Category: Seattle

Neiman tackles Transcedental Etudes as part of SCMS festival

By R.M. Campbell

The winter season of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival, which celebrates its 30th season this summer, was always a splendid idea. It was the first venture outside the confines of Lakeside School. This wise expansion was followed by the addition of a summer Eastside venue at the Overlake School. Both have proven to be splendid additions to the core festival for artistic and financial reasons. Among its other attributes, the winter festival opened the doors of Nordstrom Recital Hall which became the summer home of the Seattle festival last year. The festival had the advantage of knowing exactly where it was going when it left the wretched acoustics of St. Nicholas Hall at Lakeside for Nordstrom, a vastly superior space in spite of its quirkiness.

There were four concerts over the weekend, beginning on Thursday evening and ending Sunday afternoon, all sold-out or nearly so. Repertory rarely went beyond the canon, but there were points of interest. The concert Saturday night was devoted to the piano trios of Johannes Brahms — talk about intellectual comfort on a winter’s day — and pianist Adam Neiman played all of the “Transcedental Etudes” of Franz Lizst over three days.
Continue reading Neiman tackles Transcedental Etudes as part of SCMS festival

Brahms, Brahms and more Brahms

By Philippa Kiraly

Last year at Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Winter Festival, one of the concerts was devoted to Schumann’s Piano Trios. It was such an enlightening and successful performance that artistic director Toby Saks asked the same three players to do a similar concert at this year’s festival with Brahms’ Piano Trios. The result was Friday night’s concert at Nordstrom Recital Hall.

In the pre-concert recital, pianist Alon Goldstein linked the two concerts with comments on the connections between the Schumanns and Brahms and the Schumanns’ reaction, as they wrote it themselves, when the young Brahms first came to their house to play for them. Then Goldstein played one of the pieces Brahms had performed on that occasion: the Scherzo in E-Flat Minor, Op. 4.
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Bright Sheng sits down with TGN

Bright Sheng, a name familiar to SSO audiences, sat down with the Gathering Note earlier this month. The composer was in town to hear the orchestra perform two of his short pieces. One of them, Prelude to Black Swan, a world premiere. The other, Shanghai Overture, a Seattle premiere.

Sheng came onto the classical music scene in the 1980’s when he and a number of other Chinese composers settled in New York to continue their studies and also begin careers. A young Gerard Schwarz noticed the composer, commissioned a piece for his chamber orchestra, and helped launch Sheng’s career.

Schwarz and Sheng’s creative partnership has resulted in countless commissions and premieres, and two stints for the composer as Seattle’s composer in residence.

Bright Sheng talks with TGN from gatheringnote on Vimeo.

It’s back; the Seattle Chamber Music Society Winter Festival returns to Nordstrom

By Philippa Kiraly

By this stage in the winter, many people are starved for more chamber music than they can get from the excellent but not so frequent performances on the UW Chamber Music Series. When Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Winter Festival arrives at Nordstrom Recital Hall, with four recitals and four concerts in four days by superb musicians in a small hall, where every move, every sound, every nuance from every player can be seen and heard close up, it’s like having a long-awaited feast.

This year’s festival began Thursday night. First up was the recital by pianist Adam Neiman, his first of three free recitals—last night, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon—of all of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes, S.139, in honor of the composer’s bicentennial.
Continue reading It’s back; the Seattle Chamber Music Society Winter Festival returns to Nordstrom

A Requiem or a celebration?

By Philippa Kiraly

Thursday’s Seattle Symphony concert at Benaroya Hall was beautifully designed. First, a world premiere based on Mozart themes, followed by one of the symphonies and one of the horn concertos, and after intermission, the composer’s last work, his Requiem (which was completed after his death and from his notes by Franz Suessmayr). In execution, the program’s first half was satisfying, the second half less so.

