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two concerts
Jun. 12th, 2007 03:22 pmI heard two concerts last weekend.
On Friday, the New Century Chamber Orchestra, a tiny group of very high quality, attracted me with Mozart's A Major Symphony, K. 201. The first movement was a little unprepossessing, but by the finale the work had become crisp and wonderful. They also made light of his lumbering Serenata Notturna, and did well with Elgar's Serenade for Strings. I was less impressed with the new work on the program, a violin concerto by a Taiwanese composer named Gordon Chin, who wished to emulate (but not sound at all like) Vivaldi's Four Seasons, so he named his work Formosa Seasons, get it? Not as witty as the title, if the title can be called witty.
On Sunday, to the Redwood Symphony, a pretty good community orchestra whom I've heard several times before. They acquitted themselves quite well on Copland's Third Symphony, though - as you'd expect from a difficult work in nonprofessional hands - there were some occasions when ensemble fell apart, and listening to the violins groping around for the right note in some high passages was ... well, I'm glad they weren't playing the Elgar Serenade.
But why their concertmaster decided to expose her limitations in Bartók's Second Rhapsody for violin and orchestra, I'm not sure. It's a raw, unrefined little piece that needs a big personality to fill it. I didn't know it well, so I'd gotten a recording from the library. On the record, Yehudi Menuhin (accompaniment conducted by Pierre Boulez - now there's a match made in heaven for you) played it all to order, but still sounded exactly like Menuhin, a weird combination like unto, say, John Gielgud in a part requiring him to pronounce a lot of dirty words (which, come to think of it, he did once or twice).
I reviewed this concert, and reviewing nonprofessionals is tough. You don't want to criticize them for not being what they don't pretend to be; on the other hand, you don't want by absence of criticism to give the impression that they are what they don't pretend to be; and respect for the music being played also has its own imperatives. As Le Guin put it, "In art, the best is the standard. When you hear a new violinist ... if he falls short, you do not blame him for it, but you will know what he falls short of. And if he is a real violinist, he knows it too."
So I try to be fair to all the imperatives, by being honest about the limitations, but also by giving a big A for effort where it seems deserved, praising what can deservedly be praised, and perhaps being a little selective about specific criticisms. In describing their performance of Dvořák's Carnival Overture, I wrote, "the winds were particularly expressive here," omitting to add, "but the brass were out to lunch," which is what I was mostly thinking at the time.
On Friday, the New Century Chamber Orchestra, a tiny group of very high quality, attracted me with Mozart's A Major Symphony, K. 201. The first movement was a little unprepossessing, but by the finale the work had become crisp and wonderful. They also made light of his lumbering Serenata Notturna, and did well with Elgar's Serenade for Strings. I was less impressed with the new work on the program, a violin concerto by a Taiwanese composer named Gordon Chin, who wished to emulate (but not sound at all like) Vivaldi's Four Seasons, so he named his work Formosa Seasons, get it? Not as witty as the title, if the title can be called witty.
On Sunday, to the Redwood Symphony, a pretty good community orchestra whom I've heard several times before. They acquitted themselves quite well on Copland's Third Symphony, though - as you'd expect from a difficult work in nonprofessional hands - there were some occasions when ensemble fell apart, and listening to the violins groping around for the right note in some high passages was ... well, I'm glad they weren't playing the Elgar Serenade.
But why their concertmaster decided to expose her limitations in Bartók's Second Rhapsody for violin and orchestra, I'm not sure. It's a raw, unrefined little piece that needs a big personality to fill it. I didn't know it well, so I'd gotten a recording from the library. On the record, Yehudi Menuhin (accompaniment conducted by Pierre Boulez - now there's a match made in heaven for you) played it all to order, but still sounded exactly like Menuhin, a weird combination like unto, say, John Gielgud in a part requiring him to pronounce a lot of dirty words (which, come to think of it, he did once or twice).
I reviewed this concert, and reviewing nonprofessionals is tough. You don't want to criticize them for not being what they don't pretend to be; on the other hand, you don't want by absence of criticism to give the impression that they are what they don't pretend to be; and respect for the music being played also has its own imperatives. As Le Guin put it, "In art, the best is the standard. When you hear a new violinist ... if he falls short, you do not blame him for it, but you will know what he falls short of. And if he is a real violinist, he knows it too."
So I try to be fair to all the imperatives, by being honest about the limitations, but also by giving a big A for effort where it seems deserved, praising what can deservedly be praised, and perhaps being a little selective about specific criticisms. In describing their performance of Dvořák's Carnival Overture, I wrote, "the winds were particularly expressive here," omitting to add, "but the brass were out to lunch," which is what I was mostly thinking at the time.
