Concert Season Begins; Good News for Europe

Concert Season Begins.  On Saturday the sailing season ended for me as I helped run the last Saturday races for 2011. On Sunday the concert season began for me as I attended my first Handel and Haydn Society concert of their 2011-2012 season. They had actually given the concert on Friday as well, and here's a link to the review in Saturday's Boston Globe. Unfortunately, I tend to doze more at matinee concerts than at evening ones. Still, I heard enough to say that I liked the performances, that I didn't think the sound of the fortepiano was lost — at least where I was sitting in the second balcony center — and I found the Mozart symphony really striking, especially the second movement, which struck me as a little bit faster than I expected. In a Q&A session with audience member after the concert, Christophers and Bezuidenhout explained that the somewhat faster tempo seems to correspond more nearly to the 18th Century style than the slower tempo which is common today. One source is the metronome markings which Czerny and Hummel placed in the piano four hands arrangements which each made of the symphony.

I had thought that this was the quickest turnaround ever for me between sailing and concert seasons, but I see from my archive that last year I went to a concert even before the sailing season was over. But it was a special event, not part of a subscription.

I may go to the BSO opening night concert this Friday. They are offering a $50 discount, which brings it close to the price I pay for my Thursday evening subscription concerts.

Good News for Europe.  WCRB has announced that they will rebroadcast the Saturday evening Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts at 1:00 p.m. on Sundays (which would be 6:00 p.m. in Great Britain and 7:00 in Germany — a more convenient time for most Europeans that 2 or 3 in the morning, I suppose).

Note: Edited to correct time of rebroadcasts of BSO concerts. Correct times are now in bold face above.

BSO — 2009/04/30-05/01-02: Season Finale —Review and Comment

I liked it, but the Boston Globe's reviewer had faint praise. Interestingly, the review that I've linked contains a three minute audio clip from the piano concerto.

Even though the performance was sold out, there were several empty seats. Maybe people were afraid of the swine flu. There was a pretty good number of late teenagers in the audience. I don't know if management "papered the house" but it is always good to have young people there.

As the Globe reviewer says, the Te Deum doesn't quite match the Requiem, but it's still good Berlioz. I gave them a standing O, which I don't do for everything. And it is remarkable that the chorus always memorize their music and sing without scores — this time in a piece which lasted over 45 minutes. There were a couple of faulty intonations in the horns (and you've got to expect that anywhere), but everything else seemed very well performed.

The piano concerto is lovely music, and it went off without a hitch.

I still strongly recommend listening if you have a chance.

Jean-Frédéric Neuburger

Last Friday evening M. Neuburger gave a concert at the Harvard Musical Association. He's about 22 years old and has been winning prizes as a pianist and organist for the past ten years. He gave a piano program of five pieces — Bach, Franck, Ravel, and 2 by Chopin. It was over an hour of music, and he did it all from memory. More importantly, he did it well. The audience applauded enthusiastically, and he gave an encore, by Debussy, also from memory.

So here's another name to look for in a concert hall near you.

18 Year Old Cellist

This evening I went to a concert at the Harvard Musical Association. The performer was Tavi Ungerleider, the person referred to in the title of this post. He is the latest winner of the Association's High School Achievement Award.

The announcement of the concert said, "A freshman in the Columbia-Juilliard School of Music joint degree program, Tavi Ungerleider has won numerous accolades, including First Prize, New England Conservatory Concerto Competition, and First Prize, National Federation of the Music Clubs Award. He will present Beethoven’s Sonata No. 4 for Piano and Cello in C Major, op. 102, no. 1; Britten’s Cello Suite No. 1, op. 72; and Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne (from Pulcinella), for cello and piano. Mr. Ungerleider’s recital partner will be pianist, Sayuri Miyamoto."

He played the second piece from memory, and he did very well on all three. Seemed as if he was having the most fun with the last one.

His identical twin brother, Oren, who plays violin and is also studying at Julliard was runner-up in the competition for this award; and they have an older brother who plays piano.

I think we'll be hearing his name a lot once he embarks on a full-time career. So remember, you heard it here first.

