The Complete Piano Sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya
Conor Hanick, piano
This was a concert so profoundly unusual and interesting that I felt compelled to go to it. Other Minds is a sponsor that does offbeat modern music events; I've been to them occasionally before. For this one, they rented the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley.
Ustvolskaya was a Soviet-era composer who was a pupil of Shostakovich (he had a crush on her, as he did on most of his female pupils, but nothing came of it). But her music is not like his; in truth it's not like much of anything else, and she was even more insistent on her own uniqueness than is justified by the music.
Her output is small. She wrote six piano sonatas over the course of her career, four in 1947-57 and the other two in 1986-88. What I learned from this concert was how different the two subsets are: I'll explain that. There are recordings of these pieces, but the impact of hearing them live is incomparable.
After a half-hour talk on Ustvolskaya by musicologist Simon Morrison and a brief break, Hanick sat down and played all six sonatas without a break, only stopping long enough to take his hands briefly from the keyboard between works: one solid 70-minute wad of music.
It takes something really good to keep from being wearying over that time. Not only was Hanick a solid and vivid pianist (and the Freight's acoustics are wonderfully clear for piano music), but it was constantly evident throughout that this was music of great substance and thought, no matter how uningratiating it was - and it was, very. The contrast could not have been greater with certain renowned modern composers whose difficult music is empty and void of anything except challenges to the performers.
From the beginning, Ustvolskaya's music was tough and brutal. Someone dubbed her "the lady with the hammer." Yet throughout the early sonatas, there were quiet and tender passages as well. The variety was part of what kept the flow working. Though the music held interest and was obviously of intellectual substance, I was not sure if I was really connecting with it on a visceral level.
This changed when we got to the last two sonatas. If the earlier music was tough and harsh, this was tougher and harsher. Hanick slammed the keys down, and even employed his forearm to play tone clusters - not for the gentle washes of sound that Henry Cowell, their inventor, had done, but for the ferocious clang that people think they're for.
It was at this point in her career that Ustvolskaya started employing insistent repetitions of notes and phrases, always at top volume, that put tremendous tension and drive into the music. This is what caused one critic to dub her an exponent of "sado-minimalism," a term whose cleverness can't disguise that it's inapt for both of its components. Though severe, it isn't painful, and there's nothing of the absorbent trance of canonical minimalism.
Though you'd think I'd be beginning to be tired out from all this, instead I found my interest renewed and refreshed, absorbed and captivated by this hard but very human stuff. It spoke a strange and hard language, but it spoke clearly and compellingly. I'm not sure I'd want to listen to it again soon, but I'm oh so glad I did, and was I ever artistically satisfied by the evening.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Monday, October 28, 2024
concert review: Voices of Silicon Valley
This was the 10th anniversary celebration of a little (17-voice) local acappella choir that I hadn't heard of before. SFCV actually promoted this concert, though they haven't reviewed it, at least the first performance (I went to the second, yesterday). But what inspired me to go was that my old friend K., who's belonged to other local choirs, has joined this one. I think she felt it was more her style.
Its style is an offbeat combination of avant-garde experimental pieces and epically tuneful musical excerpts from video games.* The main work on the program was Bits torn from words by Peter S. Shin, which has lyrics but mostly consists of oohs and ahhs overlaid on each other in complicated ways. It sounds great in the recording by the famed avant-garde choir Roomful of Teeth. But though VoSV sang this challenging piece with fair competence, they lacked the artistic flair needed to put it across effectively. Nice try, though.
I was much more impressed with the premiere of a commission from one of their own tenors, Alexander Frank. Describing the work beforehand in a talk that deserved the title Chatter as much as the composition did, Frank said that, because the work consists entirely of spoken words, he does not classify it as music, but as 'voice.'
