Sibelius rudely awakens audience

Yet another gem from the Kansas City Star.

Timothy McDonald bravely infiltrated a Kansas City Symphony concert to help uncover the radical programming and shocking socialist agendas being used to brainwash its patrons.

Review: Chamber Players deliver a high-powered show

Classical music enthusiasts whose tastes are confined to Germany, Austria, Italy and France...

Wait a minute...? Germany, Italy... where do I know these countries from? They must have some sort of historical association...

[As always, checks internets for all of life's questions...]

figure Germans and Italians: Bringing venereal disease.

I knew it! Socialist communists!!

And it looks like they're bringing healthcare!!!

Let's throw a rock through their window!

No, no. Calm down, Gustav.

While classical music enthusiasts are fascists, that doesn't mean that the Kansas City Symphony isn't going to launch some capitalist music up their asses!

[Takes deep breath. Pulls out "Glenn Beck's Common Sense" for some much needed wisdom...

“Everyone is Hitler, except for me!”...

Exactly. Thanks, Glenn.]

Let's try this again, okay?

Classical music enthusiasts whose tastes are confined to Germany, Austria, Italy and France...

Okay...again, huh?

Is there someone out there who loves the 6 works Handel wrote in Germany, but scoffs at the music from after he moved to London in 1710? Or doubts the supreme-melodic-awesomeness of Tchaikovsky? They do realize that Dvorak was Czech and Chopin was Polish, right?

...experienced a rude awakening Friday night at the Bell Cultural Events Center of Mid-America Nazarene University.

Yeah, orchestras and audiences can become too reliant on the standard repertoire. Good call, let's shock the audiences to attention with new and challenging music...not just another performance of the "Holberg" Suite.

So, whatcha got on tap -- Composer-of-the-Day Louis Andriessen? Ligeti, Gubaydulina? Na...too socialist. How about some capitalist music? Jennifer Higdon seems pretty popular right now...how about some of her music?

The Kansas City Symphony Chamber Players took the chill out of a cool spring evening with a program entitled “Sibelius, Grieg and the Music of the North.”

Huh? First, I think your "took the chill out of [the] evening" with "Music of the North" construction is a bit contradictory. We associate the North with cold, yes? Especially Scandinavian countries...right?

No matter, we all know what you mean. I think.

But, I thought you said we were in for a rude awakening? You think that the incredibly often-played music of Sibelius and Grieg was a rude awakening to some in the audience?

That can't be right. Something else must be the rude part of the concert.

A Chamber Players concert is a somewhat more casual affair than the orchestra’s typical Classical Series offering.

Aha! ...er, casual? What does that mean? Let's ask google images...they know everything!

figure casual: Well, fuck yeah for casual!

So casual means hot chicks, beaches and looking great! What else?

The program is shorter, orchestral personnel are dressed more informally and the music is discussed in relaxed fashion from the stage.

Loosely fitting clothes for me, tight pants for her, and socialist, I mean, Scandinavian music...sounds like the perfect concert to me! However, I sense a "but" coming...

But casual by no means equates with unengaged.

Crap. I have to engage?

This was a high-powered concert by 21 string players and Steven Jarvi, the Kansas City Symphony’s associate conductor. The concert opened with Andante Festivo, a brief one-movement work by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.

Andante?! String players?! That does sound "high-powered".

From the outset, the audience heard a wonderfully blended lyrical passage that was hymnlike in nature.

Hymnlike? Lyrical? I hope everyone brought earplugs in case things got out of hand.

Sounds like a pretty high-powered concert. If you had to narrow it down, what was the most satisfying part?

What was most satisfying was the rich sonority the orchestra brought to the work.

Rich sonority, eh? Good call, because if there's one thing all of Sibelius' music is missing, it's rich sonority.

The “Little” Suite by Danish composer Carl Nielsen followed.

figure Nielsen: Honk if you demand satisfaction.

It began with a particularly rich sound by the cellos and double basses.

Is that "rich sound" anything like the "rich sonority" of the Sibelius?

To be honest, the opening movement of this early work is not very melodically engaging.

What did you expect? Franco-Austrio-Italio-Germanic music?!

Jarvi and the players did a fine job, however, infusing the work with energy and insistent phrasing.

Thank god. Nielsen is a great composer and everything, but why he wrote all of his music without energy and insistent phrasing is beyond me.

But seriously, why are we programming all this melodically unengaging (i.e. not "casual"), sluggish, submissively phrased music?

I know the Germans tried to take over the world twice in the last hundred years, but at least their music doesn't lack melodies and phrasing.

The central movement was the work’s most interesting section, with its lilting, dancelike character. Again, beautifully shaped phrases produced a delightful gem that was occasionally compromised by flaws in intonation and blend.

Why would Nielsen compose in intonation flaws?

All in all, the performance was well conceived, and violist Jessica Nance played admirably as a soloist.

No thanks to that damn Dane.

A rarely heard gem followed: Two Swedish Folk Songs, Op. 27 by Johan Severin Svendsen, a Norwegian composer.

figure Svendsen: Compositional facial hair of the week.

