saw a play

"Art" by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton, directed by Emilie Whelan

I saw this play in London in 1998, a couple years into the run of the first English-language production (the original is in French). I thought it'd be worth seeing again, especially after Kosman gave it a good review (halfway down this page). This was by Shotgun Players, a Berkeley troupe whom I once saw in a production of Hamlet in which the actors pull slips of paper out of a hat (actually Yorick's skull) at the beginning of each performance to see who'll play which part.

Nothing so avant-garde this time. "Art" was well-performed, but I didn't like this production as well as I did the London one. This was mostly because the director took the emphasis away from one theme - what is art, what makes it valuable and how do we know what we like? - and on to another, the nature of male friendship, a depiction completely alien to anything in my experience of friendship, but whatever.

In this play, a moderately successful man drops a large load of money on buying a painting by a fashionable modern artist and shows it off to his two closest friends. The painting is pure white, supposedly with features and highlights that only the connoisseur can see. One of the friends is offended, less by what he sees as the artistic worthlessness of the painting than by what it says about his friend's taste. The other tries to be agreeable to both of them in turn.

The third, who is the youngest and least well-off, illustrates his haplessness with a long monologue about being caught in the middle of an argument between his fiancée and his mother over the wording of the wedding invitation. The London performer (I no longer remember who was in the show at the time I saw it, sorry) delivered this as an evenly-paced steadily rising hysteria. This one did it in rising and falling outbursts. He did, however, at one point deliver a golden piece of advice I didn't remember from the previous showing. He said, "'Calm down' is the worst thing you could say to somebody who's lost their calm." And this is true. It will anger them further because it shows you don't care what they're angry about, you just want to exert control over them.

Anyway, the art side of it interests me. Are there actually painters who produce blank monochromatic paintings that are considered great art? Yes there are. I've been to this display of fourteen featureless black paintings and sat there for a few minutes pretending to be moved by it. I have never felt more ripped off by an art museum, despite the fact that there is no admission charge.

And do their defenders actually make the desperate argument of pointing to minute variations in the texture as where the value of the art lies? Yes they do and my thoughts on the value of modernist art are there. It's also my answer to the question the painting's owner asks his critic: how can someone who doesn't claim any expertise in the subject judge the work? The answer is that if it has any value, any viewer should be able to pick that up. Crikes, why do people with no technical training in music whatever listen to symphonies? They must be getting something valuable out of the aesthetic experience or else there would be no point in performing for them.

imported children's books

I got into a conversation about which British children's books beloved there also became American favorites and which didn't. This came through an experience I've had before, a reference by a Brit to some children's story or character that I'd barely or never heard of, but which context showed was universally known there. I'm making the assumption of what's known in the US from what's known to me, a leap I'd hardly take for current material, but children's lit from the early to mid 20C ... I'm pretty confident that if I hadn't heard of it, it wasn't widely known in the US.

So what's the score?

Winnie the Pooh made it in the US.

Peter Rabbit did.

The Hobbit and Narnia did, of course.

Just William didn't. The first I ever heard of that was reading that these books were favorites of John Lennon's in childhood.

Worzel Gummidge didn't. The first I'd ever heard of this character was years ago when somebody wrote that Michael Foot looked like him. "Do you not get scarecrows over there?" I was asked when I said this. Of course we do: and the nameless Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz is one of our most beloved characters. What we didn't get was Worzel Gummidge.

Enid Blyton didn't. The first I ever heard of her was a British critic making the comparison in a blithe dismissal of Tolkien's early chapters.

I'm sure there are others I just haven't seen references to, or have forgotten about.

Then there's the mixed cases:

The Wind in the Willows made it. I don't think it's as widely beloved in the US as it is in the UK, but it's certainly known.

Swallows and Amazons ... I think that became sort of a special interest. It didn't become well known, but is cherished by a measurable number of Americans in a way that other less well-known ones are not.

can't buy me love. or elections either, apparently

Does anyone remember Al Checchi? I did, vaguely, but I had to paw through a series of Wikipedia articles on California gubernatorial elections to recall his name. He was the businessman who tried to buy the Democratic primary for governor in 1998. He shoveled out from his personal fortune nearly twice as much money as both of the other major candidates combined. But in the primary vote, he just barely squeaked into second place, far behind the winner. (Who was Gray Davis, five years later to be ousted in a recall, so hardly invulnerable.)

Then there was Michael Huffington, who similarly tried to buy a California Senate seat in 1994. Also didn't work.

These came to mind when I read of the results of Elon Musk's attempts to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Money can buy elections, but only if you spend it wisely. Apparently people resent it if the attempted purchase is too naked and too lavish. But I wouldn't expect Elon Musk, who thinks a chainsaw is a useful metaphor for trimming wasteful spending, and who 'trims' as if it is; and who sells a vehicle that looks like a cross between a DeLorean and the box that an Amazon package comes in, to grasp anything resembling a subtle point.

concert review: Bay Area Rainbow Symphony

I go to occasional concerts by the local LGBT&c orchestra because I like their programming. This concert, guest conducted by local luminary John Kendall Bailey, was held in the large hall at the SF Conservatory, which is still rather small and was packed.

There were two items new to me that I was eager to hear. Sussex Landscape is a tone poem by Avril Coleridge-Taylor, who was the daughter of the more-remembered Samuel Coleridge-Taylor but whom I'd not previously known of. The piece was written in 1940, when Sussex, where she lived, and neighboring Kent were right in the path of invasion by air and (potentially) sea. So not surprisingly it's somber-toned, with shafts of light peering through on occasion, ranging in mood from anguished to pensive. The idiom is more like Carwithen than, say, Finzi.

Kurt Atterberg is my favorite of the phalanx of great Swedish composers of the first half of the 20C. I had not heard his Suite No. 3, which is for strings with solo parts for violin and viola, another dark and quiet work of impressive beauty.

The rest of the program consisted of familiar but not overplayed classics. I was impressed enough by the robust presentation of Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, with a rigor better reflecting its subtitle, Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, that I was willing to stay and hear the suite from Ravel's Daphnis and Chloé, one of the most overripe works in the entire repertoire. Also pretty well done without indulgence.

concert review: South Bay Philharmonic

This is the nonprofessional orchestra with which B. plays viola. I've been hearing a lot of comments about this program in recent weeks, but the piece I heard the least about was Schubert's Fifth Symphony, which is the part of the concert that went well. Not only were all the notes roughly in place, which is not a given in the nonpro market, but with the help of music director George Yefchak, the orchestra conveyed the grace and charm of Schubert's delightful composition. Really enjoyable, that.

The concerto half, not so much. We had Beethoven's Triple Concerto, which - though mostly ignored - is really a fun piece when played well - and Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto, which is a 15-minute chunk of ersatz Rachmaninoff commissioned for a movie score by producers too cheap to pay for the original. Neither of these came off well. Communication between the soloists and the orchestra seemed to be completely absent. The playing by the soloists was ... inconsistent, let's leave it at that.

The interesting part is that the soloist trio in the Beethoven were three juvenile siblings, and the pianist in the Warsaw was their mother. Some seven years ago, I'd heard a concert with Mom in which she invited her two then pre-teen string-playing sons to play an encore piano trio piece with her. Now the cellist is about 17 and the violinist about 20, and they were joined by their even younger sister at piano who's about 15. She was the best of the four of them.

Also played, an encore of "Ashokan Farewell" with a really fine solo from concertmaster Gene Huang, and an brief session with a string quartet summoned by cellist Brent Cyca. He likes tangos, so they played two, including this rather familiar one, though they didn't play it that well, sounding more like the string quartet that used to practice in our living room.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Juraj Valčuha surprised me. Previous encounters had shown him a conductor prone to the gentle and lyrical, though not flaccid. This time a more dynamic man showed up. Brahms's Violin Concerto, with the estimable Gil Shaham as soloist, was crisp and surprisingly concise for such a long rambling work.

Then, Shostakovich's Tenth. Very slow and cautious first movement, even a little dull, but then it ramped up fast, with the finale blasting the DSCH motif off in all directions. Pretty exciting.

But ... why a program consisting of nothing but two warhorses, excellent works though they are? It's an evening like an early visitor from next season, recently announced, where the absence of a music director has left the programming with no coherent direction whatever. (I'm still going to be attending. The quality of the musicianship in SFS is what keeps me making the trip up here, and while I expect that will decay soon, I'll wait for it to happen.) I wonder what Kosman will say about this concert, or if he'll even go. Last time they played the Tenth, which was only three years ago, he made clear he was tired of hearing the piece. But I'm not.

Shaham's encore was Isolation Rag by Scott Wheeler, who's got a ways to go before he becomes William Bolcom.

war plans

The silliest argument going on over Signalgate is whether Hegseth's operational details of the then-impending attack on Yemen constituted "war plans."

Insofar as there's a difference between "war plans" and "attack plans," the latter is probably the more accurate term. These were tactical details. "War plan" implies a more strategic overview.

But even given that, the obfuscation over this subtle distinction in terminology is intended merely to disguise the fact that, whether war plans or attack plans, they were or should have been classified information that was treated with total lack of attention to operational security. Hegseth's sanctimonious claim that no "war plans" were discussed is not only misleading but evades the entire point. Senator Duckworth, who's been an Army pilot, was especially scorching: "Pete Hegseth is a f*cking liar. This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately."

