Posts from — September 2008

Oregonian classical music critic David Stabler has posted a follow-up on his review of last Saturday’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony.  You can find it here.

What I find most interesting is the discussion that has apparently begun about the efficacy of the stage extension that we use for large works for choir and orchestra.  Carl Herko, the OSO’s PR director, wrote:

“After your review yesterday detailing your disappointment with Beethoven 9, and after we heard from some regular concertgoers who said they were unhappy with the sound quality this weekend (a feeling echoed by more than a few people on our staff), several of us got to thinking this morning: Is it possible that when we use a stage extension at the Schnitz, the sound quality is so altered that listener’s perceptions are really affected negatively?

I know that I should know why we started using the extensions, which I believe has been more prevalent during Carlos’ tenure than during Jimmy’s, but I’m not exactly sure why the setup was instituted.  I am recalling very dimly that perhaps it was to help the choir project better (even though in the hall they still need, and are given, electronic reinforcement) than was possible with them in the choir loft.

It’s not an unusual situation - the Seattle Symphony constructed a stage extension for their performances last week of Mahler’s massive Eighth symphony due to the large number of performers on stage.  They, however, have an acoustically excellent hall, so I’m not sure how much of an impact it had on either the sound apparent to the audience or in how the musicians heard themselves on stage.

Either way, it’s a discussion worth having between the artistic and managerial personnel at the symphony, to determine if a stage extension is warranted for every performance with chorus and orchestra, especially with our reduced string complement.  In the end, however, it might be moot, since there are myriad problems with the acoustics that will not be fixed by rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  It may be that this problem will not be resolved in the short term.

We’ve got two out of our three performances of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony out into the ether, and the reviews of the first performances have been mixed. [Read more →]

In one of my recent posts, I happened to say that I didn’t care for the Ode to Joy from the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony.  Well, I’ve reconsidered that stance a bit.

I still don’t do cartwheels over the long initial statement of the theme in the celli and basses, then the violas.  I think it just has something to do with overexposure.  That’s not Beethoven’s fault.

I do happen to love the triumphant verse with the entire choir singing “Joy, beautiful spark of God/Daughter of Elysium” at maximum volume while the strings play their counterpoint of eighth-notes and the brass interject their contributions.  Gives me chills every time!

It’s pretty hair-raising, especially the two bar crescendo that leads up to the roof being blown off the place.  It must have been something to hear for the first time.  It’s no wonder it took Brahms over 30 years to have the guts to write his First symphony.

It’s an older interview (2003), but it gives some insight into who this classical music phenomenon is as a person, rather than just an aggressively marketed persona.

We had our first rehearsals on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony yesterday, and it was one of those days where I was tired from the very beginning, but I thought I could at least dredge up nine observations about this well-loved work from an insider’s perspective.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I cannot vouch for the veracity of these thoughts, they are just what came forth as I as pondering what to write today. [Read more →]

Christoph Eschenbach, formerly the embattled music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, has taken a position with the National Symphony, which will entail not only being the NSO’s music director, but also being the music director of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.  Reportedly, this will enable him to curate interdisciplinary festivals in the complex, which includes an opera house, concert hall, recital hall, and theater spaces within its spacious confines.

Read the Washington Post article here.

If you were hoping to catch the piano phenom known as Lang Lang, you’re out of luck: his special concert with the Oregon Symphony on October 3rd is sold out.  However, if you’ve got some extra money burning a hole in your pocket, there is a special premium ticket auction going on at ticketmaster…

From today’s New York Times:

Last October the Juilliard School announced that it would establish a graduate program in historical performance, shaped in large part by the American expatriate William Christie, who spearheaded the modern early-music movement in Paris. Now Juilliard is announcing specific dates and faculty members.

Auditions for the program, which begins in the fall of 2009, will be held on Jan. 28 and 29 in Paris and on March 1 and 2 in New York.

The artistic director will be Monica Huggett, an English violinist steeped in period performance. As concertmaster and soloist, Ms. Huggett was a central figure in London in the 1970s, when it more or less led the early-music field, largely on the strength of recordings, and in Amsterdam in the 1980s, when it achieved similar prominence. She has since been active internationally. She taught in Bremen, Germany, and in The Hague, and she is the artistic director of the Portland Baroque Orchestra in Oregon and the Irish Baroque Orchestra in Dublin.

At least according to the MacArthur Foundation, who made Ross one of its 2008 Genius Grant Fellows.

Here’s his bio from the Foundation website:

Alex Ross is a critic whose writing captures the often-elusive aesthetic and technical aspects of classical and contemporary music with clarity, grace, and wit. A staff writer for the New Yorker, his frequent essays display an expansive knowledge of music and a facility for guiding his readers, who range from professional musicians to scholars to the general public alike, to a richer experience of the complex pieces and artists he explores. With a finely tuned grasp of a full spectrum of styles, he places works by a broad variety of artists – from Mozart to Schoenberg to Bob Dylan – within a continuum and sets aside categories and classifications that impede the appreciation of works on their own terms. In each article, Ross strives to demonstrate how a specific piece of music, be it centuries or months old, conveys meaning and feeling in the present. In addition to his work in essay form, he recently published the book The Rest Is Noise (2007), a cultural history of 20th-century music that journeys through pre-World War I Vienna, Paris of the 1920s, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and New York of the 1960s and 1970s. Through a widely read blog of the same title (www.therestisnoise.com), he further expands the reach of his interpretive skills and enthusiasm for championing overlooked composers and out-of-the-way ensembles. In an era when many proclaim the imminent demise of concert halls due to waning attendance, Ross offers both highly specialized and casual readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future.

Alex Ross received a B.A. (1990) from Harvard University. He has been the music critic for the New Yorker since 1996 and served previously as a music critic for the New York Times (1992-1996). His writing has also appeared in the New Republic, Slate, Lingua Franca, and the London Review of Books.

David Stabler

David Stabler, the classical music critic for the Oregonian newspaper, has stated on his blog that he’s not taking a buyout from the paper, and is staying on indefinitely.

It’s good news.  Full-time classical music critics are getting to be as rare as hens’ teeth, and David is the only one left in the state of Oregon, so far as I can tell.

While there are things that he writes that I might occasionally quibble with, having a critic to read on a weekly basis is becoming more of a privilege than a right these days, and David’s done a lot to promote the hard work of many, many local arts organizations, which is much appreciated here in Portland, as opposed to Cleveland, Ohio…

Coming up on Thursday: our first rehearsals for Classical 1 - the might Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.  I’ll give my thoughts as the week progresses.  Meanwhile, check out David’s excellent piece on this oft-faved work (complete with some hilarious internet-sourced quotes from fans) here.