calimac

I had an extra ticket to this one, and

wild_patience wanted to stay home and needs to get up early tomorrow, so I wound up going with Mike. Which Mike?

vgqn's Mike, that's which. Although the distance was short, we had a horrible time getting there. Whatever was going on downtown, it was generating lots of traffic and causing the parking garages to burst at the seams. I finally achieved street parking by the tactic of picking a direction and driving in a straight line until I found some. That I headed straight for the seedy side of downtown probably helped. I barely made it in time for the first piece, and Mike had to stop off in the little engineers' room [as our friend Jules calls it], so he missed it.

He didn't miss much. It was Benjamin Britten's variations on "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," which he scribbled off on commission in his brassy film-music style. It's the kind of piece he would have gotten a A for in composition class, but nobody would have thought that anybody would actually ever play it. The orchestra sounded as if they didn't believe they'd have to play it either: they flubbed around terribly. (And the program notes, otherwise good, called the composer "Lord Benjamin Britten." That's wrong. Americans who don't know how to use British titles of nobility shouldn't try.)

What followed was something else. Francis Poulenc's Gloria, a work of his eccentric old age (as opposed to his eccentric youth), was received with tepid applause it didn't deserve. What it deserved was a rousing ovation. A terrifically imaginative, spiky but tuneful work, played diligently by the orchestra and sung well by chorus and soprano Tonna Miller, this was the piece to sell the proposition that Poulenc, not Debussy, is the composer who should go at the top of the "If you like X, you might also like" lists for Ravel and Satie.

Before Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, conductor Thomas Conlin told us that he believes the work reveals that Schubert was really depressed at the time. And, it turned out, if the work wasn't going to tell us that, by God the conductor would. This was the slowest, most somber and lugubrious performance you're ever likely to hear. And the sense of expectancy for the unwritten rest of the symphony was palpable. Some critics say that Schubert dropped the work after two movements because it was perfect as it stood. That's nonsense: no classical composer would write a second movement in a related key like that (tonic major of the subdominant, tending towards its own subdominant, if you're curious) and claim the work complete if he stopped there. The second movement is a huge subdominant vacuum chamber begging for a large-scale harmonic resolution to follow, and the slower it's played the more obvious this is.

Finally, the chorus came back out again, and the same conductor who showed us Schubert the mournful depressive gave us Richard Wagner the cheerful pops composer. Three famous choruses from different operas, played bright and lively with no break between them, so the pilgrims from Tannhäuser walk right in on the wedding scene from Lohengrin. They go fast, too, so fast they're not quite in tune.

This was the first choral concert I'd heard in the new hall, and the question arose of whether, tucked in the back of the deep stage, the chorus could be heard. Turned out that their sound floated out above the orchestra, and so long as the instruments didn't drown them out (not a problem in Poulenc), they could be heard reasonably if not always clearly. The problem is that the utterly dry acoustics robbed the chorus of much of its richness, and particularly in the Poulenc the hundred-odd voices sounded as if they were about a third of their actual number. This was less of a problem with Wagner's beefier choral writing, but the solution came with the encore, Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus. Perfect. Mozart: they should be singing Mozart.

Came home and put on a record of Schubert's Great C Major. Fifty minutes of a tireless musical rubber ball bouncing up and down, *boing*boing*boing*. The best antidote to an Unfinished that thinks it's Tchaikovsky's Pathétique.