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All comments by Bob Johnson

A splendid concert. The Debussy was gorgeous, Prokofiev dramatic, and Stravinsky magnificent. I was amazed at the power and originality of the Firebird. The Rite of Spring is usually called his masterpiece but much of the innovation is already there in the Firebird. A performance like this shows why live performance can’t be matched by any recording.

A fascinating evening. It is time to acknowledge that the aleatoric art of the last century is dead, dead, dead. It was an interesting idea worth a try, but we have to acknowledge that the experiment is a failure. The John Cage piece was nearly unbearable to sit through. Twenty minutes of pointlessness is really hard to take. Because the intermission was then an hour the wise viewer would have put off coming until 9:30, when the music began. The Cowell was odd but very nice, a series of episodes, all of the interesting. Absolute Jest had some moments of heartbreaking beauty, and other sections of what has been called sewing machine music. But I think I need to her this incredibly complicated piece again to understand it. Varese exemplifies what some one has called the odd French combination of sophistication and naivety. Some of Ameriques is goofy and dated (that siren), but the last five minutes is immensely powerful, staggeringly great music. I am grateful that the SF Symphony did these pieces. Even the Cage serves to eliminate any romantic notions that Cage’s “music” is worth hearing.

I hated it. Having carefully avoided horror movies all my life, I was unhappy to find sadistic violence arbitrarily part of Shakespeare. I know that (as Anthony Lane) recently pointed out, even Hollywood comedies currently include brutal violence but I am left behind by this. Most of the acting in Richard III was poor – not that the actors are untalented but they were often directed to scream and overact. Most harmfully, they rarely spoke the play’s words, or believed this was a drama involving characters who mattered to each other. For example, one of the most successful scenes, the visit of the two assassins, worked because the two actors actually spoke to one another, and therefore spoke intelligibly. Many of the speeches were delivered to the audience, straight out over the footlights, and in those speeches the actors took no care to be intelligible. They did not regard the dialogues as actual dialogue, but rather as bits of verbal display. The performance was not helped by a lead actor who in many ways was excellent, but was also usually incomprehensible during the soliloquies, converting Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter into duometer: “Thus is. The winter. Of our. Discontent. ” etc. Propeller has no faith in Shakespeare’s words, but believe that he needs screams and violence to appeal to current audiences. Maybe they’re right however. Many of the audience seemed to have liked it.

Yes, the precision was impressive, although I am not personally fond of these Asian performance styles that involve turning humans into robots. A more general comment, however – I happened to be sitting in the sixth row and the sound level was very high. I thought of Dr. Raphael’s Saturday Morning Physics lecture about saving the fragile hair cells in your ear, by avoiding loud noises. I am not suggesting that the performers should be less loud – I realize they have to fill a big space in Hill (although I have heard classical singers fill it with just their unamplified voice). What I suggest is that UMS might warn those sitting near the stage that ear plugs might be a wise option, if the performers are going to be loud, or really heavily amplified (like the Blues concert a few weeks ago).