This past weekend, my girlfriend and I went to Chicago. Amongst other activities, we saw the Chicago Symphony Orchestra perform. Gathering ourselves together after dinner, we walked down Michigan Avenue. Millennium Park looked really neat with a colonnade at one corner and the mirrored jelly bean just down the block. On one street corner, there was a puppet show ongoing. A big box was strapped to the back of a bicycle and two cats were dancing in the hole at the top. On another corner, a guy dressed kinda like a 21st century Tin Man was doing his shtick – standing perfectly still. The crowd got noticeably wealthier as the Art Institute went past us across the street. Finally we arrived at Symphony Hall.
Standing there made me think of my dad as he had once commented to me that he and my mom would go to Symphony Hall quite frequently in the early and mid-1960s to see Joan Baez, et al. It was an eerie feeling to be in his shoes some 40 years later.
We went in and The Dulcinea smelled coffee and had to have some to ward off the post-prandial lethargy. She darted to the concession stand. Done sipping, we grabbed a few throat lozenges and walked up to the 6th floor where our nosebleed seats awaited us.
If you're not familiar with the place, the seats in the upper levels are positioned at a steep angle and I think this gave The Dulcinea a small case of vertigo. On the other hand, being so far up, I could not discern the features of any of the violinists of the fairer sex. Thusly I could not swoon over any of them like I do with Samantha George of the Milwaukee Symphony. I also want to add that, while, I like Overture Hall here in Madison, the home of the Madison Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Hall just looks a million times better. A writer for the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, after the CSO had played in Overture Hall, "Several CSO players reported that they could hear themselves and each other with greater clarity than at perhaps any hall they have played." I certainly believe this as OH was constructed from the ground up for acoustic greatness and it was achieved. But it looks like an Ikea showroom. Symphony Hall, on the other hand, actually looks like a place where the composers of most of the music the CSO plays could have actually been in their lifetimes. There's that antiquarian in me.
The program featured Anton Webern's Symphony, Op. 21, Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 4, and Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. I came for the Stravinsky but was pleased with the other pieces as well.
Webern's piece was first. (The program notes indicated that Webern was shot and killed by an American soldier in the final days of WWII as he stepped outside of his house to have a cigarette. We smokers just don't get no respect.) One of the founding fathers of serialism, his 21st symphony clocked in at 10 minutes with an orchestra of 9 performers. I'm not a huge fan of serialism but I do like the odd Schoenberg piece and the night's bit of Webern was pretty good. I enjoyed how the string and horn sections played off and against one another with the harp adding the odd bit of color to the mix and making transitions between sections. I think. The music would just go somewhere else after the harpist played a precious few notes. It was definitely music I had to concentrate on. Perhaps after hearing it several times, I won't need to listen so intently. But, for the first go-round, I definitely paid attention to what each section was playing and how the parts contrasted with one another. Mozart was next on the bill and the concerto featured the fantastic playing of Maxim Vengerov. The guy is younger than me and he can play a mean fiddle, lemme tell ya. I liked the feel of the piece – it was like a folk-like jig.
The crowd was very different than those I encounter here in Madison. Similar people, I suppose, but, they took every advantage of the pause between movements to cough. The first movement of Webern's piece came to a quiet close and the whole audience erupted in fits of coughing. I think it's just quaint how they hold it all in and wait for the right moment.
After the intermission came The Rite of Spring. It is one of my favorite classical pieces and I'd never heard it live previously so I was in for a real treat. It's one of those pieces that aficionados of classical music recommend to lovers of rock music to get them into classical. With the emphasis on rhythm and the fact that there was a riot at its premiere in France back in 1913, it seems like a natural gateway song. Some guy wrote a book 10-15 years ago in which he tried to match rock songs to classical pieces. He even gave an equivalent classical song for Allman Brothers fans. While I can understand such an approach, part of me feels like it's a waste of time. It's all music, on the one hand, but they're very different, on the other. Classical music should be appreciated as music and on its own terms. Rock and classical are both great genres of music. They have a lot in common but also have differences in modes of presentation, instrumentation, and demands made of the listener. Big whoop. Neither is better than the other. It's a real shame that rock critics like Dave Marsh, Simon Frith, and Lester Bangs have done so much to portray classical music as being "bourgeois" with rock music being more "natural" and unmediated because of it having sprung from the taproot that is the blues. The upshot of this is that white people are overly-intellectual and make music devoid of emotion while black people are so primitive that they cannot endow their music with an intellectual aspect thusly it provides a "true" path to raw emotion. What utter bullshit! Well, enough of this.
