Monday was my day for researching the annual Tolkien bibliography in the library, having exhausted the free databases at home. I drove over our local mountains to Santa Cruz, where the university library is the most useful for online searching and visitor-friendly of any I know. I bought a daily parking permit at the gatehouse, $10, drove over to the appropriate parking lot, and then walked the most stunningly beautiful quarter-mile walk from a parking lot to a college library of any I know. Even Cornell, which is the only other campus I know with pedestrian bridges over canyons as deep as this one's, isn't as attractive as UC Santa Cruz.
This was the first time I'd been there in three years, but I used to go annually so I remembered it well, including where to go to park, which isn't obviously labeled. Getting through campus is a drive through fields and forests, with only occasional buildings visible in the distance, one of which is a residence hall cluster with a vague similarity to The Village from The Prisoner.
Inside the library, masks were required and most everyone had one. The foyer to the library, which you must pass through on your way inside, is a cafe, and nobody there had masks. I settled down at a computer and spent five straight hours online searching, interrupted only by the obvious restroom breaks and much more frequent visits to the help desk, starting with one following seeing that the login screen no longer tells you what the visitor login is. (Though it does say there is one.) Then there was a hitch when it wasn't clear that inter-library access isn't available to visitors: it actually gives the option to enter a visitor account, and that's sure misleading. Lastly, when I left, I gave them a list of those databases on their pull-down menu where I found that the link was broken. You'd think they'd check this occasionally themselves, but maybe not. What if they're paying subscription fees for databases they can't access?
My other momentary paralysis came when I was about to save a file and realized I'd forgotten to bring along my thumb drive. Help desk provided the answer I should have thought of for myself. Save the file to the computer's download folder. Open up my webmail and send it as an attachment to myself. That worked except for one file which was too large to mail. Fortunately I remembered the web address and password to access the control panel for my personal website, so I stuffed the file up there until I got home.
As the years have gone by, I've had to spend less and less time in the stacks. Even the one relevant serial that UCSC gets in hard copy that no other library in my ambit gets is now available in online databases. And now, I'm finding that the pay databases have fewer items that aren't in the free databases than they used to. What the pay databases have is more complete citations (irritating to find a great article but the entry doesn't give the author's name) and, of course, many of them have full text. These I was grabbing so that I'll have them available to hand out to the Year's Work contributors next year.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
the slap
So people in the public sphere are talking about The Slap at the Academy Awards on Sunday, when presenter Chris Rock made a tasteless joke about Jada Pinkett Smith - wife of Will Smith, Best Actor nominee (and, later in the evening, winner) - having lost her hair. And Will, having apparently originally thought it was funny, caught the distressed look on Jada's face and decided to do the Really Macho Husband thing, walked up on stage and socked Rock in the kisser.
At this point the sound cut out on the U.S. show, but a very revealing verbal exchange between the two was captured by other broadcasters, revealed in a Twitter feed embedded in this article. Here's what they said:
Rock: Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me.
Smith (who by this time has returned to his seat): Keep my wife's name out your fuckin' mouth.
Rock: Wow, dude.
Smith: Yes.
Rock: It was a G.I. Jane joke.
Smith: Keep my wife's name ... out ... your ... fuckin' ... mouth!
Rock: I'm going to. OK?
Here's my thoughts:
1) From the audience gasp at Will's first statement, this may have been their realization of why he did it.
2) Note Chris Rock's defense. He thinks that comparing Jada's current disease-caused shaven head with the cropped hair of a female military officer in a half-forgotten old movie is a joke about the movie? Dude, that's fucked up.
3) Will, probably from stress, is not clear. What he means is "Don't make crude jokes about my wife." But what he says is, "Don't mention her name." At all. And when challenged he just repeats the same words.
I have to say, though, this wasn't the most distressful moment of the ceremony for me. Part of it was that I've never seen any of Chris Rock's movies; I wasn't exactly sure who he is, so that it was him who got slapped didn't mean anything to me. (But then, this was The Evening Of The Presenters I'd Never Heard Of.)
No, the most distressful moment for me was, after much earlier having promised the first live performance of "We Don't Talk About Bruno" (it wasn't: one of the many cover versions on YouTube is live and uncut) and they cut the lyrics and turned it into an Oscars pitch song. Feh.
You know, it would have been a lot better if Will Smith had gone up, refrained from hitting, grabbed the microphone, and sung "We Don't Talk About Jada." A better reaction, and a better parody song.
At this point the sound cut out on the U.S. show, but a very revealing verbal exchange between the two was captured by other broadcasters, revealed in a Twitter feed embedded in this article. Here's what they said:
Rock: Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me.
