automation

This is very 1963, but it's also disturbingly relevant today:

one thing about doctors

and dentists is that - I suppose depending on their specialty - is that they love looking around the inside of your body, where all the blood and guts are. (In the case of dentists, close-up views of the gums and around the tongue.) If they have cameras floating around in there, they want to show off the view to the patient, and are rather hurt if you decline on grounds of ickk.

voting for the least annoying candidate

Here's a clue, politicians. If you're running for a relatively low-profile down-ballot office, like state legislature or a county office, don't deluge the voters with endless flyers or giant ads on tv or in newspapers. Because all you'll do is make me wonder, "Who's funding this person?" and make me reluctant to vote for you.

Indeed, for one local office there were two candidates, of which I was very skeptical of the incumbent. But the challenger's ads were so glaring that I got even more uncomfortable with him. I voted for the incumbent, who won.

ok, here's the story ...

I was asked to tell about Shostakovich and the San Jose Symphony, so here it is.

This happened in 1992, after long-time music director George Cleve was persuaded to retire. Those who heard Cleve in later years may think of him as a mellow Brahmsian figure, but that's not what he was like when he was younger. Everyone agreed his music-making was inspired, but in rehearsal he could be tempestuous, even tyrannical - B. sang with the symphony in those years, and can testify to the long rehearsals and the tantrums - and eventually it was just too much.

To hunt for Cleve's replacement, the symphony held one of those "seasons of discovery" that orchestras in search of a new music director are sometimes fond of. A set of prospective conductors were invited to lead one concert each which served as an audition. One of the finalists, who didn't get the job, was Marin Alsop, now probably the most renowned female conductor around. But remember this was 1992, she was young and still little-known - it was the first I'd heard of her - and it may be a good thing she didn't get the job, because it meant she didn't go down with the ship. But I get ahead of myself.

The successful candidate was a Ukrainian named Leonid Grin (pronounced Green). His audition concert featured a dark, somber and compelling rendition of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, preceded by Grin's own brief talk about what this music meant to him. It was a stunner of a performance, and it was probably responsible for him getting the job.

Unfortunately, it turned out that dark, depressing Russian music was the only thing that Grin could really do well. His attempts at being light-hearted were particularly cringe-worthy; I remember a rendition of Ravel's Bolero that was especially pathetic. He put the snare-drummer (regular percussionist Galen Lemmon) in front of the orchestra on the grounds that this was a snare-drum concerto, and it just didn't work.

I don't say that ten years of this ham-handedness was solely responsible for the symphony's decline and eventual bankruptcy - an incompetent management was the primary cause - but it didn't help. After the orchestra's demise, an entirely new management hired most of the same musicians - nothing wrong with them - and founded a new and more successfully-run orchestra initially named Symphony Silicon Valley, now Symphony San Jose. Grin has never been seen here since, though SSV did eventually bring back the older and mellower George Cleve as a guest conductor.

two outings

On Friday, the Redwood Symphony put on another of its occasional spectacular Sondheim semi-staged productions, this one of A Little Night Music. B. came with me to this one. I was unfamiliar with the show and hadn't heard much of it, and what most struck me on this encounter was how little it sounds like standard-issue Sondheim. His usual ticks are completely absent. I enjoyed most of the music; the closest thing to a catchy song in it is "The Glamorous Life" and the most tiresome and irritating is "A Weekend in the Country," which I had heard before somewhere.

The orchestra - this was Tunick's rarely-heard full symphony orchestration - did very well, but the singers were mixed. Fredrik had a weak voice, and Anne was whiny and annoying, which undercut both the character and the plot. But Desiree (Annmarie Macry) did a good job with "Send in the Clowns," and William Giammona as Carl-Magnus had complete command of his character's infinite self-regard; he was even better than the guy on the original cast recording.

Sunday I headed out to the local area's most popular ethnic event, the Greek festival put on annually by a local Greek Orthodox church in the forlorn hope that attendees might be distracted from the food and the dancing long enough to pay regard to the religion. Instead, I spent two hours eating the like of lamb chops, dolmas, and a new offering of fried cheese (saganaki) that was quite delicious. Having arrived at opening, I was able to get in some of this before the lines became insanely long, and at that point I just left.

However, I did unusually run into someone I knew, and thus spent a considerable part of my eating time in the company of the marketing director from Music@Menlo, whom I've had a lot of professional contact with, plus her husband and two small children, whom I hadn't met before because she doesn't bring them to work. We chatted on a lot of music gossip, such as the appointments of new music directors in both San Francisco and L.A., hopeful signs both of them, and I told stories like how Shostakovich led to the fall of the old San Jose Symphony.

Bay Area Book Festival

I spent much of Saturday attending four politically-oriented panels at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, all of them in the rented facility of the Freight and Salvage stage.

I was unfamiliar with the names of any of the participants, but they turned out mostly to be authors of books, usually non-fiction, on the topics of their panels. But the subjects interested me.

The first panel was something of a damp squib. Titled "Mindful Democracy," it was full of activists who said that democracy wasn't, or shouldn't be, a war between two hostile tribes, but a communitarian act of compassion and connection. But they offered no way to get there from here, or to solve the mutual suspicions that characterize our political world.

The second, though, was a dazzler. The topic was detention of immigrants, and the highlight speaker, buttressed by the others, was a historian from Stanford named Ana Raquel Minian, who argued that detention of immigrants is a long-standing US practice and who summarized her book tracing that history back to 1900. I was impressed enough with Minian's speaking that I went to the sales table afterwards and bought that book, titled In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention.

Moderator for this panel was a local named Piper Kerman, whom I didn't know by name but who turned out to be the author of the original book of Orange is the New Black.

