concert review: Symphony Silicon Valley
Oct. 28th, 2006 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThat went well.
Gary Hoffman is a renowned cellist of whom (blush) I hadn't previously heard. No showman, he's purely emotive. He has a hesitant, introverted way of playing, almost as if he's talking to you spontaneously and it's costing him some mental pain to get the words out. In a play, this kind of performance can be mesmerizing if the actor is good enough. And here, the cellist was more than good enough. He's a conduit to the emotional heart of the music.
Apply this, then, to Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1, the concerto with perhaps the longest and least flashy cadenza in the repertoire. Its musings and meanderings were perfectly suited for him. Orchestra and audience alike sat and simply listened.
Outside of the cadenza, the concerto shows its date, 1959: right in the middle of Shostakovich's most active and outgoing decade. I particularly liked the fast finale, with the wind choir - including piccolo, to make the sound even more pointed - clipping out chords in perfect unison.
That was the big piece on the program; it was surrounded by two smaller ones, both French but in different styles: Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, rather Impressionistic with one really famous tune; and Bizet's Symphony in C. This is an odd one: a pure classical-period symphony written forty years after the period had ended for everyone else, then shelved and only discovered eighty years after that, by which time even the neo-classical period was over. (We will play no symphony before its time.) To the high classicists, C Major was a key to pull out the trumpets and drums for, which Bizet does. Rather a bumptuous, blaring work, but a good palate-cleanser after the Shostakovich. Martin West, new to the orchestra, guest conducted, and seemed pretty good at it.
Gary Hoffman is a renowned cellist of whom (blush) I hadn't previously heard. No showman, he's purely emotive. He has a hesitant, introverted way of playing, almost as if he's talking to you spontaneously and it's costing him some mental pain to get the words out. In a play, this kind of performance can be mesmerizing if the actor is good enough. And here, the cellist was more than good enough. He's a conduit to the emotional heart of the music.
Apply this, then, to Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1, the concerto with perhaps the longest and least flashy cadenza in the repertoire. Its musings and meanderings were perfectly suited for him. Orchestra and audience alike sat and simply listened.
Outside of the cadenza, the concerto shows its date, 1959: right in the middle of Shostakovich's most active and outgoing decade. I particularly liked the fast finale, with the wind choir - including piccolo, to make the sound even more pointed - clipping out chords in perfect unison.
That was the big piece on the program; it was surrounded by two smaller ones, both French but in different styles: Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, rather Impressionistic with one really famous tune; and Bizet's Symphony in C. This is an odd one: a pure classical-period symphony written forty years after the period had ended for everyone else, then shelved and only discovered eighty years after that, by which time even the neo-classical period was over. (We will play no symphony before its time.) To the high classicists, C Major was a key to pull out the trumpets and drums for, which Bizet does. Rather a bumptuous, blaring work, but a good palate-cleanser after the Shostakovich. Martin West, new to the orchestra, guest conducted, and seemed pretty good at it.
