Tybalt is lying on my desk, reaching his claw out to snag my hand whenever I touch the trackball. I've had to move the trackball inside the desk drawer. He thinks it's time to be fed. It isn't, yet.
Meantime, I'm going to tell you about the three concerts I've attended in the last week, you lucky people. All of them featured music by Prokofiev, which makes me a lucky person for getting to hear it.
Redwood Symphony began its season first, so it got to be the subject of my first review of the season for the Daily Journal. Nice solid performances of Romeo and Juliet and the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto.
Then, the first concert of Symphony San Jose, a review on assignment from SFCV, my first since the Menlo Festival. Again, technically highly solid, but notably unexciting, performances of Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod, which I don't often hear, and another late-period Prokofiev ballet, Cinderella, which I don't think I'd ever heard in concert. Plus a piece by Lera Auerbach, a contemporary composer whose works are of highly variable appeal. This was an early piece, in a style I rather enjoy, or at least find comprehensible. I was annoyed at how many people sitting around and behind me were talking during the music, and this was the highest-priced section of the hall! I thought about admonishing them during the break, but didn't, and then they all kept quiet during the Wagner which followed, so I realized that their discourtesy was not of thoughtless entitlement but because they'd been bored. That's a bad sign for things to come, because SSJ is making a commitment to contemporary music.
The new 7:30 starting time took me by surprise, because I didn't have my tickets in advance and they didn't make a big thing of this on the online schedule. So I missed the pre-concert talk which was at 6:30 instead of the previous 7 PM. I'd made a point of not arriving before 7 because they'd never opened the doors much earlier than that. But I like this change. It had the show over by 9:30, particularly advantageous for venturing back to the car through the hothouse night-club atmosphere of South First Street on a Saturday night, which gets more intense as the evening goes on.
Turning off those video screens which were the previous administration's last and proudest achievement was even more desirable. Now they just show house ads for upcoming programs before the concert and during breaks. They could have been used to keep listeners abreast of the titles of the movements of Cinderella, which would have been nice as it was impractical to read the darkly-printed program listing while the lights were down.
My third concert was purely on my own initiative. I ventured out for my first-ever visit to the Vallejo Symphony, which is a two-hour drive from here. I went that far because they were playing Prokofiev's Seventh Symphony, which I likewise had never heard in concert. Music director Marc Taddei's conducting was a little stiff, but the orchestra's tone colors were vivid. The quiet falling-away ending of the work was so hushed that I had to begin the applause, as nobody else was sure the piece was over. Prokofiev had written the symphony for the same Soviet radio children's department for which he'd written Peter and the Wolf, and the concert's (unsigned) program notes suggested that the ending "is intended to be a kind of lullaby, sending the listening children off to dreamland."
Infamously, authorities suggested to Prokofiev that he'd be more likely to win an official prize if the work had a happy, upbeat Soviet ending, so he tacked on ten seconds of one, asking privately that it disappear after his death. (The work still didn't win a prize, so he sold his soul for nothing.) It's still played - sometimes - when the symphony appears - which is rarely - but though Taddei left it off, he did play it afterwards as a sort of appendix/encore.
Also on the concert, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue plus infamous "bad boy of music" George Antheil's A Jazz Symphony, which was written for the same venue as the Rhapsody and, while it doesn't sound much like it, is to the same order: a medium-length single movement with a lot of piano obbligato and solo (Jeffrey LaDeur in this performance), in a jazz-inflected style, plus, in Antheil's case, a lot of admixture of French modernism of the Les Six school.
The orchestra plays in a converted movie theater - as does SSJ, but this one provides no space between your knees and the back of the seat in front, which means that everyone has to get up and move out to the aisle, where there isn't much room either, whenever anyone arrives who needs to get into a middle seat. The woman seated next to me proudly told me she'd been attending Vallejo Symphony for over 15 years, so I asked her about the strange occasion eight years ago when the board mysteriously fired the long-time music director. She knew nothing, nothing.
Around the corner is what reviews proudly proclaimed was Solano County's best Chinese restaurant. All I can say is that, in that case, don't eat Chinese in Solano County.
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