Old School Rules: Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique with John Eliot Gardiner at the Kennedy Center, November 19, 2011

On Saturday afternoon, one difference between the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the modern-instrument orchestras that typically set up in the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall was clear even before the opening smack-in-the-face chords of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Egmont” overture — the orchestra occupied maybe half of the chairs that, say, the National Symphony would have. The ORR, as conceived by its founder, conductor, and artistic director John Eliot Gardiner, tries to make music in the manner and spirit of the time the music was composed, which here meant that reduced forces had to try to fill with sound a much larger hall than those in which this all-Ludwig program would have first been heard.

Still, those chords did indeed deliver a proper smack, which speaks to the ORR’s virtues. First, where a modern orchestra sounds plush and rounded, the ORR sounds leaner and sometimes rougher. Even when played with exceptional skill, their instruments often have a bit of a rasp or a tang to them, and they’re never as loud. The period horn, a fiendishly difficult instrument to play, tends to wobble a bit or even crack (though I only heard one crack on Saturday in two solid hours of concert). The kettledrums actually do make a more smack-like sound than modern timpani. The flute sounds tentative, almost brave for standing up among the others and making itself heard, but also seduces with overtones.

Another factor in smack-delivery: Under Gardiner, these ladies and gentlemen sounded as tight as the 70s incarnation of James Brown’s band, even while untangling counterpoint more complex than anything Brown threw at Maceo Parker. (I am not saying Maceo couldn’t have done it.)  Rhythms stayed super-sharp even when shifting or not as prominent; melodies sang out in unison. With that unanimity and the intensity of effort at getting these instruments to make properly orchestral sounds, everything felt alive, bristling with potential.

And so it was that we began “Egmont.” Consistent with period-performance practice, Gardiner pressed forward with his tempos here and throughout the concert, but he didn’t let those tempos straitjacket him — when he took his pauses in “Egmont,” he drew them out and made them count, leaving me a little breathless on one occasion.

It helped that the ORR can actually play at said fleet tempos without sounding hurried. This proved especially useful in the first movement of LvB’s third symphony, the “Eroica,” which acquired a heroic sweep from the contour of its melodies and Beethoven’s relentless development of them rather than a pace slowed by a desire for stateliness. Their “Eroica” also showed how dense with invention this symphony is: Details and countermelodies that often get drowned out in modern-instrument performances by whatever section is playing loudest at the time here emerged in natural proportion and counter-proportion. The development teemed with activity; at times, each section seemed to be separately trying to work out the problems of a knotty dissonance or a sudden change of key, which sharpened the surprise when Beethoven pulled a solution out of thin air.

The rest of “Eroica” was a revelation as well: the perfectly pointed fugato development of the second movement’s funeral march theme, the ridiculously talented horn players (Anneke Scott, Joe Walters, Jorge Renteria Campos, and Chris Larkin) romping through their ridiculously hard trio from the Scherzo, the finale ablaze with color and drama. Never have I felt as satisfied to hear the “Prometheus” theme emerge after Beethoven spends so long teasing us with its harmonic underpinnings; never have the subsequent variations seemed so much like a novel in music, with the theme’s transformations composing the narrative.

I tend to avoid concerts featuring Beethoven’s Fifth because overfamiliarity has dimmed its charms for me. In the iconic first movement, Gardiner and the ORR played splendidly; having been extremely spoiled by this point in the concert, I was disappointed not to feel the excitement of hearing something new. The second movement, though, normally sounds to me like a swamp of brass taking a curious melodic idea and making it sound awkwardly grandiose; with the less opulent, more transparent sounds of the ORR (and Gardiner’s careful management thereof), you could actually hear all the parts that Beethoven had written, and suddenly the movement made sense. Gardiner has a sure sense for shaping a melody, obviously, but even by Saturday’s standards the third movement of the Fifth excelled; the pizzicato tiptoe up to the bridge to the finale, in particular, flowed along deliciously. The finale, also a brass swamp in many conventional performances, here sounded as good as I’ve ever heard it.

This review is at an exhaustive length now, but I could go on enumerating virtues for paragraphs and paragraphs. Let’s just end with my sincere thanks to the Washington Performing Arts Society for bringing Gardiner and the ORR to the DMV. This will likely end up being the best concert I see this year.

Other People’s Perspectives: Charles T. Downey, Joe Banno. Also, you can hear their concert three days earlier at Carnegie Hall (substituting the Seventh for the Third) here. And here’s a fascinating blog from the ORR’s Beethoven tour.

RONDO ALLA ACCIDENTE

I don’t normally cover out-of-town ensembles on DMV Classical, because that’s not really the point of the blog. But I had to go see these dudes because I was a big fan in high school, and you know how much you love things that you loved in high school. In fact, when I had just gotten my driver’s license, the first order of business was to make cassette tapes of all my favorite music so I could cruise around in my parents’ Ford Taurus station wagon bopping to said tunes. (Someday, young people, your methods of music intake will seem just as antiquated.) Gardiner’s set of the Beethoven symphonies with the ORR had just come out, and I was bowled over by the unstoppable dance energy of his rendition of the Seventh’s outer movements, so it was a natural for taping.

One afternoon, I had just loaded a bunch of rocks into the back of the Taurus for a friend’s art project (my mind has erased further details), and we were headed back to school where the project was being assembled. The Seventh was blasting through the speakers, and JEG and the ORR were blazing through the finale. The light ahead of me was red, but it was just half a bar until the closing chord – I thought I had plenty of time to let the symphony conclude and stop when Beethoven did. I had forgotten about the rocks. The result was no damage to the gigantic pickup truck ahead of me, but a bent hood on my parents’ wagon, which in the grand tradition of auto body repairs cost a sum of money to fix that was nearly incomprehensible to both me and my parents. (I was lucky they didn’t make me pay for it.)

