concert update

[calimac]

1. The evening before my departure for Ditto, I was feeling tired and out of sorts, and wondering why I had agreed to get up early the next morning and go, and even pick up someone at the airport on the way. Brahms's Third Symphony, as played by Symphony Silicon Valley under George Cleve, proved to be just the tonic. I felt much better afterwards, and the next day everything was fine.

2. Rob Kapilow is a guy who goes around giving musically-illustrated lectures on the topic of "What Makes It Great?" He talks very fast with a New York accent and sounds remarkably like sandial. He brought his schtick to Stanford recently; the "It" on this occasion was Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and he answered his question in the form of a phrase analysis. Not bad, though how much of it sailed over the heads of any auditors not used to this sort of thing, I know not.

3. Ensemble Mirable Chamber Orchestra played concertos by Vivaldi, Bach, and Georg Matthias Monn (now that's a name you don't find in concert too often: an early Viennese classicist). Very nice sound mixed with occasional strange out-of-tune passages.

Comments

[divertimento.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you've been to concerts other than one I wanted to ask you about. I went to the San Francisco performance of Philharmonia's latest concert, which included a Telemann concerto for flute and recorder. The two soloists played beautifully, making a seamless blend of the two different woodwind instruments (hey, one's horizontal, one's vertical). (And consistently well tuned, unlike the other baroque concert you heard.) But I wondered whether that skillful and sensitive merging of timbres lost something from the intent of the piece. Would the interchange of the solo parts have something more to say if there was more obvious contrast between the sound of recorder on top or flute on top?

I was curious what your opinion of the performance would be. Can a harmonioius blend be too much of a good thing?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, that's an interesting question. Sometimes the sound of a consort of instruments identical apart from their pitch can be delightful. Think of a consort of crumhorns (yum) or even of saxophones. For that matter, the lack of variety of timbres in a string quartet is supposed to the medium's austere virtue.

What would concern me about this concerto is the possibility of the flute drowning the recorder out. It would take skillful writing, or canny players, to prevent that.