realm of silence

I haven't had anything to post for several days because I've been in isolation mode, on two counts.

First, B. and I have contacted the covid. First time for either of us. We've been highly vigilant so far, but we relaxed enough to go unmasked to a family gathering just when we shouldn't have.

Covid symptoms vary in nature and severity. Mine have been mostly cold/flu-like symptoms, plus the interesting one of loss of appetite. I cannot eat more than half of what I usually do. B. is having it much worse. Due to our age and condition, we're both on paxlovid. Picking that up from the pharmacy was just about my only exit from the house lately. We've got plenty of food and we're isolating.

Simultaneously, my computer was in the shop for a much-needed overhaul, prompted by a catastrophic glitch. This also took several days, so at the same time as I was isolating, I was isolated from the online world. I had access to e-mail, more to read than to write it, but I couldn't do much of anything else. Whole lotta book-reading going on.

But now it's back, and I can start getting ramped back up on work. I'm feeling better - so is B. - but I'm going to stay isolated for at least another couple of days before I take another covid test to see how I'm doing.

water valve

A few days ago, we got a dismaying notice: our water would be turned off today for a period of 5 hours during the daytime. Some work needed to done on the valve controlling the whole complex.

If we were working, we could have been gone the entire period, but as it is, we're home. What if we needed to flush a toilet more than once? So we filled every pot, basin, and pitcher we have full of water, and prepared.

Didn't need to worry. About an hour into the 5-hour period I turned on a faucet just to check. It was running. I went out to where the complex's valve is and found a repairman. He said he was almost done. The 5-hour period was just cautionary in case something went really wrong.

Music@Menlo: the last week

The Menlo Festival ended on Saturday, and today saw the publication of my review of the previous Sunday's concert. It was put off a week because it was a vocal program and the previous week's issue was clogged with three opera reviews. I had my review of Cabrillo in that issue instead. The put-off publication meant I had an extra day to write the review, which I appreciated after having just finished up the Cabrillo one.

I don't have much to add to it. My editors cut my 875-word review down to 650 words, mostly by cutting detail and context, but they left all my main points intact, so despite a few minor added glitches, I count this as good editing.

That Sunday concert was the last time I went up to Menlo this year. All the free concerts and coaching sessions I wanted to hear are online, and it's less time-consuming (a major issue for me right now) to watch them online than go up there. As for the two remaining mainstage concerts I wanted to hear, I bought livestream tickets for those and also appreciated them from home. Unlike the free concerts which are up permanently, these are available only to purchasers and just for a few days.

But it's fortunate you don't have to be live, because the first one took place on Friday while I was at Cabrillo. It was the Viano Quartet, old favorites from when they won the Banff competition six years ago, doing a standard program that even included an encore, which Menlo never does. I liked their crisp and witty Haydn Op 76/5 and their dark and wretched Shostakovich Ninth better than their attempt at jollity in Mendelssohn's Op 44/1 or the wet late-Romantic sop of a very young Anton Webern's "Langsamer Satz" (which means "slow piece," in case the German title impressed you into thinking it indicated something significant).

The other concert, on Saturday, was a must-hear for me because it featured my two absolute favorites of all string chamber music for larger ensembles. Brahms's Op 18 Sextet was a good performance, but I missed the sly and coy elements that make for a great version. First violist Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu showed just a little of the burning grit that enlivened her playing of the second viola part the last time I heard this piece here, four years ago. Mendelssohn's Octet, on the other hand, was all that could be asked for. The players were sorted as two quartets in dialog, which is how Mendelssohn wrote the piece, and the two quartets showed slightly different tone colors. First violinist Benjamin Beilman put all the necessary passion into his solos and drove the rest of the ensemble in speed and energy - with an unusual dark and mysterious quality to the slow and quiet passages.

Also on the program was 180 beats per minute by Jörg Widmann, which I heard here eight years ago in a student performance, at which time I called it "a concise technobeat moto perpetuo with some minimalist sensibility." The professionals put more heft into it than the teenage students did, but not more fire. (The student performance is still online, so I could make the direct comparison.)

Now all is over, and it will be quiet for two weeks until the beginning of Banff, which I'm also attending online only.

a Gilbert and Sullivan weekend

I went to two Gilbert & Sullivan performances this weekend. The first was a production by the Lamplighters, the premier G&S group around here, of H.M.S. Pinafore. Sometimes Lamplighters productions are superb; this one was merely quite good.

