concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

"I'll see you after Mozart dies," I said cheerfully to my traveling companions, as we all headed off to our separate seats in Davies to hear the Requiem he died in the middle of composing. Of. (It feels like there's a preposition missing somewhere in that sentence.)

The problem with the Mozart Requiem is that Franz Süssmayr, the pupil who edited and finished the work off,* wasn't Mozart, and the final movements, which he had to write from scratch, lack a certain degree of inspiration. MTT tried to compensate for this by becoming louder and brasher. Nice singing, though, particularly from the chorus.

Two really innnnteresting postmodern works began the program. A contemporary Lithuanian, Mindaugas Urbaitis, composed a short acappella choral work, conducted by the symphony chorus director, Ragnar Bohlin, which evolves the theme of Mozart's Lacrimosa (a movement of the Requiem) out of a series of minimalist approximations, rather akin to roughly chopping out a block of stone and then slowly polishing it into an elegant sculpture. Of course Urbaitis functionally wrote this work backwards, with the goal in existence before he started, but turned around and played forwards it was as effective as Shostakovich similarly evolving the DSCH theme in his Tenth Symphony.

Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman. I've been to the chapel in Houston that this piece is named for and was written to be performed in. I thought it was the biggest ripoff of an art installation I'd ever seen, this despite the fact that they don't charge anything to see it. I knew that Rothko was a minimalist painter, but I hadn't realized that even he would decorate a squat, ugly, and otherwise empty concrete octagonal chamber with 14 paintings every one of which is in flat undifferentiated black. But I like Feldman's music; why is that? Because for all his filling in of wide sound spaces with hushed and utter stillness, the music has content. The quietness forces you really to listen, and there's something to listen to. This is a chamber music work (like everything by Feldman I know), with performers spread over the wide stage: timpanist, percussionist, celesta, a chorus in back, a conductor, and a violist who wanders around the stage. Listen carefully to the violist's melody-like phrases, as the timpani rumble in the distance, xylophone and wood blocks inject tiny splashes of color, and the chorus hums "nnnn". For half an hour, quite hasty by Feldman's Entish standards.

*And if you think Antonio Salieri had anything whatsoever to do with Mozart's Requiem, you've been watching too many ahistorical movies!

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

"I'll see you after Mozart dies," I said cheerfully to my traveling companions, as we all headed off to our separate seats in Davies to hear the Requiem he died in the middle of composing. Of. (It feels like there's a preposition missing somewhere in that sentence.)

Speaking purely professionally, I can tell you that there is nothing whatever wrong with the grammar of that sentence. Here's a derivational sequence:

He died in the middle of composing the Requiem is an independent clause.
To make it a dependent, subordinate clause, you attach it to a sentence that has the same direct object: . . . to hear the Requiem.
To do the attachment, you move the words the Requiem to the front of the (now subordinate) clause: the Requiem he died in the middle of composing. And it leaves behind he died in the middle of composing [ ].

There was no preposition before you moved it; there doesn't need to be a preposition after you move it. Really, it's fine.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I've liked the two pieces by Feldman that I've heard: a Piano and String Quartet (the recording by the Kronos Quartet and Aki Takahashi) and Triadic Memories. I don't listen to them much, but you characterize his music well. With all the repetition, small changes become enormous. The instrumentation of the piece you heard sounds great.

[(Anonymous)]

Regarding Rothko, your remarks bring to mind John Simon's review (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-01/high-minded-rothko-explodes-among-four-seasons-crowd-in-red-john-simon.html) of John Logan's play Red:

"Rothko perceives himself as embattled, and his so-called color-field works (though he rejected labels) as brushstroke upon tragic brushstroke. He mocks his assistant's lack of erudition and sternly, pompously holds up Nietzsche's writing and great painting from the Renaissance to Matisse as models [...] which come to theatrical life here as a vivid supporting cast joining in spirited debate. For instance, Rothko: 'You really think Andy Warhol will be hanging in museums in a hundred years alongside Bruegels and Vermeers?' To which Ken replies: 'He is hanging alongside Rothko now.'
[...]
Red is a compelling example of how a thinking theater can simultaneously entertain and educate. And to think that such a fine play should have been elicited by such an overrated painter."

