concert review: Geneva Lewis, violin

Violin and piano recital at Herbst.

Geneva Lewis has a violin tone that's light and soft, but with a strong bite to it. It gives the effect of a small bird chirping, if the bird could chirp classical music. The sound was highly appropriate for the delicate, fragmentary Post Scriptum Sonata by Valentin Silvestrov, and impressively effective in the Romances by both Robert and Clara Schumann, and Mozart's K. 301 sonata.

Evren Ozel on piano matched her with lightness of touch. He has the softest and most pillowy of rolled chords.

You wouldn't think that the Franck Sonata would work well with this approach, but listen again: most of the first and third movements, and even part of the fourth, work well as light, delicate, and quiet. But both Lewis and Ozel could ramp up to strong and loud dynamics, just not exaggeratedly so, when Franck calls for it.

While I'm on music, a note on the recent death of Joel Krosnick, long-time cellist of the Julliard Quartet. They were among the groups whose records first taught me the string quartet repertoire. Already retired from there, he was at the Banff String Quartet Competition to teach student masterclasses in 2016, the first time I attended. I met him when he sat next to me for one of the competition concerts.

I won the lottery

Oh, relax, it was only $50; but nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and I've never seen a description of what actually happens when you do, so I'm writing about it here.

At Easter, our niece passed out scratch-off lottery cards as a kind of party favor. I got two of them. One of them I couldn't figure out the instructions for, so after scratching off most of its surface in a futile attempt to understand it, I threw it out. The other made sense, though. It had two 4x4 squares showing various occultish tokens - The Rooster, The Mermaid, The Hand, The Cello, etc - and another section which you'd scratch off to reveal a list of 14 more tokens. Match those up with the ones in the squares, which you could scratch off to keep track, and if you got four in a row on a square you win the amount printed at the end of the row.

According to the lottery's website, 1 in 44 tickets in this game win $50, so it isn't that rare. The instructions say take a small-win ticket to any lottery agent to redeem. So Monday morning I went to a local 7-11 that sells lottery tickets.

What would they do? Would they painstakingly verify that the tokens I'd scratched off on the square matched the ones in the list? Would they demand to know where I'd bought the ticket? (I don't know where she bought them.) Would they make me fill out the name/address/phone/email form on the back of the card?

No, none of those. The guy scratched off an unmarked section of the card, which I guess confirmed it was a winner, and also revealed a barcode which he scanned, probably to let the state know he was on the hook for the money, and then he handed me $50 in cash from the register. That's it. No ceremony, no Bob Barker or anything like that. I gave some of my largess to the homeless guy on the stoop outside.

I've never bought a lottery ticket, but I'm willing to try one if it's given me. This is about the fourth time that's ever happened, and the first one that's come up a winner however petty. These tickets cost $10 each, and I'm sure our niece spent a lot more than $50 to acquire her stash. So that explains where all that lottery money comes from, and that's why I'm not buying any tickets.

traveling broccoli chef

Most weekends that my days are both busy are because of concerts. Not this last weekend. No concerts. But Saturday was the last night of Pesach, and my friends who invite a bunch of their friends to their family Seder did that on this date this year. Sunday was Easter, and B. and I always spend that with her family. So I get two holidays for the price of one.

Pesach and a family Easter are both food-oriented celebrations, and my contribution to both is usually to bring along my trademark and favorite veggie, broccoli. The question is how to cook it. At home for a dinner side dish I usually just steam it, and I've done that for holidays. But usually I look for something fancier. Most of my specialty broccoli dishes are roasted, and have rather complicated recipes. So when I do those I usually make them in advance and bring them along to be heated by microwave just before serving. The problem is that reheated roasted broccoli is a rather sad thing compared to the fresh stuff.

This year, however, browsing through my recipe collection I found one which uses steamed broccoli and also cashews, which both B. and I like a lot. And the recipe was not complicated to prepare. So I made it twice, putting all the sauce ingredients together at home and packing everything up, altering the procedure for circumstances.

At the Seder, the hosting couple split duties this way: the wife organizes the invites and the table seating, while the husband and one of the sons do all the cooking. They're really well organized and prepare lots of dishes, so (with prearrangement) I figured they could add this in. When I arrived, I gave them the instructions:

This is a four-step recipe.

One, steam the broccoli. [Holds up large storage bag full of cut-up broccoli pieces.]

Two, melt 1/3 cup of margarine or butter or whatever you have in a small saucepan.

Three, stir this in - it's mostly soy sauce and garlic - and bring the mixture to a boil. [Holds up small sealed container of the sauce ingredients I'd mixed at home.]

