If you stand on the middle level of the cat tree, leaning back with your front paws on the edge of the upper level, and you let go to grab at the cat toy hovering around in front of you, you will fall over backwards.
If I were more than six months old, I would probably already know this.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Friday, January 31, 2014
Thursday, January 30, 2014
concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Osmo Vänskä, the heroic conductor who, last fall, carried out his threat to shame the board of the Minnesota Orchestra by resigning as music director when the lockout had not ended, came this week to our city to conduct our orchestra in some mildly heroic music.
Unfortunately, personal exigencies meant I could stay for only the first half of the concert, so I missed his Sibelius Sixth. I'm listening to his recording of it with another orchestra right now.
What I did hear was another Sibelius piece, the little-known (at least by me) Night Ride and Sunrise, and Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The Sibelius was very Sibelian, and the Rachmaninoff was played by Daniil Trifonov, a very young pianist with a very light-fingered style. Matched well with Vänskä's liking to use the brass to punch light-fingered holes in the wall.
Unfortunately, personal exigencies meant I could stay for only the first half of the concert, so I missed his Sibelius Sixth. I'm listening to his recording of it with another orchestra right now.
What I did hear was another Sibelius piece, the little-known (at least by me) Night Ride and Sunrise, and Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The Sibelius was very Sibelian, and the Rachmaninoff was played by Daniil Trifonov, a very young pianist with a very light-fingered style. Matched well with Vänskä's liking to use the brass to punch light-fingered holes in the wall.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
concert review: Takács Quartet
A few weeks ago, my editor alerted (warned, cautioned, even admonished) me that he'd be expecting me to cover the Takács Quartet's Bartók cycle. Holy bleep, what an assignment. Toughest I've had since being sent to hear the Concord Sonata. (And that was why I was looking for somebody who really likes Bartók.)
This called for intensive pre-concert study, to get a handle on these works I'd never entirely digested. I'd heard them all at one time or another, but the only one I'd ever enjoyed hearing was the Fourth, and I don't claim to understand any of them.
Unfortunately, a satisfactory study of such difficult works would take at least 10 or 12 hours, and exigencies, alluded to earlier in this blog, meant that there was no time. None. I read a little technical musicology about them, I perused and marked up the scores, but that was about it. I didn't even make a full listen to recordings, because I couldn't do it early enough to prevent the concert from becoming fatigue instead of enlightenment.
As a result, my review reads to me an amateur's view, Thog goes to a string quartet concert. I sat there through weird and bewildering passage after passage, just trying to find some sort of handle to grab on to. In the end I had to write about the knobs and not the train. It just added to the intensity of an already high-pressure weekend.
This called for intensive pre-concert study, to get a handle on these works I'd never entirely digested. I'd heard them all at one time or another, but the only one I'd ever enjoyed hearing was the Fourth, and I don't claim to understand any of them.
Unfortunately, a satisfactory study of such difficult works would take at least 10 or 12 hours, and exigencies, alluded to earlier in this blog, meant that there was no time. None. I read a little technical musicology about them, I perused and marked up the scores, but that was about it. I didn't even make a full listen to recordings, because I couldn't do it early enough to prevent the concert from becoming fatigue instead of enlightenment.
As a result, my review reads to me an amateur's view, Thog goes to a string quartet concert. I sat there through weird and bewildering passage after passage, just trying to find some sort of handle to grab on to. In the end I had to write about the knobs and not the train. It just added to the intensity of an already high-pressure weekend.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Thomas Jefferson is pregnant
There, was that headline enough to catch your attention? Friday evening, B. and I attended the premiere performance of a small local theater production of 1776 in which all the roles were played by women. I was hoping they'd go full Python and have Abigail and Martha played by men, but no such luck. B. said it was like going back to her all-girl high school.
Although, in fact, most of the cast were considerably longer in the tooth than that, and full of useful theatrical experience, too. Jefferson was one of the younger performers, and, yes, she was visibly and five months pregnant, which lent new piquance to lines like, "I have not seen my wife for the last six months."
Just about everybody was good and had personality, and I had no trouble being able to identify every character on stage by intermission time. Adams had that cutting William Daniels quality (which she must have adopted for the role, since I can't imagine her talking that way when playing Abigail or Martha, both of which she'd done in other productions). Franklin kept flubbing spoken lines, which I hope she gets over because it was her only flaw.
