Several Thursdays ago I went to the Berkeley Symphony’s season finale in Zellerbach. They invited me, which was very nice of them, and since they offered me two tickets I was going to take ABW. Her back went out the day before the concert and since she could barely walk to the bathroom she sure wasn’t going to make it across the Bay on BART, so that was a shame. I tried to find another taker, but of course when most people hear that something is on a weeknight and doesn’t start until 8:00 they’ll just turn you down flat. I did end up making productive use of the second ticket, giving it to a friend who was trapped, as he put it, “next to a very large gentleman.” I was glad that I did not also qualify as very large, especially after my beer and pizza dinner at Jupiter, which was not only delicious, but helped to kill at least some of the time beforehand, pizza being one of those things that requires a fair amount of time. After that I moseyed over to Moe’s Books, where I spent about an hour (which still got me to Zellerbach about an hour before the concert started). I walked out of there with a copy of Thackeray’s Paris Sketch Book, Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree (romance among the parish choir!), Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead (relics!), and the New York Times Book Review, which I bought for the cover story on the new edition of Philip Larkin’s poems, an article which, I have just realized, has been sitting unread in the bag since I bought it, because that is the way my life is lived.
The concert was titled A Hungarian Excursion, though that only covered the Bartok and Kodaly works in the first half; the second half was the premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Holy Sisters, Part One. Conductor Joana Carneiro had injured her shoulder in a way that made conducting impossible, so Edwin Outwater stepped in at the last minute and did a wonderful job with what couldn’t have been an easy assignment, especially since there was no way he could have seen the Holy Sisters music ahead of time. I hadn't heard this orchestra before but was impressed by their sound. There were a couple of old women behind me who were the sort who had to comment compulsively on every obvious thing that happens around them but since they managed to keep it mostly under control during the music I was able to find them amusing and colorful rather than the first potential victims of a homicidal rage. They were quite taken with the dapper Mr Outwater and commented several times on how athletic he looked bounding up and down from the podium.
Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta was very attractive, but seemed like a pops piece to me, kind of light and flowing, with scenic countryside music and an ethnic flavor for those who like to latch on to that sort of thing. That was followed by Bartok’s dreamy Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. It seems to me I have heard this music somewhere else recently, but not as well played.
After the intermission we had the Frank piece, in which soprano Jessica Rivera, accompanied by the orchestra and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, sings (I’m quoting from the program) “Biblical texts arranged and adapted by Jose Tolentino de Mondonca (with further arrangements by Nilo Cruz and Gabriela Lena Frank)." The texts all center around women: Rachel, Sarah, Miriam the Prophetess, Hannah mother of Samuel, Mary of Magdala. Frank spoke beforehand. Sometimes an artist’s remarks are illuminating and interesting (and in fact I avoid readings unless the author is going to talk about and around his or her work; I mean, if it’s just reading the words on the page, I can stay home and do that myself). But generally I’m not a big fan of having composers telling us what they were trying to do when we could instead be listening to what they actually did. I also feel that if you’re not going to start your concert until 8:00, you shouldn’t take up time with this sort of thing. Frank seems very genial but I found her talk pointless, since it was all about how the piece came to be commissioned, in the sort of insidery tone that makes me feel very much like an outsider, and which is in any case mostly irrelevant to a listener, and anyway I had already read all the information in the program.
As for the piece itself, I enjoyed it, finding it smoothly flowing with a gentle radiance, but I also found it too unvaried in tone and mood for its length (roughly half an hour) and for the variety of women included. There was some vague reference in the talk or the program to the piece being about “women’s spirituality,” but the notion of some universal, one-size-fits-all spirituality generic to women strikes me as both improbable and uninteresting. Perhaps when Part Two is added the work will go in a different direction. The woman two seats over from me paged through her program for the duration, getting louder and louder with each flipped page. I have no idea what she was looking for, or if she ever found it, or why she was there at all when she was so afraid to listen.
(The pictures are all of the UC Berkeley campus.)
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