calimac

Here's an article on the heat + humidity that's currently wracking the central and eastern U.S. It's full of detail on exactly how to measure the danger to human health. I hope those of you currently subject to this heat dome are doing OK, especially those of you without air conditioning.

I say "currently" because we get heat domes out here in the west too - we just don't have one right now. It's been 70s up to mid-80s F lately, which is not too uncomfortable, especially because our humidity is typically low - although that's less often true than it used to be. We've gotten some sparkling high waves here in recent years, up to about 105F, but usually in August-October. And of course it gets much hotter further inland: the shore is typically quite cool here in high summer, with each successive coastwise valley inland getting hotter; we're in the first valley, which can be bad enough, and have no intention of retiring out to the second or third valley as so many lounge lizards do.

So I'm counting us really lucky - so far.

This year's driving visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was a bit precarious, due to both B. and I being ill at various times (just a cold, but nasty enough). B. missed two plays as a result - fortunately not the best ones. I didn't miss any plays, but undertaking the six hour drive there after a night when the cold had given me no sleep was a grim business which shouldn't have been attempted.

There were six plays on our schedule, three Shakespeare:

As You Like It: utterly charming, clever, good-humored, imaginative, a delight in every way - and performed with utterly pellucid line-readings. Everything everyone said was clear and understandable. After a stark court setting, with everyone in antiseptic white, the Forest of Arden burst out as sixties hippie utopia, with everyone in it, from Duke Senior on down, dressed as flower children - except for the melancholy Jaques, who was a leftover beatnik poet in a shabby black suit. Aw, perfect.

Julius Caesar: another production by the upstart crow collective of female and nonbinary performers. The central characters of Brutus and Cassius were good enough but might have done better with the casting exchanged; but Caesar (Kate Wisniewski) exuded arrogance and self-confidence, perfect for the character. Nonspecific modern dress.

The Merry Wives of Windsor: a more conventional production than OSF's last Merry Wives, this didn't tinker with the text or add musical interjection; here the characters expressed their emotional reactions by screaming a lot. An attempt was made to frame the plot around the crafty plans by the merry wives, but this could have been more focused. The costumes were livelier: Falstaff and his cronies first sauntered in as a biker gang, and things just got sillier from there.

and three not:

The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde: The director couldn't identify with Victorian England, so set this in the Victorian English colony of Malaya, which had little effect outside the vegetation in act 2 and the place names, which didn't make much sense. (The casting was multiracial, which would lead to genetic impossibilities in this play, so you just ignore that.) Never mind the place names either: the acting was great. Newcomer Hao Feng made a splendidly foppish Algy, and Kiki deLohr as Gwendolen mugged her way through, channeling Miss Piggy.

Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine: Supposedly a revival of OSF's 2014 production which we saw, and with some of the same cast, it wasn't the same at all. With much less of the bursting clever imagination of its predecessor and a more improvisationary feel, it was just a good solid performance of Into the Woods that succeeded in making Act 2 more involving than Act 1 instead of more dour.

Fat Ham, James Ijames: Starts out as a very funny and clever resetting of Hamlet in a rural Southern Black family holding a wedding reception barbecue. The Ghost, who is still figuring out how to be one, was particularly amusing. Lots of specific Shakespearean points well translated into Black vernacular. But the author didn't want to kill the characters off, so the plot makes a turn into a closing celebration of former uptight Marine Larry (= Laertes) coming out as a drag queen. Good for him, but something of a nonsequitur in the circumstances.

The reason for the posting gap between covering last week's San Francisco Symphony program and this week's is that I've been buried - and still am - in my part of copy-editing the papers for the next issue of Tolkien Studies. This is a major task that has been occupying all three editors. There are authors who have trouble with - well, I shouldn't say the things they have trouble with, but they have trouble with them. But that leads to the first of my catch-up news items, which is:

1. I should say, since there have been a couple of inquiries, that Tolkien Studies is alive and well. It's just delayed. A combination of various personal difficulties on top of never having quite recovered from the dent in our schedule caused by the 2022 supplement are the cause, but the 2024 (tsk) issue should have gone to the publisher (more processing time) within a month from now.

2. Last week, B. and I went to hear the San Jose Symphonic Choir give its centenary concert of singing Beethoven's Ninth, and I reviewed it for the Daily Journal. The singing and playing ranged from excellent to not so excellent, but we had a good time of it. This was the fullest I've seen the Mountain View CPA in a long time, and the fullest I've seen its parking garage ever. I had to park out on the street two blocks away, and I was lucky to find that.

