The music log

Live in Concert

2005-05-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

May 4, 2005
The UCSF Grand Celebration Concert

So, last Wednesday was our trio's public premiere. This concert is an annual event staged by an organization called "The UCSF Piano Committee." It was started to raise money to overhaul this Steinway grand piano they've got in one of the lecture halls at UCSF. It's a very nice piano, but that was over 10 years ago, and I think it might be time for another overhaul. The creaking of the pedals isn't supposed to be louder than the music.

The concert was a mixed bag of UCSF students, staff and "members of the community." There were maybe 15 or 20 different people and small groups, and some of them had quite impressive credentials. Everyone had to write a short bio for the program, which revealed that several of the performers had professional experience or were conservatory graduates. So yeah, many of the performers were a lot better than us, but we weren't the worst, either!

I think we were all nervous. The other flautist and the cellist in my group had played in the same chamber orchestra I had a few months back, so we'd done a performance then, but even a small orchestra is better camouflage for any errors you might make than a trio is. You can't hide in a trio.

We'd had several rehearsals in the weeks leading up to the concert, and a couple of hours before it began, we scheduled a run-through in an empty classroom. Luckily, we were able to scrounge up three chairs that didn't have desks attached to them (which makes it especially hard to play the cello) although I had to clear one of them off; someone had left behind what were presumably instructional materials for a sex-ed class: a pregnancy test and a small packet of personal lubricant.

We warmed up and began the run-through, and immediately we realized something was very wrong. Then we realized that the problem was that the cellist had opened his music to the wrong page and was playing a different piece. We all giggled nervously. "Bad dress rehearsal, good performance, right, guys?" I asked hopefully.

And it was OK. Shannon came out to support us, and a guy I work with was there, too. I hadn't been to an amateur concert in a long time (which is especially funny given how many gazillions of them I've been to in my life, just not in the past 15 years or so), and it was really interesting to see what qualities separated certain performances from others. Most everybody managed to hit all their notes, it was really a matter of tone and self-assurance and musicality. The more amateur performers were visibly nervous, whereas the pros looked like they enjoyed having everyone in the room looking at them. I don't think I will ever enjoy having everyone in the room look at me, but I aspire to be able to pretend to.

So overall, it was fun. Our part was scary, but I enjoyed listening to everyone else, and it was fun to be at a more relaxed concert than I'm used to, where the people in the audience aren't people who shelled out $60 a ticket to impress their dates, but are, rather, friends and family members of the performers. I especially liked it when one pianist introduced herself by saying "I want you all to know that two of my pieces have four flats in them and the other one has five sharps!" And she played them beautifully, I would have never guessed.

Nice baroque music

2005-05-03T20:49:00.000-07:00

April 27, 2005

Bernard Labadie conducting the San Francisco Symphony

J.S. Bach, Orchestral Suite No. 4 in D major
Handel, O Numi eterni (La Lucrezia), with mezzo-soprano Jane Irwin
Handel, Water Music

Number of photos of MTT in the program: only 3.

Yet again Phil was off jet-setting last week (he's sailing around Thailand on a boat some friends of his rented) so Shannon went to this with me.

I went into it knowing more or less what to expect, since I knew the first and last pieces pretty well. Bach is one of my favorite composers, but honestly, I find Handel a little dull. And so he was, at least to me. Jane Irwin was very good, though, so that made the O Numi eterni somewhat interesting.

The rest of the audience seemed a little restless during Water Music, as well. Usually when it's performed, they just do the most famous parts of it, but they did all 19 movements. They're short movements, but still. They did seem to perk up at the end when the most famous movement, the Alla hornpipe (which is much more widely known as "the theme to Masterpiece Theatre) was played. As for me, I found myself mentally rearranging my living room furniture to accommodate my new couch which had been delivered that day.

Oh, one interesting thing about the concert, though, was that they had a different person playing harpsichord than usual, but she wasn't credited in the program. I think the last time I saw a concert there with a harpsichordist was this one which made me wince a little bit to consider. Did he get fired? Or was he just sick or something? Also, they had a guy playing the theorbo in the O Numi eterni, which is a Baroque stringed instrument that sort of looks like a lute, which was kind of cool. He didn't get credited in the program, either.

Self-Promotion

2005-05-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

My trio is playing in a concert tomorrow. This is it. We're the first group in the second half of the concert, so I'm guessing we'll go on somewhere in the 6:45-7 p.m. range. And hey, there's a reception afterwards with free food and possibly booze!

in-store appearance

2005-04-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

April 2, 2005

DJ Z-Trip at the Apple Store, San Francisco

I've been a Z-Trip fan for many years now, and I've seen him play maybe 7 or 8 times now but never during the day in a retail establishment (and a computer store, no less!). I used to be very active on Z-Trip's message board but pretty much dropped out of that scene about 6 months ago...it's not that I became any less interested in his music, I just got tired of dealing with all the teenaged boys over there. So, until I randomly happened to read about this appearance in the newspaper, I had no idea that his first major label CD is finally coming out this month, and that he would be making the rounds to promote it.

