A Celebration of Ukrainian Classical Music at a Pivotal Moment in History
In wartime, extremes always prevail in the public imagination. The fact is that the people of Ukraine had absolutely nothing to do with Vladimir Zelensky’s reckless provocation of the bellicose dictator next door, or the proliferation of American-built germ warfare labs which the Russians claim to have bombed into the stone age. Russian propaganda is no more trustworthy than MSNBC, so we don’t know if or to what degree their claim is true. At this moment in history, it seems like basic common sense to advocate for a rapid end to hostilities, not only for the sake of Ukraine’s diverse populations, but for all of us, considering what great musical contributions the country has given the world over the centuries.
One Ukrainian musician who’s given us great beauty lately is violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv. Her latest album Poems and Rhapsodies with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine under Volodymyr Sirenko is streaming at Spotify. It’s a mix of standard repertoire along with some fascinating rarities from her home turf.
She joins forces with cellist Sophie Shao in a lush, rapturous, tersely lyrical take of Saint-Saëns’ La muse et le poète to open the record. Ivakhiv’s elegant, downwardly stairstepping interlude draws sober reflection from Shao and pillowy ambience from the orchestra. From there Ivakhiv parses the dreamy atmosphere with a spun-steel precision, Shao holding down her role as brooding foil.
The drifting, enveloping ambience continues with Chausson’s Poème symphonique, Ivakhiv cutting through acerbically in this showcase for both her lower register and dynamics, Sirenko deftly exercising restraint until the magnificently determined peak before the end.
The centerpiece is a nimbly evocative take of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. Sirenko opts for mystery and dancing precision as Ivakhiv mines the subtly enigmatic corners of the piece: this is a remarkably restless interpretation. Them again, that perception might be colored by having listened to the composer’s harrowing Symphony No. 6 on loop for much of last year: it’s no less relevant now.
The first of the rarities here is Anatol Kos-Anatolsky’s Poem for Violin and Orchestra in D Minor, a moody, captivatingly Romantic kaleidoscope of Carpathian-tinged violin riffage, with moments of blustery brass and persistently wary lustre. It ought to be better known: Ivakhiv deserves props for unearthing it.
Kenneth Fuchs‘ American Rhapsody (Romance for Violin and Orchestra), a Robert Motherwell-inspired tone poem, has panoramic sweep and interweave between orchestral voices and Ivakhiv’s alternately stark and soaring lines. The ensemble close the album with another Ukrainian gem, Myroslav Skoryk’s Carpathian Rhapsody, making Bach and then phantasmagorical hi-de-ho jazz out of an ancient-sounding chromatic folk theme, All this underscores the need to preserve the culture that incubated this music
An Epic, Historically-Inspired Collection of Rarities For One of the World’s Most Soulful Instruments
What better to brighten a dreary January in apartheid-era New York than an epic album dedicated to little-known material for the vastly underrated bassoon? Laurence Perkins knows as well as anyone else who plays a low-register instrument that his axe of choice is just as well suited to somber depths as it is to buffoonery. There’s some of both and a lot in between on his fascinating latest album Voyage of a Sea-God, which isn’t online yet It’s a dynamically vast collaboration with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Carducci String Quartet, among others. Just as ambitiously, Perkins has assembled the program as a musical capsule history of the 20th century.
He takes the album title from a Mozart bio which likened the instrument to a mythical triton blowing a conch shell. He teams up with pianist Michael Hancock to open the record with the moodily expressive flamenco echoes of a real rarity, British Romantic composer Richard Henry Walthew’s Introduction and Allegro,
His fellow bassoonists Amy Thompson, Matthew Kitteringham and Catriona McDermid join him for another rarity, Prokofiev’s blithely strolling miniature Scherzo Humoristique: cartoonish as this is, the textures of the more resonant moments are luscious. A little later, they negotiate William Schumann’s colorful Quartettino for Four Bassoons, from an initial dervish dance, to nocturnal solemnity, a playfully fleeting waltz and a fugue.
One of the better-known pieces here is Saint-Saens’ Bassoon Sonata, with Hancock rising from a chiming triumph to more torrential heights as Perkins stays in wistful mode in the first movement. The second gives Perkins a challenging, slithery workout as well as moments of poignancy over a coy operatic bounce. Yet the baroque-flavored third movement is where Perkins squeezes out the most subtlety and pathos.
