concert review: Meta4

A rather painfully elaborate name for a string quartet. My editors sent me to review them because it seemed like one of the more intriguing things that Stanford would be putting on this term.

The concert was in the Studio, a small cube in Bing's basement. Ostensibly the reason to put concerts here is for more intimate, smaller-scale performances, and I repeated the party line in the review, but regardless of the unusual repertoire this was just a string quartet concert, the kind which Bing's acoustically excellent main space can handle just fine. I suspect the real reason for putting concerts in the cube, as has been when I've been there before, has been their narrow audience appeal. It would be too dismaying to face a sea of empty seats in the main space. Even the cube was far from full.

But it was an enriching artistic experience, not least because I finally heard a piece by Kaija Saariaho that I really like, and one by Amy Beach that isn't all wet. For once I knew beforehand for sure that I'd have two tickets, so I invited an athenais along and she was also enriched. The only problem was chairs not made for concentrated sitting. Now I'll associate Sibelius's string quartet with having a sore butt.

one thrilling play

I've been to the Tabard Theatre in downtown San Jose before, most recently for The Odd Couple, which was well done, but a small audience meant for rather anemic laughter. I thought maybe a serious thriller might work better if it were a good enough play, and this one looked promising: Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott and Jeffrey Hatcher.

It's set in a basement apartment in New York some time probably in the 1950s or maybe 60s. It's got a complicated plot but it ends up with the woman who lives there being menaced by a psychopathic criminal who is sure she has the valuable missing MacGuffin. The gimmick is ... she's blind, so she turns the lights out on him.

Only a small part of the play actually takes place in total darkness, and there's another small part where it's just light enough to see shapes; the rest there is a light on somewhere, even if it's only coming from an open fridge. (But why, if she's pulled all the fuses, is there power to the fridge at all?)

The principals, Jaime Wolf (who is not blind) as the blind woman and Brandon Silberstein as the psychopath, are Tabard veterans and were excellent, but so was the rest of the cast who are mostly new to the company. Despite the rather confusing, dumped-in-at-the-deep-end opening, the plot proceeds apace, and our heroine's preparations for the confrontation which she knows is coming contribute to the suspense.

It turned out to be a good show and well worth the effort everyone put into it. It started out as a Halloween show, but it's still playing through this Sunday, so I'd recommend it to locals.

the Butler did it

It has been brought to my attention, by someone who actually follows Twitter, that "Sir David Butler, the father of psephology, or election science, died [on Tuesday] at the age of 98."

The person posting this was Michael Crick, who published a biography of Sir David a few years ago. I read that book and wrote here about it and the acknowledgment therein of my small contribution to it.

Crick writes in his tweets that Butler "promoted the word 'psephology' to describe the new study of election science." He writes carefully. Butler promoted the word, he didn't invent it. My contribution was to assist Crick's researchers in discovering who did invent it.

It was C.S. Lewis and the Inklings.

concert review: CaIifornia Symphony

Last weekend I also got up to Lesher for the California Symphony, a professional ensemble that's worth the hour-plus drive to get there, for not only good performances but appealing programming, the latter being a quality that Symphony San Jose seems to be opting out of.

This concert was all music for strings, and except for Dvorak's Serenade for same, which came out a little gruff, they were all intriguing back-burner items. The Introduction and Allegro by Elgar, and the Concerto for String Orchestra by Grazyna Bacewicz (Poland's greatest woman composer: I wrote about her before when Bard Music West devoted a small festival to her work) both had a seasoned texture to them which suited the works very well. It brought out the Brahms in Elgar and the Bartok in Bacewicz.

The last item was even more unusual, the Eclogue by Gerald Finzi, which is the slow movement from an otherwise incomplete concerto for piano and strings. The pianist, Elizabeth Dorman, got mostly soft unaccompanied passages and a little rumination with the strings. The music exuded Finzi's native quality, best describable as Vaughan Williams and water. Oh, come on: it was pleasant enough.

