Tag Archives: beethoven

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Beethoven’s “Archduke” Visits Wallingford & Town Hall

Alexander Velinzon
Alexander Velinzon

Seattle Symphony concertmaster Alexander Velinzon has an insanely busy schedule, but he still makes time where possible to play chamber music. Friday night saw his first appearance with Simple Measures, the group which recreates the meaning of the word “chamber” in chamber music: music written to be performed in intimate venues, originally concerts in privately owned salons.

The major work on the program was Beethoven’s Piano Trio in B-Flat, the “Archduke,” which he performed with Simple Measure’s founder, cellist Rajan Krishnaswami, and pianist Mark Salman. (The concert is repeated this Sunday at 2 p.m., downstairs at Town Hall.)

A small venue makes it possible for anyone in the audience to see the interplay between the musicians, the way their eyes are continually not only on the music but each other, watching tiny body movements to judge exact entries, sensing changes in tempo, dynamic, or phrasing (of course, this also takes for granted their discussion and practice beforehand). And, which is typical in chamber music, how much the musicians are enjoying themselves.

This was true Saturday at the little chapel at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford, where Velinzon and Krishnaswami seemed to be having a blast, the two playing together as though they’d done it all their lives. Asked afterward, Krishnaswami said they’d had five rehearsals only, but that there had been an instant musical rapport between them.

Simple Measures plays in coffee houses like Q Café in the Interbay area, community centers like the one in Mount Baker or, as on Saturday, in the chapel: places where people can come casually dressed, bring the kids, listen to the musicians warming up and practicing bits of the program, chatting until the performance starts. Simple Measures may be deliberately casual, but the musicianship is not. Now in its eighth season, it has gained a reputation for excellent performance and fine musicians are delighted to perform with it.

This season’s three programs have been planned around, respectively, Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony. The program always comprises several short excerpts in the first half, and a complete work for the second, in Saturday’s case the “Archduke.” For this Harmony program, Krishnaswami chose examples of Baroque, Classic, Romantic, impressionistic and modern harmonies, the performers giving brief explanations in a mini-Music Ed 101, and asking the audience after each piece for their impressions.

Velinzon gave an eloquent performance of an unaccompanied Adagio from Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Major, not attempting to recreate Baroque style, but coloring the piece with different shades of vibrato, and demonstrating beforehand how the melody connected the chords and how the bass line descended.

One of the most beautiful works, the impressionistic Allegro from Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello, had the two instruments interchanging range with the cello sometimes on top. The two performers sounded closely attuned to each other, so that phrases passed from one to the other had a matching floating approach or emphasis, a delight to hear.

The gifted clarinetist Sean Osborn, a regular with Simple Measures, appeared for just one terrific item, the first movement of Bartok’s Contrasts, which had the clarinet flying in spirals before it dies away at the end in modern harmony with violin and piano.

Classical Mozart, Hindemith pushing the harmonic envelope, and Romantic Arensky also made appearances in this very well designed group of short pieces.

Unfortunately, as with so many true chamber music performances today that include piano, the intimacy of the space was overpowered in performance. A grand piano is a massive instrument with big volume potential, suitable to be heard at the far ends of big concert halls. The piano lid is open to its furthest extent to allow more sound out and to direct it towards the audience. This is all very well at Benaroya Hall (2,500 seats), or even at Meany Theater (1,300 seats), but there’s no need for maximum volume in smaller locations.

Do we really need all that sound at Town Hall (900 seats), Nordstrom Recital Hall (540 seats) or at the Good Shepherd Chapel (150 seats)? Surely not. It would help if pianists decreased the height of the lid to four or six inches, or had it down altogether in music which requires a lighter pianistic presence. After all, string players tailor their vibrato to the requirements of the music. Why not pianists also?

Modern stringed instruments are capable of louder sound than Baroque strings, but that is dwarfed by the difference between pianos today and the early pianos used by Mozart and Beethoven. So playing in a trio for piano, violin, and cello, like Beethoven’s “Archduke,” in a tiny venue like the chapel, a grand piano with the lid up creates an imbalance of sound.

