January 11th, 2014: Bach's Coffeehouse

Just two weeks after guest conductor Carlos Kalmar took the 'worst conductor of the season' award, he is usurped by Jeannette Sorrell, the conductor and harpsichord player at Saturday night's concert. It is hard to believe that she actually led the Seattle Symphony in the manner that she did, and in trying to describe her utter childish and incompetent disposition I am sure I will often find myself at a loss for words. But to ensure that you, dear reader, always run like the wind if you ever hear her name, I will do my best to relate to you what occurred on the Benaroya Hall stage this weekend.

This concert was one of the Baroque & Wine series, aptly titled 'Bach's Coffeehouse' for it contained almost entirely music that would have been performed by Bach in a famous coffeehouse in Leipzig in the early 18th century. It opened with Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor, followed by Telemann's Horn Concerto in D major and Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Violins in A minor. An intermission then took place, and the second half consisted of Bach's "Brandenburg" Concerto No. 5 in D major and Sorrell's own arrangement of Vivaldi's "La folia" after his Trio Sonata in D minor.

I love baroque music, and I was particularly excited about the Orchestral Suite, the Concerto for Two Violins and the Brandenburg Concerto. As musicians came on stage it was evident that the symphony had successfully reserved several of the key players for this concert tonight even though the orchestra was split with the opera, which was performing the opening night of Rigoletto on Saturday. This was very promising, and I couldn't think what could go wrong. I didn't have high expectations for Sorrell, but I also assumed that she would be sitting at a harpsichord for most of the performance, for there were two on stage. Demarre McGill, who is on extended leave from his Principal Flute position this season, was featured in the program as well, soloing by himself in the Orchestral Suite and along with others in the Brandenburg Concerto.

After the small orchestra had finished seating themselves, Emma McGrath came out to tune them, and then Demarre McGill and Jeannette Sorrell entered the stage to perform the Bach Orchestral Suite.

Sorrell was dressed in some sort of black outfit that had flowing fabrics here and there, and her red hair was done up in a fancy style. Rather than taking a seat at the conductor's harpsichord, she stepped up on the podium just to the right, picked up a baton, and very slowly and pretentiously raised her arm to give the downbeat whilst gazing melodramatically into the distance.

I could have walked out then. We all know what happens next.

But if I did walk out, I wouldn't be able to write this review and warn people. So here I am. For you I have suffered. You may as well benefit.

Under her absolutely incompetent, pretentious, insipid leadership, which was entirely obsessed with childishly dramatic faces and gestures, the orchestra lurched unsteadily into the Orchestral Suite. Whilst Sorrell stood on the podium practically masturbating, the orchestra, which would have had no problem playing together without a conductor (due to their small size tonight) were utterly disarrayed by her distracting, meaningless and useless faces and gestures. It seemed as though the orchestra was always playing just a touch faster than it wanted to, and there was almost never a time throughout the entire suite that it did not feel as though the ensemble was barely holding together. The music spoke nothing, for there was no pulse and no drive; just what appeared to be a constant tripping over itself in an attempt to gain some coherence and rhythmic integrity.

Demarre's playing was good, but it was also rendered ineffective by the havoc that Sorrell was wreaking on the performance. Her arms flailed about in grotesque and abrupt movements as her face seemed to mock some mediocre, dramatic actress. What we were seeing was the absolute worst of the musically bankrupt, self-obsessed performances typical of young European soloists, except that this was the first time we observed it in a conductor, and the result was horrifying.

It was hard to believe that Sorrell was doing what she was doing. What do you suppose she's thinking when she goes about attempting to lead an ensemble in that manner? Or is there any room for thinking with an ego as large as she appeared to have? Did she think that she was going to do something novel which nobody else had done before? Did she feel that others were merely silly for restraining themselves from some kind of "authentic artistry" in which one would bring out the emotion in the music by making melodramatic faces at the orchestra from beginning to end?

