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concert review
May. 9th, 2006 02:55 pmIf you were as naive as I was when I first started listening to classical music, you might think that a violin is a violin, but instruments differ, and performers differ even more. There are all kinds of different sounds performers can generate even while playing the same music, and Chee-Yun (she's Korean, and I guess goes by just a given name, like her old Juilliard classmate Midori) brings one of the roughest, most wooden sounds out of a violin that I've ever heard.
This was terrific for the opening piece, a thunderously dark Baroque Chaconne attributed to a composer named "Tomaso Vitalino" (who might be, but probably isn't, the same person as the known Tomaso Antonio Vitali), and as a chaconne consists of playing variant versions of the same short phrase over and over again ceaselessly*, I was impressed at her ability to shape the piece into a coherent flowing entity. But after that things started going downhill. Her rendition of de Falla's Suite Populaire Espagnole was good, but I was more impressed with the accompanying pianist, Wendy Chen (a very long, thin woman who had better get the heights of her keyboard and bench adjusted pretty soon, or else she's going to find herself hunched over like that permanently). A dull sonata by Gabriel Fauré followed (usually he's better than that), and by the time intermission came, I found myself - rather to my surprise - wishing that the violinist would go away and that we could just listen to the pianist for the rest of the afternoon. Nothing much happened after intermission to make me change that assessment.
I was at Dinky, my home-town chamber auditorium, to review this concert for SFCV, which I did in somewhat less vehement terms than this. This was one of those concerts for which my editor suddenly contacts me a few days before and asks if I can cover it. At least the new regime (there's been a turnover at both editorial positions since I started writing for this outfit) is able to make future assignments as well; the previous staff often seemed unwilling to think more than a week ahead. The new staff is better organized, but so far I get the impression they're more journalists than they are musicians: more attuned to deadlines and good writing than to purely musical issues. The old staff were needle-eyed on this and really kept me on my toes. I remember one review which generated a hurried exchange of e-mails among the three of us over whether we thought the cellist had been playing on pure gut or gut-wound metal strings. Questions like this probe the limits of my musical knowledge. In the end the editors just deleted the relevant sentence.
But I like this job and really think I'm getting the hang of it, on top of which compliments on my reliability and the quality of my work from every editor I've had are always pleasant. I just hope that, in trying to be fair, judicious, and more impersonal in my published reviews that I don't start writing too formally. It's easier to feel relaxed on LJ; nobody's paying me and fewer are reading it.
*Anyone who finds minimalism unprecedentedly repetitious has either never heard a chaconne to a ground, or is just prejudiced. So say I.
This was terrific for the opening piece, a thunderously dark Baroque Chaconne attributed to a composer named "Tomaso Vitalino" (who might be, but probably isn't, the same person as the known Tomaso Antonio Vitali), and as a chaconne consists of playing variant versions of the same short phrase over and over again ceaselessly*, I was impressed at her ability to shape the piece into a coherent flowing entity. But after that things started going downhill. Her rendition of de Falla's Suite Populaire Espagnole was good, but I was more impressed with the accompanying pianist, Wendy Chen (a very long, thin woman who had better get the heights of her keyboard and bench adjusted pretty soon, or else she's going to find herself hunched over like that permanently). A dull sonata by Gabriel Fauré followed (usually he's better than that), and by the time intermission came, I found myself - rather to my surprise - wishing that the violinist would go away and that we could just listen to the pianist for the rest of the afternoon. Nothing much happened after intermission to make me change that assessment.
I was at Dinky, my home-town chamber auditorium, to review this concert for SFCV, which I did in somewhat less vehement terms than this. This was one of those concerts for which my editor suddenly contacts me a few days before and asks if I can cover it. At least the new regime (there's been a turnover at both editorial positions since I started writing for this outfit) is able to make future assignments as well; the previous staff often seemed unwilling to think more than a week ahead. The new staff is better organized, but so far I get the impression they're more journalists than they are musicians: more attuned to deadlines and good writing than to purely musical issues. The old staff were needle-eyed on this and really kept me on my toes. I remember one review which generated a hurried exchange of e-mails among the three of us over whether we thought the cellist had been playing on pure gut or gut-wound metal strings. Questions like this probe the limits of my musical knowledge. In the end the editors just deleted the relevant sentence.
But I like this job and really think I'm getting the hang of it, on top of which compliments on my reliability and the quality of my work from every editor I've had are always pleasant. I just hope that, in trying to be fair, judicious, and more impersonal in my published reviews that I don't start writing too formally. It's easier to feel relaxed on LJ; nobody's paying me and fewer are reading it.
*Anyone who finds minimalism unprecedentedly repetitious has either never heard a chaconne to a ground, or is just prejudiced. So say I.
