The orchestra wasn’t in its best form this evening. There was a lot of muddiness all around, but particularly from the brass and the 2nd violins. That said, the music itself did make it through the mud well enough for me to appreciate the scores that they were playing.
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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.
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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.
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I guess that because the season premier concert was a one-off performed on a Thursday, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra could get away with calling last night’s performance their opening weekend concert. As per tradition, Spano led the orchestra in the Star Spangled Banner with much of the audience singing along.
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Before I talk about tonight’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert, I just want to say that I have had the worst luck in seating this season. Although it hasn’t just been the ASO, the ASO has been the worst. Of the 14 ASO concerts that I’ve attended so far this year, I have had issues with fellow audience members making unreasonable amounts of noise, falling asleep, fidgeting, kicking the seats, or smelling bad at every single one of them. Part of this may be because attendance has been higher, but it has been a problem even at concerts that haven’t been well attended and I’ve been to a number of sold out concerts in the past without having any issues. I think that some of it is that they don’t have Sunday matinées anymore so more people are coming who would otherwise be much more alert and comfortable attending at an earlier time of the day. I know that a lot of the issues that I’ve had with noxious ointments or small children are probably a result of that.
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