I had no idea if it would be crowded, and if so, who the crowd would be. I wasn't really sure if this show would be worthwhile, but I had some errands to run downtown that day anyway, so I figured I'd stop by and check it out and leave if I wasn't enjoying it (it was a free show, after all). I got there about 10 minutes before it was supposed to start, and the place was still pretty empty. They had a few rows of chairs set out that seated maybe 40 people, and those were filled up, but there was plenty of standing room right behind the seats and I got a space right in the front near the middle, maybe 15 feet away from the table where Z's equipment was all set up. I saw a couple of people I recognized from past Z-Trip shows, but in general, the crowd was a lot younger than what I usually see, which makes sense seeing as how this was an all-ages daytime gig.

The show itself was surprisingly good...he played about 80% stuff I hadn't heard before mixed in with some classics like the "Mercedes Benz" and "Bombs Over Baghdad" mixes from his "Live in L.A." CD, some Ray Charles stuff I'd seen him do before, the "Billie Jean"/"Testify" mashup, and he ended with the "Alphabet Aerobics"/"Peer Gynt" mashup he did at the end of the movie "Scratch" ("Scratch" is a documentary about hip-hop DJs, which I highly recommend if you are interested in that sort of thing). I don't know how much of the new stuff he played is on the new album, but he definitely said that a couple of things were, including one song that has apparently been getting a lot of airplay on mainstream radio (I had never heard it before, but don't listen to a lot of mainstream radio). For the other song he did from the album, he was accompanied by a local MC who goes by the name of "Luke Sick." That song is called "Bury Me Standing" and the lyrics consist of a lot of tough-guy posturing about how they'll have to "bury me standing, 'cause I won't lay [sic] down." Unfortunately, this tough-guy stuff was totally undermined by the fact that Mr. Sick is a totally baby-faced teddy bear type (he also bears a strong physical resemblance to my sweet-as-pie co-worker, which made the whole thing seem even more ludicrous). Anyway, the stuff he played off the new album was not my favorite, but I enjoyed the rest of the set and still hold out hope that the album will be good (it comes out April 19).

Afterwards, Z announced that he had some 10-inch records to give away and said that he would give them to people who could prove they were members of the Z-Trip message board. I could have stuck around and gotten one, but I had more errands to do, and I had to get home, so I passed that opportunity up. But I'm glad I decided to go to the show itself.

2005-04-04T20:32:00.000-07:00

March 30, 2005

Kurt Masur conducting the San Francisco Symphony

Mozart, Symphony No. 36 in C major, Linz
Bruckner, Symphony No. 9 in D minor

Even though Kurt Masur has guest conducted the SFS several times in recent years, I don't think Phil and I had ever seen him conduct before (or if I have, I don't remember). I've certainly heard many of his recordings with the Cleveland Orchestra, though, so it was cool to finally see him live.

The orchestra seemed to think so, too--it seemed to me like they performed exceptionally well, with the exception of a couple of bum notes in a very exposed oboe solo early on in the Mozart. Of course, that's the bad part about playing the oboe--everyone can hear if you screw up, as opposed to, say, a violinist.

The theme of the evening was the Austrian city of Linz--Mozart wrote his symphony during a stint there (he agreed to conduct a concert, neglected to bring a symphony with him, so he just wrote one!), and Bruckner lived there for many years. The only thing I really know about Linz is that it's where Linzer tortes come from, and according to the program notes, that pretty much is that city's claim to fame.

Anyway, I enjoyed both pieces. I didn't know the Mozart but I'd heard the Bruckner before. The Mozart had interesting instrumentation (to me, anyway) because it had basically a full wind section except no flutes! The program notes speculate that the woodwind players in the orchestra he wrote the piece for doubled flute and oboe, and he chose to have them play oboe for that piece. But also, there is a rumor in flute circles that Mozart hated the flute. He only wrote one flute concerto (there are two Mozart flute concerti, but the one in G is just a flute adaptation of a clarinet concerto). But that's just a rumor.

The Bruckner was my favorite, though. It was his last symphony, and he actually died before completing it (even with only three movements, though, it's still a massive piece that took almost an hour to play). I think I had more to say about this, but unfortunately, I waited too long after the concert to write this. So, um, I liked this concert, yeah!

Premieres

2005-03-26T18:50:00.000-08:00

March 24, 2005

David Robertson conducting the San Francisco Symphony
Grieg: Funeral March in Memory of Richard Nordraak
Thow: Bellini Sky, with soloist Julie Ann Giacobassi
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Pathétique

Photos of MTT in the program: 6

The first two pieces in this program were both premieres--the first was just a San Francisco premiere, but the Thow piece was a world premiere of a piece commissioned by the SF Symphony for their English horn player Julie Ann Giacobassi. And since this program was being performed Thursday-Saturday and we were at the Thursday performance, we really did get to hear the first performances, which was kind of cool.