Hegseth has been going around denouncing Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist who was handed this info on a golden platter, as a liar and scum. He specifically cited the "very fine people" line, which Republican orthodoxy claims is a hoax. (Actually, DT said it and that's what he meant.) So apparently the kind of thing that makes Goldberg a liar now is calling them "war plans" instead of "attack plans." Karoline Leavitt even claimed that by using the term "attack plans" on the second article, the Atlantic admitted it was lying by calling them "war plans" on the first article. That's a truly pathetic rationalization, and we should keep in mind that this is the kind of thing that DT's minions mean when they call their critics liars.

three more concerts

I had another busy weekend.

Friday: Gut, Wind, and Wire; Piedmont
Three folks from Baltimore who play on early instruments featuring the eponymous sound-makers. The wind was mostly wooden flutes but included a small and recalcitrant bagpipe. They played mostly Renaissance music: Scottish dances, Terpsichore dances, pieces (in their original form) later edited by Respighi for his Ancient Airs and Dances, pieces referred to in Shakespeare plays, and lots and lots of Playford dances.
Performed at the Piedmont Center for the Arts, an old converted house with its main hall turned into a tiny concert hall holding some 30 people.

Saturday: California Symphony; Walnut Creek
SFCV had me reviewing this one, so reviewed it got. I mentioned conductor Cabrera's opinion, expressed in remarks prior to the piece, that it's a mistake to try to power through the triumphant ending of the third movement of Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique" and preempt the inevitable audience applause by diving straight into the finale. But I didn't mention that that's exactly what Elim Chan did with SFS a week earlier. By Joshua Kosman's account, she succeeded in stopping the applause, a feat Cabrera dismissed as unachievable. But I wasn't there so I don't know.
In regard to the piece being premiered, my editors deleted a sentence which would have made clear that a comparison to Luciano Berio is not a compliment in my book. But I guess you're not supposed to be too critical.

Sunday: Santa Cruz Chamber Players, Aptos
Music for piano trio, quartet, and quintet (that's one piano with varying numbers of strings). Included two new pieces, both soft and padding, one titled "A Wish for Ukraine." Also Frank Bridge's Phantasy, very cooly and effectively played, and Dvorak's evergreen Op. 81 quintet.
Fifty minutes turned out to be not quite enough time to drive here from Hollister where I'd gone first.

report

Local temperatures are supposed to be in the 80s F the next couple of days. And it's still March. Then they'll drop back down to the 60s. How? Clouds. Let's hear it for clouds.

I read that 23andme is potentially going bankrupt, so all of us who submitted DNA to their ancestry-testing program should delete our data lest it be sold to the highest bidder. I haven't done anything with mine since getting it years ago - it only told me I was literally 99.9% of the ethnicity I knew I was already - so I had no problem with deleting it, except for how difficult it was to do so. First the site demanded I change my password. Then it sent me a verification code. Then I had no idea what to do next, so I asked Google's A.I. for help and it told me to use the Settings menu, but not how to find the Settings menu, which turned out to be obscurely located. Once I found it, though, it was self-evident what to do next; let's hear it for self-evidence.

The Tolkien Society, based in the UK, now has so many US members that it's decided to hold a conference in the US in May. It'll be in Kansas City. Not that they know anybody in particular in Kansas City, just that it's in the middle of the country so it'll be equally convenient from everywhere. That strikes me as a very British attitude to take. The UK is small enough geographically that you can do that. I don't think they realize how large a country the US is. Kansas City is not equally close to everywhere, it's equally far. I'd like to go, but personal schedule and the difficulty of traveling argue against it.

Canada is holding its general election on April 28, it says here. If the incumbent Liberals lose, then new Prime Minister Mark Carney will only have been in office two months, probably outdoing in brevity a previous Liberal tag-end PM, John Turner. Turner also never served in parliament as PM, as Carney hasn't, but Turner at least had previous experience there. Carney's qualifications are as a steel-nerved central bank governor, which his supporters hope will help him stand up against a rampaging DT. And let's stop there.

another C.S. Lewis conference

I got a notice that a Christian theological educational group in Berkeley was sponsoring a daylong conference on "Learning from the Inklings in Wartime." And by the Inklings, they meant - mostly but not exclusively - C.S. Lewis. It sounded more introductory than I needed, but it was nearby, I needed to go to the area anyway for a concert that evening after the conference ended, and I thought I'd enjoy it, so I decided to go.

It was held in the classroom wing of a Presbyterian church, and there were about 35 people there, a few of whom I already knew. As usual at a specifically CSL conference, I was probably the only non-Christian there, but also as usual I made no effort to advertise the fact.

The plenary talks focused on Lewis's essay "Learning in Wartime," correlating Christian imperatives, the goals of a scholarly life, and the pressures of an existence in times of crisis. The fact that we're living in such a time right now was not ignored, but it was not propagandized and if anything leaned left. This group may have been theologically conservative, but it was also in Berkeley and the politics reflected that.

The breakout sessions I attended were more tangentially on wartime. One presenter read poems of his own composition inspired by Lewis's writings, not just those on war. One of the attendees said the poems reminded him of the lyrics of Bruce Cockburn. Another presenter, a scholar whose work I knew, did make the conference scholastically worthwhile for me. He spoke learnedly on Lewis's writings on Hell, observing that they all dated from during or closely adjacent to WW2, but without making much of that point. He did, however, opine that Tolkien's portrait of Satan, as Morgoth and Sauron, outdoes Lewis's in Perelandra and far outshines Milton's in Paradise Lost, for all that one of Lewis's wartime writings on Hell is a study of Milton arguing that Milton's Satan is no proud rebel but a self-pitying whiner.

The speakers were all good and had worthwhile things to say. Several had trouble pronouncing the name of Lewis's character Wormwood, one rendering it as "Wordsworth". Registration cost included a sandwich buffet for lunch. There were a few inspiring songs with guitar or piano. The church locked up the women's restroom before we were done.

the naming of chicken parts

Some people profess to be puzzled as to why other people eat chicken wings. "They're just little bags of bones," I've heard it said. Yes! I reply. That is why I like them! Wings have a higher-ratio of skin to meat than other chicken pieces, and it's the skin - and the seasoning and coating on it - that make chicken more than just good.

Whole chicken wings are less commonly served these days than before. What's become trendy in the last few decades is single joints of wings. The wing is cut into three pieces, the tips are discarded (season and cook them, and I'd eat them), and the rest makes two pieces.

One of those pieces, the one directly connected to the breast before it's cut off, is called the drumette, due to its resemblance to a miniature of the leg piece known as the drumstick from its resemblance to a etc. But what is the other piece called? For a long time I didn't know, which was frustrating because it was my preferred piece. But then I began to accumulate names:

Flats are what I found them called at the original Buffalo wing bar in Buffalo, and which I subsequently confirmed is a generally recognized term among others who serve wing pieces as snacks. Wingstop, for instance, uses the term.

Mid-joints is how they're labeled when you buy them uncooked at an Asian grocery. Many Chinese restaurants that serve chicken wing pieces only use the mid-joints.

Wingettes is how they're referred to on bags of cooked and frozen wing pieces in supermarkets. Isn't that a more general term for all the pieces? No, because the bag reads "wingettes and drumettes."

By any of those names ...

it's spring

If you feel like finding something, however nominal, to celebrate, today's the vernal equinox - and it's this, not Daylight Saving Time, which is primarily responsible for the greater light we're getting in the evening - so here's something to celebrate with:

"Here Comes the Sun," by George Harrison and the Beatles, performed as it would have been done by a ragtime band of circa 1910:



Enjoy!

books

Source Code: My Beginnings, Bill Gates (Knopf, 2025)
Covers the mogul's life up until Microsoft packed up in Albuquerque and moved to Seattle. It's a remarkably self-reflective memoir for someone on the autism spectrum. Gates attributes the secret of his success as his ability to concentrate ceaselessly on any task that interests him, an inclination not shared, to his irritation, by his business partners, except for one friend who died in a mountain-climbing accident while they were still in high school. Gates' intellectual passion was for anything that could be defined exactly, without gray areas or ambiguity. At school he thought of himself as a mathematician, and he was the best one at his school. But when he got to Harvard, he found - as have many others who've gone there - that everybody at Harvard had been the best at their school, and others now outshone him. His turning point came when a friend suggested that he concentrate on what he was the best at, computer programming. This had been a neglected field because software was then thought of as the free supplement to hardware. Gates credits himself with changing that attitude. But when he started a real company, he found himself concerned with covering the practical necessities of running a business, which - again - his business partners had no interest in. He had a real love/hate relationship with Paul Allen in particular: they were friends, appreciated each other's talents, but got on each other's nerves and argued fiercely.

The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993, Anthony Burgess (Carcanet, 2024)
I picked this up at the concert with Burgess's music I attended a few weeks ago. It's a UK publication not in print in the US. It's a large (75 items) collection of Burgess's music journalism - reviews and feature articles. It does not include his monograph This Man and Music, though there is some overlap in content. It's mostly classical, of course, and when he dips into popular music you wish he hadn't. The title article is on whether music can be dangerous, and he dismisses pop music as too puerile (his word) to be of any concern: that's why the Devil prefers Mozart. Burgess claims to be writing for a general audience, but often delves rather bewilderingly into technical talk: I've had a modest technical training in harmonic theory, but I couldn't always follow him. Because these are separate pieces, there's a lot of repetition, including of Burgess's weird theory that Lady Macbeth's "Screw your courage to the sticking place" refers to tuning a lute. The editor, Paul Phillips, provides footnotes correcting numerous factual errors.

three concerts

I had a busy weekend.

