Music@Menlo begins

The Menlo chamber music festival began on Friday, so I've got some catching up to do. Friday featured not a concert but a lecture. Aaron Boyd was to speak on the history of chamber music. I went because I'd heard Boyd lecture in past years: his profound erudition and eloquent lucidity always make for a delightful experience.

He began by saying that the size of the topic had thrown him for a loss. Seeking some guidance for a road through his topic, he turned to A.I. But while he tried a vast variety of prompts, he found that invariably the A.I. gave him what he called "completely useless blandnesses."

So, having already covered much of the central history in previous years' lectures, he focused on the edges. The first half was a prehistory, tracing from the first medieval definition of chamber music as any music played in private rooms, as distinct from church or theatrical music. (There were no public concerts then, apart from theatrical performances.) Instrumental music evolved from adaptations of vocal forms, and through Renaissance and Baroque forms like viol consort music and trio sonatas, chamber music as we'd know it had a long history by the time Haydn developed the modern string quartet; he didn't work in a vacuum.

The second half explored works fitting the definition of "late style" as coined by the critic Theodor Adorno, and then proposed that chamber music itself is in a "late style" crisis, identified by Milton Babbitt's infamous 1958 article, "Who Cares If You Listen?", proposing that new classical music should be addressed to a hermetic audience of specialists and not to the general pubic, hermetic obscurity being one of Adorno's hallmarks of "late style." Boyd went on to say that even the reaction against Babbitt's total serialism was still "late style": the general public isn't going to listen to a five-hour piece by Morton Feldman, either.

I think he's excluding a middle, here. The composers inspired by Feldman and Cage eschew their extremes too, and produce music that concert audiences want to hear, as any number of Menlo contemporary music concerts have demonstrated.

Still, Boyd is right in a larger sense, that even the general concert audience for classical music is a hermetic group now, preserving the relics of a grandiose lost past civilization we cannot re-create.

But there was some music on Friday after all, a Prelude concert by the International Program artists having preceded the lecture. A crunchy and urgent version of Beethoven's Piano Trio Op 1/3 was followed by Schumann's Piano Quintet with strikingly vehement solos in the slow movement by violist Sofia Gilchenok; I'll be looking out for her in later concerts.

not seeing Superman

B. wants to see the new Superman movie, enough to have ventured out to see it, but the theater she went to did not have a functioning restroom, so she gave up and left. One more strike against our city's downtown, which we rarely go to anyway.

I am not interested. The last Superman movie I saw was in 1978 with Christopher Reeve. This one has been acclaimed the best one since then, but the last time I saw a superhero movie because it was supposed to be really good was Iron Man in 2008 with Robert Downey Jr, and while he was good, the movie was the usual superhero crap. I saw the trailer for the new Superman which consists mostly of Superman trying to argue that he's not the bad guy. That he's not the bad guy? I don't need this.

I read a review of the movie which listed some other superhero characters who appear in it. Green Lantern I knew about, but to me Mister Terrific is the name of a short-lived 1960s tv comedy show about a gas station attendant who takes a pill that gave him short-lived superpowers. (I remember liking it a lot at the time, but I sought out an episode some years later and found that, like most of the other comedies I liked as a child, it was really bad.)

B., who knows a lot more about superhero comics than I do, tells me that no, there was a Superman-universe superhero called Mister Terrific, and that the tv show was probably named after it.

had a hammer

The doorbell rang this morning, and it wasn't a package delivery, which is what usually generates a doorbell ring here. It was a guy from the utility company, wanting to look at our gas meter.

This was slightly odd, as the same thing had happened the previous day.

The guy said the previous guy hadn't been able to get access to the meter.

Uh-oh, had we blocked it off or something? No, he just meant that the previous guy hadn't had the right tool with him.

It turned out, the new guy explained, that the valve on the pipe attached to the meter was partly underneath the concrete in the patio, and they had to get it free. (It's been this way for the 18 years we've lived here.) So the right tool turned out to be ... a jackhammer.

Not too large a dent in the concrete, and everything was swept up afterwards, and the cats were not as bothered by the loud noise as I'd thought. B. had on her noise-canceling headphones, and I just went upstairs.

dreamworld

I keep having this dream in which I'm the eldest of 6 or 8 children who've been kidnapped, or something, and we're each going to be asked a question, some type of relevant trivia knowledge I think. But though at the time I face the first question, I think I can identify the age and gender of all the other children as well as remember what the question is that each has been asked, by the time I get through that stage of the dream, all that knowledge has vanished and the dream crumbles. (I have particular trouble remembering dreams after I wake, thus even more of the vagueness of this account.)

Speaking of trivia questions, I've been watching compilations from a British quiz program called University Challenge, in which teams of undergraduates expose their knowledge, or, if the questions are about classical music as in these compilations, their ignorance. I've gotten used to identifications of Wagner's Lohengrin as by Leonard Bernstein, or not knowing a crumhorn when they see a picture of one, but this was a real gem. Played a piece of music and told it was from an opera overture and asked to name the opera, they were stumped.

The music was a pastoral theme for English horn and flute that you've probably heard in Bugs Bunny cartoons or even Bambi Meets Godzilla, and which in the overture immediately precedes what is surely the most famous tune in any opera overture anywhere. One team guessed La bohème and the other Carmen. No, it's the Ranz des vaches from Rossini's William Tell.

world according to cat, and more

Tybalt really does seem to find my weekly sorting of pills into pillboxes to be fascinating. Whenever I start it, he'll jump up and start inserting his nose in the business. I've managed to dissuade him before he gets to the point of eating the pills. He also likes knocking pill bottles to the floor. When I'm done, he goes back to wherever he was resting before. We call him my assistant.

