I very nearly missed the Emory Percussion Symposium concert last night because I managed to overlook the little note in the email that said that we’d need to enter the Schwartz Center from the rear and come into Emerson Hall from back-stage. Fortunately, I saw a few people walking that way and started following them and, fortunately, they were going there, too. It was a good concert, so I’m glad that I didn’t give up and go home.
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Last night I went to Callanwolde for Kit Modus’ Me/diums with choreography by Porter Grubbs. This post is probably more about my state of mind last night than the actual piece of work that I saw, although I am ostensibly writing about the piece. The two or three friends who read this blog because they are interested in my thoughts and feelings about the stuff that I go to might want to read on but you other few people who just found this by Googling yourselves might want to skip it. Or at least take anything negative in it with a grain of salt: I really don’t feel that I was able to give it a fair shake.
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This evening’s special concert of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with cellist Yo-Yo Ma was very good. It could have been great, though. I sometimes suspect that the ASO doesn’t really take anything seriously that was composed from the Classical Period to WWII if it didn’t come from somewhere between the German states and the Russian Empire. It’s almost like they want to say that all serious music of that period was confined to some pale of settlement that stretched between the Rhine and Volga rivers. This concert reinforced that suspicion.
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Last night’s dance concert by Atlanta Dance Collective was, overall, a good show. It featured six works by as many choreographers, four of which were set on the ADC ensemble and two others performed by two different guest ensembles. The pieces were all a little short and none of them stood out as the “must see” portion of the show, but it was definitely an enjoyable hour plus of dance at the Balzer Theater at Herren’s.
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I went with a couple of friends to 7 Stages Friday night to see their production of Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. Directed by Rachel Parish, it’s a farce that struck me as kind of like a cross between Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis and Věra Chytilová’s Daisies. Performed by six actors, it consists of a series of absurdist sketches that range from silly and accessible to anyone to chaotic and a bit challenging.
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Yesterday was one of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s pre-concert chamber recitals. They had originally programmed Beethoven’s Septet in Eb major but, sadly, Associate Concertmaster Justin Bruns was unable to play because of an injury. Instead, we were treated to David Cucheron and William Ransom playing the Kreutzer Sonata. It was a good performance of the piece and, honestly, I think I may have enjoyed it more than I might have enjoyed the septet. They were scheduled to play it again today at the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta’s Cooke Noontime Concert series at the Carlos Museum and if it was half as good as last night then the audience had quite a treat.
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Last night was a decent night at Symphony Hall. It began with Janáček’s rhapsody Taras Bulba. A dramantic and often exciting and beautiful work, Christian Arming did a decent job with it. Nothing stood out in his conducting of it that doesn’t jump out of the score anyway. I have to admit that my mind wandered a bit, which is probably more my fault than Arming’s: I’d been a little out of it all day.
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