I was expecting this to be a much more interesting story than it is.
We acquired Tybalt in February. He was, we were told, 12 months old at the time, and he was very much still a kitten. He's slowed down a bit since then, but only a bit, and still demands playing with great frequency. But his most frequent habits are to get in everything - wastebaskets, the kitchen sink - and to eat anything he can find. Once I accidentally dropped a couple wooden ends of asparagus stalks on the kitchen floor, and was surprised to see Tybalt eat them, both of them. I let him do it because it was a most amazing sight.
So what would he do when he saw his first Christmas tree? I set up our artificial tree today. Severian used to climb the tree. Would Tybalt? No; he watched with curiosity but didn't attempt to go up. He did, however, twice try to nibble the plastic needles. I buffed him off that in a hurry, and even more when he tried to chew the power cord for the tree's installed lights, but after that he left it alone.
So when B. puts the ornaments on ...
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Friday, November 29, 2019
thanksgave
My contribution to the family Thanksgiving table is usually a veggie dish, since I make so many of them at home and everybody else tends to bring dessert. Recently I've been making roasted broccoli, which keeps well for the couple hours between coming out of my oven and being set out on our niece's kitchen counter, and which has gotten its share of compliments. But this year I decided on something different.
B's youngest sister, who died last summer, was the family's mistress of what we called the greenie beanie casserole. Perhaps you've had this too; it's a common dish, made with frozen green beans and a can of cream of mushroom soup, plus a package of toasted onions. Since she's gone, we will have this no more.
But I found a recipe for the same dish made with fresh green beans and fresh mushrooms. I looked it over and decided I could do this, so I did, as a memorial for Jo. Bought the veggies at the best of the local produce markets, and prepared everything except for the final mixing and baking at home in the morning. Brought the creamed mushrooms (surprisingly easy to make) in the casserole dish, the blanched green beans in a tupperware container, and the split toasted onions in baggies, and hit it to the oven at the right moment. I was pleased at how well it came out: the beans were cooked just right and never stringy, and while I don't much like mushrooms, the pieces were tolerable and the cream sauce actually good.
Next time I may try making it with home-made cream of celery done the same way.
This dish also marked a notable landmark for me. The big 26-ounce canister of salt, which I've been using ever since I was in college, finally came to emptiness. I always wondered if I'd outlive that. Now I have to buy a new one, but I think it will be a smaller size.
B's youngest sister, who died last summer, was the family's mistress of what we called the greenie beanie casserole. Perhaps you've had this too; it's a common dish, made with frozen green beans and a can of cream of mushroom soup, plus a package of toasted onions. Since she's gone, we will have this no more.
But I found a recipe for the same dish made with fresh green beans and fresh mushrooms. I looked it over and decided I could do this, so I did, as a memorial for Jo. Bought the veggies at the best of the local produce markets, and prepared everything except for the final mixing and baking at home in the morning. Brought the creamed mushrooms (surprisingly easy to make) in the casserole dish, the blanched green beans in a tupperware container, and the split toasted onions in baggies, and hit it to the oven at the right moment. I was pleased at how well it came out: the beans were cooked just right and never stringy, and while I don't much like mushrooms, the pieces were tolerable and the cream sauce actually good.
Next time I may try making it with home-made cream of celery done the same way.
This dish also marked a notable landmark for me. The big 26-ounce canister of salt, which I've been using ever since I was in college, finally came to emptiness. I always wondered if I'd outlive that. Now I have to buy a new one, but I think it will be a smaller size.
Thursday, November 28, 2019
some posthumous thanks
Just a moment to post here before prepping for family Thanksgiving, so here's my chance to give thanks for the lives and work of Clive James and Jonathan Miller, two great British cultural figures who've left us within the past few days.
