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Before the concert:
Outside at intermission:
Looking down from one of those windows. Everyone is gathered around those awnings because that is where they are selling champagne, sekt, wine and other beverages.
And finally, Yannick urging the orchestra to stand to acknowledge the applause at the end:
Now of course this was a fine concert. It was announced a month or so ago that Yannick was replacing Mariss Jansons, the music director, for this concert due to illness. But I have to say I was just a bit disappointed. These are both pieces I know fairly well, the Shostakovich especially, and the performance seemed to lack intensity. Yes, the climaxes were certainly loud enough and the soft passages were very soft indeed, but the whole seemed to lack drive. The Beethoven was rather sensitive and frothy instead of sinewy. And the Shostakovich was certainly not going to move anyone to tears as it did at the first performance. This seemed just a bit cautious and the tempos were a bit slow. Where a Russian orchestra might have been tearing up the carpet and frothing at the mouth, the Bavarians were making very pleasant and charming music. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and the audience seemed to love it. But the raw emotion that a really great performance of Shostakovich ought to bring out didn't quite seem to be there. Everything was just a bit too smooth, without the gasps and breaks that I am used to.
I'll mull it over, of course, and might think differently tomorrow. There was an encore, quite bucolic. I didn't know it, but it made me think of Richard Strauss. Anyone want to correct me on that?
UPDATE: I just ran across piece on Yannick Nézet-Séguin in the Montreal Gazette: Kaptainis: Nézet-Séguin goes around the world in seven days. Arthur Kaptainis is the long-time music critic for the Montreal Gazette and probably the best classical music journalist/critic in Canada. Here is the meat of the article:
You should read the whole thing. Basically, Yannick has the kind of schedule that seems simply impossible. After a couple of weeks of this how can you even remember what city you are in, or what orchestra you are conducting, let alone the details of how each movement needs to be conducted?Yannick’s travel needs in the coming week are relatively straightforward. Nuns’ Island on Tuesday for an outdoor concert with the OM: this is not such a problem.The Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on Wednesday evening? Doable. A 3 1/2-hour drive, assuming no trouble at the border.This concert will feature the Philadelphia Orchestra — the third ensemble YNS stares down in four days. Now, Philly players know their Rachmaninoff. Many of Rocky’s works were premièred by this orchestra. Still, the First Symphony remains something of a rarity that does not play itself.Another Philadelphia program, on Thursday, includes two contemporary pieces being given their Saratoga premières: Jennifer Higdon’s Blue Cathedral and Mason Bates’s Anthology of Fantastic Zoology. Chicago critic Lawrence A. Johnson described the latter 11-movement opus in 2015 as the American composer’s “largest and most ambitious orchestral work to date, scored for huge forces and massive percussion battery.” Good thing the orchestra performed it under YNS last November.The conductor is back with the OM on this side of the border later next week for concerts on Aug. 9 in Île-Perrot and Aug. 10 in Granby. Counting from Sunday, that makes a run of seven concerts for YNS in seven days with three orchestras in three countries in two hemispheres.Again I ask: Who gave him Saturday off?
Must look about and see if there are Bavarian Radio Symphony recordings of the Beethoven and Shostakovich. Are you going to hear their Sibelius/Prokoviev/Strauss on Sunday? Maybe the Bavarian pleasantness and charm is a constant, as it were, filter no matter the works?
ReplyDeleteYou might be interested in this DrehPunktKultur, which is devoted to the arts in Salzburg; something for the down times perhaps, if there are any (and I see a review of the Sokolov recital, not that I can read it without a translator).
ReplyDeleteNo, on Sunday I have a ticket to the Igor Levit recital. He is playing the Diabelli Variations so I am quite looking forward to it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link. I will try to puzzle it out--my German is very rusty! But it does confirm the encores played once again.
Very few conductors overcome the home crowd in musical interpretation. I generally have recordings of Russian music by Russian or at least East European conductors. I think the only great generalist conductors were v. Karajan, Stokowski, Bernstein and Toscanini. Nobody today is remotely in their league with respect to orchestral music.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Levit piano recital, it sounds like a dog's breakfast. The Mahler 10 is probably the least pianistic of any of his symphonies with the possible exception of the first. I gather you are unfamiliar with the work but it is mainly sweeping and relatively uncomplicated melodies on the strings in the outer movements with straightforward but differentiated scherzos in the middle. Simply impossible to reduce to piano. Why didn't he program something from Korngold's piano works instead written at the same time? Strange.
As for the Viennese food glad you liked it. I get my Viennese sweets from their music which is non fattening. The food would all be wasted on me except for apple strudel which I love. Sadly it is extremely difficult to make properly or I would bake it myself.
I was very impressed by the St. Petersburg Symphony playing Russian music.
ReplyDeleteNo, I haven't studied the Mahler Symphony 10.
You know, I don't think I have ever had a really good apple strudel. But I plan to try the Sachertorte at the Hotel Sacher!