three concerts and two movies
Apr. 1st, 2008 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacNo 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.
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.
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Date: 2008-04-02 02:56 am (UTC)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)