concert review: Redwood Symphony

Saturday evening was Redwood's annual outdoors concert, held in the courthouse square downtown. It's right near the train station, so I took the commuter train up. It runs every half an hour, well into the evenings, on weekends, and the parking garage down at my end won't be full.

Advertising for the concert advised bringing lawn chairs. I don't have one, and wouldn't be inclined to lug it on the train anyway. I figured I'd arrive early and sit on one of the low stone walls that surround the plaza. But what I found was that a large number of slat chairs had been arranged in front of the orchestra's tent, so I could sit in one of those.

The orchestra was under a tent, and was festooned with microphones, the speakers for which gave a tinny and metallic sound to the music, especially the strings. They played Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which I'm always up for hearing, sloppy and warbly in places, but the Largo and finale came out pretty much OK.

Also on the program, the waltz from Swan Lake, and two extremely catchy military marches, the second of which conductor Eric Kujawsky is convinced was an homage to the first: the "Colonel Bogey" March, and the main theme from the movie The Great Escape, by Kenneth Alford and Elmer Bernstein respectively. I know both marches well, but this was the first time I'd ever heard either in concert.

When I was very small, 3 or 4 I guess, "Colonel Bogey," then in the flush of fame coming off its appearance in The Bridge on the River Kwai, was my favorite piece of music. I wrote lyrics to it about my baby brother, the first line of which is all I can remember and which went, "Mikey, he is a pike-pike boy." What a pike-pike boy may be, I can alas no longer remember.

When we went to a record store to buy a recording of "Colonel Bogey," my parents encouraged me to make the request. "Do you have 'Mikey Is a Pike-Pike Boy'?" I asked. The clerks disclaimed knowledge of this until my parents told me to sing it. Then they said, "Oh yes, we have that."

vacation planning

I'm planning a major vacation, or what counts as major by my standards, next month. This started as a convention trip, but I hanker to tootle around what's strange country to me while I'm there. And having made plane, car, and hotel reservations, I've been exploring the matter of what to do and see, and just as importantly what to eat, while I'm there. This involves checking out a whole host of tour books - I'm partial to Moon and Lonely Planet - from various libraries, jotting down notes about tempting things located where I'm going, and then checking everything online for accuracy and up-to-dateness. Detailed planning, with lots of options rather than a rigid schedule, whets the appetite for the trip.

There's two catches. One is that things closed on the one day of the week that I'll be there are a specialty everywhere. And also, some areas are better covered by tourist guides than others. I'm visiting four states on this trip, and I find that while there's plenty of tourist information on Texas and New Mexico, for Oklahoma and Kansas the material is more limited. I have some old AAA tourbooks, from back when they were still covering restaurants, and both states have entries in the sketchy but intermittently useful "Off the Beaten Path" guidebook series, which I was able to find at one cozy library. That helped.

Having made my lists of sites and restaurants, I then print out a series of maps from Google Maps of the various towns and small cities I'm visiting, and mark on them the locations of my sites. Bigger cities are more difficult to handle this way, but photocopies of urban area insets from the state maps, and of tourist districts from the tourbooks, serve as substitutes.

What am I seeing? I'm inclined to history museums, mostly - not the little local ones that collect miscellaneous junk, but serious explorations of the history of a region. And some scenery, so long as I don't have to take a hike to see it, since long walks are beyond me now. And as for eating, I follow the way of the Trillin, which is to look for solid but not fancy expressions of the local cuisine. In Texas and Oklahoma that means steakhouses and barbecue, and in New Mexico lots of green chile. Also, Louisiana cuisine - my favorite US regional - leaks over as far as central Texas, so I'm noting that as well. There's lots of Mexican and Tex-Mex places too, and I'm noting those for when there's nothing else or when I simply want a change, but since those are cuisines well-supplied at home, I'm not prioritizing it for the trip.

Now to turn my attention to preparing to pack, and shopping for anything I'll need.

I will

All the signing and stamping have been done, and B. and I have officially created our wills. It's a rather complicated procedure; we're establishing a living trust and putting some of our assets into it, with the trust as the sole heir of each of us. Then, after we're both deceased, come the bequests and the distribution of the residue of the estate. This, our financial advisor explained, will simplify matters and avoid probate. I won't live to see it, of course, but I hope it works out that way.

After getting the documents drafted, for which we employed an online legal service, we needed witnesses - for which we asked the nearest nephew & his wife - and a notary. Then we needed the relevant assets transferred to the trust, which meant visits to brokers and a lot of paperwork which isn't complete yet.

Our medical provider had already nudged us into filling out advance directives using their forms (a lot better drafted than the ones the legal service provided), and we're keeping those with the same documents.

the file vanishes

This has happened to me more than once lately.

I'm using a library computer, saving files onto my USB drive. I check the directory frequently; the files I've already copied are all listed as saved files. I've chosen my USB's directory, no other.

