Category: Seattle

To accommodate the new site server and additional content that is being added to this blog, I am redesigning the layout.  Hopefully, the blog will be more functional.  Don’t be alarmed if the site looks different over the next few days, I promise it will settle down soon.

The Seattle Opera is doing it again; appealing to a younger demographic with a creative way to frame opera in a way that is understandable to most twenty and thirty-somethings.  In conjunction with this summer’s production of “the Ring,” the Seattle Opera is launching a  contest for one lucky winner to be part of a ten minute documentary – “Confessions” –  tracking the latest production of “the Ring.”

Continue reading “Confessions”

I had never before heard three of the offerings on the Seattle Symphony program this week, yet the composers are household words among classical musicians: Schubert and Liszt. Perhaps it’s weaseling to say I didn’t know Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy.” I do, but not in this transcription by Liszt where he has added an orchestral component to a solo piano work

The first measures are disconcerting. The orchestra takes the initial piano measures and feels heavy in comparison. However, in general Liszt has kept the orchestra in a relatively supportive role and left the piano part alone. At a couple of points his intervention enhances the original: an exquisite duet between solo cello and piano and an equally lovely one for piano with bassoon. Liszt’s is a romantic interpretation of Schubert, but it worked with the sensitive playing of pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin, who never lost sight of Schubert, but played as though he was Liszt.

Continue reading The Seattle Symphony’s successful pairing: Schubert and Liszt

The Esoterics close out their season this Saturday and Sunday with “Memoriam.”  The program features contemporary, choral music that honors people who have risked their lives and died.  One of the pieces on the program, “Meanwhile,” is an Esoterics commission remembering the ten year anniversary of the Columbine shooting.  Also on the program are pieces by Dominick Argento, John Muehleisen, and Eric Banks, the founder of the Esoterics.  You can listen to a podcast about the concert here(April 25 and 26).

Tomorrow, the Serious Quartet continues the Seattle Symphony’s musician driven chamber series.  The recital happens in the Nordstrom Recital Hall.  (April 24).

Dennis Russell Davies continues his residency with the Seattle Symphony this weekend and is joined by pianist Marc Andre Hamelin for a concert of Schubert and Liszt.  Liszt’s play on the Dies Ire theme “Totentanz” and Liszt’s setting of the “Wanderer Fantasy” will give Hamelin plenty of opportunity for keyboard fireworks(April 23-26).

The Early Music Guild presents Ensemble Caprice (April 25).

The last time Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman was in Seattle, he played for an encore the last movement of the Sonata No.2 by his compatriot Grazyna Bacewicz. The performance was memorable, so much so that at Meany Theater last night, he changed the program by request of those who heard him before, to include the whole sonata.

It was the highlight of the evening, the last concert of the year on the UW President’s Piano Series. Bacewicz would have been 100 this year and wrote under the constraints of communism, but like Shostakovich, she wrote on many levels and in her music one can hear many of the same themes of war, anxiety, anger, sorrow and caution, but also peace.

Continue reading Zimerman brings Bacewicz and Szymanowski to Meany Hall

Recorder virtuoso Matthias Maute would be a phenomenon in any century.  Maute and Ensemble Caprice bring their creativity and fearlessness to Seattle this Saturday, as part of the Early Music Guild’s International Series.

It’s music that touches 3 centuries — maybe even more because it continues an unbroken oral tradition of the Romany people.

Ensemble Caprice  reconstructs music from a collection of gypsy melodies published in 1730 and blends it with court music of the 17th and 18th centuries.  Composers like Telemann and Vivaldi were intrigued by the gypsy music of the period.  In fact, Telemann wrote in his autobiography that listening to gypsy music for one week could inspire a serious composer for the rest of his life.

Media producer Marty Ronish talks with Matthias Maute about this repertoire.

Early Music Guild of Seattle presents Ensemble Caprice

Saturday, Apr. 25th

8 pm, Town Hall, Seattle

Tickets here.

The Simple Measures folks were at it again – deconstructing classical music and providing an up close, music making experience – this time they were helped by acclaimed harpist Yolonda Kondonassis.  “High Strung – The Celestial Dimension,” was the final concert of Simple Measure’s 2008/2009 season.  With a name like “The Celestial Dimension” and Kondonassis in town, the focus was on the harp.  However, Kondonassis demonstrated the full range of the harp rather than merely evoke heavenly delights and angels.