Though to be realistic, with as much self-indulgence and philosophizing as she was going through on the podium, it's hard to believe many thoughts about the orchestra entered her head. She was the star of the show, and she was going to go to the ends of the earth (and to the limits of musical masturbation and self-obsessed pretentiousness) to prove to everybody how "into the music" she was.

It may sound like I must be exaggerating, but I'm not. She completely and utterly destroyed the coherence of the ensemble and its ability to speak the music to the audience. She made the concert about herself. There was a moment or two in the orchestral suite where she did move over to the harpsichord, and during those moments the ensemble became noticeably more together. And the last movement, the Badinerie, was slightly more together than the rest of the suite, featuring brisk and impressive playing by Demarre McGill.

Sorrell took up a microphone a few times throughout the evening, and would talk about the composers they were performing and about the coffeehouses in Leipzig where this music would have been performed. Her voice was unsurprisingly that of a bimbo, and her jokes and comments were insipid.

Following the Orchestral Suite was Telemann's Horn Concerto in D major. It was a fine little piece, and the horn soloist, Mark Robbins, was exactly what you'd expect for a professional horn player who didn't feel the need to practice a little piece by Telemann before going on stage. He played well, but cracked occasionally during tough passages. Particularly during this concerto the concert took on the feel of an actual coffeeshop performance. And at the end of the slow movement Sorrell outdid herself in melodrama; the orchestra had a sequence of passages that would each end in a fermata, and as each one drew to an end Sorrell would 'cut them off' with a drawn out series of flowing movements and a laughably insipid, 'thoughtful' look up towards the ceiling.

Then came Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Violins in A minor. This is one of my all time favorite pieces of baroque music, probably the one I was most excited to hear that night. In keeping with the fact that Vivaldi wrote all his concertos for the girls at the orphanage where he worked, they had two women soloing in it; Elisa Barston and Cordula Merks. And in keeping with the rest of the concert, the first few notes of the piece were hardly together at all, and this was followed by a seemingly endless pursuit towards coherence of pulse, endless because it's never quite attained. It was like riding on a horse who never has his left legs and right legs moving quite in sync.

Barston and Merks are both fine violinists who also know when it's not important to practice. Barston made two very serious and noticeable mistakes within the first minute of the concerto. It was clear that they just saw this as a fun thing to do, figured they know the music well enough to not spend too much time practicing it, and didn't think too much about how much money the audience had paid to hear a professional performance. Sorrell kept up her antics, consistently rendering the performance lame, and finally at the end of that concerto, intermission began.

Not much happened during intermission, so we'll get right on with it.

For Bach's "Brandenburg" Concerto, Sorrell was situated at a harpsichord in the midst of a chamber ensemble. Laudate dominum. With her absence from the podium, we got the first reasonably performed piece of the evening. The "Brandenburg" Concerto No. 5 is a lovely work, and the small group of players who performed it did quite well, delivering an enjoyable performance of Bach's masterpiece.

And to close off the evening, Sorrell again led her own arrangement of Vivaldi's Trio Sonata in D minor, "La folia." With her at the helm the disjointed pulse returned, and even as the piece got faster and faster in what is supposed to be a toe-tapping endeavor, there was no toe-tapping because the orchestra wasn't on the same page. Every moment felt like a yearning for greater coherence of ensemble, and it always felt like in a measure or two it could be reached, but it never was. For an orchestra to intentionally play like this would be impossibly difficult, and it's fascinating when it happens, but such was our fate on Saturday night. Jeannette Sorrell demonstrated the power the conductor wields; she single-handedly destroyed the pulse of the music.

My girlfriend kept commenting on how Sorrell looked like a witch who was casting spells, and throughout the course of the evening it dawned on me that I was witnessing the greatest act of musical crime I have ever seen.

I am again disappointed in the Seattle Symphony for not demanding more preparedness from their own soloists and for hiring incompetent guest conductors. They think that because the audience doesn't feel ripped off on the given night of the performance that it's not doing harm to the reputation of classical music. But it is, because people are bored at such concerts, and if they aren't blaming the performers or the administration, where else can the blame fall?

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