Month: March 2010

April foolery

By Peter A. Klein

Here are some musical announcements and news for the week of April 1:

Ever the Revolutionary. The Italian early music ensemble Mess’ Uppa di Voce will bring some hitherto-unknown works of Claudio Monteverdi to Seattle, at 2:00 PM Saturday in Our Lady of Perpetual Amazement Church in Wallingford. The group’s director, Dr. Alfredo Fettucine recently discovered the manuscripts in an empty barrel in a Venetian wine cellar, where some of the composer’s more prudent friends had hidden them over 350 years ago.

The centerpiece of the program is the dramatic cantata Galileo liberato, in which the renowned Renaissance scientist is freed from Inquisition house arrest by opponents of Pope Urban VIII. He builds an aerial sailing ship and travels the solar system with his new benefactors, singing the ritornello aria, Eppur si muove (Still it moves).
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Intiman opens its first season with Kate Whoriskey

By R.M. Campbell

The opening gambit of any artistic director is often a sign of what to come in terms of style and intent. And so, one looks at Clifford Odets’ “Paradise Lost,” which opened last weekend at Intiman Theater, with considerable interest, for it is the inaugural gesture of the company’s new artistic director Kate Whoriskey, even though she did not stage the play.

Odets is a fixture in the American theater scene, not only with his plays but also his deep involvement in the Group Theatre. “Paradise Lost,” premiered the same year, 1935, as his most celebrated play, “Awake and Sing!” but it is not done so often. There is reason for that. It is play of problems in character development and narrative thrust. Yet the play projects a resonance in today’s world, which must have been the attraction to Whoriskey who makes a point about the play’s relevance. Indeed it has a social conscience, like most of Odets’ plays, and a little bit of a polemic, but its strength lies in its characters and how they deal, or fail to deal, with their personal circumstances in the Great Depression. The years — 1933-1936 — in which the play is set, are deep in that Depression with no sunlight just around the corner. These characters can be vastly irritating, self-serving, self-pitying, self-destructive and tiring. They are all beaten down except Clara Gorden, played with such acumen by Lori Larsen. Collectively, they are over the top with their neuroses. Still one wishes them a better life.
Continue reading Intiman opens its first season with Kate Whoriskey

If you had to choose: which piece for chorus and orchestra would you like to hear?

The performance of “Daphnis et Chloe” at the Seattle Symphony put me in a hopeful mood. What other seldom heard, secular pieces for chorus and orchestra could the SSO perform next?

By no means is the following poll an exhaustive list of the many pieces composed for chorus and orchestra. But, if you had to pick just one, which would you like to hear the SSO or another local ensemble perform?

Bach to the future

Bach, of course, anchored the program, with his Suite No. 2 in B Minor, BWV 1067, and his Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. For the second half, music director Christophe Chagnard chose one of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ tributes to the composer, the “Bachianas Brasileiras No 5” in an arrangement for string orchestra by J. Krance; and lastly, a work by one of Bach’s contemporaries and friends, Telemann’s “Don Quixote” Suite.
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Consider me a Dausgaard partisan


Whether you fell in love with Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony or loathed it, found a new favorite in Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony or still prefer the Second, Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard had one of the toughest programs to conduct of any of the season’s guest conductors. Based on the audience’s reaction after each piece, it can be said he succeeded.

Abbado might have Dutilleux in April, but Beethoven’s Fifth will have everyone flashing “V for victory” before the night is done. Even the Seattle Symphony debut of John Adams’ Harmonielehre under the baton of Robert Spano has the help of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto.

Dausgaard not only had to contend with the least interesting of Rachmaninov’s piano concertos (the fourth) but he also had the job of guiding the orchestra and (what I am sure was) a skeptical audience through Witold Lutoslawski’s slithering, slinking, and shimmering symphony from 1992. The score alone is enough to make lesser conductors and musicians hurl themselves into Puget Sound.

Under normal circumstances, closing the night with a Sibelius symphony – if it is the First or Second Symphony – would be an automatic hit. Dausgaard picked the Fifth instead, a symphony that begins with two movements that can be problematic for orchestra and audience, but ends with a third movement that is both dignified and resplendent.

