Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall. Balcony (Seat D34, $20.)
Program
Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin
(1848) by Wagner (1813-1883).
Anthology of
Fantastic Zoology (2014) by Bates (b. 1977).
Poeme de l’amour et
de la mer, Op. 19 (1882-1890, rev. 1893) by Chausson (1855-1899).
Fountains of Rome
(1915-1916) by Respighi (1879-1936).
As the “At a Glance” of the Playbill describes it, tonight’s
program was inspired by “a medieval German legend, the magical realism of Jorge
Luis Borges, French poetry, and the sights of Rome.” Indeed, there is a “program” behind each of
the compositions.
Of the ten Wagner operas (per the Playbill) that are still
performed regularly today, the only one I haven’t seen is Lohengrin, who is the
son of Parsifal, and a guardian of the Holy Grail. The prelude is supposed to start softly,
builds to a crescendo representing the unveiling of the grail, and then returns
to the soft opening to conclude. It
sounded well enough, but I thought the dynamics was a bit on the flat side.
A few words about our tickets. Recently I installed this TodayTix APP on my
phone which offers discounted tickets to mostly Broadway-like shows, but they
do have a few Met, NY Phil, and Carnegie Performances on there. Today’s tickets were discounted from $43, and
were supposed to be “center balcony.” They
were actually on the far right hand side, and we moved to some empty seats one
section closer to the center after the Prelude.
While $20 is a great value, I do wonder if I should’ve shelled out more
for better seats in this auditorium. The
acoustics was good, but my complaint about Carnegie Hall is the sound can be “too
clean,” for lack of a better phrase, still applies.
The stage looked really far away from our seats in the balcony. We could hear the music well, most of the time.
Mason Bates wrote the Anthology based on the short book
by Borges. The work consists of 11
movements, played without pause: Forest:Twilight; Sprite; Dusk; The A Bao A Qu;
Nymphs; Night; The Gryphon; Midnight; Sirens; The Zaratan; Madrugada. In the Program Notes Bates provides a
description of the various creatures and how he constructed the music. One interesting movement is “The A Bao A Qu,”
describing a snake slithering up a tower, molting at the top, and slides back
down. The movement is an exact
palindrome. I could tell which movement
it was, but didn’t catch how the music was reversed. (It took me a while to get the Rachmaninoff
inversion, which is simpler.) The
descriptions of the movements are such that the audience spends a lot of time
trying to match them to the music. (And
what does “luring the violins one by one” mean practically?) Eventually I thought 30 minutes of this
intellectual exercise was too much and gave up. At that point the music just
sounded flat and meandering until the orchestra picked up the pace for a loud
finale.
The composer Mason Bates came on stage at the conclusion of the performance of his piece. Notice the array of percussion instruments in the back, they kept the three percussionists very busy. The keyboard artist does double duty on the piano and the celesta.
One noteworthy characteristic of the composition is the
use of many percussion instruments. The
Program Notes lists 27 different kinds (counting the piano and the celesta,) and
the percussionists had to go back and forth for the different instruments. With 9 drums and 2 music stands in front of
him, the timpanist got a work out. He
did great.
The timpanist had a real workout, attending to nine drums. He also has two music stands.
One can find video clips of this work on YouTube. I wonder how likely I will listen to them?
While the Chausson piece was about 30 minutes long, a lot
of that was taken up by the orchestra.
Indeed in the video clip on the Carnegie Hall website Nezet-Seguin
describes the voice as an integrated part of the music.
There is something about French love songs (even
classical ones) that make them appealing.
I don’t know how good DiDonato’s French is, but she certainly painted a beautiful
and melancholic picture with her delivery.
The sadness is described by one critic as “the inexpressible horror of
dead love.” I simply found the words “the
season for lilac and the season for roses will not come back …” incredibly
regretful. I have always liked DiDonato’s
sound, too bad sometimes it didn’t carry well into the balcony.
Joyce DiDonato at the end of Chausson's Poeme.
Respighi used the Fountains of Rome to describe four
fountains around the city in four different parts of the day. I was in Rome recently, and really should
have visited these fountains (and the pines.)
I have visit Trevi and Triton, but not Valle Giulia and Villa
Medici.) The only other blog entry for
this work was a concert I attended while visiting Montepulciano, Italy during a
family vacation in 2013. Embarrassingly,
tonight’s performance didn’t feel that different from the one by the Orchestra
of the Royal Northern College of Music of Manchester, held outdoors in a cool
evening.
It was a good concert, and we enjoyed it despite our
seats far away from the stage. I had
higher expectations though. Things sometimes
look better on paper.
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