Of the lesser roles, I want to single out the large, brassy Stephen Hopkins as someone as colorful as the role deserves; the otherwise-invisible Robert Livingston, who burst out delightfully with a vividly cheerful solo verse in "But, Mr. Adams" - and boy did she ever look surprised and flattered when I told her so at the post-performance reception line; and the young Edward Rutledge, who, after hiding her talent under a bushel for most of the show, commanded the stage with her cruel solo song describing the Triangle Trade.
Music came from a wholly hidden small band. The set consisted of the tally board and a lot of chairs and small tables. Costumes were basically non-existent: everybody just wore pantsuits.
We had great fun watching it, and I'm sorry that the run ends before Potlatch arrives. In the meantime, everyone around here: here's the show info and a link to tickets. Go see it.
Although, in fact, most of the cast were considerably longer in the tooth than that, and full of useful theatrical experience, too. Jefferson was one of the younger performers, and, yes, she was visibly and five months pregnant, which lent new piquance to lines like, "I have not seen my wife for the last six months."
Just about everybody was good and had personality, and I had no trouble being able to identify every character on stage by intermission time. Adams had that cutting William Daniels quality (which she must have adopted for the role, since I can't imagine her talking that way when playing Abigail or Martha, both of which she'd done in other productions). Franklin kept flubbing spoken lines, which I hope she gets over because it was her only flaw.
Of the lesser roles, I want to single out the large, brassy Stephen Hopkins as someone as colorful as the role deserves; the otherwise-invisible Robert Livingston, who burst out delightfully with a vividly cheerful solo verse in "But, Mr. Adams" - and boy did she ever look surprised and flattered when I told her so at the post-performance reception line; and the young Edward Rutledge, who, after hiding her talent under a bushel for most of the show, commanded the stage with her cruel solo song describing the Triangle Trade.
Music came from a wholly hidden small band. The set consisted of the tally board and a lot of chairs and small tables. Costumes were basically non-existent: everybody just wore pantsuits.
We had great fun watching it, and I'm sorry that the run ends before Potlatch arrives. In the meantime, everyone around here: here's the show info and a link to tickets. Go see it.
Friday, January 24, 2014
notes for a new notebook
1. I received some highly disturbing news today. It must have been disturbing, because I then completely forgot where I had parked my car. On going out to lunch at the usual to have the usual, I ordered the wrong thing.
2. I finally bit the bullet and updated my Firefox, which I'd been preserving in an old form (rapidly becoming more useless) out of fear that an update would disable the features I like and I'd never be able to go back. Part of that was true: I can't revert. But my preferred color scheme works better than on Opera; though it's less convenient to switch back and forth to the default, I have far less need to do so. The ways of dealing with features like bookmarks, which I always preferred on Firefox, are functionally unchanged, and my add-ons still work: AdBlocker even blocks the video ads before Daily Show segments! The only downside to that is that I'll no longer get whatever succeeds "most interesting man in the world" jokes.
3. Remember how the cold temperatures in the eastern US were supposed to prove that there was no global warming? Checked any thermometers in Australia lately? Or how about here in California, where we've been having August-style brushfires and temperatures so warm it's uncomfortable to wear a jacket. What it'll be like by the real August is not to be contemplated.
4. The New Yorker had an article about the decline of Detroit and the concomitant rise of its suburbs. It marked the death knell for the city as the day the flagship of Hudson's department store downtown closed. So then I saw this and thought, "Bye-bye, Chicago."
5. In slightly cheerier news. Slate has been running a series of cooking articles with the theme of "You're doing it wrong." So then I read the one on quesadillas and felt very smug, because I already do everything they suggest.
6. Music dept., part 1: Somebody says that classical music in America is dead. But their source turns out to be Greg Sandow, so it must be thriving, as indeed it was at the Beethoven & Mason Bates concert in the City where all these young people showed up.
7. Music dept., part 2: And here's one who praises Thomas Newman's score for Saving Mr. Banks. I did not think well of the score. It was pleasant rather than outstanding music, and I found its tone, its emotional language, highly ill-judged for its movie. It belonged on a much more warm-hearted picture.