Thompson and McDermid return for two segments of Granville Bantock’s Incidental Music for Macbeth, the first a bagpipe-like Scottish air, the second a cheerily strutting “witches dance” for the full bassoon quartet. The string quartet, bolstered by bassist Michael Escreet, violist Susie Meszaros and harpist Eira Lynn Jones join Perkins for an expressively reflective, dynamic performance of Arnold Bax’s Threnody and Scherzo, shifting from a striking sense of longing to more puckish, Gershwinesque terrain, then bouncing and blipping between the baroque and, eventually, a more darkly acerbic chase scene.
This is a long album: there are many more treats here!
Hindemith’s Bassoon Sonata is more tuneful than most of his repertoire, veering in and out of rainy-day focus against Hancock’s steadily waltzing backdrop, then unexpected glitter, goofiness and pastoral touches. Henri Dutilleux’s Sarabande and Cortege for piano and bassoon have a bracing, chromatically-fueled bite matched by moments of creepy phantasmagoria with some devious quotes from more famous works.
Elizabeth Maconchy’s Concertino For Bassoon and String Orchestra, William Goodchild conducting the ensemble, begins with some jarring contrasts between vigorous lushness and Perkins’ introspectively wandering lines, then a more seamless counterpoint ensues. Serioso strings anchor Perkins’ moody march in the second movement; the similarly disquieted third features one of Perkins’ most incisive solos here.
Perkins premiered Alan Ridout’s two Shakespearean character studies for solo bassoon, Caliban and Ariel, in 1974. The former has a gnomic creepiness; the latter is spacious and airy yet far from carefree. The highlight of Andrzej Panufnik’s haunting Concerto for Bassoon and Small Orchestra – inspired by the murder of Polish dissident priest Jerzy Popieluszko – is a long, sparse, woundedly resonant Perkins solo in the second movement. From there, stabbing string motives alternate with methodical bassoon lines, then give way to vast Shostakovian desolation, distantly hopeful austerity, and Gorecki-esque prayerfulness. What a profound piece of music for an era where big pharma whistleblowers are being assassinated.
The last of the piano-and-bassoon pieces is Richard Rodney Bennett’s Bassoon Sonata, the most modernist but also strangely compelling piece on the program, with a persistently restless, sometimes furtive feel. The final track is David Bedford’s Dream of Stac Pollaidh, a Scottish mountainscape which Perkins plays solo with matter-of-factly cadenced, syncopated steps toward the summit.
Wait, there’s more: an enigmatically marching miniature by Herbert Howells. The amount of creativity and singleminded dedication that went into this record is awe-inspiring.
Virgil Boutellis-Taft Puts Out One of the Most Darkly Beguiling Classical Albums of Recent Years
One of the most diversely entertaining, dark-themed classical records of recent years is violinist Virgil Boutellis-Taft‘s new album Incantation with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, streaming at Spotify. His approach is disarmingly direct and typically understated: overall, this is about mystery far more than the macabre.
He and the ensemble open with an aptly lush, starkly dynamic, moody take of Bruch’s Kol Nidrei. Max Bruch was not Jewish, but he liked to plunder Jewish melodies – in this case, the prayer for the dead – rather than reaching for a faux-Romany sound as so many of his contemporaries did when they needed an extra jolt of minor-key intensity.
Tomaso Antonio Vitali’s Chaconne in G minor is one of the great classical mystery stories. We don’t know when it was written, but it was obviously radical for the baroque era. We know next to nothing about the composer and those who first resurrected it. Some investigators have suggested that the piece was deliberately misattributed in order to deflect possible criticism of its strikingly forward-looking chromatics. Boutellis-Taft holds onto the piece’s wicked ornamentation with a vise-grip legato as the orchestra looms and pulses menacingly behind him.
Saint-Saëns’ iconic Danse Macabre has been featured on this page innumerable times. This version of the witchy tarantella is distinguished by Boutellis-Taft’s gleeful vibrato, the forceful presence of the flutes, and an unusually persistent, skittish tension – which makes obvious sense in context. And the reaper doesn’t tiptoe out here – he leaves with a sinister flourish. He’ll be back!
