September 24th, 2013: New Subscriber and Donor Welcome Party

We were invited to this small event yesterday evening in the Grand Lobby of Benaroya Hall. It consisted of a few bites of food and a short chamber music recital, followed by a Q&A.

A string quartet made up of Seattle Symphony musicians performed the third, fourth and fifth movements of Peter Schickele's American Dreams. Stephen Bryant, the first violinist of the quartet and one of the most engaged players in the symphony, introduced the piece and talked about each movement, and afterwards he took most of the questions about it.

I wasn't thrilled with the choice of repertoire, but I didn't get too depressed about it because the choice certainly didn't come from any ill will towards the classical masters. Throughout the course of the Q&A Stephen Bryant even made an explicit comment that "it's not Mozart or Beethoven," but that it was a piece they have fun playing and wanted to share with us. I was actually quite comforted by Bryant and the way he spoke and came across. He's very evidently a traditional classical player who views things much like I do, and this was evident through several of the comments he made during the Q&A.

It was a fairly short event and we were out of there about an hour after we walked through the doors. There isn't too much else to say about it, I just didn't want to leave it out of the blog.

September 21st, 2013: Morlot Conducts Ravel

This was the first concert of the 2013-2014 Masterworks series. Morlot decided to open the series with an all-Ravel program and close it in June with an all-Stravinsky program. Last night's concert consisted of Alborada del gracioso, Piano Concerto in D major for Left Hand, Rapsodie espagnole, Pavane pour une infante défunte, Piano Concerto in G major and Boléro. Jean-Yves Thibaudet was the pianist soloing in the two piano concertos, so the conductor, soloist and all the repertoire were French in this concert.

I was under the impression that Ravel is generally very easy to like, so I didn't spend much time getting acquainted with the works on this program beforehand. Unfortunately it seems that several of the pieces do take some getting to know in order to enjoy or appreciate. I won't say much about those works that I failed to appreciate because that's pretty much all I have to say about them. Alborada del gracioso, the piece that opened the program, was one of these. It was a festive sounding opening to the concert, but it failed to enchant me and I failed to find much beauty in it.

Next Jean-Yves came on stage for the Piano Concerto for Left Hand. Jean-Yves was an incredibly slick fellow. He walked with a suave stride and his shoes were so shiny I'm still seeing spots. Anyways, he sat down at the piano and very impressively performed the entire concerto with only his left hand. He did miss notes here and there (or at least didn't hit them smack on), but all in all he seemed like a mature, competent musician, and I'm not sure exactly what Ravel expected technically out of the soloist with what he demanded from the left hand alone. Thibaudet actually engaged in some "flailing" throughout the work (to use the word of a volunteer usher I overheard during intermission, who by the way was a woman I once provided Mac tech support for and who has a dog named Faust [only because Mephistopheles was too long], but I don't think she recognized me), possibly as a result of having to reach all the notes he did with his left hand. His use of the pedal at times shook the entire piano. Upon the conclusion of the work, Thibaudet immediately got up and went to hug Morlot.

In any case, the music itself in the left hand concerto again did not captivate me very much. I was beginning to think that perhaps I do need to be really familiar with the repertoire in a concert in order to really enjoy it. The last piece before intermission, Rapsodie espagnole, was a four movement work that again I had trouble finding the beauty in. The orchestra throughout the first half of the program seemed to be playing very well though, and Morlot appeared to be in high spirits. He would be, with an all-French program.

After intermission we took up our seats once more and settled in for Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess). As the piece unfolded I felt myself sinking into it. At last! Beauty! Real, haunting, lush, divine music! I could have heard the theme of this seven minute piece for seventy minutes. It was one of those pieces that after you are introduced to in a concert you go home, buy on iTunes and listen to on repeat for a month. It was one of those works that just kills you, as if Ravel had a map of your soul while he wrote it. By the end of it I felt very much like beauty is beauty, whether or not I've heard it before. So even now I'm not sure what it was about the works in the first half that didn't speak to me. If Ravel could write this, surely those works must be great.

