Tag Archives: toby saks

Arts & Entertainment, Music

SYSO: An Astonishing Young Orchestra in our Midst

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Over every five years or so, the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra experiences 100% turnover. How many musical groups contend with this and still manage to produce a polished performance for the public to enjoy?

Sunday afternoon at Benaroya Hall, the SYSO, under music director Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, presented the orchestra in Part II of Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, Ernest Bloch’s tone poem “Schelomo” with 17-year-old cello soloist Hana Cohon, and Brahms’s “Symphony No. 2 in D Major.”

The orchestra usually contains as many musicians as the stage can hold. This time, there were somewhat fewer musicians (only around 100), and those in a lopsided configuration, due to so many having graduated and headed off to college at the end of last season. Fifteen first violins, 13 second violins, eight violists and nine basses, but 18 cellos as well as a healthily populated brass section could have meant an imbalance in the playing, but Radcliffe kept the sound evenly distributed and the orchestra never sounded off-kilter.

The SYSO family has four orchestras and upwards of 1,100 young musicians in its programs, which are geared to educate and train young players, not necessarily just for a musical career, but for acquiring skills useful in any career, like community and teamwork, self-discipline, and focus, all while having the exhilarating satisfaction that playing in an orchestra gives them. Players move up all the time from the beginning orchestras to the Junior Orchestra and from there to the Youth Symphony. About half of the current Youth Symphony are new this season, and had never been on the Benaroya stage before, according to SYSO’s education director Kathleen Allen.

Given this, the quality of the performance was extraordinary. Any of SYSO’s programs are worth going to for their professional caliber, and every work they play is, to the musicians, a premiere: something they have never before played in performance. As such, they bring a freshness and excitement to each one.

This was evident Sunday. The Berlioz begins extremely softly with just the first violins, in exposed phrases where any glitch or wobble would be grossly obvious. They played it with aplomb: beautiful tone, pianissimo, nothing shaky about it. Radcliffe would need confidence in his players to essay that.

Principal oboe Bhavani Kotha deserves special mention for the nuanced phrasing and smooth shaping of her prominent role here.

Cohon, who won SYSO’s 2013 Concerto Competition, performed “Schelomo” with maturity and expressiveness, as well as fine tone and good use of vibrato, while the orchestra remained closely with her without ever overwhelming her playing.

There were some rough edges in the brass during the first movement of the Brahms symphony, but here again, Radcliffe balanced his forces and had the orchestra playing as a close-knit group so that the richness, warmth and beauty of the work came through clearly. The horns did particularly well, and at the end, Radcliffe recognized principal horn Andrew Angelos for a personal ovation.

The performance was dedicated to the memory of Toby Saks, who died last summer. She had been a long-time supporter of SYSO, was one of their cello coaches; and, in 1984, herself played “Schelomo” as soloist with the orchestra.

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Arts & Entertainment, Music

Seattle Chamber Music Society Bids Farewell to Founder Toby Saks

Toby Saks

On Friday July 29th, Toby Saks’ reign at Seattle Chamber Music Society comes to an end with a performance celebrating the organization’s 30th birthday and Saks’ 30-year tenure.

This summer’s festival does continue for another couple of weeks, at The Overlake School in Redmond, but the Overlake expansion is a relative newcomer, only seven years old, so the toasts to Saks will be this week.

The concert at Nordstrom Recital Hall will go on as usual though without the usual preceding recital, and it concludes with a special performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.3 with ten musicians, including some luminaries from festivals years past, among them violinist Paul Rosenthal, violist Marcus Thompson, and Jon Kimura Parker playing harpsichord. A few tickets remain if you want to go. A gala dinner in Saks’ honor follows at the Four Seasons.

Meanwhile before that, several highlights beckon at Monday’s and Wednesday’s recitals and concerts; Prokofiev and Shostakovich Monday, preceded by cellist Johannes Moser in the recital playing Bach and Lutoslawski.

