I hadn't covered the Peninsula Symphony for the Daily Journal yet this season, so I reviewed their big blowout season finale, big grand extroverted - and also very well-known - works by Sibelius, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky. Performed with all the panache the orchestra could summon, except that the guest pianist in the Grieg Concerto, Jon Kimura Parker, wanted to be fairly quiet and ruminative.
At the pre-concert talk he told an amusing story of his first performance of this concerto. He's originally from Vancouver BC, and went off to attend Juilliard. Soon after his arrival, one Saturday he got a phone call from the Vancouver Symphony, saying that they knew he was a rising local pianist, and hoping he'd be available for a concert next spring. Parker was impressed to hear from the orchestra he'd grown up listening to. But when they asked, "Do you know the Grieg Concerto?", if he said "No, but I'm a really fast learner," he was sure they'd cancel the invitation. So he said "Sure, I know it well." And they said, "Great. Our guest conductor, Harry Ellis Dickson, will be in New York on Tuesday; you can play it for him then."
Uh-oh. Parker ran out and bought the printed music, then disappeared into a Juilliard practice room for three days. He was a fast learner; by Tuesday he had the first movement practiced and memorized; not so much the rest of the piece. When he met Dickson, he put him off by offering to play the Beethoven Appassionata Sonata, which he did know well and which is half an hour long. Finally, Dickson said, "Let's hear the Grieg now." Parker started, and halfway through the first movement Dickson waved him to stop. "OK, that's enough," he said. "See you in March."
By which time, of course, Parker had learned the whole concerto, and did well enough that Dickson invited him to play it with his home orchestra, the Boston Pops, of which he was assistant conductor.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Monday, May 20, 2024
Sunday, May 19, 2024
concert review: Santa Cruz Chamber Players
I ventured down past Santa Cruz to a tiny church perched on a hilltop on the fringes of Aptos - a town that already consists mostly of fringes - for one of the quaint little events that this concert series specializes in. It turned out to be far better performed than the last time I heard this rubric over a decade ago, but then the personnel were entirely different.
Concert director Ivan Rosenblum, a pianist formerly an instructor at UCSC, had decided to put on a concert in celebration of the bassoon, an instrument that proverbially "don't get no respect." For a soloist he recruited Michelle Keem, the new principal bassoon with the Santa Cruz Symphony. She was an excellent performer, and made fewer breathy or grunting noises than any other woodwind player I've sat so close to - did I mention this was a tiny church? - at a concert.
Keem began with a bassoon arrangement of a C.P.E. Bach sonata for unaccompanied flute, and the rest of the bassoon music was trios for bassoon, clarinet, and piano, with Rosenblum on piano and local notable Erica Horn on clarinet. Glinka's Trio pathetique sounded more like Mozart or a bel canto operatic duet than like the echt-Russian music Glinka's better-known for. A trio by Bill Douglas, a jazz performer who also works the classical side, had no more than a touch of jazz and was very agreeable. One by Rosenblum himself, from his student days in the 60s, records his rebellion against the serialist hegemony of the day by placing counterpoint against dissonant piano chords but ending with a consonance. And Mendelssohn's fussy little Concert Piece No. 1 for clarinet and basset horn, with the latter arranged for bassoon.
Plus some tiny pieces for unaccompanied clarinet by Stravinsky, and a couple short piano pieces commenting on the program: a sad little elegy by Fanny Mendelssohn, which couldn't have been her response to her brother Felix's death because, pace Rosenblum, she died six months before him instead of the other way around; and one by C.P.E., who, again pace Rosenblum, wasn't J.S.'s eldest surviving son - that was W.F.
* * *
But that wasn't all. To give the bassoon its due respect, the concert began with an audience participation quiz. Keem played three solo passages from the bassoon's orchestral repertoire. If, after hearing them all, someone in the audience could identify all the works, they'd get a free ticket to one of next season's concerts.
I guess I was the only person to raise my hand, because I was called on, and everyone seemed very impressed that I got them all right. Rosenblum asked, "Are you by any chance a bassoonist?" and I replied "No, I've just been listening to classical music since I was shorter than that bassoon." (A bassoon is about 4 1/2 feet tall, if you're curious.)
And indeed, I could have identified these pieces as easily when I was 12 as I could today, though I didn't say that. I'd been expecting something like the bassoon melody that opens the finale of Shostakovich's Ninth, but the choices were, I thought, dead easy. But since everyone else was so impressed at my identification skill, I'm giving you a chance. I've managed to excerpt and strip the ID off recordings of the three, and here they are.First accurate reply in comments gets the star.
I didn't drive all the way to Aptos just for this concert. I had another errand in the area and picked this day because it coincided with an agreeable concert. What else I was doing, I'll tell you later.
Concert director Ivan Rosenblum, a pianist formerly an instructor at UCSC, had decided to put on a concert in celebration of the bassoon, an instrument that proverbially "don't get no respect." For a soloist he recruited Michelle Keem, the new principal bassoon with the Santa Cruz Symphony. She was an excellent performer, and made fewer breathy or grunting noises than any other woodwind player I've sat so close to - did I mention this was a tiny church? - at a concert.
Keem began with a bassoon arrangement of a C.P.E. Bach sonata for unaccompanied flute, and the rest of the bassoon music was trios for bassoon, clarinet, and piano, with Rosenblum on piano and local notable Erica Horn on clarinet. Glinka's Trio pathetique sounded more like Mozart or a bel canto operatic duet than like the echt-Russian music Glinka's better-known for. A trio by Bill Douglas, a jazz performer who also works the classical side, had no more than a touch of jazz and was very agreeable. One by Rosenblum himself, from his student days in the 60s, records his rebellion against the serialist hegemony of the day by placing counterpoint against dissonant piano chords but ending with a consonance. And Mendelssohn's fussy little Concert Piece No. 1 for clarinet and basset horn, with the latter arranged for bassoon.
Plus some tiny pieces for unaccompanied clarinet by Stravinsky, and a couple short piano pieces commenting on the program: a sad little elegy by Fanny Mendelssohn, which couldn't have been her response to her brother Felix's death because, pace Rosenblum, she died six months before him instead of the other way around; and one by C.P.E., who, again pace Rosenblum, wasn't J.S.'s eldest surviving son - that was W.F.
* * *
But that wasn't all. To give the bassoon its due respect, the concert began with an audience participation quiz. Keem played three solo passages from the bassoon's orchestral repertoire. If, after hearing them all, someone in the audience could identify all the works, they'd get a free ticket to one of next season's concerts.
I guess I was the only person to raise my hand, because I was called on, and everyone seemed very impressed that I got them all right. Rosenblum asked, "Are you by any chance a bassoonist?" and I replied "No, I've just been listening to classical music since I was shorter than that bassoon." (A bassoon is about 4 1/2 feet tall, if you're curious.)
And indeed, I could have identified these pieces as easily when I was 12 as I could today, though I didn't say that. I'd been expecting something like the bassoon melody that opens the finale of Shostakovich's Ninth, but the choices were, I thought, dead easy. But since everyone else was so impressed at my identification skill, I'm giving you a chance. I've managed to excerpt and strip the ID off recordings of the three, and here they are.First accurate reply in comments gets the star.
I didn't drive all the way to Aptos just for this concert. I had another errand in the area and picked this day because it coincided with an agreeable concert. What else I was doing, I'll tell you later.
Friday, May 17, 2024
concert review: South Bay Philharmonic
B's second concert as a member of the viola section of this community orchestra. The players communicated the charms of both Florence Price's Dances in the Canebrakes and Gabriel Fauré's Dolly Suite. Antonín Dvořák's Symphonic Variations was another matter: it's probably mostly the composer's fault that it wanders around directionless for most of its length. Unity of ensemble was this orchestra's biggest virtue, though it often took a few measures to get this into shape at the beginning of a movement or, in the Dvořák, in successive variations.
As an addition to the program, a string quartet made out of regular orchestra players performed a movement from a Haydn quartet in a sprightly manner, plus an arrangement of "Yellow" by Coldplay, which I infinitely preferred to the original, and which came out - as a lot of recent pop songs do when played by classical ensembles - sounding rather minimalist.
The Dolly Suite has a quaint origin. It's formed out of what were originally piano pieces that Fauré wrote to amuse the young daughter of his mistress, a girl nicknamed Dolly (real name, Regina-Hélène). The movement titles include a couple that sound as if they're cat references, but they aren't. "Mi-a-ou" isn't a cat sound, it's the infant Dolly's attempt to say the name of her elder brother Raoul. The "Kitty Valse" isn't about a cat either. Kitty (actually Ketty) was the name of the family dog.
Footnote: After her affair with Fauré had run its course, the mistress, whose name was Emma Bardac, ran off with Raoul's piano teacher, whose name was Claude Debussy. They had a daughter of their own, whose nickname was Chouchou (real name, Claude-Emma), and the piano pieces that Debussy wrote to amuse her form his Children's Corner Suite.
As an addition to the program, a string quartet made out of regular orchestra players performed a movement from a Haydn quartet in a sprightly manner, plus an arrangement of "Yellow" by Coldplay, which I infinitely preferred to the original, and which came out - as a lot of recent pop songs do when played by classical ensembles - sounding rather minimalist.
The Dolly Suite has a quaint origin. It's formed out of what were originally piano pieces that Fauré wrote to amuse the young daughter of his mistress, a girl nicknamed Dolly (real name, Regina-Hélène). The movement titles include a couple that sound as if they're cat references, but they aren't. "Mi-a-ou" isn't a cat sound, it's the infant Dolly's attempt to say the name of her elder brother Raoul. The "Kitty Valse" isn't about a cat either. Kitty (actually Ketty) was the name of the family dog.
Footnote: After her affair with Fauré had run its course, the mistress, whose name was Emma Bardac, ran off with Raoul's piano teacher, whose name was Claude Debussy. They had a daughter of their own, whose nickname was Chouchou (real name, Claude-Emma), and the piano pieces that Debussy wrote to amuse her form his Children's Corner Suite.
Thursday, May 16, 2024
this is amusing
It seems that the professional women's basketball league, experiencing an upsurge in popularity, is starting new teams, and the one here is to be called the Valkyries.
Good name for a women's sports team, I thought, especially one in a game that requires a lot of bounding around; but the result has been a flood of queries to Google as to what "valkyries" might mean.
Oy. Haven't they ever heard this?
Good name for a women's sports team, I thought, especially one in a game that requires a lot of bounding around; but the result has been a flood of queries to Google as to what "valkyries" might mean.
Oy. Haven't they ever heard this?
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
this is just to say that
I have sworn eternal hostility against every claim that Apple device interfaces are "user-friendly." A more frustrating, illogical, incomprehensible, inconsistent screen I never hope to see. Bah.
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
concert review: Mission Chamber Orchestra
This was a difficult review to write. The MCO, already the diciest in technical quality of those local orchestras which claim professional quality, has gone distinctly downhill in that aspect since I heard them last a year ago. I suspect, though not with enough assuredness to say so in print, that the retirement of the longtime music director, Emily Ray, is responsible: her militarily-precise conducting style kept them pretty firmly in line.
I felt I would be remiss if I didn't mention the problems honestly. But the performances were still enjoyable and effective, and I had to emphasize that too. I hope I managed this balance. At any rate, the editors did very little tinkering with the text, so they must have judged it a satisfactory report.
I felt I would be remiss if I didn't mention the problems honestly. But the performances were still enjoyable and effective, and I had to emphasize that too. I hope I managed this balance. At any rate, the editors did very little tinkering with the text, so they must have judged it a satisfactory report.
Monday, May 13, 2024
sort of like KFC
A while ago I came across somewhere what purported to be the original recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. I remember the KFC of my childhood, much tastier than the stuff they have today, so I saved it in my recipe book, but I didn't pull it out until now, when the prospect of an evening's dinner at home on my own made it feasible to try the rather elaborate directions.
I bought a couple pounds of my favorite chicken piece, wing mid-joints, as they're called in the Japanese market which is the only place I know where you can buy a package without having to get drumettes along with them, lined up the other ingredients, turned on my little portable deep fryer, and set to work.
First you soak the chicken for half an hour in a buttermilk and egg mixture. The recipe is for a full 8-piece regular chicken, and my wing flats were less than that, but I had to make a double helping of the mixture to cover all the chicken.
On the other hand, I had more than enough of the mixture featuring the famous eleven herbs and spices. I already had ten of these in my pantry, and the last was easy enough to get. You take varying amounts, usually a tbsp, of each, totaling about a cup of material altogether, and mix it with two cups of flour. Dredge the chicken in the bowl of the mixture, let it sit again for another half hour, and it's ready to cook in small batches.
The recipe said fry at 350 for 15-18 minutes, but wing flats, which I've fried before, are very small and don't take nearly that long. I tried the first batch for 8 minutes, and found the coating was a dark brown, not the "medium golden brown" the recipe states. I then tried a batch for 5 minutes, which is closer to my usual frying time for flats. The meat, when I tasted it, was juicier because not overcooked, but the coating was just as dark.
It didn't taste much like KFC. The seasoning was faintly reminiscent, but not nearly enough so to have been worth the trouble of assembling a small army of spice jars to make it. And the coating, besides being rather dark-tasting, was hard and crisp, not the soft and dangly of traditional KFC. It was good chicken, but not very akin to KFC.
I bought a couple pounds of my favorite chicken piece, wing mid-joints, as they're called in the Japanese market which is the only place I know where you can buy a package without having to get drumettes along with them, lined up the other ingredients, turned on my little portable deep fryer, and set to work.
First you soak the chicken for half an hour in a buttermilk and egg mixture. The recipe is for a full 8-piece regular chicken, and my wing flats were less than that, but I had to make a double helping of the mixture to cover all the chicken.
On the other hand, I had more than enough of the mixture featuring the famous eleven herbs and spices. I already had ten of these in my pantry, and the last was easy enough to get. You take varying amounts, usually a tbsp, of each, totaling about a cup of material altogether, and mix it with two cups of flour. Dredge the chicken in the bowl of the mixture, let it sit again for another half hour, and it's ready to cook in small batches.
The recipe said fry at 350 for 15-18 minutes, but wing flats, which I've fried before, are very small and don't take nearly that long. I tried the first batch for 8 minutes, and found the coating was a dark brown, not the "medium golden brown" the recipe states. I then tried a batch for 5 minutes, which is closer to my usual frying time for flats. The meat, when I tasted it, was juicier because not overcooked, but the coating was just as dark.
It didn't taste much like KFC. The seasoning was faintly reminiscent, but not nearly enough so to have been worth the trouble of assembling a small army of spice jars to make it. And the coating, besides being rather dark-tasting, was hard and crisp, not the soft and dangly of traditional KFC. It was good chicken, but not very akin to KFC.
Sunday, May 12, 2024
a talent to annoy
Compilations of annoying things that people do never include this one, but it's happened to me more than once.
A group of people (not co-workers in an office, but e.g. a committee of volunteers, with other things in their lives) needs to hold a meeting. Careful planning is done to ensure it's an acceptable and feasible date: either it's discussed extensively at a previous meeting, or through one of those online apps that enable people to say what times they're available.
Then somebody complains that they can't make that date. Either they weren't part of the previous discussion, or their plans have changed, or something.
So the organizer makes a unilateral decision to change the date of the meeting, without checking with anybody else as to whether it suits them. And this after the elaborate procedure to try and establish a good date the first time!
Well, guess what: I have a conflicting engagement. Do I register my own objections? In this case, my conflict is unimportant: I can just cancel it, though I wouldn't have said I was available on this date if I'd been asked the first time. So I don't object: I can't feel arrogant enough to put the group through another date-setting hassle for a trivial reason.
In another case, I then went to great lengths to change my engagement on the new meeting date to the only other possibility, the old meeting date; and I only complained when the organizer then changed the date back again for equally arbitrary reasons. I said I cannot remain part of this committee if it's going to be run in this manner.
It's not just that a carefully-planned process can be overturned if it doesn't work for one person; it's not that the date couldn't be changed again if necessary; it's that the organizer made a unilateral decision, suddenly dropping the previous principle of being generally consultative.
A group of people (not co-workers in an office, but e.g. a committee of volunteers, with other things in their lives) needs to hold a meeting. Careful planning is done to ensure it's an acceptable and feasible date: either it's discussed extensively at a previous meeting, or through one of those online apps that enable people to say what times they're available.
Then somebody complains that they can't make that date. Either they weren't part of the previous discussion, or their plans have changed, or something.
So the organizer makes a unilateral decision to change the date of the meeting, without checking with anybody else as to whether it suits them. And this after the elaborate procedure to try and establish a good date the first time!
Well, guess what: I have a conflicting engagement. Do I register my own objections? In this case, my conflict is unimportant: I can just cancel it, though I wouldn't have said I was available on this date if I'd been asked the first time. So I don't object: I can't feel arrogant enough to put the group through another date-setting hassle for a trivial reason.
