What concerts are you looking forward to? (Part II)

[Christo]

I'll be in Milan May 23-26. The only opera performance running for these dates is Aida  (my favorite grand opera). I'm not familiar with last minute tickets business  .

I was lucky, two years ago, that they staged Wozzeck - much easier to secure a ticket.  (Performance was terrific though).

[NikF]

Claude Debussy: Images
Manuel de Falla: The Three-Cornered Hat, Suite No. 1; Nights in the Gardens of Spain
Maurice Ravel: Alborada del gracioso (for Orchestra); Rapsodie espagnole

BBC SSO
Conductor: Thomas Dausgaard
Piano: Javier Perianes

Again, planning further ahead than I'd prefer to. But a nice problem to have.

[Karl Henning]

Claude Debussy: Images
Manuel de Falla: The Three-Cornered Hat, Suite No. 1; Nights in the Gardens of Spain
Maurice Ravel: Alborada del gracioso (for Orchestra); Rapsodie espagnole

BBC SSO
Conductor: Thomas Dausgaard
Piano: Javier Perianes

Again, planning further ahead than I'd prefer to. But a nice problem to have.

Exquisite program.

[Karl Henning]

Thread Duty:

[bhodges]

Exquisite program.

I agree, very attractive!

Next week:

The MET Orchestra
Gianandrea Noseda, Conductor
James Ehnes, Violin

Mozart: Violin Concerto No. 5, "Turkish"
Mahler: Symphony No. 5

--Bruce

[ritter]

Claude Debussy: Images
Manuel de Falla: The Three-Cornered Hat, Suite No. 1; Nights in the Gardens of Spain
Maurice Ravel: Alborada del gracioso (for Orchestra); Rapsodie espagnole

BBC SSO
Conductor: Thomas Dausgaard
Piano: Javier Perianes

Again, planning further ahead than I'd prefer to. But a nice problem to have.

Exquisite (and very Spanish) program. Looks very enticing, NikF. 

THREAD DUTY:

Not 100% sure yet, but I might show up tomorrow evening at the concert of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife at the Auditorium here in Santa Cruz. Edmon Colomer will conduct Stravinsky's Symphonies d'instruments à vent, Bartók's Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, and then Le sacre du printemps.

This is the venue where the concert will take place (designed by Santiago Calatrava):

[bhodges]

Exquisite (and very Spanish) program. Looks very enticing, NikF. 

THREAD DUTY:

Not 100% sure yet, but I might show up tomorrow evening at the concert of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife at the Auditorium here in Santa Cruz. Edmon Colomer will conduct Stravinsky's Symphonies d'instruments à vent, Bartók's Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, and then Le sacre du printemps.

This is the venue where the concert will take place (designed by Santiago Calatrava):

Another fantastic program! And I have admired the Calatrava building from afar, ever since it was built. Do report, please, if you go.

--Bruce

[Draško]

Exquisite (and very Spanish) program. Looks very enticing, NikF. 

THREAD DUTY:

Not 100% sure yet, but I might show up tomorrow evening at the concert of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife at the Auditorium here in Santa Cruz. Edmon Colomer will conduct Stravinsky's Symphonies d'instruments à vent, Bartók's Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, and then Le sacre du printemps.

This is the venue where the concert will take place (designed by Santiago Calatrava):

To echo Bruce, please do report back.

Have you been to Tenerife Auditorium before? It's incredibly gorgeous building, but I'm curious about the acoustics. The roof and the space of the hall more resembles a church than a concert hall.

I've heard myself Rite of Spring live couple of weeks ago, after a long time, and almost forgot just how viscerally exciting that piece is when heard live.

[bhodges]

I've heard myself Rite of Spring live couple of weeks ago, after a long time, and almost forgot just how viscerally exciting that piece is when heard live.

Still sounds incredibly modern after all these years! I think it's a piece everyone should try to hear live now and then -- like say, Beethoven's Eroica or Mahler 9 -- just to be reminded of its greatness.

--Bruce

[Cato]

In about a month, my wife and I will splurge for one of the few times in our married lives and visit London and (we hope) a few areas outside of London (e.g. Bath, which is featured in my Latin textbooks (the Cambridge Latin Program), where it is called Aquae Sulis).

