Klarinet Archive - Posting 000634.txt from 2010/09

From: "Dan Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] NY Philharmonic opening night [X-posted to BB]
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:41:55 -0400

Good posting Lelia. I want to add that the combination of a jazz group and
a symphony orchestra was done in the 1950s with the Stan Kenton band and the
CBS symphony in a work by a man named Lieberman. We were considering doing
it with the Trenton Symphony when I was in the army in 1954-56, but it was
far too complex an undertaking.

I think the title of the piece was something like, "Concerto for jazz band
and symphony orchestra."

Dan Leeson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
To: <klarinet@-----.com>
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 11:35 AM
Subject: [kl] NY Philharmonic opening night [X-posted to BB]

> 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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