• I just caught Robert Levine’s latest blog entry about the Milwaukee Symphony’s recent concerts with Hilary Hahn.  Robert is one of the smartest guys out there, I’m coming to appreciate, and reading this post had me scratching my head and wondering “why couldn’t I have said that?”.  I like the way he clearly expresses what’s on his mind, and gets to the crux of the matter with minimal equivocation.  Hahn was in Milwaukee playing the Tchaikovsky concerto, and Levine really hits the nail on the head about this piece (which is one of my favorite guilty pleasures, by the way):

But I found myself not really convinced by her version of the piece, which surprised me, as I hadn’t felt that way about the previous times she’d played with us. I spent all week trying to figure out why. The best I could come up with was that she was trying to find more in the piece than was actually there. She was making wonderful and interesting phrases all over the place. But it’s not that kind of piece. In a funny way, her great strengths as a musician – her intelligence and imagination – were not really relevant to the piece, and even got in the way. One doesn’t think of semplice and Tchaikowsky as ever being coupled – but I think that’s what it needs. Perhaps that’s why the last movement consistently worked the best, because all it needs – all there’s time for, really – is technique and a kind of inexorable rhythmic stability, which of course she has in spades.

• In other news, my joint recital with Heather Blackburn went pretty well - I’ll have more thoughts on it when I have a little more distance from it.  For now, my alarm clock is off until further notice, however!

• Last Friday evening I went to hear a chamber concert organized by cellist Justin Kagan, and it featured some top local players in works of Shostakovich (his Piano Quintet), Gerald Cohen (a trio for viola, cello and piano), and Schoenberg (his sextet Verklärte Nacht).  Every work was played with conviction and assurance, with kudos going out to everyone involved, as to single out one or several would be unfair to them all.  

I hope that concerts such as this become more of a regular event in Portland.  We have plenty of high-powered out-of-towners that come in and play chamber music on the various series in town, but little opportunity to hear our high-powered locals play the same.

 
Photo credit: Alexei Kuznetsoff
Courtesy of Columbia Artists Managment

James Bash reviews the recital of Valentina Lisitsa, who is now best known around Portland as the last-minute reliever who saves the day when artists cancel or have visa problems (as with Rachel Cheung, whose problems with an artist visa have more to do with her parents than the US Government, as David Stabler reported).  She should also be known as a pianist who should be getting first-call gigs as well (a situation which I have the feeling some Local Arts Organization(s) will soon rectify).

Read about last night’s recital on the Portland Piano Series at James’ blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot about practicing lately. Maybe that’s because I’ve actually been practicing lately. Or not. But I’ve been thinking about the process of practicing, and it’s really quite militaristic! [Read more →]

David Stabler

David Stabler, the classical music critic of the Oregonian newspaper, has listed his top classical music happenings of 2007. [Read more →]

I almost rethought my title to today’s post, because if you remove the “i” from “recital”, you’ll get a decidedly different impression of what I’m writing about…

I’m getting ready to start the long, arduous road towards giving another recital this year, and this time around I think that it will largely be a solo affair, rather than the mostly chamber music version I gave last spring. I went to the music store and bought a new copy of the Shostakovich Viola Sonata, which I also did the the Bloch Suite (1919) this summer. I find that after a while, especially when I haven’t worked on a piece for a long time, that I need to start fresh and from scratch without any pencil markings from my life as a student or from the first time through a piece to influence me.

I think that I’ll also do the Kodaly Adagio (postponed from last spring’s recital) and the Hindemith Meditation from Nobilissima Visione to round out what is already shaping up to be an ambitious program. I like to mix pieces that I have a history with with those that I’ve never done before. The Bloch and Shostakovich are pretty firm in my mind right now, but there are other pieces vying for the two smaller slots, among them the Enesco Concertpiece and Britten’s Lachrymae.

I’m also planning on doing a recital of all new pieces (at least new in that they were written within the last five years) if I can really get my act together. That will most likely happen in early 2008, with the more conventional pieces happening in April or May 2008.

Stay tuned…