jack

Hanukkah tonight, but not a happy one. Some forty people shot, eleven of them killed, in an attack on a first-night Hanukkah celebration on a beach in Sydney, Australia. Anti-Semitism the apparent cause. Yes, again.

More celebratory news in the actor-comedian-dancer Dick Van Dyke reaching his centenary yesterday. He's good at what he does, I saw a couple of his movies when I was very small and enjoyed them, and that's about all I have to say about that. Such an intensely American figure should never have been asked to play a cockney chimney sweep in the first place, but his talent did a good job with the performance, accent or no.

Say, I've been to a couple of concerts. A Stanford student recital, various groups doing movements of chamber music pieces. The only work I knew well was Brahms's Op. 60 piano quartet, and I could hear how far the students had to stretch in this tumultuously dark work, but they tried hard. Most interesting was Chausson's Op. 3 piano trio, with its extremely strange first-movement ending. Two pianists playing a movement from a Rachmaninoff suite changed places with their page turners for the next movement; that was nice.

Up in the City, the Esmé Quartet was joined by Kronos cellist Paul Wiancko for Schubert's String Quintet, though the program book kept stating that it was a quartet. This was the last concert in the Robert Greenberg-curated series of morning Schubert concerts, and Greenberg had some useful things to say about how the piece is constructed from sub-ensembles: two overlapping quartets in the opening bars, a trio playing the theme in the slow movement with the first violin dancing descant above and the second cello providing pizzicato below. In that slow movement, when Schubert lowers the already pp volume to ppp, the softness and beauty were truly exquisite.