Benefit concert

Last night the National Symphony Orchestra played a benefit concert for their Young Soloists' Competition, a national program that supports 18–25 year old musicians, ultimately giving the winner $10,000 and a chance to play with the NSO in May.

Philadelphia Orchestra and Orchestre de Paris music director Christoph Eschenbach, long a champion of young musicians, conducted the NSO in a vibrant performance of familiar old war horses. Eschenbach did the entire concert from memory and got quite the physical workout from his vigorous conducting.

Eschenbach protégé violinist Erik Schumann, age 25, from Germany played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto (Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 35). The audience seemed quite impressed with the young man, giving him sustained applause after the first movement and then awarding him a brief standing ovation at the conclusion of the concerto. I thought he was quite good, though certainly not the child prodigy of, say, a younger Joshua Bell. His playing is still a bit bright and doesn't quite have the soul-pulling depth and maturity of sound and vibrato he'll no doubt develop as he continues to play; that is made all the more apparent because of the instrument he plays, the 1722 "Jupiter" Stradivarius.

The Tchaikovsky, while one of the standard works in the virtuosic violinist repertoire, is fiendishly difficult to play. In fact, Tchaikovsky had a hard time finding a violinist to premiere the work, with many famous violinists of the time declaring it "unplayable." It's in those "unplayable" cadenzas that a violinist is tested, and while Schumann played the notes, he still hasn't quite mastered the art of keeping those occasional stratospherically high notes from popping up out of context from the rest of the musical line. A couple of other times, he lost sound as he attempted diminuendos at the end of some very high pianissimo passages.

At the same time, though, there were times Schumann played with great passion and fire. And, as I mentioned, the Tchaikovsky certainly is not an easy work to play, so he definitely has technical skills. I expect that as he grows and matures in his musicality, we will see a lot of Erik Schumann on the international concert stage. I hope also as he gains more and more experience, he'll gain more self-confidence, as he definitely looked rather shy on stage and almost embarrassed to receive the audience's applause and adulation.

One of the disadvantages of being an Eschenbach protégé is exposure to Eschenbach's sartorial choices. Rather than a standard tail coat with white tie, or even a tuxedo jacket with black tie, Eschenbach chose to wear what looked like a loose, Nehru-style, black jacket, buttoned all the way up to the throat. Schumann wore a similar black jacket, but opted to wear his open all the way, revealing an untucked, black and taupe print, square-tailed, banded collar shirt underneath.

We heard Johannes Brahms' dramatic Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 in the second half of the concert. The themes of the first and last movements are well-known to those who listen to very much classical music or radio stations. Those movements were fine; what caught my attention, though, was the penultimate movement, when the orchestra played with hoppy excitement under Eschenbach's frenetic conducting.

The audience liked the Brahms, with many people in the audience (remember that this was a fund raiser for young artist programs and there were, no doubt, a lot of adoring parents in the audience unused to concert going) applauding between movements, and then standing for two lengthy curtain calls.

Oscar

Last night I watched the 80th Academy Awards broadcast, and the one and only best picture nominee that I saw won Best Picture. See what a great steward of my movie-going dollars I am?

My favorite dress? Keri Russell in Nina Ricci. Runner up? Heidi Klum in Dior. Worst dressed? Well, it wasn't the dress, it was the stalactite necklace on Nicole Kidman—the dress by itself was pretty, but that necklace just had to go! And youngster Ellen Page looked like she was stuck in a bad bridesmaid dress. And then there was that writer in the leopard print with the huge tattoo on her arm......

Guys? George Clooney looked very sharp and extremely well tailored in Armani and looked better than his date. Daniel Day-Lewis was wearing ***brown*** shoes to match his brown-piped shawl collared tuxedo—yuck! That's the real reason Helen Mirren is the closest he'll get to a knighthood! LOL And we won't even talk about Viggo Mortensen's 19th century frock coat.

I thought the writers' strike was over. Didn't they have anybody help Jon Stewart with his lame, went-nowhere, attempt at comedy filler? I kept hearing crickets.

No Country for Old Men

After eating at a Texas-themed restaurant in Silver Spring, we went to the lovely AFI Silver Theater to view Academy Award Best Picture nominee No Country for Old Men yesterday. With less than a fortnight left before the Oscars, I'm in my usual last-minute crush to try to see the nominated films, and thus far, the only thing I'd seen was Sweeney Todd.

No Country for Old Men is set in West Texas, near the Mexican border. It's a gritty tale of the Mexican drug trade and its impact on American society starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem. I'm not quite sure how Javier Bardem qualified for his best supporting actor nomination; he seemed a very, very major presence in the movie, so I'd have considered him for best actor, instead.

