STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER WITH THE CBSO
CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★
Forget about Paris as portrayed by France’s great artists; the impressionist masterpieces of Monet and Pissarro, Renoir's bustling Montmartre and Seurat's painstaking pointillist Eiffel Tower. In 'An American in Paris' George Gershwin paints the city in bold, garish primary colours, the musical equivalent of Pop Art thirty years before the movement was invented. It's a crackling, zinging piece, the city seen from the viewpoint of a wide-eye naïf seduced and entranced by its romance and bustle, so busy soaking in the sights that he's almost knocked down by the traffic - listen out for the four parping taxi horns blasting out their warning. It demands a huge orchestra with the CBSO spread to the ends of the platform to accommodate its massively reinforced percussion and wind sections, the latter including three saxophones to add to the jazz-tinged flavour. All that power requires deft handling and Kazuki Yamada was in his element - directing on tip toe, encouraging, chivvying (part traffic cop) and inspiring. The CBSO’s music director clearly loves American music – another CBSO concert of Americana is aptly scheduled for July 4, Independence Day – and the orchestra was duly inspired. The upbeat passages were crisp and snappy, Gershwin's romantic big tune, made-to-measure for Hollywood, warm and luscious. The big finish, Yamada holding back and then unleashing it, deserved the whoops and cheers it received.
There were lots of ear-tickling touches from individual players, notably from guest trumpeter Mike Lovatt whose scorching, rasping low-down-and-dirty style had the authentic jazz sound. His distinctive use of the mute, in the concert's opening work, Carlos Simon's ‘Hellfighters’ Blues’, immediately conjured up the sound of the World War I jazz band of the 369th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters. It's a spirited and fun five minutes, bluesy, vigorous and dispatched with pizzazz by the CBSO. While Lovatt nailed his big moments spare a thought for the CBSO's principal clarinet Oliver Janes. Gershwin's ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ has a stunning opening, the clarinet quietly palpitating and then launching into a swooping, whooshing upward glissando, the instrument a single-reeded rocket. All eyes are on the soloist. It's an all-in moment, no holding back, you're a hero or a zero. Janes fluffed it. In the interval the people sitting behind me thought that Janes was affected by nerves. I don't think so. Gershwin didn't come up with that opening, it was improvised at the premiere by jazz band clarinettist Ross Gorman as a joke. The audience loved it and Gershwin wrote it into the score. It's a sound that comes naturally to a jazz player, that uninhibited wailing, but not to a classical player. Mike Lovatt won a jazz scholarship as a student and honed his skills playing in countless shows in London's West End theatre. There's the crucial difference.
After the shaky start everything went wonderfully with Stewart Goodyear as lively and adept a soloist as one could wishfor, with dazzlingly crisp staccato playing and warm lubricious tone for the big sweeping romantic melody. I like the slowing down and deliberate hesitation during the first cadenza as if he were inventing the notes on the spot. Plenty of power as well. The thundering octave passage where, in his own words, "I almost go absolutely berserk," was thrilling and he received tremendous support from Yamada and the orchestra.
While these three works were enjoyed by the audience their response to the others was polite and perhaps a little puzzled. The versatile Missy Mazzoli's dreamy sci-fi miniature ‘Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)' is a hypnotic piece. On disc, performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, it's recorded in surround-sound with the listener in the centre of its swirling, enfolding mysticism, which is perhaps the ideal way to hear it. Listening in Symphony Hall had its compensations though; the distance providing a bigger spectacle and CBSO's delicate playing always satisfying. Charles Ives' ‘Three Places in New England’ is a musical time machine with the composer's quirky one-of-a-kind orchestration, always intriguing and sometimes just amazing in its comic chutzpah and disorientating juxtapositions. The triptych opens with 'St. Gaudens' in Boston Common, a meditation on a monument in honour of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-Black regiment in the Union Army during the American Civil War, slow and grave (obviously) but with musical flashbacks to scenes of action. The work ends with 'The Housatonic at Stockbridge' a portrait of the river which Ives and his wife Harmony (perfect name for a composer's spouse) spent happy hours walking by, with the CBSO's strings swirling and flowing picturesquely. In between comes the riotous 'Putnam's Camp' with the famous musical collision between different tunes played simultaneously by two marching bands. With amazing skill Ives juggles the disparate musical strands into a joyful raucous harmony that teeters on the edge of cacophony. Yamada and his players triumphed in this tightrope act - screeching, roaring, rollicking and immense fun.
