The weather was a pleasure. While much of the rest of the country roasted, San Francisco last weekend appeared a beatific city lorded over by mild yet sunny cerulean skies and ideally chilly nights.
Civic Center and the adjacent Hayes Valley neighborhood offered their own musical gratifications. June is a special month for the San Francisco Symphony, whose music director is allowed to indulge his passions. San Francisco Opera boasts a June festival of three operas, and the incomparable Kronos Quartet mounts its own festival.
Symphony, opera and Kronos were all marvelous. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted an exalted performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony in Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, the orchestra brass as golden as a certain nearby bridge. Next door at the War Memorial Opera House, a gripping performance introduced America to Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Innocence,” a shocking drama of gun violence. A couple of blocks away at SF Jazz, Kronos celebrated its 50th anniversary, reminding us that this ensemble has changed music like no other.
All venues were full. All audiences I joined were infectiously rapt. All three institutions, it might be added, still provided large glossy program books with extensive notes, something nearly extinct in the rest of the country.
Yet everywhere I went there was an inescapable feeling of doom, of disquieting calm before the storm. Lovely days now, but summer forebodes fires. Apparent urban bliss camouflages San Francisco’s seemingly insoluble urban ills.
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As I headed into Davies Hall for the Sunday matinee, I was greeted by a longtime member of the orchestra handing out yellow fliers on which was a message from the musicians to patrons. “The board is trying to turn us into a regional orchestra,” the bass player angrily announced.
The symphony is indeed in a state of turmoil that feels existential. Four years ago, Salonen became music director with the mandate to foster innovation, following what he had accomplished in his 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Unfortunately, the city and its orchestra were hard hit by the pandemic. Rather than give Salonen the support to realize his bold vision, the San Francisco Symphony, which sits on a $345-million endowment (the second largest of any American orchestra), slashed, slashed and slashed some more. Management insists the institution will otherwise run out of cash. Dire financial projections have become self-fulfilling prophecy.
Salonen has refused to renew his contract (which runs for one more season) after the board scaled back a European tour, new commissions, innovative programming and staged productions with Peter Sellars, its much-heralded digital media, its “Concerts for Kids” series and the far-reaching creative partners from various walks of music and technology Salonen appointed. A black-box series, SoundBox, a hit with young audiences, has been downgraded as well. Frank Gehry’s proposals for inexpensive experimental new halls made by refashioning warehouses on Treasure Island should be a no-brainer, but for this board they are a nonstarter. A musicians strike looks likely in the fall.
Still, one ironic outcome from these troubles is an orchestra hell-bent on proving its worth. There was in its performance Sunday — which opened with a wondrous performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto and soloist Yefim Bronfman — unrelenting intensity. Meanwhile, Bruckner’s brazen rhythmic patterns in his “Romantic” symphony sounded like bodacious calls for change and expletives against the board. In the composer’s grand lyrical phrases, the orchestra seemed to say, with profound expression, Read our collective hearts.
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A scene from the San Francisco Opera production of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”
(Corey Weaver / San Francisco Opera)
The atmosphere at San Francisco Opera feels to an outsider more accepting than bellicose. But it, too, has instituted large cutbacks. Facing rising costs in producing opera, it will reduce the number of operas performed from eight to six next season. That’s a third the number the company once presented. The big difference between this company and the orchestra, however, is that the will to continue its mission appears unchanged, and new ways are being explored to pay for it.
I met with Matthew Shilvock, the company’s general director and a trained musicologist. He says costs are rising so rapidly that every year an additional $2 million to $3 million is needed for even this modest number of productions.
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Shilvock’s strategy is to productively tap into the kind of crisis intensity felt by his neighboring symphony. Every production, every performance needs to matter. That includes continuing to present new and challenging work.
“Innocence,” which has been a hit, gives him confidence that this is the right approach. The opera, which had its premiere in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2021, was the last for Saariaho, who died a year ago. It is also a change of direction from her earlier profoundly philosophical and poetic pieces, all done in collaboration with Sellars.
There is little of that poetry or profundity here; “Innocence” is more akin to a Netflix drama. Ten years after a school shooting in which 10 students and their teacher were killed, the mother of one of the victims and the young shooter confront each other at a party. The students are ghosts, actors with speaking roles. There are strange and startling twists of plot keeping the audience in suspense.
The issue of gun violence was presented with complexity. The fashionable production by Simon Stone is cleverly devised on a revolving stage. The large cast of singing actors proved uniformly excellent Friday night, the last of the six performances. The enthusiastic conductor, Clément Mao-Takacs, could be overly flashy, but the real glory in the opera, its saving grace in many ways, was the exceptional beauty and expression of Saariaho’s orchestral writing, and this came through spectacularly well.
