Classical Music

On Sunday, May 23, City Arts presented the latest installment of Chamber vs. Chamber, a monthly evening of music and conversation at the Sorrento Hotel, featuring artists from more classical forms playing alongside those more familiar with the pop realm. This evening, the format took a turn towards musical theatre when host Michael Hebb invited theatrical stars Nick Garrison and Sarah Rudinoff to start the evening, followed by prog-folk septet Awesome. Read the review of the evening here; and check out more photos after the jump.

There have been a lot of new works presented on Seattle concert stages this month. Seattle Opera’s Amelia opened last weekend to strong reviews, Eric Banks Haptadama (not a premiere, but a recent creation) opened,and last Monday, Music of Remembrance concluded their twelfth season by showcasing a brand new commission from Lori Laitman based on Vedem (Czech for “In the Lead”) — an underground journal written by teenage boys imprisoned in the Terezin concentration camp. 

Read the review after the jump.

This concert wouldn’t have been possible if John Adams and Sergei Rachmaninoff hadn’t each suffered writer’s block at a key moment in his career. 

The poor premiere of his First Symphony put Rachmaninoff in a slump. The composer tried to focus on piano performance, but his copious alcohol consumption got in the way. Hypnosis helped Rachmaninoff shake off his demons, and the result is the stirring Second Piano Concerto.

At the end of his time as composer in residence with the San Francisco Symphony, Adams faced his own writer’s block. It ended after he dreamed he was driving over the San Francisco Bay Bridge when he saw a tanker enter the bay and ascend into the sky. Adams’ dream was the inspiration for “Harmonielehre,” a symphony in everything but name.

Leading the Seattle Symphony in this concert will be the Atlanta Symphony’s Robert Spano, a proponent of American music ever since his days with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and one of a handful of American conductors actively promoting Adams’ modern masterpiece in the concert hall. — ZACH CARSTENSEN

Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., 206.215.4747

Buy tickets and listen to preview audio clips on the Seattle Symphony's Web site.

Peter Rose (Falstaff) and Stephanie Blythe (Dame Quickly), © Rozarii Lynch photo

Verdi's Falstaff is over two hours of comical farce about a fat man...except it really isn't. The opera is based around the theme of ridicule of the man, all of it directly or indirectly in regard to his girth. However, upon further reflection, I realized that it's not really his size that constitutes the core of the issue. He is an archetype of greed, and of gluttony. His appetites are inappropriately huge — he eats too much, he drinks too much, he courts too many women at a time. He's also a thief — of other men's wives and property, sometimes successful, often not, but always driven by wanting more, more, more.

While the surrounding characters call him monster, he himself revels in the bounty of his prodigious belly. He seems to hold it before him as a sign of his acquisitions and conquests.

Rose (Falstaff), Ashraf Sewailam (Pistol) and Steven Goldstein (Bardolph) © Rozarii Lynch photo

During the course of Verdi's opera — based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Winsor — Falstaff is made a fool of. He is led down paths of deception, dumped in the river and made even more absurd when he is tricked into wearing a pair of horns under false pretenses. But ultimately he doesn't really exhibit much beyond the slightest air of repentance. Throughout, he stands as symbol of the greedy consumption of the upper classes.

The music of Falstaff is not terribly thrilling. It doesn't contain any virtuosic arias or any fabulous overblown musical passages. It doesn't have any particularly memorable or well-known melodies, but this fits the character of the piece. The music is light, as fits a comic opera. I suspect that Verdi was rather tired by the very late stage in his career. He'd used up all of the glorious excessive music he had in him already. But Falstaff is easy to listen to.

Svetla Vassileva (Alice Ford) © Rozarii Lynch photo

The best parts of Seattle Opera's production are Peter Kazaras's wonderful staging, Donald Eastman's sets and Connie Yun's lighting design. Edged in sets of bleachers, with the "offstage" singers often visible to the audience, the effect makes visible the opera's Shakespearean origins. Before a single note sounds, the singers fuss about the stage, getting into — and out of — clothing, chatting and drinking out of pewter steins. So the audience is taken into the actor/singer's side of the production, setting the relaxed character of the opera to come.

Some of the most powerful and interesting uses of the set were between scenes, as frozen silhouettes of actors and objects played against the solid-color background. The effect was quite wonderful.

© Rozarii Lynch photo

As the opera winds down towards its conclusion, just like many Shakespearean comedies, there's a jumble of deceptions with true love finally winning out and Sir Falstaff getting nothing of what he was trying to get. There's also a surprising ending in regard to the staging, which is more effective without me spoiling it for you.

Seattle Opera's Falstaff plays through March 13.

a review by Zach Carstensen

I probably would have skipped Beth Fleenor’s January 31st show at the Rendezvous JewelBox Theater in Belltown if the night’s lineup began with her experimental band, Figeater. 

 [more after the jump]

The Seattle Symphony management has just announced, via press release, that it has reached a tentative agreement with the Seattle Symphony and Opera Players’ Organization for a three-year contract. The agreement still needs to be ratified by the players’ union, but the SSO management sounds upbeat. It’s hard to decipher why, as details are scant.

