November 2010 – Gathering Note

Holiday season gets underway with PNB’s Nutcracker

By R.M. Campbell

“The Nutcracker” defines the Christmas season in American towns large enough to have even a semblance of a ballet company, or perhaps just a school looking for attention and ready cash. Some productions are grand, like New York City Ballet, which started the whole affair more than 50 years ago, and Pacific Northwest Ballet, which has been happily seen by hundreds of thousands of people; others are of more modest scale and ambition, which make up in enthusiasm what they lack in sophistication. What ties everything together is, of course, Tchaikovsky’s miraculous score and, in most cases, the holiday season as the basis of the story. A notable exception was John Neumeier’s production for Royal Winnipeg Ballet which tells of a girl’s birthday party. But dreams and fantasies and a heart-felt libretto are nearly always omnipresent.

The ballet was the rock on which PNB began its uncertain life in the 1970’s. A new production, in 1983, with Kent Stowell’s choreography and Maurice Sendak’s sets and costumes, was the company’s first brush with fame. National magazines paid attention and Caroll Ballard did a feature film. It has made millions for the company and revenue derived from the box office is still the rock on which the company survives. It is the most original production in PNB’s repertory, and continues to hold its fascination with the public. This year there will be 39 performances, the first of which was Friday night at McCaw Hall.
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Mara Gearman and Alexander Bishop talk about their upcoming recital

Composer Alexander Bishop’s music came into wider awareness last spring when SSO violist Mara Gearman played two of his works as part of Paul Taub’s May Day, May Day festival. Gearman was looking for a couple of new pieces of music to play for the festival, and Bishop was seeking a violist to to play two short pieces he wrote for Viola. Bishop and Gearman are taking their partnership one step further on December 1st with a an all Bishop recital featuring two brand new works: a viola sonata and a string quartet. Composer and violist sat down with me last Saturday to talk about the recital, their creative partnership, and even the possibility of new Bishop compositions for the viola (a viola concerto perhaps?)

For your Thanksgiving and Black Friday viewing pleasure!

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Classical music lives on in the youngest generation

By Philippa Kiraly

It restores faith in the future of classical music to go to hear the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra. There are many kids listening attentively in the audience to the mass of kids playing on stage. The big orchestra is professional in demeanor, and the performance is high class playing.

While much of this is due to the fine adult musicians who nurture their talent—the conductors of all of SYSO’s orchestras and the coaches who work with individual sections as well as each child’s individual instrumental teacher—a lot is due the kids themselves. If they didn’t stick to the work and give up many hours to practice, they wouldn’t be where they are today.
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Week in classical Music: Peters v. May, Thalia, Degenerate Music, and Capucon

Seattle possesses a new, contemporary, modern music scene. A devoted and talented one at that. This is a discovery for some and crusade for others. Late in the week Thomas May — author, editor, Crosscut contributor — praised the Seattle Modern Orchestra for injecting life into a supposedly timid modern music scene. Steve Peters, a composer and head of Nonsequitor and the Wayward Music Series, promptly responded with a long note explaining for May the depth and breadth of the contemporary music he is missing.

Peters isn’t wrong, and nor is May. Peters is rightly frustrated. His Wayward Music Series at the Good Shepherd Center is a robust center of adventurous music activity that is also regrettably under covered. And it’s not just Peters’ concerts which go unnoticed. Music Northwest — which had their second concert of the season — had never even received a mention until I wrote about them last year. Jane Harty routinely gives her loyal West Seattle audience a healthy dose of music written in the not too distant past. This was the case this past Sunday when Piazzolla, Ginastera, and Schulhoff were on the program. Later in the year Morton Feldman makes an appearance. Last year there was John Cage and Gyorgy Ligeti.
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Seattle Opera Young Artists and Viva la Mamma!

By Philippa Kiraly

There can be only have been one really good reason for Seattle Opera Young Artists Program to perform Donizetti’s “Viva la Mamma!” or to give it its full Italian name “Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali.”

That reason lies in the person of baritone Daniel Scofield, who undertakes the role of the aforementioned Mamma! in drag (as it was originally written), and succeeds triumphantly and hilariously as well as musically to hold the stage whenever he is on it.

