opera review: The Magic Flute again

Last June, I went to the San Francisco Opera's Magic Flute, which I found so boring and dreary that I got up at intermission and never went back.

This week I decided to give Mozart's wayward opera a chance again with The Matchbox Magic Flute, adapted and directed by Mary Zimmerman and given by Berkeley Rep, which is a theater company and not an opera company, and it did sound like it.

That's part of what made it "matchbox." The word meant that it was small-scale: designed for a small theater, cut down to two hours instead of three, minor characters as well as plot distractions and lengthy dialogue disposed of, simple staging, a pit band of only five players, and singers who would have been more at home in musical theater than grand opera. But since The Magic Flute is a Singspiel and not an opera, that's appropriate.

Kosman hated it: he claimed that it retained the original's entire pointless plot (not true) and that the singers weren't up to the music. It's certainly true that Mariene Fernandez as Pamina was the only one who sounded like an opera singer, and that Emily Rohm was too weak in her high notes for such a powerhouse part as the Queen of the Night. But I attend enough musical theater, and dislike operatic grandiosity for its own sake enough, that I didn't mind that. What I really regretted was that most of the singers didn't have clear enough enunciation and it was hard to make out the words. Usually opera companies put up supertitles, but since Berkeley Rep isn't an opera company, they didn't. The Lamplighters, the local Gilbert & Sullivan group, do use supertitles even though their singers all have outstandingly clear enunciation. The only performer in this cast who sounded as clear as that was Shawn Pfautsch as Papageno, who has done G&S.

But was it fun to watch? Yes! It was clever and witty and charming and I had a good time. Zimmerman's translation, insofar as I could make it out, was naturally phrased and fit the music well. I liked the sly contemporary references, and making Papageno into a bird himself, not just a bird-catcher, meant that he could be silenced by removing the beak that he otherwise wore (and when, while wearing it, he was offered some wine, he drank it like one of those bobbing duck toys).

concert review: San Jose Chamber Orchestra

I attended and reviewed an unexpectedly unusual concert on Sunday. Here, the headline my editors put on it says it all: San Jose Chamber Orchestra Plays Two Works With Three Conductors.

musical events

Not really concerts as I normally go to them, but certainly musical:

1) Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane
This was at Herbst and sponsored by the classical promoter, and the performers both have classical credentials, but it was more like a singer-songwriter event at the Freight, not least in consisting of one set lasting just over an hour. Kahane, at piano, and Shaw, sometimes with viola, sang and played reflective and ruminative songs they'd severally and jointly written, many of them forming a cycle called "Hexagons" whose lyrics set them in Borges's Library of Babel. That made it a pretty high-culture event, even by Freight standards, but the music didn't indulge in any of the post-modernist abstractions both composers are known for. It would have fit right in with the more ethereal and thoughtful performers at the Freight, much more than it did with anything else I hear at Herbst.

2) Palo Alto Players, Fiddler on the Roof
It's been a while since I've seen a production of this; happy to do so again. The first thing you need for this show is a Tevye with real stage presence, and in Joey McDaniel they had that. Golde (Brittney Mignano) was strong; the girls (Gabrielle Goodman, Madelyn Davis-Haddad, Teagan Murphy) did a great job with "Matchmaker Matchmaker"; Yente (Marsha van Broek) was emphatically Yenteish to the delight of all; Fruma-Sarah (Marie Finch) loomed adequately; Motel (Joe Steely) sang a better "Miracle of Miracles" than the song deserved. But in a show like this there always has to be one performer who can't sing. This was Perchik. He acted his part very well, but ... he could not sing.
Despite a large cast, a little thin-sounding in the ensemble numbers, but well-staged, good costumes, an enjoyable show. Playing through Nov. 24 at Lucie Stern.

Fantasy: Realms of Imagination

And the other artistic expedition that I made on my trip to LA was to venture down to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, because it was hosting the touring version of the British Library exhibit by the above title.

