Tag Archive for ‘Berlioz’
The Damnation of Faust and the Ascension of Berlioz
The paradox of Berlioz is that he is both quintessentially of the nineteenth-century and in many ways far ahead of his time. Grandiose, self-absorbed, at home in both Heaven and Hell (well, perhaps a bit more in Hell), operating on the largest temporal and spatial canvases, bringing together mammoth forces to speak in one voice; but also episodic and arbitrary in construction, harmonically idiosyncratic and technically suspect, bombastic, addicted to overwhelming sound spectaculars, in short, in questionable taste; in these ways he epitomizes Romanticism. All of these characteristics of his music have been noticed and pondered in attempts to come up with an evaluation of this unavoidable maverick, a figure whose closest counterpart in his own time might be Mussorgsky, or in ours, Charles Ives. Today, with post-modernism, mash-ups, the valuing of discontinuity and fragmentary statements, Berlioz rides high. He is seen as a predecessor to the liberation of tone color as an independent element of construction, as in the music of Debussy. In the past, when polished craftsmanship and solid structure were primary virtues, critics often looked askance at Berlioz’s bulky, generically ambiguous compositions. Today, we recognize the uniqueness of his vision.
The Bard Summer Music Festival 2012: Saint-Saëns and his World
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) is, like his friend Franz Liszt, an exemplary subject for the Bard Summer Music Festival: his world was large, and he was vitally connected with it. He was recognized as an important composer—the most important French composer—through most of his maturity. He studied with important teachers. He had many friends, many enemies, and many students. His musical output was encyclopaedic. Uncharacteristically for a French composer, he wrote in virtually every form there was to write in. His compositions are in many cases linked to prominent contemporary issues in politics, the arts, and science. He prepared an historical edition of the works of Rameau and revived works by Lully and Charpentier.
Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Sydney Symphony Play Prokofiev with Behzod Abduraimov, Berlioz and Elliott Gyger
This fascinating and varied program, each piece using equally colorful but very different orchestras and very different forms and structures, shows us some of the breadth of the Sydney Symphony. Their style is nimble enough to express itself in multifarious ways and Ashkenazy’s style and approach to symphonic music is well suited to the three pieces. To mark the occasion of the orchestra’s 80th anniversary, they have done something special in commissioning themselves a new piece by way of an open competition. Elliott Gyger’s entry was chosen, and though only alloted a short amount of time to fit into this larger program of more familiar pieces, it does rather expand under the intensity of its short broken up motifs and its varied colors, sounds and textures, qualities Ashkenazy, at least as a conductor, seems to relish. The piece’s title refers to the SSO’s origin as a radio orchestra formed along with the Australian Broadcast Corporation in 1932. Gyger says he used an ensemble of 17 instruments, the same in the original 1932 radio orchestra, which for his “dialogue” are spread through the larger orchestra: three violins, viola, cello, bass, two each of trombones, trumpets and clarinets, a horn, sousaphone, piccolo, piano and percussion.
Berlioz, Béatrice et Bénédict, at Opera Boston
Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing centers on Hero and Claudio, two young lovers who are thrown into disarray by a villain who leads Claudio to believe that Hero has betrayed him. There is a lot of marvelous business with the local constable, Dogberry, and his friends, who disrupt the villain and save the day. And then there is a parallel lovers’ story involving Beatrice and Benedict, two highly clever people who like to spar with each other, seeming to hate each other, and yet are eventually brought to realize that they like each other tremendously and wish to be together. The brilliant dialogue of this pair and the course of their development crucially influenced Jane Austen in her depiction of Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and her depiction of other prickly remarkable couples who are really meant for each other, and such depictions in later fiction and drama, including classic Hollywood films such as The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, and The Awful Truth (Cary Grant in every case, plus Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Irene Dunne, respectively).
The Transformation of Ritual Space: Berlioz’s “La Grande Messe des Morts” at Tanglewood
For medieval and modern readers, Dante’s Inferno imparts to the after-life a spatial grandeur, a vision of echoing vaults, vast beyond the reaches of terrestrial architecture, filled with souls in various stages of damnation or beatitude. Our imaginations seem capable of constituting visual and three-dimensional experiences from such partial cues as words on the page or moving images on a screen. Natural locales such as the top of Pike’s Peak or the rim of the Grand Canyon inspire awe, if not vertigo, but provide a different order of experience. Closer to Hell-Purgatory-Heaven, or to the view from the space-ship Enterprise, perhaps, are the interior architectures designed by humans to enclose us in ideological spaces. Chief among these, in the Western historical experience, is the Gothic and post-Gothic cathedral, in which spatial experience is given a precise theological definition.
Ray Chen, Peter Oundjian and the Sydney Symphony
It can sometimes seem like a scalping to play an opera overture as a concert piece, but Maestro Oundjian’s apparent delight in Berlioz’ music overcame any such qualms. They played the piece as if it were self-contained with a closer-than-usual study and without the anticipation or apprehension of the visual elements of theatre. It can be nice to hear an overture without the distraction of a rising curtain. It also served nicely as a relatively lighter prelude to the Brahms and Tchaikovsky. The precise stops and timing of the silences were very satisfying (and provided an interesting test of the hall’s acoustical decay time — the sound taking about 3 seconds to decay but fairly evenly across the pitches). The Sydney Symphony brought across the vivid orchestration as effortlessly as singing.
Simon Rattle Conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the Love Scene from Roméo et Juliette and Wagner’s Tristan, Act II
Point taken. Whenever period orchestras venture far beyond the Baroque, they have something to prove. But at last night’s concert of Wagner and Berlioz by the esteemed Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, some of the proof was self-evident. Banished completely are the intonation problems that plagued such ensembles in the past; one felt secure in the technical abilities of every section; the wind soloists played as expressively as anyone could wish. London is a center for period performance, which has become beloved. Sir Simon Rattle has conducted Act II of Tristan, in concert with the forces of Berlin and Vienna, but it’s good to be flexible, and since he enjoys a long-standing rapport with the OAE, they were a comfortable fit.
Gustavo Dudamel leads the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra at the Proms
Wunderkindfest. Unless you are a stubborn opinionator, performances can confuse you at times. I was flummoxed last night at the Proms by Gustavo Dudamel and his Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, in a concert I was expecting to enjoy, though not to the utmost. The Berlioz Symphonie fantastique wore out its welcome many years ago, and only a brilliant performance can redeem it for me. That Dudamel did not deliver. Sparkling as he is in the bright media limelight, the skyrocketing young Venezuelan has to have the goods, too. In this case, his reading was flat, disjointed, and plodding, with a drawn-out Scene aux champs that lasted long enough for Madame Defarge to knit a quilt. The guillotine movement that followed was coarse and blatty, which is how the whole reading went, either in slow mo with exaggerated emphases or sped up recklessly. Dudamel’s inability to sustain tension in soft passages, one of the most blatant failings in a bad conductor, shocked me.