half a concert

My concert expedition on Saturday morning was not entirely successful. The Beethoven Center at San Jose State was sponsoring the annual Young Pianist's Beethoven Competition. I'd been to this once before. Spending a Saturday morning listening to six high school students of professional accomplishment play Beethoven sonatas in the cavernous concert hall of the San Jose State music building had been a pleasant experience.

This time, walking the half mile from the nearest convenient parking to the music building in the middle of campus was a chore. I arrived at 9:30, the announced starting time of the concert, to learn that it was actually scheduled for 10:00. About 30 people - fewer than there are Beethoven piano sonatas, and a small enough audience that instead of being spread out in this giant hall, we could have fit snugly in the tiny recital room in the Beethoven Center itself, which is a lot closer to where I parked - waited silently for the music to start. In the event, one of the judges didn't arrive until 10:15, the first pianist didn't appear on stage for five minutes after that, and then spent two minutes silently sitting at the piano bench, gathering his nerve or possibly just thinking about John Cage, before launching into the "Appassionata" Sonata. The second pianist spent her two pre-playing minutes flexing her arms by adjusting the height of the piano bench, and then played "Les Adieux." By the time of the third performer (Op. 90), I was thinking more about a visit to the restroom than about Beethoven.

By the time of intermission, it was almost 11:30, so I bailed on the second half. I hadn't found the performances that artistically inspiring, and I wasn't overwhelmed by the opportunity to hear somebody else play the "Appassionata" again. So I limped back to my car, stopping along the way for lunch at a new campus-side restaurant whose gimmick is that they put Texas-style barbecue meat in their Vietnamese pho soup. Interesting idea, which sort of works and sort of doesn't.

Hugo finalists

This year's Hugo finalists have been announced. There are finalists in Chinese scattered throughout several categories, no doubt a result of the members of last year's Worldcon, which was in China, being eligible to nominate. I see that several of the Chinese-language fiction stories have been translated, which will enable them to be considered on an equal basis with the other finalists by non-Chinese-reading voters.

Not long ago, a friend revealed that he'd nominated my essay collection, Gifted Amateurs, for the Best Related Work category. I felt quite honored, but I never considered it likely that it would make the final list, and it didn't. If it had, I'd have needed to appoint somebody as my designated acceptor at the awards ceremony, as I'm certainly not attending the convention in Glasgow myself.¹ At least the category does have one book that I've read, Maureen Kincaid Speller's posthumous essay collection, A Traveller in Time. Maureen was a friendly acquaintance of mine and an excellent writer, so I'm pleased to see her collected and honored.

I have and have read one other written nominee, the fanzine Idea edited by Geri Sullivan, which is always worthwhile; and I've seen exactly one of the dramatic presentation nominees, the movie Nimona, which I thought was quite good. It has a coherent and touching plot, and the animation is imaginative. Of the two main characters, one's a gay man and the other is conspicuously non-gender. No big deal is made of any of this, which is how it should be.

I've read and enjoyed other works by some of the fiction nominees - John Scalzi, Nghi Vo, T. Kingfisher, Naomi Kritzer - plus a few others I didn't enjoy quite so much, and that about sums it up for me and this year's Hugos.

1. I've never been to Glasgow at all. I've been to Edinburgh, but not Glasgow. Standing in the queue for the big 1995 Steeleye Span reunion concert in London, which was just after the end of a Worldcon in Glasgow, I ran into friends who said to me, "We didn't see you in Glasgow," and I got to reply, "I wasn't there! I just flew in from the States this morning."

nominee for "most challenging instrumental arrangement"

figuring out Taylor Swift

It's been nearly 40 years since I paid close attention to current popular music. The ratio of songs that really attract me is too low. Every once in a while I hear something, and it's often nice enough, but not something that I'd feel the urge to listen to again. When I hear a pop song new to me that does attract me, it turns out to date from 1982. (That is not hyperbole.) I don't despise current pop, I just don't find it interesting.

Nevertheless, the current fame and ubiquity of Taylor Swift - up till quite recently, I would have recognized the name but wouldn't have been able to say who she was - prompted me to check out her work. Figuring I should start with the most popular songs but having no idea which they were, I looked up her list of singles and their chart rankings on Wikipedia and then sought out on YouTube some of the biggest hits. Then the concert film of her Eras Tour came to Disney+ and I started to watch that.

