A Sweet Concord of Mind
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
“The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other is by music.” Jonathan Edwards
The first hour of Evening Music features French Baroque music: one of Marin Marais’s Pieces en trio, the Suite in C Major and the Concert No. 2 by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Sostakovich continues to be our featured composer: Yefim Bronfman is the soloist in his Piano Concerto No. 1, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The workin which a solo trumpet is also featured, here played by Thomas Stevensis a mercurial one, full of melodramatic extremes, with many moods colliding and subsiding before the madly cheerful close.
Talk about a wild ride! The music of Amy Beach calms things down, as Eugenia Zukerman and the Shanghai Quartet bring us her beautifully thoughtful and sincere Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet. Later, we hear the unusual combo of clarinet, button accordion, cello, and piano animating echoes of dance music from the Congo and the Caribbean in a piece by Jim Hiscott, who says of it: “The sway in ‘Blue Ocean’ relates to that of the blue ocean waves that rise and fall on the sunny shores of Cuba and Africa.”
Mixed in with all this: a Vivaldi Recorder Concerto, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, a terrifically jazzed-up version of a Bach Prelude and Fugue by jazz pianist John Lewis and friends. Featured in the final hour: Gorecki’s “Good Night,” written as a memorial to his friend and supporter, Michael Vyner. The unusually scored work features Dawn Upshaw, soprano, Sebastian Bell on alto flute, Johan Constable on Piano, and David Hockings playing tam-tams.
The first hour of Evening Music features French Baroque music: one of Marin Marais’s Pieces en trio, the Suite in C Major and the Concert No. 2 by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Sostakovich continues to be our featured composer: Yefim Bronfman is the soloist in his Piano Concerto No. 1, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The workin which a solo trumpet is also featured, here played by Thomas Stevensis a mercurial one, full of melodramatic extremes, with many moods colliding and subsiding before the madly cheerful close.
Talk about a wild ride! The music of Amy Beach calms things down, as Eugenia Zukerman and the Shanghai Quartet bring us her beautifully thoughtful and sincere Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet. Later, we hear the unusual combo of clarinet, button accordion, cello, and piano animating echoes of dance music from the Congo and the Caribbean in a piece by Jim Hiscott, who says of it: “The sway in ‘Blue Ocean’ relates to that of the blue ocean waves that rise and fall on the sunny shores of Cuba and Africa.”
Mixed in with all this: a Vivaldi Recorder Concerto, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, a terrifically jazzed-up version of a Bach Prelude and Fugue by jazz pianist John Lewis and friends. Featured in the final hour: Gorecki’s “Good Night,” written as a memorial to his friend and supporter, Michael Vyner. The unusually scored work features Dawn Upshaw, soprano, Sebastian Bell on alto flute, Johan Constable on Piano, and David Hockings playing tam-tams.
