concert review: Claremont Trio
Apr. 11th, 2006 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThis is what I write like when I'm not that enthused by the concert. Three young women, lacking seasoning, playing trios (piano, violin, cello) by Haydn, Schumann ... and Leon Kirchner. If the last name is less familiar, there's a reason. He's one of those academic modernists who stalked the landscape during the post-WW2 period. Some of these composers had talent (others didn't), and having scoured over Kirchner's score and listened to a recording several times prior to the concert, I'll admit it's an interesting piece to study, and presumably to play ... but it's not something to be grasped on first hearing by ordinary listeners, and above all it lacks the artistic beauty that Haydn and Schumann accept as requisite without question.
Not to say that the Kirchner is a bad piece, or that the trio shouldn't have played it, but that it stuck out like the proverbial painful sore thumb. "Mental whiplash" is what I said in the review. If the message comes out that the living composers we ought to be hearing are more like Paul Schoenfield, and that Leon Kirchner ought to be gently relegated to a museum of quaint 20th-century artistic customs, then I've conveyed my intent.
(Surprised to learn while writing the review that "dodecaphonic" is in the Word spelling dictionary. So is "dodecaphonist", which is what I originally wrote of the composer.)
At Dinkelspiel the office gives reviewers a giant press pack. I always take this away and dump it in my car before the concert. Like most press packs it doesn't help much anyway. We were talking once before about musician "biographies" which are giant resumes rather than actual biographies. Such was the case here. The Trio's biographical handouts didn't even say that two of them are twin sisters (although their website does). Instead, it begins by telling us that Emily Bruskin, violin, has soloed with the Quincy (MA) Symphony Orchestra. Are we supposed to be impressed? If she were the girl next door, that'd be impressive, but not from someone playing chamber music in a high-profile concert series.
She also, I regret to say, is sufficiently off-key that she ought to be playing at $5 or $10 concerts, not $30+ ones. I referred to this as gently as I could.
I presume the fellow sitting in front of me (reviewers tend to get clustered together) was a reviewer for some other publication. I heard him telling his companion that he would be writing about a new work this summer, and that to do so he'd be attending some workshop event, "and hanging out with the composer, Libby Larsen." For the sci-fi guys among my readers, that's about the equivalent in name-dropping terms of saying "hanging out with Connie Willis." Well, it sounds like fun.
Not to say that the Kirchner is a bad piece, or that the trio shouldn't have played it, but that it stuck out like the proverbial painful sore thumb. "Mental whiplash" is what I said in the review. If the message comes out that the living composers we ought to be hearing are more like Paul Schoenfield, and that Leon Kirchner ought to be gently relegated to a museum of quaint 20th-century artistic customs, then I've conveyed my intent.
(Surprised to learn while writing the review that "dodecaphonic" is in the Word spelling dictionary. So is "dodecaphonist", which is what I originally wrote of the composer.)
At Dinkelspiel the office gives reviewers a giant press pack. I always take this away and dump it in my car before the concert. Like most press packs it doesn't help much anyway. We were talking once before about musician "biographies" which are giant resumes rather than actual biographies. Such was the case here. The Trio's biographical handouts didn't even say that two of them are twin sisters (although their website does). Instead, it begins by telling us that Emily Bruskin, violin, has soloed with the Quincy (MA) Symphony Orchestra. Are we supposed to be impressed? If she were the girl next door, that'd be impressive, but not from someone playing chamber music in a high-profile concert series.
She also, I regret to say, is sufficiently off-key that she ought to be playing at $5 or $10 concerts, not $30+ ones. I referred to this as gently as I could.
I presume the fellow sitting in front of me (reviewers tend to get clustered together) was a reviewer for some other publication. I heard him telling his companion that he would be writing about a new work this summer, and that to do so he'd be attending some workshop event, "and hanging out with the composer, Libby Larsen." For the sci-fi guys among my readers, that's about the equivalent in name-dropping terms of saying "hanging out with Connie Willis." Well, it sounds like fun.
