Meme from Elaine

Elaine Fine tagged me with the following meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

I waited to be home from work, where you'd be reading a few tasty lines from Head-First Java or worse. Instead, I give you this:

The common subject of these disparate assessments is Cesare Lombroso's theory of l'uomo delinquente--the criminal man--probably the most influential doctrine ever to emerge from the anthropometric tradition. Lombroso, an Italian physician, described the insight that led to his theory of innate criminality and to the profession he established--criminal anthropology. He had, in 1870, been trying to discover anatomical differences between criminals and insane men "without succeeding very well."

From The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould. The book immediately under it was The Rest is Noise, but I resisted. The book under that? Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories.

Matthew, David, Joshua, Patrick, and Carrie, you're it if you'd like to play.

Gibberish?

In his latest commentary stemming from Bernard Holland's George Perle CD review, ACD has this to say:

It's something much more fundamental: the lack of a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from work's beginning to end, which is to say the lack of the work's saying comprehensibly something beyond and exclusive of commentary on its own processes and methods which are — or ought to have been and be — but the mere tools used in its making.

And this (you should read the Justin Davidson quotation at Sounds & Fury):

To put the matter more bluntly and much less eloquently than Mr. Davidson, a musical composition absent a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from beginning to end is gibberish, and not music.

(Justin's point is quite a bit subtler and more suggestive than ACD's matter put more buntly.)

As in so many things, one's personal experience of music is one's own. It's not necessarily universal. I don't have problems following Carter's narrative. If you can't, it's not necessarily Carter's fault.

I don't have a problem with the outright dislike of any particular style of music. We all have our own ears and preferences. I know people who can't follow a Mozart symphony and others who can't follow Wagner. As I've posted, I couldn't deal with St. Francois d'Assisse. I just don't happen to think it's Messiaen's fault.

Catching Up

Concerts, links, etc.

• Molly Sheridan, blogger! Read her new ArtsJournal Blog, Mind the Gap.


• I went to the Alan Gilbert program at SFS a few weeks ago. What do you know - Marc Geelhoed's suggestion, The Great Nielsenist, turned out to be exactly right. The Steven Stucky curtain-raiser, Son et Lumiere, was pleasant but insubstantial. Richard Goode's account of a Mozart piano concerto (no. 17?) was competently uninteresting. The Nielsen, Symphony No. 2, The Four Temperaments, blew everything else away, with Nielsen's characteristic energy and wit. It's good to have gotten a look at Gilbert in more repertory. So far, I've liked him in late 19th c. through 21st c. music, though I have found almost everyone else I've heard in that repertory more interesting an exciting, including MTT, Robertson, Alsop, and Foster.


• I also saw Dutoit's Don Quixote program. I'll go along with everyone who loved the Strauss, principal cellist Michael Grebanier, and acting principal violist Yun Jie Liu. I have to part company with both Georgia Rowe and Joshua Kosman on the subject of Manuel de Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show. I loved the acerbic wit and dry orchestration of the piece and think it suffered rather badly in concert presentation. The Symphony didn't project supertitles or, annoyingly, keep the lights up enough for us to read the libretto in the program booklet. I suspect it's quite funny when there's an actual puppet theater on stage. This program also reminded me that I need to read a biography of the notorious Princess de Polignac (nee Winaretta Singer, 20th child of sewing machine zillionaire Isaac Singer, a famous lesbian, etc., etc.).


• Bernard Labadie conducts an all-Haydn concert this week at San Francisco Symphony, including Symphony 100 ("Military") and two choral masterpieces, the Te Deum and the "Mass in Time of War."


• I have in hand a press release about the launch of HDtracks.com, described as "the world's first high resolution digital music site offering DRM-free music in multiple formats, as well as cover art and complete liner notes." It's from David and Norman Chesky, who brought you the excellent audiophile label Chesky. Stereophile covers the launch here.


• Plácido Domingo celebrates the 40th anniversary of his LA Opera debut on May 11 - Mother's Day - with a gala concert. Don't worry - James Conlon conducts. And if you don't hapopen to be in Los Angeles, you can catch the program on the silver screen. Go to Landmark Theaters for details.