Moser is a cellist it is hard to take your eyes off. Dramatic and passionate, the festival newcomer performs with his whole body with a vast range of musical subtleties at his command. You like it or hate it.

Pianist Parker and his wife violinist Aloysia Friedmann will be members of a quintet playing Schumann on Wednesday, their first appearances here this summer.

However, for those who can’t bear to see this summer’s festival ended and those optimists who plan on a picnic on the lawn and listening to the music that way, the five concerts (August 3-12) at Overlake have the same format and the same fine musicmaking, plus some of the festival’s familiar musicians who have only just arrived: pianists Anton Nel and Adam Neiman, violinists Scott Yoo and Ida Levin, cellists Amit Peled and Ronald Thomas. And, there’s no toll on 520 yet. Make the most of it while you can.

Every concert, someone turns to a neighbor and says: “It can’t get any better than this.” Both Friday and Saturday’s performances last week are examples of this. The laurels go to flutist Lorna McGhee, who stole the show in both concerts.

Friday, she and pianist Jeewon Park played Schubert’s Introduction and Variations on “Trockne Blume,” in a performance so closely interwoven together that every shaped note or phrase had just the same emotion, so musically beguiling that this listener sat entranced. McGhee performed Villa-Lobos’  The Jet Whistle here some years ago, and brought it back, this time with cellist Moser. A fun piece to hear, it requires spectacular technique from the flute and McGhee triumphed.

Saturday’s concert saw her in a Trio for flute, viola and harp by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, commissioned for the three players who premiered it in Canada earlier this year and again here: McGhee, violist David Harding and harpist Heidi Krutzen. This accessible work bows to the French idiom of a century ago to start with, and ends up with hints of wild central European dances, syncopated, jazzy, fast. Schafer makes good use of the three very different instrument timbres and the result is a work of charm and substance, a fine addition to the literature.

Mozart’s Quintet for two violins (Erin Keefe and James Ehnes), two violas (Harding and Richard O’Neill), and cello (Robert deMaine), in G Minor received to my mind one of the best performances of the festival so far. The musicians all eschewed the hacking which so many string players today seem to feel essential in any loud passages, no matter if the work was composed in a musically gentler time when stringed instruments had gut strings and loud still had to be elegant. Even playing 19th century music, the style today too often can be a double or triple fortissimo and heavy bowing instead of forte, which does not fit well for Brahms, Schumann, or Beethoven, while it may be just right for Bartok or Shostakovich.

Keefe as first violin set the tone and the performance had some wonderful soft moments which sang, while creating plenty of verve where it was needed. The lack of bombast made it memorable.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Crowds Arrive for Summer Chamber Music Festival

Laura Kaminsky

We are now midway through the second week of Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival, and word is percolating as concertgoers are realizing it’s here and the concerts fall happily into the “not to be missed” category. (For tickets: call 206-283-8808 or purchase online. For information: email info@seattlechambermusic.org.)

Monday was pretty well sold out, and tonight’s (Wednesday’s) concert includes two great Schubert works, the Wanderer Fantasy in the opening recital, played by Jeewon Park, and the Death and the Maiden string quartet with some of the festival’s most thoughtful musicians, Augustin Hadelich and Nurit Bar-Josef, violins; violist Cynthia Phelps; and cellist Bion Tsang. There’s also Martinu and Kodaly as great contrast. Good programming!

Friday’s major interest is the premiere of Laura Kaminsky’s Horizon Line for oboe, bassoon and piano, composed on commission by the Society’s commissioning club and dedicated to retiring artistic director Toby Saks. Paintings with the same theme by Rebecca Allan, Kaminsky’s partner, will be on display and there is a concurrent exhibition of Allan’s work also titled Horizon Lines at Seattle Art Museum Gallery.

Kaminsky, who many will remember from her faculty years at Cornish College of the Arts between 1999 and 2004, will introduce her work with illustrations in the recital (with oboist Ben Hausmann, bassoonist Seth Krimsky, and pianist Craig Sheppard) and it will be performed in its entirety during the concert, along with works by Boccherini and Brahms.

