![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
concert reviews
Aug. 14th, 2007 02:56 pmThursday I went back to Menlo for their last festival concert. This is already one of the most renowned chamber music festivals in the world, but they're really anxious about their reviewers: the publicity people made sure to greet me when I picked up my ticket, sewed me to my sheet, introduced me to the new executive director, and e-mailed me afterwards to check on when the review would be appearing.
Again I attended the free prelude concert first at the cost of not having any actual dinner, but was it ever worth it. I pretty much have to throw down my pen in the face of those youngsters' Dvořák "American" Quartet. What a treat. And they're giving this stuff away free!
The main concert was more mixed. A few weeks ago I'd heard (equally void of admission charges) a terrifically supple rendition at Stanford of Brahms's G Minor Piano Quartet, so when the same work turned up here as a big slab of undifferentiated Brahmsian pot roast, I couldn't help but feeling a bit disappointed. I was happier with the care given to Ravel's Violin Sonata, a work I normally don't much like, and to Copland's Vitebsk, a fierce work from his modernist period. And Beethoven's settings of Scottish songs could be listened to all day.
Saturday evening![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
irontongue and I ventured down to Santa Cruz for my only Cabrillo Festival concert of the season, where we turned out to be half the SFCV delegation. She was the one writing the review, though a comment of mine makes a cameo appearance therein. The amount of ignorant prejudice out there against Philip Glass is greater than I realized. Even the local paper's reviewer claimed that Glass's symphony goes "boo-dee-dee, boo-dee-dee, boo-dee-dee," which he could only say if he's so deafened by Glass's stereotyped reputation that he didn't bother to listen to the music.
Again I attended the free prelude concert first at the cost of not having any actual dinner, but was it ever worth it. I pretty much have to throw down my pen in the face of those youngsters' Dvořák "American" Quartet. What a treat. And they're giving this stuff away free!
The main concert was more mixed. A few weeks ago I'd heard (equally void of admission charges) a terrifically supple rendition at Stanford of Brahms's G Minor Piano Quartet, so when the same work turned up here as a big slab of undifferentiated Brahmsian pot roast, I couldn't help but feeling a bit disappointed. I was happier with the care given to Ravel's Violin Sonata, a work I normally don't much like, and to Copland's Vitebsk, a fierce work from his modernist period. And Beethoven's settings of Scottish songs could be listened to all day.
Saturday evening
irontongue and I ventured down to Santa Cruz for my only Cabrillo Festival concert of the season, where we turned out to be half the SFCV delegation. She was the one writing the review, though a comment of mine makes a cameo appearance therein. The amount of ignorant prejudice out there against Philip Glass is greater than I realized. Even the local paper's reviewer claimed that Glass's symphony goes "boo-dee-dee, boo-dee-dee, boo-dee-dee," which he could only say if he's so deafened by Glass's stereotyped reputation that he didn't bother to listen to the music.
