opera review: The Magic Flute again

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

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

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

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

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

concert review: San Jose Chamber Orchestra

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

musical events

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

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

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

Fantasy: Realms of Imagination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mini-Mythcon

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

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

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

concert review: blech

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

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

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

Not a great use of my time.

Sondheim Festival VII: Pacific Overtures

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

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

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

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

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

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

concert review: Jerusalem Quartet

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

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

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

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

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

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

responsive music for a troubled time

Michael Tippett, A Child of Our Time

concert review: California Symphony

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

concert review: Redwood Symphony

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

And I reviewed it.

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

return to history

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

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

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

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

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

On whether King Arthur actually existed:

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

On whether Richard III was really a bad guy:

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

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

soup for dinner

When B. and I were up in Ashland, Oregon, last June, I stopped in a grocers that carried interesting stuff that I didn't see at home. I bought several packets of a northwest brand of soup fixings - one envelope of pasta or beans, another one of seasonings, a recipe card inside.

It was hard to believe, in June, that it would ever again be cold enough for soup for dinner to be desirable, but at last it's come. I got down the bag from the back of the pantry where the packets had been sitting all these months, pulled out the basic chicken noodle soup mix, and made it. Of course it expected you to add chicken, but on the back of the card there were some additional suggestions, one of which was a cup of fresh vegetables: "We like summer squash & broccoli." Substitute zucchini for the summer squash and it not only sounds good to me, I was already planning to put those in before I saw the back of the card.

So that was our nice small dinner, and I'll make the others soon.

And that was our Halloween. No trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood in recent years, so no costumes, no decorations, no candy, no lights on, just a normal evening at home.

no, el coward

Our play-reading group just finished our second play by Noël Coward. We've all agreed that it will be our last.

Some time ago we read Blithe Spirit, and despite the degree that it's about the staging rather than the dialogue, we enjoyed it and decided to pick another one some time. I argued against Present Laughter, because I'd watched a tv presentation of that and found it boring and tedious, despite the fact that it starred Kevin Kline. The amount of bad writing required to make Kevin Kline boring and tedious is unimaginable.

Instead, we picked Private Lives, which as a play with only four characters (essentially: there's a maid with a brief walkon) was ideal for a four-reader group. It's the one about a divorced couple who run into each other while each on their honeymoon with a new partner, who rediscover first why they got married in the first place and then why they got divorced.

But no, it's more than that. They actually reunite, then split up again, then reunite again, meanwhile revealing themselves as both truly unpleasant people whom we felt bespoiled by trying to impersonate by reading their lines. This is the play with the infamous line so beloved by Brett Kavanaugh's frat brothers, "Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs."

It should be noted that the woman addressed replies to the man saying it, "You're an unmitigated cad, and a bully." But he returns, "And you're an ill-mannered, bad-tempered slattern." We couldn't say that either of them were wrong.

As the play went on it turned out that the discarded partners, instead of sympathetic innocents, are just as bad as the other two. And we noticed retrospectively how the general air of nastiness and inhumanity infects Blithe Spirit as well: it was just disguised by the comic situation. This one is not so well-disguised. Coward's world turns out to be an unpleasant one we just don't want to spend any more time in, and so, no more.

And so, having done all of Shakespeare's history plays, we're turning to Marlowe's Edward II. Those people are also nasty and brutish, but they're not pretending to be oh-so-cleverly witty about it, and that makes all the difference.

concert review: Other Minds

The Complete Piano Sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya
Conor Hanick, piano

This was a concert so profoundly unusual and interesting that I felt compelled to go to it. Other Minds is a sponsor that does offbeat modern music events; I've been to them occasionally before. For this one, they rented the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley.

Ustvolskaya was a Soviet-era composer who was a pupil of Shostakovich (he had a crush on her, as he did on most of his female pupils, but nothing came of it). But her music is not like his; in truth it's not like much of anything else, and she was even more insistent on her own uniqueness than is justified by the music.

Her output is small. She wrote six piano sonatas over the course of her career, four in 1947-57 and the other two in 1986-88. What I learned from this concert was how different the two subsets are: I'll explain that. There are recordings of these pieces, but the impact of hearing them live is incomparable.

After a half-hour talk on Ustvolskaya by musicologist Simon Morrison and a brief break, Hanick sat down and played all six sonatas without a break, only stopping long enough to take his hands briefly from the keyboard between works: one solid 70-minute wad of music.

It takes something really good to keep from being wearying over that time. Not only was Hanick a solid and vivid pianist (and the Freight's acoustics are wonderfully clear for piano music), but it was constantly evident throughout that this was music of great substance and thought, no matter how uningratiating it was - and it was, very. The contrast could not have been greater with certain renowned modern composers whose difficult music is empty and void of anything except challenges to the performers.

From the beginning, Ustvolskaya's music was tough and brutal. Someone dubbed her "the lady with the hammer." Yet throughout the early sonatas, there were quiet and tender passages as well. The variety was part of what kept the flow working. Though the music held interest and was obviously of intellectual substance, I was not sure if I was really connecting with it on a visceral level.

This changed when we got to the last two sonatas. If the earlier music was tough and harsh, this was tougher and harsher. Hanick slammed the keys down, and even employed his forearm to play tone clusters - not for the gentle washes of sound that Henry Cowell, their inventor, had done, but for the ferocious clang that people think they're for.

It was at this point in her career that Ustvolskaya started employing insistent repetitions of notes and phrases, always at top volume, that put tremendous tension and drive into the music. This is what caused one critic to dub her an exponent of "sado-minimalism," a term whose cleverness can't disguise that it's inapt for both of its components. Though severe, it isn't painful, and there's nothing of the absorbent trance of canonical minimalism.

Though you'd think I'd be beginning to be tired out from all this, instead I found my interest renewed and refreshed, absorbed and captivated by this hard but very human stuff. It spoke a strange and hard language, but it spoke clearly and compellingly. I'm not sure I'd want to listen to it again soon, but I'm oh so glad I did, and was I ever artistically satisfied by the evening.

concert review: Voices of Silicon Valley

This was the 10th anniversary celebration of a little (17-voice) local acappella choir that I hadn't heard of before. SFCV actually promoted this concert, though they haven't reviewed it, at least the first performance (I went to the second, yesterday). But what inspired me to go was that my old friend K., who's belonged to other local choirs, has joined this one. I think she felt it was more her style.

Its style is an offbeat combination of avant-garde experimental pieces and epically tuneful musical excerpts from video games.* The main work on the program was Bits torn from words by Peter S. Shin, which has lyrics but mostly consists of oohs and ahhs overlaid on each other in complicated ways. It sounds great in the recording by the famed avant-garde choir Roomful of Teeth. But though VoSV sang this challenging piece with fair competence, they lacked the artistic flair needed to put it across effectively. Nice try, though.

I was much more impressed with the premiere of a commission from one of their own tenors, Alexander Frank. Describing the work beforehand in a talk that deserved the title Chatter as much as the composition did, Frank said that, because the work consists entirely of spoken words, he does not classify it as music, but as 'voice.'

Oh, I thought, I wish my old buddy V. were alive to hear that. She and I used to have intense arguments about this. I said that certain types of aural compositions were not music, not to denigrate them but to classify them properly, because they needed to be listened to differently in order to be appreciated. (Imagine listening to the 'music' in, say, a Shakespeare soliloquy as if it actually were a musical composition. It would just be wayward and irritating.) V. insisted it was all music; music is the whole sphere, it's not differentiated. I would say fine, in that case we need another word to describe what the term 'music' used to mean. I suggest 'music,' and for the larger category of organized sound, something like 'organized sound.'

