Author: Zach Carstensen

Last Saturday’s Camerata Northwest recital at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford showed the depth of classical music in Seattle. Camerata Northwest was started by John Scanlon, a violist from Tacoma, for the purpose of bringing high-quality chamber music to audiences at a reasonable price. The Camerata joins a multitude of other organizations who are doing basically the same thing in and around Seattle.

The recital – a French impressionistic and romantic affair, done in reverse chronological order – was competing with an unusually nice spring day. Instead of preparing flower gardens, walking around Green Lake, or doing some early spring cleaning, a respectable crowd made their way to the recital.

The recital began with Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello. The sonata is reminiscent of Ravel’s String Quartet with its cyclical structure. Ravel’s writing for the instruments is both spartan and dense. The vacillation between these two extremes balances out the two parts. For Saturday’s performance, Heather Blackburn, cello, and Shin-young Kwon, violin, played. Below is a very short clip from the potent second movement

Following the sonata, Charles Noble, a violist with the Oregon Symphony joined pianist, Cary Lewis for Vieuxtemps’s Elegie

for Viola and Piano. The Elegie can also be played on a cello, but the viola’s middle range seemed well suited for the ruminating quality of the piece.  I would like to hear the piece played on a cello sometime.

After a short intermission, all four musicians came out to play Saint Saens’s rarely heard Quartet for Piano and Strings in E Major. Scanlon called the Elegie a pallet cleanser.  I have to disagree.  Saint Saens’s unabashably, old-fashioned quartet was the real cleanser.  The quartet was fun to hear, easy on the ears, and a delieriously great way to close a recital on the first tolerable spring day of 2009.

During intermission, Scanlon urged the audience to spread the word about the Camerata Northwest. The recession has taken a toll on ticket sales and contributions. Organizations like Scanlon’s, make Seattle’s music scene vibrant and diverse.  I hope the recession ends soon; we need more organizations like Scanlon’s, not fewer.

Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is all about faeries and spells, lovers running all over the place, a bunch of uncouth workmen and a couple of titled aristocrats.

Benjamin Britten incorporated them all into his opera of the same name, with music which delineates clearly who belongs to which category.

Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, which presents the opera at Meydenbauer Center beginning this Friday, is playing the opera in an English boarding school.

I am in the useful position of having spent five formative years in an English boaarding school and to have spent a whole year there studying, you guessed it, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I have been quite unable to see the connection.

So it was with extreme curiosity that I met with the program’s artistic director, Peter Kazaras, stage director and and prime mover for this unusual setting for the opera, to ask him why?

He led me back to the first time he saw it, a production at the Metropolitan Opera which left him cold. But then he saw the opera in a student production a couple of years ago at UCLA. “A young cast, a 550-seat theater, I was completely captivated.”

He found a recording of it with the Northern Sinfonia conducted by the late Richard Hickox. “It was very theatrical, very immediate,” says Kazaras, who listens with headphones, not a score, and lets his imagination run wild. “I could see moonlight streaming in through a window…students making magic…” Kind of Hogwartsian. He called set designer Donald Eastman, who had similar visions.

“Magic comes from within,” says Kazaras. “The dream presupposes there are periods which are not dream. Dreams are the time in which wonder, amazement, miracles, the irrational can reign. You never think in a dream that this doesn’t make sense.”

This Young Artists’ production of Midsummer Night’s Dream is just that, a dream.

It all fell together, particularly when Kazaras discovered the program’s music director, Brian Garman, loved the opera and had conducted it.

The Duke of Athens, Theseus, is the headmaster; his consort-to-be, Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons, a visiting faculty member, but Kazaras describes her as being like the headmistress visiting Hogwarts from France, the formidable Madame Maxime.

The lovers are faculty members; faery king and queen, Oberon and Tytania, head boy and girl, to whom the younger students (the faeries) are in thrall. The workmen are the school handymen. Bottom the weaver in Shakespeare is here Bottom the weaver of tales, maybe the school janitor?

Correct accents have been a major concern for Kazaras. All except the workmen and Puck speak pure Oxford English, otherwise known as the King’s (Queen’s) English or Received Pronunciation in theater language. The others speak varying different English dialects except for one whose accent is faintly French. They have been intensively tutored by Lynn Baker, English diction coach and assistant conductor at New York City Opera.

“If it’s set in a school, what does that give us?” asks Kazaras rhetorically. “In a nutshell, affordability.” The Young Artists Program operates on a shoestring, as far as possible the funding going towards the training of the young singers in all the aspects of an operatic career.