In another case, I then went to great lengths to change my engagement on the new meeting date to the only other possibility, the old meeting date; and I only complained when the organizer then changed the date back again for equally arbitrary reasons. I said I cannot remain part of this committee if it's going to be run in this manner.
It's not just that a carefully-planned process can be overturned if it doesn't work for one person; it's not that the date couldn't be changed again if necessary; it's that the organizer made a unilateral decision, suddenly dropping the previous principle of being generally consultative.
Friday, May 10, 2024
news
1. As I've mentioned, I do not watch TV news, but I do watch the released videos of the monologues of Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart, et al, and those have clips. And this is where I've noticed what I wouldn't learn from print, which is that there seems no certainty as to how to pronounce the name of DT's lawyer Susan Necheles. Some say 'necklace', some say 'nichols'.
1a. Meanwhile, even the print media covering the trial is descending into inanity. I've seen articles discussing when the defendant has his arms crossed.
1b. I do give Stormy Daniels credit for the best snappy comebacks ever to cross-examination questions in a real-life trial.
2. Barron Trump, now 18, will be a delegate to the RNC. He is now an adult, he is now a practicing politician; that means the exemption shielding children from political commentary and attacks is now officially off as far as he's concerned.
3. In local news, the recount breaking the tie for second place in the November runoff for a Congressional seat has now been broken in favor of the candidate who opposed the recount from the start.
4. As I've mentioned privately, Pete McCloskey has died. Former Congressman (in my district, I'm proud to say) and the last liberal Republican, that is until 2007 when he finally gave up and joined the Democrats.
5. In media news, Peter Jackson has announced he's going to make more Lord of the Rings-inspired movies. One is of the hunt for Gollum, which has already been done as a fanfic movie, the other of the backstory of the Rohirrim. I thought Amazon was prohibited from using Third Age material, but apparently Jackson is not. This is producing in me moans of agony you're fortunate that you can't hear. Will I have to go see these, or has the necessity of knowing how they screw Tolkien's story up, so that I can better watch out for the distortions entering future scholarship, reached the point of diminishing returns?
5a. The article on this says that "The news that Jackson, Boyens and Walsh will be involved in the new film franchise is sure to calm any concerns from loyal fans." Loyal fans of what? Certainly not of Tolkien. Loyal fans of the Lord of the Rings movies, the ones who came up to me after the Hobbit movies came out and said "Now we understand what you were complaining about," are not going to be reassured either, because that trio were also responsible for the Hobbit disasters.
1a. Meanwhile, even the print media covering the trial is descending into inanity. I've seen articles discussing when the defendant has his arms crossed.
1b. I do give Stormy Daniels credit for the best snappy comebacks ever to cross-examination questions in a real-life trial.
2. Barron Trump, now 18, will be a delegate to the RNC. He is now an adult, he is now a practicing politician; that means the exemption shielding children from political commentary and attacks is now officially off as far as he's concerned.
3. In local news, the recount breaking the tie for second place in the November runoff for a Congressional seat has now been broken in favor of the candidate who opposed the recount from the start.
4. As I've mentioned privately, Pete McCloskey has died. Former Congressman (in my district, I'm proud to say) and the last liberal Republican, that is until 2007 when he finally gave up and joined the Democrats.
5. In media news, Peter Jackson has announced he's going to make more Lord of the Rings-inspired movies. One is of the hunt for Gollum, which has already been done as a fanfic movie, the other of the backstory of the Rohirrim. I thought Amazon was prohibited from using Third Age material, but apparently Jackson is not. This is producing in me moans of agony you're fortunate that you can't hear. Will I have to go see these, or has the necessity of knowing how they screw Tolkien's story up, so that I can better watch out for the distortions entering future scholarship, reached the point of diminishing returns?
5a. The article on this says that "The news that Jackson, Boyens and Walsh will be involved in the new film franchise is sure to calm any concerns from loyal fans." Loyal fans of what? Certainly not of Tolkien. Loyal fans of the Lord of the Rings movies, the ones who came up to me after the Hobbit movies came out and said "Now we understand what you were complaining about," are not going to be reassured either, because that trio were also responsible for the Hobbit disasters.
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
evaluating musical genres
The Post polled people on their opinions of various genres of music. The choices were Love it, Like it, Not sure, Dislike it, Hate it. It might have been easier if the choices were Love it or Leave it, but whatever.
It may be perilous for me to attempt my ratings, as several of these categories I have only the most tenuous acquaintance with. So my evaluations may reflect ignorance and rampant stereotyping, but here goes:
Classic rock. This was the most-loved genre among respondents, so the accompanying article had the most to say about it. It seemed to exemplify this genre as Aerosmith and the Eagles, two bands I have little use for. I like the Beatles, but the article defined classic rock as beginning with Sgt. Pepper, which is close to the end of my favorite Beatles segment, what I'd call "mid-period Beatles." So my full answer on this genre is "mixed, mostly nah," so I'll put Dislike it.
Pop. I'm not sure what typifies this category, though I'm sure it isn't the wailing guitars of classic rock. I like some pop songs, to be sure, though mostly ones now pretty old. I'd have to put Not sure.
R&B. Uh, I don't think so. I count myself fortunate that I even know what those initials stand for. Dislike it.
Blues. "I'm gonna sing a line three times / I'm gonna sing a line three times / I'm gonna sing a line three times / Then I'm gonna sing another line that doesn't rhyme with it." Really annoying music. Hate it.
Country. I've heard some that's OK, even enjoyable, but mostly it irritates me because it twangs. I'll have to say Dislike it.
Classical. This is about 70% of my listening. Unfortunately they don't separate out opera, which to my ears is an entirely separate genre. Love it.
Jazz. Various friends have tried to sell me on jazz, but 99% of it does absolutely nothing for me. With this one I'm sure of my opinion, because I've spent hours on end listening to it on the sound systems of dusty old used book stores, where it is the musical genre of choice, and I've remained completely unmoved. Dislike it.
Soul/funk. More annoying than blues. Hate it.
Hard rock/metal. No, no. If this comes on, I have to leave the room. Is there a category stronger than Hate it?
Reggae. I don't like it, but it can be fun to listen to in small doses. In-between ranking, hence Not sure.
Gospel/choir. Pretty much the same, except "fun" isn't the word: maybe "moving." Not sure.
Dance/electronic. That term could mean a lot of things, but I think what it's intended to mean is more stuff for which I have to leave the room. Hate it.
Folk. This can be narrowly defined (the song has to have been found by a credited collector in the dusky woods in the dark of night) or broadly defined (any singer and/or songwriter with an acoustic guitar). Broadly, it's another 20%-25% of my listening; either way, it's the other category for which I'd say I Love it.
Rap/hip-hop. I really only know this from having it blasted at me from the speakers of cars stopped next to mine at red lights, but based on that, may I say that I don't even think this is music, without being taken as criticizing it? It's a very interesting form of organized sound, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to be, it just isn't music. But I don't really want to listen to it. Dislike it.
Latin. "Music from Latin America" is a very broad category. I suspect that what's meant by the generic term "Latin" is the kind of music associated indelibly in my mind with Mexican restaurants. Because I hardly ever hear it anywhere else. Dislike it.
Alternative/indie. I'm not exactly sure what this is, but it might include some of what would be scooped up under a sufficiently broad definition of "folk." But I'm Not sure.
Contemporary Christian. Musically this is pleasant enough to listen to, but there's a limit to how much I can take of lyrics extolling Gee-zus, and that limit is very low. Dislike it.
Punk rock. This was coming in when I was in college, and all I could think was "Why?" Hate it.
New age. If you're cool, you hate this, but I'm not cool. Like it.
World music. More of the same. Like it.
Besides leaving out opera, they've left out the related but quite distinct category which occupies most of the other 5% or so of my voluntary listening: musical theater. Rodgers and Hammerstein? Sondheim? You've heard of them? Where would they go in the above list? (I'd put Gilbert and Sullivan here too, because if you class their works as operas, they'd have all of my five favorites.) And I'm sure you can think of other genres of music not included here.
Anyway, of the 20 genres listed here, I love 2, like 2, not sure about 4, dislike 7, and hate 5, so my negative genres outweigh my positive ones 3 to 1, which is about what I'd have thought.
It may be perilous for me to attempt my ratings, as several of these categories I have only the most tenuous acquaintance with. So my evaluations may reflect ignorance and rampant stereotyping, but here goes:
Classic rock. This was the most-loved genre among respondents, so the accompanying article had the most to say about it. It seemed to exemplify this genre as Aerosmith and the Eagles, two bands I have little use for. I like the Beatles, but the article defined classic rock as beginning with Sgt. Pepper, which is close to the end of my favorite Beatles segment, what I'd call "mid-period Beatles." So my full answer on this genre is "mixed, mostly nah," so I'll put Dislike it.
Pop. I'm not sure what typifies this category, though I'm sure it isn't the wailing guitars of classic rock. I like some pop songs, to be sure, though mostly ones now pretty old. I'd have to put Not sure.
R&B. Uh, I don't think so. I count myself fortunate that I even know what those initials stand for. Dislike it.
Blues. "I'm gonna sing a line three times / I'm gonna sing a line three times / I'm gonna sing a line three times / Then I'm gonna sing another line that doesn't rhyme with it." Really annoying music. Hate it.
Country. I've heard some that's OK, even enjoyable, but mostly it irritates me because it twangs. I'll have to say Dislike it.
Classical. This is about 70% of my listening. Unfortunately they don't separate out opera, which to my ears is an entirely separate genre. Love it.
Jazz. Various friends have tried to sell me on jazz, but 99% of it does absolutely nothing for me. With this one I'm sure of my opinion, because I've spent hours on end listening to it on the sound systems of dusty old used book stores, where it is the musical genre of choice, and I've remained completely unmoved. Dislike it.
Soul/funk. More annoying than blues. Hate it.
Hard rock/metal. No, no. If this comes on, I have to leave the room. Is there a category stronger than Hate it?
Reggae. I don't like it, but it can be fun to listen to in small doses. In-between ranking, hence Not sure.
Gospel/choir. Pretty much the same, except "fun" isn't the word: maybe "moving." Not sure.
Dance/electronic. That term could mean a lot of things, but I think what it's intended to mean is more stuff for which I have to leave the room. Hate it.
Folk. This can be narrowly defined (the song has to have been found by a credited collector in the dusky woods in the dark of night) or broadly defined (any singer and/or songwriter with an acoustic guitar). Broadly, it's another 20%-25% of my listening; either way, it's the other category for which I'd say I Love it.
Rap/hip-hop. I really only know this from having it blasted at me from the speakers of cars stopped next to mine at red lights, but based on that, may I say that I don't even think this is music, without being taken as criticizing it? It's a very interesting form of organized sound, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to be, it just isn't music. But I don't really want to listen to it. Dislike it.
Latin. "Music from Latin America" is a very broad category. I suspect that what's meant by the generic term "Latin" is the kind of music associated indelibly in my mind with Mexican restaurants. Because I hardly ever hear it anywhere else. Dislike it.
Alternative/indie. I'm not exactly sure what this is, but it might include some of what would be scooped up under a sufficiently broad definition of "folk." But I'm Not sure.
Contemporary Christian. Musically this is pleasant enough to listen to, but there's a limit to how much I can take of lyrics extolling Gee-zus, and that limit is very low. Dislike it.
Punk rock. This was coming in when I was in college, and all I could think was "Why?" Hate it.
New age. If you're cool, you hate this, but I'm not cool. Like it.
World music. More of the same. Like it.
Besides leaving out opera, they've left out the related but quite distinct category which occupies most of the other 5% or so of my voluntary listening: musical theater. Rodgers and Hammerstein? Sondheim? You've heard of them? Where would they go in the above list? (I'd put Gilbert and Sullivan here too, because if you class their works as operas, they'd have all of my five favorites.) And I'm sure you can think of other genres of music not included here.
Anyway, of the 20 genres listed here, I love 2, like 2, not sure about 4, dislike 7, and hate 5, so my negative genres outweigh my positive ones 3 to 1, which is about what I'd have thought.
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
200 x 9
Today is not only the birthday anniversaries of both Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but this very day is also the bicentennial of the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1824.
Like other famous Beethoven premieres, it was probably a pretty badly under-rehearsed performance in uncomfortable conditions, but it was a great occasion anyway.
The Ninth stands out among Beethoven's symphonies - it's long, monumental in scale, and it has that huge choral finale, something almost (not quite) unprecedented in symphonies, certainly in Beethoven's - but it's not always appreciated how distinctive the Ninth is.
The length. It had been the Eroica which was the path-breaker here, nearly twice as long as any symphony ever previously written, but none of its successors, however monumental (the Fifth!) attempted to outdo it in length. Until the Ninth, which was far longer still - and not outdone by anybody else in symphonic form for some 70 years to come.
The Ninth was the first symphony Beethoven had written in 12 years. He'd written all the other eight during the previous 12 years. Then, nothing. (Lots of other stuff - his profound last piano sonatas among them - but no symphonies.) So for a long time, Beethoven was the composer of eight symphonies. That was it. Then, big surprise, a Ninth, an epic unlike anything he'd done before.
This upcoming season, San Francisco Opera is putting on a performance of the Ninth in the opera house. Probably in lieu of another opera production, since it's a lot less expensive (no sets, no costumes, no acting). This isn't unprecedented: the Ninth was the only music not by himself that Wagner allowed at Bayreuth, considering it the seed of his own work. The Opera is permitting the Ninth as a choice for a subscription package, and since there's little else on their schedule I want to see, I'd have taken it, except that there's only one performance and I have a date conflict.
So, no live Ninth for me this year, though I've certainly heard it often enough in the past, most recently in a two-piano arrangement, but before that, last fall in one of MTT's final concerts with the SFS. I'll take that.
Like other famous Beethoven premieres, it was probably a pretty badly under-rehearsed performance in uncomfortable conditions, but it was a great occasion anyway.
The Ninth stands out among Beethoven's symphonies - it's long, monumental in scale, and it has that huge choral finale, something almost (not quite) unprecedented in symphonies, certainly in Beethoven's - but it's not always appreciated how distinctive the Ninth is.
The length. It had been the Eroica which was the path-breaker here, nearly twice as long as any symphony ever previously written, but none of its successors, however monumental (the Fifth!) attempted to outdo it in length. Until the Ninth, which was far longer still - and not outdone by anybody else in symphonic form for some 70 years to come.
The Ninth was the first symphony Beethoven had written in 12 years. He'd written all the other eight during the previous 12 years. Then, nothing. (Lots of other stuff - his profound last piano sonatas among them - but no symphonies.) So for a long time, Beethoven was the composer of eight symphonies. That was it. Then, big surprise, a Ninth, an epic unlike anything he'd done before.
This upcoming season, San Francisco Opera is putting on a performance of the Ninth in the opera house. Probably in lieu of another opera production, since it's a lot less expensive (no sets, no costumes, no acting). This isn't unprecedented: the Ninth was the only music not by himself that Wagner allowed at Bayreuth, considering it the seed of his own work. The Opera is permitting the Ninth as a choice for a subscription package, and since there's little else on their schedule I want to see, I'd have taken it, except that there's only one performance and I have a date conflict.
So, no live Ninth for me this year, though I've certainly heard it often enough in the past, most recently in a two-piano arrangement, but before that, last fall in one of MTT's final concerts with the SFS. I'll take that.
Monday, May 6, 2024
why a pause?
I've never seen this discussed or explained, but I see it all the time. (I don't watch tv news programs, but I see this on clips, typically embedded in online news articles.)
Whenever a news broadcaster is interviewing a person who is not in the same room, a pause of a couple seconds ensues every time the interviewer finishes a question or a comment needing reply, before the guest reacts and starts to respond. It's as if they're not receiving the interviewer feed at the same time the viewer is.
Why is that? I suspect that the showing of the feed with the guest in it is being delayed for censorship purposes, so that someone can have their finger on the bleep-out button in case the guest says something naughty that should not be broadcast. But I don't know if that's the reason.
Whenever a news broadcaster is interviewing a person who is not in the same room, a pause of a couple seconds ensues every time the interviewer finishes a question or a comment needing reply, before the guest reacts and starts to respond. It's as if they're not receiving the interviewer feed at the same time the viewer is.
Why is that? I suspect that the showing of the feed with the guest in it is being delayed for censorship purposes, so that someone can have their finger on the bleep-out button in case the guest says something naughty that should not be broadcast. But I don't know if that's the reason.
Sunday, May 5, 2024
yes, a theatrical review
When B. and I went to New York in 2000 and wanted to see a musical on Broadway, we wound up at a revival production of The Music Man. (The Producers hadn't opened yet.) Yesterday we went to see a local production of The Music Man. It was just about as good as the one on Broadway.