Smith (who by this time has returned to his seat): Keep my wife's name out your fuckin' mouth.
Rock: Wow, dude.
Smith: Yes.
Rock: It was a G.I. Jane joke.
Smith: Keep my wife's name ... out ... your ... fuckin' ... mouth!
Rock: I'm going to. OK?
Here's my thoughts:
1) From the audience gasp at Will's first statement, this may have been their realization of why he did it.
2) Note Chris Rock's defense. He thinks that comparing Jada's current disease-caused shaven head with the cropped hair of a female military officer in a half-forgotten old movie is a joke about the movie? Dude, that's fucked up.
3) Will, probably from stress, is not clear. What he means is "Don't make crude jokes about my wife." But what he says is, "Don't mention her name." At all. And when challenged he just repeats the same words.
I have to say, though, this wasn't the most distressful moment of the ceremony for me. Part of it was that I've never seen any of Chris Rock's movies; I wasn't exactly sure who he is, so that it was him who got slapped didn't mean anything to me. (But then, this was The Evening Of The Presenters I'd Never Heard Of.)
No, the most distressful moment for me was, after much earlier having promised the first live performance of "We Don't Talk About Bruno" (it wasn't: one of the many cover versions on YouTube is live and uncut) and they cut the lyrics and turned it into an Oscars pitch song. Feh.
You know, it would have been a lot better if Will Smith had gone up, refrained from hitting, grabbed the microphone, and sung "We Don't Talk About Jada." A better reaction, and a better parody song.
Sunday, March 27, 2022
concert review: California Symphony
I bought a 3-concert series this year with the California Symphony, a small-scale professional orchestra that plays at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek in the outer East Bay. I missed the concert I was most eager to attend because it was at the height of the omicron wave, but I was at today's, the last in my set. They seem pathetically grateful to their subscribers; taped to my seat I found a personalized thank-you card from the principal trombonist, and it looks like others had similarly.
The California Symphony has a composer-in-residence program that lasts three years per composer, who premieres one new work in the spring each year. The composer for 2018-20 was Katherine Balch, but guess what: her third work, for March 2020, was postponed, and didn't get its premiere until this weekend's concerts.
But it almost got kicked in the pants again. With unnervingly good timing, just as the music had finished and the applause was breaking out, a fire alarm went off in the theater. So instead of the scheduled intermission, we all - audience and performers alike - spent 45 minutes out on the sidewalk in the cool dusk as the firefighters inspected the building.
The premiere work, designated a song cycle but more an amorphous vocal thing, was titled Illuminate and sets a farrago of poetry by Arthur Rimbaud, Adrienne Rich, and various others for three female singers, whose voices leap and cascade over each other, entangling and merging, as if playing leapfrog in the murky pond of the poetry. Balch warned in the pre-concert talk that we wouldn't be able to make out most of the words. Indeed, despite the stunning excellence of the singing, even with the lyrics in front of me I couldn't usually tell where we were, which puts paid to the composer's notion that the music reflects the meaning of the words even if you can't discern them. Not that the instrumental parts seemed to vary: it was insistent fragmented industrial, often squealing and squawking to a momentary stop. Balch studied with David Lang, and it shows in her vocal work, the high piping quality of which also curiously reminded me of the Masque in Michael Nyman's Prospero's Books.
It was preceded by an orchestral work, Three Studies from Couperin by Thomas Adès. This was more of the same: fragmented, hollowed out arrangements of the Couperin pieces leaving nothing familiar or detectable inside.
The main work after the extended intermission was Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye, which was played in a cautious crystalline fashion as if this is what the previous works would have sounded like before someone broke the glass and left it all littering the floor.
The California Symphony has a composer-in-residence program that lasts three years per composer, who premieres one new work in the spring each year. The composer for 2018-20 was Katherine Balch, but guess what: her third work, for March 2020, was postponed, and didn't get its premiere until this weekend's concerts.
But it almost got kicked in the pants again. With unnervingly good timing, just as the music had finished and the applause was breaking out, a fire alarm went off in the theater. So instead of the scheduled intermission, we all - audience and performers alike - spent 45 minutes out on the sidewalk in the cool dusk as the firefighters inspected the building.
