a choice of concerts
Oct. 24th, 2010 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacLast evening I faced a choice of student orchestra concerts to attend. Should I hear the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra play an orchestration of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet or the El Camino Youth Symphony in Prokofiev's Seventh Symphony? In the end I went for Prokofiev, for the prosaic reasons that the venue was closer and I had a flyer for a free ticket. So did everyone else, apparently: the line of cars waiting to get into Flint Center's parking garage stretched out onto the main street. My luck began when I simply went around it and parked on the other side of the small junior college campus: plenty of spaces there.
Prokofiev's Seventh is a fairly obscure, rarely played late work of his, but a favorite of mine. I suppose it was the choice of ECYS's music director, Camilla Kolchinsky, who is Russian and looks old enough to remember its premiere.
She has an unusual and rather bizarre habit of beating the notes rather than the rhythm, but the students got through this and gave fairly good accounts of the Prokofiev, and of a Liszt Les Préludes filled with ricochet tempo changes, which I guess is what you get from a Russian conductor.
Unusually for a student orchestra, the strings were better than the winds, though those too had their highlights. (Some terrible oboe flubs in the Prokofiev, but the English horn was fine.) They played with a marked degree of caution - as if they were just learning to walk and being very careful about where they planted their feet - but at moments the music came alive, particularly in the stretto conclusion to Prokofiev's Allegretto second movement: driven, I suspect, by some really excellent work by the timpanist.
No concert of this kind is complete without a student soloist or two and the monstrous loads of bouquets they collect after their turns. (Judging by the ads in the program book, the principal sponsors of these concerts are SAT tutors and dentists, but they really should be sponsored by florists, who make more money off them than anybody else.) We had two. A 15-year-old female violinist came out wearing a hot pink crushed-fabric dress, looking as if she were less likely to play a violin concerto than to sing Carmen. Regardless of her dress, what she gave us was a movement from a Vieuxtemps concerto, played very sweetly. A 17-year-old male cellist then performed the first movement of the Dvořák concerto: his rendition was emotionally intense but not, alas, very interesting.
Prokofiev's Seventh is a fairly obscure, rarely played late work of his, but a favorite of mine. I suppose it was the choice of ECYS's music director, Camilla Kolchinsky, who is Russian and looks old enough to remember its premiere.
She has an unusual and rather bizarre habit of beating the notes rather than the rhythm, but the students got through this and gave fairly good accounts of the Prokofiev, and of a Liszt Les Préludes filled with ricochet tempo changes, which I guess is what you get from a Russian conductor.
Unusually for a student orchestra, the strings were better than the winds, though those too had their highlights. (Some terrible oboe flubs in the Prokofiev, but the English horn was fine.) They played with a marked degree of caution - as if they were just learning to walk and being very careful about where they planted their feet - but at moments the music came alive, particularly in the stretto conclusion to Prokofiev's Allegretto second movement: driven, I suspect, by some really excellent work by the timpanist.
No concert of this kind is complete without a student soloist or two and the monstrous loads of bouquets they collect after their turns. (Judging by the ads in the program book, the principal sponsors of these concerts are SAT tutors and dentists, but they really should be sponsored by florists, who make more money off them than anybody else.) We had two. A 15-year-old female violinist came out wearing a hot pink crushed-fabric dress, looking as if she were less likely to play a violin concerto than to sing Carmen. Regardless of her dress, what she gave us was a movement from a Vieuxtemps concerto, played very sweetly. A 17-year-old male cellist then performed the first movement of the Dvořák concerto: his rendition was emotionally intense but not, alas, very interesting.
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Date: 2010-10-26 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 06:33 am (UTC)On the other hand, besides the prosaic factors I mentioned, chances to hear Prok's 7th are less common. And it too is a favorite.