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Concert review: Kirov Orchestra
Apr. 11th, 2005 10:17 amA very Russian orchestra touring with a very, very Russian program.
First up, Tchaikovsky's overwrought tone poem Francesca da Rimini, which the composer himself described as "extremely cold, false, and weak." That about sums it up.
Then, Borodin's heavy, lugubrious Second Symphony. This can nevertheless be a bouncy work if the orchestra really tries. They didn't. Uninspired, lifeless.
Things got better with the all-Mussorgsky second half. Mussorgsky didn't orchestrate any of it. Prelude to Khovanshchina, the Shostakovich orchestration, differing from the better-known Rimsky-Korsakov version by a few different dispositions of instruments and a couple spicier chords for flutes.
Then, the classic Ravel orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition. Fun. Weird interpretation, full of odd rallentandos and pauses right in the middle of a ... and other spots gone stretto. But there's no doubt that conductor Valery Gergiev wanted it exactly the way he got it. The orchestra could produce a weird, hollow sound very unlike anything the home team (San Francisco Symphony: this was at Davies) can do: the "Baba Yaga" movement was the best thing in the whole concert.
The brass scrod up on occasion, and the best you can say for the trumpeter playing the Shmuel solo is that he got through it in one piece. But overall they played well, especially the woodwinds who had all the precision of a well-ordered drill team.
Two encores: the first a post-Rimsky color piece I didn't recognize; the second, Tchaikovsky's Trepak (the really fast tutti dance from The Nutcracker), performed as a lark without conductor: Gergiev just gave the downbeat and then stood back to watch them do it.
Since I was up in the City anyway, I decided to drop by the APE which was on this weekend. APE is for Alternative Press Expo, a trade show for independent comics and a few-odd small-press book publishers. Tachyon Press was there, and I said hi to Jacob. Other than that I wandered around fairly fruitlessly. I found some good comics the last time I went to one of these, maybe 15 years ago, but it's been years since I paid any attention to this field, and there were only three or four booths whose contents I'd ever heard of. It's a bit intimidating to leaf through an unfamiliar comic under the eye of a table-sitter who is probably the work's sole creator and publisher: if you don't buy it, you feel like you're insulting them. One person took a proactive approach: he stood in front of his booth, handed passersby his comic and said, "Only a dollar!" Unfortunately, like many of his kind he doesn't believe in legible lettering, so I handed it back and said, "Sorry, I prefer something I can read." He didn't seem to take it badly. A couple people had freebies, and I did take a few of those.
First up, Tchaikovsky's overwrought tone poem Francesca da Rimini, which the composer himself described as "extremely cold, false, and weak." That about sums it up.
Then, Borodin's heavy, lugubrious Second Symphony. This can nevertheless be a bouncy work if the orchestra really tries. They didn't. Uninspired, lifeless.
Things got better with the all-Mussorgsky second half. Mussorgsky didn't orchestrate any of it. Prelude to Khovanshchina, the Shostakovich orchestration, differing from the better-known Rimsky-Korsakov version by a few different dispositions of instruments and a couple spicier chords for flutes.
Then, the classic Ravel orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition. Fun. Weird interpretation, full of odd rallentandos and pauses right in the middle of a ... and other spots gone stretto. But there's no doubt that conductor Valery Gergiev wanted it exactly the way he got it. The orchestra could produce a weird, hollow sound very unlike anything the home team (San Francisco Symphony: this was at Davies) can do: the "Baba Yaga" movement was the best thing in the whole concert.
The brass scrod up on occasion, and the best you can say for the trumpeter playing the Shmuel solo is that he got through it in one piece. But overall they played well, especially the woodwinds who had all the precision of a well-ordered drill team.
Two encores: the first a post-Rimsky color piece I didn't recognize; the second, Tchaikovsky's Trepak (the really fast tutti dance from The Nutcracker), performed as a lark without conductor: Gergiev just gave the downbeat and then stood back to watch them do it.
Since I was up in the City anyway, I decided to drop by the APE which was on this weekend. APE is for Alternative Press Expo, a trade show for independent comics and a few-odd small-press book publishers. Tachyon Press was there, and I said hi to Jacob. Other than that I wandered around fairly fruitlessly. I found some good comics the last time I went to one of these, maybe 15 years ago, but it's been years since I paid any attention to this field, and there were only three or four booths whose contents I'd ever heard of. It's a bit intimidating to leaf through an unfamiliar comic under the eye of a table-sitter who is probably the work's sole creator and publisher: if you don't buy it, you feel like you're insulting them. One person took a proactive approach: he stood in front of his booth, handed passersby his comic and said, "Only a dollar!" Unfortunately, like many of his kind he doesn't believe in legible lettering, so I handed it back and said, "Sorry, I prefer something I can read." He didn't seem to take it badly. A couple people had freebies, and I did take a few of those.
