A Concertgoer's Diary - The New Season is Launched

The new concert season in New York City starts slowly during September as the major performing venues come on line.  As of now, I've paid visits to what might be called The Big Four: The Metropolitan Opera (Lucia di Lammermoor), The New York City Opera (Margaret Garner), the New York Philharmonic (Tchaikovsky Concert on September 29), and, this week, Carnegie Hall (Boston Symphony all-Ravel concert on October 8).

I've not previously mentioned the BSO concert on this blog, having already noted the others.  This was my first return to Carnegie Hall since the end of last season, and the first noticeable change is -- they've redone the restrooms! New plumbing, new sinks and electric-eye paper dispensers -- Carnegie Hall amenities inch into the 21st century.  But somehow they still couldn't build an elevator to the balcony level.... ah, well.  And I sit in the center balcony, where the sight-line is at its best (aided, admittedly, by the occasional use of opera glasses) and the sound at its most blended and least raucous.  But not quite on this occasion.

I "grew up" on the Boston Symphony, in a certain sense, since it was as a law student in the metropolitan Boston area that I had my first subscription to a major symphony orchestra, and those three years imprinted on me an enormous respect for the BSO, the elegance of its soloists, the marvelous color and depth of its strings, and its extraordinary adaptability to the demands of different repertories and the gestures of different composers.  Under Seiji Ozawa the sound was bright, open, transparent, especially in Ravel, which he and the orchestra were recording "complete" for Deutsche Gramophone during my subscription years.  Under Klaus Tennstedt, it had the solid, rich thickness and depth of a central European orchestra in Brahms and Bruckner and Schubert.  Under Colin Davis, the principal guest conductor of those years recording the complete Sibelius Symphonies for Phillips, it combined the best of Ozawa and Tennstedt with the addition of that crisp rhythmic sense and lyricism so typical of Davis.

Since Ozawa finally retired, the BSO has been under the direction of James Levine, who has been head of the music with various titles at the Metropolitan Opera for more than a generation.  Levine as a symphonic conductor is exemplary in many respects, not least his interest in exploring new repertory of our time and making the orchestra thereby relevant to the life of the artistic community as well as its listening public.  On this occasion, however, I was a bit disappointed, not by the choice of an all-Ravel program, but by what I thought was an orchestra sound that failed to convey the full character of Ravel's music.  To me, there was an excess of brass, an undue raucousness in some of the loud moments, and a failure to exploit some of the most characteristic features of Ravel's magnificent orchestration, especially in the second half, when the complete Daphnis et Chloe ballet received an otherwise magnificent and thrilling performance.  Somehow, the string sound I heard was neither what I remembered under Ozawa nor, more to the point, what I hoped to hear from this piece.  (By contrast, an open rehearsal performance of large swatches of this ballet by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa Pekka Salonen at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, a while back, had exactly that sound, which can also be heard -- albeit somewhat undermined by the limitations of electronic reproduction -- in classic recordings conducted by Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch.)  I had the same unsettling feeling, to a lesser extent, listening to the first half, although Jean-Yves Thibaudet in the G Major Piano Concerto was excellent and I could not fault any member of the orchestra (except maybe the principal horn, who had a few audible slips) in the opening Alborada del Gracioso and Pavane for a Dead Princess.  I would hardly call this concert a total disappointment, though.  There were many fine moments, and I don't regret switching my Carnegie subscription allegiance this year from the Philadelphia Orchestra to the BSO, which has the more interesting concert programs in prospect.

Thus, the round of the big four.... with many more to come.

But the past few days have taken me to a variety of smaller fora for exceedingly interesting programs, and the most interesting, in many respects, was the "least professional" -- but I'll save the best for last.

First, on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 7, I tried out NYC's newest concert venue, The Times Center Stage, in the new headquarters building of The New York Times at 41st Street & 8th Avenue, where a new organization, The Gotham Early Music Scene, Inc., presented a series of programs exposing the wide variety of early music groups resident in the city.  Each of three concerts presented a variety of different groups.  At the Sunday matinee I attended, the first half featured Repast, a Baroque instrumental ensemble presenting a program titled The Apotheosis of Corelli, and Asteria, a medieval vocal duo (Sylvia Rhyne, soprano; Eric Redlinger, tenor and lute), performing Songs of Passion from the Late Middle Ages.  After intermission, we had the New York Consort of Viols, the oldest and most established of these groups, performing a program titled Viol-ation! A Celebration of Viols (which included the only contemporary music of the afternoon, a commissioned work by David Loeb called "Cries of Kyoto"), and Spiritus Collective, another baroque group, but this time especially featuring period brass instruments, in excerpts from their full-length program titled "Sonata concertate," where most of the solos were played on trumpets and sackbuts (the baroque trombone).

