Music! Music! Music!

I’ve just finished a marathon, concert-a-day, five-day stretch. Not sure I’ve ever gone to five different concerts in five straight days.

I started Wednesday night at Yale’s Morse Recital Hall for the Yale in New York concert, a preview of tonight’s Carnegie Hall performance.  The evening was titled De Profundis, The Deep End: Music for Low Instruments and featured a piece for voice and four sackbuts (!), another for solo tuba, one for eight bassoons and another for three cellos. I was there to hear Ransom conduct Sofia Gubaidulina’s Concerto for bassoon and low strings. You’ve never heard of her for good reason; it was a good performance of a terrible piece.

The next day I attended the New Music New Haven concert in the same hall. Again, I was there to hear Ransom conduct, this time the famous Vermont Counterpoint by Steve Reich, a piece Ransom commissioned in 1982. It’s meant to be played live against tape: the soloist records ten parts (three flutes, three alto flutes, three piccolos and one solo flute) and then plays the lead solo part, live against the recording. Thursday was only the second time I’ve heard it with all live flutists, and it was a thrill. Steve Reich was at the concert and took a bow after another of his pieces, Proverb (three sopranos, two tenors, two vibraphones, and two keyboards) – another charmer. The rest of the concert was music by Yale student composers and some of it was truly wonderful. The evening continued til past 3am as we hosted a party for all the flutists at our house. Note: the evening continued til 3; I did not, slipping upstairs to bed at midnight thirty.

I returned one more time to the same hall on Friday for a special treat. Morse is a small hall (approx. 800 seats) and is used almost always for chamber music: degree recitals, string quartets, etc.. This concert though featured two Beethoven symphonies (4&7) played by a scaled-down version of the Yale Philharmonia Orchestra. The sound you get with that large an ensemble (45 players) in such a small, acoustically excellent space, is thrilling. I particularly loved the haunting second movement of the 7th as well as its thrilling finale. Both pieces were well played, and both led by student conductors who didn’t use scores.

On Saturday I went to acoustically challenged Woolsey Hall for a performance of the Mozart Requiem by the Yale Glee Club. It’s one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. I first heard it on a store-bought cassette tape in the winter of 1982, sitting in a dark living room in front of a blazing fire while an ice storm paralyzed Lynchburg, VA. It was magical and I have returned to it, both live and recorded, many times. This was an interesting performance, at a tempo a bit fast for my taste, and using the Robert Levin version that I am not used to, but it was beautifully sung by the 85 members of the Glee Club. The musicians, especially the brass, need some work, but nothing they did could substantially harm this masterpiece. Click here for a nine-minute sample; or here for the whole wonderful piece.

Finally I have just come from St. Thomas Episcopal Church where I heard the Yale Camerata perform Arvo Pärt’s Passio. I tend to love his music, the charge of simplistic and unfashionable notwithstanding; this I liked  lot, not loved. Donal Henahan wrote in the New York Times in 1990 that Passio was “impossibly repetitious and unimaginative;” I somewhat agree, but I am so enthralled with choral music that I found the performance profound. Here's a sample.

And to end where I began: where does the title of this post come from, and who is that woman? Here's the answer. I am nothing if not catholic (lower case, please!) in my tastes.

Oh, and, in case you were wondering:

A sackbut