Sequenza21

Untuxed, a series of informal, intermission-less Friday-night concerts, returned to Seattle Symphony last night in the hands of its inaugurator, Ludovic Morlot, the Symphony’s former Music Director and current Conductor Emeritus. The program consisted solely of Shostakovich’s wartime Eighth Symphony (1943), a massive piece that can betray a deficient ensemble, with its multitude of lengthy and exposed solos for woodwinds, cello and violin (whose associations with death and funeral music in European are readily embraced by its composer), and by the perennial balance challenges posed by Shostakovich, whose legacy is littered with the corpses of performances that conveyed only two dynamic levels: with brass and without brass.

The Eighth is also a piece that has languished in the shadow of its neighbors, including the epic Fourth Symphony (banished before its premiere in 1936, and still unheard at the time the Eighth was composed, suggesting that Shostakovich might have intended the latter as a substitute for the former), the popular Fifth (whose first movement is echoed by its counterpart in the Eighth with its broad tempo and dotted rhythms that are interrupted midway through by a rough march), the Sixth (whose long, slow first movement is followed by two faster, shorter ones), and the martial Seventh and autobiographical Tenth. No. 8, in fact, had only been mounted once before by Seattle Symphony: in 1985 conducted by the composer’s son Maxim.

For all these reasons, Morlot’s selection of the Eighth to anchor the season’s first subscription week (whose full-length Thursday and Saturday concerts additionally featured Boulez and Ravel) was an audacious one, especially coming right after the ensemble’s summer layoff, and requiring part-time players to to cover the additional flute, bassoon and percussion parts plus a fortified complement of low strings).Happily, the musicians were more than ready for the task. The sparse audience attending the huge onstage forces experienced the full expressive and dynamic range set out by the composer, starting with the somber main theme of the opening Adagio, presented by the first violins with minimal vibrato in contrast to the lusher tone used for the more extroverted second theme. The piercing climax that came ten minutes later was the loudest unamplified sonority I can recall hearing at Benaroya Hall since Bluebeard’s Castle in 2012, and its subsidence into the prolonged English horn solo that concludes the movement was handled exquisitely by the Symphony’s longtime specialist Stefan Farkas (who received the first soloist’s bow afterwards).The mechanistic viola melody that launches the second of the work’s two scherzos is the one excerpt from the Eighth that regularly gets quoted in popular media—usually in connection with wartime Russia. Its rendition Friday night was aptly militant but not muddled. The clattering climax that concludes this movement was another high point, with the drums’ brutal at the forefront, but not enough to drown out the dotted figures in the remaining instruments, whose subsidence from fff to pp as the fourth movement’s passacaglia theme emerges was another transition whose dynamic subtlety is often lost in less careful hands.The success continued in the closing Allegretto, which requires virtuosity from many instruments (including the bass clarinet), plus enough interpretive restraint to convey the slightest touch of optimism at the work’s C major conclusion (Mariss Jansons calls it “a small light at the end of a very long tunnel” that’s possibly just an illusion).

Shostakovich has always been one of the 20th century’s most controversial and contradictory composers. Haunted by censorship and the threat of imprisonment (or worse), his music was championed by Britten and Bernstein, and praised by Rudolf Barshai for “leaving its blood on the stage”, but also dismissed as “bad Mahler” and “battleship grey” by Boulez and Robin Holloway. Whatever one’s feelings about it, though, it’s impossible to survey the landscape of late- and post-Soviet music—Schnittke, Silvestrov, Ustvolskaya, Pärt, Gubaidulina, etc.—without recognizing its inexorable connection to Shostakovich. Unlike Prokofiev, who was arguably a greater composer, but a historical dead-end who left no stylistic heirs, Shostakovich articulated a world view that managed to embody the experience and expression of multiple generations of Eastern European composers.