The costumes and set designs were outstanding and very evocative of the period at which the story is set. (So was the recorded music during intermission, which was Babes in Toyland.) Marian had a very strong voice and a firm rather than feisty personality. Harold Hill was no Robert Preston, but who else on earth is? He was very good anyway and sold that charm well.
But the real stars of the show were the ensemble. The large number of children, both teens and pre-, were outstanding, especially in the enthusiasm of their movements, dancing and otherwise. The adult ensemble shone most brightly in their singing. The "Pick-a-little/Goodnight Ladies" number jumped crisply and was the highlight of the show.
It was the chipper enthusiasm with which everything was done which really sold this show. Even those awkward moments when the lights were cut and a large cast had to clear the stage for the next scene didn't slow this baby down.
Only problem was that the orchestra was too loud. It's The Music Man, so they had 3 trumpets and 4 trombones, yeeks.
It's playing through next weekend (Friday-Sunday), so anyone near Palo Alto with a taste for this stuff should run and see it immediately. Tickets here.
The costumes and set designs were outstanding and very evocative of the period at which the story is set. (So was the recorded music during intermission, which was Babes in Toyland.) Marian had a very strong voice and a firm rather than feisty personality. Harold Hill was no Robert Preston, but who else on earth is? He was very good anyway and sold that charm well.
But the real stars of the show were the ensemble. The large number of children, both teens and pre-, were outstanding, especially in the enthusiasm of their movements, dancing and otherwise. The adult ensemble shone most brightly in their singing. The "Pick-a-little/Goodnight Ladies" number jumped crisply and was the highlight of the show.
It was the chipper enthusiasm with which everything was done which really sold this show. Even those awkward moments when the lights were cut and a large cast had to clear the stage for the next scene didn't slow this baby down.
Only problem was that the orchestra was too loud. It's The Music Man, so they had 3 trumpets and 4 trombones, yeeks.
It's playing through next weekend (Friday-Sunday), so anyone near Palo Alto with a taste for this stuff should run and see it immediately. Tickets here.
Saturday, May 4, 2024
not an anniversary
Anybody inclined to call this Star Wars Day because May the Fourth be with you - I've seen that joke twice already this morning and it's only 10 AM - should remember that the actual anniversary of the release of the first movie is May 25.
Its Wikipedia article says that "It was released in a small number of theaters ... and quickly became a surprise blockbuster hit." It was a small number of theaters to show it on the biggest screens available - that was how you got the impact of the opening scene with the Imperial ship coming overhead on and on and on. And that it was a hit was no surprise in the SF community, which had been talking about it for months and which hardly could have been more than a small percentage of the people who lined up at those few theaters to see it on opening day.
I had been rather skeptical - a neo-space opera didn't sound like my kind of movie - but I was convinced to go see it by a big writeup in the previous week's Time magazine (hardly the mark of a movie whose hit status was going to come as a surprise), which argued that it was less an adventure story than a fun story. All right, I'll go see a fun movie.
And I came out thinking, "Hmm, not bad." Had the world been of my taste, the movie would have amused inoffensively and been forgotten.
And there certainly would have been no sequels. I'm going to put aside the increasingly dismayed feelings I had upon watching each of its successors until I quit doing so after "Phantom Menace" and also the increasingly dismayed feelings I had on rewatching the first two movies, which are the only ones tolerable enough that I ever have rewatched them, and merely pass on my firm conviction, reinforced every time I do watch them, that Darth Vader is NOT Luke's father. I am absolutely convinced, and what I've read about the writing of the scripts confirms this, that that equation was never intended or even thought of until the final scene to "Empire" was added, because nothing else said about either Vader or Anakin in either movie makes sense unless they're different people. This goes far beyond what Obi-Wan says to Luke about how Vader killed Anakin. This is an example of a "surprise" story in which the eventual "true" explanation makes less sense than the "false" ones discarded along the way.
(It's not the only example of this. Similarly, Norman Bates isn't dressing up as his mother. The movie doesn't make any sense if he is.)
By the way, "Darth" isn't the title of a Sith Lord in the first movie. It's Vader's given name. Obi-Wan uses it that way.
If I'm going to have a Star Wars mythology, I prefer the original.
Its Wikipedia article says that "It was released in a small number of theaters ... and quickly became a surprise blockbuster hit." It was a small number of theaters to show it on the biggest screens available - that was how you got the impact of the opening scene with the Imperial ship coming overhead on and on and on. And that it was a hit was no surprise in the SF community, which had been talking about it for months and which hardly could have been more than a small percentage of the people who lined up at those few theaters to see it on opening day.
I had been rather skeptical - a neo-space opera didn't sound like my kind of movie - but I was convinced to go see it by a big writeup in the previous week's Time magazine (hardly the mark of a movie whose hit status was going to come as a surprise), which argued that it was less an adventure story than a fun story. All right, I'll go see a fun movie.
And I came out thinking, "Hmm, not bad." Had the world been of my taste, the movie would have amused inoffensively and been forgotten.
And there certainly would have been no sequels. I'm going to put aside the increasingly dismayed feelings I had upon watching each of its successors until I quit doing so after "Phantom Menace" and also the increasingly dismayed feelings I had on rewatching the first two movies, which are the only ones tolerable enough that I ever have rewatched them, and merely pass on my firm conviction, reinforced every time I do watch them, that Darth Vader is NOT Luke's father. I am absolutely convinced, and what I've read about the writing of the scripts confirms this, that that equation was never intended or even thought of until the final scene to "Empire" was added, because nothing else said about either Vader or Anakin in either movie makes sense unless they're different people. This goes far beyond what Obi-Wan says to Luke about how Vader killed Anakin. This is an example of a "surprise" story in which the eventual "true" explanation makes less sense than the "false" ones discarded along the way.
(It's not the only example of this. Similarly, Norman Bates isn't dressing up as his mother. The movie doesn't make any sense if he is.)
By the way, "Darth" isn't the title of a Sith Lord in the first movie. It's Vader's given name. Obi-Wan uses it that way.
If I'm going to have a Star Wars mythology, I prefer the original.
Thursday, May 2, 2024
not a theatrical review
The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder
I'd seen The Matchmaker and Our Town, I thought I'd go see a local production of this. What little I'd read about it suggested this play was very weird, which is usually a plus in my book. I carefully avoided reading anything else about the play, or the text itself, so that my reactions would be fresh. A couple of very small-local reviews (forwarded in e-mail by the theater) were enthusiastic, so I was hopeful.
The ticket info said it would be 3 hours long and there'd be only one intermission. The intermission came one hour in. I decided I didn't want to sit through another two hours of this, and just left. If anybody from the theater had accosted me and asked why I was leaving, I'd have rolled my eyes and said, "If you have to ask ..." But you, lucky people, weren't there, so I'll try to explain it.
A bit was the acting. The actors tried very hard. The trouble was that you could see them trying. They didn't inhabit the characters, they spoke the lines with over-earnest emotion.
But it was mostly the script. It was weird, but it wasn't coherently weird. The author hits the audience over the head with what would have been clever allusions if they'd been a bit more subtly introduced. The characters keep saying the same things over and over again, as if they didn't think anybody else was paying any attention, and they might have been right. On top of which they also keep changing their minds, back and forth, in a vertiginous manner that seems overgenerated by any stimuli. My interest in the characters rapidly descended below zero.
It might have been funny - at times - without all these problems. After I got home I read the play's Wikipedia article. Had I known it was based on or inspired by Finnegans Wake, I would never have gone at all.
I'd seen The Matchmaker and Our Town, I thought I'd go see a local production of this. What little I'd read about it suggested this play was very weird, which is usually a plus in my book. I carefully avoided reading anything else about the play, or the text itself, so that my reactions would be fresh. A couple of very small-local reviews (forwarded in e-mail by the theater) were enthusiastic, so I was hopeful.
The ticket info said it would be 3 hours long and there'd be only one intermission. The intermission came one hour in. I decided I didn't want to sit through another two hours of this, and just left. If anybody from the theater had accosted me and asked why I was leaving, I'd have rolled my eyes and said, "If you have to ask ..." But you, lucky people, weren't there, so I'll try to explain it.
A bit was the acting. The actors tried very hard. The trouble was that you could see them trying. They didn't inhabit the characters, they spoke the lines with over-earnest emotion.
But it was mostly the script. It was weird, but it wasn't coherently weird. The author hits the audience over the head with what would have been clever allusions if they'd been a bit more subtly introduced. The characters keep saying the same things over and over again, as if they didn't think anybody else was paying any attention, and they might have been right. On top of which they also keep changing their minds, back and forth, in a vertiginous manner that seems overgenerated by any stimuli. My interest in the characters rapidly descended below zero.
It might have been funny - at times - without all these problems. After I got home I read the play's Wikipedia article. Had I known it was based on or inspired by Finnegans Wake, I would never have gone at all.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Kosman speaks
I passed on the news that Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, is retiring after 30 years as the paper's chief (and mostly only) classical critic, and that he'd be giving a public conversation next week. That was Tuesday, and I went.
The venue was terrible. It was the stuffy, tiny back room of a bar in the Mission district, jammed with couches and folding chairs so that it was almost impossible to get past anybody. Sitting there was uncomfortable and cramped.
But the talk, essentially an interview with an audience question period, was very interesting. Some of the highlights:
The venue was terrible. It was the stuffy, tiny back room of a bar in the Mission district, jammed with couches and folding chairs so that it was almost impossible to get past anybody. Sitting there was uncomfortable and cramped.
But the talk, essentially an interview with an audience question period, was very interesting. Some of the highlights:
- Kosman became a critic when he got to university (Yale, I think he said) and found a classical review in the student paper. I can do that, he thought, and volunteered. It was a way to have "a career in music without [having] any particular musical talent."
- When he arrived at the Chronicle in 1988, there were three full-time critics. Every Monday they'd have a meeting and the chief critic, Robert Commanday, would hand out assignments for the week. (I've read of other papers working the same way.) Now he's the only critic, and outlined his priorities for deciding what to cover: A-list performers (the SF Symphony, SF Opera, visiting big names), and otherwise what's interesting: new artists, unusual repertoire.
- He enjoys his work - the point of doing this, he said, is not so much being paid as to get the free tickets - but it's a job. When he was single he learned not to invite dates to accompany him to concerts he was reviewing. "Don't bring a date to your job."
- Try to write for a wide variety of audience, both specialists and the curious general reader. Don't write down to people, and don't write about artists you dislike: it doesn't do anybody any good. (I've noted that Kosman doesn't apply that stricture to works he dislikes.) He doesn't like to take notes: it leads to a boring play-by-play description of the concert. (I don't find it so.) Don't be brutal about bad performances (I agree): as an artist he'd criticized once told him, you can be both honest and a mensch. Try to keep a large vocabulary: "go to the well for words." The artistic possibilities are infinite.
- The nicest performer he's ever met? Yo-Yo Ma. His best work? The recent commentary on the background to Salonen's resignation from SFS. (I agree.) His worst mistake? Praising David Helfgott's Rachmaninoff recording under the spell of the movie Shine. Best concert he ever heard? Victoria de los Ángeles emerging from retirement at 72 as a substitute performer for a recital with SFS. He'd figured her voice would be gone, but the event was "transfixing, mesmerizing." Best anecdote? The time the SFS marketing exec invited him to lunch and slid over a piece of paper with the name of the next music director on the other side. According to the marketing guy, Kosman "jumped out of his seat" when he saw it was Salonen, because Salonen had told Kosman personally that he wasn't interested in the job, and he was the only plausible candidate whom Kosman would find exciting. Also, the time Michael Tilson Thomas - whom Kosman calls a superb raconteur - told Kosman about visiting the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who in turn told MTT about visiting the French composer Olivier Messiaen. So there's MTT imitating Takemitsu imitating Messiaen, and Kosman said he couldn't possibly imitate that himself.
- Asked about musical controversies in general, Kosman's immediate response was "Yuja Wang can wear whatever she wants." She's one of the great artistic geniuses of our day, he says.
- The future of SFS? He wonders if it and the Opera aren't "punching above their weight." It's rare for an urban area this small to have such world-class institutions (what about Cleveland? I wondered), and guesses it may be inevitable that they'll go down a bit in prestige.
- The future of reviewing? Moving online has changed things a lot: you're going for clicks, and Kosman found that an interview he did with Igor Levit about the rare Busoni Piano Concerto, in which Levit described it as the most challenging piece he's ever performed, got more hits than anything else he'd written when the paper used that comment as the headline without identifying the work: people clicked on the article to find out what it was.
- But what will happen at the Chronicle after he's gone? He has no way of knowing. But at this point, a woman in the audience, apparently Kosman's editor, piped up to say that they'll cover the scene as best as they're able, whatever that means, and that they're looking for freelancers. (Will I try to sign up? Probably not. I have two venues that I'm happy with, and that's enough.)
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
end of the St. Lawrence
An announcement appeared in my e-mail and on the St. Lawrence String Quartet website:
I'll miss the group, but really the group was lost when Nuttall died, and everything since then has been a quiet afterlife. Anything that follows will be more of the same.
After a one year hiatus following the death of founding violinist Geoff Nuttall, the members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ) today announced that 2023-24 will be the ensemble’s final season. They are continuing, however, to make their lives at Stanford University, where the SLSQ has been in residence since 1998 —performing, teaching, directing Stanford’s chamber music program, and producing their annual Chamber Music Seminar, in addition to pursuing other musical projects.Well, there's more to the press release than that, but I guess that means they will no longer be giving concerts under the St. Lawrence name, with the three of them plus various guest musicians. I've been going to the public concerts of the Chamber Music Seminar, at which the St. Lawrence musicians host but usually do not perform. I've heard solo recitals by the cellist, but I haven't heard the others without a St. Lawrence label. So I don't know what they're going to do in place of what they have been.
I'll miss the group, but really the group was lost when Nuttall died, and everything since then has been a quiet afterlife. Anything that follows will be more of the same.
Sunday, April 28, 2024
concert review: California Bach Society
A friend had a ticket to this concert that they couldn't use, so passed it on to me. I'm not normally much of a consumer of Baroque choral music, but I don't dislike it by any means, so I was happy to go. And it turned out to be a good concert. A tiny round church in Palo Alto resembling a concrete flying saucer but with excellent acoustics, and a small choir with an impressive sound. That one of the altos is an old fannish friend is only a plus. But I was especially taken with the tenors, often a choir's weak link but powerfully strong here despite there being only five of them. And the whole directed by Paul Flight, who has a very good name hereabouts for directing early vocal music.
The program contained an early motet by Bach, BWV 228, plus similar pieces by Telemann and some other North German composers older than Telemann or Bach: Buxtehude and two I wasn't familiar with, Franz Tunder and Johann Schop. Perhaps I ought to have known of Schop, since according to this he wrote the melody that Bach used for "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." All the pieces sounded lovely, even in German, though a couple had severely Lutheran lyrics. Flight mentioned that the Telemann, an early piece titled "Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein reines Herz" (create in me, God, a clean heart), doesn't sound much like the Telemann we normally hear. I don't know Telemann's choral music enough to tell, but the instrumental parts (the chorus was accompanied by six string players and a positive organ) sure sounded like Telemann to me. But the best work was Buxtehude's "Jesu, meines Lebens Leben" (Jesus, life of my life), with its creative use of the individual sections of the chorus.
Despite the group's name and this program, they don't always sing Baroque. Next season has four concerts, one German Baroque and one French Baroque, an Eastern European Christmas program, and a survey of British choral music "from Tallis to Tavener" which covers over 400 years. That one in particular interests me and I'll probably be back. Singing this good deserves patronage.
The program contained an early motet by Bach, BWV 228, plus similar pieces by Telemann and some other North German composers older than Telemann or Bach: Buxtehude and two I wasn't familiar with, Franz Tunder and Johann Schop. Perhaps I ought to have known of Schop, since according to this he wrote the melody that Bach used for "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." All the pieces sounded lovely, even in German, though a couple had severely Lutheran lyrics. Flight mentioned that the Telemann, an early piece titled "Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein reines Herz" (create in me, God, a clean heart), doesn't sound much like the Telemann we normally hear. I don't know Telemann's choral music enough to tell, but the instrumental parts (the chorus was accompanied by six string players and a positive organ) sure sounded like Telemann to me. But the best work was Buxtehude's "Jesu, meines Lebens Leben" (Jesus, life of my life), with its creative use of the individual sections of the chorus.
Despite the group's name and this program, they don't always sing Baroque. Next season has four concerts, one German Baroque and one French Baroque, an Eastern European Christmas program, and a survey of British choral music "from Tallis to Tavener" which covers over 400 years. That one in particular interests me and I'll probably be back. Singing this good deserves patronage.
