City Symphony
Dreamhouse this weekend. I turn in early tonight to fly to Boston early tomorrow. To whet my concert-going appetite, though, I went to the Kennedy Center this evening to watch Leonard Slatkin conduct the National Symphony.
The main draw for me was Jennifer Higdon's "City Scape", a three-movement tone painting of metropolitan life composed five or so years ago. Jack highly recommended this to me a little while ago; I hadn't previously heard Higdon's music but I enjoyed this piece -- angular and energetic, a charismatic medium-weight piece, illustrative and earnestly and not too deep. The first movement, "SkyLine", struck me as an extended overture in a fractured, post-Copland style, inevitably reminiscent (given the program) of brushed steel and plate glass. The second movement, "river sings a song to trees", opened and closed in a still, Japanese-garden kind of mode, with hushed strings and exotic percussion (what was the instrument responsible for that eerie, wavering metallic tone?) but in between it opens up into a forceful, painterly flow of sound -- like Gustav Holst's Hammersmith by way of Ferdé Grofé, but with cooler and deeper currents and the sonorities turned way up. The third movement, "Peachtree Street", evoked general urban bustle and ended the piece in charismatic fashion, full of forward motion and exposed sectional playing, including a couple spots of good old-fashioned counterpoint in the strings.
Higdon's style here reminds me of mid-twentieth century tonal American music, wide and broad; the way the trombones and tubas carry so many of the low-pitched lines makes it very reminiscent of wind band music for me too. Slatkin did a nice job of balancing the various textures throughout the work, though some too-long stretches of it came off at a room-temperature, mezzo-mezzo sort of loudness. The National Symphony's playing was rhythmically precise if a little stiff, so that the whole seemed to almost hang together but not quite, sort of like the various parts of a city...
The back half of the concert consisted of Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto performed by the 24-year-old Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who got something of a rock star's reception, or anyway its genteel concert-hall equivalent. The concerto's an obvious go-to piece for any skillful player who wants to look dazzling in the most flattering light possible, and Lang Lang gave it a brisk and virtuosic read. I was oddly distrustful of the explosion of applause he got at the end -- the reaction is just so obvious, and I feel somehow like the soloist is being coy with us, since for the whole forty minutes he never really emotes. (That's by Tchaikovsky's design; the emotional breadth of the work ranges from "mildly wistful" on up to, well, basically this.) That being said, Lang Lang did sound fantastic -- all clear, sharp lines and limpid quiets in the first movement, warmer and remarkably fluid running figures in the second and third movements, the requisite acrobatics in the final minutes performed with wit and a balletic lightness of touch. He quickly acceded to playing an encore, a quiet, tuneful, vaguely Asiatic little piece -- could have been an arranged Chinese folk song, could have been early Debussy -- in a remarkably liquid tone somewhere between harp and music box.
The opening work on the program was George Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody No. 2, not his best Romanian Rhapsody but an intermittently engaging postcard of a piece. The orchestra opened with some collective energy but it seemed to dissipate after a couple of minutes, particularly during some unconvincing exposed woodwind duets. (The principal oboist in particular sounded weak and pitchy to me, not for the first time.) At about the ten-minute mark the piece seems to be building towards a rollicking, folk-flavored outburst that should barrel along for two or three more minutes, but Enescu apparently thinks better of it at the last minute and lets the rhapsody dribble off into silence instead. Somewhat perplexing. Fun fact from the program notes: The NSO made the premiere recording of the piece for RCA, I presume sometime in the 1930s.
This concert seemed to have a lot of groups of children attending it. I was sitting behind a good-sized group of (I think) young Chinese-American families, including three six- or seven-year-old boys who sat side by side by side a couple of rows in front of me. Some whispers and general restlessness, which I find myself increasingly able to deal with some patience (though my understanding of the music takes on a curious undertone of ill will towards children). The adults nearby did put the kibosh on the arm-waving that they parroted Slatkin with. After the second movement of the Higdon they discovered they could provoke a smattering of unsure, between-movements applause throughout the hall by clapping just once or twice; they repeated the trick after the second movement of the Tchaikovsky. In the hall at intermission, I overheard a late arrival to their group, a short and very articulate girl (probably nine or ten) tell an older friend, "I missed the first half, but I'll hear the Tchaikovsky, which is what I came for," and caught myself sighing inwardly: No regret that you missed the Higdon piece? So young, and already such conservative tastes...