Anyway, both of these pieces were new to me (well, obviously the Thow was, but I didn't know the Grieg, either). I like Grieg a lot--I'm a fan of Scandinavian music in general, and this was a piece that Grieg had written for a friend who died young at the age of 23, but he also requested that it be played at his own funeral ("played as well as possible over my grave" were his precise instructions, according to the program notes). I liked it, but while listening to it, it occurred to me that it really wasn't what I was used to hearing a funerals, because it was too sad. The music at all the funerals I've attended has generally been pretty upbeat, and I've been to some pretty damned sad funerals. I think maybe people don't want the music to be too sad because the event is already sad enough. But not Grieg apparently.

I liked the Thow pretty well, too, and it was considerably less melancholy. Julie Ann Giacobassi is a fabulous musician, and there really isn't too much out there in the orchestral repertoire that highlights the English horn. In fact, when she got up to play, I was surprised to see that she had a wire support attached to the bottom of her instrument to make it easier to play while standing up. I don't know if this is something she invented or if other English horn players use them, too, though, because I don't think I've ever seen anyone play an English horn solo piece before.

And then they ended with the Tchaikovsky, which was, of course, terrific.

Afterwards, we went to a reception for student subscribers. I'd gotten an e-mail about this reception from the symphony last week, and I thought it might be fun. I occasionally run into other people I know from UCSF, so I thought some of them might be there, plus, hey, free food, free drinks, and a chance to meet some of the musicians (although I figured, rightly, that I'd be too shy to go up and talk to them). Anyway, Phil and I got there and instantly wondered if we were in the right place--we were the only people there under 60. Eventually, a few other student-looking types did wander in, but a majority of the people there still had completely gray hair. And nobody I knew showed up, but one girl sat down next to Phil and I and we struck up a conversation. It turned out that she was a high school student who had just turned 18 last week, which made us feel incredibly old. She told us that she'd been given the ticket to the symphony by a friend of hers, a 75-year-old man who also arranged for her to go to the reception. It turns out that she's not only a high school student, but also a circus performer, and that she's planning to move to Japan to perform after she graduates from high school this summer. I was pretty floored (and impressed) by how self-possessed she was for an 18-year-old. I never in a million years would have gone to a reception by myself at her age, much less strike up a conversation with a couple of adult strangers. But I'm glad she did.

Memorial

2005-03-26T18:19:00.000-08:00

March 22, 2005

The Hemlock Tavern

Solid Dollar
Slowfinger
Coup de Grace
The Naysayers

This show was a benefit concert for the family of Paul Ohlhaver, the bass player from Slowfinger who unexpectedly passed away in his sleep last month at the age of 34 leaving behind his wife, an 18-month-old daughter, and another baby on the way. Paul was a friend and client of Iggy's (in fact, you can just barely see the tattoo Iggy did on him celebrating the birth of his daughter peeking out from under his shirt collar in the photo on this flyer). I didn't really know Paul, I'd just met him a couple of times, but I've seen Slowfinger play several times now, and they've always been one of my favorite bands.

Anyway, last Tuesday, Iggy and I both had long days at work, and we were in the middle of a solid week and a half of rain. There's pretty much nothing else in the world that could have gotten us out of the house that night, but it was important, so we went, and I'm so glad we did.

Turnout was only so-so, probably because nobody else felt like leaving the house, either. We missed the first band, and got there in time for one drink before Slowfinger went on, with one of their former guitar players filling in on bass. There was a big banner behind the stage with a drawing of Paul on it, so there was no forgetting why we were all there. Before the show, the lead singer had come up to us and said that they were just going to play a short set, that they didn't really want to be there. It was an incredibly hard show for them to play, but they did it and they still sounded amazing. They have a CD coming out sometime in the next few months--I urge you to check it out. Details should eventually surface on their website.

After Slowfinger, we stayed to see Coup de Grace. Iggy told me they were good, and they were, although they also played a short set. And then after that, we went home and fell asleep.

Hot vs. Cold

2005-03-15T19:52:00.000-08:00

Today's (actually tomorrow's) New York Times has an article on "cool" vs. flashy classical music performers, using two young pianists I've seen play with the SFS this season, Lang Lang and Leif Ove Andsnes, to exemplify these styles. I saw Andsnes play Rachmaninoff's second with the SFS back in October, and while he was terrific, well, I have to say, I prefer Lang Lang. I like my Rachmaninoff flashy, although this article did make me want to check out Till Fellner's "Well-Tempered Clavier" recording (I prefer Bach to be understated).

Anyway, I thought the author here made some valid points, but he sounds like a cranky old man when he says stuff like "[t]he longer I go to concerts, the more I value performances that do not exaggerate expressive touches or make interpretive points." Those young whipper-snappers with their crazy tempi and dynamics!