Four, remove from the heat, stir in the cashews, and pour it over the broccoli. [Holds up small bag of cashew pieces.]

And I left them to it. They did a splendid job, and the dish got raves around the table despite being served following three other excellent veggie dishes that others had brought.

For Easter, where prep is more relaxed and there's much more room in the kitchen, it seemed best to steam the broccoli beforehand and bring it in a serving dish - steamed broccoli reheats in a microwave better than roasted broccoli does - and asked our niece who hosts for a small saucepan, cooking spoon, a free burner on the range, and the butter, and did the cooking myself. Also a successful dish.

Plans to repeat this next year are definitely on.

concert review: Ariel Quartet

I crammed a lot of detail into my review of this concert, enough to make me feel disappointed in the roughness and lack of sophistication in the writing. For me, the hardest part of concert reviewing can be finding the right words to describe the strong experience of reacting to the specific performers' styles and abilities.

I wasn't sure if my editors would let pass my rather cheeky comparison of this concert's repertoire with that of the previous Ariel concert I reviewed, but it got through. However, though I provided one, the published article has no link to that earlier review.

The big difference between those two concerts was something off-topic enough for this one that I didn't mention it this time. The previous concert had been held to show off the Violins of Hope, instruments rescued and restored from the Nazi Holocaust. As I mentioned in that review, being played by such excellent performers pushed against the limitations of the Violins of Hope's limited qualities as musical instruments.

After this week's concert, I got a chance to talk about this a little with the group's cellist. She said it was so much easier to play this time on their own instruments, whose natures and capacities they know well. And the extreme aptitude of the performance confirmed that.

Another thing there was no room to mention was the pre-concert masterclass, something I don't always have time to attend. At Kohl, the guest artists usually hold a masterclass with local high-school students. This time the ensemble was a string quintet rather than quartet, playing the scherzo from Schubert's work for that ensemble. The most interesting part of the teaching was the request that the students sing passages from the music, to help them appreciate matters of balance and flow.

to see the giant woman

As long as I was going in to the City for the Isidore String Quartet concert on Wednesday, I decided to add a little extra time so that I could see the piece of public art that's currently roiling the place in controversy, "R-Evolution" by Marco Cochrane, a 45-foot-tall statue of a giant (did I say that?) naked woman planted in the plaza in front of the Ferry Building. Photos I've seen of it there don't seem to capture it very well, but it looks sort of like this:

Apparently it's supposed to "transcend outdated perceptions of the female body and celebrate it as a symbol of strength, beauty and empowerment" or something like that, but perhaps it could convey that message a bit more clearly if it had a few appropriate clothes on. And was not quite so gigantic.

This is not (fortunately) a permanent thing. It's going to be there for six months. Apparently it's been going around on a world tour for about ten years now. Here's a bunch more photos in various locales.

The giant naked woman is made of a steel inner structure with a wire mesh framing to give her a female shape. That makes her fairly translucent. She has short hair. She has very long fingers. She has toenails, which I mention because you can get close enough to see that. She has no sign of any genitals whatever, which is relieving but a little dishonest.

There are a number of rude comments online - "dumb" "disgusting" "inappropriate" etc - but she's there and I didn't regret the little extra time it took to see her.

concert review: Isidore String Quartet

This is the group that won the latest Banff String Quartet Competition, three years ago. I only saw videos of that, which is not at all like being there in person, so I was eager to hear this group live and up close.

A very light, bright, and chipper sound, I thought. Normally we think of Beethoven as the big brusque composer while Mozart is smooth and graceful. This was almost the other way around. Beethoven's Op. 127 was delicate, even hesitant at times, while Mozart's K. 465 was more robust - if only by contrast, for it was certainly also graceful, and there was no attempt to make anything horribly modernist out of the work's infamous 'dissonant' introduction - which is unlike anything else in the piece.

There was one small bit outside of the classics, a brief recent quartet by Billy Childs, one of a contingent of jazz players who also dabble in classical. Nothing jazz-like about this piece which was largely of the 'four voices wandering around' school of composition. Isidore played a different quartet by this composer at Banff and I didn't find it very interesting either.

Tolkien Society awards

The Tolkien Society (the UK-based fan organization of which I've been a member for many years) has announced the final ballots for its annual awards. Any member of the Society is eligible to vote; the deadline is April 25.

This year the Society has introduced a new method of picking the finalists out of the long list of initial nominees: panels of 5-6 expert jurors, one for each award. And I, perforce, was on the panel for Best Book, the books being full-length scholarly monographs or collections of articles.

