It's hard to believe there isn't enough money in the Baltimore area to keep all the music going. Here's hoping that the months ahead will see that money flowing and the steady financial improvements for all those organizations currently or potentially on the casualty list.
Of course, I have a personal motivation in all of this - I'd make a lousy crime reporter.
Alsop, BSO hit fresh peak
Marin Alsop's commitment to new music has been a substantial part of her career and reputation, and it promises to be a hallmark of her tenure on the podium of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. As it turns out, her taste in composers is close to that of one of her BSO music director predecessors, David Zinman, and that includes a mutual affinity for the work of Christopher Rouse.
His Concerto for Orchestra, dedicated to Alsop, was premiered at the conductor's Cabrillo Festival in California back in August and received its East Coast premiere from the BSO last weekend. It's a knockout.
The composer doesn't just honor the tradition of this genre, which is all about showing off each section of the orchestra and the ensemble as a whole. He goes for something deeper and more eventful, creating the feel of a full-blown, Mahler-weight symphony, but condensed to a single, tightly packed movement of about 25 minutes. And for all of the virtuoso material in it, the piece is never about displaying talent. It's about ideas, many of them quite ominous and even a little scary.
The ear is hooked right at the start, with strings racing wildly into a strange sonic landscape. Toward the end, there is a passage for violins playing at their highest range while brass chords appear with the suddenness and unnerving effect of oncoming headlights during a lonely drive on a dark night. There are many other intriguing sounds, including frantically chattering woodwinds and a striking high/low contrast that pits violins against basses.
A major thematic statement emerges from the basses playing what appears to be a reference to the closing measures of the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. That angular theme expands into a full-throated lament for the English horn and works its way through the orchestra, as the music undergoes a startling variety of tone coloring, frenzied counterpoint and anxiously twisting harmonies. The concerto offers moments of eerie repose along the way, but ultimately expends its energy with the thump and drive of heavy metal.
