Tag: Symphony

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.
Continue reading Caminos del Inka: A Musical Journey through the Inca Trail

To close the Seattle Symphony’s current season, Schwarz assembled a program of Leonard Bernstein and William Schuman works. This season finale also closes out the Seattle Celebrates Bernstein festival — a city wide effort to honor the 20th anniversary of Bernstein’s death. Personal struggle has been a theme in season finales over the last few seasons. With the help of Schwarz and the SSO, audiences have probed Mahler’s despairing Sixth Symphony and last year Aaron Jay Kernis’ pleading Third Symphony, a world premiere. Leonard Bernstein’s personal torment, doubt, and faith, embodied by his Second Symphony, were the fundamental qualities of Friday’s struggle.

Continue reading Bernstein and Schuman close out SSO season, Bernstein festival, highlighting Schwarz’s legacy

By R.M. Campbell

Nearing the end of its current season, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra is pairing the famous with the obscure for three concerts at Benaroya Hall starting Thursday night.

Both composers are in the pantheon of Western icons — Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn — but the works offered are less obvious. Wagner’s “Parsifal” rings through Western civilization. For some it carries too much weight, but, in fact, it is a profound piece of art. The opera opened McCaw Hall, in 2003, a new production by Seattle Opera, which completed the company’s survey the composer’s canon of 10 operas. Thursday night was not the same as viewing, and hearing the entire opera, but the performance had the merit of simply being with this music another time. Gerard Schwarz, SSO music director, chose three excerpts: the preludes to Act I and III and the “Good Friday Spell.” To the good particularly were the warm string sound and long, seamless phrases. On the not-so-good side were inexact attacks and sloppy phrases. Not enough rehearsal perhaps?

Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang” is on the other side of the aisle of popularity. Performances are rare: most people probably have never heard it. There are reasons for that. It is a remarkably uninteresting piece of music in spite of expansive choral writing and effective vocal writing for the three soloists, all of whom were excellent at Benaroya: sopranos Christine Goerke and Holli Harrison and tenor Vinson Cole. The Seattle Symphony Chorale was in generally good shape, sound well-assembled, balance keen. The orchestra played well. The only difficulty was the piece itself. For a man of such felicity, “Lobesang” (“Hymn of Praise”) caught Mendelssohn on his day off. It is always good to hear music that is not performed with any regularity, but the reasons for that are often because it is simply not very good. Such is this piece.