Lang Lang!

2005-03-08T21:57:00.000-08:00

March 6, 2005

Long Yu conducting the China Philharmonic Orchestra

Rimsky Korsakov, Overture to The Tsar's Bride
Hua Yanjun (A'bing)-Wu Zuqiang, Moon Reflected on the Erquan Fountain
Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, with soloist Lang Lang
Ye Xiaogang, Das Lied auf der Erde, with vocal soloist Luwa Ke
Bartok, Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin

This concert wasn't part of our regular subscription, and Phil and I got tickets to this for one reason and one reason only: Lang Lang. But then Phil forgot that we had the tickets and he went to Japan to run a marathon so I went with Shannon instead.

Phil and I have seen Lang Lang play with the San Francisco symphony twice now. I don't remember what he played the first time, but last time it was Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, which was absolutely perfect for his showboat-y style. He has a few CDs out now, but I haven't heard them, and I sort of suspect that they might not live up to the experience of seeing him live. He's such an enthusiastic and dynamic performer, and just so much fun to watch. He bounces, he flops his head, he makes little gestures with his hands when they're not on the piano keys. Some people might find it affected and annoying, I'm sure, but it really seems to me to be motivated by a sincere joy of music.

So, anyway, I was really just there for the Lang Lang. I wasn't really familiar with any of the pieces other than the Rachmaninoff (which I'm actually not super crazy about) and I'd never even heard of the China Philharmonic, either.

As I learned from reading the program, this was probably because it's only been around since May of 2000, which is probably also partly why most of the musicians looked fairly young (there were also a lot of women in the orchestra, including two female percussionists--very unusual!). It's funny--I don't think of China as being a country that produces a lot of classical musicians (and in fact, the program said that the China Philharmonic's predecessor orchestra, the China Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra, was one of the first to be founded in China, in 1949, suggesting that Western classical music has only penetrated that country in recent years), but there are lots of classical musicians who are of Chinese descent but American or European nationality. In fact, when my sister was in college and my parents attended one of her performances with the Yale Symphony Orchestra, an elderly woman behind them in the audience looked at all the Asian faces on stage and said to her companion "aren't there any Americans in this orchestra?" The stereotype of the Chinese-American kid being pushed by his or her parents to take violin lessons has more than a nugget of truth to it.

In further accord with this stereotype, the audience for this concert was quite different from most of the concerts we go to. There were a lot more kids than usual, and a lot more Chinese people. Generally, the audiences there are overwhelmingly white and mostly over 50 years of age, but on Sunday night, there were a lot of families there.

So, the music: the Rimsky-Korsakov was very nice. I had low expectations of this orchestra because I'd never heard of them before, but they were technically very good, especially the woodwinds. The Hua/Wu piece was one originally composed for the erhu (a traditional Chinese string instrument) and then arranged for orchestra. And I will just come out and say right now that Chinese music is, for me, in the same category as Schoenberg: I don't get it. I guess it's probably because I didn't grow up listening to it, but it does absolutely nothing for me, as did this piece. I politely waited for it to end.

And then it was time for the Lang Lang! He's all grown up now at 22 (the first time we saw him he was only 19) and was sporting a mullet. He turned in his usual stellar performance, and performed not one, but TWO encores, a piece by Liszt and then the semi-ridiculous Flight of the Bumblebee. As I expected, this was the highlight of the concert for me.

After Lang Lang came the second Chinese piece of the evening, the Ye. I liked this somewhat better than the first, because it incorporated some elements of Western modern music...maybe I just understood it better. It was based on Mahler's Das Lied von den Erde, which in turn was based on a series of Chinese poems of ambiguous origin. These poems were printed in the program in Chinese and in occasionally hilarious English translation. Here is one representative highlight:

Everyone lives and dies only once
Lonely ape sits, howls the moon over the grave
Must empty this cup of wine in one gulp

Luwa Ke sang the difficult vocal part bravely--at a couple of points she was called upon to "sing" these sort of swooping howling sounds that were so weird I have no idea how the composer was able to notate them on a page since they didn't seem to correspond to actual musical notes. But I guess it was this very oddness that appealed to me, whereas the other Chinese piece left me cold.

And then they finished off with the Bartok, which is taken from that composer's ballet score. The plot of the ballet is that three thugs force a girl to lure men into their lair so that they can rob him. The first victim is an old man who has no money, so they run him off. The second is a young student, who is also broke. But the third is a wealthy Chinese. The thugs try to kill him and rob him, but to no avail, he can't be killed, but merely continues to stare lustfully at the girl. Finally she gives in to his advances, and as soon as he achieves orgasm, succumbs to his wounds. I thought this was the China Philharmonic's most inspired performance and I really enjoyed hearing them play this.