For the set, Kazaras says, “We originally designed a box: cheapest, quickest, paint it white, save thousands of dollars.” This morphed into two walls with doors and windows and a back black scrim, still cheap.

“Putting it in a school helped with the costume and make-up budget, too,’he says., “but this threw a heavy burden on Connie Yun,” the lighting designer.

It’s Yun who creates the magic, moonlight and all.

I’m still not sure how Shakespeare’s creation fits into a school, but thanks to Kazaras’ compelling enthusiasm, I’m ready to be convinced. Besides, the music is one of Britten’s most imaginative, inspired scores.

Opening Friday March 27 for six performances through April 5^th, at Meydenbauer Center Theater. Tickets $15-$35 at seattleopera.org.

70 years ago, John Cage and Lou Harrison staged a series of percussion recitals dubbed Drums Along the Pacific.  The Cornish College of the Arts is reviving the concept with a series of four concerts this weekend.  Thursday: Henry Cowell; Friday: Lou Harrison; Saturday: John Cage; and Sunday

: Gamelan music.  In addition to concerts, Cornish is also sponsoring a series of lectures and educational events.  You can get event details here.

In a first for The Gathering Note

, I will be live blogging the John Cage Marathon.  You can read my instant reactions and peruse additional content here.  Be sure to book mark the page, or just go to the Live Blog page at www.gatheringnote.com.

Think you might forget?  Enter your e-mail address in the upcoming live event widget on the front page and you’ll receive a reminder e-mail.

I hope you will make it to Poncho Hall for some or all of the Drums Along the Pacific festivities.  If you can’t, tune into The Gathering Note’s first live blog.

Bach’s birthday, this year his 324th, is always a fine excuse for multiple performances of his works. This year, Bach’s faith, joy and optimism are particularly welcome, uplifting the spirits in big concerts as the six Brandenburgs at Benaroya last week, and little ones such as the Concert Spirituel performance at Christ Episcopal Church in the University district on Bach’s actual birthday, Saturday March 21.

Flutist Jeffrey Cohan is the moving spirit behind Concert Spirituel, and he has presented and performed in “J.S. Bach! A Birthday Bash,” around the Sound and over the mountains in eight concerts over the past ten days.

Christ Episcopal’s was the only Seattle performance. This was an excellent program, well-designed, beginning with Telemann’s Cantata, “Ihr Voelker, hoert,” ending with Bach’s Cantata No. 82, “Ich habe, genug,” and in between, two sonatas and the Italian Concerto, all by Bach.

Cohan, playing Baroque flute, was joined by a friend and co-performer for the past quarter-century, harpsichordist Hans-Juergen Schnoor of Luebeck, Germany, and mezzo-soprano Maike Albrecht, also from Luebeck.

Albrecht’s lovely voice is one you would never get bored listening to. It’s warm, easy and generous with depth and character, and above all expressive, so that hearing the recitatives you are hearing a story as she sings it, while the arias are heartfelt commentary. She uses only an occasional, light vibrato, perfect for Baroque music.

Both cantatas are happy ones, Telemann’s rejoicing in the light God brings to the world, and the Bach an embracing of death as a portal to God.

The balance of instruments wasn’t as good as it might have been. Cohan is an experienced performer on flutes from the Renaissance on, and the Baroque flute he chose to play at this concert was an extremely soft-toned one. Except in the higher registers couldn’t always be heard above the harpsichord.

Schnoor was playing a small, two-manual Flemish-type instrument, but played with a rhythmic freedom in his right hand which didn’t seem completely suited to either Telemann or Bach, though it was more noticeable in the Telemann. Nor did it mesh with Cohan, so that the two were often not playing exactly together. It was distracting and disconcerting.

Cohan spoke briefly and informatively before the two sonatas he played with Schnoor. Neither was originally composed for solo flute and harpsichord. In the first, BWV 1027 in G major originally for viola da gamba and later arranged by Bach for two flutes, Cohan played the gamba part. BWV 1021 was originally written for violin. The latter was the more successful of the two performances by Cohan and Schnoor, probably because the violin part was higher than the gamba one, so that Cohan’s flute was more audible against the other instrument. I would have like to hear more of Cohan, both for the music but also for his fine, expressive playing.

In the Italian Concerto, Schnoor’s habit of playing the right hand slightly before the left resulted in a less than satisfactory performance, to our ears here anyway. The performance didn’t sound decisively clean, while the lower register on the harpsichord sounded a little heavy.

Concert pianists often continue performing into old age, so long as their fingers remain supple and their ears sharp, and do so with the increased insight into the music and understanding of the composer’s intent which comes with long familiarity.

