memories

Having spent Friday evening at a concert recital of emotionally intense contemporary musical theater songs for female voice, and part of Saturday looking up other performances on YouTube, I shouldn't have been surprised when another such song floated into my mental ear. But I don't have a lot of such songs in my regular listening, so I was startled by having another showing up. At first I could just hear tiny fragments, and it wasn't for a while that they coalesced enough that I could identify the song. It was Mirabel's song from Encanto, "Waiting on a Miracle."

Walking through SF's Chinatown, where I've taken to having my pre-concert meals, I saw a sign for a restaurant which I suddenly realized must have been the one where my class had lunch on a school expedition to Chinatown when I was about ten. We visited a fortune cookie factory (not the one you'll see if you go to Chinatown today) and had a dim sum lunch, table-served on a lazy Susan. Perhaps my first experience with Chinese food, close to my first experience with chopsticks - I remember somebody showing me how to hold them, but I don't think that was the occasion - and my first experience drinking what I did not realize was tea. Years later in a conversation I said I'd never had tea, to which the reply was "You have it all the time in Chinese restaurants" and I said "That's tea?" I'd never known what it was.

How did I realize it must be the same restaurant? From the name. It's the Hang Ah Tea Room. I remember noting it at the time, and noting the name because it encodes how to get there: you go up Sacramento Street and then Hang Ah right.

From which I realize that my propensity for making puns predates my supposed introduction to the art form, by my high school science-fiction club, by about ten years.

a little stage music

I should have been doing something else, but never mind: a senior recital at Stanford by a soprano whose repertoire lay entirely in contemporary musical theater was an attractive enough idea that we both went, being as usual when we do something like this probably the only attendees who weren't personal friends of the singer.

She was talented but had a small voice and not much stage presence, so I could understand why she said she's pursuing a career in backstage work and management instead of performing, but she chose a good selection of songs I'd mostly never heard. Much better than the bleak and dull material that I've found from too much recent musical theater. A couple of the songs - from Next to Normal and Newsies respectively - stuck with me enough that I dug out recorded performances of them.



Now, if our student had brought the same crispness and rhythm that she gave to that second song to the Baker's Wife's song from Into the Woods, she would really have had something. One other thing the above performance has in common with the recital I heard last night: the piano was too loud.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Has Marin Alsop ever conducted SFS before? If so I can't recall it. She's one of the great conductors of our time and SFS is still one of the great orchestras, so the two major works on this program were both pretty sizzling.

Gabriela Montero played her own Piano Concerto No. 1, which is subtitled "Latin" as in Latin America - she's a Venezuelan expatriate - but this was just a hint of flavoring, nothing of the "tourist music" air to it. The piano part is very active and continuous without being florid; the sound was attractive but not goopy; and the work had real heft, enough to make it fascinating to listen to all the way through. At times, Montero's playing reminded me of Rachmaninoff, at other times of Bach, without actually sounding in the least like either of them.

Then Alsop led a dramatic and atmospheric performance of Samuel Barber's dense and compact Symphony No. 1. Really brought this work to vividness - same condition as the Montero - and emphasized the extent to which its one movement contains seeds of the standard four. In this performance it sounded more like an ancestor to the Korngold Symphony than anything else.

Also on the program, Antropolis by Gabriela Ortiz, and this was tourist music. Had the same jumpy nature and constant percussion battery of other Mexican dancehall-inspired pieces like El Salon Mexico and Danzon No. 2 and Huapango without being anywhere near as attractive or tuneful as any of them.

Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, just because, I suppose, followed immediately by Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is nowhere near as memorable and was probably there just for its cheeky title.

two more concerts

1. So I've occasionally mentioned before about TACO, the Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble intended to let musicians not ready for prime time have fun playing where nobody has to listen to them. B., who is about as good a player as this group ever gets, belongs because it gives her a chance to play without the rigor or speed of even a nonprofessional community orchestra.