B. is struggling with trying to get her new CD player to pair with her older headphones. They're both Bluetooth-enabled, and Bluetooth is supposed to be a universal standard, but apparently not. It's probably something like USB, which may I remind you stands for universal serial bus, but there are now at least four different sizes of USB plugs and ports, and woe if you have the wrong one for where it's supposed to go. So maybe there are different kinds of Bluetooth. They should name the new standard Forkbeard, as he was the next king of Denmark after Bluetooth.

Out on errands and needing lunch, I thought I'd revisit the Thai restaurant in a convenient shopping center. It was OK, never that great, but it'd been a long time since I'd been there. It's gone, replaced by a new Chinese Malatang outlet. This is like the fifth one I've come across in the last couple months of a type of cuisine I'd never heard of before. Malatang is a little bit like Mongolian barbecue in that you take a bowl, fill it with raw ingredients from a buffet, and hand it in for cooking. It's different in the ingredients and the seasoning - typical Malatang is soup, though there are also some dry versions - you pay by the weight, and you can't watch it being cooked. Ingredients are roughly the same between outlets but vary a bit. Some have lots of veggies, some few, some with broccoli, some with bok choy. Some have fish, some don't. Some peel their shrimp, some don't. Meat is always shaved beef and lamb, but there might be pork, might be bbq. There's also plenty of weird stuff, which the westerner tries at their peril. (I did not find cow throat edible.) There are no serving utensils in the containers; you take a pair of tongs with your bowl at the beginning. The quarters are always very clean, which is not always true of Mongolian barbecue. I've been getting kind of used to Malatang and will probably have some more.

a 17th-century joke

I thought this was pretty funny. B. didn't get it. How say you?

A melting* Sermon being preached in a Country Church, all fell a weeping, except a Country man, who being ask'd why he did not weep with the rest?
'Because' (says he) 'I am not of this Parish.'

*I presume 'melting' means 'causing the hearts of the hearers to melt.'

Source: The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, compiled by Frank Muir (OUP, 1990)

the end of Westercon

The business meeting of this year's Westercon, last weekend, passed a motion to retire Westercon, to put an end to a nearly 80-year sequence of annual science-fiction conventions. It will need to be ratified next year, and any seated conventions will still be held, so unless it's rejected next year, the last Westercon will probably be no. 80 in 2028. I wasn't at the meeting, but you can read about it and, if you're really a glutton for it, watch a half-hour video of the whole thing here.

How have the mighty fallen. When I was active in fandom in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Westercon was the king of the west coast convention calendar, behind only Worldcon in importance to fans in the area. It was large, maybe 2000 people, full of activity and a great place to expect to meet friends. There were plenty of other large regional conventions around, but Westercon was a centerpiece. Like Worldcon but unlike most other convention series, it moved from city to city each year, so nobody had to carry the entire burden of responsibility for running it. But, once shared, the responsibility was welcome. For instance, Portland had a big annual local convention, Orycon, in the fall. But for nearly 20 years, every five years or so they'd also hold a Westercon, in July. It wasn't too much of a challenge.

Westercon had grown to meet a need. It was in 1948 that LASFS, the LA club, had decided to hold a one-day event to assuage the needs of those who couldn't afford to attend the Worldcon on the east coast. After a few years it got bigger and longer, and started to be hosted in other cities, but for 20 years or more, Westercon served this role of a substitute. When the Worldcon was held on the west coast, no separate Westercon was held - there was no need for it.

But by the 1970s, Westercon had begun to exist for its own sake. 1972 was the first year there was both a Worldcon and a separate Westercon on the west coast. They were both in the LA area. Around the same time, local conventions began growing up: Loscon in LA (starting as a revival of the original format of Westercon), Orycon in Portland, Norwescon in Seattle, Baycon in San Jose, all began in the 70s or early 80s. But Westercon flourished along with them.

But sometime after the year 2000, Westercon began to diminish while other conventions continued to prosper. I'm not familiar enough with the fannish milieu of the time to understand why, but Westercons became much smaller and more obscure. I went to a couple in this period and was really surprised by how the atmosphere had changed.

In recent years it's been suffering from organizational ennui. Every Westercon but one (Tonopah in 2022) since 2014 has been co-hosted with another convention, usually as an add-on to a better-established partner. And for three consecutive years recently there was no qualified bidder, and a special committee had to figure out how to get the convention held. Maybe, Kayla Allen suggested in proposing the motion, there just isn't a need for our product any more.

But as mentioned, what I don't understand is why this has happened. Ben Yalow and Michael Siladi, also experienced conrunners supporting the motion, both suggested that the rise of other regional/local conventions on the west coast has sapped interest away from Westercon, but as Ben pointed out, that phenomenon dates back to the late 1970s/early 1980s, and Westercon was still flourishing in that period. The decline came later. What happened?

100 best

Here's a list of the New York Times's idea of the 100 best movies so far of the century of years beginning with a "20", to be precise about it. It's a little behind; there are no movies on the list from 2025, and none from 2024, either. But it's an interesting list that balances between acclaimed popular movies and more abstruse critical darlings with a lot in between also.

I've seen 37 of the 100 films, of which I'd name 10 as real favorites, which I identify as movies I've re-watched for pleasure, sometimes skipping over parts but usually in full. Those ten, from the top on the list of 100, are:
Mulholland Drive (2)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (7)
Zodiac (19)
Moneyball (45)
Inception (55)
Memento (62)
Spotlight (66)
Ocean's Eleven (71)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (76)
Inside Llewyn Davis (83)

Two Christopher Nolan movies, two Coen brothers movies. That doesn't mean I like all their movies.

