review | MEMETERIA

November 8, 2014 • 11:03 am Comments Off on Sublime Salonen from the Seattle Symphony and Jennifer Koh

Sublime Salonen from the Seattle Symphony and Jennifer Koh

Jennifer Koh; © Juergen Frank

It’s not unusual for Ludovic Morlot to offer a spirited brief introduction to a particular piece. But at the top of last night’s Seattle Symphony concert, the maestro was eager to elucidate a rationale threading together the motley menu of Samuel Barber, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and a Tchaikovsky warhorse: essentially, the proposition that all three works represented personal responses to periods of challenge or even crisis.

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Filed under: new music, review, Seattle Symphony, Tchaikovsky

October 28, 2014 • 12:01 am Comments Off on Dazed, Confused, and Lovestruck: Twelfth Night at Seattle Shakespeare

Dazed, Confused, and Lovestruck: Twelfth Night at Seattle Shakespeare

Jay Myers as Orsino and Allie Pratt as Viola. Photo by John Ulman.

“Why, this is very midsummer madness!” exclaims Countess Olivia in the middle of Twelfth Night — just as the whirligigs of the plot against Malvolio start cranking away. Olivia’s normally uptight steward has been set up to believe his boss is suddenly overcome with uncontrollable passion for him and is putting on a display that makes for one of the most outrageously funny scenes in all Shakespeare.

But Malvolio’s (David Quicksall) crazed behavior is easily matched by the antics indulged in by Olivia herself (Elinor Gunn) in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s deliriously unconventional new production, which opened this past weekend and which plays through Nov. 16 at the Center Theatre at Seattle Center. Visiting director Jon Kretzu approaches Twelfth Night as if it were a vastly elaborated version of the nocturnal spell cast in the Bard’s decade-earlier A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Just about everyone seems to wander about in a woozy haze of confused, mismatched desire.

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Filed under: directors, review, Shakespeare

October 27, 2014 • 9:43 am Comments Off on The Rake’s Revels: Don Giovanni Parties It Up in Seattle

The Rake’s Revels: Don Giovanni Parties It Up in Seattle

Photo (c) Elise Bakketun

Here’s my Bachtrack review of the current Don Giovanni revival in Seattle:

Mozart’s drama about the legendary rake’s egress launches the first season under Seattle Opera’s new general director, Aidan Lang. However, the production originated here in 2007, and the current revival had of course been scheduled well in advance. In other words, it makes no statement about the new Lang era but is instead a reverberation of the Speight Jenkins years.

This production mines the comic possibilities inherent in the essentially picaresque, stop-start narrative pieced together by Da Ponte. The Overture, with its apocalyptic opening section introducing a cheerful, buffa main course, has always posed a musical conundrum, the solution to which, as in Tristan und Isolde, remains deferred until the end of the opera. Yet in Seattle’s McCaw Hall, those foreboding first chords have the effect rather of parentheses, of a statement that’s easily shunted aside until the topic comes up again, in rather nonsequitur fashion, during the grand finale.

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Filed under: Mozart, review, Seattle Opera

September 20, 2014 • 4:51 pm Comments Off on Seattle Symphony’s Dvořák-Fest Begins

Seattle Symphony’s Dvořák-Fest Begins

Daniil Trifonov: (c) Dario Acosta

My review of the Seattle Season’s opening concert of the season — including pianist Daniil Trifonov’s spectacular SSO debut — is now live on Bachtrack:

Music by Antonín Dvořák was included on Ludovoc Morlot’s first-ever programme leading the Seattle Symphony, which took place in October 2009. At the time – two years before coming on board as music director – Morlot was a visiting conductor, and he offered the barest sampling of his thoughts on Dvořák (three of the Legends).

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Filed under: conductors, piano, review, Seattle Symphony

August 28, 2014 • 7:51 am Comments Off on William Tell at the Edinburgh International Festival

William Tell at the Edinburgh International Festival

: Gianandrea Noseda

My review of William Tell, given a concert performance by Gianandrea Noseda and the Teatro Regio Torino at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, is now live on Bachtrack:

A conspiracy theorist might ponder whether the programming of William Tell during the final week of the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival, the day after the Salmond-Darling Scottish independence debate on the BBC, was intended as a propaganda move in support of the “yes” campaign.

Certainly the fervour of the opera’s grand finale, as the Swiss rise up in triumphant revolt against their hated imperial overlords, is so palpably rousing as to make one at least question the commonplace assumption of Rossini’s indifference to political matters.

And in a coincidence sure to fuel our conspiracist’s fantasies, the Milanese censor gave the green light for the opera’s staging at La Scala – several years after its 1829 première in Paris – only on condition that the setting be changed to Scotland, with the protagonist restyled as “Guglielmo Vallace”, and a name change from Gualtiero to “Kirkpatrick”.

