Season Starts!

 

 

 

 

 

 

It says something about the state of my knees that the most productive thing to come out of my visit to La Palau de la Musica for the first Saturday afternoon concert of the season was that I have discovered (probably exorbitantly priced) parking nearer to the concert hall, and I have further discovered the lift that takes we ‘walking wounded’ to the entrance of the Platea and to my roving seat.

     As I prevaricated for months about whether or not to buy a season ticket for the concerts, I was unable to get a ‘regular’ seat.  For me, the idea seat is on the centre aisle, but as these are premium places, they go very quickly, so I will have to be more agile in my book strategy if I decide to go for a season ticket next year.

     As these Saturday ‘afternoon’ concerts actually start at 6.30 pm, it means (I hope and trust) that my driving into Barcelona will miss the evening weekend flow into the city, and I should be just early enough to get a parking space – and leave before the traffic gets, um, difficult.  Late night driving in a city like Barcelona, especially in the centre, is not usually a happy experience!

     The concert itself, was a classical blockbuster with two sure-fire favourites in the programme: Dvorak’s ‘cello concerto and The New World Symphony – but it also included a piece by

Florence Price

 

(1887-1953) a composer who, I am ashamed to admit, was unknown to me.  Before the concert started a female member of the last desk of the first violins came to centre stage and gave an enthusiastic puff for Price who was not only a(nother) neglected female composer, but also a black American.  She was the first black American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer and the first to have her work played by a major orchestra.  And I’d never heard of her.  Goes to show.

     Her music was neglected after her death, and it is only in recent years that her reputation is being re-discovered – as indeed were a stash of her unpublished scores found in her abandoned summer house!

     Her inclusion in a programme with Dvorak is apt as she was influenced by his music, especially his use of native melodies, and the Andante Moderato (her orchestrated version of a movement from her string quartet) stands comparison with the melodic mastery of Dvorak’s work.

     The string section of the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès under the direction of Andrés Salado produced a lyrical rendition that was sensitive, bordering on the reverent, so that the ‘jazzier’ sections seemed even more exotic.  Price is a composer worth looking into and there is some discography to support the attempt, as well as some YouTube and miscellaneous information on the web to make the experience worthwhile.

 

 

     The soloist in the Dvorak ‘cello concerto was Anastasia Kobekina, who while looking thoroughly modern did, in some of her impassioned playing remind me of Augustus John’s Madame Suggia – though Anastasia was not wearing such an extravagant dress!  But her playing was exceptional and committed.  I particularly liked the ‘dialogue’ between soloist and the leader of the orchestra in the final movement where there seemed to be an enjoyable and real understanding between the two of them.

     The reception that greeted the end of the concerto was tumultuous, with the audience sounding more like football game crowd than the genteel enthusiasm I am used to. 

     Perhaps this sort of programming (and relatively early start) attracts a wider group of people than usual – a large section of the audience applauded between movements, which suggests that they are not seasoned classical music concert goers - and that can only be a good thing.  In the Liceu for an Opera performance the average age of the audience (at least where I am sitting in the stalls) is even greater than my retired age!  Anything that gets young people and first timers into cultural events like this is not only a positive, but an essential aspect of allowing this form of entertainment to continue into the future.

     The soloist was brought back a few times by the strength of the applause and, to the delight of all, the soloist and the conductor

 

played a duet, with the conductor on tabor which he played with hands and fingers, sitting, and holding it between his knees.  The music was a folksy-medieval sort of piece, and it went down very well, it was cutesy and brilliant with virtuoso playing by both, and yet at the same time it was somehow intimate.

     All sections of the orchestra were outstanding in The New World Symphony that ended the concert, though I felt that when the full orchestra was playing sometimes the sound was more of a block than detailed, but that may be more to do with the acoustics of the hall than the playing of the musicians.

     For me the strings and the woodwind sections were outstanding, but the taut conducting of Salado produced a finale that was electrifying.  And if I thought that the reception of the soloist was raucous, it had absolutely nothing on the audience response at the end of the concert, with whoops, yells, whistles, and people standing to give an ovation that clearly touched conductor and performers.

    This was an exhilarating start to the season and, with the car parking sorted and the life found, I look forward with real confidence to a musical year!

 

 

 

 

Open Your Ears!

 

 

 

 

 

 

In anticipation of the first in the concert series located in the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona this Saturday, I have been trying to remember the last purely orchestral concert rather than an opera, that I have been to, and it is depressingly long ago.