Continue reading Consider me a Dausgaard partisan

Questioning the conductors: Thomas Dausgaard

Conductor Thomas Dausgaard

This week’s Seattle Symphony concerts could be a sleeper hit of the 2009/2010 season. Thomas Dausgaard is in town to lead the orchestra in performances of Sibelius’ Fifth and Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony. These two 20th century view of the symphony bookend a 20th Century concerto – Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto. Sibelius’s Fifth isn’t as well known by orchestras and audiences as his First and Second Symphonies. Rachmaninov’s middle piano concertos – the Second and Third – hold sway over most with their long, aching melodies. And Lutoslawski, for all of his inventiveness, has failed to win the hearts and minds of most classical audiences.  But, take all three pieces together and you have a program that is intellectually and aurally exciting.

What a concert like this needs is a conductor like Thomas Dausgaard. In my thirty minute chat with Dausgaard, he impressed me with his belief in the three pieces on his program, and especially Sibelius and Lutoslawski. Dausgaard gives the impression of someone who likes to get inside the music he is conducting; he’s not just counting time. If anyone can win converts to Sibelius’ Fifth and Lutoslawski’s Fourth it is Dausgaard.

Our conversation covered a lot of ground.  We talked about Sibelius’ symphonic narrative, Danish composers other than Carl Nielsen, and what Lutoslawski would have said in response to Mahler’s assertion that the symphony must be like the world.

Thomas Dausgaard talks with TGN from Zach Carstensen on Vimeo.

KING FM makes the switch (in 2011)

KING FM has finally decided to make the switch. And it only took six decades.

In a press release yesterday, Seattle’s classical radio station announced they would become a listener-supported station effective July 2011. Since 1948, when the station was founded by Dorothy Stimson Bullitt, it has used a commercial broadcasting model.

The switch to a listener-supported model isn’t surprising. Many commercial radio stations and especially commercial classical stations have struggled in recent years. Stations can point to a variety of reasons for their difficulty, but the one-two punch of a faltering economy and new audience measurement methodologies crippled the remaining commercial classical stations across the country.  The biggest victim of the changing reality for commercial classical radio was WQXR which was absorbed by WNYC late last year.

Continue reading KING FM makes the switch (in 2011)

PNB adds another work by Dove

Jordan Pacitti and soloist James Moore in Ulysses Dove’s Serious Pleasures. Photo Angela Sterling

By R. M. Campbell

Not only is Peter Boal, in his few short years as artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, adding new works of George Balanchine to the company’s repertory, he has also been introducing pieces by Twyla Tharp, Christopher Wheeldon, Jerome Robbins, Jiri Kylian, Mark Morris and Alexei Ratmansky (next season). An impressive list by any measure. He has also been bringing in ballets of Ulysses Dove, an American choreographer, who died too early in 1996.
Continue reading PNB adds another work by Dove

Questioning the conductors: Vassily Sinaisky

My series of interviews with the guest conductors taking the SSO podium continues with Vassily Sinaisky. Sinaisky wrapped up a series of four concerts with the SSO this weekend that paired Brahms’ Double Concerto for cello and violin and Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe.” This program is a departure, of sorts, for Sinaisky. In his previous engagements with the orchestra, Russian music has figured prominently on his programs. Of course, when I asked Sinaisky about this he didn’t see the program as a departure.

I caught up with Sinaisky immediately after the Friday night performance. I arrived a bit early at Benaroya Hall, and the SSO’s public relations manager kindly took me backstage and we watched in rapt attention the final ten minutes or so of “Daphnis et Chloe.” Even with Benaroya’s thick stage doors, you could feel the music vibrating through the floor and walls (how cool!)

Once Sinaisky composed himself, we chatted about the SSO, Russian conductors and non-Russian repertory, rehearsal methods, and record stores. We also talked about his ongoing Franz Schmidt symphony cycle with the Malmo Symphony for the Naxos label. When the final two disks are released this year, it will be only the second complete cycle every recorded of these Mahler and Bruckner inspired symphonies.

from gatheringnote on Vimeo.