Needless to say, I really loved the performance of The Rite of Spring. I love the pounding rhythms and the dissonance. A chill ran up my spine when the strings started the insistent rhythm part just a few minutes in. I'll never forget the close of the first part, "Adoration of the Earth". The final section of it is called "The Dancing Out of the Earth" and it features this pounding rhythm. The bass drum player was hunched over his drum beating it. To go back to the rock analogy, he was playing like Keith Moon. I mean, the guy just wailed on the thing. Plus, did you know that the piece uses the guiro? I didn't until I read the program. The Rite of Spring is a ballet and I'd love to see it performed instead of just hearing the music. From the Wikipedia entry:
The complex music and violent dance steps depicting fertility rites first drew catcalls and whistles from the crowd, and there were loud arguments in the audience between supporters and opponents of the work, and were soon followed by shouts and fistfights in the aisles. The unrest in the audience eventually degenerated into a riot… Although the music and dance were considered barbaric and sexual and are also often noted as being the primary factors for the cause of the riot, many political and social tensions surrounding the premiere contributed to the backlash as well.
There was no riot Saturday night but the crowd gave catcalls and applauded for a good long time as this was one of Conductor/Music Director Daniel Barenboim's last performances with the CSO.
Growing up in Chicago, I was aware of Barenboim's predecessor, Sir Georg Solti. I recall very clearly listening to my dad's copy of an album of Solti conducting Ravel's Bolero and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. It was one in this series that CBS Records put out called "Great Performances". He wasn't just any schmoe conductor – he was Sir Georg Solti. Plus he was from Chicago and I just thought the connection was neat. Barenboim took the reins from Solti in 1991, a few years after I had moved away from Chicago so I never became familiar with him. There was a good article in the Chicago Tribune yesterday assessing Barenboim's legacy. Although completely unfamiliar with Barenboim, I found it very interesting nonetheless. I appreciated how it described his job. McDonald's folks fry burgers and French fries; I'm a PC tech so I install software, swap out memory, tinker with Windows etc. in my job; but what the hell does a Music Director do? (S)he conducts, chooses pieces to be performed, and is to be the public face of an orchestra.
Barenboim has long been a polarizing figure in the classical music world, held in the highest esteem and affection by his colleagues and music professionals but, as a conductor and interpreter of the symphonic repertory, not universally admired outside his worldwide circle of close friends and political allies.
His Chicago years brought lively, sometimes contentious debate about the improvisatory nature of his conducting, the inconsistencies of his performances and his often cavalier regard for what was explicit in the score. The contradictions between what he said and what he did could be glaring. Barenboim, for example, seized on every opportunity to belittle the level of musical sophistication of the Chicago concert public but did next to nothing to address the alleged problem from the podium.
Relations between Barenboim and the administration had gone downhill since the arrival of Deborah R. Card, as CSO Association president, and William H. Strong, as board chairman. The board was disinclined to renew the $2.2 million contract of a Eurocentric music director with an arrogant disdain for building audiences and a penchant for programming modern music certain to have just the opposite effect at the box office.
I never really thought of an orchestra's music director as being the point man for a community's music education and doing outreach to the community and its young people. What does John DeMain, the Music Director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra do besides conduct? The MSO's webpage explains their outreach programs well enough. It's just that I don't hear or read about DeMain standing up for music education in our schools, especially when their budgets are threatened with cuts which is all the time. Maybe it's just me not paying attention but it just seems like he has a very small public presence here in Madison. Perhaps this is because he moonlights as an advisor to an opera company. After all, he is best known for putting on operas. DeMain isn't much of a personality around town. It seems that, for most of Madison, the MSO is just there. It does its thing and the hipsters of the city fawn over the High Noon Saloon and worry about a lack of places for "indie" rock bands to play. Nothing against DeMain (nothing against the High Noon either), mind you. Next season looks to be really great with The Rite of Spring, Carmina Burana, Beethoven's 8th, a pair of double bass concertos that sound highly intriguing, and Shostakovich's 5th. You can bet your sweet ass I'll be there for the Shostakovich performance!
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