BSO soars on its 10th year at Strathmore

Strathmore Music Center, Bethesda, MD/BSO photo

At the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's celebration of its 10th anniversary at the Strathmore Music Center Thursday night, fireworks and stars ignited an explosion of sorts when Garrick Ohlsson played Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18. 

The audience sat enthralled during the performance and at the end, called the pianist back four times.

Before the show began, I announced to a woman who sat two seats from me, hugging the wall, that I had come for Rachmaninoff.

"Oh," she smiled rather meekly, "I am new to classical music."

Well, our seats aren't the best, I whined (we were on the wrong side of the piano), but it's the sound we came to hear, not the visuals, and besides, I said, the price is right.

Garrick Ohlsson in Prague, May, 2013/YouTube

From our seats we could not see Mr. Ohlsson's hands as they raced up and down the keyboard like lilies gracefully landing at the speed of an asteroid upon a pond. 

And then...ouch! 

When he reached certain points in the composition, his fingers withdrew quickly as if he were striking a hot stove.

During some of the piece, while he played on, his eyes moved from the keyboard, and he watched Conductor Marin Alsop. Between the first and second movements when some in the center section began to applaud as they are wont to do, Mr. Ohlsson winced as he looked down upon the keys.

Two years ago I ventured out to Strathmore to hear Mr. Ohlsson play Rachy's Third Piano Concerto, another stellar performance. 

Before the music began last week, the announced program was delayed about 15 minutes by BSO leaders giving each other thanks, and then a huge screen dropped above the orchestra to reveal a bird's eye view of Mr. Ohlsson's hands which we were able to see, after all.

I wondered how many would call the screen a distraction, and at intermission, another seatmate and I discussed our mutual reactions. We were both magnetized by the video and at times, had to force our attention back to the music.

"I suppose people will complain," he said, and I agreed. 

It's hard to please everyone, I said, but the orchestras and symphonies now must pull out all stops to attract the younger crowds and whatever interaction it takes, it takes.

"Look around," he said.  "Where are the young ones?" and nodded to a fellow with a red beard in the center section who actually didn't look too young to me:  "There's one."  One.  About 35?   (Is 35 "young"?)

Whatever.

On my other side sat a lovely couple from Richmond who drove up to see "our Marin" conduct the BSO. 

Conductor Marin Alsop/BSO photo

 
"She was our assistant conductor for a year," the woman said proudly.  

I told them Conductor Alsop was quite popular "up here" and could probably be elected governor of Maryland, for if a Republican can be elected governor of Maryland....

"We knew she would not stay long in Richmond and would move up," said the woman's husband.  The woman wore a finger purse (!) and frequently used her opera glasses (we were seven rows from the front) which were trimmed in gold and silver. 

She asked me if there's a sign law up here.

Pardon, I said: A sign law?

"The signs here are so small, we can't find anything!" she exclaimed.

The second half of the show was a huge success, too, with Ottorino Respighi's Church Windows and The Pines of Rome. 

Several days later I noted among the pages of the Washington Post that the negative Robert Battey (what does he like?) was indeed annoyed by the giant screen and pooh-poohed the evening, wondering what in the world did the performance by a teenager, Evelyn Song (really, that's her name) who played the violin with the BSO's concertmaster, Jonathan Carney, at the beginning of the evening, mean exactly.

I'll tell you what it meant, Mr. Battey: The BSO rightfully was bragging about its outreach to the youth of the area in its two short videos, demonstrated by a 16-year-old virtuoso on the violin. That's what it meant.  What kind of understanding does that require?

Besides, Mr. Battey, can't your newspaper find a more current photo of Mr. Ohlsson than the old one it ran picturing the artist, not in the tails he wore Thursday, but in a 1970s suit which may have been shot at a rehearsal in Nebraska?

What a night at the concert hall!

A good reason to skip the Smithsonian's world religion lecture on Hinduism.

patricialesli@gmail.com

Baltimore Symphony presents 'From Russia with Love'

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was the guest artist at Thursday's performance at Strathmore by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/Photo by Christian Steiner

It was a night of music from Russia. 

Forget Putin but think Shostakovich (1906-1975) and Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), my two favorite composers, who filled the house and the program by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at Strathmore Thursday evening.

What was not to like?

The evening began with Sergei Rachmaninoff's always popular Vocalise followed by the powerful presentation by guest artist, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who delivered Dimitri Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor. 

From the first movement, when the sounds from her violin expressed sadness and later, foreshadowing, with singular percussion, a haunted tension led to the fierce passion of the second, the scherzo, and the melodies of the third, culminating in the lively but harsh finale.

