Salonen: the antepenultimate program

The San Francisco Symphony has been promoting the heck out of the last four concert programs of the season, Esa-Pekka Salonen's final appearances as music director. It's ironic because the reason he's going is the incompetent management of the Symphony, the same organization that's trying to sell this as a celebration. And it's tragic because EPS has been doing such a good job. Joshua Kosman, reviewing last week's program, the first of the set, explained: "The real theme of the program was This is what we had, and this is what we’ve lost. Onstage leadership of an extraordinary caliber, from a conductor able to infuse even familiar works with color and drama and narrative shape — that’s not something you let slip away. Except they did."

I missed that first concert, as I was away, but I'm attending the other three. Between two matinees, Friday was the only evening performance of program no. 2. (I know what 'antepenultimate' means, so I'm going to use it when appropriate.)

The repertoire was two of the less dramatic works of Beethoven's 'heroic' period, the Fourth Symphony and the Violin Concerto, both dating from 1806 and bearing adjoining opus numbers. If you wanted to hear Beethoven as a refined, elegant composer, instead of the usual brusque bumpkin, this was your chance. EPS conducted the Fourth as light and sparkling, with colorful and brilliantly tight responses from the players. The only exception to the mood was a deeply misterioso slow introduction. Soloist Hilary Hahn - with a sure-footed and beautiful consistently light tone - was at one with her conductor in presenting the Violin Concerto as smooth and graceful. That's the way the score tends anyway, and these performers just reinforced that. Even the orchestral fortissimos were smooth and graceful. It's a large-scale work, and came across as a prosperous voyage through a vast calm sea.

Possibly knowing that this series was going to be their last chance, the audience packed Davies more fully than I've seen it in years. They cheered EPS mightily on his appearance, and cheered Hahn even more mightily after the concerto (EPS declined to share her curtain calls). Two encores.

Pittsburgh diner

I had some good meals in Pittsburgh. That was one reason I chose to stay downtown, even though it was a bus ride across the river to the wedding venue: I was within walking distance of a variety of restaurants. Among the best were the outstandingly tangy and moist fried chicken at The Eagle, which is actually a chain with outlets scattered across the Midwest, but this was the first I'd encountered it; and the jambalaya at Iovino's, a brasserie out in the suburb of Mt. Lebanon near where my brother lives; he took me there. It's some of the best jambalaya I've had in a restaurant which doesn't specialize in Louisiana cuisine; other entrees I might have considered included grilled fish with polenta or a bbq burger.

Other than that: When I travel, I follow the way of the Trillin: I look for distinctively local foods that I'm not likely to find at home, that are regular cuisine and nothing fancy or expensive. I found two of them in Pittsburgh, neither mentioned in any guides to the city I read, the way that the cheesesteak is always mentioned in guides to Philadelphia. One I liked a lot, the other I definitely didn't.

The one I liked was Italian wedding soup. Every Italian restaurant whose menu I checked, and some places that weren't even Italian, had wedding soup and usually no other. This surprised me. In California, the inevitable Italian soup is minestrone. Go to an Italian restaurant whose menu lists "soup of the day" - seven days a week that soup is minestrone. Almost never any other offerings. I didn't see any minestrone in Pittsburgh. I like wedding soup, which I'd previously only had from jars I found in the grocery. It's not a soup you eat at weddings; the name refers to the marriage of meat (tiny meatballs) and vegetables (typically spinach and others). The fresh versions were of course much better than the jars, and the best I had was at a really fine Italian restaurant whose only flaw was the malfunctioning restrooms, Pizzaiolo Primo. Despite the name, there's no particular menu emphasis on pizza; I had shrimp linguini.

The 'only in Pittsburgh' I didn't like was the idea of a deli sandwich served at a local chain whose name I remembered as Prismatic Brothers. No, Primanti Bros., that was it. The sandwiches come with huge quantities of french fries (yes, in the sandwich) and cole slaw, with the ostensible ingredients of that particular type of sandwich cowering in the bottom, in "where's the beef?" style. If that's what you want, the quality of the ingredients was good. But it's not what I want.

in the Pitt

On my trip, I did something I hadn't done in over fifty years. I attended a major league baseball game. The home team Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Milwaukee Brewers 2-1, so all the locals went home happy.

