three concerts
Oct. 21st, 2008 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimac1. Shostakovich quartets - late ones, very late ones - last Wednesday. Theoretically I could have watched most of the debate and still had time to dash over to Stanford, but the desire to have my mind rested to review it was the excuse I needed to ditch the windbags and be there early. The pleasure of this concert was in the deep thought and care the Emerson Quartet put into considering every note of the music. But while I could hear this, in writing about it I felt myself smacking up against the glass wall of my inability to describe it adequately. The specific examples I give - all derived from illegible notes I scribbled on the score - feel like a collection of trivia. I want to snap at myself that I missed the point. Maybe had I a couple more days to write it would have fallen into place in my mind. But this is a review, not high art, and others seem to have liked it.
2. Friday, purely on a whim, to the San Francisco Symphony's local excursion. Almost empty hall, and considering that they charge more than at their home hall, no wonder. Guest pianist, Leon Fleischer, who's been around for a while. Made his debut in 1943, it says here, and recorded with George Szell. He played Beethoven's Emperor, my favorite of all piano concertos. The local excuse for a classical station likes to play the finale of this concerto, but it only works after the gorgeous slow movement, the way dessert tastes best after a good dinner. Also on tap under Marek Janowski, Beethoven's Egmont Overture and Schumann's Second Symphony, both clear and emphatic.
3. Saturday, George Cleve conducts Symphony Silicon Valley. Beethoven's First Symphony, with all the pauses so you get all of Beethoven's jokes. No, really, it worked fine. Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, with the local associate concertmaster, not ready for prime time. After intermission, they played Respighi's Fountains of Rome. No they didn't, they played Debussy's La Mer. But it sure didn't sound like it. Debussy is an Impressionist, right? Well, this wasn't Monet, it was Matisse. Or, in musical terms, Respighi. Bright sparkling emphasis, no gentle wash of sound. Respighi's musical palette is similar to Debussy's, he just uses it differently; and this was different in just that way. On the occasions where Debussy's harmonic vocabulary was more advanced than Respighi's, it felt like receiving interjections from Bartók.
2. Friday, purely on a whim, to the San Francisco Symphony's local excursion. Almost empty hall, and considering that they charge more than at their home hall, no wonder. Guest pianist, Leon Fleischer, who's been around for a while. Made his debut in 1943, it says here, and recorded with George Szell. He played Beethoven's Emperor, my favorite of all piano concertos. The local excuse for a classical station likes to play the finale of this concerto, but it only works after the gorgeous slow movement, the way dessert tastes best after a good dinner. Also on tap under Marek Janowski, Beethoven's Egmont Overture and Schumann's Second Symphony, both clear and emphatic.
3. Saturday, George Cleve conducts Symphony Silicon Valley. Beethoven's First Symphony, with all the pauses so you get all of Beethoven's jokes. No, really, it worked fine. Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, with the local associate concertmaster, not ready for prime time. After intermission, they played Respighi's Fountains of Rome. No they didn't, they played Debussy's La Mer. But it sure didn't sound like it. Debussy is an Impressionist, right? Well, this wasn't Monet, it was Matisse. Or, in musical terms, Respighi. Bright sparkling emphasis, no gentle wash of sound. Respighi's musical palette is similar to Debussy's, he just uses it differently; and this was different in just that way. On the occasions where Debussy's harmonic vocabulary was more advanced than Respighi's, it felt like receiving interjections from Bartók.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-10-22 02:38 am (UTC)It's a funny coincidence, but as I was driving today, I was meditating on the process by which someone hears a classical piece, and there's a section with deep turmoil and strife, and then it breaks through into the sun and makes you feel great (I was listening to Ravel's "Introduction and Allegro," which doesn't exactly have turmoil in it) -- they hear that and decide that they just liked that happy part, and the part before it was kind of a downer, so they excerpt that part -- and after a while, bereft of context, it doesn't have the same punch, and they wonder what they saw in it in the first place, and this classical stuff is just overrated anyway.
So we're on the same page with that. If you wondered.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-22 03:52 pm (UTC)For instance, I watched the videos online of the Beatles songs from Across the Universe. They work OK as reminiscences of the film if you've seen it, but just watching the videos doesn't convey how delightfully they work in the context of the whole film.
Harold Bloom once quoted a paragraph of the climax of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields out of context to "prove" that Tolkien is all pompous fustian. Leaving aside the fact that it had to be carefully chosen and not just picked at random as he claimed, it's the climax of a huge narrative arc. Elevated language is appropriate then. Would Bloom quote the last 30 seconds of Beethoven's Fifth to claim that Beethoven is all pompous fustian? Well, some people would. But it sounds like that precisely because of the length and nature of the journey that it's the end of.