The premiere work, designated a song cycle but more an amorphous vocal thing, was titled Illuminate and sets a farrago of poetry by Arthur Rimbaud, Adrienne Rich, and various others for three female singers, whose voices leap and cascade over each other, entangling and merging, as if playing leapfrog in the murky pond of the poetry. Balch warned in the pre-concert talk that we wouldn't be able to make out most of the words. Indeed, despite the stunning excellence of the singing, even with the lyrics in front of me I couldn't usually tell where we were, which puts paid to the composer's notion that the music reflects the meaning of the words even if you can't discern them. Not that the instrumental parts seemed to vary: it was insistent fragmented industrial, often squealing and squawking to a momentary stop. Balch studied with David Lang, and it shows in her vocal work, the high piping quality of which also curiously reminded me of the Masque in Michael Nyman's Prospero's Books.
It was preceded by an orchestral work, Three Studies from Couperin by Thomas Adès. This was more of the same: fragmented, hollowed out arrangements of the Couperin pieces leaving nothing familiar or detectable inside.
The main work after the extended intermission was Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye, which was played in a cautious crystalline fashion as if this is what the previous works would have sounded like before someone broke the glass and left it all littering the floor.
Saturday, March 26, 2022
not quite yet
Four years and a few months ago, I reviewed a concert with a 12-year-old prodigy named Alma Deutscher playing her own violin concerto which she'd written at the age of 9.
I had rather mixed feelings about the music. On the one hand, I didn't think a pleasantly melodic work should be penalized because it was written in 2015 instead of 1845 which is what it sometimes sounded like. On the other hand, it was anodyne enough that I doubted it would get played at all if it weren't for the publicity attendant on the composer's age.
On the third hand, I could hardly blame the composer. I pointed out that even the greatest child-prodigy composers of the past, Mozart and Mendelssohn, were writing at the same age music that was likewise pleasant and fully competent, but no more than that: impressive mostly just for the composer's age. They didn't produce any of the masterpieces they're remembered for until their late teens - Mendelssohn wrote his Octet when he was 16 and Mozart his 'little' G-minor symphony at 17.
So I concluded, "I would like to check in with Deutscher in a few more years and hear what she’s writing then."
And lo and behold, the San Jose Opera has announced a production of Deutscher's opera Cinderella for the next season. Deutscher herself, now 17, will be making her debut as a conductor. But! This isn't a new work, it's another one from 2015 although it has been revised since then, and this is actually a revival of a production put on in tandem with the symphony concert I reviewed. Apparently nothing of hers that's been recorded is much more recent than that either, so I'll have to wait a bit longer to hear what Deutscher is composing a few years later.
I had rather mixed feelings about the music. On the one hand, I didn't think a pleasantly melodic work should be penalized because it was written in 2015 instead of 1845 which is what it sometimes sounded like. On the other hand, it was anodyne enough that I doubted it would get played at all if it weren't for the publicity attendant on the composer's age.
On the third hand, I could hardly blame the composer. I pointed out that even the greatest child-prodigy composers of the past, Mozart and Mendelssohn, were writing at the same age music that was likewise pleasant and fully competent, but no more than that: impressive mostly just for the composer's age. They didn't produce any of the masterpieces they're remembered for until their late teens - Mendelssohn wrote his Octet when he was 16 and Mozart his 'little' G-minor symphony at 17.
So I concluded, "I would like to check in with Deutscher in a few more years and hear what she’s writing then."
And lo and behold, the San Jose Opera has announced a production of Deutscher's opera Cinderella for the next season. Deutscher herself, now 17, will be making her debut as a conductor. But! This isn't a new work, it's another one from 2015 although it has been revised since then, and this is actually a revival of a production put on in tandem with the symphony concert I reviewed. Apparently nothing of hers that's been recorded is much more recent than that either, so I'll have to wait a bit longer to hear what Deutscher is composing a few years later.
Thursday, March 24, 2022
senseless, unsensible
A local theater group has been heavily promoting their production of a stage musical version of Sense and Sensibility. I actually saw their equivalent version of Pride and Prejudice and liked it, but I hadn't felt as enthused about this, even after learning you could see it livestream.
Then they released a video consisting of tiny clips from the songs. And one of those clips consisted of the words:
But my sweet Marianne
All you see is a man
On the wrong side of five-and-thirty
I think I'll give it a miss.
Then they released a video consisting of tiny clips from the songs. And one of those clips consisted of the words:
But my sweet Marianne
All you see is a man
On the wrong side of five-and-thirty
I think I'll give it a miss.
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
serious nonfiction for the general reader
Philip Ball, The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
Here's a great work of mythopoeic scholarship, lucid and imaginative. A modern myth, says Ball, is one which originates, or at least is utterly transformed, in modern times with a modern setting. It's not a reconfiguration of older myth like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. It becomes myth when it becomes a cultural icon beyond its original literary form, and for that purpose it helps for that origin not to be of too high a literary quality, or else the story will become literature and not a myth, too tied to the original telling.
