The Standing Room has a great review up of Saturday's SF Symphony performance of John Adams' 1999 piece Naive and Sentimental Music. He blames guest conductor Allen Gilbert for a lackluster performance...
The whole thing felt disjointed and lacked all forward motion. The second movement ground to a halt. The various cogs of the third movement never came together to create that wondrous Adams machine. And that poor first movement melody was shapeless and flaccid, because everyone seemed so concerned about counting. Frankly, I don't think he got the piece at all.
How disappointing. As TSR also reports, I've seen MTT conduct Adams' Harmonielehre, and Adams conduct the SF Symphony himself for the debut of El Dorado, and both times they blew the roof off the place, and had the audience rapt. That said, I saw an SF Symphony violinist acquaintance of mine Saturday afternoon (before the show), and he was not looking forward to the evening. I think his exact words were "I hate this piece."
Midori would have been something to see, though...
I also heard that Allen Gilbert's interpretation of Mahler 7 recently in a performance with the St. Louis Symphony was less than stellar. ....I have seen/heard Midori numerous times...
she's incredible.
Posted by: Meg Sippey | Oct 27, 2004 at 03:10 PM
new design? i liked the trebuchet look so much i based my new blog on the same theme. now my inspiration goes.......
what brought this about?
Posted by: vijay | Oct 29, 2004 at 02:32 AM