Music I'm Listening to: Hilary Hahn in recital, San Francisco

I attended what was nominally a San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall last night, March 12 (which happened to be my birthday). The SFS is actually on tour in Europe at the moment. The concert last night was Hilary Hahn in recital – Hahn alone on the stage usually filled with musicians, dressed in a beautiful dark grey and Prussian blue dress adorned with sparkly silver sequins. 

She played one of the Bach sonatas for solo violin and two of the partitas – and played them very beautifully indeed (Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001; Partita No. 1 in B minor, BWV 1002; and, after intermission, Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004). They say muscle memory takes over, but I'm always astounded by the feats of memory playing pieces like this without a score involves. It was mesmerizing. The audience was very appreciative and coaxed her into an encore which she introduced by saying "I think I've got one more in me...." It was a movement from one of the other Bach solo violin pieces.

Berenice Bing, A Lady and a Roadmap, Oil on Canvas, 1962

Earlier in the day I had been to the Asian Art Museum to see a show of newly acquired works by Chinese-American artist Berenice Bing, an artist I became aware of only recently (some of her work was included in the show of paintings by female abstract expressionist painters at Modern Art West last September, in Sonoma). I hadn't realized that she worked with people like Diebenkorn and Lobdell, among others. 

Berenice Bing, Lotus Goddess, 
watercolor and mixed media on paper, 1986-1988

There was also an interesting show of prints by Yoshida Hodaka. I've long been familiar with Hodaka, but it seems his entire family – his mother, his wife, and others – were artists. The show included prints by all of them. 

As it was my birthday, I indulged in oysters and sparkling wine at dinner afterwards. A much better day than my birthday last year which was spent dealing with the death of one of our cats at the hand (paw?) of some kind of predator in the middle of the night. 

Yosshida Hodaka, Red Wall B, photo etching
and woodblock print, 1995

Music I'm Listening To: Alexander Barantschik with Ton Koopman and the San Francisco Symphony

Conductor Ton Koopman and soloist Alexander Barantschik

Had a fun time recently at Davies Symphony Hall hearing SF Symphony concertmaster Alexander Barantschik play Bach's Violin Concerto No. 1. Also on the program were Chaos, by Jean-Féry Rebel, and Haydn's Symphony No. 100 "The Military". Guest conductor Ton Koopman led the musicians with his usual always-smiling demeanor. 

The Haydn symphony gets its nickname from a trumpet fanfare it includes and from a couple of entries by bass drum, cymbals, and triangle in imitation of Turkish Janissary bands, reflecting an influential fad in Vienna in the 1780s. On both entrances the percussionists marched in from somewhere offstage as if in a military parade, much to the surprise and delight of the audience. After the concert, on the way to an after-concert dinner, I found myself meeting Mr. Koopman himself on a street corner—like me, waiting for the lights to change. I imagine he was walking back to his hotel or a meal of his own. I told him how much I enjoyed the concert and said "Is that the normal way of doing that?" referring to the entry of the percussion section. He said "That's MY way of doing it!" with a big smile. 

Rebel (1666-1747) is a composer I'd never heard of. Chaos was rather interesting and remarkably modern sounding, considering it was written in 1737 or 1738. The piece starts out, quite appropriately, with a chaotic "chord" that the composer describes by saying "I have risked opening with all the notes sounding together, or rather, all the notes in an octave played as a single sound" to quote the quote in the program notes. That's the sort of thing I'd expect a 20th century composer to do....

I enjoyed the Bach violin concerto as well. This was the second time I'd heard Barantschik as a soloist, having heard him play the less-well known of the two Mendelssohn violin concertos a couple of years back at Green Music Center when the SF Symphony was doing concerts here in Sonoma County. All in all, a pleasant diversion.

