Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Four years ago, I attended the last performance of San Francisco Opera's production of Cosi fan tutte, having been persuaded by a review by Lisa of the Iron Tongue. Yesterday, I attended the last performance of Opera San José's production of Cosi fan tutte, having been persuaded by a review by Lisa of the Iron Tongue.

I found it a less ideally superb performance than San Francisco's, though all the ingredients were good. Certainly there was some excellent singing on display. Soprano Emily Michiko Jensen as Fiordiligi (she's going on to play the title role in Madame Butterfly in their next production) shone the brightest with some powerhouse arias. But I like duets and ensemble numbers best in opera, and for me the highlight of the entire piece was the duet in which Guglielmo (baritone Ricardo José Rivera) wooed Dorabella (mezzo Joanne Evans) in Act 2. Their low voices blended perfectly together. Rivera has an impressively powerful voice, stronger and deeper even than that of Dale Travis as Don Alfonso. Were it not for Travis's age, I'd have suggested they exchange roles.

Nicole Koh as Despina was not only a good physical comedian, she was able to express comedy in her singing voice as well. That leaves Jonghyun Park, a good clear tenor, as Ferrando. Sets and costumes were basic 18C; the men's disguises were more than a little thin. Assistant conductor Noah Lindquist led this performance.

The gimmick of this production was having the audience vote, online during intermission, on how the characters would pair off at the end. In this performance they went with their original partners, which is what the text says; but I wonder how it would have been handled had they all split up or the men had gone off together, which were two of the other options. Maybe it would have looked like the end of a performance of Measure for Measure I once saw, in which Isabella spurns the Duke's hand and walks offstage. But that would have been a pretty sour ending for this production of Cosi, whose director said he was seeking a return to the comedy at the end.

Many years ago, San Francisco Performances put on a series of morning concerts which I attended. The Alexander String Quartet would play one or two of Shostakovich's string quartets (or sometimes, with guests, another of his chamber works), preceded by a lecture on (theoretically) that part of Shostakovich's career and those particular works, by music historian Robert Greenberg. It took three years to go through the entirety of the subject, but I went to them all and increased my familiarity with the repertoire.

But though this successful series was followed by many more with the same personnel on other composers, I didn't go to any more. After three years, I'd had enough of Greenberg's mannered, detail-clogged, and over-interpretive lecturing style, and I wasn't fond enough of the Alexander Quartet to overcome this.

But now things have changed. The Alexanders have hung up their bows, and the Esmé Quartet, of which I'm very fond indeed, is replacing them. This year's series is four concerts - that's not too many - on the major quartets (and quintet) of Schubert's, and yesterday was the first. They're not going in chronological order: this week's piece was the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet. Greenberg's lecture was as mannered and detail-clogged as ever, but at least the interpretation made sense. This work, he said, is haunted by death, which is why Schubert quoted from his song on the subject - not to recycle material (Schubert hardly needed to do that) but to convey meaning. But, Greenberg said, the finale is not a dance of death as many claim, but offers consolation and acceptance, as does Death in the last verse of the song.

The Esmé sat on stage during all of this, playing excerpts of the quartet for illustrative points. Then, after intermission, they played the whole work. It was not as violently intense as some do it, but this meant the lighter third and fourth movements were as satisfactory as the larger, darker first two. The sound was crisp and slightly metallic. The players added expression with pauses and dips in intensity. It was gratifying to hear.

I occupied mid-day with a quest I may tell you about later, and then landed in Walnut Creek for the evening with the season's first concert by the California Symphony. This was a program of pops classics, a framing confirmed by conductor Donato Cabrera's increasing tendency to yammer from the podium. Gershwin's An American in Paris had colorful enough tone color, but the tenor of the piece was dull after SFS's magnificent show last week. To be fair, this is how the work usually sounds to me. Ravel's Boléro worked better, and his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was marred only by the tendency of some of the wind soloists to swallow their phrases.

From Scott Fogelsong's pre-concert lecture I learned something about the Ravel Pictures I hadn't known. The orchestration was commissioned by Boston Symphony music director Serge Koussevitsky, who kept exclusive performing rights for his lifetime, despite clamors by others to play it. Which explains something I'd wondered: why there are so many other orchestrations of Pictures, and why most of them sound just like Ravel's.

I'm trying to catch up with light bulbs. Once there were incandescent bulbs, which looked like this:

Then we were all encouraged to abandon them and take up LED bulbs, which initially looked sort of like this:

This took some getting used to, but I did.
But then I was just in the hardware store looking, for the first time in a while, for new bulbs, and found that now the LED bulbs are the same shape as the old incandescent bulbs, just with different insides. They look rather like this:

These are the right ones, right? I'm just trying to catch up here.

1) placing this week's pickup grocery order on the store's website

and

2) listening to a lecture on Zoom sponsored by the local public library.

The lecture is by a comp sci prof named Dr. Shaolei Ren, and is on the environmental impacts of AI servers. Which appear to be gargantuan. So much so that Dr. Ren had to keep saying he's not anti-AI, he just thinks we should have a clear-eyed view of their impact. So: gobbling up more water than the rest of the county combined, and spewing carcinogenic air pollutants across borders. Be particularly careful if you're downwind of Loudoun County, Virginia, which seems to be the AI server capital of the country. Downwind of it is Montgomery County, Maryland.

It's Erev Rosh Hashanah (for the year 5786 A.M.), the equinox and thus the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere, and Bilbo's and Frodo's birthdays, all on the same day. What bliss!

I did it. Rising from my bed of recuperation, I ventured up to the City for my first SFS concert of The Season Without A Music Director. This required two forms of public transit as well as a lot of driving, and my first eating out since early August. The meal was a little iffy - even ordering a smaller than previously customary dinner, I still overestimated how much I'd be able to eat - but everything else went OK.

And I got to hear a stunningly effective concert under guest conductor James Gaffigan. At least so far in its travails, SFS hasn't lost any of its MTT-given snazz. That was on vivid display in this program, four pieces of sophisticated 20C urban Americana.

The excitement kicked off with a gratifyingly tight and exciting performance of Gershwin's Concerto in F. Soloist Hélène Grimaud, dressed in sparkles, dazzled visually as well as audibly. I've called her the Argerich of her generation, and she demonstrated that pizazz. The outer movements were big and brash, which is surely how the composer wanted it. Gaffigan was clearly fully into it on the podium. But even more pleasing was the Adagio, which simply burst with sardonic New York color. The players knew just how jazzy they needed to be. At the end of the work, Gaffigan's first acknowledgment was to rush to the back of the stage to shake hands with the principal trumpet.

Gershwin's An American in Paris, which I've never much liked, was almost as satisfying, shining equally brightly with the same colorful sass, and again Gaffigan shook hands with the trumpeter. Duke Ellington's Harlem has a different style but worked to the same effect with even more jazz stylings, as much as was called for.

I only wish these had preceded instead of followed the one new and unfamiliar (to me) piece on the program, Carlos Simon's The Block, so I could have triangulated and better appreciated the style. As it was, the piece sounded like the answer to the question, What if the composer John Adams had been an urban ethnic?

The one odd clang to the concert came on noting from the program book previous-performances listing that SFS has already played each of these works within the last four years. Considering that, as others have noted, each of the works on the opening showcase concert last week had been played within the previous one year, the programming of last night's concert looks less bold and thematic and more timid and conservative. I think we're in for a lot of that this year.

I understand that the dentist needs to drill around in my tooth for two hours, but why do I have to be there when it happens? If there were such a thing as an out-of-body experience, now would be the time for it.