concert review: San Francisco Symphony

In this, his final season as music director, MTT is focusing the repertoire for his own appearances on revisiting works especially meaningful to him. This week, my first venture there of the season, it was mid-to-late period Stravinsky. We had the Symphony in Three Movements, the Symphony of Psalms, and a lesser-known and later work, the Canticum sacrum. The first of these is for big orchestra, the other two for much smaller ensembles with chorus, with sacred lyrics in Latin.

I like the Symphony of Psalms a great deal, particularly the almost-minimalist serene outlaying of the conclusion. The Canticum sacrum sounds similar, except much drier, and to further evaporate the already naturally desiccated Stravinsky sound is tortuous. Stravinsky's late adoption of twelve-tone technique is responsible for a lot of this; MTT said in introducing the work that, for Stravinsky, twelve-tone was a neutral thing, just another tool to play with, but considering how he'd previously avoided it, I think that Robert Craft bullied him into using it.

These were good performances, but there was something - rushed? perfunctory? those are the wrong words, because they're too strong and harsh - about them.

That being the bulk of the program, what was Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 2 doing in the middle there? Unless it was just that they needed something to showcase soloist Oliver Herbert, and Stravinsky wrote nothing suitable.

I'd spent much of the afternoon in the Foster City library, visiting there in particular because they had a hard-to-find item I wanted to check out, and spending more time because the combination of air conditioning, good books, comfy chairs, and the right to loiter is my ideal way of beating summer mid-afternoon heat, even though now it's technically fall.

That put me, though, in an awkward position geographically to avoid traffic on my way up, and I found myself short of time and at the wrong BART station to get to the concert and, even more so, to get back again, not to mention getting anything substantive to eat.

we have news

1. Writing about US politics now feels like writing about UK politics over the past months. Before you can finish writing anything down, the situation entirely changes. I can note the widespread impression that impeachment will only hurt the Democrats. Newt Gingrich thinks so, because that's what happened to him when he tried it. But how much will they, and the country, be hurt if they don't? The situation is entirely different from the last case. Clinton's personal sleaze was reprehensible but not impeachable, and neither was his technical crime, the perjury. I saw an article at the time: several DAs said they would never attempt to prosecute for perjury a business executive who'd done what Clinton did: it was too petty and insignificant. Whereas what we're seeing now: wow. Undoubtably this is how DT has conducted his business for forty years, so no wonder he doesn't see anything wrong with it. Clearly he has no idea how to be President. Remember how he was going to "pivot" and become "presidential" once he secured the nomination? He never did, nor has he since.

1a. Good article on the political situation, as it is now.

2. I started to watch Ken Burns' Country Music documentary, and gave up before the end of the first 2-hour segment, covering up to 1933, from the sheer slog of it. Although I recognized several of the talking heads who gave commentary, the only historical performers described in the narration I'd ever heard of were the Carter Family, of whom all I could have told you was that they existed. The material on the historical origins of the music has no heft, while the accounts of the featured performers drown in mind-numbing levels of unnecessary detail. How many times do we have to be told that some guy I'd never heard of had tuberculosis?

2a. And now I'm really confused about the distinction between country music and American folk music. The stuff described here seems like folk to me, but Burns never calls it that. To me, "country" is a commercial genre of pop music. Or is that wrong? Other sources don't help. Wikipedia says the Carter Family were a folk music group, and then that they were country music stars. I recognized one of their songs, "Worried Man Blues," because it was later covered by the Kingston Trio. But nobody ever called the Kingston Trio a country music group, surely?

3. Article on the 50th anniversary of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I really enjoyed that movie at the time, though it has its longeurs today (the suck fairy has made some inroads, but not entirely taken it over). People forget that, though he had equal billing with Paul Newman, Robert Redford wasn't a star when this movie came out. This is the one that made him a star. I followed his work avidly for a while after that. I got to see The Candidate and The Hot Rock because of that, and the latter led me to Donald Westlake's novel and thence to all Westlake's other work. I also followed William Goldman (who also did the screenplay for The Hot Rock), and that might be why I read The Princess Bride. Productive courses.

4. Looks like an insightful review of David Cameron's memoir. He doesn't get how badly he broke the system, does he? Saving this up for when the book hits the library, as I did for the one by Tony Blair, another guy who doesn't get what harm he did.

