Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I heard the London Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski, twice last week. On Sunday, Vadim Repin was the spell-binding soloist in Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor. The performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 after the intermission was intelligent and nuanced, more Apollo than Dionysus. Then on Monday H élène Grimaud performed a highly individualistic performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. The first movement was more frilly than strong. The second slow movement made up for the first. It sounded the depths, I thought. In the last movement, she seemed to be fighting against the music instead of playing it. It was a remarkable display of a fine musician imposing her will on a mighty music. I heard the Concerto in a way that I had never heard before, but was it Beethoven?  I did not care for Mahler's Symphony No. 5 performed after the intermission. The orchestral effort was heroic: the five movements added up to 72 ...

The Budapest Festival Orchestra was stupendous yesterday afternoon. Under the baton of its founder-conductor Iván Fischer, it rollicked through Shostakovich's "Selections from Suite for variety orchestra in eight parts" (1950), finessed Bernstein's "Serenade" (with replacement Dutch violinist Liza Ferschtman) and rendered Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 its fulsome due. I thought the first movement of the Rachmaninov was a little sluggish, but the rest of the symphony was played with such  emotional conviction that I fell in love with the music all over again. I had to rush off, abandoning AH, to meet EN for dinner before the NYC launch of the journal Asymptote. We had a good soto ayam at the Noodle Bar on Orchard Street, and then walked over to the Living Theater for the launch. It was lovely to meet Yew Leong's friends, poet and translator Yu Yan Chen and contributing editor Dylan Suher. Of all the readers, I particularly enjoyed hearing Cole Sw...

With EN, I saw the dance performance "Vertical Road" at the Rose Theater on Wednesday. Choreographed by London-born Akram Khan, to music by Nitin Sawhney, the performance was disappointing. It began with someone behind the curtain shaking it and it ended with the curtain falling down, an act of revelation that just did not materialize. The movements were uninspired, at one point featuring a dancer moving two others around like marionettes by waving his hand over their bodies. Supposedly inspired by the Sufi tradition and the Persian poet Rumi, it slotted some whirling dervish moves into a grammar dictated by modern dance. As EN put it, the production exoticized itself. The eight dancers, assembled "from across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East," was a politically correct version of multi-culturalism. The production was an object lesson in how not to do fusion. * The Takács Quartet was serenely brilliant last night at Alice Tully. In superbly balanced and ble...

Heard Orpheus Chamber Orchestra again last night, at Carnegie Hall. Did not care very much for the score or the playing of Tippett's Divertimento on "Sellinger's Round" with its English musical allusions.  Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the French pianist, came on next to play, with Louis Hanzlik on trumpet, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor. First time I heard the piano concerto, and I loved it for its youthful brio. It brimmed with ideas and moved with zip. Thibaudet was poetic where the music was poetic and brash where it was brash. A tad too civilized, perhaps, but that might be my prejudice against the French. After the intermission, we heard Honegger's languorous evocation of a summer morning. Pastorale d’été was quite lovely, if not exactly ground-breaking. Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings concluded the program. Lush and sentimental. I hated it. I thought the musicians were on auto-pilot. Here was where an original interpreter--a conductor, ...

Last Wednesday, GH and I heard the London Symphony Orchestra, led by Sir Colin Davis, performed an all-Sibelius program at Carnegie Hall. Nikolaj Znaider soloed in the Violin Concerto in D minor, and he was terrific, warm and delicate in the quiet passages. I have his performance of Elgar's Violin Concerto on my iPad, and listen to it over and over again. For some reason I did not care so much for Symphony No. 2 performed after the intermission. It was a rather more unconventional program last night at Alice Tully. A part of White Light Festival, "A Homage to J. S. Bach" looked at how Russian composers have been influenced by Bach's musical forms while using a modern tonal idiom. The program was headlined by Gidon Kremer, who played with beautiful intonation a chaconne from one of Bach's partitas. I also enjoyed very much Shostakovich's Piano Trio 2, which Kremer played with cellist Giedre Dirvanauskaite and pianist Andrius Zlabys, both from Lithuania. Kreme...

Things Out of Place A flute in a trumpet case. A red crayon slash on white linen. A spray of heath in a plastic pail outside a deli. A cheeky boy among mourners at a wake. A beautiful man married to a woman. A Singaporean in New York. The Singaporean in Singapore. The moon in a lake. * Listened with LW to the London Philharmonic, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, at Lincoln Center on Sunday. Shostakovich's Five Fragments (1935) were minimalist delights. The conducting was precise but not prissy. Alexander Toradze played Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major (1929-31). The second movement was extremely moving, and I teared up. As LW said, the French is just so good at handling sentimentality with intellectual wit. After the intermission the orchestra played Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4 in C minor. It was massive and manic, especially the first and last movements. Show-offish, but inventive and colorful, nevertheless. It was deeply indebted to Mahler for its woodland soun...

from Andrew Porter's review of Harrison Birtwistle's "The Minotaur" at the Covent Garden: The Minotaur, offspring of Pasiphae's surrender to penetration by a bull that may have been Poseidon himself--Euripides' "mingled form where two strange shapes combined, and different natures, man and bull, were joined"--is the protagonist of Birtwistle's new opera for Covent Garden. Over a decade ago, Friedrich Durrenmatt's widow gave him an unrealized ballet scenario by her husband: the Minotaur, brooding in a labyrinth of mirrors, finally runs to embrace, but is killed by, a mirror-image of himself who proves to be Theseus in minotaur-disguise. (Half-brothers they were, if Poseidon indeed sired both; Ariadne and the Minoatur are half-sister-and-brother.) Murders and monsters have been recureent in Birtwistle's work; so have ritual repetitions; and so have labyrinths: intricate, extended sound structures, such as the Exody composed for the Chicago...