white smoke

That was a lot less work than it took to choose Kevin McCarthy.

concert review: Alexander Quartet

I went to review the local farewell concert by a string quartet that is disbanding. (You can read here of the depressing reasons why.)

But this wasn't a depressing occasion, but a real celebratory one.

In the old days, I was never a big fan of the Alexander String Quartet, featured local artists though they were. I found their playing rather dull and dutiful. But gradually, over the years, I've heard them showing more grit and verve in their performances. This predated the recent changes in personnel, so that wasn't the reason, or the whole reason. I've come to appreciate them more.

This concert, though, was all grit and verve. Haydn, who's a witty composer, was all wit. Brahms, who's a mellow composer, was all mellow.

I particularly liked that Haydn. I've heard this particular piece several times at the Banff String Quartet Competition, home of truly spectacular performers. This performance would have been the highlight of a Haydn round at Banff.

The one other thing I can add that wasn't in the review is that the tiny hall was absolutely packed. Everybody wanted to say goodbye to this esteemed and loved ensemble.

the Pat and Ellen show

On my way to the Cal Sym on Saturday, it was easy enough to pass through the City (the one Not Long After) and attend a event at a small branch library by the always-entertaining tag team of Pat Murphy and Ellen Klages.

The occasion was the publication of Pat's first novel in some years, The Adventures of Mary Darling (Tachyon Publications), which was available on a side table from Jacob Weisman, its publisher. You can get it, and a lot of other good stuff, here, or at the online or brick retailer of your choice. But I didn't, because B. had already bought it electronically.

When B. had told me the title of Pat's book, I responded, "That sounds like something she'd do." Pat spent most of the occasion talking about the book and reading from it. She'd always been interested in Peter Pan - from the novel, mostly; she's never seen the Disney version - and wanted to take the children's mother's viewpoint of their vanishing off somewhere. (Cue in my mind thought of Sherwood Smith's "Mom and Dad on the Home Front.")

So: it's Victorian London. Your children have mysteriously disappeared. The police don't seem to be much help. Who you gonna call?

Sherlock Holmes!

And the story is off and running.

(What, you say? Holmes is a fictional character? Well, so is Mary Darling. If she can exist, so can he.)

A lot of this sounds like fun. (Where is Neverland, anyway? And why does it have American Indians? All is explained.) I'm saving this one up to occupy my next tedious wait.

concert review: California Symphony

This is the kind of program I like to hear: two big, dark-toned, heavyweight symphonies from the major repertoire: Schubert's "Unfinished," and Bruckner's Ninth, which is also unfinished.

Both were certainly intended by their composers to be standard four-movement symphonies, but only parts of the works got completed: two movements in Schubert's case, three in Bruckner's. Owing to different placements of the slow movement, both symphonies end with it, quietly in a dying fall. There have been attempts to finish both of them off, but they don't work, because you need the original composer's genius to do it. (And that is the same reason I'm not interested in Tolkien fan fiction.)

Schubert's "Unfinished," which gets played fairly often, received a pretty standard basic run-through here. This is the symphony with which Schubert, previously a chipper Mozartean in his symphonies, got with the Beethoven program of heavy dramatic works. Pre-concert lecturer Scott Foglesong opined that Schubert actually went beyond Beethoven here and essentially brought the Gothic cultural movement of the day into the symphony. And I've certainly heard it played that way, but there was nothing Gothic looming over this performance. The strings were strong and full, enough so that wind solos sounded slightly lost in the breeze.

Bruckner, though - here the orchestra was ideally balanced between sections and the music was played with full passion and dedication. The Ninth isn't played very often. I most recently heard it in London, before the pandemic, from Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. I wasn't terribly impressed with that performance. Is Bruckner just not Rattle's thing? I wondered. So I was pleased to be able to tell a couple of the Cal Sym musicians - you often run into them after a concert, because they park in the same adjacent garage that the audience does - that they gave a more effective performance of this than the Berlin Philharmonic did.

It felt as if conductor Donato Cabrera was taking this pretty speedily, though it was not a briefer than standard performance. Where Foglesong had cautioned that Bruckner's music exists in a timeless space, you're not supposed to expect anything to happen, Cabrera falsified this one by focusing on the flow and the events of the music. I found it dramatic, eventful, and riveting of my attention all the way through the 65 minutes. Especially fine were the way he ramped up the end of the first movement to its shatteringly intense ending, and then ramped down the conclusion of the slow movement from the climax to its gentle finish.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I knew Giancarlo Guerrero as a bold and vigorous conductor. Here he led a program featuring music by two of the 20C's most colorful orchestrators, Igor Stravinsky and Ottorino Respighi (both of them pupils of Rimsky-Korsakov, the greatest orchestrator of his day).

From Igor, the full text of Petrushka, his second ballet, which came across as familiar nuggets floating in an uncharted soup. But it was sharp and colorful.

From Otto, two big colorful tone-poem suites, Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome. The former has been overshadowed by the latter, but on its own it's an excellent work which deserves airing. What makes it fall behind is a tactical mistake, of putting the triumphant procession in the middle instead of, as in Pines, at the end.