It was therefore with regret that I heard Dmitri Alexeev’s performance at Meany Theater Tuesday night.

Now in his early 60s, which should be his musical prime, Alexeev did justice to only one composer, Prokofiev. His performance of the Four Pieces for piano, Op. 32 was quirky and light, sharply delineated, completely assured and totally successful.

Would that he has brought the same perceptiveness to the Schumann and Chopin works which took up the remainder of the program.

In the past he has received enthusiastic plaudits for his lyricism, and the nuances and dynamics of his playing, but these were absent Tuesday.

His Schumann often sounded bewildering. In “Blumenstueck” with which he opened the program, his sense of rubato-the stretching of tempo and pausing after notes which correlates to the ebb and flow of speech-seemed more to halt the flow, rather than further the the phrases. In “Kreisleriana,” soft, slower passages had his old hallmarks, the delicate touch, fine shaping. The fast sections were musically disastrous. They sounded like a technically gifted teen trying to impress with how fast and loud the music could be played with no regards for the music’s mood. Phrasing was non-existent. The dynamics ranged between loud and louder. Alexeev’s left hand rose and crashed down on the piano, the right was steely-fingered, and in dense passages there were too many blurred, missed or wrong notes.

His Chopin was no better.  In the Rondo, Op. 1, parts were light and crisp, but clusters of fast notes sounded a little labored, and messy, while notes in the top register were steely to the point of ugliness, every time.

Four mazurkas had little dance to them, again with inappropriate rubato and hesitations which felt wrong in their locations. Alexeev played the daylights out of the lovely Nocturne in A-flat Major and Polonaise in the same key .

Most mature musicians take cognizance of the composer and his intent. Chopin played in small venues, on a light Pleyel piano. While his technique was amazing, his compositions scintillating, often brilliant, he was a superb, refined musician, not a bombastic performer.

Alexeev’s performance was loud, messy, almost crude at times. Except in the Prokofiev, where was the poetry, where was the music?

What a shame.

Tasmin Little’s two week residency with the Seattle Symphony ended this weekend.  The series of concerts she played marked the violinist’s debut with Seattle’s orchestra.  The concerts also demonstrated Little’s command of unlike repertoire.  During her stay, she played pieces for solo violin, Vivaldi’s excessively famous Four Seasons, and most recently Edward Elgar’s hauntingly romantic violin concerto.  Her performance of Elgar’s concerto was the capstone event for the violinist and the orchestra these last two weeks.

Elgar’s Violin Concerto was composed on the cusp of the 20^th Century.  Mahler’s symphonies, Richard Strauss’s Salome, and Schoenberg’s experimentations with atonality were well underway by the time Edward Elgar had finished his fifty plus minute concerto – the first piece the composer wrote for solo violin.  With musical innovation everywhere, audiences might have expected a piece from Elgar that also pushed music into new sound and structural realms.  Elgar, however, had different ideas.  At its very core, the concerto is an extension of the Romantic sound of the 19^th Century and a continuation of Elgar’s penchant for encoding his music with extra musical, personal meaning like he did with his earlier piece the Enigma Variations.

Like a lot of Romantic music, the concerto is both long-winded and utterly sensual.  One minute the music is frustrating and the next transfixing.  The musical language is easy to listen to, but the meaning hard to divine.

Little and the orchestra made a convincing case for the piece even if Little herself failed to put her own stamp on the music.  Elgar’s orchestral writing is such that it could easily overwhelm the solo violin.  Most of the time, Schwarz kept his orchestra at bay.  Only occasionally did a string swell overpower Little.  Within the orchestra, however, the woodwinds and brass were muzzled to the point of inaudibility during the first movement.  A disappointing oversight.

Nevertheless, the focus for the first half was Little.  Her passage work was smooth, articulation pronounced, and tone warm.  Though her technical abilities were astounding, overall her performance was straightforward and lacking in introspection.  Elgar’s concerto is so large, so obtuse, soloists need to do more than just play the notes on the page, or in Little’s case, the notes in her head.

I hate to say this, but Dvorak’s 6^th symphony, left me flat.  My problems were with the music itself and not the performance.  The 6^th symphony sits between Dvorak’s early, Slavic inspired music and his mature trio of later symphonies 7-9.  The symphony refers to the composer’s earlier Slavonic Dances, and the most effective movement for me, the scherzo, is the most obviously connected to the folk-inspired Dances.  The Seattle Symphony captured the rowdiness of this movement.  Afterward, I wondered if programming the extroverted Slavonic Dances – all or some – for the second half, would have been a better match for Elgar’s moody concerto.