Of the 37, there are also 8 which I found disappointing or annoying in at least some respects. Interestingly, while one of my top ten, Mulholland Drive, is near the top of the list at #2, it is immediately followed at #3 by the movie I saw in full that I disliked more than any other, There Will Be Blood (yes, worse than The Fellowship of the Ring, #87).

The other 19 that I saw I enjoyed watching well enough.

Besides the 37, there are 4 that bored or irritated me so much that I gave up on them early on. I'd rather explain why I hated a movie than why I loved it, so they are:
Roma (46) - Even the opening credits bored me to tears, and nothing that happened in the next five minutes changed my mind, so I turned it off.
Whiplash (60) - The teacher is such a human cretin that, were I the student, I would probably have punched him in the face before walking out and never returning.
The Hurt Locker (68) - I explained my problem with this one in a post titled action movies in which the only reason the hero doesn't die is that heroes don't die
The Florida Project (74) - Begins with three six-year-olds gleefully spitting onto their neighbor's new car for no reason other than that they can. Do I want to spend a whole movie with such obnoxious kids? Off.

1984 revisited

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984, Dorian Lynskey. (Doubleday, 2019)

B. is re-reading 1984, first time since high school. I also read it in high school, not I think for a class, but I've never attempted to re-read it. It's the bleakest, darkest novel I've ever read, it was searingly memorable and remains fresh in my thoughts, but I don't ever want to delve into it again. I've re-read other dystopias, like The Handmaid's Tale, but Offred remains defiant until the end. Orwell's Winston is just totally crushed, and the rest of the book tends to foreshadow that.

So instead I read this book about 1984. It's in two parts. Orwell said that 1984 was the summation of everything he'd read and done since the Spanish Civil War, which is where he discovered that both sides can be totalitarian. Lynskey goes through all of the ingredients, directly contributory or not, spending a lot of attention on Animal Farm, which is deeply thematically related. Lynskey also disposes of any notion that the year 1984 is any sort of code for 1948, as often suggested. That Winston's environment is based on austerity post-war Britain is a red herring. Orwell picked that as something he could depict, not out of secret hatred of the Labour government.

Orwell died less than a year after the book was published. The second half is the book's posthumous career. This includes consideration of just about every major dystopia concocted in English-language literature or film since then, even if (like Fahrenheit 451 or Brazil) they've little to do with and weren't inspired by 1984. There's also a long and gratifyingly detailed discussion of The Prisoner. But it also covers film and stage adaptations of 1984 itself, and lots of what people have said about the book or about What Orwell Would Be Saying Today. About this last genre, Lynskey is appropriately caustic. "The most inflammatory reputation grab was a story by Norman Podhoretz. 'Normally, to speculate on what a dead man might have said about events he never lived to see is a frivolous enterprise,' he acknowledged, before gamely pressing on to insist that an octogenarian Orwell would have said that Norman Podhoretz was right."

Orwell's particular balanced perspective is widely misunderstood. Normally, especially in Orwell's day but even now, critics of fascism and other leftists tend to make excuses for the Soviet Union and other communist regimes: they're not so bad, Stalin's show trials were misjudged, etc. Visitors to the USSR like Bernard Shaw were totally gulled. Even Jon Carroll writing on Elian Gonzalez thought that Elian's mother was unhinged to make a dangerous flight from the communist paradise of Cuba. And anti-communists tend to have a similar soft spot for the right. Jeane Kirkpatrick praising any dictatorship on the map as long as it was right-wing. Robert Conquest, brilliant excoriator of Soviet terror, offering comparisons as if making excuses for everyone else except the Nazis.

Orwell wasn't like that. He hated totalitarianism, and he hated it equally from either side of the spectrum. He didn't think that the sins of one side made the other side acceptable. People can't see that balance, especially right-wingers who see the depiction of the Soviet-style government in 1984 and especially the Soviet allegory in Animal Farm and assume Orwell would be a right-winger, in favor of capitalism. You'd have to ignore the opening of Animal Farm entirely to think that.

Somebody once summarized Orwell's philosophy - and I think Lynskey quotes this but I can't find it now - as "Capitalism is a disease, socialism is the cure, and communism would kill the patient." Keep that in mind, and your preconceptions won't fool you about Orwell.

talk to the police

Every once in a while YouTube shows me a link to a video urging its watchers never to talk to the police. I've never watched one of these videos - lectures on haranguing topics are not a high priority in my life - but I have looked the question up on Quora and Reddit. There it appears that the urgers don't mean this literally. For instance, when I was in a crumpling three-car auto accident, calling the police and talking to them could hardly be avoided, and it was clear that I wasn't at fault.

But otherwise the answer seems to depend on who's giving it. Police writing say that innocent people should always talk with the police, who just want to gather as much evidence as possible. Others, especially lawyers, say no! no! Whenever there's a crime involved, ask to get a lawyer first. Some say only if you're being detained to be questioned.

And the reason for all this is that the more you say, the more opportunity the police have to twist your words into evidence of your guilt. I know this happens. I've seen a number of accounts of cases where the police, having made a preliminary survey, take a first guess as to the culprit, and then devote the entirety of their attention to finding, sometimes even concocting, evidence of that person's guilt, ignoring anything that points to their innocence or to guilt lying in another direction.

OK, I thought, but if you're an innocent person terrified that the police might fasten on you as the presumed guilty suspect, wouldn't defensive insisting on a lawyer only make the police more likely to suspect you?