Tchaikovsky’s Sérénade Mélancolique is exactly that, muted but purposeful. As with the Bruch work here, it’s a showcase for Boutellis-Taft’s resonant low midrange expressiveness, but also vigorously colorful attack in the upper registers. He makes a memorable return to Jewish themes with Ernest Bloch’s Nigun, from the Baal Shem suite, lit up by quicksilver ornamentation over an ominously Asian-tinged pentatonic theme. It’s a welcome addition to the classical heavy metal canon – and that’s meant as a compliment.
Ernest Chausson’s Poème pour Violon et Orchestre, op. 25, the longest piece on the program here, launches from an uneasily dreamy woodwind-driven tableau that eventually falls away on the wings of Boutellis-Taft’s wary solo. This is the most lavishly orchestrated yet most subtle performance here, darkly celestial rather than stygian.
Boutellis-Taft closes the album with Yumeji’s Theme, by Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi, a brief, melancholy, marionettishly waltzing recent work from the soundtrack to the film In the Mood for Love.
Organist Yuri McCoy’s Symphonic Roar: Truth in Advertising
A cynic would say that the title of organist Yuri McCoy‘s new album Symphonic Roar: An Odyssey of Sound from the Paris Conservatoire – which hasn’t hit the web yet – is redundant. After all, epic grandeur and volume are what bring out the faithful in the organ demimonde and keep them coming back. On the other hand, as explosive and adrenalizing as this album is, it’s also remarkably subtle.
McCoy discovered that he had a couple of organs in his native Houston which were especially well suited to the wide expanse of characteristically French colors in this program, a mix of popular repertoire, a dazzling rarity and a brand-new arrangement of a strange relic from the Paris Surrealist movement.
He opens on the spectacular 1997 Fisk-Rosales organ at Rice University with Jean-Louis Florentz’s showstopper La Croix Du Sud. If you’ve ever wondered what Malian psychedelic rock would sound like on a pipe organ, this is it, rising from a hypnotically assertive Tuareg riff to an increasingly wild swirl of variations meant to evoke the dizzying ecstasy of Sufi dance. Florentz was a student of Messiaen, so that influence is apparent, especially in the piece’s starriest moments; Jehan Alain is another one, along with another piece that will follow later on the program here. The frenetic polyrhythms camouflaging an anthemic, Alainesque theme early on, the sudden flares over a brooding pedal note and the series of long climbs afterward will give you goosebumps. What a way to kick off an album.
McCoy follows with an increasingly blistering, breathtakingly dynamic take of the famous allegro vivace movement from Guilmant’s Sonata No. 2. He mines burbling phantasmagoria and finds a creepy anthem in Joseph Bonnet’s brief Will O’the Wisp. Then he concocts a bracing blend of icy, wafting and majestic registrations for Saint-Saens’ Fantaisie in D Flat, rising from an unexpectedly wistful introduction, to stately, airy angst, an anthemic hymn of sorts, and back.
McCoy moves to the 2017 Nichols & Simpson organ at his home base, Houston’s South Main Baptist Church to play a particularly expansive, deep-sky take of Louis Vierne’s iconic Clair de Lune. He winds up the record with his own brand-new arrangement of Edgar Varese’s sprawling 1926 symphonic work Ameriques. Varese had left France behind for the US by then: there’s a classic European wonder at American energy and vitality here, as well as a dissociatively shifting, one might say schizophrenic expanse of remarkably forward-looking ideas that sometimes edge over into the macabre. Percussion plays every bit as much a part as the organ: Brady Spitz and his “assistants,” Colin Boothby and Grant Wareham have just as much fun with their sirens and castanets and assorted implements as McCoy has in the console.
Celebrating a Halloween Classic and Its Enigmatic Composer
Today’s Halloween month installment revisits an iconic piece from the creepy classical repertoire: French early Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre. It’s been recorded to death (ouch, sorry), and strangely, it doesn’t seem to be represented in concert here in New York this month. But there’s a Utah Symphony recording worth hearing, if 19th century phantasmagoria is your thing – and if this album ever makes it to the web. For the moment, here’s a 1951 New York Philharmonic performance with maestro Dmitri Mitropoulos.
Conductor Thierry Fischer leads the Salt Lake City ensemble through a colorful, careening, deliciously inspired take. Madeline Adkins’ solo violin is jagged, almost haphazard, the simmer underneath is mutedly evil and the group are obviously having a great time with the gleeful grimness of this quasi-tarantella.
