Category Archives: Music

Neophonia: Tête-à-Tête

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I’m almost embarrassed to admit that my favorite pieces on a program of new music were all over thirty years old. Then again, I am also over thirty years old and I’m your favorite, right? Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Neophonia’s “Tête-à-Tête” at the Rialto last night. It was a woodwind-heavy program with fewer works by French composers than I’d have expected for a concert that was part of France-Atlanta 2017. With two world premiers and some very engaging music and should have been much better attended given the fact that it was free. Then again, maybe people wanted to steer clear of anything involving the French embassy after the French government’s Romani ethnic cleansing program at the beginning of this decade.
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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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Ensemble Chaconne: European Masters in 18th Century England

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There were so many concerts going on this afternoon that it was hard to pick one. I ended up going to hear Ensemble Chaconne, a HIP baroque trio, at the the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Midtown who played a program that focused on the concert music that could be heard in Restoration period London. The trio consisted of a flautist, a bass gambist, and a lutist who doubled on English guitar. Each of the three at some point introduced the works being performed and, at times, spoke about the history of their instruments, adding a bit of welcome context to the music.
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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 Russell Thomas, Mary Elizabeth Williams, and Nmon Ford

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I was excited when I saw that the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra was doing a semi-staged production of Verdi’s “Otello” this season. It’s among my favorite operas as much because of the wonderful orchestration as for anything sung by the soloists. The orchestra really tells the story almost as well as the libretto such that I think that you could strip the singing from it and still have the makings for a solid ballet. I suspected that a semi-staging would let me focus more on the musicality of the work than the dramatic aspects without reducing the emotional impact of the work on me. I’m happy to report, I was correct: this was a wonderful way to hear the opera.
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Atlanta Opera: The Seven Deadly Sins

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When they announced it last season, I wondered how Atlanta Opera would present Kurt Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins” without a double-bill. Not a traditional opera, the work is only about 45 minutes long and was originally commissioned as a ballet. I wondered if they were going to pull what Atlanta Ballet did with “Twyla Tharp’s The Princess & the Goblin” and just present it as though it were an evening-length work or if they’d add some kind of warm-up act. They ended up doing the latter, presenting a pseudo-cabaret of songs from Weill’s other works.
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Chamber Cartel – Pléïades

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This evening, in the back-room of Orpheus Brewing, Chamber Cartel presented us with an hour of sonic grace in the form of a fantastic performance of Xenakis’ piece for six percussionists, “Pléïades.” The slightly different kit for each of the six percussionists were arranged in a very large V that encompassed two rows of audience seats in the same shape except for one short row at each end that was perpendicular to the V, like dimples on a smile. I had the good fortune to sit at the tip of the audience’s V, such that I had two performers in front of me, two to the side, and two behind, absorbing me in a dramatic 6.0 surround sound experience. Each of the four movements of the work has different instrumentation and Xenakis suggested two different orders for the movements. The Cartel played a reversal of the first suggested order: Peaux (skins), Claviers (keyboards), Métaux (metals), and Mélanges (mixtures). Unlike the previous concerts in this series, the price of admission didn’t include tickets for beer tasting but they did include earplugs, which were absolutely necessary.
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