I just found some evidence, admittedly in a fictional movie, for that point of view. The movie was The Town, which I came across on Netflix. I hadn't heard of it, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was a crime drama which got good reviews. So I watched it, and it was indeed a good movie. It's about a bank robber, played by Ben Affleck, who falls in love with his hostage. Well, it's more complicated than that. First the robbers, who are masked during the crime, let the hostage go. Then they decide to tail her, and that's how Affleck meets her without her having any idea that he's one of the bank robbers. It's set in Boston, which I think is required for movies starring Ben Affleck, and is full of Boston accents coming out of unlikely people like Jeremy Renner.

Anyway, quite early on, the ex-hostage (Rebecca Hall) is being interviewed by the lead FBI agent (Jon Hamm). Worried that she might be considered complicit because she opened the safe at the robbers' orders, she asks, "Should I have a lawyer here?" and he replies, "This isn't a very civil libertarian thing of me to say, but anyone who lawyers up is guilty."

So I guess you should take that under advisement too.

well ...

With the country in the state it's in, I needed something offbeat to commemorate Independence Day, and then YouTube dropped this in my lap:

Frank Sinatra sings "America the Beautiful"
(an impression by Mel Brooks)

chirps

Chirp. It was the smoke detector in our bedroom, waking us to inform that the battery needed to be replaced. Or so we thought. Upon inspection, it turned out the battery couldn't be replaced on this one. You had to buy a new detector. Wait for the hardware store to open for the morning, then find one of the same model, so it fit on the same brackets. Sort of. Anyway, it's up and alert now.

Boom. That, I presume, was the sound of the warehouse full of fireworks exploding after it caught on fire, a couple days ago. Although it was after hours and out in the countryside, seven people were reported missing. It may be a while before this can be put out; fireworks keep exploding. At least one local town had been relying on those fireworks for its July 4th show, which has been canceled. Be careful out there.

Smof. It means ... well, it means someone experienced in running science-fiction conventions. One such has written that the unopposed bid for the next Worldcon up is woefully unequipped to do its job. This is the sort of thing smofs often say about Worldcon bids, whether or not it turns out to be true. The smof recommends voting No Award, er I mean None of the Above, so that the Worldcon Business Meeting will decide what to do. Reading the very serious comments on this post, I decided it was better not to post my snarky comment, which would have been, "Maybe we should put the Worldcon on a boat." But I'm not sure how many readers will have been around long enough to remember what that's a reference to.
Update: Worldcon bid in question has responded with a puff piece. This does not instill confidence.

Meow. A cat walking in front of my monitor, hoping for an early breakfast, made it difficult for me to read the announcement of the impending publication of Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats. This is apparently a collection of unpublished or obscure pieces, many of them whimsical, rather than e.g. an omnibus of Catwings.

Speaking of cats ... This was on xkcd a few days ago:

changing of the guard

The Music@Menlo chamber music festival is starting up in less than 3 weeks, and I'm getting ready. This is the major festival in SFCV's coverage area, and we blanket it. I'm also one of the few reviewers who lives nearby, so a lot of that goes to me. I have the list of concerts I'll be covering, and the supplementary stuff, like lectures, that I'll be attending to give me supplementary background.

And a big piece of news came out this week. Menlo was founded, 23 years ago, by cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, a married couple who are renowned performers who do a lot of duets and collaborations with other musicians. They've been artistic directors - and coaches, concert introducers, and not infrequent performers - at the festival ever since. It's in their name, it's in their image.

The news is that they'll be retiring after next season. They're both circling 70, I guess they decided it was time to hand it on. And who are they handing on to but their own image in a younger generation: Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park. Just like them, he's a cellist; she's a pianist; they're a married couple; they perform a lot together and with others.

And they know Menlo: they've been playing there for over 15 years, and for the last 5 they've been directors of the young performers program, which brings preternaturally talented 10-18 year olds to Menlo, where they put on their own concerts that you can attend. (And well worthwhile, too.)

Furthermore, Atapine and Park direct two separate chamber music series of their own, plus they're both professors at a music school (University of Nevada). So they're about as well equipped in both experience and training to take over as anybody could be. I was not in the slightest surprised at their announcement.

I expect they'll continue the Menlo mix of programming. Menlo specializes in the standard chamber music repertoire, attempting (and often enough succeeding at) the most exquisite performances of the masterworks. But they also mix in a lot of obscurer historical stuff when it's good enough - Anton Arensky is one composer whose name I've learned to seek out - and, for a festival that doesn't focus on new or modern music, a pretty fair sprinkling of newer works, very carefully selected for things you might actually enjoy listening to.

But the new directors might have a few tricks up their sleeves. Atapine once played here a solo cello sonata by György Ligeti, not the sort of composer you'd expect at Menlo, and Park has done dynamic piano work in pieces by Janáček and Bartók, also not everyday fare here. So you never know.

it's an opera review

Encouraged by the blog post and review by Lisa of the Iron Tongue, I bought a ticket for today's matinee performance of the Pocket Opera production of the opera Tartuffe by Kirke Mechem, a contemporary American composer who's also written an opera of Pride and Prejudice which I've also seen. This was the last performance of Tartuffe, and the only one convenient to me geographically, and I wasn't the only person persuaded to go. The small theater in Mountain View's CPA was pretty well packed (the main stage was putting on a musical about James Dean, in whom I have no interest) and among the audience I counted five people I know, including the conductor who put on that Pride and Prejudice.

Like the original play, from which this is significantly simplified (there's no Cléante, for one thing, and the dénouement has a rather different way of arriving at the same ending), this opera is bright and funny. It's through-composed and through-sung, with only a couple set piece arias or duets, in an agreeable modern style. The orchestration (cut down to chamber size by the composer) varies strongly depending on which characters are singing, and there are a couple clever and funny references to well-known bits from the classical repertoire; not worth explaining to non-audience members, but effective at the time.

