Mozart, Sonic Youth, and lots in between!

Wow, I had a weekend full of live music from Mozart all the way to brand new works and lots in between!  Friday night was a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert consisting of film music by three different composers and a newly commissioned work.  This new work was by Australian composer Gordon Kerry and was a flute concerto called Captain Flinders’ Musick.  Captain Matthew Flinders was the first European to circumnavigate Australia at the end of the 18^th Century; he met indigenous tribes and charted the entire island.  His story is also a sad one in that he had recently married before his journey and his wife was unexpectedly forbidden from joining him.  On his way back to Britain he was captured and put in prison for six years before returning to London where he lived the rest of his life in poverty.  In the pre-concert talk, Kerry talked a lot about the sound of Australian music that composers use to emulate the landscape.  It is mostly flat with trees, animal, and geological feaures sticking out at random places.  Thus, the music has drones and sustained sounds  with random flurries of sound throughout; it is atmospheric sparks visualization.  Since Captain Flinders was also a flute player the piece has quotes from several late-classical flute pieces and other moments of pure tonal harmony amidst this Australian sound.  The flute player, Alison Mitchell, is the principal flute for this orchestra and has a beautiful sweet sound that was always present but never overbearing.  It is not a terribly virtuostic concerto but there some beautiful clear melodies, angular lines, and free cadenza passages that were all executed tastefully.  I thought the piece was sweet to listen to and evoked the moods of the story of Flinders: adventure, longing, hope.

The other pieces on the program were from scores by Takemitsu, Saint-Saens, and Shostakovich.  The Takemitsu did not sound at all like the music I associate with him.  There were selections from three films from throughout his career Jose Torres, Black Rain, and The Face of Another.  The music included jazzy dance music, a tango, reflective and dramatic music about the bombing of Hiroshima, and concluded with a fun almost-Viennese waltz.  The Saint-Saens piece was from a very early silent horror film called The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (1908) and was towards the end of his life.  There wasn’t much special about this music but you could tell that it clearly followed a story.  It was more amazing to realize that Saint-Saens lived to the time of silent movies and was able to write such a descriptive score with no previous works to base it on.  Finally, the headlining piece for the concert was the Shostakovich’s music from the film New Babylon, a political satire that takes place in the French Commune of 1871.  The story shows the vast differences in life between the decadent bourgeoisie and the simple working-class and the music communicates these differences quite literally.  Most of the music sounds like it was taken directly from Parisian nightlife with can-cans, waltzes, and polkas all containing the sarcastic Shostakovich twist.  There are also swells in emotion and simpler tuneful parts that accompany the feeling of daily life of the working class. 

This was a fun concert and most of the music was easy to listen to and follow yet all very descriptive and rapidly changing.  I thought the conductor, Olari Elts, did a good job and stayed tastefully out of the way since much of the music is explicit in its emotion and musicality and can really speak for itself. 

Saturday night was my first time seeing the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and my first time in the Main Auditorium of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.  The conductor, Peter Oundjian, is the music director designate for the RSNO and this was his first concert with them as the former director is in his final season.  Oundjian is a British conductor who started as violinist and played with Tokyo String Quartet for over ten seasons.  He developed focal dystonia and, like Leon Fleisher, began a conducting career. His gestures were expressive but not over the top and in the pre-concert talk the principal trombone player mentioned that they can really tell he was a professional musician before becoming a conductor.  I could see it in the way he related to the musicians and in the directions he gave them without dictating every single note.

The program began with Benedictus by Scottish composer Alexander Mackenzie.  It was a beautiful yet solemn religious piece with sweet harmonies throughout.  There were some swells in dynamic and movement but it maintained its peaceful, prayer-like mood.  The next piece was Bohuslav Martinu’s Symphony No. 6 Fantasies Symphoniques.  I have to admit that I had a difficult time following this one and zoned out during parts.  It wasn’t very attention grabbing to me although I did enjoy the overall sounds of the orchestra.  There were lots of contrasts in dynamics and effects in the strings that were interesting and gave the “fantastical” sound.  This hall is much bigger and less acoustically clear so not as many things jumped out at me.