3. Last November, when I was in LA (and the National Guard wasn't), I saw a delightfully clever performance of Sondheim's rarely-staged Pacific Overtures, his musical about the opening of Japan. So when I saw that another Asian-American theater company was going to do it in San Francisco, I decided to go to that one too. Friday was it, after another long day (and a drive up the coast from Santa Cruz). Follow-ups like this are rarely a success, and this wasn't. The performers were all of professional quality, but the show was bland and dull in comparison to the bright and witty I saw in LA.

3a. Near the theater, which is in the Mission District, are two Mexican restaurants I queried for dinner beforehand. Both advertise tamales, one in their menu, the other actually is called a "Tamale Parlor." Neither has any tamales. The one was out of them, the other - despite the name - doesn't even carry them. As a tamale-lover, I was very disappointed.

4. Were you under the impression that C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams wrote each other fan letters that crossed in the mail? Neither was I, but just in case you were, Sørina Higgins is out to correct you. Actually, Williams wrote, "If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed," and the conditional of this phrasing attracted Søri's attention. She thinks Williams was just being polite; he wouldn't have taken the trouble of writing a letter if Lewis hadn't written him first.
What she doesn't address is the peculiarity of Williams, who was an editor in the London branch, the commercial office, of the Oxford University Press, being asked to evaluate Lewis's book which was an academic treatise being published by the Oxford branch, the academic office, of the Press, although he did suggest what was eventually used as the book's title, The Allegory of Love. What I've read elsewhere, though I can't remember where, is a suggestion that Williams being given Lewis's book was a stitch-up concocted by Humphrey Milford, the Publisher of the Press (manager of the London office, and Williams's supervisor) and R.W. Chapman, Secretary to the Delegates (manager of the Oxford office, who knew Lewis, an Oxford don) in collaboration, as they thought - quite astutely - that Williams and Lewis would be great friends if they ever met. That, by Lewis's own testimony (Preface to Essays Presented to CW), it was Chapman who first mentioned Williams's novels to Lewis is another clue.
Anyway, if this is true, then Williams's "admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence" that brought them together should have been pitched at a slightly lower level.

The San Francisco Symphony program this week was a miscellaneous assortment of four pieces, each about 20 minutes long. Perhaps that's why, even though it was music director Esa-Pekka Salonen's next-to-last program, the hall was not as packed on Saturday as it was last week. (I don't usually go to SFS on Saturday. I did this week because I was doing something else on Friday. More on that later.) The audience cheered EPS just as lustily, though, despite his attempts to modestly back off at the end.

We had:

1. Richard Strauss's two shortest - and, not coincidentally, best - tone poems, Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel. These were played with quicksilver energy and bumptious color, so much so that, had I not known better and were told that Don Juan actually portrayed the merry prankster Till, I might have believed it. (The reverse would be less plausible.)
2. Sibelius's shortest and most cryptic symphony, the Seventh. This was played in the same manner: it was so brilliantly colorful and convincing moment-by-moment that it didn't matter where the piece was going, and indeed I wasn't sure if it was going anywhere. Each section seemed to come from a different work; there was even a moment straight out of Valse Triste.
3. A premiere, Rewilding by local composer Gabriella Smith. This celebrates the titular ecosystem restoration projects by means of musical onomatopoeia. It both begins and ends with the percussion evoking the squeaking of Smith's bicycle as she rides to and from her project sites (which is what she spends her non-musical time doing). In between are attempts at animal sounds: lots of insect swarms from the strings and bird calls of various kinds from the woodwinds, while the brass play what come across more as Ingram Marshall-style foghorns.

EPS had a definite vision for this concert, and this is an orchestra that can do anything that a good conductor asks of it.

B. saw an announcement that a choral group we'd never heard of was giving a free concert of Mozart's Requiem on Sunday afternoon in a local church, so we decided to go. I don't know how it came out; we didn't stay for the performance.

We'd arrived early enough to read the quite extensive comments on the strange composition history of the piece, and its musical contents, in the program book. By 3 pm, the announced time, the sanctuary was packed with concertgoers, some of them children.

The conductor stood up and started to speak into a microphone. (Not very clearly: her voice kept fading in and out.) Now, many conductors have adopted the irritating habit of speaking a few superfluous sentences before pieces, but usually they're done in a couple of minutes. Not this one. She took some 15 minutes to tell the entire story of the commissioning, composition, and publication of the Requiem. I thought about shouting out, "We can read all this in the program book! Let's hear the music!"

