Ever seen these phrases in a music review?
"Every detail of the piece was laid out plain to the eye and ear."
"The conductor's motions and manner communicated perfectly with the orchestra, who gave him every sound and nuance he asked for."
"For the orchestra to take on three such virtuoso works and demonstrate perfect control over expression, nuance and dynamics, felt miraculous or superhuman."
"The sincerity of the conductor's connection to the music, the musicians and audience was refreshing for the lack of pretense one often sees in routine classical performances."
"The audience's ovations over all three pieces was the most emotional and genuine I've ever seen."
The trouble with this, and music reviews in general, is that "words about music" can’t match the experience of being there and hearing it, and it becomes a futile exercise. When you try to describe it and pick from the same bucket of words and phrasing that everyone else has ever used, inevitably they’re read as cliches...like Gene Shalit writing "A Triumph!!" for nearly every movie
Yet all those phrases can be true, and were for Thursday night's (Oct 2, 2025) Los Angeles Philharmonic performance at Disney Concert Hall of works by Stravinsky and John Adams conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. John Adams' single-movement Frenzy - a Short Symphony is a modern masterpiece of varied styles and moods, with a strong contemporary identity but with a connection to classical practices of motivic development nonetheless. "Rhythmic energy" describes much of it , but not to say that it was sustained by a single, driving ostinato; it was many different repeated figures with different feelings. The composer took bows for three curtain calls at the end.
Stravinsky's The Firebird, with its beautiful Russian-folk-tinged melodies, the beautiful textures, and harmony that drives the music to every new emotional peak, bathed the audience in its sensuality. The shimmering and scintillating orchestral effects, although they can be said to be cut from familiar Rimski-Korsakov cloth', there can be no doubt that the student exceeded the master time and time again. With great sight lines at Disney Concert Hall, the mechanics of those effects were laid out to the audience like a master class in orchestration: how a huge orchestral burst comes from piano and xylophone arpeggios, a cymbol crash and a thunderous bass drum. The dynamic control I mentioned earlier was exemplified in a descrescendo by muted tremolo strings to a virtual niente, and jaw dropping moments where Dudamel asked for, and got, palpable increases in volume from an orchestra that already seemed to be playing at peak.
Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was written with a very different musical vocabulary, but built more on recognizable major, minor and dominant seventh chords than one might think, just played against each disjoined from their usual tonal relationships. Try finding the secret formula for making your own Rite replicas, and you'll just be stopped short by Stravinsky's words: "I was guided by no system... I had only my ear to help me".
Whenever Stravinsky's three major ballets are heard next to each other you hear lots of similarities you don't expect, and that was the case with our privilege of hearing Rite and Firebird on the same program Thursday night. There are the tiny melodic ideas that are repeated with hypnotic variations as though the notes were kinetic objects of a mobile slowly. twisting in the room. And of course, the Russian melodies. Stravinsky's family roots were Lithuanian and in fact, the famous high, opening bassoon melody of Rite comes from a Lithuanian song called "O, my sister" in which a brother teases her sister that she'll have to settle for a simple peasant for a husband. From that beginning to the wild frenzy of changing meters at the end, it was a wild ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment