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.