concert review: Symphony Silicon Valley

Wow, what a lot of roughage in my concert of the two Big M's, Mozart and Mendelssohn. For some reason I found the review coming in short, and stuck some expository material in. I wonder if I'll get away with calling the "Scottish" the most epic symphony between Beethoven/Schubert and Brahms/Raff. There's another obvious candidate, but I could still make the argument that Mendelssohn carries the prize.

hoc tempore

Hanukkah is over already, but it's still Advent and B. is lighting her candles and has decorated the Christmas tree, underneath which cats perch and occasionally munch on the artificial needles. She's also playing the Roches' Christmas carol CD while doing the dishes after dinner. (I cook. She does the dishes.) So it's the season.

It also means it was the season for the book discussion group's annual Reading and Eating Meeting, last Saturday afternoon. This wilted, rather like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. There were only 6 of us there: us, the hostesses, and half the world's supply of authorized Elves. Nobody else was up to going, I guess. I brought along some home-cooked chopped chicken in an apple cider sauce I'd found in Raley's deli department, which was a big hit among the few who got to eat it; and when E. pulled out Always Coming Home to read from, I kicked myself that I'd forgotten to bring along one of Le Guin's late poetry collections to read from that, so I borrowed the book and read "The Third Child's Story" in its place. People claim that ACH is a utopia, but it isn't, and this piece is the clearest proof that not everyone is happy there.

Couldn't stay too long, as I had to get to work: to a concert whose review should be up tomorrow. Meantime, more in the season, the previous weekend I'd gotten to a choral concert titled "An English Christmas". It's sometimes hard to review these collections of numerous short pieces, but the review came out all right.

concert review: Telegraph Quartet

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon in the City, and not very many had come to Herbst Theatre to hear the Telegraph String Quartet. Even the President of San Francisco Performances, who usually says a little to introduce each concert, wasn't there.

Two composers on the program were Eastern European Jews whose lives were upended by 20th century totalitarianism. This biographical imperative seems to have helped drive their rise from obscurity to some note in the classical field in the last couple of decades. They still have some ways to go, so I was glad to hear them today.

Erwin Schulhoff was Czech, and was probably the most distinguished composer to be an actual casualty of the Nazi Holocaust. But he'd been around for a while, and wrote his Five Pieces in 1923. They're a variety of dances, from waltz to tango to tarantella. The music is harsh and brittle, perfect fare for the Telegraph, sounding a bit like Bartók or a less fragmented Webern, but it also contained a fair share of rhythm and bounce.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg was Polish, and fled permanently to Russia when the Wehrmacht hit town. There he became known as Моисей Вайнберг, which transliterates as Moisei Vainberg or Vaynberg, so the form of his name is variable, but Mieczyslaw Weinberg seems to be becoming the preferred form. He also got caught up and nearly executed in the Doctors' Plot, which was one of Stalin's paranoid fantasies. He survived in part due to the sponsorship of his great mentor, Dmitri Shostakovich.

Not surprisingly, his music can sound a lot like his mentor's, and Weinberg's String Quartet No. 6 in E Minor, Op. 35 (1946) turns out to be fabulously good in a Shostakovich mode. It has dark-toned, slowish outer movements and a central Adagio filled with chromatic but intensely lyrical melodies for various solo instruments, frequently accompanied by emphatic pizzicato notes from the others. They're separated by a brief and vehement scherzo (in two nearly indistinguishable parts) and a muted and occasionally squirrely intermezzo. This really is a great quartet in the way that I like difficult modern music to sound.

Also on the program, one 19th-century composer, Antonín Dvořák. (Connection: the elderly Dvořák endorsed the very young Schulhoff to the Prague Conservatory.) The problem is that Dvořák's Op. 51 is relaxed and genial, and I'd have said the Telegraph Quartet doesn't do relaxed and genial. But unlike Kronos, which gave up on music that didn't fit their comfort zone, Telegraph is learning how to play it. This came out quite nicely, rather on the impassioned side and all the spikes sticking out clearly, but not so much as to distort the composition.

I've heard the Telegraph several times in the last couple of years, and they get better literally every time I hear them.

apocalypsis

I recently made my first contribution to ISFDB, and I have to say, it was a lot more painless than working for Wikipedia.

I'd happened out of passing curiosity to look up Damon Knight's critical-essay series, Monad, and discovered to my surprise that the third and last issue had no contents information. Well, I have all three issues, having subscribed at the time, so I registered myself with the site, used the previous issues' entries as a template, and entered the data, following the help entry's suggestion of adding a note reading "Working from book in hand."

