Nyssen Episcopal Church in San Francisco, where the California Bach Society, with the Sex Chordæ Consort of Viols, presented a Christmas Vespers concert, a re-creation of the Vespers service as it might have been performed Christmas Eve in Venice in the late 1600's. The music was mostly by Monteverdi, but also included sections by other composers who were employed at St. Marks in Venice before and after Monteverdi. A pre-concert lecture was given by Jeffry Kurtzman, Professor of Musical History at Washington University, who literally wrote the book on 17th C. Vespers and Compline music. He ably explained the complex musical and liturgical tradition surrounding this service.
The program was long - almost 2.5 hours, with no intermission. But the performance was captivating and the attention of the capacity audience never noticeably flagged. The six excellent soloists have impressive credentials as early music specialists, performing nationally and in Europe, and also are section leaders within the 30-voice chorus. We were especially impressed with soprano Catherine Webster. The chorus and small orchestra (2 violins, 4 viols, and small organ) were also excellent, providing us with much to praise and nothing to criticize.
12/5 We took the RV Park's shuttle into the city to a drop-off point near Chinatown. From there, we walked south to Yerba Buena Center where we walked around the park and attended the IMAX film 'Wild California". Then we took a long walk to the west, past the New St Mary's Church to the Japan Center, where we enjoyed browsing through the shops and art galleries. A bag of roasted chestnuts sustained us for the long walk back to the shuttle pickup point in gathering darkness, past a couple of small city parks, one with a tall lighted Christmas tree.
12/8/00 Attending concerts in strange places with little advance information leads to occasional surprises - both good and bad. Tonight, we drove to St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park for a performance by a group called Magnificat. We knew from their web page that this is a small professional ensemble of early music specialists, and that they would be performing an unfamiliar Christmas work from the late 17th century.
The first bit of serendipity was the hall itself - an oak-paneled gem. The chapel of the seminary is large - a long narrow hall with three rows of elaborate hand-carved oak pews along each long side, facing inward, partitioned into separate seats for each individual. The high vaulted ceilings are supported by curved wood beams and covered with wood paneling. The long side walls have large stained glass windows, although we arrived after dark and couldn't see what they looked like.
The second surprise was a half-hour unadvertised pre-concert lecture, which we fortunately arrived early enough to hear. And during the lecture, we were informed that this performance was an historic event - the first time this music has been performed in 308 years and perhaps the third time it has ever been performed. Director Warren Stewart discovered the only known copy of the score in a library in Vienna, and prepared a performance edition. The composition is Il Trionfo dell' Amor Divino, (The Triumph of Divine Love), written by Giuseppe Pacieri in 1687, for the entertainment and enlightenment of a gathering of Cardinals at the Vatican on Christmas Eve. It is an allegorical depiction of the significance of Christ's birth, set as a conversation among five soloists representing Divine Love, Faith, Humanity, Idolatry, and Hell, accompanied by harpsichord and five string players.
The next surprise was the performer's impressive biographies in the program - we hadn't expected such illustrious artists. This prepared us for an outstanding listening experience and we were not disappointed. The soloists were excellent. The composition was interesting and enjoyable, although it probably won't become a best-seller.
12/9 A panorama of lights glowed below us as we parked on a hill and walked to St. Gregory Nyssen Episcopal Church - our second time there this season. Tonight's concert was by the San Francisco Choral Artists, a 21-voice professional mixed choir based in San Francisco. In contrast to the last few concerts we've attended, this program was predominantly 20th-century music, mostly from the first half of the century, with a couple of more recent compositions and a couple of much earlier works. For us, it was an enjoyable blend of familiar and unfamiliar music - some pieces we've performed ourselves, and others so unfamiliar that we'd never even heard of the composer. We've heard this group twice in previous years and expected a polished performance. We weren't disappointed - it was a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
12/10 The RV Park has gradually been filling up with big rigs in anticipation of "tailgate" parties at the 49'ers game today. It's not as noisy as we had feared, and not as crowded either, even though the campground was selling regular parking spaces for cars wherever they could fit anyone in (at $30/car), since we are closer to the stadium than many of the regular parking lots. But many rigs had set up picnic table feasts and had TV's going with eastern games by 10am. The park quieted down a bit after the game started, although we could hear the crowd roar at the action across the street in the stadium. We knew we had to leave before the game was over or we would be caught in a massive traffic jam to get across the Bay bridge.
