The New York Times ran another concert review for the festival! This one is from the Jan 16 and 17 performances of Heiner Goebbels Songs of Wars I Have Seen by festival guest orchestras the London Sinfonietta and members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Click here to read the review.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightement blog
We were thrilled to discover that our guest orchestra this week, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, also has a blog and has been writing about their experience here with the SPCO!
Click here for their first entry about arriving in the Twin Cities,
Click here for the next entry about encountering cold Minnesota weather,
click here for the entry about going to the Roseville movie theater and seeing if water thrown from a cup freezes instantly outside,
and click here for some of their photos.
And, to see their full blog, which includes entries about other things besides the festival, click here.
Click here for their first entry about arriving in the Twin Cities,
Click here for the next entry about encountering cold Minnesota weather,
click here for the entry about going to the Roseville movie theater and seeing if water thrown from a cup freezes instantly outside,
and click here for some of their photos.
And, to see their full blog, which includes entries about other things besides the festival, click here.
Paul and Dee on January 18th concert
For us, one of the most interesting features of the London Sinfonietta’s Sunday program at the Ted Mann concert hall (great acoustics, by the way!) was that we had seen virtually the entire program less than 72 hours previously at the Music Room in the Hamm Building (see our review for Thursday, January 15 for more details). We don’t know how often any of you reading this blog have had a similar experience, but for financial and time considerations, if for nothing else—fear of boredom looming large under the “else” category—we rarely see a program by anyone in the performing arts twice.
Nevertheless, the experiment was a success. Certainly, the London Sinfonietta was just as consistently interesting on Sunday as on Thursday (or on Saturday with the OAE—see our last review). They play with an intense intellectual precision, but leavened by a playful and wry sense of humor. So, not to put too fine a point on it, our grand conclusion would be that we once again liked them a lot.
Interestingly, we both found the first and second movements of Paul’s favorite piece last time (and Dee’s second favorite), Benjamin’s Three Inventions, a little thin this time around. The composition may not have been rich enough to withstand heavy scrutiny or (perhaps more likely), we enjoyed the piece’s surface flash the first time around, but missed the deeper arguments, so there was nothing to sustain us the second time we listened. Furthermore, Paul felt (Dee wasn’t sure) that the Sinfonietta dug deeper and more assertively into the third movement on Thursday night, so maybe it was the performance that didn’t sustain the composition.
Taking stock of a live performance is tricky, isn’t it? The interaction between performers, audience, and composer is so complex that it can be difficult (for us, anyway) to track down the source of our responses. Maybe we were less receptive to Benjamin this time because we forgot to eat lunch! Who knows? But enough philosophizing! Back to the Sinfonietta: Paul was converted to Dee’s point of view on Thursday night regarding Birtwistle’s Cortege (Dee: “I knew it.”).
Paul: Fantastic! I was blind the first time around! Again, it’s amazing how differently one can see an artwork depending upon one’s understanding. This time I knew enough from seeing and hearing the piece last time (not to mention listening to Dee rave about it) to grasp clearly the ceremonial thrust of the piece from the opening notes onward. The London Sinfonietta closed with Stravinsky’s Suite from L’histoire du soldat, a piece they didn’t play last Thursday. In their hands, the potential of the piece as a boozy, carnivalesque brawl is fully exploited.
Dee: One of the things I noticed was that the small combo performing the piece played to and with each other. Maybe not having a conductor to look to made a difference; the musicians looked to one another instead. Also, the orchestra really captured the eighteenth and nineteenth century satirical humor often aimed at the life of a soldier; it evoked that tradition of literature for me, novels like Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. Finally, I saw I had underestimated Stravinsky’s range, since I hadn’t really heard the piece before. I was pleasantly surprised, because Stravinsky to me has always meant something more coolly avant-garde (which I also like) than the more human tableaux he painted here.
Thanks for reading, if you made it this far. We’re signing off now until next time. Our next concert is a mock duel between the SPCO and the OAE later in the week; we’re going to the Thursday night performance at Temple Israel. See you there.
Nevertheless, the experiment was a success. Certainly, the London Sinfonietta was just as consistently interesting on Sunday as on Thursday (or on Saturday with the OAE—see our last review). They play with an intense intellectual precision, but leavened by a playful and wry sense of humor. So, not to put too fine a point on it, our grand conclusion would be that we once again liked them a lot.
Interestingly, we both found the first and second movements of Paul’s favorite piece last time (and Dee’s second favorite), Benjamin’s Three Inventions, a little thin this time around. The composition may not have been rich enough to withstand heavy scrutiny or (perhaps more likely), we enjoyed the piece’s surface flash the first time around, but missed the deeper arguments, so there was nothing to sustain us the second time we listened. Furthermore, Paul felt (Dee wasn’t sure) that the Sinfonietta dug deeper and more assertively into the third movement on Thursday night, so maybe it was the performance that didn’t sustain the composition.