Saturday, April 27, 2024
concert review and petition: San Francisco Symphony
Last week, I heard Vaughan Williams's Third Symphony. This week, it was Prokofiev's Third Symphony: equally obscure and rarely-heard, dating from the same period (1920s), but otherwise totally different: violent, stressful, startling, creepy, weird. But, being Prokofiev, it is also strangely lyrical, even beautiful in its ugliness, which is why I find it so much more appealing than equally violent, stressful, etc. works by the likes of Bartok or Stravinsky.
Under guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno (Spanish, like Philip II works mostly in the Low Countries but is also MD in Toronto), the orchestra took it with ferocity and brilliant color. This was a deserving performance which ought to put this piece on the same shelf with the better-known Fifth.
Also on this program, SFS principal violist Jonathan Vinocour was soloist in William Walton's Viola Concerto, which also dates from the same period. The viola is not a very carrying instrument anyway, not when there's only one of it (the whole SFS viola section handled the opening of Prokofiev's slow movement very nicely), and it had a hard time being heard over the loud and clangorous orchestration.
Nevertheless the audience seemed to enjoy it. There weren't many people there, but those who were applauded after each movement of both works, a rather unusual response.
Before the concert, musicians from the orchestra were standing outside, passing out flyers asking audience members to sign their petition online. The petition was linked to only with a QR code, which is useless to me, but I was able to find the petition through searching, it's here.
The petition is to "urge the Board of Governors to do everything in their power to retain Esa-Pekka Salonen as Music Director and reverse planned cuts to programming, touring, and education." I was surprised; I told the musician I was speaking with, a first violinist, that I'd thought Salonen's resignation was definite. She said no, if the cuts that caused him to resign - cuts to the very programs with which they had enticed him to join in the first place - were reversed, he'd stay.
They're also worried that this induced departure, and the pandemic-era musician salary cuts which (unlike at other ensembles) haven't been reversed, will make it hard to attract top players, and the orchestra's quality will suffer. The institution has the funds for this, so what is the problem?
I said I agree. I said there are good orchestras where I live, but I travel 45 miles to hear the SFS because it is so superb. I said I know my history and the disastrous decline in quality after Pierre Monteux retired in 1952, which still hadn't been recovered from when I started going to concerts in 1970. But the last three - four, actually - MDs have been titanic in their quest to rebuild the orchestra, which has been at top quality for over three decades now. It would a shame for that to be lost.
So I'm signing.
Under guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno (Spanish, like Philip II works mostly in the Low Countries but is also MD in Toronto), the orchestra took it with ferocity and brilliant color. This was a deserving performance which ought to put this piece on the same shelf with the better-known Fifth.
Also on this program, SFS principal violist Jonathan Vinocour was soloist in William Walton's Viola Concerto, which also dates from the same period. The viola is not a very carrying instrument anyway, not when there's only one of it (the whole SFS viola section handled the opening of Prokofiev's slow movement very nicely), and it had a hard time being heard over the loud and clangorous orchestration.
Nevertheless the audience seemed to enjoy it. There weren't many people there, but those who were applauded after each movement of both works, a rather unusual response.
Before the concert, musicians from the orchestra were standing outside, passing out flyers asking audience members to sign their petition online. The petition was linked to only with a QR code, which is useless to me, but I was able to find the petition through searching, it's here.
The petition is to "urge the Board of Governors to do everything in their power to retain Esa-Pekka Salonen as Music Director and reverse planned cuts to programming, touring, and education." I was surprised; I told the musician I was speaking with, a first violinist, that I'd thought Salonen's resignation was definite. She said no, if the cuts that caused him to resign - cuts to the very programs with which they had enticed him to join in the first place - were reversed, he'd stay.
They're also worried that this induced departure, and the pandemic-era musician salary cuts which (unlike at other ensembles) haven't been reversed, will make it hard to attract top players, and the orchestra's quality will suffer. The institution has the funds for this, so what is the problem?
I said I agree. I said there are good orchestras where I live, but I travel 45 miles to hear the SFS because it is so superb. I said I know my history and the disastrous decline in quality after Pierre Monteux retired in 1952, which still hadn't been recovered from when I started going to concerts in 1970. But the last three - four, actually - MDs have been titanic in their quest to rebuild the orchestra, which has been at top quality for over three decades now. It would a shame for that to be lost.
So I'm signing.
Friday, April 26, 2024
concert review: Dover Quartet and Leif Ove Andsnes
I almost didn't get to this concert. My plan for Thursday had been to come back from going out to lunch at about 12.30, which would give me time to rest up and complete a few errands, like submitting the week's grocery order online, before driving up to the City at about 2 in time to attend a free student chamber recital at the Conservatory at 4, then have dinner and walk to the nearby Herbst where the evening concert would be.
But then when I was out for lunch, my car's engine started to overheat. The dealer where I get my regular servicing done was 18 miles away, much too far to take with an overheated engine. So I nursed the car a few blocks to an industrial zone where I hoped I'd find an auto repair shop. I did, but they doubted they'd get to my car before Monday (they're closed on weekends). Fortunately the signup didn't take very long, and they were able to get Enterprise to come and pick me up and take me to their rental lot, so I got home and got that stuff done, but at the price of missing the Conservatory recital, and was able to leave by 4, which is my usual time for an evening trip to the City.
So what was there was not quite the Dover Quartet I knew. Since I last heard them, their violist has left and they've gotten a new one - like the rest, she's a Curtis graduate, but is a few years older than the others, who were all classmates. And their first violinist was out sick, so they borrowed the one from the Escher Quartet, whose grittier sound didn't blend ideally with the Dover's smoother texture, but there were no technical difficulties: these players are all far too professionally skilled for that.
I've heard the Brahms piano quintet played slowly with solemn weight, and I think it works better that way, but there's always room for a fiery speed demon of a performance if it's good enough, and this one certainly was, ending with a dazzle. The Dohnanyi Second Quintet, which I've heard at Menlo, the players took more slowly and cautiously, putting the emphasis on the slow sections rather than the sprightly opening. It certainly impressed the fellow I was chatting with at the bus stop after the concert, to whom it was new. Dohanyi was a conservative composer in a revolutionary age, so he tends to get neglected. We then shifted to the winnowing process which filters out the new music that deserves to be forgotten, and to point out how much of that there is, he cited Sturgeon's Law, except that he attributed it to Fred Pohl. I didn't say anything about that, or even indicate that I already knew that principle, but - Fred Pohl. Interesting.
But then when I was out for lunch, my car's engine started to overheat. The dealer where I get my regular servicing done was 18 miles away, much too far to take with an overheated engine. So I nursed the car a few blocks to an industrial zone where I hoped I'd find an auto repair shop. I did, but they doubted they'd get to my car before Monday (they're closed on weekends). Fortunately the signup didn't take very long, and they were able to get Enterprise to come and pick me up and take me to their rental lot, so I got home and got that stuff done, but at the price of missing the Conservatory recital, and was able to leave by 4, which is my usual time for an evening trip to the City.
So what was there was not quite the Dover Quartet I knew. Since I last heard them, their violist has left and they've gotten a new one - like the rest, she's a Curtis graduate, but is a few years older than the others, who were all classmates. And their first violinist was out sick, so they borrowed the one from the Escher Quartet, whose grittier sound didn't blend ideally with the Dover's smoother texture, but there were no technical difficulties: these players are all far too professionally skilled for that.
I've heard the Brahms piano quintet played slowly with solemn weight, and I think it works better that way, but there's always room for a fiery speed demon of a performance if it's good enough, and this one certainly was, ending with a dazzle. The Dohnanyi Second Quintet, which I've heard at Menlo, the players took more slowly and cautiously, putting the emphasis on the slow sections rather than the sprightly opening. It certainly impressed the fellow I was chatting with at the bus stop after the concert, to whom it was new. Dohanyi was a conservative composer in a revolutionary age, so he tends to get neglected. We then shifted to the winnowing process which filters out the new music that deserves to be forgotten, and to point out how much of that there is, he cited Sturgeon's Law, except that he attributed it to Fred Pohl. I didn't say anything about that, or even indicate that I already knew that principle, but - Fred Pohl. Interesting.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
concert review: Monterey Symphony
It takes at least an hour and a half, when there's no traffic (which is rarely the case) to drive from here to Carmel, where the Monterey Symphony plays, and it feels farther away than that. So it's not surprising that I'd only gone once, about 20 years ago, because they were playing Gluck's haunting Iphigénie en Aulide Overture. (Here, this is the recording I discovered in my university music department's record library in my student days, and came back and listened to every day for weeks.)
On the same program, they did pretty well with Mendelssohn's "Reformation" Symphony, a work needing a lot of doing well to be successful at all, but made a total hash out of Bruckner's Te Deum.
So, not a consistent orchestra. But it's been 20 years since then, most of the local professional orchestras have improved greatly over that time, and Monterey has acquired a new music director a couple years ago. So I was primed as heck to get to a concert including a work I'd much like to hear but which is never done, Ralph Vaughan Williams's A Pastoral Symphony, also known as his Third. RVW's nine symphonies don't often make it to US concert halls, but I've managed to hear five others live over the years, though I had to go to London to catch one of them. But the Pastoral? Not a chance. Its title, and its consisting of four movements, "all of them slow" (as the composer quipped, accurately enough), have given it a reputation of being utterly static.
But it isn't. Much of it is tough, even wiry, and it works even better if you hear it as what it really is, not a placid "cowpat school" product, but a memorial to the soldiers who died in the pastoral fields of France in WW1. Though already in his 40s, RVW had served there as a medical aide, driving horse-drawn ambulance wagons.
And then I mentioned to my editor that I was going to this, in place of some other concert he suggested that I cover, so he put this on my schedule instead, and here's the review. I wasn't expecting how much music director Jayce Ogren would emphasize the WW1 background of this work, to the extent of having war scenes projected on the back wall during it, and framing the entire concert as a contemplative, meditative event.
It worked very well, and the performance of the Pastoral gave much satisfaction. RVW's distinct orchestral sound came through consistently, and the whole symphony was an opportunity to bask in it.
And the rest of the concert was good too. Britten's Serenade song cycle was much more incisive than the last time I heard it; Pärt's Cantus came off with an effective production of its ghostly ending; and Adolphus Hailstork is always a reliable workaday composer.
I went to the Sunday matinee performance, a tricky proposition as there's no available parking in Carmel on weekends. The signs on the theater parking lots saying concert parking only didn't stop anyone. But I arrived early enough that there were a couple fugitive spaces left, trudged off to have lunch at a seafood place I remembered being good from my last visit to Carmel ten years ago - it still was - and came back to sit and wait for the concert. It was worth the trouble.
On the same program, they did pretty well with Mendelssohn's "Reformation" Symphony, a work needing a lot of doing well to be successful at all, but made a total hash out of Bruckner's Te Deum.
So, not a consistent orchestra. But it's been 20 years since then, most of the local professional orchestras have improved greatly over that time, and Monterey has acquired a new music director a couple years ago. So I was primed as heck to get to a concert including a work I'd much like to hear but which is never done, Ralph Vaughan Williams's A Pastoral Symphony, also known as his Third. RVW's nine symphonies don't often make it to US concert halls, but I've managed to hear five others live over the years, though I had to go to London to catch one of them. But the Pastoral? Not a chance. Its title, and its consisting of four movements, "all of them slow" (as the composer quipped, accurately enough), have given it a reputation of being utterly static.
But it isn't. Much of it is tough, even wiry, and it works even better if you hear it as what it really is, not a placid "cowpat school" product, but a memorial to the soldiers who died in the pastoral fields of France in WW1. Though already in his 40s, RVW had served there as a medical aide, driving horse-drawn ambulance wagons.
And then I mentioned to my editor that I was going to this, in place of some other concert he suggested that I cover, so he put this on my schedule instead, and here's the review. I wasn't expecting how much music director Jayce Ogren would emphasize the WW1 background of this work, to the extent of having war scenes projected on the back wall during it, and framing the entire concert as a contemplative, meditative event.
It worked very well, and the performance of the Pastoral gave much satisfaction. RVW's distinct orchestral sound came through consistently, and the whole symphony was an opportunity to bask in it.
And the rest of the concert was good too. Britten's Serenade song cycle was much more incisive than the last time I heard it; Pärt's Cantus came off with an effective production of its ghostly ending; and Adolphus Hailstork is always a reliable workaday composer.
I went to the Sunday matinee performance, a tricky proposition as there's no available parking in Carmel on weekends. The signs on the theater parking lots saying concert parking only didn't stop anyone. But I arrived early enough that there were a couple fugitive spaces left, trudged off to have lunch at a seafood place I remembered being good from my last visit to Carmel ten years ago - it still was - and came back to sit and wait for the concert. It was worth the trouble.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
retiring critic
Here's the news: Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, is retiring after 30 years as the paper's chief (and mostly only) classical critic.
Kosman could be a thoughtful reviewer, and I've sometimes found it useful, when we covered the same concert, to triangulate my views against his, especially as our tastes often differ. And I appreciated some of his cultural commentary, especially his recent analysis of what led the SF Symphony and music director Salonen to a parting of the ways. But his frequent tendency to begin - or sometimes spend the entirety of - reviews with complaints of how he disliked the repertoire seemed unprofessional, and a couple times on tangential matters he's seemed to me to cross the line of intellectual honesty.
Still, even with that, it was better to have him than not have him - the more intelligent reviewers out there, the better - and I entirely agree with the thesis of his farewell piece, that a music critic is just a listener - any intelligent, articulate listener - with an opinion of how the concert went. It's your reaction to the artistry displayed before you that counts. But, he adds, how good a critic you are depends on skills that you've learned, and I've found that so. My professional reviewing grew out of my blog reviewing, though it's developed into an idiom of its own, and I've learned a lot in the 20 years I've been doing this.
Kosman says he discovered classical music in his early teens and "knew it was going to be a lifelong commitment." I had the same - I think I was 12 when this happened - though I'd phrase it more as realizing that this was the music for me, the kind of music I'd wanted but didn't know it. Kosman says he had been "an ordinary pop music buff as a kid," but I was not. I detested most of the pop music of the time - and I'm only a couple years older than he is - and floated around listening mostly to comedy songs and musical theater, liking it (as I still do) but not feeling emotionally satisfied until I found the big heavy classics, starting with Beethoven.
Kosman is going to be giving a conversation in a cafe-cum-auditorium in the City next week. I hesitated about getting a ticket, because I wasn't sure what it meant on the announcement page when it said "A free live stream of the event will be available with RSVP." What did that mean? Was it an ornate way of saying that you had to get a ticket to access the live stream? Or did it mean it will be accessed through a program, like Zoom, whose name is "RSVP"? But it didn't make any difference, because by 8 AM when I finally went over to the ticketing page, the free live stream was sold out (how can a free live stream be sold out? that sounds like a contradiction in terms) and I nabbed one of the last live tickets instead. So I guess Kosman has a lot of fans, or at least curious readers. He'll take questions, it says, but I should probably bite my tongue.
One thing he probably won't know is: who will be replacing him? If anyone? And how good will they be? And what will they think of Salonen's successor, whoever that will be?
Kosman could be a thoughtful reviewer, and I've sometimes found it useful, when we covered the same concert, to triangulate my views against his, especially as our tastes often differ. And I appreciated some of his cultural commentary, especially his recent analysis of what led the SF Symphony and music director Salonen to a parting of the ways. But his frequent tendency to begin - or sometimes spend the entirety of - reviews with complaints of how he disliked the repertoire seemed unprofessional, and a couple times on tangential matters he's seemed to me to cross the line of intellectual honesty.
Still, even with that, it was better to have him than not have him - the more intelligent reviewers out there, the better - and I entirely agree with the thesis of his farewell piece, that a music critic is just a listener - any intelligent, articulate listener - with an opinion of how the concert went. It's your reaction to the artistry displayed before you that counts. But, he adds, how good a critic you are depends on skills that you've learned, and I've found that so. My professional reviewing grew out of my blog reviewing, though it's developed into an idiom of its own, and I've learned a lot in the 20 years I've been doing this.
Kosman says he discovered classical music in his early teens and "knew it was going to be a lifelong commitment." I had the same - I think I was 12 when this happened - though I'd phrase it more as realizing that this was the music for me, the kind of music I'd wanted but didn't know it. Kosman says he had been "an ordinary pop music buff as a kid," but I was not. I detested most of the pop music of the time - and I'm only a couple years older than he is - and floated around listening mostly to comedy songs and musical theater, liking it (as I still do) but not feeling emotionally satisfied until I found the big heavy classics, starting with Beethoven.
