three concerts and two movies

[calimac]

No kidding, this is what I've been spending my time on for the last few days.

Concert #1 - Saturday, Symphony Silicon Valley. Beethoven's Ninth, the last word in Beethoven symphonies. Good careful performance, very clear and involving, except for the horns who were having an off night. Magnificent baritone solo. Altogether, a candidate for me to give it a good review.

Concert #2 - Sunday, TinAlley String Quartet. Young Australians fresh from winning a major competition in Canada. Very bright-colored sound, as if someone had turned the treble way up. Not very helpful in Haydn, intermittently effective in Mendelssohn, but their Bartok Fourth was the best quartet performance of this composer I'd ever heard. I never thought I'd say it about this work, but it was coherent and even engaging. They should come back with works of their countryman Peter Sculthorpe, and maybe some Ives or Sessions. I might not attend such a program from other performers, but from these guys I would.

Concert #3 - Monday, Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Always trustworthy to give solid, middle-of-the-road performances of standard smaller-scale repertoire, in this case Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture and his Italian Symphony. Murray Perahia had been scheduled to play Mozart's K.491, one of my favorites of his piano concertos, but he'd canceled and instead we got Yuja Wang, a young woman still a student at the Curtis Institute, known for the famous pianists she's substituted for: Radu Lupu, Yefim Bronfman, and now Perahia. She has a heavy tone but a good lyrical sense, and encored with a silly Lisztian-style mashup based on Mozart's Turkish Rondo from K.331. (ETA: My fellow reviewer was shocked to his gills by this encore.)

Movie #1 - Copying Beethoven. I'd seen this in the theatre, but felt like watching it again before concert #1. Young woman music student is assigned to help Beethoven with getting the Ninth ready for its premiere. Fails to address the question: If everyone is so shocked at a woman, how'd she get to be a top conservatory student in the first place? Ed Harris is Beethoven, weird casting but he's a sufficiently good actor to pull it off. Silly things like having the deaf Beethoven conduct by following her, and having the 1824 orchestra emit 21st century sound, seem less painful on second viewing. Makes a halfway-decent attempt at a layman's explanation of why Beethoven next turned to writing painful music like the Grosse Fuge.

Movie #2 - Across the Universe. Cover versions of Beatles songs performed by characters named for the songs and set in a thin soup of plot - this is the recipe that produced a legendarily bad (I haven't seen it) 1978 film called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees. But this one I thought was pretty good. The plot was full of loose ends, but the movie isn't about the plot. The six major characters (and some minor ones) are all named from Beatles songs, but only two of them get their titular songs sung at them. The rest are just sly references, as are a lot of other things: there's even an unauthorized rooftop concert. Really imaginative musical and video reinventions of songs: "I Want To Hold Your Hand" as a lament, "Strawberry Fields" as a war song with strawberry juice standing for blood. Bono (not Sonny Bono, the other Bono) does "I Am the Walrus". I even liked the guy [Eddie Izzard: you may have heard of him but I hadn't] who talks his way through "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" - normally I hate renditions like that, but this was fun. Set during the Vietnam War era: a forceful reminder that we're doing the same damn stupid thing all over again.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Eddie Izzard is extremely talented. I'm a huge fan. Haven't seen that movie, though, as I do not care for the Beatles' music particularly.

The movie I saw this weekend was "10,000 BC." I haven't had so much fun picking out anachronisms and impossible geography since "Elizabeth."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"10,000 BC" - marked down from "One Million BC", as some wag observed.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Across the Universe was my favorite of the new movies I saw in the theater last year, but I was a little surprised that my brother, who watched it recently on DVD, liked it too. He specifically praised the "Hold Me Tight" sequence, which weaves togther a sock-hop version of the song with a rocking Cavern-version. It's one of my favorite sequences too, and perhaps indicative of how this movie means (which as you indicate isn't via the plot), both playing with the malleability of song, contrasting two different social/class milieus, and setting up the central love story even as the two leads dance with other lovers. Regarding your last comment, I was struck by kdotdammit's idea that this was a movie about the Iraq war for people who really didn't want to think about it.

And yes, Eddie Izzard has shown up in a surprising number of interesting movies that I've seen. You should check out Alex Cox's somewhat stefnal adaptation of Revengers Tragedy sometime, which also features the excellent Christopher Eccleston. Izzard plays Lussurioso.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, these songs are there to tell us things about the role they play in society and in lives. The early Beatles songs, for instance, can be anything from rote and insincere (All My Loving here) to in-the-moment (Hold Me Tight) to poignantly crushing (I Want to Hold Your Hand).

The set-up was startlingly complex. Once all the previously-introduced characters are assembled (when Prudence comes in through the bathroom window - reference!), I stopped the DVD and went back to watch it over from the beginning, just to get my bearings.

I remember all that Vietnam mess, which went on for year after wearisome year. It was very unpleasant, so I don't think about it much today. But when I do think about it, the deja vu with Iraq is frightening in its exactitude. The only difference is that the protests are less active and less violent. Is it that fewer people are gulled into supporting the war this time (making fewer people to have to argue with), or is it that the protesters have learned that their behavior was counter-productive, or is it just that after having done it all forty years ago, we're simply plumb tuckered out?

