Tag: Seattle

Week in classical music: Alexander Bishop, Michael Nicolella, and Monteverdi

Stephen Stubbs. Photo courtesy Pacific Musicworks.

It’s been a busy week for Cornish College, the college’s faculty, and one of the school’s talented soon to be graduates. A new president was unveiled — a violist — Nancy Uscher. That evening student composer Alexander Bishop’s music for viola was the focus at Poncho Hall. Toward the end of the week — innovative guitarist and Cornish faculty member Michael Nicolella took to the Nordstrom Recital Hall stage as part of the Seattle Classical Guitar Series. Up the hill at St. James Cathedral, Steven Stubbs (who has been tasked with building an early music program at Cornish) led the first historically accurate performance of Monteverdi’s path blazing 1610 Vespers.
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Lara Downes’ American program kicks off 2010/2011 President’s Piano series

Lara Downes

By Philippa Kiraly

Young American musician Lara Downes opened UW’s President’s Piano Series Wednesday night with an enlightening program of 20th century American music. All the composers but one are well known: Roy Harris, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, plus Florence Price, and all were born close together around the turn of the century, with Barber the youngest, born 1910, and Price the oldest, born 1888.

Price was a rarity at that time, a recognized woman composer with a large body of works under her belt, and even rarer, a black woman composer. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music, became head of the music department at Clark University and won first prize in the Wanamaker Competition and a performance of her first symphony by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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Mara Gearman and Alexander Bishop talk about their upcoming recital

Composer Alexander Bishop’s music came into wider awareness last spring when SSO violist Mara Gearman played two of his works as part of Paul Taub’s May Day, May Day festival. Gearman was looking for a couple of new pieces of music to play for the festival, and Bishop was seeking a violist to to play two short pieces he wrote for Viola. Bishop and Gearman are taking their partnership one step further on December 1st with a an all Bishop recital featuring two brand new works: a viola sonata and a string quartet. Composer and violist sat down with me last Saturday to talk about the recital, their creative partnership, and even the possibility of new Bishop compositions for the viola (a viola concerto perhaps?)

For your Thanksgiving and Black Friday viewing pleasure!

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Classical music lives on in the youngest generation

By Philippa Kiraly

It restores faith in the future of classical music to go to hear the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra. There are many kids listening attentively in the audience to the mass of kids playing on stage. The big orchestra is professional in demeanor, and the performance is high class playing.

While much of this is due to the fine adult musicians who nurture their talent—the conductors of all of SYSO’s orchestras and the coaches who work with individual sections as well as each child’s individual instrumental teacher—a lot is due the kids themselves. If they didn’t stick to the work and give up many hours to practice, they wouldn’t be where they are today.
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Week in classical Music: Peters v. May, Thalia, Degenerate Music, and Capucon

Gautier Capucon

Seattle possesses a new, contemporary, modern music scene. A devoted and talented one at that. This is a discovery for some and crusade for others. Late in the week Thomas May — author, editor, Crosscut contributor — praised the Seattle Modern Orchestra for injecting life into a supposedly timid modern music scene. Steve Peters, a composer and head of Nonsequitor and the Wayward Music Series, promptly responded with a long note explaining for May the depth and breadth of the contemporary music he is missing.

Peters isn’t wrong, and nor is May. Peters is rightly frustrated. His Wayward Music Series at the Good Shepherd Center is a robust center of adventurous music activity that is also regrettably under covered. And it’s not just Peters’ concerts which go unnoticed. Music Northwest — which had their second concert of the season — had never even received a mention until I wrote about them last year. Jane Harty routinely gives her loyal West Seattle audience a healthy dose of music written in the not too distant past. This was the case this past Sunday when Piazzolla, Ginastera, and Schulhoff were on the program. Later in the year Morton Feldman makes an appearance. Last year there was John Cage and Gyorgy Ligeti.
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Seattle Opera Young Artists and Viva la Mamma!

