Howard Who?

In the twilight of the Concrete Frequency series (one more concert to go), Esa-Pekka Salonen made a very interesting statement. As conductor David Robertson and company were concerned for two weeks about cities and the art they produce, Salonen returned to the podium with a piece that provided the primal nature world in all its sonic splendor, Messiaen’s From the Canyons to the Stars. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended.

One gets the feeling with Salonen that he’s sculpting the sound in space. You often see him scooping and making swinging movements with his arms as his wrists fling cues around. If as a conductor Robertson provides complete transparency and directness, Salonen gives poetic meaning and utter passion. I marvelled at the way some notes seemed to stretch and penetrate deeply and then break into sudden silence that was absolutely deafening. In fact, there is so much silence in the piece that in essence it is another instrument which Salonen is conducting. The orchestral colors were absolutely vivid and, unlike in some previous performances, the percussion sizzled and the whip lashed hard.

Messiaen’s music works quite differently from other composers. He is known for being cuckoo for birds, and usually infuses his music with actual birdsongs which he had the pleasant habit of notating and cataloguing. Some of the movements in Canyons were in fact dealing only with a single bird, the most notable being Mockingbird. Out of 12 movements, that movement was a solo piano piece that featured overwhelming virtuosity as well as flights of imagination regarding the inner life of a mockingbird. Marino Formenti provided the piano part, and declarations of a “21st Century Glenn Gould” are not too far off. He has the chops certainly. He also has the strange stage behavior, attacking each note with fury and then retracting, leaning back totally relaxed within his performer’s coccoon. Formenti had previously been chosen to play the last concert of the LACMA Monday Evening Concerts, which from some accounts signaled him as the next great thing. Besides Salonen, his was the major reason why this performance was so otherworldly and joyous.

I wish more people could have seen this concert, which defied every natural thing that most people expect from concerts. There was no intermission, no traditionally catchy melodies, no electronic performance techniques…just pure acoustic sound that fired up the little spaces in the brains of people present. Messiaen wrote the music based on his experience going to Bryce Canyon in Utah, but the music could have been many different things. The audience that saw it stood in ovation and wouldn’t stop. To have witnessed it, I couldn’t have been happier at that moment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Classical Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.