Anyway, overall, the concert was pleasant enough, if a bit long. But I think I would have been justified in staying home had it not been for the Lang Lang.

Sort of a cheat

2005-03-02T18:58:00.000-08:00

As I've been keeping this log, I keep thinking how weird it is that I've seen all this classical music this year and no popular music at all. Well, that changed on Saturday night when I saw J Boogie's Dubtronic Science and Mixmaster Mike. Oh, and some other guy whose name I didn't catch. As you might be able to tell from that last sentence, I wasn't actually paying too much attention to the music, which was one of many things going on at this event.

The event was a guest-list-only promotional event for Scion cars. It was held at the Hangar One vodka distillery, which is housed in a former airplane hangar in Alameda at the old Oakland Naval Base. This is not the sort of event Iggy and I usually attend, and we only wound up at this one because one of Iggy's co-workers was commissioned to paint a room at the distillery for the event. Several other graffiti and tattoo artists were also asked to paint rooms. So, we really just went for the art. I didn't even know there was going to be any live music until right before we left, and I was particularly surprised to see that Mixmaster Mike was playing (he is better known as the DJ for the Beastie Boys).

Before we headed over to the event, we were joking around that it was going to be a "rave" and talked about bringing our glow sticks and pacifiers. But as it turns out, it really was kind of a rave, and they were handing out free glow sticks and energy drinks! In addition to the bands, they had a few other little staging areas with stuff going on, like Survival Research Labs-style flaming robots and breakdancing and exhibits of the cars and stuff. It was like a hip-hop, Burning Man, car commercial rave. The crowd was sparse, and most of the young women there sparsely dressed, despite the fact that it was a cold and rainy night and we were in a not-exactly-cozy airplane hangar. There was tons of security, so I think they were expecting a lot more people. Maybe the rain kept them in. This is California, you know.

So, the music...it was pretty much exactly what I'd expected as I'd been both J. Boogie and Mixmaster Mike several times before. If you live in San Francisco, I think it's pretty hard to miss J. Boogie, because he seems to be playing somewhere just about every night. Anyway, it was OK, but I was tired (having spent the whole day moving and painting furniture) and we went home 10 minutes into Mixmaster Mike's set. I was glad I got to see the room Holly painted--it was undersea-themed and very cool, but other than that, I probably should have just stayed home and fallen asleep at 8 p.m.

Liquid Honey

2005-02-17T18:25:00.000-08:00

February 16, 2005

Ingo Metzmacher conducting the San Francisco Symphony

Schumann: Das Paradies und die Peri, Opus 50, with vocal soloists Laura Aikin, Kristine Jepson, Christoph Pregardian, William Dazeley, Brian Frutiger, Jane Archibald, Ronit Widmann-Levy, Sonia Garaieff, Catherine Cook, and Bojan Knezevic

Photos of MTT in the program: again, only 3.

Earlier this week, Iggy and I rented the movie "Magnolia." Iggy hadn't seen it before, but I had, but the only things I remembered about it were the thing with the frogs, Tom Cruise's surprisingly good performance, and the fact that I liked it. Upon re-watching it, I liked it slightly less, but I did realize that the thing I liked about it was that even though it was not really a great movie, you could tell that the director was doing pretty much exactly what he liked, which was refreshing and made it enjoyable. Anyway, the reason why I'm telling this story is because this is pretty much how I felt about this concert.

It was the same guest conductor as last week, and yet again, he chose a program of German music, but this time, it was German operatic choral music, something which I am inferring is even closer to his heart, as he is primarily an opera conductor.

So, the piece, it was nice, it was apparently a career-making work for Schumann, and I really liked the poem it was based on (scroll down a bit on that page). It's about a Peri (a mythical creature from Persian folklore who is descended from the unholy union of a fallen angel and a mortal) who wants to get into heaven, and who goes on a series of quests to find something the keeper of the gate will consider worthy of admission. Laura Aikin, in the role of The Peri, did indeed sound heavenly, and the other soloists and the chorus were terrific, too. I think this is one of the best performances I've ever seen the symphony chorus give, in fact.

My one criticism is along the lines of one mentioned in the program notes: "'The oratorio is too consistently sweet' wrote the Schumann biographer Robert Haven Schauffler in 1945. 'After an evening of it you feel as if you had taken a bath in liquid honey.'" But that's not exactly a stinging criticism, and overall I had a good time.

At the end of the concert, I almost killed the people sitting next to us, because they gave us a dirty look for staying in our seats throughout the entire curtain call while they were trying to leave. This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. These people just performed for you for TWO HOURS and you can't give them FIVE MINUTES of appreciation? Would it really kill you to have to wait a little longer to get your car out of the parking garage?

Anyway, one of the fun things about seeing concerts where the chorus performs is that I always see a bunch of them in the subway after the concert (for some reason, while I often see the instrumentalists wandering around the neighborhood before concerts, I never see them afterwards. I guess they're busy packing up their instruments). Last night, a bunch of them were standing next to me, so I turned down the volume on my iPod so I could eavesdrop on their gossip.

