Tag: Review

Can youth orchestras save classical music?

Under the steady baton of Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, the energized playing of the Seattle Youth Symphony, and a heavenly contribution from the Seattle Choral Company (Fred Coleman, the Seattle Choral Company’s music director is a SYSO alum), Mahler’s Second Symphony (Resurrection Symphony) thundered across the heavens this past Sunday. Those of us who made it to Benaroya Hall for the concert knew we were in for a sonic treat when a small statured first violinist took a microphone and described Mahler’s last movement as “cool.”

Seattle is lucky to have a youth orchestra program as large, talented as the Seattle Youth Symphony. With public schools squeezing arts education and interest waning in classical music generally, youth orchestras like the SYSO could be essential to ensuring classical music doesn’t wither away like many people predict will happen.

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Second night of American String Project features Mendelsson & Beethoven

By Dana Wen

A performance by the American String Project is like chamber music on steroids. The Project beefs up the concept of the string quartet, bringing together fifteen musicians from across the country to perform arrangements of great works from the string quartet repertoire. But the size of the ensemble is not the only thing that’s been amplified here. The effect of adding more musicians to each part (and including a double bass) results in performances that crackle with the heightened energy and vivid colors of a large ensemble, but retain the intimacy and close communion of a string quartet. This is exciting music-making that has a lot to offer, whether you’re new to string quartet repertoire or can hum the opening bars of each of the Beethoven quartets from memory.
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Barry Lieberman’s American String Project returns for a ninth season with five new arrangements

Barry Lieberman

What Barry Lieberman, and the American String Project do – taking well known and sometimes not so well known – pieces for string quartet, quintet and arranging them for an orchestra of fifteen string instruments isn’t new or even that unique. Composers and musicians have always tinkered with their own music and the music of others in this way. Sometimes they improve the product other times they don’t. Just this morning I was listening to Gideon Kremer’s orchestration of Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata.  I can report, it isn’t an improvement on the original sonata.

What is unique, is that the string project, now in its ninth season, isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. This season alone, five of the six pieces to be performed are new arrangements by Lieberman. The sixth, Johannes Brahms’ String Quintet Op. 111 was first arranged in 2003, but for this season Lieberman went back to his arrangement, adjusting the piece for Sunday’s performance. All in all, Lieberman has created an impressive repertory of sixty arrangements for string orchestra.
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Cirque Dreams returns to Seattle

By R.M. Campbell

In its more than 20 years of business around the world, Cirque du Soleil has spawned all sorts of children seeking some of its mystique and popularity. Cirque Dreams, descended from Cirque Productions, is among them with shows in theaters, casinos, arenas and parks. Its current show, Cirque Dreams Illumination, runs through Sunday evening at the Moore Theatre.

This somewhat dowdy theater, which has hosted all sorts of events, high and low, for a good share of the past 100 years, the Moore is a good place to present a show that is part circus, part vaudeville, part glossy entertainment. The current production is all of the above. The best parts are the circus performers and the worst is the shlock in which they must perform. There are nearly 30 artists all of whom perform multiple roles. They are amazingly diverse in national origin, with some from Mongolia, Russia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Belarus in the Old World and the United States, Canada, Argentina, Cuba and Trinidad in the New. They bring years of training and experience to their circus roles, defined in the program as magicians, wirewalkers, vaudevillians, cube aerialists, chair climbers, foot manipulators, percussion jugglers, perch balancers and perch aerialists, ring rollers, paint can stackers, hand balancers and strap flyers. Most of the acts have a novel twist that makes them unique.
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Mark Morris Dance Group makes its annual Seattle visit Friday night at the Paramount

By R.M. Campbell

Time passes. Is it possible that the Mark Morris Dance Group has been visiting Seattle for 25 years? It is. Morris is now middle-aged, as is everyone else still around from those days, at the very least. On the Boards was the first to bring the company here in its funky space off Yesler. Then, Morris outgrew that for Meany Hall, which presented the company for years until it got too expensive. For the past there years, the Seattle Symphony and Paramount Theatre have co-produced the annual visit. Thank goodness. Who does not want to see the Morris company on a regular basis?

Sometimes he brings new work. Not this year. On Friday night there was “Gloria,” his first major work from the 1980’s. The other two works were only slightly younger: “A Lake,” premiered at Wolf Trap near Washington, D.C., by the White Oak Dance Project, which Morris co-founded with Mikhail Baryshnikov, in 1993, and “Jesu, meine Freude,” commissioned by Dance Umbrella in Boston and premiered in that city two years later.
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Onyx chamber players build a bridge to the Romantic era

By Gigi Yellen

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Piano Trio in D Minor Op. 11 added interest and drama to the Onyx Chamber Players’ season-long commemoration of her brother Felix’s birth-bicentennial, and the death-bicentennial of their musical grandpapa, Franz Josef Haydn. Rolling in like ominous thunder, the piano part in this mature (1846) work of Ms. Mendelssohn Hensel underlines a lyrical theme, a big open melody for the cello, in the manner of the piano figure in Schubert’s famous song “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel.”