“Viva” is an unevenly written farce, a frothy romp with so little substance and so disjointed a plot that there is little to hold onto, while the music comes from before Donizetti has really found his own distinctive voice. It only works if there is excellent acting and staging, and thank goodness, this production has both, thanks to the young singers and to stage director Jeffrey Marc Buchman. Half the fun is that all of the roles are instantly recognizable to anyone who has been backstage during a production.
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Varied Program for the Italian conductor Riccardo Frizza

By R.M. Campbell

All things considered, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra concert Thursday night at Benaroya Hall was a pretty conventional affair with its Rossini overture, Bizet symphony and Ravel’s “Bolero.” What gave it an edge of difference was a Philip Glass violin concerto, although not so much because the composer’s music is pretty ubiquitous these days.

The work was written in 1986, well beyond Glass’ most minimal period. Nevertheless, it is very much in this style, both in its austerity, repetitive patterns and occasional harmonic surprises. The slow movement is the cream of his creative moment, with its brooding ground and elegiac melody above it, all very simple and very effective. This is Glass at his best and most inventive, although the slow, lyrical passage that conclude the concerto is also telling in a haunting and poignant way. The outer sections are not especially interesting on any basis. He repeats himself endlessly, just like tired old days of the original minimalism: Nothing seems to happen.

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There’s another election to vote in…

One of the Gathering Note’s occasional contributors — Ozni Torres — needs your help. He is a finalist in Chicago Classical Music’s “public critic” contest. Oz introduced me to classical music in college. He was a valuable tutor in those early years. His review is the first one, a insightful, fair assessment of Ricardo Muti’s debut as music director of the CSO. I hope you vote for his “fantastique” review.

Vote Here.

Christina Valdes recital tonight

The bird song obsessed Olivier Messiaen.

You can’t love, or even like contemporary music in Seattle and not know Christina Valdes. Valdes is a local pianist with a national reputation. She’s played with the local contemporary music group, the Seattle Chamber Players as well as the pioneering Bang on a Can. Her recital at the Good Shepherd Center tonight features Ives, Messiaen, and Scelsi among others. Messiaen’s Little Sketches of Birds (Petites esquisses d’oiseaux) from 1985 is on the program.

Messiaen’s interest in bird songs appears in many of his works. His seven volume Catalogue d’oiseaux is the composer’s most exhaustive exploration of bird songs. It catalogs countless examples of Western Europe’s different bird species. Where the longer Catalogue goes on for two and a half hours, the shorter Little Sketches zips by in a relatively brief 15 minutes (give or take). This montage of avian influence captures the chirps and tunes of the most common Western European birds — Robin, Black Bird, Song Thrush, and Sky Lark.

If your night is free, for a sliding scale donation of $5-15 this is a recital worth hearing. It starts at 8 pm at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford.

Week in classical music: Rush Hour, Composer Slash, and Hoketus

For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like a geezer at a classical concert. Thank you Seattle Symphony. Thank you Rush Hour series. And, most of all, thank you Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Stephen Hough, and the Pablo Heras Casado.

The SSO’s Rush Hour series is designed to appeal to a younger, downtown audience. Concerts fall on Fridays, have an earlier start time of 7 pm, and are shorter. Friday’s program was a little longer than an hour. To make a shorter concert, a piece, or two are excised from the week’s regular program. This week, Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 was axed from a program that also featured Prokofiev’s Third Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with Stephen Hough at the keyboard.

Prokofiev wrote the Third using themes and material from his lusty, though not very popular, opera the Fiery Angel. The symphony is a jittery, disconcerting experience compared to the better known First and Fifth Symphony. Those works seethe life, grin at the listener with humor, and easily gallop into our subconscious with catchy melodies. The Third dispenses with all of these wonderful, Prokofiev traits. The opening eruption reminded me of Bernard Hermann’s stabbing music from Psycho. Glissandos which slip from the orchestra’s strings in the third and fourth movement, do so with shivering effect. The orchestration is coagulated. Only in the second movement do we even get a hint of the melodic Prokofiev we know.
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Northwest Sinfonietta’s ‘Gypsy Nights”

By Philippa Kiraly

It wasn’t until the concert itself that the title of Northwest Sinfonietta’s performance last Friday, “Gypsy Nights,” became clear. Yes, music director Christophe Chagnard’s own work titled “Opre, Roma!” with its three guitars clearly had a gypsy component, but Dvorak, Mahler and Shostakovich?

As the concert progressed at Nordstrom Recital Hall, Chagnard’s choices made sense. Dvorak was represented by his Slavonic Dance No. 8, played with all the musicians except the cellos standing and swaying with the lively beat. It was the kind of performance to have everyone ready to join in and dance in the aisles, such was its verve and spirit, and kinship to Roma music of that era in Czechoslovakia.
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