By Philippa Kiraly

There can be only have been one really good reason for Seattle Opera Young Artists Program to perform Donizetti’s “Viva la Mamma!” or to give it its full Italian name “Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali.”

That reason lies in the person of baritone Daniel Scofield, who undertakes the role of the aforementioned Mamma! in drag (as it was originally written), and succeeds triumphantly and hilariously as well as musically to hold the stage whenever he is on it.

“Viva” is an unevenly written farce, a frothy romp with so little substance and so disjointed a plot that there is little to hold onto, while the music comes from before Donizetti has really found his own distinctive voice. It only works if there is excellent acting and staging, and thank goodness, this production has both, thanks to the young singers and to stage director Jeffrey Marc Buchman. Half the fun is that all of the roles are instantly recognizable to anyone who has been backstage during a production.
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Northwest Sinfonietta’s ‘Gypsy Nights”

By Philippa Kiraly

It wasn’t until the concert itself that the title of Northwest Sinfonietta’s performance last Friday, “Gypsy Nights,” became clear. Yes, music director Christophe Chagnard’s own work titled “Opre, Roma!” with its three guitars clearly had a gypsy component, but Dvorak, Mahler and Shostakovich?

As the concert progressed at Nordstrom Recital Hall, Chagnard’s choices made sense. Dvorak was represented by his Slavonic Dance No. 8, played with all the musicians except the cellos standing and swaying with the lively beat. It was the kind of performance to have everyone ready to join in and dance in the aisles, such was its verve and spirit, and kinship to Roma music of that era in Czechoslovakia.
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Moscow Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra lives up to its name

By Philippa Kiraly

On tour around the country, the Moscow Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra made a stop at Benaroya Hall, Sunday night. It seems as though Seattle’s Russian community turned out for it in droves—I heard little English spoken that night, and it was a deeply attentive audience.

The two halves of the program were separated by close to two centuries, the first half containing the Symphony No. 4 in D Minor (called “La Casa del Diavolo,” or “The House of the Devil”) by Boccherini from 1771, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in E Flat Major from only six years later. The two works of the second half were composed even more closely together: Schnittke’s Sonata for violin, chamber orchestra and harpsichord, transformed from his own 1963 sonata for violin, and Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony in C Minor, arranged under his aegis by Rudolf Barshai from his 1960 Eighth String Quartet, Op 110.
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Caminos del Inka: A Musical Journey through the Inca Trail

By Philippa Kiraly

If, like me, you don’t really know where the Inca Train went, it was laid out for us at the start of this Seattle Symphony concert by guest conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya. It went north from Peru to Southern Colombia through Ecuador, and south from there through Bolivia and Chile to Northern Argentina.

Harth-Bedoya, a Peruvian who is now music director of the Fort Worth Symphony, explained that much of the music composed in those countries may have had a first hearing or been part of the folk tradition, but was never published there since there were no music publishing houses. Only that music which reached the European publishing houses has come to our attention, he said. From those works that have, like those of Piazzolla and Golijov, not to mention Villa-Lobos in Brazil, we know that music of very high quality was and is being created.
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A dream team: the Kavafian-Schub-Shifrin Trio

By Philippa Kiraly

Violinist Ani Kavafian, pianist Andre-Michel Schub and clarinetist David Shifrin had been friends and musicmakers together for years before they formed the Trio made up of their last names, and the communion betweeen them was clear Wednesday night at the University of Washington’s Meany Hall.

Opening the UW International Chamber Music Series there, they gave a splendidly-played, excellently-designed program for their not-so-usual combination of instruments of works by Mozart, Bartok, Stravinsky and William Bolcom.
From the first strains of Mozart’s Trio in E-Flat, the “Kegelstatt,” for viola, clarinet and piano, there was a notable equality of balance between the players. Being alto instruments, the clarinet and viola can easily be overwhelmed by a piano with the lid full up, but never did that happen. A warm tone with plenty of energy but without force pervaded this elegant performance in which Shifrin’s smooth almost buttery clarinet carried most of the top voice.
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