concert review: missed dates

[calimac]

Tomorrow, January 31st, is Schubert's birthday. And is the San Francisco Symphony playing any Schubert this week? They are not. Guest conductor Charles Dutoit led dull and windy performances of Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole and Lalo's Symphonie espagnole. The latter, which is really a violin concerto, had as soloist James Ehnes, who is 36 years old and was consequently born about the same time I last listened to Lalo's Symphonie espagnole all the way through. I spent much of this performance thinking about how the work was written for Sarasate and how much Sarasate hated any parts of a concerto where he was not playing. Lalo didn't give him much to hate.

And some Elgar. Given the theme of the rest of the concert, did they play the suite from his opera The Spanish Lady? No. Did they play his early tone poem Sevillana (Scene Espagnole), which is so obscure even I have never heard it? No. They played the Enigma Variations, the standard default Elgar work, and made it so dull and windy as to turn it into a libel on the composer's insights into human nature. This was wrong.

I was looking forward to telling you about hearing community orchestras give free performances of Nielsen's Second and Third Symphonies, both of them, but I missed the performance of the Third. I had it on my calendar; I just forgot to go. But I did hear the Second, from the Prometheus Symphony in Oakland last Sunday. That was Mozart's birthday, but they didn't play any Mozart. Besides the Nielsen - a game attempt at a difficult work, seriously marred only by being too slow and by having the composer's name misspelled in the program book - they played Ernest Bloch's Schelomo with one of those amazing young soloists, cellist Oliver Herbert. As is often the case, he was fully technically qualified and lacked only seasoning. He could play all the notes, he just didn't give the impression of having any idea why he was playing them.

I'm looking forward to some concerts more delectable, if not next week - Dutoit is still here next week - then the week after.

Comments

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Random question here: Is there any music by Ravel that you recommend? (I think all I have by him right now is the string quartet.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Actually I'm very fond of Ravel, most of his work. (Is it clear that my disapproval was not of the work but the performance? My knockabout remarks were about the Lalo.)

Ravel's music falls into several categories. I'm most fond of his jewel-like ancien regime music - Ma mere l'oye, Le tombeau de Couperin, Pavane pour une infante defunte, Alborada del gracioso. But there's another side to him, the lush, even lurid hothouse impressionist. Here you'll find Daphnis et Chloe, his magnum opus in that realm, Rapsodie Espagnole, La Valse, and the infamous, and infamously catchy, Bolero. The String Quartet tends towards the latter rather than the former, but his formal chamber music is really a third type, a questing semi-modernism. If you like that, the next thing I'd point you towards is his Sonata for Violin and Piano.

The next composer to try if you like the hothouse Ravel is Debussy, followed by the early music of Roussel. The next thing to try if you like Ravel's ancien regime side is the similar music of Respighi, another multivarious composer.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I couldn't figure out how to ask that question without implying that you didn't like Ravel. It was more that I couldn't remember if you'd expressed any opinion on him. (Just as you apparently haven't remembered our past discussion of Debussy, whose music I love.) So thank you for the overview. I've heard Bolero numerous times, of course. (Amongst other things I've seen Allegro Non Troppo multiple times, mostly when I was in college.) I'm pretty sure I've heard Rapsodie Espagnole as well, although I'm not completely sure. The little reading I've been doing recently is pulling me toward Daphnis and Chloe (any preferred recording?), but also Le tombeau de Couperin (which is solo piano, right?)

I've been investigating contemporary composers a bit recently (most of them Finnish, it seems), and it's interesting that one theme that keeps coming up is strains of modern composition that harken back to Debussy and Ravel (and/or Bartok or Stravinsky) as opposed to Webern and Schoenberg. (Most recently in an old interview with Esa-Pekka Salonen that I found on the internet yesterday, from around the era when he took over the LA Philharmonic.) I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, but it has renewed my interest in early 20th century composers as well. (This all started with my most recent plunge into opera, which has included listening to Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, which is itself more Debussyan than I realized.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What you're encountering is one stream in a major shift in musical culture that began in the 1970s, the abandonment of the serialist hegemony that held up the Viennese school, Webern in particular, as the one and only permissible model for music, and the uncovering of a lot of other streams that had been running underground for the previous few decades, showing the influence of Stravinsky, Sibelius, Debussy, and other earlier 20C composers. Many contemporary composers are rather eclectic and take influences from several of these.

Le tombeau de Couperin is a six-movement piano suite, of which four movements were orchestrated for a ballet. Ma mere l'oye is a five-movement suite for two pianos which was expanded to six movements when it was orchestrated for a ballet. Confused yet?

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It's certainly complicated enough. And poking around in my collection just now I see I have another piece by Ravel -- Pavane pour une infante defunte -- that came as an "extra" to Faure's Requiem. I may have other bits and pieces around here too.

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't seen it since its initial release, but I quite enjoyed a 1992 French film, Un coeur en hiver, about a love triangle (of sorts) among musicians, with, as I recall, Ravel's chamber music heavily featured, especially a piano trio.

To fringefaan: you may be interested in what John Simon, a big fan, has to say about Bluebeard's Castle (in two different essays, I believe) in his 2005 collection of music criticism.

-MTD/neb