Tag: Review

Manze makes his SSO debut

By R.M. Campbell

Early in his distinguished career, Andrew Manze was known as a Baroque violinist. But not any violinist. He brought zeal, ebullience, intelligence and scholarship to everything he touched. Those qualities he brings to the podium, as his Seattle Symphony Orchestra debut testified to this weekend at Benaroya Hall. He has a small orchestra, not quite 30 musicians, all strings. The balance is at McCaw Hall doing its duty with Seattle Opera and the premiere of “Amelia.” In some ways it makes no difference because the English conductor can accomplish what he wants with whatever means he has as his disposal. What one did glimpse were his predilections toward the Baroque era, in which he has spent a good share of his career, and English music.
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Jordi Savall’s Jerusalem at Lincoln Center

By Gigi Yellen

With his characteristic blend of deep research and virtuosic performance, historical accuracy and jazzlike improvisation, Jordi Savall and his band have created in “Jerusalem: City of Heavenly and Earthly Peace” a mesmerizing and troubling contemporary performance piece. Maestro Savall, esteemed creator of over 160 honored recordings of early music, combines ancient instruments, chants, recitations of sacred texts, folk tunes and even a Sufi dance in this concert (based on his 2008 2-CD set of the same name), which I was privileged to see performed on May 5 as the focus of a three-day “Jerusalem” event at New York’s Lincoln Center. I wanted to share with you some impressions and some thoughts about this most unusual Savall project.

Silhouetted against a huge dawn-like screen, a robed man blows an immensely long, grandly twisted shofar, the flawless opening notes of a fanfare that expands to include half a dozen players of these beautiful ram’s horns and as many players of the equally long, impossibly slender Arabic trumpets called annafirs. The shofar, a wake-up call most associated in our time with synagogue High Holiday services, is played by the Israeli virtuoso Yagel Harel, one of a collection of multi-ethnic players Savall has carefully gathered to demonstrate how historic enemies can melt their differences in the warm light of their musical similarities.
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Jordi Savall’s Jerusalem seeks to mend cultural fabric

Jordi Savall

By Gigi Yellen

The pre-eminent early-music artist of our time has to be the tireless Jordi Savall, whose combination of scholarship, musicianship, and visionary good will has produced over 150 important recordings. Many of these center on a theme. When this year’s US tour brought Savall and his band, Hesperion XXI, to Seattle (Town Hall, via Early Music Guild) in March, they offered a women-themed program based on their album “Lux Feminae.” Gathering Note’s R.M. Campbell called that concert “a kind of rare adventure.”

New York’s Lincoln Center is hosting Savall and company in another kind of rare adventure, a three-evening series, “Jordi Savall: Jerusalem” part of its Great Performers season. Two of the evenings are concerts based on Savall’s recordings: Sunday May 2, the 2006 album “Orient-Occident,” and Monday, the 2008 2-CD set “Jerusalem: City of Double Peace: Heavenly Peace and Earthly Peace.” It’s my good fortune to be in NY for these, and I want to share with you some of the experience of this series.
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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.

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O death where is thy sting?

Seattle Choral Company

The two pieces of sacred music I turn to most often are W.A. Mozart’s Requiem – the first piece of music I ever fell in love with – and J. Brahms’ German Requiem – the first Brahms piece I heard in its entirety. These two pieces shaped my formative listening years and instilled in me an admiration and (minor) obsession with sacred music. After Brahms came Handel, Verdi, Haydn, Bruckner, Bach, and of course more Mozart. But even with a catalog of masses, motets, and cantatas at my disposal, Mozart’s and Brahms’ signature sacred pieces always stimulate my God Spot.

On Saturday, Fred Coleman and the Seattle Choral company ended their 2009/2010 season with half of my sacred music top two – the German Requiem. But, before I could get to the Brahms, I first had to go through Dvorak’s Te Deum.
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Northwest Puppet Center opens “Pulcinella Vendicato”

By R.M. Campbell

Every spring the Northwest Puppet Center presents an opera at its intimate, charming space in North Seattle. Spring would not be spring in Seattle, it would seem, without an opera by the Carter family at the center. This weekend a wonderfully amusing and endearing production of Giovanni Paisiello’s “Pulcinella vendicato” opened its Seattle run. The set of performances, through May 8, represents not only the opera buffo’s Seattle premiere but its American one as well.

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Menotti and more at Music Northwest’s final recital of the season

Gian Carlo Menotti

As the fates would have it, a volcano burping and spewing ash over continental Europe, prevented Xavier Philips (the Seattle Symphony’s scheduled soloist for the past weekend’s concerts) from performing a recital on Friday evening of French cello works. Even as one recital came apart, another, at Olympic Hall in West Seattle came together.

Music Northwest’s 2009/2010 chamber series came to a close on April 23rd with a recital for combinations of cellos and piano. Music Northwest’s chamber series is a gem in Seattle’s growing classical music community. The series distinguishes itself for the quality and diversity of repertory Jane Harty (Music Northwest’s artistic director) chooses and the quality of the musicians who perform each concert.
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Compania Nacional de Danza returns to Seattle

By R.M. Campbell

After two well-received visits to Meany Hall by the Compania Nacional de Danza, its third tour, which opened Thursday night, was much anticipated. With reason. The company, essentially a vehicle for the choreography of Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato, is known for the vividness of its movement, willingness to be expansive and ability to have a foot in the past and one in the future. His work is known to a wide audience in Seattle for two pieces in the repertory of Pacific Northwest Ballet, including one, “Jardi Tancat,” which it took to New York.

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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).

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Portland Baroque comes to town

By R.M. Campbell

For more than a quarter of century, the Portland Baroque Orchestra has been an integral part of the early music scene on the West Coast. Any number of luminaries have been associated with the period orchestra. including Ton Koopman Richard Egarr, Andrew Manze and Monica Huggett, the ensemble’s artistic director for 15 years. At one time the orchestra attempted to create a base in Seattle. That was not successful, so we have to wait for special opportunities to hear this exemplary group of musicians.

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