All of these groups were highly accomplished and presented engrossing brief programs on this occasion.  The hall itself should prove useful for smaller-scale musical events.  Its interior location excludes the sounds of Times Square quite effectively, and I didn't even discern any subway noise despite the location directly over the 8th Avenue line.  The large, box-like room features stadium-style seating in comfortable red cushioned seats, but the set-up is more like a modern auditorium for non-musical programs than a concert venue.  There is a built-in amplification system.  On this occasion, I was unsure for most of the program whether it was turned on, but it was definitely turned on for Asteria -- probably due to the anticipation that two voices and lute would have problems carrying in a hall that seats several hundred.  I found the amplification for that group produced a sound that was a bit artificial, as if reverberation were being added rather than the performers being subtly amplified, maybe because the microphones are suspended high above the stage and thus amplifying ambience as well as the direct sounds produced by the performers.  (Unless, of course, they were wearing tiny body mics sending radio signals, but I couldn't see such from my seat a few rows from the front.)  I look forward to the possibility of other musical events in The Times Center Stage, preferably without amplification.

Next, on Tuesday evening, in Weill Recital Hall, the small upstairs hall at Carnegie, I heard an unusual program titled "The Cry for Life: Passionate Exiled Voices - A Musical-Literary Review," presented by an organization called Elysium - Between Two Continents.  This is a non-profit organization concerned with creating cultural ties between the US and Europe, which presents an Academy of Continuing Education in the Arts and sponsors a brief series of concerts at Weill Hall featuring participants in its Academy. 

I had been drawn to this program due to the participation of Ross Benoliel, a marvelously talented young baritone who sang last season at the premiere of my friend Jorge Martin's cantata "Before Night Falls" based on the work of Reinaldo Arenas.  Having resolved to hear Benoliel again, this was my first opportunity.  Also performing were Gretchen Farrar, a soprano, Dan Franklin Smith, pianist, and German television and film actor Steffen Nowak.  This was a lieder recital with a difference.  All the songs were by composers who had experienced some form of exile from their homelands, and the songs were interspersed with recitations by Mr. Nowak of selections (in charmingly-accented English) by writers who had also experienced exile during their careers.  Most of the songs were in German, for which translations were provided.  Almost all of the repertory was unfamiliar to me, and mostly worth hearing.  I was again impressed with Mr. Benoliel's work, memorizing and performing with enthusiasm numerous relatively unknown songs in German.  Ms. Farrar was, I think, a bit stretched on this occasion.  The memorization was fine, but her voice did not seem to fit comfortably with the extended high range of some of the music, turning shrill at times and losing some intonational accuracy.  Both singers, however, seem to have captured well the style of the music, and entered into the stage motion devised for them with apparent ease.  Mr. Smith's accompaniments and occasional solos were well-chosen and rendered, and he was credited with "musical direction" for the evening, but the creative genius behind the selection and ordering was Gregorij H von Leitis, a stalwart of the sponsoring organization.

I noticed a problem with Weill that I've experienced in the past.  Singers with big voices need to scale back the louder passages or risk producing a sound that takes on a rather shrill quality at times.  On this occasion, Benoliel was rather better at that than Farrar.  I suspect I would enjoy hearing her more on a somewhat larger, more resonant venue.

Finally, far and away the most entertaining and interesting of these events, was the benefit concert given at the Auditorium of the Ethical Culture Society (W. 64th Street, a marvelous concert venue), by the orchestra of Asian Artists & Concerts, Inc., a non-profit organization devoted to assisting young Asian musicians seeking to establish themselves in the professional musical scene.  This chamber orchestra of 20-something symphonic musicians drawn from the recent graduates of the area's musical conservatories as well as recent arrivals from elsewhere, performed a core repertory program of Mozart's Don Giovanni Overture (with an extended concert ending that was unfamiliar to me), Schubert's Unfinished Symphony (No. 8), and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, under the spirited direction of the Japanese-born conductor Atsushi Yamada, who is their music director.

Certainly, this was not orchestra playing with the polish I heard from the BSO on Monday night or the NY Philharmonic the previous weekend.  On the other hand, there is an excitement in hearing young performers tackle technically demanding works under a skilled leader, and that's what we had last night.  And make no mistake, the core late-classical early-romantic Viennese orchestral repertory presents great challenges to any orchestra, as mistakes and lack of unanimity are clearly exposed and instrumental virtuosity of a high order is assumed by the composers.  Those demands were not shirked on this occasion. 

Yamada chose tempi that would challenge all but the superstar professional orchestras.  A comparison in the Beethoven 7th might be to the recent recording by Dudamel and his youth orchestra from South America.  The tempi, particularly in the last two movements, were quite similar. Dudamel and his outfit had the advantage, and one suspects they had more opportunities for rehearsal and performance prior to their recording.  This AAC orchestra is a newer body and at this point a veteran of only one season of a handful of concerts together.  Despite the occasional scrappiness, the musical soul of Beethoven was animated in this performance.  I found the adagietto (second movement) made its usual strong effect, and the strings attained unexpected eloquence at times.  I thought the first movement showed signs of rather more intense rehearsal on the finer points, while the last two movements perhaps showed signs of less time to complete that process.  The Schubert was more securely done, and the Mozart overture was generally quite fine.

In short, I was moved to send my donation to support this worthy effort, and I hope to get to hear this group again soon.  Their website needs some update, as it lists their past season of concerts but doesn't inform on future events.  It does, however, provide much information about the group, at www.aacinc.org.

And so my season is well launched. . .

Comments

[Marina]

I just want to inform readers of the upcoming season overview for the San Francisco classical music scene here:
http://www.sfcv.org/