• If you'd rather see a live performance on May 11, try the San Francisco Bach Choir's Venetian Brilliance, a program of music in the round by Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Schuetz, and Willaert. The prgram is being given twice: Saturday, May 10, 8 PM and Sunday, May 11, 4 PM, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Gough & Bush, SF. Prices are $28/$24 ($15 Student) in advance, $35/$30 ($20 Student) at the door.

He Beat Me to It

Tim Rutherford-Johnson has written a sharp takedown of Bernard Holland's ghastly George Perle review, which ran in the Times on Sunday, April 20. Yes, Mr. Holland, as a professional music critic, you should feel guilty about your intellectual laziness. I don't mind the fact that you dislike serial and atonal music. I mind a great deal that you don't have the honesty to recuse yourself from writing about music you're incapable of writing about in a fair manner. And whoever continues to assign you to review music for which you happily demonstrate your contempt should feel ashamed of himself.

And Marc Geelhoed beat me to dissecting Holland's review of the Stravinsky concert held in the Park Avenue Armory. I hope Alex Ross made it there so I can find out what it was really like. Perhaps chere La Cieca will do one of her famous pie charts of the Stravinsky concert.

Correction: Marc tells me that his posting was not tongue-in-cheek. He admires the sentence he called out. This means I'll have to dissect the review myself, but since it's 3 a.m. my time, for now I'll just say that the review says quite a bit more about the Armory's acoustics than the performances.

Sweet Spot

I went to the Bernard Labadie program at SF Symphony last night, a concert that, left to my own devices, I would have skipped entirely: Excerpts from Gluck's Orfeo, Ravel, Pavane pour une infante défunte, Mozart, Clarinet Concerto, Bizet, Symphony in C. But my girlfriend wanted to see it, so back in January I picked up a couple of inexpensive tickets during the sale.

The Gluck and Ravel were strictly snoozers. The Gluck is uninteresting to start with, and it was not strongly conducted. The Ravel was worse, startlingly lumpy and thick, and very un-French. Joshua Kosman's review noted that Labadie's strength is in peppier music, and he's right. The Gluck and Ravel suffered accordingly.

I'm glad to have heard the Symphony's new principal clarinetist, the wonderful Carey Bell, strut his stuff in a beautifully played, and marvelously ornamented, account of the Mozart, but I have heard the piece approximately five thousand times and couldn't bring myself to be especially enthused about hearing it yet again, no matter how masterful the performance. I'd rather hear Bell play the Nielsen or Lindberg or something else from the last hundred years. The Bizet is a fine piece, especially for a teenager, about on the scale of one of the first four Schubert symphonies and with a decided Gallic air to it. Still, it runs on a bit too long, and occasionally Bizet's inexperience shows. Some of the modulations are completely unprepared, as though he knew where he was going but not quite how to get there.

My problem with this program is not with any individual piece. It's that it could have been taken from a typical two-hour stretch of KDFC. It's comfortable and breezy, nothing challenging. It's all music most of us have heard a little too often. Other than when Carey Bell was playing, it never quite got my full attention.

There was one unexpected benefit, though: by some miracle my randomly-assigned seats in the second tier were sonic perfection for the evening's orchestral configuration of about 30 to 40 players. The strings were always clearly audible, all of them; the orchestral sound transparent. It makes me wonder if one of the problems in Davies is that it's acoustically balanced for a small orchestra, not a full-sized symphony; I hears lots of the big-orchestra pieces there, and they almost always blare a bit and sound poorly balanced and blended unless I'm in the orchestra or terrace.

So, for those times when a reduced orchestra is in use, remember this: Section GG, Row F, Seats 10 and 12.

Arrived in the Mail

The Complete Recordings of Marie Delna and Selected Recordings of Jeanne Marié De’Lisle, only weeks after I received the Grieg, Saint-Saëns, Pugno, and Diémer piano set, which also includes Massenet and Debussy.

This means the Marston mystery release is up next.

At ArkivMusic

I buy CDs at ArkivMusic for a number of reasons: great sales, good prices, and the availability of out-of-print sets. They've negotiated deals with some major labels to press-on-demand a range of otherwise unavailable sets. That's how I got my copy of Satyagraha, for example.

I get email from ArkivMusic once or twice a week, and usually have to bang my head against the wall a few times before clicking Delete, since I already have dozens of sets I've never heard. Currently tempting me is a boxed set of orchestral works by Mexican composers. Back, back, I say!