Norman Stinchcombe
Forget about Paris as portrayed by France’s great artists; the impressionist masterpieces of Monet and Pissarro, Renoir's bustling Montmartre and Seurat's painstaking pointillist Eiffel Tower. In 'An American in Paris' George Gershwin paints the city in bold, garish primary colours, the musical equivalent of Pop Art thirty years before the movement was invented. It's a crackling, zinging piece, the city seen from the viewpoint of a wide-eye naïf seduced and entranced by its romance and bustle, so busy soaking in the sights that he's almost knocked down by the traffic - listen out for the four parping taxi horns blasting out their warning. It demands a huge orchestra with the CBSO spread to the ends of the platform to accommodate its massively reinforced percussion and wind sections, the latter including three saxophones to add to the jazz-tinged flavour. All that power requires deft handling and Kazuki Yamada was in his element - directing on tip toe, encouraging, chivvying (part traffic cop) and inspiring. The CBSO’s music director clearly loves American music – another CBSO concert of Americana is aptly scheduled for July 4, Independence Day – and the orchestra was duly inspired. The upbeat passages were crisp and snappy, Gershwin's romantic big tune, made-to-measure for Hollywood, warm and luscious. The big finish, Yamada holding back and then unleashing it, deserved the whoops and cheers it received.
There were lots of ear-tickling touches from individual players, notably from guest trumpeter Mike Lovatt whose scorching, rasping low-down-and-dirty style had the authentic jazz sound. His distinctive use of the mute, in the concert's opening work, Carlos Simon's ‘Hellfighters’ Blues’, immediately conjured up the sound of the World War I jazz band of the 369th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters. It's a spirited and fun five minutes, bluesy, vigorous and dispatched with pizzazz by the CBSO. While Lovatt nailed his big moments spare a thought for the CBSO's principal clarinet Oliver Janes. Gershwin's ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ has a stunning opening, the clarinet quietly palpitating and then launching into a swooping, whooshing upward glissando, the instrument a single-reeded rocket. All eyes are on the soloist. It's an all-in moment, no holding back, you're a hero or a zero. Janes fluffed it. In the interval the people sitting behind me thought that Janes was affected by nerves. I don't think so. Gershwin didn't come up with that opening, it was improvised at the premiere by jazz band clarinettist Ross Gorman as a joke. The audience loved it and Gershwin wrote it into the score. It's a sound that comes naturally to a jazz player, that uninhibited wailing, but not to a classical player. Mike Lovatt won a jazz scholarship as a student and honed his skills playing in countless shows in London's West End theatre. There's the crucial difference.
After the shaky start everything went wonderfully with Stewart Goodyear as lively and adept a soloist as one could wishfor, with dazzlingly crisp staccato playing and warm lubricious tone for the big sweeping romantic melody. I like the slowing down and deliberate hesitation during the first cadenza as if he were inventing the notes on the spot. Plenty of power as well. The thundering octave passage where, in his own words, "I almost go absolutely berserk," was thrilling and he received tremendous support from Yamada and the orchestra.
While these three works were enjoyed by the audience their response to the others was polite and perhaps a little puzzled. The versatile Missy Mazzoli's dreamy sci-fi miniature ‘Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)' is a hypnotic piece. On disc, performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, it's recorded in surround-sound with the listener in the centre of its swirling, enfolding mysticism, which is perhaps the ideal way to hear it. Listening in Symphony Hall had its compensations though; the distance providing a bigger spectacle and CBSO's delicate playing always satisfying. Charles Ives' ‘Three Places in New England’ is a musical time machine with the composer's quirky one-of-a-kind orchestration, always intriguing and sometimes just amazing in its comic chutzpah and disorientating juxtapositions. The triptych opens with 'St. Gaudens' in Boston Common, a meditation on a monument in honour of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-Black regiment in the Union Army during the American Civil War, slow and grave (obviously) but with musical flashbacks to scenes of action. The work ends with 'The Housatonic at Stockbridge' a portrait of the river which Ives and his wife Harmony (perfect name for a composer's spouse) spent happy hours walking by, with the CBSO's strings swirling and flowing picturesquely. In between comes the riotous 'Putnam's Camp' with the famous musical collision between different tunes played simultaneously by two marching bands. With amazing skill Ives juggles the disparate musical strands into a joyful raucous harmony that teeters on the edge of cacophony. Yamada and his players triumphed in this tightrope act - screeching, roaring, rollicking and immense fun.
Norman Stinchcombe