calimac

Besides everything else that happened over last weekend – carpet cleaning, telephone repair, and all – I got to hear a lot of music: concerts on four successive days.

First was the OtherMinds two-day festival of the chamber music of Henry Cowell. I wanted to go to this so badly I begged to review it. I love Henry Cowell's music: he is one of my three or four favorite American composers. But his work doesn't get played much – George Cleve once programmed one of his symphonies, and when it was over there was as close to complete silence in the audience, except from me, as was compatible with politeness – so performances need to be sought out with vigor.

As I wrote in the review, Cowell is the experimental modernist who's fun to listen to, because he's interested in new sounds for the music they can make, not just to be obnoxious or to "push the envelope" for its own sake. Modernist dogma holds that Cowell, like George Antheil, turned blandly conservative in his later years, but the OtherMinds performers love all his music comminglingly, and don't divide him into periods. They find the conservative roots in his early music and the radical echoes in his later work.

There were two concerts on successive nights, both held in small obscure venues out in the middle of nowhere with no street lights. Thursday's concert, at a Presbyterian church in the upper-crust horse-country hills above Cowell's home town of Menlo Park, was the better event. The music was more interesting – little of it was new to me, but one piece I hadn't known was the "United" String Quartet, which absolutely floored me and which I would have paid the Colorado Quartet to repeat in its entirety immediately – and the venue was also a big plus. The acoustics were excellent, soft but clear, and the visuals were great: the back wall was glass, with floodlights illuminating a grove of redwood trees just outside.

Friday's concert was one of those events that you wish had been a little less deeply memorable than it was. For one thing, it was at the chapel of San Francisco's Presidio. The Presidio, now a park and formerly an army base since first established by the Spanish in 17-ought-something, is a figurative island of twisty mountainous rurality just below the Golden Gate Bridge. To find a previously unknown location in it in the dark is a challenge even to this master navigator. When I finally got there, it proved to be an imitation Spanish mission with damp, nasty acoustics. The same mezzo whose Cowell songs had been so pearly fine in the church the previous evening sounded screechy and horrid in the same repertoire here.

Nor was the evening well laid out. It was preceded by a panel discussion, which seemed to mostly consist of a couple really old guys reminiscing about wild parties with Cowell and John Cage in New York in the 40s. I guess you had to have been there. The concert was supposed to start at 8, but it may have been late – I didn't check my watch – and for some reason it didn't end until nearly 11:30. Three and a half hours? It didn't seem that long. Set of Five for violin, piano, and assorted percussion is a great work -

liveavatar who was with me really liked it – but the sound was out of balance and the piano and percussion clashed uneasily for dominance. The violin and piano sonata, even though it resurrected the weird thumping sounds Cowell had invented for a piano piece he titled Sinister Resonance, and the String Quartet No. 5 were late Cowell at his blander. The songs, as I noted, sounded awful through no fault of the performers. The only part that really sounded good was Cowell's complete organ music – four pieces of it – which unfortunately was also not his most compelling work.

Saturday I went not so far on a different errand. If you were at WFC you may have seen a slightly-built young bearded man conspicuously carting around a large cello case with him. His name is Jonathan Erman, I already knew him slightly, and he was carrying the cello because he was also going to rehearsals for the thirteen-instrument version of Copland's Appalachian Spring Suite, which was finally performed in Palo Alto on what happened to be Copland's birthday. For a non-professional ensemble it was an excellent performance, mostly in tune, firmly rhythmic, and full of color, the highlight of the concert. This also featured, from mostly different players, a somewhat wayward but well-constructed performance of Brahms's Op. 88 string quintet, and a rather more wayward and entirely featureless performance of Mozart's K. 478 piano quartet. Mozart is harder to play well than most other composers, and this amply demonstrated it.

Sunday afternoon I got an emergency call from my editor: could I rush back up to Palo Alto and cover a concert of a cappella contemporary choral music? Rather out of my normal zone of expertise, I should bloody well say, but I was game, and here's the result.