Noah Geller performs Bartok with David Robertson conducting. Brandon Patoc photo credit.
Sergei Rachmaninov was one of the most gifted and versatile composers of his generation. His music spanned a wide range of genres and forms, from piano pieces and songs to operas and orchestral works. His mastery of melody, harmony, and structure allowed him to create works that appealed to both the public and critics. But one night changed everything. His First Symphony, a daring and innovative work, was met with scorn at its premiere.
Rachmaninov had poured months of labor and love into this piece, and was left devastated and broken by the harsh judgment of his peers and mentors. His once-brilliant creative spark was smothered by a deep abyss of depression and self-doubt, which held him captive for three long years. Although he eventually recovered, the symphony almost vanished into obscurity, forever haunting the memory of its brilliant yet troubled composer.
At just twenty-two years old, Richard Strauss made a bold decision to shift his compositional focus away from traditional forms such as symphonies. At around the same time, heeding the advice of Johannes Brahms, Strauss traded in his cold North European surroundings for the temperate climate and impetuous lifestyle of Italy, where inspiration struck. It was there that Strauss composed his early work Aus Italien, which broke away from the two conservative symphonies he had produced to date. Each of the piece’s movements is programmatic, foreshadowing many of Strauss’ future works, including his first “hit” Don Juan. However, Aus Italien still adheres to a traditional, symphonic structure with four movements, with the tone and temper of the German symphony.
The last time Camille Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson and Delilah was heard in Seattle in 1965, Lyndon Johnson was in the White House and Seattle was basking in the afterglow of hosting the World’s Fair two years prior, with its new Space Needle adding a distinctive touch to the cityscape. That 1965 run featured a husband-and-wife duo: James McCracken in the role of Samson and Sandra Warfield as the temptress Delilah, whose vindictive quest ultimately devastates Dagon’s temple. Their performance was for more than half a century the Seattle Opera’s sole production of this lurid work — that is until General Director Christina Scheppelmann revived Saint-Saëns’ biblical epic as a concert performance for the 2022–2023 season.
The names Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are practically synonymous with Western music’s Classical Period. But while we may be familiar with the usual suspects in their repertoires, the Seattle Symphony’s recent concert program featuring pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet promised to be a refreshing take on these masters with a program featuring three of their lesser-known piano concerti.
Bavouzet and the orchestra opened the program with Franz Joseph Haydn’s Piano Concerto in F Major. Audiences don’t hear Haydn’s piano concerti as much as his pieces for violin and cello. Some of this may be a result of their ambiguous origins, but also the simple geniality of the writing which exudes courtly affability. But Bavouzet’s interpretation avoided these pitfalls, instead emphasizing the wit and energy of Haydn’s writing in a performance that felt like a true partnership with the orchestra.
Concertos for electric violin are not common, but they are becoming more so. Established American composers — such as John Adams and Terry Riley — have written concertos for the instrument, but so too have newer voices like Brett Dean. After a world premiere performance this past weekend by the Seattle Symphony, we can add Mexican composer and guitarist Enrico Chapela to this exclusive but growing list. The orchestra and Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, assisted by the composer, performed his new concerto for the instrument (Antiphaser) in Benaroya Hall. It had been co-commissioned by the Seattle Symphony which, even during its current artistic transition, has kept up an aggressive program of commissioning and performing new works.
Chapela describes Antiphaser as a cosmic thought experiment: what would someone see from the moon during an eclipse? His own eclectic musical background guides him in this endeavor to describe that which no one has witnessed. The son of a chemist and a physicist, he thought he would be a scientist as well, until he discovered the electric guitar, and music’s pull ultimately won out. Chapela pays homage to the scientific lineage in his family with compositions like Antiphaser and MAGNETAR (an earlier concerto for electric cello). But his style also draws in popular rock and metal influences with homage to the ‘masters’ whose works also expanded what was to be expected by orchestras and performers.
The most recent Seattle Symphony concert was once envisioned as a matchmaking session between a rising maestro in Jonathon Heyward and an orchestra in search of a new leader. In 2019, Heyward had made an impressive debut with the SSO. With youth on his side, a resume of lauded concerts, and a taste for interesting repertoire, rumors swirled that Heyward could be a good fit. But after Heyward’s return to Seattle had been planned, the Baltimore Symphony announced that he would succeed Marin Alsop as its music director.