There is a lot I'd like to say about this movie, but I can't really discuss it without revealing too many plot points. So, I'll simply say the movie reminds me a lot of the genre of French films that don't really have a beginning or an end, but that merely represent a slice of life for the protagonists.

How will it do at the Oscars? I don't know. Sweeney Todd isn't nominated for Best Picture, so I can't compare and contrast yet. It certainly leaves a dramatic impact, though. Some of the violent scenes are filmed in a way so as to avoid gratuitous violence and gore, which is a technique that I always think strengthens a film. I found the little performances of many of the small roles for small town Texas resident characters to be a highlight.

This movie is not suitable for young children, and even for older children, I would want to be sure that they were sufficiently intellectually developed to be able to absorb and consider the moral message of the film.

All Mahler, all the time

He's a little heavier and a little greyer, but there's still that commanding stage presence that comes from his great height, still that same voice with the wide-open top that I remember from twelve or fifteen years ago. I used to accuse him of being a lazy tenor, but he persists in being a lyric baritone, not opting to push his voice up the way tenor Plácido Domingo has done. It's been a long time since I last saw him, since he last helped me to open my throat as I sang and avoid that swallowed, woofy sound young singers sometimes get when they are trying to sound "operatic."

I speak of Thomas Hampson, international opera star, featured soloist at the National Symphony Orchestra's "Music of Gustav Mahler" concert this past weekend at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The evening opened with Hampson singing Kindertotenlieder, a poignant song cycle based on five poems by Friedrich Rüchert called "Songs on the Death of Children." This is not a flashy or dynamic work, but a quiet, introspective work, and a virtuosic opportunity for Hampson to display the sensitivity of his singing and the lyrical beauty of his vocal line. He did well, though he's finally "covering" a bit more than he used to when he's above his passagio, and I noticed he pushed into falsetto for one of the very high, soft phrases. One thing about Tommy, he's always the consummate artist.

After the intermission, supplemented by quite a number of players that had the orchestra completely filling the stage, the NSO played the lengthy Symphony No. 6 in A minor. Musicologists seem to think the 6th is Mahler's most important work, though I think probably only the 2nd ("Resurrection") is well known to those who frequent the concert hall, and the 6th, while interesting, has never been a great favorite of mine.

What I noticed most in watching this live performance of the 6th was the instrumentation. There were, for example, not one, but four harpists. There was an entire rack of cow bells of various sizes. And, most melodramatically, the score calls for the use of a "hammer." Well, hammer doesn't quite convey the right idea: think maul. The stage arrangement made the hammer's use unintentionally comical, too. A large, desk-looking box sat off to the far downstage left corner of the stage. When it was time for the hammer, a percussionist walked from the back row of the instruments where the drums and more conventional percussion instruments sat to the big box, and with all the dignity that only an orchestra percussionist in white tie and tails can muster, delicately picked up the maul, then with a big back swing, thunked that box like a carnival worker setting big top tent pegs.

Otherwise, the Mahler is a massive work, and one that keeps all sections of the orchestra unusually busy. He particularly makes extensive use of the low brass. The four harps were needed, indeed, since in some harp passages, the rest of the orchestra was playing fortissimo, and the quadruplication was needed so we could hear the harp.

Leonard Slatkin was back on the podium. Alas, he was back to his old ways, and not conducting with the magic he'd elicited in the fall. There were throughout the evening synchronization problems, particularly between the strings and the brass/woodwinds. I also noticed a rather disconcerting feel of the brass and winds sounding like someone had put the treble on the equalizer on maximum. The orchestra got somewhat better as the evening dragged on, but it was rather too little too late.

After the concert, Hampson was to be sitting out in the Grand Foyer outside the Concert Hall autographing his CDs. We slipped out a side door of the hall to leave and it completely slipped my mind to go out the back doors of the hall so we could slip by and say hello. Oh, well, it would have been awkward trying to talk with all the other fans bunching around.

Saving throats

What with my need to be at the Verizon Center for the Wizards-Lakers basketball performance by 11:30 Sunday morning, I opted to go to the 5:30 service at St. Stephen's. Attendance was light (about 2/3rds usual) due to the upcoming Super Bowling performance on television. I always wonder if the absentees for football actually made the effort to go to Mass in the morning, or if football needs to be added to the ever-growing list of Catholic mortal sins.

The highlight of Mass was actually after Mass, when they did the annual Blessing of Throats in honor of the patron saint of throats, Saint Blaise. After the service, those who wished could come up to the altar rail where the priest stood with crossed candles to touch the throats of the faithful and pronounce the throat blessing. Too bad all those football fanatics weren't there.....with all the yelling and screaming they were about to do, they, above all people, were in need of protected throats!

Per intercessionem Sancti Blasii liberet te Deus a malo gutteris et a quovis alio malo. Amen.