Tag Archives: schubert

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Exploring Melody with Soprano Jennifer Foster and Simple Measures

Simple Measures can pop up anywhere, as this streetcar video above proves. This program repeats tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Mt. Baker Community Club. The next Simple Measures concerts are April 19 and 21. 

Q Café in Interbay is not what you’d consider the usual venue for chamber music: a big space (for a café) with a concrete floor, a dais in one corner, coffee machine and cash register in the opposite corner, ancient couch on the side. For Friday night, however, the tables put away, casually dressed people of all ages filled the café chairs now arranged in an arc surrounding the dais, and on it were four musicians and a singer.

The occasion was one of Simple Measure’s concerts. Several times a year, the little organization, founded and headed by cellist Rajan Krishnaswami, puts together a small group of some of Seattle’s best musicians plus guests to perform a concert program in various places not usually associated with classical music. Q Café is a regular, as is Mount Baker Community Center, also the Chapel at Good Shepherd Center. The programs have a theme, this season’s being Rhythm, Melody and Harmony, and Friday’s concert was on Melody.

Normally at performances, there is silence between musicians and audience. Not so here. Krishnawami’s premise is that chamber music should be a more informal gathering with discussion flowing and demonstrations given.

Jennifer Foster, soprano

For the first half of the program, three members of the Seattle Symphony—violinists Cordula Merks and Mae Lin, and violist Mara Lise Gearman—plus cellist Krishnaswami, joined soprano Jennifer Foster from Connecticut in a varied group of art songs. Cellist and singer conversed about them before performing, pointing out musical moments or style to watch for.

Two songs in late romantic style by Arthur Shepherd to poems of Rabindranath Tragore, two to Shakespeare by Lee Hoiby and a couple by Villa-Lobos gave clear evidence that the art song form is still alive and well.

Foster is an excellent exponent. An art song, as was once explained to me, is an opera in three minutes. Without moving much Foster had to be the characters, and she did this admirably with facial expression as well as vocal.

The two songs by Hoiby had been written for her with her consultation, this being only their second performance. She was ducal in his “If Music be the Food of Love,” words spoken by Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, and later, for instance, she became a helpful little girl, then a tired old woman in Villa-Lobos’ “A menina e a cancao,” (“The Girl and the Song”). The two Brazilian songs asked for only violin accompaniment: complicated, tricky, and easily accomplished by Lin with Foster.

For the second half of the program, it’s typical for Simple Measures to perform an entire chamber work. Friday, this was Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, preceded by the Schubert song it was named for. The song is quite brief, with Foster first the Maiden pleading to keep her life, then Death, reassuring the girl that it isn’t so bad to go with him. The song lies low for Foster, but she used her well-trained voice with excellent support in her low register to sing it effectively.

It’s always a pleasure to hear the quality of Symphony musicians playing individually. This fine performance showed off the artistry of Merks as the first violin to whom Schubert gives a starring role in this quartet. Her tone and touch as well as her musicianship show why she is such an asset to the music community here.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

NPR’s Christopher O’Riley Takes Liszt Over the Top

Christopher O'Riley
Christopher O’Riley

Pianist Christopher O’Riley, host of NPR’s popular national program From the Top (which introduces gifted young musicians), brought his own talents Tuesday night to UW’s President’s Piano Series at Meany Theater. He gave a program of Liszt transcriptions of works by Berlioz, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner and Mozart. (Next up is Georgian Khatia Buniatishvili on March 6, playing Chopin, Ravel, Schubert, and Stravinsky.)

All in all, this was a deeply disappointing concert.

There’s no doubt about O’Riley’s ability. There were beautiful moments of thoughtful touch, sensitive phrasing, fine technique throughout, but in fast, dense and loud passages—and Liszt loved these and inserted them as major portions of his compositions—O’Riley tended to go overboard and the results often were not as clean as they might have been.

He opened the program with Liszt’s lengthy transcription of the entire Symphonie Fantastique of Berlioz. In its orchestral form, Berlioz shows his mastery of timbres in expressing the atmospheric eeriness of his symphony through the different instruments. It’s a complex work with many threads which in a good orchestral performance remain sufficiently delineated for listeners to hear the details.