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Delighted you enjoyed Across the Universe so much. I really loved it, and am looking forward to revisiting it on DVD. Something very soulful, deeply considered, about that arrangements and the settings of the various songs, and the actors mostly managed to live up to them with grace and gusto.

All the concerts sound worthwhile -- I do hope you're getting comp tickets for most of them! It would be an expensive proposition otherwise, cost being what keeps me away from most classical concerts. I miss hearing classical music live though.

I do wish some extraordinarily talented soul would take the finale of Beethoven's A minor string quartet, Opus 132, the thematic materials of which started life as the finale to B's 9th Symphony before he rejected them in favor of a choral finale, transpose it into D minor and arrange it for orchestra in a fashion commensurate with the orchestration in the first three movements of the 9th, and perform the resulting speculative symphony in its entirety, with the transposed / rearragned quartet finale as symphonic finale. I'm kind of with Don Keller, and in my experience an astonishingly large number of other fen, who think the real finale is a failure that ruins an otherwise great symphony, and would love to hear at least an intelligent realization / approximation of what we're missing.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I also am recorded as opining that Beethoven for once bit off more than he could chew with this one, and that the "Ode to Joy", if not a failure exactly, isn't the surpassingly brilliant apotheosis it's aiming at. The great movement of this symphony is the first, which is (among other things) the seed for the entire symphonic oeuvre of Anton Bruckner.

I'll have to try listening to it with Op. 132, ignore the key change, and see what I think. A little like trying to judge finales for the Schubert Unfinished, but worth a try.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

It would be fitting if Sonny Bono was the walrus, because (echoing the logic of the vintage Death Clues), that would mean he was dead. And he is!

I wouldn't mind seeing SGT PEPPER'S etc some time. I wonder if I taped it, years ago, and forgot I had it. I'll be more interested in seeing ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, from the reactions I've been seeing. If it's half as good as the scary-good video for "Free as a Bird," I'll be impressed. (Oh, bonus: live version)

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

I read the review by your "fellow reviewer" to the end, and was puzzled that he never noticed that Sir Neville was having trouble with one hand, which he pinked or stabbed in rehearsal. I thought to myself, "It's as though ... as though ... as though he wrote the review without actually having attended the performance!"

Then, and only then, did I read the byline: Heuwell Tircuit.

cough cough cough cough cough cough cough

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I didn't notice any particular trouble with Sir Neville's hand, either. He seemed generally slow and stiff, but I attributed that to his age.

[lynn-maudlin.livejournal.com]

oh, I'm so glad you saw it! I showed it to Ellie and her brother Kevin over the weekend (it suffered greatly from inadequate TV speakers; I am spoiled, I realize) and they both enjoyed it, Kevin more than Ellie. He was particularly struck by T.V. Carpio's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," one of the scenes I loved: when she's walking slo-mo through the football players and they're smashing and flying before and behind her - terrific!

I'm particularly fond of choreography and telling a story through movement; I think this was done very well, especially "I've Just Seen A Face" and "I Want You/She's So Heavy."

My take on the Vietnam/Iraq resonances is predictably different from your own but I was struck (and continue to be) by "Revolution" and the point when Jude breaks in and sees the Mao poster in the inner office of the 'SDS' guys... it provided a different perspective on the song itself.

Like "Almost Famous" (but in a different way), "Across The Universe" captures quite effectively a block of time from my youth - that sense of, "yeah, I remember that-- yeah, it felt like that." Quite wonderful. I love Julie Taymor's work.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That slo-mo shot with the football players was the first really astonishing visual in the film.

Shouldn't be any new perspective on "Revolution" - guys with Mao posters in their offices are exactly what Lennon was criticizing here: people who'd just lost the thread.

I liked this film better than "Almost Famous" exactly to the extent that it was more stylized.

[khatru1339.livejournal.com]

Just back from a Baltimore SO performance of Beethoven's 2nd Symphony (under the baton of Scottish composer James MacMillan), a piece I have apparently been shamefully ignoring. I know I have several recordings of it, but I almost never play them because I thought that, like the first, it was more Haydn than Beethoven. Ah. Now I know better. I hope my recordings are as good. This was a muscular rendition. Interestingly, MacMillan added a third horn; sometimes he just sat there while the other two played, sometimes all three joined in.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Even Beethoven's First is not quite Haydn, leaving aside the fact that (IMO, at least) Haydn is good.

I see from checking that MacMillan led his own works as well. How'd you like that? I've been moderately impressed by what I've heard by him.

[khatru1339.livejournal.com]

They were unusual pieces, and I didn't immediately warm up to them. Then I realized that if I had heard a progressive rock band playing music like that, I'd have been very impressed -- so when I switched my brain from Being At The Symphony to Listening To Music, I liked them. The piano concerto ended with a furious solo; I didn't know if he stopped because it was over or because he was exhausted.