Oh, I thought, I wish my old buddy V. were alive to hear that. She and I used to have intense arguments about this. I said that certain types of aural compositions were not music, not to denigrate them but to classify them properly, because they needed to be listened to differently in order to be appreciated. (Imagine listening to the 'music' in, say, a Shakespeare soliloquy as if it actually were a musical composition. It would just be wayward and irritating.) V. insisted it was all music; music is the whole sphere, it's not differentiated. I would say fine, in that case we need another word to describe what the term 'music' used to mean. I suggest 'music,' and for the larger category of organized sound, something like 'organized sound.'
Anyway, it sounds like Frank agrees with me. His composition was a fascinating collage of mostly unintelligible chatter. It began with everybody talking at once, like the sound of a restaurant full of diners, and then reduced to a few voices, then increased again. Sometimes a couple voices would talk in unison. It was not music because there was no melody, no harmony; but there was rhythm and timbre and there was certainly multiplicity of line if not exactly counterpoint, and as with other such works I've heard (Varese's Ionisation for percussion ensemble) I found myself absorbed by those elements, though I would not wish the piece to go on any longer than it did.
More conventionally, VoSV sang a piece called The House of Belonging by Jeffrey Derus, one of those efforts in which the words are stuffed awkwardly into music which they don't quite fit; and Friede auf Erden by Arnold Schoenberg, in German.
Their pianist, whose role was mostly to serve as a pitch pipe, though she did accompany a couple of pieces, also played a solo piano work, one of the most totally useless pieces of music I have ever heard. Its sole point seemed to be to proceed slowly down the entire keyboard from the top note to the bottom.
After intermission there was a brief interjected set by a local high school choir, who did pretty well for themselves. Their set included a motet by Josef Rheinberger, a 19C figure who's the most renowned composer from Liechtenstein, but their most challenging and effective piece was a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by the noted living American choral composer Z. Randall Stroope. Then they joined VoSV at the end for the grand finale, a nice arrangement of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."
The first performance had been at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, but I skipped that both for scheduling reasons and to avoid Hammer's dodgy acoustics, preferring the venue of the small and friendly, if perishingly cold, Tateuchi Hall in Mountain View. I might have been better off at Hammer. The chorus was miked, which in a hall as small as Tateuchi led to an overload of sound, with a couple of the sopranos (not K.) shrieking unpleasantly.
I think the choir strove for more than they could do here, but some of it came off well, and it's the striving that's important, right?
Credits: VoSV artistic director and conductor, Cyril Deaconoff. Pianist, Ting Chang. High school choir, Saratoga. Its director, Beth Nitzan.
*They sang themes from Genshin Impact and Portal 2, not that either of those names means anything to me, but I know that if I don't mention it, someone will ask. They also sang, with boombox-style accompaniment, music from Gladiator, which if it's not a video game, ought to be.
Its style is an offbeat combination of avant-garde experimental pieces and epically tuneful musical excerpts from video games.* The main work on the program was Bits torn from words by Peter S. Shin, which has lyrics but mostly consists of oohs and ahhs overlaid on each other in complicated ways. It sounds great in the recording by the famed avant-garde choir Roomful of Teeth. But though VoSV sang this challenging piece with fair competence, they lacked the artistic flair needed to put it across effectively. Nice try, though.
I was much more impressed with the premiere of a commission from one of their own tenors, Alexander Frank. Describing the work beforehand in a talk that deserved the title Chatter as much as the composition did, Frank said that, because the work consists entirely of spoken words, he does not classify it as music, but as 'voice.'
Oh, I thought, I wish my old buddy V. were alive to hear that. She and I used to have intense arguments about this. I said that certain types of aural compositions were not music, not to denigrate them but to classify them properly, because they needed to be listened to differently in order to be appreciated. (Imagine listening to the 'music' in, say, a Shakespeare soliloquy as if it actually were a musical composition. It would just be wayward and irritating.) V. insisted it was all music; music is the whole sphere, it's not differentiated. I would say fine, in that case we need another word to describe what the term 'music' used to mean. I suggest 'music,' and for the larger category of organized sound, something like 'organized sound.'