Lyric Theatre of San Jose is normally in a lower league, but they were absolutely spectacular this weekend in their gala anthology show, The Great Gilbert & Sullivan Sing-Off. The premise here is that three separate, and quite different, G&S groups are competing for a prize, going through one song of their choice in each of nine specified subject/ensemble rounds. Of course all the performers were pretty much the same people. (When one man appeared in two successive songs from different groups, the emcee asked, "Weren't you just in the last song?" and he replied, "That was my twin brother. We were exchanged at birth.")

The first group is a purist traditional group, and they did their songs straight. They were quite good, with special honors to the group's president, who was portrayed by Diane Squires, just about the most powerful soprano I've ever heard outside of a professional opera stage.

The second group likes to play around with the lyrics, the settings, or the singers. They're especially big on gender-swapping, and one of the best moments was when both they and the first group wanted to do "Poor Wandering One" in the same round, and their tenor (Eric Mellum) and Diane Squires traded off phrases, at first in feigned hostility and then coming together in harmony.

Funnier still was their penchant for doing SF versions. "I am the captain of the Pinafore" became the Trekkish "I am the captain of the Voyager" ("she's hardly ever de-evolved") and "Three little maids from school" became "Three little maids from space" with deely bobbers on their heads. Also, for Despard and Margaret's duet from Ruddigore ("I once was a very abandoned person"), they replaced the dance segments with wild abandon to tunes like "Hernando's Hideaway" and "Tea for Two."

But the third group was the silliest, being depicted as complete amateur beginners. They did "Never mind the why and wherefore" with Josephine (Leslie Oesterich) usurping the song from the Captain and Sir Joseph; they attempted "Tit-willow" without any accompaniment but didn't get very far; their Lady Jane ("Silvered is the raven hair") got into an argument with the supertitles which thought the song was ageist. But best of all was the Major General's Song, by a man pushed onto stage against his will, protesting that he didn't know the lyrics. He was played by Mark Blattel, actually a brilliant patter-song man who concocted the chaos that followed. He ad-libbed passages, he got the lyrics out of sync with the music, and he replaced bits with lyrics from other songs that might fit: the "matter matter" trio from Ruddigore, "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," and of course Tom Lehrer's "The Elements" which is actually set to the same tune. It was extraordinarily funny.

The whole show was performed with enormous joy and vigor, and the audience was enraptured.

Jim Lovell

Reported, the death of Jim Lovell, the astronaut who was the commander of Apollo 13, and one of the many heroes who saved that ill-fated mission. He lived to 97, same age as Tom Lehrer, and while I don't know how Lehrer did it, it's certainly true that you had to be incredibly fit and healthy to become an astronaut in Lovell's day, and most of them, those who weren't killed in accidents, had very long lives.

Still, Lovell was the last survivor of his group of nine who were picked in 1962, a group which also included Neil Armstrong. Apollo 13 was the last of his four spaceflights, a record at the time; he was also on two Gemini test flights, one of them with Buzz Aldrin, and the famous Apollo 8 ring-around-the-moon shot, in which he saw the Earth rising behind the Moon and encouraged Bill Anders to take that famous photo.

Lovell became additionally known as a result of the film of Apollo 13, in which he was played by Tom Hanks. I listened to Jim and Marilyn Lovell's commentary on the DVD of that film (are there still commentaries like that now that films have gone to streaming?), and Marilyn in particular was impressed by how many of Jim's mannerisms Hanks had picked up after a fairly brief personal acquaintance. Jim also pointed out, however, that he didn't look much like Tom Hanks, and wished he could have been played by Kevin Costner, because that's who he looked like, and I'd agree. That he looked like him, I mean; whether Costner would have done as good an acting job I'd prefer not to speculate on.

it's B's birthday

And it's a big round number birthday, but we're not doing anything special.

I've done three things that could be counted as getting presents: I baked her a cake (sugar-free chocolate with chocolate frosting), which I do every year - did it yesterday afternoon while she was out, which meant we could have some after dinner; I took her out for breakfast at our favorite pancake house this morning (she: pecan pancakes; me: Western omelette with cheese), which I also do every year; and got tickets for a Gilbert & Sullivan gala on Sunday afternoon. After which we're going to a niece & nephew's house for a family celebratory dinner.

