{"id":31373,"date":"2015-12-31T15:46:59","date_gmt":"2015-12-31T21:46:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=31373"},"modified":"2020-07-27T09:26:36","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T15:26:36","slug":"2015-in-classical-music-a-look-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/2015-in-classical-music-a-look-back\/","title":{"rendered":"2015 in Classical Music: a Look Back"},"content":{"rendered":"![\"sheet-music\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/sheet-music-1024x692.jpg\")
Salt Lake City and its surrounding environs are gifted with a raft of talented classical music ensembles and long-standing concert series. 2015 was, as in recent years, filled with an array of choices for memorable performances. Many, if not most, of my comments will be gushingly positive, but then again the talent on display locally — and imported — is exceptional. What follows is certainly not an exhaustive “best of” let alone a “top ten list,” but more a series of lightly-worn observations. Breezy might be the word. It is certainly not all-encompassing, and makes no such claims. Perhaps, if anything, it is one observer’s path of remembrance.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
2015 saw the celebration of the Utah Symphony<\/strong>‘s 75th anniversary season, which included the ongoing Mahler Symphony Cycle (all nine of Gustav Mahler\u2019s numbered symphonies in a two-season milieu) and the performance of all nine of Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies late this last summer and late this last fall (the Ninth Symphony) in Abravanel Hall. Thierry Fischer led all of these performances. The interpretations of Mahler’s Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth symphonies were all powerful and compelling, especially the Third last February, which glistened and sparkled with details placed in service of the work’s almost endless array of emotional architecture. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony reigned gloriously in a fresh, newly-minted stream of tone colors and textures.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
However, the musicians, the director, and a few guest conductors really defined excellence in some of the less heralded works. Dmitri Shostakovich’s\u00a0Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra\u00a0<\/em>bubbled with feeling in extrovert fashion in early January,\u00a0Alexander Glazunov’s Symphony No. 5 gained gossamer lyric drive guided by the United States-debut of the young Japanese conductor Kazuki Yamada in May,\u00a0Toru Takemitsu’s\u00a0Spirit Garden<\/em>\u00a0danced vivaciously with something close to impressionistic vigor led by conductor Jun\u00a0M\u00e4rkl in October,\u00a0Ravel’s\u00a0Une barque sur l’ ocean<\/em>\u00a0buoyed with charming fervor in mid-November,\u00a0and Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 7 “Morning” wafted with strongly scented textures at the end of November.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Although the Utah Symphony is a superb ensemble and more or less the flagship for the local and state-wide classical music scene, other local orchestras or symphonies can provide just as compelling of performances. The Salt Lake Symphony<\/strong>‘s interpretation of Richard Strauss’ tone poem\u00a0Death and Transfiguration<\/em>\u00a0on\u00a0September 26\u00a0was gloriously organic and laced with just the right quantity of sentiment. Robert Baldwin conducted them unerringly. The Orchestra at Temple Square<\/strong> gave a performance of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21 with Kevin Kenner as soloist on\u00a0October 16-17\u00a0that rippled with warmth and almost effortless grace. Conductor Igor Gruppman was the partner in a lightly veiled ecstasy. The University of Utah School of Music’s largest top-of-the-line ensemble, the Utah Philharmonia<\/strong>, enlivened Mozart’s Divertimento in D major K.136 with supple colors and vibrant and vivacious phrasing on September 17. Robert Baldwin propelled the musicians onward.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The University of Utah’s Wind Ensemble<\/strong> offered some of the most consistently compelling performances overall among local orchestral-style ensembles, in a genre (wind band) that perhaps has the greatest number of interesting living American composers working today. The half-dozen or so concerts it played this year exhibited compelling emotions and artistry, usually led by conductor Scott Hagen, but at times by his graduate student conductors. If forced to select one performance for all-around dynamism and brilliance, I would choose that of Alfred Reed’s Russian Christmas Music (with organ) on December 9. Scott Hagen of the School of Music conducted. There is also the Utah Wind Symphony<\/strong>, a quasi-professional ensemble founded by Mr. Hagen about four years ago. Thirteen of its members put on a stellar display of inviting musicianship when they gave a rare performance of Mozart’s\u00a0Gran Partita<\/em>\u00a0(or Serenade in B-flat major K.361) in the intimate confines of the Summerhays Music Center on\u00a0November 5.