It was an intimate setting for a choir, the Taube Atrium Theater in San Francisco. Rows of benches slanted on either side of the polished grand piano, which stood like grand pianos. Thirty-five choir members, all dressed in black, took their places in a solemn procession. Ian Robertson, San Francisco Chorus Master, and Fabrizio Corona, Associate Chorus Master, followed.

It was immediate and personal, but far from informal. The entire performance was sovereign in its polished performance. It was festive and bittersweet as the choir bid farewell to Ian Robertson after his 35-year tenure. This concert was full of miracles.

The concert spanned 300 years of music, from excerpts from Charpentier’s “Te Deum” and Bach’s “Wohl mir, das ich Jesum” from Cantata BWV 147 to Leonard Bernstein’s “Make Our Garden Grow” from “Candide”. It included choices in Latin, French, German, Spanish, English; Opera from Handel and Mozart to Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini; Poetry; Folk songs and much more. The moods ranged from devout to a little salty, melancholy to happy, each piece its own island of beauty and commentary, the texts projected onto a large wall that worked smoothly and effectively. Who could ask for more?

A lively leader

Ian Robertson conducted and related his attunement to the audience, the content and style of the music, and the choir members and accompanist Fabrizio Contorno created a performance narrative that remained both interesting and aesthetic. No wonder the San Francisco Opera Chorus performed so well during the years of Ian Robertson’s tenure. It was the perfect combination of leadership, music and performance.

The soloists and choir members worked in perfect harmony. Clare Demer, Sara Colburn, Whitney Steele, Andrew Truett, Mitchell Jones offered a rich and beautiful start to the concert with the “Te Deum”. Thomas and Demer have reproduced selections from “Idomeneo” and “L’Elisir d’Amore” with extraordinary finesse. Michael Jankosky delivered a touching Edgardo from “Lucia di Lammermoor”. The choir supplemented this with a moving performance of the “Humming Chorus” from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”, which was sung especially to commemorate the many losses caused by the pandemic.

This was followed by colorful portraits of “Noi siamo zingarelle” and “Di Madride noi siamo mattadori” from Verdi’s “La Traviata”. To highlight these, as Robertson and Contorno did, was to highlight just a few of the varied textures that a great opera like “La Traviata” contains. They remind us that it’s not just the centerpieces that make it shine. The well-known choir “Va, Pensiero” from Verdi’s “Nabucco” ended the first half.

Putting women composers in the spotlight

The second half was great with repertoire choices, especially with a number of female composers. While choirs from Offenbach’s “La Belle Helene” started, the moving chorus of “Dead Soldiers” by Jennifer Higdon, “Cold Mountain”, set the tone with haunting lyrics to Civil War dead with a men chorus. In addition to Jennifer Higdon, we heard works by Joan Szymko, Gabriela Lena Frank, Kate Rusby and Cava Menzies, whose “Invitation to Love”, based on a wonderful poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, premiered. Menzies, who was present, got up to bow. The music was rich and original, the lyrics moving and captivating. The future was there, unfolding, and it was right.

Among the soloists we heard Kathleen Bayler, soprano, and Phillip Pickens, tenor, in a Picante duet “Bailèro” from Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne”; and Angela Moser, Silvie Jensen, Alan Cochran, Mitchell Jones, who perform Ravel’s delightful “Trois Chansons”. This was followed by Joan Szymko’s “All Works of Love” with texts by Mother Teresa, which inspired the reflective strand of the concert, which was interwoven throughout.

A wonderful contrast followed when Michael Belle sang “We’re goin ’round'” from “Treemonisha” by Scott Joplin, which made us want to hear more. The “mountain songs” of the Peruvian Andes came after that and were only sung by the women. They were complex in their rhythms and rendered breathtakingly. Elizabeth Baker, mezzo-soprano, did more than justice to Underneath the Stars, composed by Kate Rusby and arranged by Jim Clements.

Before the “Candide” finale, Matthew Shilvock, General Manager of the San Francisco Opera, gave a formal “Ave” and “Atque Vale (Hail and Farewell)” to Robertson. It was graceful and graceful, listing the 2,000 performances and over 375 productions that Robertson mastered. Shilvock also commended Robertson for creating a family of singers, each with a passion for excellence. Even the happy audience felt the authenticity.

“Make our Garden Grow”, a lyrical interpretation by the well-known American poet Richard Wilbur of Voltaire’s famous “Il faut que nous cultivar notre jardin” was the “Pièce de résistance”. Jesslynn Thomas, Chester Pidduck, Claire Kelm, William O’Neill and Wilford Kelly said goodbye to us wonderfully. This is a good reminder for today – in the world where we seek to be connected, we sometimes push boundaries.

We left the theater, enriched by this diversity of talent and imagination, and we were filled with gratitude shared by Ian Robertson and the San Francisco Chorus as we have so many seasons. Hats off to the conductor, accompanist and all the performers in the group.