BSO — 2009/03/26-28

Again I'm late with the announcement of this week's BSO concert.

They're giving
Ravel's Mother Goose Suite
Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, with Lisa Batiashvili as the soloist
and after intermission
Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka (1911 version).

The conductor is Charles Dutoit.

I was there Thursday evening (only because it was part of my subscription series — none of it excites me) and I thought it was well played. But what do I know?

The Boston Globe's reviewer liked it.

The WGBH stream will begin in less than an hour and a half from the time I post this, and on Saturday at 8:00 Eastern Daylight Time, WCRB will stream it.

Comment on BSO — 2009/03/05

You gotta listen to this! The first part was really good. But after the intermission, the Ives symphony was spectacular. He has two different rhythms going in different parts of the orchestra at times, so that they need a second conductor. He takes familiar (to him at least) tunes and weaves them into this symphonic structure. The second movement is wild. The third and fourth are sublime. When it was over, the conductor held up his hand for a long time to prolong the silence into which the music had brought us. When he lowered his hand and one or two people had begun to clap, I shouted "bravo!" over the general quiet. Enthusiastic applause ensued, and eventually a standing ovation.

I urge everybody to get the program notes from www.bso.org and listen to either or both of the streamed broadcasts. And then if you're within striking distance of Symphony Hall, try to get a ticket for the final performance on next Tuesday, March 10.

I'll edit this to add the Boston Globe's review in the morning.

The Sibelius was pleasant, and the Rachmaninoff familiar and well done. But if you can only take time for the Ives, it will begin shortly after 2:45 on Friday, and 9:15 on Saturday.

Edited to add Boston Globe review:

Gilbert leads BSO in Ives's epic Fourth Symphony
By Jeremy Eichler
Globe Staff / March 6, 2009
Next fall the young conductor Alan Gilbert will be taking up the reins of the New York Philharmonic as its 25th music director and there are high hopes that he will bring that magnificent yet artistically staid orchestra a sense of freshness and new life. Focused yet unflashy on the podium, he is unquestionably a thoughtful musician with engaging ideas about the music of today and how it connects to the great masterpieces of the past. It should be fascinating to see if and how he can turn around the huge orchestral ship.

In the meantime, a bit of Gilbert's flair for programming with rich contrasts was on display last night in Symphony Hall, where he led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in three early-20th century works that were all written within 30 years of each other yet seemed to hail from completely different universes. The evening opened with an alluring performance of Sibelius's tone poem "Night Ride and Sunrise," yet the strongest contrast came with the final two works: Rachmaninoff's ubiquitous Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Ives's epic and rarely heard Fourth Symphony.

Rachmaninoff was ultimately a late-Romantic composer marooned in the 20th century. "I understand nothing of the music of today," he commented in 1933, the year before he wrote his Paganini Rhapsody. In some of its structural details you can feel Rachmaninoff working hard to sound innovative but his piece inevitably became best known for its moments of soaring lyricism and old-fashioned keyboard brilliance. The British pianist Stephen Hough last night gave it a supremely poised and thoughtful reading that did not shy away from the work's external glitter but also seemed determined to spotlight its textural subtleties and moments of quiet poetry. He did so extremely well.

Rachmaninoff once wrote that "a composer's music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books which have influenced him, the pictures he loves. It should be the product of the sum total of a composer's experiences." Ironically, few pieces answer this call more fully than Ives's visionary Fourth Symphony, in which the composer seems to have united all of the disparate musical and biographical threads that run through his other works. It was written mostly between 1909 and 1911 and yet it is still a piece that sounds bracingly modern today.

It calls for chorus and massive orchestral forces which Gilbert managed artfully last night, with the aid of an assistant conductor (Andrew Grams) who helped the musicians navigate the multiple tempos. The work is a giant palimpsest with musical layers piled high on top of each other, at times building to a kind of glorious sonic anarchy. Gilbert chose a spacious pacing and found clarity and structure within the chaos. He drew a beautifully rich tone from the strings in the third movement fugue, and traced the broadest of arcs in the spiritually searching finale. At the very end, the music created just the desired effect: it seemed to evaporate into a clear night sky.