mucho Mozart, beaucoup Brahms
Jan. 24th, 2006 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIt was a busy concert weekend, last weekend was: three consecutive evenings with three different orchestras. This is yet another Mozart anniversary year (250th of his birth), but only two of the concerts had Mozart. What all three of them had was Brahms: one First Symphony, two Seconds. (Hey, that fits. Would I like to hear the Fourth four times in one weekend? Let me think about it.)
Symphony Silicon Valley did the First, under the prodigal George Cleve, who has the additional merit of resembling Brahms in person more than any other conductor I've seen. It was a good, solid performance that made the work clear instead of turgid as it tends to get. But I wasn't as enraptured as Richard Scheinen in the Mercury News was by it. I do agree with Scheinen that omitting the first movement repeat tends to mutilate the symphony.
Also on the program, a not-so-much-heard Mozart piano concerto (No. 22 in E-flat, K.482) with Stephen Prutsman, not a great piece but engagingly played, and his amazingly dour Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K.546, the result of listening to too much Bach.
Pre-concert speaker Roger Emanuels, a cellist with the orchestra, totally befuddled his audience by telling us to watch for the triangle in the symphony. He said that Brahms uses it in one movement only, the only time Brahms uses the triangle. Actually Roger was thinking of the Fourth Symphony, and it's the only time Brahms uses the triangle in a symphony, not the only time he uses it at all. The triangle was actually on stage in anticipation of the encore, one of the Hungarian Dances. It was left unmanned during the whole symphony as the audience kept wondering why the triangle player was late.
The two Brahms Seconds came from the San Francisco Symphony and the Oakland East Bay Symphony, and quite different they were. The former is of course by far the greater orchestra, and MTT is a more notable conductor than Oakland's assistant, Bryan Nies, but Oakland gave a performance that sounded more like Brahms. This symphony's predominant mood is pastoral and ruminative, and Nies played it that way without trying to pump it up. MTT made it shine and emote, with crystalline sound better suited to Tchaikovsky. This was a performance worthy of his late master Lenny, shedding more sound than light.
MTT also gave us the Schumann Cello Concerto, with the very fine light-toned, white-bearded Lynn Harrell as soloist, and Charles Ives's Decoration Day, half watchful peace like The Unanswered Question, half Ivesian collage chaos. Oakland gave us the Mozart bassoon concerto, which sounds like a series of opera arias that happen to be for bassoon, and something kind of new: the Third Symphony of Kevin Puts, a not particularly memorable but reasonably short piece that strained away at the top end of the orchestral range. This one I was sent to review.
Symphony Silicon Valley did the First, under the prodigal George Cleve, who has the additional merit of resembling Brahms in person more than any other conductor I've seen. It was a good, solid performance that made the work clear instead of turgid as it tends to get. But I wasn't as enraptured as Richard Scheinen in the Mercury News was by it. I do agree with Scheinen that omitting the first movement repeat tends to mutilate the symphony.
Also on the program, a not-so-much-heard Mozart piano concerto (No. 22 in E-flat, K.482) with Stephen Prutsman, not a great piece but engagingly played, and his amazingly dour Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K.546, the result of listening to too much Bach.
Pre-concert speaker Roger Emanuels, a cellist with the orchestra, totally befuddled his audience by telling us to watch for the triangle in the symphony. He said that Brahms uses it in one movement only, the only time Brahms uses the triangle. Actually Roger was thinking of the Fourth Symphony, and it's the only time Brahms uses the triangle in a symphony, not the only time he uses it at all. The triangle was actually on stage in anticipation of the encore, one of the Hungarian Dances. It was left unmanned during the whole symphony as the audience kept wondering why the triangle player was late.
The two Brahms Seconds came from the San Francisco Symphony and the Oakland East Bay Symphony, and quite different they were. The former is of course by far the greater orchestra, and MTT is a more notable conductor than Oakland's assistant, Bryan Nies, but Oakland gave a performance that sounded more like Brahms. This symphony's predominant mood is pastoral and ruminative, and Nies played it that way without trying to pump it up. MTT made it shine and emote, with crystalline sound better suited to Tchaikovsky. This was a performance worthy of his late master Lenny, shedding more sound than light.
MTT also gave us the Schumann Cello Concerto, with the very fine light-toned, white-bearded Lynn Harrell as soloist, and Charles Ives's Decoration Day, half watchful peace like The Unanswered Question, half Ivesian collage chaos. Oakland gave us the Mozart bassoon concerto, which sounds like a series of opera arias that happen to be for bassoon, and something kind of new: the Third Symphony of Kevin Puts, a not particularly memorable but reasonably short piece that strained away at the top end of the orchestral range. This one I was sent to review.
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Date: 2006-01-25 02:00 pm (UTC)Would you be interested in a petition to have the four movements of Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto smushed down to two? I figure we just combine 1 and 2, and 3 and 4. That way, each of his concertos has the same number of movements as the concerto's number: 1 had one, 3 has three, 4 has four, and 5 has five. It would make the movements sort of long and confused, but I think it would be worth it.
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Date: 2006-01-25 11:17 pm (UTC)Two movements, eh? That would be ... logical, Mr. Spock. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has four movements and his Sixth has five. Does he always keep one behind like that? No, and just to be more confusing he at first had the numbers of those two reversed. The question is, how many times do I want to hear it in one weekend?