Friday: Pavel Haas Quartet, San Francisco
Average-quality performances of two average-quality quartets by Dvořák (Op. 61) and Tchaikovsky (No. 3).

Saturday: Santa Cruz Chamber Players, Aptos
I had to attend this, because when I won their bassoon theme competition last year, the prize was a free ticket to one of this year's concerts. The season is almost over and this was the first one I could get to.
But I was interested anyway. Light and reedy tenor Andrew Carter sang 1) songs with piano by Harry T. Burleigh, Dvořák's Black pupil whose work I'd never heard before (very plush late Romantic), 2) songs without piano but with viola (!) by RVW (violist, Polly Malan), 3) a song with both piano and viola by the impresario of this concert, Chris Pratorius Gomez. Pianist Kiko Torres Velasco also unloaded Beethoven's Op. 109 sonata, a bit clumsily at first but with increasing effectiveness as it went on.

Sunday: Esmé Quartet, Willow Glen
For review at SFCV, but I'd want to get to this anyway. The Esmé are supreme at conveying the sprawling masterworks of the SQ repertoire. When they played Dvořák's Op 106, I wrote, "This was awesome, a performance for the ages." When they played Schubert's G Major, I wrote, "one felt floating along in a timeless state of bliss." This time it was Beethoven's Op. 131, a particular challenge to make comprehensible, and I wrote, "This lucid presentation came off as warm, even friendly" and that in all such works, they combine "grace and drive with ideal balance and expression." Most satisfactory.

Sofia Gubaidulina

I just came across the news that Sofia Gubaidulina died on Thursday, at the age of 93.

Here's the most extensive and explanatory piece about her music I've written, in a review of a San Francisco Symphony concert back in 2009:

Sofia Gubaidulina, 77 years old and the most senior of distinguished living women composers, her round face reflecting her Tatar ancestry, leaned forward in her chair and stared in an intense birdlike way at the interviewer posing wordy, vapid questions in a language the listener knows little of, then waited as the self-effacing translator (Laurel Fay, actually one of the most formidable American scholars of modern Russian music) rendered them into Russian, then replied in the same language for Fay to make English of it.

They were talking about Gubaidulina's The Light of the End, a recent orchestral composition that the SFS then performed under Kurt Masur. This is, the composer explained, a work about the conflict between the pure tones of just intonation, represented by the French horns, and the modern compromised system of equal temperament, represented by, I guess, the rest of the orchestra. The moments when the horns went on their way against other instruments produced an intense sub-intervalic dissonance very different from the boring old chromatic dissonances of your average modern composer. It had an almost spiritually cleansing effect, especially as it was used as punctuation, not a steady diet, and the whole thing was resolved into pure consonance at the conclusion, the "light of the end" of her title.

But that's Gubaidulina for you. Much of her music has a hushed, expectant quality. This piece was louder and more forceful than others of her works I know, but it played on that expectancy. And her mastery of the orchestra and capability for creating a distinctive voice were strongly evident. I "get" Gubaidulina in a sense that I don't get Carter, Dutilleux, or Kirchner (three living male composers older than she, all of whom I've suffered through in concert).

Gubaidulina expressed satisfaction that the light of her hard-won conclusion would be followed by Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, which she described as what comes afterwards when you get there.

words to live by

B. is reading a book by Mariann Edgar Budde. She's the Episcopal bishop who offended DT by asking him to be merciful. In the book, she quotes these lines:

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

world according to cat

It's beginning to look rather spring-like out there. Tiny birds are settling down on the top of the fence around our front patio. I can't hear if they're saying anything, because the sliding glass door is closed, but Tybalt is looking at them and is making enough chirping noises for the bunch of them. He wants them, but he's not going to get them.

John Wain

Today is the centenary of the birth of John Wain, a British writer - mostly novelist and poet, though also dramatist, critic, and professor - who was well-known to followers of contemporary English literature in his heyday in the 1950s, but is almost forgotten today.

Except for one thing. As a student at Oxford in the 1940s, he'd had C.S. Lewis as his tutor, and after his graduation Lewis invited him to attend the Inklings, so now he's on the unofficial roster of that famous society.

But he wasn't too happy about being known for that, when he was still around to express an opinion (he died in 1994), because the Inklings are most famous for fostering Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Wain disliked that book. He found it meaningless and detached from reality. Wain's own fiction is conservative modern realism, so you can see the difference and perhaps understand why he couldn't grasp fantasy as reflective of reality.

But perhaps he shouldn't have been too upset, at least with me as an example, for after learning about Wain through reading about the Inklings, curiosity drove me to try his writings. I liked enough of them to carry on. Eventually I read all 14 of his published novels and 3 short story collections, as well as much of his nonfiction. Most of his novels aren't really very good, though they were clearly readable and not murky or dull, but a few I enjoyed, one of them - Lizzie's Floating Shop, his only juvenile - enough to re-read it. Some of his short stories are extremely biting. And I liked a lot of his nonfiction, particularly his two books of memoirs (Sprightly Running and Dear Shadows) and his biography of Dr. Johnson.

Last year I finally completed a long-mooted project of writing a paper about Wain - his biography, his literary views and their formation, and a survey of his novels - and gave it at Mythcon and a Signum University conference. It's not formal in nature so I have no plans to publish it academically, but maybe I can get it out somewhere else.

In the meantime, a centenary is a moment to think about its celebrant. Wain was born in Stoke-on-Trent, son of a dentist, on March 14, 1925, and by his own account wasn't much formed literarily or in personality until he got to Oxford at 18 and became a disciple of Lewis, the Oxford drama teacher Nevill Coghill, and, less formally, the independent scholar E.H.W. Meyerstein. Then Wain met fellow students and budding writers Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, both much better remembered today than himself, and his literary affiliations were set.

weird almost-coincidence

The New Yorker this week (Mar. 17 issue) had an article on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Leaving aside the politics, it discussed something about Abbott I hadn't known, though apparently everybody else did. He's permanently in a wheelchair.

It told the story of how he got there. One day, some 40 years ago, he was out jogging, and a large oak tree collapsed and fell on him.

That's weird, I thought, because at approximately the same date - and I'm just about Abbott's age, too - almost the same thing almost happened to me.

I was walking on the Stanford campus where I was working at the time (work was over and I was heading to the parking lot), and going past Encina Hall, when a full branch from a large spreading oak tree suddenly detached itself and slammed to the ground, right in front of me.

A couple steps away and I would have been hit, with unknown consequences.

But I'm confident that, whatever damage it would have done to my head, it would not have transformed me into a right-wing Texas politician.

The most amusing part of the article is an interview with Abbott's principal political advisor, who explains why he lives in New Hampshire and has been commuting to Texas fortnightly for getting on 30 years. “I never thought of moving,” he said. “Texas is hot as hell, and they have snakes.”

wickeder

B. and I just endured some three hours of watching the Wicked movie. The charge for streaming it online having been more than we wanted to pay (and far more, it turns out, than it was worth), B. put a hold on a library DVD and it came in.

Mind, I haven't seen the stage musical, and I never finished reading the Maguire novel. But seeing the movie fresh, I found:

The plot was forced (as in, "we're gonna cram in Wizard of Oz references whether they fit or not"). The dialogue was broken and discontinuous. The special effects were garish. The songs were dull and, even worse, sometimes gratuitously irritating. The problem is that they stood in the place of better songs. For instance, the movie begins with a song about how the Wicked Witch is dead. I could hardly avoid wishing I was hearing the infinitely more catchy song on the same topic from 1939 instead. And the song about visiting the wonders of the Emerald City was a pale, anemic little thing that made me think longingly of the similarly-themed but much more vivid and colorful "New York, New York" by Bernstein/Comden & Green from On the Town.

Thumb down on this one.

concert review: Vienna Philharmonic

Another year, another three-concert set by the visiting Vienna Philharmonic, the most renowned orchestra in the world, at Zellerbach Hall, and I perforce am sent to review one of the concerts. Each of the four times I've done this, it's been a different conductor. Vienna doesn't have a music director; the orchestra is a self-governing entity and invites whoever they like.

This time it was Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director in Montreal (of which he's native) and Philadelphia. I hadn't heard his work before. I didn't say so explicitly, but I couldn't avoid comparing his Dvořák New World Symphony with the splendid rendition under Dalia Stasevska that I heard from SFS a year ago. This one was effective enough, but felt rather superficial in interpretation next to Stasevska's profundity. Nézet-Séguin was, at least in this work, one of those conductors whose idea of interpretation is to take fast passages really fast and slow passages really slow. In other words, rather like Christian Thielemann, who did a haphazard job on Mendelssohn and Brahms the last time I reviewed Vienna, except that Nézet-Séguin is more like Thielemann done right. He showed more control and better taste, and so he was passable if not excellent.

The Vienna sound is still great, though. There was a small but detectable increase in the number of women in this once, not long ago, all-male orchestra, since the last time I saw them. Vienna has an elaborate system of training prospective players in the Vienna sound, and it takes recruiting players for the early stages of this process to get them in the orchestra later.

wicked

Our fantasy book discussion group met on Sunday to discuss Gregory Maguire's Wicked, in commemoration of the recent release of its musical's movie. How much the book, or the musical, is based on the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie as opposed to Baum's book was a major topic of discussion. Our answer was: mostly. Not too much of the distinctively Baum in it.

