concert review: San Francisco Symphony

EPS conducted Brahms' Fourth Symphony and Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto. What these works have in common is that each has a movement resurrecting the old Baroque form of the passacaglia, which is a set of short variations in triple meter over a repeating (but itself variable) bass line. Nevertheless the composers handle them differently: Brahms follows the passacaglia strictly but melds the successive variations into an overarching sonata-allegro form. Shostakovich is more free in form and wilder in intrumentation: he introduces his passacaglia with a solemn statement for horns, lower strings, and timpani, and finishes it with a cadenza for unaccompanied solo violin.

Sayaka Shoji was the violinist, who carried her full and solid tone both through the long slow movements (of which the passacaglia was one) and the violently wild fast ones, which went on at a ferocious clip longer than would seem possible. Her command of this disparate material was what was impressive. After the cadenza merges into the finale, the composer inserted a brief orchestral-only section before the violin launches into vigorous motion, at the behest of the original violinist, who wanted a break to wipe his brow. Shoji didn't look as if she needed it.

Brahms is a more subdued composer than EPS normally specializes in, but he knows how to be subdued and exciting at the same time. This performance of Brahms' most neglected symphony was a masterful blend of the cool and sober with the dramatic and tense, each coming in just the right proportion. The third movement, the closest Brahms ever came to a scherzo, really evoked the Beethoven tradition in its outer sections.

On the walk from BART to the concert hall, the book I was carrying fell out of my pocket and was lost. (It was expendable: don't worry about it.) On the way back, the concert program also fell out of my pocket and was lost. You'd think I'd learn not to put things like that in my pocket.

set of Bruckner

I missed noting the bicentennial of Anton Bruckner's birth, which was Sept. 4 while I was up in Oregon. But I didn't neglect celebrating it later, by buying the new box set of his symphonies, the "Complete Versions Edition," conducted by Markus Poschner. It has all 11 of his symphonies, including the two unnumbered ones, in 18 full versions plus a few extra versions of individual movements. It's not actually complete complete, but it has all the standard editions, except for the Robert Haas combined edition of the Eighth, which took what Haas considered the best parts from two competing versions, which is no longer considered a kosher procedure.

So far I've listened through the 3 versions of the Fourth, plus the single versions of the Fifth and Sixth, plus the 'student' symphony in F Minor, which I'd never had a satisfactory performance of before. Judging by his Fourth through Sixth, Poschner isn't the greatest of Bruckner conductors, but he does well enough with the F Minor, especially the Andante movement which is just charming.

What can I say of the multiple versions? The standard 1880 version remains the best-sounding Fourth, the 1876 version sounding too sketchy and the 1888 version too clotted. The other symphonies in multiple versions (1, 2, 3, and 8) I don't know as well, so that will require more chewing. But first I want to listen to the other noncanonical symphony, "Die Nullte" or No. 0. There is no attempt in this set to produce a hypothetical completed version of the finale of the Ninth, which Bruckner left in sketches when he died and has been worked on by several people, none of them really satisfactorily. It was in putting all the pieces together in final form that Bruckner's genius principally lay.

put not your faith in bookstores

It's October, right? The first full month of autumn? Yet, after a month of mostly reasonable late-summer temperatures, this week we're undergoing the biggest heat wave of the year. It's been consistently above 95F since Monday, mostly over 100. Strangely, I'm finding it less enervating than on previous experiences, and on days when I need to be home for health reasons, I'm managing.

But I'm still feeling desolated, because I can't read what I want to read. The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien was published in the U.S. on Sept. 17. I pre-ordered a copy. It still hasn't arrived. The Last Dangerous Visions was published on Oct. 1. I pre-ordered a copy. It hasn't arrived either.

debate

I didn't watch this debate either. Same reasons: too nervous, didn't want to hear 45 minutes of the other guy blithering.

