a concert reviewer sings along
Oct. 27th, 2010 07:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacSunday noon I was about to head out to the libraries to pick up recordings and scores to prepare for next week's concert review, but it's a good thing I was slow getting going, because the phone rang: it was my editor, asking if I could be an emergency fill-in reviewer for a concert that very evening. I sure enough could - B. was going back to work that night, so it wouldn't even interfere with dinner plans. Review.
The older works on this program I already knew, and the new ones haven't even been commercially recorded, so there wasn't much I could do to prepare other than check out the composers' websites (which got me some sound samples and the name of one lyricist, inexplicably omitted from the concert program book). Then up to the Kohl Mansion, hidden in darkest upscale spaghetti-bowl-street-pattern hilly suburbia, in time for a 6 pm pre-concert talk.
The performers were very good. Best rendition of that Mendelssohn anthology I've ever heard; I can't judge them so well in music I'd never heard, but I wasn't bored. I was pleased that one of the two vocal works was fantasy, and that the other was (nominally) science fiction. I doubt I could convey in the review just how hard baritone Stephen Salters - here he is - had to work to get the audience to sing the chorus lines in the encore, "It Ain't Necessarily So." Gee, I thought everybody knew that song (as people often say to me about some ephemeral pop hit or another). I normally dislike sticking my neck out in audience participation exercises like this, but I wound up singing more loudly and energetically than anyone else in the room, after I realized that nobody else was going to do it. I felt sorry for Salters up there trying to prompt us, sweating his heart out to so little pedagogical effect.
A commenter on the post took exception to my description of the audience as "mostly elderly Hillsborough gentry." Well, I was there, and I've been there before, and as the second commenter says, you gotta tell it like it is. I'm intrigued that the first commenter deemed this offensive. To adapt a line from Lewis Black: If giving people houses in Hillsborough is offensive, then offend me!*
Of course, the point isn't their age or social status, or even the part I deliberately left out - check out Salters' link again, if you missed it - in themselves, but that they couldn't sing this simple classic from "Porgy & Bess" with any enthusiasm. Autumntime, and the livin' ain't easy.
*Here's what I'd do if someone abruptly gave me a house in Hillsborough. I'd immediately - before I had to pay taxes on it - sell it for far below market price, then live high on the hog for the rest of my life on the still immense proceeds. Class warfare? Oh no, not me.
The older works on this program I already knew, and the new ones haven't even been commercially recorded, so there wasn't much I could do to prepare other than check out the composers' websites (which got me some sound samples and the name of one lyricist, inexplicably omitted from the concert program book). Then up to the Kohl Mansion, hidden in darkest upscale spaghetti-bowl-street-pattern hilly suburbia, in time for a 6 pm pre-concert talk.
The performers were very good. Best rendition of that Mendelssohn anthology I've ever heard; I can't judge them so well in music I'd never heard, but I wasn't bored. I was pleased that one of the two vocal works was fantasy, and that the other was (nominally) science fiction. I doubt I could convey in the review just how hard baritone Stephen Salters - here he is - had to work to get the audience to sing the chorus lines in the encore, "It Ain't Necessarily So." Gee, I thought everybody knew that song (as people often say to me about some ephemeral pop hit or another). I normally dislike sticking my neck out in audience participation exercises like this, but I wound up singing more loudly and energetically than anyone else in the room, after I realized that nobody else was going to do it. I felt sorry for Salters up there trying to prompt us, sweating his heart out to so little pedagogical effect.
A commenter on the post took exception to my description of the audience as "mostly elderly Hillsborough gentry." Well, I was there, and I've been there before, and as the second commenter says, you gotta tell it like it is. I'm intrigued that the first commenter deemed this offensive. To adapt a line from Lewis Black: If giving people houses in Hillsborough is offensive, then offend me!*
Of course, the point isn't their age or social status, or even the part I deliberately left out - check out Salters' link again, if you missed it - in themselves, but that they couldn't sing this simple classic from "Porgy & Bess" with any enthusiasm. Autumntime, and the livin' ain't easy.
*Here's what I'd do if someone abruptly gave me a house in Hillsborough. I'd immediately - before I had to pay taxes on it - sell it for far below market price, then live high on the hog for the rest of my life on the still immense proceeds. Class warfare? Oh no, not me.
