Tag: Seattle

A remarkable debut with SSO for violinist Augustin Hadelich


By Philippa Kiraly

The Seattle Symphony began its Beethoven and Wine series and its annual season at Benaroya Hall on a high note, with the Seattle Symphony debut of violinist Augustin Hadelich playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and the world premiere of a fine little work by Augusta Read Thomas.

Her composition was the first to be performed of eighteen commissioned from contemporary composers by Agnes Gund and Charles Simonyi to mark the farewell season of artistic director Gerard Schwarz. The list of composers, all working in this country, is a Who’s Who of today’s most respected names in the field Their works will be performed at concerts throughout the season, and this first one will be heard again in each of the remaining Beethoven and Wine concerts, tonight (Thursday) and tomorrow.

Read Thomas describes her five-minute “Of Paradise and Light” as a soulful work of reflection, “as though a sliver of paradise and light came down to shine upon a garden of colorful flowers.” So often a description like this leaves the listener, on hearing the work, wondering just what the composer meant. Not so here. She has captured her words in sound.

Continue reading A remarkable debut with SSO for violinist Augustin Hadelich

The 2010-2011 concert season opens with I-90 Collective

By Philippa Kiraly

The fall concert season starts with a flurry this year, seemingly in a hurry to get going immediately after Labor Day. The Seattle Symphony has three Beethoven and Wine concerts this week and a gala on Saturday, Cappella Romana gives its first season performance Saturday, and the Early Music Guild got in first with one of its First Tuesday series, the I-90 Collective performing at Trinity Parish Church.

The audience was surprisingly good for an early Tuesday in September and, with its excellent acoustics, the Trinity Parish Hall is becoming known as a fine place to perform.
Continue reading The 2010-2011 concert season opens with I-90 Collective

The Five: Nat Evans

Composer Nathaniel Evans. Photo credit: Erin Elyse Burns

Local composer Nat Evans has embarked on a project that fuses nature, music, community, and subjectivity of experience. Sunrise September 18, 2010 is a completely new piece of music written by Evans. It is a site specific, time specific, event specific work experienced differently by everyone who participates in the premiere. Listeners will gather at before 6:30 am on the 18th at Kite Hill in Magnuson Park. This is also the location which inspired the work and will be the vantage point for the sunrise and the premiere.

At exactly 6:30 am (the time the sun will rise up over the Cascades) Evans will give the cue and everyone will press play on their iPod, Zune, Walkman, CD player, or any other device people choose. Participants will be hearing Sunrise, while watching the sun rise. Sunrise will be recorded before the 18th and distributed to people who let the composer know they want to participate. All participants have to do is download the music, load it onto their favorite media player, and show up on the 18th at Kite Hill.

The idea for this new work originated from the composer’s experience with Zen and how the tradition treats natural cycles like sunrise and sunset.  Just as important Evans says, is how individuals experience these cycles.  “Over the years I became interested in how we interact with these cycles,” Evans remarked.  He elaborated further, “there is also the tradition in Indian classical music that certain pieces are to be played at specific times of the day, even specific times of the year.”  Evans took these ideas, put pen to paper, and wrote Sunrise.

Evans is one of Seattle’s talented, up and coming composers. I had the good fortune of introducing a piece of his at the May Day, May Day festival. The concept behind Sunrise is so interesting to me, I asked Evans if he would want to participate in The Five. He obliged. His answers follow the jump.

Oh, and if you want to hear Sunrise, email Evans at NathanielFEvans@gmail.com and he’ll send you a link for the download. See you at Kite Hill on the 18th!

Evans’ responses to my five questions are after the jump.

Continue reading The Five: Nat Evans

Quarter notes: farewell

I had been wondering when the Seattle Symphony would announce some big, audacious, splashy farewell for Gerard Schwarz’s final season. There was a two concert Hovhaness festival and the season finale is Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, but neither seemed a big enough way to say good bye to a conductor who oversaw the growth of the Seattle Symphony for 26 years. That was until I opened my email yesterday.

In partnership with two leading philanthropists — Agnes Gund and Charles Simonyi — eighteen (yes, eighteen!) new pieces, by American composers will be commissioned and premiered through out the course of the season. That is a new piece of music on every concert led by Schwarz. Suddenly, the season looks like a suitable send off.

The composers composing new works and a list of concerts where new works will be premiered follow the jump.
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Quarter notes: end of summer edition

Summer is winding down, classical performance — with the exception of Seattle Opera’s head scratching new production of Tristan und Isolde – are more or less on hiatus until September. All of this leaves a blogger with little to blog about. Yet a few noteworthy bits have popped up here and there.

This Sunday George Shangrow will be remembered at a service held at the University Christian Church in the U District. The service starts at 2 pm and runs until 5 pm. Get there early. Seating is limited and because George’s presence was huge there will no doubt be an overflowing crowd.

