Category: Seattle

Gallery concerts celebrate the Bach boys


By Harlan Glotzer

The most widely known early music ensemble in Seattle would probably have to be Seattle Baroque Orchestra, but the true scene of early music in this city are gems like Gallery Concerts. This afternoon’s performance—the Bach Family Birthday Bash—was the second in a two part Bach’s Birthday Festival. The outstanding display of works by Johann Sebastian Bach and three of his four musical sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian on period instruments in appropriate performances practices held me enraptured from the preconcert lecture to the final movement.

This concert closed out the 21st season of Gallery Concerts, and I was ecstatic to see the pews of Queen Anne Christian Church (the regular performance space for Gallery Concert) completely filled. In addition to presenting a personal, friendly, and intimate concert going experience, Founding Director Jillon Stoppels Dupree and Artistic Director George Bozarth make Gallery Concerts a truly unique and important concert series by including repertoire and performance practices of the 19th century—something I have yet to see at any other early music society in this city. Even though this was a concert of Bach, which usually conjures the image of the “High Baroque,” they presented works that spanned the Baroque, Galant, and Early Classical idioms while simultaneously shedding light on the scope of music created in the Bach family’s nearly 300 year prominence in Germanic Central Europe.
Continue reading Gallery concerts celebrate the Bach boys

St. James recreates Medieval service

By R.M. Campbell

Of all the rituals of the Roman Catholic church, one of the most mysterious and profound, and perhaps less known, must be its Tenebrae service traditionally said the last three days of Holy Week. St. James Cathedral held it Wednesday night with all due solemnity and dark eloquence.

The ambience of the church set the tone. As one entered, the lights were low and shadowy — dark actually: “Tenebrae” means “darkness” in Latin. There was a soft glow to the church including backlighting of the glass windows above the doors and the rich decor of the stained windows in the clerestory. There was a handful of candles principally six mounted high around the altar and 15 on a candelabra and a pair flanking the chair of the Very Reverend Michael G. Ryan, pastor of the cathedral, who presided. The musical forces were spare. They included the excellent singers of two of the church’s vocal ensembles, organist Joseph Adam and viola da gambist Margriet Tindemans. The forces in that large space were small but everything could be heard, and it had meaning.

The singing, chanting, praying and speaking were seamlessly coordinated, sounds going back and forth from the transept to the apse. The darkness appeared to make everything more of another world than this one. After the reading of each psalm one of the large candles was snuffed out. Slowly other lights were dimmed and eventually only 15 were left . They too, two by two, after the Benedictus Dominus was sung, were extinguished by servers leaving only the top one left. Then that was snuffed out, leaving the church in silence and complete darkness to commemorate the effect of the death of Christ. The only sound was that of clappers, which are used throughout the world in all sorts of rites and religious services as well as theater, The effect was haunting. At the very end, the candle at the top of the candelabra was relit to signify that Christ had risen. People left the church quietly.

Intiman opens its first season with Kate Whoriskey

By R.M. Campbell

The opening gambit of any artistic director is often a sign of what to come in terms of style and intent. And so, one looks at Clifford Odets’ “Paradise Lost,” which opened last weekend at Intiman Theater, with considerable interest, for it is the inaugural gesture of the company’s new artistic director Kate Whoriskey, even though she did not stage the play.

Odets is a fixture in the American theater scene, not only with his plays but also his deep involvement in the Group Theatre. “Paradise Lost,” premiered the same year, 1935, as his most celebrated play, “Awake and Sing!” but it is not done so often. There is reason for that. It is play of problems in character development and narrative thrust. Yet the play projects a resonance in today’s world, which must have been the attraction to Whoriskey who makes a point about the play’s relevance. Indeed it has a social conscience, like most of Odets’ plays, and a little bit of a polemic, but its strength lies in its characters and how they deal, or fail to deal, with their personal circumstances in the Great Depression. The years — 1933-1936 — in which the play is set, are deep in that Depression with no sunlight just around the corner. These characters can be vastly irritating, self-serving, self-pitying, self-destructive and tiring. They are all beaten down except Clara Gorden, played with such acumen by Lori Larsen. Collectively, they are over the top with their neuroses. Still one wishes them a better life.
Continue reading Intiman opens its first season with Kate Whoriskey

If you had to choose: which piece for chorus and orchestra would you like to hear?

The performance of “Daphnis et Chloe” at the Seattle Symphony put me in a hopeful mood. What other seldom heard, secular pieces for chorus and orchestra could the SSO perform next?