Liszt worked at a disadvantage here, as the piano has only one timbre. However, Liszt used, for choice, an Erard piano from the 1850s. This was a piano with much less tension than today’s concert grand. No metal bracing was needed to hold the piano’s shape together as is essential in today’s instrument, and the keyboard touch was much lighter, its sound decay shorter and the volume less loud. Liszt wanted the touch lighter still, and he had the mechanism altered to a hair-trigger sensitivity to help create more musical clarity in his furious onslaughts of notes. Even so, he left disabled pianos strewn behind him post-concert on many stages.

Playing Liszt’s Berlioz transcription leaves the modern pianist at a double disadvantage—both the single timbre, and the much heavier touch. O’Riley’s performance was often loud to over-loud, incredibly fast and dense, but instead of coming out clearly with an exciting sound and shape, there was little clarity, and his performance didn’t bring into relief the madness of the symphony’s essence as it warred with the saner moments. There was more frenzy, no nuance here, and unfortunately, much too much of this, despite oases of gentler, sparer sections in which his playing sang.

This is a work which is more fun for the performer to achieve than for the listener. I felt battered at the end. Had this been the only work of this type on the program it would have been plenty.

O’Riley continued with a short transcription of a Schubert song, Frühlingsglaube, and one by Schumann, Frühlingsnacht, the latter full of scintillating passagework. Both came off well in O’Riley’s hands, and he followed them with the transcription of Wagner’s Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Here O’Riley’s touch was more nuanced, and the emotional side came through.

Reminiscences of Don Juan, from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, fared less well. The lowest register of the modern piano is much muddier than that on the early Erard, and creating the sounds of the Don’s nemesis, the Commendatore, requires those bottom notes. In this performance they had little of the menace of the original. And while the charming and lighter central section is replete with well known melodies from the opera, the ending is again an onslaught of notes at full volume in which O’Riley again missed out on any expression or anything except getting the notes. It seemed to this listener that his hands were tired by this point in the program.

Liszt transcriptions can be a pleasure to hear, but in this performance, they mostly weren’t. Why did O’Riley choose this program? It seemed unbalanced, too much performer gratification in the fun of playing these pieces — and not enough for the audience itself — with too little variety:  not a good example for those young musicians he encourages so well on From the Top.

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

Catching a Stellar “Trout” at the Summer Chamber Music Festival

Jon Kimura Parker

The piano has always been a part of Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival (through July 29; tickets) and in both Monday and Tuesday’s programs this week, every work has included it. This may be in part because two well-known Canadian pianists are performing, Marc-André Hamelin and Jon Kimura Parker. Hamelin is a newcomer to the festival. Parker is returning after an absence of several years.

The piano line up this week also includes Jeewon Park, here with her husband, cellist Edward Arron, and the two gave the pre-concert recital of Rachmaninov’s Sonata in G Minor. Composed in 1900, Arron described it as a romantic refutation of those who had decided all melody had already been written and were heading in different musical directions.

Romantic it certainly is, and in Arron’s hands it was almost a love letter to his wife, his playing was so expressive, so warm, so rich, so tender. Throughout the work his cello sang and soared perfectly together and in balance with the piano part. Park for her part stayed easily on top of the busy piano role, with long lyrical phrases and many beautiful moments, though when the music required fast fortes, her hands seemed to lose their flexibility and became more rigid, detracting from the phrase-shaping.

The same happened in the first work of the concert itself, Mozart’s Sonata in A Major, K. 305, for violin and piano which she performed with violinist Andrew Wan. This was rather heavy-handed Mozart. I’d have liked it lighter with more elegant restraint. Wan plays a 1744 Bergonzi instrument from a couple of decades before the sonata was written, but he didn’t allow the instrument to sing, constraining its sound rather than releasing it to bloom.

Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in G Minor departs from his often subtle style, being forceful, almost violent at times except for the calmly beautiful adagio. Played by violinist and Society artistic director James Ehnes, violist David Harding, cellist Arron, and pianist Hamelin, it could be wondered if in 1921 Fauré is writing a response to his thoughts on the first World War. The players gave it intense energy and a full sound, Hamelin nearly overwhelming the strings several times with the power of his part. Fauré gives the viola many opening phrases so that Harding’s fine tone could be heard easily. The swirling tempest that is the last movement turns into a fast flow of inexorable forward motion with eddies, to which the musicians gave full rein.