Kosman is going to be giving a conversation in a cafe-cum-auditorium in the City next week. I hesitated about getting a ticket, because I wasn't sure what it meant on the announcement page when it said "A free live stream of the event will be available with RSVP." What did that mean? Was it an ornate way of saying that you had to get a ticket to access the live stream? Or did it mean it will be accessed through a program, like Zoom, whose name is "RSVP"? But it didn't make any difference, because by 8 AM when I finally went over to the ticketing page, the free live stream was sold out (how can a free live stream be sold out? that sounds like a contradiction in terms) and I nabbed one of the last live tickets instead. So I guess Kosman has a lot of fans, or at least curious readers. He'll take questions, it says, but I should probably bite my tongue.
One thing he probably won't know is: who will be replacing him? If anyone? And how good will they be? And what will they think of Salonen's successor, whoever that will be?
Sunday, April 21, 2024
thoughts on red
Sometimes when I'm sitting in my car at a red light which is not showing an inclination to turn green, even though nobody's coming in the opposite direction, I fantasize about honking my horn.
This would, of course, cause any driver in front of me to turn around and say "Hey, I can't move. The light's red."
And I'd say, "I know. I'm not honking at you. I'm honking at the light."
And they'd say, "The light? The light can't hear you."
And I'd say, "I'll just have to honk louder, then."
Why this level of frustration? The pointlessness of the light remaining red when we're waiting there and nobody's coming on the cross street, plus having arrived at the light just as it turns red, having been temptingly green all during our approach (and thus letting through all the cars that had been waiting all that time on the cross street as nobody came in our direction), plus the fact that we arrived at the light when we did because of the previous light's equally pointlessly long red.
Isn't this wasteful of both drivers' time and of fuel?
I once met a traffic engineer and posed this problem, and asked, in essence, whether it was incompetence or malevolence that was responsible. His answer amounted to "It's incompetence," but I know it can be malevolence too, because I once read a city traffic report that suggested deliberately mistiming the lights on a street the city didn't want drivers to use as a through artery, presumably to keep them away through raw frustration.
This would, of course, cause any driver in front of me to turn around and say "Hey, I can't move. The light's red."
And I'd say, "I know. I'm not honking at you. I'm honking at the light."
And they'd say, "The light? The light can't hear you."
And I'd say, "I'll just have to honk louder, then."
Why this level of frustration? The pointlessness of the light remaining red when we're waiting there and nobody's coming on the cross street, plus having arrived at the light just as it turns red, having been temptingly green all during our approach (and thus letting through all the cars that had been waiting all that time on the cross street as nobody came in our direction), plus the fact that we arrived at the light when we did because of the previous light's equally pointlessly long red.
Isn't this wasteful of both drivers' time and of fuel?
I once met a traffic engineer and posed this problem, and asked, in essence, whether it was incompetence or malevolence that was responsible. His answer amounted to "It's incompetence," but I know it can be malevolence too, because I once read a city traffic report that suggested deliberately mistiming the lights on a street the city didn't want drivers to use as a through artery, presumably to keep them away through raw frustration.
Friday, April 19, 2024
political opinions
1. I already wrote about the California jungle primary, intended to provide two finalists of any party for the general election, and how two candidates tied for second place, leading to a decision to put them both in and have a three-candidate final.
But now they're doing a recount to see if they can establish if one or the other really got second place. I can't help feeling there's something wrong here. It's one thing for a final election, where one single candidate has to win, but in the jungle primary, picking one candidate over the other, in a vote so close, feels arbitrary and denying the voters of a choice they ought to have. It isn't my district (though it's geographically close enough that both the tied candidates have been my representative on one level or another at one time or another), but I'd be very anxious and concerned about expressing my choice if it were my district.
2. I wrote about this privately, but I'm dismayed at the defenses offered, in the latest news articles, for the protesters who blocked traffic on bridges and freeways here a few days ago and chained themselves in place to make it hard to remove them. The authorities want to throw the book at them, but I'd rather throw the concrete-filled barrels they chained themselves to.
The defenders speak of the arrests as an attempt to "chill the exercise of First Amendment rights." No, protesting is exercising your First Amendment rights. Blocking traffic is not.
They say it's "a nonviolent act of civil disobedience." No, civil disobedience is when you break the law. Forcing other people into complicity with your actions is not. Also, when you force people, it's hardly nonviolent. Not unless you think that pointing a gun at somebody's head isn't violent either.
They claim that Dr. King blocked roadways during the Civil Rights movement. I don't think he did - as far as I recall, he held pre-announced marches (these blockages were not announced, because they'd have been stopped if they were), which may have interfered with traffic like any parade might, but that's not the same thing as sitting down in the roadway and blocking traffic. Not least because they walked through and then got out of the way. And if he did sit down and block traffic, I'd oppose that too.
Most offensively, the defenders claim that these blockages are merely "inconvenient for drivers." Inconvenient?? If it were merely inconvenient, the protesters wouldn't do it. It wouldn't be worth the trouble from their apocalyptic point of view. Traffic congestion caused by protesters on the sidewalk yelling and waving signs, that's inconvenient. What was aimed at here, and achieved, is massive disruption.
3. The states of Maine and Iowa are responding quite differently to recent mass shootings. Maine is enacting new restrictions to attempt to keep guns out of the hands of certified nutballs. Iowa is authorizing school teachers to carry guns. I'd feel safer in Maine. It's a good thing Mythcon this year will be in Minnesota instead of Iowa where the organizers live. I don't want to go somewhere with elementary school teachers packing heat.
But now they're doing a recount to see if they can establish if one or the other really got second place. I can't help feeling there's something wrong here. It's one thing for a final election, where one single candidate has to win, but in the jungle primary, picking one candidate over the other, in a vote so close, feels arbitrary and denying the voters of a choice they ought to have. It isn't my district (though it's geographically close enough that both the tied candidates have been my representative on one level or another at one time or another), but I'd be very anxious and concerned about expressing my choice if it were my district.
2. I wrote about this privately, but I'm dismayed at the defenses offered, in the latest news articles, for the protesters who blocked traffic on bridges and freeways here a few days ago and chained themselves in place to make it hard to remove them. The authorities want to throw the book at them, but I'd rather throw the concrete-filled barrels they chained themselves to.
The defenders speak of the arrests as an attempt to "chill the exercise of First Amendment rights." No, protesting is exercising your First Amendment rights. Blocking traffic is not.
They say it's "a nonviolent act of civil disobedience." No, civil disobedience is when you break the law. Forcing other people into complicity with your actions is not. Also, when you force people, it's hardly nonviolent. Not unless you think that pointing a gun at somebody's head isn't violent either.
They claim that Dr. King blocked roadways during the Civil Rights movement. I don't think he did - as far as I recall, he held pre-announced marches (these blockages were not announced, because they'd have been stopped if they were), which may have interfered with traffic like any parade might, but that's not the same thing as sitting down in the roadway and blocking traffic. Not least because they walked through and then got out of the way. And if he did sit down and block traffic, I'd oppose that too.
Most offensively, the defenders claim that these blockages are merely "inconvenient for drivers." Inconvenient?? If it were merely inconvenient, the protesters wouldn't do it. It wouldn't be worth the trouble from their apocalyptic point of view. Traffic congestion caused by protesters on the sidewalk yelling and waving signs, that's inconvenient. What was aimed at here, and achieved, is massive disruption.
3. The states of Maine and Iowa are responding quite differently to recent mass shootings. Maine is enacting new restrictions to attempt to keep guns out of the hands of certified nutballs. Iowa is authorizing school teachers to carry guns. I'd feel safer in Maine. It's a good thing Mythcon this year will be in Minnesota instead of Iowa where the organizers live. I don't want to go somewhere with elementary school teachers packing heat.
Thursday, April 18, 2024
duned
I went to see Dune Part Two in the movie theater, to catch all the epic sfx. I came out wishing that I hadn't bothered.
I'd rather liked Part One, and I'd enjoyed other Villeneuve movies, so I figured I'd give this a try. I should have paid more attention to my general stricture against sequels, and to the fact that, when I read the book long ago I'd liked the first half a lot more than the second half.
I didn't like the long draggy plot that wandered on and didn't get much of anywhere until it gathered up its skirts in anticipation of the ending. I didn't like the murky colors, the bulk of the movie being either in black-and-white or in such drab coloring that it might as well have been black-and-white. I didn't like the booming sound effects and/or music. I didn't like the mumbling unintelligibility of most of the dialogue underneath that, except for lines in the Fremen language which I could follow because there were subtitles. I didn't like the way Paul kept disavowing any interest in ruling the people but acting as if that was his intention. (The only character I could identify with was Chani.) I didn't like having to get up in the middle to visit the restroom, and I liked even less that the guy in the middle of the same row had to get up about six times. I didn't like the way the plot didn't come to a stopping point, but ushered in the entirely different plot of the next movie, which I'm certainly not going to see.
In fact, the only thing I did like was that I didn't have to see the previous movie again in order to follow what was going on. I remembered what I needed to know well enough.
I'd rather liked Part One, and I'd enjoyed other Villeneuve movies, so I figured I'd give this a try. I should have paid more attention to my general stricture against sequels, and to the fact that, when I read the book long ago I'd liked the first half a lot more than the second half.
I didn't like the long draggy plot that wandered on and didn't get much of anywhere until it gathered up its skirts in anticipation of the ending. I didn't like the murky colors, the bulk of the movie being either in black-and-white or in such drab coloring that it might as well have been black-and-white. I didn't like the booming sound effects and/or music. I didn't like the mumbling unintelligibility of most of the dialogue underneath that, except for lines in the Fremen language which I could follow because there were subtitles. I didn't like the way Paul kept disavowing any interest in ruling the people but acting as if that was his intention. (The only character I could identify with was Chani.) I didn't like having to get up in the middle to visit the restroom, and I liked even less that the guy in the middle of the same row had to get up about six times. I didn't like the way the plot didn't come to a stopping point, but ushered in the entirely different plot of the next movie, which I'm certainly not going to see.
In fact, the only thing I did like was that I didn't have to see the previous movie again in order to follow what was going on. I remembered what I needed to know well enough.
Monday, April 15, 2024
not recommended
Nick Groom, Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning of Middle-Earth Today (Pegasus, 2023)
I read the foreword of this book on Amazon last fall and denounced it then. Basically, Groom says that "Tolkien ... is not simply an author and a body of work, but a vast and growing field of cultural activity and products" (xviii), i.e. (though he doesn't put it that way) a lot of marketing kitsch and crappy adaptations. Specifically - and this was the main point of my critique - that you can't defend the smear of adaptations by saying that "the book is still on the shelf" because you can't read the book any more without the context of the adaptations. Also he has to insult and sneer at the existing Tolkien scholarly literature by unfairly caricaturizing it. On top of which, he says he's going to write "Middle-Earth" instead of Tolkien's preferred "Middle-earth" because you wouldn't write "Sackville-baggins" (xv), would you? which is a stunningly inept comparison.
So, having already annoyed the intelligent reader three different ways, Groom says he's going to write about "the Tolkien phenomenon today" without "get[ting] rapidly bogged down in the minutiae" (xvii-xviii). But that's not what he does. Chapter one is an extremely clotted biography which begins by getting immediately bogged down in the minutiae of listing twenty-three different names, nicknames, pseudonyms, literary incarnations, or terms of address which Tolkien used or by which he was known, some of them of extreme obscurity (2). It doesn't get better from here, going on to describe Tolkien's complex early life in the kind of detail of a full biography but not of much use to someone who just wants to understand the works, before getting into an abstruse academic bibliographically-oriented description of Tolkien's earlier work. Chapter two is on The Hobbit and chapters three and four on the writing of The Lord of the Rings, going into a lot of detail on how the drafts were developed, and on obscure and difficult points of interest to those abstruse and boring Tolkien minutiae scholars who were bashed in the foreword (like, is the shadowy figure in the eaves of Fangorn Gandalf or Saruman?), but that still have no connection with Tolkien in the 21st Century.
Finally we begin to approach the precursor of the supposed topic in chapter five, which is essentially a history of film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, running lightly through music inspired by it and mentioning earlier attempts before plunging into detail on the Boorman script, the Bakshi movie, the Sibley-Bakewell radio version, and the Jackson movies. These are fairly astute analyses, particularly noting the thrust of the changes these versions made in the story, but again the focus on detail seems inappropriate for the broad canvas this book's premise promises. I started to cheer at an incidental rebuttal to Michael Moorcock's critique of Tolkien, but swallowed it when Groom implies Moorcock was just jealous at Tolkien's success (214).
So then chapter six does the same thing with adaptations of The Hobbit, offering a weak justification for the disaster that Peter Jackson made of it by claiming that he haaaaad to make it stylistically congruent with The Lord of the Rings. Groom is learned enough to know that Tolkien once tried to do the same thing (257), but he is clueless as to why it failed, and failed again when Jackson tried it.
That's not enough to make a chapter, so Groom then turns to a discussion of the morality of war, mixing up descriptions of Tolkien's book and Jackson's movies so thoroughly that the untutored reader may be forgiven for not being able to distinguish them, and thus going away thinking that Tolkien is to blame for some of the atrocities committed only by Jackson's characters. There are also bits on gender roles and ecocriticism. Groom is again fairly good, if not particularly original, when he sticks to Tolkien, but feels rapidly off when he takes a wider focus, as with declaring that Hobbiton is no longer English but in New Zealand (293), which was not the impression Jackson wanted the viewer to leave with either.
Chapter seven is labeled "Conclusion" (what? is that as far as we get?), which is again focused on detail in Tolkien (religion, the Silmarillion, racial and nationalist issues, dreams in the stories, the element of horror, words and language) before touching at the end on Amazon's Rings of Power. The point seems to be - or would be if Groom approached this from a wider perspective - that the meaning of the story depends on who's reading it, or who (in the adaptations) is retelling it. That would be the beginning, not the end, of a book really about Tolkien in the 21st Century.
Then there's a brief afterword on the first season of Rings of Power, which must have been added at the last minute because we already had a bit on Rings of Power. This mostly discusses what the series did and didn't pick up from Tolkien or from Jackson, which are treated equally as source material, lord save us.
And that's it. I found this in the public library new books shelf, which is not a place I normally expect to see scholarly new books about Tolkien. I hope that casual readers who pick this up will get more out of this book than I think they will.
I read the foreword of this book on Amazon last fall and denounced it then. Basically, Groom says that "Tolkien ... is not simply an author and a body of work, but a vast and growing field of cultural activity and products" (xviii), i.e. (though he doesn't put it that way) a lot of marketing kitsch and crappy adaptations. Specifically - and this was the main point of my critique - that you can't defend the smear of adaptations by saying that "the book is still on the shelf" because you can't read the book any more without the context of the adaptations. Also he has to insult and sneer at the existing Tolkien scholarly literature by unfairly caricaturizing it. On top of which, he says he's going to write "Middle-Earth" instead of Tolkien's preferred "Middle-earth" because you wouldn't write "Sackville-baggins" (xv), would you? which is a stunningly inept comparison.
So, having already annoyed the intelligent reader three different ways, Groom says he's going to write about "the Tolkien phenomenon today" without "get[ting] rapidly bogged down in the minutiae" (xvii-xviii). But that's not what he does. Chapter one is an extremely clotted biography which begins by getting immediately bogged down in the minutiae of listing twenty-three different names, nicknames, pseudonyms, literary incarnations, or terms of address which Tolkien used or by which he was known, some of them of extreme obscurity (2). It doesn't get better from here, going on to describe Tolkien's complex early life in the kind of detail of a full biography but not of much use to someone who just wants to understand the works, before getting into an abstruse academic bibliographically-oriented description of Tolkien's earlier work. Chapter two is on The Hobbit and chapters three and four on the writing of The Lord of the Rings, going into a lot of detail on how the drafts were developed, and on obscure and difficult points of interest to those abstruse and boring Tolkien minutiae scholars who were bashed in the foreword (like, is the shadowy figure in the eaves of Fangorn Gandalf or Saruman?), but that still have no connection with Tolkien in the 21st Century.
Finally we begin to approach the precursor of the supposed topic in chapter five, which is essentially a history of film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, running lightly through music inspired by it and mentioning earlier attempts before plunging into detail on the Boorman script, the Bakshi movie, the Sibley-Bakewell radio version, and the Jackson movies. These are fairly astute analyses, particularly noting the thrust of the changes these versions made in the story, but again the focus on detail seems inappropriate for the broad canvas this book's premise promises. I started to cheer at an incidental rebuttal to Michael Moorcock's critique of Tolkien, but swallowed it when Groom implies Moorcock was just jealous at Tolkien's success (214).
So then chapter six does the same thing with adaptations of The Hobbit, offering a weak justification for the disaster that Peter Jackson made of it by claiming that he haaaaad to make it stylistically congruent with The Lord of the Rings. Groom is learned enough to know that Tolkien once tried to do the same thing (257), but he is clueless as to why it failed, and failed again when Jackson tried it.
