Access Atlanta > Arts > Our Reviews > Archives > 2005 > April > 17 > Entry
ASO and Emory Concerts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Concert Review
— New York New Music Ensemble, Friday at Emory University’s Emerson Concert Hall. www.art.emory.edu.
— Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Saturday at Symphony Hall. www.atlantasymphony.org
In the nostalgia-addicted classical music world, “masterpieces” are what we hear over and again. It’s a self-sustaining feedback loop. Familiarity begets popularity, and these powerful forces blur our perceptions of artistic context and, thus, value.
The mindset strangles the art form, but we know it’s true: people mostly buy tickets to hear music they already know. (Imagine if we felt the same way about movies: rejecting new films out of hand while re-watching a few dozen classics?)
So it happened over the weekend, when the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra programmed a concert devoid of “hits,” and a visiting chamber group spent an evening in uncharted territory. Great music making; great swaths of empty seats.
The New York New Music Ensemble’s bracing concert Friday evening included two world premieres, bunched together on the first half.
Hiroya Miura’s “Open Passage—In Memoriam Andrew Svoboda” — linking two composers from New York’s Columbia University — is an 11-minute edifice scored for piano, flute, violin and cello.
Born in 1976, the Japanese-born composer’s style is retro — albeit rooted in mid-century International Style modernism. It’s an atonal landscape accented by chirps, pips and purrs, enlivened by dramatic changes in texture and spiced by various sound-effects, like plunks made inside the piano. Mirura creates many brief, hauntingly gorgeous moments and just as many high-density “brown” patches — where the senses are overloaded.
John Anthony Lennon’s “Red Scimitar,” scored for six players and a conductor, also received its world premiere. Lennon, 55 and an Emory professor, says he took inspiration from the scimitar (a curved Arabian sword) to imagine, obliquely, what it’s like to suffer a beheading in the insurgent attacks in occupied Iraq. You’d never know that from just listening, as Lennon includes no Orientalist modes and no literal sounds of violence.
It is music of big personality. There’s a sense of attention-deficit and emotional sprawl in the music, which is perhaps intentional, given its subject matter.
At its best, Lennon’s 13-minute work scurries about in a ceaseless flow of ideas and bold statements, in the fertile plain between jagged modernism and low-lying populism. A flurry of low honks from the bass clarinet serves as a touchpoint. Agitated, almost cartoonishly hyper-dramatic rhythms are heard, too, along with bits of Dvorak-style sweeping romanticism. Pop-art composer Louis Andriessen is one audible influence, but so is the International Style, the same foundation used in Miura’s “Open Passage.” I’m eager to hear more of Lennon’s music.
On Saturday, I attended the ASO in Symphony Hall, and evening of highlights. I typically hear the orchestra on Thursdays, the first stand of three shows, and the playing often isn’t ideally polished, or the interpretation sounds under construction.
Not so this past Saturday. Music director Robert Spano began with Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in a lovely reading, energetically delivered. Still, Spano’s take with Haydn — unlike the way he conducts most composers — isn’t very personal. It sounded generic and middle of the road, like he hadn’t yet developed his own strong ideas.
Vaughan Williams’ Concerto for Bass Tuba is a serious, engaging work for an instrument that rarely receives star treatment — “Tubby the Tuba” excepted. The soloist was Michael Moore, who’s been ASO principal tubist since 1968, when he replaced his own father in the job.
Moore was at his best when the music demanded the most, in the yearning, plaintive, pastoral middle movement, and then in the brilliant, virtuosic finale.
Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 2, a rarely heard masterpiece closed the concert.
The symphony is a portrait of London by a passionate Londoner. Curiously, the “scenes” he depicts in the music are tourist postcard cliches, from the chimes of Big Ben to the peddlers’ cries in the market to horsey sleigh bells. That aside, much of the music is incredibly effective. The English countryside-inspired Lento movement and the tightly constructed Scherzo make a case for a first-rate symphony.
Here Spano and company dug deep into the music, at once beefy, analytical and extravagant on a moment by moment basis. If this music is so great, why don’t we hear it more often? That’s the conundrum of the state of classical music.
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