Given the importance of the double bass in Schubert’s Quintet for Piano and Strings, the “Trout,” it’s surprising how few chamber works include it. It anchors the entire work’s carefree lightness, a state which embodied the performance given by violinist Augustin Hadelich, violist Erin Keefe, cellist Bion Tsang, bass Jordan Anderson, and pianist Parker. It’s impossible to be bored with this entrancing and familiar piece of music, which contains a profusion of inspired moments one after another. The five performers kept the joy, exuberance and vitality to the fore without ever allowing the music to bog down in weight. It was a stellar performance, enthusiastically appreciated by the capacity audience at Nordstrom Recital Hall.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Seattle Symphony Presents Keyboard Fireworks, a Beloved Classic, and a World Premiere

The Seattle Symphony performs works by Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, and Nico Muhly tonight, January 28, at 8 p.m. at Benaroya Hall. More details and tickets are available at the Seattle Symphony website.

Ludovic Morlot’s been hard at work. Although it’s only been a few months into his first season as music director of the Seattle Symphony, Morlot has already made waves with his adventurous programming and fresh approach to the symphonic repertoire. Thursday night’s concert was no exception, sandwiching Schubert’s beloved “Unfinished” Symphony No. 8 between a world premiere by Nico Muhly and a performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 by Marc-André Hamelin. The Symphony will perform the same program again tonight.

In many ways, these works are worlds apart. However, when they’re performed together as part of a unified program, listeners are invited to draw parallels between the pieces. In this way, a program that initially seems like a musical grab-bag is be transformed into an insightful exploration of a single musical concept. At Thursday’s concert, the theme of the night seemed to be musical texture. All three pieces on the program cycle through a wide variety of orchestral textures in a short amount of time, creating a musical landscape full of changing moods and colors.

Nico Muhly

The concert opened with Nico Muhly’s world premiere, a one-movement work playfully titled So Far So Good. Born in Vermont and currently based in New York City, Muhly is a young composer whose star is on the rise. Only thirty years old, he’s already racked up an impressive list of accomplishments, including an upcoming opera premiere at the Met, an ongoing gig as assistant to eminent composer Philip Glass, and collaborations with Björk.

In So Far So Good, Muhly uses repeating melodic themes and ever-shifting textures to create a work that is atmospheric and sonically rich. Contrasting textures in different sections of the orchestra are often combined and overlapped. For example, at the beginning of the work, Muhly juxtaposes a smooth, legato string part with short, staccato bursts from the brass and percussion. Morlot managed the flowing textures well, guiding the ensemble through sudden transitions and mood changes.

So Far So Good paired surprisingly well with the second piece on the program, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, another work that features dramatic shifts in mood and texture. Although Schubert was only able to complete the first two movements of the symphony before his death in 1828, the “Unfinished” is one of his most popular works. The piece flows rapidly through a huge spectrum of orchestral colors, ranging from a sweet, tender cello melody to grand gestures that utilize a full orchestral sound. The woodwind section sounded fantastic in the handful of solos and duets throughout the work, particularly Ben Hausmann on oboe, Christopher Sereque on clarinet, and Demarre McGill on flute.

The evening concluded with a performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, featuring Marc-André Hamelin as the soloist. Although Schubert and Chopin both heralded from the Romantic tradition of classical composition, the “Unfinished” Symphony is miles away from Chopin’s concerto in terms of tone and texture. Schubert’s Symphony focuses on a full range of orchestral sound, while Chopin’s work utilizes the orchestra to accentuate the expressive power of the piano.

One of the most technically skilled pianists alive today, Hamelin is known for pushing the limits of what is physically possible on the piano. In addition to his international acclaim as a concert pianist, he is well-known as the composer of “Circus Galop”, a work for player piano that many consider to be the world’s most difficult piano piece.

The Chopin piano concerto was an excellent choice to showcase a different side of Hamelin’s artistry. Although Chopin’s compositions call for a virtuosic technique, his music is full of tender moments in which a simple melodic passage is imbued with great emotional intensity. Hamelin struck a harmonious balance between flashy technique and musical expression, sailing through difficult fast passages without batting an eye, but bringing out a delicate singing tone in sections that were slower and more melodic.