Then I submitted it to the moderation queue, and within 24 hours it was up. Usually when I submit something useful to Wikipedia, within 24 hours some asshat editor has deleted it.

Also on ISFDB, when I egoscanned myself, I discovered, more to my horror than any other emotion, that somebody had entered the fanzine issue that my high-school SF club issued in my senior year. Now I have to decide whether to augment this info: correct the title, which they got wrong (it was deliberately confusing), link the co-editor to the entry under which he went on to write professionally under a different form of his name [he reads this: what do you think?], and - assuming I can dig out my copies from storage - enter the previous (which had a different title) and subsequent issues which they don't know about.

cattus agonistes

The cats went to the vet today for their annual checkup et al (shots, pedicure). This was the usual agony for them, strange lady feeling their kidneys and commenting on the state of their bowels, how humiliating.

We'd put the cat carriers out a couple days beforehand, to allow the fright at their appearance (it's a magic trick: how to make Pippin disappear) to die down before the actual event.

This morning I went through the normal routine, feeding Maia in the upstairs bathroom, closing the door on her as I sometimes do to keep her from wandering down and scarfing Pippin's food; then going downstairs to feed an eager Pippin. But something spooked him that overwhelmed his usually intense desire to eat. He dashed off and ran upstairs.

But instead of the closet he usually goes to ground in, he was faced at the top landing by a phalanx of closed bedroom and bathroom doors. With the despairing look of a contestant on Let's Make a Deal who's facing a refusal by Monty Hall to open anything, he just sat there on the landing, enabling B. to scoop him up and deposit him in the carrier. He's learned over the years that resistance is useless, the autocracy will overcome.

Then B. squeezed into the bathroom with the other carrier while I waited outside with a poised laundry basket in case Maia tried to make a break for it. Then through the closed door I heard a couple loud cat wails and a thump, followed by the emergence of a victorious B.

It was still half an hour before time to leave for the vet - that's what you get for giving us trouble, cats - so I stacked the carriers in the living room, giving Maia a chance to teach the usually silent Pippin how to wail in despair, and B. took a photo and posted it on Facebook with the title "Jailhouse blues."

After it was all over and we came home, they dashed off in all directions when we let them out. When I came down to fix dinner, I found them in the living room embodying the style of English place names, Maia-under-Tree (I'd set up the Christmas tree earlier in the afternoon) and Pippin-on-the-Couch, both giving me a very wary eye. But they ate their dinner OK, and Maia wanted her usual adoration afterwards.

que?

So a while ago, leaving plenty of time to find a successor, Michael Tilson Thomas announced his retirement from the music directorship of the San Francisco Symphony, as of the end of next season. That would be about a year and a half from now.

So today, still long before the change is due, they announced the next music director. And it will be:

Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Who retired from the Los Angeles Philharmonic a decade ago because he wanted to be relieved of the extra-conductorial burdens of being a music director (fund-raising, administration, community schmoozing) so he could spend more time composing.

So why did he change his mind? According to SFCV's news announcement, it was too juicy a job to refuse.

Well, okay. But I still don't quite get it.

But while this puzzles me more than excites me, it will, I think, be good for SFS on a strategic level.

For one thing, one of MTT's few flaws is that, while he talked a good new-music game, he rarely delivered. Salonen in LA delivered (and his successor there, Dudamel, is keeping it up). We can count on much more varied programming once Salonen arrives. How good a thing that will be depends on what he programs, and that will be affected by factors we can't yet measure.

Then there's the matter of the conductor's ability to set the orchestra's tone, which is a measure of his heft or subjective weight. When MTT arrived, he was 50 years old, a mid-career conductor who was respected and liked but did not, at the time, have a big reputation. But he was coming to an orchestra that was solidly built but didn't have much flash. He was able to put the flash, the extra degree of energy and enthusiasm, in. And after staying for 25 years, longer than any of his predecessors even in what had been a fairly stable job, he has built up a towering reputation and, turning 74 this month, has become one of the leading senior conductors of his time and, more to the point, has remade SFS entirely in his image.

