From the Last Week
I’ve been busy this week and each day I tell myself I’ll blog tomorrow, because there’s another concert coming up. But now after a whole week, I’ve got to put up or shut up.
Last Friday, 5/7, ICE hosted a Tuba improvisation at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Dan Peck flew in from NYC to blow the guts out of his tuba accompanied by electronics doing a bass line drone and replaying some of his tubism. The new thing I saw was him using a clarinet mouthpiece in the tuba. Not quite a bass sax, but similar.
Saturday I saw the COT production of Jake Hegge’s “Three Decembers” starring Frederick von Stade. It was more Broadway musical than a true opera, but I enjoyed how messed up the dysfunctional family of a stage star could be compared to my own. BTW, it’s the first time I heard sh!t and f#(k in an opera, but those words didn’t appear in the supertitles.
Sunday afternoon I went to see Cabaret by “the hypocrites” company at the Storefront Theater. It was really fun for the first half of the show, but the Nazi movement showed up and brought the enjoyment to a stunning halt. Not for kids.
Monday evening, 5/10, Frederick von Stade sang a recital that was beautiful. I sat in row 4 and could appreciate all her banter about the 40 year career in opera. She will remain “My Friend Flicka”.
The Rembrandt Chamber Players performed Tuesday night at the Merit School. They opened with two young RCP competition winners who played strings and brass respectively. Then I heard Stacy Garrop’s world premier of “Frammenti”, a short piece of five fragments (about a minute each) that struck me later when I was engrossed in Brahms’ quartet in c minor, to be a micro-Mahler experience. I.e. four moments of build-up and a fifth profound killer finale.
This last Wednesday’s Dame Myra Hess concert featured a duo (K Altenberger violin & Jiayi Shi piano) who opened with two energetic excerpts from Brahms and Paradis, then they followed with a Sonata by R Strauss that was well played but nothing remarkable. There were only a few “Strauss-isms” in the last movement, but otherwise it was pretty generic.
The hit of the week was last night (Thurs) at the Cultural Center. Billed as “Guitarras de Espana”, but there was much more. Like Indonesian music, African music and dancing, modern dance and of course Flamenco. All I could think was WOW!
–
Bruce