5. Christopher Rouse died. A famous composer, to be sure. I once reviewed one of his quartets. "Rouse wishes to pack an orchestra’s worth of potential dissonance into his chamber music. ... The repeated falling passages resemble that now-antiquated sound, an amplified phonograph needle scraping across the grooves of an LP, or sometimes, when they squawk to an awkward stop, a dentist’s drill. For all its noise, this work is not nonsensical. Rouse has something substantive to say in this idiom, and he says it all in about 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the piece lasts for 20 minutes."

is the clock ticking?

People are asking if Boris Johnson will have the shortest term of any Prime Minister in Britain's history. Not counting one brief five-week caretaker prime ministership in 1834, which he's already outlived, Boris will have the shortest prime ministership in history if he's out by October 29th. But that person had also already served as PM once before (as had the caretaker); to be the shortest in total service, he could continue as far as November 18th.

But that's still cheating the record in a way, because both those PMs (Rockingham in 1782 and Canning in 1827) left office so quickly only because they died. To choose a PM who only served once and who left office for political reasons, the next step up is the previous record-holder for most hapless PM of all time: Lord Goderich, who served 131 days in 1827-8 and never actually met Parliament while in office. That would give Boris until the end of November to be bested by him; he's already even more hapless.

In other news, I was writing to a contributor to Tolkien Studies about typographical issues, and I started to write "in this case, house style trumps exact transcription," but even that innocent word is now so loathsome that I changed it to "house style is favored over exact transcription."

approximately three concerts

Having already been there once this season, Saturday I went back to Hammer for another symphony concert, this time on assignment for SFCV. Acoustics in bad auditoriums are usually worst on pianos, and though my reviews are usually pretty restrained, this time I let them have it: "an extraordinarily dampened and clanging tone, like a honky-tonk dipped in a river."

I trust I won't get any pushback on this one. I shared dismay with a couple people I knew who were there, asking them how the balance was where they sat, and also with a man who came up afterwards and asked, "Are you the guy from SFCV?"

So that was Saturday. Sunday was something different. Usually I choose my classical concerts on the basis of repertoire. If you tell me of some performer who's giving a concert, I'll say, "What are they playing?" But this one was different. It was a recital/chamber concert with violinist Stuart Canin.

Stuart Canin is 93 years old. But it wasn't the attraction of hearing so venerable a player that brought me. Stuart Canin was the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony when I first started attending it, fifty years ago, and I quickly imprinted on his smooth and elegant performing style. I heard it again in the 1990s when he founded and led the New Century Chamber Orchestra, filling it with string players in his own idiom (it's still around, but it's different), and here was another chance.

The program was the Debussy sonata and a Bartok rhapsody with pianist Markus Pawlik, and the Brahms Op. 87 Trio with cellist Angela Lee. A program I'd be happy to hear if I were going anyway, but it wouldn't otherwise lure me all the way to Oakland. This one was sponsored by the Berkeley Symphony - I learned that Canin does this for them every year, but I wasn't on their mailing list before, so I didn't know about it - and was held at the Piedmont Center for the Arts, a converted house at the top of a hill in tony Piedmont. The venue was a large living room, laid out like the Great Hall at Kohl Mansion, only much smaller, and with vividly bright sound. Canin's sound has sharpened with age, and the Bartok piece and the Brahms scherzo suited him very well, but there's still something of the unique smoothness that originally appealed to me.

I sat outside on the yard bench beforehand, hoping to get some writing done on my review, but the conversations among others there was too distracting. I wound up conversing with a pair of violinists, former students of Canin's, who were so enthusiastic to hear him that they came up from LA just for this. They were professionals, one with the LA Chamber Orchestra, the other in the New Hollywood Quartet. We wound up comparing hall acoustics in our urban areas.

As long as I was going up for this, I decided also to make a stop at the Presidio Pop-up Orchestra. To celebrate the restoration of the Presidio Theatre - which is a hall actually in the Presidio, the old military reservation at the tip of San Francisco (and not a movie house in the nearby Marina commercial district, which is what you'll get if you put "Presidio Theatre" in Google Maps), a collection of musicians got together for a brief free concert of music associated with the WPA, which originally built the theatre back in 1939.

Of course it was sketchy, and the trumpet soloist in Copland's "Hoedown" was so out of it he might as well not have been there, but it was a pleasure to hear some Copland, and Barber, and one piece I wasn't likely to hear live elsewhere, an Appalachian folk-flavored scherzo from Ernst Bacon's "Americana" Symphony.

