July 2010 – Gathering Note

Seattle Chamber Music Society wraps up Seattle festival, heads to Redmond

By Philippa Kiraly

Despite concerns and trepidation over its move from the bucolic ambiance of Lakeside School to the urban Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya, Seattle Chamber Music Society’s summer festival there has been an undoubted success.

It managed to fill, mostly, over 100 seats more than Lakeside has for each concert and recital. It has brought in a variety of new audience members, including tourists dropping in. And the concerts have been enthusiastically received, despite the sometimes sabotaging effect of the hall’s dry acoustics and the really poor quality piano provided.

While the picnicking area in the Garden of Remembrance suffers from traffic noise, the decibel level in the Nordstrom lobby during intermissions makes some concert goers try to duck out downstairs or by heading to the main Benaroya lobby, and the free lemonade and coffee are missed, these are just peripheral losses.
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Grimsley sings Kurwenal again in Seattle Opera’s new production of Tristan

10 Tristan rl 300 — Greer Grimsley as Kurwenal in Seattle Opera’s 2010 Tristan und Isolde. Photo by Rozarii Lynch.

By Philippa Kiraly

It was Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera who persuaded bass-baritone Greer Grimsley that he should sing Wagner. That was for the 1994 production of “Lohengrin,” and Grimsley has sung in nearly every Wagner production here since.
Talking with him as he prepares to sing Kurwenal in “Tristan and Isolde” which opens Saturday at McCaw Hall, you are immediately struck by his speaking voice, as sonorous as his singing one.

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Off the shelf: Schwarz’s Schuman cycle released as box set

Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony’s survey of William Schuman’s complete published symphonies has been packaged and is in stores now in a convenient boxed set (Naxos, 8.505228). This is a set that is years in the making. I picked up the first few disks for pennies when the Queen Anne Tower Records was clearing out its stock at least three years ago.

The Third Symphony is especially good. Recorded in 2005, it benefits from improved sound over Leonard Bernstein’s version with the New York Philharmonic. I gave both recordings a listen in advance of this year’s season ending performance of the piece this year. Schwarz’s recording of the piece gets a thumbs up from me. It is a more focused performance than Bernstein’s. This helps listeners swim rather than slog through Schuman’s complicated textures.

The other symphonies come off just as well. For me the shorter orchestral works are the real discoveries, causing me to wonder why these works aren’t performed more often. Orchestra Song (which I am listening to right now) is a charming three minute work featuring every section of the orchestra including a wonderful trumpet solo by (I am assuming) David Gordon. A new recording of the Violin Concerto would have been a nice addition too.

The set is nicely packaged and nicely priced, though the documentation is limited to the notes that came with the original CD’s. Would it have been too much to ask of Naxos to include an essay or statement from Schwarz on why Schuman’s music means so much to him?

Mozart to Barber Wednesday Night at Festival

By R.M. Campbell

There has been so much to admire in the concerts that I’ve attended at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival this season at Nordstrom Recital Hall, it seems redundant to say so yet again. But it is the truth.

As always there are musicians making their festival debut. A more significant new element is the hall, a vast improvement on the dreary acoustics of St. Nicholas Hall at Lakeside School where the festival most of past few decades. This is the festival’s first season at Nordstrom. The more one hears at Nordstrom — the clarity and vibrancy of sound — the more one appreciates the virtues of the new venue. When the festival leaves Seattle next week for Overlake School in Redmond, there will be no lapse in acoustical values. The hall is excellent.
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Seattle Chamber Music Festival opens final week of 2010 Seattle season Monday

By R.M. Campbell

The Seattle Chamber Music Festival used to be criticized by some for its lack of adventure in programming contemporary music. The 20th-century was well enough represented but limited mostly to well-known composer who worked early in the century. This was not necessarily a reflection of artistic director Toby Saks’ taste but a reflection of her audience, which in nearly 30 years never developed a taste for novelties of the modern era. Her partial solution was a clever one: create a small group of patrons willing to contribute money in order to commission new work.
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A lot of good and some bad close out third week of SCMS festival

By the third week of the Chamber Music Society’s festival the excitement of opening week is gone. We’ve heard enough expertly crafted chamber music to carry us through to the fall. A number of musicians have come and gone by the third week. The third week is also when repertory experiments takes place. The chamber pieces which use wind, brass, and double bass tend to show up around this time. New commissions also show up from time to time here too, away from the intensity of opening week.