That's not enough to make a chapter, so Groom then turns to a discussion of the morality of war, mixing up descriptions of Tolkien's book and Jackson's movies so thoroughly that the untutored reader may be forgiven for not being able to distinguish them, and thus going away thinking that Tolkien is to blame for some of the atrocities committed only by Jackson's characters. There are also bits on gender roles and ecocriticism. Groom is again fairly good, if not particularly original, when he sticks to Tolkien, but feels rapidly off when he takes a wider focus, as with declaring that Hobbiton is no longer English but in New Zealand (293), which was not the impression Jackson wanted the viewer to leave with either.
Chapter seven is labeled "Conclusion" (what? is that as far as we get?), which is again focused on detail in Tolkien (religion, the Silmarillion, racial and nationalist issues, dreams in the stories, the element of horror, words and language) before touching at the end on Amazon's Rings of Power. The point seems to be - or would be if Groom approached this from a wider perspective - that the meaning of the story depends on who's reading it, or who (in the adaptations) is retelling it. That would be the beginning, not the end, of a book really about Tolkien in the 21st Century.
Then there's a brief afterword on the first season of Rings of Power, which must have been added at the last minute because we already had a bit on Rings of Power. This mostly discusses what the series did and didn't pick up from Tolkien or from Jackson, which are treated equally as source material, lord save us.
And that's it. I found this in the public library new books shelf, which is not a place I normally expect to see scholarly new books about Tolkien. I hope that casual readers who pick this up will get more out of this book than I think they will.
Sunday, April 14, 2024
two new symphonies
I've been to hear the premiere performances of two new symphonies in the past week. It wasn't planned; it just worked out that way. I generally like symphonies; they're my favorite genre of music, and it pleases me when more are added to their number, particularly when they are themselves interesting works as these were.
The first was Lee Actor's Symphony No. 4, played by the Palo Alto Philharmonic, for which he's composer-in-residence. I reviewed this for the Daily Journal. As I mentioned in the review, his work occasionally reminds me of Shostakovich, of Rachmaninoff, of Nielsen, of Bruckner, and those are all good composers to sound like if you want to please me. It's not crass imitation, it's mostly just flashes of a turn of phrase.
The other was by Howard Qin, a Stanford senior undergraduate. I saw on the Music Dept. calendar that a free concert in their tiny recital hall would feature the premiere of a symphony, and that intrigued me enough to go. The hall was fairly packed, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only person there who didn't know the composer personally. He assembled a student orchestra of some 20 people, under his direction, to play this expansive but not over-long four-movement work depicting the seasons at Stanford. In the finale, two singers join the ensemble to intone the mottos of various universities.
That was the grandest movement; the other three all begin softly with just a few instruments and then build up. The themes are memorable, there is a decent amount of counterpoint, the whole has weight and movement. Despite the small numbers, the winds and brass tended to overbalance the strings, so more practice with orchestration is my only suggestion.
Also in the last week, I heard an all-Czech chamber music concert and reviewed it for SFCV. That was enjoyable, and even the ferocious attack on Janáček's Second Quartet worked in context.
And I went back to Stanford for another free concert; Christopher Costanza was playing the suites for unaccompanied cello by, no not J.S. Bach, but Benjamin Britten. These were written in the 1960s for Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom Britten wrote quite a lot in those days. I was hoping the suites would be enlightening. Instead they were incomprehensible. Obviously interesting to play but I couldn't make anything out of them as a listener.
Costanza is the cellist of the St Lawrence String Quartet, the Stanford resident ensemble. His bio in the program for this concert refers to the recent release of "the final two SLSQ recordings." Final? So I guess that means they have no intention of ever replacing their violinist Geoff Nuttall, who died a year and a half ago, but will just go on as they have been: mentoring and teaching at Stanford, which is part of their job; and performing individually and as part of other chamber ensembles. Well, I can live with that, and in any case Nuttall was in truth irreplaceable.
The first was Lee Actor's Symphony No. 4, played by the Palo Alto Philharmonic, for which he's composer-in-residence. I reviewed this for the Daily Journal. As I mentioned in the review, his work occasionally reminds me of Shostakovich, of Rachmaninoff, of Nielsen, of Bruckner, and those are all good composers to sound like if you want to please me. It's not crass imitation, it's mostly just flashes of a turn of phrase.
The other was by Howard Qin, a Stanford senior undergraduate. I saw on the Music Dept. calendar that a free concert in their tiny recital hall would feature the premiere of a symphony, and that intrigued me enough to go. The hall was fairly packed, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only person there who didn't know the composer personally. He assembled a student orchestra of some 20 people, under his direction, to play this expansive but not over-long four-movement work depicting the seasons at Stanford. In the finale, two singers join the ensemble to intone the mottos of various universities.
That was the grandest movement; the other three all begin softly with just a few instruments and then build up. The themes are memorable, there is a decent amount of counterpoint, the whole has weight and movement. Despite the small numbers, the winds and brass tended to overbalance the strings, so more practice with orchestration is my only suggestion.
Also in the last week, I heard an all-Czech chamber music concert and reviewed it for SFCV. That was enjoyable, and even the ferocious attack on Janáček's Second Quartet worked in context.
And I went back to Stanford for another free concert; Christopher Costanza was playing the suites for unaccompanied cello by, no not J.S. Bach, but Benjamin Britten. These were written in the 1960s for Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom Britten wrote quite a lot in those days. I was hoping the suites would be enlightening. Instead they were incomprehensible. Obviously interesting to play but I couldn't make anything out of them as a listener.
Costanza is the cellist of the St Lawrence String Quartet, the Stanford resident ensemble. His bio in the program for this concert refers to the recent release of "the final two SLSQ recordings." Final? So I guess that means they have no intention of ever replacing their violinist Geoff Nuttall, who died a year and a half ago, but will just go on as they have been: mentoring and teaching at Stanford, which is part of their job; and performing individually and as part of other chamber ensembles. Well, I can live with that, and in any case Nuttall was in truth irreplaceable.
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Tolkien in Vermont
I attended online part of the annual one-day Tolkien at the University of Vermont conference today. This year the online vendor was something called Microsoft Teams. Please may they not use it again. It was no trouble getting on it with my Windows machine, but I had the damndest trouble staying on. Throughout the conference, on an average of twice a minute, literally, the thing would momentarily lose its signal and display an error message for a couple of seconds before reconnecting to the audio and then, more slowly, the video. Twice a minute. All day.
Fortunately for this, most of the speakers were just reading their PowerPoint slides aloud, so I had already figured out what they were going to say during their missing two seconds, but the ones that weren't ... I missed a few good jokes. Coming back from an outage to hear the in-person audience laughing at something you missed is annoying even the first time.
Also, the presenters forgot to watch where the camera was pointed. Several in-person speakers were only visible to the extent of one arm as they stood just out of camera range. A couple other times the camera suddenly switched angles so that we had a facial close-up, looking up the nostrils, of someone in the audience.
However, the presentations were good. Lots of Jungian and/or Freudian interpretations. The keynote speaker, the invisible Sara Brown (invisible because her PowerPoint started before she came up to the podium, and afterwards was standing in the wrong place for the camera), compared the burden of the Ring to Simone de Beauvoir's polemics against the burden of pregnancy, which was quite a comparison. I think it was she who also pointed out that the other Rings are also burdensome, noting Galadriel and the Dwarves, though it took another speaker to suggest that perhaps bearing the Ring of Fire explains why Gandalf is so cross and irritable all the time.
Yet another speaker pointed out that Sam is also cross and irritable. I've always found him an unpleasant character, but I've never found agreement on that point. Maybe this will explain it.
Then there was a paper pointing out that Tolkien's intent for some of his fictional languages to sound 'harsh' comes out a lot different if you speak a human language that he'd classify that way, like German or Turkish; one describing "The New Shadow" as a story about the failure of pedagogy (don't scoff: Borlas actually admits as much); and a couple good reinterpretations of The Hobbit: one arguing that Bolg the goblin has good reason to resent the Dwarves' treatment of his people, and one analyzing why the ponies in The Hobbit get killed while those in The Lord of the Rings survive: the earlier book's lighter tone make it possible to kill off minor characters without injecting unwanted notes of tragedy.
A good conference; I'm just sorry I kept missing bits of it.
Fortunately for this, most of the speakers were just reading their PowerPoint slides aloud, so I had already figured out what they were going to say during their missing two seconds, but the ones that weren't ... I missed a few good jokes. Coming back from an outage to hear the in-person audience laughing at something you missed is annoying even the first time.
Also, the presenters forgot to watch where the camera was pointed. Several in-person speakers were only visible to the extent of one arm as they stood just out of camera range. A couple other times the camera suddenly switched angles so that we had a facial close-up, looking up the nostrils, of someone in the audience.
However, the presentations were good. Lots of Jungian and/or Freudian interpretations. The keynote speaker, the invisible Sara Brown (invisible because her PowerPoint started before she came up to the podium, and afterwards was standing in the wrong place for the camera), compared the burden of the Ring to Simone de Beauvoir's polemics against the burden of pregnancy, which was quite a comparison. I think it was she who also pointed out that the other Rings are also burdensome, noting Galadriel and the Dwarves, though it took another speaker to suggest that perhaps bearing the Ring of Fire explains why Gandalf is so cross and irritable all the time.
Yet another speaker pointed out that Sam is also cross and irritable. I've always found him an unpleasant character, but I've never found agreement on that point. Maybe this will explain it.
Then there was a paper pointing out that Tolkien's intent for some of his fictional languages to sound 'harsh' comes out a lot different if you speak a human language that he'd classify that way, like German or Turkish; one describing "The New Shadow" as a story about the failure of pedagogy (don't scoff: Borlas actually admits as much); and a couple good reinterpretations of The Hobbit: one arguing that Bolg the goblin has good reason to resent the Dwarves' treatment of his people, and one analyzing why the ponies in The Hobbit get killed while those in The Lord of the Rings survive: the earlier book's lighter tone make it possible to kill off minor characters without injecting unwanted notes of tragedy.
A good conference; I'm just sorry I kept missing bits of it.
Thursday, April 11, 2024
three things about O.J. Simpson
1. I know a lot more about his acting career than I do about his football career. I watched the Naked Gun movies. I never saw him play football.
2. One sunny Sunday morning in 1994, B. and I were married. That very night, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered. I just don't cotton to that concatenation of events at all.
3. A few days later came the famous Bronco chase. I happened to turn the TV on at the end of it. The car was just sitting in the driveway with nobody getting out of it, but the newspeople were yammering on at full force as if this were the most dramatic sequence of events in the history of the world.
This was the moment at which I decided to stop watching television news.
I've kept to that decision ever since. Of course I didn't watch the trial. By the time of 9/11, I'd figured out what to do instead when there's a major breaking news story. I open up a tab to a reputable newspaper site. I go about my other computer business, and every half hour or so I turn to the tab and hit the refresh button to see if anything has happened. Usually it hasn't, but I've been spared being made frantic by it.
2. One sunny Sunday morning in 1994, B. and I were married. That very night, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered. I just don't cotton to that concatenation of events at all.
3. A few days later came the famous Bronco chase. I happened to turn the TV on at the end of it. The car was just sitting in the driveway with nobody getting out of it, but the newspeople were yammering on at full force as if this were the most dramatic sequence of events in the history of the world.
This was the moment at which I decided to stop watching television news.
I've kept to that decision ever since. Of course I didn't watch the trial. By the time of 9/11, I'd figured out what to do instead when there's a major breaking news story. I open up a tab to a reputable newspaper site. I go about my other computer business, and every half hour or so I turn to the tab and hit the refresh button to see if anything has happened. Usually it hasn't, but I've been spared being made frantic by it.
Tuesday, April 9, 2024
the unknown soldier
Michael Palin, Great-Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire (Random House Canada, 2023)
Of World War I battles, I'm particularly interested in the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916) because that's the one J.R.R. Tolkien fought in. He was his battalion's signaling officer, rotating between the front lines and reserves as was customary, for four months during this battle until he fell ill. During this time his close friend R.Q. Gilson was killed on the first day of the battle. Tolkien's other close friend G.B. Smith died after the battle had petered out, but it was still possible to be hit by a German shell, which Smith was.
Another notable figure killed on the Somme was George Butterworth, one of the most promising young English composers.
But so were many others. The lives of the little-known are no less valuable spiritually than the famed. They deserve to be remembered, and their lives can give us a context to understand others. Here's a biography of one: Lance-Corporal H.W.B. Palin, killed on September 27, 1916, aged 32.
Michael Palin, the Monty Python guy, received a sheaf of family papers, including the terse but extensive diaries of his grandfather's youngest brother, Harry. Michael had known virtually nothing about Harry, but he set out to learn more. Michael is indefatigable in his research - to the extent that John Cleese yawns theatrically when the subject of Michael's books comes up - and he found quite a lot. He is also big on the garrulous digressions: for instance, when discussing Harry's relationship with his much older siblings, Michael recounts his own relationship with his much older sister.
Though Michael doesn't like to say so in so many words, Harry was an underachiever. Unlike his oldest brother, he did poorly in school. He went off to India to earn his fortune like so many ambitious young Englishmen in those imperial days, but failed miserably, being fired for poor work from two blue-collar jobs, on a railway and at a tea plantation. (He did, however, learn Urdu - not Hindi, Urdu, a curiosity not addressed - which served him well later on.) He seems to have done somewhat better as a farm laborer in New Zealand, clearing tree stumps off some newly-designated farmland (Michael does not discuss the environmental damage attendant on this). That's where Harry was when war broke out in 1914, and he joined the Anzacs. He was one of the few uninjured survivors of the horrors of Gallipoli, where in addition to regular soldiering he served as a translator for troops from the subcontinent. Then he was sent to France where the Somme awaited.
Despite Michael's confident command of detail, and his sure way of covering gaps in the historical record, he seems fuzzy about some facts. Besides my not being certain that he knows the difference between Urdu and Hindi, I'm not certain he knows the difference between a vicar and a rector, one of which Harry's father was.
But despite these things, this is a fascinating and readable book. The accumulation of detail helps the reader understand the environments in which Harry lived, a necessary approach given the paucity of primary source material. I'm glad I picked this one up from the library.
Of World War I battles, I'm particularly interested in the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916) because that's the one J.R.R. Tolkien fought in. He was his battalion's signaling officer, rotating between the front lines and reserves as was customary, for four months during this battle until he fell ill. During this time his close friend R.Q. Gilson was killed on the first day of the battle. Tolkien's other close friend G.B. Smith died after the battle had petered out, but it was still possible to be hit by a German shell, which Smith was.
Another notable figure killed on the Somme was George Butterworth, one of the most promising young English composers.
But so were many others. The lives of the little-known are no less valuable spiritually than the famed. They deserve to be remembered, and their lives can give us a context to understand others. Here's a biography of one: Lance-Corporal H.W.B. Palin, killed on September 27, 1916, aged 32.
Michael Palin, the Monty Python guy, received a sheaf of family papers, including the terse but extensive diaries of his grandfather's youngest brother, Harry. Michael had known virtually nothing about Harry, but he set out to learn more. Michael is indefatigable in his research - to the extent that John Cleese yawns theatrically when the subject of Michael's books comes up - and he found quite a lot. He is also big on the garrulous digressions: for instance, when discussing Harry's relationship with his much older siblings, Michael recounts his own relationship with his much older sister.
Though Michael doesn't like to say so in so many words, Harry was an underachiever. Unlike his oldest brother, he did poorly in school. He went off to India to earn his fortune like so many ambitious young Englishmen in those imperial days, but failed miserably, being fired for poor work from two blue-collar jobs, on a railway and at a tea plantation. (He did, however, learn Urdu - not Hindi, Urdu, a curiosity not addressed - which served him well later on.) He seems to have done somewhat better as a farm laborer in New Zealand, clearing tree stumps off some newly-designated farmland (Michael does not discuss the environmental damage attendant on this). That's where Harry was when war broke out in 1914, and he joined the Anzacs. He was one of the few uninjured survivors of the horrors of Gallipoli, where in addition to regular soldiering he served as a translator for troops from the subcontinent. Then he was sent to France where the Somme awaited.
Despite Michael's confident command of detail, and his sure way of covering gaps in the historical record, he seems fuzzy about some facts. Besides my not being certain that he knows the difference between Urdu and Hindi, I'm not certain he knows the difference between a vicar and a rector, one of which Harry's father was.
But despite these things, this is a fascinating and readable book. The accumulation of detail helps the reader understand the environments in which Harry lived, a necessary approach given the paucity of primary source material. I'm glad I picked this one up from the library.
Monday, April 8, 2024
der Mond
B. and I traveled to St. Louis for the 2017 total solar eclipse, at the invitation of a friend who lived in the zone of totality. Several other friends accepted the invitation, and we had a pleasant backyard party of it. We found no congestion, no trouble making hotel reservations, etc. And we experienced the totality.