James, who was Australian by origin and continued affiliation, but lived in the UK most of his adult life, did much creative writing particularly poetry, but is best known for his literary reviews, which showed much perception as well as wit. My favorite bodies of his writing are his travel accounts, usually of visits to specific places, which nearly always began with a description of the plane flight he took to get there; and his short and punchy television reviews. He won my allegiance with one that began "The gymnastics and the swimming having finally been got out of the road, the Olympics settled down to the task of boring you rigid with the track and field events," though it turned out his disdain for the Olympics didn't survive the swell of patriotism when they were held in Sydney.
Jonathan Miller won fame as one of the four Oxbridge students who put Oxbridge student humour on the map with the show Beyond the Fringe (here he is there being learnedly Oxbridgian with Alan Bennett) and then became something of a cultural polymath and one of Britain's leading directors of theatre and opera. Some rare footage of him directing the initial cast of his famous ENO production of The Mikado; if you haven't seen the result, it's here: Act 1 and Act 2.
Among the recently departed, I'm also grateful for William Ruckelshaus, the second hero of the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973. Whether his and Richardson's likes exist today remains questionable.
James, who was Australian by origin and continued affiliation, but lived in the UK most of his adult life, did much creative writing particularly poetry, but is best known for his literary reviews, which showed much perception as well as wit. My favorite bodies of his writing are his travel accounts, usually of visits to specific places, which nearly always began with a description of the plane flight he took to get there; and his short and punchy television reviews. He won my allegiance with one that began "The gymnastics and the swimming having finally been got out of the road, the Olympics settled down to the task of boring you rigid with the track and field events," though it turned out his disdain for the Olympics didn't survive the swell of patriotism when they were held in Sydney.
Jonathan Miller won fame as one of the four Oxbridge students who put Oxbridge student humour on the map with the show Beyond the Fringe (here he is there being learnedly Oxbridgian with Alan Bennett) and then became something of a cultural polymath and one of Britain's leading directors of theatre and opera. Some rare footage of him directing the initial cast of his famous ENO production of The Mikado; if you haven't seen the result, it's here: Act 1 and Act 2.
Among the recently departed, I'm also grateful for William Ruckelshaus, the second hero of the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973. Whether his and Richardson's likes exist today remains questionable.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
more British detail
I wish to make a subtle correction to the historical comment of a British political think-tank director quoted at the end of this article. He compares what might happen after the current general election with what happened after the last such election held in December, in 1923. “The Conservatives throwing away a majority and the first Labour government ever being ushered in with the support of the Liberals,” he said. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.”
Besides the fact that the Conservatives don't have a majority this time, I wish to quibble with the word support as used of the Liberals in the 1923-24 situation. The Liberals didn't support the Labour government, they consented to it. There's a difference, and since the scenario being mooted in the current election is of a massive anti-Brexit coalition, it's a big difference. There was no anti-tariff coalition in the earlier case, even though that issue separated both Labour and Liberal from the Conservatives. Labour, though a minority, governed entirely on their own. There was no consultation with the Liberals as "support" implies. Labour didn't trust the Liberals and wished to avoid being dragged down by them.
Instead, Labour sailed on and did what they wanted to do, held back by the fact that the Liberals could turn them out at any time, but pushed forward by the fact that the Liberals didn't want another election any more than Labour did. In the event, a controversy caused the government's fall after only eight months, and the Conservatives won the ensuing election. Not an enticing parallel for the anti-Brexit parties, if it is a parallel at all.
Besides the fact that the Conservatives don't have a majority this time, I wish to quibble with the word support as used of the Liberals in the 1923-24 situation. The Liberals didn't support the Labour government, they consented to it. There's a difference, and since the scenario being mooted in the current election is of a massive anti-Brexit coalition, it's a big difference. There was no anti-tariff coalition in the earlier case, even though that issue separated both Labour and Liberal from the Conservatives. Labour, though a minority, governed entirely on their own. There was no consultation with the Liberals as "support" implies. Labour didn't trust the Liberals and wished to avoid being dragged down by them.