Tristan und Isolde wraps up this weekend at McCaw hall. I saw the new production last weekend. The general consensus among critics has been reservedly favorable; consensus among the audience hasn’t been as generous.  Nearly everyone I spoke with thought the orchestra sounded spectacular. Fisch whipped the band into grand Wagnerian shape but it never missed a chance to embrace the score’s warmer moments. Most also liked Tristan’s cast as well. the golden age of Wagner singers is long gone but that didn’t stop Clifton Forbis and Annalena Persson from giving a memorable performance of Tristan and Isolde.  Once again, Persson started her Tristan performance with uncertainty in her voice and a wavering tone.  By the second act she had found Isolde’s voice; her arresting Liebestob provided a satisfying conclusion.

If the audience appreciated the musical qualities of the performance, production elements weren’t regarded as favorably. “The directing and set design were so bad I periodically closed my eyes to listen so I would not be distracted” read one comment posted on the Seattle Times web review.  The painted sets looked like cheap, grey particle board. A new projection system — written up extensively in the Tristan program — added little to the opera’s texture. Israel’s changing costumes were interesting, highlighting the opera’s mythology, but with very little else on stage, they seemed out of place. Kazaras looked to explore “Tristan time” and the idea that an event which takes a few seconds in real time might seem much longer in the mind. This is all well and good as an idea, but on stage it failed to translate, turning the opera into a series of incomprehensible moments.

The music is always paramount with an opera.  But for professional company’s like Seattle Opera the music can’t be everything.  Audiences already expect big things in the pit and on stage — for Wagner especially.  For a production to be successful then, the sets, costumes, stage direction, and everything else that isn’t musical must be good too.  Fisch’s orchestra and Jenkins’s cast were memorable, while Israel and Kazaras’s production forgettable.

Continue reading Quarter notes: end of summer edition

An increasingly enlightened audience at Seattle Chamber Music Festival

By Philippa Kiraly

Time was, maybe 17 years ago, when Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival was full of well known classics. We could confidently expect to hear Brahms, Beethoven, and Schumann, Mozart and Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. Sure there was, is, plenty to choose from among much-loved works. Some amongst us grew restless, wanting to be more challenged by the music and have our minds expanded, and SCMS responded by building a program one year full of these more adventurous work. The audience stayed away in droves.

What a change nowadays!
Continue reading An increasingly enlightened audience at Seattle Chamber Music Festival

The Five: Jayce Ogren

Conductor, composer, singer Jayce Ogren

Jayce Ogren is an example of what is happening in classical music these days. He’s a conductor who has stood before some of the finest orchestras in the world. Ogren finished a tenure with the Cleveland Orchestra in 2009. He has also conducted the Boston Symphony, LA Phil, and City Opera. Before that, he was a conducting apprentice with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic under the New York Philharmonic’s Alan Gilbert. With conducting bona fides like these, Ogren could easily stick to cultivating a career as a conductor. But, this Hoquiam native is plunging into composing, songwriting, and on Friday he and a new band of Seattle area musicians — Young Kreisler — debut at ACT with a program of Ogren’s own music, kindred depressants Kurt Cobain and Mahler, and Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union.

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Seattle Chamber Music Festival enters final week of 2010 season

By R.M. Campbell

Memories can be short and distorted, but it seems to me, as the Seattle Chamber Music Festival enters its final week of the summer, this season has been if not the best than one of the best in its nearly 30-year history.

Two things are certain. The move from the dull acoustics of St. Nicholas Hall at Lakeside to Nordstrom Recital Hall has been an unqualified success, not only in terms of box office but musically, aided in part by the vastly improved acoustical presence of the hall. There is no question Nordstrom can turn shrill in the upper registers, especially the violin, if musicians are not careful. In the early days, they were not and the hall got a bad reputation. But other musicians, more capable and more sensitive, found ways to make the hall what it is today. All concert venues have their individual profiles which musicians must take into account. Festival concerts at Nordstrom had a ring of freshness, vibrancy and clarity they did not have previously. This improved acoustical status seemed to encourage musicians to play even better than they did at Lakeside.
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A tribute to Shangrow and an evening of remarkable music making

James Ehnes

By Philippa Kiraly

Seattle Chamber Music Society’s summer festival has headed to The Overlake School in Redmond for its final five concerts, the first of which took place in those beautiful surroundings Wednesday night.

But first, the Society’s associate artistic director, James Ehnes, came out to give a tribute to the late George Shangrow, citing his long time support for the festival. In his honor Ehnes then played the largo movement from Bach’s Sonata No. 3 for unaccompanied violin.
Continue reading A tribute to Shangrow and an evening of remarkable music making

New production of “Tristan” opens Saturday at McCaw

Annalena Persson (Isolde) and Margaret Jane Wray (Brangäne). Rozarii Lynch Photo

By R.M. Campbell

Wagner’s monumental “Tristan und Isolde”  is not a stranger to Seattle Opera: it has never been approached lightly. The opera is too important, too central to the Wagner canon, too demanding to be treated with anything less than awe and respect. The last time the company mounted the opera, in 1998, it had an all-star cast (Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner singing the roles for the first time together ) and a production team, headed by stage director Francesca Zambello. The set, designed by Alison Chitty, was as massive as the opera itself. Magnificent really, especially the first and second acts.

Continue reading New production of “Tristan” opens Saturday at McCaw