August 2010 – Gathering Note

Quarter notes: farewell

I had been wondering when the Seattle Symphony would announce some big, audacious, splashy farewell for Gerard Schwarz’s final season. There was a two concert Hovhaness festival and the season finale is Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, but neither seemed a big enough way to say good bye to a conductor who oversaw the growth of the Seattle Symphony for 26 years. That was until I opened my email yesterday.

In partnership with two leading philanthropists — Agnes Gund and Charles Simonyi — eighteen (yes, eighteen!) new pieces, by American composers will be commissioned and premiered through out the course of the season. That is a new piece of music on every concert led by Schwarz. Suddenly, the season looks like a suitable send off.

The composers composing new works and a list of concerts where new works will be premiered follow the jump.
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Quarter notes: end of summer edition

Summer is winding down, classical performance — with the exception of Seattle Opera’s head scratching new production of Tristan und Isolde – are more or less on hiatus until September. All of this leaves a blogger with little to blog about. Yet a few noteworthy bits have popped up here and there.

This Sunday George Shangrow will be remembered at a service held at the University Christian Church in the U District. The service starts at 2 pm and runs until 5 pm. Get there early. Seating is limited and because George’s presence was huge there will no doubt be an overflowing crowd.

Tristan und Isolde wraps up this weekend at McCaw hall. I saw the new production last weekend. The general consensus among critics has been reservedly favorable; consensus among the audience hasn’t been as generous. Nearly everyone I spoke with thought the orchestra sounded spectacular. Fisch whipped the band into grand Wagnerian shape but it never missed a chance to embrace the score’s warmer moments. Most also liked Tristan’s cast as well. the golden age of Wagner singers is long gone but that didn’t stop Clifton Forbis and Annalena Persson from giving a memorable performance of Tristan and Isolde. Once again, Persson started her Tristan performance with uncertainty in her voice and a wavering tone. By the second act she had found Isolde’s voice; her arresting Liebestob provided a satisfying conclusion.

If the audience appreciated the musical qualities of the performance, production elements weren’t regarded as favorably. “The directing and set design were so bad I periodically closed my eyes to listen so I would not be distracted” read one comment posted on the Seattle Times web review. The painted sets looked like cheap, grey particle board. A new projection system — written up extensively in the Tristan program — added little to the opera’s texture. Israel’s changing costumes were interesting, highlighting the opera’s mythology, but with very little else on stage, they seemed out of place. Kazaras looked to explore “Tristan time” and the idea that an event which takes a few seconds in real time might seem much longer in the mind. This is all well and good as an idea, but on stage it failed to translate, turning the opera into a series of incomprehensible moments.

The music is always paramount with an opera. But for professional company’s like Seattle Opera the music can’t be everything. Audiences already expect big things in the pit and on stage — for Wagner especially. For a production to be successful then, the sets, costumes, stage direction, and everything else that isn’t musical must be good too. Fisch’s orchestra and Jenkins’s cast were memorable, while Israel and Kazaras’s production forgettable.

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An increasingly enlightened audience at Seattle Chamber Music Festival

By Philippa Kiraly

Time was, maybe 17 years ago, when Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival was full of well known classics. We could confidently expect to hear Brahms, Beethoven, and Schumann, Mozart and Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. Sure there was, is, plenty to choose from among much-loved works. Some amongst us grew restless, wanting to be more challenged by the music and have our minds expanded, and SCMS responded by building a program one year full of these more adventurous work. The audience stayed away in droves.

What a change nowadays!
Continue reading An increasingly enlightened audience at Seattle Chamber Music Festival

The Five: Jayce Ogren

Jayce Ogren is an example of what is happening in classical music these days. He’s a conductor who has stood before some of the finest orchestras in the world. Ogren finished a tenure with the Cleveland Orchestra in 2009. He has also conducted the Boston Symphony, LA Phil, and City Opera. Before that, he was a conducting apprentice with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic under the New York Philharmonic’s Alan Gilbert. With conducting bona fides like these, Ogren could easily stick to cultivating a career as a conductor. But, this Hoquiam native is plunging into composing, songwriting, and on Friday he and a new band of Seattle area musicians — Young Kreisler — debut at ACT with a program of Ogren’s own music, kindred depressants Kurt Cobain and Mahler, and Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union.

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The Five: an introduction

Rimsky Korsakov. 1/5 of the original The Five

The Five is a feature I intended to start back in July. The feature was supposed to start with the musicians of the Seattle Chamber Music Society. It never able to take off because of the scheduling challenges presented by an always changing line up of musicians.

I wish I could say the idea for the Five is wholly mine, its not. One of my favorite sections in BBC Music Magazine is the column Music That Changed Me. Every issue ends with a musician — famous or not — sharing with readers the three to five albums or pieces of music that changed them.