What I hadn't known, but the organizers of this concert should have before scheduling it early afternoon on a Sunday, is that on Sundays the parade green in the Presidio, which is right around the corner from the theatre, is taken over by a food truck festival, and packed with people. I arrived in plenty of time, but every single public parking space - and they're pay parking, even on weekends - in the central Presidio was full. I almost gave up, but my map-reading fu led me to discover a hidden stash, not far away, of mostly open spaces that didn't cost anything, and even the two-hour limit didn't apply on weekends. Am I going to reveal where this hidden treasure is located? Hell no!

Unfortunately the difficulty of parking, and the lack of ticketing for the concert, meant people were still pouring in while the music was playing. Afterwards I wandered down to the green, where I had a cup of chowder that wasn't quite worth the 20 minutes I had to stand in line for it.

Altogether an adventurous day out, by my standards of adventurous.

on fiction

The latest kerfluffle over fan fiction, and memories arise of my previous encounter with advocates, not from a separate community but what I'd thought was my own, who insisted not only that I accept the right of fan fiction writers to publish their work, in violation of copyright and the original author's wishes, but that I aesthetically admire not just the fact of fan fiction's profusion but the stories themselves, and who abused me mightily for staying uninterested.

I think the problem is that my reasons for liking or even cherishing a body of fiction are quite different from those of most people.

Most people seem to have two strong responses to finding a work or body of fiction that they greatly like.

One is, they want to see it made into a movie. You can see this here, in a thoughtful article on Tolkien that nevertheless assumes that the dearest wish of all Tolkien fans is to see his work made into a really good movie.

I do not have this desire. I do not imagine visually, still less cinematographically. When I go see a movie, it's because I expect it to be good, not because I like movies as movies. I have no interest in movies as an art form. Consequently when I read a piece of written fiction, my mind does not turn to imagining a movie adaptation.

Furthermore, the more I cherish a work of fiction, the more the news that it's to be made into a movie arouses in me feelings of fear, anxiety, and foreboding. This is because I know that the "really good" adaptation is a chimera. The more I love the written work, the more the inevitable changes in the adaptation, not to mention the equally inevitable misreadings, will pang me. This is not pleasant. I watched the Tolkien adaptations in a state of near-continuous agony, even while admiring some other (mostly visual) aspects. The last movie of a book I liked, that I liked better than the book (though only in some respects), was The Princess Bride. And that movie was written by the book's author, so he understood the intent of the book. Furthermore, while I liked the book, I didn't like it that much.

The other reaction is, they fall in love with the characters and the setting. This is what inspires fan fiction, to give them more of both.

I do not. Yes, I like the characters and the setting; if I didn't, I won't like the book. But I like them as a function of the author writing about them, and writing it well. If a work of fan fiction is as well-written as the original, I will admire it accordingly, and this has happened. But if the original is very good, this is extremely rare. Rather than read more about the same characters, even sometimes from the original author, I'd rather re-read what I already have.

What makes me cherish a work of fiction is largely the quality of the writing. By this I don't necessarily mean pellucid prose. The authors I like most, like Tolkien, are often criticized by high-literary types for their prose. And indeed it has flaws, but even Homer nods. The prose I like is plain and clear, but above all else compelling. In lighter work, I like wit and sparkle. But good writing is more than that. I like depth of imagination, I like evidence of serious thought about the creation, and I like the upholding of moral standards. I realized I liked these things when I first read some of the other books recommended to me by people who knew I liked Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings is about magical war in an imaginary pseudo-medieval realm, so they gave me sword and sorcery books about the same thing. And I was totally uninterested. I realized that they lacked these additional things that Tolkien had.

Another thing I like that applies specifically to Tolkien is the fact that all this brilliant profusion of imagination is the work of one man. Not only does that make it more awesome, but it gives it both a unity and authority that a shared-author work doesn't have on its own. Given that, why would I be interested in a fan fiction addition to the creation by somebody else? It's completely irrelevant to my interests, and if I have to study the original scholastically, the additions will only needlessly clutter up my head.

book review

Tim Bouverie, Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War (Duggan)

I saw this on a new book shelf while visiting the library for another purpose, and a quick glance was enough to convince me it was worth reading. I know a lot about this topic, but I figured with such well-written detail I'd learn more. I did.