Anyway, it sounds like Frank agrees with me. His composition was a fascinating collage of mostly unintelligible chatter. It began with everybody talking at once, like the sound of a restaurant full of diners, and then reduced to a few voices, then increased again. Sometimes a couple voices would talk in unison. It was not music because there was no melody, no harmony; but there was rhythm and timbre and there was certainly multiplicity of line if not exactly counterpoint, and as with other such works I've heard (Varese's Ionisation for percussion ensemble) I found myself absorbed by those elements, though I would not wish the piece to go on any longer than it did.

More conventionally, VoSV sang a piece called The House of Belonging by Jeffrey Derus, one of those efforts in which the words are stuffed awkwardly into music which they don't quite fit; and Friede auf Erden by Arnold Schoenberg, in German.

Their pianist, whose role was mostly to serve as a pitch pipe, though she did accompany a couple of pieces, also played a solo piano work, one of the most totally useless pieces of music I have ever heard. Its sole point seemed to be to proceed slowly down the entire keyboard from the top note to the bottom.

After intermission there was a brief interjected set by a local high school choir, who did pretty well for themselves. Their set included a motet by Josef Rheinberger, a 19C figure who's the most renowned composer from Liechtenstein, but their most challenging and effective piece was a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by the noted living American choral composer Z. Randall Stroope. Then they joined VoSV at the end for the grand finale, a nice arrangement of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

The first performance had been at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, but I skipped that both for scheduling reasons and to avoid Hammer's dodgy acoustics, preferring the venue of the small and friendly, if perishingly cold, Tateuchi Hall in Mountain View. I might have been better off at Hammer. The chorus was miked, which in a hall as small as Tateuchi led to an overload of sound, with a couple of the sopranos (not K.) shrieking unpleasantly.

I think the choir strove for more than they could do here, but some of it came off well, and it's the striving that's important, right?

Credits: VoSV artistic director and conductor, Cyril Deaconoff. Pianist, Ting Chang. High school choir, Saratoga. Its director, Beth Nitzan.

*They sang themes from Genshin Impact and Portal 2, not that either of those names means anything to me, but I know that if I don't mention it, someone will ask. They also sang, with boombox-style accompaniment, music from Gladiator, which if it's not a video game, ought to be.

concert review: Esmé Quartet

I heard this group two-and-a-half years ago, in their North American debut, at which time they consisted of four young women from Korea who had been studying in Germany. Now they consist of three of those women plus a man from Belgium, and they're not in Germany any more, they're right here in San Francisco, having all four been hired to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory, which is some six blocks down the street from the Herbst Theatre where both of these concerts were held.

At the previous concert they gave a stunningly effective performance of Dvořák's Op 106, a work which doesn't always come off that well. So how would they do this time with Schubert's G Major, which is one of the most lyrical quartets in the repertoire? Oh, one felt floating along in a timeless state of bliss listening to this lengthy work: the combination of lyricism and drive was superb. Here: this is a very fine video of the previous Esmé lineup playing this work, and it will give you something of an idea.

I was particularly pleased with the forte outbursts in the first movement, which had the bite and drama one associates with Schubert's previous quartet, "Death and the Maiden," and by the fast rondo of the finale, which had the momentum of a waterwheel or of a snowball rolling unobstructed downhill: it was as if it was being driven by the force of gravity.

Yet even more remarkable, by the same standards, was the rest of the program. Mozart's D Major Quartet, K. 575, one of his late "Prussian" Quartets, rose above any routine Mozart scribbling with an elegant sense of gracefulness and an unending emphasis on the lyric flow. Astonishingly, the same thing was true of Ligeti's First, a tiresome collection of random 1950s avant-garde tricks strung together. No matter how gritty, fragmented, dissonant, or harsh the music, the Esmé players found that lyrical flow of a melodic line. It was an astonishingly graceful performance, unlike anything I've heard in this work before. It didn't make me like Ligeti any better, but it further cemented my admiration for Esmé.

For an encore, despite now being only 3/4 Korean, they played a piece of Korean folk music, which in its ceaseless presentation of bent note slides outdid even Ligeti in weird modernism.

smashing pumpkins

Article (paywalled) about what to do with your jack-o-lantern after Halloween.

Don't put it in the garbage; it will just release methane from the landfill. Compost it, or donate it to be fed to pigs or other omnivores, or take it to a pumpkin-smashing event, after which they'll compost it.

I thought with sorrow of all the ex-jack-o-lanterns I dumped in the garbage after past Halloweens, because I didn't know any better and knew of nothing else I could do. We did keep a compost heap for a short period, but I quit because it was not something I could manage, and it wasn't large enough to have taken a whole pumpkin in a short period anyway.

But a few years ago, our garbage can was replaced with one with a separate compartment for food scraps, which I think go to the omnivores. And I would be happy to put the pumpkin in that, if we still kept a jack-o-lantern. But the number of trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood, once hefty, trickled to a near-stop years ago, so now we just turn the lights off and go to bed early on Halloween. No candy that we'd only have to eat ourselves, and no decorations and no jack-o-lanterns.

But it's nice to know what we should do if we did it.

and the trivia goes on

So Anna Kendrick was on Stephen Colbert's show a day or two ago, to promote her new movie Woman of the Hour (which I've actually seen: it's on Netflix), the true story of a woman who goes as a contestant on The Dating Game not knowing that one of the three eligible bachelors is a serial killer. (And what happens then? Stephen: "The person you play, was that a real person?" Anna: "Yes." Stephen: "And was she OK?" Anna: "Stephen! Premise of the film!")

She's talking about, having already been cast in the lead role, she applied for and won the vacant position of director, though she'd never directed a film before. She was having an internal debate on whether to apply or not, and described it (4:08-4:22) as "a Gollum/Smeagol battle of who's going to win out here."

Now that was interesting, because not only did she make the comparison, but she did so aptly: Gollum v. Smeagol is an internal debate within one person, not (as some viewers of the movie might presume) between two different personas in a multiple-personality case. Good for her.

And also, she pronounced "Gollum" correctly, whereas Colbert in response (4:35) is still saying "Golem." I wish someone would correct him on air about that. Isaac Asimov was once on The Tonight Show, and was irritated by Carson pronouncing his name "EYE-ZAK", so he fantasized about calling his host "JOE-NEE" but didn't have the nerve.

Colbert didn't know he was engaged in a Lord of the Rings trivia contest last night, but he lost it to Anna Kendrick.

more corrections

A few years ago, I cobbled together a series of corrections and additions I'd accumulated over the years for a major article I'd published about 30 years ago. I sent those updates to the original journal, two editors later, and they published it.

I've just learned of another correction that I would have included had I known about it. Another researcher, plunging into related topics, tried to order by ILL a copy of a rare article I had cited and was told that no article of that kind existed in the named issue or anywhere near it. She wrote to me and asked for help finding it.

I had received this article by photocopy from - someone else, I don't remember whom. It had no publication information on it. Where I got the citation from, I don't know either: probably the person who supplied it. But this was evidently wrong. I applied a little clever research skill and was able to determine that the article was actually five years older than I'd been told, 1976 instead of 1981.

I sent this information to the enquirer, along with a PDF of the photocopy, which came from some material I've kept in my handy file drawers all these years. She was greatly appreciative.

For a further trick, I went to a local university library which is one of the few holders of a book that one of my "Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" writers needs but which she can't get from her college's ILL, which evidently charges by the search, like the old Dialog service did. Fortunately the local university library has a usable scanner, and fortunate also that I needed only two chapters from the book. One more PDF.

those ruddy bastards

I'm really annoyed.

I was in LA in mid-August, and on Sunday morning (this was the 18th) decided to drive over to a favorite used book store in east Hollywood, because I'd been there the previous day and noticed signs saying they were having a big all-hands sale the following day.