The game was an optional add-on for attendees of the wedding, the day before the ceremony, and I figured it would be a good occasion to socialize with my fellow guests. It was also a glimpse into a world I rarely see.

Not having a smartphone to load my ticket onto, I had to stop at the box office to pick it up. (None of the team's or stadium's web material that I could find said where around the stadium's perimeter the box office was, and I couldn't reach them by phone. I presumed it would be near the gift shop, whose location was given, and I guessed right.)

Our seats were on the other side of the stadium, but instead of walking around the outside and using the gate there, I entered at the main gate by the box office, took the escalator (! - I'd never seen a sports stadium with an escalator before) up to the second level, where our seats were, and walked around the inside - in both senses: the walk around was inside the park, and it was inside the building, not open to the air.

PNC Park is, I understand, one of the new breed of baseball parks that are smaller and more intimate than old school, but it looked awfully big to me. The long, curved (so you couldn't see how much further there was to go), seemingly endless corridor was like nothing so much as a concourse at a huge airport. Tiny signs indicating the doors outside to numbered seating sections were inconspicuous; what occupied the attention was a vast sequence of concessionaires, and the crowds occupying their seating. The concessions were a bit different from what you get at an airport: frequently repeated outlets for junk food (no actual restaurants), and the same sequence of whiskey bars. The stadium opens 90 minutes before the game starts to allow attendees plenty of time to get lubricated, and judging from what I saw on quick visits to the restroom during the game, many people never bother to go out and watch the action.

When I finally got to my section, the weather outside was balmy. The seats were up a steep flight of steps, and at first I wasn't sure if I'd be able to see home plate from up here - oh, there it is - and such view outside as wasn't blocked by the giant scoreboard was impressive: the large river with downtown behind it, just like at the wedding venue, only this time it was the Allegheny, the river on the other side of downtown.

I've occasionally seen baseball on tv, and watching a game in person is different in a couple important ways. First, there's no play-by-play commentary. The PA limits itself to announcing the name of the next batter. If you don't know the umpire's signals, you have no way of telling a ball from a strike without averting your eyes from the field and looking way up at the scoreboard, which half the time isn't displaying the box score anyway, preferring pictures of the batters or animated geegaws - if a visiting team player strikes out, the scoreboard displays a gif of three cannons firing, that sort of thing.

That's the other thing about watching baseball without a tv camera to guide you - it's hard to know where to look, or when. Baseball is not like other sports. In basketball or soccer or hockey the action is nearly constant. In American football it's intermittent, but you know it's going to happen when the players line up and the quarterback takes the snap. But baseball consists of a long sequence of pitches that the batter doesn't hit, or fouls, interrupted at unpredictable intervals when something exciting happens. It only lasts a few seconds, so if you happen to be looking away you'll miss it. And you usually need to be looking at two widely separated places at once. The ball has gone out to the outfield over there, while the runners are on the base paths over here, and knowing what's going on with both is vital to following the game.

At any rate, despite having few hits and almost no runs, the game wasn't too boring as sports games go. My brother told me that in recent years, rule changes have prohibited the characteristic baseball activity of standing around not doing anything for long periods. So things proceeded on with dispatch - after the first couple innings, I wondered if the game would be over in an hour, though in fact it took more than two - and there were a couple exciting double plays, and so on. I'm not likely to do it again, but I didn't feel my time was wasted.

Tomorrow: food, transit, and birds in Pittsburgh.

radio silence

The reason I haven't posted for a week is that I've been out of town and lacked the ability conveniently to post.

I use my portable tablet computer to keep up with e-mail, assuming there's wi-fi I can access, but typing on the little popup keyboard is not conducive to writing at greater than minimal length. I did choose my hotel in part because it had a business center, guest-usable desktop computers, but I found on my first evening that both computers were frozen in awkward positions, and while the desk clerk agreed to put in a request for repair, nothing had been done by the time I left. Of course, there was a holiday weekend in there.

One of the hotel's two elevators was also out of service. Good thing that wasn't both of them, because my room was on the tenth floor.