The title role was sung by the powerful-voiced baritone (he sounds more like a bass) Eugene Brancoveanu, who'd been Darcy in that Pride and Prejudice. Unusually, his voice was not the most distinctive part of his performance here, because there was an equally powerful-voiced bass, Isaiah Musik-Ayala, as the credulous Orgon. Brancoveanu most excelled, instead, in acting the part of the oily and mock-sanctimonious Tartuffe. The other cast member I was familiar with was the bright-voiced soprano Shawnette Sulker as the sly maid Dorine, but they were all good and worked out well in the small space.

I got to the theater after stopping in for the first set of the annual Stanford Chamber Music Seminar's marathon finale, in which all the attending student and amateur groups each play a movement from something. The best I heard here were string quartets, the finale from Mendelssohn's Op. 44/1 and a couple of bright Haydn pieces.

I'd also got to the showcase concert the previous evening, which featured the two best ensembles - again, both string quartets - playing a full work each. We had a highly sharp-nosed performance of Smetana's "In My Life" and a Mendelssohn Op. 80 with a particularly snappy finale. In between the two quartets, the stage crew disassembled and then reassembled the entire string quartet infrastructure - the chairs, the music stands, the little footpads for turning the pages on the tablets - so as to provide for an intermediary performance of a Schubert song. (There was no program, and I don't remember the title.) Was it performed by a soprano? No. A tenor? No. It was a clarinet. B. wasn't there, but she likes vocal music and would have been very disappointed.

more progress

I'm still buried in copy-editing for the next issue of Tolkien Studies, with more to come, but I'm wondering what I can say publicly about it at this point. Oh, here's one thing: we have three papers so far which cite the recently-published Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, which we've decided to put in our standard abbreviations list as CP. Other posthumous Tolkien books have appeared while we've been publishing this journal, and some have sparked a flurry of papers, but no others have become this ubiquitous this quickly. It's a monument.

I'm adopting a practice of pulling down from my shelf each source item that I have in hard copy when the author first cites it, and then leaving it on my desk, because I may need it again later. When I finish the paper, I put them all away and start on the next one. Of course there's also a lot to look up in my computer files, or online, and I also need to make occasional quick trips to the university library.

In other news, I've learned that Corflu is coming back to the Bay Area, specifically Santa Rosa, next year. I dropped out of SF fandom entirely some years ago, and I missed a few events I probably should have gone to, including the last L.A. Corflu; but I think I'll go to this one. The membership list is the same old acquaintances who were there when I was attending regularly, and it's near enough that I can drive with no trouble. In fact what tipped the balance for me is that I have concerts in San Francisco both Thursday and Friday of that weekend, so staying in Santa Rosa will actually make it easier to get there.

I find little need to make political commentary, since there are online sources doing it for me, but I do wish to express how remarkable it is that for four years, judge-shopping produced speciously-argued holds on Biden administration activity without a word from the Supreme Court, but as soon as it's applied to Trump for blatantly unconstitutional actions, the Court puts a halt on the entire practice of universal holds. They're not even pretending not to be partisan any more.

the heat

Here's an article on the heat + humidity that's currently wracking the central and eastern U.S. It's full of detail on exactly how to measure the danger to human health. I hope those of you currently subject to this heat dome are doing OK, especially those of you without air conditioning.

I say "currently" because we get heat domes out here in the west too - we just don't have one right now. It's been 70s up to mid-80s F lately, which is not too uncomfortable, especially because our humidity is typically low - although that's less often true than it used to be. We've gotten some sparkling high waves here in recent years, up to about 105F, but usually in August-October. And of course it gets much hotter further inland: the shore is typically quite cool here in high summer, with each successive coastwise valley inland getting hotter; we're in the first valley, which can be bad enough, and have no intention of retiring out to the second or third valley as so many lounge lizards do.

So I'm counting us really lucky - so far.

unpacking

So much attention and energy needs to be spent preparing for a trip and ensuring that everything you need is properly packed away where it can be accessed (with extra attention devoted to avoiding glitches at airport security if a plane flight is involved) that it can be possible to neglect the process of unpacking when the trip is over.

I've sometimes let that ride in the past, leaving unemptied bags sitting around for days, but I try not to any more. During trips I keep the laundry clearly separated from the clean clothes, so the first piece of unpacking I do is to throw all the laundry into the washing machine. Next step is removing anything from the suitcase that stays downstairs, like shoes and coats, before hauling the suitcase up to the bedroom and putting away the clean clothes and any toiletries that were in there.

The carry-on bag is handled oppositely. That goes straight up to the bedroom; anything going there or in the bathroom is put away, and things going to my office or which belong downstairs are put in separate piles. Then the office items are taken there, and the downstairs material goes back in the bag and taken downstairs to be distributed.

Lastly, the emptied bags go back in the garage where they're kept normally.

This procedure may all seem obvious, but it's one of those things which took a lot of experience and practice to develop. The key is not to let post-trip exhaustion overwhelm the need to get this basic task done. It's so satisfying when this is all done, the bags are put away, and we're back to normal, and the cats like it that way too.

away in a Shakespeare

This year's driving visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was a bit precarious, due to both B. and I being ill at various times (just a cold, but nasty enough). B. missed two plays as a result - fortunately not the best ones. I didn't miss any plays, but undertaking the six hour drive there after a night when the cold had given me no sleep was a grim business which shouldn't have been attempted.