Anyway, it sounds like Frank agrees with me. His composition was a fascinating collage of mostly unintelligible chatter. It began with everybody talking at once, like the sound of a restaurant full of diners, and then reduced to a few voices, then increased again. Sometimes a couple voices would talk in unison. It was not music because there was no melody, no harmony; but there was rhythm and timbre and there was certainly multiplicity of line if not exactly counterpoint, and as with other such works I've heard (Varese's Ionisation for percussion ensemble) I found myself absorbed by those elements, though I would not wish the piece to go on any longer than it did.
More conventionally, VoSV sang a piece called The House of Belonging by Jeffrey Derus, one of those efforts in which the words are stuffed awkwardly into music which they don't quite fit; and Friede auf Erden by Arnold Schoenberg, in German.
Their pianist, whose role was mostly to serve as a pitch pipe, though she did accompany a couple of pieces, also played a solo piano work, one of the most totally useless pieces of music I have ever heard. Its sole point seemed to be to proceed slowly down the entire keyboard from the top note to the bottom.
After intermission there was a brief interjected set by a local high school choir, who did pretty well for themselves. Their set included a motet by Josef Rheinberger, a 19C figure who's the most renowned composer from Liechtenstein, but their most challenging and effective piece was a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by the noted living American choral composer Z. Randall Stroope. Then they joined VoSV at the end for the grand finale, a nice arrangement of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."
The first performance had been at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, but I skipped that both for scheduling reasons and to avoid Hammer's dodgy acoustics, preferring the venue of the small and friendly, if perishingly cold, Tateuchi Hall in Mountain View. I might have been better off at Hammer. The chorus was miked, which in a hall as small as Tateuchi led to an overload of sound, with a couple of the sopranos (not K.) shrieking unpleasantly.
I think the choir strove for more than they could do here, but some of it came off well, and it's the striving that's important, right?
Credits: VoSV artistic director and conductor, Cyril Deaconoff. Pianist, Ting Chang. High school choir, Saratoga. Its director, Beth Nitzan.
*They sang themes from Genshin Impact and Portal 2, not that either of those names means anything to me, but I know that if I don't mention it, someone will ask. They also sang, with boombox-style accompaniment, music from Gladiator, which if it's not a video game, ought to be.
Sunday, October 27, 2024
concert review: Esmé Quartet
I heard this group two-and-a-half years ago, in their North American debut, at which time they consisted of four young women from Korea who had been studying in Germany. Now they consist of three of those women plus a man from Belgium, and they're not in Germany any more, they're right here in San Francisco, having all four been hired to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory, which is some six blocks down the street from the Herbst Theatre where both of these concerts were held.
At the previous concert they gave a stunningly effective performance of Dvořák's Op 106, a work which doesn't always come off that well. So how would they do this time with Schubert's G Major, which is one of the most lyrical quartets in the repertoire? Oh, one felt floating along in a timeless state of bliss listening to this lengthy work: the combination of lyricism and drive was superb. Here: this is a very fine video of the previous Esmé lineup playing this work, and it will give you something of an idea.
I was particularly pleased with the forte outbursts in the first movement, which had the bite and drama one associates with Schubert's previous quartet, "Death and the Maiden," and by the fast rondo of the finale, which had the momentum of a waterwheel or of a snowball rolling unobstructed downhill: it was as if it was being driven by the force of gravity.
Yet even more remarkable, by the same standards, was the rest of the program. Mozart's D Major Quartet, K. 575, one of his late "Prussian" Quartets, rose above any routine Mozart scribbling with an elegant sense of gracefulness and an unending emphasis on the lyric flow. Astonishingly, the same thing was true of Ligeti's First, a tiresome collection of random 1950s avant-garde tricks strung together. No matter how gritty, fragmented, dissonant, or harsh the music, the Esmé players found that lyrical flow of a melodic line. It was an astonishingly graceful performance, unlike anything I've heard in this work before. It didn't make me like Ligeti any better, but it further cemented my admiration for Esmé.