By no means is the following poll an exhaustive list of the many pieces composed for chorus and orchestra. But, if you had to pick just one, which would you like to hear the SSO or another local ensemble perform?

Bach to the future

Bach, of course, anchored the program, with his Suite No. 2 in B Minor, BWV 1067, and his Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. For the second half, music director Christophe Chagnard chose one of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ tributes to the composer, the “Bachianas Brasileiras No 5” in an arrangement for string orchestra by J. Krance; and lastly, a work by one of Bach’s contemporaries and friends, Telemann’s “Don Quixote” Suite.
Continue reading Bach to the future

Consider me a Dausgaard partisan


Whether you fell in love with Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony or loathed it, found a new favorite in Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony or still prefer the Second, Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard had one of the toughest programs to conduct of any of the season’s guest conductors. Based on the audience’s reaction after each piece, it can be said he succeeded.

Abbado might have Dutilleux in April, but Beethoven’s Fifth will have everyone flashing “V for victory” before the night is done. Even the Seattle Symphony debut of John Adams’ Harmonielehre under the baton of Robert Spano has the help of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto.

Dausgaard not only had to contend with the least interesting of Rachmaninov’s piano concertos (the fourth) but he also had the job of guiding the orchestra and (what I am sure was) a skeptical audience through Witold Lutoslawski’s slithering, slinking, and shimmering symphony from 1992. The score alone is enough to make lesser conductors and musicians hurl themselves into Puget Sound.

Under normal circumstances, closing the night with a Sibelius symphony – if it is the First or Second Symphony – would be an automatic hit. Dausgaard picked the Fifth instead, a symphony that begins with two movements that can be problematic for orchestra and audience, but ends with a third movement that is both dignified and resplendent.

Continue reading Consider me a Dausgaard partisan

Questioning the conductors: Thomas Dausgaard

Conductor Thomas Dausgaard

This week’s Seattle Symphony concerts could be a sleeper hit of the 2009/2010 season. Thomas Dausgaard is in town to lead the orchestra in performances of Sibelius’ Fifth and Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony. These two 20th century view of the symphony bookend a 20th Century concerto – Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto. Sibelius’s Fifth isn’t as well known by orchestras and audiences as his First and Second Symphonies. Rachmaninov’s middle piano concertos – the Second and Third – hold sway over most with their long, aching melodies. And Lutoslawski, for all of his inventiveness, has failed to win the hearts and minds of most classical audiences.  But, take all three pieces together and you have a program that is intellectually and aurally exciting.

What a concert like this needs is a conductor like Thomas Dausgaard. In my thirty minute chat with Dausgaard, he impressed me with his belief in the three pieces on his program, and especially Sibelius and Lutoslawski. Dausgaard gives the impression of someone who likes to get inside the music he is conducting; he’s not just counting time. If anyone can win converts to Sibelius’ Fifth and Lutoslawski’s Fourth it is Dausgaard.

Our conversation covered a lot of ground.  We talked about Sibelius’ symphonic narrative, Danish composers other than Carl Nielsen, and what Lutoslawski would have said in response to Mahler’s assertion that the symphony must be like the world.

Thomas Dausgaard talks with TGN from Zach Carstensen on Vimeo.

KING FM makes the switch (in 2011)

KING FM has finally decided to make the switch. And it only took six decades.

In a press release yesterday, Seattle’s classical radio station announced they would become a listener-supported station effective July 2011. Since 1948, when the station was founded by Dorothy Stimson Bullitt, it has used a commercial broadcasting model.

The switch to a listener-supported model isn’t surprising. Many commercial radio stations and especially commercial classical stations have struggled in recent years. Stations can point to a variety of reasons for their difficulty, but the one-two punch of a faltering economy and new audience measurement methodologies crippled the remaining commercial classical stations across the country.  The biggest victim of the changing reality for commercial classical radio was WQXR which was absorbed by WNYC late last year.

Continue reading KING FM makes the switch (in 2011)

PNB adds another work by Dove

Jordan Pacitti and soloist James Moore in Ulysses Dove’s Serious Pleasures. Photo Angela Sterling

By R. M. Campbell

Not only is Peter Boal, in his few short years as artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, adding new works of George Balanchine to the company’s repertory, he has also been introducing pieces by Twyla Tharp, Christopher Wheeldon, Jerome Robbins, Jiri Kylian, Mark Morris and Alexei Ratmansky (next season). An impressive list by any measure. He has also been bringing in ballets of Ulysses Dove, an American choreographer, who died too early in 1996.
Continue reading PNB adds another work by Dove