From what I've read, Vance delivered himself, in his smoother and slicker way than his boss, of lie after disingenuous non-truth after lie. There's been a lot of discussion of CBS having put fact-checks under QR codes, but not a single person I've read seems to have gone and looked at any of them. The one time the moderators tried to correct him, he objected that there wasn't supposed to be any live on-air fact-checking. Which is as much as to say, "Hey! I was supposed to be able to lie with impunity!"

Walz apparently challenged almost none of this, but stuck to his pre-set talking points. This is what most candidates do at debates. Unless you're extremely skilled at impromptu debating - the recent presidential candidate who's by far the best at this is Chris Christie - there's no time to think on your feet. Best to answer any question by finding the most relevant memorized nugget in your banks and deliver that.

Besides, Harris didn't respond to most of Trump's imbecilities either, except to laugh at them. The danger of fact-checking a lie-spewing opponent is that you spend all your time doing that, letting them set the agenda and never having time to expound your own.

Several liberal commentators have said that, although Vance was smoother, Walz won the debate in terms of giving better arguments. But will they be perceived as better? If not, he can't be said to have won.

Walz could have been less nervous, and folksier, as he is in speeches. But at least it wasn't a disaster.

no movies

My attention was caught by this article discussing the choice of movie that Tim Walz took his future wife Gwen to on their first date.

It was Falling Down, a 1993 drama featuring Michael Douglas as a man who loses his cool from being stuck in traffic and goes on a rampage. (In 1993, this was apparently satire.) The article's author hadn't even heard of this film. I had; I remember noting it from when it came out and putting it on my "maybe I'll go see this" list, though I never actually did.

But what a strange pick for a first date movie? Perhaps less so when you consider they were living in a small town in rural Nebraska with only one movie theater, so there wasn't much choice.

Looking back to when B. and I were dating - this would be 1987-9 in our case - I can't recall our going to the movies. B. is not a movie person, and even less of a movie theater person, and I'm not that much of those either. Once we moved in together, we rented a fair number of movies (VHS from Blockbuster in those days) and watched them at home, but our dates were to classical and folk music concerts, science-fiction/fantasy clubs and book discussions, and Regency dances.

The only movie either of us can recall going out to together in our dating days hardly counted as a date, because it was in the daytime, and the theater was packed with enthusiasts, many of them people we knew. It was a sneak preview showing of the yet-unreleased The Princess Bride. We were all big fans of the book, an entity almost forgotten about these days. And we were very happy with what we saw. The Princess Bride remains my gold standard for an excellent adaptation of a book to a movie, and the fact that the script was by the original novelist probably has a lot to do with it.

I would also rate The Last Unicorn highly for the same reason, and it also comes to mind as one of a number of delicate fantasies from the early 1980s that I saw on dates before I ever met B. Another one that I remember with particular fleeting fondness is one that I caught on an exceedingly brief theatrical run in Berkeley, after which it vanished and was never heard of again. It was a goofy story made by the unusual technique of cut-out stop-motion animation, and it was called Twice Upon a Time.

Actually it did have both VHS and DVD releases, not that I ever laid eyes on either. But it was hardly in theaters at all, and today it's not online in full. This clip will give you a better idea of what the movie as a whole is like than other clips on YouTube, and yes that is Lorenzo Music, better-known as the voice of Garfield the cat, asking most of the questions. (Other voices, Marshall Efron and Julie Payne.) *sigh* I really ought to go find a copy of this and see it again.

(Not regarding movies, but I've been introduced to "Colin from Portsmouth," a parody of a right-wing ranter on British call-in radio. This one on Elon Musk is one of the funniest, as well as on a topic that Americans will get.)

this is just to record

that B. and I got our flu and covid shots this morning. There was already a long line when we arrived 15 minutes before the clinic opened - possibly it'd have been quieter if we'd arrived in mid-afternoon, though in general Kaiser is usually busier in the afternoon - but when they did open, they scooped up the people with canes and walkers first, as they've done before. What they were not prepared for was the size of the line, as they had only two stations open.

We picked this week so that I'd be covered for people-heavy events I'll be going to in another week and a half, but should still be at strong coverage during the holidays.

