Friday Quickie: Stravinsky best used to remove lingering flavors, avoid heartburn and promote good digestion

Opinions are important. They make a critic, or a critique, what they are -- an educated, reflective review and discerning examination of the relative value of a given piece of music or concert. They can also be fun, primarily in challenging standard orthodoxies and bringing new perspectives to common pieces and experiences.

Then again, some opinions are just...inexplicable.

Review | Chamber orchestra season has powerful conclusion

John Heuertz, Kansas City Star, June 13, 2010

The Kansas City Chamber Orchestra’s last concert of the season featured Mozart’s last work. The Mozart piece, his 1791 Requiem Mass, was preceded by Igor Stravinsky’s 1938 “Dumbarton Oaks” chamber concerto.

An interesting combination of pieces. While certainly accessible for a chamber ensemble, the Mozart Requiem (with a very sizable choral component) seems a very large scale work by comparison to the Stravinsky. But, whatever...I'm game.

Conductor Bruce Sorrell kept the 15 or 16 instrumental voices in the score in good balance.

That's good. Plus specifics are overrated.

He conducted with precision and gave the music an appropriately playful feel.

Appropriate is nice.

This cheery little item...

the Stravinsky?

...is often compared to Bach’s Brandenburg concerti.

Yes, I've heard that. In fact, I think Stravinsky even mentioned this himself:

“I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto,and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do."

Yes..."borrow".

Anywho, so one would do well to compare to this piece to the Bach Brandenburg concerti I would say. Go on...

A better comparison might be to music from the mid-18th century Mannheim school.

A better comparison, eh? Even better than the piece the composer even admitted he stole, er...borrowed themes from?

Explain.

Mannheim composers wrote the same kind of elegant, polished,...

Elegant, polished...yes yes. These were indeed traits of the neo-classical style, which was the style at the time, that Stravinsky embraced while composing this piece. What else...?

...the same kind of elegant, polished, commercially successful music that Stravinsky did.

Yes, commercially succ...wait...what?

Stravinsky wrote commercially successful music? "Dumbarton Oaks" is a commercially successful piece?

I have no idea what this means. I guess compared to Henri Pousseur Stravinsky wrote commercial music...

figure pousseur: Was always secretly disappointed that his Dichterliebesreigentraum (1992-3) didn't even crack the Billboard Hot 100, but UB40's crappy remake of "Can't Help Falling in Love" was #1 for 7 weeks.

And, like Stravinsky’s music, Mannheim music is easy to forget before intermission.

Forgettable?! Stravinsky's music is forgettable? I apparently don't know what the word 'forgettable' means.

Are we talking about the same Stravinsky?

But that matrix of forgettable music has to be there for unforgettable music to be written — and Mozart’s Requiem is unforgettable.

Whew. I thought you were being a tad dismissive at first, but I think I get it now. We need Stravinsky's forgettable music so we can fully appreciate good music from a composer who never wrote forgettable music.

Good call. Really, we should have a term for music like this. Any thoughts?

Thus Sorrell aptly described the Stravinsky as a “palate cleanser” for the Mozart.

Perfect. Stravinsky's music is like an unsalted cracker, or even better, a fruit sorbet.

figure palate cleanser: Bottled Stravinsky. Available in 6, 12 and 24 packs.

Details

I found this article interesting from a number of perspectives. First, the reviewer has a theater background, and later branched into opera (and thusly music criticism), and I think that this comes out in his writing. Second, it comes from the normally unimpeachable Guardian UK, and is quite brief. Third, the names of iconic pieces are...iconic.

Also, the Northern Sinfonia is in Newcastle, UK.

Figure 1: Figure 1 is unrelated, yet delicious.

The Northern Sinfonia began its 50th-anniversary season with...

With something cool and memorable, I hope.

a complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies,

Wow, really. Came up with that in a brainstorming session, no doubt.

and now concludes it by compressing the 20th century into a week.

Mm, mm-hm. Better than not at all, for sure, but that hundred years of stuff certainly merits less total concert time than Beethoven symphonies, which are starved for attention.

Dreams and Ceremonies,...

This title reflects the survey of 20th century music? It could easily be a festival of Romantic music. Well, shit, or Baroque music, for that matter.

Dreams and Ceremonies, which surveys the period 1906-2006, is the kind of wildly ambitious scheme at which music director Thomas Zehetmair excels.

Good, good. Although programming music that was, more or less, recently composed should hardly count as a scheme. Was jamming all of the 20th century into a week the ambitious scheme, or stretching it out to fill a week's worth of concerts?

Still, nothing seems to frighten audiences away faster than 20th-century music.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, is more awesome than taking a sentence in your three-paragraph write-up to remind people that they don't, won't, can't, and shouldn't like it. For fuck's sake, can we cut that out?

The second concert began with an apologetic plea for those present to huddle closer towards the front.

Ha ha! It's funny because they paid money to go to a concert of unlistenable avant-garde crap! Hilarious. What a bunch of maroons.

Bah. What about it, then?

A pleasing performance of Dumbarton Oaks...

Figure 2: The gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, Georgetown

A pleasing performance of Dumbarton Oaks proves Stravinsky's backward glances towards the baroque are no more intimidating than a Brandenburg Concerto;

This is a bizarre, if evocative, construction. Stravinsky's potentially intimidating (?) "glances"

Figure 3: A glance from Stravinsky. Are you intimidated? I dunno, I think I could take him.

...are tempered somehow, since...he's glancing at Bach's Brandenburgs (on which the piece was based)? Are the Brandenburg Concertos often held up as an example of non-intimidating music? Or the Baroque as a whole? This characterization confuses me. However, this performance "proves" (!) that his glances are actually quite harmless.