This isn’t to say that pianist Mark Salman didn’t play with sensitivity Saturday night. In softer passages, his playing was clear, his touch gentle, all the notes well phrased and present, his ensemble excellent. The “Archduke” andante movement in particular was gorgeous and balanced between all three instruments. However, whenever the dynamic markings went higher than mezzo forte, Salman’s fingers seemed to grow steely and he played at a triple forte level. One could see in his shoulders the force with which he hit the notes. The piano sound dominated the music at these times.

Nevertheless, the concert as a whole gave considerable pleasure, as demonstrated by the applause at the end.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

David Afkham Conducts an “Electrifying” Beethoven’s 5th at SSO

David Afkham, conductor (Image: Askonas Holt)

Thursday’s Seattle Symphony concert at Benaroya Hall featured two young musicians who are reaching the rarified atmosphere of fulfilled promise in their careers. Of the two, cellist Gautier Capuçon and conductor David Afkham, Afkham is the rarer bird. Conductors usually reach musical maturity later than instrumental musicians, and Afkham is only 29.

An orchestra is a very tricky instrument to “play.” Conductors’ knowledge of each instrument’s capacities and constraints, the encyclopedic knowledge of a myriad scores, as well as a composer’s intent, and the musical style of a composer’s era, are all essential to a conductor’s understanding even before he or she hones the ability to impart that knowledge and insight to an orchestra of maybe a hundred musicians who often feel they know better what’s required than the conductor does.

German-born and educated, Afkham finished his conducting studies at age 24 and the following year won the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, which earned him the position for a year of assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and its conductor Valery Gergiev. Impressively, he has since conducted, and been rehired for more concerts, by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin among others, none of them orchestras who would consider accepting anyone second rate.

For Thursday’s concert, Afkham conducted Britten’s Cello Symphony, bracketing this less-known work with Mozart’s Overture to Don Giovanni and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

French cellist Capuçon, 31, has also made a name for himself, particularly in chamber music with many well-known names. Of his performance of the Cello Symphony here, most arresting from the start was his tone. He plays a Goffriller instrument from 1701, and from it he drew a sound that was bright but never brash, mellow, velvety, glorious, and strong as well as able to whisper, all aspects which he needed in the Britten.

This work with its symphonic structure is not a concerto per se, but it is concerto-like in its showcasing of one instrument. It’s not a comfortable piece of music, but it’s also not spiky or violent, more one which has you hopping to keep up with the changes and ideas Britten brings.

Gautier Capuçon, cellist (Image: gautiercapucon.com)

The harmony is often spare with upper or lower strings remaining silent for extended periods and considerable use of the brass and woodwinds. Britten makes sure the cello, which plays most of the time, can always be heard against contrasting ranges in the other instruments and frequent soft pizzicato from the strings. Capuçon spent much time high on his top string, making sounds which might come from a violin but with more depth and sonority given the resonance of the instrument. At others he was on his lowest strings, creating the same warm depth and resonance, so that every note he played sang.

There’s nothing hummable about the Cello Symphony, nor is it a work to feel familiar with at first hearing, but in Afkham’s and Capuçon’s hands it was continually stimulating and arresting to hear.

The Mozart which began the concert with a small orchestra, showed Afkham as a decisive, often dynamic conductor, but it was his conducting of the Beethoven which was electrifying.

He took this very familiar work at what is now thought to be the speed intended by Beethoven, much faster than it has generally been played in the last century. The performance was vivid from the eerie start on, rushing forward, repeating, full of dynamic contrasts and tension interspersed with lyrical moments, never shrill or forced. The gentleness of the second movement seemed amazingly relaxed in contrast to what had gone before, and the last two movements with their look back to the beginning, and building from carefree and cheerful, to exciting, to joyful and triumphant left the listener almost breathless. Definitely a conductor to watch, and to bring back.

There are two more performances, tonight and Saturday, March 23.

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

Meet Anya Matanovič, a “Fresh Young Voice” in Seattle Opera’s Fidelio

Anya Matanovič

Anya Matanovič starts pulling on green rubber boots as I get up to leave from our interview backstage at McCaw Hall, and bewilderment overcomes me for a second, before I remember that, as Seattle Opera‘s production of Fidelio opens (at McCaw Hall through October 27; tickets), her character Marzelline is tending a tiny flower bed overshadowed by the prison fence.

