Geoff Nuttall in memoriam

Startling news, that Geoff Nuttall - violinist (usually first violin) of the St. Lawrence String Quartet - has died, aged only 56, of pancreatic cancer. Memoriam is up on the quartet's web page right now.

I knew his work well; the SLSQ has been the resident ensemble at Stanford for over 20 years now, hosting seminars and workshops as well as putting on their own concerts, and Geoff was usually the front man for this. What they're going to do without him I can't imagine. Two other positions in the quartet have changed hands over the years, and the ensemble has adapted, but without him it will truly be a different group.

He was a notable player, with an expressive curlicue sound particularly well suited for the elaborate first violin parts of the quartets of Haydn, his favorite composer. He moved around expressively, even excessively, while playing, bending over (even while seated), shifting his feet constantly.

And he spoke for the quartet, in a folksy, even twangy, but learned and above all enthusiastic way, keyed to conveying to a general audience what was great about the music he was discussing while neither oversimplifying it nor talking down. He was a great communicator as well as a great chamber violinist. Here, have an example of both:

concert review: Winchester Orchestra

B. liked the program, so she came along with me to this concert by a community orchestra of which she was briefly a member a while ago until deciding against spending all her time rehearsing orchestral music she hadn't chosen and playing it at breakneck speed (which they're still doing).

I'd heard that music director Scott Seaton had resigned to take another post, but he was still there.

The strings sounded lovely, the winds were placid instead of piquant, but the brass were bold and coarse. This worked well in a hopping dance from de Falla's Three-Cornered Hat and the stark opening chords of Sibelius' Finlandia, not so well for a haunting horn theme in Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending.

Soloist for the Lark was the orchestra's concertmaster, Bill Palmer, who played with a wonderfully sweet tone. For all his technical imperfections, and there were more than a few, this was a generous and rewarding performance.

For a big concluding work, Schumann's Fourth Symphony, my favorite of his, a performance strong on the dark and brooding and light on the coy and fluttering. Glad to have had this.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I had a strenuous schedule for my visit to the City on Thursday. Arrive and park (I wasn't going to lean on public transit for this) at 5 pm when the restaurants open for dinner, have what I hoped would be a quick one (it was 45 minutes) at a place new to me convenient to the city library, then walk over to the library and check out some books I need for my research; then the much longer walk across the civic center to the symphony hall in time for the pre-concert talk at 6:30

I was most concerned to get to the pre-concert talk, because I'd just been assigned to review the concert, and the talk might have useful insights.

Only to find, when I arrived tuckered out - I don't walk fast or easily any more - and barely in time, that SFS has discontinued pre-concert talks this season (this was my first concert of the season), without having announced this. If I'd known, I'd have had an extra hour to work with.

However, that evening and that evening alone, there would be a post-concert interview with the composer and pianist of the concerto being premiered that evening. So that I stayed for, and yes indeed it was exceedingly useful for my review. It also made my departure much later, so I was glad I'd driven.

I've dealt with Magnus Lindberg's music before; that's why my editor asked me to cover this one. I find his music a little clotted and hard to follow, but I have a general handle on it. This was an interesting concerto, though I didn't enjoy it half as much as Mason Bates's last season.

I wrote a sentence comparing EPS's orchestral sound to MTT's and then cut it, thinking it would be useful to save for next week, when I'm also reviewing SFS, and EPS will conduct a showpiece that MTT was spectacular in, the Symphonie fantastique. If the sound comes out the same as this week, I'll know what to say.

sports

For some reason I've been thinking about my experiences, all long ago now, playing sports. Not a favorite activity of mine, but I've been induced to do a little.

There are two ordinary sporting activities that I simply cannot do, though others do them all the time. I just can't.

1. I cannot hit a moving ball with an implement. I'm not just bad at this task, but completely incompetent.
This eliminates baseball and softball, and all net games like tennis, ping pong, badminton.