Do I blame this accident on the JEG/ORR performance of the Seventh? No, obviously. Was it a contributing factor in my incompetent operation of a motor vehicle? Yes, definitely. And while I love many different recordings, I have only ever loved one enough to operate a motor vehicle unsafely because of it. Plus, the accident happened on Veirs Mill Road in that netherland between Wheaton and Rockville, so covering this concert is totally within the scope of DMV Classical, right?

Balls in the Air: National Symphony Orchestra, June 9, 2011

“Juggler in Paradise” is not the story of the time Jimmy Buffet joined the circus, but rather the subtitle of Augusta Read Thomas‘ Violin Concerto no. 3, which received its U.S. premiere Thursday night from soloist Jennifer Koh and the National Symphony Orchestra under its music director, Christoph Eschenbach. The NSO, in fact, co-commissioned the concerto in 2007. Despite the subtitle, which I cannot quite bring myself to take seriously, the orchestra made a good investment.

Jennifer Koh, by Janette Beckman, from JenniferKoh.com

The work unfolds over one continuous span, the violinist playing nearly the whole time. The orchestra provides mostly spare accompaniment, especially from a vast array of tuned percussion instruments, which on Thursday spanned the rear of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall’s stage. The concerto journeyed from a quiet, slow opening, where high harmonics in Koh’s solo part were matched by delicate harps and percussion and then by ethereal strings, through various surges and scrambles on the part of both violinist and orchestra to a higher pitch of activity, then returning to the sublimated mood of the beginning.

From start to finish, Thomas made no effort to provide memorable melodies or get any rhythms going for more than a few bars; instead, the process of transformation, of the soloist-juggler playing with and against the paradisiacal orchestra, was the product.

No violinist could have tackled the challenge of putting across such a work better than Jennifer Koh. Whenever you hear Koh play, you know you are going to hear a performance in which the relation of every note to every other note in the piece has been deeply considered, in an effort to create a paradoxically spontaneous-sounding whole. Here, she made her violin line into a guidepath through the work, achieving Thomas’ goal of personification. The most memorable passages came when Koh meditated about a phrase or note and got confirmed or knocked around by an interjection from the tuned percussion; you could hear Koh making her violin line react to the changed circumstances and find its way. Eschenbach and the NSO timed their interjections precisely for maximum impact, yet restrained their volume to give the violin the dominant voice.

Koh also took on Thomas’ challenge of providing an optional cadenza within a work the composer described as “a continuous rhapsodic cadenza” in a program note; Koh’s effort, which seemed to be inspired by a pizzicato orchestral passage earlier in the piece, seemed both a profound inversion of the arc of the piece and exactly the right music to transition into a slow coda, during which I counted two possible satisfying endings before Koh’s bow arm finally fell slack. That overlong close is my only real reservation about a work that I’d gladly hear again tomorrow, provided that Koh was playing it.

On Thursday’s program, the Thomas concerto was sandwiched between Schumann opuses, ensuring that at least two of the three works played that evening would be related somehow. (If you haven’t picked up the June 6 issue of the New Yorker to read Alex Ross’ thoughts on orchestral programming, by the way, you need to do so. It’s what I would write if I were smarter and had time to write!) In the event, the NSO made a virtue of this program design by playing both of Bobby S.’s works really well.

The Overture to “Die Braut von Messina” got its first NSO performance on Thursday, and the opening arpeggio felt like a punch to the face, a blast of energy soon submerged in gloomy ruminating that maintained a doomful air. Eschenbach and the orchestra created a sound that bristled with dark menace and milked the tragic thrust of the narrative for all it was worth — this was far from a perfunctory curtain-raiser.

Different delights came after intermission, as Schumann’s second symphony got a performance whose good humor and crackling playing frequently made me smile from ear to ear. Eschenbach’s control of the music never wavered — each repetition of the scherzo in the second movement sounded just as fresh as the initial iteration, with the NSO’s violins bustling in extremely merry fashion — but his deep spontaneity in the long melodic paragraphs of the Adagio espressivo third movement almost made me feel that I had never heard the symphony before.

The finale burst with energy and imagination as well, leading naturally to a standing O that marked not only Eschenbach’s last subscription concert of the season but also trumpeter Adel Sanchez’ retirement, after 42 years of blowing in D.C. A satisfying way to go out for all concerned.

Other People’s Perspectives: Anne Midgette.

Quickie: National Symphony Orchestra, June 9, 2011

It’s the usual deal: I attended the National Symphony Orchestra concert tonight, conducted by music director Christoph Eschenbach, but won’t get to write the review now due to my need to sleep before going to work tomorrow. Boo! I will attempt to become independently wealthy, but in the meantime I can assure you that this is a program worth hearing tomorrow night or Saturday. You get a sandwich of Schumann overture (Die Braut von Messina, a new one for the NSO) and symphony (number 2) around the U.S. premiere of Augusta Read Thomas’ third violin concerto, an intriguing work played with rapturous intensity by Jennifer Koh. The NSO sounds super under Eschenbach’s direction, and everything burst with commitment and sympathy; in particular, the symphony had me smiling from ear-to-ear. Go have a listen if you’re free. And I will provide more details soon.