Back to Berkeley, and back to the First Congregational Church, for a concert by the Baroque Choral Guild and The Whole Noyse, augmented with a small organ and bass viol. The former is a 76-voice community choir. The Whole Noyse is a professional wind and brass ensemble, specialists in music of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, playing modern reproductions of cornetts, sackbuts, and curtals from that era. The curtal, a new instrument to us, looks like a truncated bassoon. This seems to be the year for music of the Italian High Renaissance, since this is the third concert we've heard this season featuring Italian sacred music from the late 16th century. This concert, like the California Bach Society concert last week, featured composers associated with St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, although the music in tonight's concert was chosen from a period about 50 years earlier than that in last week's program, resulting in no overlap of the specific compositions performed. Except for an occasionally weak tenor section, the performance was competent and was overall very enjoyable. The entire nation seems to have a shortage of tenors. Perhaps someone should institute a special breeding program.
Before the concert, Helen visited the Anthropology Museum (which turned out to be a waste of time), and Dave wandered around the campus for a while, coming across an outdoor jam session of percussionists which was producing some amazingly sophisticated sounds. Dave also couldn't resist browsing a campus store specializing in classical CD's. With considerable restraint, he managed to leave with only three new CD's.
12/11 The big party rigs didn't all leave the campground after the game. There must be another game here soon. Seems as if nobody is living in these rigs during the week.
12/12 Helen went off to the DeYoung Art Museum to see some old friends - on the walls in the 19thC American Gallery. There are more Bierstadt paintings here than any other museum, at least 8 on display today, most of them California vistas including two of Yosemite. Nearby rooms contained several other artist' views of Niagara Falls, and even one of Lake Ontario at Sodus, NY.
The highlight was a travelling exhibition of Chura Obata's works. Obata's ink wash drawings of the Japanese Internment camp in Utah that his family was forced into during the war were very interesting. One doesn't normally see Japanese-scrolls with desert scenes or barracks or barbed wire or water towers in them. His delicate style made them seem almost beautiful. The video showing Obata creating more recent screens showed sketchy brush strokes miraculously creating dramatic and delicate images in seconds — a fish leaping from a blue wave, bamboo leaves, peach blossoms. In his lectures, he used to ask an audience member to make a mark, any mark, on a blank sheet, and then he made a drawing that incorporated it as an essential line in the drawing.
12/14 The Oakland Museum is housed in a large, fairly new, building. The exhibit spaces are large and well-suited to their purpose, and the exterior gardens are attractive, but most of the building itself is depressing - made of exposed unadorned bare poured concrete. There are three floors, devoted respectively to art, history, and natural science.
The art collection is narrowly focussed on the local area - with works about, or artists resident in, the bay area, the central coast, the central valley, and the Sierras. Partly because of this focus, we found much of the collection very interesting and enjoyable. We were particularly impressed with an unusually large collection of late 19th century landscape (and seascape) painting. William Keith and Thomas Hill are particularly well represented, but there are many other artists as well, including Alfred Bierstadt, Ransom Holderidge, Raymond Telland, and Herman Hertzog.
We saw two turn-of-the-century silver gelatin prints by Willard E. Worden and an 1874 Jos Harrington oil portrait of "The Palace Hotel's first Chef", Jules Harder, both of whom may be distant relatives of Helen.
The history collection also focussed narrowly on the Bay Area, beginning with the pre-historic native populations and continuing through the growth of middle-class affluence and the "yuppie" phenomenon and then the early days of the high-tech silicon-based industries in the 1970's. There was a large section which presented a historical view of the "hippie", "flower child", and "beatnik" eras which are so closely associated with Berkeley.
A special exhibition, "The Forbidden City", highlighted treasures from the Imperial Palace of China. Boxes, jewelry, and costumes, all heavily ornamented. All the screens were portraits of royalty. Very little in the exhibit had the grace or simplicity usually seen in Chinese furniture and gardens. The bells were interesting. A rank of sixteen bells were just flat 7"x 9" slabs of spinach jade, all the same size and shape except for thickness. Each thickness corresponded to a different note. The text said that only one carefully selected note was played per ceremony.
12/15 We knew nothing the San Jose Choral Project other than sketchy information on their web site. It turns out to be a 32-voice mixed choir based in San Jose. They chose an ambitious and varied program for this concert, and are repeating the concert several times around the Bay area.
We attended their concert at Mission Dolores Basilica this evening. The church is large and unusual - incorporating rounded arches of smoothly dressed stone with vaguely Moorish architecture and a large central dome. The acoustics were very live, with a long reverberation time. The opening piece was perfect for this environment - an Ave Maria for two choirs by Thomas Luis de Victoria, written for exactly this kind of setting and sung with the two choirs in high balconies on opposite sides of the hall. We were seated under the dome halfway in-between.
