obit notification

Glenda Jackson, who returned to acting in old age after a long career as a politician, has died.

My favorite movie of hers is the one in which she played Richard Nixon.

Under disguise, of course. It was called Nasty Habits and was Watergate set in a nunnery. Thoroughly chortleable. Geraldine Page played Haldeman and Sandy Dennis was John Dean.

A recently deceased person of great infamy who made a principal character in some surprisingly good movies was Theodore Kaczynski. I recommend Ted K in which he's played by Sharito Copley, and also the miniseries Manhunt: Unabomber in which he's played by Paul Bettany, although that's more about the heroic, put-upon FBI agent played by Sam Worthington.

anniversary

Monday was our 29th, would you believe? (And not counting the 5 1/2 years we were together before that.)

B. was at orchestral rehearsal that afternoon, so it wasn't a good night to go out for dinner, so I made our special turkey meatloaf, plus steamed brussel sprouts (B's favorite). Besides, the Mexican restaurant I had in mind is closed Mondays, so we went on Tuesday, after feeding the cats. It's a place I hadn't been to on my own, as it doesn't do lunch. Food fairly good. I had shrimp loaded with strips of bell pepper, B. had a chicken burrito.

----

We've read the indictment. How anybody can continue to carry support for this malign thug is beyond belief, but then the same thing was true after hearing the Billy Bush tape, and anybody capable of bearing an ounce of shame must have left then. The defenses beggar the imagination: Kevin McC. says a bathroom is a good place to secure sensitive documents because it has a door that locks. From the inside, you clown, from the inside. Does he think the documents have hands and can lock the door themselves? Is he as stupid as he's making himself out to be, or is it just a deliberate fogging of the issue?

concert review: 5 Centuries of Chaconnes

I couldn't resist a piano recital with that title, performed by the ubiquitous Sarah Cahill (who's gotten a lot more ubiquitous in my concert-going since I got on her publicist's mailing list, which is how I found out about this), and held as it was at a local arts school, so it was easy for me to get to. A chaconne is a work with a 4- or 8-bar sequence of notes or chords that repeats continually and forms the harmonic foundation rather than a melodic seed, though it may move from voice to voice or be fragmented or hidden.

The title was a little exaggerated, as the 6 works included nothing from the 19th century, but there were 17th and 18th century Baroque keyboard works by Purcell, Handel, and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. From the 20th and 21st centuries, we had works inspired by Handel or Bach, as a modern usage of the term chaconne implies. The composers were Nielsen (a rather jaunty piece), Gubaidulina (very modernist, except for a section imitating a Bach fugue), and a composer not only living but present in the audience, Danny Clay, whose Still Cycles takes chords and trills from the Handel piece we'd heard earlier and repeats them between long pauses, creating a quiet and hypnotic music that sounds more like Morton Feldman than anything else.

It was Clay, invited to help explain what a chaconne is, who suggested that what the repeating harmonic sequence does could be called "looping."

To a post-concert audience question from a little girl about what age she started playing the piano (6), Cahill also said that her preferred practice mode is simply to sit at the piano all day. Recently, she said, she was in D.C. at the National Gallery and got to practice at their piano all day, after which they told her that this was the instrument that had accompanied Marian Anderson at her 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert. How cool is that?

revenge penalty

When I wrote about Kaija Saariaho's opera Adriana Mater, with its libretto by Amin Maalouf concerning a young man who vows to kill his rapist father but finds in the event that he just can't bring himself to do it, I wrote that his mother says to him, "If you were really his son" (as opposed to her own), "you would have killed him." It's an argument for mercy and grace. But I didn't mention that she also says, "This man deserved to die, but you, my son, you didn't deserve to kill him."

That interesting formulation - focused on the morality of the execution rather than on the vengeance - stuck in my mind. So I'm reading Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher, which is the topic for our book discussion group this week. It includes a princess from a small kingdom who's trapped in an abusive marriage with the cruel prince of a much larger kingdom. She can't leave him because he'd take it out militarily on her homeland if she did; the marriage was purely for diplomatic purposes anyway.

So in this scene, the princess's sister is discussing the problem with a hedgerow witch-type and declares, "He deserves to die." The other replies, "Lots of people deserve to die. Not everybody deserves to be a killer."

How interesting: almost exactly the same formulation. (The opera came first.) I've even seen this argument given primary-world application, in the form of articles discussing the moral toll that being an executioner, or even a participant or witness, in death-penalty states takes on those who do it.

Of course the conversation in Nettle & Bone also reminded me of this, and I hope I don't have to tell you where it's from, who's speaking, or who they're talking about:

"I can't understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death."
"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

opera review: Adriana Mater

A concert performance - really semi-staged, with minimal props and no scenery - of this opera by the late Kaija Saariaho is this week's San Francisco Symphony program. I attended the first performance last night. EPS conducted, and the production was stage directed by Peter Sellars, who gave an evocative, impressionistic pre-concert talk about the intangible aesthetics of the work. Both of them did the same jobs for the original production in Paris in 2006.

