two artistic events

1. The San Francisco Symphony ventured out and held a free noontime concert yesterday in downtown San Jose, at the art museum end of Chavez Plaza (away from the Quetzacoatl statue). They sat in a temporary raised pavilion, and a fair crowd braved the din of traffic noise on both sides to hear the music. The acoustic conditions required amplification, and the amplified sound was pretty grim, but the event was enjoyable enough to be worth showing up for. The program was all 20th century and half American: short pieces by Copland, Gershwin, and Adams along with a larger wad from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet.

2. Out to see Berkeley Rep's production of Heartbreak House last night. It's Shaw, which means that it's Shaw. Eight people at a country house party spend three hours accusing each other of being crazy. One cannot help feeling that they have a point there. At the end of the play, World War I - previously unmentioned - suddenly breaks out in the neighborhood in the form of a zeppelin bombing raid. Despite immediate threat to life and limb, the characters find this tremendously exciting and even appealing. (One thinks of Karlheinz Stockhausen complimenting 9/11 as a work of art, and then wishes one hadn't thought of him.) Unexplicit implication: Shaw's characters react this way because the raid is the first real thing that's ever happened to them. Playgoer's wish: that it hadn't taken 2 3/4 hours to demonstrate by example the emptiness of their lives.