The rest of their season will feature the most amazing selection of symphonies: the now-neglected Franck Symphony (I don't have a ticket for that one: maybe I should go anyway, despite it also featuring a Chopin piano concerto, snore), Walton's First, and the Symphony by Hans Rott, something I never thought I'd hear live in this lifetime. The Walton either, actually. This is the kind of stuff I'd drive to Fresno to hear if Kuchar were still there, and Walnut Creek isn't nearly so far away.

concerts review: Israel Philharmonic

The Israel Philharmonic made a rare local appearance, under its new music director Lahav Shani, so I decided to hear this noted ensemble. They gave two concerts - that I knew about - one at Davies, an auditorium so large only a massive orchestra can sonically fill it, and one the next day at Bing, an auditorium almost too small for a full orchestra, though it managed to contain the full blast this time, which hasn't always been true in the past.

Repertoire the first night was Mahler's First, the only one of his symphonies I really like, and a curiosity, the First of Paul Ben-Haim, most distinguished of the generation of Israeli composers active in the mid-20C. I'd heard some of his music before, but not this one. It was a well-argued symphony of weight and power, especially notable for a march segment at the end of the first movement. For the second night, an all-Prokofiev program, all well-known stuff: his Classical and Fifth Symphonies and excerpts from Romeo and Juliet.

This is an orchestra of crispness and sparkle rather than power or drive. Not that their flow was listless, but it didn't reach the status of awesomely compelling that you'd expect of an ensemble this good. The pinpoint exactitude of the sound, however, was amazingly vivid, and they kept it up for two whole concerts. Fast figurations came like hardened crystal of extreme detail and complexity. Shani is an impressionistic conductor who waves his arms around in general phrases rather than beating time or giving cues. Usually in a top ensemble this is a sign that the conductor has already done his job in rehearsal, the players know how to do the music, and the conductor is still there mostly for show.

At Davies but not at Bing there were protesters in front of the hall (which fortunately is soundproofed). In the absence of Gergiev-like endorsements of atrocities, which so far as I know there haven't been in this case, I don't hold cultural groups responsible for their government's misdeeds. And if I did, I'd start with the U.S.: I note that the protesters held the U.S. complicit in Israel's actions. But I'm not going to boycott all U.S. orchestras so I won't an Israeli one either.

Both concerts began with the playing of both the U.S. and Israeli national anthems. I stood up for both, out of respect. I don't approve of various things done by governments of either nation, but I believe firmly in both countries' right to exist and I want to acknowledge that.

didn't know that

I know about Shostakovich's 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. That's the one that Stalin disliked so much he caused an editorial to be published in Pravda titled "Muddle Instead of Music." Its threatening tone - no idle thing in an autocracy - supposedly kept Shostakovich, though loaded with honors, nervous for the rest of his life.

I also knew that the opera was based on a story, which on looking it up I see was written by Nikolai Leskov and published in 1865. And I presumed the title reflected the idea that here was a woman like Lady Macbeth except she lived in this place in Russia.

What was new to me came when I borrowed an obscure library book I needed for an article on Tolkien. It also had an article on Turgenev, whom I've never read and know almost nothing about. And from browsing through this I learned that Leskov's story was part of a trend, because Turgenev had some years earlier written a story called "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District." And he also wrote one called "King Lear of the Steppes," though that one (undated in the article) may have come later.

And yes, here it's explicit: Turgenev considered Shakespeare's characters to be basic human types, so he wrote about those types recurring. In his "Hamlet," the narrator meets a man whose real name he never learns, and who considers himself an ineffectual nebbish. Just like Hamlet! Or at least one view of Hamlet.

Interesting that there should have been this trend, but I'd never seen it mentioned in connection with the opera.

changing the frickin' clocks

I got home late last night, with a preassigned duty of changing those clocks that B. couldn't reach or that she didn't want to deal with.