Instead, Labour sailed on and did what they wanted to do, held back by the fact that the Liberals could turn them out at any time, but pushed forward by the fact that the Liberals didn't want another election any more than Labour did. In the event, a controversy caused the government's fall after only eight months, and the Conservatives won the ensuing election. Not an enticing parallel for the anti-Brexit parties, if it is a parallel at all.
another task
The first rainstorm of the season was due yesterday afternoon (it's still beating down on us early the next morning: typical California winter storm, no cloudbursts but long steady rain), so I needed to take in some items that had been left on the patio, which in turn meant I needed to do something we don't do often around here: open the garage door.
We don't use the garage door often because we don't keep a car in there: we use it for storage. It's a sectional door which runs on an electric motor, which is loud and grindy, and has been as long as we've lived here, but it never did before what it did this time, which is get stuck.
A hasty phone call later, enter a small truck with two men who specialize in garage doors. The motor is worn out, as are the gears. They have a new mechanism on their truck, so I hire them to replace the whole thing. Busy job that takes over an hour, as the rain begins to drizzle down. Not tremendously expensive considering the amount of work involved and the new equipment. It can be scheduled to open automatically at pre-set times. It can be made to open over wi-fi. I don't want either of those things. I want the open/close button and the button that turns on and off the lights. That's it. And it's astonishingly quiet.
We don't use the garage door often because we don't keep a car in there: we use it for storage. It's a sectional door which runs on an electric motor, which is loud and grindy, and has been as long as we've lived here, but it never did before what it did this time, which is get stuck.
A hasty phone call later, enter a small truck with two men who specialize in garage doors. The motor is worn out, as are the gears. They have a new mechanism on their truck, so I hire them to replace the whole thing. Busy job that takes over an hour, as the rain begins to drizzle down. Not tremendously expensive considering the amount of work involved and the new equipment. It can be scheduled to open automatically at pre-set times. It can be made to open over wi-fi. I don't want either of those things. I want the open/close button and the button that turns on and off the lights. That's it. And it's astonishingly quiet.
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
book review
A Man of Parts by David Lodge
This is a novel in the form of a biography, or possibly a biography in the form of a novel, about H.G. Wells. Lodge had written a previous biographical novel, about Henry James, but I never succeeded in reading that one, because I'm not very interested in Henry James. (James, who knew Wells, is a character in the present book, but I found the material on James to be about the least interesting part.) I am more interested in H.G. Wells, though, or at least I came to be interested, because it says virtually nothing about Wells's SF, which is the part of him I know best.
This book concentrates almost entirely on two aspects of Wells. One is his career as a societal reformer and prophet of the near future, mostly around the first decade of the 20C, when most of the book takes place. (Wells predicted a world war, but not really soon.) There's much about his interaction with the Fabian Society during that period.
The other is his personal life, which means mainly his sex life. This is absolutely hair-raising, particularly half a century before the sexual revolution. Even at age 50, Wells was so magnetizing that every beautiful and intelligent 20-year-old woman he met threw herself at him and demanded a sexual affair, and he was happy to oblige. The reader is liable to roll eyes at this and suspect the novelist's overheated imagination, but all these affairs really happened, and the recorded aftermaths suggest they happened pretty much this way.
The affairs are rather sad stories, though. The women start out as shining and eager to embrace life, and the sex with H.G. is great, but he has to pack them off into isolation for social propriety's sake, and then he can't give them his undivided attention, and they get bored and cranky. This happens over and over. At one point Wells is asked, don't you ever learn?, and he replies, I guess I don't. In addition to this, somehow he manages to marry the only two women of his age he knows who don't like sex.
Lodge incorporates a lot of imagined conversations into his story, but they fit well, and his research has been prodigious and is well-integrated into the story. (I caught one tiny mistake in the political history of the period: it's on p. 146.) Lodge's manner of laying out exposition (some of the best of it in a running imagined interview with Wells in which the above question is posed) and of covering a story that takes place over many years entirely fits what I want in this kind of novel, which is why I found it so compulsively readable, despite a pretty hefty length, over 400 pages.