You can get a sense of what Ball means by his examples, each taking a chapter: Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein (for the monster), Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Dracula, The War of the Worlds (for the alien invasion), Sherlock Holmes, and Batman. A final chapter speculates on the mythic potential of zombies.
Each chapter traces the history of the myth through precursors if any (a lot of them for vampires), details how the author of the core story presented the character, and then how it was transformed in later retellings, especially in movies. And there's also a lot of speculation on what makes these myths gripping. What does it mean that the ultra-rational Holmes was created by an author who fell for hoax fairy photos? Is Mr. Hyde a sexual predator? Is Dracula? Is Batman?
This is all soberly and thoughtfully, not luridly, handled, and Ball doesn't hesitate to evaluate a lot of bad movies or otherwise cast his opinions. (Batman and not Superman, for instance, because Ball thinks Superman is boring.)
Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019)
The author is an academic historian, but this is a general reader's book, not an academic treatise. It's several books in one.
First is a rather fuzzy account of 19C continental expansion, though it goes into guano islands and their contents with great gusto. It's sketchy on the effects on the Indians, and it ignores the long-standing lust for acquiring Canada and brushes off Caribbean filibusters because that would contradict the narrative that the great colony-grabbing of 1898 was an entirely new turn for the US.
At this point the book becomes a history of the Philippines and Puerto Rico as colonies - there's very little on any others; even the guano islands get dropped at this point - but this is the best part of the book, as it tells little-known stories of the US's appalling behavior as a colonial power: the brutal military suppression of the independence movement in the Philippines which our own liberation of them from Spanish rule had fostered; the racist and dehumanizing medical experiments carried out on Puerto Ricans by doctors with reputations as great humanitarians because their sojourns on the island have been brushed out of their biographies. Immerwahr is also pretty caustic on cultural depictions:
But after the Philippines win their independence (another strange twist in US policy) and Puerto Rico becomes a commonwealth, the book changes course into soft empire, and here it takes on a strange boosterish quality, as - starting actually with WW2 - American plastics, materiel, mechanical standards (like uniform screw sizes), and the English language take over the world. Immerwahr even credits American empire with the success of the Beatles, for it was a massive nearby US air base that brought American rock & roll records to Liverpool and kicked off the locals' enthusiasm for listening to and making that kind of music. Or so he says. Books on the Beatles usually explain the cultural exchange by pointing out that Liverpool was a cosmopolitan port city. Weirdly, there's little about the harmful effects of these bases. It's blasé about Gitmo and doesn't even discuss Diego Garcia, which you'd think would be red meat for Immerwahr.
So I have my doubts about this book's viewpoint and broad-scale accuracy, but it sure has some interesting things to say.
Sherrod Brown, Desk 88: Eight Progressive Senators Who Changed America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019)
Democratic Senator from Ohio writes about predecessors who carved their names into the same desk that he uses on the Senate floor. (Apparently this is customary, though there's the occasional puritan who refuses to deface government property.) Some of them are pretty well-known, like Hugo Black, Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern. Others are obscure except to Senate buffs like me. What's curious is that Brown can't hide, and doesn't even try to hide, that two of the least-known, Herbert Lehman and Theodore Francis Green, got a lot more done as governors (of New York and Rhode Island, respectively) than they ever did after coming to the Senate, where they kind of ossified.
The lesson seems to be that yes, you can change America. But only with a heck of a lot of effort and you can't change it very much.
Here's a great work of mythopoeic scholarship, lucid and imaginative. A modern myth, says Ball, is one which originates, or at least is utterly transformed, in modern times with a modern setting. It's not a reconfiguration of older myth like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. It becomes myth when it becomes a cultural icon beyond its original literary form, and for that purpose it helps for that origin not to be of too high a literary quality, or else the story will become literature and not a myth, too tied to the original telling.
You can get a sense of what Ball means by his examples, each taking a chapter: Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein (for the monster), Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Dracula, The War of the Worlds (for the alien invasion), Sherlock Holmes, and Batman. A final chapter speculates on the mythic potential of zombies.
Each chapter traces the history of the myth through precursors if any (a lot of them for vampires), details how the author of the core story presented the character, and then how it was transformed in later retellings, especially in movies. And there's also a lot of speculation on what makes these myths gripping. What does it mean that the ultra-rational Holmes was created by an author who fell for hoax fairy photos? Is Mr. Hyde a sexual predator? Is Dracula? Is Batman?
