“In ‘Lecture on Nothing,’ John Cage compared a piece of music to a glass of milk. ‘We need the glass,’ he wrote, ‘and we need the milk,’ ” writes Mark Swed in Monday’s (5/18) Los Angeles Times. “At the invitation of the San Francisco Symphony on Saturday night, actor Tim Robbins read those lines with an eloquently genial whimsy…. Michael Tilson Thomas cued members of his orchestra to pour liquidly indeterminate sounds suggested by drawings from Thoreau’s journals that make up the score to Cage’s ‘Renga.’ … In ‘Renga’ … the conductor controls dynamic and entrances, and Tilson Thomas often tied them into the text…. Cage spoke of five-finger exercises, and we heard his Suite for Toy Piano. He spoke of noises being discriminated against, and there were the sounds of an amplified cactus in ‘Child of Tree.’ … But everything worked, even the goofy Heinz pickle commercial. Trite moments were turned into insightful and often incredibly beautiful instances…. In the middle of the performance, Tilson Thomas stopped everything and played a short musical line on the piano, one of several musical haikus Cage wrote in the early ‘50s. Cage had given it to Lou Harrison, and Harrison gave it to Tilson Thomas.”
Posted May 19, 2015
