Hear ahead - part 2

The February 27th University of Colorado Artist Series featured András Schiff. It was a full audience for a big named performer but my wife was bored, bored, bored. The program started with Bach's Three Part Inventions which I enjoyed, though mildly. Schiff seemed mechanical and robotic though that sometime is Bach. Schiff next did some Bartok but the Bach muted my enthusiasm for it. What I was waiting for was Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. These 33 variations on a trite little theme are fun to listen to when you can focus on only listening. Schiff's playing was flawless and I felt I could hear each note clearly enough to try to pull out the theme as the variations proceeded. At first it was easy to hear them, at least two to my mind. They snuck in and were weaved in magnificently by Beethoven. I can't say that I recognized them all, my ear isn't sufficiently trained, but the important part relative to this post is that I "got" a lot of them. My mind was remembering and focusing. More later. Schiff is great, regardless of what my wife thinks. As I left Mackey, I teased a friend, complaining "He skipped number 17!" I hope he realized I was joking.

Here is an important point: I'm not a musician -- only a listener. I can read notes, barely. As a kid I played the accordion and again in the 1980s in Germany but that doesn't quite count. I enjoying trying to read scores while playing recordings, but often get lost, particularly with multiple repeats, etc. But I listen to a LOT of classical music, Nightly in bed plugged into earplugs I hear music on Pandora on my Chumby. Typically for an hour or more, I'll just listen and enjoy and think about the music. Pandora "recommends" music based on their musical Genome project. The thinking goes something like this: "if you like this, you'll like that!" A scherzo from a Beethoven quartet, only individual movements are allowed, might lead to another scherzo from a Mozart piano trio. Or a slow movement from a Mahler symphony might be followed by a long slow one from Bruckner. If you seed Pandora with strange composers, e.g. Geirr Tviett or Jolly Braga Santos, you sometimes get interesting music, sometimes not. The point of this diversion is that often I get hear completely unknown music as I'm lying in bed, in the quiet and the dark.

The night after András Schiff's performance, the visiting violinist Andrés Cárdenes performed a wonderfully diverse program with several other faculty. Cárdenes, paired with pianist David Korevaar, opened with a Mozart Violin Sonata, K454. While waiting for it to begin, I'd been thinking about Schiff's Diabelli and the how memory helped me through the variations. K 454 is in my music library, but I hadn't heard it since at least the middle of 2007, so I approached listening to it as if it was new. While listening it suddenly dawned on me that I was anticipating un-played notes. I was sensing notes that were to be played but that hadn't been yet. Mozart's music has always been somewhat predictable to me -- there was this sense that a sequence of notes was always to be followed by just one specific next one. Then the realization him me, halfway through the Mozart, that I was hearing notes ahead of what was being played. The next piece was a Hindemith sonata but here I couldn't "hear ahead" so I wondered it. After the break Cárdenes, this time playing viola, performed a wonderful Quartet by Niccolo Paganini. Rounding out the group was Lina Bahn on violin, Judith Glyde on cello, and Niccolo Spera on guitar. Could I "hear ahead" on this new piece? Yes, it was happening again. I don't mean to say that I was always right, but I sensed that when I was wrong I was only off a little bit and I felt I was right more than I was wrong. The concert ended with two pieces by Debussy and Schedrin and during both I felt I could "hear ahead", perhaps not as clearly as with the Mozart or the Paganini, but I felt it was happening again. Turning on Pandoa later I heard and unfamiliar piece by Dvorak for cello labeled "Klicki". A quick internet search for "Klicki" didn't find anything either but it was unfamiliar to me and I was once again "hearing ahead".

This past Tuesday, the trio of Yumi-Hwang Williams, concertmaster and violinist with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Silver Ainomäe, principal cellist with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and Hsing-ay Hsu, Artistic Director of the CU Pendulum series and pianist, performed the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 50. The second section of this incorporated 12 variations on a theme. I was unfamiliar with it, so I tested "hearing ahead". which seemed to work well though the fact that there were variations made it much easier. Hsing-ay Hsu started the concert with an intense rendition of Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The audience really loved it and the later Tchaikovsky. I couldn't agree more.