This is what transpired, taken from my blog report of the trip. "Traffic was fine until I got to Hollywood, where something was going on. Streets were closed and the traffic was packed. It took me 15 minutes to travel five blocks." I was eventually able to turn off on to a side street a few blocks from the bookstore where, to my surprise, I found available parking. The bookstore itself was not over-crowded, and I took twisty and mystifying back streets through the Hollywood hills to get out of there. But the experience was so shattering that, once I got back to my hotel, I spent the rest of the day recuperating, and got out of LA first thing the next morning instead of in the afternoon as I'd intended.

I've just now found out what caused the congestion. I was reading an article on Slate about the future of LA traffic, and found a reference to "CicLAvia, an enormous, movable parade that runs through different parts of Los Angeles some eight times a year and draws about 50,000 participants. Six miles of streets open up to pedestrians, cyclists, joggers, roller bladers, and wheelchair users, with traffic barred at some intersections and directed by police at others."

I'd never heard of this before, but I thought, "eight times a year ... could it ...?" so I looked it up and yep, it did. Sunday, August 18, it was going right through Hollywood, just one long block away from the street my bookstore was on.

And I repeat: I'd never heard of this, either the specific event or the program in general. Nobody had told me.

My absolute opposition to protesters blocking streets to force the public to suffer for some cause does allow for an acceptance of pre-planned parades. You know they're coming, where they're going, when they will stop, and that police will monitor them; travelers can plan around them. But not if they haven't heard about them. I visit LA fairly often, but I'm only a visitor. This project has apparently been going on for some time, but I'd never heard about it. There were no temporary street signs up a block away, even on Saturday, saying "warning: the streets will be congested and Hollywood Boulevard will be entirely closed on Sunday the 18th." There was nothing on the signs in the bookstore announcing the sale adding, "You might want to think twice about trying to get here that day, though."

Now I know. Whenever I go to LA in the future, I'll have to check ahead and see if there's one of those closures going on, the same way I check to see if there are any wildfires going on in the hills near where I'll be. But when it actually hit me, I didn't know. Those ruddy, ruddy bastards.

concert review: Borromeo Quartet

Borromeo Qt. L to R: Yeesun Kim, vc; Kristopher Tong, 2v; Melissa Reardon, va; Nicholas Kitchen, 1v

Sunday evening I went up to Kohl Mansion to hear the Borromeo Quartet in the first concert of the chamber music season in their magnificent Great Hall, a sort of drawing room on which a platform has been placed on the mid side, so that people in all the chairs surrounding it can see; there's no trouble with hearing. In fact, the acoustics are stunning, which brought particular vividness to this particular performance.

This was an exceedingly serious string quartet concert. The repertoire had its lighter moments - Beethoven's Op. 135 is often seen as a reversion to his clever Haydnesque youth with the greater perspective of maturity; and Sibelius's Voces Intimae Quartet has a couple of lighter and bouncier movements. But they didn't come out that way this time. Nor did the darker portions - the slow movements of both works are potentially emotionally intense, but they had a much drier interpretation here.

The Borromeo Quartet play with a hard crispness that's really best suited for the high modernist 20th century repertoire. They're known for their penetrating Bartok, and I'd be fascinated by what they could make out of Shostakovich. But when they play Romantic or Classical works with that style, it makes the music feel high modernist even if it doesn't actually sound anything like it. They have sprightliness and clarity, but only at a couple small moments - notably the pizzicato moment that almost concludes the Beethoven - was there even a trace of the lightness or wit inherent in the music. They have awesome drive and exactness of control, which expressed itself most clearly in the finales. Beethoven's had some agonizing drama until it faded away; and instead of being a frantic dance, the finale of the Sibelius was a machine of vehement power bearing down on us and nearly crushing the life out of its hearers.

I have to count this a great performance within a certain very limited perspective of interpretation. It was certainly an impressive thing to listen to.

There was a little more to the concert than that. One of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier prelude and fugue sets, arranged for quartet. Evidently the fugue has only three lines, because that's the number of performers playing at once throughout it. And Remember by Eleanor Alberga, three minutes of wistful chordal lament. A fairly succinct program.

concert review: Winchester Orchestra

B. and I attended together a symphonic pops concert by this local community orchestra - the one she belonged to briefly before deciding a different one better met her needs - because it looked like fun. It was the Halloween concert, and the theme seemed to be music that told stories that might be heard at Halloween.

We had the fanfare from Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King", Berlioz's "March to the Scaffold", Saint-Saens's "Danse Bacchanale," and a whole movement, the finale, from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

Plus suites from three movie sequences: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean. I think the last of these is the best as music, but unfortunately the visuals of this performance were spoiled by a guy dressed as Captain Jack running around through the audience and even the orchestra during the performance.

And yes, he was authorized, having even been introduced by the new conductor, James Beauton, who seemed to have a clear enough beat but whose appearance and style may be best described by saying he resembles a young Jerry Seinfeld.

This was in the same church they played in before, with the winds and brass on stage and totally drowning out the strings which were down in the pit below.

Anyway, it was fun, and not too long, and I appreciated getting a big chunk of Scheherazade.

work anniversary

Today marks 20 years since my first professional concert review was published - in phosphors, on the San Francisco Classical Voice website.

I'd been reading SFCV for some time already, and I had noted a news item there about Symphony Silicon Valley (since redubbed Symphony San Jose) moving to a new venue, the California Theatre in downtown San Jose. This was a 1927 film and stage theater that had fallen on hard times and had been renovated, and the premiere concert was going to be a vintage celebration.

I was going to be attending, and as I'd always been particularly interested in reviews of concerts I'd attended myself (to match my opinions against the reviewer's), I was looking forward to reading what they'd have to say. But when that week's batch of reviews came out, SSV wasn't in it.

So I wrote them and asked if they wanted a review. I had one already: I'd written one for LJ, having acquired the habit of reviewing all the concerts I attended. I rewrote it and beefed it up, and sent it in, and they published it. (I had to scarf this from the Wayback Machine because SFCV did not get its archiving system organized until several years later.)

And they paid me for it. And then they phoned me up a couple weeks later and asked if I could cover this string quartet concert that was coming up. And that's how I became a professional concert reviewer.

Of course, having been listening to classical music closely for over 30 years already at that point is part of what gave me the confidence to do this, as did the frequent experience of reading something noted in a review and thinking, yeah, I noticed that too. That convinced me I had the ears for the job. And I've been doing it ever since. Here's my most recent effort; I'm sure I've improved in judgment and authority, but there's a spontaneous lightness to my early reviews that I haven't always maintained.

a touch of Cajun food

On my way back from Ashland, I had to do some quick library research at UC Davis, so that also gave me time to stop at Pedrick Produce, a barn of a place by a rural freeway exit on the way back from Davis. I've been there before; besides produce they have lots of bagged bulk candy (chocolate-covered pretzels, that sort of thing) and nuts.

On a previous visit I'd discovered what I hadn't noticed before that, a wall of hot sauces, including mango sauces that are not paired with habanero, which drowns out the mango taste. And on this visit in a corner I found a case with cajun food, which really sparks my interest. I bought a couple packages of a brand of jambalaya rice mix I hadn't seen before, which has a really interesting recipe (don't use chicken broth; instead, make broth by boiling the chicken pieces that you'll later cut up and put in the mix, then add a can each of french onion soup and cream of celery soup). I bought a pound of andouille sausage - again, a brand I didn't know - to put in the jambalaya.

