Category Archives: Music

ASO: Pre-Concert Chamber Music

Posted on by
Reply

I had this plan, see: I was teaching a class at a professional conference in Buckhead and I’d been told that I’d probably get out early so I’d finally have the time to make it to one of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s pre-concert chamber music performances. It’s hard for me to make it to them these days because my commute is so awful on Thursdays, so I was excited to take advantage of this opportunity. Doubly so because there was a piece on the program that I really liked and wanted to hear live. I figured that I could grab an early supper nearby and pop in to hear the show.
Continue reading →

ASO: Robert Spano with Elizabeth Pridgen and David Coucheron

Posted on by
Reply

What an excellent evening of music from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra! Conducted by Robert Spano, the program was mostly Russian (with a Russian-inspired piece by an Englishman), 100% composed in the 20th century, and made use of two soloists, both of whom were local: Elizabeth Pridgen, best known as the artistic director of the Atlanta Chamber Players, and David Coucheron, best known as the concertmaster of the ASO. This may be the first concert of the main season where every performance and piece on the program appealed to me.
Continue reading →

Atlanta Opera: Silent Night

Posted on by
2

I was excited when I found out that Atlanta Opera had programmed “Silent Night” by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell: I like what I’ve heard of Puts music and the subject is one that I’ve always found interesting. It’s about the WWI Christmas Truce of 1914, a rather remarkable pause in hostilities in what would become one of the most horrifying wars in history. Along some parts of the front during the truce, soldiers of all sides and nationalities left the trenches and fraternized in the middle of the conflict zone. In one area, a soccer match actually broke out and the brass had a hard time restarting hostilities once it was over.
Continue reading →

ECMSA: Matt Haimovitz and Tim Fain

Posted on by
Reply

The Emory Chamber Music Association’s Cooke Noontime Concert Series held at the Carlos Museum is a bit challenging to attend. First of all, it’s at noon on a workday. Secondly, there are two or three buses of residents from retirement homes who get there at around 11:20a and take up more than 75% of the seats and the remaining 25% are generally gone by 11:40a. So you pretty much have to be available for two hours in the middle of a workday, plus you have to pay for parking at a university campus that’s probably nowhere near anywhere you need to be. Then you only get a one hour concert that is often just a collection of single movements extracted from larger works. Generally, it’s not worth it for me to go but, still, if I have the time then I often find myself there wondering how concerned I should be about my addiction to live music. Today, though, was worth it. I had reason to take the day off and got there around 11:15a and, after waiting in the hallway of the third floor of the Museum with the exits all blocked by the crowd until the doors opened at 11:30a, I was able to get a fairly decent seat to hear what turned out to be a pretty amazing concert by cellist Matt Haimovitz and violinist Tim Fain.
Continue reading →

ASO: Joseph Young with Joseph Swensen

Posted on by
Reply

Last season, Joseph Young blew me away with a program that included Hayden, Mozart, and Prokofiev so I was very excited to have the opportunity to hear him again this season. In particular, I thought that he’d kill Dvorák’s Symphony no. 9. Unfortunately, although this was an enjoyable concert, I can’t say that I was particularly impressed with Young’s conducting this time around.
Continue reading →

ASO: Hugh Wolff and Denis Kozhukhin

Posted on by
Reply

The main reason that I had a ticket for this evening’s performance was Copland’s third symphony and, honestly, I’m just not that into the first two pieces that I had to sit through this evening to get to hear it. I like a lot of John Adams’ work, but ‘Lollapalooza’ kind of annoys me. It starts off kind of groovy, but the repetition of the lol-la-pa-LOO-za theme gets old pretty quickly and, in the end, it strikes me as being kind of soulless and merely nearly fun. The performance of it this evening under Hugh Wolff’s baton wasn’t spectacular nor was it bad. One of the same violinists who was slightly off in the Adams from last week was the same this week, though it wasn’t as big of a deal since the strings were overpowered by the brass. The person sitting next to me said that it felt a lot longer than the listed runtime and, for once, I just agreed instead of trying to defend a contemporary piece of music.
Continue reading →

ASO: Robert Spano with Pedja Muzijevic

Posted on by
3

This was one of those bad-audience nights. The person sitting behind me had a deep, sickly, bronchial cough and, on the occasions that she tried to suppress it, made even more noise for longer periods of time getting cough drops from her bag. There were a couple of (probably) middle-schoolers next to me who were were whispering during the performances even more than the two adults sitting in front of me. There was, what sounded like, a hearing aid somewhere to the left of me that was squealing from feedback. And, although I hate to admit that seeing her still gets under my skin, the phony of phonies was there: Lauri Stallings, with whom Robert Spano regularly debases himself by working with her company, glo. Despite all of this, I wasn’t really bothered for the first half of the concert because what was on stage wasn’t really worth hearing or thinking about. Fortunately, things turned around dramatically after the intermission.
Continue reading →