When B. and I went to New York in 2000 and wanted to see a musical on Broadway, we wound up at a revival production of The Music Man. (The Producers hadn't opened yet.) Yesterday we went to see a local production of The Music Man. It was just about as good as the one on Broadway.
The costumes and set designs were outstanding and very evocative of the period at which the story is set. (So was the recorded music during intermission, which was Babes in Toyland.) Marian had a very strong voice and a firm rather than feisty personality. Harold Hill was no Robert Preston, but who else on earth is? He was very good anyway and sold that charm well.
But the real stars of the show were the ensemble. The large number of children, both teens and pre-, were outstanding, especially in the enthusiasm of their movements, dancing and otherwise. The adult ensemble shone most brightly in their singing. The "Pick-a-little/Goodnight Ladies" number jumped crisply and was the highlight of the show.
It was the chipper enthusiasm with which everything was done which really sold this show. Even those awkward moments when the lights were cut and a large cast had to clear the stage for the next scene didn't slow this baby down.
Only problem was that the orchestra was too loud. It's The Music Man, so they had 3 trumpets and 4 trombones, yeeks.
It's playing through next weekend (Friday-Sunday), so anyone near Palo Alto with a taste for this stuff should run and see it immediately. Tickets here.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Sunday, May 5, 2024
Saturday, May 4, 2024
not an anniversary
Anybody inclined to call this Star Wars Day because May the Fourth be with you - I've seen that joke twice already this morning and it's only 10 AM - should remember that the actual anniversary of the release of the first movie is May 25.
Its Wikipedia article says that "It was released in a small number of theaters ... and quickly became a surprise blockbuster hit." It was a small number of theaters to show it on the biggest screens available - that was how you got the impact of the opening scene with the Imperial ship coming overhead on and on and on. And that it was a hit was no surprise in the SF community, which had been talking about it for months and which hardly could have been more than a small percentage of the people who lined up at those few theaters to see it on opening day.
I had been rather skeptical - a neo-space opera didn't sound like my kind of movie - but I was convinced to go see it by a big writeup in the previous week's Time magazine (hardly the mark of a movie whose hit status was going to come as a surprise), which argued that it was less an adventure story than a fun story. All right, I'll go see a fun movie.
And I came out thinking, "Hmm, not bad." Had the world been of my taste, the movie would have amused inoffensively and been forgotten.
And there certainly would have been no sequels. I'm going to put aside the increasingly dismayed feelings I had upon watching each of its successors until I quit doing so after "Phantom Menace" and also the increasingly dismayed feelings I had on rewatching the first two movies, which are the only ones tolerable enough that I ever have rewatched them, and merely pass on my firm conviction, reinforced every time I do watch them, that Darth Vader is NOT Luke's father. I am absolutely convinced, and what I've read about the writing of the scripts confirms this, that that equation was never intended or even thought of until the final scene to "Empire" was added, because nothing else said about either Vader or Anakin in either movie makes sense unless they're different people. This goes far beyond what Obi-Wan says to Luke about how Vader killed Anakin. This is an example of a "surprise" story in which the eventual "true" explanation makes less sense than the "false" ones discarded along the way.
(It's not the only example of this. Similarly, Norman Bates isn't dressing up as his mother. The movie doesn't make any sense if he is.)
By the way, "Darth" isn't the title of a Sith Lord in the first movie. It's Vader's given name. Obi-Wan uses it that way.
If I'm going to have a Star Wars mythology, I prefer the original.
Its Wikipedia article says that "It was released in a small number of theaters ... and quickly became a surprise blockbuster hit." It was a small number of theaters to show it on the biggest screens available - that was how you got the impact of the opening scene with the Imperial ship coming overhead on and on and on. And that it was a hit was no surprise in the SF community, which had been talking about it for months and which hardly could have been more than a small percentage of the people who lined up at those few theaters to see it on opening day.
I had been rather skeptical - a neo-space opera didn't sound like my kind of movie - but I was convinced to go see it by a big writeup in the previous week's Time magazine (hardly the mark of a movie whose hit status was going to come as a surprise), which argued that it was less an adventure story than a fun story. All right, I'll go see a fun movie.
And I came out thinking, "Hmm, not bad." Had the world been of my taste, the movie would have amused inoffensively and been forgotten.
