![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
concert-going
Apr. 19th, 2005 09:56 amI got to two concerts on consecutive days last week, slightly to my surprise.
The one I'd known about was a performance of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony by the San Francisco Symphony under its laureate director, Herbert Blomstedt. The Eighth is the largest of Bruckner's completed symphonies, and one of the most formidable: it doesn't even have an opening theme, just a bunch of fragments that coalesce. Blomstedt was the master of Brucknerians during his later days as music director, and the rich sound, which is what one really goes to Bruckner for, was wonderful. Unfortunately the energy was more a product of the bad old Blomstedt, the one who'd start out with a bang and then gradually enervate over the course of the work. I didn't think the finale really hung together.
Some may have sensed this earlier than I did, or more likely they just don't like Bruckner. After the second movement, the scherzo (virtually by definition the most repetitious movement in any standard symphony), the man sitting next to me said to his companion, "He does go on and on, doesn't he?" Philistine.
Also on the program, a superfluous cello concerto by Saint-Saens.
Earlier that day, I'd gotten a phone call from my editor. The scheduled reviewer for a concert the following evening - one I know personally, as do some of you - had to cancel out, and I was asked to cover it. A cello-and-piano recital. Eh, what I know about this repertoire could fit on a stamp. But I knew I'd enjoy a program with two Brahms sonatas and three other composers I like, and what I don't know I can learn, so I grabbed some scores (after my experience with that Janacek quartet a while back, I realized I shouldn't try to review a sufficiently unfamiliar, sufficiently complex work without a score) and recordings from the library, scarfed up some reference data from my own books, and had myself a little force-feeding. I've done this before and it always works for me: I know the composers, I know the musical vocabulary, so a little familiarity with the works is all that's needed for appreciation.
So here's the review. Pretty much covers the point, except for the cellist's unusual tone quality: thin and reedy. It sounded to me as if he was playing on gut strings, but my editors thought this unlikely, and a little web research left us uncertain as to whether he normally uses gut, metal-wound gut, or what, so they just cut that sentence.
When writing about Hummel, who's generally thought of as German but was really a Slovak and was born in Bratislava, which was then in Austria and had a German name, I tried to fit in Nicolas Slonimsky's quip about the composer who was born in Pressburg and traveled widely to Pozsony and Bratislava as a child (they're all the same place), but it didn't quite fit.
As for that "Haunted House" encore, I just kept thinking this was something Neil Gaiman might have done if he were a cellist.
The one I'd known about was a performance of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony by the San Francisco Symphony under its laureate director, Herbert Blomstedt. The Eighth is the largest of Bruckner's completed symphonies, and one of the most formidable: it doesn't even have an opening theme, just a bunch of fragments that coalesce. Blomstedt was the master of Brucknerians during his later days as music director, and the rich sound, which is what one really goes to Bruckner for, was wonderful. Unfortunately the energy was more a product of the bad old Blomstedt, the one who'd start out with a bang and then gradually enervate over the course of the work. I didn't think the finale really hung together.
Some may have sensed this earlier than I did, or more likely they just don't like Bruckner. After the second movement, the scherzo (virtually by definition the most repetitious movement in any standard symphony), the man sitting next to me said to his companion, "He does go on and on, doesn't he?" Philistine.
Also on the program, a superfluous cello concerto by Saint-Saens.
Earlier that day, I'd gotten a phone call from my editor. The scheduled reviewer for a concert the following evening - one I know personally, as do some of you - had to cancel out, and I was asked to cover it. A cello-and-piano recital. Eh, what I know about this repertoire could fit on a stamp. But I knew I'd enjoy a program with two Brahms sonatas and three other composers I like, and what I don't know I can learn, so I grabbed some scores (after my experience with that Janacek quartet a while back, I realized I shouldn't try to review a sufficiently unfamiliar, sufficiently complex work without a score) and recordings from the library, scarfed up some reference data from my own books, and had myself a little force-feeding. I've done this before and it always works for me: I know the composers, I know the musical vocabulary, so a little familiarity with the works is all that's needed for appreciation.
So here's the review. Pretty much covers the point, except for the cellist's unusual tone quality: thin and reedy. It sounded to me as if he was playing on gut strings, but my editors thought this unlikely, and a little web research left us uncertain as to whether he normally uses gut, metal-wound gut, or what, so they just cut that sentence.
When writing about Hummel, who's generally thought of as German but was really a Slovak and was born in Bratislava, which was then in Austria and had a German name, I tried to fit in Nicolas Slonimsky's quip about the composer who was born in Pressburg and traveled widely to Pozsony and Bratislava as a child (they're all the same place), but it didn't quite fit.
As for that "Haunted House" encore, I just kept thinking this was something Neil Gaiman might have done if he were a cellist.