The hotel was located in downtown Pittsburgh. The one in Pennsylvania. I was there - by far the furthest away from home I've gone since before the pandemic - on a compulsion I could not possibly resist, not that I wished to resist it. It was my brother's wedding. (He lives and works in Pittsburgh, as does his wife, who's a native of the area.) It took longer for him than it did for me to "find his person," as they put it in the ceremony, but he definitely has. I've met her a few times before, and they're ideal for each other.

The ceremony was held at the Grand Concourse, an elaborate and colorful preserved 19C train station converted into the kind of restaurant you'd visit for a special occasion, of which this was certainly one. There were about 30 guests, tucked into the corner of one small room for the ceremony, after which we spread out somewhat further for a very fine dinner in another room, one with a stunning view of the Monongahela River and downtown opposite.

It was a highly personalized occasion, and cherishable for all who attended. Among the guests were a couple old friends (i.e. since childhood) of my brother's, whom I know but hadn't seen in a long time. One of them is a rabbi, and he conducted the ceremony.

Part of the service was the reading of a modern version of the seven blessings, a Jewish ritual that was new to me. Seven people close to the couple were asked, and I and my other brother were among them. We each stood up, identified ourselves, and read a blessing as modified by the couple, and, at least in my case (I read the Wisdom blessing) elaborated on a bit by me: it seemed to fit the circumstances.

There was more to the celebration than the ceremony and dinner, and I'll say more about that, and about Pittsburgh - which I've been to before, but never deposited in downtown on my own resources - tomorrow.

things I didn't get

Two of these from my childhood happened to pop into mind almost simultaneously.

1. When my parents first played for me the original cast recording of 1776 (a musical they'd seen in the theater, and bought the record of partly because they knew I'd be interested in the history), I heard the opening song, "Sit Down, John," and turned to my mother in puzzlement and asked, "What does '40-S' mean?" Huh? "Well, he keeps singing that: FOR-ty ess, FOR-ty ess." It was "Vote yes: VOTE-uh yes, VOTE-uh yes."

2. I saw a singing group on tv billed as "Tony Orlando and Dawn." There were three of them: a man in the middle and a woman on either side. I figured that one woman was Toni (I hadn't seen the name written), the man was Orlando, and the other woman was Dawn. Realistic believable given names, right?

X solved

It's Mussolini.

"A" and "B" are British statesmen, Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden.

solve for X

Here is a quotation from a book I've been reading, about world leaders, with the names removed. Your riddle is, who is X?

A lamented that 'X is behaving just like a spoilt child, and it is difficult to know how to deal with him'; as B had warned, the more X asked for, the more he got, and the greater became his demands. He was not a spoilt child, merely an avaricious and now overweeningly self-confident and cynical brigand.

Sound like anybody we know?

two community orchestra concerts

I attended two concerts by community orchestras, non-professional groups, in San Jose this weekend. They don't aspire to professional levels of playing ability, but they can be fun to attend.

The South Bay Philharmonic, conducted by George Yefchak, is the group for which B. is a viola player. They featured Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony, a rough but thoroughly enjoyable performance which conveyed Tchaikovsky's lyricism and his varying senses of excitement, coyness, and reflection. Chosen because of the composer's use of a Ukrainian folk song as the theme for the finale.
Also on the program, the Oboe Concerto by Bohuslav Martinů, a jaggedly modernist piece featuring prominent piano doublings in the orchestral chords, giving them the crunchy sound I associate with this composer. Pamela Hakl, retired from Symphony San Jose, was the impressively skilled oboeist. Plus a brief Nocturne for strings by an early 20C Ukrainian composer, Fyodor Akimenko, played almost unintelligibly, and a rather crisp and lively arrangement by Ted Ricketts of some songs from Wicked (Stephen Schwartz, prop.).

The Winchester Orchestra, conducted by James Beauton, featured Copland's Billy the Kid and once again, Tchaikovsky, the 1812 Overture. A brave thing for a small community orchestra to undertake, with tubular bells substituting for the carillon, sort of half-heartedly, and a few mighty thwaps on the bass drum for the cannon. But just about everyone plowed in enthusiastically.
Also two darker-toned brief pieces, Barber's Essay No. 1 and a fairly new piece called Something for the Dark by Sarah Kirkland Snider. The Snider was big on curled-up crescendos and rhythmic figures both simple and complex, less so on melody or harmony, especially ending as it did in the middle of the air.
Winchester is supposed to be a more advanced orchestra than South Bay, but the sound of the cellos being altogether untogether in one of Tchaikovsky's hymn passages, or of half the winds coming in a bar early at one point in the Copland, made me wonder.