Not tempting me, because I already own the set, is John Eliot Gardiner's Schumann symphony set, with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. This set should, however, be tempting you. They're first-class performances in excellent sound, - and that ORR! The set includes the marvelous Konzertstück for Four Horns, both versions of the Fourth Symphony, and the "Zwickau" symphony. How can you possibly go wrong, for $29.99?

Drool

The 2008 Proms schedule.

Jerry Kuderna at the Hillside Club: Carter, Nin-Culmell, and Others

The pianist Jerry Kuderna is playing one fantastic program at Berkeley's Hillside Club this Friday, April 11, 2008:

Two Centenaries: Elliott Carter and Joaquin Nin-Culmell

Claude Debussy: Etudes (1915)
Pour les arpeges composees
Pour les cinq doigts

Milton Babbitt: Tableaux (1973)

Elliott Carter: Night Fantasies

Joaquin Nin-Culmell: Tonadas (selections) (1957-1972)

Federico Mompou: Musica Callada (selections) (1959-1971)


This is for the bargain price of $15! I can't be there, but maybe you can:

Admission $15 ($10 for HSC members and Seniors)
The Berkeley Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street
Berkeley 94709
Info: (510) 845-1350

Pulitzer Prizes, 2008 (III)

In connection with an article I'm working on, Columbia University sent me a complete list of all the jurors for the music prize. If you've ever wondered who decides on the winners of this extremely visible prize, wonder no more. The (slightly ragged-looking) table below lists all Pulitzer music prize jurors since 1943 and how many times they served.

Clifton, Chalmers	17
Ward, Robert	15
Kastendieck, Miles	7
Schuller, Gunther composer	7
Baker, David N.	6
Hamilton, David	6
Harbison, John,	6
Schwantner, Joseph, composer	6
Copland, Aaron	5
Luening, Otto	5
Wernick, Richard	5
Lang, Paul Henry	4
Page, Tim,	4
Persichetti, Vincent,	4
Bassett, Leslie	3
Bergsma, William	3
Bernheimer, Martin	3
Dello Joio, Norman	3
Hume, Paul	3
Kirchner, Leon	3
Lewis, John	3
Lowens, Irving	3
Peterson, Wayne, composer, professor emeritus, San Francisco State University	3
Wyner, Yehudi, professor of music, Brandeis University	3
Abrams, Muhal Richard, pianist and composer	2
Cowell, Henry	2
Crumb, George, professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania	2
Druckman, Jacob, composer, (Chairman) of composition dept., school of music, Yale University	2
Gideon, Miriam, composer	2
Guzelimian, Ara, senior director and artistic advisor, Carnegia Hall, (Chairman)	2
Husa, Karel, composer, professor of music, Cornell University	2
Kolodin, Irving, music editor, Saturday Review	2
Kriegsman, Alan M., dance critic, Washington Post	2
Lockwood, Norman	2
Martino, Donald	2
Monson, Ingrid	2
Perle, George	2
Porter, Quincy	2
Reich, Howard	2
Reynolds, Roger	2
Rouse, Christopher	2
Sollberger, Harvey	2
Trimbel, Lester	2
Webster, Beveridge	2
Weisgall, Hugo	2
Zwilich, Ellen Taafe	2
Andres, Dwight	1
Argento, Dominick	1
Babbitt, Milton	1
Blier, Steven	1
Bolcom, William	1
Craft, Robert,	1
Davidovsky, Mario	1
Davidson, Justin	1
Davis, Peter G	1
Eyer, Ronald	1
Fine, Vivian	1
Finney, Ross Lee	1
Freed, Isadore	1
Hanson, Howard	1
Hartke, Stephen	1
Henahan, Donal J.	1
James, Philip	1
Kalodin, Irving	1
LaMontaine, John	1
Ran, Shulamit	1
Rhodes, Willard	1
Riegger, Wallingford	1
Rockwell, John	1
Sargent, Winthrop	1
Schaefer, John	1
Scherman, Thomas C.	1
Schuman, William	1
Sherman, Thomas B.,	1
Steinberg, Michael	1
Stucky, Steven	1
Swed, Mark	1
Thomson, Virgil	1
Tower, Joan	1
Wagenaar, Bernard	1
Wagner, Melinda	1
Wallenstein, Alfred	1
Wen Chung, Chou	1
Wilson, Olly	1
Wuorinen, Charles	1
Zinman, David	1

Updated, April 10: Removed duplicate row.