With a Twist of Orchestra: Pink Martini and the NSO Pops at the Kennedy Center, April 14, 2011

Pink Martini put on a good show Thursday night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. The group was without regular lead vocalist China Forbes, whose doctor had advised her not to further strain damaged vocal chords by performing, and some ragged episodes resulted. But Storm Large (yes, that is a performer’s name and not a Weather Channel alert) subbed in with an imperious diva approach, a big, powerful voice, and total commitment to every song she sang. That went well with the showy sound leader/pianist Thomas Lauderdale and the rest the band adopted for its ritzy surroundings; swinging hard from a solid rhythmic base, songs in Croatian, French, Spanish, and even our native tongue were tough to resist.

Somewhere behind the band sat the National Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of next season’s NSO Pops principal conductor Steven Reineke, playing at near-constant volume to accommodate their guests’ amplification, providing a certain sweep to a sound that did not actually need it. That’s the thing about pops concerts: They take place in halls mostly devoted to classical music, and they involve musicians who mostly play classical music, but they treat the orchestra as anonymous color, not as an equal partner.

The Pink Martini show actually involved more classical music than most such concerts do. It began with a samba take on Ravel’s “Bolero,” mostly led by the band but expanded usefully with the NSO’s strings and brass, and the song “Splendor in the Grass” had a long interlude of the main theme from Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, played by the NSO brass, standing up and spotlit for once. (Lauderdale praised the NSO and Reineke lavishly throughout.)

Most notably, Lauderdale teamed with guest pianist Grace Fong to play a lengthy excerpt from Schubert’s Fantasy in F Minor for two pianos, before segueing into two songs based on the Fantasy’s principal theme: a Latinified excoriation of an inconstant man, “And Then You’re Gone,” sung with the intense offense that seems comes naturally to Storm Large (using only one of those names seems to miss something), followed by the guy’s brassy perspective, “But Now I’m Back.”

This last was sung by Ari Shapiro, who may be familiar as National Public Radio’s White House correspondent, and who has a lovely voice but uses it a bit blandly for my tastes (at least when singing). NPR’s Scott Simon also made a stage appearance, dragged out of the crowd to intone Turkish phrases during another song, which he proved unwilling to do, although he enjoyed the stage. These two features showed the band’s interest in what I think of as “federal Washington,” along with frequent nods to budget work and Congress that eventually culminated in Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Portland, Ore, same as the band) and his staff appearing on stage for the grand finale, Blumenauer gamely shaking his maracas. I depend on federal Washington for a living, and I realize the band’s aesthetic is rooted in the 40s and 50s, but it would have warmed my heart to hear a go-go rhythm tapped out on their well-used conga set as well, although I was likely the only person in the audience to think of that.

A while ago, Anne Midgette asked whether pops concerts are a resource for developing new audiences or presentng different kinds of concerts. Concerts like Thursday’s are not going to do that; the NSO got love, but very little chance to show what it, and the music it plays, can really do. It would be fun if there were an occasional pops concert devoted entirely to ear candy like Borodin’s Overture and Polovtsian Dances (when was the last time you saw that on an orchestra program?), and that might develop an audience for the harder stuff.  But when the NSO plays in a show like this, all it does is show Pink Martini’s audience a group that’s really good at playing second fiddle. That’s still a fun night out with a good band, just not the one whose name is at the top of the Playbill.

Note: I apologize for how late this review is. I ended up having a root canal yesterday.

South of the Border: Jordi Savall and a Whole Bunch of People at the Kennedy Center, September 27, 2010

Whenever Jordi Savall crosses the Atlantic, it’s an event, particularly when he visits our fair metropolitan area. The consummate violist da gamba, reinvigorator of standard Baroque (and beyond) repertoire, and advocate for the folk music of his native Spain came to the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater on Monday night with a program that itself crossed the Atlantic — an exploration of the evolution of music in the land known in the 16th and 17th centuries as “New Spain” and today just known as Mexico (and New Mexico). Conveniently, Savall’s album depicting said exploration was released just in time the KenCen’s current “Celebrate Mexico 2010″ festival, under whose aegis the concert was presented.

Jordi Savall rockin’ the red (scarf)

Anyone familiar with the music-making of Savall and his compatriots — his wife, soprano, Montserrat Figueras; his orchestra, Hespérion XXI, which contributed strings, a harp, and percussion; his vocal group, La Capella Reial de Catalunya — will find it almost superfluous to note that they played and sang amazingly well during this concert. Beyond that, though, both the album and concert integrated the contributions of the Tembembe Ensemble Continuo, whose forces almost equaled those of the usual Savall suspects on Monday. The Tembembe folks, devoted to ancient and folk repertoire of their native Mexico, come equipped with a veritable arsenal of instruments from back in the day and a deep knowledge of ancient Mexican songs and their sources.

Both groups know how to play in multiple styles; harps and guitars both delicately picked out melodies and buzzed and thrummed with low-end energy, depending on the demands of the piece. Percussion, always on point and just loud enough, insistently pushed the melodic instruments to interact with the snaky rhythms while sounding lovely in its own right. The group’s rendition of a fandango started at a simmer, with simple strums on harps and guitars, and implacably rose to a boil, helped by Hespérion harpist Andrew Lawrence-King reading of a quote from none other than Casanova about the dance’s “incomparable lasciviousness.” Here, too, came the most crucial turn from the Special Bonus Guest dancer, Donaji Esparza, steaming up the music  by beating her feet on the Eisenhower stage, although her dancing gracefully skirted the seedier aspects of Casanova’s characterization.