I just took a brief pause of writing this to listen to the Pavane. Sigh. <3

The piano was then brought back on stage for the Piano Concerto in G major. Jean-Yves and his shoes came striding out again, and the musicians commenced with the first movement, another work which I wasn't too crazy about. This is getting old isn't it? At least I liked the Pavane. Anyways, Jean-Yves, now able to use both his hands, didn't engage in as much flailing, and he gave a very accomplished performance of the work. It was really nice to have an adult pianist on stage after Lang Lang the week before.

The second movement of the concerto was quite a nice piece, I did like several parts of that. There were places where it suddenly lapsed out of the romantic beauty and into quasi-modernism, but more often than not the movement was a nice lush interlude between the two outer movements which seemed to me to be rather jagged on the edges. In any case, the audience seemed to like it, and Jean-Yves gave Morlot another big hug upon the conclusion of the work.

The harp played a rather active role in the piano concerto, and during bowing Morlot invited the harpist to the front of the stage for a bow, but she cowered behind her harp blushing. Morlot was undeterred, signaling the whole orchestra to sit back down so that he could at least invite her to stand up by herself. She slowly began to stand up and peek her face out from behind the harp, but just then Jean-Yves came back on stage for another bow so the harpist was 'saved by the shoes' and sat back down. I don't get why someone would be that determined not to receive recognition for their work. If she had a simple preference to not bow that's one thing, but the minute she insisted on that in the face of him emphatically wanting to recognize her, then it became about her and it became a false modesty/ego thing.

The last piece on the program was Boléro, the only piece I was familiar with beforehand. I actually used to hear it a lot when I was little, and I even danced to it at the age of seven or eight. Yeah. Anyways, this was the one piece I was really looking forward to on the program. I hadn't heard it in a very long time, and it proved to be very much to my taste, more so than I thought it would be.

Morlot gave the downbeat and the lower strings began their pizzicati in sync with the snare drum, played by Michael Werner, who was beginning his fifteen minute marathon of playing the same rhythm over and over again with the perfection of a metronome, against all sorts of different rhythms in the orchestra. I noticed the level of skill and focus required in his work early on, and was very impressed with his methodical infallibility.

The violas were strumming their instruments like guitars, which initially had the effect of making it seem like sound was coming from nowhere, because you don't expect sound to be coming from a section if their instruments are in their laps. 

The piece slowly began to build up, with the winds one by one taking their turn at the genius and haunting melody. The flute was the first one, and I haven't mentioned this yet but Demarre McGill is on an extended leave this year, replaced by Christie Reside. She is good, but she's not Demarre, and her opening solo in Boléro confirmed that. The clarinet, bassoon and trombone solos are three in particular that stick in my memory because of the mastery with which the players executed their parts, but every player who was passed the melody did it justice.

I really really enjoyed this piece. It's for experiences like this that I go to live concerts. It was absolutely timeless. I was completely immersed. There was no sense of beginning, middle or end; just a continuous beauty and journey from instrument to instrument, constantly rising and growing. This is another Ravel melody that I could hear forever.

I had the sense during this piece that the orchestra was also enjoying it more than the rest of the program. Perhaps I was projecting my own enjoyment, but it seemed almost as if they had played the rest of the program because they had to, and now they were playing the piece that they would all want to play whether or not they were getting paid. It was like a musical party on stage.

At one point a low wind instrument took over the theme and the piccolo was harmonizing it a sixth above. I think the piccolo was supposed to be quieter than it was, because it sounded quite weird, and her notes, while they would have worked as a faint harmonization, did not work when heard tangibly. When that iteration of the theme ended Christine and I gave each other funny looks, and then the piccolo player coughed, which almost sent us into a bad bout of laughter. I was also amused by the appearance of the timpanist, who went about his repetitive motions in the manner of some sort of mechanical circus act.

I gave a standing ovation at the end of the piece. It was such a joy to observe and to hear. Truly excellent, involved, collaborative music-making was evident throughout the work. Afterwards, during the jubilant applause and to my pleasant surprise, Morlot asked Michael Werner to the front of the stage for a bow for his miraculously inhuman performance meticulously laying the rhythmic groundwork throughout the piece. I was really glad to be able to applaud him individually.