This is essentially a history of British high politics, as manifested in diplomacy and Parliament, from the rise of urgent concern with the dictatorships in the mid-30s up to the collapse of the final attempt to negotiate with them at the time of the Fall of France. The allies, the adversaries, and their victims all play a part, but the focus is all on the British. For instance, the August 1939 mission to negotiate a treaty with Russia is described in detail, but the announcement that the Russians had drawn up a treaty with the Nazis instead is presented as as big a surprise as it was to the British.

The vagaries of unofficial opinion are also skillfully presented, from the various Anglo-German friendship societies of the earlier period to the determination of much of the populace to defend the Czechs in a way the government declined to do.

Reading of Chamberlain's meetings with Hitler preceding the Munich Agreement - Chamberlain flew to Germany three separate times over a period of a couple of weeks - one feels both his frustration at being unable to pin Hitler down to a solution, and one's own frustration at Chamberlain's repeated attempts to find an accommodation where none could be had, constantly backing up and giving away more and more.

Only one minister, Duff Cooper, resigned over Munich, but many others were dismayed, and Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, quickly separated himself from appeasement as the diplomacy sank into absurdity, and much to Chamberlain's dismay advocated a tougher line. Halifax's reputation has been tainted by his attempt to find a negotiated peace at the Fall of France, but this was only a proposal, not an undercutting of Churchill, and he was much tougher earlier on than he's often given credit for.

Bouverie also quickly disposes of any idea that Munich was a tactical retreat to allow more time for the buildup of British defense. No. Chamberlain was concerned for a lasting peace and only that, and this was his project. In that connection, Bouverie answers a question I've long had. Since the year's delay before war actually broke out did allow the UK some time to build its military, didn't it also allow Germany time for the same thing? And which had the greater relative improvement? The answer is, Germany gained more against the UK than vice versa. It would have been tactically more advisable to have fought Germany over the Czechs than the Poles. True, Britain was in no condition in 1938 to defend against the Battle of Britain, but Germany was in no condition in 1938 to have launched it, so no loss.

One thing I hadn't known that not only surprised me, but suddenly seems searingly relevant. On August 4, 1939, right in the middle of the growing tensions over Poland and the launching of negotiations with Russia, Chamberlain put Parliament on a two-month summer recess. This wasn't a prorogation, but a recess. It had to be voted on. Members were shocked. Churchill said in his speech it would be "disastrous", "pathetic", "shameful" to have Parliament unavailable in this crisis. The opposition parties feared that the government would use the recess to break its pledge to Poland and resume appeasement.

So did the motion lose? No, it won. The whips put the pressure on government MPs. Those who abstained (didn't even vote against) were told they'd be blacklisted, and were threatened with deselection from their seats.

How much does that sound like what has happened recently?

In the end, Parliament was recalled on Aug. 24, after the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed, to pass an emergency powers bill, again the next week for further news from the government, and again a few days after that for the final crisis which led to a continuous seven-day sitting. Still ...

reviews and events

1. Went off to the California Symphony on Sunday, to produce this review. Which doesn't say anything about how the program book proclaimed we would hear not Lieder by Mahler but his Leider, which probably captures more of my feeling about Mahler; and advertised a forthcoming Symphony-sponsored cruise starting in Amsterdam and then going down the Rhine to Basel. That's right, down. The convention that south is down overcomes a rise in actual elevation of nearly a thousand feet.

2. The slow closing of the area's old-line Chinese restaurants, the ones designed to appeal to Western tastes, has been going on for at least twenty years (there were a lot of them), but two more notable ones have bit it. Both for the same reason: the owner decided to retire. (There was nobody to pass it on to? What do the employees think?) The one where my mother and I used to go weekly closed last month; and another, the ghost of the also-gone restaurant where I took my visitors in the year 2000 for a festive lunch, has announced its closing at the end of this month. I decided to go there for lunch today, and so did a lot of other people. This may have flummoxed them. I had a bowl of soup, and after the busser took the empty bowl away, a server arrived with another one. I had to say I'd already had mine, so the server hustled it off and consulted with another; apparently somebody else had also ordered the same soup.