Taking stock of a live performance is tricky, isn’t it? The interaction between performers, audience, and composer is so complex that it can be difficult (for us, anyway) to track down the source of our responses. Maybe we were less receptive to Benjamin this time because we forgot to eat lunch! Who knows? But enough philosophizing! Back to the Sinfonietta: Paul was converted to Dee’s point of view on Thursday night regarding Birtwistle’s Cortege (Dee: “I knew it.”).
Paul: Fantastic! I was blind the first time around! Again, it’s amazing how differently one can see an artwork depending upon one’s understanding. This time I knew enough from seeing and hearing the piece last time (not to mention listening to Dee rave about it) to grasp clearly the ceremonial thrust of the piece from the opening notes onward. The London Sinfonietta closed with Stravinsky’s Suite from L’histoire du soldat, a piece they didn’t play last Thursday. In their hands, the potential of the piece as a boozy, carnivalesque brawl is fully exploited.
Dee: One of the things I noticed was that the small combo performing the piece played to and with each other. Maybe not having a conductor to look to made a difference; the musicians looked to one another instead. Also, the orchestra really captured the eighteenth and nineteenth century satirical humor often aimed at the life of a soldier; it evoked that tradition of literature for me, novels like Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. Finally, I saw I had underestimated Stravinsky’s range, since I hadn’t really heard the piece before. I was pleasantly surprised, because Stravinsky to me has always meant something more coolly avant-garde (which I also like) than the more human tableaux he painted here.
Thanks for reading, if you made it this far. We’re signing off now until next time. Our next concert is a mock duel between the SPCO and the OAE later in the week; we’re going to the Thursday night performance at Temple Israel. See you there.
video of Songs of Wars I Have Seen
If you weren't at the concert on Friday or Saturday night, here's a taste of the US premiere of Heiner Goebbels Songs of Wars I Have Seen performed by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
video of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto
Here are a few minutes of the SPCO and Artistic Partner Pierre-Laurent Aimard performing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto this weekend.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Paul and Dee on Jan 17th concert
We must admit that we’ve been looking forward to this program since it was announced last spring. We are self-confessed Pierre-Laurent Aimard idolaters. If there was a celebrity fan magazine devoted to the world’s greatest pianists, we’d have his fold-out picture up on the wall over our stereo. We know not everyone admires his approach at all times, feeling that he brings to the older canon too much of his training with and predilection for the post-war avant-garde. But we like his severe, pure aesthetic, the way he (at his best) can strip the sometimes dead weight of tradition off the performance of the 18th and 19th century canon. As a performer, (see his interpretation of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” on DG last year) he seems, with the rigor of a scientist, to prefer to go back to first principles in thinking about a piece. Paul says he visualizes Aimard bearing in his hands like a gift the post-war canon as he journeys back to meet with its progenitors.
Dee: For me, Aimard and the SPCO’s performance of the Emperor concerto was a highpoint of an already surprising and always interesting festival. And this particular Beethoven—there is such beauty overflowing from the piece that it would seem difficult for the performers to plumb more, but they do. Pierre-Laurent Aimard represents the delicate beauty of the concerto with seeming ease—like Paul, I feel so much of the performance rests in his hands, whether rippling down the keyboard, pretending to be swans to solicit lovely tones, or as fists launching salvos. The SPCO musicians too, seem to bond instantly with Aimard’s intent. I don’t hear any questions in the piece; just faith that all is not only well with the world, but can also that the world can be beautiful.
Paul: Despite our musings on Aimard above, which may deceptively make it appear like we think we know something, I found myself quite surprised by the performance. I expected a rigorously abstract performance, but, as usual when a performance is well thought out, my preconceptions were dashed by the live performance’s surprises. This lovely interpretation of the Emperor revealed to me the insouciance under Beethoven’s typical muscularity. Aimard and the SPCO played this piece in a deceptively relaxed style, moving under Aimard’s lead in an instant from vigorous to stately to insistent. In their hands, this concerto was delicately taut.
After the break, it was on to the Goebbels composition from 2007. We would like to mention as prologue that we admired the guts of the programming here, putting the new piece after the old and much-loved classic. The usual convention these days seems to be to reward the audience for sitting through the unfamiliar by saving the familiar composition they know and love for last. This decision made internal sense too, as it turned out; the Goebbels piece was highly dramatic (see our last review, in which Paul rather plaintively asks why European high art music doesn’t employ the language of theater more—never mind!).
Speaking of theatrics, we were both impressed with the manner in which the whole stage was used to allow the correct mood and properties for the Goebbels. The planners simply arranged for a curtain behind the first work to hide the homey, lamp-lit set that was pre-arranged for the second.