<\/p>\nLess solo instrumental performances are generally given locally, at least by the highest profile \u2013 international — of performers. Nevertheless, Salt Lake City in 2015 was still graced with exceptional performances by some of these individuals, as well as established local musicians. On the 22nd annual Eccles Organ Festival<\/strong>, the young American organist Christopher Houlihan dazzled a small Cathedral of the Madeleine audience on\u00a0November 8\u00a0with a magnificent performance of French composer Louis Vierne’s Organ Symphony No. 4 in G minor, Op. 32 (1914). In September, on the first concert of that Festival, Cathedral Organist Gabriele Terrone mined the full emotional splendor of Charles-Marie Widor’s Organ Symphony No. 6 in G minor, Op. 42 No. 2 (1879). It is refreshing to hear these works played in their entirety, rather than just lone excerpted single movements.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
On the ongoing (for about a decade now) University of Utah School of Music’s Sundays @ 7 Series<\/strong> in Libby Gardner Concert Hall, Vedrana Subotic’s ongoing multi-year traversal of all of Beethoven\u2019s piano sonatas was uniformly excellent. On\u00a0October 11, her rendition of his sonata No. 18 in E flat major, Op. 31 No. 3 \u201cThe Hunt,\u201d revealed a profound feel for the subtly scampering rhythmic vagaries of this piece. Jeffrey Price, also a professor and pianist at the School of Music, decorated his all-Scriabin solo piano recital on March 8 in the same series with the full panoply of tone colors that mystic of a composer surely desired.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
On the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation’s Concert Series<\/strong>, Michael Gurt was radiantly compelling on\u00a0February 13\u00a0in a dashingly understated traversal of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’\u00a0Ciclo brasileiro<\/em>. And finally, Utah Classical Guitar<\/strong> provided the stage for guitarist Gohar Vardanyan at Vieve Gore Concert Hall to nimbly navigate her entire program on October 2\u00a0with effusive ease and eloquence, and no lack of rugged rhythmic propulsion.
\nOn the local chamber music scene, the Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake City<\/strong> offered a number of riches, although no local ensembles, which is par for the course for the last several years. Foremost perhaps was the Czech Pavel Haas String Quartet, in its immaculate yet heartfelt rendering of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95 “Serioso” on October 13.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The summer Intermezzo Chamber Music Series<\/strong> gave one of the most intuitively verdant and emotionally draining performances of any of Franz Schubert\u2019s compositions that I have ever heard, live or on a recording, in his Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat major, D. 898 on\u00a0August 3. Pianist Vedrana Subotic, cellist John Eckstein, and violinist Hanah Stuart were truly astonishing — they sought the emotional heart of each movement, yet the whole was still far greater than the sum of each of the four movements.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The now over three-decades-old NOVA Chamber Music Series<\/strong> struck platinum with a performance of a reconstruction by Alan Boustead of the original chamber (nonet) version of Johannes Brahms’ Serenade No. 1 in D major, Op. 11 on the Subscription Series in March. The performance was both energetically genial and slyly probing. On the now almost two-year old Gallery Series (at the 15th Street Gallery) on\u00a0October 18, American composer Michael Hersch’s forbidding\u00a0Of Sorrow Born: Seven Elegies\u00a0<\/em>for unaccompanied violin (2014), were conveyed with decisively crystalline tone and a sweeping, sublimated sense of windswept and rain-drenched emotion by violinist Alexander Woods of Brigham Young University.