Some thoughts on Yulianna Avdeeva’s recent recital presented by Seattle Chamber Music Society – reviewed for Bachtrack:
Yulianna Avdeeva opened Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Signature Series at the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall in notably changed surroundings. Over the summer, Benaroya Hall underwent an extensive renovation of its public spaces, leaving both performance venues untouched while transforming their surrounding lobbies. The recital hall’s newly redesigned, mid-century-modern-inflected foyer is now dominated by Robert Rauschenberg’s Echo…
Augustin Hadelich is of course a familiar and well-loved figure in Seattle, where I last heard him in March in a memorable, thoughtfully programmed recital with Francesco Piemontesi at Meany Center for the Performing Arts. What a pleasure to encounter him in varied contexts at this summer’s Lucerne Festival as ‘artiste étoile.’
The first concert of my visit here brought the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko – a kind of anti-concerto in its resistance to conventional virtuoso display that, paradoxically, became one of the great models for the Romantic violin concerto and that is also extraordinarily difficult to play convincingly.
I was blown away by Hadelich’s signature blend of warmth and poetry, and also by the natural give-and-take between him and this collective of world-class musicians, each with such a strong musical personality. As an encore, he offered his own touching arrangement of Schumann’s Träumerei.
Over the weekend, Hadelich joined with Mark O’Connor and Maggie O’Connor (all pictured here together) for ‘Fiddle Night’ in the smaller venue that is used for many of the Lucerne Festival Academy concerts. The program opened with a set by the O’Connors, charmingly introduced from the stage and including ‘Wildflowers’ as a tribute to Dolly Parton. (Mark O’Connor also played on the original 1987 recording with Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris.)
Hadelich then took the stage alone for his arrangement of Howdy Forrester’s ‘Wild Fiddler’s Rag’ – also included on his American Road Trip album – and O’Connor’s ‘Menuhin Caprice,’ written for the Menuhin Competition, a witty take on virtuosity that fuses American fiddling with the classical caprice tradition.
The high point was O’Connor’s calling-card tune, ‘Appalachia Waltz’ – played by all three violinists together as an unhurried, shared meditation that seemed to reflect on Lucerne Festival’s ‘American Dreams’ theme with a certain ache – looking back at what the American dream once promised, and asking whether it still has a future.
Xian Zhang, Seattle Symphony, and soloists; photo (c) James Holt
My Musical America review of Xian Zhang/Seattle Symphony and James Gaffigan/San Francisco Symphony in two very different West Coast encounters with the choral symphony:
SEATTLE AND SAN FRANCISCO—Call it the Ninth, times two. Last week, two major West Coast orchestras ended their seasons with Beethoven’s choral symphony, reminding us that this familiar ritual need not be merely routine.
In the Pacific Northwest, it marked the close of Xian Zhang’s inaugural season as music director of the Seattle Symphony, preceded by onstage tributes to three longtime orchestra members whose retirements were announced. At the San Francisco Symphony, the season-ending program unexpectedly acquired a memorial charge following Michael Tilson Thomas’s recent death, with musicians wearing blue ribbons—MTT’s favorite color—as a token of remembrance….
Some thoughts on Seong-Jin Cho’s recent Seattle recital:
The self-effacing persona Seong-Jin Cho projected from the Benaroya Hall stage throughout his solo recital stood in striking contrast to his musical confidence – a confidence grounded not only in extraordinary technical security but in an evident willingness to take risks. Cho’s sense of interpretive freedom made itself felt from the outset, in a program that invited close attention and repaid it generously…
Jeremy Denk and Richard O’Neill; photo: Jorge Gustavo Elias
Seattle Chamber Music Society presented Richard O’Neill and Jeremy Denk in a sold-out recital Sunday. Here’s my review for The Strad:
Seattle Chamber Music Society brought the inaugural season of its new Signature Series to a compelling close with this sold-out recital by violist Richard O’Neill – best known as a member of the Takács Quartet – and pianist Jeremy Denk.
“You should always try to escape your own success,” Víkingur Ólafsson says. “Because that success so easily turns against you and limits you and your choices and what you want to do next” …
The C major Fantasy for Violin and Piano in Schubert’s manuscript (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus)
My essay for the recital by Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace at the Pierre Boulez Saal on 29 April is here.
Complete program:
Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major Op. 47 “Kreutzer”
Richard Dubugnon: La minute exquise; Hypnos; Retour à Montfort-l’Amaury
Franz Schubert: Fantasy for Violin and Piano in C major D 934
The program that Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace bring to the Pierre Boulez Saal offers three perspectives on the violin–piano duo, from the fire and drama of Ludwig van Beethoven to the rhapsodic lyricism of Franz Schubert—with a contemporary interlude of enigmatic, nocturnal miniatures by the Swiss-French composer Richard Dubugnon….
I spoke with the pianist Jan Lisiecki about his upcoming Beethoven concerto marathon with the Toronto Symphony:
Jan Lisiecki’s immersion in the piano concertos of Ludwig van Beethoven began right at the deep end. Rather than offer his interpretation of just one work, his very first recording of music by the German composer (which appeared in 2019) encompassed nothing less than a complete concerto cycle.