Coming after such a figure is a challenge in itself. ("You replace Dr. Franklin?" asked the Parisians. "I succeed Dr. Franklin," replied Thomas Jefferson. "No-one can replace him.") Salonen, who's 60 and will have just turned 62 when he takes over, and with his successful couple of decades at LA behind him, is enough of a senior and powerful figure that he won't be overhung by MTT's shadow and can proceed on his own pace. But at the same time he's old enough that he probably won't stay more than a decade or so. Meaning that he'll have time to accomplish what he wants without becoming in turn a giant shadow. Like Herbert Blomstedt, whose decade as SFS music director roughly coincided with his sixties, he can leave a solid foundation for a younger successor to build upon after him. Who came after Blomstedt? MTT. So we go on ...

hoc est

This is it. The 6-page document legally analyzing the "backstop" agreement on EU/NI/UK trade, the one that May's government would do almost anything to avoid releasing. After repeated and increasingly growly insistences by an irritated Parliament, they gave in and let it out. (HTML cover page linking to PDF of the full document.)

So what's it say? It says that, though the backstop is declared to be temporary, that's temporary only on the basis of it being succeeded by a permanent agreement, which the parties are bound to proceed towards in good faith.

But since there is no perceivable way to reconcile the fundamentally conflicting imperatives on the Irish border question, at least not one better than the jury-rigged backstop, that points to a particular form of legal and administrative hell:

1) The backstop will go on applying indefinitely, possibly permanently, despite the fact that nobody likes it and it was accepted only because it'd be temporary;

2) The EU and UK will be, because of the "good faith" clause, bound to keep on negotiating actively, despite the fact that neither's desired position is even remotely acceptable to the other. They could well just sit there and make the same futile points over and over again. This could go on ... possibly forever.

Of course, there is a way out, though the Attorney General is too polite to specify it, saying only that this is a political question. That way out is: no Brexit.

eine Festschrift für Flieger

A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger, edited by John D. Rateliff (Gabbro Head; available in print from Amazon, with e-book coming this month)

A Festschrift is a useful German term, designating a collection usually honoring a distinguished scholar, and in that case consisting of essays in the scholar's field by students and colleagues, often drawing from that scholar's work.

J.R.R. Tolkien has two scholarly Festschriften, one published soon after his retirement and the other posthumous. Of scholars who themselves study Tolkien, there are Festschriften of one sort or another honoring Christopher Tolkien, Richard Blackwelder, Tom Shippey, and now Verlyn Flieger.

I come not to review this book, because I'm in it, but to praise it. John Rateliff has assembled a raft of distinguished scholars who have built on Verlyn Flieger's deep thoughts and penetrating insights into Tolkien.

I knew I was in good hands with the first essay, Amy Amendt-Raduege on the development of Merry and Pippin into maturity and heroism. This is exactly the theme I placed on the last Mythcon I chaired, and never have I seen this prime example of it so clearly expounded on.

There's a lot more good ones: Marjorie Burns on pre-echoes of The Hobbit in Grahame and Buchan, a paper I heard her give at a small conference years ago; Thomas Hillman and colleagues on the role of dreams in Tolkien, a highly Fliegeresque topic; Thomas Honegger also on heroism in LotR and what Tolkien accomplished by not making the story into a Chanson d'Elessar; John Rateliff himself on everything you need to know about the mysterious Romano-Celtic god Nodens to understand Tolkien's scholarly note on the name's philology; Anna Smol on sub-creation as practiced by the characters in several elusive Tolkien stories; Kris Swank on several clear Irish literary parallels in Tolkien's work; Richard C. West's clear and detailed study of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, including why Tolkien spelled the name that way; and many others.

There's two papers regarding Tolkien's recollection of writing a childhood story about a "green great dragon," examining why his mother told him it ought to be a great green dragon instead; one of which, by John R. Holmes, points out that if you look up "green great" in Google Books today, you'll find a lot of Tolkien scholarship about this very incident: "We peer into the linguistic telescope to find ourselves staring back."

There's also some papers on Verlyn's own fiction, mostly on how her work reflects on Tolkien's; and some brief personal essays honoring her scholarship and her teaching.

My own piece discusses what I've learned from Verlyn's scholarship as to what makes Smith of Wootton Major such a perfect fairy-story. I think I hit on something, because I've already received two e-mails complimenting me on such observations as "[the interpretation of the plot] seems to me to be dyed into the fabric of the story" and "What fantasies in unthinking imitation of Tolkien's have taught me is that all the appendices in the world will be of no appeal, will be just so much empty data, if the story isn't moving and meaningful."