The rest of the record holds up robustly. The composer’s Symphony No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 55 opens with a series of spot-on, momentary solos from oboe, violin, bassoon and clarinet, introducing a slashing chromatic theme. The riffs are short, sharp, Mozartean, the orchestra pulsing tightly underneath. Saint-Saens was a prickly guy and didn’t do himself any favors for the sake of posterity, but this isn’t shalllow music, and the orchestra completely get that. It’s a clinic in classical composition.
The concise, contrapuntal phrasing of the second movement is more warmly crepuscular and early 19th century, closer to, say, Beethoven’s Sixth. Fischer lets the dogs out to leap and waltz around the wry, momentary solo passages of the third, then the orchestra go racing, lickety-split through the jaunty concentric circles of the finale. Still, conceptually, wouldn’t it have been a whole lot more interesting if Saint-Saens had rolled with the menace inherent in the opening movement? Maybe eschewing that was a commercial move, figuring that there’s only so much macabre an audience can take.
The opening of the other symphony here, No. 2 in F, “Urbs Roma” has been ripped off for plenty of pop songs over the years. It’s surprising that the tumbling pageantry of the second movement and the troubled Mitteleuroepean gothic of the third haven’t also been plundered. The album’s liner notes witheringly quote Claude Debussy as saying that Saint-Saens – who’d trashed the debut of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn – once showed promise of becoming a great composer. Whatever you think of his music – his endless volleys of orchestral counterpoint, his grandiose, Lisztian piano concertos, his irresistible Organ Symphony and perhaps shockingly poignant solo organ works – you can’t deny his gift for pure entertainment. Once again, Fischer gets that, and so does this orchestra.
Loreto Aramendi Delivers Chills and Thrills at Central Synagogue
Musicians may be nocturnal creatures, but church organists have to be on their game at pertty much every hour of the day..So it was no surprkse when Spanish organist Loreto Aramendi played one of the year’s most exhilarating programs in the middle of the day, a couple of weeks ago on the
Musicians may be nocturnal creatures, but church organists have to be on their game at pertty much every hour of the day..So it was no surprkse when Spanish organist Loreto Aramendi played one of the year’s most exhilarating programs in the middle of the day, a couple of weeks ago on the gorgeously colorful organ at Central Synagogue
The highlight of her eclectically thrillling performance was the great organ composer Louis Vierne’s transcription of Rachmaninoff’s iconic C# Minor Prelude. It was a revelation: anchoring its grim counterpoint with a single, blackly portentous pedal note, Aramendi really took her time with it, a dirge to end all dirges.
Louis Robillard’s transcription of Saint-Saens’ Halloween classic Danse Macabre was another deliciously phantasmagoriacal treat. Aramendi reveled in a bief volley of sepulchral gliasandos with as much relish as the false ending and the finale where the ghost goes on its merry way.
She opened the program with a Buxtehude toccata that was more of a song without words, reminding what a paradigm-shifter Bach’s biggest influence was. Another Robillard transcription, Liszt’s Funerailles, aptly foreshadowed the Rachmaninoff, A final Robillard arrangement, the Prelude and Scicilienne from Faure’s Peleas et Melisande matched High Romantic grandeur to lilting grace.
Ligeti’s tensely circling Coulee, from his Etudes for Organ, was the most monochromatically bleak, and in that sensse, darkest piece on the bill. Aramendi closed with a blaze of fury, giving Charles Tournemire’s cult favorite Victiae Paschali chorale every bit of torrential power she could muster. A small but raptly attentive midday crowd gave her a robust standing ovation.
This concert was the final episode of this spring’s series of monthly Prism Organ Concerts in the magnificent Lexington Avenue space just north of 54th Street, programmed by organist Gail Archer, who’s put out an unusually adventurous series of albums over the past several years, ranging from obscure American repertoire to iconic Messiaen works. Watch this space for news about next season.
World-Class Symphonic Grandeur From an Unlikely Spot
Playing devil’s advocate, here’s how Roger Nichols introduces the liner notes for the Utah Symphony’s sumptuous new recording of Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony: ”Igor Stravinsky remembered Saint-Saëns as ‘a sharp little man’, demonstrably unimpressed by the sounds emanating from the orchestra in The Rite of Spring. Succeeding generations have perpetuated this view of Saint-Saëns as a carping pedant, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who excelled in providing music that was all surface and little content.”
#gutpunch.