2. I can't do anything if the other team is physically interfering with me.
This eliminates a lot of games I might be OK at without this feature (because there's no implement between you and the ball), like basketball and soccer. When forced to play these in school, I concentrated on just getting in the way of the other team, as that's the one thing I could do.

A couple other restrictions:

3. No way in heck am I going to catch a ball thrown from a great distance.
This also eliminates baseball, and American football.

4. Even in youth I was the world's slowest runner and had the weakest arm strength.
So no track and field or weights. Don't even think about gymnastics.

That left me with two kinds of ball games:

A. Ones in which there's no implement between you and the ball and the other team is kept physically separate.
That basically meant volleyball. I was reasonably OK at volleyball and enjoyed playing it. I especially liked that you were surrounded by teammates so a lot of cooperation was needed.
You could also put bowling in this category. One of my grandfathers took us to bowl. I found I could be pretty good at it if I concentrated really hard. The problem was that I didn't enjoy doing that. It was too mentally stressful, and over time I found it was really not very interesting. So I never seriously took up bowling.

B. One in which there's an implement, but the ball is sitting still.
And that's golf. (Well, croquet, but my experience with that is minimal.) Both my grandfathers were enthusiastic golfers and tried to recruit me. They never took me actually to play a game, but I practiced at driving ranges a lot. But the problem that arose was similar to that with bowling. I found I could only hit the ball off the tee with adequate force if I worked up a strong short-term hatred of the ball. But I didn't want to do that. It was mentally exhausting and distinctly unenjoyable. So I never took up golf either.
But before I quit, one day my brother and I snuck out and played nine holes on the course by the side of which my grandparents were living. One hole I made in par. I consider the ability to do that to be the minimum standard for golfing competence, so I have that to my credit.
But the actual events do not certify my golfing skills. The hole was a short par 3 with a large water hazard taking up most of the space between the tee and the green.* My ball skipped off the water, like a rock thrown with that intention, and landed near the green. Sheer luck. Two putts and I was in; a competent golfer could probably have done it in one putt.

*It was hole 16 of the Seven Lakes Country Club in Palm Springs, California.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: a commemoration

Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of this great composer, so it seems an appropriate time to pay tribute to his work, especially as it tends to get left out of histories of 20th century music that aren't intended as exhaustive surveys.

The problem is that RVW wasn't a radical revolutionary, nor did he have weird psychiatric ticks, the kinds of things that make composers easy to write about. He was a level-headed man who lived an ordinary uneventful life (aside from his mistress, and that's quite a story) and who simply wrote some great music.

Two things you need to know about RVW to start with: first, his first name is pronounced Rafe. "Any other pronunciation used to infuriate him," writes his widow, who really ought to know. Strangely, I've met a few people who remember this backwards, and are convinced that he hated it.

Second, his last name is "Vaughan Williams." Two barrels, no hyphen; file him under V. Anybody who knows people named Nielsen Hayden should have no trouble with that. But he's usually just called RVW.

RVW, like Anton Bruckner, was a late-blooming composer. He didn't hit his stride and start writing pieces for which he's remembered until he was in his mid-30s, around 1905-10. But then he remained active and fluent right up to the end. He was 85 when he died in 1958, less than a year after completing his Ninth Symphony.

His music is intensely English in a 'rooted in the landscape' way, as Tolkien's writing is. This though he was not a countryman but a Londoner by nature. (This though he was born in a Gloucestershire village - he didn't live there for long - and had a home out in Surrey after his first wife became unable to handle city staircases.) This landscape feel puts him in the same category as other pastoral nationalists like Grieg and Dvorak, but a lot of British composers of more continental bent didn't approve. He and his compatriots (Holst, Butterworth) were mocked as "cowpat" composers.

Actually there is a strong continental, particularly French, strain to RVW's music. He studied with Ravel for the purpose of acquiring a little polish, and it stuck. Compare his more pastoral works with those of Delius, on whom the French scent is more obvious, and you'll see.

