concert review: Oakland East Bay Symphony
Apr. 25th, 2006 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacMany years ago, when the Earth and time were young, my friend DGK - whom some of you will know or remember - and I attended a chamber music concert on the UW campus. The musicians, and the music they were playing, were all Swedish. DGK, whose love for high modernism can be quite intense, was eager to hear a work on the program by Allan Pettersson, a gnarly post-WW2 composer who's sort of the Swedish equivalent to Havergal Brian. Also on the program was a piece by a composer neither of us had ever heard of, Wilhelm Stenhammar. And as there were no program notes, just a listing of the items being played, we were forced to guess about the piece. DGK was stunned by its placidity, its lack of harmonic bite. It couldn't be a 20th century work, he insisted. So when was it written? He's the one who guessed 1840. I thought it far too influenced by later Romanticism in flow to be that early, so I suggested 1870.
After the concert we rushed across Red Square to the library (this is the great thing about concerts on college campuses) to look Stenhammar up in the Grove Dictionary. We were both wrong. The piece dated from 1910.
I'm pretty sure that DGK crossed Stenhammar off his list that day, but I am more attracted to slightly atavistic 20th century music and made a secret note of the name. Any composer who spends his life bitching about Wagner and Richard Strauss, as Stenhammar evidently did, can't be all bad in my book. Eventually I picked up recordings of both his completed symphonies and enjoyed listening to them, especially the moment near the start of the Tor Mann recording of the Second where the descending modal pizzicato cello line sounds right out of Hovhaness. (In other performances it tends to be inaudible.)
But you never get to hear unpretentious tonal modern symphonies like these in concert. So when I found that the Oakland East Bay Symphony would actually be performing Stenhammar's Second - and Mozart's K. 183 (alias No. 25), one of my favorite Mozart symphonies, along with it - I yearned to go. Circumstances might have led me to be out of the country at the time, but circumstances changed, and not only did I get to go, I got the ticket underwritten by the expedient of promising my editors a review of the concert, and there it is.
Writing this was a bit of a logistical challenge, as I was attending the concert on Friday, on the way up to the Middle Earth Festival I wrote of yesterday, and I don't own one of those modern giant wifi laptops that would enable me to file my review electronically. Instead I got home Sunday at dinnertime and filed the review by deadline that night. I reduced the difficulty of doing this by cheating: knowing that I'd be saying a lot about the piece, which wouldn't be changing as a result of the performance, I drafted that part before I left.
Except it did change. Both of the recordings I have make the work sound a lot like Bruckner, but the live performance didn't sound like Bruckner to me at all. That was a little unexpected, and I had to work around it. Which is just one reason I normally don't formulate anything in my reviews, no matter how basic and predictable, before the concert.
But I did get my story of my encounter of Stenhammar with DGK in, suitably depersonalized.
After the concert we rushed across Red Square to the library (this is the great thing about concerts on college campuses) to look Stenhammar up in the Grove Dictionary. We were both wrong. The piece dated from 1910.
I'm pretty sure that DGK crossed Stenhammar off his list that day, but I am more attracted to slightly atavistic 20th century music and made a secret note of the name. Any composer who spends his life bitching about Wagner and Richard Strauss, as Stenhammar evidently did, can't be all bad in my book. Eventually I picked up recordings of both his completed symphonies and enjoyed listening to them, especially the moment near the start of the Tor Mann recording of the Second where the descending modal pizzicato cello line sounds right out of Hovhaness. (In other performances it tends to be inaudible.)
But you never get to hear unpretentious tonal modern symphonies like these in concert. So when I found that the Oakland East Bay Symphony would actually be performing Stenhammar's Second - and Mozart's K. 183 (alias No. 25), one of my favorite Mozart symphonies, along with it - I yearned to go. Circumstances might have led me to be out of the country at the time, but circumstances changed, and not only did I get to go, I got the ticket underwritten by the expedient of promising my editors a review of the concert, and there it is.
Writing this was a bit of a logistical challenge, as I was attending the concert on Friday, on the way up to the Middle Earth Festival I wrote of yesterday, and I don't own one of those modern giant wifi laptops that would enable me to file my review electronically. Instead I got home Sunday at dinnertime and filed the review by deadline that night. I reduced the difficulty of doing this by cheating: knowing that I'd be saying a lot about the piece, which wouldn't be changing as a result of the performance, I drafted that part before I left.
Except it did change. Both of the recordings I have make the work sound a lot like Bruckner, but the live performance didn't sound like Bruckner to me at all. That was a little unexpected, and I had to work around it. Which is just one reason I normally don't formulate anything in my reviews, no matter how basic and predictable, before the concert.
But I did get my story of my encounter of Stenhammar with DGK in, suitably depersonalized.
