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two concerts and one prospective
Feb. 14th, 2011 10:33 pmB. was at work this evening, so I had dinner with my mother. (If a boy can't have his mother for a valentine, who can he have?) There was an ulterior motive for this, however, that being our attendance of the first chamber music concert of the season at the new Schultz Cultural Arts Hall at Charleston and San Antonio in Palo Alto. The program from the Borodin Quartet was as un-valentine as possible, consisting of Beethoven's Razumovsky Second and two quartets by Shostakovich, the Seventh (manic with a minor in depressive) and the Eighth (depressive with a minor in manic), both of them written in response to - among other things - his grief at his first wife's death. Not a romantic evening, then.
The Borodins were rather measured in the Seventh and more extreme, in both directions, and consequently better, in the Eighth. How good they were in the Beethoven, which came first, I could hardly tell, as I was reeling in gobsmacked horror at the hall's acoustics. It is dry to the point of dessication. No resonance at all. Every note in every part is stripped bare to its bachelors, and floated out panting to the audience. I wouldn't have believed the fabled Borodins could make so many flubs; in any other hall I wouldn't have been able to hear it. It didn't matter so much for the dry Shostakovich, but in Beethoven's lyrical adagio the loss was enough to make you weep. Strangely for such an acoustic, there was no loss of volume, but that may have been because we were sitting right in front, not fifteen feet from the players. What it sounded like in back I can hardly guess.
I'm not trained in acoustics, but I tried to study the hall during intermission. It's a square box with a deep inset proscenium stage. The players sat right in front, which was probably a good idea, though I know some ensembles who'd sit way in the back of the stage. The audience seating, totaling 320, is retractable gymnasium bleacher style, except with chairs. Cloth mesh panels line the walls. Dunno what to make of it all.
Meanwhile, I ran away from Corflu on Saturday to review the Redwood Symphony, again. The guest conductor was new to me, but she's very good, a leader of neatness and precision, an opposite in style from the music director and regular conductor. He has excellent rapport with his musicians, but he's a big sloppy bearhug kind of guy.
The last time I reviewed the Redwood, a commenter on the post chided me for suggesting that their concerto soloists could ever be less than impeccable, though the one on that occasion was very good. Well, this one was less than impeccable. Live with it.
I've also committed music journalism in the abstract this week by writing this preview of the Vienna Philharmonic. I consider this piece as honest hackwork. I had no compelling interest in the Vienna Philharmonic, but I agreed to write it. I spent a while reading background on the orchestra's history, mostly in German, less to provide material for the article than to give me confidence in what I was writing about. Then came the interviews. Dr. Hellsberg, the orchestra's chairman, was easy: I e-mailed him questions and he sent back boilerplate answers. Maestro Bychkov, however, I spoke to on the phone for 20 minutes. This sort of thing is arranged by the publicist. Jetsetting conductors move around a lot, and I caught Maestro Bychkov before he went back to Vienna to fetch the Philharmonic, during a guest conducting stint with St. Louis. They gave me the name and number of his hotel, his room number, and a time, and I called him up and he answered the phone, simple as that. It was a little nervewracking to do this, as I admire his work greatly* and was anxious not to waste his time. However, he seems to be an old hand with piddling journalists, and chatted away fascinatingly for the whole 20 minutes, while I frantically scribbled notes. (This explains the paucity of direct quotes. My editor told me later that he usually records interviews with a hand tape recorder, but I didn't think of that. All I can say is that, when I've been interviewed - in my capacity as a Tolkienist - by real journalists, I can only count on being quoted accurately if I send them a follow-up e-mail elaborating on what I said.)
And that's my recent productive output.
*So don't overlook the video embedded with my article (my editors found this), of the finale of Shostakovich's Sixth. It's Bychkov at his most dazzling.
The Borodins were rather measured in the Seventh and more extreme, in both directions, and consequently better, in the Eighth. How good they were in the Beethoven, which came first, I could hardly tell, as I was reeling in gobsmacked horror at the hall's acoustics. It is dry to the point of dessication. No resonance at all. Every note in every part is stripped bare to its bachelors, and floated out panting to the audience. I wouldn't have believed the fabled Borodins could make so many flubs; in any other hall I wouldn't have been able to hear it. It didn't matter so much for the dry Shostakovich, but in Beethoven's lyrical adagio the loss was enough to make you weep. Strangely for such an acoustic, there was no loss of volume, but that may have been because we were sitting right in front, not fifteen feet from the players. What it sounded like in back I can hardly guess.
I'm not trained in acoustics, but I tried to study the hall during intermission. It's a square box with a deep inset proscenium stage. The players sat right in front, which was probably a good idea, though I know some ensembles who'd sit way in the back of the stage. The audience seating, totaling 320, is retractable gymnasium bleacher style, except with chairs. Cloth mesh panels line the walls. Dunno what to make of it all.
Meanwhile, I ran away from Corflu on Saturday to review the Redwood Symphony, again. The guest conductor was new to me, but she's very good, a leader of neatness and precision, an opposite in style from the music director and regular conductor. He has excellent rapport with his musicians, but he's a big sloppy bearhug kind of guy.
The last time I reviewed the Redwood, a commenter on the post chided me for suggesting that their concerto soloists could ever be less than impeccable, though the one on that occasion was very good. Well, this one was less than impeccable. Live with it.
I've also committed music journalism in the abstract this week by writing this preview of the Vienna Philharmonic. I consider this piece as honest hackwork. I had no compelling interest in the Vienna Philharmonic, but I agreed to write it. I spent a while reading background on the orchestra's history, mostly in German, less to provide material for the article than to give me confidence in what I was writing about. Then came the interviews. Dr. Hellsberg, the orchestra's chairman, was easy: I e-mailed him questions and he sent back boilerplate answers. Maestro Bychkov, however, I spoke to on the phone for 20 minutes. This sort of thing is arranged by the publicist. Jetsetting conductors move around a lot, and I caught Maestro Bychkov before he went back to Vienna to fetch the Philharmonic, during a guest conducting stint with St. Louis. They gave me the name and number of his hotel, his room number, and a time, and I called him up and he answered the phone, simple as that. It was a little nervewracking to do this, as I admire his work greatly* and was anxious not to waste his time. However, he seems to be an old hand with piddling journalists, and chatted away fascinatingly for the whole 20 minutes, while I frantically scribbled notes. (This explains the paucity of direct quotes. My editor told me later that he usually records interviews with a hand tape recorder, but I didn't think of that. All I can say is that, when I've been interviewed - in my capacity as a Tolkienist - by real journalists, I can only count on being quoted accurately if I send them a follow-up e-mail elaborating on what I said.)
And that's my recent productive output.
*So don't overlook the video embedded with my article (my editors found this), of the finale of Shostakovich's Sixth. It's Bychkov at his most dazzling.