This is all soberly and thoughtfully, not luridly, handled, and Ball doesn't hesitate to evaluate a lot of bad movies or otherwise cast his opinions. (Batman and not Superman, for instance, because Ball thinks Superman is boring.)
Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019)
The author is an academic historian, but this is a general reader's book, not an academic treatise. It's several books in one.
First is a rather fuzzy account of 19C continental expansion, though it goes into guano islands and their contents with great gusto. It's sketchy on the effects on the Indians, and it ignores the long-standing lust for acquiring Canada and brushes off Caribbean filibusters because that would contradict the narrative that the great colony-grabbing of 1898 was an entirely new turn for the US.
At this point the book becomes a history of the Philippines and Puerto Rico as colonies - there's very little on any others; even the guano islands get dropped at this point - but this is the best part of the book, as it tells little-known stories of the US's appalling behavior as a colonial power: the brutal military suppression of the independence movement in the Philippines which our own liberation of them from Spanish rule had fostered; the racist and dehumanizing medical experiments carried out on Puerto Ricans by doctors with reputations as great humanitarians because their sojourns on the island have been brushed out of their biographies. Immerwahr is also pretty caustic on cultural depictions:
West Side Story ... was first conceived as a Romeo-and-Juliet story about a Jewish woman and a Catholic man. But the creative team, seeking relevance, swapped out the Jews for Puerto Ricans. Sondheim was nervous. "I can't do this show," he protested at first. "I've never even known a Puerto Rican." His lyrics bore that out. ...World War 2 offers an interlude with the only serious considerations of Alaska - the building of the Alaska Highway - and Hawaii. If you've ever wondered why Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps on the mainland but not in Hawaii, the answer turns out to be that military rule there was so strict as to make the whole islands effectively internment camps.
But after the Philippines win their independence (another strange twist in US policy) and Puerto Rico becomes a commonwealth, the book changes course into soft empire, and here it takes on a strange boosterish quality, as - starting actually with WW2 - American plastics, materiel, mechanical standards (like uniform screw sizes), and the English language take over the world. Immerwahr even credits American empire with the success of the Beatles, for it was a massive nearby US air base that brought American rock & roll records to Liverpool and kicked off the locals' enthusiasm for listening to and making that kind of music. Or so he says. Books on the Beatles usually explain the cultural exchange by pointing out that Liverpool was a cosmopolitan port city. Weirdly, there's little about the harmful effects of these bases. It's blasé about Gitmo and doesn't even discuss Diego Garcia, which you'd think would be red meat for Immerwahr.
So I have my doubts about this book's viewpoint and broad-scale accuracy, but it sure has some interesting things to say.
Sherrod Brown, Desk 88: Eight Progressive Senators Who Changed America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019)
Democratic Senator from Ohio writes about predecessors who carved their names into the same desk that he uses on the Senate floor. (Apparently this is customary, though there's the occasional puritan who refuses to deface government property.) Some of them are pretty well-known, like Hugo Black, Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern. Others are obscure except to Senate buffs like me. What's curious is that Brown can't hide, and doesn't even try to hide, that two of the least-known, Herbert Lehman and Theodore Francis Green, got a lot more done as governors (of New York and Rhode Island, respectively) than they ever did after coming to the Senate, where they kind of ossified.
The lesson seems to be that yes, you can change America. But only with a heck of a lot of effort and you can't change it very much.
Monday, March 21, 2022
concert review: Winchester Orchestra
This was not an ordinary concert, not for us.
B. has decided to occupy much time in her retirement with practicing and improving her playing on the violin. Along with taking lessons and playing chamber music with friends, she's wanted to join a non-professional orchestra. She's been practicing with a wholly amateur group called the Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, which I've mentioned here before; but what I hadn't mentioned is her quest to try herself out in an ensemble which, while still non-professional, is a serious orchestra that puts on serious concerts.
And she alighted on this group, the Winchester Orchestra, which looked like a potentially achievable challenge and which offered the further temptation that their March concert was scheduled to include Beethoven's Fifth, a worthy goal for any orchestral musician to aim for. And so for a while, the sound of the second violin parts of Beethoven's Fifth and the other works on that program filled our house during B's lengthy home practice hours.
But then the omicron wave arrived, and the music director decided to postpone that concert and substitute an all-strings program so that everybody could be masked. And so B. switched to practicing this instead. Either way, she found it a challenge: the level and above all the speed at which the conductor had the orchestra play, the challenges of getting to nighttime rehearsals at the isolated music building in the back of a hillside junior college, and the sheer amount of time and sweat that practicing entails has made this more drudgery than fun. So for her next act, B. is thinking of going down a notch in the non-pro sweeps. More on that when performance time arrives.
