music of the day

[calimac]

The day I got home from Milwaukee (and, fortunately, not sooner), an editor for San Francisco Classical Voice called up and asked me to write a review of the next weekend's Symphony Silicon Valley concert. So I did, and it's published today here. Yes, they are paying me to do this.

Up till now, I'd reviewed concerts because I wanted to. It feels different when you have to. I'd submitted my first review on a whim. Now I have to take my responsibilities seriously. I wasn't worried about Vaughan Williams or Tchaikovsky, whom I've been listening to for decades, but the program also contained two recent works by living composers I wasn't all that familiar with. I figured I'd better do something about that if I expected to write intelligently about them. My pre-concert thought processes went something like this:

Jennifer Higdon? Oh, blast it: I barely know her name. Didn't I listen to most of her Concerto for Orchestra at a Tower Records listening station a couple months ago? Bright, brittle, and brassy, as I recall. But that's all I know. First, read her website: OK. Now, down to the libraries to check out every CD I can find with something by her on it. Hmm, modern Christmas choral music by the New York Concert Singers. B. will like this. What have we here? She's on a collection of Lesbian American Composers. Did I need to know this? Weird music. Based on this CD, lesbian composers are clearly either modernists or postmodernists, and never the twain shall meet. Higdon is a modernist. Surprisingly, the postmodernists are more annoying: this isn't usual. I wonder if liveavatar would enjoy hearing Linda Montano slowly intone strange phrases like "Once, I had 206 bones in my body" over soft dissonant piano chords. One more CD: the Atlanta Symphony performing Higdon's Blue Cathedral. Blimey, this is good! Non-tonal and noisy like the Concerto, but interesting, beautiful, and stunningly well constructed. Same kind of sound world as, say, Aaron Jay Kernis, but infinitely better. OK, I'm sold on Higdon, and want to hear some more.

John Corigliano. Well, at least I've heard his music before, but not for a long time and I didn't like it that much. Don't I have his First Symphony somewhere? Hmm, off-the-air radio tape; better look for a library CD. I see the work being performed is taken from his film music for The Red Violin. I've never seen The Red Violin: maybe I should. The only on-shelf copy in two library systems is in the tiny branch a mile from my house. Run over, grab, watch with wild_patience, enjoy the film but make fun of bad violin-playing miming by the actors. Get a good mental handle on the music, at least. Now I'm ready for the concert.

In addition to all this, last Wednesday I went up to the San Francisco Symphony to hear Leif Ove Andsnes play the softest, gentlest version of Rachmaninoff's heaven-storming Second Piano Concerto (not the Shine one, the other famous one) ever heard. The orchestra also offered a gnarly Orchestral Variations that many hearers might not believe was by Aaron Copland, an exquisitely imaginative new orchestration of a bizarre late Debussy piano work, and the eccentrically witty nose-thumbing Shostakovich Ninth Symphony. Each great, but total effect: indigestion.