-MTD/neb

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

My cousin used to live across the street from the Rothko Chapel (and Broken Obelisk), so when I lived in Houston I went and saw it one time. Not impressed. Rothko strikes me as another one of these guys who figures out his grift and sticks with it forever. Lichtenstein with the big-dot and ripoffs of better artists, Pollock flinging paint around. Whoopee.

I was at my cousin's place when his friend Richard came over with his dad to move a sofa. They'd just been to the chapel, and his dad was in a very merry mood, finding the whole thing very amusing. I found out later he died of a heart attack less than a day after that, and am at least slightly grateful to the artist for having given him a good laugh before he went.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

> Of course Urbaitis functionally wrote this work backwards, with the goal in existence before he started,

Surely not the only composer to have composed a piece with the goal in existence before he started; among other things, individuals have different compositional processes.

I happen to love Rothko, and if you find yourself in London, go see the Tate's Rothko room, which is quite extraordinary. I have found that just sitting and looking at them for a while makes them changes in subtle ways.

Also, his paintings come in a wide range of colors. The somber paintings of the Rothko Chapel aren't the only, well, affect of his work.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It's not the color. One time when I was passing through a modern art gallery, where, as usual, some of the paintings struck me as imaginative or meaningful and some did not. But it was not until I saw a giant block of undifferentiated bright red on the wall that I thought, this is ridiculous, this artist is putting us on. It was by Rothko.

If an artist wants me to look at his paintings long enough to see changes that take that long to perceive, he should provide reasons to sit that long in the first place. I often say of minimalist music: after one minute it's arresting; after ten minutes it's excruciatingly boring; after thirty minutes you never want it to end. To get through the second stage to the third stage, you have to be able to start with the first stage. Rothko leaves out that part; other minimalist painters don't. I don't rate Pollock highly or find much meaning in his work, but unlike Rothko it is interesting at the one-minute level.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Do you happen to remember where that particular Rothko is? I've seen some that are single-color, but none that I'd describe as undifferentiated, at least not if what you mean is "looks like it was rolled on." The oil paints and brushwork in the paintings I have seen in person, on line, and in reproduction all lend a lot of detail to the canvases.

I'll also reiterate what I said: some of the effects of Rothko become visible after the five-minute mark.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I cannot remember the museum, alas. I remember that it was a huge painting dominating the end of a hallway, so I saw it and reacted to it long before I saw who painted it. Perhaps if I had stood and stared at it for ten minutes its glories would have been revealed, but two things prevented that: 1) as I suggested earlier, it gave me no reason to want to stare at it for even one minute; 2) I have never stared at any painting, no matter how great I found it or how moved I was by it, for more than 3 or 4 minutes in my entire life.

[(Anonymous)]

By a curious coincidence, I saw Rothko Chapel performed the other night as well, here in New York. It was the fourth time for me (over a period of about thirty years), and as with all the other times it seemed a little underdramatized; it’s mid-period Feldman, not late Feldman, and has some genuinely dramatic moments (the viola swelling up to forte punctuated by tubular bells, for example). The original recording (on Odyssey, during Feldman’s lifetime) doesn’t hesitate to be a little more forceful; since then, influenced by the flatter affect of his late work, I suspect, performances have been more hesitant to raise their voices.

(By the way, the same metaphor has occurred to both of us: there is definitely something Entish about Feldman’s work that makes one think “hasty” when he does something different!)

What made the concert a necessity, though, was my first opportunity to see Gyorgy Kurtag’s (not going to try for the diacriticals) Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova in concert for the first time, another work of roughly the same vintage (written in the 70s, premiered in 1981) that has been a longtime favorite in recordings: a very different piece, a descendant of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (soprano, mixed chamber ensemble) but with a Hungarian accent and a very colorful 15-piece group.

Two pieces among the greatest of the 20th century, in my opinion.

P.S. Re Rothko, if you see a career retrospective of his work (as I have, twice), seeing him go from relatively representational to surrealist to three-color to monocolor, the final black paintings make a certain amount of sense in the career arc. Alone out of context they don’t work as well.

Don Keller

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I have had two encounters with Kurtág's music within the last few years. On both occasions - and I didn't even have a mental name-check to remember the first occasion when I wrote about the second, my reaction was as violently aversive as it is to Rothko. But I still like Feldman.