And there certainly would have been no sequels. I'm going to put aside the increasingly dismayed feelings I had upon watching each of its successors until I quit doing so after "Phantom Menace" and also the increasingly dismayed feelings I had on rewatching the first two movies, which are the only ones tolerable enough that I ever have rewatched them, and merely pass on my firm conviction, reinforced every time I do watch them, that Darth Vader is NOT Luke's father. I am absolutely convinced, and what I've read about the writing of the scripts confirms this, that that equation was never intended or even thought of until the final scene to "Empire" was added, because nothing else said about either Vader or Anakin in either movie makes sense unless they're different people. This goes far beyond what Obi-Wan says to Luke about how Vader killed Anakin. This is an example of a "surprise" story in which the eventual "true" explanation makes less sense than the "false" ones discarded along the way.
(It's not the only example of this. Similarly, Norman Bates isn't dressing up as his mother. The movie doesn't make any sense if he is.)
By the way, "Darth" isn't the title of a Sith Lord in the first movie. It's Vader's given name. Obi-Wan uses it that way.
If I'm going to have a Star Wars mythology, I prefer the original.
Thursday, May 2, 2024
not a theatrical review
The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder
I'd seen The Matchmaker and Our Town, I thought I'd go see a local production of this. What little I'd read about it suggested this play was very weird, which is usually a plus in my book. I carefully avoided reading anything else about the play, or the text itself, so that my reactions would be fresh. A couple of very small-local reviews (forwarded in e-mail by the theater) were enthusiastic, so I was hopeful.
The ticket info said it would be 3 hours long and there'd be only one intermission. The intermission came one hour in. I decided I didn't want to sit through another two hours of this, and just left. If anybody from the theater had accosted me and asked why I was leaving, I'd have rolled my eyes and said, "If you have to ask ..." But you, lucky people, weren't there, so I'll try to explain it.
A bit was the acting. The actors tried very hard. The trouble was that you could see them trying. They didn't inhabit the characters, they spoke the lines with over-earnest emotion.
But it was mostly the script. It was weird, but it wasn't coherently weird. The author hits the audience over the head with what would have been clever allusions if they'd been a bit more subtly introduced. The characters keep saying the same things over and over again, as if they didn't think anybody else was paying any attention, and they might have been right. On top of which they also keep changing their minds, back and forth, in a vertiginous manner that seems overgenerated by any stimuli. My interest in the characters rapidly descended below zero.
It might have been funny - at times - without all these problems. After I got home I read the play's Wikipedia article. Had I known it was based on or inspired by Finnegans Wake, I would never have gone at all.
I'd seen The Matchmaker and Our Town, I thought I'd go see a local production of this. What little I'd read about it suggested this play was very weird, which is usually a plus in my book. I carefully avoided reading anything else about the play, or the text itself, so that my reactions would be fresh. A couple of very small-local reviews (forwarded in e-mail by the theater) were enthusiastic, so I was hopeful.
The ticket info said it would be 3 hours long and there'd be only one intermission. The intermission came one hour in. I decided I didn't want to sit through another two hours of this, and just left. If anybody from the theater had accosted me and asked why I was leaving, I'd have rolled my eyes and said, "If you have to ask ..." But you, lucky people, weren't there, so I'll try to explain it.
A bit was the acting. The actors tried very hard. The trouble was that you could see them trying. They didn't inhabit the characters, they spoke the lines with over-earnest emotion.
But it was mostly the script. It was weird, but it wasn't coherently weird. The author hits the audience over the head with what would have been clever allusions if they'd been a bit more subtly introduced. The characters keep saying the same things over and over again, as if they didn't think anybody else was paying any attention, and they might have been right. On top of which they also keep changing their minds, back and forth, in a vertiginous manner that seems overgenerated by any stimuli. My interest in the characters rapidly descended below zero.
It might have been funny - at times - without all these problems. After I got home I read the play's Wikipedia article. Had I known it was based on or inspired by Finnegans Wake, I would never have gone at all.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Kosman speaks
I passed on the news that Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, is retiring after 30 years as the paper's chief (and mostly only) classical critic, and that he'd be giving a public conversation next week. That was Tuesday, and I went.
The venue was terrible. It was the stuffy, tiny back room of a bar in the Mission district, jammed with couches and folding chairs so that it was almost impossible to get past anybody. Sitting there was uncomfortable and cramped.
