Tag Archives: Schumann

ASO: Carlos Kramer with Sheku Kanneh-Mason

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I honestly didn’t get much out of last night’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert. I found that much of the music on the program sounded either rushed or plodding under guest conductor Carlos Kramer’s baton and odd cuing gestures. It wasn’t completely dry, but it seemed that any expressive nuance was brushed over, making the music sound particularly shallow and uninteresting. The orchestra didn’t sound that great, either: often sounding muddy with one musician or another noticeably coming in late here or early there.
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ASO: Robert Spano with Daniel Hope, David Finckel, and Wu Han

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Last night’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert was particularly festive. The concerto for the evening was Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and the triplets for this performance were Daniel Hope, the associate artistic director of the Savannah Music Festival, along with David Finckel and Wu Han, who are the founding artistic directors of Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival. Robert Spano, the music director of the Aspen Music Festival and School, conducted. Even the concertmaster, David Coucheron, is the Artistic Director of the Kon Tiki Chamber Music Festival. This program will be performed again tonight at the Savannah Music Festival. With that much festivity on one stage, there really should have been a lot more sequins.
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ASO: Spano with Steven Isserlis

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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: Jun Märkl with Johannes Moser

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There was a lot to like about this evening’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by Jun Märkl. The program was fairly light-hearted, with two neo-classical works with a smaller orchestra in the first half and Schumann’s “Spring Symphony” to conclude the show. Under Märkl’s baton, the music was a warm delight on a cold winter’s evening.
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