Each time I finished reading Music That Changed Me I felt like I had been exposed to the inner musical sanctum of whoever the BBC editors had chosen to pen the column that month. In April it was the conductor Antonio Pappano. He shared with readers the first time he ever heard Tristan und Isolde. Pappano described Tristan as a dangerous piece of music and like Liszt under your fingers. I think music lovers appreciate insights like this more than the same old profile pieces that you and I have read hundreds of times.

Named after the five Russian composers – Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky Korsakov, Borodin and Balakirev, The Five is a blog twist on BBC Music Magazine’s Music That Changed Me. Periodically, I will ask musicians five questions about pieces of music that are important to them or impacted them in some way. Their answers will be published here for your reading pleasure.

Quarter notes: Shangrow remembered

2012520456 — George Shangrow. Photo John Cornicello.

It’s been more than a week since we learned of George Shangrow’s untimely death. In that time the tributes for this Seattle original have been growing with each day. Orchestra Seattle’s website has been turned into a rolling memorial.

My favorite is from Kerry Fowler who wrote:

“I was a bit nervous the night before my audition for Orchestra Seattle, when I tuned in to KING-FM to hear the end of Beethoven’s Fifth. When it was over, I heard George announce, “Even after all these years, I still get tingles listening to that movement.” I thought, “Now that’s someone I want to play music with.” I wasn’t disappointed.”

On Saturday, the matriarch of Seattle’s critical class Melinda Bargreen, penned a tribute to Shangrow. It is well worth a read if you want a window into George’s essence as a person.

If you prefere to remember George in person, there is a memorial service scheduled for 2 PM August 22, 2010 at the University Christian Church which is open to the public. I would suggest getting there early as more than 200 people have rsvp’d on the Facebook page for the event.

Seattle Chamber Music Festival enters final week of 2010 season

By R.M. Campbell

Memories can be short and distorted, but it seems to me, as the Seattle Chamber Music Festival enters its final week of the summer, this season has been if not the best than one of the best in its nearly 30-year history.

Two things are certain. The move from the dull acoustics of St. Nicholas Hall at Lakeside to Nordstrom Recital Hall has been an unqualified success, not only in terms of box office but musically, aided in part by the vastly improved acoustical presence of the hall. There is no question Nordstrom can turn shrill in the upper registers, especially the violin, if musicians are not careful. In the early days, they were not and the hall got a bad reputation. But other musicians, more capable and more sensitive, found ways to make the hall what it is today. All concert venues have their individual profiles which musicians must take into account. Festival concerts at Nordstrom had a ring of freshness, vibrancy and clarity they did not have previously. This improved acoustical status seemed to encourage musicians to play even better than they did at Lakeside.
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A tribute to Shangrow and an evening of remarkable music making

By Philippa Kiraly

Seattle Chamber Music Society’s summer festival has headed to The Overlake School in Redmond for its final five concerts, the first of which took place in those beautiful surroundings Wednesday night.

But first, the Society’s associate artistic director, James Ehnes, came out to give a tribute to the late George Shangrow, citing his long time support for the festival. In his honor Ehnes then played the largo movement from Bach’s Sonata No. 3 for unaccompanied violin.
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RIP George Shangrow

George Shangrow, one of Seattle’s finest musicians and musical personalities, died last night in an auto collision. Shangrow was driving to give a talk at the Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival when a teenager crossed the center lane of the highway, crashing into Shangrow’s car, killing him.

This is a tremendous loss for Seattle’s classical music community. Shangrow was a charismatic, sometimes awkward advocate for music that wouldn’t make it to the concert stage otherwise. His performances of Bach, Monteverdi, and Handel’s Messiah with Orchestra Seattle drew a cult following.

Rest in peace, George. You will be missed. Orchestra Seattle has posted a statement on their web page. KUOW has a nice piece on Shangrow.

A clip of George doing what he did best: conducting Handel’s Messiah.

New production of “Tristan” opens Saturday at McCaw

10 Tristan rl 156 — Annalena Persson (Isolde) and Margaret Jane Wray (Brangäne). Rozarii Lynch Photo

By R.M. Campbell

Wagner’s monumental “Tristan und Isolde” is not a stranger to Seattle Opera: it has never been approached lightly. The opera is too important, too central to the Wagner canon, too demanding to be treated with anything less than awe and respect. The last time the company mounted the opera, in 1998, it had an all-star cast (Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner singing the roles for the first time together ) and a production team, headed by stage director Francesca Zambello. The set, designed by Alison Chitty, was as massive as the opera itself. Magnificent really, especially the first and second acts.

Continue reading New production of “Tristan” opens Saturday at McCaw