One of the attractions will be the Philharmonia Orchestra's performance on June 28th of...

Arnold Schoenberg's GURRELIEDER! 

Although...if you check the website, you would think that Mister Esa Pekka-Salonen had composed a Gurrelieder of his own!   

https://www.philharmonia.co.uk/concerts/1770/esa-pekka_salonen_gurrelieder

Many thanks to our members in England who gave me advice back in the autumn on traveling in London!

[André]

The all-Sibelius LSO concert in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw was quite special. It has more to do with the high dosage of live Sibelius in one sitting than any particular interpretational revelations. Hearing symphonies 6 and 7 in succession is simply overwhelming.

The LSO boasts a powerful brass section, and its contribution was probably heard across the Museumplein. For some reason Tilson-Thomas had reduced the string section almost by half in the concerto. The imbalance with the brass was made all the more obvious. Nevertheless it was a very good performance.

[Jaakko Keskinen]

Parsifal I saw on 24th was mostly meh. Act 2 was quite good, especially the singer of Klingsor. But the conductor was not good, on most parts the music felt weak. If this would have been my first listening to Parsifal, I'm not sure if I would have liked it that much. Luckily, I know that Parsifal is a masterpiece through recordings ( and interestingly, I recall liking the very same production I saw years ago). The production felt a bit uninteresting, with little too much attention given to singers laying on the floor or on different platforms (maybe the characters suffered from epilepsy?). In act 2 prelude this worked rather well with Klingsor crawling upwards maybe in hopeless pursuit of that divinity which he in vain tried to achieve through self-mutilation. And it must have been even more difficult to crawl with spear in his hand. Tommi Hakala as Amfortas was wonderful, as always. Other than Klingsor and Amfortas, the cast was a disappointment.

[Marc]

Tomorrow evening, Masaaki Suzuki's Bach Collegium Japan playing Haydn (symphony 48 in C Major "Maria Theresia") and Mozart's unfinished C minor Mass ("Große Messe").

This evening, Suzuki, together with a buch of musicians of his band, was attending an organ concert by Erwin Wiersinga in the Martinikerk, Groningen... ending with a brillliant performance of Bach's Fantasia in G Major BWV 572 "Pièce d'orgue".

So... half of a great music weekend behind me.
Looking forward to the next half.

[ritter]

Another fantastic program! And I have admired the Calatrava building from afar, ever since it was built. Do report, please, if you go.

--Bruce

To echo Bruce, please do report back.

Have you been to Tenerife Auditorium before? It's incredibly gorgeous building, but I'm curious about the acoustics. The roof and the space of the hall more resembles a church than a concert hall.

I've heard myself Rite of Spring live couple of weeks ago, after a long time, and almost forgot just how viscerally exciting that piece is when heard live.

well, I finally did make it on Friday to the concert in Tenerife, and the superb program was most enjoyable. They altered the initially announced order of the pieces, offering Bartók's Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion first, and then (after the intermission) the two Stravinsky works.

Even if the Tenerife orchestra is not enjoying its best moments (it's been without a principal conductor for two years now), it is still a solid formation (under the 20 year tenure of Victor Pablo Pérez—which ended in 2006–, it was widely lauded as one of the top orchestras in Spain). Edmon Colomer (who had led the orchestra for a short time before Víctor Pablo Pérez and was known to me from many recordings, particularly an excellent Falla series on the Valois label) seemed very attuned to the program on offer, and gave incisive, passionate and nuanced accounts of all three works. As I've said before, Bartók is a composer I admire more than I love, but seeing the not-so-often performed orchestral version of the Sonata for two pianos and percussion was a treat, in any event. The orchestral clothing smoothens some of the angularity of the (essentially unchanged) chamber version, and there are some extraordinary moments in this seminal score (such a as the fugato segment towards the end of the first movement, or the ebullient last movement, so imbued with folk dance rhythms and tunes). The work is very much of its time, and sounds very close in intention to much of what was being composed in Italy in those years (even if the Sonata is from 1937–and the Concerto from as late as 1940–, it seems clear that it was Bartók who exerted an influence on the likes of Malipiero, Casella et al.). Local soloists Gustavo Díaz Jerez and Javier Negrín (pianos), and brothers Francisco and Emilio Díaz Martín (percussion) were very good.

