Category: Seattle

Puget Sound’s best Messiah

It won’t be very long before concert stages will be filled with music customarily associated with the holidays.  Last year, I asked who had the best holiday concert.  The winner was Seattle Pro Musica. 

For better or worse, Handel’s Messiah is standard holiday music. I want to know, who has the best Messiah? Are the SSO’s modern instruments, size, and chorus preferable to Seattle Baroque’s historically informed style? What about Orchestra Seattle’s hybrid approach? Is the Bellevue Phil the cream of the crop or do the PNB musicians that make up the Auburn Symphony do it better?

Who does the best Messiah in the region?(polls)

The Mathematics of the Pathetique

Tchaikovsky and John Luther Adams don’t appear to have much, if anything in common. More than 100 years separate the two in time. They are separated by continents and countries. Their styles are hugely dissimilar too. Tchaikovsky epitomizes the lushness of the romantic period and Adams pushes the boundaries of music with his experimentations in sound. By accident this weekend, two concerts, one featuring Adams’s percussion piece Mathematics of Resonant Bodies and the other, which ended with Tchaikovsky’s melancholy Sixth Symphony, showed me that there is at least one common feature.

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Quarter notes: upcoming

Composer John Luther Adams

The Seattle Symphony is performing Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony this weekend with guest conductor Arild Remmereit.  Remmereit and I had a good conversation about Tchaikovsky and Mozart a week ago Friday.  The musicians I spoke with are excited to work with him again, remembering his successful concert with the orchestra three years ago.  Be sure to watch the video I made with Remmereit to get the true measure of this conductor’s ideas on Mozart and Tchaikovsky.  On Saturday, Avant Garde composer John Luther Adams will be at the Chapel performance space in Wallingford.  Pianist Christina Valdes and percusionist Steve Schick will be playing a selection of pieces for piano and percussion.  Adams’s music is a cross between the meditative sounds of Morton Feldman and the crashing, upheavals often found in Iannis Xenakis’s works.  If new music isn’t to your liking, the Early Music Guild presents Musica ad Rhenum with Baroque flutist Jed Wentz on Saturday.  Also on Saturday, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra presents its very first complete program which showcases Andrew Sumitani playing Bruch’s First Violin Concerto, Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 (London), and Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 (Prague).  Finally, on Tuesday Lise de la Salle returns to Meany Hall for a program of Beethoven and Prokofiev.

Ghosts, Gargoyles, and an Emperor

 

Two concerts this past weekend exemplified Seattle’s diverse classical music scene. Saturday night, acclaimed, local flutist Paul Taub celebrated thirty years in Seattle with an anniversary concert at the Cornish College of the Arts. The next day, the musicians of Philharmonia Northwest, one of the regions many talented community and semi-professional orchestras, tuned their instruments and played their second concert of the 2009/2010 season. The concert featured Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony and Beethoven’s daunting Emperor Concerto for piano with Robert Silverman at the keyboard.

Only a few years ago, a weekend including these two concerts and performances by the Seattle Symphony playing downtown would have been considered busy. Today, a Paul Taub recital and a Philharmonia Northwest concert compete with numerous other classical music organizations. On this particular weekend, my interests were divided among at least six different performances. Since I only have one set of ears, I had to choose.

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Review: Music Northwest, masterpieces from Eastern Europe

By: Gigi Yellen

Performing as the ensemble Europa, the trio of pianist Jane Harty, violinist Leonid Keylin and cellist Mara Finkelstein today played the most traditional of this season’s Music Northwest programs (www.musicnorthwest.org).. This makes the second time this week I’ve seen these string players in concert with a series artistic director, a visionary woman, at the keyboard. Jane Harty directs Music Northwest; Keylin and Finkelstein performed earlier in the week with pianist Mina Miller, artistic director of Music of Remembrance.

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Seattle Philharmonic – November 15, 2009: Ravel & Debussy

The Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra opened its 2009/2010 season Sunday with music by Ravel and Debussy in a delightful concert that was the perfect refuge on a dark rainy afternoon.  Conductor Adam Stern assembled a program of mostly little-known works culminating in the ever crowd-pleasing Boléro .

The selections allowed each section of the orchestra to shine.  The brass opened both halves of the concert with short fanfares: on the first half the fanfare from Ravel’s L’Evantail de Jeanne , and on the second two fanfares from Debussy’s The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.  The low brass’ opening of the Debussy was particularly striking.  The principal woodwind players (flute Sharon Snel, oboe Donna Onat, clarinet Marianne Lacaille, and bassoon Jacob Kauffman) each shone in Debussy’s Petit Suite, as they did again in the Boléro, and in numerous solo moments in between.  Soft horn chorale passages in Debussy’s King Lear were particularly lovely. Continue reading Seattle Philharmonic – November 15, 2009: Ravel & Debussy

Review: Paul Taub Celebrates 30 Years of Music-Making in Seattle

By: R. M. Campbell

The flute is not a traditional major solo instrument but Taub, by virtue of hard work, a lot of talent and a nose for provocative new work, has nearly made it one. He is often in concert in Seattle, either by himself or with others, as well as traveling in the United States and Europe to give concerts. He came to Seattle and Cornish in 1979, after studies at Rutgers University and the California Institute of the Arts with such noted musicians as Michel Debost, Samuel Baron, Marcel Moyse and Rpbert Aitken. Early on he demonstrated an avid interest in contemporary music, a path he has pursued with vigor and intelligence.

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