But the English was his strongest rooting point. He edited collections of Renaissance-era compositions of his country, some of which he used in his music, and he traveled the countryside collecting folk songs, some of which he also used in his music. Plenty of composers of other countries have done the same without being called "cowpat" composers. Nobody would call Bartok that, and he was one of the great folksong collectors of all time. I guess it's because his music wasn't as pastoral as RVW's.

But then, again there's a mistaken generalization. Vaughan Williams's music was not all pastoral, far from it. Though he's best remembered for some shorter pieces which sometimes are: The Lark Ascending, a short violin concerto inspired by a poem by George Meredith; and the Fantasia on Greensleeves, an even briefer simple setting of two folksongs. The third standard RVW work is a bit different: the Tallis Fantasia is a richly contrapuntal fantasy for strings based on a Renaissance hymn tune. It has the reverberating quality of a massive cathedral.

But you can hear the variety of his work by listening to his nine symphonies. These were only numbered starting with No. 8, whose digit retrospectively numbered all its predecessors, previously all known only by title or, if they didn't have one, key. I don't know any other composer who did that.

First was A Sea Symphony, a huge choral-orchestral work setting poems of Walt Whitman. It's amazing how RVW could turn Whitman's choppy, blocky poetry into something lyrical. The slow movement, "On the beach at night alone," is my candidate for the greatest single vocal-orchestral work of the 20C.

Second was A London Symphony, alternately jaunty and impressionistic, with some of that Ravel polish to it. This was the first of his symphonies I got to know. Then A Pastoral Symphony, oh boy, cue the cowpats: but listen to it, because it's frequently tough and wiry, pastoral but not soft or gentle.

The Fourth through Sixth have no titles, no programs, but they form a trilogy that - though the composer strongly denied it - is often seen as a portrait of modern times. As a set, this is his masterwork. The Fourth can be dissonant, tough, even brutal. "I don't know if I like it," the composer said, "but it is what I meant." Although I've heard performances which bring out the jaunty side reminiscent of the Second. Written in 1935, it's seen as a warning of WW2 to come. The Fifth dates from during the war, and has a serenity to it, and also a sure depth, that suggests a hope for post-war peace. And the Sixth is odd and creepy, especially the finale which is marked unbroken pianissimo, though few dare to play it that way. Is that the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust?

The last three are more miscellaneous. No. 7, the Sinfonia Antartica, is based on music for a film on Robert Scott's explorations. It's wintry but evocative, and is some of my favorite RVW. No. 8 is brusque and jaunty again, but succinct and more lighthearted than any of its predecessors. It has one movement just for strings and one just for winds. The Ninth is median in tone, somewhere between the Third and Fifth and the Fourth and Sixth, but I find it difficult: it's the only one I've never really absorbed.

RVW didn't write much chamber or piano music, but there's lots more choral and orchestral work to hear. I'd like to point to his opera The Pilgrim's Progress, which I've actually seen staged: nothing much happens but the music is beautiful, and that's what I want. Then there's Job: A Masque for Dancing, which dates midway between the Third and Fourth Symphonies and manages to sound like both of them, quite an achievement.

You can find a lot of this work by searching, so I'll leave you to it. Happy birthday, Rafe.

a little concert

I wandered over to the grass amphitheatre behind the Mountain View CPA late yesterday afternoon for an outdoor concert by the Peninsula Symphony brass and percussion sections. It had been a long time since I'd heard live any brass music, what with pandemic and all, and this seemed like a safe occasion to get some, though few of the audience wore masks or observed social distancing.

There were about 20 musicians in all. Most of the pieces were arrangements. Selections included the opening fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra, all right! Also an extremely abbreviated Ride of the Valkyries, the Polovtsian Dances, Nimrod (yes, at a brass concert), and some tunes from Porgy and Bess (first, a trumpet played "Summertime"; then a trombone did; then they all did). 9 items, 75 minutes including an intermission.

