Friday, February 14, 2025

concert review: Yuja! Yuja!

The ubiquitous and unsurpassed pianist Yuja Wang made another appearance at Davies with the SF Symphony to play two (fairly short) piano concertos in one concert, one before and one after intermission. The hall was, unusually, packed. EPS conducted.

First came Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. This was brisk, chippy, in the neoclassical spirit of the day. Yuja emphasized clarity over sheer power.

Then the First Concerto of Einojuhani Rautavaara. I was familiar with the composer but not the work. It had three movements of startlingly differing character. In the first, Yuja pounded out huge dissonant chords while the orchestra played gentler Nordic surges. In the second, Yuja turned to gentle, rather postmodern chord sequences, intermixed with tinkling runs, while the orchestra provided a quiet shimmering background. The third was a wild and rampant toccata.

After this, Yuja played two encores, the first a piece of Glassian minimalism with a lot of tremolo, the second one of her standard encores, an abridged arrangement of Marquez's Danzon No. 2.

What Yuja wears is always a topic of interest for her concerts. For Ravel she wore a long but slit black slinky number. For Rautavaara she changed to one of her sparkling minidresses.

The two concertos were surrounded by movements from Debussy's Images. Having had more than enough Debussy in the first part - his music tends to make me slightly nauseous - I decided not to stick around for the second.

Besides, I was thoroughly soaked. Having been dumped out by the city bus 3 1/2 blocks from the hall, I found that the previously merely persistent rain had enlarged itself into a downpour. It took me over a block to find a spot to shelter and wait it out - intense downpours never last long here - and I caught the brunt of it. My jacket, a light windbreaker, was still very damp when I got home, so I put it in the clothes dryer.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

concert review: Joshua Roman

This was one of those concerts so strikingly unusual that I couldn't not attend.

Joshua Roman is a professional cellist whose career was derailed when he developed Long Covid in 2021. It hit him like a truck, with symptoms rather resembling chronic fatigue. Having played the cello every day for most of his life, he put it away and didn't touch it for months.

When he was finally able to get it out and start playing again, the first piece he played was the Prelude from Bach's Suite No. 1, pretty much the foundation stone of the cello repertoire. After so long away, the sheer joy of the physicality of playing and the nourishment he got from making music and from its sound struck him forcefully. It touched him inside, is the way he put it.

Music is for healing and nourishing the body, the emotions, the mind. It's a tool kit for wellness. That is the lesson Roman learned. Though he's never fully recovered, and will - he says - not be the same man again, he has been going around giving concerts illustrating this lesson, and this at Stanford was one of them.

In between talking about his experiences and what music means to him, he played a few unaccompanied pieces: the Bach Prelude, the medieval-inspired in manus tuas by Caroline Shaw, a Capriccio by Krzysztof Penderecki to allow for the need for chaos and craziness in life, and a couple pieces of his own. One of these, written during the original pandemic, was a duet written to express the need for playing together with others, with separate melodies for each of two cellos which interweave and layer on top of each other. He played this with Melanie Ambler, a Stanford medical student who plays healing solo cello concerts for critically ill patients and those in pallative care.

Then, for his favorite concerto, the Saint-Saëns First, Roman was joined by the Stanford Medicine Orchestra, conducted by Terrance Yan. The Medicine Orchestra? Yes, it's a project to bring artistic creativity into the busy lives of personnel at the Stanford Hospital and Medical School. And it shouldn't be surprising that many of those people play instruments, considering how many of the performers at Stanford undergraduate student concerts are revealed by their bios to be pre-meds.

Roman expressed his gratitude to be playing with "an orchestra of healers," and for an encore he offered another one of his solo pieces: he sang Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" - the original verses, which hardly anyone does in full - while accompanying himself with an imaginative cello line.

Roman's cello tone is rich and slightly nasal, but very light in ambiance. It soars rather than weighs down. As a session for healing the soul in a difficult time, this concert was - as the cliche puts it - what the doctor ordered.

But considering why we were here and what happened to Joshua Roman, why were less than 5% of the attendees wearing masks? What is wrong with people?