As for Stravinsky, my love for (most of) this man's music knows no bounds, and the Symphonies d'intruments à vent is surely one of Igor Fyodorvich's most stunning compositions IMO. This time around, I was struck of how this piece is essential Stravinsky, and how (in its short duration) it's a sort of distillation of everything that makes its composer's music so unique: the Russianness, the playfulness, the rhythmic incisiveness, the juxtaposition of different sound planes (for lack of a better term), the melodic development based on short, fragmented themes (cubism in music?), the budding (at the time) neoclassicism...

And then, of course, Le sacre. As Draško and Brewski have pointed out, seeing this live is always refreshing, and Colomer managed to balance a nuanced reading with the necessary raw passion. The audience was very appreciative at the end.

The Tenerife Auditorium is a stunning building, for sure (the common knowledge is that Calatrava was instructed to outshine by any available means the Auditorium in Santa Cruz's eternal rival city Las Palmas, on the neighbouring island of Gran Canaria). As a result, it' a striking but slightly awkward feature in the city, and has rightly become a landmark. From the outside, it's main merit IMHO is that, when seen from the north, the arch that covers the building seems to embrace the tall buildings of the old town. Yet, it is by no means a perfect concert hall. To start, accessing it is not easy, as the imposing staircases on the outside are cumbersome and even dangerous for the elderly (more so as the building is set next to the sea in a very windy area). Once inside, the foyer and cafeteria area is very cold and unwelcoming, and has the bizarre feature of a slanted floor. The symphonic hall (I did not see the chamber music room) does remind one of a church, and all that space up high appears useless. Despite that, the acoustics seemed right to me (I was sitting in the front rows, so cannot tell how things may sound further back). The innovative distribution of the organ pipes on the sides of the hall caught my attention. Still, perhaps too much the creation of a star architect who needs to make a statement IMO.

[Mahlerian]

Thanks for the report, Ritter!

[Marc]

Tomorrow evening, Masaaki Suzuki's Bach Collegium Japan playing Haydn (symphony 48 in C Major "Maria Theresia") and Mozart's unfinished C minor Mass ("Große Messe").

This evening, Suzuki, together with a buch of musicians of his band, was attending an organ concert by Erwin Wiersinga in the Martinikerk, Groningen... ending with a brillliant performance of Bach's Fantasia in G Major BWV 572 "Pièce d'orgue".

So... half of a great music weekend behind me.
Looking forward to the next half.

Suzuki in Haydn & Mozart was bl**dy marvellous. Great soloists, too, among them mezzo Olivia Vermeulen and my personal favourite Carolyn Sampson (because she's such a gorgeous woman got such a beautiful voice).

[Draško]

well, I finally did make it on Friday to the concert in Tenerife ...

Thank you for the review! 

[bhodges]

well, I finally did make it on Friday to the concert in Tenerife, and the superb program was most enjoyable.

Thanks, and adding my appreciative voice to the chorus! Even with the caveats (i.e., orchestral execution), it still sounds like a fun evening. And thanks for including the shot of the interior of the hall.

--Bruce

[Karl Henning]

In about a month, my wife and I will splurge for one of the few times in our married lives and visit London and (we hope) a few areas outside of London (e.g. Bath, which is featured in my Latin textbooks (the Cambridge Latin Program), where it is called Aquae Sulis).

One of the attractions will be the Philharmonia Orchestra's performance on June 28th of...

Arnold Schoenberg's GURRELIEDER! 

Although...if you check the website, you would think that Mister Esa Pekka-Salonen had composed a Gurrelieder of his own!   

https://www.philharmonia.co.uk/concerts/1770/esa-pekka_salonen_gurrelieder

Many thanks to our members in England who gave me advice back in the autumn on traveling in London!

Cracking!

[bhodges]

Next week, Tilson Thomas makes his debut with this group. Will be my first time hearing Yende, and much looking forward to that, but I'm really looking forward to hearing the orchestra play Carl Ruggles for the first time.

The MET Orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas, Conductor
Pretty Yende, Soprano

Ruggles Evocations
Mozart Exsultate, jubilate
Mahler Symphony No. 4

--Bruce