Pulitzer Prizes, 2008 (II)

I'm having a fine time right now listening to David Lang's Pulitzer Prize winning composition, The Little Match Girl Passion; for the recording and information about the piece, go here.

Pulitzer Prizes, 2008 (I)

Various and sundry bloggers have mentioned that The Rest is Noise was a nominated finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, but I have not yet seen discussion of the fact that Gene Weingarten's Joshua-Bell-the-Busker story actually won a prize. I'm now in the position of saying to people who loved the story when it ran "well, it was badly flawed and was roundly criticized by classical music writers and bloggers." I would like to provide links to blog postings or articles about the story; if you have some handy, or remembering having your head your hands over it, please email me or post 'em here.

Zzzzzzz....

A day or so ago, I received email from the Royal Opera House, complete with lovely embedded graphics, about the upcoming premiere of Harrison Birtwhistle's new opera, The Minotaur. There was a link, prominently labeled SEE THE TRAILER.

I clicked the link. At the other end, there's a YouTube video of the librettist, David Harsent, talking. And talking and talking and talking, interspersed with an occasional still photo that I presume to have been taken at rehearsals for the opera. Yes, it's an opera, and the Royal Opera has chosen a talking head to represent the piece in the trailer.

People! It's an opera! Put up some of the music! And even some video from the rehearsals! Whatever you do, do not bore your (potential) audience!!

Hits

So, what I think ACD's methodology shows is that a smallish group of bloggers links to me often enough to get me up up up in his standings. The other interesting measurement, of course, is hits. See my previous postings for his reasons that this can't be reliably compared.

But I thought I'd put out what I do know about my hits. Now, I do not use Google Analytics , which is incredibly complicated and geared for users of AdWords and AdSense. (Maybe I shouldn't admit that in public, or maybe I should go install it.) I don't even use the paid version of SiteMeter, so I get comparatively stripped-down statistical information.

In a good week, I get up to 140 hits, with maybe 175 or 200 page views. Sometimes that sinks down to 85 to 100 hits per week, if I'm not blogging much. The free version of SiteMeter doesn't seem to provide a count of unique visitors, which I would take to mean unique originating IP addresses.

Alex Ross posted some time ago - maybe it's in the About info at Noise - that he gets 2,000 hits per day. Matthew Guerrierri and Opera Chic have both posted information indicated readerships far larger than mine.

You can see why I'm skeptical about being listed as no. 12.

Here's the latest report from SiteMeter; there'll be a new one tomorrow:

                    -- Site Summary ---                  
       Visits

         Total ....................... 54,384         
         Average per Day ................. 99         
         Average Visit Length .......... 1:13         
         This Week ...................... 692         

       Page Views

         Total ....................... 75,135         
         Average per Day ................ 130         
         Average per Visit .............. 1.3         
         This Week ...................... 911         



               --- Visits this Week ---               
    Day
Hour  3/20   3/21   3/22   3/23   3/24   3/25   3/26   Total
---- ----- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
1       3      3      0      0      3      1      1      11
2       3      2      1      1      1      2      2      12
3       3      1      2      1      2      1      1      11
4       0      0      0      2      1      0      2       5
5       3      1      2      1      2      1      2      12
6       2      2      3      1      0      6      2      16
7       2      3      6      2      4      5      5      27
8       7      7      3      4      4      4      8      37
9       6      6      6      5      7      6      7      43
10      10      5      6      4      6      8      9      48
11       7      3      5      6      7      8      6      42
12       1      4      4      9      8      7      4      37
13       6      6      2      7      8      4      8      41
14       2      3      3      2      7      6      7      30
15       4      5      5      1      4      1      6      26
16      10     11      4      4      3      5      3      40
17       4      9      4      4      7      7      6      41
18       5      2      2      7      8      6      6      36
19       6      4      7      3      8      3      5      36
20       5      3      3      5      2      4      9      31
21       7      7      2      3      2     14      9      44
22       3      0      2      1      3      3      4      16
23       5      5      1      3      2      4      5      25
24       0      2      5      4      3      6      5      25
 ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
    104     94     78     80    102    112    122     692