And they had boudin. I've only ever seen that on restaurant menus and fresh in meat shops in cajun country itself, never packaged and never so far from home. But I really like the stuff and was delighted to get some. I'll have to venture up to Pedrick's a lot more often.

Boudin is classed as a sausage, because it comes in a sausage casing, but it isn't really. It's a loose mixture of meat (usually pork, though I've had crawfish boudin) and rice, stuffed into the casing. When I've had it before, it's boiled or poached, and the casing is too tough to eat. You cut it open and scoop the filling out.

But a thorough discussion online of how to cook it offered me another method: pan-frying. Fry it at medium heat in a little olive oil until brown, and it's crisp. I found that 9 minutes got it brown and caused the ends of the casing to pop open and the filling to spill out a bit. I flipped it over and ran it 9 minutes on the other side, and not only was it fine, but the casing was crisp and edible. Ate it with a little of the leftover jambalaya I'd made from the mix. And very satisfied with my lunch was I.

Wikipedia says there are various forms of boudin, but in cajun country there is just the one kind, with only the meat variable. Wikipedia further suggests that it's akin to the British dishes of black pudding and white pudding, but the cajun variety certainly isn't; it's totally different, both in ingredients and how it's put together.

I don't know how to pronounce boudin. When I was in cajun country, what I heard the natives say was "boo-dan." But when I tried to say "boo-dan," they couldn't understand what I meant.

conversation piece

So I was sitting in the members' lounge at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, having a lively conversation with the young man tending the lounge and a woman of about my own age, who was wearing a nametag identifying her as Susan, a Festival volunteer.

We were talking about reading Shakespeare's plays as allegories, and whether it made a difference if Shakespeare intended it that way. I commented, "A famous author once drew a distinction between allegory, which lies in the control of the author, and applicability, which lies in the freedom of the reader."

"Oh, I like that," said Susan. "Let me write it down," and she pulled out an e-device to do so. "Who said that?" she asked.

"Tolkien," I said. "It's from the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings."

Both my hearers were impressed with the specificity of this offhand citation, and after I modestly admitted to a certain degree of expertise in Tolkien, Susan said, "You must really like fantasy literature."

"Actually, I hate fantasy," I said. "Pull down a fantasy novel at random from the bookstore shelf and I'll probably hate it. I only like a few good authors."

"Like who?"

Judging it best not to retreat to the real old masters, I named some newer authors who are only recently deceased. Ursula K. Le Guin, whom Susan had heard of. Diana Wynne Jones, whom she hadn't. Patricia McKillip.

Susan mentioned Octavia Butler. I agreed she's a great writer, but really more science fiction than fantasy.

"I've been reading a newer author whom I'm really enjoying," offered the young man. I asked who that was, and from his reaction he must have seen my face fall when he said it was Brandon Sanderson.

I explained: "I read his first novel, Elantris, and couldn't make head or tail of it. But don't let me get in the way. These books are written to be enjoyed, and if you enjoy them, they're serving their purpose."

if cats could read Tolkien

Maia has read The Lord of the Rings, but found the movies too scary. She preferred to hide under the bed.

Tybalt tried to read the book, but the only part that interested him was the cats of Queen Beruthiel. Most of the rest didn't stick in his memory.

not a music post

No, I don't have anything to say about DT's music playlist. Some of the songs on it are OK. Though I am puzzled by his fondness for "YMCA", one of many hits of that era with no discernible tune.

The campaign has been speckled with instances of pop musicians objecting to DT using their songs at his rallies, because they do not endorse his campaign. But I can't recall anyone responsible even being asked what they think of his use of "YMCA", which reinforces the impression that the Village People never actually existed but were only an A.I. construct.

Obama's inaugural, which hardly counts, aside, I think the last president who would admit to listening to classical music was JFK, and it wasn't he who invited the likes of Casals and Bernstein to play at the White House, it was Jackie.

vote for tweedle

Our state Assembly member is running for Congress (not in our district) and making something of a botch of it, so his Assembly seat is vacant. The two survivors of the jungle primary to succeed him, and thus the candidates in next month's election, are of different sexes and ethnicities, but are otherwise very much alike. Patrick Ahrens and Tara Sreekrishnan are both young, they're both Democrats, they're both natives of the area who experienced poverty and deprivation in childhood. They're both employed as legislative aides - Patrick is a staff director for the current Assembly member, though he's kind of coy about saying that on his web site - and they're both members of local school boards (he: community college board; she: county board of education).

They also have very similar positions on issues, and they've both received a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood by agreeing with all the statements on PP's questionnaire. And therein lies the rub, because for whatever reason, Planned Parenthood has endorsed only Patrick. (It could have endorsed both. Our city's Democratic club did, and I presume so did our city council member, who's listed in the endorsement pages of both candidates.)

So Tara, making the best of the situation, has put her 100%-rating sticker on her website and mailers, only she's put it under the endorsements heading. Planned Parenthood cried foul: it makes it look as if they'd endorsed her. They've told Tara she can't use the 100%-rating sticker any more. But she's continuing to do so.

This sounds wilful and unethical, but I noticed something odd in the local newspaper's article on the subject. Planned Parenthood actually says that putting the sticker under endorsements is OK when other people do it.

Other non-endorsed candidates across Silicon Valley have put their 100% rating under the endorsements section on their website. But [Lauren] Babb [vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte] said that’s allowed because they don’t expect candidates to have a separate section of their website for the rating.

It's putting the sticker in the endorsement section on her paid mailers that is Tara's sin. I find the minuteness of the distinction here between 'perfectly OK' and 'absolutely forbidden' to be so bizarre, I can't fault Tara for ignoring PP's directive.

Meanwhile, Patrick is making his own hay while the sun shines by plastering "The ONLY Candidate Endorsed by PLANNED PARENTHOOD!!" [sic, exclamations and capitals and all] on his website.

But also, I've received an odd mailer, not from Patrick's campaign but from supporters of his, that accuses Tara of chronic absenteeism in her school board post. But the footnotes on the mailer supporting the claim identify the board as that for a local K to 8 district that Tara has never belonged to. Do they have her confused with someone else? Do they have the board confused with the one she does serve on? I have no idea. Apparently Patrick has not spoken up to disavow this strange thing. Here's an article about it.

The big local daily supports Patrick because it thinks he's more experienced and has a better grasp of issues, but I don't trust their recommendations in general. My friend Max, who belongs to the Democratic Club and follows local politics closely, supports Tara, partly because Patrick hasn't denounced that mailer, but also because, though he considers both competent, Tara is "more wonky."

I believe I know what I think, but I'll let it sit there.

the other half Shakespeare

When B. and I visited the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in June, we saw all the plays on my want-list except one, because it hadn't opened yet: a production of Coriolanus put on by the lower-cased upstart crow collective, a troupe of women and non-binary folk who were responsible for a fabulous King John last year. King John is a little-known standout among Shakespeare's plays, and so is Coriolanus, so I was expecting great things from this. For that reason I made another trip up this last weekend - the last weekend of the performance season, in hopes that summer weather would finally have calmed down by then, which in the nick of time it did.

Coriolanus had its excellences, and the bottom line is that I was very happy to have seen it, but it also had its difficulties. The main one is that, unlike other Shakespeare plays, it has a very large cast of characters. Having them all portrayed by only eight players didn't always work. One had to keep an eye on whether they had their coats buttoned or not, for instance: that indicated different characters. Some of the actors, notably Betsy Schwartz, were good at conveying in speech and action that they were playing different people; others not so much.

Jessika D. Williams portrayed Coriolanus as stolid, brusque, and lacking in emotion, to the point where his capitulation to his mother's entreaties felt weirdly out of character. It was very different from the sly and sardonic Philip the Bastard who Williams played in King John. It was also very different from the greatest previous Coriolanus I've seen, here at Ashland many years ago. Denis Arndt played him as a man convinced that everything he says is sweet reasonableness itself, and is surprised, hurt, and indignant that it isn't taken that way.