The other panels, all like the second full of hard advice on what to do about it, featured the topics of press freedom (support independent journalism) and academic freedom. Particularly excoriating speakers in the latter, notably UCB professor Hatem Bazian, who ran off the rails a few times but who was most impressive saying that public education is a public good that should not leave students shivering in debt and consequently fearing to speak out because of potential damage to their careers.

on my way home

Having spent Wednesday morning of my LA trip doing library research at UCLA, I was able to get as far on my drive home as Pismo Beach to stay overnight. ("What's in Pismo Beach?" asked my LA hosts, wondering why I was going there. "Hotels," I replied.)

That gave me enough time on Thursday to do something I'd only done once before: drive along the narrow and twisty coast road, the Big Sur highway. This is often closed for extended periods because of landslides or storm damage, but it's open now. Lots of lovely scenery, visible through the intermittently intense rain that fell that day, and the number of stretches of road covered in loose rocks that had fallen from the cliffs above were notable. I stopped at Willow Creek, where you can drive down below the bridge to the tiny stone beach where the creek hits the water. Despite the dicey weather, lots of surfers plying their trade out on the waves. Also, much further north in Big Sur, the Henry Miller Memorial Library, which is not a library but a bookstore specializing in literature with moral content. Both Tolkien (The Two Towers and The Return of the King) and Lewis (The Screwtape Letters and A Grief Observed) made appearances, as did Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.

And one more stop. I'd made a reservation to tour Hearst Castle, which I'd also been to only once before, many years ago. Checking their menu of tours, I'd found one designed for the walking-disabled, with no stairs. I am able but very slow on stairs, so that was the one for me. There were only three of us on this tour, guided by a Bryan Cranston type named Phil, who talked very fast and rather quietly. He kept leading us into rooms occupied by a much larger regular tour group (the same one each time), so he'd huddle us into a far corner and talk even faster and more quietly, so I didn't absorb much of what he was saying. I did gather two things: first, that the not particularly devout Hearst was fascinated by collecting medieval Christian iconography; second, that his expectations of what visitors should do and how behave meant I would not have enjoyed a visit here in his time.

B. would find the decorations fascinating, but I'm not taking her here. Opportunities to sit during the tour were few, and the shuttle bus going up to the castle from the visitor center took the winding and twisty road at breakneck speed. Even I was a little nauseous.

concert review: Los Angeles Philharmonic

I had wanted to hear Gustavo Dudamel conduct one more time in LA before he left its music directorship for that of New York at the end of this season. But I was in no position to visit LA this season until April, and then Dudamel was gone until late May. Of his last programs after his return, the most likely was his semi-staged production of Wagner’s opera Die Walkure. It’s a very long opera, so they divided the three acts into separate days. I picked Act 3, because that’s the part with both the Ride of the Valkyries and the Magic Fire Music. I bought my ticket for a pretty penny and Sunday I went to Disney Hall and heard it.

The orchestra was displayed on the stage, with the singers mostly up on a balcony behind them, though for part of the conclusion Wotan and Brunnhilde moved to a catwalk in front of the orchestra, very close to my seat at the front of the side terrace.

The music making was pretty good, though the Ride of the Valkyries was too fast and lightweight. The Magic Fire Music, though, was slow and powerful, making a grand conclusion. As for the long part between, purely a dialogue between Wotan and Brunnhilde, that wasn’t too boring, mostly because I didn’t have to sit through Acts 1 and 2. I spent more of it watching Dudamel than paying attention to the singers, Ryan Speedo Green and Christine Goerke, though they had strong voices and had no trouble being heard above the mostly not very loud music. Back during the much noisier Ride, though, the Valkyries could often not be heard over the orchestra except when all eight of them were singing together, which was pretty thrilling.

Staging was minimal. The Valkyries stood in front of papier mache statues of horses, one of which appeared to be a unicorn. Costumes were fairly traditional. Wotan kept adjusting his eyepatch.

This was only the second time I’ve seen Wagner staged, the first being a college production of a semi-staged Rheingold many years ago. I could do without any more, though I don’t consider my time wasted. I enjoyed this.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

The outstanding feature of guest conductor Cristian Macelaru’s rendition of Dvorak’s New World Symphony was its clarity of form. Every section of every movement stood out as its own entity, and the whole passed on in crystalline goodness. And the solo passages from the individual musicians! Just marvelous.

And we also had Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto. According to the program notes, the original version of this concerto sounded like any other late 19C piano concerto, but the revised version, which we heard, sounds like Rachmaninoff. Well, a bit, but not as epically as the Second or Third, problematic as they in their turns are. Soloist Simon Trpceski thundered away dramatically, but to what end?

Lastly but first on the program,the premiere of a tone poem, Embers, by Tyler Taylor. How about that, another composer with the names of two US Presidents. Taylor is a horn player, so he knows the orchestra from the inside. His music featured a well-blended mixture of grinding strings (secret: they left the practice mutes on but played loudly), ghostly winds, and clonking percussion. It was a hefty chunk of chaotic tonal noise.

music director reds

Huzzah, entering its second year without one, the San Francisco Symphony has finally named a new music director, who takes over not next season, which is already announced, but the season after that.

And they've done exactly what I hoped they'd do, which is to name a fairly young conductor who's already made her mark as a guest with the orchestra. And I say "her" because yes, it's a woman, the first one SFS has ever had in this post, and one of the few in a major position anywhere in the country.

She's Elim Chan, who'll be 40 by the time she takes over. She's originally from Hong Kong, but received her higher education in the U.S. She's conducted here several times, and I've heard her once, leading Holst's The Planets, which I described as played "with the ideal dynamism and sweep, and with every exotic instrumental color exactly where it should be."

She'll be conducting next week, which I won't be attending, but I do have a ticket for the program in October that she's already scheduled for, with John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony. I'm looking forward to it, and to a new era of exciting music-making in SF.