Wild Gray Weekend

It's a grayish part of the year, more suitable for afternoons in front of the fire than touch football, or even skiing. But it really does pay to get out and about on occasion. 

On a recent Sunday morning Hilary and I drove down to the Art Shanty Village, which has been set up in the hills behind the bandshell this year rather than out on the lake, due to concerns about slush and other unpleasant ice conditions.

We've been going to this event almost since its inception in 2004 on Medicine Lake, later White Bear Lake, and in recent years on Lake Harriet. The current village isn't one of the better ones. Because the installations are scattered here and there, often out of sight of one another; there is little community hubbub, and the few shanties that have been erected seem simpler, less outlandish, more pointedly designed for kids. Meanwhile, the vastness of the ice, where the entire village was visible and strange creatures would pass by on bicycles and sleds, doesn't come into play much.

Which is not the say the village isn't worth a visit. We got there early, before the scene had really warmed up, but it gave us more time to chat with the women and men who created the installations, and that's often the best part of the event. The woman at the "house of treasures" insisted that Hilary take her favorite piece of mini-art. The artist in question had retired and moved to the North Shore, but found it too isolated and ended up in Sturgeon Bay, where she now makes collages out of antique pieces of paper.

"But I don't have a treasure to exchange," Hilary said.

"Don't worry about that. We have hundreds of tiny treasures in these chests," the woman said.

At the bottom of the hill a minister was in attendance at a Chapel of Love. You bring the marriage license and he will marry you. Traffic had been slow but he was looking forward to doing a brisk Sunday business.

Thirty yards away stood a strange shack with plastic sheathing decorated with wreathes made of weeds and sundry other things. A large number of shoes were hanging from pieces of string nearby, and each of them was stuffed with a potato-like object painted gold. Why? I have no idea. The theme was re-use, though it was hard to tell.

I chatted with the proprietor about the joys of pallet wood, of which there was an unlimited supply on the loading dock where I worked for twenty-odd years, and even began to rave about a wine cabinet I built from such material forty years ago. It now stands in the basement behind the furnace, filled with old manuscripts, maps, travel fliers, and MACARONI back issues. (Just let me know if you want some.)

At one shanty children were given the opportunity to design quilts using frozen blocks of colored ice. (Sound like fun?) At another stylish sculptural installation at the top of the hill you could generate eerie sounds while watching colored strips of cloth rustle in the wind.

Mid-afternoon would have been a better time to visit. A klezmer band was scheduled to perform and also an opera troupe. But we enjoyed our unhurried stroll through the grounds and also our walk back to the car through the neighborhood.

Our afternoon stop was at the Ted Mann Concert Hall to hear a program presented by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra called "Distillations." The university campus was a good venue for the program, which seemed a little like Modern Music History 1-001. It was devoted to a range of musical styles and moods, though the pieces were all written within a narrow span of years. The most recent of the bunch, Richard Strauss's "String Sextet from Capriccio," was also the most conventional. A lovely interweaving of string voices—nothing more, nothing less—it showcased the sound of violins, well played at close range. (We were in the seventh row.)

Concertmaster Steven Copes, who both designed and introduced the program, described the next piece, Arnold Schoenberg's "Chamber Symphony No. 1," as "forty-five minutes of music compressed into twenty minutes of time." The question he didn't answer was, "What's the rush?" I succeeded in enjoying the piece for a third of its length by closing my eyes and imagining it was the soundtrack to a long chase scene in a German Expressionist film, perhaps starring Peter Lorre. It also brought to mind George Antheil's obscure opera Transatlantic. But Schoenberg didn't do the work required to fashion his brief and frenetic symphony into a more expansive and coherent or even superficially satisfying piece. It was obvious he wasn't listening to or imagining the sound, but merely devising logical schemes for rearranging the notes and shuttling material from one instrument to another. Scholars enjoy analyzing such things. Sometimes musicians too. Most music-lovers don't enjoy listening to them.

The best flashes of the piece reminded me of Igor Stravinsky's Octet, which is also harmonically challenging but far better paced and shaped.  

Sensing that we'd need a break after such a dense extravaganza, Cope followed it with a four-minute solo flute piece by Edgard Varèse called "Density 21.5" performed by SPCO veteran Alicia McQuerrey. Hilary read in the notes that this is a famous piece, its brevity notwithstanding. I'm not sure why. It reminded me of a typical Japanese shakuhachi solo, better suited to a pine forest or a Zen monastery than a concert stage. I "liked" it, but it didn't add up to much.

Yet all of these efforts were worthwhile, if only to prepare us for the final piece, Maurice Ravel's String Quartet, which is a sui generis masterpiece, hauntingly beautiful in a slippery and sophisticated way. I first heard it in college, decades ago, and as I listened I was reminded of the Nonesuch LP I owned back then, with a hot-air balloon on the cover. In the SPCO performance everything sounded a little different—which is what you want at a live performance. The cello was unusually prominent and I noticed for the first time how many of the sounds being made were unmusical flashes and squiggles amid the otherwise free-flowing lines.

The young Ravel dedicated the piece to Gabriel Faure, who deemed it a failure. When Ravel's slightly older contemporary Debussy heard it, he said, "Don't change a note."

We spotted violinist Maureen Nelson just ahead of us as we walked through light snow to our car after the performance. "Nice concert!" we shouted, almost in unison. (What else  are you going to say?)

 "Thanks," she said, as she hurried off.

Maybe it was the flute solo, but we were primed for the remarkable Happy Hour at the nearby Thai-sushi restaurant Soberfish. We're talking egg rolls, spring rolls, tempura, gyoza, and a sushi sampler, along with several glasses of wine, for just over $40. The cozy dining room looked to be half full of students from nearby Augsburg University, though an Asian family of five was eating a big meal that included oysters lined up in a row in little white spoons.

We drove home through light snow along West River Road feeling we'd had a good day.