But the talk, essentially an interview with an audience question period, was very interesting. Some of the highlights:
The venue was terrible. It was the stuffy, tiny back room of a bar in the Mission district, jammed with couches and folding chairs so that it was almost impossible to get past anybody. Sitting there was uncomfortable and cramped.
But the talk, essentially an interview with an audience question period, was very interesting. Some of the highlights:
- Kosman became a critic when he got to university (Yale, I think he said) and found a classical review in the student paper. I can do that, he thought, and volunteered. It was a way to have "a career in music without [having] any particular musical talent."
- When he arrived at the Chronicle in 1988, there were three full-time critics. Every Monday they'd have a meeting and the chief critic, Robert Commanday, would hand out assignments for the week. (I've read of other papers working the same way.) Now he's the only critic, and outlined his priorities for deciding what to cover: A-list performers (the SF Symphony, SF Opera, visiting big names), and otherwise what's interesting: new artists, unusual repertoire.
- He enjoys his work - the point of doing this, he said, is not so much being paid as to get the free tickets - but it's a job. When he was single he learned not to invite dates to accompany him to concerts he was reviewing. "Don't bring a date to your job."
- Try to write for a wide variety of audience, both specialists and the curious general reader. Don't write down to people, and don't write about artists you dislike: it doesn't do anybody any good. (I've noted that Kosman doesn't apply that stricture to works he dislikes.) He doesn't like to take notes: it leads to a boring play-by-play description of the concert. (I don't find it so.) Don't be brutal about bad performances (I agree): as an artist he'd criticized once told him, you can be both honest and a mensch. Try to keep a large vocabulary: "go to the well for words." The artistic possibilities are infinite.
- The nicest performer he's ever met? Yo-Yo Ma. His best work? The recent commentary on the background to Salonen's resignation from SFS. (I agree.) His worst mistake? Praising David Helfgott's Rachmaninoff recording under the spell of the movie Shine. Best concert he ever heard? Victoria de los Ángeles emerging from retirement at 72 as a substitute performer for a recital with SFS. He'd figured her voice would be gone, but the event was "transfixing, mesmerizing." Best anecdote? The time the SFS marketing exec invited him to lunch and slid over a piece of paper with the name of the next music director on the other side. According to the marketing guy, Kosman "jumped out of his seat" when he saw it was Salonen, because Salonen had told Kosman personally that he wasn't interested in the job, and he was the only plausible candidate whom Kosman would find exciting. Also, the time Michael Tilson Thomas - whom Kosman calls a superb raconteur - told Kosman about visiting the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who in turn told MTT about visiting the French composer Olivier Messiaen. So there's MTT imitating Takemitsu imitating Messiaen, and Kosman said he couldn't possibly imitate that himself.
- Asked about musical controversies in general, Kosman's immediate response was "Yuja Wang can wear whatever she wants." She's one of the great artistic geniuses of our day, he says.
- The future of SFS? He wonders if it and the Opera aren't "punching above their weight." It's rare for an urban area this small to have such world-class institutions (what about Cleveland? I wondered), and guesses it may be inevitable that they'll go down a bit in prestige.
- The future of reviewing? Moving online has changed things a lot: you're going for clicks, and Kosman found that an interview he did with Igor Levit about the rare Busoni Piano Concerto, in which Levit described it as the most challenging piece he's ever performed, got more hits than anything else he'd written when the paper used that comment as the headline without identifying the work: people clicked on the article to find out what it was.
- But what will happen at the Chronicle after he's gone? He has no way of knowing. But at this point, a woman in the audience, apparently Kosman's editor, piped up to say that they'll cover the scene as best as they're able, whatever that means, and that they're looking for freelancers. (Will I try to sign up? Probably not. I have two venues that I'm happy with, and that's enough.)
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
end of the St. Lawrence
An announcement appeared in my e-mail and on the St. Lawrence String Quartet website:
I'll miss the group, but really the group was lost when Nuttall died, and everything since then has been a quiet afterlife. Anything that follows will be more of the same.