I wouldn't mind seeing another one, but the difficulties of travel, both personal and pandemic-wise, have increased since then, so this time I stayed at home to see the partial. Maybe a good thing too, as B. tells me that everybody on FB who's gone to Texas has found heavy cloud cover. (No word yet from my brother in Pennsylvania.) It was bright and sunny here, a change from the dripping rain we've had off and on for weeks.
And I did see the partial. I went to the plaza outside the city library, but found nothing there I couldn't get at home besides a long line of people waiting to view through the telescope. So I went back home. My pinhole viewer did not produce good results, but with the eclipse glasses I had an effect unlike any I'd seen before at an eclipse. Not only was there a bite taken out of the Sun, but - faintly, as if a ghost of itself - I could see the full outline and features of the Moon. Probably it would have been clearer without the glasses, but of course then the Sun would drown it out, and fry your eyes into the bargain.
Over the course of an hour, taking a peek half a dozen times, I watched the Moon come over the Sun on the right, then slowly move down below it, still taking a bite, and then gradually move off to the left and vanish. Astronomical movement in action.
I wouldn't mind seeing another one, but the difficulties of travel, both personal and pandemic-wise, have increased since then, so this time I stayed at home to see the partial. Maybe a good thing too, as B. tells me that everybody on FB who's gone to Texas has found heavy cloud cover. (No word yet from my brother in Pennsylvania.) It was bright and sunny here, a change from the dripping rain we've had off and on for weeks.
And I did see the partial. I went to the plaza outside the city library, but found nothing there I couldn't get at home besides a long line of people waiting to view through the telescope. So I went back home. My pinhole viewer did not produce good results, but with the eclipse glasses I had an effect unlike any I'd seen before at an eclipse. Not only was there a bite taken out of the Sun, but - faintly, as if a ghost of itself - I could see the full outline and features of the Moon. Probably it would have been clearer without the glasses, but of course then the Sun would drown it out, and fry your eyes into the bargain.
Over the course of an hour, taking a peek half a dozen times, I watched the Moon come over the Sun on the right, then slowly move down below it, still taking a bite, and then gradually move off to the left and vanish. Astronomical movement in action.
Saturday, April 6, 2024
assorted concerts
Thursday I trudged my way again from the far-off parking garage to the San Jose State music auditorium for another Beethoven Center event. During term they hold monthly noon concerts, often of historic arrangements of Beethoven works, but this one wouldn't fit in their own tiny recital room because it required two pianos. It was Liszt's arrangement of the Ninth Symphony.
Played by locally noted pianists Tamami Honma* and Daniel Glover, with the quiet addition of timpani by John Gerling (plus triangle for the janissary section of the Ode to Joy), but with no singers, it came across rather jangly, a contrast especially audible in the slow movement. Liszt frequently passes the lead back and forth between the pianos. The quintessential moment may have been the great choral declaration of the Ode theme, which was accomplished with one pianist slamming away at the theme in massive chords while the other swept maniacally all over the keyboard to reproduce the accompaniment. The ending was so tumultuous it sounded as if they'd sent out for reinforcements.
And then I had to walk back to my car through a hailstorm (technically sleet, as the word is used in the US, I suppose).
For the evening I ventured up to the Freight to hear a five-person Scottish folk band called Breabach. I wasn't familiar with them, but I like that type of music. Lots of bagpipes going on, and they were the full-bodied Highland pipes, too. Enough to make your teeth rattle.
*Who's just released her recording of all 35 - that's right, 35 - Beethoven piano sonatas, which I would have bought on the spot had I $50 in cash - which was all they'd take - in my pocket, but I didn't.
Played by locally noted pianists Tamami Honma* and Daniel Glover, with the quiet addition of timpani by John Gerling (plus triangle for the janissary section of the Ode to Joy), but with no singers, it came across rather jangly, a contrast especially audible in the slow movement. Liszt frequently passes the lead back and forth between the pianos. The quintessential moment may have been the great choral declaration of the Ode theme, which was accomplished with one pianist slamming away at the theme in massive chords while the other swept maniacally all over the keyboard to reproduce the accompaniment. The ending was so tumultuous it sounded as if they'd sent out for reinforcements.
And then I had to walk back to my car through a hailstorm (technically sleet, as the word is used in the US, I suppose).
For the evening I ventured up to the Freight to hear a five-person Scottish folk band called Breabach. I wasn't familiar with them, but I like that type of music. Lots of bagpipes going on, and they were the full-bodied Highland pipes, too. Enough to make your teeth rattle.
*Who's just released her recording of all 35 - that's right, 35 - Beethoven piano sonatas, which I would have bought on the spot had I $50 in cash - which was all they'd take - in my pocket, but I didn't.
Friday, April 5, 2024
news of the weird
A couple odd things going on locally that might not have hit the broader news feeds:
1. In California we have what's called the jungle primary, in which all the candidates of whatever party run together, and the top two finishers, whatever their party, go into the general election.
But what happens if two candidates are tied for second place?
That happened in the race for an open congressional seat hereabouts, an attractive prospect for many a local officeholder. One candidate led, and two others kept shifting for second place as more votes were counted, and eventually ended up tied.
The answer is, all three of them will make the final ballot. This isn't my district, but it's interesting to watch.
2. Oakland International Airport has decided it needs more respect. Like many cities, San Francisco has more than one convenient airport but not everybody knows about it. San Francisco International is about 15 miles from downtown; Oakland International is across the Bay but is only about 20 miles from downtown SF, and both are served by the rapid transit system. (Oakland is also less likely to get fogged in.)
But Oakland has been losing flight slots because people don't know to use it. So now they want to change the name to San Francisco Bay Oakland International, a mouthful but like SFO it is right on the Bay and this will let people know where it is. But the SFO administration are annoyed by this; they say it's confusing. I must admit some sympathy with that position, remembering some misleading airport designations in my past, and especially since an Oakland administrator said "No one owns the title to the San Francisco Bay."
That's the sort of snotty remark you make only if you know you'd be confusing the customers and are deliberately planning to do so.
1. In California we have what's called the jungle primary, in which all the candidates of whatever party run together, and the top two finishers, whatever their party, go into the general election.
But what happens if two candidates are tied for second place?
That happened in the race for an open congressional seat hereabouts, an attractive prospect for many a local officeholder. One candidate led, and two others kept shifting for second place as more votes were counted, and eventually ended up tied.
The answer is, all three of them will make the final ballot. This isn't my district, but it's interesting to watch.
2. Oakland International Airport has decided it needs more respect. Like many cities, San Francisco has more than one convenient airport but not everybody knows about it. San Francisco International is about 15 miles from downtown; Oakland International is across the Bay but is only about 20 miles from downtown SF, and both are served by the rapid transit system. (Oakland is also less likely to get fogged in.)
But Oakland has been losing flight slots because people don't know to use it. So now they want to change the name to San Francisco Bay Oakland International, a mouthful but like SFO it is right on the Bay and this will let people know where it is. But the SFO administration are annoyed by this; they say it's confusing. I must admit some sympathy with that position, remembering some misleading airport designations in my past, and especially since an Oakland administrator said "No one owns the title to the San Francisco Bay."
That's the sort of snotty remark you make only if you know you'd be confusing the customers and are deliberately planning to do so.
Thursday, April 4, 2024
gender dysphoria
Statistics on gender dysphoria in pre-teens and teens.
I wonder. Questions like this didn't exist when I was a child, but I wonder how my answer would have been taken when I was a pre-teen. I despised typical boy-like behavior, I hated being a boy and being forced to associate with other boys, I thought girls were much nicer people, I sometimes wished I was a girl, but only so that I wouldn't have to be put with the boys. And I never thought I actually was a girl. So is that gender dysphoria or not?
I wonder. Questions like this didn't exist when I was a child, but I wonder how my answer would have been taken when I was a pre-teen. I despised typical boy-like behavior, I hated being a boy and being forced to associate with other boys, I thought girls were much nicer people, I sometimes wished I was a girl, but only so that I wouldn't have to be put with the boys. And I never thought I actually was a girl. So is that gender dysphoria or not?
Tuesday, April 2, 2024
celebrity fan
George was a Python fan in the way that other people were George fans. He'd taken tapes of his favorite episodes with him on the Dark Horse tour, often turning to them at moments when Rolling Stone was being particularly horrid. At every venue he had the "Lumberjack Song" played during the countdown to showtime and he registered at hotels as "Jack Lumber."- Philip Norman, George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle
And, of course, it tells the story of how he financed Monty Python's Life of Brian.
Staking the house he loved more than anything else in his life on the riskiest of all gambles was an act of incredible, foolhardy generosity to his Python friends (and a glaring contrast to fobbing off his first wife and incontrovertible creative muse with £120,000). "I just wanted to see the film" was his throwaway explanation, prompting the quip to which various Pythons would claim authorship, that he'd bought "the most expensive cinema ticket in history."
Monday, April 1, 2024
eatster
Customary Easter gathering for food and conversation at the spacious house of our well-organized niece. About half relatives, half friends of the hosts. I brought steamed broccoli, just about the only offering which was neither meat nor carbohydrates. B's sister, the family's whiz baker, baked me a birthday cake, chocolate of course. Nephew T., master of the outdoor cooking, roasted two chickens by the beer-can method. Approaching the platter at serving time, I took two of the four wings. Coming back for seconds much later, the other two wings were still there, so I took them too. If nobody else likes wings but me, I won't deny myself.
Cats were petted. Plastic easter eggs were gathered from the front lawn. They proved to contain not chocolate, but little plastic dinosaurs. B. and I have no use for these, so we gave them back along with the eggs, which have been reused for years beyond count. Although I did not fail to point out that we could use the dinosaurs to imitate Wash. "And we will call it This Land!"
Fortunately things were late enough getting going that we missed the closure of the freeway caused by a wrong-way driver doing what wrong-way drivers do, which is crashing into other cars.
Cats were petted. Plastic easter eggs were gathered from the front lawn. They proved to contain not chocolate, but little plastic dinosaurs. B. and I have no use for these, so we gave them back along with the eggs, which have been reused for years beyond count. Although I did not fail to point out that we could use the dinosaurs to imitate Wash. "And we will call it This Land!"
Fortunately things were late enough getting going that we missed the closure of the freeway caused by a wrong-way driver doing what wrong-way drivers do, which is crashing into other cars.
Sunday, March 31, 2024
half a concert
My concert expedition on Saturday morning was not entirely successful. The Beethoven Center at San Jose State was sponsoring the annual Young Pianist's Beethoven Competition. I'd been to this once before. Spending a Saturday morning listening to six high school students of professional accomplishment play Beethoven sonatas in the cavernous concert hall of the San Jose State music building had been a pleasant experience.
This time, walking the half mile from the nearest convenient parking to the music building in the middle of campus was a chore. I arrived at 9:30, the announced starting time of the concert, to learn that it was actually scheduled for 10:00. About 30 people - fewer than there are Beethoven piano sonatas, and a small enough audience that instead of being spread out in this giant hall, we could have fit snugly in the tiny recital room in the Beethoven Center itself, which is a lot closer to where I parked - waited silently for the music to start. In the event, one of the judges didn't arrive until 10:15, the first pianist didn't appear on stage for five minutes after that, and then spent two minutes silently sitting at the piano bench, gathering his nerve or possibly just thinking about John Cage, before launching into the "Appassionata" Sonata. The second pianist spent her two pre-playing minutes flexing her arms by adjusting the height of the piano bench, and then played "Les Adieux." By the time of the third performer (Op. 90), I was thinking more about a visit to the restroom than about Beethoven.
By the time of intermission, it was almost 11:30, so I bailed on the second half. I hadn't found the performances that artistically inspiring, and I wasn't overwhelmed by the opportunity to hear somebody else play the "Appassionata" again. So I limped back to my car, stopping along the way for lunch at a new campus-side restaurant whose gimmick is that they put Texas-style barbecue meat in their Vietnamese pho soup. Interesting idea, which sort of works and sort of doesn't.
This time, walking the half mile from the nearest convenient parking to the music building in the middle of campus was a chore. I arrived at 9:30, the announced starting time of the concert, to learn that it was actually scheduled for 10:00. About 30 people - fewer than there are Beethoven piano sonatas, and a small enough audience that instead of being spread out in this giant hall, we could have fit snugly in the tiny recital room in the Beethoven Center itself, which is a lot closer to where I parked - waited silently for the music to start. In the event, one of the judges didn't arrive until 10:15, the first pianist didn't appear on stage for five minutes after that, and then spent two minutes silently sitting at the piano bench, gathering his nerve or possibly just thinking about John Cage, before launching into the "Appassionata" Sonata. The second pianist spent her two pre-playing minutes flexing her arms by adjusting the height of the piano bench, and then played "Les Adieux." By the time of the third performer (Op. 90), I was thinking more about a visit to the restroom than about Beethoven.
By the time of intermission, it was almost 11:30, so I bailed on the second half. I hadn't found the performances that artistically inspiring, and I wasn't overwhelmed by the opportunity to hear somebody else play the "Appassionata" again. So I limped back to my car, stopping along the way for lunch at a new campus-side restaurant whose gimmick is that they put Texas-style barbecue meat in their Vietnamese pho soup. Interesting idea, which sort of works and sort of doesn't.
Friday, March 29, 2024
Hugo finalists
This year's Hugo finalists have been announced. There are finalists in Chinese scattered throughout several categories, no doubt a result of the members of last year's Worldcon, which was in China, being eligible to nominate. I see that several of the Chinese-language fiction stories have been translated, which will enable them to be considered on an equal basis with the other finalists by non-Chinese-reading voters.
Not long ago, a friend revealed that he'd nominated my essay collection, Gifted Amateurs, for the Best Related Work category. I felt quite honored, but I never considered it likely that it would make the final list, and it didn't. If it had, I'd have needed to appoint somebody as my designated acceptor at the awards ceremony, as I'm certainly not attending the convention in Glasgow myself.1 At least the category does have one book that I've read, Maureen Kincaid Speller's posthumous essay collection, A Traveller in Time. Maureen was a friendly acquaintance of mine and an excellent writer, so I'm pleased to see her collected and honored.
I have and have read one other written nominee, the fanzine Idea edited by Geri Sullivan, which is always worthwhile; and I've seen exactly one of the dramatic presentation nominees, the movie Nimona, which I thought was quite good. It has a coherent and touching plot, and the animation is imaginative. Of the two main characters, one's a gay man and the other is conspicuously non-gender. No big deal is made of any of this, which is how it should be.
I've read and enjoyed other works by some of the fiction nominees - John Scalzi, Nghi Vo, T. Kingfisher, Naomi Kritzer - plus a few others I didn't enjoy quite so much, and that about sums it up for me and this year's Hugos.
1. I've never been to Glasgow at all. I've been to Edinburgh, but not Glasgow. Standing in the queue for the big 1995 Steeleye Span reunion concert in London, which was just after the end of a Worldcon in Glasgow, I ran into friends who said to me, "We didn't see you in Glasgow," and I got to reply, "I wasn't there! I just flew in from the States this morning."
Not long ago, a friend revealed that he'd nominated my essay collection, Gifted Amateurs, for the Best Related Work category. I felt quite honored, but I never considered it likely that it would make the final list, and it didn't. If it had, I'd have needed to appoint somebody as my designated acceptor at the awards ceremony, as I'm certainly not attending the convention in Glasgow myself.1 At least the category does have one book that I've read, Maureen Kincaid Speller's posthumous essay collection, A Traveller in Time. Maureen was a friendly acquaintance of mine and an excellent writer, so I'm pleased to see her collected and honored.
I have and have read one other written nominee, the fanzine Idea edited by Geri Sullivan, which is always worthwhile; and I've seen exactly one of the dramatic presentation nominees, the movie Nimona, which I thought was quite good. It has a coherent and touching plot, and the animation is imaginative. Of the two main characters, one's a gay man and the other is conspicuously non-gender. No big deal is made of any of this, which is how it should be.
I've read and enjoyed other works by some of the fiction nominees - John Scalzi, Nghi Vo, T. Kingfisher, Naomi Kritzer - plus a few others I didn't enjoy quite so much, and that about sums it up for me and this year's Hugos.
1. I've never been to Glasgow at all. I've been to Edinburgh, but not Glasgow. Standing in the queue for the big 1995 Steeleye Span reunion concert in London, which was just after the end of a Worldcon in Glasgow, I ran into friends who said to me, "We didn't see you in Glasgow," and I got to reply, "I wasn't there! I just flew in from the States this morning."
