ACP: Glass, Gresham, Debussy, & Ravel

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Robbie

After feeling under the weather for much of the day, I managed to feel more like myself this evening by the time that I went to the Atlanta Chamber Players concert at the New American Shakespeare Tavern. Not that I’m glad that I didn’t feel well enough to go into work this morning, but it was great going to a weeknight concert without being drained by traffic.

Despite having a ticket to sit on the floor, I decided that I’d be better seated in the balcony. The problem with the New American Shakespeare Tavern, which is also one of it’s boons, is that it’s also a restaurant so the floor and box seats are all tables and they are usually filled by the people who are going to be eating there a good hour before a show starts. The empty seats that remained by the time that I arrived were all at awkward angles or behind where the cellists would be sitting, which wouldn’t serve me terribly well when compared with a seat in the center of the balcony. It’s such an intimate venue that even the balcony seats give a good, personal perspective of the stage and I consider the price for the floor seat a very reasonable price for the concert in any seat and have no problem with either ACP or the New American Shakespeare Tavern making a few extra bucks off of me.
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ECMSA: Hayden, Beethoven, & Janacek

Posted on May 2, 2015 by Robbie

One of the things that I really like about the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta is the way that their concerts are generally programmed with some kind of thread that connects the various pieces being played. The programs often span multiple musical periods but always manage to remain coherent, with some kind of conceptual or musical thematic connection. Tonight’s program for the Vega String Quartet was no exception; the evening began with a piece by the Classical composer Hayden, ended with a Romantic era piece by his student, Beethoven, and sandwiched in-between was an early 20th century modernist piece by Janacek that references a Beethoven sonata.
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ASO: Robert Spano with Jean-Yves Thibaudet

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Robbie

There’s a concert that I want to attend on Saturday, so I exchanged my normal season ticket for the ASO for the concert tonight. Overall, it was very well programmed and was an excellent performance. They opened with a world premier by Gandolfi, which was followed by the Suite from The Firebird by Stravinsky. After the intermission, the soloist, Thibaudet, played Ravel’s Piano Concerto and the show concluded with Gershwin’s An American in Paris.
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ASO: “Creation/Creator”

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Robbie

As I was reading the program notes for the ASO’s performance of Theofanidis’ new oratorio “Creation/Creator,” I was amazed by the variety of themes and perspectives that he was exploring with the piece. I couldn’t imagine how someone could manage to bring such disparate parts together into a coherent whole and was somewhat excited to see how he pulled it off. You can imagine my disappointment to find that his imagination did not rise above my own in this regard as he completely failed to produce a piece with any meaningful sense of flow.
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Core: A World Too Wide

Posted on March 8, 2015 by Robbie

I was terribly disappointed last night at CORE Performance Company’s ‘a world too wide’ at the Rialto Center for the Arts. The piece was danced to live accompaniment by a baroque orchestra from Houston called Mercury. The concertmaster was so bad that I was actually embarrassed for the orchestra. I felt even worse seeing the second violin cringing at the concertmaster’s mistakes over and over again. I have no idea if the mike was causing some of the problems, but a lot of that was just poor performance and possible poor instrument maintenance — some of that creaking sound was probably due to rosin buildup on the strings of the violin. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the concertmaster; the violinist most down stage left had no idea how to handle his bow and one or two people needed to learn the music a little better so that they could peek up at the conductor more often and stay with the ensemble. And could anyone even hear the theorbo? Why would you have only one theorbo in that large of a violin string orchestra? For that matter, why would you have a theorbo in that large of a space? It’s a very quiet instrument. We have two perfectly good baroque orchestras in Atlanta but Schroeder wanted to bring these guys in all the way from Houston?
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ASO: Tito Muñoz with David Coucheron

Posted on February 8, 2015 by Robbie

I have no idea if it was just me, but Muñoz seemed to be conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra to play everything slowly and deliberately, as though it was more important that the audience hear each and every note than actually connect with the pieces on an emotional level. I found my mind wandering during Bruch’s Violin Concerto no 1 and I was seriously thinking that I’d rather just go home by the second movement of Dvorak’s 8th symphony despite the fact that those are both wonderful, engaging pieces of music.

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Category Archives: Music