Tag: Review

Russian National Orchestra plays glorious concert Wednesday

By R.M. Campbell

The Russian National Orchestra spends a good share of its collective life on the road. Since its founding, in 1990, the ensemble has spurned government funding, perhaps unique in all of Europe, in favor of American style private funding. Inevitably it has an international board that insist on an international profile.

It is not a stranger to Seattle. One of the great virtues of Benaroya Hall has been that there is now time and space for orchestras other than the Seattle Symphony. They are a principal highlight of the SSO season, some orchestras greater than others admittedly, but none is shabby. The Russian National Orchestra is among the best. Led by its founding music director, the pianist Mikhail Pletnev, the ensemble did a mostly Russian program Wednesday night: Tchaikovsky’s “Elegy” and Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony. The concerto du jour belonged to Dvorak which seems almost Russian because of its long identification with the late Mikhail Rostropovich. The cellist at Benaroya was Russian — a young virtuoso of great talent, Sergey Antonov.

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A Simple Measure of good music can be satisying…

By Philippa Kiraly

One of its biggest audiences ever filled the little Chapel at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford Monday night, for the last of Simple Measure’s Fire-themed concerts. (We had Earth earlier this season, the Air group take place in April, the Water ones in May.)

It’s possible part of the draw was the return visit to Seattle of Alex Klein, the brilliant Brazilian oboist who taught at UW in the 1990s, then became principal oboist of the Chicago Symphony until he contracted focal dystonia, a neurological condition which caused weakness and unreliability in two of his fingers.

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Cappella Romana devotes an evening to Serbian Orthodox music

By R.M. Campbell

The Puget Sound region has an abundance of choral groups, from very small ensembles to large masses of singers. While they vary in quality, most are more than respectable and some first-class. They cover the repertory in astonishing breadth and depth.

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Chamber sized Mahler is part of “Romancing the Muse”

Douglas Boyd's recording of Stein's Mahler Four.

It isn’t surprising Erwin Stein picked Mahler’s Fourth Symphony to reduce for chamber ensemble for performance in Schoenberg’s Society of Private Musical Performance. The symphony is Mahler’s smallest in scope even if the impetus is other-worldly. As with all of Mahler’s symphonies, the composer sought to encompass themes larger than himself even if they are somewhat obscured. On the one hand, there are moments of childlike innocence suggesting naive love. This is the approach embraced by the Northwest Sinfonietta’s music director Christoph Chagnard. An alternative view, is that the symphony reveals the infinite pleasures of heaven, exemplified by the fourth movement — a setting of “the Heavenly Life” for soprano from the Youth’s Magic Horn.

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Barber and Brahms are the program this weekend at Benaroya

R.M. Campbell

There weren’t many people at Bernaroya Hall Thursday night (alas): The music deserved better.

The two highlights were Stefan Jackiw in Barber’s Violin Concerto and Arnold Schoenberg’s orchestral transcription of Brahms’ G Minor Piano Quartet.

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Ohlsson plays the second of his two all-Chopin concerts

By R. M. Campbell

Garrick Ohlsson’s first of two concerts devoted solely to Chopin — to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth and Olhsson’s 40th anniversary of winning the prestigious Chopin competition in Warsaw — was a brilliant affair, what one has come to expect from this pianist in his long and distinguished career. His second concert Tuesday night at Meany Hall was even more remarkable.

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Dynamic Schumann at the SSO

Busoni, Schumann and Strauss was the line-up of composers on this week’s SSO subscription concert. Ferruccio Busoni’s Turandot Suite opened the program followed by Richard Strauss’ youthful Violin Concerto. James Ehnes was the guest soloist. The night closed with Robert Schumann’s 3rd Symphony “Rhenish.” For most of the audience, the pieces chosen — with the exception of Schumann’s symphony — were probably unfamiliar. While unfamiliarity can yield surprises and new discoveries, this wasn’t the case with the recent batch of SSO concerts.

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Review: Ancestors of the Guitar

By Lorin Wilkerson

In a concert entitled ‘The Ancestors of the Guitar,” Portland lutenist/guitarist Hideki Yamaya presented an insightful look into three early instruments on Friday night, January 29th at the Little Church in NE Portland. Despite a delayed start as the artist waited for latecomers (there was a mistake in The Oregonian directing listeners to the Old Church downtown), the small hall was nearly full as Yamaya played several sets, first on the vihuela, then on a Renaissance lute, and finally a Baroque guitar. Throughout the performance Yamaya put the intimate setting to good use, taking time to set the works in their historical and social contexts, frequently interpolating vignettes on the evolution of the guitar and other plucked string instruments.

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Auryn Quartet Makes Auspicious Debut

By any count, today is a golden age for string quartets. Dozens of groups of international standing ply the concert platform on several continents. One of those, founded nearly 30 years ago, made a belated debut at Meany Hall Thursday night.

The Auryn Quartet began life in Germany and is now based in Cologne. It has toured widely, in Europe and North and South America as well as Australia and Asia. The group’s recordings are equally impressive with complete cycles of the Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms quartets and Haydn to be finished just down the road. All together more than 150 string quartets have entered its repertory with about 100 chamber music works – trios to octets – performed with all sorts of eminent musicians and ensembles such as the Guarneri and Amadeus, with whom the Auryn studied, and the Prazak.

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