After a one year hiatus following the death of founding violinist Geoff Nuttall, the members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ) today announced that 2023-24 will be the ensemble’s final season. They are continuing, however, to make their lives at Stanford University, where the SLSQ has been in residence since 1998 —performing, teaching, directing Stanford’s chamber music program, and producing their annual Chamber Music Seminar, in addition to pursuing other musical projects.Well, there's more to the press release than that, but I guess that means they will no longer be giving concerts under the St. Lawrence name, with the three of them plus various guest musicians. I've been going to the public concerts of the Chamber Music Seminar, at which the St. Lawrence musicians host but usually do not perform. I've heard solo recitals by the cellist, but I haven't heard the others without a St. Lawrence label. So I don't know what they're going to do in place of what they have been.
I'll miss the group, but really the group was lost when Nuttall died, and everything since then has been a quiet afterlife. Anything that follows will be more of the same.
Sunday, April 28, 2024
concert review: California Bach Society
A friend had a ticket to this concert that they couldn't use, so passed it on to me. I'm not normally much of a consumer of Baroque choral music, but I don't dislike it by any means, so I was happy to go. And it turned out to be a good concert. A tiny round church in Palo Alto resembling a concrete flying saucer but with excellent acoustics, and a small choir with an impressive sound. That one of the altos is an old fannish friend is only a plus. But I was especially taken with the tenors, often a choir's weak link but powerfully strong here despite there being only five of them. And the whole directed by Paul Flight, who has a very good name hereabouts for directing early vocal music.
The program contained an early motet by Bach, BWV 228, plus similar pieces by Telemann and some other North German composers older than Telemann or Bach: Buxtehude and two I wasn't familiar with, Franz Tunder and Johann Schop. Perhaps I ought to have known of Schop, since according to this he wrote the melody that Bach used for "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." All the pieces sounded lovely, even in German, though a couple had severely Lutheran lyrics. Flight mentioned that the Telemann, an early piece titled "Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein reines Herz" (create in me, God, a clean heart), doesn't sound much like the Telemann we normally hear. I don't know Telemann's choral music enough to tell, but the instrumental parts (the chorus was accompanied by six string players and a positive organ) sure sounded like Telemann to me. But the best work was Buxtehude's "Jesu, meines Lebens Leben" (Jesus, life of my life), with its creative use of the individual sections of the chorus.
Despite the group's name and this program, they don't always sing Baroque. Next season has four concerts, one German Baroque and one French Baroque, an Eastern European Christmas program, and a survey of British choral music "from Tallis to Tavener" which covers over 400 years. That one in particular interests me and I'll probably be back. Singing this good deserves patronage.
The program contained an early motet by Bach, BWV 228, plus similar pieces by Telemann and some other North German composers older than Telemann or Bach: Buxtehude and two I wasn't familiar with, Franz Tunder and Johann Schop. Perhaps I ought to have known of Schop, since according to this he wrote the melody that Bach used for "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." All the pieces sounded lovely, even in German, though a couple had severely Lutheran lyrics. Flight mentioned that the Telemann, an early piece titled "Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein reines Herz" (create in me, God, a clean heart), doesn't sound much like the Telemann we normally hear. I don't know Telemann's choral music enough to tell, but the instrumental parts (the chorus was accompanied by six string players and a positive organ) sure sounded like Telemann to me. But the best work was Buxtehude's "Jesu, meines Lebens Leben" (Jesus, life of my life), with its creative use of the individual sections of the chorus.
Despite the group's name and this program, they don't always sing Baroque. Next season has four concerts, one German Baroque and one French Baroque, an Eastern European Christmas program, and a survey of British choral music "from Tallis to Tavener" which covers over 400 years. That one in particular interests me and I'll probably be back. Singing this good deserves patronage.
Saturday, April 27, 2024
concert review and petition: San Francisco Symphony
Last week, I heard Vaughan Williams's Third Symphony. This week, it was Prokofiev's Third Symphony: equally obscure and rarely-heard, dating from the same period (1920s), but otherwise totally different: violent, stressful, startling, creepy, weird. But, being Prokofiev, it is also strangely lyrical, even beautiful in its ugliness, which is why I find it so much more appealing than equally violent, stressful, etc. works by the likes of Bartok or Stravinsky.
Under guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno (Spanish, like Philip II works mostly in the Low Countries but is also MD in Toronto), the orchestra took it with ferocity and brilliant color. This was a deserving performance which ought to put this piece on the same shelf with the better-known Fifth.
