WETA FM 90.9 Blog

Happy 2009!

A new year of great performances and interesting musical discoveries awaits us. Here’s a list of the concerts in January that hold particular promise.

Sunday January 4^th at the National Gallery will feature the National Gallery String Quartet in collaboration with one of the musical treasures of this country, Menahem Pressler. At the keyboard he sheds his years with every successive movement and it is ever palpable how much fun he has making music. Fortunately for the listener, it’s also great fun to listen to him, because even if his fingers are not as nimble as they once were, his musicality and enlivening spirit shine strongly through all that he touches. Mozart and Schumann will be touched in this concert. (6.30pm)

Jens Elvekjaer’s piano recital on Sunday January 11^th at the Music Room at Dumbarton Oaks looks interesting and ambitious at once. Interesting because he will play the Theme and Variations by Carl Nielsen, ambitious because he will also tackle Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In between his program might turn toward something more conventional with the first of the last three Schubert sonatas – the c-minor “Winterreise” Sonata D958 – but what a beautiful work it is. (7pm –Tickets are available by subscription only. When available, additional tickets may be purchased the week before the concert. For any questions, you call the “Friends of Music” office at 202-339-6436.)

Also on January 11^th will be a performance of the Smithsonian Consort of Viols (organized by the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society) at the Renwick Gallery with music of Orlando Gibbons, William Byrd, and Christopher Tye. This is music one usually has to go a little out of one’s way to listen to, but music that will always reward having done so. (7.30pm)

I loved it as a kid, but for many years Ballet simply hasn’t been my thing. Except: if I was privileged only to see spectacular dancers (like Evgenya Obraztsova or Svetlana Zakharova), I might regain my taste for it. Unfortunately, there isn’t much of that to be had in Washington, and the Kirov/Mariinsky Ballet’s pit-stops at the Kennedy Center don’t usually change that fact, either. Unlike the Bolshoi (look forward to their Corsaire in Washington in June!), the Kirov doesn’t take its foreign stops behind London very seriously and they don’t bother brining their best dancers all this way to perform in their hoary, cliché-fulfilling productions. That will apply to their Don Quixote, too, so whether it will be worth seeing depends wholly on the presence of at least one superlative dancer. I am told, by those in the know, that the only dancer to look forward to in this year’s Kirov production is Diana Vishneva. She is scheduled to appear at the Kennedy Center Opera House on Tuesday January 13^th , 2009 and Friday, January 16^th. (7.30pm)

Ilan Volkov is an exciting conductor, Leif-Ove Andsnes an inspired, occasionally fish-kissing, pianist, and Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto a barnstormer sure to please. (Andsnes’ recording of it is quite good, too.) There’s no harm if people should attend this NSO concert for Rachmaninoff, but Volkov, for one, has the potential to shine even more in Stravinsky’s Jeu de cartes and the inclined listener will find most to listen for in George Crumb’s A Haunted Landscape (1984). This orchestral work for lots of wind and brass, ridiculous amounts of percussion (from cow bells to kabuki blocks and everything in between), amplified piano, and strings sounds a bit like scuttling Varèse twice around the world in 20 minutes, except it achieves an uncanny sense of quiet. It all happens at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Friday January 15^th, Saturday the 16^th, and Sunday the17^th. (8pm, Friday 7pm)

Additionally or alternatively, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra offers Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, Franck’s Symphonic Variations, and Ravel’s La Valse. Ravel’s imperial Waltz-gone-horribly wrong is rightly a standard of concert halls, although the Rachmaninoff is usually little more than a brash affair with lots of dogged determination and quite short on grace. Notable here is the Franck piece – a de-fact piano concerto, as beautiful as it is unassuming, that has a bit of history for the BSO: Leon Fleisher played it at the opening of the Joseph Meyerhoff Hall over a quarter century ago. Frank Braley will perform it on January 15^th and 16^th at Meyerhoff Hall in Baltimore (8pm) and on January 17^th at Strathmore. (8pm). Perhaps the best reason to go: Stéphane Denéve will conduct the concert. His Verdi Requiem didn’t convince me entirely when he made his debut in the region (Tim Page showed more foresight); subsequent encounters with his art have since opened my ears to the likelihood of Denéve being one of the conductors of his generation to watch.