But she made it through to this concert, and from this listener's standpoint it was worth the effort. The orchestra has the usual wobbles of a non-pro group, but mostly I thought it shone very nicely. The conductor, Scott Seaton, has a clear beat despite not using a baton in concert (he did at rehearsal), and has definite ideas about interpretive matters like emphasis and phrasing that he's able to communicate to the players and have them respond to. The result was a work of art in the performance as well as in the composition, and that's what you want of a concert.
The orchestra had further luck in the venue, a Mennonite (of all things) church in Willow Glen, whose small but spaciously-shaped sanctuary had stunningly great acoustics that gripped the 24-member orchestra and enlarged the sound to be as rich and full as it deserved. About 60 people attended and got to hear a good 75-minute concert. Winchester is so lucky it didn't wind up in the theatrical but unmusical Hammer Theatre in downtown San Jose like some of the other local groups.
The program included, as appetizer, Mozart's unutterably catchy Divertimento in F, K. 138, which I was surprised to find, when the conductor asked, that I was one of only 2 people in the audience who knew it; for the main course, Tchaikovsky's gorgeous and wholly characteristic Serenade; and for dessert, an arrangement of Astor Piazzolla's lively little Libertango for strings plus piano and clonk (I don't know what it's called, but you hit the two halves of it together and it goes clonk). Plus, as unscheduled introduction, the national anthem of Ukraine. Because of course you do that.
B. has decided to occupy much time in her retirement with practicing and improving her playing on the violin. Along with taking lessons and playing chamber music with friends, she's wanted to join a non-professional orchestra. She's been practicing with a wholly amateur group called the Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, which I've mentioned here before; but what I hadn't mentioned is her quest to try herself out in an ensemble which, while still non-professional, is a serious orchestra that puts on serious concerts.
And she alighted on this group, the Winchester Orchestra, which looked like a potentially achievable challenge and which offered the further temptation that their March concert was scheduled to include Beethoven's Fifth, a worthy goal for any orchestral musician to aim for. And so for a while, the sound of the second violin parts of Beethoven's Fifth and the other works on that program filled our house during B's lengthy home practice hours.
But then the omicron wave arrived, and the music director decided to postpone that concert and substitute an all-strings program so that everybody could be masked. And so B. switched to practicing this instead. Either way, she found it a challenge: the level and above all the speed at which the conductor had the orchestra play, the challenges of getting to nighttime rehearsals at the isolated music building in the back of a hillside junior college, and the sheer amount of time and sweat that practicing entails has made this more drudgery than fun. So for her next act, B. is thinking of going down a notch in the non-pro sweeps. More on that when performance time arrives.
But she made it through to this concert, and from this listener's standpoint it was worth the effort. The orchestra has the usual wobbles of a non-pro group, but mostly I thought it shone very nicely. The conductor, Scott Seaton, has a clear beat despite not using a baton in concert (he did at rehearsal), and has definite ideas about interpretive matters like emphasis and phrasing that he's able to communicate to the players and have them respond to. The result was a work of art in the performance as well as in the composition, and that's what you want of a concert.
The orchestra had further luck in the venue, a Mennonite (of all things) church in Willow Glen, whose small but spaciously-shaped sanctuary had stunningly great acoustics that gripped the 24-member orchestra and enlarged the sound to be as rich and full as it deserved. About 60 people attended and got to hear a good 75-minute concert. Winchester is so lucky it didn't wind up in the theatrical but unmusical Hammer Theatre in downtown San Jose like some of the other local groups.
The program included, as appetizer, Mozart's unutterably catchy Divertimento in F, K. 138, which I was surprised to find, when the conductor asked, that I was one of only 2 people in the audience who knew it; for the main course, Tchaikovsky's gorgeous and wholly characteristic Serenade; and for dessert, an arrangement of Astor Piazzolla's lively little Libertango for strings plus piano and clonk (I don't know what it's called, but you hit the two halves of it together and it goes clonk). Plus, as unscheduled introduction, the national anthem of Ukraine. Because of course you do that.
Sunday, March 20, 2022
folk festival
I couldn't miss this one. A collective performance at the Freight & Salvage of several luminaries - including my adored Christine Lavin - of the American folkie singer-songwriter movement (mostly just one person with an acoustic guitar: occasional substitution of subdued electric or of piano), usually their own compositions, sometimes each other's, sometimes old folk or pop numbers.
