Going out with style: Tokyo String Quartet bids a fond farewell to Chicago

July 26, 2012 3 Comments

This past Tuesday, the Tokyo String Quartet played what first violin Martin Beaver said would almost certainly be their last concert at the Ravinia Festival.  In all likelihood, it will also be their final appearance anywhere in the Chicago area.  With Kazuhide Isomura (founding viola)  and Kikuei Ikeda (longtime second violin) deciding to retire, the whole ensemble is calling it quits after the 2012/2013 season.  It was “an evening full of meaning for us,” according to Mr. Beaver.

That I was there to experience it was a confluence of lucky events.  A week before, I didn’t know I’d be in Chicago.  The day before, I wasn’t sure if I’d be attending.  That morning, a massive thunderstorm rolled through the region, complete with hail and some not-messin’-around wind causing widespread damage and some power outages.

Around lunch time, the rain stopped, but I got a weather alert on my phone warning of “Severe Heat” with temperatures between 100 and 104 degrees with a heat index of up to 110 degrees once you factored in the humidity;  however, this turned out to be a warning for Wednesday, not the night of the concert  By the time I arrived at Ravinia around 6:30pm, the skies had cleared and the temperature was a very SoCal-like mid-70′s with moderate humidity.  Nothing would get in the way of the chance to see this concert.

Lucky me — and very lucky, too, for the near-capacity crowd inside Martin Theatre and the many others picnicking outside.  The Tokyo Quartet treated everyone to an evening that was enjoyable on so many levels.

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Filed under All Reviews, Chicago, Music (News & Reviews), Other classical music concerts and recitals (in So Cal and beyond), Reviews 2011/2012, Travel Tagged with , , , ,

This week’s concerts (cross country edition)

July 24, 2012 Leave a comment

This week at the Hollywood Bowl, conductor Stéphane Denève returns to Southern California to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in two different programs.

  • Tuesday’s concert features two works not often heard at the Bowl (or anywhere else for that matter):  Stokowski’s “Symphonic Synthesis” of Mussorgsky’s music from Boris Godunov and the lone violin concerto of Julius Conus.  Martin Chalifour, the LA Phil’s Principal Concertmaster, will be the soloist; he has made it a habit to do rarely performed concertos (much like one of his predecessors, David Frisina), and this is another fine example of that.  Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances ends the evening on a more familiar note.
  • Thursday’s concert is a compelling program loaded with much more typical Bowl fare, including  Bernstein’s Candide Overture and On the Town, Gershwin’s An American in Paris, and two works by Maurice Ravel:  the Piano Concerto in G with Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist and the Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2.

Mr. Denève had been a regular visitor to Los Angeles for a few years, but didn’t appear this last season at Walt Disney Concert Hall, nor is he scheduled to appear this coming 2012/2013 season.  If you want to catch this increasingly prominent conductor, you’ll have to do it this week.

While both concerts look quite interesting, I’ll only be at Thursday night’s performance — that’s because I currently happen to be in Chicago where, asides from trying to dodge lightning storms and other random stuff, I’m planning on being at Ravinia tonight to catch the Tokyo String Quartet’s final Chicago appearance before retiring.  The program includes:  “The Rider” quartet of Haydn; the original string quartet version of  Webern’s Five Movements, Op. 5, along with his Langsamer Satz (“Slow Movement”); and finally, the third “Razumovsky” Quartet of Beethoven.  Let’s hope the weather cooperates.

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Photo credits:

  • Ravinia, Tyler Gate:   courtesy of the Ravinia Festival
  • Hollywood Bowl:  courtesy of Los Angeles Philharmonic Association

Filed under Los Angeles Philharmonic, Music (News & Reviews) Tagged with , ,

Summer Whites in the great outdoors; avoiding Lang Lang

July 13, 2011 3 Comments

Decidedly NOT a picture of Lang Lang (Gustavo Dudamel, July 12, 2011) (photo: Lawrence K. Ho, Los Angeles Times)

Though the Hollywood Bowl has been open for about a month, the Los Angeles Philharmonic play did not play in their white jackets (and blouses) under the venue’s iconic white arches until this past Friday and Saturday when they gave the word premiere performances of the full film score to West Side Story.  They followed it with more movie music on Sunday, this time a cross-cultural endeavor playing compositions of A. R. Rahman.  Traditional “Symphony Under the Stars” concerts finally  were on the bill last night as Gustavo Dudamel and the orchestra played music by Borodin, Mussorgsky (with orchestral help from Ravel), and Prokofiev (with pianistic help from Lang Lang).

I am not a fan of Lang Lang.  I respect his amazing technical ability at the keyboard, but his interpretations and visual machinations are not to my taste.  After seeing him perform a gooey rendition of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto in 2000 with Zubin Mehta and the LA Phil, I vowed to avoid him in the future.  A subsequent encounter six years later was more of a veritable free-gift-with-purchase of tickets to see Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct Le Sacre du Printemps at Walt Disney Concert Hall; the good news was that Lang Lang brought a piece I liked, Bartok’s 2nd Concerto, to WDCH; the bad news was that he didn’t bring much that I liked to Bartok’s 2nd Concerto.

With this in mind, my strong desire to experience Mr. Dudamel’s take on Pictures at an Exhibition and the happy thought of picnicking with yummy food and wine at the Bowl were overruled by my even stronger desire to avoid Lang Lang; the thought of fighting with stack parking and the Bowl’s hit-and-miss sound system certainly made my decision that much easier.   After reading reviews by Tim Mangan, Mark Swed, and Richard Ginell (links below), it seems like I didn’t miss anything from the 29 year-old pianist that I now regret.   The three gentlemen writers seemed to agree on many things about the concert . . .  if I may summarize:

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Filed under Los Angeles Philharmonic, Music (News & Reviews) Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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