Tonight for dinner, despite heat which usually drives me to fix cold chicken salad, I'm insisting upon making her favorite meal in my repertoire: turkey meatloaf and steamed brussel sprouts/broccoli.

And that's how we quietly celebrate.

concert review: Cabrillo Festival Orchestra

I interrupted my Menlo Festival vigil on Friday for a visit to the opening night of another festival, Cabrillo, for an SFCV review. Much unlike Menlo, Cabrillo specializes in new, or newish, music for orchestra. It's also in Santa Cruz, which is a 30-minute drive over twisty mountain roads on the rare occasions when there's no traffic, but more usually an hour or more. So I had to leave early. Fortunately I received a final dismissal from a week's on-call for jury duty at noon on Friday, because if I'd had to go in during the afternoon it would have been tough.

The music was all new to me, though two of the three composers were familiar, but I listened to it all on YouTube beforehand. I got a definite sense of the particular performance at the concert, but packed all I had to say about that in the last paragraph. Most of my review attempts to describe the music, about half of which I'd thought up from the recordings.

But how much my preparations have changed since my early days. One of the very first pieces I ever reviewed was a concert adaptation of John Corigliano's music for the movie The Red Violin. I prepared for that by seeking, with some trouble, for a library VCR copy of the movie (that'll tell you how long ago this was) and watching it, to set the music in context.

This time, one of two pieces by Corigliano was a concert adaptation of his music for the movie Altered States (which is actually much earlier than The Red Violin). I did not watch the movie. I had no time for it, and Wikipedia informed me it was a horror movie, which crossed it off my list to see under any circumstances for any purpose.

Instead, in the review I made a virtue of my ignorance. Having noted that the concert work gives the "impression that it's trying to tell bits of a story," I described its contents: "Wind instruments honking in the style of Arab street music, French horns blatting like kazoos, or an out-of-tune offstage piano playing 'Rock of Ages' may communicate messages to listeners who've seen the movie." Implication that, if you haven't, they don't communicate anything, left unspoken.

I did not attempt to describe Jennifer Koh's hair (see photo with the review). I figured there'd be a photo, and feared that my vocabulary was not up to describing what color that was. (I'm very bad with colors.)

I managed to sneak into the review a brief description of the pre-concert event. Attendees were invited to arrive 90 minutes early and dine at tables set out in the street outside, and then listen to an interview with the conductor and concertmaster. (My editors added "the evening's" to "concertmaster"; actually he's been there for years.) You could bring your own food or buy meals from food trucks on site, or from nearby restaurants, some of which offered discounts. I got lamb ossobuco (neck meat, challenging to eat) from an Italian place a block away, brought it over, and sat down in one of the few available shady spots next to a group of locals.

One of them was a staff member for a local youth orchestra. She told the story of their attempt to find a new rehearsal venue, the church they'd been using having acquired new management which decided that hosting such rehearsals was not in their mission. So the orchestra located a private school which was willing, but there was a hitch. The school required the orchestra to have a $2 million liability insurance policy, but the orchestra's policy covered only $1 million. So they went to their agent and got an additional $1 million rider. This is where the story got really interesting, because that was not accepted by the school. So my interlocutor had to explain to them - to a school - that 1 + 1 = 2.

Mythcon report

Since the pandemic, the Mythopoeic Society has moved its annual conference in alternating years online, and this year's online one was last weekend. I didn't get to much, being busy with reviews, but I did attend a couple panels and papers.

The theme of the conference was to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the publication of the Society's first anthology, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien. For a Guest of Honor speech, we had the two editors of the anthology, Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, reminiscing about envisaging the anthology, putting it together, and publishing it. They also talked about their own personal experiences with Tolkien. Janet asked herself why, as a young female reader, she hadn't been irritated by a novel with so few female characters in it. She said she found the answer later when she read Melanie A. Rawls's essay on "The Feminine Principle in Tolkien" - an essay reprinted in Perilous and Fair, making it easier to find. Tolkien's favored male characters have traits associated with women: they're caring, introspective, intuitive. Both Elrond and Aragorn are healers. And so forth.

At the other end of the conference was a panel including several contributors to Perilous and Fair. They talked about what scholarly work they're doing now - often research into newer fantasy, much of which hasn't gotten much scholarly attention yet. Someone pointed to an article online which seemed to me, when I read it, to be reinventing Melanie Rawls's feminine principle. Great minds ... There was also news that more anthologies are in the works following on from what Perilous and Fair did. Tolkien is a multifarious author, and it's impressive how many readings of his work are possible without giving the sense that the scholar is stretching the text to fit.