Daniel Brewbaker is one of the composers who received a Gund/Simonyi Farewell (to artistic director Gerard Schwarz) Commission, the balance of works being performed at concerts throughout this final season for the conductor. Brewbaker dedicated his “Be Thou the Voice” for soprano and orchestra to Schwarz.
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A different concept


By Philippa Kiraly

The Phiharmonia Quartett Berlin needs no introduction to devotees of chamber music, with more than a quarter century of performances behind it and a reputation as one of the best.

Playing at Meany Theater last night on the UW International Chamber Music Series, it gave performances of Shostakovich, Beethoven and Debussy that were arresting, thought provoking and illuminating.

Why? In Steven Lowe’s admirable program notes, he describes the first two works with words of force in several places, such as, “slashing, commanding chords” (Beethoven), “nightmarish, scratchy” (Shostakovich), and his notes seemed perfectly in tune with what we often expect from both these composers.
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Putting Louis XIV to bed

By Philippa Kiraly

This has to be one of Concert Spirituel’s more intriguing titles for a concert. Jeffrey Cohan, the moving spirit behind Concert Spirituel, found an early edition in the National Library of “Trios pour coucher du Roi,” and other contemporary works of similar type, and put together a charming program from them. Louis XIV lived from 1638-1715, at the same time as France nurtured a group of fine composers, of whom Jean-Baptiste Lully, Andre Danican Philidor l‘Aisne, Marin Marais, Michel Richard de la Lande, Pierre Gaultier de Marseille, Robert de Visee, Andre Cheron and Jacques Hotteterre were featured in this program.
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Seattle Opera’s “Barber” Opened a Two-week Run at McCaw Hall This Weekend

By R.M. Campbell

Most likely Seattle Opera has hit on its hands with Rossini’s ineffable comedy, “Il barbiere di Siviglia,” aka “The Barber of Seville,” which opened this weekend at McCaw Hall. Laughter, sometimes guffaws, sometimes giggling, was omnipresent, and the applause at the end was loud and enthusiastic. Seven more performances are scheduled, a sign the company believes there will be that kind of demand at the box office.

Is it necessary to say, once again, nearly 200 years after its premiere, that the opera is a masterpiece, one of the greatest comic operas ever written and the oldest opera of an Italian composer never to go out of the repertory. Cesare Sterbini’s libretto — based on a play by 18th-century French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron Beaumarchais — is a model of coherency, well-developed personalities, comic situations and marvelous humor that has not worn out its welcome. It remains fresh, even the old jokes. In a fit of genius, Rossini composed the opera in an astonishing two-three weeks, borrowing when necessary from previous works. The music ripples with memorable tunes — lyrical, original, ironic — uncommon elegance and rhythmic acuity.
Continue reading Seattle Opera’s “Barber” Opened a Two-week Run at McCaw Hall This Weekend

SMCO makes Benaroya debut with concert of German Masterworks

In less than two years Geoffrey Larson and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra (SMCO) have gone from a pick up ensemble of sorts, with an ever changing cast of musicians, to a core ensemble of 29 musicians that made its Benaroya Hall debut on January 15th. SMCO is an exceptionally talented group of musicians, that deserved it’s billing at the Nordstrom Recital Hall. The wind section is top notch, the French horns surprisingly good, and the string section — usually one of the weakest sections in a community orchestra like SMCO — better than average. Larson, although still learning the art of conducting, is an adroit leader who has a good understanding of musical shape, detail, and each piece’s greater message.
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Dean Williamson shares his thoughts on the Barber of Seville

Dean Williamson. Photo credit Bill Mohn Photography.

By Philippa Kiraly

Seattle Opera’s presentation of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” which begins Saturday,
is like old home week for many of the participants. Conductor Dean Williamson, until its untimely suspension last month (temporarily we hope) the Artistic Director of Opera Cleveland, was principal coach and pianist for Seattle Opera for twelve years from the middle 1990s and a major player in Seattle Opera Young Artists Program. He still lives in Bellevue.
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