ASO: Edo De Waart with Augustin Hadelich

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Robbie

On Tuesday I attended a gallery talk for the Carlos Museum’s Divine Felines exhibit during which I learned that the Egyptian word for “cat” is pronounced “mew,” as in the sound that cats make. This is relevant for two reasons. First, it’s adorable and awesome and I think that everyone should know about it. Secondly, Augustin Hadelich, the soloist for this weekend’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts, is actually a cat according to a documentary that I saw. On the other hand, the guest conductor, Edo De Waart, is human, all too human. Given that to err is human, last night’s performance offers further confirmation of De Waart’s humanity.
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ASO: Roberto Abbado with Jorge Federico Osorio

Posted on February 16, 2018 by Robbie

I’m not particularly fond of Roberto Abbado’s conducting, so this is going to be a mostly negative post and you may want to skip it. I do have something nice to say about Jorge Federico Osorio’s playing, though, in case you want to skip to the last paragraph to read that.
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ASO: Spano with Steven Isserlis

Posted on November 10, 2017 by Robbie

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: Ludovic Morlot with Ray Chen

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Robbie

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

Posted on October 15, 2017 by Robbie

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

Posted on October 8, 2017 by Robbie

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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ASO: Donald Runnicles with Christina Smith

Posted on May 27, 2017 by Robbie

There were two concerts for which I originally had tickets but did not attend; one of them was canceled due to weather and the other I decided to skip: they had the poor taste to tack some obnoxious gimmicks onto the performance that were created by two artists who clearly would have nothing of interest to say about the music. That would have detracted too much from the music for me to be able to enjoy myself so I figured that I’d exchange the ticket for one of the concerts that I’d originally not planned to attend. As such, even though I wasn’t excited about the program, I found myself at this evening’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert featuring all French composers under the baton of Donald Runnicles. Of the three pieces on the program, I really only wanted to hear one of them, but that one really made it worth it for me to bother with the trip to Symphony Hall.
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