Saturday at Sunday in the Park with George with Dan and Mandy
Praise be to George and Abe, who were born so that we might not have to work on a Monday in February. I'm moving through the day off at a leisurely pace (sleep in, gym, omelet, laundry, blog) following a full two-day weekend in New York spent largely with Mandy and our college friend Dan, who was in town from Michigan. Dan was in town to participate in a Stephen Sondheim conference (Dan is in musicology school, and studying Sondheim among other topics); the conference was pegged to the current Broadway run of Sunday in the Park with George, which the three of us went to see on Saturday afternoon. Good times. We had coffee afterwards and chatted about it for a while; it's good to be able to do this with like-minded people. Dan and I proceeded on after dinner (Korean food on 32nd St. near 5th Ave.) to Carnegie Hall and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. (I'm going to throw a bunch of words about modernist orchestra music into a post or two later. The short report on the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is that they, and David Robertson, are amazing.)
Sunday in the Park is a pretty interesting work, and hard to classify. [synopsis via The Internet] Musically it's artful and usually fairly subtle, with lyrical melodies swimming along over what's basically a chamber accompaniment (piano, keyboard, two strings, & a reed player) with influences from 80s pop-minimalism and 19th-century French salon music. That's a plenty appropriate atmosphere for a Georges Seurat story. There's a welcome kick to the sassier numbers, which are a lot of fun. Sondheim is, as always, good with lyrics, and compositionally he's in fine form here, connecting the songs with musical material that he develops over time without calling obvious attention to it. The staging was clean and economical, with most of the scene-setting heavy lifting done by some surprisingly effective video projections.
I'm not entirely sold by the jump forward in time in the second act, and I think the concept behind the show gets a lot less interesting when it leaves the Grand Jatte frame, so to speak. It's unusual, though, and I'm generally in favor of that.
After Company last year this makes two very fine Sondheim shows in two years, which is not bad. (Company did not run for very long, and Sunday in the Park has a modest fixed run; I'm not extraordinarily familiar with the world of musical theater but offhand I'd say that people need to work harder at aligning their tastes with my own.) Merrily We Roll Along is getting a staging in London, meanwhile (at the hands of John Doyle, who brought Company to Broadway and Sweeney Todd before that) and I rather hope that'll make the leap across the pond, too.
On Sunday I went up to Columbia to see my friend Andy conduct the college wind ensemble (this is the one I played in while I lived in NYC), which was quite a bit of fun too. They've improved noticeably over the last couple of years, and among other things they brought off a very successful Suite of Old American Dances (which more than anything else makes me want to play in a band again: I love this piece) and a fairly ambitious ten-minute composition by one of Andy's college friends, which was a bit over-typical of serious-minded contemporary band music but clear and effective and well orchestrated. It's good to see the ensemble premiering works; that's very much a good step to take. They've also got a higher proportion of the ensemble being covered by undergrads (rather than community players or ringers), another measure of success.
Sunday in the Park is a pretty interesting work, and hard to classify. [synopsis via The Internet] Musically it's artful and usually fairly subtle, with lyrical melodies swimming along over what's basically a chamber accompaniment (piano, keyboard, two strings, & a reed player) with influences from 80s pop-minimalism and 19th-century French salon music. That's a plenty appropriate atmosphere for a Georges Seurat story. There's a welcome kick to the sassier numbers, which are a lot of fun. Sondheim is, as always, good with lyrics, and compositionally he's in fine form here, connecting the songs with musical material that he develops over time without calling obvious attention to it. The staging was clean and economical, with most of the scene-setting heavy lifting done by some surprisingly effective video projections.
I'm not entirely sold by the jump forward in time in the second act, and I think the concept behind the show gets a lot less interesting when it leaves the Grand Jatte frame, so to speak. It's unusual, though, and I'm generally in favor of that.
After Company last year this makes two very fine Sondheim shows in two years, which is not bad. (Company did not run for very long, and Sunday in the Park has a modest fixed run; I'm not extraordinarily familiar with the world of musical theater but offhand I'd say that people need to work harder at aligning their tastes with my own.) Merrily We Roll Along is getting a staging in London, meanwhile (at the hands of John Doyle, who brought Company to Broadway and Sweeney Todd before that) and I rather hope that'll make the leap across the pond, too.
On Sunday I went up to Columbia to see my friend Andy conduct the college wind ensemble (this is the one I played in while I lived in NYC), which was quite a bit of fun too. They've improved noticeably over the last couple of years, and among other things they brought off a very successful Suite of Old American Dances (which more than anything else makes me want to play in a band again: I love this piece) and a fairly ambitious ten-minute composition by one of Andy's college friends, which was a bit over-typical of serious-minded contemporary band music but clear and effective and well orchestrated. It's good to see the ensemble premiering works; that's very much a good step to take. They've also got a higher proportion of the ensemble being covered by undergrads (rather than community players or ringers), another measure of success.
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