calimac

The reason for the posting gap between covering last week's San Francisco Symphony program and this week's is that I've been buried - and still am - in my part of copy-editing the papers for the next issue of Tolkien Studies. This is a major task that has been occupying all three editors. There are authors who have trouble with - well, I shouldn't say the things they have trouble with, but they have trouble with them. But that leads to the first of my catch-up news items, which is:

1. I should say, since there have been a couple of inquiries, that Tolkien Studies is alive and well. It's just delayed. A combination of various personal difficulties on top of never having quite recovered from the dent in our schedule caused by the 2022 supplement are the cause, but the 2024 (tsk) issue should have gone to the publisher (more processing time) within a month from now.

2. Last week, B. and I went to hear the San Jose Symphonic Choir give its centenary concert of singing Beethoven's Ninth, and I reviewed it for the Daily Journal. The singing and playing ranged from excellent to not so excellent, but we had a good time of it. This was the fullest I've seen the Mountain View CPA in a long time, and the fullest I've seen its parking garage ever. I had to park out on the street two blocks away, and I was lucky to find that.

3. Last November, when I was in LA (and the National Guard wasn't), I saw a delightfully clever performance of Sondheim's rarely-staged Pacific Overtures, his musical about the opening of Japan. So when I saw that another Asian-American theater company was going to do it in San Francisco, I decided to go to that one too. Friday was it, after another long day (and a drive up the coast from Santa Cruz). Follow-ups like this are rarely a success, and this wasn't. The performers were all of professional quality, but the show was bland and dull in comparison to the bright and witty I saw in LA.

3a. Near the theater, which is in the Mission District, are two Mexican restaurants I queried for dinner beforehand. Both advertise tamales, one in their menu, the other actually is called a "Tamale Parlor." Neither has any tamales. The one was out of them, the other - despite the name - doesn't even carry them. As a tamale-lover, I was very disappointed.

4. Were you under the impression that C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams wrote each other fan letters that crossed in the mail? Neither was I, but just in case you were, Sørina Higgins is out to correct you. Actually, Williams wrote, "If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed," and the conditional of this phrasing attracted Søri's attention. She thinks Williams was just being polite; he wouldn't have taken the trouble of writing a letter if Lewis hadn't written him first.
What she doesn't address is the peculiarity of Williams, who was an editor in the London branch, the commercial office, of the Oxford University Press, being asked to evaluate Lewis's book which was an academic treatise being published by the Oxford branch, the academic office, of the Press, although he did suggest what was eventually used as the book's title, The Allegory of Love. What I've read elsewhere, though I can't remember where, is a suggestion that Williams being given Lewis's book was a stitch-up concocted by Humphrey Milford, the Publisher of the Press (manager of the London office, and Williams's supervisor) and R.W. Chapman, Secretary to the Delegates (manager of the Oxford office, who knew Lewis, an Oxford don) in collaboration, as they thought - quite astutely - that Williams and Lewis would be great friends if they ever met. That, by Lewis's own testimony (Preface to Essays Presented to CW), it was Chapman who first mentioned Williams's novels to Lewis is another clue.
Anyway, if this is true, then Williams's "admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence" that brought them together should have been pitched at a slightly lower level.

For his last-ever program as music director of the San Francisco Symphony (though he didn't know it would be his last-ever when he scheduled it), Esa-Pekka Salonen chose Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, big enough to make a concert by itself. Ordinarily I'd skip out on an all-Mahler program, but I decided to attend this one (first of three performances) not just because it was EPS's last, but because I was so impressed with his interpretation of Mahler's Third at the end of last year's season.

And it wasn't as revelatory, but still extremely interesting. As with the Third, EPS divided the Second up into two unanticipated parts.

The dramatic and somber (with placid interludes) first movement of the Second is the only piece of Mahler's which can be played to sound as if it might have been written by Mahler's mentor Anton Bruckner. EPS did not direct it that way. Instead, he had it sound like the anti-Bruckner: the sound was bright, clean-cut, and almost crystal-clear throughout. If it was dark at all, it came in touches where it was creepy in the way that Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre is creepy.

The result of this is that the delicate and wistful second movement intermezzo, which is intended to be as incongruously different from the first movement as possible, sounded just like it. Placid and calm? Yes, just like the interludes in the first movement. Loud and dramatic moments? (Yes, it has them: this is Mahler, after all.) As clear and simply bright as the first movement's.

So the first two movements were the ad hoc part 1 of Salonen's version of the Second. The third movement scherzo turned out to be the beginning of part 2. The climax at the end of this was the first loud passage in the symphony to be at all rough and chaotic or, to put it more bluntly, to sound as if it had been composed by Mahler. The long instrumental opening of the choral finale, written as something of a return to the first movement's approach, was here hairier and irregular and much more like the end of the scherzo.

What most impressed with the finale was EPS's command of the extremes of dynamics. At the choral climax, the SFS Chorus, some 140 strong, was beefy and powerful enough to stride over the full noise of the orchestra, and the final instrumental-only conclusion made an even mightier roar with multiple sets of timpani banging away and the organ at full throttle, the way I always want to hear it at the climaxes of works like Saint-Saëns's Organ Symphony or Holst's "Uranus" from The Planets.

On the other hand, the quiet was really quiet. It's difficult for a large chorus to sing as intensely quietly as Mahler directs its opening passage to be (ppp), but this ensemble managed that hush. The instrumental side could be just as quiet. EPS managed the passages with an offstage band to come across so softly that they were in perfect volume balance with active onstage performers of nothing but one flute and one piccolo.

Not to forget the work's two solo singers. Heidi Stober's soprano repeatedly rose beautifully out of the chorus, but even greater honors are due to acclaimed mezzo Sasha Cooke, who in addition to parts in the finale has a solemn and subdued prelude song, "Urlicht," between the scherzo and the finale, which she conveyed as sweet and coy in her powerful deep voice.

Huge applause afterwards for all concerned, including Chorus director Jenny Wong, who's rapidly establishing herself as the best director this choir has ever had. Unlike last week, EPS consented to take a couple of curtain calls by himself as well, though he insisted on taking them standing in the middle of the orchestra, somewhere between the second violins and violas, as if to emphasize he considers himself just one of the fabulous musicians on stage.

And thus concludes EPS's five-year tenure as Music Director of SFS. He'll turn 67 at the end of this month, a prime age for a conductor, and we could have had him for much longer if only incompetent and clueless management hadn't driven him to let his contract expire and leave. He's not returning as a guest next season and we might well never have him again. What a loss.