3. In addition to curling up in my arms to cuddle, something no previous cat I've had ever wanted to do, licking my hair, and vocalizing loudly when he's bored and wants some cat-toy action, Tybalt has developed a hankering to sleep with me. I'm lying on the bed and he curls up next to me and "makes bread" on me. If you don't know this, it's a cat comfort habit, akin to human children sucking their thumbs and for much the same reason. Kittens knead the mother's breast to expel milk, and grown cats will still mimic the motion as a comfort thing. Usually they do it on blankets, but Tybalt does it on me. This would be cute except that when I'm not wearing something thick, which I'm usually not (and I don't sleep under blankets unless I'm very cold), the fact that he never entirely retracts his front claws becomes apparent. Ouch, cat, ouch.

concert review: Cambrian Symphony

This local volunteer orchestra is now playing in the Hammer Theatre in downtown San Jose, a drama theatre not entirely suited to being a concert hall. This is the first time I've heard an unamplified orchestra there, and find that the acoustics are painfully bright from the strings in front, and muffled from the winds in back. At least where I was sitting; next time I'll try somewhere else.

I went to hear Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances and a suite from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, favorite modern works. Crisp and energetic performances, conducted with precision by Scott Krijnen. I got to talk with him afterwards, and asked, "In the slow themes of the Rachmaninoff, was that actually portamento I heard a few times?" He said, "Yes, that was us. We were trying to sound sentimental."

One other gem made an appearance, a piece by Helen Crane (1868-1930), an American composer so obscure she's not in the Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. The program notes say she's in Baker's, but not in the Slonimsky edition I have. Evidently she got played a bit during her lifetime, but mostly in Germany where she studied. This was, so far as anyone can tell, the American premiere of this work, titled Evangeline, Op. 11 (1905). Her scores and papers, donated to the NYPL after her death (she'd lived in Westchester), were noticed recently by a composer named Bernard Crane, who was tickled to find another composer with the same surname. (They appear to be very distant relations.) Looking through them, he picked this piece as a likely performance prospect and it wound up here.

Helen Crane dubbed Evangeline a concert overture, and it's typical of the breed: 12 minutes long, in sonata-allegro form. But it's not rigidly or textbook so. I found it fairly imaginative - a sequence of varying rhythmic figures at the retransition especially so - with a strong but not indulgent melodic sense and entirely accomplished orchestration. The idiom floated somewhere between Mendelssohn and Raff, which may seem antiquated for the period, but in fact a lot of lesser composers (MacCunn, Yamada, etc.) were still writing in that style. It wasn't an overwhelming discovery, but it was pleasant, and I'd like to hear more of her music. She wrote piano pieces, songs, chamber music (including 3 string quartets), a few suites and tone poems, a couple vocal-orchestral works, and two completed symphonies.

not at play

Critique of re-creating school playground time for adults as the happy time of their childhood. My comments:

Oh yes, like you I detested school recess. I would stay in the classroom reading if the teacher would let me. Otherwise I'd wander around along the back fences of the yard, as far away from everyone else as I could get.

I wouldn't say that what I liked about childhood was the absence of things like bills or marital tension. My god, as a child I had virtually no money and couldn't buy anything unless I begged my parents, so money was a very tight issue; and as for adult interpersonal tensions, those have nothing on sibling tension or the heavy foot of parental authority, let alone being bullied by other children.

What I liked about childhood was where I did have agency and control over my own actions. I could read whatever I liked, and my parents trusted me so I could go off on bicycle expeditions anywhere I wanted so long as I was home by dinner.* That latter is a privilege few parents would allow their children today. But the point is: I can still read whatever I want, and I can still travel wherever I want so long as I can fit it in my schedule. What made me happy as a child is what still makes me happy today. It just has nothing to do with schoolyard playing, then or now.

*They trusted me because I was a whiz with maps. I was navigating family car trips by the time I was 8.

a test

Today's reprinted Peanuts says:



It's possible that Schulz got this from an actual textbook, instead of making it up. I decided to see if it was possible to deduce the answer. Not by direct calculation; I wouldn't know where to start. But by brute force. Easy enough with Excel; you just enter a sequence of possible ages for the daughter in one column, and then calculate all the derivatives in other columns.

And the answer? The man is 41. His daughter is 7 (7x6=42, 1 year older than he is now) and his son is 10 (7+3). That has to be it, because 10 years from now, they will be 17 & 20 (= 37, which +14=51, 10 years more than his present age), and nothing else fits. Note that "the combined ages of his children" means their ages then, ten years from now, and not their ages today, because then the man would have to be 11 and his daughter 2 (2+5=7, 7+14=21).