Nichols quickly goes on to explain how that perception is only part of the picture. In the days when it was even more customary (and often necessary) for composers to rely on commissions from the entitled classes to pay the rent, guys like Saint-Saëns would churn out one predictably cheery, cliched score after another. After all, the landed gentry of 1880s France had no more interest in anything challenging or cutting edge than the tattooed newcomers to Bushwick and Bed-Stuy do now. But as anybody who’s heard Carnival of the Animals or Danse Macabre – each written for Saint-Saëns’ family – will agree, there’s a whole different side to his work.
This is a rare recording – streaming at Spotify – where the shorter pieces on the program actually upstage the centerpiece. Conductor Thierry Fischer and the ensemble give Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 every bit of opulent ostentatiousness it deserves, a fullscale orchestral work supercharged with both organ and piano, the icing on a many-layered sonic cake. As classical party music goes, this is about as good as it gets. Recorded live in concert just over a year ago on the group’s home turf, the sound quality is magnificent. Solos throughout the orchestra, from James Hall’s oboe to Louise Vickerman’s harp, are precise and emphatic. Exchanges between various sections of the group are seamless, and the dynamics cover as much ground as a symphonic ensemble possibly can. And the hooks come at you, over and over again: just when you’re humming one, another will jump in and displace it.
The performance of the composer’s only slightly less lavish 1909 suite Trois Tableaux Symphoniques d’Après La Foi is even more of a thrill. If less ambitiously than Bartok, Saint-Saëns by then had fallen under the spell of North African music. While this is limited to what fans of Middle Eastern sounds cynically call “Hollywood hijaz,” the French Romantic was obviously feeding off a big jolt of inspiration and that translates to the orchestra here. Its cinematic vistas may be comfortable and predictably catchy, but they’re hardly shallow. And the wistful finale has poignancy to rival anything Samuel Barber ever wrote. The orchestra follow by stampeding through the chromatics of the famous Bacchanale from the opera Samson & Delilah, every single click of the castanets fired off with relish.
Over the years, the people of the state of Utah haven’t done themselves any favors by pulling stunts like withdrawing from the Boy Scouts of America since girls are allowed to join Scout troops now (you’d think that it would be the other way around, that all the boys would want to join the Girl Scouts for the sake of the enormous profits in selling cookies, but that’s a topic for another time). Rather than reinforcing any regional preconceptions, this album reminds how great art sometimes flourishes in unlikely places. Put this on your playlist along with the best-ever recording of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, by the Rochester Symphony Orchestra…if you can find it.
Defiance, Relevance and Transcendence With the New York Philharmonic in Prospect Park
So many inspiring conclusions to take away from the New York Philharmonic’s phantasmagorically majestic performance this past evening in Prospect Park. In the year of the Metoo movement, that the orchestra would choose a centerpiece celebrating a mythic heroine who disarms a psychotic dictator using only her wits spoke volumes.
As does the organization’s long-running Very Young Composers mentorship and advocacy program. Two of those individuals were represented on the bill, each a young African-American woman and a native Brooklynite. And in what’s been a challengingly transitional interregnum between music directors, the choice of James Gaffigan to lead the ensemble through some stunningly fresh, meticulously articulated, relevatory interpretations of material they’ve probably played dozens of times before paid mighty dividends.
At a concert pitched to pull a family audience, local city council representative Brad Lander’s commentary on the ongoing anguish of families being broken up by the ongoing extremist clampdown on immigrants was the night’s most overtly political moment. A polyglot crowd echoed their fervent, familial solidarity, then the orchestra spoke to how triumphantly this scenario could actually play out.
They foreshadowed the suspense and splendor of their romp through Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade with an arguably even more carnivalesque stampede through the Bacchanale from Saint-Saens’ opera Samson and Delilah. Even if its creepy chromatics aren’t much more than Hollywood hijaz, those Arabic inflections were another crushingly relevant reference point.
If the program’s two brief, kinetic works by young composers Jordan Millar and Camryn Cowan are any indication, the blues are as much alive in Brooklyn as they were during the Harlem Renaissance, a most welcome meme throughout the New York City public schools this year and a vivid theme for these two gradeschoolers. Each composer’s piece put simple, emphatic blues hooks front and center in lieu of expansive harmony or flourishes, the former with a neat, cold stop midway through and some unexpected, Mozartean lustre afterward.