I hope we have left Verlyn Flieger well-honored.

exempli gratia

1. Sunday evening was the first night of Hanukkah. Our goyische wall calendar says "Hanukkah begins" under Monday, which is impressively misleading. B. didn't realize it started the previous night until I began to light the candles.

2. And it's also Advent, so her candle ceremony comes right after mine.

3. So I've been trying to spend more time at work in the library than in the past. I've undertaken a massive project which will take a few months to complete, cleaning up the typos and inconsistencies in the subject database. This would be less of a problem had I been reviewing the inputters' work all along, so I'm trying to do that too.

4. Occasionally SFCV decides to review a few CDs. And sometimes they ask me to do that. This time the publisher didn't send out the physical CDs, but issued a press release with links to Dropbox entries with WAV files and a PDF of the liner notes. I took my good headphones down to the library and listened to it on the computer there so I could follow along with the (non-circulating) scores. Read my brief take (CD reviews are 300 words) on bristling modern performances of three bristling modern quartets here.

5. News nugget that people are buying iceberg lettuce as a desperate substitute for tainted romaine. That choice amuses me, as I actually like iceberg, and generally consider romaine an acceptable substitute. I won't eat most other lettuce at all. The spinach recall years ago didn't worry me, because I only eat spinach cooked. Lettuce is another matter, but except for the occasional caesar salad I rarely eat salads, and I only eat caesars because they're made with romaine. So right now I'm not eating those either.

6. World's most caustic Bible book review, by Jo Walton.

7. 2 1/2 years ago I went to a week-long string quartet festival in the Canadian Rockies. I had a fabulous time. Would I return when they held it again in three years? I said, very possibly. They've announced next summer's schedule. I've looked at it. There will be a good helping of Schubert this year. I've thought about it. And yes, I'm going. This is in part in compensation for not being able to get to the Tolkien Society's Birmingham conference a few weeks earlier.

8. Delayed flight announcement for the fabulous new book on Tolkien I'm reading, until I finish reading it. Which should be real soon.

de mortuis nil nisi bonum

Never have I seen this rule more stringently applied than in the obituaries that have been appearing this morning for the late U.S. President, George "H.W." Bush. They're all about the wisdom of his foreign policy and the character virtues of his restrained and humble personality.

Yes, there may be some acknowledgment that, say, the 1988 election was not the highlight of his career, but let's leave it at that. In fact, Bush's virtues did not go unnoticed during his active career, but they had a tendency to get drowned out by less admirable things. That 1988 campaign, for one, put the lie to any categorical statements about Bush's uprightness and honesty. If he's willing to go down in the gutter like that, it doesn't really matter that he doesn't spend all of his time there.

This article concentrates on the particularly interesting area of his foreign policy, arguing that during an especially critical period of two years he was something of a genius at it. More so than he himself realized: one of the virtues cited in the article was his bringing the Gulf War to an end after the liberation of Kuwait, not turning it into an imperialist conquest of Iraq. The article doesn't mention that, although for some years he eloquently defended that decision, after his son launched Gulf War II to do exactly what had been refrained from earlier, the elder Bush started saying "I miscalculated." No, he hadn't, and subsequent events have shown that.

I noted much of the foreign policy achievement at the time, particularly admiring the careful and diplomatic handling of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. Had I been polled at the time and asked if I thought the President was doing a good job, I would have had to say yes. So did a lot of other people, which is why the pollsters were so bewildered by his loss of the next election. But what the pollsters failed to do was to follow Ted Sturgeon's advice to ask the next question. After saying that I thought Bush was doing a good job, if I'd been asked, "And do you plan to vote for his re-election?" I would have replied, "Hell no." Well, why? Because I didn't support his economic program. (Characteristically, the above-cited article mentions only the half-right part of that policy.)

And so the first vice-president since Martin Van Buren to immediately succeed his presidential predecessor by election, instead of accession, like Van Buren passed out of office after one term.

A word on his name. Everything written about him today invariably calls him "George H.W. Bush". It seems to have been written out of history that, during his active political career, he was always called "George Bush" with no initials whatever. Google ngrams confirms that he was never called "H.W." until his son George W. began running for President around 1998 and it became necessary to clearly distinguish the two. That's fine, although I find the previously-unused initials intrusive and prefer to call him "'Poppy' Bush"; it's the retroactive erasure of the old form, as if it never existed, that feels weird.

ETA: Politico has more, a lot more, on the real legacy of George Bush.