Savall presided as concertmaster, looking placidly upon the proceedings when not himself involved, occasionally conducting with his bow when slower meters demanded some guidance. (His long gray hair, beard, and all-black clothes made him look like everyone’s favorite drama teacher.) His viola da gamba made its biggest impression when he played it quietly, in the penultimate improvisation on “Son Jarocho,” where he dipped into a pianississimo barely audible from my seat five rows back while continuing to carry a high, sweet melodic exploration forward; no one could resist leaning forward to hear such an instrumental tone.

Yet vocal pieces provided both the bulk of the program and its most memorable moments. Ada Coronel and Enrique Barona, both from the Tembembe group, dug into folk-style vocals with an approach to phrasing and pronunciation of Spanish that you can still easily hear in Mexican music. Their he-said she-said duet “Niña como en tus mudanças” drew plenty of chuckles from a highly Hispanic crowd, with their stylish dispatch of the lyrics heightening the comedic effect. Figueras, of course, came with a different stylistic background, one she explored most hauntingly in “Duerme mi niño,” in which she herself plucked out some heartbreaking notes on a harp and breathed a passionate lament as Savall’s viola da gamba wove a hushed ornament around her voice in the background. Her voice has become a little thin, but it’s still agile and bright, and she still knows how to use it to tug at the heartstrings.

The Capella Reial vocalists put in plenty of good work, particuarly in the nativity piece, “San Sabeya, gugurumbe/El Son de los negritos,” with a proper mix of solemnity and wonder. And when all the vocalists came together, their styles blended to create something bigger and better than they had separately, in the closing “El Arrancazacate,” which had almost too many wonderful things going on to take in at once.

Savall and his partners also took the time to prepare a show, rather than just a concert. Scholarly devotion informed all these performances but did not stifle them. (I must note that the program notes did not provide even the most basic info on the composers or any of the specific pieces, which seemed to be taking this a little too far.) Besides Esparza’s bright shawl and dramatic skirt, many of the Tembembe players dressed in Mexican duds outside the usual as-anonymous-as-possible concert-wear template. The musicians did not pause between pieces, keeping the momentum high and sharpening the music’s contrasting styles. Most importantly, everyone played and sang like they were thrilled to have the opportunity to present this music to us, including a bunch of music not available on the CD. Ultimately, that committment makes almost any concert memorable, and given the skill that went with that enthusiasm, I will remember Monday’s concert for a long time to come.

Note: Based on pictures and such, I think all the names here are accurate, but there’s not much way to check since the whole show moved so fluidly. Please let me know if I got something wrong. (Well, always please let me know if I got something wrong.)

RANDOM MUSINGS

I appreciated also the blitheness with which the concert mixed traditional classical and folk music.  It all sounded like it belonged when played like that. But of course we have to continue to argue whether classical music is better or worse than any other kind of music.

I have to admit that the concert was so generously proportioned that by the time it ended at 10:15, I was dragging a little. I’m the oldest 32-year-old I know.

Other People’s Perspectives: Joe Banno, Charles T. Downey.

From the Core of the Earth: National Symphony Orchestra, June 12, 2010

Guest conductor Kristjan Järvi showed some huge strengths and some glaring weaknesses in his leadership of the National Symphony Orchestra on Saturday night. His sensitive shaping of phrases and skill at eliciting sonorities from the orchestra made the first part of the program passionate, intriguing, and occasionally brilliant, but his extremely imprecise approach to rhythm made a hash of two jazzy works after intermission.

Järvi had help with the rhythms in the meatiest piece on the program, the Symphony no. 4 (“Magma”) of his Estonian countryman Erkki-Sven Tüür, written for solo percussionist and orchestra. Judging on his bio and his fourth symphony, Tüür seems a bit like Baltimore’s own Christopher Rouse. Both love rock as well as classical — Tüür even led his own Estonian prog-rock group in the “chamber rock” vein — and show it in their orchestral work. (Tüür also shows it by having the largest possible number of rockin’ umlauts in his name.) The Fourth, though shot through with icy sonorities that we associate with Tüür’s part of the world, could fit without too much trouble into Rouse’s oeuvre, with rock rhythms sparring with essentially tonal harmonies in inventive, string-heavy orchestral scoring that occasionally breaks into unapologetic lyricism. (Tüür breaks into it a little less often than Rouse does.)

“Magma” was written for and dedicated to percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, also the dedicatee of Rouse’s “Der gerettete Alberich” (I will stop belaboring this now), and Järvi and the NSO were lucky to secure her services to perform the work for the series of three concerts that ended Saturday. Sometimes Glennie attacked her instruments a little harder than necessary, but “Magma” requires her to play continuously for over a half-hour, and she never missed a beat. (The guns she was showing in her one-armed black top suggested one source of her stamina.)

The “Magma” erupted immediately in the form of a series of loud chords that forced their way from low rumbles to high crashes in the orchestra, spiked by cold, glimmering sounds from the first of three batteries of percussion among which Glennie circulated, especially from the vibraphone. The orchestra then began exploring a long series of slow, grinding harmonic modulations, with Glennie’s vibraphone probing the orchestra’s sound, sometimes suggesting a freeze, sometimes starting to crumble a series of notes. The effect, as this suggests, was pretty cool, but there is only so much of this one can take before the sheer imperturbability of the process stops being impressive and starts feeling stagnant. A lack of dynamic variation, here and elsewhere, also posed a problem; the quieter moments held the most drama here, as there was a general sense of unrelenting medium-loudness.