As long as I was there, I saw the closing or near-closing performances of two plays I'd seen much earlier in their runs. This production of Macbeth featured the eeriest, creepiest, strangest Weird Sisters ever seen, and I had to admire them again. One of them, Amy Lizardo, was at the post-performance talk, and I got to tell her how good they all were. Macbeth himself seemed to be acted better than he had been, and even Macduff was slightly less than inert.

Much Ado About Nothing was also somewhat better-acted, even though a comparison was difficult because both Benedick and Claudio were being played by different people than before. The play seemed less the glorious romp than it had been, though the outright funny parts were probably funnier. Rex Young as Dogberry in particular seemed to have caught a groove he was missing before.

I stayed at a maze-like hotel which had not caught on that it would be a good idea to add the lobby as an entry to the directional signs in the corridors. The first time I tried heading there from my room I had to stop at the housekeeping break room and ask them.

I took along The Last Dangerous Visions on this trip, and made some progress reading it.

concert review: The Reverberays

Why was I listening to a surf rock concert? I was there, I had the time, it was free and outdoors. Besides, I like some of that music. Of course they played the theme from “Hawaii Five-O”, without which no surf rock concert would be complete. They played an uptempo instrumental rock version of “The Sound of Silence”, which raised my eyebrows a little. And they played, and sang, “Secret Agent Man”. And a lot of stuff I didn’t know.

The band was lively and together. Standard four-piece: two guitars, one doubling trumpet; bass (the only woman, cf Talking Heads); drums. It was not too loud and I enjoyed it.

also without having read the whole thing yet

You didn't think I was going to inflict another 1100-word book review on you, did you? Instead, here's 600 words of statistical thoughts about The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.

weather report

Just as the heat wave in California has broken and given us some relief, the Southeast gets another hurricane. Hurricane Milton (the Monster) has, as I write, just made landfall near Tampa and the expected winds and floods are ensuing. I wish everybody and everything in its pathway the best of luck.

Still, the Florida peninsula sticks right out into the middle of hurricane alley. It's a target, and gets hit quite frequently. I wouldn't want to live there, for that and numerous other reasons, and nobody much did, except the Seminoles, until the invention of air conditioning. It's given the false impression that this land is generally habitable.

However, what is one to make of Marjorie Taylor Greene's declaration that an unspecified "they" control the weather? If I had control of the weather, I wouldn't have hurricanes at all. What a strange and unhelpful thing to invent. I don't quite understand them anyway, although I took a course in meteorology in college. Hurricanes seem to be created by the following algorithm:

1. Heated tropical water transfers excess energy to the atmosphere.
2. ????
3. Hurricane!

I'm sure there's more to it than that, but that's the impression one gets from the news.

Tropical cyclones do form in the east Pacific, but the shape of the land is such that the tracks usually take them out to the most isolated part of the ocean. Occasionally one hits Mexico, and brings heavy rains to southern California, but that's about all we get. It's the shape of the land which spares us where the Southeast gets slammed. Geography really is destiny.

without having read any of the stories yet

The Last Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison (actually by J. Michael Straczynski, but he modestly leaves his name off the title page), Blackstone Publishing, 2024: a review of the concept and the ancillary material (which I have read).

Here it is, the third Dangerous Visions anthology of science fiction stories, finally out 50 years after it was promised by its editor, a year or so after the second anthology, and some six years after that editor's death, put together by his literary executor.

Or is it? LDV, in all the announcements made of its imminent publication during the first decade or so that Ellison sat on it, was going to be legendarily long. A typewritten list by Ellison from 1979, reproduced here, lists stories by 108 writers. Of course such an enormous anthology was not practically publishable, as ex-contributor Christopher Priest pointed out many years ago now. And over 40 of the stories were withdrawn and published elsewhere by authors - or their estates - tired of waiting for a publication they'd been repeatedly assured was imminent.

Besides those, JMS says that many of the stories are just outdated today, or were never any good in the first place, having been bought by Ellison as favors to his friends. And as history wended on into the 1980s, JMS says, writers were less willing to be "dangerous" than they had been in the 60s or early 70s. So granted that a publishable anthology today would be a lot shorter than what Ellison tempted us with, what JMS presents us here is stories by 24 separate authors (one author is responsible for eight vignettes). It's a hefty volume - 433 pages - but the original Dangerous Visions had stories by 32 authors and Again, Dangerous Visions by 43, if I've counted correctly, so after all that anticipation, a 24-author anthology feels a little damp. Besides, seven of the stories are new ones bought by JMS, leaving only 17 authors from Ellison's stash.

It's a little hard to tell at a glance which are the new stories. They aren't marked in any way, though the authors are named in the afterword. All the stories are followed by brief author bios, many of which give the author's age, some of them stated to be "at the time of this sale," but others, if you know the author's birth year, are obviously as of some date between 1973 and 1980. And then they go on, in the rare "future-in-the-past" tense, to explain what the author has done since then. Which, in eight cases, includes that they've died. While waiting for their stories to be published. On the other side, if the author's age is of 2020 or so, this must be a new story.

JMS includes a long essay, much longer than any of the stories, titled "Ellison Exegesis," that after a lot of throat-clearing about his own childhood discovery of Ellison's work, explains the history of LDV and how it clashed with its editor's life. Besides those favors to friends, JMS says that Harlan continued buying stories for LDV to fill gaps in the anthology as stories were withdrawn by impatient authors - or their estates. That sounds strange: given the huge oversize of the volume, Ellison should have been relieved at its reduction. There were other reasons too: to keep the anthology new and relevant, and also - JMS says - Ellison bought stories the way that people eat potato chips, reflexively and impulsively.

But JMS doesn't recount the repeated announcements of imminent publication, nor does he discuss another obvious motive of Ellison's - his desire to get every SF author of worth in the DV anthologies somewhere, and his increasing frantic rush as new authors kept appearing. JMS can be critical of Ellison, but he's not that critical.

In his initial announcement of the book, JMS said that it would include "one last, significant work by Harlan that has never been published ... that ties directly into the reason why The Last Dangerous Visions has taken so long to come to light." The only sign of that here is JMS's explanation of why Ellison couldn't bring himself to finish up the anthology: his refusal to see a psychiatrist who could diagnose and treat his bipolar condition. It was this condition, JMS says, that torpedoed any sustained work, not just LDV: Ellison could toss off short stories at speed, but after a few brief efforts very early in his career, he never wrote a novel. Finally, JMS says, he essentially forced Ellison to see a shrink and go on his meds, after which he began to feel a lot better. But soon after that, his physical health began to fail, and that was as far as that went.

DV and ADV featured long and entertaining introductions by Ellison to each story. It was facing the prospect of writing the same for LDV that apparently stymied work on it. Why didn't he just give up and let the stories appear unintroduced, or let someone else write the introductions? According to JMS, Ellison only completed one introduction, and it's here: it's an introduction to Edward Bryant's story and it's basically an apologia for being too jocularly rude about Bryant (a close friend, so the rudeness was intended as humorous, God help it) for his story in ADV. JMS also prints the abortive beginning of a general introduction to the anthology that Ellison couldn't bring himself to finish.

Each story (except for the vignettes) is accompanied by a full-page black-and-white illustration, as was the case with the earlier anthologies. This time, they're by Tim Kirk, who, like the authors, has been waiting half a century for his work to appear in print. This includes the new stories and the two introductory essays. Are the illustrations for those repurposed from stories that did not get published here, or did Kirk draw new ones? I suspect the former, but it doesn't say.

