I had a string quartet concert at Herbst in the City on Friday evening, and another one on Saturday morning, so it made sense to stay up there overnight. I chose an airport hotel, less expensive than in the central city but still close enough to make driving in easy, especially on a weekend morning.
Then Saturday evening was the California Symphony out in Walnut Creek, which I determined to get to after I discovered that the Berkeley Symphony was holding an open rehearsal that afternoon, halfway between the other concerts both geographically and temporally.
Friday evening was the Modigliani Quartet, which played Haydn's Op. 77/2 with a brisk, clean-cut approach, devoid of emotional effect. None of the piece's humor came out either, but the clarity was striking. It may seem silly to talk about subtleties of instrumentation in a string quartet, but Haydn does some interesting things, and you could hear them here.
Then they played Beethoven's Op. 59/3 in exactly the same way, making it sound more like slightly larger-scale Haydn than Beethoven. Puzzlingly, they poured all the emotion they'd omitted from the main program into their encore, the Adagio from Beethoven's Op. 18/1, which they pointed out was written the same year as the Haydn but which, they said, opened up a new sound world - the world they'd done their best to omit from Op. 59.
(Also on the program, ten minutes of Webernian nonsense by György Kurtág, the most superfluous composer since the days of Baroque wallpaper. Why this dreck even bothers to exist in a universe with Haydn and Beethoven in it escapes me.)
Saturday morning, Robert Greenberg gives another lecture on Schubert followed by the Esmé Quartet playing the masterpiece which was the lecture's topic. This week, the G Major Quartet. Both lecture and quartet take about an hour each.
Greenberg is very good at structural analysis of the music, much less good at inventing biographical reasons for Schubert to have written it that way, which serve only to trivialize his genius. As for the music, the Esmé played it as if they were steering a sturdy ship firmly through rough waters. An hour with Greenberg was worth the price for such a fine hour with Schubert.
The Berkeley Symphony opened up their Saturday rehearsal because the Sunday concert, which I wouldn't have been able to make anyway, was sold out. Both rehearsal and concert are in Berkeley's First Congregational Church, a chamber with damp echoing acoustics that's no improvement over the Symphony's previous venue, the infamously dead Zellerbach Hall. The orchestra seems better than deserving this. Conductor Ming Luke devoted most of his attention to Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, with Laquita Mitchell singing in a foghorn voice I find hard to credit deserving the label "soprano." Thanks to the acoustics, I could not make out a word she was singing, even with the lyrics open in front of me.
The California Symphony is at Lesher, where the seats are uncomfortable but the acoustics good, and the orchestra getting really impressive. Highlight of this concert under music director Donato Cabrera was Beethoven's Eroica, in an urgent, driven performance full of subtleties of dynamics from the strings, who were at the top of their game.
Also on the program, Mozart's "Elvira Madigan" concerto with the solo part played by Robert Thies in a cool and bloodless manner, and an overture by Jessie Montgomery, featuring lyric melodies played in the form of hideously dissonant chords. Not the most successful work of hers I've heard.
Meals on this trip were good. Dinner Friday at a grungy Chinese place in the Tenderloin with some of the richest and thickest wor won ton soup I've ever had. Breakfast Saturday included at the hotel, sausage and a little bell pepper omelet for me. Lunch, palak saag (spinach) at an Indian place a block from the Berkeley church. Dinner at the last remaining restaurant within walking distance of Lesher that I really like, a tapas place on Bonanza Street: little plates of shrimp and lamb were tasty and enough to eat.
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