Under a surface of undulating sonic beauty, the roots of the shattering elements in “Innocence” can be found in Saariaho’s 1987 “Nymphéa” for string quartet and electronics. That happens to be one of more than 1,000 string quartets Kronos has commissioned over the last half century. Thanks to Kronos, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and many of the great names of the 20th and 21st centuries — along with composers in rock, jazz, country, folk, raga, Chinese pipa music and other global traditions from every continent — turned to this unlikely medium.
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The Kronos Quartet performs with the San Francisco Girls Chorus at SF Jazz on Saturday night in San Francisco.
(Lenny Gonzalez / Kronos Quartet)
No ensemble in the history of music has come close to doing so much, and a four-night festival can’t come close to exhibiting it. So with but a little looking back, Kronos did what it always does: look ahead, performing new music.
Saturday night, the first of the two programs I heard, was the premiere of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s spiritually spellbound “The Space Between.” There was a movement from Riley’s new, otherworldly “This Assortment of Atoms — One Time Only!” This is one of the Kronos Quartet’s “50 for the Future” commissions from composers, Glass and Laurie Anderson among them, producing works suitable for young string quartets. All the scores are made available for free on the Kronos website, and more than 38,000 scores have been downloaded in 108 countries and territories.
The concert also included two feisty new works by teenage composers Hannah Wolkowitz and Ilaria Hawley. The San Francisco Girls Chorus joined Kronos for works by the likes of Yoko Ono, Pete Seeger and Mali singer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté. At the end, the guest was Iranian singer Mahsa Vahdat.
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The festival ended Sunday with Sam Green’s live Kronos documentary film “A Thousand Thoughts,” which includes live performances by the Kronos. This was the 46th and last time the film will be shown. Two key members of the quartet from the last four-plus decades, violinist John Sherba and Hank Dutt, are retiring. It was a bittersweet, deeply moving and loving finale.
What will happen next to the Kronos? The ensemble also is losing its first and only manager, Janet Cowperthwaite, who behind the scenes made the commissions and all else possible. First violinist David Harrington, the quartet’s visionary founder, will soldier on with cellist Paul Wiancko and two new young players, violinist Gabriela Díaz and violist Ayane Kozasa.
An era has ended. But Harrington is the most optimistic musician I know. His record of accomplishing the unthinkable has made him an unerring San Francisco symbol for the future.
It would be a poor investment not to bet on Kronos. Harrington has made the impossible happen not by cutting back but by tirelessly seeking more. He has gained international support by not letting anything stop him.
The San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Opera could do the same by believing in the future, beginning with digging into the damn endowments. The city, too, could (and typically does) do worse than following Kronos’ extraordinary belief in the possible. We all could. The model exists.
An intriguing romantic relationship but also a series of issues in Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in Four Parts
Shot in Sri Lanka, “Ben and Suzanne” is a film that unfolds on a number of levels, from a tour guide to the country to the exploration of a rather complicated relationship. It is Shaun Seneviratze’s feature debut and it was shot mostly with local non-actors.
Ben Santhanaraj travels to Sri Lanka in order to reunite with Suzanne Hopper, who works for a local NGO, after a long separation. However, although his plans were to see the country and have a good time with her, she is stuck with work, which comes up at any given time. As time passes, their relationship is being tested by both the fact and a number of other episodes, while the ego and individuality of both seems to place another set of burdens.
Allow me to start with the negative. There are two archetypes of Western people living in Asian countries, or even simply staying for a bit. The one is the ‘savior’ who probably works for a Western NGO and tries to help, considering their effort life-altering for the locals, in a most of the time rather big misconception. The second is the ‘tourist’ who just wants to have a good time inside the usual bubble tourists experience, retaining as many of the tendencies they keep in their country of living, frequently complaining about everything. These two rather annoying archetypes do not represent everyone of course, but are quite prevalent, and they are also exactly the personas of the two protagonists. Suzanne is the ‘savior’ and Ben is the ‘tourist’.
Expectedly, and considering they both consider their wants as above everything, they soon find themselves clashing, with each one, but particularly Ben actually flaunting the aforementioned to each other, in probably one of most entertaining and realistic aspects of the narrative. At the same time, though, and in a yet another annoying aspect of the movie, there is no indication why those two ever got together. They seem to have nothing in common, or ever had for that matter, maybe except from the fact that he likes to make her laugh by clowning and she is quite susceptible to it. Whether that is enough for a relationship does not sound like a question with a positive answer.