There were six plays on our schedule, three Shakespeare:

As You Like It: utterly charming, clever, good-humored, imaginative, a delight in every way - and performed with utterly pellucid line-readings. Everything everyone said was clear and understandable. After a stark court setting, with everyone in antiseptic white, the Forest of Arden burst out as sixties hippie utopia, with everyone in it, from Duke Senior on down, dressed as flower children - except for the melancholy Jaques, who was a leftover beatnik poet in a shabby black suit. Aw, perfect.

Julius Caesar: another production by the upstart crow collective of female and nonbinary performers. The central characters of Brutus and Cassius were good enough but might have done better with the casting exchanged; but Caesar (Kate Wisniewski) exuded arrogance and self-confidence, perfect for the character. Nonspecific modern dress.

The Merry Wives of Windsor: a more conventional production than OSF's last Merry Wives, this didn't tinker with the text or add musical interjection; here the characters expressed their emotional reactions by screaming a lot. An attempt was made to frame the plot around the crafty plans by the merry wives, but this could have been more focused. The costumes were livelier: Falstaff and his cronies first sauntered in as a biker gang, and things just got sillier from there.

and three not:

The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde: The director couldn't identify with Victorian England, so set this in the Victorian English colony of Malaya, which had little effect outside the vegetation in act 2 and the place names, which didn't make much sense. (The casting was multiracial, which would lead to genetic impossibilities in this play, so you just ignore that.) Never mind the place names either: the acting was great. Newcomer Hao Feng made a splendidly foppish Algy, and Kiki deLohr as Gwendolen mugged her way through, channeling Miss Piggy.

Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine: Supposedly a revival of OSF's 2014 production which we saw, and with some of the same cast, it wasn't the same at all. With much less of the bursting clever imagination of its predecessor and a more improvisationary feel, it was just a good solid performance of Into the Woods that succeeded in making Act 2 more involving than Act 1 instead of more dour.

Fat Ham, James Ijames: Starts out as a very funny and clever resetting of Hamlet in a rural Southern Black family holding a wedding reception barbecue. The Ghost, who is still figuring out how to be one, was particularly amusing. Lots of specific Shakespearean points well translated into Black vernacular. But the author didn't want to kill the characters off, so the plot makes a turn into a closing celebration of former uptight Marine Larry (=Laertes) coming out as a drag queen. Good for him, but something of a nonsequitur in the circumstances.

caught up

B. went to the local No Kings protest on Saturday. I support the cause, but I stayed home and took a nap. I feel I've already had my say on this subject.

Instead, I went up to the City that evening for the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony's Pride celebratory concert. The music sounded interesting. Conducted by Martha Stoddard, known locally for the Oakland Civic Orchestra, it featured a timpani concerto by the Colombian/US composer Juan Sebastian Cardona Ospina, and Sibelius's Third Symphony. Both of them came across as busy and bustling.

Today I happened to be sitting in the living room when B. turned the tv on to continue watching Andor (which I persist in thinking of as "and/or" because I've been trained in Boolean logic). Although it's set in the Star Wars universe, it didn't feel to me like Star Wars at all, because the dialogue isn't stiff and inane like in all the Star Wars movies I've seen. (I haven't seen Rogue One.) But I couldn't follow what was going on, so I let it be.

catch-up

The reason for the posting gap between covering last week's San Francisco Symphony program and this week's is that I've been buried - and still am - in my part of copy-editing the papers for the next issue of Tolkien Studies. This is a major task that has been occupying all three editors. There are authors who have trouble with - well, I shouldn't say the things they have trouble with, but they have trouble with them. But that leads to the first of my catch-up news items, which is:

1. I should say, since there have been a couple of inquiries, that Tolkien Studies is alive and well. It's just delayed. A combination of various personal difficulties on top of never having quite recovered from the dent in our schedule caused by the 2022 supplement are the cause, but the 2024 (tsk) issue should have gone to the publisher (more processing time) within a month from now.

2. Last week, B. and I went to hear the San Jose Symphonic Choir give its centenary concert of singing Beethoven's Ninth, and I reviewed it for the Daily Journal. The singing and playing ranged from excellent to not so excellent, but we had a good time of it. This was the fullest I've seen the Mountain View CPA in a long time, and the fullest I've seen its parking garage ever. I had to park out on the street two blocks away, and I was lucky to find that.

3. Last November, when I was in LA (and the National Guard wasn't), I saw a delightfully clever performance of Sondheim's rarely-staged Pacific Overtures, his musical about the opening of Japan. So when I saw that another Asian-American theater company was going to do it in San Francisco, I decided to go to that one too. Friday was it, after another long day (and a drive up the coast from Santa Cruz). Follow-ups like this are rarely a success, and this wasn't. The performers were all of professional quality, but the show was bland and dull in comparison to the bright and witty I saw in LA.

3a. Near the theater, which is in the Mission District, are two Mexican restaurants I queried for dinner beforehand. Both advertise tamales, one in their menu, the other actually is called a "Tamale Parlor." Neither has any tamales. The one was out of them, the other - despite the name - doesn't even carry them. As a tamale-lover, I was very disappointed.