The third week is especially problematic for writers. Our adjectives are exhausted and an endless supply of Romantic melodies and classical formalities are dancing through the parts of our brain we use to listen to music. We’ve heard a lot of music with even more to come.

This year the third week of the festival ended with back to back evening concerts. Friday’s concert embodied some of the best and the worst of the festival so far. Franz Berwald’s Septet glowered for 20 minutes to start Friday’s concert. It’s a piece without much of a point even when it is played well as it was on Friday night. I would have preferred to hear Jeff Fair (horn); Sean Osborne (clarinet); Seth Krimsky (bassoon); Jordan Anderson (bass); Ida Levin (violin); Che-Yen Chen (viola); and Jeremy Turner’s (cello) use their considerable talents in different repertory.
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Schwarz’s Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano to be premiered next week

By Peter Klein

We all know about Gerard Schwarz, conductor. Lately, we’ve been hearing more and more about Gerard Schwarz, composer.

Schwarz’ latest work, a “Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano” (Horn Trio for short), will receive its world premiere at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival on Monday, July 26 at 8:00 PM in Benaroya Hall. Schwarz and the three performers will give an introduction to the work in a free recital at 7:00 PM.

The Seattle Symphony’s Music Director is by no means new to composition. As a teenager, he studied with the noted American composer Paul Creston. Later teachers included Roger Sessions, Jacob Druckman, Milton Babbitt, Vincent Persichetti and Pierre Boulez. But as the trumpet and then the baton became the focus of Schwarz’ career, his composing took a three-decade hiatus. Until recently.

“All of a sudden, I’m into it again. And it’s getting to be exciting,” said Schwarz, speaking by telephone from the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, NC, where he is Music Director.
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Quarter notes: summer edition

Summer is finally in full swing. Seattle is warming up. We are in the thick of the summer chamber festival. And, the new symphony seasons are still a few months away. Even though the number of classical performances have thinned out, it doesn’t mean there aren’t events worth mentioning or worth seeking out.

The biggest event after the chamber festival is Seattle Opera’s new production of Tristan und Isolde. Seattle’s a Wagner town and Speight Jenkins and company are back this summer with Wagner’s epic love story. Seattle Opers offers Tristan veterans and newcomers alike plenty of insightful information about the opera on the Seattle Opera website and You Tube. For instance, check out this video of Asher Fisch the conductor for the new production.

Local composer and Esoterics music director Eric Banks is on the rise nationally. The Esoterics have been invited to perform at 2011 ACDA conference in Chicago and Banks is in the thick of writing new commissions for performances at Alice Tully Hall and the Kennedy Center.

In other choral news, Robert Bode and Choral Arts have won the prestigious American Prize in choral performance. Pro Musica, another local favorite, snagged second place.

City Journal is out with a piece making a case for now being the golden age of classical music. There might be more music being made, of higher quality than ever before, but I am not sure if matters when our culture doesn’t seem as supportive of serious music as it used to be. More music doesn’t mean anything if people aren’t listening.

Summer festival continues as expected: another splendid concert on Sunday

By Philippa Kiraly

Each year for the past decade or more, I have been saying that Seattle Chamber Music Society surpasses itself with a season which is even better played with even more superb (and young) performers than the year before, and with programming which is far more interesting than it used to be.

This year is no exception. A couple of last year’s newcomers, violinist Augustin Hadelich and pianist Ran Dank, are showing themselves to be musicians of unusual sensitivity as well as extraordinary technique. So too are violinist Nurit Bar-Josef, the very young concertmaster of the National Symphony and cellist Edward Arron, also recent additions; while another youngster, violinist Andrew Wan, who shares the concertmaster position at the Montreal Symphony, is new this year and already showing his ability to join in the very rarified level of musical performance we’ve come to expect at the Festival.
All these and more go to prove that classical music is alive and well in this country with excellent performers coming up all the time, and judging by the audiences SMCS gets, the audience for chamber music is there too.
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More superb chamber music: Bridge, Stravinsky, and Schubert

By Philippa Kiraly

Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival is a joy in the midst of July’s usual musical dearth. Concerts come up three times a week, each with stellar performances and programs which are never boring. Even very familiar pieces receive illuminating performances which bring out facets not perceived before.

Friday’s performance at Nordstrom Recital Hall was a case in point. Frank Bridge is a composer we don’t often hear. He worked at the beginning of the 20th century in England, at a time when the only towering figure in English music was Edward Elgar. Bridge’s chamber music is well worth a hearing.
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