That may have changed the calculus behind Heyward’s return to the podium, but not its tone or temper. As with his debut program with the Seattle Symphony — which blended Haydn and Holst with a new work by Hannah Kendall — Heyward mixed the familiar with the novel. The latter in this case took the form of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Cello Concerto, performed with aplomb by German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt. Salonen’s enigmatic description of the piece contrasts sharply with experiencing it live in concert, where energy radiates off the stage and fills the performance hall. Set in three movements, the structure is familiar enough, but belies a special intricacy that must be heard to be believed. An energetic opening movement precedes an introspective middle section that is rich with melodic lines for both the solo cello and flute accompaniment. The fast-paced final movement is more reminiscent of many of the standards in the cello concerto repertoire.
Port Angeles is an unlikely location to hear world class chamber music performances. The town sits on the north shore of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, its downtown hugging the Strait of Juan de Fuca. To the south, the Olympic Mountains rise above the city.
It grew rapidly back when timber was a driving economic force for the region, but today its growth is driven by geography. Balanced between sea and mountain, it is a top tourist destination and the seat of government for a sprawling county. Recreation, agriculture and environmental rehabilitation are also major economic drivers in this arguably ‘post-timber’ era, and signs of all of dot the Port Angeles downtown and outskirts. But the transition has not been without pain: in some areas, vacant storefronts are conspicuous and streets are lined with battered motels and discount stores.
Next weekend Morlot takes a stab at his first Mahler with the Seattle Symphony. For this he chose Kindertotenlieder, one of Mahler’s sublime song cycles. So far I am loving Morlot’s choices. He isn’t going for typical anything.
Ludovic Morlot impressed again this week with a program that featured the smartly chosen Ameriques of Edgard Varese and Stravinsky’s classic ballet the Rite of Spring. As Morlot pointed out in the open rehearsal earlier in the week — Varese is to Stravinsky the way Beethoven is to Haydn. Ameriques’s homage to the Rite is overt, borrowing themes, rhythms, and mimicking solos. The Rite opens with a bassoon solo, Ameriques opens with a flute solo (bravo Seth Krimsky and Judy Kriewall).
Morlot seems to be focusing the orchestra on the fundamentals of their craft: rhythmic precision, dynamic range, color, and above all else the idea of an orchestra as a musical team. Ear splitting climaxes were a signature of the Schwarz era. Morlot’s climaxes in Ameriques were forceful without being painful to hear.
When the big moments came during Ameriques, there was always room for more sound, more energy. This paid huge dividends at the piece’s conclusion when Morlot pulled a massive, driving crescendo out of the orchestra. Chailly, Boulez, Dohnanyi, none of them in their recordings of the piece, achieve the same humongous sound and none of them match the drama of the work’s final bars.
Some might have thought pegging Ameriques at the end of the program created an anticlimactic concert experience. They would be wrong. The Rite of Spring is a popular piece and its rhythms, harmonies, and violence are part of the vocabulary of most classical music lovers. Putting a popular piece last always leaves the crowd satisfied. Varese’s vocabulary, however, isn’t far removed from Stravinsky. There are enough interesting fragments and repeated ideas to keep the piece interesting. As far as visceral listening experiences go, Varese wins easily. Hearing Varese and Stravinsky side-by-side I couldn’t help but wonder why we don’t hear Varese more often especially placed in the context of more familiar and warmly accepted contemporaries like Gershwin and Stravinsky.
If you like the Rite of Spring shaped by pathos, fury, and romantic fire then Morlot’s view of the piece probably wouldn’t have caused you to riot. Morlot’s performance was perhaps too tame for the piece, but just the right approach for an orchestra playing with the renewed clarity, focus, and shared musical goals of the SSO.
I hope Morlot gives the Rite another go in a few seasons. I’d be interested to hear if the conductor can generate more heat once he and the orchestra are more familiar with one another.
Today the SSO is opening its doors to the public with an open rehearsal of this weekend’s performance. We will get to watch Morlot and the orchestra tinker with the Rite of Spring and if we are lucky Edgard Varese’s Ameriques, which if the program notes are to be believed, will close out the concerts this weekend.
Gathering Note 