Bent Frequency: Sarah Hennies Residency

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Robbie

Bent Frequency and the Georgia State Center for Collaborative and International Arts brought composer Sarah Hennies to Atlanta for a brief residency that included a couple of pretty amazing concerts of her music. Friday night’s concert was held at Plaza Theatre and featured Contralto for video and chamber ensemble consisting of violin, viola, cello, double bass, and a variety of both traditional and novel percussion instruments. The video features eight transgender women going through a series of vocal exercises that are designed to help transwomen feminize their voices. The women are featured one at a time and the only time that their voices overlap are moments when Hennies mixes the sound of them singing their highest or lowest notes together to create a chord. The live ensemble served as a sort of accompaniment, the effect making me think of the relationship between a piano accompaniment and the soloist in a sonata. And I don’t know exactly why it made me think of a sonata rather than a cantata despite featuring human voice. Perhaps in the way that it was edited, the film felt a little more like an instrument being played by Hennies (as editor) than a chorus or series of vocal soloists.
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ASO: Robert Spano with Kirill Gerstein

Posted on September 23, 2018 by Robbie

I have the softest little black bag that the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra gave to me as a subscriber at the concert last night with a little Post-It calendar in it and I feel like it should be useful but I haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. It goes with the new color of the walls in the hallways of Symphony Hall, which were painted black. There are new portraits of the musicians, too, which are in vibrant color and in which everyone is dressed smart casual instead of how they dress on stage. I’m honestly not happy about the dark wall – it now feels even more cramped when the auditorium is emptying out. And the pictures seem kind of disingenuous if they’re going to keep the men of the orchestra performing in tails. It’s not really that bad, though: just not what I’d do. I was pretty happy at first to see that they got rid of the two projection screens hanging off of the proscenium on either side of the stage in favor of one large one suspended from between some of the acoustic shell’s drop panels – sitting in row C made the old ones a bit uncomfortable to watch – but then I noticed that they kept the projector in one of the little compartments in the mezzanine so now we have three lines through anything they put up there from the shadows cast by the hanging microphones over the stage. They do get credit for trying, though, and I think they finally fixed the torn cloth cover over one of the built-in speakers, which is unquestionably a positive. Maybe if I ever become a multi-decamillionaire then I’ll grant them the money for a real renovation.
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YInMn Project

Posted on June 17, 2018 by Robbie

The problem with liking new music in Atlanta is that concerts are often held in spaces with no climate control. Yesterday’s YInMn Project new music festival organized by Cassidy Chey Goldblatt was held in one of the galleries at Whitespace Gallery. While it’s a lovely space and its location in Inman Park likely provided the inspiration for the festival’s name (the blue chemical compound YInMn is a homophone of Inman), the gallery provided no cooling on a humid, sticky day that reached 90˚F. For ventilation, the gallery was left open to the property’s lovely courtyard, which is wonderfully well protected from any errant breezes that might try to invade it. So, sweaty, salty, and sticky, I sat for 6 ½ hours or so listening to six ensembles do an excellent job playing a wonderfully varied array of music. With the exception of one of the ensembles, there were no printed set lists and the heat slowed my poor brain down too much to note what the musicians said, so below are my general impressions of each set with only a few pieces mentioned by name.
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ASO: Robert Spano with Inon Barnatan

Posted on June 9, 2018 by Robbie

So, if you don’t know me and you haven’t read the About Me page on this blog, then let me warn you that I am neither a critic nor a journalist. This is really just where I dump my thoughts on some of the things that I go to so that I can remember them later. That said, I’m starting this blog entry with something whiny and unrelated to the concert itself.
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2018 EPS Evening Concert

Posted on June 9, 2018 by Robbie

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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ASO: Robert Spano with Yo-Yo Ma

Posted on May 5, 2018 by Robbie

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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ASO: Matthias Pintscher with Nicola Benedetti

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Robbie

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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