It wasn't too super juicy but I learned that:
-they all agreed Kristine Jepson was the most impressive of the soloists
-that Bojan Knezevic spent all the time he wasn't sitting sitting slouched in his chair with his legs spread wide (something I hadn't noticed myself)
-that they liked the conductor pretty well
-that they had 11 3-hour rehearsals on this material! "We only needed 5" one of them said, but I'd thought they sounded better than usual last night, so maybe it made a difference.

"Who is Afraid of 20th-Century Music?"

2005-02-11T10:15:00.000-08:00

February 10, 2005

Ingo Metzmacher conducting the San Francisco Symphony

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Opus 73 with Soloist Garrick Ohlsson
Webern: Passacaglia, Opus 1
Hartmann: Symphony No. 6

Photos of Michael Tilson Thomas in the program: only 3!

Last night I went to the symphony with Ian because Phil couldn't make it. Oddly enough, he told me that the last time he'd been at Davies Symphony Hall, many years ago, he'd heard them play another Beethoven Piano Concerto.

This program was somewhat unusual in that they played the Beethoven first and the two modern pieces after the intermission. Usually they put the less familiar stuff first, probably because they figure people would get up and leave at intermission if they started with the Brahms or the Mozart or whatever. But then again, when they do a concerto, it's almost always in the first half of the program, so maybe that's why it was this way (maybe they don't want to keep the soloists waiting around or something).

It was also unusual in that it was all music by German (or Viennese) composers, but the choice of music seemed to be pretty easily explained by looking at the conductor's bio. Not only is he a German himself, but the vast majority of the recordings he's done have been of German music (especially opera) and the program describes him as "Hartmann's foremost champion among conductors today." Neither Ian nor I had ever heard of Hartmann before yesterday. "Well," I told him, "I guess we're going to hear the definitive Hartmann tonight, and if we don't like it, we never will." The program also said that his most recent series of live recordings was entitled Who is Afraid of 20th-Century Music?

The Beethoven was great--unfortunately, this year, our seats are all on the left side of the stage which means that we can never see pianists' hands, but Ohlsson was terrific and I loved the piece. I was surprised by how modern parts of it sounded--a few passages almost sounded like Gershwin. I think I might have to buy a recording of this.

Liking the Beethoven was no surprise, though. I was less sure about the Webern and the Hartmann. Like I said, I'd never even heard of Hartmann, and while I knew Webern's name, I couldn't recall any of his music, nor did I know about his bizarre accidental death at the hands of a U.S. Army soldier during the course of an operation to entrap his black-marketeer son-in-law. Ian told me that this incident is recounted in Gravity's Rainbow, a book which I've tried and failed to read several times now.

Anyway, in addition to the unfamiliarity of these composers and my fear of 20th century music, I was dismayed to read in the program notes that these guys were both professionally associated with Schoenberg (although I was relieved to see that it said of Hartmann "he was amused on occasion to invent a theme consisting of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, but as a ruling principle the twelve-tone system held no charms for him." Yessss!)

But actually, the second half of the concert was quite enjoyable. The Webern was a lot shorter than I expected, maybe 10 minutes or so. I thought they were about halfway through when suddenly the music stopped and people started clapping. I think the reason why this piece psyched me out is because it never really builds to the expected climax. But hey, modern music keeps you on your toes like that, I guess.

The Hartmann was longer and definitely had a climax (in fact according to the program notes, the composer actually wrote the word "Höhepunkt" (climax in German, isn't that a great word?) at that point in the score). As a rule, I am a fan of big, loud symphonic pieces with elaborate instrumentation, and this was definitely one of those, with the percussion section alone including "timpani, bass drum, snare drum, wooden drum, tenor drum, military drum, two tom-toms, tambourine, suspended and clash cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, two xylophones, harp, piano (solo and four-hands), and celesta!" They must have had 6 or 7 guys back there just covering the drums. Anyway, it was big and loud and fun, and as I told Ian, the only thing it was missing was a gong. You need a gong to be truly bombastic.

Anyway, I have tickets to a symphony concert next week and the same guy is conducting another (German) piece, Schumann's "Das Paradies und die Peri." Should be pretty good, I think.

On Anonymous Comments

2005-01-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

I enabled anonymous comments here because I didn't want to require everyone to register with Blogger in order to comment. But I would appreciate if people would take the time to sign their names to their comments, OK?