Both were well played, not the most dazzling renditions I've heard, but good enough. Except that the extra brass players for the end of Pines, usually placed in the audience balcony for an interesting antiphonal effect, were here put in the terrace just behind the orchestra, where their impact was minimal.

Guerrero pointed out, introducing the pieces, that Pines is the first work of electronic music ever composed, requiring as it does a recording of a nightingale's call during a peaceful interlude. At one time, if you got a copy of the score it came with a 78-rpm record. "Anybody remember those?" he said.

Also on the program, a very short introductory piece by Kaija Saariaho, inspired by an earth-grazer asteroid named Toutatis, one of several pieces commissioned as supplements to Holst's Planets. It doesn't sound in the least as if it belongs there.

Canada resurgent

When a political party is in deep trouble in the popularity stakes as an election looms, switching their leader to a new and shiny model rarely works. If you look at the list of Canadian prime ministers, you'll see a couple from the 1980s and 90s who served derisorily short terms. That was the reason.

It worked this time, though. And, weirdly, the person responsible for that was Donald Trump. Old PM Justin Trudeau from the Liberal Party had already announced his impending retirement when DT pulled his "be a bully to Canada" routine, and it got everybody's back up. You'd think a guy who wrote The Art of the Deal would know better than to antagonize people he's negotiating with, but then Trump didn't really write his own book, did he? Anyway, Trudeau denounced all of this in his quiet Canadian way; his successor Mark Carney denounced it even further in his even quieter Canadian way, and just about everybody in the country agreed with them. (As do I, though I'm not Canadian.)

Even Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the opposition, chimed in, rather awkwardly both because "me too" isn't a fervent campaigning posture and because Poilievre's personal style is rather Trumpian. He's also even more alarmingly right-wing than Stephen Harper, the noxious previous Conservative PM. Canada dodged a bullet by not electing him. Voters decided that Carney, a sober banker who's led major financial institutions out of crises before, was a better bet to stand up to Trump.

But this didn't mostly happen because of Conservatives changing their minds. It seems to have been mostly supporters of the third major party, the New Democrats - a social democratic group rather similar to what Bernie Sanders and AOC want to lead here in the States - who decided they couldn't risk letting Poilievre into office and turned over en masse to the Liberals. They weren't willing to do this before, but they were with Trudeau out and Trump looming. As a result, the NDP - which 14 years ago actually outpolled the Liberals at their pre-Trudeau nadir - won the fewest seats ever in its history. But that's what happens to third parties in a first-past-the-post system.

concert review: Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra

I was less than excited to be sent to review a concert with Schoenberg and Mahler in it. But the Schoenberg was Verklärte Nacht which is tonal and was not played too goopily; and the Mahler was a brief cycle of very early songs, and hence as unobjectionable as Mahler can get. And to go with this, Beethoven's Seventh, an old favorite played with the tires squealing as it rocketed down the street.

This was not just the concert. The performers were here for a week to work with students, so I enriched my experience by going to the public events on Wednesday. This included a long concert of mostly very dull music by Mahler and the Second Viennese School; a talk with Verbier Festival administrators, who explained how and why the festival works and what this touring orchestra has to do with it; and, in the morning, a master class with the orchestra's conductor and some of the groups that would play that evening.

The conductor's accent was almost impenetrable (yes, this was the same guy who read the Verklärte Nacht poem aloud before the performance, with results as you might expect), but I tried my best to follow him. When the high school string quartet played the Webern Bagatelles, he told them they were very good (which they certainly were) but that they were too intellectual; their performance needed more emotion. He said that composers encode the emotions they want to express in the score, and that performers need to bring those out and convey them to the audience - gesturing to those of us gathered to listen to the session. He took the leader's violin and showed what he meant. Essentially it amounted to adding more variation in dynamics and tone color to the playing.

And I thought: what good is it to 'add emotion' to music when there's no emotion to be had? This is Webern! The driest, most dessicated and cryptic composer in the western repertoire. Maybe a few connoisseurs will appreciate it, but there is no emotion in Webern that can be conveyed to a general classical audience. No matter what you do, it doesn't come across as emotion. It's eloquence in an alien language. Try this on something that actually has some emotional content.

Anyway, I didn't hear any effective difference in the performance afterwards, although I hear master classes entirely reworking students' playing styles all the time.

dramatic review

Here There Are Blueberries, conceived, directed, and co-written by Moises Kaufman (Berkeley Rep)

This is a documentary play. By which I mean it records historical events in plausibly accurate language, with genuine historical material inserted. Here that material is projections of photographs.

The play is mostly set in the US Holocaust Museum. They've recently acquired a donation, a photo album that a US intelligence officer found in a ruined house in Germany just after the war and has kept ever since. There's no name, but some of the captions say they were taken at Auschwitz.

They're not of prisoners. They're of SS officers and clerical staff, enjoying themselves at after-work parties and such. Oh, look, there's Dr Mengele, laughing it up among his comrades. One set of photos shows the SS officer who's clearly the man who compiled the album - later identified by the museum staff as the adjutant to Auschwitz's commander - serving food to the young women of the office staff. "Here there are blueberries," says the caption in German.