Anu Tali, conducting the London Sinfonietta and The Orchestra for the Age of Enlightenment, highlights adeptly the questions that seem to stream from this work. The questions and conversational comments that run through the piece are the same now as they were in post-war Europe; to paraphrase: “How long has it been going on now, this war? … even I, who used to be optimistic have become fairly pessimistic, now.” Tali does not shy away from the silences inherent to our knowledge of our involvement or noninvolvement in recent wars. She allows Goebbels messages to sink in at many levels: the stark contrasts befit its multi-layered complexity. Among other things, it seemed to us a meditation on the Enlightenment as a progenitor for both good and ill of the “modern” world from the perspective of a fragmented “postmodern” aesthetic. The Baroque, as representation of the Enlightenment’s dawn, young, fresh and optimistic, keeps erupting into the composition’s present, the twentieth century world wars which seemed to dash the hopes of the Enlightenment regarding the efficacy of the progress of knowledge. We also see the Enlightenment in its 19th century maturity and flowering, as represented by its legacy teaching us to perceive the world anew through science, the very science that collapses us into the morass of the twentieth century.
Moreover, the readings of Gertrude Stein’s wartime letters throughout the piece demonstrate starkly the potential oppressiveness of a patriarchal scientific “objectivity,” a point the piece also “stages” by having the women form a community in the front of the stage, while the men form percussive cadre in the back.
Dee: For me, Aimard and the SPCO’s performance of the Emperor concerto was a highpoint of an already surprising and always interesting festival. And this particular Beethoven—there is such beauty overflowing from the piece that it would seem difficult for the performers to plumb more, but they do. Pierre-Laurent Aimard represents the delicate beauty of the concerto with seeming ease—like Paul, I feel so much of the performance rests in his hands, whether rippling down the keyboard, pretending to be swans to solicit lovely tones, or as fists launching salvos. The SPCO musicians too, seem to bond instantly with Aimard’s intent. I don’t hear any questions in the piece; just faith that all is not only well with the world, but can also that the world can be beautiful.
Paul: Despite our musings on Aimard above, which may deceptively make it appear like we think we know something, I found myself quite surprised by the performance. I expected a rigorously abstract performance, but, as usual when a performance is well thought out, my preconceptions were dashed by the live performance’s surprises. This lovely interpretation of the Emperor revealed to me the insouciance under Beethoven’s typical muscularity. Aimard and the SPCO played this piece in a deceptively relaxed style, moving under Aimard’s lead in an instant from vigorous to stately to insistent. In their hands, this concerto was delicately taut.
After the break, it was on to the Goebbels composition from 2007. We would like to mention as prologue that we admired the guts of the programming here, putting the new piece after the old and much-loved classic. The usual convention these days seems to be to reward the audience for sitting through the unfamiliar by saving the familiar composition they know and love for last. This decision made internal sense too, as it turned out; the Goebbels piece was highly dramatic (see our last review, in which Paul rather plaintively asks why European high art music doesn’t employ the language of theater more—never mind!).
Speaking of theatrics, we were both impressed with the manner in which the whole stage was used to allow the correct mood and properties for the Goebbels. The planners simply arranged for a curtain behind the first work to hide the homey, lamp-lit set that was pre-arranged for the second.
Anu Tali, conducting the London Sinfonietta and The Orchestra for the Age of Enlightenment, highlights adeptly the questions that seem to stream from this work. The questions and conversational comments that run through the piece are the same now as they were in post-war Europe; to paraphrase: “How long has it been going on now, this war? … even I, who used to be optimistic have become fairly pessimistic, now.” Tali does not shy away from the silences inherent to our knowledge of our involvement or noninvolvement in recent wars. She allows Goebbels messages to sink in at many levels: the stark contrasts befit its multi-layered complexity. Among other things, it seemed to us a meditation on the Enlightenment as a progenitor for both good and ill of the “modern” world from the perspective of a fragmented “postmodern” aesthetic. The Baroque, as representation of the Enlightenment’s dawn, young, fresh and optimistic, keeps erupting into the composition’s present, the twentieth century world wars which seemed to dash the hopes of the Enlightenment regarding the efficacy of the progress of knowledge. We also see the Enlightenment in its 19th century maturity and flowering, as represented by its legacy teaching us to perceive the world anew through science, the very science that collapses us into the morass of the twentieth century.
Moreover, the readings of Gertrude Stein’s wartime letters throughout the piece demonstrate starkly the potential oppressiveness of a patriarchal scientific “objectivity,” a point the piece also “stages” by having the women form a community in the front of the stage, while the men form percussive cadre in the back.
SPCO reviewed in The New York Times
Last week a critic from The New York Times went to a few festival concerts. Click here to read his review of the January 15th and 16th (am) performances.
We also had some local reviews this weekend. Click here to read the Star Tribune's review of the January 15th concert. And click here to read the Pioneer Press review of the January 16th (pm) concert.
We also had some local reviews this weekend. Click here to read the Star Tribune's review of the January 15th concert. And click here to read the Pioneer Press review of the January 16th (pm) concert.
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