8. Music dept., part 3: A coffee-table book on the subject, borrowed from the library, led me to a website on an entire genre of music of whose mere existence I was barely aware: industrial musicals, musical theater shows, sometimes full-scale, put on by giant industrial corporations between the 1950s and 1970s, during the live big, pre-penny pinching era, at annual conventions to pump up the eagerness of the salesfolk and other personnel. Think How To Succeed In Business Without Even Trying without the tongue in the cheek. Some of them were even recorded, and those are the ones covered here. There's even a page with some sample recordings, but I can't say I was very impressed, even by the ones by Bock and Harnick (later of Fiorello! and Fiddler on the Roof) or by Kander and Ebb (of Cabaret and Chicago).
9. Music dept., part 4: When I was very young, I would see in gossip columns or the like the current doings of some long-forgotten silent film star, and I'd think of how quaint and removed from present-day concerns this was. That must be how young people today react to the news that the Captain and Tennille are getting divorced.
10. Cute item of the week: the trailer for Muppets of the Caribbean.
2. I finally bit the bullet and updated my Firefox, which I'd been preserving in an old form (rapidly becoming more useless) out of fear that an update would disable the features I like and I'd never be able to go back. Part of that was true: I can't revert. But my preferred color scheme works better than on Opera; though it's less convenient to switch back and forth to the default, I have far less need to do so. The ways of dealing with features like bookmarks, which I always preferred on Firefox, are functionally unchanged, and my add-ons still work: AdBlocker even blocks the video ads before Daily Show segments! The only downside to that is that I'll no longer get whatever succeeds "most interesting man in the world" jokes.
3. Remember how the cold temperatures in the eastern US were supposed to prove that there was no global warming? Checked any thermometers in Australia lately? Or how about here in California, where we've been having August-style brushfires and temperatures so warm it's uncomfortable to wear a jacket. What it'll be like by the real August is not to be contemplated.
4. The New Yorker had an article about the decline of Detroit and the concomitant rise of its suburbs. It marked the death knell for the city as the day the flagship of Hudson's department store downtown closed. So then I saw this and thought, "Bye-bye, Chicago."
5. In slightly cheerier news. Slate has been running a series of cooking articles with the theme of "You're doing it wrong." So then I read the one on quesadillas and felt very smug, because I already do everything they suggest.
6. Music dept., part 1: Somebody says that classical music in America is dead. But their source turns out to be Greg Sandow, so it must be thriving, as indeed it was at the Beethoven & Mason Bates concert in the City where all these young people showed up.
7. Music dept., part 2: And here's one who praises Thomas Newman's score for Saving Mr. Banks. I did not think well of the score. It was pleasant rather than outstanding music, and I found its tone, its emotional language, highly ill-judged for its movie. It belonged on a much more warm-hearted picture.
8. Music dept., part 3: A coffee-table book on the subject, borrowed from the library, led me to a website on an entire genre of music of whose mere existence I was barely aware: industrial musicals, musical theater shows, sometimes full-scale, put on by giant industrial corporations between the 1950s and 1970s, during the live big, pre-penny pinching era, at annual conventions to pump up the eagerness of the salesfolk and other personnel. Think How To Succeed In Business Without Even Trying without the tongue in the cheek. Some of them were even recorded, and those are the ones covered here. There's even a page with some sample recordings, but I can't say I was very impressed, even by the ones by Bock and Harnick (later of Fiorello! and Fiddler on the Roof) or by Kander and Ebb (of Cabaret and Chicago).
9. Music dept., part 4: When I was very young, I would see in gossip columns or the like the current doings of some long-forgotten silent film star, and I'd think of how quaint and removed from present-day concerns this was. That must be how young people today react to the news that the Captain and Tennille are getting divorced.
10. Cute item of the week: the trailer for Muppets of the Caribbean.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
concert review: San Francisco Symphony
This week was the annual "concertmaster Alexander Barantschik leads the string section" concert. Usually the repertoire at these things is 18C, but this year we got more of a potpourri. There was one Mozart, the Divertimento K. 138, a lovely little piece played a little fast for my taste.