Morlot’s conducting talent and leadership abilities earned Seattle Symphony a recent mention in the New York Times. NYT music critic Zachary Woolfe reviewed Thursday night’s concert and commented favorably on Morlot’s accomplishments and vision for the orchestra: “Watching Seattle in the coming years will be fun”. If the excitement of Thursday night’s performance is any indication, Seattle’s new maestro’s on the right track.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Gerard Schwarz Takes His Last Bows–For Now

Seattle Symphony's Gerard Schwarz

This weekend sees the final concert of Gerard Schwarz’ long tenure as music director of the Seattle Symphony (June 18, 8 p.m., tickets). He’ll be back, as conductor laureate, for several weeks next season but Thursday night’s audience at Benaroya Hall treated him to a prolonged ovation—several minutes—as he came out on stage with former governor Dan Evans and the Symphony’s board chair, Leslie Jackson Chihuly.

Chihuly paid tribute to Schwarz, describing him as a “big dreamer,” emphasizing his tremendous energy and thought for the community’s musical wellbeing, as well as being the force behind the building of Benaroya Hall itself. Evans spoke of Schwarz’s comnmitment to Seattle, moving to live and raise his family here, and the building of the orchestra.

In brief and graceful comments, Schwarz said: “The music says it all. My gratitude goes to the musicians. I love you all.” Then he turned to the audience and thanked us, for being there, supporting the orchestra over the years. He received more applause, including from the musicians themselves.

Then it was down to business.

Philip Glass

The first item on the program was the last of this season’s 17 Gund-Simonyi Farewell Commissions, Philip Glass’s Harmonium Mountain in its world premiere. All of these were stipulated to be short concert openers, and this one came in at just under five minutes. An appealing work, it is in the composer’s minimalist vein, but much less aggressively so than some of his other works. Perhaps it was the short length, but this sounded more like a kaleidoscope of colors shifting frequently, with different patterns in the music but without any theme per se, and very basic rhythms.

Because of the length of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the “Resurrection,” the major work on the program, one more short work came before intermission, Schubert’s Overture to Rosamunde, which was given a well-shaped performance that brought out its dramatic portent as well as its singing melodies.

The Mahler is a huge work, around 75 minutes. It requires huge forces, such as ten horns and eight trumpets, all the flutes doubling on piccolo, and plenty of percussion, not to mention a chorus and two vocal soloists. Perhaps Schwarz wanted to have on stage for his farewell all the musicians with whom he whas worked in recent years, including all those who have substituted. Perhaps it was the grandeur of the work, and its message of death and resurrection, as metaphor for “Au revoir” which means “to meet again” or in today’s laconic parlance, “See you!”

Whatever the reason, this was an excellent performance. Mahler’s was an extraordinary accomplishment, to create a work of such length while constantly holding the attention of the listener. Schwarz achieved the same feat, maintaining the symphony’s nuances, triumphs, despondency and joys, its descriptions, its charm, and above all its endless variety. Soft sections had fine tone and transparency, and there were startling salvos from the brass—which sounded superb all evening despite catching a few minor frogs.

The Seattle Sympony Chorale in the last movement could easily be heard over the orchestra forces without straining, and the two young soloists, soprano Angele Meade and mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, have voices it would be a pleasure to hear again. I was particularly taken with Cooke’s mezzo, which has the true alto quality and timbre essential for Mahler.

Schwarz has his detractors. Almost all conductors have feet of clay to their orchestra musicians, but I think nobody would deny that when he came in, 26 years ago, the Seattle Symphony was a provincial orchestra. Nobody could describe it that way now. He has been a consummate orchestra builder. He has brought in excellent players, and his programming has been consistently enlightening, adventurous at times without turning off the audience.

He hands off to Ludovic Morlot a fine-tuned precision instrument able to do anything Morlot requires of them.

The audience brought him and the soloists back three times. At the last one, when Schwarz signaled the orchestra to rise, concertmaster Maria Larionoff shook her head slightly and the orchestra remained seated, giving the applause to him.