A spate of concerts

On Sunday afternoon we went to a Celebrity Series concert at Jordan Hall of the St Lawrence Quartet with Soprano Heidi Grant Murphy. Monday night it was Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmonic at Symphony Hall, and tonight it is Gabriel Chodos (pianist at NEC) at Jordan Hall.

It is rare to have a soprano with a chamber music group, but this was enticing to me because I am not a super fan of chamber music unless they are playing Shubert Death and the Maiden - actually there is quite a lot of Beethoven, Mozart, and others that I do like but I prefer when there is also a piano or something else that isn't a string instrument.

This concert culminated with the Beethoven Quartet in B-flat Major, Op 130 with Grosse Fuge, a big, and somewhat weird piece. A bit difficult to watch was the 2nd violinist who jumped around an awful lot when he was playing. Murphy and her pianist husband were quite good although I was surprised that she was reading music for everything except the four Schubert Songs; several times she was really looking down at the music instead of singing out. One of the pieces they performed was Songs from the Diaspora by Roberto Sierra, a contemporary composer. This was interesting with some very nice coloration. I'd never heard of Sierra, but I wouldn't mind hearing it again (it's not recorded yet.)

One slightly annoying thing was that the program placed the Sierra in the second half and I didn't read the lyrics while waiting for the first half to occur. Then they announced that the order was to be changed and Sierra would be in the first half but this was after they'd already dimmed the lights thus making it hard to read the program.

The Berliner did a modern piece by Gyorgy Kurtag called Stele. Quite intriguing was the way it opened with portions of the orchestra playing slightly out-of-tune and then generally resolving into rich sounds. The stage was crammed full of instruments for this piece - even more than for the Mahler which followed. Here is what the Globe reviewer says about the Kurtag:

"Stele" is a trio of connected musical tombstones. Enormous orchestral forces are required; the writing is fiercely expressive. Picture a Mahler symphony placed to simmer all day long on a low flame, producing an Austro-German concentrate of great potency. This is the world of Kurtag, and this orchestra knows it well. "Stele" was written for this group in 1993.

For the second half of the concert they did Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and it was most beautiful. The tenor soloist was Ben Heppner who fortunately has a big voice because he had a lot of orchestra to sound over. The second soloist was Thomas Quasthoff (this part is usually done by a contralto). Quasthoff was incredible and really suited this incredible piece of music. This piece's lyrics end with:

"The dear earth everywhere
Blossoms in spring, and grows green anew.
Everywhere and forever, forever
Blue lights the horizon.
Forever... forever..."

With Quasthoff singing ewig... ewig... fading off. Rattle held the silence in the hall for at least a half minute at the end and the spellbound audience cooperated. We've heard Quasthoff before and he is really something special. On top of everything else, he is only about 4 feet tall because he is a Thalidomide baby with very short legs and almost no arms; but the effects of the drug had no impact on his lungs an vocal chords.

And tonight we hear Gabriel Chodos play the last three Shubert sonatas. I particularly like the way he plays the slow movement of the A major having heard it on WGBH recently on a replay of one of their live recordings.

Three women talking

Sitting behind us in Jordan Hall while waiting for the Chodos concert to start (it was fantastic) were three middle/older aged women chatting. It could have been a home-care advice show.

They started with one explaining that she had just cleaned her kitchen cabinets because some of the flour, grains, etc, had become infested with flour moths. [We're familiar with this game having just had to discard a bunch of stuff.] It turns out that each of them had had this problem. Put the stuff in jars, or plastic bags [even this doesn't always work as we have discovered] they chatted on suggesting to tear off a bit of the package with the label to put in the jar. [A good idea that I wish we sometimes used; one day this summer I was making bread in the bread machine and I had to do quite a lot of guessing and had to eliminate a couple of recipes because I couldn't recognize the ingredient.]

One said, thank heavens for Pesach; it makes you throw away lots of stuff every year - enforced spring cleaning! I think this is a demonstration for the saying Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

Then there was how to cook oatmeal and whether Irish Oat Meal was better (no, one said) and the suggestion to buy in bulk at Whole Foods because it is cheaper, and the comment to not bother with organic because it wasn't worth it.

How long can you leave stuff in the freezer? One said she'd had some stuff for quite a while. There were various suggestions. [This evening we threw out a container of unremembered soup and a freezer bag of something quite unrecognizable except that there seemed to be penne in it.]

One of them has had some contractors in who were renovating the kitchen and as a result the refrigerator had been unplugged several times for the day. The question was what food was at risk and should be discarded. Mayonnaise was identified. To top it all off, this person was about to have house guests for the weekend and what should she do if the kitchen isn't restored. A possibility was to have them stay next door at a neighbors. It turned out that the neighbor's daughter had stayed at her house for 6 months several years ago so that sounded OK.

Another problem was a trip for thanksgiving with various family members. The big problem was that she had a 5 passenger car, but at some point in this trip 6 people had to be transported so should she take two trips or find another person to drive. And the whole thing was complicated by one of the grandmothers that was pretty fussy about things and wasn't really well liked and should really just stay home because there was another thanksgiving thing several days later for other parts of the family anyway.

At the intermission we chatted with them - about the concert, not their radio show - after getting the usual are you two brothers thing.

At the end of the concert (long because he played 3 huge Schubert sonatas) after several trips back (where he looked quite exhausted) to acknowledge the applause he walked over to the piano as if he was contemplating an encore and folded down the lid.