None of these were songs I had ever heard before. In both cases I found the songs in themselves to be pleasant enough, though I was a bit surprised by the extremely downbeat lyrics of some. Two I remember as being particularly good were "Cruel Summer" and "The Man," but nothing of their melodies stuck in my head. But in both cases, the singles and the concert video, I found that two or three songs was about all that I could take of the heavy arrangements. Unobjectionable but not for me was my conclusion.

Consequently I was taken totally by surprise by her NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Entirely acoustic, just her: two songs with piano, two with acoustic guitar. And, despite her between-songs patter needing considerable tightening up, it worked for me. If she were to play a concert in this manner in a folk-music coffeehouse like the Freight and Salvage, I could be there and enjoy every minute of it.

For that's what she's writing. Her songs are in the mode of acoustic folk singer-songwriters, not those of the catchy tunes and hypnotic rhythms that make for the pop songs I remember. Here, though, her wandering melodies and introspective lyrics virtually define the genre. If she had chosen that route of music-making, she could have fit right in as a distinguished colleague of a couple dozen such women I've heard concerts by.

Of course, coffeehouse audiences of a few hundred, a tiny level of fame, and barely making a living touring around this way - that would have been an entirely different fate than the one she's got now. And I do have the highest respect for the way she seems to have grounded herself as a level-headed person in the face of extreme celebrity. That's rather rare.

Taylor Swift actually showing up to do a coffeehouse concert would be impractical, but she could make more solo acoustic recordings. And if she does that, then and only then will I be likely to listen to some more.

keep not traveling

Here's somebody's idea of the 24 Best Islands in the World. I had to go all the way down to no. 24 to find one that I've visited: Kau'ai. I was there on a family vacation cruise when I was 19. We docked at Lihue and took a hired car tour to Waimea Canyon. It was very pretty. Then we went back and sailed away, all in one day. That was it.

During part of their period of frequently shifting abode during their retirement, B.'s parents lived on Kau'ai. B's sister went to visit them, and we were encouraged to go too. But besides the expense, and the time and trouble of getting there, any idea of going was stymied by the question of, what would we do there? Visiting B's parents, but they were often visiting here. Sitting around relaxing we can do at home. Viewing scenery would be nice, but not as the sole necessary reason for a long trip. So we didn't go. Most of the other 23 islands on the list are of no more interest to me.

My idea of the best islands in the world would be quite different. My choice for the best island in the world would be the island of Great Britain. It has lots of things that attract me, starting with some of the people who live there. It has blazes of historic sites and fascinating old buildings, it has bookstores and museums and great concert halls and some interesting food. I've been there nine times, the last six years ago, but what with pandemics and health issues I'm not sure if I'll ever be back.

I'd also put a high ranking on the island of Manhattan. I'm less fond of it as a place, because I found living there for a week to be exhausting in a way London isn't, but it sure measures almost as high as Britain on the scale of interesting things to do.

Now I have an opportunity to go back there. But I'm not taking it. We got an invitation from dear friends to a special anniversary party to be held very near Manhattan in an interesting venue. Once upon a time I'd have been willing to take the trouble to go all the way across the country for such a tempting reason, and would have tacked on other things to do. But loss of physical agility ... the still-high risks of pandemic ... the only partially-consequent decay of my ability at and interest in party socializing ... and the corrosive experience of the time I lost my bag in the airport due to trying to do four things at once ... I'm not up to that any more.

concert review: Prometheus Symphony

Sometimes it's the venue that makes or breaks a concert.

I don't understand it, actually. I've heard the Prometheus Symphony - a nonprofessional group from Oakland - in this church - a rectangular cavern of red brick that calls itself St. Paul's Episcopal - before. I've even heard them play Carl Nielsen here before.

So why was Nielsen's Third Symphony such an acoustic disaster? Except for a few quiet passages, and the beginning of the finale when the whole orchestra plays the theme tutti - this symphony, which doesn't have more different things going on at once than the average complex symphony - came out like a slab of undifferentiated mud. Only the fact that I already knew how it was supposed to sound enabled me to pick out the melodic line or anything else from the chaos of noise.

Insofar as I could tell, the orchestra was doing a pretty good job, though it seemed a bit hesitant over the rhythmically irregular sequence of chords which started the work off. Of the other work on the program, a cycle of four French songs that Benjamin Britten composed at the age of 14 - I won't even attempt an evaluation. Soprano Raeeka Shehabi-Yaghmi, whom I've heard before, has a strong voice, but I wouldn't have been able to make out any of the French words even if they were printed in the program, which they weren't.

