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ASO Premieres Gonzo Music
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., 404-744-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gonzalo Grau — Gonzo to his friends — is wonderfully hard to pin down.
The 35-year-old Venezuelan plays in a salsa band in the U.S., arranges and composes music for jazz bands, modern operas, movies and theater. His parents are classical musical celebrities back home, and he absorbed their music and popular Latin American sounds, “music of the street,” he calls it, with equal zeal.
And he’s played percussion and piano with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in epic, impassioned music by Osvaldo Golijov, the global man of the moment in classical music and an artistically kindred spirit. It was Golijov and ASO music director Robert Spano who together decided Grau deserved a chance to step onto the classical stage in his own right.
The ASO commissioned Grau’s 15-minute “Pregunta y Respuesta,” his first orchestral score, and gave its world premiere Thursday in Symphony Hall. The one thing you expect to be intrinsic to a down and funky salsa composer — and likely a reason the ASO commissioned him in the first place — is a sense of audience involvement. A musica call to get up and move (or at least feel the music take charge your body).
The work is in two sections, “Question” and “Answer.” It opens with a four-note theme — B, F#, D, A — which are the tuning notes of a small South American folk guitar called a cuatro, an instrument most school children learn to play in Venezuela.
Except Grau’s order is the reverse of how kids learn it. By upending an imprinted childhood memory, he makes a mild political statement about Venezuela’s social upheavals under the turbulent leadership of President Chavez. Here the question concerns the future and is unresolved; the answer is a joyous celebration — life, and thus music, will always go on.
The first section is mostly quiet and subtly evokes the gentle, open plains made famous by Aaron Copland, with the addition of lovely, lingering voices emerging from the orchestra, like birds at dawn. The peace is interrupted, temporarily, by a heavy salsa beat — six percussionists at work, two of them clapping their hands. The music often threatens to shout a compelling song, but instead leaves us wondering where all the throat-clearing will take us.
Part two is equally tame, with nice sounds moment by moment yet never seeming to take us anywhere. Spano conducted in the same half-squatting flamenco dancer position he deploys for Golijov’s music. The ASO probably gave it the best performance it’ll ever receive.
Could it be that in “Pregunta,” Grau holds the sort of soft-lens nostalgia for his homeland that affects self-exiled artists of all cultures? His new work is uncommonly pleasant, yet feels undernourished and inert. It lacks a vibrant personality, although for him it’s just a start.
Along with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, which I missed, the ASO and principal cellist Christopher Rex offered Samuel Barber’s 1945 Cello Concerto. For both the orchestra and Rex, it was the first time playing this fiendishly difficult music.
This is curious for a major, 30-minute work, given Barber’s perennial appeal in the concert hall. Yet the concerto, perhaps one of his rare misses, isn’t idiomatic for the cello’s natural, warm singing tone and it crams too many notes, not all of them welcome, into the finale.
Before the music started, Rex served as teacher and emcee, microphone in hand, introducing the main themes with his cello, leading us through the concerto’s structure, often with a humorous aside. (Rex studied with important cellists who knew important composers, a glimpse into 20th century music history.)
Rex was most eloquent where the concerto is most lyrical and emotional, in the plaintive middle movement. Still, they couldn’t step through the portal that would make this concerto live and breathe, if such a door exists.
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By Hugh
March 8, 2008 1:30 PM | Link to this
This week’s ASO concert. Well, you’ll be surprised, as was I, that with all my wrestling with the “Transmigration” of Adams, I thoroughly enjoyed the Gonzalo Grau piece. Here are notations I put into my program as the music went along:
Far more “music” and listenability than anything I’ve heard of Adams. (As I say this I recall Shakespeare—“Comparisons are odious.”) Actually pleasant. Enjoyable. The South American rhythms feel good. The percussionists’ hand-clapping was nice, “groovy,” as was the finger-snapping. I actually wanted to join in.
And I’d definitely like to hear it again—right on the spot would have been fine.
I liked hearing the Barber. I had not before. It was harmonic and melodic though there was nothing I could hold onto, at least not at a first hearing. I found Rex’s playing excellent (not that I’m a cellist). Bravo for him. (I wondered if I observed correctly that the assistant principal cellist was positively riveted on Rex’s playing of the First Movement cadenza. I sit Row D, center.)
How I did enjoy the Tschaikovsky Fourth. That was a fine experience. (In the First Movement there is a bit that sounds very much like his “Serenade for Strings.” Did you catch that?) The Second Movement with the unison between the violins and cellos is strong and beautiful. The Third Movement pizzicato alternation with the woodwind choir and brass was really nice. And the Fourth strong ending sealed up a really good work.
I have pondered what Pierre said to me about getting a recording of a new work and listening to it before a performance. As I’ve weighed that I’ve had thoughts both ways. Yes, if I were studying academically, that would be a good thing to do; or if I were writing a paper, etc. As I thought, I saw that I go to concerts to enjoy music. Then if a work catches my ear, I want to hear it again or get a recording to hear it many times. I will say about my concert preparation now that it is high on my agenda to get to the concert hall early enough to read all the program notes and go to the pre-concert lectures. They both prepare me for what I will hear and what I can listen for. I thank you for your bringing up the topic and I plan to meditate on the idea more.
Peace to you