Still, both were good shows and I'm glad I went. The more so as it'll be two busy weeks before I get to another concert.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Dalia Stasevska has led some dazzling performances here in the past. So I was looking forward to hearing what she could do with Sibelius's dramatically extroverted Fifth Symphony.

So here she was, dressed as usual in yet another oddly-colored long coat, and her Sibelius Fifth was not dazzling, exactly, but Heroically Grand. Through most of the work, Sibelius builds up to brief but intense climaxes, and Stasevska emphasized their Grandeur. Then at the end, when Sibelius marshals up all his resources for a final blast, the Heroic Grandeur just topped them all. Stasevska was especially skilled at flowing it naturally into the coda, whose long pauses sometimes fool audiences into applause who can't tell the difference between a dominant chord and a tonic when they hear it. But that didn't happen this time. The conductor was in command.

A similar approach was taken to Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia, a work you rarely hear live. The general approach was slow and worshipful, as it should be, but Stasevska built the climaxes up into some of the same sense of Grandeur that she did Sibelius.

Also on the program, and taking up a good holy chunk of it, was a new cello concerto by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inexplicably titled Before we fall and featuring Johannes Moser as soloist. Anna (that chunk of letters, properly Þorvaldsdóttir, is not her surname, but her patronymic: you call Icelanders by their first names) is a soundscape composer who specializes in weird sonorities, and we had that here. Strange dissonant shimmerings from the orchestra began this work. There's a long cadenza filled with col legno, ponticello, and other rattling sounds. But gradually the music melted down, via some weird sinking glissandi, into deep dark low sounds from soloist and orchestra alike, punctuated by clangs and thumps from the percussion. And this might have been interesting had it been half as long.

amusing serious books

These books are both amusing, and fun to read, although they take their topics seriously.

Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History, by Simon Winder (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010)

I reviewed here Unruly by David Mitchell, a history of England's rulers up to Elizabeth I, dealing entirely seriously with its topic but doing so in an entirely witty and amusing style. In an acknowledgments note, Mitchell points to this book as the one whose approach he was trying to emulate with that distinctive combination, so I went to read it as well.

It does indeed have the same distinctive combination of wit and seriousness. The one thing Winder has that Mitchell doesn't is a desperate need for an editor. The beginning of the book contains enormous digressions in the form of apologias for Winder's interest in German history; and the earlier part of the book, mostly on the medieval period, wanders around chronologically a lot and concentrates just as much on later Germans' reaction to and framings of their history as on the history itself. To be fair, Winder had alerted the reader that he was going to do that.

Somewhere around the Thirty Years' War, the narrative settles down and becomes more chronological, though there are lots of marked digressions into specific points of interest, for instance a section on the Jews, in which Winder seems to be arguing that the Holocaust was an aberration and not a uniquely German perversion, and proves it by pointing to earlier German pogroms. Huh? Anyway, the main narrative ends with the Weimar Republic, and that's one of the few references to what happens afterwards.

Though there's plenty of political history in here, this is mostly a cultural history, a lot from the perspective of what historical patterns and customs survive today, especially in surviving townscapes. Though many rulers are mentioned, if you want to keep track of the list of Holy Roman Emperors, for instance, you'll need another book. (Mitchell, by contrast, is clear and complete in his accounts of rulers, but that's his topic.)