The brief but luxuriant works were lovely and featured lush string sonorities that could take your frosty breath away.

Ahem, one work, two Swedish folk songs.

Also, were these sonorities also rich?

Edvard Grieg’s familiar but lovely “Holberg” Suite concluded the performance.

Because familiar pieces are rarely lovely?

The crisply accented opening was impressive, but the rhythms in the most rapid sections were not quite together.

What a strangely contradictory sentence. I actually think, in music, crisp usually mean that the rhythms were played together.

The concluding Rigaudon was delightful and playful and featured technically demanding solos from violinist Gregory Sandomirsky and violist Jessica Nance.

Consider me rudely awakened.

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Despite surviving our brush with socialism, let us never forget the teachings of the great Glenn Beck:

The most used phrase in my administration if I were to be President would be "What the hell you mean we're out of missiles?"

Amen.

Seriously, Someone Got Paid for This

We’ve seen some doozey lead-ins in our time, ranging from outlandish to outlandisher. In general, they’re uninformative, putrid, zing-slinging shit bombs, like, “Oh my gosh! This concert was the most bestest, transcendentest, awesomest musical ejaculation ever heard, ever! The audience almost died it was so much more gooder than the goodest performance in the history of the universe.” But this one is a little different. It’s a little more subtle.

It was something of a family affair at Friday night’s concert by the Kansas City Symphony at the Lyric Theatre.

Alright. A family affair. Seems reasonable, if a little lackluster. A family affair. That's the thread to be expounded upon. Great. There's one question left to ask, then: How will the opening line play out this time?

Well, my friends, as the Chinese proverb says, the journey is the reward...er...or something. So, sit back and take it all in, in fill-in-the-blank form.

Concertmistress _______ took center stage as soloist in an exciting performance of _______.

_______ employed a sumptuous tone in the work’s famous opening theme. As the movement progressed, _______ also displayed impressive musicality and driving energy.

Music Director _______ conducted a well balanced [sic] performance, keeping the orchestra’s dynamic levels soft enough to let the solo lines dominate. In addition, _______ stretched the phrases beautifully in the movement’s slower central section.

In the second movement, _______ utilized a marvelous blend of lyrical line and rich tonal color. The exciting finale brought the audience to its feet.

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So far, this vapid assessment—which, by the way, is precisely for what the author received payment—makes one wonder whether or not he actually attended this performance. It has all the characteristics of a prefabricated review:

1. All the descriptors could equally apply to nearly any performer or performance (“exciting performance”, “sumptuous tone”, “impressive musicality”, “well-balanced performance”, etc., etc.).

2. All the music’s formal markers are generic (“soloist”, “famous opening theme”, “movement”, “phrases”, “finale”). Can you describe another piece using these terms? I can.

3. The lead-in thread is entirely absent, suggesting that it was added on later, as an afterthought.

Of course, I’m not suggesting this indeed is what happened. But, for fuck’s sake, a quadriplegic monkey could pound out better assessments.

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The _______ Symphony Chorus, directed by _______, joined the orchestra and four vocal soloists for _______’s thrilling and dramatic ______.

From the outset the chorus sounded strong and impressive, and balance with the orchestra was quite good, with the exception of the organ, which stuck out like a sore thumb.

The vocal quartet was better on the inner parts, mezzo-soprano and tenor rather than soprano and baritone. From the opening _______, soprano _______ sounded harsh, especially at the top of her range. Baritone _______ sang with beauty and resonance in his upper and middle range, but didn’t have the chops for the ungodly lowest notes in the _______.

Mezzo-soprano _______ was magnificent in the _______ and tenor _______ sang with lyrical beauty throughout the work.

While the performance was quite good overall, the violins never seemed to be together on the ornamental phrases at the beginning of the _______. The chorus suffered a few cases of a single tenor entering early and a few fuzzy-toned soprano entrances.

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Slightly better, but still, the observations could’ve been made by a dead parrot or a shrubbery.

But enough of that, let's return to the lead-in. Remember that the concert was “something of a family affair”? What could that have meant? How did it play out?

Even the opening work, Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3,”conveyed a familial air:

Even? I didn’t smell a whiff of familial air in the above text. Did you?

...Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3,”conveyed [sic] a familial air: [Michael] Stern conducted an intimate group of 10 strings and harpsichord.

Small, intimate group = family lead-in

Wow. That’s fucking weak. In fact, this whole review is fucking weak. First, we get a promising lead-in; second, we get nondescript, prefabricated statements about several pieces and performers (really, who cares what or who they were?); then, the lead-in returns to reveal a wafer-thin connection. In all, poor form, poor prose, poor critique, poor observations, poor everything. Calling this mediocre would be an overstatement.

Instead, I’ll offer this: embarrassingly lazy.

Figure 1. Sketch artist’s rendering of this review

A final hackneyed description:

Although the opening movement suffered from a handful of intonation slips in the violins, the performance was nicely shaped and musically satisfying.

Stupendous.
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