With a couple of great press tickets in hand, I went to the second week of the "Composer Residency" of Sofia Gubaidulina with the Opera Tattler, above, in tow (click here). It was the "Friday 6.5" performance which starts at 6:30 PM with a slightly pared down program so people can presumably go out for a lovely dinner after the concert.
The first half of the concert was devoted to Gubaidulina's violin concerto, "In tempus praesens," written in 2007 for the German superstar Anne-Sophie Mutter who was to perform it that evening.
Michael Tilson Thomas, the Symphony's Music Director, can be much too verbose when he's introducing music to an audience through a microphone, but this evening his remarks were short and graceful, telling us how much he and the orchestra loved this piece of music. He also sat down at the amplified harpsichord which was part of the huge orchestra and gave us a couple of simple themes and notes that anchored the entire 30-minute piece.
The performance by both Mutter and the orchestra was sensationally good. The critic Janos Gereben (click here) had loaned me a recording of the work which turned out to be invaluable because it's so dense.
Gubaidulina's music sounds a bit like that point where Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich's output of the 1960s intersects, and what that fusion might have created forty years down the road. I heard elements of both Britten's "War Requiem" and Shostakovich's late string quartets throughout, though with a voice that is all her own. By the way, Britten and Shostakovich were huge fans of each other, which is saying something, since Britten was otherwise a musical snob about most of his contemporaries. Gubaidulina (above) also wrote a cello concerto for Britten and Shostakovich's favorite instrumentalist, Mstislav Rostropovich, which feels perfectly apt.
Listening to the Mutter/Gergiev recording helped with my enjoyment of the piece, but the music really needs to be heard live because its soft-to-loud dynamic contrasts are some of the most gorgeous and extreme I've ever heard, and can't really be reproduced on disc.
3 comments:
Glad you enjoyed it! MTT did not provide any commentary the night before. Not that he should, the music speaks for itself.
Hi SF Mike,
Glad you are able to attend all of these culture events for me, because my tuxedo is perpetually "at the cleaners", and besides I tend to wiggle around too much at events like these... (actually, the truth is that I'm just an uncultured slob)
Noticed your comment on Liz's Venetianred.net blog when I was over there venting my spleen about the Patrick Dougherty installation... She calmed me down a bit and we had a really fine couple of interchanges about good-art and bad-art... I finally realized that my problem with the installation was how it was perched in those trees -- I DO like a lot of his other work that rests on the ground or against buildings... I tend to be a real nuckle-dragger when it comes to most new concepts.
Dear Donald: You're most welcome. Part of the reason there's so much "high culture" coverage here is that I'm being offered press tickets these days, which tend to be wonderful seats that I wouldn't normally have the means to buy, and also these cultural institutions are literally at my doorstep here in Civic Center. It's been a lot of fun covering them over the last four years, and I do my best to keep my accounts interesting for both "uncultured slobs" and "overcultured snobs."
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