after the concert

I got home about 10.30 on Thursday evening. B. was still up and told me with some tenseness to check my e-mail. That's how I came to spend the next half-hour writing a quick memoir of the late Mary Kay Kare, filled with regret and frustration at how I tried to be her friend, but full success at that was beyond my friendship skill set.

I've received a number of compliments on the excellence of this quick portraiture, and it's not the first time a hasty memorial that I've written in the first flush of grief has received such responses. I seem to have a knack for this, but I'd much rather not have to write them in the first place, wouldn't you agree?

So where had I been? For the first time in over 19 months since before the pandemic, I'd gone up to San Francisco for a concert. Aside from distance and time, it wasn't more difficult than going to San Jose. I picked up take-out on the way for a quick dinner, and parked in the garage a block from Herbst Theatre, which was masked, vaccination-required, and (unlike San Jose) firmly socially distanced in seating.

It was the first in a four-concert series from San Francisco Performances that I could not resist. The Catalyst Quartet, who are all I think Hispanic, decided to play a set of concerts of the music of historically important Black composers. I'd heard all these composers, I liked their music, and I wanted to get to know them better.

The main feature of the concert was the precocious (he was 18) Piano Quintet in G Minor (1893) of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (yes, named in honor of the obvious person), which the performers in post-concert talk said was influenced by Dvorak, but I don't hear that: to me it's in a Brahmsian declamatory style, yet filled with un-Brahmsian touches throughout, like the florid flourishes in the piano in the first of four epic movements. Stewart Goodyear was the pianist, like SCT British and of half-Black half-white parentage.

We also had a set of 5 short quartet pieces by SCT, these more looking forward to Stravinsky than back to Brahms; and the full "Lyric" Quartet by George Walker, a notable African-American composer (first of that description to win the Pulitzer in music) whose music I've reviewed before. He wrote this in 1946 and it fits the same description as the Quartet of a decade earlier by Samuel Barber (about a decade Walker's senior). It has a famous central Adagio often played by itself with string orchestra, surrounded by faster and harsher outer movements. Except that Walker's movements fit better together, yet his Allegros are more diverse in style than Barber's. But like Barber, Walker wrote on the human scale that was being abandoned by many post-WW2 composers, and I'm grateful to have his work.

And so my soul was enriched by music and I was unknowingly readied to face our human mortality.