When I'm done, I carefully use the "eject" command before removing my drive.

But when I take the USB drive to another computer, the files I've saved have all vanished. They're completely gone, no trace.

How do I stop this from happening?

concert review: Garden of Memory

Owing to scheduling glitches, I missed last year's edition of the annual walk-through avant-garde concert held at Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland's ornate columbarium and mausoleum. But I got there this year, nabbing a nearby parking space by arriving 2.5 hours early, with my lunch packed in my car.

Unfortunately many of my favorite performers didn't get there this year. So instead of focusing on them, I decided to emphasize the walk-through aspect and prowl around until I found things worth sitting and listening to for a while.

Garden of Memory always begins at 5 pm rather unpopulated, but although the organizers limit attendance, it tends to get more and more crowded over its four-hour length until it becomes deucedly uncomfortable. So I figured I'd start at the part of the building that gets the most crowded later on, the east end of the old wing, and I headed straight for the room designated the Garden of St. Matthew. Instead of being a niche like many of the "garden" rooms, it's along a major pathway. When I've been there before, interesting music was always going on, but I could never stop and listen to it but had to proceed directly towards the exit on the other side of the room, and the reason was that the room was so crowded that, if you stopped, you were blocking the only (and invariably busy) pathway.

So this time I got there early to get a spot where I could stop and listen, and found singer-songwriter Majel Connery on double-tracked vocals and electronic keyboard, accompanied by Felix Fan on electronic cello. I'd actually heard Connery here before, and was impressed with what I heard, but I'd never sealed her down as one of my favorites. I have now. I found this stuff enrapturing; unfortunately nothing of hers online really sounds like what I heard, so I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

Proceeding onward, I wound up in Laura Inserra's old stomping grounds (she's not there this year), the Garden of Eternal Wisdom, where I found violinist Shira Kammen, hammer dulcimer player Robin Petrie, and Celtic harpist Shelley Phillips playing what sounded like Celtic folk music with a Middle Eastern edge to it. I was able to grab the only chair in the room and sat in comfort for quite a while to listen to this charming stuff. Getting lost in the building is part of the experience, the publicity says, and as always in this room I noticed someone starting at the event map trying to figure out which room they were in. (I whispered it to them.) When I left, I found the twisty passage leading to the room was packed with people waiting for an opportunity to enter and listen, so again I had been wise to get there fairly early.

At this point, I found it was time for a set I wanted to hear in the largest venue, the Chimes Chapel, customarily shared by 3 or 4 performers. This was a contemporary classical art song recital, mezzo Silvie Jensen accompanied by pianist Sarah Cahill (founder of this concert series and a regular performer here) in songs by Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and some other younger composers whose names I didn't know and didn't catch. The Glass and Monk sounded very typical of their composers although I hadn't heard these particular pieces before.

I then hung around for the next set, which was the women's chorus Kitka - which I first encountered here, many years ago - applying their standard nasal vocals to their usual repertoire of obscure Eastern European and Central Asian folk music. As always, a half hour set by Kitka is easier to take than a whole concert. Talking with the people next to me beforehand, I found they'd never heard Kitka before. This is going to be unusual, I warned them.

By this time it was 7:30 and I moved onward to the new wing, which I'd avoided earlier in the day, as it's more spacious and is consequently better saved for later when things are more crowded. Here I passed by a lot of performers of ambient noodling, none of which attracted me enough to make me want to sit down and listen for a while. So eventually I meandered back down to the entrance and left just before the closing time of 9 pm.

MTT memorial, pt 2

The second MTT memorial was the annual Pride Concert of the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, a group of LGBTQIA+ and allies, held at the SF Conservatory's concert hall. It was pretty well packed.

The highlight of the concert was the local premiere of a song cycle by Jake Heggie, titled "Good Morning, Beauty," to poems by the performance artist Taylor Mac, who refers to the poems as "a present to queers in long-term relationships," and they're about the long-termness of it. It says: "Good morning, beauty / How are you here? / How has it happened? / Year after year?" The art song settings with elaborate orchestration was conducted by music director Robert Mollicone and sung by mezzo Nikola Printz, who went ambigender in an outfit that was a man's black suit on the right and a woman's white dress on the left. And the dedication in the program book read "to the memory of Michael Tilson Thomas and Joshua Robison, whose fifty years together embodied everything the piece celebrates."

Also on the program, a suite reconstruction of the orchestral music for the 1939 Wizard of Oz, a movie with iconic status in this community, composed by Herbert Stothart (who won an Oscar for doing so), based partly on the song melodies by Harold Arlen (who also won an Oscar for that).

And Brahms's Third Symphony. Why Brahms, who as far as we know was straight? Let Mellicone explain: "This felt like a great tie-in for Pride not only due to the broad spectrum of emotions involved, but also because of the musical code embedded in the opening (and recurrent) statement of the work: Frei aber Froh, or 'Free yet Joyful.'" It was a somewhat hairy performance, with things oddly sticking out of Brahms's mellow texture, but nicely and passionately performed.