At least this trip was a brilliant success logistically. I drove to the nearest BART station, 35 minutes if there's no traffic, and took the train in. I used to walk the half-mile to the church from the station to these afternoon concerts, but that kind of distance is beyond me now, so Google maps found me a bus line that stops only a block away. Afterwards I took the bus back to downtown for dinner. My favorite Chinese restaurant there, close to the Paramount Theater which is my usual destination, closed during the pandemic, but I found another one, a tiny hole in the wall several blocks away but with stunningly good food, so I was happy.

concert review: South Bay Philharmonic

After having tried out other ensembles, and getting far enough in one of them to play in a concert with them two years ago, B. has settled on the South Bay Philharmonic to fill her retirement dream of performing in a nonprofessional orchestra. The conductor has a clear beat and a lack of exasperating rehearsal habits, he doesn't take the music too fast, and rehearsals are not held farther from the nearest parking space than aging bodies can handle.

These are mighty virtues on B.'s scale of standards, so now she is a contented member of the viola section, and tonight was the first concert that she'd rehearsed for. At the same open-plan church that Harmonia California played in last week (this is how I heard about that), the concert was well-attended and parts of it were excellent.

I particularly liked the rendition of Sibelius's quiet little bon-bon Valse triste. Lacking the eccentric tempo variations common in professional performances, it was rehearsed enough to be played with full competence and even a little exquisite sweetness. Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony was also pretty good. Square and placid, in the traditional way, it was mostly, if not entirely, graspable by these performers.

I was less happy with two concerted works. The compositions were less inspired. The soloists had full command of getting the notes out on time, but their tone quality left much to be desired. And the orchestra needed some help at several parts also.

The four pieces were each written in a different calendrical century, so conductor George Yefchak dubbed this the symphony's Eras Tour. Cue Taylor Swift reference, which took the form of a surprise encore in the form of an arrangement of her song "Love Story."

If anyone local wants to hear B. play viola, come to the First Congregational Church (Hamilton and Leigh) on May 17 for the SBP's next concert, a truly scrumptious program of Dvorak, Faure, and Florence Price.

four concerts

1. I picked this concert by the Master Sinfonia to review for the Daily Journal because it was three symphonies, and that's the kind of meaty program I like.

2. Then SFCV sent me to cover an (almost) all winds and percussion concert by the California Symphony. Pieces like these don't fit in to conventional symphony programs. At the end of the review is the rhetorical question, "Despite the fame of [Mozart's] 'Gran Partita' in recordings, have you ever heard a performance live?" Actually, I have, once. It was an impromptu pick-up session with George Cleve conducting the winds of Symphony Silicon Valley, as it was called at the time, and it was purely fortuitous that I heard about it when I was in a position to go.
Scott Fogelsong in his pre-concert talk framed Lou Harrison's turn to Asian musical inspirations as a reaction to the serialist hegemony, which was apparently already a going concern when Lou was at school in the 1930s. "They wanted their students to write music that sounded like this," said Scott, and played a clip of I know not what, but it was Webernian pointillism.

3. Another little birdie told me that a string orchestra calling itself Harmonia California was giving a concert in a nearby church on Sunday afternoon. With Warlock's Capriol Suite and Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1, two of my favorite neoclassicals, on the program, I rearranged my schedule to be able to go. The orchestra was quite good, a bit heavy-handed on the rhythms for the more ethereal sections of the Warlock, but very good for the Bloch, which is supposed to sound like that. However, they only played 3 of the Bloch's 4 movements, with no indication one was missing. Since it was St Patrick's Day, they concluded with a lush arrangement of "Danny Boy," which they played rather badly: probably not enough rehearsal.

4. Last night, student chamber music showcase at Stanford, or, demonstrating what they've been working on all semester. A movement from a Bartok quartet - unusually plush, it sounded as if Alban Berg had written it - was very unusual for Stanford students, we were told, though B. comments that she heard enough Bartok to last a lifetime when she was a music student at San Jose State years ago.

news

Well, I've got some news.

First, that The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien is being published this fall. My first excursion into Tolkien arcana was tracking down some of the obscure anthologies and magazines where Tolkien published occasional fugitive poems in the 1920s and 30s - some of them tangents to his then otherwise completely unknown Silmarillion mythology. And now nobody will have to do that. I've put the details up on the Tolkien Society blog.

Second, that not one but three short stories by the late, great, and utterly weird Howard Waldrop are being made into movies. They're all short films, but I don't know when they're being released. But there are trailers online! They are:

The Ugly Chickens, starring Felicia Day

Mary Margaret Road-Grader. That looks like Keanu Reeves, but he's not in the IMDB credits.

