The Washington Post: Classical music festivals feature Mother Nature as accompaniment

The Washington Post
By Michael Andor Brodeur

Sun Valley Music Festival
For nearly 40 years, this admission-free festival has been attracting persnickety listeners and unpicky picnickers to Sun Valley, Idaho. Music Director Alasdair Neale has lined up strong guest artists, including pianist Orli Shaham (July 30 and Aug. 3); mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke (Aug. 9 and 10); Stéphane Denève, the new director of the New World Symphony, conducting a concert of John Williams’s music (Aug. 12); pianist Yefim Bronfman (Aug. 14); and violinist Augustin Hadelich (Aug. 20 and 21).

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The Washington Post: NSO’s ‘Wind & Wave’ celebrates the sea, but ignores the tide

The Washington Post
By Michael Andor Brodeur

The National Symphony Orchestra’s sea-and-sky themed program features violinist Anne Akiko Meyers in a world premiere by Michael Daugherty

This guy right here loves a theme. When orchestras build a night of music around a central idea — be it a topic, a color, an era, a season — it offers listeners a comfy couch of context that allows us to settle in and feel situated. Having a theme also allows us to hear pieces of music in fresh dialogue with one another.

More to the point of this review, sometimes a theme just provides a good enough excuse to invite old friends over for a party, as was the case with the National Symphony Orchestra’s “Wind & Wave” concert on Thursday (repeating Friday and Saturday nights). This sea-and-sky-inspired selection brought together works from Richard Wagner (the overture to “Der fliegende Holländer”), Samuel Barber (“Night Flight”) and Claude Debussy (“La Mer”).

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Photo Credits: Jati Lindsay

Washington Post: Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Debuts at Wolf Trap

Washington Post
Patrick D. McCoy

A balmy evening and an enthusiastic audience created the perfect setting Wednesday for the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra’s Wolf Trap debut. But there are things beyond the weather to consider for the orchestra’s appearance in the cultural backyard of our nation’s capital — repertoire among them. Conducted by Long Yu, the program began with “Wu Xing” by Chinese composer Qigang Chen. Based on the traditional pentatonic scale, the work took on an otherworldly quality. Divided into five short movements, the elements of metal, wood, water, fire and earth were reflected in the instruments…

With new sounds in the beginning of the concert to the tried and true of the Western canon, the Shanghai Symphony’s debut at Wolf Trap was a wonderful snapshot of its musical history and tradition.

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Washington Post: Juilliard Quartet shows new faces, same strong voice

Washington Post
Patrick Rucker

"Decisive and uncompromising...Juilliard’s confidently thoughtful approach, rhythmic acuity and ensemble precision were on full display."

Washington Post: Serenade! Choral Festival on the Hotlist for June

Washington Post
By Going Out Guide Staff

The Hotlist: 13 things to see, eat, drink and do in June

Serenade! Washington D.C. Choral Festival at Kennedy Center, June 28-July 3

The international choral festival moves to the Kennedy Center, which continues its celebration of the 100th birthday of President John F. Kennedy by showcasing choirs from countries where his Peace Corps initiative has been active. The list is long: Depending on the day, you can see traditional groups from countries including India, Ireland, Panama, Zimbabwe, Bulgaria, Latvia, Mongolia or Ghana. Catch the grand finale July 3, at the Concert Hall, to see all of the choirs in action together. Free.

— Fritz Hahn, Maura Judkis, Peter Marks, Harrison Smith, John Taylor

Washington Post: Anne Akiko Meyers: Violinist breaks a leg — or rather, a foot.

The Washington Post
By Anne Midgette

“Break a leg” and “the show must go on” are among the most overused injunctions in the performing arts. On Friday, Anne Akiko Meyers joined the lists of performers who have obeyed both.

To be exact, she didn’t break a leg. She broke her foot. But it didn’t stop her from performing Mason Bates’s challenging violin concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra on Friday and Saturday nights (after Thursday night’s unhampered performance).

“I thought I just completely sprained my foot,” the violinist said by phone from her home in Austin, Texas on Monday afternoon. “It was black and blue. But I didn’t know it was broken. I have never broken anything in my body.”

On Friday night, all that was evident was a slight limp – and slightly unconventional footwear, sturdy platform sandals. (“They’re like wearing sneakers,” Meyers said.) Sitting in the audience, I might not have noticed either had I not been tipped, off the record, before the concert, that Meyers had had a bad fall in the afternoon. That explained the placement of a stool on stage; but in the event, Meyers walked out, did not use the stool, and played the difficult concerto with aplomb.

By Saturday morning, the foot had ballooned. For Saturday night’s performance, Meyers used a wheelchair to get on stage – but still played standing up.

“You cannot sit and play Mason’s music,” she said on Monday. “It doesn’t work.” Besides, she added, “If I had sat, I would never have gotten up.”

The accident itself was relatively benign, or perhaps “domestic” is a better term: Meyers was pushing a stroller with her two daughters, ages four and five, while checking her e-mail on a smartphone, and didn’t see the curb at the edge of the sidewalk.