Monday, February 10, 2025

nah, a concert review

I've occasionally enjoyed listening to bluegrass music. I still have fond memories of attending the public concert of a dulcimer convention in Little Rock, Arkansas, some 16 years ago, and most of the music fell in that category.

So I decided to take up the Freight's offer of early tickets to a concert by what they assured us was a popular bluegrass band, though I'd never heard of it. And so last night I found myself among the enthusiastic crowd pouring in for a two-hour set by the Del McCoury Band.

This was a different sort of bluegrass. What I'd heard in Little Rock was typically a single performer at a time balancing a mountain dulcimer across her knees. This was Big Band Bluegrass: Two guitars, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, and bass, played by six men (and they were all men) all trying to outdo each other in fancy solo instrumental displays, which they'd trade off on during songs. This kind of show-offery is one of the things I dislike about jazz, and I don't much like it in classical concertos either.

The singing, though live and on mikes, all sounded like it came from a scratchy old 78, and the words were usually unintelligible.

Nevertheless I sat through the whole set, it wasn't unpleasant, and towards the end I had the treat of hearing them do a song I actually knew: Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning." I don't think I'd heard anyone but RT do that before, and hearing it translated into bluegrass was - interesting. Things devolved chaotically when the leader - whom I guessed was Del McCoury himself, though he never introduced himself - asked for requests. The torrent of song titles bellowed out from the audience seemed to bewilder him, and they just played what they wanted.

Uniquely for a concert I've attended on the evening of the game, nobody mentioned the Super Bowl. What a relief.

Sunday, February 9, 2025

a panel and a concert

Saturday afternoon I attended a panel on "music and mind" at Stanford. Famed soprano Renée Fleming, who's edited a book on the subject, moderated three Stanford professors of neuroscience and a dean, who described research. One professor talked about training for people with cochlear implants to get them to hear music properly (the implants are designed to clarify voices only). Another described some sort of tactile glove he's developed that helps give Parkinson's patients better control over their limbs; he's hoping to transfer this research into dealing with musicians with focal dystonia (cramps and contractions that affect them particularly when they're playing or singing). The dean spoke of a Stanford arts therapy program open to help students who feel lonely, depressed, etc. Sending students to concerts, museums, etc., may seem a dorky idea for a program, but the therapists, after determining your tastes, find appropriate venues, pay for the tickets and arrange transportation, and above all they match you with other students who want to go to the same things, since not having anyone to go with and not being able to find anyone is a major student complaint.

The third professor spoke in more general terms about brain and bodily states, discussing neural control over exhalation, which all speech and singing is. He said that open improvisation is less traumatic than anything formal or scripted - he cited waiting your turn to introduce yourself at a meeting as particularly anxiety-inducing; it's better to go first. Fleming disagreed; it's when she's practiced an aria to perfection that she gets into the zone, a flow state as she described it. Whereas improvisation - which she's done as a jazz singer - requires thinking, analytics of the accompaniment, etc.

I'm not a performer as Fleming is, but my ideas fall on her lines. Listening to others doing the introductions gives me a chance to mentally draft my own words and a database of others to model myself on, and I get less anxious as it goes along. Whereas free improvisation, like improv theater, panics me, because I don't know what to do, and I can't think of anything under pressure. (My brother, on the other hand, loves improv theater, and does it regularly.)

After the panel, I had just under two hours to travel successively by car, BART, and bus 40 miles to Herbst in the City for a piano recital. Having prepared by stuffing portable food in my car so I wouldn't have to stop for dinner, I managed it in exactly 90 minutes.

Pianist Marc-André Hamelin began by applying his clear, precise, and liquid tones to a delightfully crisp and chipper performance of a Haydn sonata. He then spoiled the effect by playing two pieces of atonal modernist crap, one messy and one stodgy, and one piece of postmodernist pastiche crap (lots of Debussy quotes, a Scott Joplin quote interrupted by Igor Stravinsky, that sort of thing).

