concert reviews: The Barber of Philadelphia

I had two reviews in SFCV this week. Both of them were of concerts featuring music by Samuel Barber.

For the first review, amongst all the fluff that constitutes the SF Symphony's summer season, they did put on one substantive concert in the style of winter subscription concerts. And the focus was on the attractive but hardly crowd-favorite Barber Violin Concerto.

Most of the editing done on my submissions is excellent verbiage trimming, but this one did garble something I said about the Tchaikovsky Fourth. The published review says "The performance started off as slow and calm as possible under the score’s surging emotions, the contrasts not sounding ridiculous." What I meant was that the performance was as slow and calm as it could get without making the contrast sound ridiculous. I'm not sure what the point is in the published version.

But there's one other thing the editors did not change that I'm sure they would have if there had been any ambiguity to it. I wrote, and this is presented unchanged, that "Davies Symphony Hall was packed, more fully than is typical for a subscription concert." The last time I used phrasing like this, one of my readers was absolutely insistent that it meant what in this case would be that it was a subscription concert. My insistence that I was trying to contrast it with subscription concerts he brushed aside, in that other instance, as nonsensical. But it made sense to my editors.

The other review was of one of Music@Menlo's potpourri concerts. Half of the concert was the Viano Quartet playing the daylights out of the Barber and Ravel Quartets. The other half was of large miscellaneous chamber pieces that had a string quartet among the parts, but the Viano didn't play in them. Never mind: Menlo has a large stable of players to draw from.

The only editing problem in this one was that, in one place, the composition date that Menlo gave for a piece, of 1897, was changed to 1896, but not in the other place I mentioned it, making me appear slightly innumerate. But there's another thing that might confuse readers. I mentioned the Viano's first violinist Lucy Wang, but in the photo preceding it she's obviously the second violinist. Simple explanation: they switched between pieces, as violinists do in a lot of quartet ensembles. The text is about the Barber, the photo is of the Ravel. I would have mentioned this if I'd had more space, but the variety and complexity of this concert burst my word limit anyway.

Consequently, my biggest regret is no opportunity to describe the Koret Young Performers Concert earlier that day. These are the students aged 11 to 18 at whom the Café Conversations I described earlier were addressed. They will be able for the rest of their careers to burnish their credentials on having been in the Menlo Young Performers Program, because they were all fabulously good as the program participants always are. The best, I think, were the ones who played the finale of the Franck Quintet, possibly because they were the ones who were advised in a masterclass by the Viano Quartet. I was at that session last week. The Viano urged them to put more grit in their performance, and they did.

But it was all great. You have to just drop your incredulity when the concert begins and two eleven-year-olds, looking a lot younger than that, and a 13-year-old come out and do a completely professional job on a movement from a Haydn piano trio, having already charmed the audience by saying, in their spoken introduction, that Haydn's tumbling themes had reminded them of Winnie-the-Pooh chasing after a honey jar. One of the players was very nervous during the spoken introduction but showed no signs of difficulty playing, which demonstrates what I've heard classical musicians say about playing: you just practice over and over until every moment, every placement of the fingers, is completely internalized into muscle memory. It works.