The Holocaust Museum staff ask, do we want this album? Our focus is on the victims, it shouldn't be on the perpetrators. But they decide there's value in knowing more about how the Holocaust happened, and emphasizing that it was people who did this, not alien monsters.

The innocent-looking young women on the staff, for instance. What did they do? They ran the message office. What messages did it send? The museum tracked down an interview of one of them, after the war.
Witness: Every time a train came in, we'd send a message off to Berlin. So many men to work camp, so many women to work camp, so many men S.B., so many women S.B., so many children S.B.
Query: What did S.B. mean?
Witness: Sonderbehandlung. Special treatment.
Query: What did 'special treatment' mean?
Witness: Gassing.
They knew.

So did the officers, including the one whose album it had been (nothing is said of how he lost it), who claimed they knew nothing, nothing of what was really going on there. But the photos show them touring the extermination centers.

And then, at the end of the play, after we're assured that we have almost no photos of the prisoners, some do show up. It's another album, photos taken the day the train arrived that held the very prisoner who found the album in an abandoned SS barracks after the camp was liberated. She sees herself in the photos. She sees her family, the ones she never met again after she was sent to work camp and they were all marked for S.B.

I was not just stunned, I was thrown for a loop. Why does this only show up now? The whole play should have been about this album, instead.

This was powerfully done - the small cast played varied parts. The creators are the same people behind The Laramie Project. But the switch at the end ... I dunno why they presented it this way.

concert review: Chamber Musicians of the San Francisco Symphony

The particular reason I like chamber music concerts sponsored by symphony orchestras is the opportunity it allows for performing works for unusual combos. Where, for instance, but at a symphony orchestra would you be likely to be able to assemble a nonet (one each of all the standard string and wind instruments)? Or - this was really stunning - four men* on bass? (If you thought three was the maximum, that's baseball.)

The Nonet was by Bohuslav Martinů, and was a substantial piece in his lively, angular post-neoclassical style. Lots of group exchanges back and forth between the strings and the winds.

The piece for four basses was by 19C Italian bassist Giovanni Bottesini. Melodic in a bel canto style, it was so high-pitched (a preference of Bottesini's) that it sounded more like cellos under some weird straining stress than it did anything distinctively bassish. At least it was consistently in tune, which I don't expect to hear in exposed bass music by players from anywhere less distinguished than SFS.

The concert also had two more conventionally instrumented works.

Café Music by Paul Schoenfield, which is a piano trio disguised as a romp through early 20C popular music, was played with what I'd expect of orchestral musicians tackling it: well up to the technical demands but lacking that last deposit of wild abandon needed to make this piece really go. The elegant ballad in the slow movement came out well, though.

Shostakovich's Third String Quartet - one of his most often played, and one of his best - started as a cool and objective reading, but gradually the emotion that Shostakovich keeps locked up came out, especially in the desolate finale.

All around, a really interesting afternoon out.

*and they were men

folk music between covers

An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock Music, by Dave Thompson (Backbeat Books, 2023)

This is some 500 pages absolutely packed with information. Its topic is the performing and recording history of the Child Ballads (click on the link if you don't know what that means: there's always someone), so mostly British, American, Canadian. And other British folk songs get a mention here and there.

And it's thorough, thorough. Occasionally it's a little difficult to follow what Thompson is saying, but mostly the info is densely packed and, as far as I can tell, pretty reliable. Near the beginning are accounts of composers who wrote accompaniments to the tunes (Haydn and Beethoven: yes they did), lots about folk song collectors in the field from Cecil Sharp on down, eventually getting to early recordings ("Phil Tanner, the first folk-singing superstar"), more composers (Benj. Britten, Ruth Crawford), gradually into folk singers you've heard of (Jean Ritchie, Judy Collins), a chapter on folk songs that influenced Angela Carter, then through Dylan and Baez to the folkies I listened to in my youth, going through Martin Carthy, the Incredible String Band (yes, they did Child ballads), Pentangle, etc., and finally arriving at Fairport Convention in chapter 37. Steeleye Span gets two chapters, chapter 40 which has a brief overview of their early work, and chapter 41, a fuller discussion of their Golden Age. Thompson says that Steeleye's real innovation was the almost brutally heavy rock arrangements on the likes of "King Henry" and "Alison Gross", at last giving these songs music that was as menacing and vicious as the lyrics. The "haunted and eerie" arrangement of "Long Lankin" also falls in that category. There are a few more references to Steeleye later on, suggesting that "The Prickly Bush" and "Lord Randall" are their two best later songs, ignoring their amazing "Tam Lin".

As the later chapters (there's 48) drift off into newer performers I don't know but who sound tempting from Thompson's descriptions, I looked some of them up but none wound up appealing to me at all. I'm a child of my time, I guess. But I enjoyed reading about the performers I knew and the earlier ones I didn't.

However, the best thing, the very best thing, in this book is the dedication, which reads like this:

To my beloved cousin Jane Thompson Dua, 1971-2022. As a child, she heard me playing "The Wee Wee Man" (Child 38) one day, and completely misunderstood what the song was about. Her interpretation still comes to mind when I hear that ballad.