That being the situation, why did TACO's director commission (and pay for) a new composition by a respected local composer? But she did. Then the composer died just after delivering the piece, and then the pandemic happened, so it wasn't until now that TACO held one of its very rare public concerts and played the music. At the director's request I persuaded my editor at the Daily Journal to let me review it. He consented because he was sure I could make it entertaining to read about. If the DJ's website will let you access the review you can decide for yourself if you agree with him that I succeeded.

Amazingly, TACO gathered all its skirts together and did a pretty fair job for an amateur group at playing the new composition, so I didn't have to dissemble on that. They were less effective on the other orchestral composition, but that was a piano concerto carried almost entirely by the soloist, and he was a professional pianist so that was all right. The rest of the concert - the whole thing was a memorial to the same composer - was chamber music by professionals, except for one piece over which I decided to draw a curtain and just mention that they played it.

2. The Palo Alto Philharmonic is the, oh, third-tier (i.e. pretty good) nonprofessional group for which our niece E. plays double bass. So along with E's husband and his mother (E's parents don't live around here), we showed up. Surprisingly lusty performance of Copland's quiet and melancholy Our Town suite, and a successfully winning rendition of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Symphonic Variations on an African Air, more pleasing than when I've heard it before. But Dvorak's Symphony from the New World is too familiar a piece for this group to bring anything special to the table, and it was just a decent average run-through - with, I noted, no repeat of the first movement exposition.

what else

As long as I was going up to Berkeley on Friday to see a play, it was the ideal occasion to spend part of the afternoon doing something else.

The idea came to mind a couple weeks earlier, when I read an article in the AAA magazine on places to see wildflowers without crowds. One of them was nearby: the Jepson Prairie Preserve, a chunk of land trust in the ranching flatlands of the lower Sacramento Valley, east of Fairfield.

I could drive out there easily, and Friday was the perfect time to go: three days after the last rains ended, not yet too hot (the temp turned out to be 75F at 3 pm when I was there), the wildflowers should be well in bloom. There are docent tours on weekends, but I'm not up to that much walking, so I went on my own.

Near the end of the dirt road leading into the preserve, there was room to park on one side of the road and an enclosure with picnic tables, informative plaques, and a portapotty; and on the other side a gate leading to a nature trail which is the only part of the preserve open to visitors.

Off in the distance I could see sheets of yellow among the green fields, but none by this end of the nature trail. Feeling disappointed, I nevertheless walked in and found that I merely needed to look more closely. There were flowers everywhere, just not in giant sheet-like profusion. In just a short walk I saw at least seven different kinds of flowers, some yellow, some purple, also blue ones and white ones, mostly in colonies near others of their own kind. I found more after I drove over to the other end of the trail, a bit of a way down the road by the large vernal pool, as the plaques informed me this kind of lake is called. (Dry in the summer, it was full of water now up to its marshy shores.) Some of the flowers I saw are among the ones pictured on this page. The Goldfields and Yellow Carpet were the most common yellow ones. I'm not good at taking photos, and even if I had, I don't think they could have captured what it looked like to walk among the flowers only visible close by.

They're blooming now, and should still be until the lake dries up in May or so. If you're in the area and you like wildflowers, go now.

saw a play

"Art" by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton, directed by Emilie Whelan

I saw this play in London in 1998, a couple years into the run of the first English-language production (the original is in French). I thought it'd be worth seeing again, especially after Kosman gave it a good review (halfway down this page). This was by Shotgun Players, a Berkeley troupe whom I once saw in a production of Hamlet in which the actors pull slips of paper out of a hat (actually Yorick's skull) at the beginning of each performance to see who'll play which part.

Nothing so avant-garde this time. "Art" was well-performed, but I didn't like this production as well as I did the London one. This was mostly because the director took the emphasis away from one theme - what is art, what makes it valuable and how do we know what we like? - and on to another, the nature of male friendship, a depiction completely alien to anything in my experience of friendship, but whatever.

