Up and out early, speeding reasonably legally toward St. Mary's, for what has turned out to be the only teaching gig of the week, with music of Johann Sebastian Bach's Cothen and Leipzig periods,
then a walk on the Briones-to-Diablo Trail, Diablowise, from the Lafayette Ridge Staging Area,
past Spring Hill Elementary School on
Pleasant Hill Boulevard to the
Eucalyptus (and, temporarily, Horse) Trailhead, seemingly
straight up Acalanes Ridge,
past more eucalypti in a windbreak,
with views of Las Trampas,
Acalanes High (the Dons are down there somewhere)
Deer Hill Road,
Elizabeth Canyon Pass on
Lafayette Ridge, and
the Briones Highlands.
There's time to reach a saddle in a high bowl,
above
and below pre-recession housing.
The return is mostly the same, save for a variant stretch past a tree
swing
and colorful side ridges.
After scouting out another Acalanes trailhead on Monarch Ridge Boulevard,
with heroic vistas of Mt. Diablo and Walnut Creek,
it's lunch at China Garden (with its own Devil's view), serendipidously meeting up with Amy Brinkman, from Elephant Bar, then
finishing the orchestration of and recording
Solomon:
VII. This Woman follows at Diablo Valley College, before making the leap over the Bay to
Noh Space in San Francisco for a very fine Dioclesian/Diocletian rehearsal, including the latter's I. First Paragraph Music,
IV. What Shall I Do?
(with Alexandra Jerinic [Diocletian],
Kimberly Anderman [Drusilla],
and Maria Mikheyenko [Edward Gibbon]),
and VI. Country Dance, with its ups and
downs. Down home following, beginning the instrumental disposition of
Solomon: VIII. You Know (The Building of the Temple and Palace)