“A bridge to the Romantic era,” is how pianist David White described Fanny Mendelssohn’s music, in his spirited remarks before the concert on Sunday afternoon May 16. He also described Fanny’s considerable contributions to her younger brother’s works.

Happily, there’s more about that contribution in a new biography, Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn by R. Larry Todd (© 2010, Oxford University Press) with extensive documentation of this powerful relationship between equally talented, but unequally privileged musical siblings. The book is filled with detailed musical analyses of Fanny’s work, including the intriguing trio Onyx played. During intermission, I showed it to pianist Judith Cohen, who was in the audience, and her eyes lit up.
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Hercules vs. Vampires comes to Oregon

By Lorin Wilkerson

“Cigars, cigarettes? Sweets, flair?” If you heard these sing-song syllables from a beautiful cigarette girl ringing out over a noisy theater the last time you went out, you either last went to the movies in the 1950s, or attended the premier of the Opera Theater Oregon/Filmusik production of Mario Bava’s Hercules vs. Vampires this weekend. (Of course the cigars are bubblegum and the cigarettes chocolate or mint, but with all proceeds going to OTO, the ambience is what counts.)

This isn’t the first joining of forces between OTO, Portland’s homegrown alternative opera troupe, and Filmusik, a project that re-imagines the sonic world of classic cinema through brand new sound- and vocal tracks. It’s not the first collaboration, but to date it may be the most brilliant. Thanks to the combination of Los Angeles composer Patrick Morganelli’s inspired short opera composed specifically for this film, the sterling quality of the OTO singers and Erica Melton’s expert direction of the Filmusik orchestra, Hercules vs. Vampires (It. Ercole al Centro della Terra) was a high-caliber musical experience coupled with the guilty pleasure of watching a campy old movie. In short, it was exactly the type of experience that Filmusik seeks to impart and contintually does, in fresh new iterations time and again.
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Jun Markl conducts SSO in all German program

Since January, when the legendary Kurt Masur came to Seattle to conduct the SSO in a spellbinding performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, SSO performances have steadily improved, interpretations from the podium have varied, and among musicians there is genuine excitement for the orchestra’s future. The musicians have even magnanimously stepped up their playing for Gerard Schwarz, the orchestra’s current music director. It is, without a doubt, an exciting time to hear the SSO in action.

One musician confided a few days back that it is a good thing he isn’t on the search committee to find a new music director because he is having so much fun playing for the likes of Spano, Dausgaard, Masur, Markl, Gaffigan, and Manze that he would prefer the search for a new music director go on as long as possible.
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Seattle Opera premieres Amelia

Nathan Gunn as Paul. Photo by Rozarii Lynch photo.

By R.M. Campbell

During the past 25 years or so of Speight Jenkins’ tenure as general director, Seattle Opera has traveled in many music waters. However, none involved commissioning a work. That absence was rectified this weekend at McCaw Hall with an often compelling and poignant “Amelia.” The climate for new operas has changed considerably since Jenkins took over the reins: then new opera was rarity, now it is common, despite the huge costs (“Amelia” cost $3.6 million) and huge risks of artistic or box office failure.

Jenkins did not go about the task of commissioning an opera with little thought. He began the process in 2002 with a search for a composer. The following year, Daron Aric Hagen was approached as the composer. Hagen suggested the subject of flight. The next year Hagen introduced Jenkins to the poetry of Gardner McFall, and, in 2005, Hagen and McFall began to toss ideas around at Yaddo, the artists’ colony. A story on flight emerges, and Stephen Wadsworth joins the team to create a story based in part on McFall’s own history in which her father, a flight commander in the U.S. Navy, was lost in a training mission, in 1966. A workshop of the complete opera was given in Seattle two years ago.
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Haptadama comes to a close at Olympic Sculpture Park on Saturday night

Composer/conductor Eric Banks explains Haptadama to a capacity audience Saturday night.

With Haptadama: The Seven Creations of Ancient Persia, Eric Banks unexpectedly challenges audiences to reconsider how they think about opera. It’s not that Banks is dabbling in new forms or means of expression – although he does have a tremendous gift for contemporizing ancient languages and melodies in ways that observe texts, respect original ideas, and avoid kitsch. Banks calls Haptadama a choral opera. However the piece synthesizes opera, song cycles, and sacred music that leads listeners in a number of different directions.

Banks got the idea to write Haptadama after two visits to India. The material for the piece comes from the Persian creation story of the Zorostrians drawn from both the Gathas and Bundahisn. The Gathas, perhaps the oldest written music in history, provide an austere framework for the piece. The Bundahisn, on the other hand, gives the music its mystical quality. The creation story follows a well worn formula. A benevolent creator coexists with evil. The creator creates life and the known world. Evil strikes back causing cataclysm and robbing the world of its innocence. The creator redeems the world by wiping everything out with a cleansing flood.
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