             --- Page Views this Week ---             
    Day
Hour  3/20   3/21   3/22   3/23   3/24   3/25   3/26   Total
---- ----- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
1       3      4      0      0      3      1      2      13
2       4      6      1      1      1      3      2      18
3       4      1      3      1      2      4      1      16
4       0      0      0      2      1      0      2       5
5       4      1      5      1      2      1      2      16
6       4      3      4      1      0      9      2      23
7       2      6     14      2      4      5      7      40
8       9      7      5      5      4      4     10      44
9       8     10      9      8      8      8     10      61
10      11      5      6      5      6     10     10      53
11      10      3     12      9      8      9      9      60
12       1      8      5     11     10     10      9      54
13       7      8      2      7     11      4     18      57
14       2      4      3      2      7      6      8      32
15       4      7      6      1      4      1      7      30
16      14     12      6      4      3      8      4      51
17       6     25      5      5     11     12      8      72
18      11      3      2      8      8     11      6      49
19       7      4      8      3     10      4      7      43
20       5      3      4      6      3      5     13      39
21       7      7      5      3      2     17      9      50
22       3      0      3      1      3      3      7      20
23      10      6      1      3      2      6      5      33
24       0      2      5      7      3      7      8      32
 ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
    136    135    114     96    116    148    166     911

I Would Do It Differently, Myself

A.C. Douglas has posted a list of what he's calling the top 50 classical music blogs. He has used an idiosyncratic means of determining the ranking, based on a listing of incoming links "generated by Google."

If I were ranking any group of blogs, I'd do it by hits, which give an indication of the size of a blog's readership. That's a better gauge than incoming links. There is just no way this blog should be ranked above parterre box and Opera Chic, which I would guess have a readership an order of magnitude greater than mine.

Finally!

San Francisco Symphony told me last September that a redesign of their web site was in the works. It is finally on line, and a vast improvement it is: better layout, better typography, much prettier, and best of all, much, much easier to navigate.

I would take issue with the amount of orange on white print, and somehow the search box has gone missing. Well, it didn't always work right. I remember searching on "Thomas" and getting two results. Maybe a new, improved search box is in the works.

On Right Now, As In, NOW

To celebrate the fact that Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner are finally singing together, the Met is streaming Tristan und Isolde live. Go to the Met home page and click the obvious graphic. You need RealPlayer (sorry).

Peter Gelb just told the audience that DVo & HeppB are both singing - hooray! The originally-scheduled Brangaene seems to be ill, however, so first-cast member Michelle DeYoung is taking the performance.

Whoa.

Today's Times contains an amazing article about the reconstruction of a sound recording made in 1860.

Yes, you read that right: 1860, seventeen years before Thomas Edison received his phonograph patent. The catch here is that the recording, in the form of a phonautogram, was never intended for playback. It's a visual record of sound, made by a device called a phonautograph. Here's how the Times describes the phonautograph, which is illustrated in the article:

[The] device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.

Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley Labs figured out how to interpret the sounds thus recorded - a fragment of the song "Au Claire de la Lune." The article includes an mp3 version of the phonautogram, which is about on par with the Mapleson cylinders for audio quality, as well as a perfectly lovely 1931 rendition by an unidentified soprano.

The oldest phonautograms known are from 1853 and 1854!

If you're interested in old recordings - and who isn't? - the Association for Recorded Sound Collections is having its annual convention at Stanford this year, starting, uh, today - and there will be a session devoted to the phonautograph and phonautograms. I wish someone had told me about this a month ago, because I would have planned to attend some of the sessions.

In any event, read, and enjoy, the thrilling detective story that is the Times article.

Oh, Just Review It

Tim Mangan and Justin Davidson were sent the same CD, then asked by email not to review it. Tim revealed that the CD is the Ahn Trio's Lullaby for My Favorite Insomniac, which certainly sounds like the easy-listening version of whatever the Ahn normally performs.

70,000!

I finally started reading the most talked-about book of 2007, and today I find that there are 70,000 copies in print. Uh, wow! Congratulations to the proud author.

Needless to Say, I'm Not Quoted

KDFC releases the results of a listener survey, and I have my head in my hands.

Even the Lazy

Bernard Holland reviews the Brentano Quartet in today's Times - well, no, actually he doesn't. The quartet is allowed only 97 of the 307 words in the review. The other 210 are ruminations on the matter of late style in Brahms, Shostakovich, and Mendelssohn, and those 97 words tell me only that the Brentano is young and energetic. Holland closes with this gem:

One awaits the Brentano’s late period. As excess energy wears off with the years, I think it will settle into the possibility that music making, like life, is more than trying hard; it also incorporates the easygoing, the calm, the gently ironic — even the lazy.