The music eventually segued into a cadenza for Glennie and a rock drum kit, and soon it became apparent that “Magma” has the standard four symphonic movements hiding it its continuous span. Sure enough, a slow, lyrical section succeeded Glennie’s sparky, shifty solo spot, highlighted by the strings spinning out a melody that Järvi shaped into generous, impassioned paragraphs and that Glennie expertly accented and occasionally undermined with detailed, precise conga playing. The fourth section gathered steam (ha-ha) in an impressivly implacable but also repetitive way, so that the climax felt only marginally more thundering than what had come before. Still, I’d love to hear more of Tüür’s work, and kudos are due to the NSO for putting it on and to the orchestra, Järvi, and Glennie for stepping right up to its challenges.

The other works on the program had more immediate appeal for the amateur listener, at least on paper. Some sloppy playing marred Edward Grieg’s Lyric Suite, especially the “Nocturne,” in which Järvi and the NSO blurred the fast running melody more often than not. But more memorable than those missteps was Järvi’s wonderful feel for phrasing Grieg’s melodies — the “Shepherd’s Boy” in particular had intense swells of strings punctuating well-formed melodic sentences in a non-histrionic but nonetheless riveting manner — and the memorable sonorities that came from the NSO. In particular, the wonderfully balanced, hushed sound of the bassoons blending with the low strings in the “Norwegian Rustic March” evoked wet leaves on an autumn evening, a sound that felt almost tangible in its intensity.

The big bass-drum blowout in “Bell-Ringing,” the finale of the Lyric Suite, foreshadowed the two incredibly loud pieces that came after intermission, the Overture and Suite from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide and Duke Ellington’s “Harlem.” The Candide Overture came in the original orchestral garb in which it has become a favorite concert piece, and Järvi and the NSO could not deliver it precisely enough to make it fizz. This problem continued in Charlie Harmon’s suite from the opera(-ish thing), where rhythmic precision left the building; Bernstein became generically genial rather than wittily pointed.

Even worse things happened in “Harlem,” heard in a transcription from big band to full orchestra by Luther Henderson (with edits from John Mauceri). Here the NSO had the benefit of its own rock-solid rhythm section to help it stay on rhythm, but Järvi and the rest of the orchestra seemed unable to use this helper. The final section of “Harlem” was probably the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall, a stage full of musicians playing just that bit out of time with each other, a sludgy soup topped by blown-out brass and served messy. Listening to it was actively unpleasant, and a far cry from the Grieg and Tüür that made this concert worthwhile.

ME VERSUS THE AUDIENCE

Charles T. Downey reviewed Thursday’s performance of this program for the Post. In the comments thread on the link to his review on The Classical Beat, an interesting discussion has broken out about whether the review should have discussed an especially appreciative audience reaction to the Ellington on Friday night, followed by what was apparently a well-received encore.

The audience appeared to be just as happy with the Ellington on Saturday, which is sad, because if you listen to Ellington’s own recordings of his compositions you hear precision and sensitivity to tone and color that were not present in Saturday’s performance. My guess is that any hint of jazz gets folks excited, although why this one in particular worked I don’t know. For my part, I didn’t stay for whatever encore ensued after “Harlem,” because I didn’t want to hear any more from the NSO at that point.

TELL YOUR STORY

I have a lot of respect for Järvi and Glennie as artists, which is why I am about to make fun of their artistic bios in the Playbill program, because said bios need to be edited to remove some laughable sentences.

Kristjan Järvi’s name has become synonymous with artistic and cultural diversity

That’s true! Just the other day I heard the following conversation:

Hipster 1: I couldn’t imagine living in the suburbs — no Kristjan Järvi at all.
Hipster 2: So true. The city is where all the Kristjan Järvi is.

Evelyn’s 12th solo CD, Shadow Behind the Iron Sun, was based on a radical improvisational concept and has once again questioned people’s expectations.

Once again? Is her 12th CD a rerelease of an earlier CD? And the CD itself is questioning my expectations? That’s some interactive content!

Outside of actual performance, the Evelyn Glennie brand is constantly exploring other areas of creativity.

Wait a minute — the Glennie brand? You’re Oprah now? Who’s exploring these areas besides Evelyn Glennie? But I’m eager to hear about these new areas — tell me more!

…to regularly appearing on television across the world, including the Late Show with David Letterman…

Wow! It sure does take a lot of creativity to play one’s instrument on TV!

After 20 years in the music business she had begun teaching privately, which allows her to explore the art of teaching

So teaching allows you to explore the art of teaching? Well, if you give me some of that brand money, I’d be happy to explore the art of editing your bio.

Why Don’t I Like Opera? Random Thoughts on the Washington National Opera’s “Porgy and Bess” at the Kennedy Center, April 1, 2010

In case you are wondering, I had a good marathon. I am now recovered, and regular updates will resume here.

I’m not into opera, despite the self-evident accumulation of great music in that genre. My latest theory regarding why not: Opera has too many conventions to which I’m not accustomed, not having grown up an operagoer. Nevertheless, I went to the Washington National Opera’s “Porgy and Bess” last Thursday, eager to see this American masterwork in full stage bloom and reacquaint myself with tunes I hear most often when Miles Davis’ Porgy suite is in my CD player. I found the following impediments to my full enjoyment:

An opera in English should not require surtitles. From Alyson Cambridge’s opening “Summertime” lullaby, in which expansive vowels drowned all consonants in their wake, I spent most of the opera looking up at the words over the stage simply to hear what people were singing,.  For a dramatic art, it would seem to be imperative to enunciate the sung words so they can be heard by the audience, thus communicating what’s going on in the plot by.

