REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS/GEORGE HANSON, CONDUCTOR

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    George Hanson led the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night in a stimulating program any way you look at it. Do you want spiritual stimulation? Meditate on the mystical Medieval texts set by Stephen Paulus in his recent Voices of Light. Want erotic stimulation? Check out the salacious Latin lyrics toward the end of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Or maybe you just want to be slammed back into your seat by the power of a full orchestra and chorus? Well, Hanson and company were fully capable of that in stretches of both works.
    Don’t get the idea that the program was a nonstop noisefest, though. At least half of Carmina Burana is delicate music celebrating springtime and love, and Voices of Light runs the gamut of emotion and effect in a mélange of audience-friendly styles.
    Now, that “mélange of styles” comment may lead you to suspect that Paulus’ score is derivative. Some passages, indeed, do spring a bit too pure from other sources, but for the most part Paulus manages to filter everything through his own sensibilities. He draws his texts from 13th-century writings by the women mystics Mechtilde of Magdeburg and Hadewijch II. The first of the five movements blends the general sound of early Vaughan Williams (specifically his Sea Symphony) with the more contemporary choral harmonies of John Adams, though without a trace of the latter’s minimalism. The second movement steps out with Bernstein-style syncopations, and late portions of the score evoke Samuel Barber’s sadly under-performed The Lovers. But there’s plenty of echt-Paulus here, too, particularly in the central movement, “The Oneness Within,” which is in part a nocturne with delicate touches of percussion, and in the choral scherzo that follows.
    The chorus was very well prepared by Bruce Chamberlain, and Hanson kept it and the colorful orchestra in good balance. The one real drawback, here and throughout the concert, was the chorus’ enunciation; either it was mushy to start with, or the hall garbled it by the time it got past the conductor’s ears.
    Orff’s ever-popular Carmina Burana came off almost as well. Hanson did take the opening and closing “O Fortuna” at a clip just a shade too fast to convey the music’s underlying grim inevitability, but the tempo worked on its own terms. At times, the orchestra pulled ahead of the chorus; this was fine in contrasting instrumental episodes, rather less good if chorus and orchestra were supposed to be together. This didn’t happen often enough to compromise the overall effect.
    Otherwise, the performance fell nicely into place, with good contributions from the vocal soloists. Baritone Charles Roe nearly came to grief near the end when Orff sent him into a cruelly high tessitura, but otherwise he was tremendously effective: suave and tender in “Omnia sol temperat,” in praise of spring, and spitting out the drunken “Estuans interius” with the syllables popping almost like little hiccups. Tenor Jason Ferrante sang the song of the roasting swan with plenty of character, and soprano Mary Wilson delivered lovely, floating solos in the final third of the work.
    The programming was smart—two post-Romantic choral works employing Medieval texts—and so, overall, was the performance.

TEODORA MITEVA

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    A listener has e-mailed me a link to a video of Teodora Miteva playing Bruch’s Kol Nidre, and my correspondent has high praise for Miteva’s performance. I haven’t had a chance to hear enough of it to form my own opinion, but I like what little I’ve heard. I didn’t know anything about Miteva until this morning, and I don't know much more after a cursory Googling. She was born 31 years ago in Bulgaria and seems to be active mainly in Austria and Germany. Her discography is extremely limited so far. The video clip, made with a single camera and thus not intended for normal broadcast, captures Miteva in concert with a women’s orchestra in Vienna—maybe it’s all the good female musicians who’ve been kept out of the Vienna Philharmonic. Or not. Follow the link and see what you think of her performance, and don’t forget to move on to the second half of the video in a separate file.

CAN YOU DIG IT?

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Borderlands Theater’s latest premiere proves to be a mild disappointment:

    Evangeline Ordaz's Hippie Mexicana is partly an affectionate nostalgia trip, looking back at a time when a "trip" didn't necessarily involve going away or falling down. Well, not going away, at least. The play is also a snort of exasperation over the institutionalized racism that kept a qualified man of part-Native American heritage from conducting credible scientific research on his own property. It's also a bittersweet story of how a bunch of likable, laid-back, optimistic people wind up 20 years later in dead-end jobs, and how these people who value their cultural and family history ultimately decide it makes sense to sell the old family home.
    Hippie Mexicana is getting its premiere performances courtesy of Borderlands Theater, and while it's the sort of play and production that one really wants to enjoy, it doesn't quite work.