There was also the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in D minor, parts of which sound like they might be by Mozart. This is the other Mendelssohn violin concerto, the one the child prodigy wrote at 13 and which wasn't rediscovered until Yehudi Menuhin found it in the 1950s. The possibility of confusing this with the more renowned concerto in E minor, which dates from over 20 years later, is immense. (YouTube recordings of this piece are full of comments like, "Are you sure this is Mendelssohn?") The old San Jose Symphony once played the D minor, while providing a program note describing the E minor, just with the name of the key changed. But their program notes were frequently that hapless. Anyway, no problem with that this time. Just a nice performance of a work whose main claim to notability is the composer's age.
Also a less than inspiring tango by Piazzolla, with violin and bandoneon solos, and Britten's Simple Symphony, a work of his early adulthood (he was 20) but based on material from his own prodigal youth (9-12). It's a cute work at the very least, and this was a stunningly outstanding performance. Also very fast, but with a combination of such precision and expression that I've never heard its better. The all-pizzicato scherzo was particularly good: how the string players got so much lyricism from such a limited means could be a lesson to everybody.
There was one weirdness in the program book under Britten, though: a reproduction of a childhood notebook of the composer's with the caption "A play written and 'published' by the six- or seven-year-old Britten, to honor the Prince of Wales after his sudden death." Britten was six or seven between Nov. 1919 and Nov. 1921, but he who was Prince of Wales throughout Britten's childhood lived on for another half century. So what on earth are they talking about here? I guessed easily enough, and an examination of the notebook text confirmed it, but I'll leave it to you to figure out.
Another thing I'll have to leave to you to figure out is the surreal experience I had on the Muni streetcar system. I only take Muni occasionally, and this is like only the third time I'd ventured into its section of the Market Street tunnel. The paper tickets they use there are unlike anything else on the system or anything else I know: after buying them from a machine, apparently you just wave them in front of the gates which then open: I still haven't figured out what I'm doing. I'd arrived in the City early enough that I had time to go have dinner elsewhere, and had a whim to visit a place I know in the Noe Valley, which is on the outbound route. The surrealism came with the loudspeaker announcements every two minutes that cars of various lines were arriving on the outbound route in another two minutes, a different car every two minutes, and yet no car ever came. Unless they were invisible or took a different tunnel. It was just this whole phantom streetcar system. Meanwhile cars were coming through on the inbound route at a regular pace. After 20 minutes of this, I was beginning to run short of time and gave up, switching my culinary interest to a place I knew on the inbound route instead. But to listen to those announcements was disconcerting. Cars continually two minutes from now, but "two minutes from now" never arrived. Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.
There was also the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in D minor, parts of which sound like they might be by Mozart. This is the other Mendelssohn violin concerto, the one the child prodigy wrote at 13 and which wasn't rediscovered until Yehudi Menuhin found it in the 1950s. The possibility of confusing this with the more renowned concerto in E minor, which dates from over 20 years later, is immense. (YouTube recordings of this piece are full of comments like, "Are you sure this is Mendelssohn?") The old San Jose Symphony once played the D minor, while providing a program note describing the E minor, just with the name of the key changed. But their program notes were frequently that hapless. Anyway, no problem with that this time. Just a nice performance of a work whose main claim to notability is the composer's age.
Also a less than inspiring tango by Piazzolla, with violin and bandoneon solos, and Britten's Simple Symphony, a work of his early adulthood (he was 20) but based on material from his own prodigal youth (9-12). It's a cute work at the very least, and this was a stunningly outstanding performance. Also very fast, but with a combination of such precision and expression that I've never heard its better. The all-pizzicato scherzo was particularly good: how the string players got so much lyricism from such a limited means could be a lesson to everybody.
There was one weirdness in the program book under Britten, though: a reproduction of a childhood notebook of the composer's with the caption "A play written and 'published' by the six- or seven-year-old Britten, to honor the Prince of Wales after his sudden death." Britten was six or seven between Nov. 1919 and Nov. 1921, but he who was Prince of Wales throughout Britten's childhood lived on for another half century. So what on earth are they talking about here? I guessed easily enough, and an examination of the notebook text confirmed it, but I'll leave it to you to figure out.
