musical weekend

[calimac]

After Thursday's Shostakovich concert, I just kept right on going.

1. Friday: A local light opera production of Once Upon a Mattress, Mary Rodgers' fractured-fairy-tale-style "Princess and the Pea" adaptation, the one that made Carol Burnett famous back in 1959. Disjointed production, as if the actors were making it up as they went along, but amusing. Jillian Lawson, a tall, lanky high school senior, plays Princess Fred, and belted out "Shy" and "Happily Ever After" lustily.
2. Saturday: SSV concert. Jon Nakamatsu rules! A local boy who made good (he taught German at the high school Jillian Lawson goes to until he won the Cliburn Competition nine years ago), tremendously popular hereabouts and rightly so, he sped through the fripperies of Grieg's Piano Concerto with tremendous ease and straight-forwardness. Delirious audience response; he gave two encores. (Not pieces I recognized: I'd guess a Chopin and a Liszt. "Chopin Liszt," get it?) The Sibelius Fifth Symphony that followed was stiff, stodgy, dull. Filled with tiny flubs, nothing disastrous but lots of articulation glitches and suchlike, betraying the musicians' awkwardness. The tone colors were fine, but there was no intensity. Even the horns (more vital to this symphony than any other) had their bells turned backwards; why? This orchestra has given Sibelius's swing and flow (in the Second Symphony and Violin Concerto) better than anybody I've ever heard, so for this damp squib I must blame either lack of rehearsal, or the conductor, William Boughton, who's perhaps more at home in smaller-scale music with less grandeur. The work ends with a series of widely-spaced chords that are the most dangerous applause-trap in the symphonic repertoire. But nobody clapped early this time; in fact, nobody clapped when it actually ended, either. Maybe they were afraid. I finally started the ovation in the balcony myself (something I never do, because I like to pause and recover myself before starting to applaud). Patioboe wondered why the applause was tepid, but she's not going to like the answer: it was a tepid performance.
3. Sunday: To le petit Trianon for violin and piano sonatas with Arnold Steinhardt (long-serving violinist with the Guarneri Quartet) and Lydia Artymiw (not a typo). Not repertoire very close to my heart, but Grieg's Op. 45, an auld Kreisler-Rachmaninoff staple, was delightful and carried the air of those old-time Carnegie Hall guys. Janacek's so-called Third Sonata more lyrical than I'd have thought. Beethoven's Op. 30 No. 1 typical early Beethoven. Fauré (Op. 13, slow mvt) for an encore. Artymiw very powerful, Rachmaninoff-like; Steinhardt very wobbly tone. Hall hollow and echoey today; was it the relative bareness of the stage or the relative emptiness of the seats?
4. CDs for birthday presents:
   1. Yiddishbbuk, chamber music by Osvaldo Golijov, hot young (he's 46) Argentinian composer. Really powerful, grabby stuff, vigorously played by the St. Lawrence Quartet. Sounds better the first time than the second, though. Not a good sign. Further investigation needed.
   2. Beethoven's First and Second Piano Concertos. Perahia, Haitink, Concertgebouw. Fills a hole in my collection; the First is the first piano concerto I ever heard.
   3. Two symphonies by Ferdinand Ries, pupil of Beethoven. A composer I've long been curious about. Unlike his contemporaries Pleyel, Reicha, Wilms, and the sublime Mehul, one listen amptly satisfied this curiosity.
   4. Nikolaus Harnoncourt lecturing on and playing excerpts from the "lost" finale of Bruckner's Ninth. He says Bruckner had finished the movement and just had a little tidying up to do. Like, say, orchestrating it. I think that if Harnoncourt went into politics he'd say that we're nearly done tidying up Iraq. But really interesting nonetheless.
   5. Shostakovich's complete film music for the 1964 Soviet Hamlet, on Naxos. Nobody, but nobody, was a better choice to write Hamlet music than Shostakovich.
   6. Bartók quartets, with the Takács. Goshwowoboyoboy. Haven't listened to this one yet: saving it up.