Gut wrenching

2005-01-26T22:46:00.000-08:00

Alexander Barantschik conducting the San Francisco Symphony (part of it, anyway)

J.S. Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No.5 with soloists Alexander Barantschik (violin), Robin McKee (flute) and Robin Sutherland (harpsichord)
Vivaldi: Piccolo Concerto in C major with soloist Catherine Payne
Mozart: Serenade No. 6 in D major with soloists Alexander Barantschik, Dan Smiley (violin), Geraldine Walther (viola) and Scott Pingel (bass)
J.S. Bach: Violin Concerto No. 2 in E major with soloist Alexander Barantschik
J.S. Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3

Number of photos of Michael Tilson Thomas in the program: 4.

This was an unusual concert. It was the conducting debut of Alexander Barantschik, who is normally the symphony's concertmaster, and he chose to do all chamber orchestra pieces featuring soloists from the symphony. When I saw the program, I thought this was a pretty cool idea. The symphony features lots of soloists, but not very often soloists drawn from its own ranks, and it seemed extra cool that they were doing this in a concert which was conducted by another member of the symphony.

On top of that, I was excited that the first piece they were playing was one of my favorites, the fifth Brandenburg concerto. I played this piece myself when I was a senior in high school, and the other two soloists were good friends of mine and people I'd been playing with for years. As is usual for me when hearing a favorite piece, I was excited, but also nervous that they would play it in a way I didn't like.

It started out OK. The first thing I noticed was that I could barely hear the solo harpsichord, but I was willing to overlook that. I figured I'd be able to hear it during the important part: the beautiful cadenza where all the other instruments are silent. Also, the flautist was playing way more legato than I would have liked, but again, it wasn't really a big deal. So, they play along for a while, and then they get to the cadenza, and I realize why the harpsichord was so quiet.

I'm not sure what happened, if the harpsichordist was just off his game or nervous or didn't have time to prepare, but he mangled that cadenza. He hit bad note after bad note, and at times, he even got his fingers so tangled up that he had to pause for a second before playing again. It was painful, and not just because it didn't sound good--the really awful part was being witness to his public humilitation. It was so uncomfortable I actually started to feel sick to my stomach and couldn't look at the stage.

Anyway, after that, I didn't really know what to expect.

Up next was the Vivaldi piccolo concerto. Despite being a flautist (and therefore a sometime piccolo-ist) I wasn't familiar with this piece, and in fact didn't actually know that there was such a thing as a piccolo concerto. The piccolo is one of those instruments that I think of as being there to add a little color to the overall sound, not as a featured player in and of itself.

Ms. Payne came out looking striking in a red strapless dress. And she played beautifully, although the piece itself wasn't that interesting to me other than the fact that it was a piccolo concerto. It is not easy to make a piccolo produce a beautiful and expressive sound, but she and her wooden piccolo managed it somehow.

It was still very odd to watch someone play a piccolo concerto, though. It's pretty much impossible to play the piccolo and look dignified--you have to scrunch your arms up around your body to reach all the keys. On top of that, for some reason Ms. Payne decided to place her music stand very low, around the height of her thighs, so she had to keep bending over to see her music.

After that was the Mozart Serenade, which I had low hopes for after reading the program notes: "Most of what Mozart called serenade, divertimento, cassation, notturno, and so forth is entertainment more than art--worked, to be sure, with art and attention, but for the most part written in the expectation that it would be chatted through rather than listened to." And yes, through the first two movements, it was a pleasant enough piece, but nothing too exciting. It was when I got to the third movement that I realized why Barantschik chose this piece. It was funny! It sounded like it could have been written by P.D.Q.Bach. My favorite part was when each of the soloists played a solo cadenza one after the other, even the bassist. And then the timpani played it! A timpani cadenza is not something you hear in Mozart, and I think that alone redeemed this piece.

The second half of the concert was a lot less rocky. Barantschik did a nice job with the violin concerto, but the highlight of the evening was definitely the third Brandenburg. They played it with very minimal instrumentation: three violins, three violas, three cellos, and continuo (a bass and a harpsichord). The players really seemed to enjoy this one, and I think I enjoyed the sound of Barantschik's 1742 Guarnerius del Gesu violin in this even more than in the violin concerto. What's more, they decided to do a brief harpsichord improvisation in place of the missing second movement, and the harpsichordist managed to recover from the earlier Brandenburg and do a solid job here.

Anyway, overall, I thought the concert was just OK, but it's been a long time since I can remember a musical performance giving me so many emotional ups and downs like that, so I guess that's a good thing.

SF Opera's 2005-2006 Season

2005-01-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

It's been announced, and there's going to be some interesting stuff.

First of all, the premiere of John Adams's "Doctor Atomic," about J. Robert Oppenheimer. I am generally not a huge fan of modern music, or even really of Adams, but I think I like his operas better than any of his other stuff. I really like "Nixon in China" and "The Death of Klinghoffer" and Oppenheimer was a pretty interesting guy (and a scientist!), so I think there's a pretty excellent chance that I'll like this.

