Scratchings

Okay, maybe that was a little too snarky. But I think Gordon Getty’s song cycle White Election would be a sharper and more effective piece if it were half the length. There didn’t seem to me to be enough going on in either the words or the music to justify a song cycle that’s long enough to include an intermission. I have to admit that I’m not much of a lover of Dickinson’s poetry, though. After a while it sounds to me like they all begin, “How sweet to never live your life!”

Lisa Delan sang very beautifully but with so-so diction and without finding a way to make the 32 songs into some kind of progression; they came across as a long string of pleasant but mostly rather similar songs. Mikhail Pletnev was at the piano, and it was fun to see him in action relatively close up.

I crept into a yellow church
And folded there my wings
And heard, as blossom hears the day,
A cycle spun from songs.

The poems were by Dickinson
And one by one they came
Till two and thirty stood in line,
Their meters all the same,

Until the sound of anapest
And dactyl seemed as far
As ancient lute or mandolin
Played on a distant shore.

Mere two and thirty daffodils
Could never be enough.
With verses, though, by Dickinson,
They might have stopped at five.

Dave and I went to hear Mikhail Pletnev conducting the Russian National Orchestra at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley Friday night. The program began with a short cycle of three songs composed by Pletnev himself, based on Yeats poems. The music seemed rather ordinary to me, no surprises in how the words were set, and the poems by Yeats are not particularly exciting subjects to begin with, but the orchestration was clear and full of vivid colors. The soprano, Lisa Delan, was very good. The best of the three was the last, a setting of the poem “When You Are Old”.

Next was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, with a young violinist named Stefan Jackiw as soloist. Jackiw has plenty of technique and it was a very showy performance, lots of dazzle but not much heart. However, he looks very young, so one can hope he’ll grow into it. The second half of the program was Shostokovich’s Ninth Symphony, a piece I don’t think I’d ever heard before. Even without knowing anything about the musical codes that I gather are said to be planted in the melodies, it wasn’t hard to figure out why Stalin thought Shostokovich was flipping him the bird.

Pletnev’s conducting throughout was extremely low-key, often barely keeping time, yet the orchestra was always very crisp and polished in their playing. The encores were two more pieces by Pletnev, very jazzy and a lot of fun; once again the orchestration was startlingly bright and colorful, while the melodies and harmonies seemed much less inventive.

Friday night Dave and I went to Davies Hall to hear MTT conducting an orchestration by Henry Brant of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. The Concord, as Ives wrote it, is a very difficult and densely written work for solo piano; I’ve listened to it a few times on record but never with much comprehension. As arranged by Brant, it is much clearer, much easier to make out what is going on. Still a difficult work to figure out, but I felt I could see much further into it this way, and I came away with some sense of the work’s overall shape that I never did with the piano sonata. Now I want to get hold of a recording of the symphonic version and listen to it some more, and that’s saying something because I had pretty much figured the Concord Sonata was a work I was probably just never going to figure out how to listen to with understanding or enjoyment in this lifetime.

Brant worked for several decades on the orchestration, in between other projects, as a labor of love. The orchestration is terrific; some of the orchestral colors didn’t always sound quite like Ives’s own, but it rang true to my ear all the way through and I’m not sure that it wasn’t actually a more skilled orchestration than any of Ives’s own. At any rate, I often felt there was a greater variety of colors and a greater transparency to the orchestration than Ives generally had. There are also some appropriately inexplicable Ivesian quirks, such as a wind machine in the the percussion section that as far as Dave and I noticed only gets used once, and for only a few bars.

The other work on the program was a short Schubert mass which they could have skipped as far as I was concerned, though I did notice quite a few people came only for it and left at intermission, so I guess it had its purpose on the program. It was probably chosen as something easy and pleasant that the orchestra could just about sight-read through, so as to save all the orchestra’s rehearsal time for the difficult and unfamiliar Ives/Brant work.

Terrific San Francisco symphony concert tonight. Everything full of life and crisply played, every piece a highlight in its own way.

Yan Pascal Tortelier is a very bouncy conductor, both figuratively and literally, actually jumping into the air at the big moments.

The concert stated with a selection from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne music, but it wasn’t either of the suites I’ve heard before. It had an unusually large orchestra, probably because they were going to need all those musicians for the symphony at the end of the program and might as well use them for something. Delicious.

The rest of the program was pieces I hadn’t heard before. Next was Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, which is a very odd but likeable work, often changing moods in a moment. After intermission was Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, with a really stunning violin solo by Nadya Tichman.

Finishing the concert was Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, a dense, harsh, many-layered work that Tortelier nevertheless conducted without a score. I liked it a lot but it’ll take another few hearings before I really grasp it. There’s a remarkable — maybe insane is a better word for it — fugal section at the end that is a bit like watchng a tornado sweep up all the music up to that point, swirl it up, and drop it In a huge heap.

Last night Dave and I went to Davies Hall for a concert. When we’d bought the tickets a couple months ago, the program was to be conducted by Oliver Knussen, and it was to include some of his own music (including some music from Where the Wild Things Are) as well as Pictures at an Exhibition in the Stokowski orchestration, which was an attraction for Dave and me because it’s performed much less often than the standard Ravel orchestration, and neither of us have heard it live.

