Emerson plays VCU in May

The Emerson String Quartet will perform in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Rennolds Chamber Concerts series on May 5 in place of violinist Leila Josefowicz, who canceled her VCU date for “personal reasons.”

The Emerson, long rated among the leading U.S. chamber ensembles, last performed in Richmond in 1996. The program for its Rennolds concert, 8 p.m. May 5 in VCU’s Singleton Arts Center, has not been announced.

Tickets already issued for Josefowicz will be honored for the Emerson date. Single tickets are $32.

For more information, call the VCU Music Department box office at (804) 828-6776, or visit http://www.vcu.edu/arts/music/dept/events/rennolds.html#violin

Review: Richmond Symphony

Steven Smith conducting
Jan. 14, Richmond CenterStage

One of the hardest things a symphony orchestra can do is play very quietly while maintaining balance, tonal quality, expression and projection. In that sense, the Richmond Symphony faces one of its biggest challenges of the season in accompanying classical guitarist Jason Vieaux in Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.”

This most familiar of guitar concertos requires not just an accomplished guitarist, which Vieaux certainly is, but also extraordinary sensitivity on the part of the conductor and orchestra, lest they overwhelm the soloist. The challenge is compounded when orchestral forces are substantial enough to project into a space as large as Richmond CenterStage’s Carpenter Theatre. Even when guitar sound is amplified, as it is in this weekend’s performances, maintaining balance between soloist and orchestra is very tricky indeed.

In the first of a pair of concerts, conducting an ensemble with a nearly full-sized complement of 36 strings, Steven Smith obtained rich and colorful sound from the orchestra, but without overbalancing Vieaux. The guitarist produced comparably robust tone and consistently fine expressive touches, notably in his extended duet with English horn player Shawn Welk in the concerto’s sublime slow movement. Amplification of the guitar sounded quite natural. Altogether, it was a jewel of a performance.

The Rodrigo is the centerpiece of an unusual program for the Masterworks series, which commonly is devoted to large-scale symphonic works. Of the four works on this bill, only one, Astor Piazzolla’s “Tangazo,” is scored for a big orchestra. The balance of the program, the Rodrigo concerto, William Bolcom’s “Commedia for (almost) 18th-Century Orchestra” and Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in E flat major, K. 543, are works ordinarily played by a chamber orchestra, as they have been played previously by the symphony, usually in small halls.

Bolcom’s “Commedia,” a sometimes startlingly comic send-up of classical-period style and orchestration (also, less obviously, an homage to Charles Ives and several other modernist musical icons), is raucous enough to fill a room the size of this hall, especially when the piece’s concertante string trio is placed in the balcony, as it is for these performances.

The Mozart symphony is made room-filling with a beefier reading than this composer’s orchestral music usually gets these days. Smith’s interpretation is not quite a throwback to pre-historically informed “big-band” Mozart, but it is more broadly paced and richer in string tone, especially bass strings, than usual. This symphony is a good choice for this kind of treatment, because its orchestration features no oboes and only one flute; its wind choir has a warm, mellow quality that goes well with full-bodied string sound.

Piazzolla, the modern master of the Argentine tango, wrote a number of orchestral concert pieces as well as smaller-scaled music made for nightclubs and dance halls. “Tangazo,” peppered with colorful and playful touches and atmospheric effects, sounds like music in search of a movie, and is given an appropriately big-screen, Technicolor reading from Smith and the orchestra.

The program repeats at 3 p.m. Jan. 15 at Richmond CenterStage, Sixth and Grace streets. Tickets: $18-$73. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://www.richmondsymphony.com/

A most unwelcome distraction

New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert stops the orchestra in the midst of the finale of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony when a marimba-toned cell phone goes off, The New York Times’ Daniel J. Wakin reports:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/new-york-philharmonic-interrupted-by-chimes-mahler-never-intended/?ref=music

Shades of the night in March 2009 when a cell phone chirped, not once but twice, as the Richmond Symphony played Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” a profoundly quiet piece at least as easily damaged by extraneous noise as the “dying away” at the end of the Mahler Ninth. Conductor Dorian Wilson and the orchestra played on as if nothing had happened.

That’s the usual response, Gilbert tells Wakin. Remarkably, this seems to be the first time in the New York Philharmonic’s history that a conductor has stopped a performance because of disruption in the audience. It ought to be standard practice, with the offender frog-marched out of the hall.

