Tag: Seattle

Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saens’s Christmas Oratorio: an unusual holiday pairing

Adding to the odd mix of pieces, the youthful Christmas Oratorio by Saint-Saens welcomed a leaner audience (many of the families with young children left) after the intermission. Saint-Saens music is remembered and enjoyed because it tends toward the beautiful as opposed to the innovative – not that innovative has to be ugly.

Saint-Saens, at the ripe age of twenty three, wrote the Christmas Oratorio in eleven days. The work’s placid harmonies and swooping melodies radiated from the orchestra and the chamber singers. Solos for soprano (Linda Tsatsanis), mezzo-soprano (Melissa Plagemann), alto (Tessa Studebaker), tenor (Stephen Wall) and bass (Brian Box) were delightfully shaped by the afternoon’s soloists.

I am confident that no other orchestra, choral ensemble, or chamber group performing a holiday concert this year featured a program of Prokofiev, Bozza/Kechley, or Saint-Saens. Like oil and water, these composers and the piece’s chosen for Orchestra Seattle’s holiday concert, don’t mix. This is precisely what Shangrow wants and what OSSCS observers expect. Days after the concert, I am still not sure how I feel about the collective impact of the choices. Making sense of it all, trying to deduce a purpose for the program has been maddening. Making sense of a concert, however, isn’t as important when you have a community orchestra that plays and a chorus that sings as well as OSSCS.

Happy (belated) birthday Beethoven

The piece still retained the geniality of the first half’s Serenade and Quintet. Like Bryant, Yablonsky was an assured leader. The Septet is sometimes lead by a conductor, for this performance the musicians turned to Yablonsky for their cues. Yablonsky was also at home in the piece’s violin solos, equaling the vim and vigor of the work. She was helped by balanced, soft edged playing from the winds and horn. DiLorenzo’s playing maintained the same stylishness and plush tone from the beginning of the concert to the end.

With this early Beethoven concert behind them, the SSO will turn its attention to the pinnacle of the composer’s late period – the Ninth Symphony. The annual, end of year performances, of the Ninth attracts large, adoring audiences. On purely musical terms, the Ninth is a stark counterpoint to the smiling air of his early chamber music. The story of Beethoven’s compositional life began with pieces like the Septet and Serenade, but ends, later in the month, with the still unsurpassed Ninth.

In Memorium: Perry Lorenzo

There is no easy way to break this sad news.  I will let the the Seattle Opera’s press release speak for itself:

Seattle—Seattle Opera’s General Director Speight Jenkins announced today that Perry Lorenzo, an internationally acclaimed speaker on opera and for almost twenty years Director of Education at Seattle Opera, passed away on December 19. He fought a valiant fight against lung cancer for the past seven months. He was 51.

Dedicated to introducing everyone to opera, Lorenzo lectured widely both here and abroad. He took a fledgling Education program at Seattle Opera and expanded it exponentially, drawing to him a devoted core of speakers and discussing opera in many forums. He worked with students in many communities all over the state as well as in the Seattle area. At Woodinville High School, for example, he was well known as the “Opera Guy.”

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Messiah Returns to Benaroya Hall

By R.M. Campbell

The performance of the “Messiah” during the Christmas season is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, traditions of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. There is nothing unusual in this commitment to Handel’s oratorio. It is a work of pure, seemingly inexhaustible, genius. Although the work was intended as a vehicle to celebrate Easter, it works very well during the holiday season. Moreover, it sells tickets. This weekend the symphony presented five performances at Benaroya Hall. The symphony’s attachment to the “Messiah” is not singular. All sorts of ensembles, if they can muster a small orchestra and chorus and a quartet of vocal soloists, present the piece in some form or another.

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Questioning the conductors: Gary Thor Wedow

Gary Thor Wedow sat down with TGN to talk about his run of Messiah performances with the Seattle Symphony this weekend. Wedow is an active early music and opera conductor whose reputation continues to grow.  He has conducted both the Seattle Symphony and the Seattle Opera in recent years. This past fall, Wedow led the New York City Opera in a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which by all accounts, was a bloody, sexualized, and well received production. For those who may not know, the New York City Opera went dark for a year and a half after financial difficulties, leadership turmoil, and eventually a complete renovation of Koch Theater.  I confessed to Wedow that if I lived in New York, I would probably prefer the edgier performances and pluckier attitude of City Opera to the neighboring Metropolitan Opera. 

Wedow impressed me with his breadth of knowledge and enthusiasm for the Messiah but also for new and contemporary music – an area most might not immediately associate with Wedow. We talked for more than twenty minutes on camera, and at least twenty minutes off camera, slowly shuffling toward Benaroya Hall’s artist’s entrance. It was one of those walking conversations where there is more conversation than actual walking. Just before leaving the hall, I told Wedow how much I appreciate and how much I learn about music when I interview conductors, composers, musicians, and that I have met so many interesting people that I would want to invite them all to dinner. Hyperbole? Perhaps. In Wedow’s case, I might just try to wrangle a dinner out of him next time I am in New York or he is in Seattle.

Mozart and Manfred

Manfred being saved by the hunter

Last Friday, UW’s University Symphony gave a lively performance in Meany Hall. The orchestra began their concert with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491 featuring one of my favorite pianists: Craig Sheppard. I’ve been a fan of Sheppard’s since I heard his live recordings of the 32 Beethoven Piano Sonatas – all of the sonatas were performed and recorded chronologically over sixteen months in 2003 and 2004. In his recordings, Sheppard engages the listener by exploring the composer’s journey through the music and creating a separate journey of his own. The same explorative qualities that make his recordings so wonderful materialized in concert last Friday.

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Snarky and the sublime: the Esoterics and the Seattle Men’s Chorus

Alfred Schnittke

Some ensembles pad their December concerts with traditional holiday music ranging from GF Handel’s Messiah (which the composer never intended as the holiday staple it has become) to tapestries of Christmas carols, often set in new or unfamiliar ways. A handful of ensembles in town buck these traditional formulas for programs that are different, but in the holiday spirit. Orchestra Seattle’s performance of Saint Saens Christmas Oratorio this weekend is in this spirit. On the extreme ends of the spectrum are two groups – the Esoterics and the Seattle Men’s Chorus – with completely different points of view on what makes a successful choral performance.

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“Messiah” with Handelian size forces

By Philippa Kiraly

This time of year, we hear Handel’s “Messiah” sung in myriad venues with forces of all sizes and professional levels, but we rarely hear it done as Handel himself was apt to hear it, as in its initial performance in Dublin in 1742.

Thanks to The Tudor Choir and Seattle Baroque Orchestra who have joined once more to perform it, we heard it again Saturday night as it might have been performed then, and in a place, Town Hall, of somewhat similar size to the New Music-Hall in Fishamble Street, Dublin.

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