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The Park City Autumn Classics Music Festival<\/strong> witnessed the Utah premiere of one of then-East German composer Otto Gerster’s two sonatas for viola and piano in a vivid and clear performance by violist Leslie Harlow and pianist Bryan Stanley at the Temple Har Shalom just outside of Park City on\u00a0October 11. Fizzy and at times almost jazzy textures and lines seeped into the snuggly spacious acoustic<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The Westminster Concert Series<\/strong> was the home of a sensuously iridescent performance of Camille Saint-Saens’ Piano Trio No. 1 in F major, Op. 18 on\u00a0March 23\u00a0in Vieve Gore Concert Hall at Westminster College. Pianist Karlyn Bond, cellist Ann Lee, and violinist Claude Halter did the honors. This was augmented by the sinuously refined energy of violinist Alex Martin in an ardently atmospheric and riveting — almost grandiose — interpretation of Cesar Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. Ms. Bond again honored the composer with a gritty, perfumed delicacy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
If forced to nominate one concert for “concert of the year,” I would choose the\u00a0January 26 Westminster concert of all six of the solo violin sonatas of the Belgian Eug\u00e8ne Ysa\u00ffe. Violinists Yuki MacQueen, David Porter, and Alex Martin (all of the Utah Symphony) shaped their harmonic lines with feline intensity. Indeed, for me, Yuki MacQueen’s playing and interpretations of No. 3 and No. 4 would be my performances of the year — played from memory for good measure.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The University of Utah New Music Ensemble<\/strong>, on\u00a0November 30, had oboist Luca Florin and pianist Stephen Arroyo give an ardently invigorating interpretation of Vladimir Ussachevsky’s\u00a0Triskelion<\/em>\u00a0(1982). The Maurice Abravanel Distinguished Visiting Composer Series concert at the U of U Dumke Recital Hall on\u00a0November 23\u00a0included a piece — Four Pieces Quasi Sonata (2006) — by this year\u2019s honoree, Stephen Jaffe. Violist Lois Martin and pianist Stephen Gosling did the delectable honors.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The Salty Cricket Composers Collective<\/strong> (begun in 2006) mostly provides a venue for living local composers to showcase elements of their work, often but not exclusively in the genre of chamber music. This collective\u2019s Living Masters Residency featured an out-of-towner, with one concert on February 28 devoted to at least one of his compositions, along with those of a few local composers. The interloper was the American composer Martin Boykan. The composer was present, and the artistry was relentless. Pianist Jason Hardink surfed the sounds of Boykan\u2019s Piano Sonata No. 3 (2007) to immersive effect, and shifted into more smoothly mellifluous territory with local composer and U of U School of Music director Miguel Chuaqui\u2019s\u00a0Blues Claro<\/em>and\u00a0Blues Ronco\u00a0<\/em>from his\u00a0Blues el Coraz\u00f3n<\/em>\u00a0(2009).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The apparently last-ever concert of the Emerging Quartets and Composers program at the Deer Valley Music Festival on\u00a0July 28\u00a0in St. Mary’s Church in Park City showcased \u2013 in world premieres — some intensely colored and textured compositions for string quartet by the young composers Daniel Castellanos and Douglas Friedman, courtesy of the Semiosis and Denovo String Quartets, all young artists. Friedman\u2019s\u00a0The Pilgrim<\/em>\u00a0and Castellanos\u2019s\u00a0Propulsions <\/em>endeared themselves to the appreciative audience with little sign of artifice. Such adventurism at the Festival will be missed.<\/p>\nAs for choral performances, notable and memorable ones were given by the Utah Chamber Artists <\/strong>(Gerald Finzi’s\u00a0In terra pax<\/em>\u00a0on December 7), the Salt Lake Choral Artists<\/strong> (the Russian Alexander Gretchaninov’s\u00a0Passion Week<\/em>\u00a0of 1911\u00a0<\/em>on\u00a0April 12\u00a0as part of the Madeleine Festival), the U of U A Cappella Choir and Chamber Choir <\/strong>in all of their performances led by Barlow Bradford, and Utopia Early Music<\/strong> (a themed concert titled Poignant Pleasures: Music of the French Baroque on\u00a0May 10\u00a0at the Cathedral Church of St. Marks). Last, but one with the other superb choral performances, the Choir of the Cathedral of the Madeleine and Orchestra, along with the Choristers of the Madeleine Choir School<\/strong>, rendered grief with humbling warmth in the Englishman Herbert Howell’s\u00a0Hymnus Paradisi<\/em>, led by Melanie Malinka on the St. Cecilia’s Day Concert of\u00a0November 22.