Compare and Contrast 8

Reviews of Kaija Saariaho's string quartet Terra Memoria:

• Bernard Holland in the Times
• Me, in San Francisco Classical Voice
• Richard Scheinin in the Murk, best of all

Is It Too Late?

There's something truly operatic about watching a powerful public official tumble into the abyss, his promising career wrecked by a scandal.

But I've been wondering if 48 is too late to start a singing career, because Eliot Spitzer may shortly be in a position to make his Met debut singing soprano.

A Family Affair

I picked up tickets for this week's San Francisco Symphony concert with some trepidation, because on the program were two works by MTT hisownself. The last piece of his I'd heard, the overblown, 40-minute Island Music, for two marimbas, had sounded like something produced by an undergraduate composer who'd listened to way, way, way too much late 70s Glass and Reich. Not only that, it sat on a concert between masterpieces, a selection of Berio's tiny, marvelous violin duets and Janacek's monumental Glagolitic Mass.

Not to worry: last night's selections between them were half the length of Island Music. One of them, the cheery occasional piece Agnegram, was sufficiently amusing, with its Bernstein-like gestures, klaxons, and jokes, that I'd be happy to hear it again. It's a superb little curtain-raiser.

Notturno, written in honor of the now-retired Paul Renzi, long the principal flutist of the San Francisco Symphony, is another matter. MTT's comments indicate that it's an hommage to a type of work that has fallen out of favor, the light virtuoso showpiece. The composer cites hearing concerts by Jascha Heifetz and other performers of that era, on which he'd heard this kind of chestnut. He was aiming for a similar feel.

You need two things to make this type of work convincing: the ability to write an unselfconscious showpiece and a virtuoso who can bring it off with perfect aplomb and plenty of panache, without breaking a sweat and making it all sound very, very easy.

In an age of irony, meeting that first requirement is tough, and Notturno doesn't make it. On one hand, each section is derived from some past style of popular showpiece. First the English countryside goes by, and you think of Ralph Vaughn Williams. Then there's a tarantella and you think of sunny Italy. Then there's a section with Spanish rhythms, and you think of Bizet and how much better he was at writing Spanish-style music. You also think of De Falla and his superb settings of Spanish folk songs. Toward the end, you start thinking it's too long. If you're going to try to pull this kind of piece off, you need to do it better than Notturno does it.

On the other hand, you read the program notes and discover the piece has a subtext about the life of a performer. I'm glad I read the program notes after the concert. Advice to the budding composer: some things are better left unsaid. Resist the temptation to talk too much about your own music, especially when you are really good when talking about music by other composers.

Then there's that second requirement, the virtuoso performer with fingers of steel. Well, Paula Robison played all the notes, as far as I could tell, but the rest? She flubbed attacks left and right, not quite landing squarely on an astonishing number of pitches. Lots of air in her tone, which was nothing special to begin with, and I'm not talking about the section where the flutist is clearly supposed to play with a lot of air in the tone, trying to sound faintly bluesy. Tim Day, the Symphony's principal flutist, would have played this piece much better.

The first half of the concert closed a meandering and unfocussed performance of Sibelius's compact Seventh Symphony. A friend tells me he heard pastel colors and a song all of one piece; I heard shapelessness, lack of forward movement, and a conductor without much feel for the work's tricky rhythmic organization. Esa-Pekka Salonen - you knew I'd say this - played it much more persuasively in Los Angeles this past October.

I'd like to say that my seat in the center terrace had something to do with how the Sibelius came off, because of the wide variation in sound quality in different sections of Davies. But the Shostakovich Ninth, which closed the program, sounded crisp and clear and focussed. Whatever happened in the Sibelius was what MTT intended.

And hearing the Shostakovich was like listening to another conductor entirely, one fully in charge and in command of the composer's rhetoric. And an entertaining rhetoric it is, all cheeky circus music in the outer movements, with much beautiful solo work for the winds in the inner movements. Hooray for Carey Bell, Catherine Payne, and especially principal bassoonist Stephen Paulson; they were all great. Joshua Kosman's review gets it just right, and in more detail.