I got a confirmation of that when I checked the DVR today to see what was on Great Performances lately and found they had shown the Movies for Grownups Awards, sponsored by AARP. Alan Cumming hosted, boasting that he'd just turned 60, the spring chicken, but he and his show were far preferable to the average Oscar host and show. It moved along briskly, didn't waste time with a lot of follies, and Cumming's little songs were funnier than the average Oscar host's little songs ("Hey, Mr. Chalamet man, sing like Bob for me").

Anyway, the screenwriting award went to the writers for the Wicked movie, and Jeff Goldblum, who played the Wizard in that movie, introduced the winners by saying that their movie was based on a stage musical which was based on a book which was based on a movie which was based on another book. And there's your officially blessed answer: Maguire's book was based on the 1939 movie.

a day in San Francisco

There's a music series I'm on the mailing list for, held at a small church in the City, but for which the timings are usually awkward so I can rarely go. But this Saturday morning they were holding a children's program, and I had to go up to the City anyway for a concert at Herbst that evening, and the program for the children's concert was Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals, which I like, so I thought, why not?

Because I often have difficulty forcing my body to be ready to go out in the mornings, that's why not, but this time it co-operated and I was there. It was only about half an hour, but the arrangement for one piano, violin, viola, and bass worked fine - Meena Bhasin on viola playing "The Swan," as far as I could tell in the same register as the original cello part, was particularly good, and it was fun watching the tiny children cavorting to the music.

The evening concert was the Calidore String Quartet, which previously I've found very impressive, but either I was too tired out or they were, because otherwise why would a program with Beethoven and Schubert in it sound dull and crabby, and the best piece in it was Jesse Montgomery's Strum? I've heard that before and thought it an outstanding piece; it was even better this time. The scherzo of Korngold's Third Quartet was also a moment that had life in it.

That left over eight hours with nothing to do besides meals, so what would I do with it? I decided to spend my time in North Beach, which is another neighborhood I rarely get to. Herbst is in the Civic Center which is here, and the kids' concert was in Noe Valley which is over there, and North Beach is way off in the other direction, but with knowledge of the city's bus and streetcar system, I got between the places OK.

There was a restaurant in North Beach that had been on my "try this" list for some time, and I walked over to examine from below two of the legendarily steepest street segments in the City which were nearby, but I spent most of my afternoon in the famous City Lights Bookstore, which was also conveniently nearby. I'd never bought anything at City Lights on my few previous visits, having not found anything that interested me, but it turns out that's because I hadn't noticed that there's a little staircase leading down to the basement, and that's where all the books are that are more my speed.

Good thing I brought a canvas bag, also for a couple bottles of interestingly flavored cider that I found at a little street fair back in Noe Valley.

world according to cats

After his visit two weeks ago to the vet for a teeth-cleaning, Tybalt began - even more than usual - to love-bomb me. I was afraid he was calculating that sufficient ministrations would convince me never to take him to the vet again.

Unfortunately that didn't work. Yesterday he went back for a follow-up check, and this time it was Maia's turn in the dental chair. The cries of dismay as we stuffed them in their carriers and hauled them off by car were intense, but they survived and are back at home, as over-loving as ever.

For instance, I cannot work at my computer without Tybalt alternating between 1) standing up right in front of the screen so that I can't see anything; 2) flopping down by the side and preventing me from using the trackball by clawing at my fingers whenever I try.

Tybalt had been sent home from his major appointment with various meds which we were supposed to squirt onto his teeth twice a day. B. held him and squeezed his mouth open while I wielded the syringes. We gave up on this after a day and a half, having traumatized the cat and placed more medicine on his jaw, B.'s hands, etc. than in Tybalt's mouth let alone on his teeth.

Anyway, yesterday the vet, trying to examine Tybalt's teeth, was having even more trouble squeezing his mouth open than B. had had. I refrained from pointing out that this was why we gave up on the meds.

concert review: Mission Chamber Orchestra

This is the third concert season in a row that my editor has sent me down to review this unpretentious little orchestra, so I gave it an unpretentious little review. My spirits lightened when we got as far in Falla's El amor brujo as the "Ritual Fire Dance," which at least sounded familiar, and then they dampened again afterwards.

It did occur to me, elsewhere in the piece when the orchestra gives the sound of a clock striking midnight, that this was the second ballet score I'd heard with that effect. The first being Prokofiev's Cinderella, duh.

The only matter of real note I decided it was better not to critique. In the opening piece for strings, the playing was seriously not up to snuff, and I thought, oh dear this orchestra has devolved. But it hadn't: it was the high-school musicians they'd invited to play along with them in that one piece. Last time they did that, they'd made a big production out of it, having the high-schoolers play alone first, and even doing it in their school auditorium, so that time I was warned.

a heroic concert

Christopher Costanza, a cellist whom I just reviewed in a different concert, and pianist Stephen Prutsman, with whom he's frequently collaborated, often with others, gave a concert tonight at Stanford of a distinctly challenging nature.

They played Beethoven's sonatas for cello and piano. All five of them. They're big, hefty works. With intermission, it took 2 1/2 hours. It was in the music department's small recital hall, and like most of the concerts there, it was free. The hall was packed.

Interesting performances, too. Costanza was inquisitive and querulous. Prutsman was bold and daring and stomped over everything.

I tried an experiment at this concert. I downloaded all the scores from the IMSLP onto my ipad, to see if it was feasible to follow along. And I sat in the far back corner, so that nobody sitting behind me would be distracted. This wouldn't work with orchestral pieces, because the ipad screen at 8 inches is too small to display them clearly, but chamber music works.

And it did. My only problem was one place where I wasn't sure whether they were taking the repeat or not, and I lost my place until the end of the movement.

This is good because in a couple weeks I'm reviewing Beethoven's Op. 131 string quartet, and I really need a score for that one. Now I know I can download it, and avoid all the hassles attendant on getting a score from the library.

Preceded by a quick early dinner at home, because I'd been out in the late afternoon at another concert, an amateur strings group called Harmonia California, who played suites by three fairly obscure early 20C British composers: Frank Bridge and Granville Bantock, whom I already knew, and Christopher Wilson, whom I didn't. Bridge's, like most of his work, was mildly modernist; Bantock's was intensely Scottish; and Wilson's was kind of incipiently neoclassical. The orchestra stumbled a certain amount, but got through the pieces basically intact.

concert review: Stanford Philharmonia

I skipped out on the SF Symphony, which was playing pieces by Beethoven and Rachmaninoff that I like but are not among my favorites, and went here instead because they were playing two of my most cherished works of the early 20C: Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1 and Sibelius's Symphony No. 3.

The Bloch was stunningly good. There were a few wobbles in the strings here and elsewhere, but generally the playing was of professional quality. It was crisp, bold, and sharply etched. This is the perfect approach to Bloch's jagged writing, but the same approach sat rather oddly on the atmospheric Sibelius symphony. Frequently, background oscillations in the strings somewhere would be more prominent than the theme. However, the climaxes were gigantically exciting, so there's that. I was pretty satisfied with the Sibelius for adventure, though it was a rather emotionless rendition. Prof. Paul Phillips is the music director and conductor.

A third work on the program I'd known nothing about but it raised my curiosity. It was the Concerto Grosso for Guitar Quartet and Orchestra by Anthony Burgess (1987). Yes, the author of A Clockwork Orange was also a composer, mostly for the drawer - it was a good way to change gears between novels, he said - but occasional performance. This work had only been played once before, ever.

Unfortunately, either as a guitar concerto or a concerto grosso, it didn't quite work. The acoustic guitar is a very quiet instrument, and it's difficult to keep the orchestra from drowning it out. Burgess could have used some tips from Joaquin Rodrigo as to how to do it right. As it was, the guitars - even four of them, played by the Mela Guitar Quartet - could not be heard when the orchestra was also playing. The orchestration had a tendency to blare, which is not something you want to hear in a guitar concerto.

He called it a concerto grosso because there were 4 soloists, about the number for a good concertino group, but he didn't treat them as such. Because they couldn't be heard with the orchestra, instead of blending and counterpointing as in a good concerto grosso, it was alternation between soloists and orchestra, as in a 19C concerto. What's more, he treated the soloists as a single unit, a big 24-string guitar, instead of separating them.

The orchestral writing, besides being blatty, was tonal conservative modernism with no particular outstanding qualities, rather dry and academic to my ear, though some of that could have been the performance.

in quest of trackball

When I first started using a graphic computer interface - about 30 years ago; I was a late adopter - I quickly realized that the interface tool I wanted was not a mouse, and certainly not a touchpad, but a trackball.

A trackball is basically a mouse upside down, with the ball that senses movement exposed at the top. Because the device as a whole does not move, it requires less desktop space than a mouse; and because the ball is moved with the user's fingers, the irritation of the desktop surface not providing enough friction to move the mouse's ball does not arise.

I got myself one of this model:


Or two, actually. I took one to work and plugged it into my computer there, and took it with me whenever I changed jobs, rather than use the mouse that was already there.

I've been through five or six of them over the years - the click buttons eventually wear out - but always the same model.

Until now. I went to order one online and found the price had increased to over five times as much as other models of wired trackballs. (I insist on wired auxiliaries on my computer, because they can't be mislaid.) The same manufacturer seemed to have changed its default model to this:


So I got one. What I hadn't taken into account is that it works differently. Where the old version has the ball between the buttons, so you move the ball with your right forefinger and hit the button with your thumb, the new model is the other way around. The ball is to the left of both buttons, and you move the ball with your right thumb.

Maybe I'd get used to this eventually, but I found it incredibly awkward. I had the deuce of a trouble placing the cursor even within a large box, let alone a small one.

