The Mikado: the director's cut

Lyric Theatre is the San Jose Gilbert and Sullivan Society. They're not as bad as their embarrassing web site might suggest, but over the years their productions have been maddeningly inconsistent, ranging from a brilliant 1960s recostuming of Patience to a clumsy Mikado whose Katisha had no voice whatever, and sufficient blows of the latter kind led me gradually to stop going.

The current production caught my eye, though: it is an attempt to approximate a re-creation of the original text of The Mikado. Knowing the show well, I wanted to see what difference this would make.

( All is revealed behind the cut )

zwei kleine konzerte

A promising morning turned into a rainy afternoon. Didn't keep me from two small concerts, which I might not have bothered going to if there were only one of them.

The Prometheus Symphony Orchestra is a volunteer group with some 50 members (about half the size of a big-time orchestra) which gives occasional free concerts. I was attracted to this one because it featured Kalinnikov's First Symphony. Who? Well, he died young, but before he did he wrote two large echt-Russian 19th-century symphonies akin to Borodin's or Balakirev's. (Who? Well, there we go again.) Long languid melodies, big Russian sound, really quite good. Never heard it live before; glad to have heard it this time. The deep echoing acoustics of a small, high-vaulted brick church in Oakland suited the work well and made the orchestra sound a lot bigger.

Also on the program, Copland's Rodeo (you don't expect letter-perfect renditions of music this complex from an amateur group, but they had the swing of the music despite the lack of technical perfection, rather than letting the lack of the latter freeze them out of the former) and a Boccherini cello concerto with a 6th-grader as soloist. It seems churlish to point out that she totally lost the pitch when reaching down to hold the high notes: one is still dazzled. A 6th-grader, wow.

The Stanford Woodwind Quintet is something quite different. Most of its members are Stanford music faculty and their fluency is complete. I enjoyed the imaginative Gordon Davies arrangement of some Debussy piano pieces, with lots of clever pairing; the way the players threw phrases back and forth during a Danzi quintet; and the forlornly jazzy cold-war-era work by a Hungarian state composer named Frigyes Hidas.