So this concert was all in all a great evening. Even one performance like Boléro is worth the ticket price, and there was also the Pavane as well as a host of other very well played works by Ravel, even if they were not justly appreciated by me.

Next up is a concert of Beethoven's Triple Concerto and Schubert's 9th Symphony on October 5th. I'm quite excited about that one.

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http://www.seattlesymphony.org/symphony/buy/single/production.aspx?id=13605&src=t&dateid=13605

September 15th, 2013: Opening Night Concert

The 2013-2014 Seattle Symphony season kicked off yesterday with the Opening Night Concert conducted by Ludovic Morlot, who is now beginning his third season as Music Director of the Seattle Symphony.

The program consisted of some Dvořák Slavonic Dances, Bartók's Rumanian Folk Dances, a Toccata by a Bulgarian composer named Pancho Vladigerov, a few Brahms Hungarian Dances, the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor by Borodin, and lastly Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, with Lang Lang as soloist.

Before the house lights dimmed the chorus took to the stage behind the orchestra, and then when Morlot stepped on the podium he gave a cue to the pianist who commenced in a flamboyant rolling chord atop which the chorus burst forth in the National Anthem. The whole audience stood up appropriately, and it was really nice to have the evening start off that way.

Then the chorus exited and Morlot returned to the podium to start the first Slavonic Dance by Dvořák. It was a delightfully festive piece, and he began it with great excitement, actually interrupting the applause from the audience. It was the perfect piece to open an Opening Night concert, and the orchestra was clearly in high spirits and top form.

The second Slavonic Dance contained much richer music and gave the strings a chance to really shine, particularly the violins, who had gorgeous, iconic melodies that took them high up on the e-string. It was really a pleasure to bask in the music-making being delivered by the musicians. Bartók's Rumanian Folk Dances followed. I felt very familiar with almost all of them, and they were also performed extremely well.

Before the next piece (the Valdigerov) Morlot picked up a microphone and spoke to the audience about the theme of the concert and how it's more Eastern European this year, as opposed to American themed on Opening Night last year. He then revealed that he picked the Bulgarian Seattle Symphony Assistant Conductor Stilian Kirov to conduct the Toccata by the Bulgarian Pancho Vladigerov.

Kirov came across as a very suave young man, and he was the spitting image of the excited, fresh, eager, nervous, contained, crisp conductor. He seemed a little too involved with his image as a budding conductor and with what his presence on stage yesterday would contribute to that. His movements were brisk and curt, and he often gave the orchestra fake smiles.

That was all over after not too long, and Morlot returned to conduct the Brahms Hungarian Dances. I was disappointed that they didn't perform No. 5, which has always been my personal favorite. However, No. 1 is my second favorite and that's the first one they played. The other two (No. 3 and No. 2) I was not that familiar with, but the orchestra maintained their stellar quality throughout all of them. I wish that the excitement of opening night and the involvement of the players could stick 100% through every concert throughout the season.

After the Brahms dances the chorus returned to the stage for Borodin's Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor.

Once in a while there is a piece by a lesser known composer that makes me ask the question "Are Bach, Mozart and Beethoven really that much greater than the rest of them?" The answer of course is yes, and yet sometimes a work from somebody like Borodin shows up that makes me ask that question, and also "how did he do it?" Music does not get much better than what Borodin gifted us with in his Polovtsian Dances. The famous melody of course is stunningly beautiful and haunting, and the melodies and harmonies throughout the work are just magnificent; a truly wonderful gift to the world of music. The difference though is that I could listen to this piece a hundred times, and then be sick of it for a very long time. I wouldn't get sick of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven in the same way.

Intermission followed the Borodin. We got up and wandered around the lobby. I wanted to get my tickets printed for some of the upcoming concerts but we accidentally waited in line at the merchandise booth rather than the Ticket Concierge booth, so that didn't end up happening.

There was a black tie gala at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel following yesterday's concert (the concert was at 4pm), and even though we weren't going to it (cheapest tickets were $650) I decided to dress black tie because it was opening night. There were only a handful of other people dressed black tie there, and I assume most if not all of them were headed to the gala afterwards.

