Tag: Conductor

Questioning the conductors: Andrew Manze

Andrew Manze

The early music world has known Andrew Manze for years as an accomplished Baroque violinist, but the rest of the classical music world is getting acquainted with Manze as an assured, intelligent conductor working hard to establish a reputation as an interpreter of core 18th and 19th century repertory.  Manze’s recent Beethoven recordings have even been met with praise from David Hurwitz, a period performance skeptic of sorts.

For my interview with Manze yesterday, I was most curious about his view on the limits of historically informed performance practice (HIPP). We talked at length about vibrato, its appropriateness, and HIPP as it relates to 20th Century music. Manze’s concerts this week with the Seattle Symphony juxtapose music by Corelli and Tallis with Tippett, Elgar, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. 3/5 ths of the program was composed in the first half of the last century.

Manze struck me as an artist who lets HIPP guide his work on the podium without dominating it. He readily admits that Elgar wouldn’t sound like Elgar without vibrato and the contends (although not explicitly) that there hasn’t been a time before vibrato and a time after vibrato.

There was one shocking moment in the interview. As we talked about how he inhabits the musical world of the composers he is conducting, Manze admitted (after a question from me) that he doesn’t understand Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and other nationalist composers.

The SSO is split this week and for the next few weeks because of Seattle Opera’s premiere of Amelia.  Even with the smaller forces of the SSO Manze’s insights from the podium and a Baroque influenced program should make for good listening this week.

from on .

Come for the Rachmaninov, stay for the Adams

Robert Spano

Robert Spano’s debut with the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall started with Jean Sibelius’ Pohjola’s Daughter and ended with John Adams’ Harmonielehre. In between, Dejan Lejic, a rising, young Croatian pianist joined the orchestra for Sergey Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2. In the build-up to the concert, the orchestra’s marketing emphasized Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto (“Before there was Rock there was Rachmaninov” explains a poster outside Benaroya Hall) but the orchestra could have just as easily emphasized the two seldom played pieces on the program. “Come for the Rachmaninov, stay for the Adams” – maybe?

Strangely, Robert Spano, currently the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra never conducted the SSO at Benaroya Hall until this week. He is, however, a familiar face to many of the orchestra’s members and Seattle’s classical music community through his long relationship with the Seattle Opera. Seattle Opera has turned to Spano for two Ring cycles and Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd. These three projects presented challenges more cautious conductors would pass up. Spano, on the other hand, seems to live for difficult musical projects. On Thursday evening, Spano was given yet another challenging assignment – corralling an orchestra unfamiliar with Harmonielehre and Pohjola’s Daughter. Fortunately for the audience, Spano’s podium ability and command of the music guaranteed an exciting night.

Continue reading Come for the Rachmaninov, stay for the Adams

Questioning the conductors: Robert Spano

The first thing I noticed about Robert Spano when I met him for the first time last summer was the exhilarating energy that surrounds him. His mind races through more thoughts than are possible to keep up with. His wit is quick and sharp (often at my expense). In my conversations with Spano, good ideas and pending projects were the jumping off points for other ideas, and other projects he’d like to do sometime. Listen to Spano talk and you know classical music deserves broader attention from the public.

Spano and I reunited late Tuesday afternoon after the orchestra just finished a double rehearsal of John Adams’ epic symphonic work Harmonielehre. Before we started talking on tape, he genuinely raved about the quality of the SSO’s playing and had plenty of jokes to lighten the mood. Harmonielehre, is not an easy piece — as you can hear in the video posted bellow. And, it is even harder for an orchestra who has never performed it before — which is the case for the SSO.

I was excited to see Spano again and to experience his insight on a non-Ring musical project. But I was just as excited to hear about how he turned the Atlanta Symphony — an orchestra known for stodginess — into an inventive, forward looking cultural institution. His thoughts on the subject are interesting. He says plainly that in Atlanta “there is no ghetto for new music.” But, he also is realistic about his audience and what is needed to bring them along. There are plenty of examples that validate Spano’s careful attention to new music, his orchestra, and the audience. Jennifer Higdon’s Pulitzer Prize comes just as the Atlanta Symphony prepares for her concerto for the group Eighth Blackbird. Higdon is one of the composers Spano has championed during his time in Atlanta. Then there was the sell out concert performance of John Adams’ Dr. Atomic with the Atlanta Symphony last fall.