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The above essentially makes the whole approach of the movie somewhat naive, particularly because it also includes an outsider’s epidermal view of the country, especially when one compares it with a similar film we watched recently, “Paradise” by Prasanna Vithanage, or any other local films for that matter.
There are, however, a number of things that do work for the film. For starters, the chemistry of the two protagonists is impressive, with Anastasia Olowin as Suzanne and Sathya Sridharan as Ben presenting the fact that they have known each other for some time and that they both have changed quite eloquently. Their rapport is quite entertaining to watch, particularly in the erotic scenes and the moments they have fun with each other. Their fights could have been handled a bit better, but overall, this aspect is one of the best of the movie.
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The same applies to the cinematography, with the 1:1 ratio giving a very appealing retro essence to the movie, and the overall capturing of the country by Molly Scotti is occasionally impressive to watch, despite the focus on realism. Joe Violette’s editing could have been a bit better in the succession of the scenes, but the overall pace is definitely fitting.
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“Ben and Suzanne” has its merits, and the relationship in its center is appealing to watch. However, it frequently feels as a film that was supposed to be shot in the US, just found itself in Sri Lanka without being able to realize the difference or what to do with the fact.
Two days before they’re due to play the first date of a headlining theater tour, the members of the rock band Diiv are sitting around a picnic table in the parking lot of a Burbank rehearsal studio, reminiscing about the arena shows they opened last fall for Depeche Mode.
They talk about the glittery jackets frontman Dave Gahan wore onstage (only to slip them off after a few minutes) and the moves he’d bust every night on a catwalk; they talk about the confidence they developed by playing in front of thousands of people who hadn’t turned up to see Diiv (but who were open to being won over by the right performance).
Also: They talk about catering. “Man, I miss that,” guitarist Andrew Bailey says as though lost in a memory of endless chafing dishes.
Diiv is going without many of the borrowed perks of A-list rock stardom on the road behind its latest album, “Frog in Boiling Water.” After launching in early June, the tour stops at the Wiltern in Los Angeles — Diiv’s hometown, more or less, since three of the four members moved here from New York a few years ago — on Saturday night.
Yet the musicians, all in their mid to late 30s, seem no less eager to be out playing their new songs; indeed, they say the music reflects the fact that “we’ve committed our lives to this band,” as bassist Colin Caulfield puts it, even minus the kind of “long-term infrastructure” that might appeal to people their age. Adds Caulfield, wryly: “No one’s matching our 401(k).”
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Diiv’s determination is warranted. Easily the most impressive of the group’s four LPs, “Frog in Boiling Water” is probably also the best rock record released so far this year: a dense and luxurious set of hooky post-shoegaze guitar jams that evokes a dream-pop Nirvana. With their layers of fuzz and their trippy yet propulsive grooves, songs like “Brown Paper Bag” and “Raining on Your Pillow” fit easily into the shoegaze revival that’s taken off lately on TikTok and introduced bands from the 1980s and ’90s such as My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive — noisy but sensitive types known for staring down at their effects pedals — to a new generation of young fans. Yet Diiv pairs those immersive textures with songwriting much sturdier than what you’ll find on, say, Spotify’s popular Shoegaze Now playlist.
“When it comes to music in this genre, there’s a lot of trying to emulate what’s come before,” says Jasamine White-Gluz of the Montreal band No Joy, which has toured with Diiv. “So you’re kind of just doing a ‘Loveless’ or doing a ‘Souvlaki’ — trying to fit in the box of what shoegaze is,” she adds, referring to the seminal albums by MBV and Slowdive, respectively. “Diiv doesn’t do that — they’ve got their own sound. They’re in the box but they’re making the box bigger.”
Part of what distinguishes “Frog in Boiling Water” is the political thrust of singer Zachary Cole Smith’s lyrics, which ponder the brutality of late-stage capitalism and the deceptions of the military-industrial complex — ideas he says he was drawn to after he and his wife brought their first child into the world about a year ago. (That his words about “rotating villains profit[ing] off suffering” are intelligible at all represents something of a break from a lot of shoegaze music, in which vocals serve as just one more instrumental component.)
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“I think the record has a sense of hope,” Smith says, “despite all the evidence that we’re heading toward total f—ing collapse.”
Optimistic or not, the album’s focus on the outside world represents Smith’s effort to move beyond the personal demons that long defined Diiv. In 2013, Smith was arrested in New York with his then-girlfriend, singer Sky Ferreira, for possession of heroin; he exhaustively detailed his experiences with addiction and recovery on Diiv’s 2016 “Is the Is Are” and 2019 “Deceiver.” Of the latter, Smith says his hope was that it “took the trash out a little bit, so that now we can talk about other things in our music.”
