Baltimore, Baltimore, Burning Bright
Last night I drove up to Baltimore to see the BSO's first concert program of the 2007-08 season, and it occurred to me when I actually got into Meyerhoff Symphony Hall that I haven't been to a concert there since I've lived in the D.C. area. One summer between college semesters Jack and I went to a performance there so the building was familiar, but still unfamiliar enough that I thought, "You know, I really haven't been in this place for six or seven years". This was followed by mild self-reproach: In four-plus years I haven't identified and attended one worthy concert in a city a mere hour's drive away, just one node northward on the megalopolis?
At any rate I find the Meyerhoff to be a fairly cozy concert space. It's older than I somehow thought it was, opened in 1982 or so, and it has the feel of a large early-eighties library or middle school to me: Essentially round, curving hallways, relatively low and sharply sloped ceilings. Plus the brown brick on the interior walls. The little areas with cafe-style seating where they'll sell you a brownie or a presumably much-needed midconcert bottle of beer seem to be their own semi-separate spaces as opposed to just a countertop and cash register plopped down arbitrarily in a lobby. The hall itself has a nice sound -- not particularly warm, but not distancing either -- with the same sort of curved-line aesthetic. The terrace-level seating along the sides is divided among separate pod-like subsections that each hold twenty or thirty seats or so, making you feel less like you're in a crowd (or maybe less like you're in a drastically underfilled symphony hall, depending on how ticket sales go).
A corollary to being surprisingly unfamiliar with the Meyerhoff is that once they started playing I realized I had no conception of what the Baltimore Symphony sounds like. They have a nice sound, though; confident solo work and a nice richness in the strings. Technically the orchestra sounds sharper than the National Symphony but not as nuanced and precise as the Philadelphia Orchestra. Perhaps this is tied to mile markers on I-95 somehow.
This was Marin Alsop's opening weekend as music director of the BSO and the ensemble was nicely balanced and shaded under her. She chose a bold/ weird program -- John Adams' "Fearful Symmetries" and Gustav Mahler's fifth symphony -- but it had enough logic to hold together as a concert, if not put as many bodies in the audience as you might hope for the second concert of the season.
"Fearful Symmetries" is a propulsive, fun oddball of a piece. At about twenty-five minutes it's at risk of being too long for that sort of thing; Woody Allen's "dead shark" joke from Annie Hall applies to it somehow, in that if it ever loses its forward-moving energy it kind of dies on the stage. Alsop brought out a lot of rhythmic pop in the most overtly bouncy parts and a lovely atmospheric warmth, especially in the strings, in the piece's gentler moments. She maintained an almost transparent sense of balance in the orchestra, too, and did an excellent job of managing and illustrating the various musical currents running simultaneously at skew angles through the piece. Her louds were never particularly loud, which was a problem at the beginning -- for three or four minutes the dynamic level of the piece seemed set at a kind of arbitrary mezzo-mezzo, when the music is at its most exuberant and needs to sell itself to the audience to get them on board for the next twenty minutes. A solid and consistent reading of the piece though. It seemed more defined by its hazy atmosphere than by full-throttle boppiness, like driving through fog.
I'm not a fan of Mahler's fifth symphony; it contains some great music, most of all its beatific Adagietto for strings and harp, but it's too rambling and episodic and long. (Is this the implicit, dangerous theme of Alsop's first program? "Wearing Out Our Welcome Already"?) I was sold on the first movement, the funeral march, though: It moved with a serpentine power and Alsop nicely highlighted its leering, almost obscene quality, making it more obviously a cousin to the perverse funeral-march setting of "Frere Jacques" in Mahler's first symphony. Somewhere around the middle of the second movement the shark more or less died for me, but the phrasing and detail work continued to sound good to me once the overall direction of the symphony seemed to bow under its own weight. The trumpet and horn soloists sounded great -- appropriately proclamatory and sometimes snarly -- and I liked Alsop's touch of minimizing the breaks between movements, especially overlapping the last fading of the Adagietto with the opening horn of the last movement. She capped the finale with a breathless, mercurial flourish, which functioned more or less like an "Applause" sign for the audience and had me entirely on board again at least for the last half minute. The louds here were very particularly loud, blowing the roof off of the upper level she established in "Fearful Symmetries" within about ten seconds or so.
Alsop is an energetic presence on the podium, lots of sweeping gestures from the shoulders and side-to-side motion. Occasionally she would illustrate quick rhythmic figures with a flurry of her hands or, at least in the Adams, let out an odd little foot kick. As with David Robertson or Manfred Honeck (both more or less her age, i.e. relatively young) her music continuously keeps up a similar level of energy, an intensity of form. After "Fearful Symmetries" Adams, who turned out to be in attendance, bounded up onstage and lankily took his bows alongside Alsop; it's hard not to think that the country's professional orchestras belong increasingly to the baby boomers.