Matanovič, a former Seattle Opera Young Artist (and former Issaquah resident), has been back to McCaw Hall for mainstage productions a few times now. She made her official Seattle Opera debut as Nanetta in Falstaff, where I pronounced her “perkycute incarnate.” Opera companies are always in search of brunettes who can project that sweet-and-spicy temperament that runs so strongly in the heroines of say, Italian comic operas or Mozart’s confections, so Matanovič has a Gilda, Pamina, and a Zerlina coming up after Seattle.

In Fidelio, Marzelline is not a major singing role, but she’s the audience’s guide into the belly of the beast where resistance fighter Florestan is imprisoned. Incongruously, Beethoven’s opera begins with the rhapsodizing of teenager in love, but there’s a dramatic method to this madness.

“I think that Marzelline is really the little spot of brightness and hope–ultimately, hope is a word that is repeated by almost everybody in this opera. I sing it, whatever, like…eight times in that first aria,” explains Matanovič.

There are two prisons here–the one you can see onstage, and the one that keeps people from being themselves. Director Chris Alexander instructed the cast that every one of them is fearful of something, and to find out what that was. “That’s what he talked to us about at the beginning, to try to make this very real, to find this fear beneath things,” says Matanovič. “For me, I think it would be the fear of being stuck in this dark place, so I have found, pinned all of my hopes on, this new guy [Fidelio] who comes in.

“I see him as…well, you know when you’re madly in love, head over heels in love, and you feel you’re actually…insane? Marzelline is feeling that way, it’s all she can think about, all she talks about. It’s this beautiful, exciting hope about what her life could be.” After that aria, of course, things go downhill for pretty much everyone.

“It’s a big day, I get engaged to a boy, I find out it’s to a girl, my dad almost dies–I mean there’s a lot that happens,” she sums up, smiling. “But what I learn from that is that I see this woman [Leonore/Fidelio] who has so much courage, so much love, that that’s what I aspire to be.”

To catch you up a little, Leonore (Christiane Libor, making her Seattle Opera debut) has disguised herself as a man, Fidelio, to infiltrate the prison where her all-too-mortal beloved, Florestan (Clifton Forbis, last here as Tristan), is being held before execution. Somehow she has to outwit the prison’s commandant Pizarro (Greer Grimsley) and Marzelline’s father, the  jailer Rocco (Arthur Woodley)–you might have seen that duo in the same roles at Portland Opera.

Marzelline could be just an innocent, unschooled bystander, but Matanovič is representative of a younger group of singers who don’t let small roles–or opera plots–keep them from finding emotional authenticity. “I try to approach my characters always from as honest a place as possible, but at the same time, we can only do what the composer has written, there’s only time for that,” she says, judiciously.

“I have my own little journey that I take, and I don’t know who will see that at all, because that moment is all about Florestan and Leonore reuniting. But I think when I see her unchain him, and I see the look that they share, and I realize everything that she’s gone through, that at that moment I stop being hurt about myself and I see how strong love can be.”

It is just like the maverick Beethoven to write an opera that has a transcendent, happy ending. After the war, conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote with agreeable German overstatement that “Fidelio is a Mass, not an opera–its emotions touch the borders of religion….” It’s a famously challenging work to sing (Beethoven seeming to take singers at their word that their voices were just another “instrument”), but perhaps that is why singers invest so much emotionally in the work.

“Beethoven to me is a composer that got something on this other level. Whatever you want to call it, God, or a spiritual level, he wrote that, his music is that,” attests Matanovič. “It transcends anything we can say about it. It’s why I wanted to sing in the first place, because there are certain things that I just cannot express with words, and I think Beethoven’s music encompasses that.

“With this cast…I was watching [rehearsal] the other night, and I just thought if Beethoven were he he’d be really proud. This cast that Speight [Jenkins] has assembled is the best you’re going to see. Not only do they sing it beautifully, but they live it. I feel very honored.”

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Joshua Roman’s TownMusic Series Begins with a Trio Treat

Joshua Roman (Photo: Tina Su)

Joshua Roman needs no introduction to Seattle, where he has been the fair-haired darling of classical groupies ever since his appointment as principal cellist for the Seattle Symphony in 2006, a two-year stint which he left to pursue a varied solo career.