The opera has two acts, it has four characters, and it lasts somewhat over two hours. Adriana is a young woman who rebuffs the advances of a crude and uncouth man. He becomes a soldier in the civil war that erupts in their unnamed Balkan country, forces his way into her house on a military pretext, and rapes her. To the dismay of her elder sister, she decides to keep the resulting pregnancy, but wonders what kind of child will result from the mixture of her blood and his.

Seventeen years pass during intermission. Adriana's son learns his origins from somewhere else, and is furious both about this news and with his mother and aunt for having hidden it from him. He vows to track down and kill the monster who sired him. To her sister's horror, Adriana doesn't try to stop him. "If he is meant to kill him, he will kill him," she says. What she means by this becomes clear when her son finds the man, now blind, sick, repentant, and longing only for death. The son keeps threatening to kill him, but he can't do it. When he reports this to his mother, she says, "If you were really his son" (as opposed to her own), "you would have killed him," and all three - the young man, his mother and aunt - have a big hug.

And so this opera which is all about violence turns out at the end to be a call for peace and reconciliation. I think that's the best term: they don't forgive the man, but they're reconciled to his existence.

It was staged by placing four square elevated platforms irregularly around the stage, two in front sticking out into the audience seating and two by the side, stage left. The singers stand on various different ones and interact by walking between them, carrying ipads with their musical parts. The white surfaces are bathed in various colored lights. A blackout covers the rape scene, but the orchestra screams a lot. The text, by Lebanese-born French author Amin Maalouf, is in French, not that it's easy to tell from the murky singing. Supertitles in English are helpful but aren't adequate to cope with some of the overlapping vocal lines.

The only cast member whose work I knew was Nicholas Phan as the son, but his gorgeous tenor was fractured by the fury that suffuses the part. Mezzo Fleur Barron as Adriana and soprano Axelle Fanyo as her sister were hard to tell apart vocally and tended to get buried beneath the accompaniment. Christopher Purves as the man gave a powerful baritone, particularly in act 2.

Saariaho's scoring is dark, brooding, and churning, but colorful and interesting. The sonic idiom resembles spectralism, but it has none of the vast sheeting quality of that musical style. While it's not my preferred musical character, I found it often effective and captivating, and even two hours of it was almost not too much. As often in opera, I kept wishing the singers would shush so that I could hear the music better. Only at a few points do the vocal lines really meld with the orchestral ones in powerful drama, which is what I really want to hear in opera. The inspiration started to run out of steam in act 2 when the orchestra responds too closely to the text. Every time the son calls his father a monster, the orchestra replies by going bleargha bleargha. We could have done without that.

Still, though, I'm glad I heard this: effective drama with interestingly crafted music by a composer whose idiom I'm learning to appreciate. So I am minded to take the earnest recommendation I've received and attend Saariaho's Innocence from SF Opera next spring, despite - from what happened last time I went - the avalanche of subsequent phone calls it will get me from the Opera entreating me to subscribe.

an incident

Arriving at the bus stop in the City at 10:30 pm after my concert, I leaned my arm up against the outside wall of the bus shelter. At which the man sitting inside the bus shelter on that side - he was Black, probably about 40, with a cap and a smartphone he was looking at - suddenly said, "Are you intending to hit me?" I said, "What?" which was a mistake, for he then launched into a long and mostly unintelligible diatribe, including a lot of insult terms, among them the N-word. It was at that point that I figured out he wasn't really talking to me but was off in a world of his own.

Then, although by appearances waiting for the bus, he got up, went around me - if he'd been planning a physical attack, that would have been the moment - and walked off, last seen by me crossing the street at the intersection.

That might not even make the top ten spookiest encounters I've had in the City.

concert review: Redwood Symphony

Even at my age, I'm still capable of learning practical rules of life the hard way.

That barbecue counter where you're used to having quiet weekday lunches? Don't try to have dinner there on a Saturday.

We finally got to the concert hall in time for this.

Denny Lien

I didn't mention Denny Lien when he died nearly two months ago, but now that a memorial fanzine of his writings has been published, I'd like to pay tribute to two of his signal virtues.

First, his skill as a reference librarian. As a librarian myself, and having a modicum of that skill and training, I can recognize a true master when I see one. Denny had the particular talent of being able to make small and intricate corrections without seeming to be drowning in trivial distractions.

Second, the selfless care he took of his ailing wife, Terry Garey. I didn't know Denny very well, but Terry is an old friend of mine from a long way back, the same vintage and environment as the late Andi Shechter, and I appreciate what Denny could do for her.

The fanzine has a few examples of Denny's learning and wit that generate responses of mine.