A couple hundred items in four or five rooms, mostly books and manuscripts (usually from the BL collection) but a fair number of media items, less illustrations (though there were some of those) than screens showing videos. Some of these were talks of the interview sort with authors, of whom the only one I knew was Terri Windling. But there were also some clips from movies and tv shows, ranging from the 1910 Wizard of Oz film to a clip from Buffy (Tara running away from the Gentlemen).

At one end of one room was a 14th-century manuscript of the Iliad, at the other a 1983 kit for Dungeons & Dragons. That'll give you an idea of the scope and range. No single author got more than minimal attention. CSL had an early US edition of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and a copy of the poster of Pauline Baynes's Narnia map. Tolkien had a first edition of The Hobbit, open to Thror's Map, and a Swedish translation open to an illustration by Tove Jansson depicting Gollum as a giant troll-like blob. The caption astutely noted that Tolkien subsequently added the adjective "small" to Gollum's description, but it leaves the impression that Jansson was the only artist who made this strange interpretation: no, she wasn't.

Manuscripts included the faint pencil of a page from The Wind in the Willows, a typescript page with extensive pen changes from Macdonald's Lilith, and the notebook in which Le Guin wrote the first draft of A Wizard of Earthsea, placed so far back in the case it was not possible to read any of it.

Such a circumstance was the locale of the one factual error I found in the caption. It said we were looking at the "original manuscript" of Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic, but it wasn't. It was the galley proofs. I mentioned this to the clerk in the exhibit gift shop, figuring to get a shrug, but no, she was a former part-time English lit grad student who was very interested and promised to pass this on, though I had to explain both what galley proofs were and why they're called that.

I wasn't in a position to say what really bothered me about the way the exhibit was presented, which was its depiction of all these assorted authors as if they were engaged in a conscious group project, each contributing a stone or two to a vast edifice. But at least until the advent of a publishing genre of original fantasy in the 1970s (or earlier if limited to sword and sorcery), the characteristic of literary fantasy was that, though authors were intermittently aware of and admiring of one another, each plowed their own furrow; they were distinctive for their individuality. There was no "group project" about it and it belittles them and the field to suggest there was.

That there was something naive and belittling about the entire thing was communicated by the animated illustration at the entrance. It was of a unicorn, depicted as a horse with a horn in its forehead. There's more to a unicorn than that, but I'm not going to bother saying so.

mini-Mythcon

In a living room east of LA on Monday afternoon, five locals who are Mythopoeic Society regulars but were not able to attend this year's Mythcon gathered to hear me, come down from NorCal for the occasion, give my paper from this year's Mythcon on one of the most elusive and atypical Inklings, CSL's pupil John Wain.

I described how he didn't fit in with the Inklings, how he didn't fit in with the younger writers of his own generation with whom he's most associated, and then described some of his novels (modern realist, decidedly not fantasy, except insofar as he's deluding himself about human behavior), all of which I've read. Some I thought casually worthwhile, others are ... not.

After the paper, and some supplementary prepared contributions to panels at Mythcon, and much discussion among the Mini-atures, we adjourned for dinner at a local roastery. And a Good Time was had by all.

concert review: blech

Having another free evening in LA, searching the events listings beforehand I found what I thought would be a Rodgers and Hammerstein revue.

It wasn’t. When I arrived, at the PAC at a community college in the Pomona Valley near where I am staying, it was billed as a tribute to the Great American Songbook, but what it actually was, was jazz vocals. You know the kind, where the singers unpleasantly distort the melody, then hand it over to the instrumentalists, who distort it further to the point of unrecognizability. This is why I hate jazz. I stuck out the 90 minutes, more because I was curious as to what songs they’d maul than eagerness to hear them maul them. (There was no set list in the program booklet, which was only available by QR code anyway, and from the age of the audience I doubt I was the only person there who couldn’t access it, though I was apparently the only one who raised enough of a fuss about it that the assistant manager let me look at her phone.)

