i wish i knew how to cut..thingy.
1/14/07
This concert was at Benaroya Hall. The Auburn Symphony played Wagner’s Overture to “Die Meistersinger Von Nurnberg”, Chopin’s Piano Concerto Number two in F Minor, and Shostakovich’s Symphony Number Eleven, “The Year 1905”.
It was a cold winter day. After a morning spent with my family that was only in town for that Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, I made my way downtown. Traffic was light, luckily. There was a little pre-pre-concert lecture confusion. A few Roosevelt orchestra students wandered around the lobby, waiting for someone to direct them to their tickets. Once the tickets were attained, we managed to find our way inside to the pre-concert lecture.
The audience was full of white-haired men and women who have evidently decided to spend the rest of their days enjoying “culture”. I pondered the elderly as we took seats in the very front row.
Apparently I hadn’t been paying attention before, because I was surprised to see Mr. Kershaw, the English-sounding man who we all liked who conducted our orchestra that one evening.
I whipped out my miniature notebook to take notes; it was nearly full, I noticed. I had to write on the back of the drawing of Cow Girl (she fell into a radioactive vat of milk).
After the lecture, there was a very confused usher who directed us to the completely wrong seats. After being made to move, the seats were found and the music started.
My personal favorite of the three pieces was the first; the Wagner. I had played it before (an arrangement). It was very long, though. The conductor said so himself in the pre-concert lecture. The piece was quite dramatic and interesting.
Richard Wagner was a German Composer in the mid 1800’s. Die Meistersinger Von Nurnberg is a comedic opera involving unrequited love and a singing contest at the end, determining who gets the fair maiden. The opera took Wagner around twenty-two years to develop. He was side-tracked, writing several other operas.
The next piece they played was Chopin’s Piano Concerto Number two. Personally, I did not like this piece. The symphony had a solo pianist, Craig Sheppard. He was admittedly a very good pianist. The piece was just long and medium-paced. I felt that there wasn’t enough movement and that it wasn’t exciting. But perhaps I just do not understand Chopin. Or the piano.
Mr. Kershaw, the conductor and director of the symphony, refers to Frederic Chopin as a “poet of the piano”. He said that Chopin was very good at writing music for the piano, but not so much as full orchestra music. The piece, he says, is difficult to accompany. The strange thing about this piece is that there is a bass trombone. I don’t really know why. Probably because it is a concerto.
After these two pieces I was exhausted from all the spacing-out. Although I had enjoyed the music (mostly), an intermission was much needed. My back hurt. During the break, I socialized with nearby Roosevelt-types, discussing what was needed in the paper we had to write. No one really knew…
The third and final piece was Shostakovich’s Symphony Number Eleven (“The Year 1905”). I was expecting a lot from this piece. Mr. Kershaw seemed to be very into the story it was based on. He spent a long time in the pre-concert lecture explaining it. He said it would be obvious when there was the mass murder, the sound of gunshot. I couldn’t really tell.
I thought all movements in this piece sounded very much the same. I liked the more expressive parts. I have never been a fan of Shostakovich, or any twentieth century composers, really. The whole thing was very long - about an hour. I did like the idea behind it - and the fact that there was a story.
Basically, Shostakovich was reaching out to his fellow Russians during the time of Stalin. He was calling for the end of tyranny. Shostakovich apparently felt very strongly about his fellow Russians, and corruption.
He wrote this piece in 1957, forty years after the mass murder in front of the St. Petersburg Winter Palace. A ton of surfs were going to peacefully present a petition to the Tsar. They were hungry and oppressed. The Tsar wasn’t there, and the palace guard just started shooting. One thousand demonstrators were shot to death.
This mass murder thing was called Bloody Sunday, but incidentally has nothing to do with U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which is unfortunate because I like that song a lot - and I would have been able to say that U2 is a modern Shostakovich. But, no.
Yet Shostakovich’s Eleventh was not just about the year 1905, but also 1956, when the Russians invaded Hungary, trying to preserve their control of communism there. The Eleventh Symphony was pretty controversial for that time.
When the piece ended, there was an “emergency situation” and we had to wait for emergency-situation people to help some guy. After that, while waiting for a ride, I wondered why the Auburn Symphony is so cheap, since they are just as good as the Seattle Symphony.