4. Were you under the impression that C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams wrote each other fan letters that crossed in the mail? Neither was I, but just in case you were, Sørina Higgins is out to correct you. Actually, Williams wrote, "If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed," and the conditional of this phrasing attracted Søri's attention. She thinks Williams was just being polite; he wouldn't have taken the trouble of writing a letter if Lewis hadn't written him first.
What she doesn't address is the peculiarity of Williams, who was an editor in the London branch, the commercial office, of the Oxford University Press, being asked to evaluate Lewis's book which was an academic treatise being published by the Oxford branch, the academic office, of the Press, although he did suggest what was eventually used as the book's title, The Allegory of Love. What I've read elsewhere, though I can't remember where, is a suggestion that Williams being given Lewis's book was a stitch-up concocted by Humphrey Milford, the Publisher of the Press (manager of the London office, and Williams's supervisor) and R.W. Chapman, Secretary to the Delegates (manager of the Oxford office, who knew Lewis, an Oxford don) in collaboration, as they thought - quite astutely - that Williams and Lewis would be great friends if they ever met. That, by Lewis's own testimony (Preface to Essays Presented to CW), it was Chapman who first mentioned Williams's novels to Lewis is another clue.
Anyway, if this is true, then Williams's "admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence" that brought them together should have been pitched at a slightly lower level.

Salonen: the grand finale

For his last-ever program as music director of the San Francisco Symphony (though he didn't know it would be his last-ever when he scheduled it), Esa-Pekka Salonen chose Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, big enough to make a concert by itself. Ordinarily I'd skip out on an all-Mahler program, but I decided to attend this one (first of three performances) not just because it was EPS's last, but because I was so impressed with his interpretation of Mahler's Third at the end of last year's season.

And it wasn't as revelatory, but still extremely interesting. As with the Third, EPS divided the Second up into two unanticipated parts.

The dramatic and somber (with placid interludes) first movement of the Second is the only piece of Mahler's which can be played to sound as if it might have been written by Mahler's mentor Anton Bruckner. EPS did not direct it that way. Instead, he had it sound like the anti-Bruckner: the sound was bright, clean-cut, and almost crystal-clear throughout. If it was dark at all, it came in touches where it was creepy in the way that Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre is creepy.

The result of this is that the delicate and wistful second movement intermezzo, which is intended to be as incongruously different from the first movement as possible, sounded just like it. Placid and calm? Yes, just like the interludes in the first movement. Loud and dramatic moments? (Yes, it has them: this is Mahler, after all.) As clear and simply bright as the first movement's.

So the first two movements were the ad hoc part 1 of Salonen's version of the Second. The third movement scherzo turned out to be the beginning of part 2. The climax at the end of this was the first loud passage in the symphony to be at all rough and chaotic or, to put it more bluntly, to sound as if it had been composed by Mahler. The long instrumental opening of the choral finale, written as something of a return to the first movement's approach, was here hairier and irregular and much more like the end of the scherzo.

What most impressed with the finale was EPS's command of the extremes of dynamics. At the choral climax, the SFS Chorus, some 140 strong, was beefy and powerful enough to stride over the full noise of the orchestra, and the final instrumental-only conclusion made an even mightier roar with multiple sets of timpani banging away and the organ at full throttle, the way I always want to hear it at the climaxes of works like Saint-Saëns's Organ Symphony or Holst's "Uranus" from The Planets.

On the other hand, the quiet was really quiet. It's difficult for a large chorus to sing as intensely quietly as Mahler directs its opening passage to be (ppp), but this ensemble managed that hush. The instrumental side could be just as quiet. EPS managed the passages with an offstage band to come across so softly that they were in perfect volume balance with active onstage performers of nothing but one flute and one piccolo.

Not to forget the work's two solo singers. Heidi Stober's soprano repeatedly rose beautifully out of the chorus, but even greater honors are due to acclaimed mezzo Sasha Cooke, who in addition to parts in the finale has a solemn and subdued prelude song, "Urlicht," between the scherzo and the finale, which she conveyed as sweet and coy in her powerful deep voice.

Huge applause afterwards for all concerned, including Chorus director Jenny Wong, who's rapidly establishing herself as the best director this choir has ever had. Unlike last week, EPS consented to take a couple of curtain calls by himself as well, though he insisted on taking them standing in the middle of the orchestra, somewhere between the second violins and violas, as if to emphasize he considers himself just one of the fabulous musicians on stage.

And thus concludes EPS's five-year tenure as Music Director of SFS. He'll turn 67 at the end of this month, a prime age for a conductor, and we could have had him for much longer if only incompetent and clueless management hadn't driven him to let his contract expire and leave. He's not returning as a guest next season and we might well never have him again. What a loss.

Salonen: the penultimate program

The San Francisco Symphony program this week was a miscellaneous assortment of four pieces, each about 20 minutes long. Perhaps that's why, even though it was music director Esa-Pekka Salonen's next-to-last program, the hall was not as packed on Saturday as it was last week. (I don't usually go to SFS on Saturday. I did this week because I was doing something else on Friday. More on that later.) The audience cheered EPS just as lustily, though, despite his attempts to modestly back off at the end.

We had:

1. Richard Strauss's two shortest - and, not coincidentally, best - tone poems, Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel. These were played with quicksilver energy and bumptious color, so much so that, had I not known better and were told that Don Juan actually portrayed the merry prankster Till, I might have believed it. (The reverse would be less plausible.)
2. Sibelius's shortest and most cryptic symphony, the Seventh. This was played in the same manner: it was so brilliantly colorful and convincing moment-by-moment that it didn't matter where the piece was going, and indeed I wasn't sure if it was going anywhere. Each section seemed to come from a different work; there was even a moment straight out of Valse Triste.
3. A premiere, Rewilding by local composer Gabriella Smith. This celebrates the titular ecosystem restoration projects by means of musical onomatopoeia. It both begins and ends with the percussion evoking the squeaking of Smith's bicycle as she rides to and from her project sites (which is what she spends her non-musical time doing). In between are attempts at animal sounds: lots of insect swarms from the strings and bird calls of various kinds from the woodwinds, while the brass play what come across more as Ingram Marshall-style foghorns.

EPS had a definite vision for this concert, and this is an orchestra that can do anything that a good conductor asks of it.

what are they waiting for?