Actually, I don’t understand why original English-language opera is not performed more in the United States.  It seems to me that, by removing a hurdle the audience must surmount to enter into the narrative, performing in the native tongue of the audience would make the resulting dramatic experience more immediate.  Translation of the best-loved classix would be tougher, since so much of drama is wrapped up in the sound of the words, but it would also seem to be worth a shot given the huge gains to be reaped. (And yes, I do prefer my foreign-language movies subtitled rather than dubbed, but opera is a re-creative art, not a duplicative art. I would argue that all these modernist productions I read about on Anne’s blog do more violence to the original intention of a composer than presenting the libretto in the local tongue.)

I like the original intermission break better. The synopsis indicates an intermission after everyone leaves for Kittiwah Island for their awesome Bible picnic/party and Porgy reprises “I Got Plenty O’ Nuthin’.” Cheery! In this production, intermission came after Crown has beaten up Bess and prevented her from getting on the boat off the island. Right before the curtain comes down, Crown has Bess slung over his shoulder, doubtless ready to rape her. Then we go into the lobby and hang out for 25 minutes. (Want some Junior Mints?) The reason for the change was not self-evident in the performance. And speaking of incongruities…

Weird socioeconomic things occur at a performance of an opera about poor people. Tix for this performance were advertised at $60 to $300; discounts were available, but let’s estimate that folks paid an average somewhere in that range to hear Eric Owens’ Porgy sing “I Got Plenty O’ Nuthin’.” So the best song in the opera (and Owens sung it well) was a nostalgia trip at the very best for the audience, certainly unlikely to reflect its current situation.

Also, in the program notes, it was noted that the original producers of “Porgy and Bess” experienced “some difficulty…in finding enough skilled African-American actors for the play’s large cast.”  The notes did not go on to explain, “This is because white people systematically oppressed African-Americans from slave times up to (and past) the date of the premiere; the resulting material and social deprivation limited African-American outlets for creative expression in the wider cultural realm.” It might have been useful to note that. (Wikipedia handles the discussion of the stereotypes that populate the opera better than I could, but such thoughts were going through my mind too.)

Inappropriate clapping. So near the end of the opera, the drug dealer Sportin’ Life gets Bess back on his “happy dust” and induces her to abandon the only man who’s ever been good to her (i.e., Porgy), instead heading with Sportin’ Life to New York City. This transpires in the aria “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon,” the rousing tune of which only makes what’s happening more horrifying — Bess is losing herself, literally, to the promise of glitz so well embodied in the song. At the end of the song, a bunch of people clapped. Both Jermaine Smith as Sportin’ Life and Morenike Fadayomi as Bess performed admirably, but I sure didn’t feel like clapping, horrified as I was at what had just happened. Why did people clap? Is that just what you do after a well-performed, rousing aria, no matter how what’s going on dramatically?

The hardest-working man onstage. Smith’s Sportin’ Life had some amazing dance moves, including pelvic thrusts of vigor and depth that I’m pretty sure would have sent 1930s audiences and townsfolk into unassuageable fits of offendedness. Though I appreciated the showmanship, the other aspects of the production seemed to be stuck in the 1920s, making me wonder where Smith had gotten the idea to swing it like James Brown. Another incongruity, tearing at the dramatic fabric. (At one point, Sportin’ Life also appeared to be makin’ it rain.)

And yet, that said, I enjoyed a whole lot about it. Owens sang tremendously well, giving Porgy the gravitas he deserves and making an effective mockery object for his foes Crown (Terry Cook) and Sportin’ Life. Serena’s lament for her dead husband Robbins, from the pipes of Lisa Daltirus, broke through the wall of convention and artifice and tapped into genuine emotion, as did the title duo’s “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” Most of the comic numbers were actually funny, particularly Smith’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” And the tunes remained in my head for the entire time I was awake after seeing the show, and said tunes were still rattling around between my eardrums as I showered and brushed my teeth the next morning.

It didn’t compare to my affection for my all-time favorite operatic perfomance I’ve attended — WNO’s Peter Grimes, baby! — but there’s at least a hint that I might one day acclimate to the conventions (and the vagaries of productions and performance) and enjoy a wider selection of operas. A hint that I might.

Real reviews: Anne Midgette, Sophia Vastek.

Nonstop Ivory-Tinkling: National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, December 3, 2009

19,615. That’s how many notes are in the solo part of Jennifer Higdon’s piano concerto, as the composer told conductor Andrew Litton in a brief, fun onstage interview just before the concerto’s world premiere at Thursday’s National Symphony Orchestra concert. What does 19,615 (a number known only through the magic of computers) mean? Well, later, Higdon said she would be pulling for the pianist, 22-year-old Yuja Wang, because “I realize this is like an Olympic sport.” Even the dense (me) in the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall eventually got the idea: This concerto has more notes in it than most.

It certainly seemed like you could hear every one of them on Thursday. Wang, who possesses both formidable technical address and a musically inquisitive mind, played as cleanly and with as much brio several thousand notes into the concerto as she did at the outset, and Litton expertly integrated the piano’s sound with the orchestra, crucial to Higdon’s conception of the concerto. If this were indeed an Olympic event, the musicians would have medals around their necks right now. Unfortunately, it was a musical event, and Higdon’s writing in this work won’t win any prizes.