Looking over my previous post, it occurs to me that it would have been more coherent if I hadn't written it in late evening when I was about to fall asleep. I'll have to watch my timing.

assorted books

Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire, by Peter Stark (HarperCollins, 2015)
Books on the history of US Western exploration usually, after describing Lewis and Clark's journey in great detail, mention briefly that wealthy merchant John Jacob Astor sent a party to establish a fur-trading post, to barter with the natives, at the mouth of the Columbia, the far end of L&C's journey; that they did so, calling it Astoria, but at the outbreak of the war of 1812 a couple years later, they gave in to the threats of the Brits' far stronger navy and sold them their assets, and that was the end of that.*
But you don't hear anything about how Astor's men got there in the first place. This book tells that, in hideous but captivating detail. This was only the second party of whites to cross the continent north of Mexico, and the skill and luck of Lewis & Clark is demonstrated by the terrible time of it these people had, taking nearly two years, including two winters in the wilderness, to get there, losing several people along the way. Meantime, Astor also sent a ship around the Horn, which got there first but also had a terrible time of it, also losing several people along the way. Stark's theory is that, by the time they got there, everyone involved was suffering from PTSD, which is why they were so inert about getting the post set up. Other weird events included the destruction of the ship by a suicide bomber. Yes, in 1811.

The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, by Calvin Trillin (Random House, 2024)
Not as consistently interesting as Trillin's previous retrospective collection of a half century of journalism, Jackson, 1964, and Other Dispatches, which covers racial issues. This one mixes serious articles with humorous pieces, and the problem is that, in classic New Yorker style (where much of this originally appeared), many of the serious reports are far longer than any possible interest the reader might have in the subject. I guess it depends on your inherent interest, because the one on the rise of the satirical redneck movie reviewer Joe Bob Briggs did not become wearisome. It seemed to me that the trouble with Joe Bob began when the paper didn't take enough care to mark the satire off, for instance mixing Joe Bob's four-star ratings of splatter films with the regular reviewer's two-star ratings of serious films.

*However, the fact that the Americans were able to establish a post there before the British in the first place - the Brits kept finding the wrong rivers when they were trying to float downstream from the upper end of the Columbia in what is now B.C. - plus Lewis and Clark, plus an American ship having made the whites' discovery of the mouth of the Columbia in the first place (which is why the river is called that), contributed to a U.S. claim to the area, which is why Oregon and Washington are U.S. territory today, and there's a town called Astoria on the site of the Astor post. It was because I was going there that I bought this book at Powell's in Portland, though I didn't read it until after I got home.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Their first week's concert having been cancelled by a chorus strike, SFS finally put on a regular concert - no chorus this week - Friday evening. Of course, given the cavalier way management has treated the chorus, I expect the orchestra players also to go on strike again (they've done this before) when their contract comes up, but that's not until November, and I don't have any concerts scheduled after next week until January.

Esa-Pekka Salonen - the music director whom management let get away - thus began the subscription concerts of the final season on his contract with this performance. He was greeted by huge audience cheers when he arrived and even huger ones when he was finished, having demonstrated yet again what a loss his departure will be.

The big piece on the program was Hindemith's Mathis der Maler Symphony, which you don't hear very often. Its thematic material consists mostly of unpromising-sounding fragmentary motifs, but a good performance builds them up into a big hefty solemn-sounding work that sounds more compelling than the material making it up. That happened here.

The symphony material is taken from an opera about a 16th-century painter, though there's nothing 16th-centuryish about the music. Somewhat more concrete 20th-century references to earlier music were found in two shorter accompanying pieces. Hindemith's rare Ragtime (Well-Tempered), from his early cheeky period, takes a phrase from a Bach prelude and adapts it into as much raucous noise as an orchestra can generate. Edward Elgar orchestrated Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor, which had an integrated texture that made it sound like it was being played on an organ with more different stops than you'd ever heard of.