On the Road: Leipzig (July 2-3, 2018)

The Bach statue in front of
ThomasKirche, Leipzig

I had hoped to catch up on writing about the museums in Munich, but there's only so much time to write when you're traveling. This afternoon I head to Berlin already. I chose a latish train to allow time this morning for a visit to the Bach Museum in Leipzig, which was closed yesterday when it would have been more convenient. I sit now in a café not far from Bach's Thomaskirche, aiming to get myself fed early in the day today. Yesterday, traveling by rented car in the countryside in search of ancestors, I found myself in places where food was hard to find. I eventually had a lunch of fried trout and beer (Altenburger) in the town of Langenleuba-Niederhain. Everywhere beer.

Currants for sale

It happened to be a market day in Leipzig. I enjoyed watching people and looking at the bounty of fruit, cheeses, mushrooms, vegetables, and meat on offer. The variety of fruit was impressive: blueberries; cherries; peaches; apricots; red, black, and white currants; raspberries; gooseberries; figs; strawberries; and more. Some of the vendors were from as far away as Poland. Many vendors felt it important to say their produce was from Germany. "Deutsche Erdbeeren, Deutsche Himmelbeeren!" I bought cherries, black currants, and blueberries. I had a quick look at the Bach Museum and at Bach's Thomaskirche, where his remains lie today (having been moved there from a spot not far from where I was staying, near the Johannisplatz, the site of a church destroyed in WWII).

The courtyard of Colditz Castle

On the way, I stopped at Colditz and took a quick self-guided tour of the castle infamous as a WWII prison for allied officers, and, I learned, as a psychiatric "hospital" used even before the concentration camps were set up as a place to extinguish patients rather than care for them, usually by intentional starvation (after the war, it was used as an actual hospital). A bit incongruously, there was an exhibit of nude photography from the East German era, that was as interesting for the cameras on display as for the photographs. In the prison museum is a collection of artifacts, including fake German uniforms prisoners painstakingly made for escape attempts from blankets and cardboard, complete with insignia and other details. The famous glider was never used, apparently. The prison was liberated before an attempt could be made. It was to have been catapulted from the windows above the chapel (just to the right of the tower in my photograph of the courtyard here).

Wheat fields near Langenleuba-Niederhain

Langenleuba-Niederhain, the town from which the German ancestors on my mother's side emigrated, is about 50 minutes south of Leipzig. It was a quick drive through flat farmland (mostly wheat and corn) studded with dark lollipop trees along the roads and relieved here and there by patches of forest or a village with red-orange or black and grey roofs and always a church spire. Huge combines were harvesting wheat. Crows in the fields behind them appeared to be gleaning kernels left behind. Raptors (probably kites) circled overhead, perhaps looking for mice or voles.

A traditional house, Langenleuba-Niederhain

I found the church in Langenleuba-Niederhain after asking directions several times. It's a bit outside of the cluster of buildings at the center of the village. I was disappointed to find no graves of any kind there. I also found the closest cemetery (and another closer to the village of Flemmingen), but in both the oldest burial I could find was from 1966 and most were much newer than that. Strange in Europe to find a cemetery with no old graves. A woman tending a gravesite said there were no old graves in the area. A man at the library told me the same and that there were no records as old as I was seeking anyway (lost in the war? Lost in the confusion following the fall of East Germany?). I didn't quite understand the explanation given but it sounded as if they had all disappeared. I learned also that records for Langenleuba-Niederhain are kept in Flemmingen at the Pfarramt there (in the custody of one Herr Coblenz at Pfarramt 27 Flemmingen, Thuringen, 04618, who was not at home either of the two times I tried to enquire).

Eventually, I gave up, but there were buildings both old and new in the traditional Saxon style in the village and in the neighboring villages, always with a stone ground floor (often but not always with shallowly arched wooden lintels over the first-storey windows) and a half-timbered second story. The drawing we have of the home of ancestor Christoph Heinig in the town is one of these (Christoph was father of Gottfried Heinig, my great-great-grandfather, who arrived in the US in 1859). Perhaps a letter to Mr. Coblenz will turn something up.