Perhaps I should have, because then the conductor turned to an analysis of repeated musical motifs in the Requiem, with musical illustrations by the rehearsal pianist.

It was at about this point that B. asked if we should just leave. I said I hoped the talk would be done soon. It wasn't. After five minutes - this had now gone on for 20 minutes total, and it still wasn't done - the conductor was on her third motif, and we got up and left. I walked to the back parking lot to fetch the car while B. waited at the front door. When I picked her up, the conductor was still talking.

Look, if you want to give a pre-concert talk before the concert, schedule it for an hour before showtime. Don't incorporate it into the actual program. Then people can decide if they want to attend or not. Besides, this wasn't really a pre-concert talk in content. The motivic analysis made it more like a lecture in a junior college class on Mozart.

I won't dignify the ensemble by naming it, but we certainly won't attempt to attend any more of its concerts.

The San Francisco Symphony has been promoting the heck out of the last four concert programs of the season, Esa-Pekka Salonen's final appearances as music director. It's ironic because the reason he's going is the incompetent management of the Symphony, the same organization that's trying to sell this as a celebration. And it's tragic because EPS has been doing such a good job. Joshua Kosman, reviewing last week's program, the first of the set, explained: "The real theme of the program was This is what we had, and this is what we’ve lost. Onstage leadership of an extraordinary caliber, from a conductor able to infuse even familiar works with color and drama and narrative shape — that’s not something you let slip away. Except they did."

I missed that first concert, as I was away, but I'm attending the other three. Between two matinees, Friday was the only evening performance of program no. 2. (I know what 'antepenultimate' means, so I'm going to use it when appropriate.)

The repertoire was two of the less dramatic works of Beethoven's 'heroic' period, the Fourth Symphony and the Violin Concerto, both dating from 1806 and bearing adjoining opus numbers. If you wanted to hear Beethoven as a refined, elegant composer, instead of the usual brusque bumpkin, this was your chance. EPS conducted the Fourth as light and sparkling, with colorful and brilliantly tight responses from the players. The only exception to the mood was a deeply misterioso slow introduction. Soloist Hilary Hahn - with a sure-footed and beautiful consistently light tone - was at one with her conductor in presenting the Violin Concerto as smooth and graceful. That's the way the score tends anyway, and these performers just reinforced that. Even the orchestral fortissimos were smooth and graceful. It's a large-scale work, and came across as a prosperous voyage through a vast calm sea.

Possibly knowing that this series was going to be their last chance, the audience packed Davies more fully than I've seen it in years. They cheered EPS mightily on his appearance, and cheered Hahn even more mightily after the concerto (EPS declined to share her curtain calls). Two encores.

On my trip, I did something I hadn't done in over fifty years. I attended a major league baseball game. The home team Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Milwaukee Brewers 2-1, so all the locals went home happy.

The game was an optional add-on for attendees of the wedding, the day before the ceremony, and I figured it would be a good occasion to socialize with my fellow guests. It was also a glimpse into a world I rarely see.

Not having a smartphone to load my ticket onto, I had to stop at the box office to pick it up. (None of the team's or stadium's web material that I could find said where around the stadium's perimeter the box office was, and I couldn't reach them by phone. I presumed it would be near the gift shop, whose location was given, and I guessed right.)

Our seats were on the other side of the stadium, but instead of walking around the outside and using the gate there, I entered at the main gate by the box office, took the escalator (! - I'd never seen a sports stadium with an escalator before) up to the second level, where our seats were, and walked around the inside - in both senses: the walk around was inside the park, and it was inside the building, not open to the air.

PNC Park is, I understand, one of the new breed of baseball parks that are smaller and more intimate than old school, but it looked awfully big to me. The long, curved (so you couldn't see how much further there was to go), seemingly endless corridor was like nothing so much as a concourse at a huge airport. Tiny signs indicating the doors outside to numbered seating sections were inconspicuous; what occupied the attention was a vast sequence of concessionaires, and the crowds occupying their seating. The concessions were a bit different from what you get at an airport: frequently repeated outlets for junk food (no actual restaurants), and the same sequence of whiskey bars. The stadium opens 90 minutes before the game starts to allow attendees plenty of time to get lubricated, and judging from what I saw on quick visits to the restroom during the game, many people never bother to go out and watch the action.

