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My plan to take the train to the City yesterday was fouled by the local station's parking garage being full. This has never happened when I tried this trick in the late morning before, so I guess my plans were a victim of the improving economy. Not having another place I could leave my car all day around there, I drove up to Millbrae and took BART instead.
Other than that, a successful day's outing. Lunch at my favorite spicy Chinese restaurant. An afternoon in the attic of the city library in successful pursuit of obscure 19th century fantasy stories in crumbling magazines and difficult reels of microfilm. A walk through the Tenderloin, always delightful, dodging folk who rummage through trash cans and walk across streets on red lights, narrowly avoiding being obliviously squashed by speeding cars right in front of one's eyes. Dinner in the form of bistro paella. Followed by the SFS concert.
The concert was succeeded by a Q&A session with conductor and soloist, which I made the mistake of staying for. Vapid questions were succeeded by vacuous answers. Mark Inouye, principal trumpet and soloist in Copland's Quiet City (and no relation to Daniel - this was actually asked), hunkered down in his chair like a football player, and gave a football player's answer to the question of how he deals with being principal: "I give 110%." Then asked, "What does '110%' mean, really?" he said, "You know what 100% means?"*
The question I'd have liked to know the answer to, but was not foolish enough to try to ask, is: Does MTT realize how much like Leonard Bernstein he sounds when he conducts Tchaikovsky's Fourth like that? Filled with uncanonical dramatic pauses and constant minor shifts in tempo - in the oboe melody that opens the slow movement, I don't think that any three consecutive notes were played at the same tempo - it got the full "Son of Lenny" treatment.
It is also Bernstein-like to fill the rest of the concert with Copland. Besides Quiet City, we also had Noisy City, which is a cheeky title that might be applicable for Copland's early and modernist Symphony for Organ and Orchestra in some other performance than this. Here was MTT at his best and most caring, bringing out the contemplation and grace in this unlikely work.
Also thrown in, A Parade by Lou Harrison, a brief essay in the very Harrison-like quest to make a symphony orchestra sound like a gamelan.
*These go to eleven.
Other than that, a successful day's outing. Lunch at my favorite spicy Chinese restaurant. An afternoon in the attic of the city library in successful pursuit of obscure 19th century fantasy stories in crumbling magazines and difficult reels of microfilm. A walk through the Tenderloin, always delightful, dodging folk who rummage through trash cans and walk across streets on red lights, narrowly avoiding being obliviously squashed by speeding cars right in front of one's eyes. Dinner in the form of bistro paella. Followed by the SFS concert.
The concert was succeeded by a Q&A session with conductor and soloist, which I made the mistake of staying for. Vapid questions were succeeded by vacuous answers. Mark Inouye, principal trumpet and soloist in Copland's Quiet City (and no relation to Daniel - this was actually asked), hunkered down in his chair like a football player, and gave a football player's answer to the question of how he deals with being principal: "I give 110%." Then asked, "What does '110%' mean, really?" he said, "You know what 100% means?"*
The question I'd have liked to know the answer to, but was not foolish enough to try to ask, is: Does MTT realize how much like Leonard Bernstein he sounds when he conducts Tchaikovsky's Fourth like that? Filled with uncanonical dramatic pauses and constant minor shifts in tempo - in the oboe melody that opens the slow movement, I don't think that any three consecutive notes were played at the same tempo - it got the full "Son of Lenny" treatment.
It is also Bernstein-like to fill the rest of the concert with Copland. Besides Quiet City, we also had Noisy City, which is a cheeky title that might be applicable for Copland's early and modernist Symphony for Organ and Orchestra in some other performance than this. Here was MTT at his best and most caring, bringing out the contemplation and grace in this unlikely work.
Also thrown in, A Parade by Lou Harrison, a brief essay in the very Harrison-like quest to make a symphony orchestra sound like a gamelan.
*These go to eleven.
