concert in phosphors
Oct. 19th, 2004 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacHey, what about that: I have my first professionally published concert review. Robert Commanday, editor of the online reviewzine San Francisco Classical Voice, had mentioned the Symphony Silicon Valley concert of Oct. 9 in his editorial last week, but there was no review. So I wrote and offered them one. They liked it, and now have published it. It's a greatly expanded and rewritten version of the one I published here.
I'm particularly pleased with this part:
If I'd been feeling sufficiently prolific, I could have sent in two reviews, for on Sunday I heard the Schubert Ensemble of London perform at San Jose's le petit Trianon, the little hall with the great acoustics. No Schubert was heard: instead we had two great 20th century quintets for piano & strings, by Elgar and Shostakovich, plus a quartet by a contemporary English composer named Martin Butler.
I liked Butler a lot better than Mark-Anthony Turnage, that's for sure. His Sequenza Notturna was a mostly quiet ghostly piece with eerie sonorities possibly derived from Luciano Berio, to whose memory the work is dedicated. But instead of Berio's clashy kitchen sink aesthetics, Butler took a passive soundscape approach, letting the music emerge instead of forcing it on the listener.
The Elgar and Shostakovich were like pudding: they tasted great, but had no theme. The Schubert Ensemble are unrivaled at conveying mood and character in music, and they always do it appropriately: when the music should sound fierce, it's really fierce, and when it should sound wistful, it's really wistful. They can even convey with ease such intangible emotional states as the coy and the snide (the latter really useful for Shostakovich). The performer who spoke before the piece said that for him, Shostakovich is a composer who's trying to say very little on the surface but a whole lot underneath, and that character came through.
The flip side of this protean emotional quality is that the pieces didn't always hang together that well. Music isn't merely a succession of emotional states: it should have a coherency. Shostakovich's coherency is more deliberately fragmented than that of Elgar, who's less prone to switching gears, and accordingly the one worked better than the other. But there was some very fine playing and terrific balance.
I'm particularly pleased with this part:
Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture was arranged by master Broadway orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett after Gershwin’s death, placing nuggets of Gershwin tunes in a rhapsodic soup. The way a recognizable tune would emerge occasionally, like a whale surfacing in the distance, brought home how Gershwin didn’t really write long melodies but preferred catchy extended motifs, around which he would build his songs.So now I am a music reviewer, and me with hardly any formal training in the subject. Someone I know slightly also reviews for SFCV, but she didn't have anything to do with this, honest.
If I'd been feeling sufficiently prolific, I could have sent in two reviews, for on Sunday I heard the Schubert Ensemble of London perform at San Jose's le petit Trianon, the little hall with the great acoustics. No Schubert was heard: instead we had two great 20th century quintets for piano & strings, by Elgar and Shostakovich, plus a quartet by a contemporary English composer named Martin Butler.
I liked Butler a lot better than Mark-Anthony Turnage, that's for sure. His Sequenza Notturna was a mostly quiet ghostly piece with eerie sonorities possibly derived from Luciano Berio, to whose memory the work is dedicated. But instead of Berio's clashy kitchen sink aesthetics, Butler took a passive soundscape approach, letting the music emerge instead of forcing it on the listener.
The Elgar and Shostakovich were like pudding: they tasted great, but had no theme. The Schubert Ensemble are unrivaled at conveying mood and character in music, and they always do it appropriately: when the music should sound fierce, it's really fierce, and when it should sound wistful, it's really wistful. They can even convey with ease such intangible emotional states as the coy and the snide (the latter really useful for Shostakovich). The performer who spoke before the piece said that for him, Shostakovich is a composer who's trying to say very little on the surface but a whole lot underneath, and that character came through.
