When the 2018-19 season for SFS was announced earlier this year, there was an awful lot of sighing, whimpering, and eye-rolling among my friends, because the season opened with a Stravinsky Festival. This is the second or third of them since MTT has been the music director here, and of course they're important because you just never hear Stravinsky's music.
Okay, I could just barely type that without falling under my desk laughing. Stravinsky is one of the composers you hear most often at SFS; MTT is a great conductor of Russian music in general, and after nearly 25 years with him, the orchestra is a sleek, colorful machine when it plays the ballets and everything else Igor wrote.
But I was reminded by Rebecca Mead's wonderful New Yorker profile of George Benjamin that SFS used to be an orchestra that programmed recent music and focussed on specific living composers who weren't John Adams and Mason Bates: not that long ago, Benjamin was composer in residence here, and the orchestra and its individual players did several performances of Benjamin's music. I attended a couple of those programs and reviewed one.
It is really sad that some combination of pressure from the orchestra's administration and/or board and MTT's current preferences has resulted in pretty conservative programming for a once-adventurous orchestra. This year's eye-rolling wasn't all about the Stravinsky fest; it was about the season in general. I'm sort-of interested in a fair number of the programs, but it's not until MGT is here doing Sibelius (and, unfortunately, Tchaikovsky) that there's much that excites me. (And after that....oh, the season-end L'enfant et les sortileges.)
And it seems as though I'm not the only person who'd like to hear less Stravinsky: both last weekend and this, I got offers from SFS of $15 tickets, undercutting even Goldstar. (That's on top of my looking into tickets to hear Yuja Wang play Ravel and blanching when I saw that the cheapest seats in the house were $99, up in the second tier. I gave it a pass; I wouldn't pay that much, plus the second half of the program was a work I dislike pretty intensely.)
Maybe try playing music people haven't heard so many times, eh?
16 comments:
Hear, Hear! I’m looking forward to MTT’s departure, just to hear some new or at least different music. I’m sorry to say that and wouldn’t have imagined even thinking it 10 years ago. I did manage to find 6 concerts I liked to enough to create a subscription, but only one of them features MTT.
Sigh, yeah.
I think the season-ending Ravel is one of the concerts I'm most looking forward to - I love that opera so much.
I'll give another thought to the Ravel opera. I've never heard it and may never get a chance to see it staged locally.
Oh, I meant to say first that I don't have a ticket to the Ravel opera, but that I'd reconsider not going.
Oh, it is so wonderful - charming and beautiful, libretto by Colette!
Berkeley Opera did a double bill of it with Bluebeard's Castle, of all things. It worked (TO EVERYONE'S SURPRISE) and was one of the best things they did before they became WEO.
Argh. I missed another one. #latebloomer
It was in 2008. They'd also done Bluebeard in about 1994? 96? on a double bill with someone's completion of Debussy's "Fall of the House of Usher," not the one SFO used.
Was the other completion of Usher any better?
I don't remember much about it - my guess is that the one SFO used is better.
But neither made much drama out of the fragments.
hmm. Sometimes it's better to let an uncompleted thing lie and move on to something else or new.
Yeah. I understand how tantalizing it must be, and how tempting, given what a great piece Pelleas is, but I also think Debussy probably knew what he was doing when he didn't finish Usher.
Salonen is also doing three weeks of Stravinsky in LA next April, the third time he has done this over the last 25 years, but this time he's picked more unusual pieces. Admittedly, the first program has the Rite of Spring on it, but also Agon and the recently re-discovered Funeral Song. The second program is a grab-bag of religious works, heavy on late atonal pieces (Requiem Canticles, In Memoriam TS Eliot, etc), and the third has two very neo-classical ballets (Orpheus, Persephone) staged by Peter Sellars.
This is not the same old thing, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Sigh. We got the Big Three, violin concerto, and Persephone.
If I liked Stravinsky more than I do, I might be more interested in this. As it is, I have a ticket to tonight's concert and am even thinking not of going. I'm sure they will do a fine job with Le sacre, but do I need to hear that again?
Now, if they were playing the Symphony of Psalms, I'd definitely go.
I love Stravinsky, but I have heard the works on this program often enough.
The program that would get me in is Symphony of Psalms and Les Noces.
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