three inexpensive concerts
May. 18th, 2009 08:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacNon-professional orchestras are a great opportunity to hear live classical music free or inexpensively, if you can stand the fact that they're not up to professional standards. I got soured on this route very early in my listening career, when I heard a local community orchestra massacre Sibelius's Second.
However, when I was working at Stanford, I started going to occasional concerts by the student orchestra, and found that their passion and commitment made up for their faults in technical expertise.
This weekend I had three such concerts to enjoy.
Friday, the Peninsula Symphony, the same community group I had that bad Sibelius experience with long ago. They've improved mightily since then. They played Carmina Burana and the Bruch Violin Concerto, and the soloists in each were definitely professionals. I was at this one to review it, and that'll be up by tomorrow.
Saturday, the Stanford Symphony, the student group. I've attended this less often since they got a new music director, as his repertoire choices are less to my taste, but I couldn't miss this one: an all-Brahms concert (Academic Festival Overture, Double Concerto, and Second Symphony). Brahms is one of the most difficult of standard composers to play well, possibly second only to Mozart, and technically this is the poorest of the three orchestras. I found my mind shunting the heard sounds aside, using them as a reminder of what a platonically perfect concert of these works would be like. Still, I'm glad I went.
Sunday, the Oakland Youth Orchestra: the high-school training auxiliary of the Oakland East Bay Symphony, led by that professional ensemble's conductors. Intermittently but often astonishingly good. Shostakovich Fifth, which I'm always glad to hear. (But could someone perform the Sixth some time instead?)
One problem with such groups is finding a good venue. Either they play in over-large, rather acoustically dead high school auditoriums (Peninsula Sym), or in tiny chamber-music venues (Stanford Sym) or masonry churches (Oakland Youth) where they fairly blast the walls out.
However, when I was working at Stanford, I started going to occasional concerts by the student orchestra, and found that their passion and commitment made up for their faults in technical expertise.
This weekend I had three such concerts to enjoy.
Friday, the Peninsula Symphony, the same community group I had that bad Sibelius experience with long ago. They've improved mightily since then. They played Carmina Burana and the Bruch Violin Concerto, and the soloists in each were definitely professionals. I was at this one to review it, and that'll be up by tomorrow.
Saturday, the Stanford Symphony, the student group. I've attended this less often since they got a new music director, as his repertoire choices are less to my taste, but I couldn't miss this one: an all-Brahms concert (Academic Festival Overture, Double Concerto, and Second Symphony). Brahms is one of the most difficult of standard composers to play well, possibly second only to Mozart, and technically this is the poorest of the three orchestras. I found my mind shunting the heard sounds aside, using them as a reminder of what a platonically perfect concert of these works would be like. Still, I'm glad I went.
Sunday, the Oakland Youth Orchestra: the high-school training auxiliary of the Oakland East Bay Symphony, led by that professional ensemble's conductors. Intermittently but often astonishingly good. Shostakovich Fifth, which I'm always glad to hear. (But could someone perform the Sixth some time instead?)
One problem with such groups is finding a good venue. Either they play in over-large, rather acoustically dead high school auditoriums (Peninsula Sym), or in tiny chamber-music venues (Stanford Sym) or masonry churches (Oakland Youth) where they fairly blast the walls out.