MTT memorial, pt 1

(pt 1? Yes, pt 2 is coming along in a couple of days)

Regular San Francisco Symphony guest conductor James Gaffigan was scheduled to lead Beethoven's Ninth this week. After former music director Michael Tilson Thomas died two months ago, management decided to repurpose this concert as a memorial to him.

This was appropriate, as the Ninth was a signature work for MTT. He performed it in his inaugural concert as music director in 1995, and I heard him conduct it at least twice - when he recorded it in 2013, and in the last concert by him I ever heard, in 2023.

To the Ninth - which was originally scheduled as the whole concert - management added new material as a first half. It began with brief appreciation/reminiscences by representatives of the orchestra, the chorus, and the symphony board - all women, by the way. I particularly enjoyed the chorus member talking about the time that MTT, with a combination of curiosity and whimsical joy, scheduled a fiendishly difficult choral work by the Italian ultra-modernist Giacinto Scelsi. Thanks to MTT's attitude, both performers and audience had a great time.

Then, three brief works - a lullaby movement from Brahms's German Requiem, done just as a memorial, I guess; Ives' The Unanswered Question, because it was a favorite of MTT's; and a raucously Bernsteinian squib by MTT himself, titled Agnegram.

Gaffigan took the three instrumental movements of the Ninth with broad imperturbability, satisfying without trying to dazzle. The Ode to Joy was bolder and busier in its instrumental presentation. The chorus burned through the score with unspeakable power, towering over everything Beethoven forced them to do. Principal soloist bass Peixin Chen gave an impressively deep sound, with a hollow tone that sounded as if he were singing from within a very large cave. Tenor Thomas Cooley was lighter and fleetier, with a pleasing strong tone quality. The two women don't get enough solo material to judge, but soprano Jessica Faselt and mezzo Kelley O'Connor were both strong and clear in voice, topping each other in turn as they sang together.

that was strange

I was up in the middle of the night, and occupying my time watching a YouTube clip of a John Oliver segment, when all of a sudden the picture froze, though the sound kept sailing on. As this went on for a while, I force-closed the browser, re-started it - the tab was cued to just before the picture stopped - but it only played for a couple of minutes before this happened again. Repeat, rinse, and again.

I got through the entire video eventually, but then the browser - I use Firefox - started freezing whenever I tried doing something else. Rebooting the computer didn't help. I'd start Firefox, it'd work fine for a couple minutes, then it'd freeze - and it wouldn't unfreeze; at one point I left it alone for an hour to see what would happen.

Then it got to the point where it was freezing as soon as I'd start it. Before it got that far, I'd searched for help, and the only clear advice was to uncheck something called hardware acceleration, which I'd already done to solve some other problem. Beyond that was things I couldn't do, and I was thinking about taking the computer in to the software wizards when they opened in the morning, when all of a sudden the problem stopped, and the browser works fine again.

Well, this computer is nearing the end of its lifespan anyway, so sooner or later I'll have to do something, but in the meantime I'm just going to hope this doesn't recur. If I'd been asleep when I should have been, I'd never have noticed anything.

another day

Last week's searing temperatures have calmed down, and we're back to the merely uncomfortably warm. B. runs the fans in the bedroom all night, and this enables us to sleep - in fact, I need to keep a heavy robe on because of the moving air.

All we have to worry about locally right now is the World Cup. My interest in this is best measured with a zero, but I do have to worry that when a game is scheduled at the big local stadium, the traffic closures can extend as far as the passing highways, which I sometimes use. So I've put little "avoid 237" stickers on my pocket calendar for days that games are scheduled, one of which is today. But I don't think I'll have to go that way any time soon.

listen to Elim Chan conduct

In search of online interviews and other such publicity material about Elim Chan, the San Francisco Symphony's new music director, I found a number of full-length concert videos of her conducting various European orchestras in standard classics of the repertoire. They were all good performances - I listened to the bunch of them with full appreciation - but two struck me as particularly outstanding. They captured the fervor and intensity that these pieces had when new and bold, they were led and played with full commitment to the music, and they had me captivated on the edge of my seat throughout - an experience I find rare enough in concert and even rarer in recordings. But this is the amazing conducting that I heard in person when she led Holst's The Planets in a guest appearance at SFS a few years ago.

One of these particularly outstanding renditions was of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, his last and most experimental essay in the form, and my long-time favorite of his. Compelling and urgent.



The other was the monster itself, Beethoven's Fifth, the work that originally sold me on the heavy classics. If bad performances have led you to find this work dull and routine, just listen to this fiery attack.



The other full-length recordings I listened to of Elim Chan conducting included:

Tchaikovsky's Fifth

Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade

Shostakovich's Fifth

Shostakovich's Tenth

Beethoven's First