The second half was all late Romantic Russians, Sergei Rachmaninoff and his almost-forgotten epigone Nikolai Medtner. I actually liked the Medtner better: it was lighter and less turgid. But the Rachmaninoff pieces, including his rare Second Piano Sonata, could have been chosen specifically to make him look bad, because he's often better than this. Performance: A, insofar as it was possible to tell; Program selection: D.

The program note writer was interested in one thing, describing how hard all this music was to play. Haydn: "these sonatas are at times very difficult." Crap modernist 1 (Frank Zappa, no less): "Zappa himself described the solo-piano version as 'very, very, very difficult.'" Crap modernist 2 (Stefan Wolpe): "this exceptionally complex score." Crap postmodernist (John Oswald): "two measures of the score were possibly impossible to play." Medtner: "a study in fiery virtuosity." Rachmaninoff: "The one thing clear about this music is how difficult it is."

Saturday, February 8, 2025

conference report update

I've received a couple of comments on my Fahrenheit 2451 conference report, referring to my paper on image reproduction access in libraries, mentioning the alleged practice of libraries to discard paper originals of newspapers after microfilming them.

I addressed this in the paper, but I didn't want to respond to these in comments, because it's a complicated matter, so here instead is what I said in the paper.
For a period when microfilms were new*, libraries thought they might actually replace fragile originals. But that quickly proved to be mistaken. Nicholson Baker, a gadfly essayist and novelist, claimed in a book published in the year 2001** that the British Library was still discarding original printed newspapers after microfilming them, but every fellow librarian I talked to at the time – and that book got a lot of discussion in libraries – found this claim puzzling. I’d been taught in library school that discarding originals was a bad old idea that was not being done any more, and I was taught that 20 years before Baker wrote his book. So what happened? Had the British Library reverted to bad practice? Had they never got the message in the first place? Or were the discards merely unneeded duplicates? I don’t know. The fact that Baker, on purchasing some of these discarded bound volumes, had no trouble finding a university library willing to take them in shows that the discarding of originals was far from the widespread mania his book depicts it as. But all of Baker’s writings on libraries are so sophomoric – an inextricable combination of wise and foolish – that I can’t take the time to discuss him any further.
*Microfilm was introduced in the 1920s, but the period I'm thinking of, I was told, extended to the 1950s.
**The book was titled Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Friday, February 7, 2025

New Yorker, Feb. 10

I get this magazine every week, but only sometimes do I feel like writing about it.

You've heard about the leaning tower of Pisa? Here's an article about the leaning tower of Manhattan, an apartment building so narrow it only has space for one-room apartments, and which was built on infill without drilling down to the bedrock, so this is what happens when you do that. It's still not finished and probably never will be.

Alex Ross, the classical critic, writes about Alma Mahler. Mostly biographical, says only a little about her music. Her first husband, the renowned Gustav, made her stop composing to be a housewife - why would a musician marry a woman who composes if he wants her to stop? - until he actually looked at her music and discovered to his surprise that it was good. I've heard some performed and would rather agree. But by that time she'd lost her creative juices and never got started up again.
Tests the proposition, it is possible to write an article about Alma Mahler without mentioning Tom Lehrer? Answer here, no it is not. Ross only mentions the song to chide its premise and call it "a sniggering ballad." What would he think of Lehrer's song about Wernher von Braun?

Articles about the shortage of soldiers in the US military - proposed solution, lower recruiting standards, which makes one wonder whether they needed to be so high in the first place - and on the shortage of blood available for medical transfusions - proposed solution, artificial blood, but they're still working on that; it's complicated. Includes numerous quotes from a medical researcher actually surnamed Doctor. Surprised me by noting that only 38% of Americans are even eligible to donate blood. That makes me feel less bad about not being one of them. After the mad cow scare I was deemed ineligible because I've eaten beef in Britain.

Article about an artist I'd never heard of (Giorgio Morandi) that actually includes a reproduction of one of his paintings, a useful feature the New Yorker rarely bothers with in its articles on art.