However, his appeal to Seattleites, not to mention his fine playing and eclectic musical ideas, inspired Town Hall to engage him to spearhead a new series called TownMusic in 2007.

Now beginning its sixth season, the series of five concerts ranges from the wacky (A Little Nightmare Music, this November) to the intellectually adventurous (violinist Jennifer Koh’s exploration of Bach, his influence on and connection to composers in all genres, next February), to the purely classical as in the opening performance last Tuesday. Roman performs in three of them.

For this concert, Roman, pianist Victor Santiago Asuncion, and violinist Dale Barltrop performed trios by Beethoven and Schubert as well as a recent work by Dan Visconti, a composer whose work Roman has brought here before.

From the first notes of the Beethoven, it was clear that this threesome is of the caliber we’ve come to expect in the UW Series at Meany Hall or at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival. Moreover, Town Hall has the intimacy for chamber music that the size of Meany Theater obviates, and the warm acoustics support the performers as they don’t at Nordstrom Recital Hall.

Barltrop is beginning his fourth season as concertmaster of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and met Roman at the Cleveland Institute of Music where both were studying. Both have been avid players of chamber music, and Barltrop and Asuncion both studied at the University of Maryland.

They are not listed in the program as a named trio. But having heard them, I can hope that they decide to perform together on a regular basis. This concert was part of a short concert tour which began in Memphis and from here headed to Vancouver and then goes to Australia.

Their Beethoven, the early Trio in B-Flat Minor, was a joy. First noticed was Asuncion’s playing, his runs so clean, so light, so expressive, his phrasing so beautifully shaped. But Barltrop’s and Roman’s playing was equally sensitive, all three of them building to climaxes, ratcheting back to sudden softer sections, full of verve and attack but without aggression in an eloquence which held and absorbed the listener.

Their Schubert, the Trio in E-Flat Major, combined thoughtful undercurrents with bubbling charm, somber at one moment, full of excitement here, lightheartedness there. At all times the three played as with one mind, always balanced so that no instrument overwhelmed the others but came to the fore at the appropriate moments.

Visconti’s Lonesome Road, in its Seattle premiere, is an 18-minute work in seven short movements which purports to portray that American vacation standby, the crosscountry roadtrip. Apparently the movements can be played in any order, and for this trip it seemed they were driving in circles. I heard, I thought, something from Tenessee, down to New Orleans with more than a hint of jazz, out to Kansas with one of that state’s huge summer storms, and back to a bit of Kentucky bluegrass, always with the feel of cars whizzing by and fading in the distance: A well-designed, amusing work easy to hear and never becoming boring.

I’d go with keen interest to hear any of these performers again, separately or together as a trio. The audience, a good size for any concert so early in the concert season, seemed to feel likewise, judging by its response.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival Opens Fortissimo

This July sees the first year of artistic director James Ehnes’s stamp on the programming and artists presented at Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival (running through July 29; tickets). The festival is in its 31st season, and Ehnes has been playing violin here for some 15 years: His choices show a continuity which will reassure audience, but also fresh ideas which will enliven the festival.

Among these has been bringing at least one work to each performance never played at the festival before—not easy when one remembers there have been between 12 and 20 concerts in each of 30 years, each with three or four works played, though many have been repeated more than once.

Opening night Monday at Nordstrom Recital Hall included the rarely-performed Variations for Violin, Cello and Piano, Op. 44, by Beethoven. He sketched it out in 1792, the year he reached 22 and was studying—not always fruitfully—with Haydn, but didn’t publish it for years after.

Although Beethoven had written some well-received works prior to this, the Variations seem more a student work, heavily leaning towards the piano part, played Monday by Jeewon Park. When each instrument has its limelight, the other two are not much more than accompaniment. Nevertheless, the work has its charm, and much of the performance, by Park, violinist Erin Keefe, and cellist Edward Aaron, gave it shape and nuance particularly in the lighter variations, though the musicians tended to be overly forceful when the music called for a forte.

Those who attended the free pre-concert recital had the delight of hearing pianist Marc-André Hamelin give a superb performance of two of his own works: Theme and Variations (Cathy’s Variations) and Variations on a Theme of Paganini—this last a spinoff, or perhaps I should say a takeoff, on other famous Variations on the same theme.

