Messiah

Started: 2025-12-31 11:00:27

Submitted: 2025-12-31 12:43:31

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Seeing the Messiah in San Francisco

As we approached the holiday season, I decided we should do holiday-involved activities to observe the season and establish some traditions and set up some holiday-involved memories. We made a list of various activities (including several performances of the Nutcracker and Messiah) and presented them to our kids to give them some agency in the process. They decided they'd like to go to the holiday lights display at Vasona County Park in Los Gatos, and Julian also expressed interest in ice skating.

Grace Cathedral at night

No one else in my family wanted to see Messiah, so I went by myself to Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco. (The last time we saw Messiah was when Kiesa was six months pregnant with Calvin; he spent the performance kicking during the arias.) This was the first time I've actually visited Grace Cathedral (it seems like it should be further than it really is, but it's only a ten-minute walk up hill from Union Square). I spent much of the intermission admiring the construction: it's a Gothic Revival cathedral built entirely out of reinforced concrete. The fluted columns flanking the nave look like they were each built from a single pour into specifically-shaped molds. The walls and vaults predict Brutalism with visible mold marks from carefully-placed wooden beams. The tracing in the vaulted ceiling hung in open space (but I couldn't get a good picture of the most elaborate tracing because the nave was lit from above with lights shining from above, so the free-floating ribs would have been invisible in any picture). The entire building was a spectacular monument to reinforced concrete; and now I have a hook to bring my family back to visit the cathedral as tourists.

Inside Grace Cathedral

(Actually getting to Grace Cathedral proved more difficult than I had expected. I encountered slow traffic around collisions on highways 17 and 280; it took me two hours to drive to Daly City. This ate up the margin I was hoping to use to eat supper in the city; I grabbed a sandwich at Canyon Market and ate it while walking up Nob Hill to the cathedral.)

Messiah inside Grace Cathedral

The music itself was spectacular. I sat in the middle of the pews in the nave; we had assigned numbered seats but there was no real indication where these seats were supposed to be (except that there were supposed to be 12 seats across the pew so we sort of had to sort ourselves accordingly). The orchestra was seated on the floor, so I couldn't really see them over the heads ahead of me; but I could see some of the choir on risers on both sides of the orchestra, and the soloists as they stood up to sing. I followed along with the text in the program, which helped me understand what the soloists were singing.

(I listened to a recording of the Messiah on heavy repeat on the living room stereo while I was in high school, so the music is baked into my memory. Even though we occasionally misinterpreted lines like "Oh we like sheep".)

"Hallelujah", at the end of the second part, was spectacular. The program had a sidebar discussing the convention about standing during the chorus, with a question about the provenance of the tradition and a comment about anti-colonial sentiment casting aspersions on the tradition. The conventions of classical music meant that the audience didn't react at all to the spectacular performance of the show-stopping set-piece. My normal experiences at concerts is that the audience would erupt in riotous applause; but this was one movement in a long piece so the audience remained completely silent aside from a general shuffling as we all sat down. Overall there was little visible audience reaction aside from polite applause at the end of the first part (before the intermission) and at the end of the third part (at the end of the concert, when the performers all took their bows). It's not like I expected a mosh pit to break out at the front of the nave but even a little more head-bobbing or otherwise swaying to the music seems like it would have been in line (but having stated that thought now I want to see an audience slam-dancing in response to a heavy metal cover of "Hallelujah", and I hope saying it out loud is enough to manifest it into being).

The whole performance was a great experience.

My route back home took me by Union Square, where I could see the Christmas decorations including a large Christmas tree in the middle of the square (overlooking an ice-skating rink) and the red-and-green colored lights illuminating Macy's.

Union Square lit up for Christmas