For an encore, despite now being only 3/4 Korean, they played a piece of Korean folk music, which in its ceaseless presentation of bent note slides outdid even Ligeti in weird modernism.
At the previous concert they gave a stunningly effective performance of Dvořák's Op 106, a work which doesn't always come off that well. So how would they do this time with Schubert's G Major, which is one of the most lyrical quartets in the repertoire? Oh, one felt floating along in a timeless state of bliss listening to this lengthy work: the combination of lyricism and drive was superb. Here: this is a very fine video of the previous Esmé lineup playing this work, and it will give you something of an idea.
I was particularly pleased with the forte outbursts in the first movement, which had the bite and drama one associates with Schubert's previous quartet, "Death and the Maiden," and by the fast rondo of the finale, which had the momentum of a waterwheel or of a snowball rolling unobstructed downhill: it was as if it was being driven by the force of gravity.
Yet even more remarkable, by the same standards, was the rest of the program. Mozart's D Major Quartet, K. 575, one of his late "Prussian" Quartets, rose above any routine Mozart scribbling with an elegant sense of gracefulness and an unending emphasis on the lyric flow. Astonishingly, the same thing was true of Ligeti's First, a tiresome collection of random 1950s avant-garde tricks strung together. No matter how gritty, fragmented, dissonant, or harsh the music, the Esmé players found that lyrical flow of a melodic line. It was an astonishingly graceful performance, unlike anything I've heard in this work before. It didn't make me like Ligeti any better, but it further cemented my admiration for Esmé.
For an encore, despite now being only 3/4 Korean, they played a piece of Korean folk music, which in its ceaseless presentation of bent note slides outdid even Ligeti in weird modernism.
Saturday, October 26, 2024
smashing pumpkins
Article (paywalled) about what to do with your jack-o-lantern after Halloween.
Don't put it in the garbage; it will just release methane from the landfill. Compost it, or donate it to be fed to pigs or other omnivores, or take it to a pumpkin-smashing event, after which they'll compost it.
I thought with sorrow of all the ex-jack-o-lanterns I dumped in the garbage after past Halloweens, because I didn't know any better and knew of nothing else I could do. We did keep a compost heap for a short period, but I quit because it was not something I could manage, and it wasn't large enough to have taken a whole pumpkin in a short period anyway.
But a few years ago, our garbage can was replaced with one with a separate compartment for food scraps, which I think go to the omnivores. And I would be happy to put the pumpkin in that, if we still kept a jack-o-lantern. But the number of trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood, once hefty, trickled to a near-stop years ago, so now we just turn the lights off and go to bed early on Halloween. No candy that we'd only have to eat ourselves, and no decorations and no jack-o-lanterns.
But it's nice to know what we should do if we did it.
Don't put it in the garbage; it will just release methane from the landfill. Compost it, or donate it to be fed to pigs or other omnivores, or take it to a pumpkin-smashing event, after which they'll compost it.
I thought with sorrow of all the ex-jack-o-lanterns I dumped in the garbage after past Halloweens, because I didn't know any better and knew of nothing else I could do. We did keep a compost heap for a short period, but I quit because it was not something I could manage, and it wasn't large enough to have taken a whole pumpkin in a short period anyway.
But a few years ago, our garbage can was replaced with one with a separate compartment for food scraps, which I think go to the omnivores. And I would be happy to put the pumpkin in that, if we still kept a jack-o-lantern. But the number of trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood, once hefty, trickled to a near-stop years ago, so now we just turn the lights off and go to bed early on Halloween. No candy that we'd only have to eat ourselves, and no decorations and no jack-o-lanterns.
But it's nice to know what we should do if we did it.