When I finally got to my section, the weather outside was balmy. The seats were up a steep flight of steps, and at first I wasn't sure if I'd be able to see home plate from up here - oh, there it is - and such view outside as wasn't blocked by the giant scoreboard was impressive: the large river with downtown behind it, just like at the wedding venue, only this time it was the Allegheny, the river on the other side of downtown.

I've occasionally seen baseball on tv, and watching a game in person is different in a couple important ways. First, there's no play-by-play commentary. The PA limits itself to announcing the name of the next batter. If you don't know the umpire's signals, you have no way of telling a ball from a strike without averting your eyes from the field and looking way up at the scoreboard, which half the time isn't displaying the box score anyway, preferring pictures of the batters or animated geegaws - if a visiting team player strikes out, the scoreboard displays a gif of three cannons firing, that sort of thing.

That's the other thing about watching baseball without a tv camera to guide you - it's hard to know where to look, or when. Baseball is not like other sports. In basketball or soccer or hockey the action is nearly constant. In American football it's intermittent, but you know it's going to happen when the players line up and the quarterback takes the snap. But baseball consists of a long sequence of pitches that the batter doesn't hit, or fouls, interrupted at unpredictable intervals when something exciting happens. It only lasts a few seconds, so if you happen to be looking away you'll miss it. And you usually need to be looking at two widely separated places at once. The ball has gone out to the outfield over there, while the runners are on the base paths over here, and knowing what's going on with both is vital to following the game.

At any rate, despite having few hits and almost no runs, the game wasn't too boring as sports games go. My brother told me that in recent years, rule changes have prohibited the characteristic baseball activity of standing around not doing anything for long periods. So things proceeded on with dispatch - after the first couple innings, I wondered if the game would be over in an hour, though in fact it took more than two - and there were a couple exciting double plays, and so on. I'm not likely to do it again, but I didn't feel my time was wasted.

Tomorrow: food, transit, and birds in Pittsburgh.

Two of these from my childhood happened to pop into mind almost simultaneously.

1. When my parents first played for me the original cast recording of 1776 (a musical they'd seen in the theater, and bought the record of partly because they knew I'd be interested in the history), I heard the opening song, "Sit Down, John," and turned to my mother in puzzlement and asked, "What does '40-S' mean?" Huh? "Well, he keeps singing that: FOR-ty ess, FOR-ty ess." It was "Vote yes: VOTE-uh yes, VOTE-uh yes."

2. I saw a singing group on tv billed as "Tony Orlando and Dawn." There were three of them: a man in the middle and a woman on either side. I figured that one woman was Toni (I hadn't seen the name written), the man was Orlando, and the other woman was Dawn. Realistic believable given names, right?

Here is a quotation from a book I've been reading, about world leaders, with the names removed. Your riddle is, who is X?

A lamented that 'X is behaving just like a spoilt child, and it is difficult to know how to deal with him'; as B had warned, the more X asked for, the more he got, and the greater became his demands. He was not a spoilt child, merely an avaricious and now overweeningly self-confident and cynical brigand.

Sound like anybody we know?

Dalia Stasevska has led some dazzling performances here in the past. So I was looking forward to hearing what she could do with Sibelius's dramatically extroverted Fifth Symphony.

So here she was, dressed as usual in yet another oddly-colored long coat, and her Sibelius Fifth was not dazzling, exactly, but Heroically Grand. Through most of the work, Sibelius builds up to brief but intense climaxes, and Stasevska emphasized their Grandeur. Then at the end, when Sibelius marshals up all his resources for a final blast, the Heroic Grandeur just topped them all. Stasevska was especially skilled at flowing it naturally into the coda, whose long pauses sometimes fool audiences into applause who can't tell the difference between a dominant chord and a tonic when they hear it. But that didn't happen this time. The conductor was in command.

A similar approach was taken to Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia, a work you rarely hear live. The general approach was slow and worshipful, as it should be, but Stasevska built the climaxes up into some of the same sense of Grandeur that she did Sibelius.

Also on the program, and taking up a good holy chunk of it, was a new cello concerto by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inexplicably titled Before we fall and featuring Johannes Moser as soloist. Anna (that chunk of letters, properly Þorvaldsdóttir, is not her surname, but her patronymic: you call Icelanders by their first names) is a soundscape composer who specializes in weird sonorities, and we had that here. Strange dissonant shimmerings from the orchestra began this work. There's a long cadenza filled with col legno, ponticello, and other rattling sounds. But gradually the music melted down, via some weird sinking glissandi, into deep dark low sounds from soloist and orchestra alike, punctuated by clangs and thumps from the percussion. And this might have been interesting had it been half as long.