“It happened at like two o’clock,” she said. “I had a soundcheck at four.” There wasn’t time to go to the doctor, and besides, she was pretty sure what a doctor would say: “You need to ice it, and elevate, and medicate: three things I couldn’t do at that moment.”

It wasn’t until she got home to Austin on Sunday that she went to the emergency room and discovered that she had played with a broken foot.

Her misadventure is reminiscent of the time in 2009 that the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato fell on stage and broke her leg during a performance of “The Barber of Seville” at Covent Garden. DiDonato finished the performance, on crutches, and then went to the hospital. She sang the next performance in a wheelchair.

But opera staging involves so much physical activity that people are apt to get hurt once in a while. (I remember a night when the stage knife failed to retract when Don Jose stabbed Carmen, drawing blood from the mezzo-soprano Elena Zaremba. Fortunately he only hit her arm.) Generally speaking, the concert stage tends to be a less perilous place.

Meyers is not cancelling any performances. Next on her schedule is a recording in London of a new piece by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, Szymanowski’s violin concerto, and Mortin Lauridsen’s arrangement of his popular “O Magnum Mysterium.” At least no one will see her footwear for that.

Washington Post: Julian Rachlin in Washington with Orchestre National de France

Washington Post
By Anne Midgette

I confess I wasn’t very excited about going to hear the Orchestre National de France play a program of chestnuts on Sunday afternoon. Evidently, a lot of other music-lovers shared my sentiments, because the Kennedy Center Concert Hall was only about half-full.

Why, after all, should we want to hear the Orchestre National de France? It’s partly the presenter’s job to let us know. And indeed, Doug Wheeler, the president emeritus of Washington Performing Arts, answered in his brief and on-point remarks from the stage before the show: because the orchestra was among the first that the organization’s founder, Patrick Hayes, presented in Washington even before Washington Performing Arts came to be, and the two institutions have had a long and fruitful collaboration ever since. [Ed: The previous sentence has been corrected; it originally misstated the date of Washington Performing Arts’s founding.] Maybe knowing that would have incited a few ticket-buyers; as it was, it was a bit of too little, too late.

Why else? Because their music director, Daniele Gatti, is a heavyweight in the conducting world, and will take over the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, one of the world’s greatest ensembles, when his contract with this group ends at the end of the current season.

But we couldn’t have known some of the other reasons beforehand. For instance: because Julian Rachlin, the violin soloist in the Shostakovich first concerto, is a veritable force of nature who turned out to be the centerpiece of a searing performance of that work. And because everything the orchestra played on Sunday was pretty remarkable — even for those of us who said beforehand that we had heard Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony done so often, and done so well, that we had no desire to hear it again any time soon. (An awful lot of my job these days seems to involve defending fine performances of over-familiar works.)

Gatti is a formidable presence on the podium: visually, he conveys a sense of physical power, so that his delicacy and restraint and detail take on a kind of implicit force. He used this to full effect throughout hte afternoon, starting with an exquisite, languid, idiomatic performance of Debussy’s “Prelude to the afternoon of a faun,” in which every instrument offered precision while maintaining the soft, fluid contours of this score.

But it was the Shostakovich that was the real tour de force. Rachlin, the violinist, is a small contained firebrand of a man onstage, and he eased his way into the opening movement with playing that was almost painful in its muted restraint, over the humid, brooding chords of the orchestra. The second movement then uncurled into some of the most biting fierce Shostakovich playing I can remember hearing. And when Rachlin got going into the final cadenza, he became a wild thing, a kind of inspired mad scientist in a monologue both profound and terrifying, until the orchestra finally chimed in with ferocious clashes of regretful understanding.

I didn’t even need to fight to lower my defenses against the Tchaikovsky; Gatti and the orchestra simply leveled them, with authoritative, urbane playing. Gatti even nodded to the piece’s familiarity by leaving off conducting entirely at times, keeping himself to the most minimal of gestures even in the final movement, which nonetheless seemed informed by the Shostakovich that had preceded it: more abrasive and aggressive than a triumphant resolution.

So those of us who went to this concert were pretty happy we had gone. Now, Washington Performing Arts is looking for ways to convince you that you want to go hear Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, who arrive with Marc-André Hamelin and a slightly less overworked program on February 15th. You can get tickets at a 50% discount now.

Washington Post: China Philharmonic’s Silk Road tour wends to Iran

Washington Post
By Anne Midgette

Photo: China Philharmonic Orchestra

Cultural diplomacy is a significant activity for symphony orchestras. The Boston Symphony Orchestra toured Russia in 1956. The Philadelphia Orchestra went to China in 1973. The New York Philharmonic played Pyongyang in 2008; the Minnesota Orchestra went to Cuba this past May. And on Friday night, the music of Dvorak’s “New World” symphony was heard in Tehran, performed from the original music the New York Philharmonic has guarded since the work’s 1893 premiere.