Also, "Rodelinda," the Handel opera I just saw at the Met, is going to be coming here with the same countertenor, David Daniels, who stole the show there. In case you don't know what a countertenor is (I didn't until recently) it is: "a man who uses either falsetto or, rarely, a naturally light and heady tenor voice to sing in the alto range." These men were traditionally castrati, although these days, now that human castration has gone out of favor, countertenor roles are usually filled by women dressed as men. David Daniels is neither a castrato nor a woman, so I'm not really sure how he does it, but he's pretty amazing. The female lead in the SF "Rodelinda" will be sung by local soprano Catherine Naglestad, who was excellent in another Handel opera performed here three years ago, "Alcina."

The other one I'm really psyched about is Ruth Ann Swenson in "The Marriage of Figaro." I love me some Mozart opera--it's a nice antidote to all the Italian stuff (I know that it's in Italian, but it's not fundamentally Italian. Or in other words, it's not Verdi).

On still not getting Schoenberg

2005-01-14T11:17:00.000-08:00

January 12, 2005

Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony

Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music
Schoenberg: Violin Concerto, w/ soloist Christian Tetzlaff
Beethoven: Symphony No. 7

It had been a while since Phil and I had been to the symphony. Every year for the last 6 years we have been getting 2 6-concert subscriptions a season, which makes 12 concerts a year, plus usually a few extras that we want to see. But the symphony usually has a lot of special programs and stuff (such as "The Colors of Christmas" featuring Peabo Bryson) over the holidays, so we hadn't been in over a month.

This concert was fairly typical in that it had a couple of short pieces in the first half, one of them "challenging" and then something big and crowd-pleasing in the second half. Of the pieces being played that night, I only knew the Beethoven, but it's one of my favorites, so I was excited.

Phil and I like to play this game at the symphony where we each guess how many times Michael Tilson Thomas's face will appear in the program. He's almost always on the cover when he conducts (although he's the Music Director of the symphony, he only conducts about 50% of their concerts, and the others feature guest conductors) and at those performances, there are usually a total of 6 or 7 pictures of him in the program. But this time there were only 5! Yes, we are dorks.

So, the concert. The Mozart was pretty much what I expected, brief and pretty. I didn't know that Mozart was a Freemason, although in retrospect, that explains a lot about "The Magic Flute." According to the program notes (link will expire at some point), Mozart was quite deeply involved with the organization and "with [a] single exception, all of the correspondence between Wolfgang and Leopold Mozart is missing from April 1785 on; it has been suggested that someone destroyed these letters because they may have been filled with explicit discussion of Freemasonry that could have been regarded as in some way dangerous."

And then the Schoenberg. I should come right out and say that I don't "get" Schoenberg. To me, it sounds dissonant and boring. But before the piece began, MTT gave a short introductory talk about the piece. He pointed out that Schoenberg, a Viennese Jew, wrote this piece in 1937 as a recent emigrant to Los Angeles. He talked about the difficulty Schoenberg faced in writing music at the same time that the society which spawned his musical tradition had become something so perverted. I had never really thought of it that way...hmm, maybe Schoenberg was actually more interesting than I thought. I resolved to give the piece a chance. But I still don't get Schoenberg.

The rest of the audience didn't seem to, either, with the exception of a few lone souls who gave the soloist a standing ovation. I felt a little guilty and sort of sorry for him. Here he'd worked to perfect a concerto which is one of the most difficult in all the violin repertoire (Schoenberg himself said that the piece "would require a new and special brand of fiddler, with six fingers on the left hand") and he was doomed to play it before audiences who just wanted to hear some pretty Beethoven and Mozart. And the guilt, of course, came from knowing that I was one of those people.

And then after intermission was the Beethoven. I first played this symphony when I was in high school, and have been listening to it ever since. While I love going to see familiar pieces played live, it also always makes me a little nervous, because if I really know and love a piece, I tend to have strong feelings about how it should be played. And while MTT's tempi were a little faster than I would have liked, especially in the second movement, which is marked Allegretto, so he is probably right and I am wrong, but I know what I like!

But actually, my favorite part of this performance was watching the first stand cellists smile at one another throughout the final movement. These guys are professional orchestral musicians, and god knows how many times they've played Beethoven's 7th. Most of the people in the orchestra look permanently bored all the time, but these guys actually looked like they were having fun, a rare thing which made it fun to watch.

Off to a shaky start

2005-01-10T22:17:00.000-08:00

A lot of my friends keep reading and writing logs, but I keep most of the books I like and re-read them so I don't really feel like I need a log for that. I do, however, see a lot of live music and don't tend to keep programs or anything, so I thought I'd start a listening log, both so that I can have some sort of record of what I've seen and heard and also so that maybe I can transmit some knowledge to the world about stuff I think is worth a listen. And hey, maybe I'll write about playing some music, too.

Last year I set out to listen to some sort of live music at least once a week. And now this year, I've already blown that: it's January 10th and I haven't seen any live music yet this year. But I've got symphony tickets on Wednesday, so that'll be remedied soon.