I found an inexpensive trackball from a different manufacturer that doesn't look at all like my old one, but it has the ball in the middle. It looks like this:


So far it works fine. I hope it's sturdy and the buttons don't wear out too fast. It has one other potential problem. The ball doesn't click into place in the housing; it just sits there. That means if a cat knocks the device off the desk - a not unknown event - the ball will come out and roll off into an obscure corner and be hard to find. Well, I'll deal with it.

Michelle Trachtenberg

Oh my lordy, Michelle Trachtenberg died. She was only 39. Apparently some sort of medical issue. One site said it was complications from a liver transplant. That's a hell of an operation to have, especially when you're only 39.

She was an actress, well beloved - and I said beloved - by me from Buffy the Vampire Slayer long ago when she was quite young. Many viewers disliked her character, Dawn Summers, for being a whiny teenager. Well, she was a whiny teenager, but unlike another show's infamous teenager with the initials W.C., she was enjoyable and fun to watch. At least I thought so. "Real Me," the episode that effectively introduced her, is one of my favorites, and not just for Harmony and her minions.

As for Trachtenberg, like just about all the rest of the cast, she was superb in her part, really embodying the character. And, in that scene with the henchmen in "Once More with Feeling," she showed herself quite the dancer.

concert review: Dalby Costanza Yakushev Piano Trio

At the artist q&a after this concert, I asked how these members of the disbanded St. Lawrence String Quartet partnered up with this pianist, who was not one who had collaborated with the Quartet while it was alive. The answer sufficiently clarified the nature of the group that I used it to lead off my review.

My editors tend not to approve of discursive leads, but they passed this one. They also passed my saying that the principal work "took a while to hit its groove" and that it finally "clicked." Not very formal language, but it seemed the best way to say succinctly what I meant.

It was an OK concert with a lot of miscellaneous items, and I was pleased to review it, the more so as we hadn't covered anything else yet from this presenter this season.

filibuster review

Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy (Liveright, 2021)

I grabbed this book almost at random off the library shelf, but it turned out to be exactly what I wanted: a history of the Senate filibuster, filling in lots of gaps from what I previously knew of Senate history. I already knew that the filibuster was a bug in the Senate's rule of unlimited debate, being an exploitation of that rule to stop debate, but I hadn't known that, before the further exploitation of the rule in the 1980s, almost the only successful filibusters - that actually stopped bills instead of just delaying them - were applied to civil rights bills. Even racist Southern senators, who would sanctimoniously declare that unlimited debate was the Senate's hallowed tradition - it is, but holding the floor to stop debate isn't - were perfectly happy to vote for cloture, the overriding of a filibuster, when the topic was something else. Like the 3/5ths clause, the filibuster is tainted from its origins.

Jentleson tells clearly the complex story of the revisions of Senate rules that inadvertently led to the situation we have today, where filibusters need not hold the floor but only be signalled by intent and are applied to every bill, so that every one needs a 60%+ majority to pass. It's also clear that the "nuclear option," to require only a 50%+ vote to pass, is not an explosion but a reversion to normal Senate rules. What isn't clear is why, having already applied the "nuclear option" to nominations for lower judges, Harry Reid couldn't change the rule further to apply it to Merrick Garland's nomination.

Though Jentleson earned his knowledge as an aide to Reid, the most interesting part of the book is the discussion of recent Republican obstruction from their point of view, explaining why they do it. McConnell's refusal to allow any Democratic bills or nominations to pass was a desperate attempt to propitiate the radicals in his caucus, who'd depose him as leader if he didn't. And Chuck Grassley? A Republican senator described in Obama's memoirs as having previously supported everything in the Obamacare bill, but who told Obama he wouldn't vote for it even if they gave him everything he wanted, but wouldn't say why? It turns out that it's because McConnell would threaten to deprive him of the Judiciary committee chairmanship, next time the Republicans got the majority, if he broke ranks. But of course he couldn't say that: it'd sound too venal and self-serving.

There's a few small factual quibbles. John Quincy Adams didn't make a deal with Henry Clay to throw him the presidency in 1825 in return for making Clay Secretary of State. That's what Andrew Jackson charged, but Adams was simply too naive to realize his integrity would be questioned. Also, at times I think Jentleson relies too heavily on Robert Caro for the historical material on Lyndon Johnson, but not always.

filmed theater review

National Theatre Live, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

This is one of those films of a live performance of a British theater production, shown on a screen in a stage theater as if it were an in-person live performance, got it?

It was a pretty good performance, but one thing was clear above all else: that the Musk-Trump administration had nothing to do with sponsoring it, because they would have abominated it.

For one thing, the production had gay overtones (which added nothing except to make Algy falling for Cecily seem incongruous), and drag/mardi-gras framing (prelude and curtain calls), which added nothing whatever.

More significantly, three of the main characters - Algy and his relatives, Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen - were played by Black actors. (The rest were white.) Not only would their presence infuriate the bigots who resent a minority person taking any job a white person could do, but the casting meant that both of the main romantic relationships in the play were interracial. Oh no, they could go on to have mongrel children (like Barack Obama). Sounds fine by me.

The big scene between Gwendolen and Cecily, where they pass from being new acquaintances to friends to bitter rivals to sisters in adversity, was the acting showpiece of the performance, with Ronke Adékoluéjó as Gwendolen and Eliza Scanlen as Cecily.

Next National Theatre Live production, in April, is Dr. Strangelove. That's right, a film of a stage adaptation of a film. With Steve Coogan in the Peter Sellers roles (plus Major Kong, which Sellers was also originally scheduled to play), so ... maybe.

concert review: Redwood Symphony

With some misgivings, I decided to review Redwood Symphony's Mahler Second last weekend; it's just been published.

Redwood does Mahler very well, but though the quality of the performance was good, this was one of their less enticing interpretations. The dramatic first movement, which should thunder from mighty heights in the manner of Bruckner, was instead ominous and brooding. The problem with that is, when the same mood reappears in the finale, there's nothing left for it to do. It got extremely tedious, and I was reminded again that what Mahler needed was a good editor. I would have just thrown out the entire finale before the point where the chorus enters: that, which normally I could do without, was really good.

This was at the San Mateo PAC, which is the auditorium of the city's main high school. High schools are not famed for having large parking lots (normally they play at a junior college, and those do have huge parking lots), and with a large orchestra and larger chorus all wanting to park there too, it was far more jammed than when I've been there before. I wound up out on the street on the other side of the large campus.

Both a symphony board member and one of the instrumentalists caught me before the concert and thanked me for reviewing it: Redwood doesn't get covered too often. I trust they'll be happy with the result. As for me, I'm not used to being accosted this way.

cats in agony

I'm used to taking lots of medicines. The cats aren't.

Tybalt went in to the vet for a teeth cleaning yesterday. He trotted in as usual in the morning to the bathroom where we keep the cat food, thinking he was going to be fed, but he was mistaken. (No food before a cleaning, because it requires anesthesia.) I'm used to the look of dismay and resignation he gives when I shut the bathroom door and then open up the shower stall in which I'd hidden the cat carrier the night before, but the yowls of agony he gave continuously from then on until I dropped him off were heartrending.

Then he came home with a tooth extracted and three medicines we have to squirt in orally twice a day for two weeks: a painkiller, an antibiotic, and a dental rinse. B. holds him and squeezes his mouth open, and I handle the syringes.

Tybalt has been a loving cat. Often he rests over on B's side of the bed, but whenever I lie down for a nap, if I'm lying on my right side so that I'm facing B's side, Tybalt will get up, saunter over, and snuggle down in my arms for a long petting session.

But I don't think that will happen any more, at least for a while. There weren't even any cats meowing for food when I got up this morning, over an hour after their default feeding time (B. was still asleep), and that's unprecedented. The medicine is upsetting Tybalt too much, and as for Maia, anything out of the ordinary freaks her out and she's gone, hiding somewhere.

It pains us to be upsetting our cats so, but what can we do? Besides give up on the medicine, which we probably will do long before the vet's instruction.

was there an election?

DT has claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a "dictator," apparently because Ukraine holds presidential elections every five years but Zelensky is in his sixth year. As this article points out, "Ukraine is currently under martial law because of the full-scale Russian invasion" and the relevant law postpones elections in time of martial law.

Leaving aside the question of whether that makes you a dictator or not - DT said he was going to be a dictator on day 1; now he's even saying he's the king - the article quoted Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) as saying that Zelensky "should hold an election." It then goes on to say, "When reporters noted to Hawley that Ukraine hasn’t been able to hold an election because of the war, Hawley argued that the United States and Britain held elections during World War II."

But here we have British prime minister Keir Starmer saying that it is "perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during war time as the UK did during World War II."

So who's right, Hawley or Starmer? Did Britain hold elections during WW2 or not?

Starmer is right, basically.

The US held elections without interruption during the war, but - the attack on Pearl Harbor aside - the US wasn't in the front lines of the war. Ukraine is being subject to a full-scale invasion. Britain wasn't quite that close to the front lines, but it was under German attack and it did suspend general elections.

A regular election for the House of Commons was due in 1940. The House suspended it by legislation, one year at a time, each year until the European war was over in 1945. Then they held an election.

They'd done something similar during WW1. But those are the only times the British have suspended their then-current law requiring regular elections.

There is a minor exception, though. Special elections to fill vacant seats in the House were held. Those were local and easier to manage. But all the major parties had agreed on an electoral truce. Whichever party had held the seat prior to the vacancy was allowed to nominate a candidate unopposed by the other parties.