The flip side of this protean emotional quality is that the pieces didn't always hang together that well. Music isn't merely a succession of emotional states: it should have a coherency. Shostakovich's coherency is more deliberately fragmented than that of Elgar, who's less prone to switching gears, and accordingly the one worked better than the other. But there was some very fine playing and terrific balance.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-19 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-19 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-19 11:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-20 04:54 am (UTC)What usually happens with me and SFCV reviews is that I read ones of concerts I attended and say, "Yes, that technical stuff accurately describes what this performance was like. Why couldn't I think of explaining it like that?" Because I haven't been sufficiently trained, that's why. I know enough to understand the lingo, but not enough to formulate my own thoughts in words. This is where I'll have trouble writing reviews.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-20 07:03 am (UTC)I am frequently delighted to see my own opinions reflected in the reviews in the SFCV. I had a long talk with Tom Becker about the generally conservative and predictable programming at the SF Symphony and the SF Opera, and two days later that was the subject of Robert Commanday's editorial!
Meanwhile, I suffer from a lack of initiative to go see everything I want to see (I'm not usually in the mood on work nights, for instance) plus money is always something of an issue. That's why I volunteered for the SLA. I get to hear about $350 worth of concerts by doing that. I, of course, chose mostly chamber music and vocal ensembles.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-20 06:45 am (UTC)Also, thank you for introducing me to the San Francisco Classical Voice.
Mazel tov on the review
Date: 2004-10-22 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 03:24 pm (UTC)I'd be hard pressed to find anything nice to say about RRB's Gershwin soup. It's a disjointed jumble that turns solo lines into soppy unison chorales. "Besses, you-all am our womens now!" "We loves youse, Porgies!" (With a tip to WKRP and "The Hallelujah Chorale performs 'You're Having Our Baby.'")
The piece exists because Fritz Reiner (oh, Fritz, how could you?) asked Bennett to make a suite that eliminated the piano from the orchestration. He managed to do that, and also extirpate all traces of feeling, thus enriching elevators and dentist's offices all over our great land.
Luckily, there is a counter-suite that is occasionally played and recorded, though penned by someone without the lofty orchestrating credentials of Bennett: "Catfish Row" by George Gershwin. Those times I have to turn the radio off to avoid the muzak version, that's the one I turn to.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 06:35 pm (UTC)Heh. In the early 80s, I was doing the college thing in Statesboro, Georgia, which for me included drawing cartoons for the college paper. I also reviewed a couple of concerts. The first, if memory serves, was Cho Liang-Lin's recital, which I wrote about enthusiastically, especially the second violin sonata of Prokofiev. Skipping ahead a little, I placed third in the state journalism event's criticism category with that. (This small victory was outweighed by my being shut out in the editorial cartoons category because I thought a college weekly should focus its energies on the college, so I was somewhat despondent when I was beaten by yetanothercartoon on some national issue.)
Anyway, another review or so later, a Big Name Flutist (wife of a Bigger Name Violinist) came and played. By a coincidence, the concert included the original flute version of the same sonata, but that doesn't figure in anywhere; just a sidenote. I got to talk to her a bit before or after or something, and -- mindful that the school's flute teacher was loudly wondering why a non-flute person was getting to review the concert -- ended up writing her a better review than her breathy tone really deserved. And after that, I felt like I had already sold out, and didn't write any more reviews for them. I wished, and maybe still wish, that I had written exactly what I thought.
Hm. Putting the story here, in response to that, seems like it's meant for something other than a windy recollection of my glory days, minus the really bad parts that I don't talk about. It isn't, and your rather faint praise of the piece itself was likely the right thing to do.
Somewhere in there, I also reviewed "The Four Note Opera," which deserves more performances. I loved it, and have urged the folks here to give it a shot. I talked to one of the performers some time after that, and found out that I had been talked about. They saw me in the front row, scribbling away, and briefly considered saying -- I mean singing -- something about me, which would have included me in the show. No idea what I'd have done at the time, but since then I've mentally rehearsed what I should've said. Just in case, you know.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 05:49 pm (UTC)Do you know the scene in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer where the male and female choruses wake up from a spell-induced sleep and instantly fall into spell-induced love with each other? It's just like that.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 06:36 pm (UTC)We agree, we agree, we agree!"
--Bored of the Rings, of chorus