Beethoven and wine; wine and Beethoven, the Seattle Symphony kicked off the 2010/2011 season with three shorter all-Beethoven concerts preceded by an hour of wine tasting. The Beethoven and Wine festival isn’t new. Last season was its inagueral season. It’s a disappointing world we live in. These days it takes putting “wine” in the title of the program to fill Benaroya to near capacity. Wine and ___ (fill in the blank with a composer or musical period) has proven to be such a successful model that I noticed a new Baroque and wine series has been added to the SSO season. Other orchestras have included wine tasting in their programs as well. Continue reading Beethoven and Wine festival concludes with the Eighth Symphony and Third Piano Concerto
The Seattle Symphony began its Beethoven and Wine series and its annual season at Benaroya Hall on a high note, with the Seattle Symphony debut of violinist Augustin Hadelich playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and the world premiere of a fine little work by Augusta Read Thomas.
Her composition was the first to be performed of eighteen commissioned from contemporary composers by Agnes Gund and Charles Simonyi to mark the farewell season of artistic director Gerard Schwarz. The list of composers, all working in this country, is a Who’s Who of today’s most respected names in the field Their works will be performed at concerts throughout the season, and this first one will be heard again in each of the remaining Beethoven and Wine concerts, tonight (Thursday) and tomorrow.
Read Thomas describes her five-minute “Of Paradise and Light” as a soulful work of reflection, “as though a sliver of paradise and light came down to shine upon a garden of colorful flowers.” So often a description like this leaves the listener, on hearing the work, wondering just what the composer meant. Not so here. She has captured her words in sound.
The fall concert season starts with a flurry this year, seemingly in a hurry to get going immediately after Labor Day. The Seattle Symphony has three Beethoven and Wine concerts this week and a gala on Saturday, Cappella Romana gives its first season performance Saturday, and the Early Music Guild got in first with one of its First Tuesday series, the I-90 Collective performing at Trinity Parish Church.
Local composer Nat Evans has embarked on a project that fuses nature, music, community, and subjectivity of experience. Sunrise September 18, 2010 is a completely new piece of music written by Evans. It is a site specific, time specific, event specific work experienced differently by everyone who participates in the premiere. Listeners will gather at before 6:30 am on the 18th at Kite Hill in Magnuson Park. This is also the location which inspired the work and will be the vantage point for the sunrise and the premiere.
At exactly 6:30 am (the time the sun will rise up over the Cascades) Evans will give the cue and everyone will press play on their iPod, Zune, Walkman, CD player, or any other device people choose. Participants will be hearing Sunrise, while watching the sun rise. Sunrise will be recorded before the 18th and distributed to people who let the composer know they want to participate. All participants have to do is download the music, load it onto their favorite media player, and show up on the 18th at Kite Hill.
The idea for this new work originated from the composer’s experience with Zen and how the tradition treats natural cycles like sunrise and sunset. Just as important Evans says, is how individuals experience these cycles. “Over the years I became interested in how we interact with these cycles,” Evans remarked. He elaborated further, “there is also the tradition in Indian classical music that certain pieces are to be played at specific times of the day, even specific times of the year.” Evans took these ideas, put pen to paper, and wrote Sunrise.
Evans is one of Seattle’s talented, up and coming composers. I had the good fortune of introducing a piece of his at the May Day, May Day festival. The concept behind Sunrise is so interesting to me, I asked Evans if he would want to participate in The Five. He obliged. His answers follow the jump.
Oh, and if you want to hear Sunrise, email Evans at NathanielFEvans@gmail.com and he’ll send you a link for the download. See you at Kite Hill on the 18th!
Evans’ responses to my five questions are after the jump.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gathering Note 