However, particularly near the end of the war, voters impatient at not having a choice would sometimes nominate an independent or minor-party candidate in opposition, and sometimes that candidate even won.

But that's the only exception. Britain did not hold a general election during the European conflict in WW2.

presidents' day

As Stephen Colbert pointed out just now, while we used to celebrate Lincoln's Birthday (last Wednesday this year) and Washington's Birthday (next Saturday), now we have Presidents' Day, today, to commemorate all the presidents. And DT is a president, so no thanks.

I actually forgot it was a holiday before I went to the medical center for my regular blood test. Almost everything was deserted, but there was one blood lab open. They said it was really only for emergencies, not routine tests, but they let me get tested anyway. And thus I ignore, if not defy.

Colbert has also found a mapping service still using "Gulf of Mexico," because, as he points out, that's its name. If you search "Gulf of Mexico" on MapQuest, it'll take you to a realty on the Florida Gulf coast, but if you pull back, sure enough it's correctly labeled.

post-Valentine's

As Valentine's itself is not a good day to dine out, B. and I had our Valentine's dinner out on Tuesday, which is the only other day I had free in a busy week. We went to an Italian place we'd tried before and liked, in the little township of Loyola Corners not far from here, and were pretty happy with our fish dishes.

For last weekend when I was out, B. had put in the grocery order an entry for a dozen eggs, the overpriced food du jour, figuring she might make herself an omelet. But she didn't, and there were still a full dozen in the counter when I came back. They need to get used up eventually, so what do I have that uses a lot of eggs? A quiche. Haven't done one of those in a while. So I got the veggies and the cheese and the crust, and made my standard quiche, the one I submitted to the Tiptree cookbook years ago.

And that was our Valentine's dinner. For dessert, slices of a Turkish delight I'd picked up at a new Mediterranean place at lunch a couple days before. Unlike the jelly-like stuff I get at Pike Place in Seattle, this was slices from a roll made of a paste - this one hazelnut-flavored - coated in a frosting studded with pistachio bits.

concert review: Yuja! Yuja!

The ubiquitous and unsurpassed pianist Yuja Wang made another appearance at Davies with the SF Symphony to play two (fairly short) piano concertos in one concert, one before and one after intermission. The hall was, unusually, packed. EPS conducted.

First came Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. This was brisk, chippy, in the neoclassical spirit of the day. Yuja emphasized clarity over sheer power.

Then the First Concerto of Einojuhani Rautavaara. I was familiar with the composer but not the work. It had three movements of startlingly differing character. In the first, Yuja pounded out huge dissonant chords while the orchestra played gentler Nordic surges. In the second, Yuja turned to gentle, rather postmodern chord sequences, intermixed with tinkling runs, while the orchestra provided a quiet shimmering background. The third was a wild and rampant toccata.

After this, Yuja played two encores, the first a piece of Glassian minimalism with a lot of tremolo, the second one of her standard encores, an abridged arrangement of Marquez's Danzon No. 2.

What Yuja wears is always a topic of interest for her concerts. For Ravel she wore a long but slit black slinky number. For Rautavaara she changed to one of her sparkling minidresses.

The two concertos were surrounded by movements from Debussy's Images. Having had more than enough Debussy in the first part - his music tends to make me slightly nauseous - I decided not to stick around for the second.

Besides, I was thoroughly soaked. Having been dumped out by the city bus 3 1/2 blocks from the hall, I found that the previously merely persistent rain had enlarged itself into a downpour. It took me over a block to find a spot to shelter and wait it out - intense downpours never last long here - and I caught the brunt of it. My jacket, a light windbreaker, was still very damp when I got home, so I put it in the clothes dryer.

concert review: Joshua Roman

This was one of those concerts so strikingly unusual that I couldn't not attend.

Joshua Roman is a professional cellist whose career was derailed when he developed Long Covid in 2021. It hit him like a truck, with symptoms rather resembling chronic fatigue. Having played the cello every day for most of his life, he put it away and didn't touch it for months.

When he was finally able to get it out and start playing again, the first piece he played was the Prelude from Bach's Suite No. 1, pretty much the foundation stone of the cello repertoire. After so long away, the sheer joy of the physicality of playing and the nourishment he got from making music and from its sound struck him forcefully. It touched him inside, is the way he put it.

Music is for healing and nourishing the body, the emotions, the mind. It's a tool kit for wellness. That is the lesson Roman learned. Though he's never fully recovered, and will - he says - not be the same man again, he has been going around giving concerts illustrating this lesson, and this at Stanford was one of them.

In between talking about his experiences and what music means to him, he played a few unaccompanied pieces: the Bach Prelude, the medieval-inspired in manus tuas by Caroline Shaw, a Capriccio by Krzysztof Penderecki to allow for the need for chaos and craziness in life, and a couple pieces of his own. One of these, written during the original pandemic, was a duet written to express the need for playing together with others, with separate melodies for each of two cellos which interweave and layer on top of each other. He played this with Melanie Ambler, a Stanford medical student who plays healing solo cello concerts for critically ill patients and those in pallative care.

Then, for his favorite concerto, the Saint-Saëns First, Roman was joined by the Stanford Medicine Orchestra, conducted by Terrance Yan. The Medicine Orchestra? Yes, it's a project to bring artistic creativity into the busy lives of personnel at the Stanford Hospital and Medical School. And it shouldn't be surprising that many of those people play instruments, considering how many of the performers at Stanford undergraduate student concerts are revealed by their bios to be pre-meds.

Roman expressed his gratitude to be playing with "an orchestra of healers," and for an encore he offered another one of his solo pieces: he sang Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" - the original verses, which hardly anyone does in full - while accompanying himself with an imaginative cello line.

Roman's cello tone is rich and slightly nasal, but very light in ambiance. It soars rather than weighs down. As a session for healing the soul in a difficult time, this concert was - as the cliche puts it - what the doctor ordered.

But considering why we were here and what happened to Joshua Roman, why were less than 5% of the attendees wearing masks? What is wrong with people?

nah, a concert review

I've occasionally enjoyed listening to bluegrass music. I still have fond memories of attending the public concert of a dulcimer convention in Little Rock, Arkansas, some 16 years ago, and most of the music fell in that category.

So I decided to take up the Freight's offer of early tickets to a concert by what they assured us was a popular bluegrass band, though I'd never heard of it. And so last night I found myself among the enthusiastic crowd pouring in for a two-hour set by the Del McCoury Band.

This was a different sort of bluegrass. What I'd heard in Little Rock was typically a single performer at a time balancing a mountain dulcimer across her knees. This was Big Band Bluegrass: Two guitars, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, and bass, played by six men (and they were all men) all trying to outdo each other in fancy solo instrumental displays, which they'd trade off on during songs. This kind of show-offery is one of the things I dislike about jazz, and I don't much like it in classical concertos either.

The singing, though live and on mikes, all sounded like it came from a scratchy old 78, and the words were usually unintelligible.

Nevertheless I sat through the whole set, it wasn't unpleasant, and towards the end I had the treat of hearing them do a song I actually knew: Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning." I don't think I'd heard anyone but RT do that before, and hearing it translated into bluegrass was - interesting. Things devolved chaotically when the leader - whom I guessed was Del McCoury himself, though he never introduced himself - asked for requests. The torrent of song titles bellowed out from the audience seemed to bewilder him, and they just played what they wanted.

Uniquely for a concert I've attended on the evening of the game, nobody mentioned the Super Bowl. What a relief.

a panel and a concert

Saturday afternoon I attended a panel on "music and mind" at Stanford. Famed soprano Renée Fleming, who's edited a book on the subject, moderated three Stanford professors of neuroscience and a dean, who described research. One professor talked about training for people with cochlear implants to get them to hear music properly (the implants are designed to clarify voices only). Another described some sort of tactile glove he's developed that helps give Parkinson's patients better control over their limbs; he's hoping to transfer this research into dealing with musicians with focal dystonia (cramps and contractions that affect them particularly when they're playing or singing). The dean spoke of a Stanford arts therapy program open to help students who feel lonely, depressed, etc. Sending students to concerts, museums, etc., may seem a dorky idea for a program, but the therapists, after determining your tastes, find appropriate venues, pay for the tickets and arrange transportation, and above all they match you with other students who want to go to the same things, since not having anyone to go with and not being able to find anyone is a major student complaint.

The third professor spoke in more general terms about brain and bodily states, discussing neural control over exhalation, which all speech and singing is. He said that open improvisation is less traumatic than anything formal or scripted - he cited waiting your turn to introduce yourself at a meeting as particularly anxiety-inducing; it's better to go first. Fleming disagreed; it's when she's practiced an aria to perfection that she gets into the zone, a flow state as she described it. Whereas improvisation - which she's done as a jazz singer - requires thinking, analytics of the accompaniment, etc.

I'm not a performer as Fleming is, but my ideas fall on her lines. Listening to others doing the introductions gives me a chance to mentally draft my own words and a database of others to model myself on, and I get less anxious as it goes along. Whereas free improvisation, like improv theater, panics me, because I don't know what to do, and I can't think of anything under pressure. (My brother, on the other hand, loves improv theater, and does it regularly.)

After the panel, I had just under two hours to travel successively by car, BART, and bus 40 miles to Herbst in the City for a piano recital. Having prepared by stuffing portable food in my car so I wouldn't have to stop for dinner, I managed it in exactly 90 minutes.

