Tag: Review

SCMS Summer Festival opens new season in new hall

James Ehnes

By R.M. Campbell

The Seattle Chamber Music Festival, which opened its 29th season Monday night, has a long, distinguished history. For nearly all of its 28 years, it has been located at the Lakeside School. The New England-style prep school informed the festival a few years ago that it was claiming summer usage of its concert hall, throwing the administration into a search for an alternative. Nordstrom Recital Hall was always a good possibility, in terms of size and acoustical properties. The drawback was its urban setting in contrast to the pastoral idyll of the Lakeside campus.

The opening concert in the new venue proved what a good choice the festival made. The house was nearly full, with 100 more seats than at Lakeside. Even the pre-concert recital was packed. The festival has grown considerably from a handful of weeks to a month of concerts, with an extension at Overlake School on the Eastside and Winter Festival in January, also at Nordstrom. There is still pre-concert dining and free broadcasts outside the hall on the Benaroya property. Most important the acoustics are so much better — greater clarity and richness — than St. Nicholas which are marginal at best.
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Bernstein and Schuman close out SSO season, Bernstein festival, highlighting Schwarz’s legacy

William Schuman

To close the Seattle Symphony’s current season, Schwarz assembled a program of Leonard Bernstein and William Schuman works. This season finale also closes out the Seattle Celebrates Bernstein festival — a city wide effort to honor the 20th anniversary of Bernstein’s death. Personal struggle has been a theme in season finales over the last few seasons. With the help of Schwarz and the SSO, audiences have probed Mahler’s despairing Sixth Symphony and last year Aaron Jay Kernis’ pleading Third Symphony, a world premiere. Leonard Bernstein’s personal torment, doubt, and faith, embodied by his Second Symphony, were the fundamental qualities of Friday’s struggle.

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The Onyx Chamber Players end their season with Haydn and Mendelssohn at Town Hall

By Dana Wen

One of the great joys of chamber music is the conversation that unfolds between the musicians on stage. Each performer is given a chance to contribute to the musical dialogue in a very prominent way. In such an intimate environment, the personality of each musician inevitably emerges. Sometimes the going gets rough, and personalities will clash. But other times, especially with a group of musicians who have been playing together for a while, watching a performance can feel like sitting in on a lively conversation between old friends. When this happens, it’s a treat for the performers and the audience alike.
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Barber’s songs take center stage at the Good Shepherd Center

In this, the Barber anniversary year, mezzo-soprano Janna Wachter paid homage to the creative partnership of Samuel Barber and his long time partner Gian Carlo Menotti with a recital of songs, piano works, and chamber operas by the two composers. Wachter’s Saturday evening tribute concert on June 19th was a first for the season. With the exception of The Esoterics, no other local ensemble has delved into Barber’s music for voice or vocal ensembles. And, to my knowledge no one has explored Barber’s formidable songs until this Wachter’s recital this past Saturday.

For her recital, Wachter enlisted the help of a number of local musicians. Roger Nelson provided confident accompaniment throughout the night. While the voices changed, Nelson’s contributions were consistently reliable. Nelson even took the spotlight himself on a couple of occasions playing Barber’s character shifting Nocturne and Menotti’s own Nocturne with searching aplomb.

The best and worst of the night were reserved for A Hand of Bridge and Knoxville Summer 1915. To close the evening, Wachter showed Unabridged, Curtis Taylor’s movie reproduction of A Hand of Bridge. Eric Banks and Glen Guhr sang roles in the chamber opera along with Wachter and Avinger. These four card players represent the composer’s inner circle. Each singer takes turns exploring the personal world of the card player they depict. Thoughts range from the vacuous to the perverse. Taylor’s visuals were a witty compliment to the four singers and the libretto. Taylor’s movie was the night’s high point. By contrast, Anneliese von Goerken’s rendition of Knoxville Summer 1915 was the night’s low-point. You would expect, in a small space like the Chapel at the Good Shepherd Center, clarity wouldn’t have been issue. For this performance it was. The lines of James Agee’s poem blurred. Goerken chose mawkish grandeur that might have worked on a concert stage, with a full orchestra, and an audience that gives the sung text at best casual attention. Scott Garlund arranged each piece’s instrumental music for saxophone ensemble. The arrangement was seductive in its simplicity but I still prefer Barber’s instrumentation better.

Wagner and Mendelssohn paired on symphony program

By R.M. Campbell

Nearing the end of its current season, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra is pairing the famous with the obscure for three concerts at Benaroya Hall starting Thursday night.

