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two concerts
Feb. 11th, 2008 08:55 amThe Redwood Symphony, guest conducted by Barbara Day Turner in a brightly resonant church, featured works by eight American (seven US-American, one Mexican) composers, six of whom are still living. A nice mixture of things one might not normally hear. The highlight was three baritone arias, from The Ballad of Baby Doe, Susannah, and Dead Man Walking (by Moore, Floyd, and Heggie, respectively). These are like B.'s three favorite operas, so I'm sorry she couldn't join me there. The baritone, Cole Grissom, has a light and reedy voice, that doesn't cut through well, but his characterization is powerful and his enunciation almost over-clear. He did well enough with a love aria from Baby Doe, but the Sermon from Susannah and the Confession from Dead Man Walking are very powerful pieces. If you haven't heard them, you're missing something.
On to the instrumental music. The warhorse of the bunch was Copland's Appalachian Spring (the suite, not the whole work, though the program didn't say so), quite nicely done. Clarinetist Richard Steinberg's introduction of the "Simple Gifts" theme was brilliant. Also: Fanfare by Joan Tower, nice show-off for the heavy brass, who were well-behaved tonight. (Just don't ask me about the horns.) Quiet little tone poem by Tobias Picker inspired by the bayous east of Houston; why didn't I think of this work, which I already knew, when I was there a year ago? One younger piece, "Blaze" by Vivian Fung, written ten years ago in her early 20s. Like most orchestral music I hear by composers under 50, it's brash and jangly, and Fung has less idea of where her piece is going than does, say, Jennifer Higdon. Finish with the Danzon No. 2 by Arturo Márquez, inspired by the same Mexican dance halls that produced Copland's El Salón México. A much better piece of music, Danzon is the classical bonbon of the last two decades that most deserves to be, and is closest to becoming, a concert staple like Fanfare for the Common Man or the Adagio for Strings. But not from this performance. Appalachian Spring had come to life; this was sludgy, and the musicians kept falling out of sequence with each other in the most painful fashion. Turner had invited the audience to get up and dance, but nobody moved a muscle. Nor should they have.
Then: Ives Quartet. Le petit Trianon has even an even lovelier acoustic when hardly anybody is there to hear it, and such was the case tonight. Haydn's Op. 20 No. 2 (which sounded under-rehearsed, alas) and Beethoven's Razumovsky No. 1 (served very well by the Ives's tough-grained rigid expressionist style) framed the Second Quartet of Leo Ornstein, a composer I'd previously known only by name. Curiosity was well-served. This piece from circa 1930 is an enormous work in three large movements, very thickly scored, ruthless and compelling and written in a fairly conservative but well-spiced modernist idiom. Parts of the last movement, fast and ostinato, reminded me of late Shostakovich; the rest was budding academician without the crap (to borrow a phrase from Kingsley Amis). If you want to hear it, there's an MP3 of a performance - less gritty than the Ives's - as well as a lot of other music on the audio page of the Ornstein site.
Ornstein's son, who's about the same age as the quartet, spoke beforehand. From his anecdotes, his father sounds like one of those self-contained, cranky, reclusive composers who consider it their job just to put notes on paper. Whether anybody liked the results or not was pretty much all the same to him.
But the most interesting anecdote related to Arthur Rubinstein, who'd known Ornstein in the 20s. The son had sent Rubinstein a recording, and Rubinstein writing back had referred to what he called "a shameful little incident" from those days involving player piano rolls. Rubinstein and some other eminent pianists had, at the instigation of the player piano companies, put on a concert where they'd each play a piece and then sit there while the player piano would emit their (previously made) recording of the same piece, to impress everyone with its capacity. What made this shameful, Rubinstein said, was that the recording piano was not capable of picking up nuance, so engineers would tinker with the roll in the lab. The result still didn't sound like the original, so the pianists picked up the habit of playing in imitation of the style of the player piano. Now this would have made a notable anecdote at the historical performances symposium I attended last year.
On to the instrumental music. The warhorse of the bunch was Copland's Appalachian Spring (the suite, not the whole work, though the program didn't say so), quite nicely done. Clarinetist Richard Steinberg's introduction of the "Simple Gifts" theme was brilliant. Also: Fanfare by Joan Tower, nice show-off for the heavy brass, who were well-behaved tonight. (Just don't ask me about the horns.) Quiet little tone poem by Tobias Picker inspired by the bayous east of Houston; why didn't I think of this work, which I already knew, when I was there a year ago? One younger piece, "Blaze" by Vivian Fung, written ten years ago in her early 20s. Like most orchestral music I hear by composers under 50, it's brash and jangly, and Fung has less idea of where her piece is going than does, say, Jennifer Higdon. Finish with the Danzon No. 2 by Arturo Márquez, inspired by the same Mexican dance halls that produced Copland's El Salón México. A much better piece of music, Danzon is the classical bonbon of the last two decades that most deserves to be, and is closest to becoming, a concert staple like Fanfare for the Common Man or the Adagio for Strings. But not from this performance. Appalachian Spring had come to life; this was sludgy, and the musicians kept falling out of sequence with each other in the most painful fashion. Turner had invited the audience to get up and dance, but nobody moved a muscle. Nor should they have.
Then: Ives Quartet. Le petit Trianon has even an even lovelier acoustic when hardly anybody is there to hear it, and such was the case tonight. Haydn's Op. 20 No. 2 (which sounded under-rehearsed, alas) and Beethoven's Razumovsky No. 1 (served very well by the Ives's tough-grained rigid expressionist style) framed the Second Quartet of Leo Ornstein, a composer I'd previously known only by name. Curiosity was well-served. This piece from circa 1930 is an enormous work in three large movements, very thickly scored, ruthless and compelling and written in a fairly conservative but well-spiced modernist idiom. Parts of the last movement, fast and ostinato, reminded me of late Shostakovich; the rest was budding academician without the crap (to borrow a phrase from Kingsley Amis). If you want to hear it, there's an MP3 of a performance - less gritty than the Ives's - as well as a lot of other music on the audio page of the Ornstein site.
Ornstein's son, who's about the same age as the quartet, spoke beforehand. From his anecdotes, his father sounds like one of those self-contained, cranky, reclusive composers who consider it their job just to put notes on paper. Whether anybody liked the results or not was pretty much all the same to him.
But the most interesting anecdote related to Arthur Rubinstein, who'd known Ornstein in the 20s. The son had sent Rubinstein a recording, and Rubinstein writing back had referred to what he called "a shameful little incident" from those days involving player piano rolls. Rubinstein and some other eminent pianists had, at the instigation of the player piano companies, put on a concert where they'd each play a piece and then sit there while the player piano would emit their (previously made) recording of the same piece, to impress everyone with its capacity. What made this shameful, Rubinstein said, was that the recording piano was not capable of picking up nuance, so engineers would tinker with the roll in the lab. The result still didn't sound like the original, so the pianists picked up the habit of playing in imitation of the style of the player piano. Now this would have made a notable anecdote at the historical performances symposium I attended last year.
