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Morlot’s Seattle Symphony Celebrates Rhythms of Stravinsky, Gershwin, Varèse

Ludovic Morlot at Opening Night at Seattle Symphony, 2011 (Photo: Ben VanHouten)

This program plays at Benaroya Hall tonight, September 29, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, October 1, at 8 p.m. Tickets here.

It’s a delight to see fresh winds blowing at Seattle Symphony, courtesy of its new young music director, Ludovic Morlot.

For this week’s concerts, he announced he was celebrating rhythm, but as well as pulsing with rhythm, the Benaroya Hall stage exploded with musical excitement, flavors and colors on Thursday night, and the audience responded with enthusiasm.

Morlot programmed two very familiar works, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and Gershwin’s An American in Paris, but then he added a composer who is not nearly as familiar, Edgard Varèse, and his work Amériques. This last choice is in accord with another statement of Morlot’s that he wants to introduce less familiar works to the audience, expanding our horizons.

Many of us are dubious about having our musical horizons widened. “We never heard of this composer. What if we don’t like it? I don’t want to pay money to go to hear somethiing I won’t enjoy.”

Never fear. So far Morlot may be bringing on music less familiar to us, but he is doing it with a discriminating hand, and a good understanding of what the audience will embrace. I heard from one concertgoer last week who had been to the concert including music by Dutilleux and Frank Zappa. She had enjoyed it so much she went out and bought a ticket to hear it again the next day.

Thursday night, Morlot created the same enjoyment. The three works were all written within a span of about 15 years, Rite in 1913, Paris in 1928 and Amériques between 1918 and 1922. It was a time of artistic ferment in Paris, even during WWI, beginning the same kind of musical upheaval which had occurred in Italy at the very end of the 16th and early 17th centuries when the Florentine Camerata and composers like Monteverdi realized that one could express all kinds of emotions dramatically in music, culminating in the birth of opera.

This time the innovation which redirected musical directions for the future was spearheaded by the Rite, the premiere of which produced near pandemonium in the theater. It’s not so far out for us today, but its onslaught of vitality, excitement and tension, its shrill discordance, unusual—to them—harmonies and sawtoothed rhythms, the seemingly disorderly cacophony, was a shocker.

All of these were present in Morlot’s performance Thursday. He brought out the musical colors and the unexpected instrumental combinations, used the sudden quieter moods and the silent pauses as clear contrasts to the relentless clangor, and he shaped the whole so that it hung together as a work. It is easy in this work to have the orchestra playing at full volume almost throughout. He never did. There was plenty of volume, but it never reached a fullscale assault on the eardrums.

Gershwin’s An American in Paris is much less wild, more urbane, and great fun. Morlot chose to perform it two weeks ago at the SSO’s opening gala, and I reviewed it then in this space. Suffice it to say I enjoyed it as much Thursday. In Morlot’s hands, this is a piece with a grin on its face, exuberance in its heart, and wings on its feet.

Varèse was born only a year after Stravinsky, in 1883, and many of the same world influences worked on him. Well before he wrote Amériques he began to look for different sounds, different instruments he could use, and was not thinking along the lines of the romantic composers he grew up hearing. Amériques which he wrote after he arrived in New York is like Gershwin’s Paris in that the sounds and ambience of the city captured him, but it is much harder to distinguish them in the music. If you listen very carefully you can maybe hear the clopping of horses’ hooves, the foghorn, or the cries of vendors, but the only unmistakable city sound is the siren which he brings in often.

Morlot said from the stage that he deliberately put this on the same program as the Rite, as the influence of the 1913 work on the 1918-22 one is obvious. Varèse uses winds similarly, and, importantly, the music has the same flavor, often even similar harmonies, and has a similar impact on the hearer. But his ideas on melody—he called it “organizational sound”—and his huge use of percussion, eleven of them and two timpanists, are all his own, as is his imagination.

However, it does feel closely akin to the Rite in every way, and that leaves one wondering why the Rite caught on and is heard everywhere, and Amériques much less so. It was fascinating to hear the two in juxtaposition. Both are noisy works, and no one could call the Gershwin a quiet dreamy piece, but the effect of all this loud exuberance did not leave this audience member with ears ringing from the blast. Rather, Morlot kept the volume at just under that point, until the last measure of the Varèse when, having thought before the orchestra was playing at full, it suddenly became an amzing blast of sound.

As Gershwin would have said: Fascinating rhythm.

