concert in phosphors

[calimac]

Hey, 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:

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.

Comments

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Congratulations. Way to go!

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Van Nuys.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I saw that! Good job; I thought it was an excellent review when I read it here. I get the SFCV in email. It's a great resource, but all too often I read a review and think, "Damn, why didn't I know about that concert? I would have loved it!"

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! I've always enjoyed your reviews, and for that matter your writing in general, for their ability to capture the essence of their subject while retaining your own distinct voice and metaphors. It's only fitting that they find a wider audience.

Also, thank you for introducing me to the San Francisco Classical Voice.

Mazel tov on the review

[amy-thomson.livejournal.com]

May it be the first of many! You write well, and clearly you have an excellent ear. The thing that I loved about reviewing was the knowledge that my subjective opinion was never wrong, though my facts might be. If you like a thing, you like a thing. I found it very empowering. So, when in doubt on the facts, focus on your subjective truth!

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Belated congratulations from the new guy.

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.