During the long wait - it's been four years since JMS's first announcement - for this refurbished version of the book to appear, JMS has made a lot of announcements that made it sound as if, like Ellison before him, he'd bitten off more than he could chew. That made me very nervous, and I worried that JMS was following in Ellison's footsteps in another way, by making promises he couldn't deliver on.

In a sense he didn't deliver. The actual book is much more modest than the announcements suggested. On the other hand it does now really exist in print, which Ellison's version never did, so full points to JMS for that. And on its own, not in comparison with DV and ADV before it, it's a pretty sizeable anthology.

Now to read the stories.

faucet fix'd

We had a plumbing crisis a few days ago. I have a tub/shower in my bathroom, and the little gadget for shutting off the tub water and making it come out of the shower instead has long been sticking and acting up.

And then one day the entire faucet fixture fell apart and came off in my hand.

It was at this point that I discovered that tub faucets are not fastened to the wall. A water pipe extends several inches out from the wall with a screw thread on the end. This screws onto a thread on the inside of the faucet fixture.

OK, that looks easy. To the hardware store to buy a tub faucet fixture. They only sell kits: the faucet, the control handle, the shower head. OK, I could use a new shower head too: the old one tended to dribble.

Brought it home, tried to screw on the faucet fixture. It wouldn't screw on.

Call a plumber. He couldn't do it either, nor could the other plumber from the same outfit whom he called to replace him with greater skill. It took the third plumber, who had to wield a blowtorch (!) to remove the old screw thread from the end of the pipe and solder on a new one, to get this to work.

But victory was ours, and he replaced the shower head too. (He could not, however, figure out that you had to pull, not rotate, the handle to turn the water on.)

As soon as he left, I took my first shower in three days (I'd been subsisting on sponge baths), and - considering how badly the old shower head worked - my first really satisfactory shower since the last time I stayed in a hotel room a month ago. Bliss.

concert review: Miró Quartet

The Miró Quartet was previously heard by me at the Music@Menlo summer festival back in 2005, when they played four of Beethoven's Op. 18 quartets at one concert. Now they returned, with one member different, to open Menlo's winter season with a standard string quartet recital at the Spieker Center on the Menlo School campus last Saturday.

The Miró have a firm and somewhat gritty, but clear, straightforward, and above all pliant style. Their Haydn sounds like Haydn, and their Debussy sounds like Debussy. (Not everyone does this.) Haydn's Op. 77 No. 1 in G, one of his very last quartets, was fast, chipper, matter-of-fact, and suffused with a humorous geniality, just as it should be. The clarity making all the lines audible was gratifying and impressively balanced.

Debussy's Quartet (he only wrote the one) exposed those impressionist harmonies without wallowing in them. That gritty foundation was vital here in keeping the music grounded and focused on the melodic motifs and the interplay of the instruments. The result was that I have never heard a performance of Debussy's scherzo that so demonstrated a stylistic resemblance and similarity of purpose with the one in Ravel's Quartet. Debussy and Ravel are usually classed together, though not by me. (I see Debussy as more like Delius, and Ravel more resembling Respighi.) But this time I agree, they go together.

And in between, a piece the Miró commissioned several years ago from the ubiquitous (at least if you go to the Cabrillo Festival he is) Kevin Puts, titled Home. Inspired by the 2015 refugees from the Middle East, this piece is about leaving home and then, I guess, returning. It begins with several minutes of a rocking motif in thick, variable, but consonant harmony. That's "home." Then it goes chaotic, or at least as chaotic as the sober, straightlaced Puts can manage. Pointillism, grinding tuttis, glissando runs, and chromatic scales are all tried out momentarily, though nothing goes really wild. When it returns to the opening, it's a rougher, more astringent consonance. It's all earnestly played by the Miró four.

Some quartets open their program with Haydn to be dull and dutiful. Not this one. Here the Haydn was the treat of the program. But Debussy and Puts also received careful attention from this impressive ensemble.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

EPS conducted Brahms' Fourth Symphony and Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto. What these works have in common is that each has a movement resurrecting the old Baroque form of the passacaglia, which is a set of short variations in triple meter over a repeating (but itself variable) bass line. Nevertheless the composers handle them differently: Brahms follows the passacaglia strictly but melds the successive variations into an overarching sonata-allegro form. Shostakovich is more free in form and wilder in intrumentation: he introduces his passacaglia with a solemn statement for horns, lower strings, and timpani, and finishes it with a cadenza for unaccompanied solo violin.

Sayaka Shoji was the violinist, who carried her full and solid tone both through the long slow movements (of which the passacaglia was one) and the violently wild fast ones, which went on at a ferocious clip longer than would seem possible. Her command of this disparate material was what was impressive. After the cadenza merges into the finale, the composer inserted a brief orchestral-only section before the violin launches into vigorous motion, at the behest of the original violinist, who wanted a break to wipe his brow. Shoji didn't look as if she needed it.

Brahms is a more subdued composer than EPS normally specializes in, but he knows how to be subdued and exciting at the same time. This performance of Brahms' most neglected symphony was a masterful blend of the cool and sober with the dramatic and tense, each coming in just the right proportion. The third movement, the closest Brahms ever came to a scherzo, really evoked the Beethoven tradition in its outer sections.

On the walk from BART to the concert hall, the book I was carrying fell out of my pocket and was lost. (It was expendable: don't worry about it.) On the way back, the concert program also fell out of my pocket and was lost. You'd think I'd learn not to put things like that in my pocket.

set of Bruckner

I missed noting the bicentennial of Anton Bruckner's birth, which was Sept. 4 while I was up in Oregon. But I didn't neglect celebrating it later, by buying the new box set of his symphonies, the "Complete Versions Edition," conducted by Markus Poschner. It has all 11 of his symphonies, including the two unnumbered ones, in 18 full versions plus a few extra versions of individual movements. It's not actually complete complete, but it has all the standard editions, except for the Robert Haas combined edition of the Eighth, which took what Haas considered the best parts from two competing versions, which is no longer considered a kosher procedure.

So far I've listened through the 3 versions of the Fourth, plus the single versions of the Fifth and Sixth, plus the 'student' symphony in F Minor, which I'd never had a satisfactory performance of before. Judging by his Fourth through Sixth, Poschner isn't the greatest of Bruckner conductors, but he does well enough with the F Minor, especially the Andante movement which is just charming.

What can I say of the multiple versions? The standard 1880 version remains the best-sounding Fourth, the 1876 version sounding too sketchy and the 1888 version too clotted. The other symphonies in multiple versions (1, 2, 3, and 8) I don't know as well, so that will require more chewing. But first I want to listen to the other noncanonical symphony, "Die Nullte" or No. 0. There is no attempt in this set to produce a hypothetical completed version of the finale of the Ninth, which Bruckner left in sketches when he died and has been worked on by several people, none of them really satisfactorily. It was in putting all the pieces together in final form that Bruckner's genius principally lay.

put not your faith in bookstores

It's October, right? The first full month of autumn? Yet, after a month of mostly reasonable late-summer temperatures, this week we're undergoing the biggest heat wave of the year. It's been consistently above 95F since Monday, mostly over 100. Strangely, I'm finding it less enervating than on previous experiences, and on days when I need to be home for health reasons, I'm managing.

But I'm still feeling desolated, because I can't read what I want to read. The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien was published in the U.S. on Sept. 17. I pre-ordered a copy. It still hasn't arrived. The Last Dangerous Visions was published on Oct. 1. I pre-ordered a copy. It hasn't arrived either.

debate

I didn't watch this debate either. Same reasons: too nervous, didn't want to hear 45 minutes of the other guy blithering.

