San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Increase in alfresco performances during pandemic a welcome trend
Ever since I resumed going to musical events regularly, there’s been one aspect of the experience that has sometimes been noticeably absent: a roof. Also walls, for that matter.
Thanks in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced a lot of musical organizations out of their usual performing setup — and out of their comfort zones as well — outdoor performances of classical music have suddenly become more common around the Bay Area.
And, I have to say, I like it. A little starlight and birdsong goes beautifully with humanmade music. Why not let God, or Mother Nature, or whatever you prefer to call her, chip in a little on the lighting and sound design?
Just over the past month or two, the San Francisco Symphony undertook a weekly concert series at Stanford’s bucolic Frost Amphitheater, picking up plans that had just gotten under way in 2019 but were sidelined by the pandemic. The Merola Opera Program presented its Grand Finale concert, usually held in the aptly grand setting of the War Memorial Opera House, in the Golden Gate Park Bandshell.
Perhaps most promising of all is the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda, for years the exclusive outdoor home of the California Shakespeare Theater. Now the company has opened its doors to other local arts groups, including West Edge Opera, the Berkeley Symphony and the aerial dance company Bandaloop.
None of this is completely novel, of course. Just on the classical front — to say nothing of the big outdoor rock venues — Sigmund Stern Grove in San Francisco has played host to a variety of performers over the decades, and so has the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. Before the pandemic, the San Francisco Opera’s annual Opera in the Park event used to fill Robin Williams Meadow, and will probably do so again. Summer festivals in the Wine Country and beyond have long mixed fresh air with live orchestral and chamber music.
Still, the recent spate of alfresco music feels different somehow. Like the urban parklets, outdoor restaurant seating and slow streets that have sprung up around San Francisco, these could be experimental tendrils that the cultural world has sent out in the wake of the coronavirus disasters — feelers to see what new configurations might be sustainable.
One of the obvious benefits of outdoor music-making has already been mentioned — the absence of walls. The Merola Grand Finale on the afternoon of July 31 was a wonderfully porous free event, and part of the joy of it was watching random passersby, including families with children, drift in to enjoy an aria or two and then go on about their day. That’s a qualitatively different experience of opera from having to show a ticket to get inside the doors of a building.
Even standard events, such as West Edge Opera’s phenomenal local premiere of Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell’s 2017 opera “Elizabeth Cree,” present a different aspect out in the open. They may not be freely permeable by unticketed folks (which is fair, since artists have to eat too), but they’re in touch with the world in a way indoor performances can’t be.
The helicopter passing overhead, the stealthy shifts of light and dark in the latening twilight, the sharp variations in temperature — all of these can sometimes register as mild annoyances in the moment. But they provide a vivid layer of nubby reality to the proceedings, just like the imperfections and the rough-hewn sonic texture that make some audiophiles prefer vinyl to the gleaming sterility of digital recordings.
Still, all these events represent a forcible transplantation of the music from its intended setting. Janácek’s “Katya Kabanova” was composed to be heard in an opera house, and Sibelius’ Second Symphony in a concert hall. Chamber music was written for, you know,
The real payoff comes in music that was created expressly for performance outdoors, though such opportunities are rare. Handel’s “Water Music,” with its loud, lusty groups of woodwinds and brass, was intended to be audible by King George I from his royal barge on the Thames, and I live in hope of one day hearing the piece across water rather than in a dull old concert hall.
But one of my most treasured outdoor musical memories was the local premiere of John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit,” a sort of large-scale musical mobile for an ensemble of anywhere from nine to 99 percussionists. The musicians, and the music, gradually spread out across a landscape, making sounds that interact with the birds, the trees and the breezes. Audience members can optionally move around as well.
When the piece was presented in 2012 as part of Cal Performances’ Ojai North festival, rhythms and harmonies suffused Faculty Glade on the UC Berkeley campus — not like water filling a lake bed, but with a subtler and more delicate touch. You got the feeling that the landscape, the music and the human presence were all part of a single intertwined organism, a blend of biology and art. Music in the outdoors doesn’t get much more thrilling than that.