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Our own oldmkvi shines with MTT and the SF Symphony!

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on February 24, 2017 at 12:15:29

Yes! - that was him playing sax in excerpts from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet last night. What a genius-level score! And I thought the playing of the whole orchestra throughout was great - gossamer strings, brilliant brass and winds, and impactful percussion - and all with a kind of you-can-take-it-for-granted precision. Yes, there was a squeak from the clarinet early on, but overall the playing was as wonderful as you'd expect considering how often the orchestra must have played this music. And even though I usually like more vibrato from my sax players (LOL!), oldmkvi covered himself with glory! Well done!

The audience loved it so much that people began to applaud before the performance was over (right after the Balcony Scene) - and they would not stop! MTT finally had to hold up his hands to stop the applause and announce, "We're very grateful for your applause - but we still have more excerpts to go!" ;-)

I noticed one other interesting thing I'd never seen before in an orchestral performance: very soon after the performance was already underway, the bass drum player used a spray bottle to apply some kind of liquid on the playing surfaces of his drum. He'd spray and then wipe the liquid around with a towel. He did the same thing near the end of the performance too. As I say, I've never seen that, and I wonder what was going on. Maybe it gave the sound greater impact (which it certainly did have!).

I got to Davies right at the nominal start time of the concert, and I mentioned to the usher near the ticket window that I wasn't sure I would get to my seat in time. "Oh don't worry about that!", she said. "Last night, John Adams was jabbering away about his piece for five or ten minutes before the start of the performance, and we're still seating people during that whole time!". "His piece" in this case was "Scheherazade 2" - or as he referred to it, "Scheherazade 2 point 0".

Now Adams is a composer whose music I generally don't mind, but I would hardly go out of my way to hear it. And the usher was right that he did jabber away: about how the original story was so cruel to women, how Scheherazade was such a "strong woman". . . and blah, blah, blah with more politically correct observations. And he capped it off with a swipe at Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade by saying that, by ignoring the cruelty to women underlying the story, Rimsky sleepwalked through the whole thing.

Permit me to offer you some advice, Mr. John Adams: at the point when your "Scheherazade 2" gets one-tenth of one percent of the love and respect that Rimsky's Scheherazade gets from audiences worldwide, then AND ONLY THEN should you presume to lecture us about how Rimsky-Korsakov sleepwalked through Scheherazade!

As it turns out, the Adams work is actually a violin concerto, and the soloist, Leila Josefowicz, has already made the transition from babe violinist to "strong woman" violinist. Adams himself said so! (Well, the "strong woman" part anyway.) And although the piece droned on for about 50 minutes, I couldn't help but respect the preparation and accomplishment which Leila showed. This piece seemed to be a demanding challenge for both orchestra and soloist. (I have it on good authority that BY FAR the greater portion of the rehearsal time for this concert was devoted to Adams' piece!). In any case, I was really impressed by the command that Leila showed in this difficult, unfamiliar music. And she played it from memory to boot. Another unusual thing about the piece was the large obbligato part for cimbalom. Unfortunately, all this was not enough to make Adams' new work all that interesting. The performance seemed result from a lot of work and effort which could easily have been put to better use.

Leila Josefowicz in her "babe" violinist days

Edits: 02/24/17 02/24/17

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