The fervor Salerno-Sonnenberg utilized in interpretation matched the color of her red top which matched the blouse Maestro Marin Alsop wore which matched the evening's energy exuded by all the forces on stage.

Members of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/Photo, BSO

While she pierced her instrument with her bow, Salerno-Sonnenberg moved up and down, bending at times almost at right angles, frequently grimacing and expressing anguish.

Music and stand were unnecessary since she seemed to play with her eyes closed most of the time, or so they appeared to me in my chair nearby.

She pounded the violin strings, leaving one guessing how the poor instrument was able to endure her strength and intensity without breakage, but it answered in perfect response every time, softly and eloquently as she required, alas, no doubt fearful of going astray.

At times, during a violin respite, Salerno-Sonnenberg stood and turned her back to the audience, becoming a fan to enjoy majestic achievement by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra while Maestro Alsop weaved and led nearby.

Conductor Marin Alsop of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/Photo, BSO

Salerno-Sonnenberg's casual apparel (black skinny jeans) belied her performance which ended with shouts and cheers from the standing gallery and, for the first time, she smiled broadly and saluted her comrades, orchestra members whose output, as usual, was every bit as perfect as one has come to expect. 

The evening ended with Rachmaninoff's splendid Symphonic Dances with noticeable contributions from his beloved piano.  He wrote it only three years before he died, a summation, which he composed for the Russian ballet dancer, Fokine, according to program notes. 

For the encore, the orchestra played Shostakovich's Bolt Ballet Suite, No. 8 Final Dance and Apotheosis which was well received.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/Photo, BSO

Strathmore's love affair with Maestro Alsop continues:  Her contract has been renewed for seven years.

Ms. Salerno-Sonnenberg, a U.S. citizen, was born in Rome in 1961 and emigrated with her family to the U.S. when she was eight years old. In 2008 she was appointed music director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra in San Francisco. 

You can take the music out of Russia but you can't take Russia out of the music.  Amen. 

Thank you to Total Wine & More for sponsoring the show. 

Please, once more I must ask what's wrong with Strathmore that it doesn't install more seats and tables for dinner patrons?  How many years have I been complaining about this?  Think of the missed revenue because of lousy facility management, not to mention customer satisfaction.

Although you may be seated at one of the tiny tables for dinner before the concert, it does not guarantee that a pushy patron (comparable to those at the Kennedy Center) will not uplift your chair and dump you right out upon the floor. Or so goes the feeling.

After being dumped, just try to enter the lobby outside the music hall and find a seat to drink your wine or coffee.  Reserved for ushers and closed to patrons until 7:30 p.m., if you please.

Where is a person to go? 

Oh, I forgot: The patio with a temperature of 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Конечно!

Coffee or wine may warm you up on the Strathmore patio/Photo, BSO

BSO performances coming up at Strathmore:

March 15: Bach's Brandenburgs

March 22: Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto

March 27: The Bee Gees and 'Stayin' Alive'

April 5:  Bugs!  (Two performances for young children)

April 5:  Andre Watts Returns!

April 10:  Itzhak Perlman

April 25: Off the Cuff:  Mahler's Titan

May 3: Moo, Baa, Neigh (Two performances for young children)

May 3:  Yefim Bronfman

May 15:  All That Jazz, celebrating Kander and Ebb

May 24:  Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto

May 29:  A Midsummer Night's Dream Concert

June 7:  Summertime Movin' and Groovin' (Two performances for young children)

June 7:  Beethoven's Ninth

June 14:  Casablanca with music

Where:   Strathmore is located at 5301 Tuckerman Lane, N. Bethesda, MD 20852.

Park:  For free at the adjacent Metro Strathmore station.

Tickets:  Click here.



Patricialesli@gmail.com

 

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra rocks with Rachmaninoff

Sergei Romaninoff, age 12/Wikimedia Commons

To hear guest pianist Garrick Ohlsson play Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto is to enjoy a sensual experience which is not plentiful enough in anyone’s life. 

At Strathmore last weekend, music lovers sat like statues without moving while Ohlsson and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra played what is considered one of the most, if not the most, difficult of all piano concertos,  which was also the composer's (1873-1943) favorite piano concerto.

Garrick Ohlsson/instantencore.com

Some audience members draped over railings, others leaned forward with elbows on knees, chins resting on palms, hypnotized and afraid they might miss one of the many notes.  Equally as spellbound as their parents and grandparents were the young people who attended.