Admittedly, a lot of people did stand up and cheer the concerto on Thursday, but the warm reception mystified me. Here’s what Higdon has in the concerto, from this first listen:

1.    A few passages of slow, pure tonal chords, out of which melodies blossom. This music sounded almost exactly like piano-bar jazz, with banal harmonization. During these passages, I kept looking for the cup on Wang’s Steinway into which I could deposit my tip. The melodic materials here informed the

2.    Endless, endless skeins of quick flowing notes, runs up and down the keyboard, rippling, cresting, cascading, rising, falling, hither, yon, etc. (19,615!) These made the piano sound like the person in the cubicle next to yours who never, ever shuts up, causing you to tune out said neighbor even on topics of interest; similarly, interesting textural and harmonic moves Higdon made during these passages washed away quickly from the mind, lost in the showers. During these piano passages, I looked to the orchestra for melodic material or some kind of spectacular timbral flourish of the kind for which Higdon is justly celebrated, and only rarely did she provide any of either. I’m still not sure what was supposed to be happening during most of the first and second movements — whether anything was supposed to be happening, in fact, other than the pallidly pretty stasis-in-motion Wang so expertly conjured.

Frankly, these parts seemed inspired by a single-voice instrument (Higdon started as a flutist) rather than something with the manifold capabilities of the piano; you don’t wish for other notes when it’s a violin rhapsodizing above chords, but somehow a pianist touching all 88 keys but only one or (at most) two at a time sounds thin.

3.    The piano acting as a percussive instrument. There needed to be a lot of this to balance #2, but Higdon rarely went to it. Thinking of Liszt afterward (as I did), you remember how a real piano composer balances the ornament and filigree of the runs with distinct, authoritative (even if reserved) melodic statements or at the very least different kinds of virtuoso doings. That mostly didn’t happen here.

The third movement held the most interest; Higdon knows how to write socko finales, and here she deployed some pointillistic solo percussion as a texture for the piano to infiltrate and then dominate. Heck, she even broke up some of Wang’s runs with percussive statements in the non-running hand, thus further emphasizing just how fast (and clean) these runs were and making them exciting rather than soporific. That was fun. Higdon needed to do more of that.

I am still 100 percent behind Higdon, most of whose works I really enjoy. Let’s hope this is the Dvorák piano concerto (do not let anyone convince you the Dvorák piano concerto is good) in what ends up being her Dvorák-quality (or better!) career.

Somewhat oddly, Litton and the NSO bracketed this 21st-century American premiere with two 19th-century Russian works having something to do with winter. (Thanks for reminding us, guys!) Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov’s little-heard suite from the opera The Snow Maiden started us off, and if you think I wasn’t excited about that, you don’t know how obsessed I am with Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral music. Indeed, hearing the suite in live performance illuminated many lovely facets of R-K’s always-intoxicating orchestration. Unfortunately, Litton and the NSO had evidently not rehearsed the music enough to perform it properly, with super-mushy ensemble from the strings and really bad tempo desynchronizations between brass and strings especially marring the performance. Perhaps this will be fixed tonight and Litton and the NSO will do justice to some really neat music.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 in G minor, “Winter Daydreams,” which came after intermission, makes some of the more clichéd moves in the whole symphonic literature, complete with a repeated fugato in the overstuffed finale. In Litton’s hands, though, Tchaikovsky’s predictable manipulations nevertheless delivered rousing entertainment, sort of the musical equivalent of watching Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Commando” and both laughing at and thoroughly enjoying the tropes of the genre.

Litton also got some fine playing from the NSO; the big themes sang out marvelously, particularly when the bassoon and oboe floated the slow movement’s melancholy melody over a bed of strings, with a flute providing ornaments. Litton had a good feel for how to approach the Scherzo’s occasionally square development, and if you didn’t like the explosion of brass at the end, you probably don’t like minor-key Romantic symphonies at all. If you do, though, you’ll like Litton and the NSO performing this one.

PEOPLE/THINGS THAT ARE HOT

You know how Yuja Wang’s publicity photos all look super-cute? Well, maybe you don’t spend as much time as I do looking at Yuja Wang’s publicity photos. But from my seat she appeared to be just as cute in person. So yay. Interestingly, Google’s first search suggestion when you search on “yuja wang” is “yuja wang boyfriend.” (Apparently she has one.) So I’m definitely not the only person who has noticed this.

As the audience settled into its seats for the Tchaik, there arose in the Concert Hall the sulfurous aroma of struck matches. That was pretty mysterious. Was someone trying to clutch close a little heat before the onslaught of additional cold in the “Winter Daydreams”? It subsided about when Litton picked up the baton again.

Other reviews: Anne Midgette, Robert R. Reilly, Tim Smith. I really enjoyed reading everyone else’s perspectives on this one. I’m a bit shocked that I was the only one to really dislike a Jennifer Higdon piece, but that’s why they perform the concerts; if you knew what you were going to like at every concert, you’d just stay home and imagine it. Or at least I would. There’s very little marginal utility for me in taking the Metro to Foggy Bottom-GWU and walking to the big white box unless I don’t quite know what’s going to happen.

Edited to add a couple more reviews: Charles T. Downey, T.L. Ponick. Downey adds some interesting background info on the concerto that I had not known, so that’s definitely worth a look for the curious.

Quickie: National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, December 3, 2009

I went to the National Symphony Orchestra’s concert under guest conductor Andrew Litton tonight, but because I need to go to my job that is not writing about classical music tomorrow, I cannot review it in full right now. Meanwhile, you may be wondering whether to skip work on Friday to go to the afternoon show, or whether to wander over to the KenCen Saturday eve for the final rendition of this program. So here’s a quick summary:

1. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden Suite: Piquant but direly under-rehearsed. If they can fix it for Friday and Saturday, it is fun music to listen to.
2. Jennifer Higdon’s world-premiere piano concerto with Yuja Wang as soloist: Repetitive, unidiomatic for the instrument, harmonically banal. A major disappointment from a major American composer.
3. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 1 (“Winter Daydreams”): Well-played, big-boned Romantic fun. Not great music but extremely entertaining in this performance.