Anyway, the singers, Benny Benack III and Stella Cole, semi-performed three R&H songs, Some Enchanted Evening, The Sound of Music, and Getting to Know You; a bunch of other Broadway musical theatre songs of that era (I Could Have Danced All Night, Till There Was You, Almost Like Being in Love, Hello Dolly and Food Glorious Food - a bit later date, those two - and a few others, almost all of which I knew), and a few songs from movies (including Moon River and Over the Rainbow, both of which Stella liked so much she sang them almost straight) and a few other miscellanea.

Not a great use of my time.

Sondheim Festival VII: Pacific Overtures

I attended a whole sheaf of productions of Sondheim shows in the first half of last year; here's a supplement. It was Pacific Overtures, a show rarely done, perhaps because it requires a cast of Asian ethnicities, and all-Asian theater companies are not thick on the ground, perhaps? I don't know. But the East West Players in Los Angeles is such a troupe, and I caught the first preview performance of their new production - it runs through December 1 - on my current trip to LA. I'd encourage anyone in LA who's interested in this kind of theater to go; it's one of the best Sondheim productions I've seen.

So Pacific Overtures - with "Pacific" meaning peaceful, not the ocean, and "Overtures" meaning introductory offers, not what comes before an opera, phrase taken from a letter by Commodore Perry, tells the story of the 1850s opening of Japan to Western contact, almost entirely from the Japanese point of view, with the rest being what the Japanese might imagine the Americans and other Westerners are like. Despite some tragic events, it's mostly comic, even silly, almost slapstick, and I'm almost surprised that the Japanese don't object to this Western portrait of their ancestors.

For most of the plot, the Japanese are just trying to make the Westerners go away, Perry and his ships in the first act and various others following in his wake in the second act. Things get hairy - there's a nasty scene, reminiscent of something from Sweeney Todd, where three British sailors - played, like all the Westerners, by regular cast members in masks - menace a high-ranking Japanese woman pursuant to her rape, but at the end the Emperor takes charge, officially bans rejection of the visitors and the scene segues into a quick closing account of all that Japan and Japanese people have accomplished since adopting Western ways, though the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere doesn't get a reference.

The music is perhaps vaguely Japanese in style without being pentatonic, with interjections of what I guess was authentic Japanese folk music, but what struck me was the lyrics with echoes of the Sondheim writing style from shows like Into the Woods (especially the ensemble opening number) and Sunday in the Park with George.

But oh, the production! Brilliantly colorful costumes, ingenious staging of characters sometimes speaking for each other, and the most fervent and dedicated acting and singing. The song that struck me as the best in the show depicted the shogun's advisors considering how to react to Perry's arrival. I thought about posting a link to a recording, but none of the performers of the principal part I found online were even close to a match for the delight of hearing and seeing Gedde Watanabe (who was actually in a small part in the show's original production in 1976) perform it onstage last night. And they were all like that, with special marks to Jon Jon Briones as the Reciter, the principal character.

This was a winner. Go see it if you're anywhere in the area. Through December 1. Ticket info at the company web site.

concert review: Jerusalem Quartet

Joshua Kosman, retired newspaper reviewer who's now blogging, is "at the moment struggling to imagine what purpose is served by going to concerts, listening to music, and thinking and writing about it" in our new authoritarian reality.

I look at it differently. I see music as a refuge, a - not a "comfort," that's too facile - but a means for healing and enriching the soul. Even music that's dissonant can do that. That's why I posted a link to A Child of Our Time on Wednesday, and that I think is the point of having any form of art at all.

Which is why I went with cheerful anticipation to this concert by a string quartet group I knew nothing about. They're four men from Israel, a country whose exports some would prefer to boycott, though how avoiding its cultural features would help the people in Gaza is not clear to me. Perhaps it's just to chide the entire country for having an obnoxious government, though if that's the motive then come January I'd have to start boycotting myself, and I'm not sure how I would do that.