To give a sample of the prose, after a long discussion of the marriages of the British royal family to princesses from obscure German states, Winder writes,

I go on about this, partly because it is funny and curious (both the facts and the names), but also because these little territories had potentially very considerable power and prestige and the most bashful beginnings could end in glory. In a sort of asteroid belt of low-grade German princesses and narrow, petty, moustachioed princes, there was enough room for something really surprising to happen. Most absolutely alarming in this respect was pretty little Sophie Augusta Frederica of the laughable territory of Anhalt-Zerbst, a place so small it could hardly breathe. Her father was a Prussian field marshal and as a helpless pawn in plans to boost Prussian-Russian relations in the 1740s Sophie was shunted off to Russia where, after several ups and downs, she married the Grand Duke Peter, learned Russian, became Russian Orthodox, had Peter killed and wound up as Catherine the Great, devastating the Ottomans, the Swedes and the Poles and carving out immense new territories from Latvia to the Crimea. Indeed, a case could be made for her being the single most successful German ruler of all time, albeit not one ruling Germany.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

These are actual memoirs, not the 'personal tales of my everyday life' stories we're used to from the famous humor columnist. They are, however, professional memoirs. After opening chapters on his childhood and schooling, it discusses purely his career until he settles down at the Miami Herald, at which point it broadens out into a topic-oriented survey of work he did there, then narrowing back to a final chapter on his decision to retire 20 years ago, at which point it stops. It's also oriented towards his newspaper career; there's almost nothing about his books. Barry gives full descriptions in his typical amusing style, emphasizing eccentricities, of his parents - both now deceased - but all he says of his adult family is that he's been married three times, and there's a cameo appearance by his son.

But on that professional life he is clear and lucid. How he stumbled into a job as a reporter for a small-town paper and wrote his first professional humor columns there; a discussion of his seven years as a business-writing consultant, which he handles in some specific detail because of the training it provided him for his later career; how he sidled back into becoming a full-time humor columnist; why he took the job in Miami; and so on. He's a little reluctant to show his early work, which he doesn't think is very good; but once he becomes a professional he shows more of it, and the Miami chapters are tales about various feature stories and other items he wrote, much of which I hadn't known about. I'd forgotten, for instance, that Barry is the person who popularized Talk Like a Pirate Day. His greatest delight, though, is when he discovers that a celebrity he interviews has a good sense of humor.

As with Mitchell and Winder, Barry strikes a balance between serious and straightforward content and a witty and amusing way of writing about it. In his chapter on schooling (one of his classmates was Glenn Close, interestingly enough), he comes up with one sentence that perfectly encapsulates its topic - as I know, having suffered through the same thing in junior high:

At certain points of the week we boys would troop off to the shop, where we would learn, over the course of several months, how to use tools to turn pieces of wood into slightly smaller pieces of wood stained brown.

concert review: Symphony San Jose

Reviewed for SFCV.

This was a performance of The Planets in which the quiet parts had the same intensity and drive as the loud parts. I could go with that.

What I did not like was the added visuals. I thought it was going to be a special presentation of NASA material curated for this performance, but it wasn't. On checking I found that it was a film made in 2010, to accompany a recording of The Planets by the Houston Symphony, and that showing it at concerts with the soundtrack removed is a common practice. If I'd ever seen it before, I'd have been even more irritated.

The conductor having to wait for the opening credits to end before he could start the music provoked much amusement in the audience.

I explain in the review why I didn't like the movie, but my editor removed my description of what the movie contains. Perhaps he thought you could pick that up from the rest. At any rate, what I'd written was, "The visuals were a collection of film clips, some from nearby space, some closeup of surfaces, some of moons of the gas giants, of whichever planet Holst was depicting at the moment."

retooled Freight

The Freight & Salvage, music venue & coffeehouse in Berkeley, has sent out an announcement that it's retooling itself. Basically the problem is that it needs to increase and broaden its audience if it wishes to remain financially viable. And so it's undertaking the sort of things that organizations in such a fix traditionally do.

First, it's changing its name. People already call it just "The Freight," so that's going to be the official name from now on. This "formally signals our readiness to grow and evolve—without losing sight of where we came from." And to go along with it, new logos, colors on the marquee, etc.

Second, a new Mission Statement and Vision and Values. The old Mission Statement read, "The Freight's mission is to be a world-famous venue for traditional music, rooted in and expressive of the diverse regional, ethnic, and social cultures of peoples worldwide." The new one reads, "The Freight is a vital home for music with deep roots from around the world that celebrates cultures, connects communities, and inspires creativity." So it's no longer a world-famous venue, it's a vital home. It no longer plays traditional music but music with deep roots. It is no longer expressive of the diverse ... cultures of people worldwide, it celebrates cultures.