Before I quit, I want to again complain about classical music broadcast on the radio. I've stopped listening to the radio though I still hear it in the car. These supposedly public-supported "educational" stations play junk posing as art. They broadcast not music performances but just partial performances. Can't they see that the natural next step is to no long broadcast only movements but just "the best parts". If they can broadcast a movement of a symphony, why not just play the "pretty parts". Why wait for the whole last movement of Beethoven's 9th to hear the Ode to Joy, why not just start with that. Skip directly to "O Freunde, niche diese Töne!", why waste time? Mahler's symphony endings are triumphs, so why not just put them all together into one ending of endings? I'm sure the mini-minds of classical music producers could come up with something that would consolidate all great music to one 90 minute CD. Then they could convince "educational" radio to put it into a loop and get rid of all the announcers. Wouldn't that be great?

Hear ahead

It's a great time of year for music in Boulder. Concerts and recitals everywhere, with many free and most well attended. I'm happy.

I'm not as active blogging as I used to be. Other projects and activities use up a lot of my time, so it's taken a weekend away with some skiing and partying to free up time for this little submission. It's cold in my condo right now but it will be colder on the mountain tomorrow at 8:30.

I'd like to touch on a few concerts and recognize some good performances and then introduce an thought I had about music, so here goes.

First chronologically, the University of Colorado's (CU) Symphony Orchestra played Rossini's William Tell Overture followed by Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Our favorite graduate student was concert-mistress -- she lives with us this year and is great. What I remember most was the beautiful cello solo by Andrew Briggs in the opening of William Tell. He's been to our house a few times, so I knew him a bit. He later in February was the winner of the CU Student Concerto Competition along with Cobus du Toit, who plays often with the Boulder Chamber Orchestra, so congratulations to both Andrew and Cobus.

Next CU had "Faculty Tuesdays", a concert featuring outstanding professors as performers. It's weekly and I try to go to most of them. More and more people in Boulder are coming to these, rightfully so. Jeffrey Nytch, director of the Entrepreneurship Center for Music, put together an eclectic program calling on many of the faculty. My favorite was a piece by Graham Fitkin, "Hard Fair" for Soprano Saxophone and Two Pianos. David Korevaar and Carter Pann slammed into this piece on piano and Grant Larson screamed with the Sax. I'd love to hear it again.

It was a very windy Wednesday and the CU Pendulum program was without program notes --they had "blown away" supposedly but understandably. The winds at my house that day, right below the National Center for Atmospheric Research lab, were measure at over 90 miles per hour. CU Pendulum features student compositions and new faculty works and I've enjoyed them in the past, though this one was a little less persuasive. One student composition went on interminably with unintelligibly spoken poetry covering sometimes interesting by mostly boring music. I encourage student compositions, so try, try again. What was interesting was a faculty work by John Drumheller -- its hard to say it's a composition since it was a dynamically computer processed transmission of a live performance by Nicolò Spera on a 10 stringed guitar. Perhaps Drumheller composed the guitar music, but with experimental music like this, one can't be sure.

On Friday night my wife and I went to an interesting performance sponsored by Playground, an off-shoot of the Boulder Symphony Orchestra, a relatively new group in town. The performances, mostly solos and duets, were by contemporary composers like Stockhausen, Reich, Berg and Gorecki. Two performances in particular stood out. Another computer enhanced performance by Ben Cantu on guitar playing "Electric Counterpoint" by Steve Reich. Having heard Drumheller's work earlier, it was a good comparison and very well done. Secondly, with high kudos, was performance of Gorecki's Piano Sonata No 1, Opus 6 performed by Heidi Brende Leathwood. Gorecki is most noted for his 3rd Symphony but has some interesting piano music including at least one Piano Concerto. This sonata was as electrifying as the recording of that concerto and compliments to Ms. Leathwood for tackling it.

The next night the Boulder Philharmonic, under Michael Butterman, gave a full audience a full plate -- Shostokovich, Gulda and Schubert's "Great C Major Symphony". Friedrich Gulda was new to me -- in fact I thought it was Fulda until I realized, after a Wikipedia search, that I had an F for a G, with Fulda a town and US Army base in Germany. Gulda was apparently quite the pianist but an oddball, faking his own death late in life. The piece, Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra, was performed by Joshua Roman, a young upcoming performer tied into the TED program. I have to say that it left me puzzled. Roman's cello was miked, though I suppose to guarantee clarity in the cavernous Mackey auditorium. The 5 movement piece centered on a cadenza that went on and on and on -- Roman clearly commands his instrument but this solo riff caused unfamiliarity to spawn boredom. The last two movements were better and more interesting, so the audience sprang up cheering. I guess they liked it more than I did.

While I had intended for this post to cover more, I think I'll stop here and introduce "head-ahead" on the next one.