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Filed under: conductors, opera, review, Rossini

August 19, 2014 • 1:34 am Comments Off on Prom 40: Haitink and the LSO Trace a Mahlerian Journey through Childhood Innocence

Prom 40: Haitink and the LSO Trace a Mahlerian Journey through Childhood Innocence

Here’s my review for Bachtrack of Bernard Haitink’s Saturday concert with the London Symphony Orchestra (Prom 40):

Having celebrated his 85th birthday this past March, Bernard Haitink continues to demonstrate that he profits from the advantages of age whilst commanding the deftness of a conductor decades his junior. His programme at the Proms on Saturday evening with the London Symphony Orchestra offered musical perspectives on youthfulness and memory by way of Schubert and Mahler, culminating in the songs of innocence and experience of which the latter’s Symphony no. 4 in G major is woven.

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Filed under: conductors, Mahler, review, Schubert

August 4, 2014 • 8:32 am Comments Off on Seattle Chamber Music Festival Closes on an Elegiac Note

Seattle Chamber Music Festival Closes on an Elegiac Note

My review of the concluding concert of the 2014 Summer Festival is now on Bachtrack:

The days are starting to grow noticeably shorter in the Pacific Northwest, and the end of the month-long Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival brings yet another wistful reminder that we’re now facing the season’s inexorable downward slope. An immersive atmosphere of four weeks of three concerts each (plus free prelude recitals and additional events) gives the festival much of its flavour, making one all the more reluctant to bid adieu.

It’s been a month especially generous in discoveries, from the world première of an imaginatively crafted single-movement piano trio commissioned from Derek Bermel (with the Saramago-inspired title Death with Interruptions) to a welcome dose of vocal chamber music gems and other rarities mixed in with more standard fare.

On Saturday night the festival drew to a close with a typically diverse roster of musicians (totalling 15 over the course of the concert).

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Filed under: Beethoven, chamber music, review

July 11, 2014 • 8:45 am Comments Off on Seattle’s Chamber Music Summer Festival: Review

Seattle’s Chamber Music Summer Festival: Review

Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of Memeteria. I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t have the archives to the right to prove it — this year has been a whirlwind. A huge thanks to all my readers for taking the time to visit. I hope you will continue to come back and would love to hear from you.

And how’s this for unplanned synchronicity: my very first piece was a report on the opening of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival. And my latest offering is a review of one of the 2014 Summer Festival’s concerts. To wit:

For 33 summers now, the Seattle Chamber Music Society (SCMS) has been presenting an extensive festival that now ranks as a particularly desired destination for musicians on the summer chamber circuit across North America. This latest edition is off to an especially invigorating start. For their part, the audiences tend to be uniformly enthusiastic and devoted, but last night’s performances met with vociferous approval that reached the extreme end of the applause-meter.

The unusual programme design – juxtaposing Stravinsky’s infrequently heard Octet for Winds with bread-and-butter classics by Mendelssohn and Beethoven – is a signature of James Ehnes, now in his third year as SCMS’s artistic director.

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Filed under: chamber music, James Ehnes, review

June 23, 2014 • 8:45 am 1

Seattle Symphony’s Stravinsky Marathon

Costume sketch by Léon Bakst for The Firebird

My review of the Seattle Symphony’s final concert of the season:

The past few months have brought the ensemble far more exposure than usual (an appearance at Carnegie Hall, a concert for the League of American Orchestras, the launch of an in-house label): its appetite for new challenges seems unstoppable.

So it’s hardly surprising that music director Ludovic Morlot is concluding the current season with an all-out marathon of orchestral virtuosity. The program of Stravinsky’s three pre-First World War ballet scores for the Ballets Russes in their entirety lasts close to three hours and, out of necessity for the players, requires two intermissions. It drew what appeared to be a close-to-packed house.

No matter how well we think we know this music, the opportunity to hear the young Stravinsky’s three iconic ballets back to back is bound to prompt new perspectives. And Morlot’s deeply sensitive interpretation of the uncut, sumptuous score for The Firebird (1910) did precisely that – all the more so since, only two weeks before, he’d led the SSO in the complete Daphnis et Chloé, also for the Ballets Russes, which was premiered in 1912, the year between Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913).

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Filed under: review, Seattle Symphony, Stravinsky

June 9, 2014 • 6:05 am Comments Off on Impressing Their Peers: All Eyes and Ears on Seattle

Impressing Their Peers: All Eyes and Ears on Seattle

New review on Bachtrack:

Talk about keeping the pressure on: Only last month the Seattle Symphony and music director Ludovic Morlot journeyed to Carnegie Hall for an unusually high-stakes concert and attracted a good deal of press coverage — not least because one of the works featured had just won the Pulitzer Prize in music (John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean, a Seattle Symphony commission). Thursday night’s all-French program meanwhile attracted special scrutiny from movers and shakers throughout the American orchestral scene.

This time the ensemble was playing on its home turf at Benaroya Hall, where it welcomed a sizable number of guests in town for the annual conference of the League of American Orchestras. Under the slogan “Critical Questions/Countless Solutions”, some 1,000 participants representing the breadth of America’s orchestral life had flocked to Seattle. Their mission: to brainstorm ways to engage audiences more meaningfully. Ideas ranged from more innovative concert formats and digital initiatives to suggestions for making orchestras “the heartbeats of our cities”, as Morlot put it.

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—Thomas May

Filed under: concert programming, review, Seattle Symphony

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