Mar 03 2008
From wtf? to wow!
Sunday I drove out to Ohio to visit my friends Ken and Trudy, who live about 40 minutes outside Cleveland, and with them hear the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra in the visuallly stunning and acoustically perfect Severance Hall. The concert was conducted by the CSO’s Music Director, Franz Welser-Möst.
The first work on the program was by the Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud. Called Apeiron, it is scored for a massive orchestra of 101 musicians. In the program notes, Staud says “… what I attempted was to bring the ‘unlimited’ (an infinity comprised solely of the combinatorial possibilities afforded by a large orchestra) and the ‘determinate’ (derivation from a few basic building blocks, plus a clear formal construction based on the simplest of arithmetical relationships) into a harmonious relationship with each other.” I have no idea what the hell that means, and after listening to the 20-minute work, I still don’t.
The problem that my friends and I had was that we couldn’t discern any organizing principle around which to make sense of the sounds the orchestra was making. There was no underlying rythmic structure that I could make out. Much of it was atonal. There were stretches of tonalilty, but the tonal passages seemed unrelated to each other. The orchestra played it vigorously and apparently with a lot of enthusiasm, so maybe they had it figured out.
The next work was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Alfred Brendel, piano. Brendel, who is retiring from public performance this year, gave a very thoughtful and moving reading of the piece. He is not a showy player, but is economical in his gestures and concise in his playing. The orchestra and soloist complemented each other very well.
The final work was Brahm’s Fourth Symphony, again played really well by the CSO. The CSO is a terrific band, with a rich, highly polished sound, and a flawless sense of ensemble, so this type of repertoire suits them well.
That’s a lovely hall. I wish we had something like that ’round here. I have to drive to DC to get any good acoustics, and the Kennedy Center et. al. are a bit pricey.
We do have the Richmond Symphony, which are pretty good, but their hall is crumbling. The city keeps trying to rebuild or replace the venue, but internal scandal and general head-up-arsedness has prevented anything being done for years.
The Richmond Symphony performs many free concerts at lovely outdoor venues over the summer. But outdoor acoustics just don’t lend themselves well. And the Virginia Opera is in hiding.