So I just ignored that point. This concert ought to have been in Herbst, but there was a scheduling conflict after the performers had to change their date, so it was moved to the large(r of the) halls at the San Francisco Conservatory down the street, a much better venue than it looks. They played Haydn's Op 50/1, a lively piece, Dvorak's Op 106, an expansive one, and Shostakovich's Twelfth. Shostakovich's Twelfth is in D-flat major, an insane key to write for strings in, but I think Shostakovich had a plan, if he lived long enough (which he didn't), to write a string quartet in each key, like The Well-Tempered Clavier. As for why this one, apparently the Jerusalem Quartet is working its way through a Shostakovich cycle, and this was just the Twelfth's turn to come up.

This is the work which begins with an attempt to write twelve-tone music, but soon enough the composer gives it up and goes back to writing like Shostakovich. It was at this point that it became crystal clear what the Jerusalem Quartet is good for, and that's for playing fast loud passages in unison. They simply burn the carpet. Something similar had been revealed in the Haydn, not in unison but in a quick forte exchange, where despite the quartet's serious mien they passed the phrases around with the vim and vigor of children playing with a ball.

And so it was a pretty good concert, and I preceded it with trying out for dinner a nearby Burmese restaurant (hey, this is San Francisco - we have every national culture in the world) of some reputation, where I had Strange Catfish (not its name, but should have been).

responsive music for a troubled time

Michael Tippett, A Child of Our Time

concert review: California Symphony

I think that Mason Bates's update to the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra was supposed to be the highlight of this concert, but the Brahms Fourth Symphony took that prize instead, in my ears, so that became the focus of my review.

concert review: Redwood Symphony

What is this? It's the entire bassoon section of the Redwood Symphony dressed as gnomes for the orchestra's Halloween concert. Everybody was dressed up: they were conducted by a pirate, and Batman played the timpani.

And I reviewed it.

Watching ten small children, each bearing a souvenir baton, escorted in turn up to the podium for 30-second stints "conducting" a Sousa march - it reminded me of the old joke of a conductor with a small piece of paper on the music stand in front of him which proved to read "Wave hands around until music stops." The main point of the exercise, of course, was for their parents to take photos.

return to history

Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell (Crown, 2023)

David Mitchell is a British comedian, tv panelist, and writer whom I think is not well-known in the US. I know his screen work exclusively from clips on YouTube. But I'm aware that he's both very funny in a ruthlessly logical way and extremely intelligent, so I picked up this book which is a history of English monarchs from post-Roman times up through Elizabeth I, which is when, Michell says, royal history became too much of a subset of general history to be worth pursuing.

Reviews describe this as a humorous book, but while it does have some comic digressions in the manner of John Oliver, it's mostly an entirely serious historical account; it's the way that it's told that's funny; and this appeals to me, for though my style is different and I'm nowhere near as good as Mitchell, that's similar to the effect I aim at when writing informally about history myself.

Mitchell has a main theme which becomes more explicit as the book goes along, which is an analysis of the whole point of having a king, what good does it do to have one in a medieval society. And he measures the kings he discusses in terms of how well they succeed at those aims.

I'll leave that analysis to him, but I would like to quote extracts from his extraordinarily level-headed (i.e. he agrees with me) evaluations of some of the more challenging historical problems of the period.

On whether King Arthur actually existed:

Some people will still say he might have existed, but the sort of person they say he might have been is so far removed from King Arthur in any of the forms we understand him that it feels like they're just saying he didn't exist in a different way. Perhaps a Roman officer who served in Britain, or a Romano-British chieftain, or a Welsh king. Someone like that, the idea goes, might have been the bit of real grit in the imagination oyster that turned into the Arthurian pearl. Personally, I don't think imagination oysters need real grit any more than metaphorical bonnets need real bees.

On whether Richard III was really a bad guy:

It's well established, then, that the Tudors worked hard to make Richard III look bad. Too well established. People in modern times got a bit overexcited about it and started to jump to the contrary conclusion that Richard was, in fact, lovely. This is a bit of a leap. The lamentable problem that you can't believe everything you're told is not solved by merely believing the polar opposite. I find all this a bit daft. It's nice to take an active interest in history. But we don't and can't really know these people. The truth is lost under centuries of propaganda and then centuries of contrarian rejection of it.

This is an amazing, entertaining, and useful history book.