From what I've read, Vance delivered himself, in his smoother and slicker way than his boss, of lie after disingenuous non-truth after lie. There's been a lot of discussion of CBS having put fact-checks under QR codes, but not a single person I've read seems to have gone and looked at any of them. The one time the moderators tried to correct him, he objected that there wasn't supposed to be any live on-air fact-checking. Which is as much as to say, "Hey! I was supposed to be able to lie with impunity!"

Walz apparently challenged almost none of this, but stuck to his pre-set talking points. This is what most candidates do at debates. Unless you're extremely skilled at impromptu debating - the recent presidential candidate who's by far the best at this is Chris Christie - there's no time to think on your feet. Best to answer any question by finding the most relevant memorized nugget in your banks and deliver that.

Besides, Harris didn't respond to most of Trump's imbecilities either, except to laugh at them. The danger of fact-checking a lie-spewing opponent is that you spend all your time doing that, letting them set the agenda and never having time to expound your own.

Several liberal commentators have said that, although Vance was smoother, Walz won the debate in terms of giving better arguments. But will they be perceived as better? If not, he can't be said to have won.

Walz could have been less nervous, and folksier, as he is in speeches. But at least it wasn't a disaster.

no movies

My attention was caught by this article discussing the choice of movie that Tim Walz took his future wife Gwen to on their first date.

It was Falling Down, a 1993 drama featuring Michael Douglas as a man who loses his cool from being stuck in traffic and goes on a rampage. (In 1993, this was apparently satire.) The article's author hadn't even heard of this film. I had; I remember noting it from when it came out and putting it on my "maybe I'll go see this" list, though I never actually did.

But what a strange pick for a first date movie? Perhaps less so when you consider they were living in a small town in rural Nebraska with only one movie theater, so there wasn't much choice.

Looking back to when B. and I were dating - this would be 1987-9 in our case - I can't recall our going to the movies. B. is not a movie person, and even less of a movie theater person, and I'm not that much of those either. Once we moved in together, we rented a fair number of movies (VHS from Blockbuster in those days) and watched them at home, but our dates were to classical and folk music concerts, science-fiction/fantasy clubs and book discussions, and Regency dances.

The only movie either of us can recall going out to together in our dating days hardly counted as a date, because it was in the daytime, and the theater was packed with enthusiasts, many of them people we knew. It was a sneak preview showing of the yet-unreleased The Princess Bride. We were all big fans of the book, an entity almost forgotten about these days. And we were very happy with what we saw. The Princess Bride remains my gold standard for an excellent adaptation of a book to a movie, and the fact that the script was by the original novelist probably has a lot to do with it.

I would also rate The Last Unicorn highly for the same reason, and it also comes to mind as one of a number of delicate fantasies from the early 1980s that I saw on dates before I ever met B. Another one that I remember with particular fleeting fondness is one that I caught on an exceedingly brief theatrical run in Berkeley, after which it vanished and was never heard of again. It was a goofy story made by the unusual technique of cut-out stop-motion animation, and it was called Twice Upon a Time.

Actually it did have both VHS and DVD releases, not that I ever laid eyes on either. But it was hardly in theaters at all, and today it's not online in full. This clip will give you a better idea of what the movie as a whole is like than other clips on YouTube, and yes that is Lorenzo Music, better-known as the voice of Garfield the cat, asking most of the questions. (Other voices, Marshall Efron and Julie Payne.) *sigh* I really ought to go find a copy of this and see it again.

(Not regarding movies, but I've been introduced to "Colin from Portsmouth," a parody of a right-wing ranter on British call-in radio. This one on Elon Musk is one of the funniest, as well as on a topic that Americans will get.)

this is just to record

that B. and I got our flu and covid shots this morning. There was already a long line when we arrived 15 minutes before the clinic opened - possibly it'd have been quieter if we'd arrived in mid-afternoon, though in general Kaiser is usually busier in the afternoon - but when they did open, they scooped up the people with canes and walkers first, as they've done before. What they were not prepared for was the size of the line, as they had only two stations open.

We picked this week so that I'd be covered for people-heavy events I'll be going to in another week and a half, but should still be at strong coverage during the holidays.

Looking over my previous post, it occurs to me that it would have been more coherent if I hadn't written it in late evening when I was about to fall asleep. I'll have to watch my timing.

assorted books

Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire, by Peter Stark (HarperCollins, 2015)
Books on the history of US Western exploration usually, after describing Lewis and Clark's journey in great detail, mention briefly that wealthy merchant John Jacob Astor sent a party to establish a fur-trading post, to barter with the natives, at the mouth of the Columbia, the far end of L&C's journey; that they did so, calling it Astoria, but at the outbreak of the war of 1812 a couple years later, they gave in to the threats of the Brits' far stronger navy and sold them their assets, and that was the end of that.*
But you don't hear anything about how Astor's men got there in the first place. This book tells that, in hideous but captivating detail. This was only the second party of whites to cross the continent north of Mexico, and the skill and luck of Lewis & Clark is demonstrated by the terrible time of it these people had, taking nearly two years, including two winters in the wilderness, to get there, losing several people along the way. Meantime, Astor also sent a ship around the Horn, which got there first but also had a terrible time of it, also losing several people along the way. Stark's theory is that, by the time they got there, everyone involved was suffering from PTSD, which is why they were so inert about getting the post set up. Other weird events included the destruction of the ship by a suicide bomber. Yes, in 1811.

The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, by Calvin Trillin (Random House, 2024)
Not as consistently interesting as Trillin's previous retrospective collection of a half century of journalism, Jackson, 1964, and Other Dispatches, which covers racial issues. This one mixes serious articles with humorous pieces, and the problem is that, in classic New Yorker style (where much of this originally appeared), many of the serious reports are far longer than any possible interest the reader might have in the subject. I guess it depends on your inherent interest, because the one on the rise of the satirical redneck movie reviewer Joe Bob Briggs did not become wearisome. It seemed to me that the trouble with Joe Bob began when the paper didn't take enough care to mark the satire off, for instance mixing Joe Bob's four-star ratings of splatter films with the regular reviewer's two-star ratings of serious films.

*However, the fact that the Americans were able to establish a post there before the British in the first place - the Brits kept finding the wrong rivers when they were trying to float downstream from the upper end of the Columbia in what is now B.C. - plus Lewis and Clark, plus an American ship having made the whites' discovery of the mouth of the Columbia in the first place (which is why the river is called that), contributed to a U.S. claim to the area, which is why Oregon and Washington are U.S. territory today, and there's a town called Astoria on the site of the Astor post. It was because I was going there that I bought this book at Powell's in Portland, though I didn't read it until after I got home.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Their first week's concert having been cancelled by a chorus strike, SFS finally put on a regular concert - no chorus this week - Friday evening. Of course, given the cavalier way management has treated the chorus, I expect the orchestra players also to go on strike again (they've done this before) when their contract comes up, but that's not until November, and I don't have any concerts scheduled after next week until January.

Esa-Pekka Salonen - the music director whom management let get away - thus began the subscription concerts of the final season on his contract with this performance. He was greeted by huge audience cheers when he arrived and even huger ones when he was finished, having demonstrated yet again what a loss his departure will be.

The big piece on the program was Hindemith's Mathis der Maler Symphony, which you don't hear very often. Its thematic material consists mostly of unpromising-sounding fragmentary motifs, but a good performance builds them up into a big hefty solemn-sounding work that sounds more compelling than the material making it up. That happened here.

