Category Archives: Orchestra

ASO: Robert Spano and Stephen Mulligan with Jennifer Johnson Cano and Jorge Federico Osorio

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Although I attended the Saturday concert, I went to the chamber music performance that preceded the Thursday concert. I had to make a huge effort to leave work on time and then, to avoid feeling rushed, I stopped at a Moe’s near the Woodruff Arts Center to have an early and decidedly unsatisfying supper. If I’m completely honest, I’m not sure that it was worth the trouble. Each of the three pieces had at least one performer without whom the works would have sounded a lot better and I wasn’t that fond of the first two pieces on the program.
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ASO: Peter Oundjian with David Coucheron

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I really enjoyed last night’s concert of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. It began with some dancey fun in the form of three dance variations from Bernstein’s ballet “Fancy Free.” It was a vivacious start to the evening and the musicians sounded great under the capable baton of Peter Oundjian.
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ASO: Spano with Steven Isserlis

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I mentioned last week how I was a bit put off by the fact that they only had the English translations of the movements in Falla’s ‘El Amore Brujo.’ I would have probably had stronger words then if I’d flipped a few pages through this month’s program and seen that the Schumann and Mahler on this week’s program had movements with descriptive names in German that weren’t translated at all. I think that more people in the Atlanta metro will know that “Introducción y escena” means “Introduction and scene” than will know that “Nicht zu schnell” means “Allegro non troppo”…I mean, “Not too fast.” The movements of Verdi’s Requiem next week are in the untranslated Latin of the Catholic Requiem Mass, but for some reason every-day Spanish has to be translated. What schmucks (pendejos)!
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ASO: Jun Märkl with Catalina Cuervo and Bertrand Chamayou

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I ended up going home at the intermission of Saturday’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert. I’m actually pretty sure that the final piece on the program, Beethoven’s symphony no. 4, would have been handled well by conductor Jun Märkl and played well by the orchestra, but I decided that I didn’t want to sit through it. I can take or leave the work itself and my hip was bothering me. Plus, the main work that I was excited to hear was played poorly and there was an excellent encore after the concerto that I preferred to have in my head over the Beethoven.
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ASO: Ludovic Morlot with Ray Chen

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Thursday’s concert by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra was a good one. The program was made up of four wonderfully mad pieces from the 20th century, composed on either side of WWII. It also featured a less impressive chamber concert before the main performance that I’d have been okay with missing.
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ASO: Robert Spano with Dejan Lazić

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Saturday’s performance of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra was a good one. It began with the world premier of two new movements of Michael Gandolfi’s “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” that, together, were titled “A Garden Feeds Also the Soul.” The first of these two movements was titled “The Bone Garden.” It came across as a sort of stately pseudo-march from dark to light, where it lingered somewhere pretty, with a lighter motif supported by the rhythms that brought the music there. Then it turned back towards a last memento mori with an overlay of mystery rather than dread underlying the beginning of the work. It was a beautiful journey guided by some pretty cool music.
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ASO: Robert Spano with Jean-Yves Thibaudet

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The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra started it’s new year at the beginning of the second day of Rosh Hashana. The program had a few things about it that set it apart from previous season openers of which I’ve been aware. Particularly of interest to me was that the only piece to have been composed prior to the 20th century was the Star Spangled Banner. The Damrosch arrangement has traditionally begun each new season, as it did this year, but they also added a second, new arrangement by ASO Bassist Michael Kurth to begin the second half of the program.
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