But Mr. Knussen got sick (probably with the flu that’s been going around, I figure — Dave and I have both had it, as have quite a few of our friends), and then his replacement got sick, and on Wednesday I got an email message from my friend Donato Cabrera that he was going to be conducting all three concerts, Thursday through Saturday, on less than 24 hours’ notice. The program had been changed, though, obviously to pieces that could be gotten up on a minimum of rehearsal time. All Mozart for the first half, and Pictures in the Ravel orchestration for the second.

Donato and I met because he was the original musical director for the Tales of Hoffmann at Berkeley Opera in February, and we had a few meetings back in late summer of last year to discuss the production, but he had to drop out shortly after auditions. Donato’s a very sharp guy and I was sorry not to have the chance to work with him. Maybe another time. (As it turned out, Ernest Knell, who took over for Hoffmann, was wonderful to work with, very sharp and meticulous.)

The concert got off to a terrific start with the Figaro overture, which struck me as one of the best I’ve heard. Dave said to me afterward that you could tell he’d conducted the whole opera before and not just the overture, and that he understood it. Next was the cantata Exsultate, jubilate, which I’m sure was very nice if cantatas are your thing, but they aren’t much mine. Clearly they had had to find something that the soloist for the canceled Knussen songs, soprano Lisa Saffer, could perform with the orchestra on very short notice. Nothing much wrong with it, just not much to my taste — I’d really wanted to hear her sing the Knussen pieces.

Finishing the first half was a very good Prague Symphony, crisp and confident and enjoying the constant sidestepping into and out of the minor that runs through all the movements. The second half was Pictures. Donato told me by email that he’d had rather performed the Stokie orchestration if he’d had more notice, but that the decision was made before he took over the podium. Dave mentioned, too, that it’s possible that the orchestra scores for the Stokie were traveling with Mr. Knussen (or, at the moment, not traveling) rather than in the symphony library, whereas they certainly would have had scores for the Ravel version at hand. Anyway, Donato conducted a very impressive Pictures, more straightforwardly paced than finely nuanced, but sounding very, very good all the way through.

Didn’t hurt, either, that the piece ends with a big, exciting, brassy fanfare, the sort of thing that audiences go wild over. And sure enough, the audience went wild when the music ended, and Donato and the orchestra got a long, long ovation, with a lot of people bravoing and maybe a third of the audience even standing. I was surprised by that, as it was a very good concert but didn’t seem like a standing-O concert. The audience may have come prepared to enjoy it, though — there’d been a good review in the Chron that morning, and always increases an audience’s enthusiasm.

More stuff I’m behind with blogging about: Last Wednesday Dave took me to see Annie Lennox at the Masonic Auditorium.

I had a good time, but it was also frustrating because I didn’t already know the songs, and from the beginning of the concert to the end I could make out only maybe a dozen words in all. I thought it was just me again with my one deaf ear, which makes it hard to tell which direction a sound is coming from and therefore hard to focus on one thing when there are sounds coming from multiple directions, even though I can hear about as well as ever. (For example, it can be very hard to focus on the conversation at my dinner table if there are equally audible conversations going on around me — all those conversations have equal prominence as far as my brain is concerned, which can make following and keeping focused on a conversation in a crowded restaurant a really exhausting job of concentration for me these days.) But Dave said later he had trouble too, so it was apparently a combination of the Masonic’s echoey acoustics and too much amplification for the space.

Other than two Eurhythmics songs that I remembered from my college days, I didn’t know any of the songs, and there was no program given, so I didn’t even know what the titles of the songs were until afterward when Dave showed me the list he’d made during the concert. But that’s my own ignorance at work, I’m sure, and Dave told me later than the program was mostly her most popular songs from earlier albums and only maybe two or three from her most recent.

However, I seemed to be the only person there who didn’t have every one of the songs memorized, as I could see people mouthing the words all around the audience. Folks were dancing in the aisles and generally having a great time.

On the blog University Diaries:

The critics’ acclaim for Joyce Hatto
Had reached an impossible plateau,
And her falling from grace
Was quite clearly a case
Of her spouse over-egging the gateau.

– Rex Lawson

But: “Quite clearly”?

Most people seem to be partial to the theory that the fraudulent recordings were entirely the work of Ms. Hatto’s husband, and that she herself was either already dead or too sick to realize what was going on. That seems likeliest to me, too — but then I wonder whether I’m giving in to the same sweet tooth, the same desire to connect the available dots in this affair in such a way as to create a sentimental story I would enjoy believing — The grief-stricken widower, bitter about the rotten deal his wife got out of life, madly tries to recreate the career he thinks she should have had! How human! How forgivable! — that same desire to believe that caused some music critics never to question the legitimacy of her 120 CDs, a discography that looks in 20/20 hindsight to be just begging to be questioned. Without knowing the first thing about Joyce Hatto, I find myself not wanting to believe that she had any part in the fraud, but where does that come from? Why do I prefer to believe that an artist of any merit could not be capable of this, when I know perfectly well that plenty of artists, some of them quite great, have been perfectly capable of worse fraud than this? Really, for all I can tell right at the moment, Joyce Hatto may have been in on every detail of the scheme. Or not. No way of knowing.

Yet I want to believe she didn’t know. Why? Sweet tooth, maybe.