Saturday Night Shostakovich
Two big Shostakovich pieces via the undergraduate Symphony Orchestra tonight, a concert I took in with my college friend Nick, who's here in New Haven now. (Had dinner with him & his wife Lisa the other night, too, at their place. He's got a faculty position in the physics dept. here, and she's in law school. And they've got an 11-month-old kid. They're busy people.)
Violin Concerto No. 1. I thought it was going to be a grad student soloist playing this, but instead it was a 19-year-old biology major. He, impressively, played the hell out of the piece, displaying a sharp-edged lower register and the ability to carve Shostakovich's mind-bending third-movement cadenza into the stark, spellbinding thing it should be. The orchestra was playing catch-up to a greater extent than usual, but it's a tough piece and the concert hall doesn't do any acoustical favors. (We were sitting near the front, the better to hear the soloist; still a good call, even if the timpani and horns were getting sucked out of the sound mix. We moved up to the second balcony after intermission.)
Fifth Symphony. The past couple of times I've heard this piece it's been with professional big-city orchestras able to machine-tool it into fair perfection. Like most works I've seen the undergrads play, it throws off new shadows when it sounds a bit more rough-edged and difficult. (Gutsy, though, always gutsy, these undergrads. And that's what makes for a successful concert, too.) That final, ambiguously triumphant climax of the symphony rings much differently when the trumpets are struggling mightily to attain the high notes; it's both more honest and less believably victorious. Also, the Symphony's music director, Toshiyuki Shimada, comes down, I think, in the "play the end part slowly to make it sound like an ironic celebration" school of Shostakovich Fiveology. Average-to-quick tempos everywhere else. Good show. I like thinking about how Shostakovich saved his own life with this piece.
Violin Concerto No. 1. I thought it was going to be a grad student soloist playing this, but instead it was a 19-year-old biology major. He, impressively, played the hell out of the piece, displaying a sharp-edged lower register and the ability to carve Shostakovich's mind-bending third-movement cadenza into the stark, spellbinding thing it should be. The orchestra was playing catch-up to a greater extent than usual, but it's a tough piece and the concert hall doesn't do any acoustical favors. (We were sitting near the front, the better to hear the soloist; still a good call, even if the timpani and horns were getting sucked out of the sound mix. We moved up to the second balcony after intermission.)
Fifth Symphony. The past couple of times I've heard this piece it's been with professional big-city orchestras able to machine-tool it into fair perfection. Like most works I've seen the undergrads play, it throws off new shadows when it sounds a bit more rough-edged and difficult. (Gutsy, though, always gutsy, these undergrads. And that's what makes for a successful concert, too.) That final, ambiguously triumphant climax of the symphony rings much differently when the trumpets are struggling mightily to attain the high notes; it's both more honest and less believably victorious. Also, the Symphony's music director, Toshiyuki Shimada, comes down, I think, in the "play the end part slowly to make it sound like an ironic celebration" school of Shostakovich Fiveology. Average-to-quick tempos everywhere else. Good show. I like thinking about how Shostakovich saved his own life with this piece.
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