Monday, February 3, 2025

conference report: Fahrenheit 2451

In between the concerts I last reported on, I attended this conference. I'd heard about it from Sørina Higgins, the principal organizer, who is an Inklings scholar I've had dealings with. The topic was "Ideas Worth Saving: The Future of Theology & Thought." Besides theological and Inklings angles, it was sponsored by the Internet Archive and to be held at their offices in San Francisco. That meant it was nearby and I could attend. But it also inspired me to send a note to Søri in my capacity as a librarian, to the effect that "computerization of texts is to provide ease of access. It's not an ideal form for preserving data." And suddenly I found myself listed as a presenter at the conference, with a 15-minute slot to explain what I meant by that.

The Internet Archive offices are in a converted church in the outer reaches of the city, which doesn't mean there's any available parking nearby. It also means a lot of climbing of stairs. The main meeting room is the church's auditorium - it looked more like that than like a sanctuary - up on the second floor, a room whose acoustics were daunted by the massed servers of the Internet Archive humming away in the back of the room. Main presentations were given there (with microphones, fortunately), but the paper breakout sessions were in a couple of tiny rooms elsewhere in the building.

Mine was first in a 75-minute session in a tiny room with a large table, around which a dozen people could fit. I talked about the history of image reproduction in libraries, from microfilm to computer scans, and how those assist access by taking the burden of usage off the originals and thus help preserve them. But they're not archival: they won't last without vigilant updating and replacement. And how do you preserve words over the centuries? "By printing them out on acid-free paper, binding them between sturdy covers, and storing them in a building with a constant cool temperature. In other words, a book in a library."

Then we had another librarian talking about the future of libraries and the role of A.I., a theology professor on the importance of writing and preserved data in the heaven of Judeo-Christian tradition, and a film scholar on the use of film fragments as inserts in other movies, a particularly interesting topic which he traced back to Duck Soup.

The other main item I attended was a panel discussion on myth in Star Wars, anchored by clips from the movies. I remember my own comments on a couple of these. On the opening crawl at the start of the original movie: "We're always being told that stories need to start with action scenes, that expository lumps in particular are deadly. Yet the most popular movie of all time begins with three paragraphs of exposition, in print." On the scene in Empire where Luke meets Yoda without knowing who he is: "I'd like to respond to this scene by quoting a different book altogether: 'All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was a little old man with a staff.'" (Actually that quote as I gave it offhand mangles up two different editions of the text, but the point is clear: Yoda is also little and has a staff.)

There were a few people there I knew, a few more I'd met at the Lewis conference in Oregon last year, others worth talking to, and my only regret is that precarious health meant I couldn't be there for more of it.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

concert review: California Symphony

Featured work of the evening, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Conductor Donato Cabrera pulled out all the stops for this one, especially in the finale for which he took all the repeats. The result, with the orchestra at full roar, was Mozart the Mighty Conqueror, fully the equal of Beethoven or any of the other heroes who came after.

Far gentler, Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, with the tall and elegant Meng Su playing a crisp and elegant solo guitar. Rodrigo was very careful to ensure the orchestra never drowns out the guitar, and these performers were equally sure to observe his wishes.

Gentler still, Breathe by the increasingly ubiquitous Carlos Simon, a ten-minute exercise in meditation. Fortunately it didn’t try to reproduce the experience of breathing itself, concentration on which I find hideously uncomfortable and is the reason I dislike meditation. Instead, it featured a steady sheen of sound, but nothing spectralist or minimalist, but with fragments of melody on top, some lyric but some rather jangly. At times it sounded like the music of a quiet and peaceful jungle, possibly the one in which the lion sleeps tonight.

Subscribers found at our seats a card with a QR code and its associated URL, thank you, which on inspection proved to lead to a brief video of Cabrera announcing that next season will include Gershwin’s American in Paris, eh, and the obscure discovery of the season, Borodin’s Second Symphony. OK, granted that the Borodin is criminally underplayed, but if he really wants a totally obscure but worthwhile 19C Russian symphony, how about Kalinnikov’s First, which I’ve actually heard a lot of recently, or Balakirev’s First?