NSO

I seem to be in permanent catch-up mode these days.

Went to hear the NSO a couple of weeks ago. Interesting program – Stravinsky's Jeu de Cartes, Crumb's A Haunted Landscape and Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. Stravinsky was fun – great wind parts, especially bassoon, a good horn solo, and an amusing quote from Rossini's Barber of Seville towards the end. It was the Crumb that made the concert worthwhile, though. I have mostly avoided his music, largely on the basis of his reputation for an almost complete lack of structure. Landscape, though, was worth hearing, and it absolutely had to be heard live. The work is a percussionist's wet dream. Every percussion instrument was dragged out for the occasion, including ethnic instruments not normally seen in an orchestra. The structure was predictably lacking, the orchestration sparse in the extreme, and the melodic content equally minimal. The basic pattern was a sequence of short pairwise solos, with one conventional and one percussion instrument in each. It was all about sound in its pure form, and as long as you approached the work with that in mind, it was fascinating. What made hearing it live essential was the fact that we could see the percussionists reach for their next instrument. The stage was partially obscured from our usual perch in the chorister, but we saw enough to build anticipation. Had we been listening on record, the sounds would have seemed random. I don't know that I need to hear the work again – it is too fragmented to serve as ambient music, and too abrasive for repeated active listening, but experiencing it once was definitely worth it.

The second half of the concert was Lief Ove Andsnes playing Rachmaninoff. He played well, at least as far as we could tell. The main distinguishing feature of the work, to me, is the fact that the soloist and the orchestra are almost always playing together, the way they might in a Baroque concerto, as opposed to alternating solo and tutti sections common to Romantic concertos. This is interesting. Unique at the time it was written, in fact. The problem was that from where we were sitting, we could barely hear the piano most of the time, so much of the solo part was lost to us. Still, I had to give it to Rachmaninoff for some gorgeous string parts, which sounded fresh since I haven't heard the concerto in years, even though I have an LP of Horowitz playing it. I wish I had pulled it out – had I been reminded of the mass of sound that it is most of the time, I might have splurged for orchestra seats.