two lectures and a concert
Mar. 19th, 2006 07:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIt hardly registered when I was told that Calvin Trillin was giving a free talk at Stanford last Thursday. Free? I got there half an hour before showtime and found the auditorium already half-full. An elderly lady named Sandra Day O'Connor was in the front row.
Trillin looks like Carl Reiner, and sounds a bit like him too. He answered moderator and audience questions with his expected tangents and dry wit. To a serious question on journalists who invent their stories, he reminisced about the things he gets away with as a humorous columnist. An editor once asked him, "Did John Foster Dulles really say, 'You can't fool all the people all of the time, but you can give it your best shot'?"
Saturday afternoon (we're Reform, it's OK), Eric Kujawsky, conductor of a local community orchestra, gave a talk at the synagogue on Jewish composers - classical, Broadway, and film. When he stopped to see if the audience knew which film directors are associated with Bernard Herrmann and Danny Elfman, the wise guy who broke the dead silences by calling out the answers from the back row was me.
It was fun; I didn't learn much (except that Ligeti is Jewish), but Kujawsky brought along recorded excerpts from a number of pieces I hadn't heard. I'm shamed to say that, though I'm certainly aware of Louis Gottschalk (the first significant US-born orchestral/instrumental composer), I've never heard much of his music. From the evidence here, he was writing Gershwin-style jazz-flavored concert music in the 1860s. I'll have to get some of this.
Then, down to San Jose for a Symphony Silicon Valley program, grand finale of George Cleve's three-concert mini Mozart festival. This one was pretty much all vocal or choral, not what I normally go to the concert hall for, but once in a while is all right. Soloists from Opera San Jose sang excerpts from Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute in plummy tones. Then the Requiem with more soloists and the symphony chorale, which lacked bite. It's a much better work than one would guess from this performance. Cleve did one very intelligent thing: he rescued the Requiem from its trailing-off Süssmayr ending by tacking on the utterly beautiful (even in this performance) Ave verum Corpus that Mozart had written a few months earlier.
Trillin looks like Carl Reiner, and sounds a bit like him too. He answered moderator and audience questions with his expected tangents and dry wit. To a serious question on journalists who invent their stories, he reminisced about the things he gets away with as a humorous columnist. An editor once asked him, "Did John Foster Dulles really say, 'You can't fool all the people all of the time, but you can give it your best shot'?"
Saturday afternoon (we're Reform, it's OK), Eric Kujawsky, conductor of a local community orchestra, gave a talk at the synagogue on Jewish composers - classical, Broadway, and film. When he stopped to see if the audience knew which film directors are associated with Bernard Herrmann and Danny Elfman, the wise guy who broke the dead silences by calling out the answers from the back row was me.
It was fun; I didn't learn much (except that Ligeti is Jewish), but Kujawsky brought along recorded excerpts from a number of pieces I hadn't heard. I'm shamed to say that, though I'm certainly aware of Louis Gottschalk (the first significant US-born orchestral/instrumental composer), I've never heard much of his music. From the evidence here, he was writing Gershwin-style jazz-flavored concert music in the 1860s. I'll have to get some of this.
Then, down to San Jose for a Symphony Silicon Valley program, grand finale of George Cleve's three-concert mini Mozart festival. This one was pretty much all vocal or choral, not what I normally go to the concert hall for, but once in a while is all right. Soloists from Opera San Jose sang excerpts from Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute in plummy tones. Then the Requiem with more soloists and the symphony chorale, which lacked bite. It's a much better work than one would guess from this performance. Cleve did one very intelligent thing: he rescued the Requiem from its trailing-off Süssmayr ending by tacking on the utterly beautiful (even in this performance) Ave verum Corpus that Mozart had written a few months earlier.
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Date: 2006-03-20 09:16 am (UTC)"A Night in the Tropics" was the work we heard an excerpt of.