Friday, October 25, 2024
and the trivia goes on
So Anna Kendrick was on Stephen Colbert's show a day or two ago, to promote her new movie Woman of the Hour (which I've actually seen: it's on Netflix), the true story of a woman who goes as a contestant on The Dating Game not knowing that one of the three eligible bachelors is a serial killer. (And what happens then? Stephen: "The person you play, was that a real person?" Anna: "Yes." Stephen: "And was she OK?" Anna: "Stephen! Premise of the film!")
She's talking about, having already been cast in the lead role, she applied for and won the vacant position of director, though she'd never directed a film before. She was having an internal debate on whether to apply or not, and described it (4:08-4:22) as "a Gollum/Smeagol battle of who's going to win out here."
Now that was interesting, because not only did she make the comparison, but she did so aptly: Gollum v. Smeagol is an internal debate within one person, not (as some viewers of the movie might presume) between two different personas in a multiple-personality case. Good for her.
And also, she pronounced "Gollum" correctly, whereas Colbert in response (4:35) is still saying "Golem." I wish someone would correct him on air about that. Isaac Asimov was once on The Tonight Show, and was irritated by Carson pronouncing his name "EYE-ZAK", so he fantasized about calling his host "JOE-NEE" but didn't have the nerve.
Colbert didn't know he was engaged in a Lord of the Rings trivia contest last night, but he lost it to Anna Kendrick.
She's talking about, having already been cast in the lead role, she applied for and won the vacant position of director, though she'd never directed a film before. She was having an internal debate on whether to apply or not, and described it (4:08-4:22) as "a Gollum/Smeagol battle of who's going to win out here."
Now that was interesting, because not only did she make the comparison, but she did so aptly: Gollum v. Smeagol is an internal debate within one person, not (as some viewers of the movie might presume) between two different personas in a multiple-personality case. Good for her.
And also, she pronounced "Gollum" correctly, whereas Colbert in response (4:35) is still saying "Golem." I wish someone would correct him on air about that. Isaac Asimov was once on The Tonight Show, and was irritated by Carson pronouncing his name "EYE-ZAK", so he fantasized about calling his host "JOE-NEE" but didn't have the nerve.
Colbert didn't know he was engaged in a Lord of the Rings trivia contest last night, but he lost it to Anna Kendrick.
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
more corrections
A few years ago, I cobbled together a series of corrections and additions I'd accumulated over the years for a major article I'd published about 30 years ago. I sent those updates to the original journal, two editors later, and they published it.
I've just learned of another correction that I would have included had I known about it. Another researcher, plunging into related topics, tried to order by ILL a copy of a rare article I had cited and was told that no article of that kind existed in the named issue or anywhere near it. She wrote to me and asked for help finding it.
I had received this article by photocopy from - someone else, I don't remember whom. It had no publication information on it. Where I got the citation from, I don't know either: probably the person who supplied it. But this was evidently wrong. I applied a little clever research skill and was able to determine that the article was actually five years older than I'd been told, 1976 instead of 1981.
I sent this information to the enquirer, along with a PDF of the photocopy, which came from some material I've kept in my handy file drawers all these years. She was greatly appreciative.
For a further trick, I went to a local university library which is one of the few holders of a book that one of my "Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" writers needs but which she can't get from her college's ILL, which evidently charges by the search, like the old Dialog service did. Fortunately the local university library has a usable scanner, and fortunate also that I needed only two chapters from the book. One more PDF.
I've just learned of another correction that I would have included had I known about it. Another researcher, plunging into related topics, tried to order by ILL a copy of a rare article I had cited and was told that no article of that kind existed in the named issue or anywhere near it. She wrote to me and asked for help finding it.
I had received this article by photocopy from - someone else, I don't remember whom. It had no publication information on it. Where I got the citation from, I don't know either: probably the person who supplied it. But this was evidently wrong. I applied a little clever research skill and was able to determine that the article was actually five years older than I'd been told, 1976 instead of 1981.
I sent this information to the enquirer, along with a PDF of the photocopy, which came from some material I've kept in my handy file drawers all these years. She was greatly appreciative.
