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December 2005
New Trinity Baroque’s ‘Candlelight Christmas’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New Trinity Baroque’s “Candlelight Christmas.” Saturday at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta. www.newtrinitybaroque.org.
CONCERT REVIEW
When violinist John Holloway and New Trinity Baroque are going full fury, no music ensemble in Atlanta creates so much excitement. No group seems as vital.
In “Candlelight Christmas,” Saturday at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, they delivered the most satisfying concert of this classical holiday season — a model for how to do it — and were joined by organist Brad Hughley and St. Bartholomew’s a capella Schola.
Their program covered about a dozen short vocal and instrumental works of 17th century German composers, including Buxtehude, Biber, Pachelbel — the generations before Bach and Handel.
An eloquent speaker, Holloway explained that music of Christmas is often in the warm, lulling 6/8 meter of cradle songs and often pastoral in character: naïve and rustic, of shepherds celebrating the season. When you combine that mood with the contrapuntal elegance and harmonic gravitas typical of the German school, you get Christmas music of uncommon sincerity and substance — the perfect antidote to an overdose of “Jingle Bell Rock.”
The evening began with carillon bells pealing outside the sanctuary, the first of many touches that helped create an air of ceremony and, at times, a sense of musical holiness.
The evening’s highlights can when New Trinity were on their own — pared down for this concert to just two violinists, Holloway and Mirna Ogrizovic, with continuo provided by Predrag Gosta on chamber organ and Christina Babich on cello.
In Biber’s Sonata “Pastorella” Holloway’s fiddle sang, stomped and swayed, rhythmically sturdy and viscerally thrilling. They emphasized the bizarre chromaticism of Johann Joseph Fux’s “Sonata Pastorale,” making this music from the early 1700s anticipate Viennese classicism or, alternatively, experimental modern music.
Soprano Julia Matthews, based in Reading, Pa., joined them for several brief cantatas. She was most convincing in Christoph Bernhard’s “Fear you not” (“Weihnachtskonzert”), where she summoned a choir boy’s chaste “white” tone but also let loose a few moments of operatic opulence.
Hughley, playing St. Bart’s great Rosales pipe organ, was at his best in Buxtehude’s Passacaglia in D minor, in thick swaths of glorious, lucid sound. Near concert’s end, the Schola — a group of enthusiastic amateurs — sang Michael Praetorius’ “A Rose Sprang Up” an ancient Christmas chorale that seemed to sum up the mood of the season.
New Trinity’s next performance, Feb. 11, continues to explored this rich era in a program titled “Baroque Before Bach.”
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Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (and Bach) from ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphon.org.
Old friends G.F. Handel and J.S. Bach join the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on stage this weekend for music of the Christmas season. Conducted by ASO chorus director Norman Mackenzie, the concert Thursday evening proved to be another sparkling facet of the orchestra’s zooming artistic progress.
For the institution, its appeal is spreading far outside Atlanta and the Deep South.
For instance: After last month’s triumphant in-concert performances of Osvaldo Golijov’s opera “Ainadamar,” the ASO and music director Robert Spano have been invited to take the show on tour to Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, in June.
Meanwhile, musicians in the mighty Chicago Symphony have added Spano to the short list of candidates for its music directorship, which comes open this summer. (Although Spano’s ASO contract runs through 2009, conductors are notorious for holding two or more posts concurrently.)
There’s more: ASO president Allison Vulgamore, credited with piloting the orchestra to financial stability and enabling its progressive artistic agenda, is the talked-about candidate to take charge of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a venerable ensemble suffering an administrative crisis.
Hire away Atlanta’s musical leaders? For the moment, it’s all speculation. What’s increasingly clear is that other cities, some mired in orchestral malaise, are starting to want what we’ve got.
Thursday from Symphony Hall what we got was the same sort of concert heard all over: bleeding chunks of Bach’s “Christmas” Oratorio and Handel’s “Messiah.” Yet under Mackenzie’s spirited baton, and with the ASO Chamber Chorus in top form, the evening held many surprises.
