Encouraged by the blog post and review by Lisa of the Iron Tongue, I bought a ticket for today's matinee performance of the Pocket Opera production of the opera Tartuffe by Kirke Mechem, a contemporary American composer who's also written an opera of Pride and Prejudice which I've also seen. This was the last performance of Tartuffe, and the only one convenient to me geographically, and I wasn't the only person persuaded to go. The small theater in Mountain View's CPA was pretty well packed (the main stage was putting on a musical about James Dean, in whom I have no interest) and among the audience I counted five people I know, including the conductor who put on that Pride and Prejudice.

Like the original play, from which this is significantly simplified (there's no Cléante, for one thing, and the dénouement has a rather different way of arriving at the same ending), this opera is bright and funny. It's through-composed and through-sung, with only a couple set piece arias or duets, in an agreeable modern style. The orchestration (cut down to chamber size by the composer) varies strongly depending on which characters are singing, and there are a couple clever and funny references to well-known bits from the classical repertoire; not worth explaining to non-audience members, but effective at the time.

The title role was sung by the powerful-voiced baritone (he sounds more like a bass) Eugene Brancoveanu, who'd been Darcy in that Pride and Prejudice. Unusually, his voice was not the most distinctive part of his performance here, because there was an equally powerful-voiced bass, Isaiah Musik-Ayala, as the credulous Orgon. Brancoveanu most excelled, instead, in acting the part of the oily and mock-sanctimonious Tartuffe. The other cast member I was familiar with was the bright-voiced soprano Shawnette Sulker as the sly maid Dorine, but they were all good and worked out well in the small space.

I got to the theater after stopping in for the first set of the annual Stanford Chamber Music Seminar's marathon finale, in which all the attending student and amateur groups each play a movement from something. The best I heard here were string quartets, the finale from Mendelssohn's Op. 44/1 and a couple of bright Haydn pieces.

I'd also got to the showcase concert the previous evening, which featured the two best ensembles - again, both string quartets - playing a full work each. We had a highly sharp-nosed performance of Smetana's "In My Life" and a Mendelssohn Op. 80 with a particularly snappy finale. In between the two quartets, the stage crew disassembled and then reassembled the entire string quartet infrastructure - the chairs, the music stands, the little footpads for turning the pages on the tablets - so as to provide for an intermediary performance of a Schubert song. (There was no program, and I don't remember the title.) Was it performed by a soprano? No. A tenor? No. It was a clarinet. B. wasn't there, but she likes vocal music and would have been very disappointed.

I'm still buried in copy-editing for the next issue of Tolkien Studies, with more to come, but I'm wondering what I can say publicly about it at this point. Oh, here's one thing: we have three papers so far which cite the recently-published Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, which we've decided to put in our standard abbreviations list as CP. Other posthumous Tolkien books have appeared while we've been publishing this journal, and some have sparked a flurry of papers, but no others have become this ubiquitous this quickly. It's a monument.

I'm adopting a practice of pulling down from my shelf each source item that I have in hard copy when the author first cites it, and then leaving it on my desk, because I may need it again later. When I finish the paper, I put them all away and start on the next one. Of course there's also a lot to look up in my computer files, or online, and I also need to make occasional quick trips to the university library.

In other news, I've learned that Corflu is coming back to the Bay Area, specifically Santa Rosa, next year. I dropped out of SF fandom entirely some years ago, and I missed a few events I probably should have gone to, including the last L.A. Corflu; but I think I'll go to this one. The membership list is the same old acquaintances who were there when I was attending regularly, and it's near enough that I can drive with no trouble. In fact what tipped the balance for me is that I have concerts in San Francisco both Thursday and Friday of that weekend, so staying in Santa Rosa will actually make it easier to get there.

I find little need to make political commentary, since there are online sources doing it for me, but I do wish to express how remarkable it is that for four years, judge-shopping produced speciously-argued holds on Biden administration activity without a word from the Supreme Court, but as soon as it's applied to Trump for blatantly unconstitutional actions, the Court puts a halt on the entire practice of universal holds. They're not even pretending not to be partisan any more.