Tag Archives: steve reeder

Arts & Entertainment, Music

How Pictures at an Exhibition came to be

Beyond the Score is a gem of a program series the Seattle Symphony has been importing from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which creates it. In each one, the orchestra, plus pianists, actors and narrators deconstruct a single work, describing the history of its genesis, its composition and orchestration with many instrumental samples, photographs and other illustrations portrayed on a big screen. And then after intermission, the orchestra performs the entire piece.

In the second of three this season, performed Sunday afternoon, the work in question was Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which lends itself to this kind of analysis. Narrator Steve Reeder, with actor Galen Joseph Osier, pianist Anastasiya Popova and the Seattle Symphony, brought to life Mussorgsky’s close friendship with designer/illustrator Victor Hartmann, his devastation at his death, and his determination to create something in commemoration, using Hartmann’s own exhibited work as a jumping off point.

But also, they brought out Mussorgsky’s disorganized life and the total mess his papers and compositions were in after he died at the young age of 42 (brought on by alcoholic seizures).

They spent much of the first part of the concert showing, with enlightening samples from the orchestra, how various composers had tried to orchestrate his Pictures (which Mussorgsky had written for solo piano) but none had managed to transmit the composer’s originality to an orchestral realization until Ravel. Hearing the blandness of Rimsky-Korsakov’s attempt and that of Leopold Stokowski, showed in contrast how imaginative Ravel’s instrumental choices were and how true to the emotions of the original.

It made sense that most of the concert’s first half was spent on just one part of the work, Mussorgsky’s “Promenade,” in which he imagines with a specific melody the viewer walking from painting to painting through the exhibition, but including his feelings about the work he has just seen.

Perhaps though, what showed most clearly Ravel’s brilliant orchestration was how he portrayed the two Jews, one wealthy and established, the other poor and desperate, in “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle.” Mussorgsky’s music for the former, Reeder pointed out, was based on religious chant, that of the poor man on klezmer music. Ravel chose low ponderous instrumentation for the first, and high, whiny trumpets for the latter, a marvelous contrast.

During the first half, Popova played brief excerpts on piano, her hands shown on screen, and she was often followed by the same excerpt in the orchestra, conducted by the orchestra’s associate conductor Stilian Kirov.

After intermission, Kirov conducted the entire work in Ravel’s orchestration, giving a now enlightened audience a chance to hear the full work with all its colorful, vigorous and descriptive glory in an excellent performance.

While the 2014-2015 season has a plethora of concerts guaranteed to attract many listeners, it’s a shame that Beyond the Score has been downgraded to just one concert next year. Certainly Sunday’s big and enthusiastic audience made clear its delight.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Deconstructing Elgar’s “Enigma” at Seattle Symphony. Solving it? No.

Michael Francis, conductor (Photo: Horst Kolo)
Michael Francis, conductor (Photo: Horst Kolo)

Edward Elgar composed his Enigma Variations around the theme of a dark saying, a riddle to which he left no answer and, furthermore, said that another theme overlaid his entire set of variations, one unheard and unplayed though central to the work (rather like Godot in Waiting for Godot). He said it was a well known tune, but no one has yet guessed it. Perhaps it’s just as well that the 14 variations, mostly identified by initials and one identified only by asterisks, engendered great enjoyment by themselves for the owners who found episodes of time they spent with Elgar immortalized, and for listeners in the 114 years since its composition.

Though it began with a theme he composed almost while noodling for fun on the piano, as Elgar continued to work on the Variations, he became serious about the project and ended up with one of the most beloved and durable works written by an English composer.

The Enigma Variations, on last week’s regular Seattle Symphony concerts, also had a concert to itself Sunday afternoon. “Beyond the Score” is a program initiated by the Chicago Symphony in which one well-known work is deconstructed and explained in the first half of the program with narrator, actors, visuals, and the orchestra, and performed in its entirety in the second.

The Enigma Variations lends itself perfectly to such a program. On Sunday, narrator Steve Reeder gave the background, while actors Dave White, Lucy Bialik, and Dennis Bateman took the roles of Elgar, his wife and many of those portrayed, all made easier by the penchant of late Victorians to write frequent letters to each other.

Sitting cosily at a small tea table, White made an excellent Elgar, complete with suitable “harrumphs” at intervals, while Bialik made the perfect Caroline Alice Elgar (as well as the irrepressibly enthusiastic and bubbling young friend Dora), and Bateman took on some of the male friends.

All their comments were interleaved with illustrative snippets of music, first from the piano (played by SSO pianist Kimberly Russ), then seamlessly taken up by the orchestra, directed by young British conductor Michael Francis. At the same time, on a big screen above the musicians, the audience saw the milieu in which Elgar lived and worked, the bald Malvern Hills near his home, the house in which he and Caroline Alice lived as well as the houses of friends and the woods where he walked with his dog. Parts of letters or of musical scorescame up on the screen, plus photos of the friends whose company he enjoyed and about whom he composed.

By the time the second half of the concert began, the large audience was able to identify which variation had the bulldog sliding down a steep slope into the fast running river and splashing his way out; which described the thunderstorm Elgar and another friend got caught in on a walk; which the high pitched giggle of one friend or the rather gloomy outlook of another. Cello and viola solos gave reference to friends who played these instruments, and perhaps the heart of the work, the stately “Nimrod” variation characterized his publisher and close friend, August Jaeger.

Francis conducted the work with empathy and understanding, never allowing it to become brash or forced. From the quiet beginning, the sound floated in a leisurely unfolding of the theme and its development, and continued with each individual variation receiving its particular character: gentle, excitable, expansive, jumpy, grand, starting with the one for his wife, ending with the finale for himself.

It was a fine concert with which to introduce a child to classical music and there were many young people present. The 11-year-old in my party found it thrilling, and is looking forward to the next “Beyond the Score,” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, May 5, 2013.