CD REVIEWS: SOL GABETTA, BAIBA SKRIDE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Evidence that the major labels have not gone completely down the drain: two fine new concerto discs from Sony/BMG. Now, it’s true that the soloists—cellist Sol Gabetta and violinist Baiba Skride—are tremendously photogenic, but their appeal is more than skin-deep. I just sent in a very brief review of each disc to a magazine you probably don’t read and which rarely posts CD reviews at its Web site, so I’ll share them with you here.

    Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme; Andante Cantabile; Pezo Capriccioso; Nocturne. Saint-Saëns: Cello Concerto No. 1. Ginastera: Pampana No. 2. Sol Gabetta, cello; Ari Rasilainen conducts the Munich Radio Orchestra (RCA 82876759512).
    Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta introduces herself on disc with the more-or-less complete music for cello and orchestra by Tchaikovsky (a couple of song arrangements are missing), naturally mated with the Saint-Saëns First Concerto, plus the rarely (if ever) recorded orchestral version of Ginastera’s Pampeana No. 2. Best comes first: a fabulous performance of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations. This isn’t for people who prefer big, loud, fast, beefy versions of the work; Gabetta’s way with it is quietly teasing. She tends to operate at a relatively low volume, but makes lots of little dynamic adjustments from bar to bar and stretches out phrases to romantic effect; her rubato in the fourth variation is especially impish, and the cadenza built into the fifth variation is full of personality. Overall, the work has rarely sounded so balletic.
    The rest of the disc comes off well, but with less individuality than the Rococo Variations. The outer movements of the Saint-Saëns are impassioned, and the central Allegretto is especially elegant. The other items respond well to Gabetta’s light touch and impeccable intonation.

    Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1; Janácek: Violin Concerto. Baiba Skride, violin; Mikko Franck conducts the Munich Philharmonic; Marek Janowski conducts the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (Sony 82876-73146-2).
    For her third Sony recording, Baiba Skride takes up what has apparently become a rite of passage for all young violinists: Shostakovich’s First Concerto. Her way with the opening Nocturne is patient and dark; from the beginning, there’s a subtle sense of menace. The Scherzo is properly frantic, the Passacaglia warm and lyrical—not the dry meander it can become—and a fervent cadenza leads to a stunning Burlesque: The intepretation is gritty, but the intonation is pure, even in this concert performance. True, Skride’s tone sometimes does become wiry in high passages, but this happens in spots where it may be a conscious color decision.
    The filler is a welcome bonus, Janácek’s Violin Concerto, “The Wandering of a Little Soul.” There’s more than one reconstruction of this unfinished work, which shares material with the overture to Janácek’s prison-camp opera From the House of the Dead; this version is by Leos Faltus and Milos Stedron. Skide’s approach is as mercurial as it should be.
    This Latvian laureate of the Queen Elisabeth International Competition clearly knows how to execute a keen conception of challenging, unhackneyed music; her earlier disc devoted to Mozart and the Haydn brothers should also be worth seeking out.

CODED MESSAGE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    A couple of leading online figures have called for a blogger’s code of conduct, and it’s about time. The code of conduct doesn’t so much address the posts of bloggers as the comments posted by readers. You can read the first draft here at Tim O’Reilly’s site, and find answers to some libertarian objections here. The libertarian types, as usual, are screaming “censorship.”
    So what’s with all this hand-wringing over “censorship,” anyway? There’s a huge difference between controlling someone’s independent expression and supervising the content of a site or publication for which you are responsible. The latter is not censorship; it’s editing, and it’s necessary even in a free, civil society if discourse isn’t to be hijacked by bullies with nothing to contribute.

THE HIGHER PRICE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    A friend had considered joining us for this Thursday's Tucson Symphony concert, but then reconsidered. She writes, "It turns out that a ticket, in the front balcony, would cost me $62 -- with Ticketmaster charges etc -- too much -- if it were for Der Rosenkavalier or Magic Flute I would do it in a heartbeat, but not for Orff." She has nothing against Carmina Burana; but she expects a substantial production for that kind of money in Tucson.
     From what I can see from my balcony seat, Thursday-night TSO attendance has been alarmingly low this season. If the orchestra wants to increase attendance next year, raising the ticket price seems, to put it politely, counterintuitive.