The announcement also says, "While we are strongly rooted in a profound respect for the varying traditions of all cultures, we acknowledge that some of our institutional practices over the years have perpetuated a system that caused some people to be excluded, silenced, or neglected." I would like to know what those terrible institutional practices are.

I'm only interested in a relatively small part of what the Freight offers, but that includes its recently rather extensive classical chamber music program. On top of which it's far from home and requires some work to get there, so I don't go that often and usually have to be tempted pretty hard. So I await to see what they're going to do with this, whether it means anything at all and, if it does, whether it means they're going to throw out the old despite denying they're going to do this.

auto in the shop

I spent most of last week carless, as mine was spending its time in a repair shop. I could borrow B's car for a few errands, but because there weren't very many (which is why I picked this week), there was no need to rent a car.

I wanted to get a persistent problem solved before we go off on a long drive next month.

The 'check engine' light has come on repeatedly over the last year or so, and every time I have someone run a diagnostic, it claims to be a leak in the system that keeps gas fumes from escaping outside the fuel line, but nobody could find a leak.

This time I asked them to dive in with more detail, and they did find a couple misfunctioning parts and replaced them. It may not solve the problem entirely - there appears to be a short in an electrical wire somewhere that's contributing to the festivities, and those are even harder to track down - but for the moment the warning light is off.

Also, the car's horn had stopped working.

Turned out that somehow it had gotten unplugged.

visit, with cheesecake and books

Our nephew and niece from out of town were in town, on a rare visit, with their two daughters, aged 11 and 9. They suggested lunch with us, B. and myself, and they proposed the Cheesecake Factory in the big regional mall. We never go to the mall, but it's not far from us, so we said OK, and all was well until we got there. There were plenty of spaces in the garages, but the sheer number of cars trying to get in was causing huge backups at the ticket-dispensing machines. Time was pressing, so I found a way in around the lines, and then navigated a walking route through a large department store to the restaurant.

After ordering lunch, we asked the girls if they were still as big readers as they were when we last saw them some three years ago, and they were. "So," I said to their Mom, knowing her to be a bit of a Tolkien fan, "have you read them The Hobbit yet?" "Not yet," she said, "but soon." "Do you have a copy at home?" She looked at her husband with uncertainty. "I'm not sure."

"So here, have one," I said, reaching into my book bag and pulling out one of my extra hardcover copies. They were delighted. 9-year-old took it and, at Mom's suggestion, undertook to read the opening aloud. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," she read. "Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole."

"And?" prompted Mom.

"That's all we're reading today," 9-year-old said decisively.

I then reached again into my magic book bag and pulled out one more book for each; favorites of ours and these stories, unlike The Hobbit, are about girls. For 9-year-old, Wren to the Rescue by Sherwood Smith; for 11-year-old, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages. And we did not omit to mention that we know both authors personally. They were even more delighted. 11-year-old got particularly excited when I told her that her book is about a girl her age living at the lab where the atomic bomb was being built during World War II. She's specially interested in WW2, it appears, and it's gratifying to find a young person so interested in an event from 70 years before they were born.

concert review: Master Sinfonia

So, as previously reported, last Saturday I went to a concert with Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. And on Sunday afternoon, I went to a concert with his follow-up piece, the Great C Major Symphony. And that is the "Great C Major" Symphony, not as often called the Symphony in C Major "Great". As I wrote, "It’s sometimes thought to be called “Great” because of its sheer size, but in fact it’s so called to distinguish it from an earlier work which is the “Little C Major” Symphony."

And I wrote that in a review - finally published today - of the concert, which was by a local group called the Master Sinfonia. This was in fact the first time I've reviewed this piece, which gave me the chance not only to correct the nickname but point out the confusion in its numbering and emphasize how much it's a weird piece that doesn't sound remotely like any other symphony that had previously been written. (I think it took until Dvorak, 50 years later, for somebody else to write sort of like that.)

Although the programming was pretty standard, this was in fact the first time I'd reviewed any of the pieces in the concert.