Caro again

I've written before of the lapses in description and reasoning in Robert Caro's multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, and I've just found another one. I only found it, though, because Caro is such an entertaining writer that I got down Master of the Senate, his volume covering 1949-57, for dinner-table re-reading.

I was reading the chapter on LBJ's futile attempt to position himself as a fallback candidate for the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention of 1956. Caro says that LBJ's big mistake was to assume that his Senate colleagues, big shots in the Capitol, were equally powerful in control of their state convention delegations. But that wasn't so, Caro says, and quotes a reporter as writing that for "control of delegations ... the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders" (p. 807). Why Johnson - depicted elsewhere in the book as the supreme political genius - didn't know that is left unexplained. Except that he did control his own Texas delegation, so there is that.

But Caro says that he depended for his support in other states on "senators, or former senators." And Caro names seven men, five of whom were current senators (p. 806).

But what Caro doesn't say is that when this is taking place, in 1956, the other two, the former senators - Bob McFarland of Arizona and Ed Johnson of Colorado - were the Governors of their states. After having lost his Senate seat in 1952 to an obscure opponent named Barry Goldwater, McFarland had been elected Governor in 1954 and was right now engaging in what would be a successful re-election campaign (Governors of Arizona then served a 2-year term), so if governors can be powers in their states, he surely was one. (I don't know why Ed Johnson didn't run for re-election in 1956.)

Yet McFarland was unsuccessful in persuading the Arizona delegates to vote for LBJ (p. 818), so again things are more complicated than Caro would like to tell us.

chewy reading

1. Suddenly I'm finding a whole lot of articles and reviews about Tár, a new movie about a star conductor of the imperious old school, played by Cate Blanchett, who's accused of emotional abuse. Sounds fascinating, and the reason the articles are appearing now is because the movie is supposed to be released today. But according to Moviefone (where I couldn't find it directly, probably because of the accent in the title; I had to look it up under Blanchett), it's not appearing for another three weeks. I expect I'll have to go see this one.

2. B. has been watching the Korean series Extraordinary Attorney Woo on Netflix. I learned, I think from a comment on one of the articles on Tár, that it was preceded by a one-season show starring the same lead actor, about students at a classical music conservatory, titled Do You Like Brahms? That is not on Netflix, but I found a video of musical excerpts from it.

3. Michael Tilson Thomas, facing his mortality. I thought this particularly wise: “Even in a situation where the time is short, whether in rehearsal or in life, you can accept and forgive yourself,” he said. “You can say, ‘I had this much time and this is what I could accomplish.’ And that’s fine. I am at peace with it.”

4. Laura Miller is one of the best literary commentators out there, and this analysis of Maggie Haberman's book on DT is more substantial than the book seems to be. I was especially struck by her observation that "Trump expected his political career to operate the same way his New York and New Jersey real estate development enterprises did" and her demonstration of how that worked in the next paragraph, and by her note that "what’s fascinating about Trump and his presidency is not him, but the people around him." About the people who tried to tether him to reality but only wound up enabling him, she reaches the rare example of a Tolkien comparison that works: "Like Saruman and Gollum, their compromises and torments are more interesting than the dark lord they served."

5. This is old but I saved it. It's sf author Connie Willis's reaction to the repeal of Roe.

6. Columbus Day v. Indigenous Peoples Day. I'm staying out of this dispute altogether.

7. I'm not sure what to make of this. It says it's a Historical Database of Sundown Towns, that is, towns where Black people (or other minorities) were told they had to be out of town by sundown, i.e. they couldn't live there. But its information seems awfully sketchy and, when looking up towns I know in California, I find it includes towns whose evidence is that it once had a pogrom of the Chinese in the 1880s, or one report of a Black or Hispanic person feeling harassed and unable to buy a house. Which are bad but not the same thing. We need a finer distinction and less sweeping generalization.

8. Angry rant in an angry Scots accent about The Rings of Power. This is 20 minutes I found a lot more satisfying than an hour plus of the original, which was all I could stand.

ballet review

And we're home. My previous post was written from the hotel where we broke our journey overnight.

