Wow !! Those pictures are awesome John.
Thank you for them !!!!
Oh, I love the symphony!!!
What I wouldn't give to live in NYC.
Well, this gave me a true whiff of the wonders of the Big City!
I especially loved the colour palette used, very deep and rich and lush. Napoleon's imperial France meets the secret inner chambers of the seraille.....
Thank you so much for your photo-reports, John.
It's like being there for a little while! NYC is special, no place like it.
Glad you managed to get to the Symphony anyway. Sounds wonderful.
Thank you, Karen! And thank you, Mikaela! I'm so glad you liked the photos.
NY is just my little hometown, my goldfish bowl with tiny plastic castle, my hamster cage with wheel. I love it, but I can be oblivious. I also have a tin-ear and a skull stuffed with horsehair and feathers--but even I knew that we had a great, great evening at the London Philharmonic--look, see below, the schmarty Einstein critics (mostly) agreed--and ONE of the schmarties and Einsteins, Meryl, ESPECIALLY loved the Der Rosenkavalier encore.
Yeah, we looked at one another afterwards, and thought--yup, however exaperating sometimes, NY can be really, really great.http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20090303_New_York_musical_test_of_interest_to_Phila_.html?text=med&c=yPosted on Tue, Mar. 3, 2009
New York musical test of interest to Phila.
By Peter Dobrin
Inquirer Classical Music CriticVladimir Jurowski conducts the London Philharmonic in the U.S. premiere of
"Vita Nuova" at the remade, and acoustically impressive,
Alice Tully Hall. Jurowski will conduct this week at the Kimmel Center.
(....)
That said, the experience paled next to the originality Friday night in a Jurowski-assembled program of late
Mahler, Mozart, Ligeti, and
Richard Strauss.
Leon Fleisher, technically impaired to a sorrowful point, was soloist in Mozart's
Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major (K. 488). The less said the better here, though he at least managed a poetic second movement. But it was Jurowski who, through pacing of inevitability and connectiveness, gave that music its most soulful moments.
You might not have noticed his contribution unless you had heard other conductors micro-manipulating phrasing that really needed no further contribution from them, and it was this way, too, in Mahler's "Adagio" from the
Symphony No. 10. Jurowski didn't inject profundity or vulgarity, letting the work's own terrifying narrative unfold under its own steam.
The second half of the program was half the repertoire Jurowski was to have conducted with the Philadelphia Orchestra a year ago, an appearance canceled due to illness. He performed without interruption an incisive account of Ligeti's
Atmosphères and an edgy but never crass Strauss
Also sprach Zarathustra (an elision which must have confused a part of the audience that broke out into applause in the middle of the Strauss).
Technically, Jurowski has it all down. His senses of balance and color are minutely calibrated. He is a masterly communicator with players, dovetailing one solo into another so that long stretches of music came across as complete ideas rather than isolated phrases.
But all these are, to some extent, logistical issues (as surprisingly rare as they are with other conductors).
The more valuable insight Jurowski brings is the one relating to emotion. The encore was more Strauss: the "Sempre più lento - Moderato molto sostenuto" and "quick waltz" from the suite from
Der Rosenkavalier. Jurowski knows that in order to have a really great climax you can't have four or five smaller ones along the way. To put it clinically, release is most meaningful after a period of steady restraint. In more human terms it was a philosophy that doubtless, at its excruciating peak, brought tears to the eyes of more than one listener.
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/classicalmusic/2009/02/london_philharmonic_jurowski_d.htmlLondon Philharmonic, Jurowski, Fleisher deliver superb music-making at StrathmoreFor a brief moment, I felt a little guilty about missing the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's performance last night at the Meyerhoff in order to catch the
London Philharmonic Orchestra at Strathmore. But I quickly spotted some BSO staffers playing hooky, too, so those qualms evaporated in a flash. Besides, the BSO's program will be repeated; the LPO's visit to the region (another valuable presentation by the Washington Performing Arts Society) was confined to this single appearance.
It has been quite a while since I heard the esteemed ensemble, and I had yet to experience its buzz-producing principal conductor, Moscow-born
Vladimir Jurowski. Both left me deeply impressed.
Let's start with the sound of the
LPO -- lush, but never thick, and exceptionally refined. I was quite taken with how smoothly and tightly entrances were made, each section cohesively articulating and adding equally to the big aural picture. The strings had a silken tone (the basses -- lined single-file along one side wall, a practice the BSO might want to explore -- sounded unusually rich and dark); the woodwinds glowed; the brass had power that never coarsened. It was fun just soaking up all the orchestral color emanating from the stage, but there was much more than that to savor.
Jurowski, tall and thin with a long mane of black hair (he probably could have gotten a supporting role in
Twilight ), goes against the podium norm, conducting with an economy of means and few leaps or swirls. His precise gestures obviously communicate with clarity and feeling to his LPO players.
Jurowski's firm command served him well throughout the demanding program, starting with the Adagio from Mahler's
Symphony No. 10 (the only movement fully completed before the composer's death). Although I would have liked even more whomp when the music reached the amazing passage of screaming dissonance toward the end, everything else registered in a thoroughly convincing and involving fashion as the conductor drew out one telling detail after another. The final moments, when Mahler seems to let go of all earthly cares, were molded with particularly sensitivity.
After an awfully long seating change, a reduced complement of players took their places for ...
Mozart's
Piano Concerto No. 23 -- and unusual places at that, with all of the wind instruments grouped on one side of the piano. That turned out to be a terrific idea, visually and sonically, underlining the exquisite role those instruments play in this work. The soloist was
Leon Fleisher, whose every performance is treasurable for the wealth of musical depth it reveals. A few little bumps aside, his playing was as technically poised as it was expressively potent. He achieved a transfixing beauty of phrase in the bittersweet slow movement. Jurowski partnered the pianist effortlessly, drawing gorgeous work from the orchestra.
The evening closed with an imaginative pairing of
Ligeti's
Atmospheres and
Strauss'
Also sprach Zarathustra, linked together with no break. This nod to the works' use in
2001 wasn't some cheap marketing idea. You didn't even need to have any memory of that iconic film (personally, I always thought it was way over-praised -- perhaps because I never could make heads or tails of it). The diffuse clusters of sound in the time-stopping Ligeti score conjured up a kind of ancient, unfathomable cosmic space that slowly dissolved into nothing more than the breaths of brass players blowing note-lessly through the instruments, before the first rumbles of the Strauss piece signaled the approaching sun. Cool.
The LPO responded firmly to Jurowski's sure, nuanced direction, producing Ligeti's painstakingly crafted tone clusters deftly and digging into Zarathustra with a vivid spirit.
Quite a night.