This and the next three concerts include wind instruments, so if these are your bag, come now.

Concert days have traditionally been Monday, Wednesday, and Friday throughout the four weeks, but next week scheduling problems have meant rearrangement to Sunday, July 17th, then a gap until Friday the 22nd, and Saturday the 23rd. Sunday’s highlights include recital and concert works by Charles Ives, plus Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, a D’Indy quartet, and oh joy! Brahms’ Trio in A Minor for clarinet, cello and piano, with clarinetist Sean Osborn, cellist Godfried Hoogeveen (principal cellist of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra), and pianist Jeremy Denk.

Orion Weiss (Photo: Henry Fair)

Musicians come and go during the festival, most here for a week or so, and Monday’s concert saw the last appearances this year of pianists Anna Polonsky and Orion Weiss (though Weiss will return for one concert at the festival’s eastside continuation in August). They’ve worked hard this past ten days, with Weiss playing in seven and Polonsky in six works, three of them in two-piano or four-hand pieces. Since they married shortly before last year’s festival, the two are doing more work together.

Monday’s recital heard Polonsky in four of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces.

They were widely varied, from the first Melody which left the listener thinking hearts, flowers and moonlight, Butterfly with frilly, flighty ripples and darts, a Waltz with surely some influence from Chopin, and To Spring, which burst with a sense of fresh life and greenery. Hard to say how these can exactly be reproduced in music, but Polonsky’s sensitive playing brought all these thoughts to the fore.

Weiss joined her for Schumann’s Bilder aus osten, Six Impromptus for Piano four hands, another delight to hear.

Not all of the concert works were as successful, but performances grew in stature as the performance went on. In Mozart’s Trio in G Major with Polonsky, violinist Stefan Jackiw and cellist Tsang, there never seemed to be the requisite chemistry between the three. The piano has the lion’s share here and Polonsky gave her part lightness and grace, but Jackiw had an unattractive surface shine to his playing which precluded depth and nuance, except when playing very softly where his musicianship came to the fore and the music seemed deeply felt. Tsang had less to do but is always a player worth hearing.

In the expressive performance of Schubert’s Trio in B-Flat major, however, with violinist Hadelich, violist Richard O’Neill and cellist Hoogeveen, there was all the difference in the world. From the first measures there was a sense that the players were on the same page.

The most satisfying moments of the concert came with the last two works, the Quartet for Strings by Debussy, his only one, and the Piano Quartet, Op. 13, by Richard Strauss, composed at age 20.

For Debussy, Hadelich, O’Neill and Hoogeveen were joined by violinist Joseph Lin, as they explored this fascinating work, so ahead of its time in 1893. It’s full of dissonance, even muddy harmonies at times, and Debussy uses every technique at his disposal to achieve an astonishing array of instrumental colors and qualities, including an extraordinary second movement which has extended passages of plucked strings.  The four musicians gave it a superb, gripping performance.

Strauss’s effort from only a year later looks backward, due no doubt to the influence of his domineering and conservative musician father. It’s still a remarkable piece from one so young, well worked out, but we have yet to hear what became the hallmarks of his later work. The influence of Brahms and Schumann are behind Strauss’s thinking here. Violinist Bar-Josef, violist Phelps, cellist Edward Arron, and Weiss gave it a full, passionate performance which made the most of his ideas.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Seattle’s Summer Chamber Music Festival Now in Progress

Toby Saks

Toby Saks won’t be running it any more, but she isn’t going away. While she is handing over the artistic director reins of Seattle Chamber Music Society and its summer and winter festivals to violinist James Ehnes, she will still be a presence there, with advice as asked for, with her in-depth knowledge of the chamber music scene, and not least, with her house open to all the visiting musicians for rehearsing, eating and just hanging out.