Designed for the Lenten season, “Messiah” has been an Advent evergreen since it arrived in Boston in 1818. Mackenzie followed the shallow tradition of performing just part one, the nativity portion of the score, tacking on “Hallelujah” and calling it a show.
But which “Messiah” to perform? A practical man of the theater, Handel in his own lifetime rearranged “Messiah” to suit the specific talents of the available singers and orchestra. The soprano can’t sing low notes? No problem, if you’re the composer: you simply rewrite her arias, tailoring them to encompass her limited range. With annual performances spread over the last few decades of the composer’s life, it’s no wonder there is no definitive edition of the score.
The ASO, following Robert Shaw’s game plan, uses as a starting point one well-documented performance from May 15, 1754. Mackenzie here wasn’t going for literal historical accuracy: that 1754 concert employed just 22 singers; the Symphony Hall stage on Thursday held more than 60 vocalists.
Still, Mackenzie urged the band to adopt a few “historically informed” performance practices. For the strings, these include techniques like spare vibrato, shorter bow strokes and more crisp phrasings. The winds are asked to blow bright, pungent tones. Harpsichordist Peter Marshall’s continuo playing was a thorough delight.
The only serious drawback — and it’s very serious — was the balance of the solo vocal quartet: soprano Leah Partridge, mezzo Nannette Soles, tenor Frank Timmerman and baritone Gerard Sundberg.
While the men delivered their parts with consistency and a bit of flair, the women stumbled. Soles, in particular, had a rough time navigating the vocally treacherous displays in “But who may abide the day of His coming,” which was designed for an operatic coloratura and features a prestissimo section that’s the fastest marking Handel ever wrote.
J.S Bach started the evening. Here the solo vocal quartet more easily matched their parts. Mackenzie shaped the music with intelligence and character, a fresh and fetching performance.
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Tobias Picker’s ‘An American Tragedy’ at the Met
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
NEW YORK OPERA REVIEW
NEW YORK OPERA REVIEW
Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy� at the Metropolitan Opera, through Dec. 28. 212-362-6000, www.metopera.org. (In Atlanta, the opera will be heard live from the Met Dec. 24 at 1:30 p.m. on WABE 90.1 FM.)
New York — Political pundits will never scream about it on television, but there’s an increasingly clear red state/blue state divide in contemporary American opera. The cultural values, however, are divided by opera companies and their composers, not geography.
In essence, it comes down to what a typical listener might term modernist vs. traditional. (Forget for a moment that modernism has been the dominant tradition for the past half century.)
When commissioning new works, opera companies in Detroit, St. Louis and Dallas, for instance, have hewed to the traditional — linear storytelling; politically noncontroversial topics; good-vs.-evil plots with clear resolution; and, crucially, dissonance used mainly for psychological or cinematic effects, but never woven into the fabric of the score.
By this reckoning, the modernist style might include everything else. At the San Francisco Opera, John Adams’ latest opera, “Doctor Atomic,� premiered in October. Onstage, it was blue state all the way, highlighted by edgy, politically charged commentary on an opaque topic — the morality of dropping the atom bomb on the Japanese — and a plot that flickered between realism and meditation.
Quality is not determined by musical styles or politics, of course, but a composer who takes an artistically “retro� approach should, in theory, have an easier time than one who is trying to reinvent the genre.
The latest salvo in this cultural struggle comes from New York, where the Metropolitan Opera has commissioned Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy,� which runs through Dec. 28. With a poorly paced libretto by Gene Scheer, it’s a deluxe, mostly old-fashioned opera that tries hard to place the familiar American epic onstage, involving a man’s ambition, set within a framework of class structure, religion, morality, money and sex.
Like the George Stevens’ film “A Place in the Sun,� the opera is based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1920s novel about an amoral young man and the two women who represent the poles of society. He satisfies his lust with a factory girl, whom he impregnates, while also wooing a rich and beautiful socialite. With ambitions of joining the moneyed class, he drowns the to-be mother, stands trial, repents to his Christian zealot mother and, finally, takes his seat in the electric chair. The 1951 film version holds much more emotional uncertainty than Picker’s opera. The delectable, 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and her strong family embody the American dream and contrast with the hopelessness of Shelley Winter’s dreary poverty. Montgomery Clift’s crime is horrible, but you can root for him anyway. Hollywood’s take on Dreiser was subtle, faceted, compelling.