So often, great pianists are not great composers, but Hamelin, definitely a great pianist, has the depth and the imagination and the knowledge to write music which has the components to make it last. Cathy’s Variations, written for his fiancée about five years ago has a gentle flowing melody for a theme, largely in classical-romantic style and tonality, with variations which build and extend and embroider.

My neighbor turned to me afterward, commenting: “After that, I feel I know Cathy,” which seemed an appropriate compliment to the music. His brilliant Paganini Variations were clearly recognizable and impishly distorted, an excellent choice for this musically educated audience which caught all the insertions and nuances and chuckled often.

Ehnes himself with pianist Jon Kimura Parker performed Bartok’s Sonata No. 1 for violin and piano, the heart and soul of the ensuing concert. It’s a work which takes complete attention for the listener to absorb, and judging by the silence between movements, it received that. It also takes thorough understanding by the musicians in order to put it across, and that too it had. This was a stellar performance of a work written in the early 1920s which sounds as fresh and contemporary today, 90 years later, as it must have when written.

Brahms’ Quintet for Piano and Strings, Op. 34, which concluded the concert, received an intense, vigorous, sometimes even aggressive performance which began startlingly loud and continued that way. While there were many moments of extreme beauty and exquisite soft playing, and a synchronization of bowing between the two violins, Andrew Wan and Augustin Hadelich, which was a marvel to hear and behold, the performance was marred by too much forcing at every forte moment, turning each into an unneccessary quadruple forte.

Strings in Brahms’ time were all gut. Had they played this way in the 1860s when this was composed, strings would have snapped right and left during the performance. The lower registers of cellist Bion Tsang and violist David Harding were less noticeable in this regard, but Hamelin at the piano sounded equally overloud.

Maybe the performance would have sounded less pushed in a large concert hall, but this is chamber music, and Nordstrom holds only 500-plus seats. The idea of using performance practice—an approach to performing music in the context of its time—not only in Baroque music but in all music up to the present day, has been taking hold in many unexpected places, even in one of the last hold outs, the orchestra. Surely it is not too much to hope that chamber music players, particularly those of the caliber always present at Seattle Chamber Music Society’s concerts, could pay attention to this?

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Itzhak Perlman Performs Classical Favorites with Seattle Symphony

Legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman is back in Seattle this week for two concerts with the Seattle Symphony.  It’s always inspiring to watch Perlman in action, whether as a violin soloist or conductor. This time, Seattle audiences get to see Perlman in both roles. Last night’s concert featured a grab-bag of favorites including Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Perlman and the Symphony will repeat the program tonight.

Itzhak Perlman

Despite its ubiquitous presence in classical compilation CDs and car commercials, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was a treat with the world’s foremost violinist at the helm. Perlman and the orchestra performed the “Summer” and “Winter” concertos, with Perlman playing the solo part and conducting from the ranks of the first violin section. Both concertos are full of drama. Slow, languid solo melodies provide stark contrast with rapid, buzzing textures that involve the entire string section.

In the fast movements, particular the frantic final movement of “Summer,” Perlman and the orchestra maintained a high level of excitement despite a few rough spots, particularly involving the contrasting timbres of the violins and harpsichord. Perlman’s violin sung out best in the slower movements, especially in the sweet and sorrowful middle movement of “Winter.”

The audience got its first glimpse of Perlman solely in a conducting role with Mozart’s Symphony No. 38, known as the “Prague” Symphony. Perlman’s clear direction brought the orchestra together, particularly in the fine ensemble playing in the fast third movement. Also of note were interesting and unexpected harmonies between the strings and winds that rose to the surface in the slow second movement. Unsurprisingly, Perlman’s conducting occasionally mimed the playing of a violin–only natural for one who has achieved international fame as a concert violinist.

The evening’s performance concluded with Beethoven’s beloved Symphony No. 7. Here Perlman seemed to take a step back as a conductor, letting Beethoven’s writing speak for itself. The result was enthralling, from the somber, stately second movement to the joyous horn calls of the fourth movement.

If last night’s near-capacity crowd was any indication, tickets will likely be scarce for tonight’s performance. Arrive at Benaroya Hall early if you’re hoping to grab a seat.