This orchestra, though, wasn’t American. It was the China Philharmonic.

“The New York Philharmonic gave me the original parts,” said China Philharmonic music director Long Yu, speaking by cellphone from an airport en route to Greece the day after a concert he described as historic. “So it’s very touching if you see the music, you’re touching that history.”

The China Philharmonic, created in 2000 from what had formerly been the China Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra, and still technically the state radio orchestra, is wrapping up a six-stop Silk Road tour with Long Yu. Unlike Yo-Yo Ma’s ongoing Silk Road Project, which since 1998 has celebrated the Silk Road’s melange of cultures and history of exchange through chamber music and educational programs, the China Philharmonic’s tour takes a traditional approach to cultural diplomacy. The orchestra is playing Chinese and Western repertory and effectively showcasing its strengths to China’s not-so-distant geographical neighbors.

It also showcases Long Yu, a superpower of China’s burgeoning music world who also leads the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, the Beijing Music Festival, and the Shanghai Orchestra Academy, in a role he would dearly like to assume: that of cultural diplomat.

Speaking the day after the concert, which was met with the requisite standing ovation, two encores and seven curtain calls (not an unprecedented number on international tours), he embraced the time-honored rhetoric trotted out on such occasions of “the universal language of music” and the joys of bringing the treasures of the West to a new audience.

“You can see how the people are looking for life, and the passion for life,” he said, waxing eloquent on the beauties of Tehran.

The West tends to think of China as a recipient of its cultural diplomacy, not as its purveyor. And yet at a time when some Iranians are chanting “Death to America” in the streets, it’s a Chinese orchestra, rather than an American one, that brought this American-flavored music, with the imprimatur of its American parts and what Long Yu describes as “liberal ideas,” to Iran.

The Pittsburgh Symphony, which last played in Tehran in 1964 as part of a tour sponsored by the State Department, voiced hopes last year of playing there again; and it’s been rumored that Daniel Barenboim may lead the Berlin Staatskapelle there during Angela Merkel’s state visit in October. But China has beaten them to the punch — with a work that symbolizes the appropriation of traditional forms by a “new world.”

On Friday, there were a couple of “new worlds” at play. China is planting a flag to show itself as a player in the international cultural community. But Tehran was also spreading its wings as a city that wants such culture. The performance, in fact, was shared between the China Philharmonic and the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1933, defunct for several years, and revived this past April with what by one account was a struggling but eager performance of Beethoven’s Ninth.

On Friday, led by Ali Rahbari (who has had a distinguished career in the West, and has come under fire in Iran in the past for “promoting Western values”), the ensemble played Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” — a snapshot of the East through Western eyes.

Washington Post: Pianist Lara Downes gives insightful performance of Czech composers

Washington Post
By Stephen Brookes

Franz Kafka may have been ignored in his own lifetime, but his novels — and the sense of dread and alienation they evoke — came to have an extraordinary impact on the 20th century mind. So it was intriguing to hear pianist Lara Downes at the Embassy of the Czech Republic on Thursday evening, playing music by Czech composers who endured the rising totalitarianism that Kafka’s writing seemed to presage — and who were either killed by it or forced into decades of exile.

Perhaps the most tragic of these was Erwin Schulhoff, who produced an astonishingly innovative body of work — including the “Suite Dansante en Jazz,” which Downes opened with — before dying in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. The six-movement suite is an earthy, slow-burning piece from 1931, bluesy at its heart but imbued with edgy, wildly colored, often brilliant ideas, and Downes gave it a fine reading — more thoughtful than sensual, maybe, but very engaging.

She followed with Andre Singer’s “Nine Parables to Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika,’ ” which alternated short passages from Kafka’s enigmatic 1914 novel with equally enigmatic and expressive musical fragments — a fascinating work from Singer (who was forced into exile in the 1930s) that seemed to capture a complex and Kafkaesque world where nothing is what it seems to be. Robert Rehak and Mary Fetzco delivered the written passages with aplomb.

Jaroslav Jezek’s lovely “Svita” (Shining) — famous for boosting Czech morale during World War II — provided a few moments of sunshine, as did five of Bohuslav Martinů’s “Etudes and Polkas.” Written in exile (where the composer spent much of his life), these brief pieces seemed to evoke both the freedom of a new world and nostalgia for the old; a poignant glimpse into the heart of the exiled composer.

The final work on the program was the biggest but the least satisfying. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a remarkable prodigy, and his Sonata No. 2 in E Major, Op. 2, written when he was all of 13 years old, is a remarkable accomplishment for an adolescent, technically accomplished and ambitious in every way. That said, it’s a noisy show-off piece, full of heroic chest-pounding and thundering charges up and down the keyboard, anchored by a largo con dolore that fairly wallows in adolescent woe. Downes — who admitted that Korngold was “the new love of my life” — gave the thing an impassioned performance, but it was her insights into the more complex, understated and subtle works on the program that more deeply impressed.