alternative universe V

It's summer festival season in the alternative world, and there were only two big things on my calendar for this month.

Friday, July 17-Saturday, August 8: Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival, Menlo Park/Atherton
This was canceled before the schedule for the Prelude Performances, which are the best part, was released, and that schedule has a big effect on what I decide to attend of the main program. Other than that, I'd have been happy to attend whatever main concerts my editor chose to send me to, although as is typical for Menlo they're presented in roughly chronological order and get more interesting as they go along, reaching the height of interest just when I have to be gone for Mythcon. Still, not all the music was to my taste, including as it did pieces by Schnittke and Widmann that I'd heard before and could live without. But how about a string quintet by Glazunov (July 23), Bartok's Contrasts paired with a wind-and-piano Tarantelle by Saint-Saens (July 30), or Haydn tributes by Dukas, d'Indy, and Reynaldo Hahn (August 1)?
But wait! In substitute for the festival, Menlo will be running a series of recordings of previous events: mainstage concerts, preludes, lectures, special concerts, and so on, daily during the festival period. I think I'll watch some of that.

Friday, July 31-Monday, August 3: Mythcon 51, Ramada Plaza Hotel, Albuquerque
Attending Mythcon is the highlight event of my year, and has been ever since I first started going back in the Ford Administration (Brits, read "Callaghan"). Most sorry I am that this has been put off till next year, and I'm just hoping that it will be possible to do it then. The nervousness I feel over this is due to strangely and irrelevantly obsessing over, if conditions are like they are now, whether it would be wiser to fly (2 1/2 hours) or drive (2 1/2 days) and how to handle it practically in either case, and not at all worrying over what I'm to say in a scholarly Guest of Honor address, which is what I ought to be thinking about.

Also in the meantime, the San Francisco Symphony held an online gala commemorating the retirement of Michael Tilson Thomas. Whole lot of gushing going on, but also some interesting music. The highlights (links directly to that spot in the video) are a striking new setting by MTT himself of Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody", sung by Measha Brueggergosman and the entire orchestra in a Zoom performance of the coda of Mahler's First Symphony, a little wayward without MTT to conduct, but still a fabulous accomplishment and an appropriate tribute. (If you need a little more context, here's the LA Phil in the whole last movement, conducted by Dudamel in a state of barely controlled hysteria.)