Night of the Cooters, starring Vincent D'Onofrio. That one has already been released, but I hadn't known about it.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Friday's SFS concert came in the wake of institutional trauma unleashed the previous day. Thursday morning the Symphony unveiled its schedule for next season, 2024-25 (I haven't looked at it yet; there's no point until I know which concerts will be on my series). That afternoon was a matinee performance of the same program I would hear on Friday. In between, however, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen released a statement that he will not be seeking to renew his contract which expires at the end of next season. "I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does," the statement said waspishly.

He didn't say what those goals were, but the CEO of the orchestra said in an interview that it was due to financial cutbacks, especially hurting EPS's pet projects, that were undreamed of when he was hired.

But SF Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman thinks there's more to it than that. I got into terrible difficulties when I tried to summarize what he wrote, so let me just quote him:

What went wrong?

The simplest answer to that question is banally obvious: COVID-19.

Salonen announced plans for his first season as music director in February 2020. It was supposed to begin that September with an inventive festival spotlighting the eight artists and thinkers he’d tapped as Collaborative Partners, and to include an array of dynamic, inventive programming.

A month later, it all crumbled in the face of the pandemic. Some might argue — OK, I would argue — that the Salonen era in San Francisco never fully recovered from that initial blow.

Nearly everything Salonen undertook for the first two years of his tenure had to function as a survival strategy, and later a recovery strategy, in the face of the pandemic.

He took the Collaborative Partners online with “Throughline,” an ingenious but slender digital program with a score by pianist and composer Nico Muhly. He reconfigured SoundBox, the orchestra’s experimental music series, to function as a digital offering.

And in spring of 2021, when audiences were finally able to trickle back into Davies Symphony Hall for in-person performances, he created ingenious programs that worked around the logistical constraints of masks and social distancing.

All of this was handled with imagination and dexterity. But it wasn’t what anybody wanted — not the orchestra, not its audiences, not (I assume) Salonen. Even after regular concerts resumed in earnest that fall, there was still that faint shadow across the proceedings, a sense that we had all gotten off on the wrong foot together.

One should remember that EPS doesn't need the music director job. He didn't want another music director post after retiring from the LA Philharmonic; he wanted to compose and to guest-conduct occasionally. He acceded to SFS's offer because the opportunity to do the work he wanted was irresistible. If it no longer is giving those opportunities, why should he continue beyond what he's already contracted for? He'll be turning 67 about when next season ends; maybe it's time to go.

That gives management about a year to find a replacement, assuming they don't go the "seasons of discovery and decision" route of making a season or two out of auditioning people in guest conducting slots. SFS tried that once before, in the early 1950s: it did not produce a successful result. Nor did it work well for the San Jose Symphony in the 1990s. On the other hand, the California Symphony is happy with the music director it got that way, after firing its previous director because of - ta-da - financial disagreements.

So how was Friday's concert? EPS conducted, and there's no question what the audience thought about the situation: he received rapturous applause and cheers from the full house when he entered, though that was nothing compared with what he got when he finished. He took his bows standing in the midst of the orchestra, as if to emphasize the musical partnership which is unaffected by what management does, and the orchestra members presented him with a huge bouquet of flowers, which they'd also done on Thursday.

EPS specializes in new music, but if you're going to have a conductor from Finland, you can't prevent him from indulging in Finland's most renowned composer, Jean Sibelius, and doing a fabulous job of an all-Sibelius program. He took the famous tone poem Finlandia with great solemnity, grand and slow with biting brass and timpani. In the Violin Concerto, soloist Lisa Batiashvili, who specializes in this piece, gave a sweet and caressing tone throughout double-stops and harmonics and whatever else threatened to be difficult. Meanwhile, EPS kept the orchestra fully involved in dialogue with the soloist, not an easy accomplishment in this concerto. I didn't catch Batiashvili's announcement of the shivering piece she played as an encore, though I think she said it was (like herself) from the nation of Georgia, but I'm not reviewing this concert so I don't have to worry about it.

The concert finished with Sibelius's First Symphony. EPS pulled out all the grand and solemn stops he'd used in Finlandia for the finale, but otherwise the piece was bright, crisp, and bold. I was particularly impressed by the emphasis on the strophic outline of the opening of the gorgeous and touching slow movement, yet without a sense of repetitiveness. A magnificent performance that kept me rapt throughout. It deserved all the applause it got.