Li Yundi (李云迪) played the Ravel piano concerto beautifully on a relatively recent release with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Berlin Philharmonic – and he’ll play it again with the NSO on January 22^nd, 23^rd, and 24^th. It’s such a gorgeous concerto that every opportunity to hear it live should be considered. Especially when a pianist of Li’s caliber tackles it. Emmanuel Krivine accompanies him and will also conduct Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique and give the world premiere of Pascal Dusapin’s Apex, a work originally intended for Krivine and the Orchestre national de Lyon. Dusapin (*1955) has, among other things, written two operas that are available on CD and DVD respectively: the substantially beautiful Perelà, Uomo di Fumo and Faustus, the last Night, a work the potential of which far exceeds its greatness, vacillates between the weird and monotonous, and is undermined by a production (from Lyon, by Peter Mussbach) too witty and gorgeous for its own good. But since Faustus is inventive, intense, high quality music – except too much of it, for too long – a short orchestral piece of his bodes well for listener beguilement. (8pm, Friday 7pm)

I’ve quite enjoyed BSO performances under the baton of Carlos Kalmar, and when’s the next time you’ll be able to hear an oboe concerto? Martinů would be your man, Katherine Needleman your oboist-woman, and Thursday, January 22^nd the date (at Strathmore, 8pm). Martinů might be an uneven composer, but at his worst he’s curiously charming and at his best he’s woefully underrated. The oboe concerto tends much more toward the latter than the former. The concert will be repeated in Baltimore on Friday the 23^rd (8pm) and is rounded out by Haydn’s “Military” Symphony (No.100) and Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances.

If you are into piano recitals, Yevgeny Sudbin’s at the Terrace Theater on Saturday, January 24^th, is one you can’t afford to miss. WPAS will present him in Scarlatti, Haydn, Medtner, and Ravel. With a bit of luck, there might be a ticket left for what will surely be a sold out performance. (2pm)

Pierre Alexandre Monsigny’s 1769 Le Déserteur is the frizzy, bubbly cure for Fidelio hangover. Leonore is Louise, Fidelio is Alexis. She’s not in drag but he’s in prison – thanks to a (more or less political) plot. There is a good deal of spoken dialogue, and she comes to the rescue. The overture – this was novel at the time – hints at events to come — a faint but extant relation to Leonore III. However, the whole thing is funny, not tragic and the music is rather French and resembles that of, say, A.M. Grétry or J.C. Bach. The opera was once hugely popular in Europe and the United States, apparently being performed up and down the east coast, and especially in New Orleans, but then fell out of the repertoire, quickly and hard. Opera Lafayette will make it heard in US for the first time in about two hundred years.

Ryan Brown conducts the 31-piece period instrument Opera Lafayette Orchestra, while artistic director and choreographer of the New York Baroque Dance Company Catherine Turocy directs an actor and a (pantomiming) dancer in what is otherwise a concert performance at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on January 29^th. (7.30pm) The dialogue, essential to the plot, was newly written – in English – for this performance. A condensed, family-friendly performance of this opera, with young artists taking the principle roles, will be given on January 31^st at the Atlas Theater. Adults $2, Children free. .(2pm) There’s a clip on YouTube of the only (?) other recent production of that opera. Opera Lafayette Orchestra will record the opera for Naxos.

Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony is as gloomy an affair as it gets, even for Shostakovich’s standards. So it’s only right that with Tchaikovsky’s (First) Piano Concerto the great Stephen Hough will bring an altogether lighter, gayer mood to the BSO’s concerts conducted by Vasily Petrenko. The incredibly young eleve of Mariss Jansons, Yuri Temirkanov, and Esa-Pekka Salonen has turned around the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, made some fine Suk recordings with the orchestra of Berlin’s Komische Oper, and is one of the fast-rising young Russian conductors alongside Vladimir Jurowski, and the Israeli-Russian Volkov. Now he’ll bring this all-Russian program to Baltimore, topping it off with Anatoly Liadov’s evocative – luminous and eerie – tone poem Kikimora. Liadov is in some ways the link between the older Russian school – “The Mighty Handful”, having studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and learned from Mussorgsky – and the next generation of Russian composers, having been the teacher of Prokofiev and Mussorgsky. The concerts take place on Thursday January 29^th and Saturday January 31^st at Meyerhoff Hall at 8pm.