Being solo performers, they played mostly separately. Each did a mini-set of 2 or 3 songs, then they all sat together and took turns for another total of 3 songs each. Then they closed with a couple of joint performances, finishing off with "You've really got a hold on me."
In their solos,
Christine Lavin played a male (het) edition of "Good thing [s]he can't read my mind," including a verse on "I am watching chick flicks," which referenced Terms of Endearment and The Way We Were, which would be a bit much even for me. She also sang my (obscure) favorite of her songs, "Fly on a Plane," which utterly stunned the audience: no applause, except from me.
Patty Larkin sang her setting of William Carlos Williams's poem "The Fool's Song."
Cliff Eberhardt sang a tribute song to all the things he's forgotten on tour and left behind in his hotel room. Near the end, it included the line "I left my heart in San Francisco."
John Gorka sang a sardonic toast to being from New Jersey, and also the folk song "Wayfaring Stranger."
Very relaxed evening. The room about 2/3 filled. The performers pointed out that for a couple of years there, they weren't sure if they'd ever get to perform live again, so they were so happy to be here, with an audience - which is pretty much the same thing Richard Thompson said at his concert last month. And we were happy to have them.
It rained that day, for a wonder, but I didn't get wet. Now that BART runs all the way to east San Jose, and the Berkeley station where the Freight is is on that line, I decided to take BART the whole way, and even coming back at 11 PM I still felt toasty enough from the concert that it wasn't too tedious.
Being solo performers, they played mostly separately. Each did a mini-set of 2 or 3 songs, then they all sat together and took turns for another total of 3 songs each. Then they closed with a couple of joint performances, finishing off with "You've really got a hold on me."
In their solos,
Christine Lavin played a male (het) edition of "Good thing [s]he can't read my mind," including a verse on "I am watching chick flicks," which referenced Terms of Endearment and The Way We Were, which would be a bit much even for me. She also sang my (obscure) favorite of her songs, "Fly on a Plane," which utterly stunned the audience: no applause, except from me.
Patty Larkin sang her setting of William Carlos Williams's poem "The Fool's Song."
Cliff Eberhardt sang a tribute song to all the things he's forgotten on tour and left behind in his hotel room. Near the end, it included the line "I left my heart in San Francisco."
John Gorka sang a sardonic toast to being from New Jersey, and also the folk song "Wayfaring Stranger."
Very relaxed evening. The room about 2/3 filled. The performers pointed out that for a couple of years there, they weren't sure if they'd ever get to perform live again, so they were so happy to be here, with an audience - which is pretty much the same thing Richard Thompson said at his concert last month. And we were happy to have them.
It rained that day, for a wonder, but I didn't get wet. Now that BART runs all the way to east San Jose, and the Berkeley station where the Freight is is on that line, I decided to take BART the whole way, and even coming back at 11 PM I still felt toasty enough from the concert that it wasn't too tedious.
Saturday, March 19, 2022
two string quartet concerts
I've been to two string quartet concerts at Herbst in the City this week. One was pretty good. The other was truly exceptional.
They had similar programs. One late Haydn, one epic-sized 19th century work, one mid-20C central European work by a composer more agreeable than Bartók.
The pretty good ensemble was the Pavel Haas, four Czechs (2 M, 2 F) who named their group after a Czech composer who died in the Holocaust. They didn't play his music, though. They played Martinů, his 7th, a bustling and energetic work written while the composer was recovering from a severe injury (he fell off an unrailed balcony in the dark - ouch!), but doesn't sound like the composer is suffering.
It sounds, instead, like it's bustling off in various directions at once, a good look for one of those quartet ensembles which sounds like four entirely distinct voices in conversation. It was a less good look on Schubert's G major, which though never boring or slack came out kind of ropy and overextended, as if it was just trying to speak plainly and not achieve the blissful harmonic realms of great Schubert. The Haydn (Op 76/1) was more successful at being matter-of-fact.
The exceptional ensemble was the Esmé. Four young Korean women (very tall, all of them), working in Germany where they all trained, who gave their group a French name.
Even in their opening Haydn (Op 77/1), it was apparent they had a distinct sound, extremely bright and airy, floating out and exposing Haydn's graceful construction. This worked less well with the lush harmonies of Korngold's 2nd, which while played well and incisively, gave off a wet and lurid sound as if what was being exposed here was living flesh.