The group moved smoothly from this late 16th century music through the centuries all the way to contemporary music by Arvo Pärt and Morten Lauridsen. Most of the program was sung without accompaniment, although enlivened occasionally by group members doubling on percussion, drum, and recorders, and a few pieces with guest performers on organ or oboe. The chorus moved from place to place in the church and rearranged itself into various groupings appropriate to the particular composition being performed.
The performance was always enjoyable and occasionally awesome, in spite of a few minor lapses in intonation, timing, and blend. We bought their two CDs and hear the same kinds of minor problems in the recording. These folks obviously aspire to be world-class, and are pushing their limits outward and upward as hard and fast as they can. The results are often impressive, although the inevitable consequence of testing their limits is that they occasionally fall a bit short.
12/16 The San Francisco Bach Choir, David R. Babbitt, Director, claims to be the oldest continuing community choir in the Western United States, having been in existence for six decades. For this concert, they joined with Coro Hispano de San Francisco and Conjunto Nuevo Mundo, founded and directed by Juan Pedro Gaffney R. (the name's not a misprint, although we don't understand the significance of the "R."). Coro Hispano is a choir drawn from the Bay Area Hispanic community and dressed for this concert in a variety of colorful shawls and scarves. Conjunto Nuevo Mundo is an ensemble of vocal soloists and early instruments from the Spanish world. The total ensemble was about 100 chorus members, nine vocal soloists, and 16 instrumentalists. Each choir sang a few pieces by itself. Much of this music is inherently polychoral - written for two or three choirs - and used the entire ensemble.
The program was early Christmas music from Spain and the Spanish-speaking portions of the Americas. A substantial number of Spanish composers and musicians were included in the migrations from Spain to the New World in the 1500's and 1600's, and brought with them the classical musical training of the Spanish baroque period. Some of the churches in Mexico and South America were quite affluent, and supported a music program fully as large as in the major courts and cathedrals of Europe. As a result, a great deal of high-quality church music was written and performed in the New World during this period. The formal liturgical music (settings of sacred texts, in Latin) stayed quite close to European traditions and forms.
Less formal church music, in both Spain and the New World, was written in the vernacular and often incorporated elements from local folk music. One piece performed tonight had almost no European influence, being a contemporary arrangement of old Andean folk melodies, sung in Quechua and accompanied by indigenous flutes and percussion.
The entire program was staged with considerable pageantry. The huge ornate church set the scene. The first portion of the concert was performed in almost total darkness, lit only by candles which each performer had clipped to their music. The first piece was a processional chant, sung in Quechua, with the singers initially spaced out along the full length of the side aisles of the church, singing from that position, then processing up the center aisle to the chancel where the candlelight caused the gold leaf in the dome to glow softly overhead. In an oddly modern intrusion, the conductor's glo-stick baton glimmered blue-white like a Halloween prop.
The pageantry and the exotic music, language, and instruments added up to very effective presentation. But the large distances and long reverberation time of the huge church tended to blur and homogenize the sound, so that details were lost. We'd like to hear the music again, with crisper acoustics.
12/17 The park has been filling up for another Football Sunday - apparently the last home game of the season - and is now jammed. Fortunately, tonight's concert was just a few miles away at St. Ignatius Catholic Church, so we were able to wait until the football crowd had dispersed before leaving our campsite.
Chanticleer is a 12-voice male choir which bills itself as the "only full-time classical vocal ensemble in the United States". Tonight they performed before a wildly enthusiastic "home" audience, and gave their usual polished and incredibly virtuosic performance. The program ranged from Gregorian Chant to recent works by John Tavener, and ended with medleys of spirituals and Christmas Carols arranged by for the group by Joe Jennings.
We were initially worried about how the small group would sound in the huge acoustically live church, and we arrived very early so as to get the best seats possible. From our seats, at least, the sound was fine. Chanticleer performed several works while processing up and down the aisles, and stopped to do complete songs from several points throughout the space, giving even those people far in the rear a chance to hear a sample of their close-up sound.
12/19 Helen flew to Delaware to be with our daughter Leata, who has some minor surgery planned.
12/20 Dave packed up, hitched up, and headed south. Although it's been pleasant here, it will be nice to get to a place a few degrees warmer, and with less fog and smog. The next chapter will be written in San Diego.