Its treatment of Wells as a writer is curious. He writes easily, and is often described as going off to spend an entire morning, or indeed a hermetic span of weeks, doing nothing but writing, but we the readers hardly ever see him doing it, the way we see him having the even more private activity of sex. This is a weird imbalance I've seen in other novels relating the sex life of writers or indeed anybody who does something other than have sex. Usually the sex is the only part described in detail, although at least here you get the social reform activity too.
Several of Wells's novels are described in detail, but only the ones that draw, if distantly, on his own life. After a while, this selectivity becomes conspicuous.
Nevertheless, there is a lot of good material in here, and a renowned supporting cast, including - besides Henry James - Bernard Shaw, E. Nesbit, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ford Madox Ford, and a lot of other authors and celebrities of the time and place whom it's not surprising Wells knew. And there's a lot of great lines. In the imaginary interview, Wells is depicted as saying about Bernard Shaw, "His real point of view was hard to pin down, as usual. He liked to goad people into re-examining their assumptions, but all he usually succeeded in doing was to annoy the hell out of them," which is about as good a summary of Shaw as you're likely to get.
Wells had generated a lot of controversy for depicting extramarital affairs in some of his novels, but the book's summary of his later novel The History of Mr. Polly, a comedy featuring arson, insurance fraud, faked death, and other shenanigans, concludes: "It was the most immoral story [Wells] had ever written, but the British public received it without a murmur of disapproval because there wasn't a word in it about sex."
One more thing about the sex. It is commonplace these days to describe self-declared "incels" as men who believe that beautiful women owe them sex, and to mock them for this absurd self-aggrandizement. But that's not what the incels I've read actually say. What they do is point to men like the H.G. Wells in this book, and say, "Here are men who treat women shabbily but get unlimited sex. Why can't I, who try to be more polite than that, get some too?" That's a much more reasonable question. I think I know the answer, but they're not going to like it.
This is a novel in the form of a biography, or possibly a biography in the form of a novel, about H.G. Wells. Lodge had written a previous biographical novel, about Henry James, but I never succeeded in reading that one, because I'm not very interested in Henry James. (James, who knew Wells, is a character in the present book, but I found the material on James to be about the least interesting part.) I am more interested in H.G. Wells, though, or at least I came to be interested, because it says virtually nothing about Wells's SF, which is the part of him I know best.
This book concentrates almost entirely on two aspects of Wells. One is his career as a societal reformer and prophet of the near future, mostly around the first decade of the 20C, when most of the book takes place. (Wells predicted a world war, but not really soon.) There's much about his interaction with the Fabian Society during that period.
The other is his personal life, which means mainly his sex life. This is absolutely hair-raising, particularly half a century before the sexual revolution. Even at age 50, Wells was so magnetizing that every beautiful and intelligent 20-year-old woman he met threw herself at him and demanded a sexual affair, and he was happy to oblige. The reader is liable to roll eyes at this and suspect the novelist's overheated imagination, but all these affairs really happened, and the recorded aftermaths suggest they happened pretty much this way.
The affairs are rather sad stories, though. The women start out as shining and eager to embrace life, and the sex with H.G. is great, but he has to pack them off into isolation for social propriety's sake, and then he can't give them his undivided attention, and they get bored and cranky. This happens over and over. At one point Wells is asked, don't you ever learn?, and he replies, I guess I don't. In addition to this, somehow he manages to marry the only two women of his age he knows who don't like sex.
Lodge incorporates a lot of imagined conversations into his story, but they fit well, and his research has been prodigious and is well-integrated into the story. (I caught one tiny mistake in the political history of the period: it's on p. 146.) Lodge's manner of laying out exposition (some of the best of it in a running imagined interview with Wells in which the above question is posed) and of covering a story that takes place over many years entirely fits what I want in this kind of novel, which is why I found it so compulsively readable, despite a pretty hefty length, over 400 pages.
