Foreign Bodies
The good folks at Metro North are a round trip's worth richer again, thanks to the fact that Esa-Pekka Salonen was conducting in NYC again today, this time with his home team, so to speak, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On the program: Salonen's recent short piece "Helix" (composed in '05), Ravel's Left Hand Piano Concerto (with Jean-Ives Thibaudet), and forty minutes' worth of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet score.
Salonen announced recently that he's departing the LA Phil after the 08/09 season (details here, plus photo of highly awkward-looking man-hug) in order to have more time to compose, so it was a good chance to hear Salonen both as conductor and composer: how his orchestra sounds late in his tenure, how his composing is maturing. And, more to the point, the concert was predictably pretty awesome.
I have to say that Helix didn't impress me too much. At ten minutes long it sounds like a chunk of a larger work, without much to stick in your ears besides its general shape and texture, which is a fairly constant increase in mass of sound. Mandy, who came with me, put it well: a lot of climax for not a lot of development. (She liked the piece in general, though.)
The LA Phil sounded fine throughout, and fantastic in the Prokofiev. Ravel's Left Hand Concerto, as always, is something to see — listen to it with your eyes closed, and you wouldn't easily guess that five fingers are flying instead of ten — and this was a fun, bright, sharply outlined performance. The Prokofiev was dazzling start to finish; I find it funny that you don't get a lot of hummable tunes out of that music, but it's still so brilliantly characterful. Salonen's big-picture verve and detail work are both electrifying.
Prokofiev offers a lot of subtle pleasures, but my favorite parts were still the huge punchy punctuating chords, Salonen conducting them with forearm blows like he was hammering them into the air.
And an encore! I love these: orchestras should always do encores. This one was Luciano Berio's charming arrangement of Luigi Boccherini's Ritirata notturna di Madrid. There's a fascinating postmodern backstory to this piece, but if you want to imagine it, think of a kind of U-shaped classical mini-Bolero.
Helix was actually the third Salonen piece I've seen performed in the space of three months, after his Piano Concerto with the NY Phil and a Pittsburgh Symphony concert I saw back at the Burgh earlier in April. That one had the youngish American conductor Michael Christie conducting Salonen's three-movement Foreign Bodies, from '04. Which is an OK piece, again not a great one; Salonen's calling cards of sound bulk, multilayered textures, and forward momentum are all out in full force here.
The PSO did well by it, but a piece that thick creates a fairly muddy sound, which I think is inevitable, rather than attributable to rusty performance; the same thing was pretty evident with the Concerto and Helix, too. It'll be interesting to see whether orchestras can pull this off with more clarity as time goes along. It's out on CD with the LA Phil already, polished in the recording to a sonic high gloss; no muddiness there. Maybe thick orchestrations just function better on CD? My knowledge of acoustics gets off at an earlier stop.
Michael Christie seems like a conductor with something to say; he conducted an eye-opening Sibelius Second Symphony, from which he coaxed a surprisingly modern-sounding sense of edge and contrast. Notably by holding silences long enough to settle in as negative space: this was thrilling in the scherzo, where you have this Beethoven-sounding flurry that goes for a minute and a half and then just stops cold. The soaring parts all soared just the same, more powerful for being restrained just a bit; and the PSO were in fine form, all of them, especially the invincible-as-ever brass section. Pretty blissful.
(Andrew Druckenbrod in the PG had a pretty negative take on the Sibelius, which surprised me a bit. He has one of those newspaper-website quasi blogs now, by the way.)
Christie conducts the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and I'm tempted to go hear him put on Henryk Gorecki's Third Symphony with Hindemith's Mathis der Maler next month. And most definitely MTT conducting Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements with the San Francisco Symphony later that week at Carnegie Hall.
The Metro North is really becoming something of a symphonic umbilical cord here.
Salonen announced recently that he's departing the LA Phil after the 08/09 season (details here, plus photo of highly awkward-looking man-hug) in order to have more time to compose, so it was a good chance to hear Salonen both as conductor and composer: how his orchestra sounds late in his tenure, how his composing is maturing. And, more to the point, the concert was predictably pretty awesome.
I have to say that Helix didn't impress me too much. At ten minutes long it sounds like a chunk of a larger work, without much to stick in your ears besides its general shape and texture, which is a fairly constant increase in mass of sound. Mandy, who came with me, put it well: a lot of climax for not a lot of development. (She liked the piece in general, though.)
The LA Phil sounded fine throughout, and fantastic in the Prokofiev. Ravel's Left Hand Concerto, as always, is something to see — listen to it with your eyes closed, and you wouldn't easily guess that five fingers are flying instead of ten — and this was a fun, bright, sharply outlined performance. The Prokofiev was dazzling start to finish; I find it funny that you don't get a lot of hummable tunes out of that music, but it's still so brilliantly characterful. Salonen's big-picture verve and detail work are both electrifying.
Prokofiev offers a lot of subtle pleasures, but my favorite parts were still the huge punchy punctuating chords, Salonen conducting them with forearm blows like he was hammering them into the air.
And an encore! I love these: orchestras should always do encores. This one was Luciano Berio's charming arrangement of Luigi Boccherini's Ritirata notturna di Madrid. There's a fascinating postmodern backstory to this piece, but if you want to imagine it, think of a kind of U-shaped classical mini-Bolero.
Helix was actually the third Salonen piece I've seen performed in the space of three months, after his Piano Concerto with the NY Phil and a Pittsburgh Symphony concert I saw back at the Burgh earlier in April. That one had the youngish American conductor Michael Christie conducting Salonen's three-movement Foreign Bodies, from '04. Which is an OK piece, again not a great one; Salonen's calling cards of sound bulk, multilayered textures, and forward momentum are all out in full force here.
The PSO did well by it, but a piece that thick creates a fairly muddy sound, which I think is inevitable, rather than attributable to rusty performance; the same thing was pretty evident with the Concerto and Helix, too. It'll be interesting to see whether orchestras can pull this off with more clarity as time goes along. It's out on CD with the LA Phil already, polished in the recording to a sonic high gloss; no muddiness there. Maybe thick orchestrations just function better on CD? My knowledge of acoustics gets off at an earlier stop.
Michael Christie seems like a conductor with something to say; he conducted an eye-opening Sibelius Second Symphony, from which he coaxed a surprisingly modern-sounding sense of edge and contrast. Notably by holding silences long enough to settle in as negative space: this was thrilling in the scherzo, where you have this Beethoven-sounding flurry that goes for a minute and a half and then just stops cold. The soaring parts all soared just the same, more powerful for being restrained just a bit; and the PSO were in fine form, all of them, especially the invincible-as-ever brass section. Pretty blissful.
(Andrew Druckenbrod in the PG had a pretty negative take on the Sibelius, which surprised me a bit. He has one of those newspaper-website quasi blogs now, by the way.)
Christie conducts the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and I'm tempted to go hear him put on Henryk Gorecki's Third Symphony with Hindemith's Mathis der Maler next month. And most definitely MTT conducting Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements with the San Francisco Symphony later that week at Carnegie Hall.
The Metro North is really becoming something of a symphonic umbilical cord here.
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