The orchestra made it to the concert’s midway point with three jaunty, frequently coy excerpts from Leonard Bernstein’s score to On the Town. The Philharmonic’s pretty-much-annual tour of the New York City parks system, from the Bronx to Staten Island, always features a little bit of everything, including what in another century would have been called “pops” material from outside the classical canon. But as with the rest of the program, Gaffigan didn’t deviate from the game plan or phone these in, airing out the composer’s exchanges of voicings with a painterly charm.
And as much as the park programming is standard repertoire, the Philharmonic never picks tired or cheesy material. Over the last few years, we’ve been treated to plenty of Stravinsky – notably a conflagration of The Firebird in Central Park a couple years back – as well as a similarly colorful tour of Respighi’s Pines of Rome a little before then. Considering both the political subtext and the stunning attention to detail from both Gaffigan and the orchestra, this could have been the best of all of them since the turn of the decade.
Getting to witness it from the best seat in the house – about the equivalent of row L at their Lincoln Center home – no doubt colored this perception. Looking out into the wide swath of greenery in front of them, it must be tempting for everyone onstage to want to play loud, but Gaffigan mined the entirety of the sonic spectrum in keeping with the composer’s top-to-bottom orchestration. When there was suspense, it was relentless; when there was menace, it was a carnival of potentially dead souls; when there were dreamy interludes, they had a celestial vastness.
And the solos, tantalizingly brief as they were, were mesmerizing. Concertmaster Frank Huang spun joyously expert filigrees and flickers, up to an almost shocking cadenza in the final movement where he dug in so hard it seemed that he might break a violin string. Similar effects – especially bassoonist Judith LeClair’s silken, mutedly bittersweet solo – further underscored a triumphant narrative mirroring both the angst and transgressive victories in so many of the world’s ongoing struggles and rebellions.
The Philharmonic’s 2018 tour of the boroughs concludes on Sunday, June 17 indoors at 3 PM at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island.
An Uneasily Stunning Program of Works for Oboe and Piano at the Morgan Library
The repertoire for oboe and piano isn’t as vast as for, say, violin and piano, but there are plenty of gems out there.The duo performance by Olivier Stankiewicz and Jonathan Ware on Tuesday in the magnificent sonics at the Morgan Library was a feast of amusing trick endings, vivid color, stunning clarity and a program that offered a series of salutes, some more subtle than others, to the Ravel Bolero.
References to that work, both oblique and obvious, traced a path straight from Antal Dorati’s Duo Concertante for Oboe and Piano, from 1983, back to Pierre Sancan’s 1957 Sonatine for Oboe and Piano, and finally a late Poulenc work, the 1962 Sonata for Oboe and Piano. Beyond flamenco allusions, eerie Satie-like close harmonies and belltones permeated all three pieces. Ware’s attack on the piano had an emphatic, purposeful drive to match his icepick precision, while Stankiewicz’s oboe rose from striking, perfectly precise spirals and volleys to a stark, burred, woody tone in the closing number: it was almost as if Stankiewicz was playing Poulenc on a duduk, or a Turkish zurla.
A persistent sense of suspense pervaded Sancan’s piece, alternately jaunty and funereal, a Hitchcock film overture of sorts. Dorati’s work was a showcase for Ware’s vigorous clarity and Stankiewicz’s seemingly effortless command of rapidfire trills, matched by long, airy, plaintive phrasing. The Poulenc gave the duo even more of a launching pad for bright contrasts between a neoromantic nocturnal calm and heroic swells with more than a hint of sarcasm…and wry quotes from Ravel and La Vie En Rose. The second movement, with its frequently droll conversational repartee, was particularly entertaining.
They’d opened with Saint-Saens’ Sonata in D Major, a predictably pleasant way to spotlight Stankiewicz;’s lyricism: the piano is a supporting instrument in that one. This concert was staged by Young Concert Artists as part of their ongoing noontime series at the Morgan. Impressively, the house was close to sold out, and while there were plenty of retirees, the audience demographics were unexpectedly diverse:. Clearly, word is out about the series, whether among those in the gig economy or neighborhood folks who may have snuck away from school or the dayjob. The next concert here is Feb 21 at noon with pianist Remi Geniet playing works by Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky; cover is $20.
And YCA’s next concert after that, at Merkin Concert Hall at 8 PM on Feb 28, is especially enticing for those of us who love low-register sonics. Bassist Xavier Foley plays solo works by Bach, Sperger and Franck plus his own compositions; you can get in for as little as $10.
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