The hands of the pianist, who was the first American to win the International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition (1970), raced up and down the keyboard all night, crossing each other and moving almost as quickly as a hummingbird's wings.  

Ohlsson said later that memorization plays no role in his performance for he’s played Rach 3 “thousands of times,” and it has become part of his persona. His brain and fingers know what to do.

Maestro Marin Alsop and the orchestra complemented the pianist splendidly, and it was no surprise at the end when audience members, who filled the house, leaped up, applauding madly and shouting "Bravo" to four encores.

Conductor Marin Alsop/Opus 3 Artists

In a 30-minute conversation with audience members afterwards, Conductor Alsop said enthusiasm for the production helps her determine future programming, and the crowd cheered. 

Ohlsson began studies at Julliard when he was 13, and heard "Rach 3" the next year.   His teacher ordered him to play it at age 15 to avoid intimidation, he said.

Alsop and Ohlsson answered questions from the audience, bantering back and forth, quite at ease with themselves and each other. Approximately half the Strathmore house stayed late to listen.

Oh!  Crusted tilapia, couscous, and salad for $19.95 at the Strathmore restaurant. Great price and delicious, but the meal's pleasure is diluted by having to eat it on your lap because of insufficient tables and chairs.  Please, Strathmore.

Free parking at the Metro parking garage next door!

BSO concerts coming up at Strathmore:

Jan. 24:  Hairspray in Concert, 8 p.m.

Feb. 2:  Pictures at an Exhibition, 8 p.m. (Hindemith, Mozart, Mussorgsky by Ravel)

Feb. 7:  Stephen Hough plays Liszt

And on March 4 Ohlsson joins the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center to play Grieg's Piano Concerto No. 1.


Patricialesli@gmail.com

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra captures Shostakovich's genius

Marin Alsop leads the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Before the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra played Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, conductor Marin Alsop provided a brief history of the piece to a spellbound audience which filled the Strathmore Symphony Hall.

According to Ms. Alsop and program notes, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was in Leningrad, the city of his birth, on the evening of June 22, 1941, where he was shaken by the news that despite an agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany, Adolph Hitler's forces had attacked his homeland.  It didn't take long for German forces to overwhelm Russia and begin bombing Leningrad.

Hitler's goal was to take down Leningrad, "the once and future St. Petersburg."

The protection of Leningrad, October 1, 1941/David Trahtenberg, Wikimedia Commons

During the onslaught, an estimated one million Leningrad citizens died, but the Russian people refused to give up their city, and Shostakovich's talents and fortitude helped them persist.

The timing of his start on the symphony is actually in dispute, according to Wikipedia, but some claim Shostakovich began the composition in July, 1941, after the German attack.  Whenever the start, he dedicated his work to the city of Leningrad which he refused to abandon. By October, Shostakovich had written three movements. 

Dimitri Shostakovich in 1942, the year the Seventh Symphony premiered/Wikimedia Commons

Under orders from the government which wanted to protect one of its most talented, Shostakovich moved with his family from Leningrad to Moscow and then to Kuibyshev, both cities which premiered the symphony the following March, after he completed it in late December. The March productions were broadcast in the Soviet Union and abroad.

Meanwhile, English and American audiences eagerly wanted to hear it, and the score was transported on microfilm by car, ship, and plane through Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, and Brazil before reaching New York where orchestras competed to play the American premiere.  In a radio broadcast, Arturo Toscanini introduced it to the U.S. on July 19, 1942 with the NBC Symphony.  In the 1942-43 season, the BSO was one of 62 orchestras to play the work.  The entire composition calls for more than 100 musicians and lasts less than 90 minutes. 

Against a backdrop of quotes from Shostakovich and video of Leningrad and the initially downtrodden Russians, the BSO musicians enthusiastically played their most recent rendition.   The harsh sounds and clashes of war and its aftermath are the focus of the first movement, allegretto, lasting 28 minutes, however, the output and enjoyment of the music, despite its strident message, made it seem far shorter. 

Some have compared the movement to Ravel's Bolero to which Shostakovich replied, "That's how I hear war."

At the end and as expected, Strathmore attendees leaped immediately to their feet and gave the BS0 three encores.

Juxtaposed with Shostakovich's response to murder and political upheaval in his homeland during World War II, are the responses of another artist, Joan Miro, deeply affected by tragedies occurring at the same time in his native Spain.  On Sunday, a major exhibition of Miro's works, "The Ladder of Escape," opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the only venue in the U.S.

