venue review

Review of a new pop-music concert venue in my area, the Siesta Valley Bowl. Only it's not new, it's the amphitheater that used to host the now-defunct California Shakespeare Festival.

You know, I stopped going there long before Cal Shakes died, and the reason was the acoustics. The bowl was not focused, and the unamplified actors had to shout to be heard. That's assuming that a plane landing at or taking off from the nearby Oakland Airport wasn't passing overhead, which they did frequently, because that would rip a few pages out of the script entirely, making the actors inaudible no matter what they did.

So, all in all, this is a better venue for amplified pop music than it was for unamplified theater, assuming it doesn't bother the neighbors. Though I will say that I was curious enough to go and listen to what the review said was probably "the finest song in [the performer's] entire catalog," and all I can say is that if that is his finest song, I'm really glad I don't have to hear any of the others.

driving

B. and I had received an invitation for Saturday. Our great-niece, T., has graduated from high school - and beyond that, owing to an arrangement between her high school and a local junior college, a lot of extra classes, and four years of summer school, she also completed an A.S. degree, normally two years full-time of junior college, at the same time. So she goes off to university this fall a couple of legs ahead.

So T.'s parents, A. and C., decided to host a big late-afternoon party to celebrate. We've been invited to some earlier birthday and other celebrations but were not able to attend. So since we did have this day free, we decided to go.

The thing is, T. and her family live three hours' drive and a mountain range away from here, in a large and comfortable home out in the boondocks far from anything, so it's a major investment in time to go there. I drove us, we spent an hour and a half there, and then B. wanted to get back, partly to perform evening ablutions before it was too late. It took even longer to get home, thanks to a brush fire in the freeway median, but we did that too. Amazingly I got us home without feeling too tired out on the way.

Not a trip we may ever take again, at least not together, but we did get a chance to congratulate (congraduate) the honoree, and chat with parents and grandparents. It was a good outing, despite the trouble it took to get there.

automation

This is very 1963, but it's also disturbingly relevant today:

one thing about doctors

and dentists is that - I suppose depending on their specialty - is that they love looking around the inside of your body, where all the blood and guts are. (In the case of dentists, close-up views of the gums and around the tongue.) If they have cameras floating around in there, they want to show off the view to the patient, and are rather hurt if you decline on grounds of ickk.

voting for the least annoying candidate

Here's a clue, politicians. If you're running for a relatively low-profile down-ballot office, like state legislature or a county office, don't deluge the voters with endless flyers or giant ads on tv or in newspapers. Because all you'll do is make me wonder, "Who's funding this person?" and make me reluctant to vote for you.

Indeed, for one local office there were two candidates, of which I was very skeptical of the incumbent. But the challenger's ads were so glaring that I got even more uncomfortable with him. I voted for the incumbent, who won.

ok, here's the story ...

I was asked to tell about Shostakovich and the San Jose Symphony, so here it is.

This happened in 1992, after long-time music director George Cleve was persuaded to retire. Those who heard Cleve in later years may think of him as a mellow Brahmsian figure, but that's not what he was like when he was younger. Everyone agreed his music-making was inspired, but in rehearsal he could be tempestuous, even tyrannical - B. sang with the symphony in those years, and can testify to the long rehearsals and the tantrums - and eventually it was just too much.

To hunt for Cleve's replacement, the symphony held one of those "seasons of discovery" that orchestras in search of a new music director are sometimes fond of. A set of prospective conductors were invited to lead one concert each which served as an audition. One of the finalists, who didn't get the job, was Marin Alsop, now probably the most renowned female conductor around. But remember this was 1992, she was young and still little-known - it was the first I'd heard of her - and it may be a good thing she didn't get the job, because it meant she didn't go down with the ship. But I get ahead of myself.

The successful candidate was a Ukrainian named Leonid Grin (pronounced Green). His audition concert featured a dark, somber and compelling rendition of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, preceded by Grin's own brief talk about what this music meant to him. It was a stunner of a performance, and it was probably responsible for him getting the job.

Unfortunately, it turned out that dark, depressing Russian music was the only thing that Grin could really do well. His attempts at being light-hearted were particularly cringe-worthy; I remember a rendition of Ravel's Bolero that was especially pathetic. He put the snare-drummer (regular percussionist Galen Lemmon) in front of the orchestra on the grounds that this was a snare-drum concerto, and it just didn't work.

I don't say that ten years of this ham-handedness was solely responsible for the symphony's decline and eventual bankruptcy - an incompetent management was the primary cause - but it didn't help. After the orchestra's demise, an entirely new management hired most of the same musicians - nothing wrong with them - and founded a new and more successfully-run orchestra initially named Symphony Silicon Valley, now Symphony San Jose. Grin has never been seen here since, though SSV did eventually bring back the older and mellower George Cleve as a guest conductor.

two outings

On Friday, the Redwood Symphony put on another of its occasional spectacular Sondheim semi-staged productions, this one of A Little Night Music. B. came with me to this one. I was unfamiliar with the show and hadn't heard much of it, and what most struck me on this encounter was how little it sounds like standard-issue Sondheim. His usual ticks are completely absent. I enjoyed most of the music; the closest thing to a catchy song in it is "The Glamorous Life" and the most tiresome and irritating is "A Weekend in the Country," which I had heard before somewhere.

The orchestra - this was Tunick's rarely-heard full symphony orchestration - did very well, but the singers were mixed. Fredrik had a weak voice, and Anne was whiny and annoying, which undercut both the character and the plot. But Desiree (Annmarie Macry) did a good job with "Send in the Clowns," and William Giammona as Carl-Magnus had complete command of his character's infinite self-regard; he was even better than the guy on the original cast recording.

Sunday I headed out to the local area's most popular ethnic event, the Greek festival put on annually by a local Greek Orthodox church in the forlorn hope that attendees might be distracted from the food and the dancing long enough to pay regard to the religion. Instead, I spent two hours eating the like of lamb chops, dolmas, and a new offering of fried cheese (saganaki) that was quite delicious. Having arrived at opening, I was able to get in some of this before the lines became insanely long, and at that point I just left.

However, I did unusually run into someone I knew, and thus spent a considerable part of my eating time in the company of the marketing director from Music@Menlo, whom I've had a lot of professional contact with, plus her husband and two small children, whom I hadn't met before because she doesn't bring them to work. We chatted on a lot of music gossip, such as the appointments of new music directors in both San Francisco and L.A., hopeful signs both of them, and I told stories like how Shostakovich led to the fall of the old San Jose Symphony.