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
figuring out Taylor Swift
It's been nearly 40 years since I paid close attention to current popular music. The ratio of songs that really attract me is too low. Every once in a while I hear something, and it's often nice enough, but not something that I'd feel the urge to listen to again. When I hear a pop song new to me that does attract me, it turns out to date from 1982. (That is not hyperbole.) I don't despise current pop, I just don't find it interesting.
Nevertheless, the current fame and ubiquity of Taylor Swift - up till quite recently, I would have recognized the name but wouldn't have been able to say who she was - prompted me to check out her work. Figuring I should start with the most popular songs but having no idea which they were, I looked up her list of singles and their chart rankings on Wikipedia and then sought out on YouTube some of the biggest hits. Then the concert film of her Eras Tour came to Disney+ and I started to watch that.
None of these were songs I had ever heard before. In both cases I found the songs in themselves to be pleasant enough, though I was a bit surprised by the extremely downbeat lyrics of some. Two I remember as being particularly good were "Cruel Summer" and "The Man," but nothing of their melodies stuck in my head. But in both cases, the singles and the concert video, I found that two or three songs was about all that I could take of the heavy arrangements. Unobjectionable but not for me was my conclusion.
Consequently I was taken totally by surprise by her NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Entirely acoustic, just her: two songs with piano, two with acoustic guitar. And, despite her between-songs patter needing considerable tightening up, it worked for me. If she were to play a concert in this manner in a folk-music coffeehouse like the Freight and Salvage, I could be there and enjoy every minute of it.
For that's what she's writing. Her songs are in the mode of acoustic folk singer-songwriters, not those of the catchy tunes and hypnotic rhythms that make for the pop songs I remember. Here, though, her wandering melodies and introspective lyrics virtually define the genre. If she had chosen that route of music-making, she could have fit right in as a distinguished colleague of a couple dozen such women I've heard concerts by.
Of course, coffeehouse audiences of a few hundred, a tiny level of fame, and barely making a living touring around this way - that would have been an entirely different fate than the one she's got now. And I do have the highest respect for the way she seems to have grounded herself as a level-headed person in the face of extreme celebrity. That's rather rare.
Taylor Swift actually showing up to do a coffeehouse concert would be impractical, but she could make more solo acoustic recordings. And if she does that, then and only then will I be likely to listen to some more.
Nevertheless, the current fame and ubiquity of Taylor Swift - up till quite recently, I would have recognized the name but wouldn't have been able to say who she was - prompted me to check out her work. Figuring I should start with the most popular songs but having no idea which they were, I looked up her list of singles and their chart rankings on Wikipedia and then sought out on YouTube some of the biggest hits. Then the concert film of her Eras Tour came to Disney+ and I started to watch that.
None of these were songs I had ever heard before. In both cases I found the songs in themselves to be pleasant enough, though I was a bit surprised by the extremely downbeat lyrics of some. Two I remember as being particularly good were "Cruel Summer" and "The Man," but nothing of their melodies stuck in my head. But in both cases, the singles and the concert video, I found that two or three songs was about all that I could take of the heavy arrangements. Unobjectionable but not for me was my conclusion.
Consequently I was taken totally by surprise by her NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Entirely acoustic, just her: two songs with piano, two with acoustic guitar. And, despite her between-songs patter needing considerable tightening up, it worked for me. If she were to play a concert in this manner in a folk-music coffeehouse like the Freight and Salvage, I could be there and enjoy every minute of it.
For that's what she's writing. Her songs are in the mode of acoustic folk singer-songwriters, not those of the catchy tunes and hypnotic rhythms that make for the pop songs I remember. Here, though, her wandering melodies and introspective lyrics virtually define the genre. If she had chosen that route of music-making, she could have fit right in as a distinguished colleague of a couple dozen such women I've heard concerts by.
Of course, coffeehouse audiences of a few hundred, a tiny level of fame, and barely making a living touring around this way - that would have been an entirely different fate than the one she's got now. And I do have the highest respect for the way she seems to have grounded herself as a level-headed person in the face of extreme celebrity. That's rather rare.
Taylor Swift actually showing up to do a coffeehouse concert would be impractical, but she could make more solo acoustic recordings. And if she does that, then and only then will I be likely to listen to some more.
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
keep not traveling
Here's somebody's idea of the 24 Best Islands in the World. I had to go all the way down to no. 24 to find one that I've visited: Kau'ai. I was there on a family vacation cruise when I was 19. We docked at Lihue and took a hired car tour to Waimea Canyon. It was very pretty. Then we went back and sailed away, all in one day. That was it.
During part of their period of frequently shifting abode during their retirement, B.'s parents lived on Kau'ai. B's sister went to visit them, and we were encouraged to go too. But besides the expense, and the time and trouble of getting there, any idea of going was stymied by the question of, what would we do there? Visiting B's parents, but they were often visiting here. Sitting around relaxing we can do at home. Viewing scenery would be nice, but not as the sole necessary reason for a long trip. So we didn't go. Most of the other 23 islands on the list are of no more interest to me.
My idea of the best islands in the world would be quite different. My choice for the best island in the world would be the island of Great Britain. It has lots of things that attract me, starting with some of the people who live there. It has blazes of historic sites and fascinating old buildings, it has bookstores and museums and great concert halls and some interesting food. I've been there nine times, the last six years ago, but what with pandemics and health issues I'm not sure if I'll ever be back.
I'd also put a high ranking on the island of Manhattan. I'm less fond of it as a place, because I found living there for a week to be exhausting in a way London isn't, but it sure measures almost as high as Britain on the scale of interesting things to do.
Now I have an opportunity to go back there. But I'm not taking it. We got an invitation from dear friends to a special anniversary party to be held very near Manhattan in an interesting venue. Once upon a time I'd have been willing to take the trouble to go all the way across the country for such a tempting reason, and would have tacked on other things to do. But loss of physical agility ... the still-high risks of pandemic ... the only partially-consequent decay of my ability at and interest in party socializing ... and the corrosive experience of the time I lost my bag in the airport due to trying to do four things at once ... I'm not up to that any more.
During part of their period of frequently shifting abode during their retirement, B.'s parents lived on Kau'ai. B's sister went to visit them, and we were encouraged to go too. But besides the expense, and the time and trouble of getting there, any idea of going was stymied by the question of, what would we do there? Visiting B's parents, but they were often visiting here. Sitting around relaxing we can do at home. Viewing scenery would be nice, but not as the sole necessary reason for a long trip. So we didn't go. Most of the other 23 islands on the list are of no more interest to me.
My idea of the best islands in the world would be quite different. My choice for the best island in the world would be the island of Great Britain. It has lots of things that attract me, starting with some of the people who live there. It has blazes of historic sites and fascinating old buildings, it has bookstores and museums and great concert halls and some interesting food. I've been there nine times, the last six years ago, but what with pandemics and health issues I'm not sure if I'll ever be back.
I'd also put a high ranking on the island of Manhattan. I'm less fond of it as a place, because I found living there for a week to be exhausting in a way London isn't, but it sure measures almost as high as Britain on the scale of interesting things to do.
Now I have an opportunity to go back there. But I'm not taking it. We got an invitation from dear friends to a special anniversary party to be held very near Manhattan in an interesting venue. Once upon a time I'd have been willing to take the trouble to go all the way across the country for such a tempting reason, and would have tacked on other things to do. But loss of physical agility ... the still-high risks of pandemic ... the only partially-consequent decay of my ability at and interest in party socializing ... and the corrosive experience of the time I lost my bag in the airport due to trying to do four things at once ... I'm not up to that any more.
Sunday, March 24, 2024
concert review: Prometheus Symphony
Sometimes it's the venue that makes or breaks a concert.
I don't understand it, actually. I've heard the Prometheus Symphony - a nonprofessional group from Oakland - in this church - a rectangular cavern of red brick that calls itself St. Paul's Episcopal - before. I've even heard them play Carl Nielsen here before.
So why was Nielsen's Third Symphony such an acoustic disaster? Except for a few quiet passages, and the beginning of the finale when the whole orchestra plays the theme tutti - this symphony, which doesn't have more different things going on at once than the average complex symphony - came out like a slab of undifferentiated mud. Only the fact that I already knew how it was supposed to sound enabled me to pick out the melodic line or anything else from the chaos of noise.
Insofar as I could tell, the orchestra was doing a pretty good job, though it seemed a bit hesitant over the rhythmically irregular sequence of chords which started the work off. Of the other work on the program, a cycle of four French songs that Benjamin Britten composed at the age of 14 - I won't even attempt an evaluation. Soprano Raeeka Shehabi-Yaghmi, whom I've heard before, has a strong voice, but I wouldn't have been able to make out any of the French words even if they were printed in the program, which they weren't.
At least this trip was a brilliant success logistically. I drove to the nearest BART station, 35 minutes if there's no traffic, and took the train in. I used to walk the half-mile to the church from the station to these afternoon concerts, but that kind of distance is beyond me now, so Google maps found me a bus line that stops only a block away. Afterwards I took the bus back to downtown for dinner. My favorite Chinese restaurant there, close to the Paramount Theater which is my usual destination, closed during the pandemic, but I found another one, a tiny hole in the wall several blocks away but with stunningly good food, so I was happy.
I don't understand it, actually. I've heard the Prometheus Symphony - a nonprofessional group from Oakland - in this church - a rectangular cavern of red brick that calls itself St. Paul's Episcopal - before. I've even heard them play Carl Nielsen here before.
So why was Nielsen's Third Symphony such an acoustic disaster? Except for a few quiet passages, and the beginning of the finale when the whole orchestra plays the theme tutti - this symphony, which doesn't have more different things going on at once than the average complex symphony - came out like a slab of undifferentiated mud. Only the fact that I already knew how it was supposed to sound enabled me to pick out the melodic line or anything else from the chaos of noise.
Insofar as I could tell, the orchestra was doing a pretty good job, though it seemed a bit hesitant over the rhythmically irregular sequence of chords which started the work off. Of the other work on the program, a cycle of four French songs that Benjamin Britten composed at the age of 14 - I won't even attempt an evaluation. Soprano Raeeka Shehabi-Yaghmi, whom I've heard before, has a strong voice, but I wouldn't have been able to make out any of the French words even if they were printed in the program, which they weren't.
At least this trip was a brilliant success logistically. I drove to the nearest BART station, 35 minutes if there's no traffic, and took the train in. I used to walk the half-mile to the church from the station to these afternoon concerts, but that kind of distance is beyond me now, so Google maps found me a bus line that stops only a block away. Afterwards I took the bus back to downtown for dinner. My favorite Chinese restaurant there, close to the Paramount Theater which is my usual destination, closed during the pandemic, but I found another one, a tiny hole in the wall several blocks away but with stunningly good food, so I was happy.
Friday, March 22, 2024
concert review: South Bay Philharmonic
After having tried out other ensembles, and getting far enough in one of them to play in a concert with them two years ago, B. has settled on the South Bay Philharmonic to fill her retirement dream of performing in a nonprofessional orchestra. The conductor has a clear beat and a lack of exasperating rehearsal habits, he doesn't take the music too fast, and rehearsals are not held farther from the nearest parking space than aging bodies can handle.
These are mighty virtues on B.'s scale of standards, so now she is a contented member of the viola section, and tonight was the first concert that she'd rehearsed for. At the same open-plan church that Harmonia California played in last week (this is how I heard about that), the concert was well-attended and parts of it were excellent.
I particularly liked the rendition of Sibelius's quiet little bon-bon Valse triste. Lacking the eccentric tempo variations common in professional performances, it was rehearsed enough to be played with full competence and even a little exquisite sweetness. Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony was also pretty good. Square and placid, in the traditional way, it was mostly, if not entirely, graspable by these performers.
I was less happy with two concerted works. The compositions were less inspired. The soloists had full command of getting the notes out on time, but their tone quality left much to be desired. And the orchestra needed some help at several parts also.
The four pieces were each written in a different calendrical century, so conductor George Yefchak dubbed this the symphony's Eras Tour. Cue Taylor Swift reference, which took the form of a surprise encore in the form of an arrangement of her song "Love Story."
If anyone local wants to hear B. play viola, come to the First Congregational Church (Hamilton and Leigh) on May 17 for the SBP's next concert, a truly scrumptious program of Dvorak, Faure, and Florence Price.
These are mighty virtues on B.'s scale of standards, so now she is a contented member of the viola section, and tonight was the first concert that she'd rehearsed for. At the same open-plan church that Harmonia California played in last week (this is how I heard about that), the concert was well-attended and parts of it were excellent.
I particularly liked the rendition of Sibelius's quiet little bon-bon Valse triste. Lacking the eccentric tempo variations common in professional performances, it was rehearsed enough to be played with full competence and even a little exquisite sweetness. Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony was also pretty good. Square and placid, in the traditional way, it was mostly, if not entirely, graspable by these performers.
I was less happy with two concerted works. The compositions were less inspired. The soloists had full command of getting the notes out on time, but their tone quality left much to be desired. And the orchestra needed some help at several parts also.
The four pieces were each written in a different calendrical century, so conductor George Yefchak dubbed this the symphony's Eras Tour. Cue Taylor Swift reference, which took the form of a surprise encore in the form of an arrangement of her song "Love Story."
If anyone local wants to hear B. play viola, come to the First Congregational Church (Hamilton and Leigh) on May 17 for the SBP's next concert, a truly scrumptious program of Dvorak, Faure, and Florence Price.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
four concerts
1. I picked this concert by the Master Sinfonia to review for the Daily Journal because it was three symphonies, and that's the kind of meaty program I like.
2. Then SFCV sent me to cover an (almost) all winds and percussion concert by the California Symphony. Pieces like these don't fit in to conventional symphony programs. At the end of the review is the rhetorical question, "Despite the fame of [Mozart's] 'Gran Partita' in recordings, have you ever heard a performance live?" Actually, I have, once. It was an impromptu pick-up session with George Cleve conducting the winds of Symphony Silicon Valley, as it was called at the time, and it was purely fortuitous that I heard about it when I was in a position to go.
Scott Fogelsong in his pre-concert talk framed Lou Harrison's turn to Asian musical inspirations as a reaction to the serialist hegemony, which was apparently already a going concern when Lou was at school in the 1930s. "They wanted their students to write music that sounded like this," said Scott, and played a clip of I know not what, but it was Webernian pointillism.
3. Another little birdie told me that a string orchestra calling itself Harmonia California was giving a concert in a nearby church on Sunday afternoon. With Warlock's Capriol Suite and Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1, two of my favorite neoclassicals, on the program, I rearranged my schedule to be able to go. The orchestra was quite good, a bit heavy-handed on the rhythms for the more ethereal sections of the Warlock, but very good for the Bloch, which is supposed to sound like that. However, they only played 3 of the Bloch's 4 movements, with no indication one was missing. Since it was St Patrick's Day, they concluded with a lush arrangement of "Danny Boy," which they played rather badly: probably not enough rehearsal.
4. Last night, student chamber music showcase at Stanford, or, demonstrating what they've been working on all semester. A movement from a Bartok quartet - unusually plush, it sounded as if Alban Berg had written it - was very unusual for Stanford students, we were told, though B. comments that she heard enough Bartok to last a lifetime when she was a music student at San Jose State years ago.
2. Then SFCV sent me to cover an (almost) all winds and percussion concert by the California Symphony. Pieces like these don't fit in to conventional symphony programs. At the end of the review is the rhetorical question, "Despite the fame of [Mozart's] 'Gran Partita' in recordings, have you ever heard a performance live?" Actually, I have, once. It was an impromptu pick-up session with George Cleve conducting the winds of Symphony Silicon Valley, as it was called at the time, and it was purely fortuitous that I heard about it when I was in a position to go.
Scott Fogelsong in his pre-concert talk framed Lou Harrison's turn to Asian musical inspirations as a reaction to the serialist hegemony, which was apparently already a going concern when Lou was at school in the 1930s. "They wanted their students to write music that sounded like this," said Scott, and played a clip of I know not what, but it was Webernian pointillism.
3. Another little birdie told me that a string orchestra calling itself Harmonia California was giving a concert in a nearby church on Sunday afternoon. With Warlock's Capriol Suite and Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1, two of my favorite neoclassicals, on the program, I rearranged my schedule to be able to go. The orchestra was quite good, a bit heavy-handed on the rhythms for the more ethereal sections of the Warlock, but very good for the Bloch, which is supposed to sound like that. However, they only played 3 of the Bloch's 4 movements, with no indication one was missing. Since it was St Patrick's Day, they concluded with a lush arrangement of "Danny Boy," which they played rather badly: probably not enough rehearsal.
4. Last night, student chamber music showcase at Stanford, or, demonstrating what they've been working on all semester. A movement from a Bartok quartet - unusually plush, it sounded as if Alban Berg had written it - was very unusual for Stanford students, we were told, though B. comments that she heard enough Bartok to last a lifetime when she was a music student at San Jose State years ago.