Shortly after the SSO announced the 2009/2010 season and long after Gerard Schwarz had announced his decision not to seek a contract extension, I wondered whether Spano might be a good fit for the SSO and the city. Only the search committee knows for sure the qualities being sought in the next music director. And, only the conductors (many of them guest conductors this season and next) in the mix for the position know if they are interested in the job. Yet, as I thought about it then and think about it now, Spano as music director appeals to me. His zeal for contemporary music, ability to help an orchestra grow, intellectual curiosity, and love for the city remind me of the qualities Michael Tilson Thomas brought to the San Francisco Symphony. Could Spano be Seattle’s MTT? We’ll have to wait and see.

from on .

Update

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Despite twists of fate, Seattle Symphony delivers

By Philippa Kiraly

It’s the hall mark of a professional orchestra that when unexpected obstacles threaten to overcome a concert, musicians rise above them and achieve a high level of performance anyway. This week the Seattle Symphony rose to the challenge and triumphed.

I’ve been at a performance elsewhere where the lights went out and the orchestra performed in the pitch dark—music it knew well, granted. I’ve heard firsthand about a travel performance where the musicians’ trunks didn’t arrive, and they played borrowed instruments in borrowed clothes (Moscow), and another where the stagehands didn’t like Americans and made the musicians dress and warm up on the loading dock ( Paris).

Continue reading Despite twists of fate, Seattle Symphony delivers

Questioning the conductors: Gilbert Varga

Gilbert Varga is in town this week to conduct the SSO in a series of concerts with Stravinsky and Beethoven as the focus. Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto will have the help of Horaccio Gutierrez; after the intermission it’s Stravinsky’s ballet Petrouchka.

Varga is the son of violin legend Tibor Varga. The younger Varga also played the violin but switched to conducting. Varga is or isn’t (depending on whether he is telling you his biography or you are reading the bio prepared by his agents) a newbie to North American concert halls. Regardless, his North American career has picked up considerably during the last decade, and he is regularly making stops at the continent’s leading orchestras.

Varga’s claim to fame, perhaps, comes from his commanding baton technique. It is aggressive, imposing, and precise. You can get a sense of his craft by watching this video of him .

My conversation with Varga on this point reminded me of an old measure the writer and composer Virgil Thomson used to ask when evaluating a new piece of music: is it merely good clock work or can it actually tell time too?  Applied to Varga, is there a vision and inspiration behind his surgically precise slicing?

I am not able to attend the concerts this weekend (traveling), so I will leave this last point for audiences to judge.

from on .

Ludovic Morlot to replace Roberto Abbado

Roberto Abbado has withdrawn from his upcoming appearance with the SSO.  In his place, the orchestra is bringing back Ludovic Morlot.  Morlot was last here in October when he conducted a concert of Martinu and Haydn.  For that concert, the orchestra was split with the opera.  This time, Morlot will have the benefit of the whole orchestra as he leads the group in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Henri Dutilleux’s Cello Concerto with Xavier Phillips as the cello soloist.

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.

Questioning the conductors: Vassily Sinaisky

My series of interviews with the guest conductors taking the SSO podium continues with Vassily Sinaisky. Sinaisky wrapped up a series of four concerts with the SSO this weekend that paired Brahms’ Double Concerto for cello and violin and Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe.” This program is a departure, of sorts, for Sinaisky. In his previous engagements with the orchestra, Russian music has figured prominently on his programs. Of course, when I asked Sinaisky about this he didn’t see the program as a departure.

I caught up with Sinaisky immediately after the Friday night performance. I arrived a bit early at Benaroya Hall, and the SSO’s public relations manager kindly took me backstage and we watched in rapt attention the final ten minutes or so of “Daphnis et Chloe.” Even with Benaroya’s thick stage doors, you could feel the music vibrating through the floor and walls (how cool!)

Once Sinaisky composed himself, we chatted about the SSO, Russian conductors and non-Russian repertory, rehearsal methods, and record stores. We also talked about his ongoing Franz Schmidt symphony cycle with the Malmo Symphony for the Naxos label. When the final two disks are released this year, it will be only the second complete cycle every recorded of these Mahler and Bruckner inspired symphonies.

from gatheringnote on Vimeo.