\n.
\nSolo vocal recitals with piano accompaniment are given less frequently on the major classical music series in Salt Lake City. Some of the best such recitals are routinely given by graduate students at the School of Music at the University of Utah. Young soprano Michelle Dean\u2019s recital on\u00a0October 2\u00a0was touching, moving, and playful, especially in Barlow Bradford\u2019s brief four-song cycle\u00a0The Song of the Lark<\/em>, with the composer at the piano. Those qualities were abundant as well in that least-known of the six French composers of\u00a0Les Six<\/em>, Louis Durey. Dean made her six song selections from his\u00a0Le Bestiaire\u00a0<\/em>(1922) her own little shadow world, but the audience was graciously invited to slither inside it.<\/p>\nOpera and musical theatre saw memorable performances by Utah Opera<\/strong> (Mozart’s\u00a0Cosi fan<\/em>\u00a0Tutte<\/em>\u00a0in March), Utah Festival Opera<\/strong> (How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying <\/em>July-August in Logan), the U of U Lyric Opera Ensemble (Jules Massenet’s\u00a0Cendrillon\u00a0<\/em>in a steampunk production in April), and Westminster College’s Opera Studio (Handel’s\u00a0Semele<\/em>\u00a0in March). Indeed, this production of\u00a0Semele\u00a0<\/em>(set in a southern American Gothic funeral parlor)\u00a0in my opinion in some ways matched and exceeded the production of the same opera I saw at Seattle Opera in March.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
To touch upon Utah Opera again, consistency was the watchword, with excellent productions (and first company productions) of Georges Bizet’s\u00a0The Pearl Fishers<\/em>\u00a0and Igor Stravinsky’s\u00a0The Rake’s Progress<\/em>, the latter led by Thierry Fischer in his precise and prismatic Utah Opera conducting debut. However, for me the largely unheralded conductor Will Crutchfield’s conducting\u00a0of\u00a0Cosi\u00a0<\/em>was the conducting masterclass of the year \u2013 so invigorating yet so supple, so all-encompassing a shaping of lines, yet drawing forth phrasing and articulation of such point and effervescent sheen. Each of the five performances I attended was indelible, with a delightfully balanced cast of singers who could all act and sing most convincingly, on sets and with direction and costumes that insinuated listeners and viewers into the recesses of the drama.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Although this retrospective is really only about the 2015 classical music concert season in Salt Lake City and environs, two local concerts in the rock\/pop genre caught my attention this year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On the summer Twilight Concert Series<\/strong> at Pioneer Park, St. Vincent’s intimately epic, at times hard-edged cabaret rock\/electronic fusion transfixed me for her entire concert on\u00a0August 27. I attended two of her previously far less heralded performances in Salt Lake City, in 2014 at The Depot and in 2011 at the Urban Lounge. Her rendition of the song \u201cPrince Johnny\u201d off of her 2014 self-titled\u00a0St. Vincent\u00a0<\/em>album this time easily serenaded the entire block — it was almost too self-contained when she shimmered through it at The Depot. She is one of the most talented and purely musical artists on the more popular music scene today. Her live performances lose none of their sprawling immediacy in an outside venue.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The set run through on that same series by the band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, culled mostly from their five most acclaimed albums, lit the evening of\u00a0July 23\u00a0with a dark amber melancholy swirl of honest emotions, full of lyrically rhythmic zest. The song \u201cReturning\u201d from their latest album, 2013\u2019s\u00a0Specter at the Feast<\/em>, churned itself into my glinting haze of a memory. The band\u2019s performance was almost a classic case of live being even better than the tracks on the studio albums.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
So, it was a superb year in music in Salt Lake City and vicinity, and tomorrow we start 2016. I really don’t want to say that the best is yet to come, but we very well may have come to expect it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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