Its treatment of Wells as a writer is curious. He writes easily, and is often described as going off to spend an entire morning, or indeed a hermetic span of weeks, doing nothing but writing, but we the readers hardly ever see him doing it, the way we see him having the even more private activity of sex. This is a weird imbalance I've seen in other novels relating the sex life of writers or indeed anybody who does something other than have sex. Usually the sex is the only part described in detail, although at least here you get the social reform activity too.
Several of Wells's novels are described in detail, but only the ones that draw, if distantly, on his own life. After a while, this selectivity becomes conspicuous.
Nevertheless, there is a lot of good material in here, and a renowned supporting cast, including - besides Henry James - Bernard Shaw, E. Nesbit, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ford Madox Ford, and a lot of other authors and celebrities of the time and place whom it's not surprising Wells knew. And there's a lot of great lines. In the imaginary interview, Wells is depicted as saying about Bernard Shaw, "His real point of view was hard to pin down, as usual. He liked to goad people into re-examining their assumptions, but all he usually succeeded in doing was to annoy the hell out of them," which is about as good a summary of Shaw as you're likely to get.
Wells had generated a lot of controversy for depicting extramarital affairs in some of his novels, but the book's summary of his later novel The History of Mr. Polly, a comedy featuring arson, insurance fraud, faked death, and other shenanigans, concludes: "It was the most immoral story [Wells] had ever written, but the British public received it without a murmur of disapproval because there wasn't a word in it about sex."
One more thing about the sex. It is commonplace these days to describe self-declared "incels" as men who believe that beautiful women owe them sex, and to mock them for this absurd self-aggrandizement. But that's not what the incels I've read actually say. What they do is point to men like the H.G. Wells in this book, and say, "Here are men who treat women shabbily but get unlimited sex. Why can't I, who try to be more polite than that, get some too?" That's a much more reasonable question. I think I know the answer, but they're not going to like it.
Monday, November 25, 2019
concert review: Redwood Symphony
As I wrote in the review, the value of this program lay in its purpose-written concert music, but I used the presence of not one but two chunks of film music in the repertoire to have a say about the presence of film music on concert programs.
To be blunter than I normally manage in a review, I don't think it belongs there. I came to this view from listening to it on our low-brow classical radio station, KDFC, where it doesn't belong either. I find that, when I turn the radio on, I can always correctly identify if the piece being played is film music. Although it uses symphony orchestra and is written by composers with classical training, it's not classical music but a different genre. It just sounds profoundly different. The main difference, I think, is that while classical music, especially of the minimalist variety, can achieve stasis, it's still active while it does so. Film music aspires to motionlessness.
I'm speaking here of the music of recent decades for drama films (as opposed to both comedies and action flicks), which both of the pieces at this concert are. Such films are usually romances with heartwarming or heartbreaking endings, and the music is intended to underpin that mood. Which it can do very well; it's just that it's very different from the way classical music works.
I wanted to listen to music from these movies before it was played at the concert. I'd seen Cider House Rules when it came out, but I don't remember a thing about it. I found a soundtrack album online, and as I listened I was overwhelmed with a sense of familiarity. Where else had I heard this before? It was also in a movie score ... it was a Jane Austen adaptation ... Sense and Sensibility? ... no, Emma. That was it, Emma. Quick check for the credits of Emma, and guess who composed the music? Same person. There you go.
That was by far the closest to Cider House Rules, but I listened around to a bunch of other Portman soundtracks, and they all sounded pretty much like that too. Desperate to see if she could do anything different, I scanned her credit list for something, anything, that I recognized as not a wistful romance flick. Ah, the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. OK, that's certainly different. Listened to some of the music of that: exactly the same sense of motionless stasis as the rest, just a different tone.
As for The Shape of Water, I remembered that movie all right, but I'd paid no attention to the music, because when you watch a movie, you're not supposed to. Listening to some of that online created the reaction I put in the review: this doesn't sound like a creature living underwater, this sounds like Parisian café music.