First, on page 11 is a newspaper letter to the editor decrying "the technique of proving the obscurity of a subject on the basis of its nonappearance in a totally inappropriate reference work." I found a choice example of that once, years ago. An orchestra member had the job of giving preconcert talks, and was faced with the responsibility of speaking on Carmina Burana, a work he loathed. His technical analysis of it was actually pretty good, but he tripped up in attempting to prove that Carl Orff was a composer of utmost insignificance. "He isn't even listed in the authoritative St. James Press guide to Contemporary Composers." I'd used this reference work and I raised my hand. "The St. James Press guide to Contemporary Composers," I said, "says in its foreword that its coverage is limited to composers still alive at the date of compilation. Orff had already been dead for a decade, so he wasn't eligible any more than Stravinsky or Bartok, who aren't there either."

Also on page 11 is Denny's simple recipe for pizza. (Remove the frozen pizza from the box, heat it up and eat it.) I've seen an even simpler pizza recipe, that's capable of providing better results:
Pizza. Ingredients: 1. Phone. 2. Coupon.

The garbling of Carl Akeley's name as Earl Akaley, corrected by Denny on page 27, reminds me of the worst such garbling I've seen. In a published transcription of tape recordings of the conversation of Philip K. Dick, Phil twice mentions a composer named Schmenkna. There is no such composer. It's pretty obvious that he's referring to Bedřich Smetana.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Guest conductor for last night's concert was Manfred Honeck, music director in Pittsburgh, a healthy-looking grey-haired guy.

He brought with him a brief recent piece that Pittsburgh had commissioned, by Gloria Isabel Ramos Triano, originally from Venezuela and now a conductor working mainly in Europe. amazon (pretentiously eschewing a capital letter) - referring to the warrior women, not the river or the shipping company - is a bustling, active work resembling movie music in the Danny Elfman mode, with sudden quiet passages and a lot of percussion (7 players) clopping around in the background.

The rest of the concert delivered brilliantly colorful, rather than interpretatively compelling, versions of two of my favorite large-scale works.

In Rachmaninoff's Paganini Rhapsody, both pianist Beatrice Rana and the orchestra were magnificently crisp, like a single perfect potato chip that somehow takes half an hour to eat.

Schubert's Great C Major Symphony, of which I would not put "crispness" among its many virtues, was blisteringly fast, with a terrifyingly intense coda.

This was not MTT's or EPS's, let alone Blomstedt's, SFS, but it was good enough.

---

Next week's concert will be less familiar and more challenging: a concert version of the opera Adriana Mater by Kaija Saariaho. Who just died yesterday, I learned to my shock this morning. She was 70. Peace to her memory, and as this concert will be the first to demonstrate, her music will live on.

new machines

A couple years ago our kitchen range fell apart and we got a new one. This week it was the turn of our dishwasher. Our disposition of chores is that I cook dinner (B. hates cooking) and B. does the dishes, so I rarely touch the dishwasher, but I was heavily involved in the purchase process, for which we replicated what we did for the range.

A library visit for Consumer Reports (whose annual Buying Guide is now the same shape and size as a regular issue) revealed that the top brand is something called Bosch. This was confirmed by the salesfolk at Best Buy, and fortunately we were able to get the least expensive version. You can pay $100 more for a different-shaped handle or for a stainless-steel surface, but we didn't.

Only problem was that the deliverers did not phone the previous day with a time window as the salesfolk had promised. 5 pm I phoned Best Buy customer support who told me to wait till they called the next morning; I said that wasn't good enough, and by employing heavy sarcasm ("Are you calling the salesperson a liar?") got them to check the schedule, which said we were the 6th customer on the day's list, probably early afternoon.

Next morning, still no call, but another call to support got a window of 1-4 pm. Fine. Showed up at 3, did the job, no trouble. Dishwasher works: less noise than the old one, no leaks on the floor, moderately good at drying the contents.

In less epic vein, we replaced the older of our two litter boxes. The cats weren't using it any more, and that must have been because the plastic had absorbed just too much odor over the years. They certainly like the new one.

The problem was that covered litter boxes now comes with the kind of bells and whistles we're all familiar with from computer shopping. There's a little swinging door over the entrance. And there's a sieve at the bottom. The idea is that you clean the box by lifting the sieve out; the poop comes with and the loose litter stays behind. Then you just dump the contents from the sieve into the wastebasket. Easy, no?

No. First, we're not putting the cat poop into a wastebasket to sit there smelly all week until trash day; it goes in a bag which is put directly in the outside bin. But I can't dump the sieve into the bag without three hands like the woman in the Charles Addams cartoon.

Second, the process of reassembly is far too complex. You don't just put the sieve back in, because then it would ride on top of the litter. So there's an extra bottom part. You put the sieve in that. You dump the litter from the other bottom into that one, on top of the sieve. Then you lift the now-full bottom and put it inside the now-empty bottom. Is that at all clear? I could not find words to explain it to B.

Way too much trouble. It's easier to use the scoop, the one the ads say you don't have to use any more.

As for the swinging door, the cats knocked it off on the first day. So the bells and whistles are all gone, and we're back to a normal covered litter box.