The Morlot Era at Seattle Symphony Has Now Begun

Morlot_Opening Night
©2010 Darin Fong Photography
Efe Baltacıgil_Credit Christian Steiner
Roman, Joshua1(c)Jeremy Sawatzky

Ludovic Morlot at Opening Night at Seattle Symphony, 2011 (Photo: Ben VanHouten)

Demarre McGill (Photo: ©2010 Darin Fong Photography)

Efe Baltacigil (Photo: Christian Steiner)

Joshua Roman (Photo: Jeremy Sawatzky)

Morlot_Opening Night thumbnail
©2010 Darin Fong Photography thumbnail
Efe Baltacıgil_Credit Christian Steiner thumbnail
Roman, Joshua1(c)Jeremy Sawatzky thumbnail

Saturday night at Benaroya Hall saw the dressiest Seattle crowd since the opening of McCaw Hall, with silks, satins, sparkles and high fashion abounding. The occasion? Ludovic Morlot’s debut as music director of the Seattle Symphony. The auditorium was packed, following a pre-concert cocktail party and preceding a gala dinner.

Proceedings on stage began with a brief, graceful welcome by board chair Leslie Jackson Chihuly, who mentioned also that conductor, now laureate, Gerard Schwarz and his wife Jody were present, as were Morlot’s wife Chizlane and two children.

And then the concert began.

As well as Morlot, two more musicians made their orchestra debuts at this concert: principal cello Efe Baltacigil and principal flute Demarre McGill, both experienced performers who seemed very much at home in the repertoire. Two positions remain open, that of concertmaster, and unexpectedly and to our loss, principal horn, as John Cerminaro has quietly retired.

Morlot chose wisely for his gala program. All four works were immediately accessible to the audience, two of them familiar favorites, one being French, as is Morlot. The third was an appropriately classical opener stylishly played, Beethoven’s Overture to The Consecration of the House, and the fourth showcased Morlot’s adventurous musical spirit and that of solo cellist Joshua Roman, who has had his own following here ever since his two years as principal cellist with the Seattle Symphony.

So often people turn away from concert programs which include a composer name they don’t know–particularly if it is from the 20th, or heaven forbid, the 21st century. Morlot is determined to undo that prejudice and at the same time encourage the performing of music from genres which have rarely been welcome on a symphony stage. Yet many well-known performers from other genres have written in a symphonic vein, though that may not be where their fame lies. Take Frank Zappa, whose “Dupree’s Paradise” comes up in next week’s symphony concerts.

In this gala, it was a concerto for cello and wind orchestra by 20th century classical and jazz pianist Friedrich Gulda. He frequently mixed both genres on the concert stage and he does in this 1980 work.

While the stage was being reset, Morlot took the microphone to say a few words, including his thanks to the community and the orchestra for making him and his family welcome, and he also took time to thank the stagehands, by name, for the work they do. Talking about the outreach he hopes to do, bringing music to people, and people to Benaroya, he mentioned that school children will be able to come free to Masterpiece series concerts on a companion ticket. He talked a bit about Gulda, and his passion for jazz and improvisation as well as his ability to play and record impeccable classical performances.

The cello role in the Gulda is nonstop for the entire 30 minutes of this five-movement work. The mood swings from folk type melodies to jazzy sections and back without a hitch, the jazzy parts backed by a couple of electric guitars and drumset. Much of the music is recognizable dance rhythms such as a German laendler going oom-pah-pah to a lullaby to a Sousa-type march with the tuba belting it out. The third movement is an extended unaccompanied cadenza for the cello, with brief snatches from the Marseillaise, Reveille and more, each of which brought appreciative laughs from the attentive audience.

It isn’t a profound work, but it is great fun and musically solid, just right for a concert such as this. Roman did it proud, his technique as unerring as ever, his tone singing, his musicianship making the most of the work’s arches and shape. Morlot too made the most of it, keeping the balance and the vigor going throughout.

Morlot’s own abilities showed up best in Gershwin’s An American in Paris. In his hands it became a joyous, exuberant performance, yet with seamless connections between sections, and nuance which left one hearing it fresh.

Bolero, by his compatriot Ravel, is a crowd-pleaser, not for any exciting musical content, but for the way its constant repetition grows from soft to huge, and by the contrast in different instruments playing that melody. Morlot brought snare drummer Michael Werner, who repeats the same brief phrase from start to finish, to perform at the front of the stage. I’ve never heard this piece begun so softly. It seemed no one was playing at all, but the cellists’ hands were moving, as were Werner’s, and only gradually, as one listened harder, did the sound begin to emerge and grow.

In the middle, Morlot, a violinist, put down his baton and joined the first violins for a spell, while around him the musicians continued as closeknit as before. Towards the end, he took up his baton again, but it showed, which perhaps he intended, the coherence and professionalism of the orchestra, that, where necessary, it can play without leadership.

All in all, this was an auspicious beginning to Morlot’s tenure here. Let’s hope that packed audience repeats at many more concerts. Preview the many, varied programs to come here.

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.