Klarinet Archive - Posting 000631.txt from 2010/09

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] NY Philharmonic opening night [X-posted to BB]
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 14:35:41 -0400

Dan Leeson wrote,
>>P.S. The entire first half of the concert was a piece for jazz band and
>>symphony. I thought it
would never end.>>

I wished it hadn't ended quite so soon! My comments from here on are
X-posted from a discussion on the Bulletuing Board:

I liked the Marsalis Swing Symphony a lot, but something strange came out in
the intermission interview with Marsalis: The performance omitted two
movements! It's a long symphony. I'm guessing the cuts facilitated fitting
the whole concert into the PBS "Live from Lincoln Center" two-hour broadcast
slot with the intermission close to the middle. Without any cuts, the Swing
Symphony probably runs longer than an hour.

That's an awfully big compromise to make in the United States premiere of a
modern American composer's score (and why did he premiere it in Berlin, I
wonder?), with the composer sitting right there, not out in the audience,
but contributing virtuosic licks in the trumpet section, no less. I thought
the Strauss and Hindemith performances were excellent and I'm glad to have
heard them, but if the broadcast couldn't run overtime, then I think it
woud've made better sense to omit the Hindemith (the shorter of the three
pieces on the program), give us the symphony intact and let the intermission
come late.

I like the way Marsalis brings the swing tradition into the symphony by
giving choruses/solos to most of his jazz section members, not just to first
chair players. However, I also think the Lincoln Center Jazz group, so heavy
on brasses, over-balanced the Philharmonic's strings and woodwinds. Some of
that imbalance may have come from microphone placement. Except in the solo
passages, the clarinets got drowned out much of the time in the Strauss and
Hindemith pieces, too.

Came back later to add one other thing: It's hard to tell without ever
having heard the music before, but I thought that performance of the
Marsalis sounded as if it could've used another rehearsal or two for their
first performance of a long, challenging score. There were what sounded to
me like quite a few little whoopsies, mostly on entrances. Nothing huge, but
just a bit of raggedy-baggedy, where the orchestra sounded slightly out of
synch with the jazz band. No such problems in the second half of the
program, with the orchestra alone, despite some extremely difficult cues.

Lelia Loban
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/Lelia_Loban

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