The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: Brazilian pianist Alexandre Dossin makes his Madison debut Friday night with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra in an overlooked masterpiece of American Romanticism. Plus, the amateur Madison Community Symphony Orchestra performs a FREE all-Russian program on Friday night at MATC
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ALERT 1: This week’s FREE Friday Noon Musicale at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, 900 University Bay Drive, features violinist Wendy Adams and pianist Ann Aschbacher in music by Schubert, Brahms and Hovhaness.
ALERT 2: The amateur Madison Community Symphony Orchestra will perform a FREE concert Friday night at 7:30 p.m. in the Norman Mitty Theater, 1701 Wright Street on the Madison Area Technical College campus on the east side. The all-Russian program, under the baton of Blake Walter of Edgewood College, features works by Glazunov, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Balakirev. For more information and the complete program, go to: http://www.madisoncommunityorchestra.org/pages/concerts.htm
By Jacob Stockinger
The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra (below top), under music director Andrew Sewell (below bottom), always puts together memorable programs, often with new and exciting soloists plus neglected or little known repertoire.
That is once again the promise of the WCO concert this Friday night at 7:30 p.m. in the Capitol Theater of the Overture Center, 201 State St.
Tickets are $15-$80. See below.
First, the program offers the Madison debut of Alexandre Dossin (below), the 2003 winner of the Martha Argerich International Piano Competition.
Trained at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, Dossin seems a power player. Little wonder that he has recorded music by Liszt, Prokofiev, Kabalevsky and Leonard Bernstein for Naxos Records as well as by Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky for G. Schirmer Music. You can also hear and see a lot of his performances on YouTube.
Moreover, Dossin, who has taught at the UW-Eau Claire and the University of Louisiana and who now teaches at the University of Oregon, will be playing a relatively neglected masterpiece of American Romantic music: the Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 23, by Edward MacDowell (below).
MacDowell’s work is a dark, dramatic and virtuosic work that was once championed by Van Cliburn. (You can hear Cliburn with the third movement with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the late Walter Hendl in the YouTube video at the bottom.).
For most listeners, that will be the discovery of the evening.
Rounding out the program are two more widely known masterpieces: the Orchestral Suite No. 4 by Johann Sebastian Bach and the Symphony No. 3, the “Rhenish,” by Robert Schumann.
The Ear is especially pleased that the WCO is doing Bach.
Too often modern instrument groups defer to period-instrument ensembles for Bach – which means that audiences don’t hear as much Bach (below) as they should and as previous generations did, as the prize-winning composer John Harbison has often lamented in public.
Of course, it is safe to bet that the WCO will borrow some of the faster tempi and historically informed performance techniques from the early music movement. Still, The Ear says Bravo to the programming of Bach by a group that uses modern instruments. We can always use more Bach.
The symphony by Robert Schumann (below) will also have an unusual, if subtle, aspect to its performance.
It is usually played by larger symphony orchestras. But using a chamber orchestra creates a certain intimacy and lends a transparency that reveals structure and themes in an engaging way. Yannick Nézet-Séguin – the highly acclaimed music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and music director-designate of the Metropolitan Opera — recently proved that with his outstanding recording of the four symphonies by Robert Schumann (below) with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.
For more background and information about tickets, go to:
https://wisconsinchamberorchestra.org/performances/masterworks-iii-3/
For more information about Alexandre Dossin, go to his two websites:
http://www.dossin.net/alexandredossin/Welcome.html
https://music.uoregon.edu/people/faculty/adossin
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Classical music: Which piece of music did you first connect with emotionally and how old were you?
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By Jacob Stockinger
Another weekend, another reader survey.
For The Ear, music was and remains much more an emotional experience than an intellectual one.
So he was intrigued when he came across a survey question on the Internet earlier this week.
The question was simple: When did you first connect emotionally with a piece of classical music and how old were you? And what was the piece and composer of the piece that you first connected with emotionally?
It sounds so easy. But The Ear found himself going back through time and really straining to choose the right answer.
Early on, The Ear loved the sound and drama of Smetana’s tone poem “The Moldau.” And he loved some works by Johann Sebastian Bach that he heard in church. During piano lessons, there was some pieces by Chopin.
But then at about age 11, the Great Emotional Awakening to Music came in a way that reminded him of the famous madeleine memory episode in Marcel Proust’s novel “Remembrance of Things Past,” translated more accurately, if less poetically, these days as “In Search of Lost Time.”
Since he himself was a young and aspiring pianist, The Ear has realized, he no doubt first connected with the powerful recording by Arthur Rubinstein (below top) of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18, by Sergei Rachmaninoff (below bottom). That recording also featured Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and you can hear it in the YouTube video at the bottom.
The answer really isn’t a surprise — young people love the sweep of Romantic music. After all, on a lesser emotional level, Rachmaninoff had also moved The Ear with the famous Prelude in C-Sharp Minor — the “Bells of Moscow” — which spurred The Ear into starting piano lessons when he heard it played live and right in front of him by a babysitter.
How intently he listened to the concerto, with a friend in the basement of his friend’s house, over and over again. How it moved him and never failed to move him – and still moves him today.
And then, maybe at 12 or 13, he rushed out and bought the Schirmer score tot he concerto when he was old enough and skilled enough to try to play some of it – the famous opening chords and excerpts from the beautiful and lyrical slow second movement. That experience of playing even excerpts also proved very emotional.
Now, there is also a practical purpose to this question. The answer just might give adults an idea about how to attract young children and new audiences to classical music.
Anyway, that’s what The Ear wants to know this weekend:
How old were you when you first connected EMOTIONALLY to classical music?
And who was the composer, the piece and the performer that you connected with emotionally?
The Ear hopes you have just as much poignant fun recollecting the answer as he did.
Let us know the answer in the COMMENT section with a YouTube link if possible.
The Ear wants to ear.
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