For a further trick, I went to a local university library which is one of the few holders of a book that one of my "Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" writers needs but which she can't get from her college's ILL, which evidently charges by the search, like the old Dialog service did. Fortunately the local university library has a usable scanner, and fortunate also that I needed only two chapters from the book. One more PDF.
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
those ruddy bastards
I'm really annoyed.
I was in LA in mid-August, and on Sunday morning (this was the 18th) decided to drive over to a favorite used book store in east Hollywood, because I'd been there the previous day and noticed signs saying they were having a big all-hands sale the following day.
This is what transpired, taken from my blog report of the trip. "Traffic was fine until I got to Hollywood, where something was going on. Streets were closed and the traffic was packed. It took me 15 minutes to travel five blocks." I was eventually able to turn off on to a side street a few blocks from the bookstore where, to my surprise, I found available parking. The bookstore itself was not over-crowded, and I took twisty and mystifying back streets through the Hollywood hills to get out of there. But the experience was so shattering that, once I got back to my hotel, I spent the rest of the day recuperating, and got out of LA first thing the next morning instead of in the afternoon as I'd intended.
I've just now found out what caused the congestion. I was reading an article on Slate about the future of LA traffic, and found a reference to "CicLAvia, an enormous, movable parade that runs through different parts of Los Angeles some eight times a year and draws about 50,000 participants. Six miles of streets open up to pedestrians, cyclists, joggers, roller bladers, and wheelchair users, with traffic barred at some intersections and directed by police at others."
I'd never heard of this before, but I thought, "eight times a year ... could it ...?" so I looked it up and yep, it did. Sunday, August 18, it was going right through Hollywood, just one long block away from the street my bookstore was on.
And I repeat: I'd never heard of this, either the specific event or the program in general. Nobody had told me.
My absolute opposition to protesters blocking streets to force the public to suffer for some cause does allow for an acceptance of pre-planned parades. You know they're coming, where they're going, when they will stop, and that police will monitor them; travelers can plan around them. But not if they haven't heard about them. I visit LA fairly often, but I'm only a visitor. This project has apparently been going on for some time, but I'd never heard about it. There were no temporary street signs up a block away, even on Saturday, saying "warning: the streets will be congested and Hollywood Boulevard will be entirely closed on Sunday the 18th." There was nothing on the signs in the bookstore announcing the sale adding, "You might want to think twice about trying to get here that day, though."
Now I know. Whenever I go to LA in the future, I'll have to check ahead and see if there's one of those closures going on, the same way I check to see if there are any wildfires going on in the hills near where I'll be. But when it actually hit me, I didn't know. Those ruddy, ruddy bastards.
I was in LA in mid-August, and on Sunday morning (this was the 18th) decided to drive over to a favorite used book store in east Hollywood, because I'd been there the previous day and noticed signs saying they were having a big all-hands sale the following day.
This is what transpired, taken from my blog report of the trip. "Traffic was fine until I got to Hollywood, where something was going on. Streets were closed and the traffic was packed. It took me 15 minutes to travel five blocks." I was eventually able to turn off on to a side street a few blocks from the bookstore where, to my surprise, I found available parking. The bookstore itself was not over-crowded, and I took twisty and mystifying back streets through the Hollywood hills to get out of there. But the experience was so shattering that, once I got back to my hotel, I spent the rest of the day recuperating, and got out of LA first thing the next morning instead of in the afternoon as I'd intended.
I've just now found out what caused the congestion. I was reading an article on Slate about the future of LA traffic, and found a reference to "CicLAvia, an enormous, movable parade that runs through different parts of Los Angeles some eight times a year and draws about 50,000 participants. Six miles of streets open up to pedestrians, cyclists, joggers, roller bladers, and wheelchair users, with traffic barred at some intersections and directed by police at others."