Also on this program, SFS principal violist Jonathan Vinocour was soloist in William Walton's Viola Concerto, which also dates from the same period. The viola is not a very carrying instrument anyway, not when there's only one of it (the whole SFS viola section handled the opening of Prokofiev's slow movement very nicely), and it had a hard time being heard over the loud and clangorous orchestration.
Nevertheless the audience seemed to enjoy it. There weren't many people there, but those who were applauded after each movement of both works, a rather unusual response.
Before the concert, musicians from the orchestra were standing outside, passing out flyers asking audience members to sign their petition online. The petition was linked to only with a QR code, which is useless to me, but I was able to find the petition through searching, it's here.
The petition is to "urge the Board of Governors to do everything in their power to retain Esa-Pekka Salonen as Music Director and reverse planned cuts to programming, touring, and education." I was surprised; I told the musician I was speaking with, a first violinist, that I'd thought Salonen's resignation was definite. She said no, if the cuts that caused him to resign - cuts to the very programs with which they had enticed him to join in the first place - were reversed, he'd stay.
They're also worried that this induced departure, and the pandemic-era musician salary cuts which (unlike at other ensembles) haven't been reversed, will make it hard to attract top players, and the orchestra's quality will suffer. The institution has the funds for this, so what is the problem?
I said I agree. I said there are good orchestras where I live, but I travel 45 miles to hear the SFS because it is so superb. I said I know my history and the disastrous decline in quality after Pierre Monteux retired in 1952, which still hadn't been recovered from when I started going to concerts in 1970. But the last three - four, actually - MDs have been titanic in their quest to rebuild the orchestra, which has been at top quality for over three decades now. It would a shame for that to be lost.
So I'm signing.
Under guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno (Spanish, like Philip II works mostly in the Low Countries but is also MD in Toronto), the orchestra took it with ferocity and brilliant color. This was a deserving performance which ought to put this piece on the same shelf with the better-known Fifth.
Also on this program, SFS principal violist Jonathan Vinocour was soloist in William Walton's Viola Concerto, which also dates from the same period. The viola is not a very carrying instrument anyway, not when there's only one of it (the whole SFS viola section handled the opening of Prokofiev's slow movement very nicely), and it had a hard time being heard over the loud and clangorous orchestration.
Nevertheless the audience seemed to enjoy it. There weren't many people there, but those who were applauded after each movement of both works, a rather unusual response.
Before the concert, musicians from the orchestra were standing outside, passing out flyers asking audience members to sign their petition online. The petition was linked to only with a QR code, which is useless to me, but I was able to find the petition through searching, it's here.
The petition is to "urge the Board of Governors to do everything in their power to retain Esa-Pekka Salonen as Music Director and reverse planned cuts to programming, touring, and education." I was surprised; I told the musician I was speaking with, a first violinist, that I'd thought Salonen's resignation was definite. She said no, if the cuts that caused him to resign - cuts to the very programs with which they had enticed him to join in the first place - were reversed, he'd stay.
They're also worried that this induced departure, and the pandemic-era musician salary cuts which (unlike at other ensembles) haven't been reversed, will make it hard to attract top players, and the orchestra's quality will suffer. The institution has the funds for this, so what is the problem?
I said I agree. I said there are good orchestras where I live, but I travel 45 miles to hear the SFS because it is so superb. I said I know my history and the disastrous decline in quality after Pierre Monteux retired in 1952, which still hadn't been recovered from when I started going to concerts in 1970. But the last three - four, actually - MDs have been titanic in their quest to rebuild the orchestra, which has been at top quality for over three decades now. It would a shame for that to be lost.
So I'm signing.
Friday, April 26, 2024
concert review: Dover Quartet and Leif Ove Andsnes
I almost didn't get to this concert. My plan for Thursday had been to come back from going out to lunch at about 12.30, which would give me time to rest up and complete a few errands, like submitting the week's grocery order online, before driving up to the City at about 2 in time to attend a free student chamber recital at the Conservatory at 4, then have dinner and walk to the nearby Herbst where the evening concert would be.
