concert review: Symphony Silicon Valley
May. 17th, 2010 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacGenerally I don't care much for cello concertos. Not that there are too many of them around, anyway, which I guess is the point, since the visiting cellist Gary Hoffman, who's good enough that I'd be willing to hear what he had to say about most things, played two partial concertos, single movements for cello and orchestra, one by Bruch and one by Tchaikovsky, both agreeable works.
What I hadn't known until reading up on it was that Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme, as normally played, is actually a fairly extensive recomposition by the cellist Tchaikovsky wrote it for. Apparently the composer abandoned all interest in the work, because some years later when someone asked him if it'd be possible to restore it, he said, "The hell with it: leave it alone." Claimed reconstructions of the original exist and are played occasionally, but apparently they're actually bastard combinations of the two versions.
This was the first time I'd been in reviewer seats, rather than using my own tickets, for an SSV concert. Where the San Jose Opera, in the same hall, puts reviewers on the main floor, further forward than the balcony goes, SSV prefers to put them up at the very front of the balcony: a gorgeous close-up view of the stage, and a not so gorgeous close-up of the sound. California Theatre has a built-in high treble gain in its acoustics, as I noted the first time I ever sat there, but it must be worst right here. (Normally I sit much further back up the balcony.) The sound was ... well, that and much else are in my review.
What I hadn't known until reading up on it was that Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme, as normally played, is actually a fairly extensive recomposition by the cellist Tchaikovsky wrote it for. Apparently the composer abandoned all interest in the work, because some years later when someone asked him if it'd be possible to restore it, he said, "The hell with it: leave it alone." Claimed reconstructions of the original exist and are played occasionally, but apparently they're actually bastard combinations of the two versions.
This was the first time I'd been in reviewer seats, rather than using my own tickets, for an SSV concert. Where the San Jose Opera, in the same hall, puts reviewers on the main floor, further forward than the balcony goes, SSV prefers to put them up at the very front of the balcony: a gorgeous close-up view of the stage, and a not so gorgeous close-up of the sound. California Theatre has a built-in high treble gain in its acoustics, as I noted the first time I ever sat there, but it must be worst right here. (Normally I sit much further back up the balcony.) The sound was ... well, that and much else are in my review.