After intermission Lang Lang performed Prokofiev's 3rd piano concerto. Lang Lang is one of the most notorious figures in the new age phenomenon of pretentious, exaggerated, self-indulgent playing to compensate for actual deep understanding of the music. He embodies the awful trend of classical music taking on the form of pop culture and presenting "stars" in a similar fashion. I knew all of this before we went, and so I expected to be entertained at best.

Lang Lang did have an immaculate technical grasp of the work. Fortunately I couldn't see his face from where we were sitting, but his hand gestures and body language revealed all too well how much he was going overboard with the acting in order to win over the masses sitting wide-eyed throughout the hall. However, the Prokofiev piano concerto seemed to be primarily a virtuosic work intended for the pianist to show off technical prowess, and Lang Lang certainly did excel in that regard. Unlike HJ Lim when she performed Mendelssohn back in January, Lang Lang did compensate for musical shallowness with technical brilliance. And since I was not familiar with the Prokofiev concerto and so could not pick up on any deep subtleties in the music that he may have slaughtered, I more or less enjoyed most of the performance. It was clearly high quality music, just not a musical language that I am familiar with, and Lang Lang's hands blazing over the keys was at times mesmerizing to observe.

After the first movement the audience broke out in raucous applause. It was by far the loudest applause-before-the-piece-is-over I had ever heard. And at the end of the concerto the ovation was deafening. Voices cried out in exuberant approval, and the sound of 2,500 pairs of hands clapping passionately thundered through the auditorium. In retrospect I thought "So this is how musical depth and maturity dies; to thunderous applause." No worries if you don't get the reference.

Lang Lang was called back to the stage by the applause three or four times before he sat back down on the piano bench. He then announced that he had a Chopin nocturne for this special Seattle Symphony Opening Night.

*insert face-palm*

Everything bad about him that was hidden by the nature of the Prokofiev concerto and the technical brilliance he displayed now came leeching out from the stage like a noxious ink. He raised his right arm in the air and ever so slowly moved it towards the first note of the piece, creating instantly an atmosphere of sickening pretentiousness and shallow melodrama. The execution of the work followed like a reflection from that first agonizing motion, a tortured, mutilated catastrophe, utterly crushed by the oppressive weight of a performer with no depth or wisdom merely using the notes as pawns to spin a web of false profundity.

He was called back to the stage several more times after the Chopin, and by this point I was in a bit of a depression. But then something caught my eye which truly terrified me. Efe Baltacigil, the stellar new principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, appeared to be applauding Lang Lang sincerely and heartedly. The whole orchestra applauds by default as the soloist returns to stage multiple times, but Efe in particular was giving thoughtful intent to each clap, his face aglow with the expression of having just been deeply moved, and his head shook slightly from side to side in apparent disbelief at Lang Lang's mastery.

I immediately thought to myself that he better be putting on an act or we have a very serious problem. If Efe Baltacigil was genuinely moved by Lang Lang's performance of the Chopin, that means that everything great about Efe's playing is not there because Efe has an understanding of why that's the way to play, but because he just happens to have been trained that way. It would mean that Efe is not acting as a cultural pillar, as any kind of rock to prevent the chaotic waves of modern sentiments from breaking asunder the fabric on which great classical performances are sewn. It would mean that his mastery is up for grabs, that he presents what he does by coincidence and does nothing to try to preserve it in this world, and in fact does not even realize that there is something great that needs to be preserved and is at risk of being lost.

We can only hope he was acting.

In any case, all in all it was a fantastic opening night concert. Next up is Morlot Conducts Ravel on September 21st!

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http://www.seattlesymphony.org/symphony/buy/single/production.aspx?id=13742&src=t&dateid=13742

The Holy Trinity of composers (Humor)

This is a funny little thing I cooked up a while ago and posted on my old blog. Dave Segal from The Stranger came across it and wrote this: 

http://lineout.thestranger.com/lineout/archives/2012/06/25/gods-chosen-composers-according-to-one-21-year-old-blogger

I subsequently added "(Humor)" to the title of the blog post, and then removed it completely. In any case, since it has to do with classical composers I thought it would be fitting to repost it on this blog for fun.
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After close examination of the birth dates, death dates and lifespans of several of the greatest composers who ever lived, I have concluded that God played a hand in sending them to earth, and devised patterns to reveal his intervention.