And immediately after the concert was over, I dashed up to Kohl Mansion to review, for my other outlet, the string quartet concert I previously mentioned. Busy day.

a Tolkienian miscellany

1. If you've heard a rumor that yet another new book by JRRT is coming out, it's true. The Bovadium Fragments will be appearing in the UK in October and in the US in November. "First-ever publication" as it says in the blurb is true, but "previously unknown"? Not a chance. As with some other posthumous Tolkien publication touted as "previously unknown," its existence was first revealed in Humphrey Carpenter's biography nearly 50 years ago. The Bovadium Fragments is mentioned there in a footnote as "a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode." Which makes it something of a pair to an almost incoherently angry alliterative poem about motorcycles, written probably over 40 years earlier, which is no. 63 in the Collected Poems published last year, and which I think was previously unknown.

2. A collection of brief memories of Tolkien at Oxford's Merton College, where he was a fellow for some 14 years and then returned to live in a college flat in his widowhood long after retirement, from dons and students there. Anecdotes include a revelation of why Tolkien gave up his previous professorship for one attached to Merton (he liked the food), and a related explanation of why the other dons had no particular interest in Tolkien as a famous author: "Fellowships resemble a zoo in which beasts are largely kept in separate cages, yet at feeding times they mix amicably enough."

3. A recurrence of one of the most obnoxious lies about Tolkien. Adam Roberts depicts Tolkien putting the name "Lúthien" on the tombstone of Edith, his wife, as a personality-erasing appropriation. He imagines Tolkien saying "when you are dead I shall put on your gravestone not your actual name, not even my name, but the name from a mythology I invented." Roberts says Tolkien put it instead of her name, and that's a lie, not just an error, because it can be easily checked. The tombstone looks like this:

It has both names, the legal and the mythological, and for him as well as her. (And yes, despite Roberts' sneering innuendo, "Tolkien" was Edith's surname, even though it's not the one she was born with. That was the standard custom of her society, and still is. Don't believe me, ask the nearly 80% of US women married to men who've taken their husband's surname and now have to worry about not being able to vote because it doesn't match their birth certificates.)

4. Charles Wiliams's The Place of the Lion as a specific influence on Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers. That NCP is Tolkien's Williamsian novel is obvious enough, but here's suggestions on how the plot resembles this specific Williams novel.
Lots of interesting stuff in this blog, notably an explanation of exactly what Tolkien disliked about allegory.

5. I am translated (with permission) into Italian. Topic: the Christopher Tolkien memorial conference. Link to the original near the end.

white smoke

That was a lot less work than it took to choose Kevin McCarthy.

concert review: Alexander Quartet

I went to review the local farewell concert by a string quartet that is disbanding. (You can read here of the depressing reasons why.)

But this wasn't a depressing occasion, but a real celebratory one.

In the old days, I was never a big fan of the Alexander String Quartet, featured local artists though they were. I found their playing rather dull and dutiful. But gradually, over the years, I've heard them showing more grit and verve in their performances. This predated the recent changes in personnel, so that wasn't the reason, or the whole reason. I've come to appreciate them more.

This concert, though, was all grit and verve. Haydn, who's a witty composer, was all wit. Brahms, who's a mellow composer, was all mellow.

I particularly liked that Haydn. I've heard this particular piece several times at the Banff String Quartet Competition, home of truly spectacular performers. This performance would have been the highlight of a Haydn round at Banff.

The one other thing I can add that wasn't in the review is that the tiny hall was absolutely packed. Everybody wanted to say goodbye to this esteemed and loved ensemble.

the Pat and Ellen show

On my way to the Cal Sym on Saturday, it was easy enough to pass through the City (the one Not Long After) and attend a event at a small branch library by the always-entertaining tag team of Pat Murphy and Ellen Klages.

The occasion was the publication of Pat's first novel in some years, The Adventures of Mary Darling (Tachyon Publications), which was available on a side table from Jacob Weisman, its publisher. You can get it, and a lot of other good stuff, here, or at the online or brick retailer of your choice. But I didn't, because B. had already bought it electronically.