I'd never heard of this before, but I thought, "eight times a year ... could it ...?" so I looked it up and yep, it did. Sunday, August 18, it was going right through Hollywood, just one long block away from the street my bookstore was on.
And I repeat: I'd never heard of this, either the specific event or the program in general. Nobody had told me.
My absolute opposition to protesters blocking streets to force the public to suffer for some cause does allow for an acceptance of pre-planned parades. You know they're coming, where they're going, when they will stop, and that police will monitor them; travelers can plan around them. But not if they haven't heard about them. I visit LA fairly often, but I'm only a visitor. This project has apparently been going on for some time, but I'd never heard about it. There were no temporary street signs up a block away, even on Saturday, saying "warning: the streets will be congested and Hollywood Boulevard will be entirely closed on Sunday the 18th." There was nothing on the signs in the bookstore announcing the sale adding, "You might want to think twice about trying to get here that day, though."
Now I know. Whenever I go to LA in the future, I'll have to check ahead and see if there's one of those closures going on, the same way I check to see if there are any wildfires going on in the hills near where I'll be. But when it actually hit me, I didn't know. Those ruddy, ruddy bastards.
Monday, October 21, 2024
concert review: Borromeo Quartet
Borromeo Qt. L to R: Yeesun Kim, vc; Kristopher Tong, 2v; Melissa Reardon, va; Nicholas Kitchen, 1v
Sunday evening I went up to Kohl Mansion to hear the Borromeo Quartet in the first concert of the chamber music season in their magnificent Great Hall, a sort of drawing room on which a platform has been placed on the mid side, so that people in all the chairs surrounding it can see; there's no trouble with hearing. In fact, the acoustics are stunning, which brought particular vividness to this particular performance.
This was an exceedingly serious string quartet concert. The repertoire had its lighter moments - Beethoven's Op. 135 is often seen as a reversion to his clever Haydnesque youth with the greater perspective of maturity; and Sibelius's Voces Intimae Quartet has a couple of lighter and bouncier movements. But they didn't come out that way this time. Nor did the darker portions - the slow movements of both works are potentially emotionally intense, but they had a much drier interpretation here.
The Borromeo Quartet play with a hard crispness that's really best suited for the high modernist 20th century repertoire. They're known for their penetrating Bartok, and I'd be fascinated by what they could make out of Shostakovich. But when they play Romantic or Classical works with that style, it makes the music feel high modernist even if it doesn't actually sound anything like it. They have sprightliness and clarity, but only at a couple small moments - notably the pizzicato moment that almost concludes the Beethoven - was there even a trace of the lightness or wit inherent in the music. They have awesome drive and exactness of control, which expressed itself most clearly in the finales. Beethoven's had some agonizing drama until it faded away; and instead of being a frantic dance, the finale of the Sibelius was a machine of vehement power bearing down on us and nearly crushing the life out of its hearers.
I have to count this a great performance within a certain very limited perspective of interpretation. It was certainly an impressive thing to listen to.
There was a little more to the concert than that. One of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier prelude and fugue sets, arranged for quartet. Evidently the fugue has only three lines, because that's the number of performers playing at once throughout it. And Remember by Eleanor Alberga, three minutes of wistful chordal lament. A fairly succinct program.
Sunday, October 20, 2024
concert review: Winchester Orchestra
B. and I attended together a symphonic pops concert by this local community orchestra - the one she belonged to briefly before deciding a different one better met her needs - because it looked like fun. It was the Halloween concert, and the theme seemed to be music that told stories that might be heard at Halloween.
We had the fanfare from Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King", Berlioz's "March to the Scaffold", Saint-Saens's "Danse Bacchanale," and a whole movement, the finale, from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.
Plus suites from three movie sequences: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean. I think the last of these is the best as music, but unfortunately the visuals of this performance were spoiled by a guy dressed as Captain Jack running around through the audience and even the orchestra during the performance.