The program was made up of pieces Kondonassis has a strong connection to, especially Carlos Salzedo’s “Song in the Night.”  As Kondonassis explained, Salzedo approached the harp differently than other composers.  He experimented with technique and the full capabilities of the instrument.  He sought to bring to light the instrument’s virtuosic potential. Kondonassis has recorded a number of Salzedo’s pieces for the Telarc label over the years.  And, Sunday, she cited Salzedo as a model for how she approaches playing and commissioning new pieces for the instrument.

Continue reading Not just heaven and angels; Kondonassis delivers it all

Just as Cervantes’ Don Quixote vacillates between reality and chimera, so does the Don shift seamlessly between man and puppet in Northwest Puppet Center’s production of Telemann’s opera “Don Quixote,” which opened Friday night and continues through next weekend.

NW Puppets departs from the usual production where a small stage contains puppets manipulated from above or below or by shadow against a backdrop, the puppeteers unseen.

Continue reading Don Quixote is alive and well at Northwest Puppet Center

A few years ago the Seattle Symphony Orchestra began to vary the nature of its conventional concert format with residencies of noted musicians, sometimes a conductor, sometimes a soloist. Instead of one program performed several times in a week, there are several programs spread over a couple of weeks. They have been, in the main, a success.

This week the noted American conductor, Dennis Russell Davies, who has made his career mostly in Europe, is spending some time in Seattle. He is not the first musician, not to mention choreographers and designers, who have found European soil, particularly Germany and France, conducive to their creativity. Although Davies has spent time in New York and California and St Paul, the bulk of his career has been in Germany and Austria, leading orchestras in Stuttgart, Vienna, Bonn, Basel and Saarbrucken. He is currently music director and chief conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz and Linz Opera in Austria and the Basel Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland.

His repertory is broad, with plenty of the canon in his repertory. But he is also known for his commitment to music of the past century and the present one. His program Thursday is a good example. He began with Schumann’s Fourth Symphony — a place where most conductors conclude their programs — and continued with a piano concerto by Alan Hovhaness and the suite from Bartok’s ballet score “The Miraculous Mandarin.”

The Schumann was least successful reading of the evening, the Hovhaness the most idiosyncratic and the Bartok, the most forceful.

It is easy to think of Schumann’s symphonies as old friends — dependable and welcome but not always so dynamic. That is the case when performances slip into the routine or simply lack imagination. Davies’  account of the score was stolid, dull and unyielding. There was almost no dynamic variation and the most wondrous of melodies fell lifeless onto the stage. It was rhythmically inert, something I would not has expected from Davies who has given other scores remarkable life. Alas.

Scored for piano and strings, the Hovhaness concerto, “Lousadzak” (“The Coming of Light”), came early in the composer’s long career It was premiered in 1945 in Boston, with Hovhaness as the soloist. Maki Namekawa, who often collaborates with Davies, was the soloist. The Hovhaness  idiom, unlike no other 20th-century composer, was readily grasped by Namekawa, which is to her credit. She invested her considerable technique and interpretative facility to the effort. Even with that, the piece fell rather flat. It is repetitive and never seemed to go anywhere in particular, at least to my ears.

“The Miraculous Mandarin” has a fascinating history. Because of its lurid subject matter, the one-act ballet was banned in the early days. Eventually it found its way onto the main stages of Europe with many different productions, a record for the time. It was done at New York City Ballet in 1951. Only a couple of years ago Donald Byrd, artistic director of Spectrum Dance Theatre in Seattle, produced the ballet with his own choreography at the Moore Theatre. Needless to say, there was no Seattle Symphony in the pit. The alternative was a chamber ensemble of unusual scoring.

Say what one will about the libretto, it is dramatic and powerful. So is Bartok’s music. Davies gave the piece its full due on Thursday. The music-making was decisive, full of color and had unquestioned authority. One can only dream of hearing such a musical presence accompanying the dance.

Tickets for the remaining performances of the “Miraculous Mandarin” and “Lousadzak” can be purchased at www.seattlesymphony.org. Be sure to read Zach Carstensen’s take on Thursday’s performance here.