Here's something that bugs me, and that seems to be happening constantly these days: People who get into their cars, turn the engine on, and then just sit there, maybe checking their phone or doing nothing at all.

The reason this bugs me is that they're doing this in parking lots, and my car is next to theirs or directly across the lane, and I want to leave but I don't want to risk hitting or being hit by another car leaving at the same time, because it's awfully hard to see behind you, despite turning head and rear-view mirrors, and they got to their car before I got to mine. So I wait for them to leave. And wait, and wait ...

Occasionally I've actually gotten back out of my car, gone to theirs, knocked on the window, and asked, "Are you planning on leaving soon? Because I'm parked next to you, and I don't want to move if you're going to be moving." But mostly now I give up, and figure if they don't leave after one minute they're unlikely to leave before two, and go out myself.

But if people would just go when they're ready to - again, they've turned the engine on - there wouldn't be this problem.

no concert

B. saw an announcement that a choral group we'd never heard of was giving a free concert of Mozart's Requiem on Sunday afternoon in a local church, so we decided to go. I don't know how it came out; we didn't stay for the performance.

We'd arrived early enough to read the quite extensive comments on the strange composition history of the piece, and its musical contents, in the program book. By 3 pm, the announced time, the sanctuary was packed with concertgoers, some of them children.

The conductor stood up and started to speak into a microphone. (Not very clearly: her voice kept fading in and out.) Now, many conductors have adopted the irritating habit of speaking a few superfluous sentences before pieces, but usually they're done in a couple of minutes. Not this one. She took some 15 minutes to tell the entire story of the commissioning, composition, and publication of the Requiem. I thought about shouting out, "We can read all this in the program book! Let's hear the music!"

Perhaps I should have, because then the conductor turned to an analysis of repeated musical motifs in the Requiem, with musical illustrations by the rehearsal pianist.

It was at about this point that B. asked if we should just leave. I said I hoped the talk would be done soon. It wasn't. After five minutes - this had now gone on for 20 minutes total, and it still wasn't done - the conductor was on her third motif, and we got up and left. I walked to the back parking lot to fetch the car while B. waited at the front door. When I picked her up, the conductor was still talking.

Look, if you want to give a pre-concert talk before the concert, schedule it for an hour before showtime. Don't incorporate it into the actual program. Then people can decide if they want to attend or not. Besides, this wasn't really a pre-concert talk in content. The motivic analysis made it more like a lecture in a junior college class on Mozart.

I won't dignify the ensemble by naming it, but we certainly won't attempt to attend any more of its concerts.

transit and birds in Pittsburgh

I said I was going to write about these subjects, but my post on food got a little too long.

Both the wedding venue, just across the Monongahela River on one side of downtown, and the baseball stadium, just across the Allegheny on the other side, were a little further from my hotel than I was comfortable walking, so I was going to need to learn the bus system. I found the online guide to transit in Pittsburgh confusing and useless, and while Google Maps will tell you how to do if you need to leave right now, it's too narrowly focused to be useful for planning ahead.

I walked over to the nearest station of the light rail, which is called the T (which stands for trolley, which you'll understand if you take it out to the suburbs, where it runs down the middle of streets). It was an underground station like on BART, except no gates, because the T is free in the central city. There were, however, ticket machines for buying passes, good on both the buses and the pay parts of the T - 3-hour, 1-day, 7-day, starting from whenever you first use them, not when you buy them. All this was explained to me by helpful locals whom I enquired from.

Down in the bowels of the station was a large multiple-compartment tray with folding paper schedules for every bus line in the city. Not having time to figure out which lines I might need, I took one copy of each. They were very useful. For all of my travel plans, I'd look up the route on Google Maps, write down the numbers of all the bus lines that served it, then look up on the paper schedules where they actually went and when. This was particularly useful when I went out to my brother's house in the suburbs. I took a taxi out there (I don't do Uber), but I came back on the bus, having carefully printed out a map that would show me how to walk the 1/4 mile downhill (which is why I didn't take the bus in) to the bus stop and what time it would arrive, which was vital given that the line runs only every 90 minutes on holidays. I was relieved to find I was not the only rider on the bus.

I plotted an even more elaborate trip to the North Shore for the ball game. First I took a bus to a likely lunch place, then I walked a few blocks through a park to the National Aviary, then a longer distance distinctly downhill to the ball park. (No bus service on that route that wouldn't be more trouble than it was worth; figuring things like that out is what made the planning elaborate.) Plenty of time; the game wasn't until 4 pm. Having realized our seats were on the back side of the stadium close to the otherwise awkwardly-located local T station, I took that back downtown afterwards.

But the National Aviary, ah that was worth seeing. I enjoy aviaries, especially the walk-through kind. The San Antonio Zoo has four of them and is the best such experience I've had, but this was a close second. It's small, but is packed with birds and is all-bird. There's three walk-throughs: a grasslands one with tiny birds, mostly canaries and finches; a wetlands, which B. would have enjoyed the most, full of flamingos and odd ducks (I saw one duck, which the posted guide identified as a puna teal, chasing a flamingo around the pond); and a tropical rainforest, which featured gigantic blue parrots which missed a bet by not being the mascots of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and a large Malaysian pheasant (the Great Argus, the guidebook said) which kept throwing back its head and emitting a piercingly loud woo woo cry that echoed through the room.

There were also smaller displays featuring African penguins (tolerant of a temperate climate), lorikeets, and a giant Steller's sea eagle. And much more. There's a tiny cafeteria that includes among its offerings chicken tenders and turkey sandwiches. Roasted bird, in an aviary? I had to wonder about that.

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.