     I do of course listen to music via CDs (yes, I am still old fashioned enough to use them) and mostly on line.  The on-line music is tricky.  I refuse to pay for a streaming service, because I (painstakingly) added most of my CDs to my music library and I was more than content to meander through versions of the music that I knew than make do with some un-provenanced rendition of a famous symphony or so.

     Some on-line offerings of music are somewhat like the web sites of information that may look professional but are actually made by some 14-year-old student in the rural Mid West for a school project and are heavily reliant on Wikipedia and other questionable sources.  So, you might want to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth, and find yourself listening to something that sounds as if it has been recorded in the studio equivalent of a shoe box, or a version of the symphony which sounds as though it has been transcribed from wax cylinders!

     Opera is particularly prone to musical mischief as you settle down to watch a YouTube ‘full’ performance and rapidly realize that you are watching something that is only a step above a poor school production with sound quality to match!

     Which is not to say that a live performance is always the gold standard of listening.  I have any number of performances in my experience when I would have been much better off listening to a recording.

    When a student I vividly remember going to an orchestral concert in the Glyn Hall in Neath, in South Wales and sitting in the cheaper (student discount) seats and being horrified during the first piece because it was as if there was a sonic barrier between our impoverished selves and the noise that the orchestra was apparently making – I mean we could actually see the musician moving hands and mouths, but it really wasn’t getting through to us.  I solved that problem by marching down the length of the hall for the second piece of music and sitting in a vacant more expensive seat, and considered myself totally justified because, after all, I had paid to listen to the music, not watch a musicians’ dumb show!

     Another time I was given a seat next to the double basses and the whole of the musical experience of the concert was filtered through the deep thrum of those instruments.  Not something that I would recommend unless you are a double bass player yourself, and perhaps not even then!

     The number of times that the people at the side or in front or behind my seat has shown the consideration of louts, by eating or talking or going on their mobile phone are many – and don’t get me started on the noisy breathers!  One performance of two of Nielsen’s symphonies was almost destroyed for me by the gasping difficulty of one man’s breathing that seemed to require emergency pulmonary treatment rather than live music.

     Of course there were other times when the experience has been magical: string quartets played on a Greek island with windows and doors open so that the breeze wafted the full length diaphanous curtains in a gentle material ballet to accompany the music; a London Prom where you really felt that the people standing with you cared about the music being played; The Swansea Brangwen Hall organ blaring out in my first hearing of The Manfred Symphony; a lunchtime concert in Cardiff City Hall and The Firebird Suite; the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra playing The Turangalila Symphony in St David’s Hall; a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony when I was seated directly behind the percussion and felt like an assaulted, but excited part of the performance!  Many more positive experiences than negative.

     With some pieces of music, my attitude is more like the attitude I have to the performance of Shakespeare plays.  I have seen some Shakespeare plays so many times (including three difference productions of Twelfth Night in a few months) that I look at them hoping that there will be something original thought provoking in the production that I can take away, and add to my appreciation of the play.  Sometimes just a moment, or piece of staging or phrasing of a particular line or lines can be enough to justify my being a member of the audience and my spending time there.

     With some music I have my preferences as far as weighting of instruments and tempi are concerned, but I have found in many compelling performances that a conductor can persuade me to a new way of listening.

     The main piece in the concert that I am going to on Saturday is Dvorak’s New World Symphony, a piece of music whose ‘tune’ is so famous that like the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech in Macbeth you can almost (and sometimes quite literally) hear the audience performing it too!  There is also a sigh of happy recognition of 'something we know' that you only get in a live performance.

     The real problem of live performances is that we members of the audience are spoiled, in so far as we have probably got to know the individual pieces of music through recordings – and those recordings are the results of numerous ‘takes’ and of electronic tweaking after the event, so that what we hear as the final result never happened in real time.  How can a perfectly balanced and engineered performance complete with a listeners not sitting in the ‘ideal’ spot, on a chair that is not very comfortable and next to people who noisily exist at the same time as the music!

     I suppose that the point is that each live performance is unique for everyone.  What I am hearing is not what you, five rows back and to the side are hearing.  It is a perspective that I value and sometimes it is a revelation.

     Many times I have gone to a concert at the end of a working day because I had already bought the ticket as part of my subscription.  I went almost with a sense of duty, and the thought that I couldn’t waste the cost of the ticket.  And I have been blown away by what I have heard.  All tiredness gone in the delight of music heard afresh.

     It is always worth hoping for revelation, and when it does happen, well, it justifies one or two duff performances that one can put down to experience!

     For this concert, my hopes are high!