But then when I was out for lunch, my car's engine started to overheat. The dealer where I get my regular servicing done was 18 miles away, much too far to take with an overheated engine. So I nursed the car a few blocks to an industrial zone where I hoped I'd find an auto repair shop. I did, but they doubted they'd get to my car before Monday (they're closed on weekends). Fortunately the signup didn't take very long, and they were able to get Enterprise to come and pick me up and take me to their rental lot, so I got home and got that stuff done, but at the price of missing the Conservatory recital, and was able to leave by 4, which is my usual time for an evening trip to the City.
So what was there was not quite the Dover Quartet I knew. Since I last heard them, their violist has left and they've gotten a new one - like the rest, she's a Curtis graduate, but is a few years older than the others, who were all classmates. And their first violinist was out sick, so they borrowed the one from the Escher Quartet, whose grittier sound didn't blend ideally with the Dover's smoother texture, but there were no technical difficulties: these players are all far too professionally skilled for that.
I've heard the Brahms piano quintet played slowly with solemn weight, and I think it works better that way, but there's always room for a fiery speed demon of a performance if it's good enough, and this one certainly was, ending with a dazzle. The Dohnanyi Second Quintet, which I've heard at Menlo, the players took more slowly and cautiously, putting the emphasis on the slow sections rather than the sprightly opening. It certainly impressed the fellow I was chatting with at the bus stop after the concert, to whom it was new. Dohanyi was a conservative composer in a revolutionary age, so he tends to get neglected. We then shifted to the winnowing process which filters out the new music that deserves to be forgotten, and to point out how much of that there is, he cited Sturgeon's Law, except that he attributed it to Fred Pohl. I didn't say anything about that, or even indicate that I already knew that principle, but - Fred Pohl. Interesting.
But then when I was out for lunch, my car's engine started to overheat. The dealer where I get my regular servicing done was 18 miles away, much too far to take with an overheated engine. So I nursed the car a few blocks to an industrial zone where I hoped I'd find an auto repair shop. I did, but they doubted they'd get to my car before Monday (they're closed on weekends). Fortunately the signup didn't take very long, and they were able to get Enterprise to come and pick me up and take me to their rental lot, so I got home and got that stuff done, but at the price of missing the Conservatory recital, and was able to leave by 4, which is my usual time for an evening trip to the City.
So what was there was not quite the Dover Quartet I knew. Since I last heard them, their violist has left and they've gotten a new one - like the rest, she's a Curtis graduate, but is a few years older than the others, who were all classmates. And their first violinist was out sick, so they borrowed the one from the Escher Quartet, whose grittier sound didn't blend ideally with the Dover's smoother texture, but there were no technical difficulties: these players are all far too professionally skilled for that.
I've heard the Brahms piano quintet played slowly with solemn weight, and I think it works better that way, but there's always room for a fiery speed demon of a performance if it's good enough, and this one certainly was, ending with a dazzle. The Dohnanyi Second Quintet, which I've heard at Menlo, the players took more slowly and cautiously, putting the emphasis on the slow sections rather than the sprightly opening. It certainly impressed the fellow I was chatting with at the bus stop after the concert, to whom it was new. Dohanyi was a conservative composer in a revolutionary age, so he tends to get neglected. We then shifted to the winnowing process which filters out the new music that deserves to be forgotten, and to point out how much of that there is, he cited Sturgeon's Law, except that he attributed it to Fred Pohl. I didn't say anything about that, or even indicate that I already knew that principle, but - Fred Pohl. Interesting.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
concert review: Monterey Symphony
It takes at least an hour and a half, when there's no traffic (which is rarely the case) to drive from here to Carmel, where the Monterey Symphony plays, and it feels farther away than that. So it's not surprising that I'd only gone once, about 20 years ago, because they were playing Gluck's haunting Iphigénie en Aulide Overture. (Here, this is the recording I discovered in my university music department's record library in my student days, and came back and listened to every day for weeks.)
On the same program, they did pretty well with Mendelssohn's "Reformation" Symphony, a work needing a lot of doing well to be successful at all, but made a total hash out of Bruckner's Te Deum.
So, not a consistent orchestra. But it's been 20 years since then, most of the local professional orchestras have improved greatly over that time, and Monterey has acquired a new music director a couple years ago. So I was primed as heck to get to a concert including a work I'd much like to hear but which is never done, Ralph Vaughan Williams's A Pastoral Symphony, also known as his Third. RVW's nine symphonies don't often make it to US concert halls, but I've managed to hear five others live over the years, though I had to go to London to catch one of them. But the Pastoral? Not a chance. Its title, and its consisting of four movements, "all of them slow" (as the composer quipped, accurately enough), have given it a reputation of being utterly static.