The main draw for me was Jennifer Higdon's "City Scape", a three-movement tone painting of metropolitan life composed five or so years ago. Jack highly recommended this to me a little while ago; I hadn't previously heard Higdon's music but I enjoyed this piece -- angular and energetic, a charismatic medium-weight piece, illustrative and earnestly and not too deep. The first movement, "SkyLine", struck me as an extended overture in a fractured, post-Copland style, inevitably reminiscent (given the program) of brushed steel and plate glass. The second movement, "river sings a song to trees", opened and closed in a still, Japanese-garden kind of mode, with hushed strings and exotic percussion (what was the instrument responsible for that eerie, wavering metallic tone?) but in between it opens up into a forceful, painterly flow of sound -- like Gustav Holst's Hammersmith by way of Ferdé Grofé, but with cooler and deeper currents and the sonorities turned way up. The third movement, "Peachtree Street", evoked general urban bustle and ended the piece in charismatic fashion, full of forward motion and exposed sectional playing, including a couple spots of good old-fashioned counterpoint in the strings.
Higdon's style here reminds me of mid-twentieth century tonal American music, wide and broad; the way the trombones and tubas carry so many of the low-pitched lines makes it very reminiscent of wind band music for me too. Slatkin did a nice job of balancing the various textures throughout the work, though some too-long stretches of it came off at a room-temperature, mezzo-mezzo sort of loudness. The National Symphony's playing was rhythmically precise if a little stiff, so that the whole seemed to almost hang together but not quite, sort of like the various parts of a city...
The back half of the concert consisted of Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto performed by the 24-year-old Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who got something of a rock star's reception, or anyway its genteel concert-hall equivalent. The concerto's an obvious go-to piece for any skillful player who wants to look dazzling in the most flattering light possible, and Lang Lang gave it a brisk and virtuosic read. I was oddly distrustful of the explosion of applause he got at the end -- the reaction is just so obvious, and I feel somehow like the soloist is being coy with us, since for the whole forty minutes he never really emotes. (That's by Tchaikovsky's design; the emotional breadth of the work ranges from "mildly wistful" on up to, well, basically this.) That being said, Lang Lang did sound fantastic -- all clear, sharp lines and limpid quiets in the first movement, warmer and remarkably fluid running figures in the second and third movements, the requisite acrobatics in the final minutes performed with wit and a balletic lightness of touch. He quickly acceded to playing an encore, a quiet, tuneful, vaguely Asiatic little piece -- could have been an arranged Chinese folk song, could have been early Debussy -- in a remarkably liquid tone somewhere between harp and music box.
The opening work on the program was George Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody No. 2, not his best Romanian Rhapsody but an intermittently engaging postcard of a piece. The orchestra opened with some collective energy but it seemed to dissipate after a couple of minutes, particularly during some unconvincing exposed woodwind duets. (The principal oboist in particular sounded weak and pitchy to me, not for the first time.) At about the ten-minute mark the piece seems to be building towards a rollicking, folk-flavored outburst that should barrel along for two or three more minutes, but Enescu apparently thinks better of it at the last minute and lets the rhapsody dribble off into silence instead. Somewhat perplexing. Fun fact from the program notes: The NSO made the premiere recording of the piece for RCA, I presume sometime in the 1930s.
This concert seemed to have a lot of groups of children attending it. I was sitting behind a good-sized group of (I think) young Chinese-American families, including three six- or seven-year-old boys who sat side by side by side a couple of rows in front of me. Some whispers and general restlessness, which I find myself increasingly able to deal with some patience (though my understanding of the music takes on a curious undertone of ill will towards children). The adults nearby did put the kibosh on the arm-waving that they parroted Slatkin with. After the second movement of the Higdon they discovered they could provoke a smattering of unsure, between-movements applause throughout the hall by clapping just once or twice; they repeated the trick after the second movement of the Tchaikovsky. In the hall at intermission, I overheard a late arrival to their group, a short and very articulate girl (probably nine or ten) tell an older friend, "I missed the first half, but I'll hear the Tchaikovsky, which is what I came for," and caught myself sighing inwardly: No regret that you missed the Higdon piece? So young, and already such conservative tastes...
1 Comments:
Higdon reminds me a lot of some of Copland's contemporaries -- Roy Harris, William Schuman, others -- who wrote these brawny, optimistic symphonies during the 30s and 40s.
There's a recording out of City Scape; also of Higdon's blue cathedral, which is short enough to be getting around to a lot of orchestras.
The latter is on a CD including Samuel Barber's riveting First Symphony, a fine rendition of Copland's "Appalachian Spring," and another luminous, short new piece called "Rainbow Body" by Christopher Theofanidis. This all adds up to a pretty good jumping-in point for American orchestral music, actually.
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