The challenge was the time display on our new stove. There's nothing in the manual on how to change it, but I know I managed to do it back in April or whenever that was. I found that I'd written an instructional note down in the margin of the manual. It said:

"To change clock: Push buttons at random until display changes to '----'. Then you can enter the new time."

This time I figured out how to handle the buttons, and changed the note.

a drip of news

1. According to a news article, only 17% of the voters in our state have voted so far. But I am one of them. I dropped my ballot off at the deposit box at the city library on Wednesday (the little statue out front of a man reading was still dressed up in Halloween costume) and got the e-mail from the state on Friday saying it had been counted.

2. There's been a little rain this week.

3. Best obit for Geoff Nuttall, best because it really captures his character. "inspiring and infectious energy that radiated on stage" ... "charming and ebullient manner, boundless enthusiasm, and a disarming sense of humor" ... "energetic and physical musical performances, jumping out of his chair, bouncing around on stage, and enthusiastically moving his whole body" ... "playing with such visceral intensity, exuberant joy, incredible sweetness, and depth of sorrow." Yes.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I had just gone to a concert featuring Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances; why (by pure coincidence, I trust) another one? I thought about not bothering to go, but I realized why I went after I got there. Because a volunteer orchestra managing to play at professional level is one thing, but a truly world-class orchestra is quite another. And it's because SFS is such an orchestra that I go to the trouble of going up there.

Juraj Valčuha (native of Slovakia, newly appointed music director in Houston) conducted like a flowing stream of water in human form. Behzod Abduraimov (from Uzbekistan) played the Prokofiev piano part; the integration of this with the orchestra was the striking feature, quite different from the bold separation I heard before.

Although the Rachmaninoff's program note writer has been dead for over a decade, it was news to me that one briefly-appearing melody is a serene transformation of a stormy theme from the composer's First Symphony, a work he'd withdrawn and which was therefore unknown at the time the Dances were new. I'd never noticed this before. But I paid attention when it came up here, and sure enough, it is. (Much of the time I find I don't believe such offered equations.)

The difference in the program was that, instead of a Mendelssohn march for wind band, this concert had a recently-composed opener, The Spark Catchers by Hannah Kendall, a Black British composer in her 30s. It sounded a lot like John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine: jangly, abrupt, and bumpy.

cat daddies

Terrible title, but a great movie if you like cats. B. found a blurb for this online, and forwarded it to me, and when I found it was playing in the City, a block from one of my favorite BART stations (the one next to the great burrito place, where I of course stopped for food on the way in), I decided to go.

It's a series of documentary interviews with about ten men who have cats. With plenty of footage of the cats, of course. Men from around the US, mostly men with pretty traditionally masculine lives, some of whom were a bit surprised to find themselves cat people. A truck driver who's taken his cat to 45 states. An outdoorsman who takes his cat hiking. An entire fire station full of men who've adopted a cat they found behind the station. It lives in the bay with the fire engines - doesn't like to come inside - but knows enough to get out of the way when the engines head out. A shaved-head bruiser of a stunt man whose girlfriend, a fellow stunt performer, fell for him when he sent her a photo of him cradling his cat, a 25-pound Maine Coon. (That men having cats will impress women is a minor but continuing theme in this movie. Don't hold your breath waiting for incels to notice this.) The founder and CEO of a cat neuter-and-release nonprofit in Brooklyn, who got the idea from walking the streets and seeing all these feral cats around, and who gives most of the film's narration about the virtues of cat ownership.

But the most touching part is a series of segments tracing events in the life of a homeless man in Manhattan who rescued a dying kitten he found and nursed it back to health, and has become utterly devoted to this cat. Then he had to go in the hospital for several months for a series of operations; fortunately he'd befriended a woman, a secretary who worked in the area he hung out, who volunteered to take the cat in while he was hospitalized. I hope their friendship survived the scratches from her cat that he's tsking over on his cat when we last see them.

Most of the cats are disconcertingly placid. But some like to ride on their humans' shoulders or lick their faces, things that Tybalt does to me. So I know I'm not alone in having a cat who does that.