None of that prepared us for what came with Dvořák's Op 106. This was awesome, a performance for the ages. Somehow the ensemble's airy sound was perfectly matched to Dvořák's balance and expression, while the piece flowed along with the ideal bounce and energy which makes for a winning visit to this composer. Everything felt as if it belonged there and was contributing to the whole. And to think I've heard performances of Op 106 that sounded dull or routine.
This was SF Performance's annual subscriber gift concert, for which they usually come up with something special. This group is apparently well-known in Europe, but this was, they modestly explained, their first-ever performance in North America. (Actually, they had a concert scheduled a couple days earlier in the Cal Tech chamber music series, but it was cancelled for some reason.) They're on tour for a couple more weeks, but they aren't playing the Dvořák again. That was ... truly amazing, and I'm sorry for anyone who missed it.
They had similar programs. One late Haydn, one epic-sized 19th century work, one mid-20C central European work by a composer more agreeable than Bartók.
The pretty good ensemble was the Pavel Haas, four Czechs (2 M, 2 F) who named their group after a Czech composer who died in the Holocaust. They didn't play his music, though. They played Martinů, his 7th, a bustling and energetic work written while the composer was recovering from a severe injury (he fell off an unrailed balcony in the dark - ouch!), but doesn't sound like the composer is suffering.
It sounds, instead, like it's bustling off in various directions at once, a good look for one of those quartet ensembles which sounds like four entirely distinct voices in conversation. It was a less good look on Schubert's G major, which though never boring or slack came out kind of ropy and overextended, as if it was just trying to speak plainly and not achieve the blissful harmonic realms of great Schubert. The Haydn (Op 76/1) was more successful at being matter-of-fact.
The exceptional ensemble was the Esmé. Four young Korean women (very tall, all of them), working in Germany where they all trained, who gave their group a French name.
Even in their opening Haydn (Op 77/1), it was apparent they had a distinct sound, extremely bright and airy, floating out and exposing Haydn's graceful construction. This worked less well with the lush harmonies of Korngold's 2nd, which while played well and incisively, gave off a wet and lurid sound as if what was being exposed here was living flesh.
None of that prepared us for what came with Dvořák's Op 106. This was awesome, a performance for the ages. Somehow the ensemble's airy sound was perfectly matched to Dvořák's balance and expression, while the piece flowed along with the ideal bounce and energy which makes for a winning visit to this composer. Everything felt as if it belonged there and was contributing to the whole. And to think I've heard performances of Op 106 that sounded dull or routine.
This was SF Performance's annual subscriber gift concert, for which they usually come up with something special. This group is apparently well-known in Europe, but this was, they modestly explained, their first-ever performance in North America. (Actually, they had a concert scheduled a couple days earlier in the Cal Tech chamber music series, but it was cancelled for some reason.) They're on tour for a couple more weeks, but they aren't playing the Dvořák again. That was ... truly amazing, and I'm sorry for anyone who missed it.
Friday, March 18, 2022
an ominous rumble
Rumor is filtering over from Europe about a new variant virus which hasn't had much of an effect in the US yet. But it might soon, and thereby lies a practical concern for me.
I had been intending to put off compiling the annual bibliography for Tolkien Studies for another month, in favor of more urgent matters. But this task requires going out to the university libraries to search the proprietary databases. For two years I couldn't do that because the libraries were closed, and I had to resort to makeshift solutions.
But now the libraries are open, some of them anyway, and I am looking forward to going. But if the new variant spreads, will they stay open? It would be folly to wait a month and then find I was too late.
But before I visit the libraries I have to do first the even more extensive work in my own collection and in the public online databases, so that I can have as much information already down on my list, maximizing the efficiency of my time in the libraries by being able to pass over many of the listed items with "OK, I already have that one."
And that's going to require several days of perspiring work over a hot computer, and I'm starting that now. If I can get over the hill to Santa Cruz, my library of first resort, before the end of next week, that'll be great.
I had been intending to put off compiling the annual bibliography for Tolkien Studies for another month, in favor of more urgent matters. But this task requires going out to the university libraries to search the proprietary databases. For two years I couldn't do that because the libraries were closed, and I had to resort to makeshift solutions.
But now the libraries are open, some of them anyway, and I am looking forward to going. But if the new variant spreads, will they stay open? It would be folly to wait a month and then find I was too late.
But before I visit the libraries I have to do first the even more extensive work in my own collection and in the public online databases, so that I can have as much information already down on my list, maximizing the efficiency of my time in the libraries by being able to pass over many of the listed items with "OK, I already have that one."
And that's going to require several days of perspiring work over a hot computer, and I'm starting that now. If I can get over the hill to Santa Cruz, my library of first resort, before the end of next week, that'll be great.
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