Calidore String Quartet: Ryan Meehan, left, Estelle Choi, Jeffrey Myers, and Jeremy Berry, Photo: Marco Borggreve
I spoke with Calidore Quartet violinist Ryan Meehan about their recording of the complete Beethoven quartets:
To accompany its ongoing release of the complete Beethoven cycle, the Calidore String Quartet has chosen Mark Rothko–like images as cover art: floating fields of color that seem suspended in time. “We’re all huge fans of Rothko’s work,” says violinist Ryan Meehan. “These colors are so bold and sometimes polarizing. Each color creates such a clear feeling on its own, but then as a collective, they also fill the viewer with an intense inner feeling. That’s very similar to Beethoven in that sections can be so contrasting from one to another, but the combination is an experience that you don’t forget.” continue
Ludovic Morlot conducting the Seattle Symphony; photo courtesy of the Seattle Symphony
For their second-to-last program of the season, the Seattle Symphony added John Adams’s early breakthrough Harmonium to its repertory with a breathtaking performance led by Conductor Emeritus Ludovic Morlot. During the 1970s, Adams had been building a reputation as an experimental composer doing his own thing in the Bay Area. He had become an advisor on contemporary music to the San Francisco Symphony’s then-music director Edo de Waart and received a commission to write a big choral-orchestral piece to help the orchestra celebrate its first season in Davies Hall, SFO’s new home across the street from the War Memorial Opera House. The premiere in April 1981 was a sensation that launched Adams on his path toward international stardom.
In his guise as a conductor, Adams has paid multiple visits to Seattle to lead the musicians in various of his own compositions and regards the SSO as “an excellent orchestra.” So it was especially satisfying to finally hear the collective forces of the SSO and its Chorale perform this pivotal work from more than four decades ago for the first time.
As it happened, I’d just come from hearing the original septet version of Adams’s 1978 piece Shaker Loops the week before at the Ojai Music Festival (performed by members of the visiting Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with fresh birdsong obbligato from the trees surrounding the outdoor Libbey Bowl). Adams had adopted the idioms of Minimalism in his distinctive, “impure” way in Shaker Loops and does something similar in Harmonium, but working for the first time with the much larger canvas of symphony orchestra and chorus. It was interesting to notice that some of the DNA of Shaker Loops is still present in varied form in Harmonium. At the same time, aspects of the signature language Adams would go on to develop (mostly orchestral, but in some respects choral as well) also appear in this score — certain timbral gestures from the tuned percussion, a shine that anticipates Grand Pianola Music (1982), or the stirring choral “pillars” found in the operas.
But the very fine performance led by Morlot kept me from falling into the trap of viewing a great artist’s early work merely contextually, as a launching pad toward future greatness. Harmonium proved completely compelling on its own terms, a splendidly structured choral triptych that conveys states of transcendence, serene contemplation, and unbridled joy.
Adams initially considered setting texts from the Wallace Stevens collection called Harmonium and then thought of writing for a wordless chorus, relying on their pure sounds, before he found a basis for what he imagined — “human voices — many of them — riding upon waves of rippling sound in John Donne’s “Negative Love” and two poems by Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “Wild Nights.”
Morlot showed his sensitive understanding of Adams’s dramatic use of sudden harmonic modulations — at this stage in his career, the composer had been likening it to the process of “gating” in electronic music — and shaped the sense of progressive revelation via negation in the opening Donne section with a tenacious clarity.
The Chorale, excellently prepared by Joseph Crnko, encompassed an enormous sonic spectrum, from mystic whispers to ecstatic, Whitmanesque yawping that sent shockwaves crashing through Benaroya Hall. (Fittingly, the concert had begun with Tromba lontana, an “anti-fanfare” from 1986 in which the composer uses a pair of trumpets to sound an elegiac rather than military mood, calling to mind Whitman’s poem “The Mystic Trumpeter.”) Adams’s guiding image of surging waves of sound came to life most thrillingly in the final “section”Wild Nights” movement, a drastically contrasting juxtaposition with Dickinson’s death meditation preceding it.
Seattle Symphony Chorale plus part of the fabulous SSO brass section; photo courtesy of the Seattle Symphony
One of the most unforgettable moments in Harmonium is the seamless transition between the polar Dickinson poems, in which Adams builds up an irresistible, orgiastic flow of momentum. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which occupied the second half of the program, happens to offer a plausible parallel in the musical “tunnel” that interlinks its last two movements.
Curiously, the program on which Harmonium was given its world premiere in San Francisco also involved a Beethoven pairing: in that case, with the Emperor Piano Concerto No. 5 — a work whose aura Adams confronted the next year in his wonderfully over-the-top Grand Pianola Music. On this occasion, Morlot — in his first reunion with the SSO since the sadly under-attended opening night of the season last September — approached the Beethoven with a clear sense of proportions and architecture. And with a bigger, more-rounded sound overall than in his Beethoven interpretations of several years ago, when he was music director.
Morlot held back from imposing an “interesting” perspective on the score, following Beethoven’s command of a single eighth-note rest between the first two statements, for example. He followed all of the repetitions — including, a bit surprisingly, even in the Scherzo. Still, the vision that emerged was more finale-centric, it seemed to me, with the terseness of the opening movement as a mere station on the way forward rather than an existential state. Despite brisk tempi, Morlot shaped the eccentrically long-spun melody of the Andante’s main theme with style and drew a magnificent dark sheen from the strings in particular, with bold strokes in the finale.
If aspects of the Scherzo felt understated, Morlot steered clear of the feeling of anti-climax that deflates so many renditions of the finale. The return of the ominous Scherzo music actually felt surprising, and the insistent paragraphs of C major brought to mind something of the French Revolutionary era music that was a clear inspiration for the young Beethoven.