The cats, though they got along pretty well with the sitter, are desperate for attention. Tybalt crawls up on my chest or shoulders almost every time I sit down.

And I learned on the way that two days of driving seven hours a day is now at least one too many days for me. Lots of breaks and all the caffeine in the world won't keep me from getting loggy on the second afternoon. Good thing we didn't drive to Mythcon, a 20% longer trip.

But now I'm home and find - as expected - that the last thing I did before leaving, writing a performance review, saw publication while I was gone.

Normally I don't cover ballet - I'm just a music guy - but when two choruses that are within my coverage sing Carmina Burana while a local dance company performs to it, that seemed like a good opportunity to trap several birds at once.

And I had something of a revelation. A few years ago I wrote of my disillusion with ballet. I'd attended the San Francisco Ballet fairly often in the 1980s and enjoyed it. But my recent experiences at their recitals had been disappointing: I found the work crude and ugly, athletic rather than artistic in aesthetic, and just not appealing. The final straw came when I read an article naming what the author claimed were the three greatest ballet choreographers now working. I realized I'd seen work by all three at the SF Ballet and thought them all terrible.

Was it them - had ballet entered a trough of ugliness, the way modern music did in the 1950s? - or was it me - had I just lost my taste for ballet?

It was them. The Peninsula Ballet Theatre, a small local company without the pretensions of the SF Ballet, delighted me wholly. Their work had beauty and grace, and when it wasn't either of those things it was funny, and sometimes it was all of them at once. This is exactly what I got out of the ballet in the 80s. True, work by George Balanchine that I saw back then was orders of magnitude more sublime than that of the local choreographers I saw last week, but at least they're all working towards the same admirable goal.

I wrote: This was a fine evening with a company that still maintains that grace, beauty, nobility and a little humor are the essence of ballet. And I hold by that. I will go back here some time. I've described the neglected composers of the 1950s who aimed at beauty instead of ugliness as the Hidden City. Well, I've found the Hidden City of ballet.

aborted vacation

I've heard there are people who dislike using the word "abort" to mean other things cut off (space missions, running of computer programs) because it reminds them of aborted pregnancies to which they object. Well, tough.

After completing our stay at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (described in previous post), B. and I headed north - not quite to Seattle, but somewhere in that general direction - to visit her brother and family who have settled out there. A. and his wife M., not quite retired yet but working from home, are now rattling around a huge house they've had built for themselves out on the expanding edge of civilization, about the desirability and aesthetic qualities of which I prefer to express no opinion whatever. Two of their three children are nearby and we got to their places too - a son (married with two daughters aged 8 and 7: great girls, they read a lot) whose house is literally right over the back yard, and a daughter who lives up in the mountains where the smoke from the forest fires is so strong she can't work in her garden but who hasn't gotten around to changing the house's air filter, tsk.

We also got to see a couple friends from the area, and out on a family meal expedition to a locally famous breakfast cafe crammed into a decommissioned circa 1900 school gym basement. Powerfully crowded place, despite which everyone even in the waiting area was unmasked, tsk, but fantastically fast service: from the moment we were actually seated until our meals arrived took (I had my watch out) ten minutes. That's not to the ordering or the drinks, but the full honking meals. The food was OK. The world's largest cinnamon rolls are huge, but they taste like ... a cinnamon roll. I couldn't resist ordering a "whole hog omelet," which lacked snouts or trotters but was packed with slightly burnt ham, sausage, and bacon, folded into the egg patty instead of mixed in.

Good thing for trying it that we went there on Saturday, because later that day, M. tested positive. A little fast for her to have gotten it from the cafe. A. tested negative, so did we, but we were taking no chances. We called off our last day, including more friends with cats, packed up into my trusty little car and headed home over a day early, eating fast-food window service and wearing masks whenever we couldn't avoid human contact, near-constant availability of classical music radio, and regular text-messaged photos of our cats from our cat sitter our only company.