I was particularly gobsmacked by the composer's explanation for his inclusion of the bandoneón. The creature is from South America; the bandoneón is from South America; therefore, in his primitive mind, they go together. But the creature is from the Amazon somewhere, while the bandoneón is typically played in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. I actually got out my globe to measure how far those cities are from the Amazon. Over two thousand miles. No wonder I don't associate any underwater creature with a bandoneón, no matter where he comes from.
To be blunter than I normally manage in a review, I don't think it belongs there. I came to this view from listening to it on our low-brow classical radio station, KDFC, where it doesn't belong either. I find that, when I turn the radio on, I can always correctly identify if the piece being played is film music. Although it uses symphony orchestra and is written by composers with classical training, it's not classical music but a different genre. It just sounds profoundly different. The main difference, I think, is that while classical music, especially of the minimalist variety, can achieve stasis, it's still active while it does so. Film music aspires to motionlessness.
I'm speaking here of the music of recent decades for drama films (as opposed to both comedies and action flicks), which both of the pieces at this concert are. Such films are usually romances with heartwarming or heartbreaking endings, and the music is intended to underpin that mood. Which it can do very well; it's just that it's very different from the way classical music works.
I wanted to listen to music from these movies before it was played at the concert. I'd seen Cider House Rules when it came out, but I don't remember a thing about it. I found a soundtrack album online, and as I listened I was overwhelmed with a sense of familiarity. Where else had I heard this before? It was also in a movie score ... it was a Jane Austen adaptation ... Sense and Sensibility? ... no, Emma. That was it, Emma. Quick check for the credits of Emma, and guess who composed the music? Same person. There you go.
That was by far the closest to Cider House Rules, but I listened around to a bunch of other Portman soundtracks, and they all sounded pretty much like that too. Desperate to see if she could do anything different, I scanned her credit list for something, anything, that I recognized as not a wistful romance flick. Ah, the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. OK, that's certainly different. Listened to some of the music of that: exactly the same sense of motionless stasis as the rest, just a different tone.
As for The Shape of Water, I remembered that movie all right, but I'd paid no attention to the music, because when you watch a movie, you're not supposed to. Listening to some of that online created the reaction I put in the review: this doesn't sound like a creature living underwater, this sounds like Parisian café music.
I was particularly gobsmacked by the composer's explanation for his inclusion of the bandoneón. The creature is from South America; the bandoneón is from South America; therefore, in his primitive mind, they go together. But the creature is from the Amazon somewhere, while the bandoneón is typically played in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. I actually got out my globe to measure how far those cities are from the Amazon. Over two thousand miles. No wonder I don't associate any underwater creature with a bandoneón, no matter where he comes from.
Sunday, November 24, 2019
eggxactly
Ad for eggs: "We're thankful for eggs made with fresh air & sunshine."
And a chicken! Don't forget that!
And a chicken! Don't forget that!
Saturday, November 23, 2019
day up in the City
An invitation wafted into the Daily Journal's mailbox and was tossed in my direction, so that's why I was one of some 30 people in a restaurant around the corner from Davies Symphony Hall for a press luncheon for the impending local residency of the Violins of Hope.
This is the name given to a collection of some 85 violins that belonged to victims, survivors, or refugees of the Nazi Holocaust. Some of them were played in concentration camps. Some of them were given up by their owners after the war because of the bad memories. They all wound up in the hands of an Israeli luthier who restored them (some of them requiring a lot of that, as you can imagine) and has put them out on tour. The idea is that the violins, or at least the most high-quality ones, are to be played in concert by local performers, and they and the audience can think noble thoughts of hope and resilience while this is going on.
I'd known there were going to be some concerts of this kind here early next year, but it wasn't until I saw the well-organized calendar on the website that I realized just how extensive the program will be: numerous chamber music concerts, orchestral concerts, klezmer concerts, all featuring the violins; plus lectures, demonstrations, panel discussions, films, and museum exhibits, lasting two months. Music at Kohl Mansion, the chamber music series that's the chief sponsor, has commissioned a song cycle from noted opera composer Jake Heggie and his frequent librettist Gene Scheer, written in the persona of the violins, to be sung by Sasha Cooke, accompanied by those same violins.