There were several papers on the forgotten or little-known women of Tolkien's imagination: papers on Aredhel, Melian, the Corrigan (know who that is?), and Robert T. Tally's truly virtuoso paper on the unexaminable topic - because absolutely zero is known about them, but they must have existed - of Orc women. Rob used Tolkien's distasteful comment that Orcs physically resembled "Mongol-types" to extrapolate onto Orcs the customs of Mongols of the Genghis Khan era - if the men went to war, some women went too, and the rest stayed home and ruled the kingdom in the men's absence, applying that to Azog and his son Bolg - after Azog was killed, what role might Bolg's mother have played?

Saturday evening I got to the Tolkien trivia contest. Log on and the moderator would assign you to a team by sending you to a breakout room. I was a little late arriving and was gratified by my team's pleased reaction that I was joining them. We won the contest, too. And I didn't guess all the answers: it was someone else who remembered that the Westron name for Eregion was Hollin. But I knew that before Tolkien read chunks of The Lord of the Rings into a friend's tape recorder, what he first recited was the Lord's Prayer. To exorcise the machine, he said. And, being Tolkien, he recited it in Gothic.

Music@Menlo: wind chamber music

This actually took place before the vocal chamber music program, but my review of it wasn't published until today.

Part or all of a wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn), with or without piano, played pieces by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and a couple lesser-known composers, with all the piquancy that these instruments can provide.

As with the vocal program, it was preceded a couple days earlier with a lecture, this one on the history of wind instruments, given by one of the actual performers at the concert, oboist James Austin Smith, who was witty and sly.

He made much of the fact that the wind instruments are all different, producing sound in different ways (suggesting that the single-reed clarinet, a relative latecomer to the ensemble, was invented by someone who found the double-reed oboe too difficult to play), noting that, because flutists blow wind across the mouthpiece, that the flute is the only instrument that can be played by sticking it out the window of a moving car. As a result, they all sound distinct.

In the Renaissance, he told us, wind instruments were often played in consorts, larger and smaller (and hence lower- and higher-pitched) versions of the same instrument playing together. And he played us a video of a crumhorn consort honking away. In the late 18th century, the most common form of wind ensemble was one formed of pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns, and Mozart wrote some memorable serenades for this combination or (in the Gran Partita) an extended version of it.

In the 19th century, wind chamber music became focused on the wind quintet, as we heard it in the concert, but there wasn't much music of this kind from major composers until the 20th century.

Music@Menlo: vocal chamber music

Thursday I attended one of Menlo's lectures, an introduction to vocal chamber music, prefatory to a concert of some I'll be attending on Sunday.

The lecture was given by the noted tenor Nicholas Phan (pronounced Pan, not Fan), who won't be performing on Sunday but who did illustrate his lecture with projected videos of himself performing works from throughout the history of the repertoire: not live, so he wouldn't have to wrangle on stage all the instrumentalists he was performing with.

Like the lecture on wind chamber music I attended last week (which I didn't describe here, but maybe later), it was divided into two parts: before the 19th century, when there was a kind of hole in the repertoire, and afterwards.

The hole came when the piano developed around 1800 into an instrument capable of virtuoso expressive shading, and the art song with piano became the default vocal chamber music genre. Before that time, music with a consort of lute and viol and other instruments was common. Phan spent a lot of time on the Baroque genre of the cantata, which is not just a sacred music form by Bach as we tend to think of it today; in fact Bach and other Lutheran composers had appropriated what was originally a secular form.

A cantata was typically 15-25 minutes long and consisted of a sequence of numbers in a variety of moods or styles for a single singer, often telling a story. What was really interesting was Phan's description of the revival of the cantata form in recent years, and he had a notable example of it.

It was by Viet Cuong, an American composer whose work I'm familiar with, as he was the composer in residence at the California Symphony a few years back. The title is A Moment's Oblivion, and the ensemble is of Baroque instruments: oboe, violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord. Its story concerns a man who has lost his memory, but his family find a doctor who is able to restore it. This number presents the man, who - like Buffy after she's returned from the dead in the sixth season - turns out not to be pleased about his restoration. He was happier in bliss without memories.

Here's Phan singing the number. I thought it was a really striking piece of contemporary music.