The patterns all revolve around the number six, which you may say is the devil's number, but let me remind you that God created the world in six days, that there are six points on the star of david, and that six is the atomic number of carbon, the chemical without which we could not exist.

God's plan was to send a Holy Trinity of composers that would rival all others, sending each one six years after the death of the former. He waited until music on earth evolved to the point of being worthy of Him, and by 1685 he felt that this had happened, so he sent Bach, the first of the Holy Trinity. The year 1685 is rooted in the sixth century of a millennium, and is eclipsed by the numbers one and five, which make another six. What remains is eight, standing for divine infinity.

Bach lived until 1750, and according to God's plan, gave us a tremendous output of divine music. Six years after his death God sent Mozart to be the next of the Holy Trinity. Everything was going great with Mozart, and God was already prepping Beethoven to be the next of the Holy Trinity, but that's where something went a little wrong. Beethoven said "I'm not going to be part of this trinity plan of yours. I'm going now!" and he went to earth in 1770, long before Mozart's death. It should be noted that the year 1770 does still result in six (1 + 7 + 7 + 0 = 15. 1 + 5 = 6). Beethoven wasn't entirely abandoning God's aesthetic, but he was doing it his own way.

Beethoven's defiance surprised and angered God, who began to devise a new composer to be the third of the Trinity. After Mozart died in 1791, God sent Schubert six years later in 1797 to be the replacement "holy ghost" of the Trinity. However, Beethoven, having originally been destined for the Trinity, would be the greater of the two composers, though his individualism would forever veer the course of music away from the path God had intended. Schubert, though he did end up the third part of the Trinity, was not God's first choice and therefore has a taint of mortality in some of his music.

It is interesting to note that six years after Beethoven prematurely went to earth, America declared independence from Britain, reflecting Beethoven's fiery independence with another six-year gap.

Before we go into what God did with the slightly disjunct situation he was left with, let's bring to light a few more connections involving the Holy Trinity and Beethoven.

Mozart's grandfather was born six years before Bach, in 1679.

Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony was composed six years after Schubert's birth, the first symphonic foundation of the Romantic period.

There were 41 years between the births of Mozart and Schubert, reflecting the divine 41st 'Jupiter' Symphony.

Bach was born in March, and Mozart died in December. Beethoven was born in December and died in March, eclipsing in reverse the lifespans of both the Father and Son of the Holy Trinity, again reflecting his opposition to God's path.

So, the Holy Trinity ended up officially being Bach, Mozart and Schubert, though in reality in terms of compositional quality it is still Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Beethoven having been the one God first destined for the third spot. But God knew that Beethoven's aesthetics in music would lead to the destruction of music ultimately, so six years after Beethoven's death he sent Brahms to try and correct the course of the Beethoven trajectory. Brahms was a classicist, turning back to old values and ideals in composing his music, and working against ideas forwarded by composers like Wagner.

But it was too late.

Six years after Wagner died, Hitler was born. Six years after Hitler died, Schoenberg died. Wagner contributed to the destruction of music by stretching tonality to its limits, and Schoenberg then destroyed it completely, and we find these two composers eclipsing the lifespan of Hitler with the same six-year gap. In addition, World War II lasted six years. Clearly some other power came into play along the way, drastically altering God's original plan.

In any case, we do have the music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to prove that these patterns aren't a coincidence, though it is fascinating that Beethoven simultaneously fulfilled his mission as a Divine composer while also breaking away from God. Schubert ends up a composer who is a very close fourth place after the first three, and when we look at the patterns I've laid out here, we can understand much clearer his slightly awkward place in the compositional hierarchy. He has divine music, but he doesn't quite stand on the same pedestal with the original Holy Trinity.

The fact that the third of the Trinity was a rebel who used God's gift to take humanity in its own direction is a religious and theological allegory to so many things that we see in the world today. If the devil is real, surely it was he who veered the path off course, but surely there can be no doubt, listening to the music of Bach and Mozart, that the original plan was a beautiful one from beginning to end.