Both composers are in the pantheon of Western icons — Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn — but the works offered are less obvious. Wagner’s “Parsifal” rings through Western civilization. For some it carries too much weight, but, in fact, it is a profound piece of art. The opera opened McCaw Hall, in 2003, a new production by Seattle Opera, which completed the company’s survey the composer’s canon of 10 operas. Thursday night was not the same as viewing, and hearing the entire opera, but the performance had the merit of simply being with this music another time. Gerard Schwarz, SSO music director, chose three excerpts: the preludes to Act I and III and the “Good Friday Spell.” To the good particularly were the warm string sound and long, seamless phrases. On the not-so-good side were inexact attacks and sloppy phrases. Not enough rehearsal perhaps?

Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang” is on the other side of the aisle of popularity. Performances are rare: most people probably have never heard it. There are reasons for that. It is a remarkably uninteresting piece of music in spite of expansive choral writing and effective vocal writing for the three soloists, all of whom were excellent at Benaroya: sopranos Christine Goerke and Holli Harrison and tenor Vinson Cole. The Seattle Symphony Chorale was in generally good shape, sound well-assembled, balance keen. The orchestra played well. The only difficulty was the piece itself. For a man of such felicity, “Lobesang” (“Hymn of Praise”) caught Mendelssohn on his day off. It is always good to hear music that is not performed with any regularity, but the reasons for that are often because it is simply not very good. Such is this piece.

Joshua Roman returns to Seattle for world premiere of Dan Visconti’s Americana

Back in the day, when Joshua Roman was the hot-shot, super-talented, ever-modest, principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony the press and younger concertgoers — many who had never set foot in a recital hall before Roman came along — fawned over him. Roman was the closest thing Seattle had to a classical music rebel – the Cameron Carpenter or Nigel Kennedy of the cello. His programs showed musical interests stretching beyond the standard repertory. Steve Reich’s Clapping Music showed up on one recital program as did Roman’s own arrangement of a handful of pop songs. You could count on him to dress down (jeans, casual t-shirt) from to time. We loved it. He loved. And Seattle’s classical music world happily rode the waves Roman created.

I can report (with some personal sadness) that Seattle’s classical music world has returned to the placidity of the pre-Roman days.
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Trpceski and an all French program take the stage at the SSO this weekend


By R.M. Campbell

Gerard Schwarz has long had an affinity for French music, thus a program like the one that opened Thursday night and continues through Sunday afternoon at Benaroya Hall.

There were many pleasures along the way. Principal among them was the reading of Saint-Saens’ Second Piano Concerto by Simon Trpceski. Now, in full possession of an international career, the Macedonian musician is not a stranger to Seattle. He was introduced to the city via the Seattle Symphony Orchestra when he was still in his 20s (turning 30 last year) and has returned both as a soloist with the orchestra and as a recitalist at Meany Hall. His concerts are typically well-received.
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Schumann birthday celebration with Simon Trpceski

By Philippa Kiraly

Robert Schumann was born 200 years ago Tuesday, and that night, in this year of 2010, there was a chamber music concert in his honor at Nordstrom Recital Hall with members of the Seattle Symphony and pianist Simon Trpceski (who plays a Saint-Saens concerto at the regular symphony concerts this Thursday, Saturday and Sunday).

It began with several Schumann works we don’t hear so often and ended with the great Piano Quintet in E Flat major. It’s rare to hear public recitals of duets by professional musicians except for those playing piano, violin or cello, not that musicians wouldn’t want to, but because they can’t command a big enough audience to make it financially worth while for the presenters. May the Symphony promote more of these.
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The 2009/2010 season comes to an end for OSSCS and SMCO

It’s that time of year again. Orchestras, professional and volunteer, are wrapping up their seasons. Two of Seattle’s many community orchestras finished their seasons this weekend. The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra – University of Washington conducting student Geoffrey Larson’s creation – closed their inaugural season with a concert titled “Just Dance.” The next day, George Shangrow, Orchestra Seattle, and the Seattle Chamber Singers ended their 2009/2010 series of concerts with a jazz (and Bernstein) inspired program that featured two works by Washington composers and choruses from Leonard Bernstein’s incidental music to the Lark.
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PNB introduces its Coppelia this weekend at McCaw Hall

By R.M. Campbell

Before both “Swan Lakes,” “Romeo and Juliets” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Nutcracker,” in Kent Stowell/Maurice Sendak’s production,” “Sleeping Beauty,” Merry Widow” or “Cinderella,” there was the sturdy “Coppelia,” bringing sunlight to everyone in its presence despite its unremarkable qualities. It entered the repertory in 1978 but has been in retirement for a while, waiting for a successor. Now it has one — splendid, engaging, charming and full of all sorts of dancing. Its premiere was this weekend at McCaw Hall.

The work is a masterpiece, even if it doesn’t seem so, and it possesses one of the most amiable scores, by Leo Delibes, in ballet history. Its tunes may not possess the emotional resonance and power of Tchaikovsky, but they are felicitous, melodious and warm.
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