...the same can hardly be said for Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time,

Figure 4: Olivier Messiaen writing down what birds say.

which is among the most harrowing experiences you can have in a concert hall.

I'd be lying if I said that the Quartet is a fancy-free, happy-go-lucky piece of fluff, but it's hardly the most gruesome stuff out there. It also seems to me that things other than music can be experienced in a concert hall.

Figure 5: Ruins of a concert hall in Weisbaden, Germany after WWII.

The original audience was the composer's fellow detainees in a German PoW camp, and the gravid tempos of the 50-minute piece almost defy the musicians to maintain a pulse.

So...it had some "pacing problems," to borrow some theater-jargon?

The highlight is the plaintive aria for unaccompanied clarinet, here breathtakingly executed by Christopher Richards.

Fine. But the best is yet to come.

John Cage's notorious 4'3"...

D'oh! I had to look twice to make sure. This is of course not correct. Which happens; it does. It's a bit of a major blunder considering the uniqueness of the title, and the piece, which is (arguably, of course) Cage's most iconic work, and possibly deserves some hyperbolic title like Most Important Piece of the Last 100 Years. Arguably. But still.

And so:

John Cage's notorious 4'3" was given additional drama by plunging the auditorium into darkness.

Probably not the first time, but a decent enough idea nonetheless.

Pianist Kate Thompson refused to be put off by an outbreak of giggles among the audience.

One would hope that's the least of things she was prepared to endure.

But though the random, ambient sound is supposed to be the point,

It is?!

...it's still reminiscent of the silent observance before football matches, where you're hoping some idiot won't spoil it before the ref blows his whistle.

Ooh, yeah...or, you know, get the name wrong.

Figure 6: Pianist David Tudor performing Cage's 4'33".

Music Espresso, How May I Help You?

There is something to be said for the consistency of analytical method in a review. There are exceptions (mostly poetic), of course, but if inconsistent, the review can easily expose its author’s biases, unfamiliarity with the work or even the low levels of caffeine in her or his system. None of which, I think we’ll all agree, makes for good, fair criticism.

In Sarah Bryan Miller’s case, one can see, via the progression of her stylistic consistency, how the St. Louis Symphony’s morning concert series may not be the best idea. That is, from a PR standpoint, if you want a good review, make sure there is plenty of espresso to wake up the critic; they often have late, late, finger-crampy nights.

Perhaps it was appropriate to open a Friday morning coffee concert with a piece by Igor Stravinsky jn [sp.] jittery, nervous mode; the Concerto in D sounds distinctly overcaffeinated in places.

Perhaps it was the sheer rudeness of being disturbed before Stage N3 was complete, but isn’t it Sarah’s job to be wide awake and alert?

Apparently, the coffee hadn’t worked its magic, yet.

The Concerto demands great technical ability, but doesn’t offer listeners much to cherish. From its skittish opening, it drifts into a limping dance and a melody that loses its way -- and back into anxiety.

I can just see the eye crusties and the unwillingness to listen. Maybe a few yawns and a cowlick or two.

However, by saying that the piece “doesn’t offer listeners much to cherish” is downright lazy. (Personally, I wasn't familiar with the Concerto in D, so I took a few minutes to become acquainted, at which time I found this lovely little YouTube video of the middle movement, and an article written by Greg Sandow who said this about it:

One of my great musical pleasures — in many ways a guilty one — is the slow movement of Stravinsky's Concerto in D, written in 1946 for string orchestra. Stravinsky, of course, was a Very Serious Composer, but in the 1930's and 40's he wrote some fluff, and this slow movement sounds, I swear, a bit like Mantovani, the man who once reigned as the king of easy listening.

Not exactly “limping” by my account, anyway.) It’s lazy because it doesn’t make its case very well. Why does “skittish” to “limping” to “anxiety” make for a bad piece of music? I don’t think there’s anything inherently non-cherishable about this description or progression of descriptors.

No doubt, the coffee hadn’t settled in.

The compactness of the first half was accentuated by having the conductor double as soloist in the morning’s second work. Leonidas Kavakos, an estimable violinist who made his Symphony conducting debut on Friday morning, led a small chamber ensemble in J.S. Bach’s Violin Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052.

As a violinist, Kavakos offered his usual spot-on accuracy, with great beauty in the lyric passages and technique to spare. As conductor, he had great interaction with the players in the front stands; some of the lower strings, however, didn’t stay with him as well.

And that’s all there was to say about the Bach. No “good piece.” No “bad Bach.” It just was.

I liken this to that moment of repose after waking up, having had the first sip of Sanka, sort of neither fully conscious nor asleep, but still kind of functional, spewing out inconsistent gibberish and clichés like “technique to spare.”

But don’t worry. Sarah was fully awake for the second half. I’m guessing another cup of Joe and a cigarette during intermission.

The second half was a reasonably solid, if not overwhelming, performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor, op. 56, "Scottish."

HYOPERBOLE TIME! I’M WIDE AWAKE. JITTERY AND OVERCAFFIENATED IN PLACES! OVERWHELMING! AHHHH! BUZZZZZ! ROMANTIC SWEEP! ROMANTIC ARCHING! NARRATIVING NARRATIVES! WEEEEEEE! BLACK! NO SUGAR! SUN-DAPPLED WHIMSY!

The Mendelssohn, a full-blown Romantic work, offers an abundance of melody and evocative tonal painting to gladden the heart and ears of the most traditional of concertgoers.

A Note to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Program Director: Let’s make it the “Friday Lunch Time Tea & Cookie Concert Series.” Please.
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