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Apparently it's supposed to "transcend outdated perceptions of the female body and celebrate it as a symbol of strength, beauty and empowerment" or something like that, but perhaps it could convey that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.

a little stage music

I should have been doing something else, but never mind: a senior recital at Stanford by a soprano whose repertoire lay entirely in contemporary musical theater was an attractive enough idea that we both went, being as usual when we do something like this probably the only attendees who weren't personal friends of the singer.

She was talented but had a small voice and not much stage presence, so I could understand why she said she's pursuing a career in backstage work and management instead of performing, but she chose a good selection of songs I'd mostly never heard. Much better than the bleak and dull material that I've found from too much recent musical theater. A couple of the songs - from Next to Normal and Newsies respectively - stuck with me enough that I dug out recorded performances of them.



Now, if our student had brought the same crispness and rhythm that she gave to that second song to the Baker's Wife's song from Into the Woods, she would really have had something. One other thing the above performance has in common with the recital I heard last night: the piano was too loud.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Has Marin Alsop ever conducted SFS before? If so I can't recall it. She's one of the great conductors of our time and SFS is still one of the great orchestras, so the two major works on this program were both pretty sizzling.

Gabriela Montero played her own Piano Concerto No. 1, which is subtitled "Latin" as in Latin America - she's a Venezuelan expatriate - but this was just a hint of flavoring, nothing of the "tourist music" air to it. The piano part is very active and continuous without being florid; the sound was attractive but not goopy; and the work had real heft, enough to make it fascinating to listen to all the way through. At times, Montero's playing reminded me of Rachmaninoff, at other times of Bach, without actually sounding in the least like either of them.

Then Alsop led a dramatic and atmospheric performance of Samuel Barber's dense and compact Symphony No. 1. Really brought this work to vividness - same condition as the Montero - and emphasized the extent to which its one movement contains seeds of the standard four. In this performance it sounded more like an ancestor to the Korngold Symphony than anything else.

Also on the program, Antropolis by Gabriela Ortiz, and this was tourist music. Had the same jumpy nature and constant percussion battery of other Mexican dancehall-inspired pieces like El Salon Mexico and Danzon No. 2 and Huapango without being anywhere near as attractive or tuneful as any of them.

Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, just because, I suppose, followed immediately by Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is nowhere near as memorable and was probably there just for its cheeky title.

two more concerts

1. So I've occasionally mentioned before about TACO, the Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble intended to let musicians not ready for prime time have fun playing where nobody has to listen to them. B., who is about as good a player as this group ever gets, belongs because it gives her a chance to play without the rigor or speed of even a nonprofessional community orchestra.

That being the situation, why did TACO's director commission (and pay for) a new composition by a respected local composer? But she did. Then the composer died just after delivering the piece, and then the pandemic happened, so it wasn't until now that TACO held one of its very rare public concerts and played the music. At the director's request I persuaded my editor at the Daily Journal to let me review it. He consented because he was sure I could make it entertaining to read about. If the DJ's website will let you access the review you can decide for yourself if you agree with him that I succeeded.

Amazingly, TACO gathered all its skirts together and did a pretty fair job for an amateur group at playing the new composition, so I didn't have to dissemble on that. They were less effective on the other orchestral composition, but that was a piano concerto carried almost entirely by the soloist, and he was a professional pianist so that was all right. The rest of the concert - the whole thing was a memorial to the same composer - was chamber music by professionals, except for one piece over which I decided to draw a curtain and just mention that they played it.

2. The Palo Alto Philharmonic is the, oh, third-tier (i.e. pretty good) nonprofessional group for which our niece E. plays double bass. So along with E's husband and his mother (E's parents don't live around here), we showed up. Surprisingly lusty performance of Copland's quiet and melancholy Our Town suite, and a successfully winning rendition of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Symphonic Variations on an African Air, more pleasing than when I've heard it before. But Dvorak's Symphony from the New World is too familiar a piece for this group to bring anything special to the table, and it was just a decent average run-through - with, I noted, no repeat of the first movement exposition.