But it isn't. Much of it is tough, even wiry, and it works even better if you hear it as what it really is, not a placid "cowpat school" product, but a memorial to the soldiers who died in the pastoral fields of France in WW1. Though already in his 40s, RVW had served there as a medical aide, driving horse-drawn ambulance wagons.
And then I mentioned to my editor that I was going to this, in place of some other concert he suggested that I cover, so he put this on my schedule instead, and here's the review. I wasn't expecting how much music director Jayce Ogren would emphasize the WW1 background of this work, to the extent of having war scenes projected on the back wall during it, and framing the entire concert as a contemplative, meditative event.
It worked very well, and the performance of the Pastoral gave much satisfaction. RVW's distinct orchestral sound came through consistently, and the whole symphony was an opportunity to bask in it.
And the rest of the concert was good too. Britten's Serenade song cycle was much more incisive than the last time I heard it; Pärt's Cantus came off with an effective production of its ghostly ending; and Adolphus Hailstork is always a reliable workaday composer.
I went to the Sunday matinee performance, a tricky proposition as there's no available parking in Carmel on weekends. The signs on the theater parking lots saying concert parking only didn't stop anyone. But I arrived early enough that there were a couple fugitive spaces left, trudged off to have lunch at a seafood place I remembered being good from my last visit to Carmel ten years ago - it still was - and came back to sit and wait for the concert. It was worth the trouble.
On the same program, they did pretty well with Mendelssohn's "Reformation" Symphony, a work needing a lot of doing well to be successful at all, but made a total hash out of Bruckner's Te Deum.
So, not a consistent orchestra. But it's been 20 years since then, most of the local professional orchestras have improved greatly over that time, and Monterey has acquired a new music director a couple years ago. So I was primed as heck to get to a concert including a work I'd much like to hear but which is never done, Ralph Vaughan Williams's A Pastoral Symphony, also known as his Third. RVW's nine symphonies don't often make it to US concert halls, but I've managed to hear five others live over the years, though I had to go to London to catch one of them. But the Pastoral? Not a chance. Its title, and its consisting of four movements, "all of them slow" (as the composer quipped, accurately enough), have given it a reputation of being utterly static.
But it isn't. Much of it is tough, even wiry, and it works even better if you hear it as what it really is, not a placid "cowpat school" product, but a memorial to the soldiers who died in the pastoral fields of France in WW1. Though already in his 40s, RVW had served there as a medical aide, driving horse-drawn ambulance wagons.
And then I mentioned to my editor that I was going to this, in place of some other concert he suggested that I cover, so he put this on my schedule instead, and here's the review. I wasn't expecting how much music director Jayce Ogren would emphasize the WW1 background of this work, to the extent of having war scenes projected on the back wall during it, and framing the entire concert as a contemplative, meditative event.
It worked very well, and the performance of the Pastoral gave much satisfaction. RVW's distinct orchestral sound came through consistently, and the whole symphony was an opportunity to bask in it.
And the rest of the concert was good too. Britten's Serenade song cycle was much more incisive than the last time I heard it; Pärt's Cantus came off with an effective production of its ghostly ending; and Adolphus Hailstork is always a reliable workaday composer.
I went to the Sunday matinee performance, a tricky proposition as there's no available parking in Carmel on weekends. The signs on the theater parking lots saying concert parking only didn't stop anyone. But I arrived early enough that there were a couple fugitive spaces left, trudged off to have lunch at a seafood place I remembered being good from my last visit to Carmel ten years ago - it still was - and came back to sit and wait for the concert. It was worth the trouble.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
retiring critic
Here's the news: Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, is retiring after 30 years as the paper's chief (and mostly only) classical critic.
Kosman could be a thoughtful reviewer, and I've sometimes found it useful, when we covered the same concert, to triangulate my views against his, especially as our tastes often differ. And I appreciated some of his cultural commentary, especially his recent analysis of what led the SF Symphony and music director Salonen to a parting of the ways. But his frequent tendency to begin - or sometimes spend the entirety of - reviews with complaints of how he disliked the repertoire seemed unprofessional, and a couple times on tangential matters he's seemed to me to cross the line of intellectual honesty.
