Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

A few days ago, we got a dismaying notice: our water would be turned off today for a period of 5 hours during the daytime. Some work needed to done on the valve controlling the whole complex.

If we were working, we could have been gone the entire period, but as it is, we're home. What if we needed to flush a toilet more than once? So we filled every pot, basin, and pitcher we have full of water, and prepared.

Didn't need to worry. About an hour into the 5-hour period I turned on a faucet just to check. It was running. I went out to where the complex's valve is and found a repairman. He said he was almost done. The 5-hour period was just cautionary in case something went really wrong.

The Menlo Festival ended on Saturday, and today saw the publication of my review of the previous Sunday's concert. It was put off a week because it was a vocal program and the previous week's issue was clogged with three opera reviews. I had my review of Cabrillo in that issue instead. The put-off publication meant I had an extra day to write the review, which I appreciated after having just finished up the Cabrillo one.

I don't have much to add to it. My editors cut my 875-word review down to 650 words, mostly by cutting detail and context, but they left all my main points intact, so despite a few minor added glitches, I count this as good editing.

That Sunday concert was the last time I went up to Menlo this year. All the free concerts and coaching sessions I wanted to hear are online, and it's less time-consuming (a major issue for me right now) to watch them online than go up there. As for the two remaining mainstage concerts I wanted to hear, I bought livestream tickets for those and also appreciated them from home. Unlike the free concerts which are up permanently, these are available only to purchasers and just for a few days.

But it's fortunate you don't have to be live, because the first one took place on Friday while I was at Cabrillo. It was the Viano Quartet, old favorites from when they won the Banff competition six years ago, doing a standard program that even included an encore, which Menlo never does. I liked their crisp and witty Haydn Op 76/5 and their dark and wretched Shostakovich Ninth better than their attempt at jollity in Mendelssohn's Op 44/1 or the wet late-Romantic sop of a very young Anton Webern's "Langsamer Satz" (which means "slow piece," in case the German title impressed you into thinking it indicated something significant).

The other concert, on Saturday, was a must-hear for me because it featured my two absolute favorites of all string chamber music for larger ensembles. Brahms's Op 18 Sextet was a good performance, but I missed the sly and coy elements that make for a great version. First violist Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu showed just a little of the burning grit that enlivened her playing of the second viola part the last time I heard this piece here, four years ago. Mendelssohn's Octet, on the other hand, was all that could be asked for. The players were sorted as two quartets in dialog, which is how Mendelssohn wrote the piece, and the two quartets showed slightly different tone colors. First violinist Benjamin Beilman put all the necessary passion into his solos and drove the rest of the ensemble in speed and energy - with an unusual dark and mysterious quality to the slow and quiet passages.

Also on the program was 180 beats per minute by Jörg Widmann, which I heard here eight years ago in a student performance, at which time I called it "a concise technobeat moto perpetuo with some minimalist sensibility." The professionals put more heft into it than the teenage students did, but not more fire. (The student performance is still online, so I could make the direct comparison.)

Now all is over, and it will be quiet for two weeks until the beginning of Banff, which I'm also attending online only.

Reported, the death of Jim Lovell, the astronaut who was the commander of Apollo 13, and one of the many heroes who saved that ill-fated mission. He lived to 97, same age as Tom Lehrer, and while I don't know how Lehrer did it, it's certainly true that you had to be incredibly fit and healthy to become an astronaut in Lovell's day, and most of them, those who weren't killed in accidents, had very long lives.

Still, Lovell was the last survivor of his group of nine who were picked in 1962, a group which also included Neil Armstrong. Apollo 13 was the last of his four spaceflights, a record at the time; he was also on two Gemini test flights, one of them with Buzz Aldrin, and the famous Apollo 8 ring-around-the-moon shot, in which he saw the Earth rising behind the Moon and encouraged Bill Anders to take that famous photo.

Lovell became additionally known as a result of the film of Apollo 13, in which he was played by Tom Hanks. I listened to Jim and Marilyn Lovell's commentary on the DVD of that film (are there still commentaries like that now that films have gone to streaming?), and Marilyn in particular was impressed by how many of Jim's mannerisms Hanks had picked up after a fairly brief personal acquaintance. Jim also pointed out, however, that he didn't look much like Tom Hanks, and wished he could have been played by Kevin Costner, because that's who he looked like, and I'd agree. That he looked like him, I mean; whether Costner would have done as good an acting job I'd prefer not to speculate on.