The symphony material is taken from an opera about a 16th-century painter, though there's nothing 16th-centuryish about the music. Somewhat more concrete 20th-century references to earlier music were found in two shorter accompanying pieces. Hindemith's rare Ragtime (Well-Tempered), from his early cheeky period, takes a phrase from a Bach prelude and adapts it into as much raucous noise as an orchestra can generate. Edward Elgar orchestrated Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor, which had an integrated texture that made it sound like it was being played on an organ with more different stops than you'd ever heard of.

For another big piece, EPS has commissioned yet another new piano concerto, this one from composer Nico Muhly and written for pianist Alexandre Tharaud, whose album of French Baroque music Muhly had admired. There was supposed to be an air of, but no quotations from, music of that kind in the outer movements, but the music sounded to me more like fast pulsating minimalism of the Steve Reich school. In the slow movement, Tharaud played an endless series of soft diatonic chords, for all the world as if this were by Georgs Pelēcis, while the orchestra steadily built up into a contrasting din around it.

If you want an account of the mess that led to the strike, and the labor/financial situation that SFS is in, a simple but right-headed accounting comes from retired Chronicle reviewer Joshua Kosman; but for the full-throated burn, Kosman suggests the latest (as of now) four posts from this blogger, Emily Hogstad, who isn't even a Californian but is viewing this from Minnesota, but is her gaze ever piercing, informed as it is by their own orchestral troubles a few years back.

My own take is that the only solution here is to dissolve the management and get a new and more level-headed one, while keeping the musicians - nothing wrong with them. That's what they did in San Jose a couple decades back, and things have been fine there since. The big difference is, San Jose was a local orchestra that learned to live within its budget, while SFS is a world-class ensemble that has yet to grasp that to retain that status, they need to pay for the requisite talent instead of trying to run it on the cheap. If they're going to drop back into a regional-level orchestra, which is where they're headed, they should acknowledge that and have a good excuse for it. But if they want to keep on, they need 1) a clearer, less waffling, and more rip-roaring vision, that will attract the donors they say they want; and 2) a willingness in the meantime to dip further into their enormous endowment to keep the coaster running.

research day

I spent Thursday at UC Berkeley, doing research for the Tolkien Studies bibliography, in particular catching PDFs of the articles so that I'll have them handy for the next year's "Year's Work." It was a successful and rewarding day: lots of available indexes, lots of full-text links, easy access for a visitor to the databases, no trouble getting a stack pass for the hardcopy material, and the same brilliantly designed scanners in the stacks that I've found so satisfactory before. The only irritation was the increasing number of articles that say they're about the book but are actually about the movies.

So now that UC Santa Cruz has made on-campus visitor parking permits difficult to obtain (by changing to some ornate online process instead of the old system, which was to drive up to a booth at the entrance to campus and pay them $10), and the one relevant journal that Santa Cruz carries and nobody else around here does is now online, and it's clear to me that Berkeley actually has better access to databases, I think in future I'll come here first, when my home online research is done and it's time to turn to universities.

Of course, Berkeley has no weekday on-campus visitor parking either, at least not that I've been able to figure out, but unlike Santa Cruz it's in the middle of a city, so there's commercial garages, which have space available at least if you get there before noonish.

But it was clear to me, after walking around among three campus libraries as well as venturing off-campus for lunch, that the sort of rushing around that I did as an undergraduate, all those years ago, is no longer in my repertoire.

I had one little scare when my car wouldn't start. Battery wasn't dead but the engine wouldn't respond. It was fine later, so I don't know what went wrong, but in the meantime I called the AAA, though I called back to cancel later. I'd heard that AAA now makes you fill out an online form, which I can't do unless I'm at home, because I don't have That Kind of a mobile phone, but it turns out they only send you there if you answer "yes" to the automated-vocal inquiry, "Are you calling from a mobile phone?" Otherwise they continue to ask you questions by automated voice and then eventually send you to an agent to handle any queries or problems.

voting quiz

My dreams, however vividly recalled at the moment I wake up, tend to crumble into dust over the next few minutes.

All I can recall of this one is that a cancelled debate between Trump and Harris had been replaced with a voter quiz/challenge, items designed by the Trump campaign. If you could accomplish the task/pass the quiz, you could be counted as a vote for Harris ... if you wanted to, I guess. I can't remember how that part worked.

There were five parts. They were:

1. Park your car properly in a Trump-owned parking lot.

2. Answer the question, how far away is the nearest star to the solar system, Alpha Centauri? ("Four light years" would do.)

3. Do you prefer dogs or cats? (Dog people = Trump; cat people = Harris)

... I can't remember the others.

I've outwitted myself

So I want the newly-released 3-volume edition of Tolkien's collected poetry, but I haven't got it.

I don't usually pre-order unpublished books, but I did in this case, a few weeks ago. My first instinct was to support my local independent bookstore, but to my surprise the book was not listed in their online catalog of books available for pre-order. (The Last Dangerous Visions was, and I ordered that.)

So, since that implied they wouldn't be carrying it, I placed my order with Barnes and Noble, figuring it'd get shipped so that it arrived on publication day, the way the Harry Potter books were. US publication day was yesterday, Tuesday. It hasn't arrived. My order status says it's expected to arrive today, but it's also listed as on back order.

So it may not come for some time, despite the order status's promise. Meanwhile, now that the work is published, the independent bookstore now has it, and their online catalog says there's a copy for sale in their local branch.

I could rush down there this morning and buy it, and make the booksellers happy with a big sale (it's over $100), but it's too late to cancel my Barnes & Noble order, even though it hasn't been shipped. I don't want to buy two copies of such a large and expensive work, so I'm stuck. Why didn't the local bookstore have it listed on pre-order?

it concludes with a concert

Saturday I was out for a long round trip that took me to errands in four different places around the Bay Area.

1. Stopping for an early lunch at the Irish pub in Millbrae where our Mythopoeic book discussion group rented their back room last December for our annual festive reading meeting, and to arrange to rent the room again for this year.

2. Up into the City for another visit to the public library for more research on the Tolkien Studies bibliography.

3. Across the Bay to Berkeley for an afternoon invitational gathering in honor of the hostess's Big Round Number birthday. As I entered the room, I saw, seated on the couch beneath the window (so that the light was behind her and I couldn't see her very well), the hostess's daughter, the one who lives at home and had organized the party. She raised her hand in greeting and I acknowledged back. Then Mom, who was seated on the opposite side of the room, said that same daughter could fetch me a drink. I looked into the interior room, and there she was! Puzzled, I looked back to the window, and realized that the one who'd greeted me was the other daughter, the one who lives 2000 miles away and is consequently not often seen. She looks only a bit like her sister, but as I said the light was bad. Her husband and son were there too: it was a festive gathering.

4. And lastly, over the hills to Walnut Creek for my first achieved concert of the season, the California Symphony in the bicentennial bash of Beethoven's Ninth. What a magnificent performance. The orchestra, under music director Donato Cabrera, burst with fervor and intensity. Where did the brass learn to play with such stentorian energy? All three fast movements had craggy vigor, while the slow movement had an unexpected majesty. The chorus, from the SF Conservatory, wobbled in some dicey spots, but had the vocal power necessary. The lead soloist, Sidney Outlaw, sang in a light-toned and lyrical baritone, almost as if he were a tenor, but he too had the carrying power. Of the other soloists, soprano Laquita Mitchell surprised with the intensity of her vocal production.

This was a glorious concert, and I learned something driving to it also. I learned that the electronic signs on the freeway giving the time to various destinations are not to be trusted. In Oakland, it said 15 minutes to Walnut Creek. 15 minutes later, I was still stuck in the traffic jam caused by drivers apparently too cautious to enter the Caldecott Tunnel at speed. This had obviously been going on for some time, but nobody told the signs about it. Next time I need to take this drive, I'll go around on San Pablo Dam Road instead.