More complete thoughts coming tomorrow.

Night of Wrath: Philly Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, June 3, 2009

I realize this review is not “timely,” but I thought it might give an idea of what style you can expect from this blog. Plus it’s just sitting there on my hard drive, content waiting to be placed into the chamber and fired onto the Internet.

The year is 1995, I just got my driver’s license, and I need to make tapes to rock in my car. About nine months later, I had a few, well-chosen 90-minute cassettes to roll with. One featured Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata on the B-side. Another was mainly devoted to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers, but used Franz Liszt’s “Totentanz” — the only classical music I knew that could thump as hard as the Wu — to fill the tape up.

I rocked those tapes driving to school, to comedy shows, to landscape jobs — particularly the Rachmaninov, whose third-movement slow section provided solace one time when I crossed Memorial Bridge into Virginia and meant to go south on Route 1 but ended up floundering about in D.C. after crossing the Key, whose thrilling apocalyptic joyful climax made me envision the tall buildings of Bethesda falling. So when the Philadelphia Orchestra decided to come to town under the direction of Charles Dutoit to play both “Totentanz” and the Symphonic Dances, I had to be there. Blast from the past, baybee!

“Totentanz” gets its thump mostly from its piano soloist, and Philly brought Jean-Yves Thibaudet to do the honors. The critics generally lauded Thibaudet’s performance of Liszt’s second piano concerto with the National Symphony, which I did not attend; the writeups raised my expectations, though, and the Frenchman did not disappoint. Though he lacks the swagger that you can imagine Liszt himself bringing to the party, he made a formidable force starting with the demonic tread of his low chords underneath brass snarling out the “Dies Irae” theme. The 13 variations that followed were sharply characterized, with Thibaudet capable of playing the outlines of a single chord underneath a ripe clarinet melody and making it sound even more magical, then turning around the next moment and unleashing artillery blasts of notes up and down the keyboard. Although sometimes the orchestra swamped the piano completely (at least from where I was sitting), Dutoit never let his accompaniment sag or outrun Thibaudet, and when he called on the brass to match Thibaudet’s intensity, they responded in full. Most importantly, both Thibaudet and Dutoit seemed to sense a dramatic thread connecting these disparate episodes, and the gusto with which they attacked the work made me sense it too. A riveting performance.

My obsession with the Symphonic Dances has only grown since my youth, yet Dutoit found things in the score that had eluded me thus far in my experience of with the piece. The waltz of the second movement staggers and hiccups just a little bit, and Dutoit pushed and pulled the rhythms so that you could really feel in your spine where Rachmaninov leads the beat astray, including litle ornamental sprays of notes that one could almost imagine as the small spills of a too-enthusiastic happy hour participant. This marked an improvement over the first movement, which had many felicities but never quite seemed to find the dance in the work’s title. The opening doodles in the winds didn’t have their usual coiled energy, from which the big thrusting chords that outline the first theme did not mark as dramatic a departure as they normally do. The alto saxophone came at his sighing, sorrowful melody too freely, forgetting that even when a dance rhythm is not being outlined in the accompaniment, it should still be felt in the melody. The followup essay of that melody by the string section over bare piano chords, though, displayed the Philly strings at their finest, rich and seductive without being glossy, and thus sounding all the chillier as Rachmaninov denied this big tune its normal Rachmaninovian harmonic accoutrements. They sounded lovely in the warm coda, too, establishing the relaxed mood that Dutoit so cannily jerked around in the second movement.

Dutoit paused for just a breath between the second and third movements, making the screech at the latter’s opening shock the audience, and from there it was off to the races, as well it should be. The rhythmic pulse beat hard throughout this movement, unifying its many episodes, and Dutoit played up every single time the Rachman flirts with the “Dies Irae” before its triumphal shattering brass invocation near the end of the work. Details were sharp, textures clear, Rachmaninov’s astonishing orchestration vivid, and what I now think of as the “Key Bridge big tune” got another extra boost from those Philly violins, beautifully molding the melody while keeping its rhythmic pulse clearly in mind. After we finally hit the “Dies Irae,” Dutoit kept up the interest through the grim march episode that succeeds it and the wild coda ending in four big chords and a gongstroke that echoed for precisely the measure it is supposed to. Ka-pow!

These works were framed oddly on the program by two Ravel pieces, neither of which I am terrifically fond of: the piano concerto for the left hand and “La Valse.” I am willing to admit that the lefty concerto is probably good and I am unable to apprehend it, but this is about the fourth time I’ve heard it live and it still doesn’t make any sense to me. Thibaudet played his part with no mean eloquence, and the bassoons introduced the work with hypnotic low rumblings, but from there I’m lost. “La Valse,” on the other hand, seems to me to be clearly a useless piece, about twice as long as it needs to be and not half as entertaining as it thinks it is. (Yes, we get it, dude: There can never be another carefree waltz after World War I. I heard you the first time. Do you have anything else to say?) Coming after Rachmaninov’s dramatic power and clear, sustained musical argument, “La Valse” had little chance of being anything other than an anticlimax, and that was precisely what it was.

Nevertheless, I got what I came for: Memorable performances of two of my favorite works in the whole classical canon. Philly, I hate your sports teams, but I love your cheesesteaks and I’m becoming very fond of your orchestra.