As we incongruously dined on hamburgers or chicken salad while talking of the Holocaust, Heggie spoke, Cooke spoke, the director of Kohl (a child of Holocaust survivors herself: I've known her for years, and I had not known that) spoke, and various other people running the local project spoke. One of them was the museum curator who's overseeing the exhibits. She spoke of incorporating train imagery into the main exhibit, due to all the historical resonance it has. Since she's not a musician, I wondered if she knew of Steve Reich's Different Trains, perhaps the most significant musical response to the Holocaust. So I asked her afterwards. She hadn't; she has now.
Although I find something quaint and curious about the whole notion of Violins of Hope, this project is clearly a major local event musically, and since much of it will be taking place in the Daily Journal's home territory, it'll be worth some writeup in my columns there.
After that was over, I spent the afternoon in the city library nearby. Since it has a good music books collection, I dug out some recent books on the topic on my reading want list and browsed them over. A book on 19th century American symphonies, a repertoire of truly monumental obscurity. A book on the anti-German hysteria that overtook the US musical world in 1917-18. A book on the history of the Stalin Prize: how'd you like to be on a musical awards committee with Stalin looking over your shoulder the entire time? And another collection of essays on Russian musical history by Richard Taruskin. He says in his introduction that he's mellowed out and become less contentious than in his previous collections. Who is he fooling? He's just as contentious as ever, defending Rimsky-Korsakov from charges of being a hack, defending Mussorgsky from Rimsky-Korsakov, defending Tchaikovsky from claims that he committed suicide, defending Shostakovich from Volkov and his acolytes, defending musical groups' right to cancel performances of pro-Stalin or anti-Semitic music, and defending Stravinsky from just about anything. I agree with Taruskin a lot more than I disagree, but my, is he exhausting.
The reason I stayed on was because I had a ticket to SFS at Davies that evening. Manfred Honeck conducting Bruckner's Fourth: I couldn't miss that. Honeck's recent recording of the Ninth with his home orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, has been getting good reviews and making end of the year lists, and they recorded the Fourth a while back.
This was in some ways a perfect performance. Each note was played exactly as it should be, every swell and fade was precisely of the right intensity, the flow and shape of the music was ideal, Robert Ward played every one of the extensive horn solos without the slightest hitch or bobble. So then why did it feel a little dull? This wasn't just me; the applause afterwards was warm but not wild as it had been for Canellakis's Shostakovich Seventh. Was it too perfect; to be precise, too perfectly controlled? Was it too predictable? - at every moment I knew not only exactly what was to happen next, but how. The only flaw I heard was that some passages were rather too smoothly polished; one for strings with a more typically Brucknerian roughness really stood out.
Also on the program, Mozart's E-flat piano concerto, K. 482 - supposedly one of his more obscure major works, but I've heard it here three times in the last four years - with Leif Ove Andsnes pouring out pure liquid streams of notes. Honeck conducted by shaking his arms around a lot; this produced an elegant and satisfyingly curvaceous Mozartean sound.
For once, the Millbrae train was the first into the BART station when I got there after the concert, but for once, I didn't need it; as I'd come up in the morning I'd parked at Daly City instead of San Bruno, my usual stop for an evening visit (difference in traffic congestion and parking space availability). Good thing I remembered that, instead of absently continuing to my usual stop.
This is the name given to a collection of some 85 violins that belonged to victims, survivors, or refugees of the Nazi Holocaust. Some of them were played in concentration camps. Some of them were given up by their owners after the war because of the bad memories. They all wound up in the hands of an Israeli luthier who restored them (some of them requiring a lot of that, as you can imagine) and has put them out on tour. The idea is that the violins, or at least the most high-quality ones, are to be played in concert by local performers, and they and the audience can think noble thoughts of hope and resilience while this is going on.