Another thing I'll have to leave to you to figure out is the surreal experience I had on the Muni streetcar system. I only take Muni occasionally, and this is like only the third time I'd ventured into its section of the Market Street tunnel. The paper tickets they use there are unlike anything else on the system or anything else I know: after buying them from a machine, apparently you just wave them in front of the gates which then open: I still haven't figured out what I'm doing. I'd arrived in the City early enough that I had time to go have dinner elsewhere, and had a whim to visit a place I know in the Noe Valley, which is on the outbound route. The surrealism came with the loudspeaker announcements every two minutes that cars of various lines were arriving on the outbound route in another two minutes, a different car every two minutes, and yet no car ever came. Unless they were invisible or took a different tunnel. It was just this whole phantom streetcar system. Meanwhile cars were coming through on the inbound route at a regular pace. After 20 minutes of this, I was beginning to run short of time and gave up, switching my culinary interest to a place I knew on the inbound route instead. But to listen to those announcements was disconcerting. Cars continually two minutes from now, but "two minutes from now" never arrived. Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
cat, phone, tree
B. sometimes leaves me notes when I'm out, regarding the doings of the cats. This one is too good not to pass on:
Pippin: "Oh, no! She's in my spot on the cat tree! What'll I do? What'll I do?"
Maia: "Hey, this is comfy here!" [Phone rings] "What's that?" [Lifts head, stands up. Phone stops ringing. Climbs on top of phone.] "Guess it wasn't important." [Goes back to cat tree, middle position, & settles down again.]
Pippin: "Oh, no! She's in my spot on the cat tree! What'll I do? What'll I do?"
Maia: "Hey, this is comfy here!" [Phone rings] "What's that?" [Lifts head, stands up. Phone stops ringing. Climbs on top of phone.] "Guess it wasn't important." [Goes back to cat tree, middle position, & settles down again.]
Maia
This is Maia:
This is Maia:
This is Maia:
Now, this is Maia:
This, by the way, is Pippin, since you won't have seen him either:
Yesterday morning I came out to the hallway where we shelve the paperback books to find a few from the top shelf on the floor, along with two peacock feathers - cat toys in reserve - plus a long felt dragon that we keep up there, the last thrown from its perch with sufficient force that it landed down on the staircase below. Maia's doing, because it certainly isn't Pippin's, giant slug that he is. That bookcase is nearly 5 feet high. She really can climb the invisible stairs.
This is Maia:
This is Maia:
Now, this is Maia:
This, by the way, is Pippin, since you won't have seen him either:
Yesterday morning I came out to the hallway where we shelve the paperback books to find a few from the top shelf on the floor, along with two peacock feathers - cat toys in reserve - plus a long felt dragon that we keep up there, the last thrown from its perch with sufficient force that it landed down on the staircase below. Maia's doing, because it certainly isn't Pippin's, giant slug that he is. That bookcase is nearly 5 feet high. She really can climb the invisible stairs.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
a great conductor
Claudio Abbado has died. Here's some tributes.
I never got to hear his conducting in person, but I encountered it on records very early. One of my first LPs was a gift of his expansive and well-seasoned Brahms Second with the Berlin Philharmonic. (This was years - a couple decades - before he became chief conductor there.) This and Bruno Walter's Fourth were the recordings that taught me to love Brahms's symphonies. Here's a small taste of his live performance of the same work with the same orchestra.
Strangely, I only have one other Abbado recording, another early-acquired LP that I still cherish. It was with the London Symphony Orchestra, of the Janáček Sinfonietta and the Hindemith Weber Metamorphoses, two early/mid 20C works that are perfectly to my taste. Again, I pretty much learned them from this record. I have to this day not found another recording of the Sinfonetta to match it for majesty and power, which is why I've kept it.
I never got to hear his conducting in person, but I encountered it on records very early. One of my first LPs was a gift of his expansive and well-seasoned Brahms Second with the Berlin Philharmonic. (This was years - a couple decades - before he became chief conductor there.) This and Bruno Walter's Fourth were the recordings that taught me to love Brahms's symphonies. Here's a small taste of his live performance of the same work with the same orchestra.
Strangely, I only have one other Abbado recording, another early-acquired LP that I still cherish. It was with the London Symphony Orchestra, of the Janáček Sinfonietta and the Hindemith Weber Metamorphoses, two early/mid 20C works that are perfectly to my taste. Again, I pretty much learned them from this record. I have to this day not found another recording of the Sinfonetta to match it for majesty and power, which is why I've kept it.
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