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The Jolly Green Giant, Mr. Clean and the Frito Bandito lost one of their most enthusiastic supporters last month with the death of Ellen Havre Weis, a California museum founder and writer who recognized the mythology in American advertising characters.

Weis was the co-founder and director of the Museum of Modern Mythology, a once well-known tourist destination in San Francisco, where a vinyl Michelin man rubbed his elbows with a life-size statue of Colonel Sanders and a plastic figure of the monocled Mr. Peanut, among thousands of others Advertising figures could be seen.

Know with the Michelin man. Photo: San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers / Getty Images

The museum was open to the public for an entry fee of $ 2 from 1982 until it was closed by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

Weis, who also co-founded a PR firm and worked as an advertising manager, never gave up on finding a new home for the quirky collection. Just before she died of brain cancer on July 27 at the age of 64, she and her family signed a contract for a new location for the museum’s characters, which will move to Van Nuys, California.

“We’re trying to get these advertising characters out of their normal sales context and see them as anthropology,” Weis told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “Most of American society is exposed to these images. Certainly the Jolly Green Giant is more recognizable than Zeus – or your State Senator. “

Weis came up with the idea for the museum while living in a warehouse full of lifelike replicas of advertising mascots. Just finished writing school at the University of Iowa, Weis and her boyfriend at the time, Matthew Cohen, had moved to San Francisco to lead the “boho, hippie” lifestyle, according to Gordon Whiting, Weis’ 25-year-old husband. They crashed at a live workspace warehouse owned by friends including Jeff Errick, who was collecting promotional memorabilia.

“Ellen felt that all of these characters were related; they seemed to know each other and belong together, ”said Whiting, who added that Weis had studied mythology to learn how to use its archetypes in her writing. “That sparked their idea that the reason things work as advertising is because they’re mythological archetypes.”

Weis, Cohen, and Errick made the museum in one corner of the warehouse. Within a few years it moved to its own small room in downtown San Francisco and was celebrated in publications such as People Magazine and the New York Times through to German Spiegel.

The original gallery of the museum. Photo: Courtesy Gordon Whiting

Weis loaded characters like the Doggie Diner Head, a giant fiberglass representation of a grinning dachshund that once graced the sign of an American restaurant chain, into a trailer and took them on the streets to various shows, including a long-running one near by Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

Film critic Leonard Maltin featured the collection in his television appearances on Entertainment Tonight and became a board member of the museum.

“While Mr. Peanut and Speedy Alka-Seltzer were made up by someone on Madison Avenue, they had a life of their own like the Frankenstein monster,” Maltin told the Guardian. “Ellen took them out of their normal environment, which was a television screen, and presented them like works of art and developed a thesis that gave them a unity.”

American Express gave the museum $ 10,000 and had its Centurion character brought into the gallery. Photo: Courtesy Gordon Whiting

The last year of the museum, 1989, was heavy. First, someone stole the Doggie Diner head from an outdoor bin in San Francisco. The thing was so big and over two feet high that Whiting says he doesn’t know how anyone could have moved it over the three foot fence.

Then the museum was notified by its landlord that it had to vacate the rented space on the 9th floor of a rickety building from 1906 on Mission Street.

The final blow came on October 17th at 5:04 p.m. when the magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Loma Prieta rocked and rolled the historic building while Weis was moving boxes with figures there.

The museums The building was condemned and the founders had two hours a few days later to clear out their belongings. Weis rounded up an army of volunteers who heaved up the Jolly Green Giant, the Dutch Boy cardboard cutout of the famous color advertisement, and hundreds of boxes of everyone from cigarette mascot Joe Camel to Rice Krispies characters Snap, Crackle and Pop.

In the decades that followed, the figures waited in the warehouse while Weis looked for a new home for the museum. In the meantime, Weis founded WeisPR with her husband Whiting, raised their son Benjamin and eventually became advertising director for Bay Nature Magazine. Along the way, the longtime East Bay resident co-authored Berkeley: the Life and Spirit of a Remarkable Town and wrote fiction as a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Big Boy and Charlie Tuna come out of the camp. Photo: Courtesy Gordon Whiting

In various places she was on the verge of obtaining permission to move the collection to the Smithsonian and Henry Ford Museum. But it wasn’t until she was diagnosed with a brain tumor in January that the path for the museum collection was clear. Ten days before her death at home in Altadena, California, her family received confirmation that the collection would soon be on display at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, Los Angeles.

“It will be running again,” said Whiting, who worked with Benjamin, now 20, to finalize collection plans while tending to Weis as her illness progressed this spring. “She was well enough to know about it and she was satisfied.”

Maltin said he was thrilled to know that Weis’ dream of bringing characters like Tony the Tiger, Mr. Bubbles, and their friends back together in public, was about to come true.

“I’m a 20th century pop culture kid, so I grew up with a lot of these characters,” he said. “But Ellen was the first person I ever met who – for lack of a better word – took her seriously.”

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