Picker’s music ennobles his characters with no such power. “American Tragedy� is his fourth opera. The composer here writes vocal lines that pleasingly follow the contours of speech but just as often sours on an awkward or vocally ungrateful turn. Orchestrally, he hectors, rather than seduces, with jarring chordal progressions and bland rhythms. From the opening, he jackhammers the mood of the final tragedy. Across three hours, Picker fatigues the listener’s ear.
Still, the Met knows how to deliver a grand show. Almost all the roles are well cast, and in Francesca Zambello’s taut direction and James Conlon’s conducting the disciplined Met orchestra, the story unfolds with unflagging concentration.
Handsome, meek and vocally serviceable, baritone Nathan Gunn looks and sounds the part of confused killer Clyde.
As the factory girl Roberta, Patricia Racette is blessed with a pretty, girl-next-door soprano with lovely top notes and no sexiness in her sound. (Racette played a similar, youthfully naive personality in Picker’s first opera, “Emmeline.�)
Onstage, Racette is just as likable as her opposite number, glamorous mezzo Susan Graham, who sings Sondra gorgeously and affectionately but here looks too matronly to play the ingénue. Musically, Clyde and Sondra’s romance could have been fresh, joyous and love-struck, a welcome contrast to the gnawing doom. Picker didn’t exploit that opportunity.
Smaller roles, too, hold impressive voices, notably low-lying mezzo Dolora Zajick as Clyde’s missionary mother. Mezzo Jennifer Larmore (a Marietta native) sings the cameo role of Clyde’s aunt, all affected mannerisms and snarky tones. If only Picker had given them all something better to sing.
Atlanta Opera general director Dennis Hanthorn, by the way, attended opening night. “It’s audience-friendly and dramatically strong,� he said, emphasizing the opera’s traditional approach. “It’s the sort of new opera that might work in Atlanta.�
“An American Tragedy� is the first Met premiere since John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby� (1999), another score mired in thrice-familiar musical idioms, with little new to add beyond a great plot. So perhaps the paradox is that these traditional-style operas have greater immediate appeal but compromise an artist’s struggle to be original, to find his own voice. And it’s reflecting a cultural divide, like politics in America. Operatically speaking, are we on the right track? Audiences and critics are divided.
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Mackenzie’s debut ‘Christmas with the ASO’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
“Christmas with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.” Thursday in Symphony Hall, Program repeats 8 p.m. Friday and 2 and 8 p,m. on Saturday. www.atlantasymphony.org.
This weekend in Symphony Hall, “Christmas with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra” — a local tradition with roots back to the 1940s and to the late Robert Shaw — continues under new management.
Thursday evening, for the first time, the show was conducted by ASO chorus director Norman Mackenzie. He led a superbly played concert that was unfailingly energetic and often charged with emotion — an all around winning series debut.
Mackenzie opened the program with the magical shimmers of percussion and celeste, introducing “O Come, Emmanuel” (in an effective arrangement by Alice Parker). With powerful abandon, the ASO Chorus landed on the words “rejoice, rejoice,” setting the mood for what followed.
By the now-hallowed Shaw tradition, the 80-minute Christmas pageant moved fast, with few pauses and no intermission. Divided into four parts, Mackenzie combined sacred works, ancient carols, spirituals, festive-sounding orchestral numbers and a few sing-alongs. By design, when you join more than a thousand people to sing a 700-year-old English carol like “The First Nowell,” you gain access to deep psychic memories left untapped in today’s dispose-all culture.
And in the Shaw tradition, the Christmas concert is dominated by choral music. In a capella numbers like Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia,” the ASO choristers sang like they’re the greatest choir in the world — with burnished tone and tender affection.
The men of the Morehouse College Glee Club, directed by David Morrow, offered spirituals and carols with exceptional verve and elegance, highlighted by Babatunde Olatunji’s “Betelehemu,” a fantastical West African carol by sung in the Yoruba language. Nothing tops it, not even the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah,” which followed.