I'd known there were going to be some concerts of this kind here early next year, but it wasn't until I saw the well-organized calendar on the website that I realized just how extensive the program will be: numerous chamber music concerts, orchestral concerts, klezmer concerts, all featuring the violins; plus lectures, demonstrations, panel discussions, films, and museum exhibits, lasting two months. Music at Kohl Mansion, the chamber music series that's the chief sponsor, has commissioned a song cycle from noted opera composer Jake Heggie and his frequent librettist Gene Scheer, written in the persona of the violins, to be sung by Sasha Cooke, accompanied by those same violins.
As we incongruously dined on hamburgers or chicken salad while talking of the Holocaust, Heggie spoke, Cooke spoke, the director of Kohl (a child of Holocaust survivors herself: I've known her for years, and I had not known that) spoke, and various other people running the local project spoke. One of them was the museum curator who's overseeing the exhibits. She spoke of incorporating train imagery into the main exhibit, due to all the historical resonance it has. Since she's not a musician, I wondered if she knew of Steve Reich's Different Trains, perhaps the most significant musical response to the Holocaust. So I asked her afterwards. She hadn't; she has now.
Although I find something quaint and curious about the whole notion of Violins of Hope, this project is clearly a major local event musically, and since much of it will be taking place in the Daily Journal's home territory, it'll be worth some writeup in my columns there.
After that was over, I spent the afternoon in the city library nearby. Since it has a good music books collection, I dug out some recent books on the topic on my reading want list and browsed them over. A book on 19th century American symphonies, a repertoire of truly monumental obscurity. A book on the anti-German hysteria that overtook the US musical world in 1917-18. A book on the history of the Stalin Prize: how'd you like to be on a musical awards committee with Stalin looking over your shoulder the entire time? And another collection of essays on Russian musical history by Richard Taruskin. He says in his introduction that he's mellowed out and become less contentious than in his previous collections. Who is he fooling? He's just as contentious as ever, defending Rimsky-Korsakov from charges of being a hack, defending Mussorgsky from Rimsky-Korsakov, defending Tchaikovsky from claims that he committed suicide, defending Shostakovich from Volkov and his acolytes, defending musical groups' right to cancel performances of pro-Stalin or anti-Semitic music, and defending Stravinsky from just about anything. I agree with Taruskin a lot more than I disagree, but my, is he exhausting.
The reason I stayed on was because I had a ticket to SFS at Davies that evening. Manfred Honeck conducting Bruckner's Fourth: I couldn't miss that. Honeck's recent recording of the Ninth with his home orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, has been getting good reviews and making end of the year lists, and they recorded the Fourth a while back.
This was in some ways a perfect performance. Each note was played exactly as it should be, every swell and fade was precisely of the right intensity, the flow and shape of the music was ideal, Robert Ward played every one of the extensive horn solos without the slightest hitch or bobble. So then why did it feel a little dull? This wasn't just me; the applause afterwards was warm but not wild as it had been for Canellakis's Shostakovich Seventh. Was it too perfect; to be precise, too perfectly controlled? Was it too predictable? - at every moment I knew not only exactly what was to happen next, but how. The only flaw I heard was that some passages were rather too smoothly polished; one for strings with a more typically Brucknerian roughness really stood out.
Also on the program, Mozart's E-flat piano concerto, K. 482 - supposedly one of his more obscure major works, but I've heard it here three times in the last four years - with Leif Ove Andsnes pouring out pure liquid streams of notes. Honeck conducted by shaking his arms around a lot; this produced an elegant and satisfyingly curvaceous Mozartean sound.
For once, the Millbrae train was the first into the BART station when I got there after the concert, but for once, I didn't need it; as I'd come up in the morning I'd parked at Daly City instead of San Bruno, my usual stop for an evening visit (difference in traffic congestion and parking space availability). Good thing I remembered that, instead of absently continuing to my usual stop.
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