Symphony Hall,
Boston. Orchestra (Seat CC33, $71.50).
Program
Prelude a
lapres-midi d’un faune by Claude Debussy.
Piano Concerto
No. 23 in A Major, K.488 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Symphony No. 5,
Op. 64 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
We decided to
come up to Boston for our granddaughter’s birthday after our Hong Kong
trip. I looked around and found discount
tickets on Goldstar for this concert. It
would be interesting to see a new orchestra, and to visit Symphony Hall
again. After church we had lunch with
the Tsai’s before Joe dropped us off at the venue.
The short
Debussy piece put the concert on a good footing. Our seats did not afford us views of the back
of the orchestra, but the soloist came through nice and clear. Program Notes on this piece keep talking
about a ballet associated with the music, but I have trouble picturing what it
would be like, other than a fawn jumping around on a meadow as it blows on a
pan flute.
The Mozart
concerto was pleasant to listen to, with a good give-and-take between the
soloist and the orchestra. As usual, I
can’t tell if this is a “good” or a “great” performance. The interesting thing is both the soloist and
the conductor needed the music in front of them. (Gatti didn’t need the score for the other
two pieces.) The three movements are
Allegro, Adagio, and Allegro assai.
In my prior
encounters with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth I have come away with different feelings:
gloom and doom at times, a ray of home at other times. Today’s performance is more in the latter
category. While this was competently
performed, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, it wasn’t quite up to the standard of
my last two, conducted by Blomstedt and Dudamel.
The programming
is a bit of a head-scratcher. Of course
all three are popular pieces for the concert stage, but I can’t tell how they
belong together. And for a touring
French orchestra, one might reasonably expect the program would have a heavy
French tilt; well, the soloist was French.
Gatti is Italian,
and seems to be on his way up (if he isn’t there already.) His next appointment is with the
Concertgebouw Orchestra. His movements
are generally economical, at times imperceptible, yet he managed to keep the
musicians together. Most of the time
anyway, things got a bit wild towards the end of the Tchaikovsky piece, which
may be impossible to do anyway.
Perhaps it was
the snow – NJ was hit hard, Boston had about half a foot – attendance was not
great (80%, maybe?) Anne noticed that
her former colleague, now CEO of a startup biotech company, is a sponsor of
this Celebrity Series.
No comments:
Post a Comment