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Where’s the ASO Review???
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dear Readers — This AJC blog, which has been called Classical Music and Our Reviews and Concert Reviews, is going away.
The new site for my reviews and articles and commentary is the ATLarts blog, which you can find by clicking right here or by going to www.ajc.com and clicking on “entertainment” at the top, then going to the arts page.
If you’re a regular reader, here’s is the bookmark for the new site:
http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/accessatlanta/atlarts/
Any problems, concerns? Email me at pruhe@ajc.com
— Pierre Ruhe
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‘Bach at Leipzig,’ at Aurora Theatre
THEATER REVIEW Itamar Moses' “Bach at Leipzig.” Through Oct. 28. Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville. 678-226-6222, www.auroratheatre.com
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We tend to think of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music as lofty, sublime, perfect — “an argument for the existence of God,” as one Bach scholar recently put it. To his contemporaries, however, Bach was competent but not great.
After he died, no one bothered to save his music; hundreds of his scores were discarded as scrap paper. During his life, when important jobs came open, he had to audition like everyone else — and he wasn’t anybody’s first choice.
That’s the starting premise of “Bach at Leipzig,” Itamar Moses’ charmingly, maddeningly daffy play that wears its cleverness on its sleeve, running through Oct. 28 at Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville.
In lucid, precision-timed direction by Danielle Mindess, and with a winning cast, the characters carve for themselves rounded personas: None are especially likable, none are forgettable.
It is June 1722. Leipzig. The revered Johann Kuhnau, music master of the Thomaskirche, dies at the pipe organ. Georg Philipp Telemann, “the greatest organist in Germany” (Jim Adkins, grandiloquent in his silence), is the favorite to capture the prestigious post.
Meanwhile, six nobodies — Moses concocted this cadre, based somewhat on historical figures; Bach never appears — can’t hope to compete on musical merits, so they scheme, swindle, poison, blackmail and counter-blackmail in hopes of landing the job.
All the wannabes are named either Johann or Georg (a point of comic confusion that never tires the playwright). There’s Lenck (Dan Triandiflou), a con man who hopes to restore his reputation through more trickery. Steindorff (Jeremy Aggers) is the pretty playboy who really wants to be a dancer. Kaufmann (Daniel Burnley) stumbles around in a geriatric fog. Graupner (Larry Davis), more talented than the others, still fears the charismatic Telemann.
One by one, each introduces himself by reciting a letter home before joining the thrust and parry of the others. Thus, all of act one is constructed — as we learn at the start of act two — like a six-voiced fugue in music. (The audience is encouraged to applaud Moses’ brilliance.) Act two’s conceit is a play within a play, another opportunity to weave together six or more threads of verbal mayhem.
On occasion, grand ideas about art and society threaten to lift the wordplay and poppycock to a more cerebral plain. Schott (Al Stilo), the traditionalist, argues that Kuhnau had prized craftsmanship, never innovation: “When you deny the musical principles laid down by our predecessors you risk denying their religious ones as well.”
Fasch (Chris Entweiler), the progressive, counters, “That is preposterous! New music might, in fact, reach those who do not like the work of our predecessors …”
But such chewable exchanges go nowhere, evaporating with the next rim-shot gag.
If “Bach at Leipzig” feels a lot like a Tom Stoppard play — think “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” about two insignificant characters yanked out of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” — it’s intentional. Although he credits Stoppard as his influence, Moses can’t match his idol’s balance of theatrical artifice with dramatic substance.
Perhaps that explains why there’s hardly any music in this production (Thom Jenkins gets sound design credit), which further reinforces the notion that “Bach at Leipzig” isn’t about the complexities of art and mankind, but merely a crafty play about itself, clever for cleverness’ sake.
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Russian Pianist Opens Spivey Hall Season
RECITAL REVIEW Polina Leschenko, pianist. Saturday at Spivey Hall. www.spiveyhall.org.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Polina Leschenko, a formidable young pianist who until now had been known only within the inner sanctum of the music biz, opened Spivey Hall’s 17th season Saturday night.
She’s a perfect fit for the classical music calendar at the 400-seat jewelbox theater, about 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. Spivey is consistent in booking a range of esteemed classical artists at the peak of their careers — and also consistent in discovering the next generation of esteemed classical artists, still on the rise.
A photogenic 26-year-old Russian, brimming with life and virtuosity at the keyboard, Leschenko is in the latter group.