Yet a recent review of “Frog in Boiling Water” in Pitchfork made him wonder if he’s attained that leeway. In a thread on X that went indie-rock viral, Smith wrote about seeing his music “met with an unwillingness to accept me as the person I’ve worked so diligently the last eight years to become”; he also lamented that his bandmates — Diiv’s fourth member is drummer Ben Newman — are “still at the mercy of a public tendency to root discussion of our band around a past that they personally suffered from as well.” (The review, which was positive, opened with a mention of Smith’s arrest.)
“These events in my life, I don’t get to decide when people stop talking about them,” Smith acknowledges in Burbank. “But not including the rest of the story or where it led me, I think that’s a damaging mind-set for people in sobriety. It makes me sad to think about somebody who’s experiencing addiction seeing that and being like, ‘Damn, I’m just always going to be this destructive force,’” he says. “People can change — profoundly.”
Zachary Cole Smith of Diiv
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
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One effect of Smith’s change is a democratizing of Diiv’s creative process. During the band’s early days, the music was unquestionably a product of Smith’s vision, a situation he looks back at with complicated feelings: “In my active addiction I was selfish and ego-driven in a really unsustainable way,” he admits; recovery led him to “want to retreat from a leadership role” and invite more participation from his bandmates à la Sonic Youth, to name one touchstone act with more than one person in a controlling role.
“I think that choice to open it up to being everyone’s band is what made the record great,” says Chris Coady, who produced “Frog in Boiling Water” and who’s known for his work with TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. “As a producer, it was a bit of a nightmare,” he adds with a laugh, explaining that getting everyone to agree on every decision meant that the sessions at his studio in northeast L.A. weren’t brief. “But all four of them are good at all kinds of stuff, and this allowed them to come together in such a cool way.”
That shared investment in Diiv — and in the belief that together they’ve hit a new artistic peak with “Frog in Boiling Water” — has buoyed the band’s members after a long stretch of turmoil, even at a moment when making a living as a musician feels more precarious to many than it has in decades.
“All our eggs are in this basket,” Smith says as he heads back into rehearsal. “It’s scary — and thrilling.”
It’s a silent nightmare in New York when monsters appear and ravage the world – but it’s an exciting ride when it’s back on the big screen.
White knuckle thrills abound in A Quiet Place: Day One, the new horror adventure from Paramount that’s infinitely stronger than a franchise spin-off movie has any business being.
That’s thanks to two luminous, dedicated talents: the first is writer and director Sarnoski, taking over from A Quiet Place franchise creator John Krasinski (who, in a funny contrast, made the family film IF this year instead), and the other is Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Sam, the woman on a quest for pizza and a happy memory.
Instead of following the main cast from the popular 2018 and 2021 films, Nyong’o leads a smaller scale quest looking at Sam, a dying cancer patient, who unluckily gets trapped in Manhattan on the titular “Day One” when the auditory alien monsters arrive and begin an apocalyptic takeover of Earth.
(For those unfamiliar: the monsters from the films are an unknown species of predators who eat humans, but they’re blind and can only detect prey if they make sound.)
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Audiences saw a small taste of that day in the prologue for 2021’s Part II, but that was in a small, midwest town. But this time it’s the millions of people in New York all being threatened at once, and some of the chases and crowd-crashing scenes are scarily tight.
Sarnoski’s eye for terrorizing vignettes and setting up smart, scary obstacles for Sam throughout the city is endlessly creative and exciting. Crashed subways, abandoned buildings, power outages and some wild weather all pose scary, sound-like obstacles that’s more gripping than the last.
The real standout is Nyong’o, who almost never leaves the screen throughout the 90-minute film. Her conviction and fear are so palpable and engaging that audiences can’t help but get invested in Sam’s survival.
A premise of Sam wanting one last moment of peace before either the aliens or her cancer gets her may sound like too simple a premise. Under the careful nuance of Sarnoski’s direction, the team has made both a bright and bleak thriller that’s great summer entertainment.
What’s most compelling in the script are the moments when, despite the disaster, Sam (and her scene-stealing cat Frodo) is appreciating the small signs of life in the desolate city. Even though things literally couldn’t be worse, somehow Sam still has some small hope left.
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Audiences will gasp and jump at this latest silent screamer, and if the quality control is this good, there will likely be more quiet places to find even after three movies. I’m certainly excited for what this world brings next.