At any rate I find the Meyerhoff to be a fairly cozy concert space. It's older than I somehow thought it was, opened in 1982 or so, and it has the feel of a large early-eighties library or middle school to me: Essentially round, curving hallways, relatively low and sharply sloped ceilings. Plus the brown brick on the interior walls. The little areas with cafe-style seating where they'll sell you a brownie or a presumably much-needed midconcert bottle of beer seem to be their own semi-separate spaces as opposed to just a countertop and cash register plopped down arbitrarily in a lobby. The hall itself has a nice sound -- not particularly warm, but not distancing either -- with the same sort of curved-line aesthetic. The terrace-level seating along the sides is divided among separate pod-like subsections that each hold twenty or thirty seats or so, making you feel less like you're in a crowd (or maybe less like you're in a drastically underfilled symphony hall, depending on how ticket sales go).
A corollary to being surprisingly unfamiliar with the Meyerhoff is that once they started playing I realized I had no conception of what the Baltimore Symphony sounds like. They have a nice sound, though; confident solo work and a nice richness in the strings. Technically the orchestra sounds sharper than the National Symphony but not as nuanced and precise as the Philadelphia Orchestra. Perhaps this is tied to mile markers on I-95 somehow.
This was Marin Alsop's opening weekend as music director of the BSO and the ensemble was nicely balanced and shaded under her. She chose a bold/ weird program -- John Adams' "Fearful Symmetries" and Gustav Mahler's fifth symphony -- but it had enough logic to hold together as a concert, if not put as many bodies in the audience as you might hope for the second concert of the season.
"Fearful Symmetries" is a propulsive, fun oddball of a piece. At about twenty-five minutes it's at risk of being too long for that sort of thing; Woody Allen's "dead shark" joke from Annie Hall applies to it somehow, in that if it ever loses its forward-moving energy it kind of dies on the stage. Alsop brought out a lot of rhythmic pop in the most overtly bouncy parts and a lovely atmospheric warmth, especially in the strings, in the piece's gentler moments. She maintained an almost transparent sense of balance in the orchestra, too, and did an excellent job of managing and illustrating the various musical currents running simultaneously at skew angles through the piece. Her louds were never particularly loud, which was a problem at the beginning -- for three or four minutes the dynamic level of the piece seemed set at a kind of arbitrary mezzo-mezzo, when the music is at its most exuberant and needs to sell itself to the audience to get them on board for the next twenty minutes. A solid and consistent reading of the piece though. It seemed more defined by its hazy atmosphere than by full-throttle boppiness, like driving through fog.
I'm not a fan of Mahler's fifth symphony; it contains some great music, most of all its beatific Adagietto for strings and harp, but it's too rambling and episodic and long. (Is this the implicit, dangerous theme of Alsop's first program? "Wearing Out Our Welcome Already"?) I was sold on the first movement, the funeral march, though: It moved with a serpentine power and Alsop nicely highlighted its leering, almost obscene quality, making it more obviously a cousin to the perverse funeral-march setting of "Frere Jacques" in Mahler's first symphony. Somewhere around the middle of the second movement the shark more or less died for me, but the phrasing and detail work continued to sound good to me once the overall direction of the symphony seemed to bow under its own weight. The trumpet and horn soloists sounded great -- appropriately proclamatory and sometimes snarly -- and I liked Alsop's touch of minimizing the breaks between movements, especially overlapping the last fading of the Adagietto with the opening horn of the last movement. She capped the finale with a breathless, mercurial flourish, which functioned more or less like an "Applause" sign for the audience and had me entirely on board again at least for the last half minute. The louds here were very particularly loud, blowing the roof off of the upper level she established in "Fearful Symmetries" within about ten seconds or so.
Alsop is an energetic presence on the podium, lots of sweeping gestures from the shoulders and side-to-side motion. Occasionally she would illustrate quick rhythmic figures with a flurry of her hands or, at least in the Adams, let out an odd little foot kick. As with David Robertson or Manfred Honeck (both more or less her age, i.e. relatively young) her music continuously keeps up a similar level of energy, an intensity of form. After "Fearful Symmetries" Adams, who turned out to be in attendance, bounded up onstage and lankily took his bows alongside Alsop; it's hard not to think that the country's professional orchestras belong increasingly to the baby boomers.
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There's a review of this concert in the NY Times today, in case you didn't see it.
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