The eligibility winnowing process (a complex matter in itself) had left ten candidates to be considered. The 5 of us on this panel were sent links to PDF copies of all the nominees (arrangements having been made for this with the publishers), and to a Google Docs spreadsheet to cast our votes on. We were given about a month to read them all and make our choices, by putting checkmarks in cells under our names on the spreadsheet.

I'd already seriously browsed through 3 of the 10 books in hard copy, but I had a lot of reading ahead of me. I loaded the files onto both my desktop computer and my tablet, and did a lot of the reading on the tablet while taking transit to and from concerts. Still, I pushed the deadline pretty close, but at least I had strong clear reactions, positive or otherwise, to all the nominees.

The panelists were asked to cast between 3 and 5 votes for the worthiest books. In the end, all of us picked 4. Our choices were not all identical, but there was a general consensus. There were 6 books which received 2 or more votes, and those became the finalists. I'm pretty pleased with the list: everything I picked is on it, and even the ones I didn't pick I thought were decent and worthwhile books.

And that's what we're presenting for the members to vote on.

crisis averted

We signed our tax forms - prepared by our accountant - electronically on Monday. There was a notation that the money we owed the IRS would be withdrawn by it on Tuesday from B's checking account - which we've used for that purpose and for refunds for many years.

But it wasn't withdrawn on Tuesday.

At this point I got slightly worried. Maybe the IRS was just running slow, but also: B's bank had been eaten by another bank (a common thing with banks) and the routing number was changed. They'd told her that the old number would still be valid, but what if something had gone wrong?

I tried contacting the accountant on Wednesday, without success - maybe he was still recuperating from tax season - and was going to do so again Thursday morning, when B. checked again and the withdrawal had been made. It was just the IRS being slow.

At any rate I've put a note in the folder where I'm keeping documents going into next year's taxes, to inform the accountant of the routing number and have him change his records.

on a rover

Our play-reading group having made its way through most of the Shakespeare we wanted to do, and a number of 18C plays both English and French (the latter in translation), I suggested we venture into Restoration comedy, English plays from when the theaters reopened after 1660. I don't know anything about Restoration comedies - they're not much done today, and I've never seen one - but I found a list of major works, noted that the principal female author was Aphra Behn, and that her most prominent play seemed to be The Rover, so I suggested we try that.

We've just finished it, and my word. It's my understanding that Behn did not create the plot for this one, but merely entirely rewrote (and the writing is very good) an older play. I would hope that's true. It features exiled English cavaliers during the Commonwealth, cavorting in Naples. I thought Shakespeare was full of bawdy, but this handily outdoes it. It gets worse. I found myself in one scene reading a character who spends the entire scene as a drunken rapist. I had to ask for a break after that. Later on, there's an attempted gang-bang. Apparently, the urgent question in these cases is whether the victim is a "woman of quality" or not. (The female characters spend a lot of time in disguise, so it can be hard to tell from their dress.) If she is a "woman of quality," it's not OK to rape her. If she isn't, it apparently is.

There is no way this play could be staged today. You couldn't even cut it: there would be nothing left.

memories

Having spent Friday evening at a concert recital of emotionally intense contemporary musical theater songs for female voice, and part of Saturday looking up other performances on YouTube, I shouldn't have been surprised when another such song floated into my mental ear. But I don't have a lot of such songs in my regular listening, so I was startled by having another showing up. At first I could just hear tiny fragments, and it wasn't for a while that they coalesced enough that I could identify the song. It was Mirabel's song from Encanto, "Waiting on a Miracle."

Walking through SF's Chinatown, where I've taken to having my pre-concert meals, I saw a sign for a restaurant which I suddenly realized must have been the one where my class had lunch on a school expedition to Chinatown when I was about ten. We visited a fortune cookie factory (not the one you'll see if you go to Chinatown today) and had a dim sum lunch, table-served on a lazy Susan. Perhaps my first experience with Chinese food, close to my first experience with chopsticks - I remember somebody showing me how to hold them, but I don't think that was the occasion - and my first experience drinking what I did not realize was tea. Years later in a conversation I said I'd never had tea, to which the reply was "You have it all the time in Chinese restaurants" and I said "That's tea?" I'd never known what it was.

How did I realize it must be the same restaurant? From the name. It's the Hang Ah Tea Room. I remember noting it at the time, and noting the name because it encodes how to get there: you go up Sacramento Street and then Hang Ah right.

From which I realize that my propensity for making puns predates my supposed introduction to the art form, by my high school science-fiction club, by about ten years.