By R.M. Campbell
When Stephane Deneve made his Seattle Symphony Orchestra debut a few years ago, he was immediately recognized for the talent he was. His return to the SSO podium Thursday night at Benaroya did nothing to change that impression.
His program had multiple virtues: two works because they were little known or not known and one work which was very familiar but sounded freshly minted. Such was Deneve’s vision and talent.
Continue reading Deneve returns to Benaroya Hall
It’s been a busy week for Cornish College, the college’s faculty, and one of the school’s talented soon to be graduates. A new president was unveiled — a violist — Nancy Uscher. That evening student composer Alexander Bishop’s music for viola was the focus at Poncho Hall. Toward the end of the week — innovative guitarist and Cornish faculty member Michael Nicolella took to the Nordstrom Recital Hall stage as part of the Seattle Classical Guitar Series. Up the hill at St. James Cathedral, Steven Stubbs (who has been tasked with building an early music program at Cornish) led the first historically accurate performance of Monteverdi’s path blazing 1610 Vespers.
Continue reading Week in classical music: Alexander Bishop, Michael Nicolella, and Monteverdi
By Philippa Kiraly
Young American musician Lara Downes opened UW’s President’s Piano Series Wednesday night with an enlightening program of 20th century American music. All the composers but one are well known: Roy Harris, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, plus Florence Price, and all were born close together around the turn of the century, with Barber the youngest, born 1910, and Price the oldest, born 1888.
Price was a rarity at that time, a recognized woman composer with a large body of works under her belt, and even rarer, a black woman composer. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music, became head of the music department at Clark University and won first prize in the Wanamaker Competition and a performance of her first symphony by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Continue reading Lara Downes’ American program kicks off 2010/2011 President’s Piano series
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.
Continue reading Holiday season gets underway with PNB’s Nutcracker
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!
Continue reading Mara Gearman and Alexander Bishop talk about their upcoming recital
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.
Continue reading Classical music lives on in the youngest generation
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.
Continue reading Week in classical Music: Peters v. May, Thalia, Degenerate Music, and Capucon
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.
Continue reading Seattle Opera Young Artists and Viva la Mamma!
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.
Continue reading Varied Program for the Italian conductor Riccardo Frizza
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.
Gathering Note 