also on last weekend's menu

... a San Francisco Symphony concert Friday night at Flint Center, the big warm hall they sometimes play in on South Bay visits. The old San Jose Symphony used to play at Flint sometimes, and I much preferred it to their regular hall, but the booking opportunity was lost when the group reorganized. Flint has much better backstage facilities than a lot of other local halls, and is much in demand for musical theatre tours and such.

This concert's most unusual feature was a sinfonietta by the Czech (sometimes resident in America) Bohuslav Martinu [there's a ring over the U in his surname, but I can't find it in the HTML codes]. Describing this concert beforehand to athenais, I said, "I like Martinu. Crisp, light but strong with a very distinctive sound." She replied, "He sounds like a wine!" Oh god, am I doing it again? I once made a whole list of the foods that best metaphorically described various composers. I'll have to dig it out some time. "A dry white wine" would do very nicely for Martinu. "Crisp and crunchy" is the way I put it in my review published here.

I'm trying to get the hang of professional journalism: it was challenging getting a polished review (at least I hope it's polished) written over a busy weekend. I forced myself to draft something before leaving for work Saturday morning, then avoided looking at it for as long as possible, to get the most mental distance from it for a successful revision yesterday morning. After which I was late for work, but nobody noticed. (Visitors kept coming to the agency's new offices and saying "Wow!" It's a beautiful old building full of dark wood paneling.)

The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto was on the concert program, and in the review I mention the soloist and "her Stradivarius violin." In the draft I wrote "her Strad," but decided I didn't want to address only those elitists who know what "Strad" means, especially as I'd just finished a general description of the concerto, a work you don't have to go very far in classical music to know intimately.

But the violin did cause me a problem because I'm not a professional musician and I don't entirely trust my ear. I wrote that I enjoyed the performance, and I did, but I was also wondering, "Why does this famous violin, fabled even among Strads for its beautiful tone, sound like a buzz saw? Are my ears just on wrong?" In the end I made very cautious references to this and other problems I heard with the interpretations. I can't let my caustic side rip in a music review as I can with books where I'm on firmer ground - and the circumstances are different as well. A.A. Milne, who made his living writing plays, once wrote a heartfelt plea on the difference between reviewing performances, which have limited opportunity to be seen, and reviewing books, which are already in fixed print for everyone to see. If I give a book a slashing review, you can look at it and decide for yourself if you agree with me, and in fact I wish you would. But you don't have that opportunity with a performance that's already past, so that's another reason to approach it differently in a professional review.

But if I had more self-confidence in this field, I'd feel freer to maneuvre, especially when discussing the music rather than the performance. I got a kick out of a colleague's take-down of John Tavener's music, even though I'm more fond of Tavener than he is.