The main piece on this program was the Mozart Requiem, one of the most mysterious and famous in the entire repertoire and this was my first time hearing it live.  They reduced the size of the orchestra for this and brought on a massive chorus and four soloists.  The soprano that was scheduled was sick and they had a replacement who was good but not as strong and confident when her voice was supposed to be on top of the others. (This is the second replacement soloist I’ve seen since I’ve been here.)  The choir was wonderfully powerful with a huge range of dynamics and really carried the piece, as they are supposed to.  The orchestra was a great support for the choir, always audible but never covering them up.  The piece had all of the powerful fearful moods like the Dies Irae and the more mournful and reflective ones like the Lacrimosa.  It wasn’t the sound of perfection and unity that I had hoped for before the concert but I certainly enjoyed it and felt the strong tradition that goes along with this piece.  It is a religious piece as its purpose dictates and its place in the classical repertory has also become sacred for its musical value.  During the pre-concert talk the trombonist demonstrated several different trombones and mentioned that three trombones were always used in church to play along with the three lower voices of the choir so it was fun to pay attention to that aspect. 

This weekend the city was also presenting the first of two two-day festivals dedicated to Phillip Glass in his 75^th year.  There were several concerts going on at various venues and I chose two free concerts by a group called Bang on a Can All-Stars which is part of a new music organization based in New York.  The first of these concerts was at a venue right around the corner from my flat called the Tramway.  Formerly a hub for trams, it was converted to the Transit Museum in the 1960’s and then into a multi-purpose art space that includes visual exhibits, theatre, a garden, and houses the Scottish Ballet school.  The second concert of I saw was in a small exhibition room at the Royal Concert Hall.  The ensemble consisted of percussion (drum set, mallets, auxiliary), double bass, cello, electric guitar, piano, and clarinets. 

The first concert had music by David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, and Evan Ziporyn (who was the clarinetist/leader of the group).  The program notes and titles gave good images to think about during these pieces and though they all had very different feels though their construction used similar layering techniques.  One or two instruments would start a beat and then the others would build on top.  It wasn’t true minimalism and it wasn’t straight rhythmic jamming but there wasn’t much sense melody or harmony in the traditional way.  I really enjoyed the music because you could relax and take it all on without having to focus as much and the structure or content.  For one of the pieces the performers had to wear ear-pieces with a click track because there were two different tempi going on at the same time.  The pianist and marimba player had constant even notes in one hand and played other patterns with the other hand that were a different tempo.  It didn’t sound chaotic at all and the rhythms blended together nicely so you almost couldn’t notice but it was really amazing to know that were doing this.

The second concert I saw by this group had some similar music.  Unfortunately there was no program so I don’t remember the composers names except that one is part of the band The Dirty Projectors and one is part of Sonic Youth.  This group has great relationships to the music world in New York and though they present concerts at traditional classical music venues there work extends far beyond that into rock and roll, electronic, and completely experimental.  This is very important to the music world as a whole because no one genre needs to be exclusive and it is good for people stuck in the classical music world to be open to new styles.  This concert did feature one Phillip Glass piece called Two Pages which is one of his early works and the only true minimalist piece I have ever heard live.  All six musicians played in unison one line of five notes that would build by adding smaller lines from within the original line.  For example they would play 1-2-3-4-5 1-2-3-4-5 1-2-3-4-5 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4-5 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4-5 1-2-3-4 1-2-3...  The piece completely undoes your sense of time by repeating the same simple line seemingly infinite times and destroying any sense of expectation.  It was really easy for me to zone out and just keep hearing the repetition without always noticing the changes in the pattern.  It was somewhat tiring by the end and there was a sense of relief when it stopped and yet there was also the feeling that something was missing from the room.  We learn about minimalism in music history class and I have listened to small excerpts but I was really glad to finally experience the complete timelessness and anti-classical mindset that Phillip Glass was going for. 

So yes, I saw a lot of music during the weekend and concluded it all with jazz at Glasgow’s favorite vegan bar and live music venue, The 78.  It was a good time and the jazz was top notch!