When B. had told me the title of Pat's book, I responded, "That sounds like something she'd do." Pat spent most of the occasion talking about the book and reading from it. She'd always been interested in Peter Pan - from the novel, mostly; she's never seen the Disney version - and wanted to take the children's mother's viewpoint of their vanishing off somewhere. (Cue in my mind thought of Sherwood Smith's "Mom and Dad on the Home Front.")

So: it's Victorian London. Your children have mysteriously disappeared. The police don't seem to be much help. Who you gonna call?

Sherlock Holmes!

And the story is off and running.

(What, you say? Holmes is a fictional character? Well, so is Mary Darling. If she can exist, so can he.)

A lot of this sounds like fun. (Where is Neverland, anyway? And why does it have American Indians? All is explained.) I'm saving this one up to occupy my next tedious wait.

concert review: California Symphony

This is the kind of program I like to hear: two big, dark-toned, heavyweight symphonies from the major repertoire: Schubert's "Unfinished," and Bruckner's Ninth, which is also unfinished.

Both were certainly intended by their composers to be standard four-movement symphonies, but only parts of the works got completed: two movements in Schubert's case, three in Bruckner's. Owing to different placements of the slow movement, both symphonies end with it, quietly in a dying fall. There have been attempts to finish both of them off, but they don't work, because you need the original composer's genius to do it. (And that is the same reason I'm not interested in Tolkien fan fiction.)

Schubert's "Unfinished," which gets played fairly often, received a pretty standard basic run-through here. This is the symphony with which Schubert, previously a chipper Mozartean in his symphonies, got with the Beethoven program of heavy dramatic works. Pre-concert lecturer Scott Foglesong opined that Schubert actually went beyond Beethoven here and essentially brought the Gothic cultural movement of the day into the symphony. And I've certainly heard it played that way, but there was nothing Gothic looming over this performance. The strings were strong and full, enough so that wind solos sounded slightly lost in the breeze.

Bruckner, though - here the orchestra was ideally balanced between sections and the music was played with full passion and dedication. The Ninth isn't played very often. I most recently heard it in London, before the pandemic, from Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. I wasn't terribly impressed with that performance. Is Bruckner just not Rattle's thing? I wondered. So I was pleased to be able to tell a couple of the Cal Sym musicians - you often run into them after a concert, because they park in the same adjacent garage that the audience does - that they gave a more effective performance of this than the Berlin Philharmonic did.

It felt as if conductor Donato Cabrera was taking this pretty speedily, though it was not a briefer than standard performance. Where Foglesong had cautioned that Bruckner's music exists in a timeless space, you're not supposed to expect anything to happen, Cabrera falsified this one by focusing on the flow and the events of the music. I found it dramatic, eventful, and riveting of my attention all the way through the 65 minutes. Especially fine were the way he ramped up the end of the first movement to its shatteringly intense ending, and then ramped down the conclusion of the slow movement from the climax to its gentle finish.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I knew Giancarlo Guerrero as a bold and vigorous conductor. Here he led a program featuring music by two of the 20C's most colorful orchestrators, Igor Stravinsky and Ottorino Respighi (both of them pupils of Rimsky-Korsakov, the greatest orchestrator of his day).

From Igor, the full text of Petrushka, his second ballet, which came across as familiar nuggets floating in an uncharted soup. But it was sharp and colorful.

From Otto, two big colorful tone-poem suites, Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome. The former has been overshadowed by the latter, but on its own it's an excellent work which deserves airing. What makes it fall behind is a tactical mistake, of putting the triumphant procession in the middle instead of, as in Pines, at the end.

Both were well played, not the most dazzling renditions I've heard, but good enough. Except that the extra brass players for the end of Pines, usually placed in the audience balcony for an interesting antiphonal effect, were here put in the terrace just behind the orchestra, where their impact was minimal.

Guerrero pointed out, introducing the pieces, that Pines is the first work of electronic music ever composed, requiring as it does a recording of a nightingale's call during a peaceful interlude. At one time, if you got a copy of the score it came with a 78-rpm record. "Anybody remember those?" he said.

Also on the program, a very short introductory piece by Kaija Saariaho, inspired by an earth-grazer asteroid named Toutatis, one of several pieces commissioned as supplements to Holst's Planets. It doesn't sound in the least as if it belongs there.