Pianist Marc-André Hamelin began by applying his clear, precise, and liquid tones to a delightfully crisp and chipper performance of a Haydn sonata. He then spoiled the effect by playing two pieces of atonal modernist crap, one messy and one stodgy, and one piece of postmodernist pastiche crap (lots of Debussy quotes, a Scott Joplin quote interrupted by Igor Stravinsky, that sort of thing).

The second half was all late Romantic Russians, Sergei Rachmaninoff and his almost-forgotten epigone Nikolai Medtner. I actually liked the Medtner better: it was lighter and less turgid. But the Rachmaninoff pieces, including his rare Second Piano Sonata, could have been chosen specifically to make him look bad, because he's often better than this. Performance: A, insofar as it was possible to tell; Program selection: D.

The program note writer was interested in one thing, describing how hard all this music was to play. Haydn: "these sonatas are at times very difficult." Crap modernist 1 (Frank Zappa, no less): "Zappa himself described the solo-piano version as 'very, very, very difficult.'" Crap modernist 2 (Stefan Wolpe): "this exceptionally complex score." Crap postmodernist (John Oswald): "two measures of the score were possibly impossible to play." Medtner: "a study in fiery virtuosity." Rachmaninoff: "The one thing clear about this music is how difficult it is."

conference report update

I've received a couple of comments on my Fahrenheit 2451 conference report, referring to my paper on image reproduction access in libraries, mentioning the alleged practice of libraries to discard paper originals of newspapers after microfilming them.

I addressed this in the paper, but I didn't want to respond to these in comments, because it's a complicated matter, so here instead is what I said in the paper.

For a period when microfilms were new*, libraries thought they might actually replace fragile originals. But that quickly proved to be mistaken. Nicholson Baker, a gadfly essayist and novelist, claimed in a book published in the year 2001** that the British Library was still discarding original printed newspapers after microfilming them, but every fellow librarian I talked to at the time – and that book got a lot of discussion in libraries – found this claim puzzling. I’d been taught in library school that discarding originals was a bad old idea that was not being done any more, and I was taught that 20 years before Baker wrote his book. So what happened? Had the British Library reverted to bad practice? Had they never got the message in the first place? Or were the discards merely unneeded duplicates? I don’t know. The fact that Baker, on purchasing some of these discarded bound volumes, had no trouble finding a university library willing to take them in shows that the discarding of originals was far from the widespread mania his book depicts it as. But all of Baker’s writings on libraries are so sophomoric – an inextricable combination of wise and foolish – that I can’t take the time to discuss him any further.

*Microfilm was introduced in the 1920s, but the period I'm thinking of, I was told, extended to the 1950s.
**The book was titled Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

New Yorker, Feb. 10

I get this magazine every week, but only sometimes do I feel like writing about it.

You've heard about the leaning tower of Pisa? Here's an article about the leaning tower of Manhattan, an apartment building so narrow it only has space for one-room apartments, and which was built on infill without drilling down to the bedrock, so this is what happens when you do that. It's still not finished and probably never will be.

Alex Ross, the classical critic, writes about Alma Mahler. Mostly biographical, says only a little about her music. Her first husband, the renowned Gustav, made her stop composing to be a housewife - why would a musician marry a woman who composes if he wants her to stop? - until he actually looked at her music and discovered to his surprise that it was good. I've heard some performed and would rather agree. But by that time she'd lost her creative juices and never got started up again.
Tests the proposition, it is possible to write an article about Alma Mahler without mentioning Tom Lehrer? Answer here, no it is not. Ross only mentions the song to chide its premise and call it "a sniggering ballad." What would he think of Lehrer's song about Wernher von Braun?

Articles about the shortage of soldiers in the US military - proposed solution, lower recruiting standards, which makes one wonder whether they needed to be so high in the first place - and on the shortage of blood available for medical transfusions - proposed solution, artificial blood, but they're still working on that; it's complicated. Includes numerous quotes from a medical researcher actually surnamed Doctor. Surprised me by noting that only 38% of Americans are even eligible to donate blood. That makes me feel less bad about not being one of them. After the mad cow scare I was deemed ineligible because I've eaten beef in Britain.

Article about an artist I'd never heard of (Giorgio Morandi) that actually includes a reproduction of one of his paintings, a useful feature the New Yorker rarely bothers with in its articles on art.

conference report: Fahrenheit 2451

In between the concerts I last reported on, I attended this conference. I'd heard about it from Sørina Higgins, the principal organizer, who is an Inklings scholar I've had dealings with. The topic was "Ideas Worth Saving: The Future of Theology & Thought." Besides theological and Inklings angles, it was sponsored by the Internet Archive and to be held at their offices in San Francisco. That meant it was nearby and I could attend. But it also inspired me to send a note to Søri in my capacity as a librarian, to the effect that "computerization of texts is to provide ease of access. It's not an ideal form for preserving data." And suddenly I found myself listed as a presenter at the conference, with a 15-minute slot to explain what I meant by that.

The Internet Archive offices are in a converted church in the outer reaches of the city, which doesn't mean there's any available parking nearby. It also means a lot of climbing of stairs. The main meeting room is the church's auditorium - it looked more like that than like a sanctuary - up on the second floor, a room whose acoustics were daunted by the massed servers of the Internet Archive humming away in the back of the room. Main presentations were given there (with microphones, fortunately), but the paper breakout sessions were in a couple of tiny rooms elsewhere in the building.

Mine was first in a 75-minute session in a tiny room with a large table, around which a dozen people could fit. I talked about the history of image reproduction in libraries, from microfilm to computer scans, and how those assist access by taking the burden of usage off the originals and thus help preserve them. But they're not archival: they won't last without vigilant updating and replacement. And how do you preserve words over the centuries? "By printing them out on acid-free paper, binding them between sturdy covers, and storing them in a building with a constant cool temperature. In other words, a book in a library."

Then we had another librarian talking about the future of libraries and the role of A.I., a theology professor on the importance of writing and preserved data in the heaven of Judeo-Christian tradition, and a film scholar on the use of film fragments as inserts in other movies, a particularly interesting topic which he traced back to Duck Soup.

The other main item I attended was a panel discussion on myth in Star Wars, anchored by clips from the movies. I remember my own comments on a couple of these. On the opening crawl at the start of the original movie: "We're always being told that stories need to start with action scenes, that expository lumps in particular are deadly. Yet the most popular movie of all time begins with three paragraphs of exposition, in print." On the scene in Empire where Luke meets Yoda without knowing who he is: "I'd like to respond to this scene by quoting a different book altogether: 'All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was a little old man with a staff.'" (Actually that quote as I gave it offhand mangles up two different editions of the text, but the point is clear: Yoda is also little and has a staff.)

There were a few people there I knew, a few more I'd met at the Lewis conference in Oregon last year, others worth talking to, and my only regret is that precarious health meant I couldn't be there for more of it.

concert review: California Symphony

Featured work of the evening, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Conductor Donato Cabrera pulled out all the stops for this one, especially in the finale for which he took all the repeats. The result, with the orchestra at full roar, was Mozart the Mighty Conqueror, fully the equal of Beethoven or any of the other heroes who came after.

Far gentler, Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, with the tall and elegant Meng Su playing a crisp and elegant solo guitar. Rodrigo was very careful to ensure the orchestra never drowns out the guitar, and these performers were equally sure to observe his wishes.

Gentler still, Breathe by the increasingly ubiquitous Carlos Simon, a ten-minute exercise in meditation. Fortunately it didn’t try to reproduce the experience of breathing itself, concentration on which I find hideously uncomfortable and is the reason I dislike meditation. Instead, it featured a steady sheen of sound, but nothing spectralist or minimalist, but with fragments of melody on top, some lyric but some rather jangly. At times it sounded like the music of a quiet and peaceful jungle, possibly the one in which the lion sleeps tonight.

Subscribers found at our seats a card with a QR code and its associated URL, thank you, which on inspection proved to lead to a brief video of Cabrera announcing that next season will include Gershwin’s American in Paris, eh, and the obscure discovery of the season, Borodin’s Second Symphony. OK, granted that the Borodin is criminally underplayed, but if he really wants a totally obscure but worthwhile 19C Russian symphony, how about Kalinnikov’s First, which I’ve actually heard a lot of recently, or Balakirev’s First?

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

The old man, he still has it.

SFS Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt, an unbelievable 97, needed assistance to hobble his way to the podium, but once he sat down (of course he sat), the music flowed with undiminished freshness.

We had two standard repertoire symphonies, an ordinary Blomstedt program. The point was to hear what he could do with them.

Schubert’s Fifth, one of his early Mozartean symphonies, had heft as well as beauty, but the real revelation was Brahms’ First. Blomstedt and the orchestra worked overtime on putting life and color into this often featureless slab. The first movement was thrilling. Emphasizing the structural joins in the music, Blomstedt threw himself into building up the energy of each individual section. He countered drabness with a variety of colors, featuring an amazing series in the development of strings and winds throwing phrases in exchange at each other.

The quieter middle movements featured careful emphasis on phrasing, with the Andante showing a melting beauty combined with drama in a manner reminiscent of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fifth.

The finale did not thrill as the opening had. In the past, undramatic finales were a flaw of Blomstedt’s, but this was deliberate - and successful. Instead of thrilling, it was expansive - in a dignified way, without grandiosity. The trombone chorale, for instance, was slow and quiet, a perfect unpretentious lead in to the main theme, played plain and humbly without pomposity.

birthright citizenship

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Thus sayeth the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. DT is now trying to undercut it. His tool is the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," but he misunderstands it. "Subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means that the laws of the US apply to them. Immigrants, whatever their legal status, are subject to the legal jurisdiction of the US. They're expected to obey the laws. They pay taxes. That's regardless if they're citizens or not.