UPDATE: Wakin tracks down the culprit, a longtime philharmonic patron, who says, “I apologize to the whole audience” . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/nyregion/ringing-finally-stopped-but-concertgoers-alarm-persists.html?hp

Alexis Weissenberg (1929-2012)

Alexis Weissenberg, the Bulgarian-born pianist famed for his formidable technique and speedy tempos, has died at the age of 82. An obituary by Margalit Fox in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/arts/music/alexis-weissenberg-pianist-of-fire-and-ice-dies-at-82.html?ref=obituaries 

Review: Chamber Music Society

Jan. 6, First Unitarian Universalist Church

Mary Boodell, the Richmond Symphony’s principal flutist and a regular participant in the programs of the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia, is one of the most versatile and venturesome musicians in town.

Playing for a society program in October, she reveled in the exotically modernistic flute techniques permeating the “Four Pre-Incan Sketches” of Gabriela Lena Frank. In the opening concert of the society’s “Winter Baroque” mini-series, Boodell, playing the old-style traverso flute, made impeccably stylish work of Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto in G minor, known as “Il Cardellino.”

Boodell joined baroque violinists Krista Bennion Feeney, Fiona Hughes and David McCormick, violist Theresa Salomon, cellist James Wilson, harpsichordist Carsten Schmidt and lutenist David Walker, playing theorbo, the long-necked bass lute, in “Red Priest,” a program presenting three works of Vivaldi alongside pieces by three of his contemporaries, Arcangelo Corelli, Francesco Geminiani and Pietro Locatelli.

Italians of the late 17th and early 18th centuries created the violin as we now know it and the first examples of virtuoso music for the instrument; so, naturally, this program centered on violins. Feeney and Hughes were featured soloists, respectively, in Locatelli’s “Introduzione Teatrale” and the “Winter” Concerto from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” and were duo partners in Vivaldi’s Trio Sonata, Op. 1, No. 12 (“La Folia”). Hughes and McCormick took on Corelli’s brief Trio Sonata in G major, known as “Ciacona.” Feeney and Boodell were concertante soloists in Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso in D major, Op. 2, No. 4.

Virtuosity was not confined to these high-register voices. Some of the evening’s most impressive fiddling came from Wilson, the society’s artistic director, in the fast-and-furious continuo cello figurations underlying much of the program’s uptempo music. Harpsichordist Schmidt contributed similar animation and extroversion, and lutenist Walker both texture and color, to the rhythm and bass lines of the selections.

Although gut-strung fiddles such as these do not project as powerfully as modern, metal-strung stringed instruments, and are trickier to tune and more prone to mishaps (such as the string that snapped on Hughes’ instrument, luckily while she was playing a supporting role in the Vivaldi Flute Concerto, rather than one of the pieces in which she was showcased), their tone and color is less homogenized than those of modern strings; so this small ensemble produced a more varied tonal palette and more vivid sound effects and atmospherics than a modern orchestra might in this music.

The Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia’s “Winter Baroque” continues with “Chaconne,” a free lecture-recital at noon Jan. 7 in the Gellman Room of the Richmond Public Library, First and Franklin streets; and “Agony and Ecstasy,” a program featuring the “Mystery” sonatas of Heinrich Biber, at 4 p.m. Jan. 8 at First Unitarian, 1000 Blanton Ave. at the Carillon. Tickets: $25. Details: (804) 519-2098; http://www.cmscva.org/

Symphony commemorates 1812

The Richmond Symphony will mark the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 with a special concert at 3:30 p.m. Jan. 11 at the Carpenter Theatre of Richmond CenterStage, Sixth and Grace streets.

The program, conducted by Steven Smith, coincides with the opening day of the 2012 session of the Virginia General Assembly. The orchestra will play works written around or about 1812, including Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” which musically chronicles Napoleon’s invasion and retreat from Russia in the same year as the war between the United States and Great Britain.

Admission to the hour-long concert is free, but tickets are required. They may be ordered by calling the symphony’s patron services desk at (804) 788-1212 or e-mailing patronservices@richmondsymphony.com

WCVE (88.9 FM) and its affiliates will broadcast the concert shortly after 8 p.m. Jan. 11, following Gov. Bob McDonnell’s State of the Commonwealth address to the General Assembly.

Classics vs. moderns

In what they call “a striking challenge to conventional wisdom,” a team of researchers led by Claudia Fritz of the University of Paris report that a group of violinists, given six fiddles to play – two by Stradivarius, one by Guarneri and three by modern makers – couldn’t tell by sound which were classic instruments and which were modern, The Guardian’s Ian Sample reports:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jan/02/how-many-notes-violinist-stradivarius

“[T]he report of this test leaves too many questions unanswered,” writes cellist Steven Isserlis, also for The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/jan/03/stradivarius-v-modern-violins-study