One of our little luxuries in life is season tickets to the San Francisco Symphony. The last concert for this season in our series was last night. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted, with Thomas Hampson as the soloist.
The first piece was Aaron Copland's Short Symphony. I'm not overly familiar with this piece, although I know a fair amount of Copland's work. The performance shows that MTT has a deep understanding of American music, and is one of today's foremost interpreters of Copland's work. The intensity of this piece was startling, but it had a distinctively Copland sound. From the program notes, it took Copland two years to write this 15 minute piece. He definitely was aiming for no more and no less than he needed, and succeeded admirably.
The second 'piece' of the night was a set of five songs by Gustav Mahler from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The performance was recorded, and will be featured on a future CD in the SFS Mahler cycle that is in progress. Mahler's unique style shines through in these short pieces. "Urlicht" in particular has that sound of rural Austria and high symphonic style at the same time. I'm a huge Mahler fan, and greatly enjoyed this song cycle.
After the intermission, the final piece of the night was Also sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss. Strauss is one of the few composers who attempts Mahler's ideal of symphonic works where a piece creates an entire universe of its own. Echoes of this piece continue to appear in music throughout the 20th century. The beginning, of course, has a distinct cultural identity. It's impossible to hear it and not see a black monolith, some out of control apes, and a space station. Still, if you can get those images out of your head, you can easily see the intended imagary: sunrise. There's the first inkling of the Sun, and then first contact as the limb of the Sun emerges above the horizon. As the Sun continues to rise, the intensity of the repeated themes intensifies, until the whole of that giant nuclear fire in the sky is blazing in the morning sky, and the whole orchestra (including the organ) are pumping out maximum volume. (Note to self: make a point of finding an organ recital at Davies Symphony Hall. That instrument is amazing!) After sunrise, the music turns introspective. The string quartet that starts one of the main themes eventually expands to the entire string section, and the overall effect is sublime. Alexander Barantschik, the SFS concertmaster, was featured on all of the solo violin parts in the piece. His playing of the lyrical passages made his violin seem to sing, while other much folksier passages sound like a gypsy fiddle. (It doesn't hurt that he plays a great instrument - a 1742 del Gesu violin named "the David". Still, he has to play it to get those sounds!) The entire piece is, of course, a tone poem based on the Nietzsche text of the same name. After exploring all of the world available in the piece, Strauss wraps up the entire piece with a quiet and introspective coda.
Overall, this was an extraordinary night of music, and the SFS and MTT were in top form.
Coming next: the SFS Youth Orchestra celebrates their 25th anniversary on the 20th of May with a concert featuring some minor works. Yeah, that's it. They're playing Beethoven's Ninth!
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Thursday, March 29, 2007
So, what's with the blog title?
That's a good question!
The title is inspired by two different sources: a mildly obscure piece of classical music and a science-fiction short story. The former is "The Unanswered Question" by Charles Ives; the latter is "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov. While the story is a bit more literal (it's text, after all!), both have what might, at first, appear to be similar themes.
You can find a fun version of the Ives piece at the American Mavericks website, with a performance by the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. The Asimov story is available online at a site dedicated to the story, although I'm unsure of it's actual legal status.
You can read "The Last Question" for yourself. It's a bit more overtly religious than most fiction that I like, but it's a very satisfying short story. Indeed, it's reputed to be Asimov's personal favorite. The top level of the Multivax site is an amusing homage, but the question itself is a fundamentally meta-physical one. Physics has a clear answer: no. The details to explain that would take a while, so I'll let anyone interested ask, or Google for it.
The Ives piece is actually a bit more complex to explain. The piece itself is fairly simple, if unconventional. There's a soft continuum of strings that evokes a mildly exotic and spacious feeling. At intervals, a solo trumpet gives a simple set of notes that seems to be a question. A set of noisy and blaring flutes (yes, flutes!) answers the trumpet each time but the last. At the end, the trumpet's final question fades away, and the strings slowly fade to silence. Interpretations vary, but the general sense is remarkably similar to the Asimov story: a question is repeatedly asked, and never really answered in a way useful to the question's source.
There's a somewhat broader context here, too. At the time the music was written (1906), the debate between the two sides of classical music was ongoing. Should music be programmatic, as the Wagnerians thought, or entirely abstract, as espoused by the Brahmsian set? Ives, idiosyncratic as ever, seems to be saying "neither...and both" all in this one piece. To some extent, the entire piece is just an abstract work with no clear plot. On the other hand, it could be seen as literal. Indeed, the question in the title might be the larger question about the purpose of music, and the piece itself declines to answer.
None of this, of course, answers the question in the title of this blog entry. And, I'm not going to. You'll have to figure it out!
The title is inspired by two different sources: a mildly obscure piece of classical music and a science-fiction short story. The former is "The Unanswered Question" by Charles Ives; the latter is "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov. While the story is a bit more literal (it's text, after all!), both have what might, at first, appear to be similar themes.
You can find a fun version of the Ives piece at the American Mavericks website, with a performance by the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. The Asimov story is available online at a site dedicated to the story, although I'm unsure of it's actual legal status.
You can read "The Last Question" for yourself. It's a bit more overtly religious than most fiction that I like, but it's a very satisfying short story. Indeed, it's reputed to be Asimov's personal favorite. The top level of the Multivax site is an amusing homage, but the question itself is a fundamentally meta-physical one. Physics has a clear answer: no. The details to explain that would take a while, so I'll let anyone interested ask, or Google for it.
The Ives piece is actually a bit more complex to explain. The piece itself is fairly simple, if unconventional. There's a soft continuum of strings that evokes a mildly exotic and spacious feeling. At intervals, a solo trumpet gives a simple set of notes that seems to be a question. A set of noisy and blaring flutes (yes, flutes!) answers the trumpet each time but the last. At the end, the trumpet's final question fades away, and the strings slowly fade to silence. Interpretations vary, but the general sense is remarkably similar to the Asimov story: a question is repeatedly asked, and never really answered in a way useful to the question's source.
There's a somewhat broader context here, too. At the time the music was written (1906), the debate between the two sides of classical music was ongoing. Should music be programmatic, as the Wagnerians thought, or entirely abstract, as espoused by the Brahmsian set? Ives, idiosyncratic as ever, seems to be saying "neither...and both" all in this one piece. To some extent, the entire piece is just an abstract work with no clear plot. On the other hand, it could be seen as literal. Indeed, the question in the title might be the larger question about the purpose of music, and the piece itself declines to answer.
None of this, of course, answers the question in the title of this blog entry. And, I'm not going to. You'll have to figure it out!
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