Still, even with that, it was better to have him than not have him - the more intelligent reviewers out there, the better - and I entirely agree with the thesis of his farewell piece, that a music critic is just a listener - any intelligent, articulate listener - with an opinion of how the concert went. It's your reaction to the artistry displayed before you that counts. But, he adds, how good a critic you are depends on skills that you've learned, and I've found that so. My professional reviewing grew out of my blog reviewing, though it's developed into an idiom of its own, and I've learned a lot in the 20 years I've been doing this.
Kosman says he discovered classical music in his early teens and "knew it was going to be a lifelong commitment." I had the same - I think I was 12 when this happened - though I'd phrase it more as realizing that this was the music for me, the kind of music I'd wanted but didn't know it. Kosman says he had been "an ordinary pop music buff as a kid," but I was not. I detested most of the pop music of the time - and I'm only a couple years older than he is - and floated around listening mostly to comedy songs and musical theater, liking it (as I still do) but not feeling emotionally satisfied until I found the big heavy classics, starting with Beethoven.
Kosman is going to be giving a conversation in a cafe-cum-auditorium in the City next week. I hesitated about getting a ticket, because I wasn't sure what it meant on the announcement page when it said "A free live stream of the event will be available with RSVP." What did that mean? Was it an ornate way of saying that you had to get a ticket to access the live stream? Or did it mean it will be accessed through a program, like Zoom, whose name is "RSVP"? But it didn't make any difference, because by 8 AM when I finally went over to the ticketing page, the free live stream was sold out (how can a free live stream be sold out? that sounds like a contradiction in terms) and I nabbed one of the last live tickets instead. So I guess Kosman has a lot of fans, or at least curious readers. He'll take questions, it says, but I should probably bite my tongue.
One thing he probably won't know is: who will be replacing him? If anyone? And how good will they be? And what will they think of Salonen's successor, whoever that will be?
Kosman could be a thoughtful reviewer, and I've sometimes found it useful, when we covered the same concert, to triangulate my views against his, especially as our tastes often differ. And I appreciated some of his cultural commentary, especially his recent analysis of what led the SF Symphony and music director Salonen to a parting of the ways. But his frequent tendency to begin - or sometimes spend the entirety of - reviews with complaints of how he disliked the repertoire seemed unprofessional, and a couple times on tangential matters he's seemed to me to cross the line of intellectual honesty.
Still, even with that, it was better to have him than not have him - the more intelligent reviewers out there, the better - and I entirely agree with the thesis of his farewell piece, that a music critic is just a listener - any intelligent, articulate listener - with an opinion of how the concert went. It's your reaction to the artistry displayed before you that counts. But, he adds, how good a critic you are depends on skills that you've learned, and I've found that so. My professional reviewing grew out of my blog reviewing, though it's developed into an idiom of its own, and I've learned a lot in the 20 years I've been doing this.
Kosman says he discovered classical music in his early teens and "knew it was going to be a lifelong commitment." I had the same - I think I was 12 when this happened - though I'd phrase it more as realizing that this was the music for me, the kind of music I'd wanted but didn't know it. Kosman says he had been "an ordinary pop music buff as a kid," but I was not. I detested most of the pop music of the time - and I'm only a couple years older than he is - and floated around listening mostly to comedy songs and musical theater, liking it (as I still do) but not feeling emotionally satisfied until I found the big heavy classics, starting with Beethoven.
Kosman is going to be giving a conversation in a cafe-cum-auditorium in the City next week. I hesitated about getting a ticket, because I wasn't sure what it meant on the announcement page when it said "A free live stream of the event will be available with RSVP." What did that mean? Was it an ornate way of saying that you had to get a ticket to access the live stream? Or did it mean it will be accessed through a program, like Zoom, whose name is "RSVP"? But it didn't make any difference, because by 8 AM when I finally went over to the ticketing page, the free live stream was sold out (how can a free live stream be sold out? that sounds like a contradiction in terms) and I nabbed one of the last live tickets instead. So I guess Kosman has a lot of fans, or at least curious readers. He'll take questions, it says, but I should probably bite my tongue.
One thing he probably won't know is: who will be replacing him? If anyone? And how good will they be? And what will they think of Salonen's successor, whoever that will be?
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