It is clear that the Strathmore audience adores its BSO and the confident Ms. Alsop, the first conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellow and the first woman to lead a major orchestra in the U.S.  This September she will celebrate her fifth anniversary with the BSO. 

Next up for the BSO at Strathmore is a program featuring works by another Russian composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and an Englishman, Sir Edward Elgar.  Conductor Alsop will lead, with guest artist Andre Watts on the piano for Rachmaninoff.

When:  8 p.m., Saturday May 12, 2012

Where:  Strathmore Symphony Hall adjacent to Metro Grosvenor-Strathmore station with free parking in the Metro garage

How much:  Call 301-581-5800 at Strathmore or the BSO ticket office at 410-783-8000 or 877-BSO-1444 to see if any tickets remain since it's sold out on the Web. Update: Today (May 7) two tickets at $88/each remained for the Strathmore performance, however, $25 tickets are available if you will go to Baltimore. 

For more information: 301-581-5200

patricialeighleslie@gmail.com

'Joan of Arc' dazzles Baltimore Symphony Orchestra audience

Hermann Stilke (1803-1860). Joan of Arc's Death at the Stake (1843) Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg/Wikimedia Commons

                                    


Powerful, stunning, and intoxicating.

Those are some of the adjectives which come to mind remembering the exceptional concert at Strathmore Saturday played by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in commemoration of its "women who take risks" series and the 600th anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc born in 1412, perhaps on Epiphany, January 6.

The music for the Voices of Light Baltimore premiere was composed by Richard Einhorn (b. 1952) performed to accompany the screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc, about Joan's trial and interrogation, her torture, imprisonment, and burning at the stake.

From recorded words in the trial, the judges asked Joan: "Are you in a state of grace?" "Are you Satan's creature?" and, to the guards, "Go, prepare the torture chamber."

The film was released a few years after the Catholic Church, which had ex-communicated Joan as a heretic, canonized her in 1920.

Most negatives and prints of Dreyer's film were lost in two fires, however, a Danish version was discovered in 1981 in a mental hospital in Oslo, Norway. In 1988 composer Einhorn "idly poking around in the film archives of New York's Museum of Modern Art  stumbled upon the movie and after viewing it "walked out...shattered" and immediately began writing his piece about the maiden, according to program notes.

It took Einhorn six years to complete Voices  which includes actual words from the trial, lots of medieval "misogynistic poetry," and her own writings. 

The Baltimore Choral Arts Society under the direction of Tom Hall added immensely to the production which never ceased to be haunting and ominous throughout the 90-minute presentation of 15th century music and frequent Gregorian chants. Church bells tolled intermittently.

Joan of Arc's birth place, now a museum,  Behind the trees is the church where she worshipped/Wikimedia Commons

     

The program quoted Einhorn who said Joan loved bells whose sounds seemed to speak to her.  The composer traveled to her home village, Domremy, France, where he recorded church bells for use in his score. At the film's end, they ring to toll her burning at the stake, and a man cries out "You have burned a saint!" Police seize weapons to beat unmercifully the hundreds of people who had gathered and wail in anger and sorrow, mourning the loss of an innocent person.

Joan was 19 when she died at the stake on May 30, 1431.  Her remains were burned twice more and then tossed in the Seine.

The entire musical rendition was captivating in its beauty of a tragedy. Renee Jeanne Falconetti starred in the film as Joan, a performance critic Pauline Kael called perhaps "the finest ...ever recorded on film." Ms. Falconetti never acted again.   (Watch the full movie here in French with English sub-titles.)

Soloists on Saturday were expert, and all were making their BSO debut: Julie Bosworth, Janna Critz, Tyler Lee, and David Williams. In the orchestra, drums, flutes, and strings got a heavy and much-appreciated workout.

At the evening's conclusion, the two teen-aged boys who sat beside me and never moved during the show, rose slowly from their seats, smiled softly and said, yes, Joan of Art was a remarkable person.  They were as captivated as the rest of us by the masterpiece they witnessed on the stage.

Six hundred years after Jeanne d'Arc, and we are reminded how little times have changed as we see in the halls of the United States Congress a similar jury of patriarchal white men sitting in judgment over women while Rush Limbaugh attempts to burn with his venom, a Georgetown University law school student.

Bravo to the prescient BSO for choosing risky women to feature this year. What would the judges think of an orchestra headed by the capable and erudite Marin Alsop? Shocked that a large city orchestra is headed by a woman, the first conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellow award and named last year to The Guardian's list of Top 100 Women? Congratulations, Ms. Alsop and the BSO on another stellar production.