For another big piece, EPS has commissioned yet another new piano concerto, this one from composer Nico Muhly and written for pianist Alexandre Tharaud, whose album of French Baroque music Muhly had admired. There was supposed to be an air of, but no quotations from, music of that kind in the outer movements, but the music sounded to me more like fast pulsating minimalism of the Steve Reich school. In the slow movement, Tharaud played an endless series of soft diatonic chords, for all the world as if this were by Georgs Pelēcis, while the orchestra steadily built up into a contrasting din around it.

If you want an account of the mess that led to the strike, and the labor/financial situation that SFS is in, a simple but right-headed accounting comes from retired Chronicle reviewer Joshua Kosman; but for the full-throated burn, Kosman suggests the latest (as of now) four posts from this blogger, Emily Hogstad, who isn't even a Californian but is viewing this from Minnesota, but is her gaze ever piercing, informed as it is by their own orchestral troubles a few years back.

My own take is that the only solution here is to dissolve the management and get a new and more level-headed one, while keeping the musicians - nothing wrong with them. That's what they did in San Jose a couple decades back, and things have been fine there since. The big difference is, San Jose was a local orchestra that learned to live within its budget, while SFS is a world-class ensemble that has yet to grasp that to retain that status, they need to pay for the requisite talent instead of trying to run it on the cheap. If they're going to drop back into a regional-level orchestra, which is where they're headed, they should acknowledge that and have a good excuse for it. But if they want to keep on, they need 1) a clearer, less waffling, and more rip-roaring vision, that will attract the donors they say they want; and 2) a willingness in the meantime to dip further into their enormous endowment to keep the coaster running.

research day

I spent Thursday at UC Berkeley, doing research for the Tolkien Studies bibliography, in particular catching PDFs of the articles so that I'll have them handy for the next year's "Year's Work." It was a successful and rewarding day: lots of available indexes, lots of full-text links, easy access for a visitor to the databases, no trouble getting a stack pass for the hardcopy material, and the same brilliantly designed scanners in the stacks that I've found so satisfactory before. The only irritation was the increasing number of articles that say they're about the book but are actually about the movies.

So now that UC Santa Cruz has made on-campus visitor parking permits difficult to obtain (by changing to some ornate online process instead of the old system, which was to drive up to a booth at the entrance to campus and pay them $10), and the one relevant journal that Santa Cruz carries and nobody else around here does is now online, and it's clear to me that Berkeley actually has better access to databases, I think in future I'll come here first, when my home online research is done and it's time to turn to universities.

Of course, Berkeley has no weekday on-campus visitor parking either, at least not that I've been able to figure out, but unlike Santa Cruz it's in the middle of a city, so there's commercial garages, which have space available at least if you get there before noonish.

But it was clear to me, after walking around among three campus libraries as well as venturing off-campus for lunch, that the sort of rushing around that I did as an undergraduate, all those years ago, is no longer in my repertoire.

I had one little scare when my car wouldn't start. Battery wasn't dead but the engine wouldn't respond. It was fine later, so I don't know what went wrong, but in the meantime I called the AAA, though I called back to cancel later. I'd heard that AAA now makes you fill out an online form, which I can't do unless I'm at home, because I don't have That Kind of a mobile phone, but it turns out they only send you there if you answer "yes" to the automated-vocal inquiry, "Are you calling from a mobile phone?" Otherwise they continue to ask you questions by automated voice and then eventually send you to an agent to handle any queries or problems.

voting quiz

My dreams, however vividly recalled at the moment I wake up, tend to crumble into dust over the next few minutes.

All I can recall of this one is that a cancelled debate between Trump and Harris had been replaced with a voter quiz/challenge, items designed by the Trump campaign. If you could accomplish the task/pass the quiz, you could be counted as a vote for Harris ... if you wanted to, I guess. I can't remember how that part worked.

There were five parts. They were:

1. Park your car properly in a Trump-owned parking lot.

2. Answer the question, how far away is the nearest star to the solar system, Alpha Centauri? ("Four light years" would do.)

3. Do you prefer dogs or cats? (Dog people = Trump; cat people = Harris)

... I can't remember the others.