Trained in her native St. Petersburg and in Belgium, her first international exposure came as a protege of the willful, exacting, legendary Argentine pianist Martha Argerich … and any friend of Martha’s is probably worth knowing.
For her Atlanta debut, however, Leschenko’s program felt weirdly out of balance. She placed a growling monster of music at the end, Franz Liszt’s B minor Sonata. While the piece is only about 30 minutes long, its hulking presence loomed from the start.
After striding to the keyboard and tossing back her long brown locks, she was barely seated (on a plain upright chair) when she launched into the first of three transcriptions, Bach-Busoni’s Chaconne, a pure and cosmic violin tour of earth and heaven reworked for the more metaphysical piano.
At the start, she coaxed a rich, delicate, crisp sound from the Steinway, going easy on the pedal. And as the Chaconne shakes its earthly bonds and spirals up into the stratosphere, her played became elastic, almost improvisatory, pushing and lingering and rushing and pulling. It wasn’t so much an original interpretation as a personal one.
That none of this seemed forced or mannered suggested Leschenko is a true stage animal, a virtuosa with a knack for storytelling, for drawing in the audience. I was completely on board.
Yet she seemed to be having problems either with the piano itself or, more troubling, with her right hand. In a largo by Bach-Feinberg, the upper reaches of the instrument were underpowered, which interrupted the singing line and threw the harmonies a little out of whack.
It got more noticeable after that. In Liszt’s “Paganini” Etude No. 6, she blurred several hyper-difficult passages. Under her fingers, she made Chopin’s “Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise brilliante” sound like an especially tricky and regal puzzle, made to be solved rather than as a means to heart-felt expression. Still, it was impossible to resist her lyricism and the wispiness of filigree passages.
At intermission, she asked to change instruments — a rare request for a visiting pianist — swapping Walter for Emilie. (Spivey’s two grand pianos, each with unique traits, are named after Mr. and Mrs. Spivey, the hall’s benefactors.)
Liszt’s monumental and monumentally strange Sonata, from 1853, is more abstract and nonlinear and hallucinogenic than almost anything written before — in short, it’s a visionary masterpiece that still challenges even the most complete of pianists.
Leschenko had the measure of the music, at turns grandiloquent, demonic, full of bombast and tenderness. Wonderfully, she seemed to be making up the music as she went along, capturing the ferocity of the opening themes and peeking inside the slow andante section with equal intuition. (In concert, she’s much more spontaneous-sounding than on her new CD of the Sonata, on the AvantiClassics label.)
Yet her performance, for whatever reasons, never congealed into a convincing whole, a pity since this young pianist showed flashes of the sort of brilliance and musicality that should propel her from unknown to rising star.
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ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org, 404-733-5000
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s music director, Robert Spano, is as sharp a concert programmer as any conductor in the business.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, he assembled what on first glance seemed like disparate music by Hector Berlioz, Frederic Chopin and Cesar Franck. Yet in juxtaposition, and by Spano’s coherent interpretations, they felt tightly locked, each work referring to the others, where the concert as a whole amounted to much more than its parts.
Berlioz and Franck, born a generation apart, were both French-speaking Romantic composers whose affinities were less with the French than with the darker, more philosophical Germanic musical traditions.
Berlioz and Chopin, contemporaries in Paris, violated compositional formalities and pushed their instruments — the piano for Chopin, the whole orchestra for Berlioz — into uncharted worlds. Horn calls within the Franck and Chopin works, and supernatural spirits in the Franck and Berlioz, were small details that took a new potency in this collection.
They opened with Franck’s “The Accursed Huntsman,” which is cinema before the invention of the movie camera.
In 14 minutes, the music is a pictorial, literal setting of a once-popular tale where a German count defies God’s command to rest on the Sabbath and goes hunting. He’s chased by demons, flames flickering at his feet. If you know the story ahead of time, it’s all there, every click of the horse hooves, ever backwards glance to evade hot pursuit.
The ASO’s reading was terrific, starting with the call to the hunt and ringing church bells played by the orchestra’s crack French horn section.
Garrick Ohlsson, a regular guest on this stage, was soloist for Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto. The American pianist is a formidable Chopin specialist because he doesn’t go looking for stereotypes — of the Romantic martyr, of the genius introvert, of the weepy poet, of the proto-avant gardist.
