concert in phosphors
Oct. 19th, 2004 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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:
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.
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.