In this play, a moderately successful man drops a large load of money on buying a painting by a fashionable modern artist and shows it off to his two closest friends. The painting is pure white, supposedly with features and highlights that only the connoisseur can see. One of the friends is offended, less by what he sees as the artistic worthlessness of the painting than by what it says about his friend's taste. The other tries to be agreeable to both of them in turn.

The third, who is the youngest and least well-off, illustrates his haplessness with a long monologue about being caught in the middle of an argument between his fiancée and his mother over the wording of the wedding invitation. The London performer (I no longer remember who was in the show at the time I saw it, sorry) delivered this as an evenly-paced steadily rising hysteria. This one did it in rising and falling outbursts. He did, however, at one point deliver a golden piece of advice I didn't remember from the previous showing. He said, "'Calm down' is the worst thing you could say to somebody who's lost their calm." And this is true. It will anger them further because it shows you don't care what they're angry about, you just want to exert control over them.

Anyway, the art side of it interests me. Are there actually painters who produce blank monochromatic paintings that are considered great art? Yes there are. I've been to this display of fourteen featureless black paintings and sat there for a few minutes pretending to be moved by it. I have never felt more ripped off by an art museum, despite the fact that there is no admission charge.

And do their defenders actually make the desperate argument of pointing to minute variations in the texture as where the value of the art lies? Yes they do and my thoughts on the value of modernist art are there. It's also my answer to the question the painting's owner asks his critic: how can someone who doesn't claim any expertise in the subject judge the work? The answer is that if it has any value, any viewer should be able to pick that up. Crikes, why do people with no technical training in music whatever listen to symphonies? They must be getting something valuable out of the aesthetic experience or else there would be no point in performing for them.

imported children's books

I got into a conversation about which British children's books beloved there also became American favorites and which didn't. This came through an experience I've had before, a reference by a Brit to some children's story or character that I'd barely or never heard of, but which context showed was universally known there. I'm making the assumption of what's known in the US from what's known to me, a leap I'd hardly take for current material, but children's lit from the early to mid 20C ... I'm pretty confident that if I hadn't heard of it, it wasn't widely known in the US.

So what's the score?

Winnie the Pooh made it in the US.

Peter Rabbit did.

The Hobbit and Narnia did, of course.

Just William didn't. The first I ever heard of that was reading that these books were favorites of John Lennon's in childhood.

Worzel Gummidge didn't. The first I'd ever heard of this character was years ago when somebody wrote that Michael Foot looked like him. "Do you not get scarecrows over there?" I was asked when I said this. Of course we do: and the nameless Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz is one of our most beloved characters. What we didn't get was Worzel Gummidge.

Enid Blyton didn't. The first I ever heard of her was a British critic making the comparison in a blithe dismissal of Tolkien's early chapters.

I'm sure there are others I just haven't seen references to, or have forgotten about.

Then there's the mixed cases:

The Wind in the Willows made it. I don't think it's as widely beloved in the US as it is in the UK, but it's certainly known.

Swallows and Amazons ... I think that became sort of a special interest. It didn't become well known, but is cherished by a measurable number of Americans in a way that other less well-known ones are not.

can't buy me love. or elections either, apparently

Does anyone remember Al Checchi? I did, vaguely, but I had to paw through a series of Wikipedia articles on California gubernatorial elections to recall his name. He was the businessman who tried to buy the Democratic primary for governor in 1998. He shoveled out from his personal fortune nearly twice as much money as both of the other major candidates combined. But in the primary vote, he just barely squeaked into second place, far behind the winner. (Who was Gray Davis, five years later to be ousted in a recall, so hardly invulnerable.)

Then there was Michael Huffington, who similarly tried to buy a California Senate seat in 1994. Also didn't work.

These came to mind when I read of the results of Elon Musk's attempts to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Money can buy elections, but only if you spend it wisely. Apparently people resent it if the attempted purchase is too naked and too lavish. But I wouldn't expect Elon Musk, who thinks a chainsaw is a useful metaphor for trimming wasteful spending, and who 'trims' as if it is; and who sells a vehicle that looks like a cross between a DeLorean and the box that an Amazon package comes in, to grasp anything resembling a subtle point.