And yes, he was authorized, having even been introduced by the new conductor, James Beauton, who seemed to have a clear enough beat but whose appearance and style may be best described by saying he resembles a young Jerry Seinfeld.
This was in the same church they played in before, with the winds and brass on stage and totally drowning out the strings which were down in the pit below.
Anyway, it was fun, and not too long, and I appreciated getting a big chunk of Scheherazade.
We had the fanfare from Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King", Berlioz's "March to the Scaffold", Saint-Saens's "Danse Bacchanale," and a whole movement, the finale, from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.
Plus suites from three movie sequences: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean. I think the last of these is the best as music, but unfortunately the visuals of this performance were spoiled by a guy dressed as Captain Jack running around through the audience and even the orchestra during the performance.
And yes, he was authorized, having even been introduced by the new conductor, James Beauton, who seemed to have a clear enough beat but whose appearance and style may be best described by saying he resembles a young Jerry Seinfeld.
This was in the same church they played in before, with the winds and brass on stage and totally drowning out the strings which were down in the pit below.
Anyway, it was fun, and not too long, and I appreciated getting a big chunk of Scheherazade.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
work anniversary
Today marks 20 years since my first professional concert review was published - in phosphors, on the San Francisco Classical Voice website.
I'd been reading SFCV for some time already, and I had noted a news item there about Symphony Silicon Valley (since redubbed Symphony San Jose) moving to a new venue, the California Theatre in downtown San Jose. This was a 1927 film and stage theater that had fallen on hard times and had been renovated, and the premiere concert was going to be a vintage celebration.
I was going to be attending, and as I'd always been particularly interested in reviews of concerts I'd attended myself (to match my opinions against the reviewer's), I was looking forward to reading what they'd have to say. But when that week's batch of reviews came out, SSV wasn't in it.
So I wrote them and asked if they wanted a review. I had one already: I'd written one for LJ, having acquired the habit of reviewing all the concerts I attended. I rewrote it and beefed it up, and sent it in, and they published it. (I had to scarf this from the Wayback Machine because SFCV did not get its archiving system organized until several years later.)
And they paid me for it. And then they phoned me up a couple weeks later and asked if I could cover this string quartet concert that was coming up. And that's how I became a professional concert reviewer.
Of course, having been listening to classical music closely for over 30 years already at that point is part of what gave me the confidence to do this, as did the frequent experience of reading something noted in a review and thinking, yeah, I noticed that too. That convinced me I had the ears for the job. And I've been doing it ever since. Here's my most recent effort; I'm sure I've improved in judgment and authority, but there's a spontaneous lightness to my early reviews that I haven't always maintained.
I'd been reading SFCV for some time already, and I had noted a news item there about Symphony Silicon Valley (since redubbed Symphony San Jose) moving to a new venue, the California Theatre in downtown San Jose. This was a 1927 film and stage theater that had fallen on hard times and had been renovated, and the premiere concert was going to be a vintage celebration.
I was going to be attending, and as I'd always been particularly interested in reviews of concerts I'd attended myself (to match my opinions against the reviewer's), I was looking forward to reading what they'd have to say. But when that week's batch of reviews came out, SSV wasn't in it.
So I wrote them and asked if they wanted a review. I had one already: I'd written one for LJ, having acquired the habit of reviewing all the concerts I attended. I rewrote it and beefed it up, and sent it in, and they published it. (I had to scarf this from the Wayback Machine because SFCV did not get its archiving system organized until several years later.)
And they paid me for it. And then they phoned me up a couple weeks later and asked if I could cover this string quartet concert that was coming up. And that's how I became a professional concert reviewer.
Of course, having been listening to classical music closely for over 30 years already at that point is part of what gave me the confidence to do this, as did the frequent experience of reading something noted in a review and thinking, yeah, I noticed that too. That convinced me I had the ears for the job. And I've been doing it ever since. Here's my most recent effort; I'm sure I've improved in judgment and authority, but there's a spontaneous lightness to my early reviews that I haven't always maintained.
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