Who is not subject to the jurisdiction thereof? The children born here of three categories of people are not subject to the jurisdiction.

1. Foreign diplomats accredited to the US. Diplomats do not vote or pay income tax, and by long-standing tradition are immune from law enforcement. Every once in a while this makes news when some diplomat accumulates a vast number of unpaid parking tickets in New York. They don't have to pay.

2. Soldiers in invading armies. We haven't had that here since 1815, but obviously they would be neither legally nor practically subject to US law enforcement.

3. A category of people, referred to in the apportionment clause of this Amendment and in Article 1 as not counting for that purpose, and called "Indians not taxed." Note that "Indians not taxed" is only a subcategory of "Indians." DT claims that since Indians, many of them anyway, claim primary allegiance to their tribe, they're not primarily subject to the jurisdiction of the US. But they are still subject to its jurisdiction: they're expected to abide by its laws. "Indians not taxed" was the term of law for what were demotically known as "wild Indians": those who lived uninterrupted aboriginal lives and had never come under the purview of the government. No tax collectors or census takers ventured into their territory; they were not taxed and were not counted for congressional apportionment. But there are no longer any Indians not taxed. Whatever their personal lifestyles, they're all subject to taxation, have the law enforced on them, and are citizens entitled to vote.

Therefore diplomats are the only category we have to allow for today.

Arwen

This is very sad.

Let me tell the personal story first.

Ever since I became old enough not to be one myself, I've enjoyed playing with small children. Fortunate I've been that for a period of thirty years, friends and acquaintances produced a steady supply of small children whose company I could enjoy, and then give them back to their parents afterwards. Much of this would go on at Mythcon, the locus of my acquaintance with many of the parents.

The eldest of all these children was a girl named Arwen. (Her parents were serious Tolkien fans.) At the one Mythcon I met her at, she was 5, I was 20. We played around in the garden of the campus where the meetings were, and formed our own meeting of the snails we found among the shrubs while her mother, an enthusiastic photographer, took photos. It's a cherished memory.

I'm not sure if I ever saw Arwen again after that, maybe briefly once or twice, though I did hear a bit about her doings. She became an art student, moved to the Boston area for some years, preferred to call herself Ari for a while. More recently she came back to LA whence she originally hailed and moved in with her mother and stepfather in their rambling home up at the tip of the Altadena hills.

Yes, what you're thinking. All of them lost everything in the fire. For Arwen, it was too much, and I've just learned that she took her own life at the age of 52.

What a tragedy. There's a lot of grief I'm feeling for someone I hardly knew, but I still remember the little girl in the garden among the snails.

gadgeteer

The other thing I did this weekend was hook up our new DVD player. The old one had gone wonky, and in looking for a replacement B. noticed a well-rated one from Toshiba which includes both DVD and VCR players. This was further pleasing, as we still have a fair number of VCR tapes - including home-made ones of old Mythcon programs and the like - which we haven't been able to watch for years because our old VCR player was also broken and fixing or replacing it seemed like too much of a hurdle.

To my surprise, I was able to toss aside most of the verbiage in the manual and hook it up quite efficiently. The manual wants you to run the cable feed through the machine, but the old machine had had nothing of the sort and I didn't think it would be necessary this time either. So I didn't, and it turned out all right.

Once it was connected, it was time to check it out. When I'd turned the tv on, what was playing was the DVR recording of the last few minutes of something B. had taped, running into the next show on that channel, a recent episode of Celebrity Jeopardy with Seth Green in it. So to test out the DVD player, I put in an old episode of Buffy with Seth Green in it. Then to test the VCR, I wanted a tape that'd be replaceable if something turned out wrong with the machine, so I took a commercial tape of The Producers, the original movie, which I hadn't seen in some time. I watched it as far as my favorite line in the movie, which is when Gene Wilder says, "I'm wet! I'm wet! I'm hysterical and I'm wet!"

So now I'll also be able to watch the rarer tapes, and I'll need to do that periodically, because lack of watching tapes is what caused the heads on the old machine to freeze up and become nonfunctional.

not out

B. and I have both been ill this week. Fear of coughing, fear of being contagious, and general physical disinclination to do anything account for our absence from tonight's performance of a local production of Noises Off which we'd been looking forward to seeing. We've seen it before, but it's always good.

It also means I'm intending to miss two performances I was planning to see this weekend. After that, nothing till Thursday and I should be better by then.

We did at least manage to struggle up and out to redeem my car from the body shop which nicely fixed the bumper over the past week, during which for both the above reasons and a generally light schedule this week I hardly went anywhere, so I didn't even need a rental car, just borrowing B's for a couple of necessary errands. Like picking up my medication.

Other than that, just following the news with the usual amount of incredulity. The delta smelt and the LA fires is just another example of a regular practice: he picks up a mistaken impression of something from somewhere, probably by misunderstanding or not paying close attention, and from then on for him it's an immutable fact, untouchable by any corrections. Ever encounter that particular pathology elsewhere?

Oscar the grouch

Time for my annual confession of how few Academy-Award nominated movies I've seen.

Aside from the documentary short The Only Girl in the Orchestra, which I actually liked - whoops, how'd that get on here? - only two.

Dune Part Two - dull, duller, dulles.

A Complete Unknown - When Meryl Streep played Florence Foster Jenkins in a movie, despite what sounded like a noble effort she did not come anywhere near capturing the sheer wretchedness of the original's singing. Similarly here. Chalamet has Dylan's nasal tone down pat, but it's actually pleasant to listen to him sing, whereas the original is agonizing. (I had to forbid my college roommate from playing his Dylan records when I was in the apartment. All our other musical tastes were completely sympatico.) Some people seem puzzled by this movie's point. To me, it depicts Dylan as a man determined to do his own thing and not get enlisted in anybody else's causes.

I have little interest in seeing anything else on the list.

better things to do

We did not watch the inauguration. At that moment, we were in fact engaged in a useful activity: turning in my car at the auto body shop for some necessary work. (The front bumper cover had been mangled by some parking space stoppers and a particularly vicious dip.) That was the time they'd offered for check-in, so we were there. B. was with me to drive me home.

I looked at my posting archives and found that during the creature's previous inaugural, we'd also been engaged in a much more useful activity: we were at the veterinarian's, taking Maia in for her annual checkup.

pair of concerts

To Kohl Mansion last Sunday for the Reverón Piano Trio, named for a painter from their native land, Venezuela. Years ago I heard another Latin American chamber ensemble, the Dalí String Quartet, also named after a painter and who also filled half their concert with a Latin American potpourri. The difference was, the Dalí were delightfully wild and crazy guys in their Latin half, but their excursion into standard repertoire, by Mozart, was rather dull and unconvincing.

The Reverón were far more balanced. Their Latin half was taken soberly, though it included a lively chunk of Astor Piazzolla and a piece by Ricardo Lorenz in which the cello lengthily imitates the buzz of a noisy electric ceiling fan. Also in that half, a little waltz by the 19C piano virtuoso Teresa Carreño which sounded like circus music. That's because a lot of Latin American salon music of that era was transcribed for circus organs and that became the associated style. Here, have a listen to "Over the Waves" by Juventino Rosas, which is the piece I most have in mind in making that association. The main theme starts 30 seconds in; tell me you don't recognize it.

But the other half of the Reverón concert was anything but dull or unconvincing. For one thing, it wasn't a standard repertoire piece but the D-minor Trio of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Felix's sister. This was the best performance of it I've heard, and it ought to be standard repertoire after this. Wonderfully clear, even compelling, full of individual character.

Anyway, I wrote a review saying all of that.

To Davies on Thursday for the San Francisco Symphony, which may be the last time I get to hear them for a while if the musicians go on strike when their contract extension expires next week. The Symphony Chorus appeared this week, having already gone through their own strike last fall, and were greeted by huge applause by the audience, and even bigger applause greeted the announcement on the supertitles screen that an anonymous donor has given $4 million to endow the Chorus.

What were they singing? Why, Carmina Burana. Led by guest conductor David Robertson, this was a pretty dull run-through if you've heard Carmina as often as I have. Heavy, trudging. Of the soloists, the soprano was OK, but the baritone, though deep-voiced enough, had nowhere near enough power to carry off the part. His drunken abbot was pathetic. The tenor, unusually, appeared on stage only to sing his one solo, the lament of the roasted swan, and then slogged slowly off again, perhaps sad because his character was dead but more likely because he'd been merely adequate in singing about it.

The Chorus was good, though, and even better was the strong and pure sound of the SF Girls Chorus in the children's role, singing (in Latin) words more hair-raising than any children should be approaching, but that's a perennial problem with this work.

Also on the program, yet another newly commissioned piano concerto, this one by John Adams. I liked it better than his clotted and noisy previous piano concerto. This one was light and shining, more like typical Adams. Titled After the Fall, it consists largely of falling phrases, get it?, first provided by soloist Vikingur Ólafsson as the strings shimmer in the background, then by the strings as Ólafsson shimmers in the background. Towards the end the piece is attacked by a lemming-like horde of copies of a quotation from a Bach prelude, which takes over without making the music sound much like Bach. Overall it was OK, though it would probably have gone better with a perkier conductor.

Oh yes, and an opener of Ives's The Unanswered Question, a piece too short and quiet, if dissonant, to contribute to a judgement of the evening.