The unblemished voices of the Gwinnett Young Singers, led by Lynn Urda, were at their best in René Clausen’s calypso-tinged “Psalm 100.”
Where Mackenzie’s conducting of the ASO chorus was pristine and passionate, his handling of the orchestra sometimes seemed less involved. He conducted a movement from Poulenc’s “Gloria,” for instance, with an ear for the tangy harmonies but gave a rather boxy shape to the melodic lines — and focused his attention throughout on the chorus. But then his reading of Bizet’s orchestral “Farandole” was big and brassy and exploded with life.
Still, it all came together as a joyous whole. At the end, after a sing-along of “Adeste, fideles,” the appreciative audience cheered and thundered like they’d rediscovered a favorite holiday tradition.
The evening started with a three-minute business transaction: Wachovia Foundation’s $5 million gift to the ASO toward its planned Symphony Center, which carries the fund-raising total just over the one-third mark. (Only $200 million left.)
The little ceremony wasn’t accompanied by music, and normally you want to keep the corporate logos and marketing schemes off stage because they would too easily swamp the art. But perhaps, if these sorts of major Symphony Center gifts must be presented publicly on stage, the orchestra should set the mood by playing the shimmering, love-struck chords from the Presentation of the Rose scene from “Der Rosenkavalier.” It might help convey how euphoric the ASO musicians and concert audiences will feel when Atlanta finally has a decent concert hall.
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Stephane Deneve conducts the ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org.
Stéphane Denève is a young French conductor riding a wave of critical raves. After one hearing, for instance, a Washington Post critic all but suggested the 34-year-old conductor should be next in line as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra — although he’s just started his first significant job, learning the ropes with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, a regional ensemble.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, Denève made his Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. If he wasn’t instantly offered keys to the city, he at least left an uncommonly vivid first impression.
His programming of mostly French music helped. So did the conductor’s showmanship. Tall and crowned with a mop of reddish-brown hair, he spoke with panache and wit to the audience, introducing the first piece: Guillaume Connesson’s “Une Lueur dans l’age somber” (“A Glimmer in the Age of Darkness”), composed this summer and premiered, in Scotland, in September.
The conductor said Connesson, 35, was inspired by a space-telescope photo of light from the other side of the universe. Denève framed our aural impressions by calling the 20-minute work a “cosmic-pastoral symphony.”
“Une Lueur” sounds modern and very French, where harmony is a counterpoint of timbres. It also evokes the gentle atmospherics of Debussy, and places Connesson in the company of other great (and eclectic) Francophone composers like Vivier, Dutilleux and Dusapin.
“Une Lueur” has no “program” or plot line, but there is an arc of a voyage, with audible anchor points and a satisfying sense of resolution.
In Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, German pianist Lars Vogt seems to share a mindset with Denève. Vogt’s playing was elegant, substantial and surprisingly fresh at each turn. He seems incapable of delivering a routine performance.
There’s a sublime passage, near the end of the concerto’s slow movement, where the strings pluck simple accompaniment and the pianist has just a few notes on the page. Here the soloist is expected to ornament and personalize the phrase. Vogt didn’t embellish at all. By sheer gravitas, he connected each note into a richly detailed, almost operatic lyrical line — it was a moment of subtle, poignant, deep Mozart.
After intermission came Claude Debussy’s “Iberia,” a sort of touristic postcard of Spain. It’s the middle movement from the symphonic triptych “Images.”
By emphasizing the almost mechanical repetitions in the opening and closing sections of “Iberia,” Denève reimagined the composer’s painterly, Impressionistic sound, where the foreground of lissome woodwinds is set against a watery and slow-moving orchestral background.
Although the orchestra often sounded uncertain of where the conductor would lead them next — with a corresponding reduction in ensemble cohesion — the interpretation was smart and rousing, a lucid frenzy.
Denève closed with Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse,” a glittery, ballroom-sized waltz with an unsettling undercurrent suggesting cultural doom.
Here again, Denève precisely and exquisitely balanced the winds against the strings, to ghostly effect. In familiar Ravel, the ASO sounded like its old self, in the most beguiling ways. One expects to be hearing a lot more from Stéphane Denève.
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