Virtuoso pianists looking for these characters will finds them, and more. Ohlsson instead takes the notes at face value. In the concerto, the textures were scrubbed clean, the emotions honest, the lyricism pure and youthful — reminding us that the piece was composed by a 19-year-old. What was missing was a sense of mystery. It was perhaps a little too fresh faced and earnest.
Ohlsson returned for an encore: Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 27 no. 2, beautifully judged, rather sunny in disposition, perfectly taped at the end. This is how popular pianists continue to build their audience capital.
The concert ended with five episodes from Berlioz’s “Romeo et Juliette.” Labeled by the composer a “dramatic symphony,” it’s not so much Shakespeare put to music as the tempestuous, serene, melancholy, reactionary and euphoric impressions of Monsieur Berlioz when he read the play. (The program originally included six excerpts, with bass Denis Sedov — the Colline from last week’s ASO “La Boheme” — singing a Friar Laurence aria. But as they say in times of war and orchestral rehearsal, stuff happens. Sedov withdrew for “artistic reasons” and the Berlioz was reconfigured.)
The violas, in recent years the ASO’s weakest section, got the star-crossed tale started with ferocious spunk (and in tune) — which raises the question of why they can’t play with this much intensity on a weekly basis.
Yet on this highly strung program — under Spano’s often tense baton — the orchestra couldn’t maintain its focus throughout the rather dry selections of “Romeo et Juliette.” The energy levels flagged during the “Love Scene” and never recovered — a situation likely to be remedied in subsequent performances.
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Conductor Runnicles Goes Home to Scotland
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Donald Runnicles, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor since 2001, will today announce he’s becoming Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow, his publicists at New York’s 21C Media announced.
It’s a three-year contract, and his duties begin officially in the autumn of 2009 — just after he ends his tenure at the San Francisco Opera, where he’s been music director since 1992.
Although he’ll retain his other part-time gigs — in Atlanta (fewer than 6 programs a season) and principal conductor of New York’s Orchestra of St. Lukes and music director of the Grand Tetons Music Festival, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming — the BBC Scottish becomes his most significant post. He’ll lead the orchestra a minimum of eight weeks a season.
A rare conductor who holds his baton in his left hand, and re-seats the cellos and basses accordingly, Runnicles is known to favor the heavy Germanic repertoire — Wagner and Strauss — although he’s consistently more interesting in colorful, atmospheric or rhythmically gauzy 20th century music that’s away from the Teutonic center. His conducting of the US stage premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s “Saint Francois d’Assise,” at the San Francisco Opera, was among the most critically acclaimed performances, globally, of the past decade.
The Messiaen, Ravel and Britten pieces he’s conducted with the ASO, likewise, are among the highlights of his time here. Contemporary music is also a specialty. Two years ago, he conducted the world premiere of John Adams’ opera “Doctor Atomic” in San Francisco, and will perform it again next season with the ASO, to be recorded by Nonesuch.
Around the time of the “Doctor Atomic” premiere, Runnicles seemed likely to snag the BBC’s flagship ensemble, the prestigious and well-funded BBC Symphony Orchestra, based in London. But after months of talk and speculation, that gig went to another maestro.
The BBC Scottish is arguably the best of the Corporation’s regional orchestras. It will provide Runnicles with countless opportunites for international exposure, including tours, CDs (many attached to the cover of BBC Music Magazine) and concerts at the BBC Proms, the celebrated London music festival. Also, Runnicles’ mother still lives in nearby Edinburgh.
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Latest comments
I find it unacceptable that any subscription concerts of the ASO are deemed unworthy of a first night review. No review in print or posted on the internet for Thursday, October 11? What gives?... read the full comment by Peter Stelling | Comment on ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing Read ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing
I attended the concert and thought it was brillantly done. The horns sounded great as the strings were well in tuned. Very well down ASO. Bravo!!!... read the full comment by Chopin | Comment on ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing Read ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing
Regarding the Leschenko recital last night: I was quite surprised and pleased over the attendance. I’d like to talk to Sam about how so many students came to be there, as well as black adults. This pleased me. I was... read the full comment by Hugh | Comment on Russian Pianist Opens Spivey Hall Season Read Russian Pianist Opens Spivey Hall Season
This is in response to Pierre Ruhe’s review of Atlanta Opera’s TURANDOT. (See article: “Atlanta Opera will sing praises to new Cobb home”, AJC September 30, 2007): Since the premise of “victory or death” that... read the full comment by Peter Stelling | Comment on ASO's complete 'La Boheme' Read ASO's complete 'La Boheme'