Monday saw the opening performance of the 30th Summer Festival, in its second year at Nordstrom Recital Hall. There will be 17 series and two family concerts, four weeks in July at Nordstrom, and two weeks in August at The Overlake School in Redmond. For those who want to listen in a more casual atmosphere, the music will be piped free to the Garden of Remembrance outside Benaroya Hall and, on Friday July 8, 15, and 22, to Westlake Park as well, while at Overlake there is a lawn to picnic on while listening.

As well, the Society has always presented a free half-hour recital one hour before each concert.

Saks’ has chosen many of her favorite works for her final season, not all of them, she says, because there are far too many, but we can look forward to an eclectic variety of composers, mostly from the great heyday of chamber music, the classical and romantic eras.

Photo: Seattle Chamber Music Society

Monday’s performances opened the festival on a high note. The recitalists choose their own programs, and pianist Orion Weiss performed three toccatas and an unexpected fourth, beginning with Bach’s Toccata in C Minor. From the first notes, one could sit back and bask in the sound, because it was clear that this was a consummate musician who could elucidate Bach’s mysteries. He brought each line of music as its musical prominence indicated, yet the whole had a coherent completeness and transparency.

Weiss described a toccata as being a work of fantasy, often seemingly improvisatory, often leading into a fugue, a description which fitted the Bach. He neglected to mention that a toccata is usually a virtuoso piece. The Bach certainly is, and even more so the works which followed: a minute-long Toccata by Liszt which had enough notes for a symphony, and the more substantial Toccata in C Major by Schumann. Each of these requires a superb technique to encompass the notes yet make that all in service to the music itself. Weiss achieved it with ease and insight, though I felt the Schumann could have been played a tad slower with a little more room to breathe.

He finished up with an impromptu encore, a Toccata by Keith Jarrett. One might think that Jarrett, 150 years or so younger than Liszt, and from a different musical stream, might not fit here, but this was an equally brilliant performance which followed seamlessly in the genre.

If this recital hadn’t been enough work for him for one night, with festival newcomer pianist Inon Barnatan, Weiss also played the closing work of the concert proper, Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2 in C Major for two pianos. Barnatan fits the mold of artists new to the festival. He’s young, 32 this year, received an Avery Fisher grant in 2009 and has been building an impressive name for himself as an artist.

Barnatan is a welcome addition. His and Weiss’s performance of the Rachmaninoff demanded attention. Exciting from the start, thunderous at times—imagine four hands using what sounded like all the fingers playing together and clamoring to be heard—as well as exquisite softness, lively and light with the two players apparently having a great time. More important, they played as though one. Two piano works can often sound clunky, but apart from one chord at the end of the first movement where they weren’t quite together, the two men were in the same intuitive groove which became tighter and tighter as the work progressed. Often two piano works are performed by siblings, or people who have known each other for decades. Barnatan and Weiss have only know each other for a few years, and played together sometimes, but one would never know it.

In between these bookends of Monday’s performances came Glazounov’s Quintet for Strings in A Major, with two cellos, and two trios for violin, cello and piano, one by Brahms in C Minor, and the other Three Nocturnes by Ernst Bloch. All were worth hearing, but the standout was the less familiar Bloch.

Written between the two world wars, Saks’ husband Martin Greene observed that it was composed by a Swiss Jew, and played here by a Russian Jew, pianist Anna Polonsky; a Dutchman, cellist Godfried Hoogeveen; and a German, violinist Augustin Hadelich.

The Nocturnes are gorgeous. Not flashy, but quiet, enigmatic; muted at first, expansive and joyful in the second one and with a hint of Ravel’s “Chansons Madecasses” in their mood, while the last sounded more like a fairly riotous nighttime party. The musicians balanced their performance so that the qualities of each instrument came through and the music sang.

Friday’s recital has Andres Diaz playing his 1698 Goffriller cello in Bach and composer Xi Wang, and concertgoers will hear Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-Flat Major, and two piano quartets, by Suk and Dvorak.

Monday July 11 has Schumann, Mozart, Schubert, Debussy and a blockbuster quartet by Richard Strauss. All well worth hearing. For tickets: call 206-283-8808 or purchase online. For information email info@seattlechambermusic.org.