The release does promise that management and the players are committed to working together to better the orchestra – and all that predictable, feel good claptrap – but it does not specify the status of salary cuts and hiring freezes proposed by management in a December 29 offer (read more on that in the current issue of City Arts Seattle). The little bit that the proposed agreement does detail is, well, kind of weird. To wit:

The agreement includes an unprecedented up-front contribution by the musicians to the Seattle Symphony’s Annual Fund. In a new initiative named The 2010 Challenge, each of our 84 musicians will contribute $2,010. This donation, totaling $168,840, from the musicians is intended to be a catalyst for the Seattle Symphony Board’s next phase of fundraising.

It’s laudable that players would offer to serve as the catalyst for a fundraising effort, but the fact that such a move is the only tangible bit of information to come out of this tentative agreement makes the musicians sound, well, weak. I, personally, would like management to tell us what their plan for the players is.

Read the full press release here.

[UPDATE: Zach Carstensen, who authored the piece on the Symphony in the February issue of City Arts, spoke with SSOPO spokesman Dale Gluck and unearthed some more details on the agreement: "The contract is shorter (23 months with the option of another 8 according SSOPO spokesman Dale Gluck) than the five year agreement management proposed. Musicians must endure an immediate 5% across the board salary reduction for the rest of the season, returning to the current scale in 2011." There's more. Read his full post here.]

Illustration by André Mora for City Arts

Tonight Carolyn Kuan, the conductor who we featured in our December 2008 Seattle issue, will be guest conducting the Seattle Symphony at a special Celebrate Asia! concert at Benaroya Hall. The concert begins at 7:30pm, but there will be pre-concert activites, including a Chinese Lion Dance at 6:30pm. Following the concert, at 9:00pm, there will be a performance of Japanese Taiko drumming.

The concert program consists of: Mendelssohn: Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61, Li Bo: The Tale of Matou Qin, Franz von Suppe: Overture to Light Cavalry, Traditional: “Arirang,” Bizet: Excerpts from Carmen, Gang Chen / Zhanhao He: The Butterfly Lovers Concerto

Today in local music

In the midst of tense labor negotiations (which Zach Carstensen is covering closely on The Gathering Note), the Seattle Symphony Orchestra will perform Samuel Jones’ Elegy tonight at 7:00pm at Mercer Middle School. The performance is free and open to the public and dedicated to the victims of Haiti’s earthquake. Checks and cash donations will be accepted at the concerts. Checks should be made out to the “American Red Cross International Response Fund.”

Photo by Laurence E. Tucker

Anyone who ever had the opportunity to hear one of Perry Lorenzo's wonderful lectures on opera will recognize the enormous loss his death from cancer last weekend represents - to his employer, the Seattle Opera, where he served as Director of Education for nearly twenty years; to St. James Cathedral, the parish he was a vital and active member of for so many years; to his former students and all of the other young people he worked with and inspired over the years; to any of the rest of us, who appreciated what he knew and shared through his love of art and his faith. He was a truly exceptional educator, with a rare gift of being able to combine encyclopedic levels of knowledge of music and many other topics with a passion to bring that knowledge to a very broad and varied audience.

The video below shows Lorenzo and Speight Jenkins, in conversation about the Seattle Opera's February 2009 production of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle with Schoenberg's Erwartung:

Lorenzo was also a devout Roman Catholic and held a great deal of knowledge of Church history, theology and liturgy. I attended a lecture more than a year ago that he presented at Blessed Sacrament Parish on the history and concepts behind the musical aspects of the Dominican Rite Mass. The breadth of his knowledge of chant and liturgical practice was quite impressive and his impassioned presentation made it quite a fascinating and illuminating talk. I would imagine that for him, the chance to combine his knowledge and passion for Catholicism and music into one talk was a cherished opportunity.

He wrote extensively in his blog about music and his faith, and extensively about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, including this post, for example, in which he compares Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman" with Hopkins' poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," eloquently stating:

"But a comparison of Hopkins' Catholic vision and Wagner's Romantic vision is instructive. It shows us that Romanticism is really a kind of Catholic heresy: for the Romantic generation was the first generation of European artists who almost completely dumped Christianity and thus created a void in their imaginations' horizons. Suddenly, without a God and without an Incarnation and without a Church, the Romantics still needed a way to express their immortal longings. Romanticism is like a ruined Gothic chapel--the ruins, the fragments, the remains of a Catholic faith, no longer the sanctuary of the Blessed Sacrament, but now a ruin haunted by ghosts and monsters."

I will let Lorenzo's own words serve as a more eloquent way to speak of his death. This was written in 2005, upon the death of a friend:

Crossing the Waters Just recently a friend died--or, more factually, was killed in a terrible accident. She was 21, beautiful, smart, talented, generous, just out of Yale, and riding her bike on a fundraising-bike-trip across the country for Habitat for Humanity. A car struck her and killed her.

Friends, family, people all are saying things like "What a waste!" and "We are devestated!" or even the eloquent silence of shock and disbelief. All such responses are honest: and I cannot argue with them.

Death is a fact that all of us face--the deaths of people we know, of people we love, and indeed most of all our own deaths.

How we live, what we do, how and whom we love--that's what's important in the face of death.