Seattle Symphony has had a long affinity for Shostakovich, extending back to Gerard Schwarz’s lengthy tenure as Music Director. The presence of several orchestra members who grew up in the Soviet Union surely helps as well. In that sense it’s fitting for his music to accompany the resumption of the Untuxed series following a 2½ year absence brought on by post-COVID consolidation and the executive turmoil that reached a head with the acrimonious departure of Thomas Dausgaard as Music Director in January 2022, leaving a gap that will finally be filled by Xian Zhang’s arrival in Fall 2024. It’s a testament to the caliber of its musicians and the leadership of its section principals that the artistic standards of the Symphony have remained so high despite the organization’s offstage issues.

On the 18th and 19th of August Dave Smith’s 75th birthday was celebrated at Café Oto with two concerts of his music, performed by Jan Steele, Janet Sherbourne, and himself. Each concert began with Smith, who is an extremely masterly pianist performing works of his, and concluded with Steele and Sherbourne performing his major work, Albanian Summer.

Albanian Summer was written in 1980 for Steele and Sherbourne, and performed widely by them for a while. These performances were the first in about 30 years. The work is a sort of travelog of a number of summers that Smith spent in Albania in the 1970s, and includes over its approximately 45 minute duration evocations of Albanian bagpipes (which is how the piece starts), Albanian Communist “anthems,” folksongs, and dances. On both evenings it was engaging and enjoyable and rousing. The performances were completely compelling.

The first concert began with Smith playing three quite substantial works. On the Virtues of Flowers, a half hour long piece, celebrates the therapeutic and restorative powers of flowers as part of a treatment of hospital patients, and was written for a concert by John Tilbury to mark the 30th anniversary of a hospital of the West Sussex Health Authority. The sort of jazzy meditative music which begins and ends the work frames what might be described as post minimalist fast and flashy material. The other two works on the concert were shorter and possibly more dynamic pieces, which were originally intended as parts of a set (Smith has written a number of evening long sequences of sorter pieces which he calls piano concerts), that he says “never materialized.” Nails is forceful and hard as. All This and Less came together as a reaction to a review of a concert of music by friends and associates of Smith’s by Nicholas Kenyon in the Financial Times in 1979: “Satie without the wit; Ravel without the grace; Cage without the silence; Rakhmaninov without the tunes: the recent music of Gavin Bryars and John White is all this, and less.”

The second evening’s concert began with Smith playing fourteen pieces from his First Piano Concert. The Concert was a reaction to the more than one hundred tangos that were written by many composers, including Smith, for the Tango Project of Yvar Mikhashoff. Hearing one of Mikhashoff’s “Tango Marathons” at the Almeida Festival in 1985, Smith thought that “it was apparent that many of the featured composers had not seriously engaged with any form of tango.” In reaction he wrote a set of 24 pieces for piano, each 3 to 4 minutes long, each one “relating to specific musical genres or piano playing styles, western or non-western, well-known or obscure, real or imagined.” The fourteen played on this concert included as well as a tango and a bossa nova, a Charleston, a Calypso, and Hokey Cokey, and some vaguer forms: Afterhours, Nocturne, and Avash Avash (which is an arrangement of a section of Albanian Summer.) Smith’s playing in both evenings was powerful and satisfying.

Both of the concerts were, to put it one way, well attended, or, to put it another way, mobbed; and both were full of the joviality that one would expect from a birthday party. So not only did they offer the opportunity to experience a sizable and satisfying sampling of a serious and impressive composer’s work, they also were a festive celebration of that composer’s accomplishments.

The Prom on August 10 was presented by The National Youth Orchestra, conducted by Alexandre Bloch and Tess Jackson. The 160 members of the orchestra, who completely filled the stage, were joined by the almost as large cohort of NYO Inspire, who were in various places in the hall, including the gallery, some boxes, the choir seating areas behind the stage, and, eventually, in the aisles of the stalls. The program began with the Overture to The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner, and concluded with the Symphony No. 1 of Gustav Mahler. In between those were two works, Orpheus Undone by Missy Mazzoli and Three, Four, AND… by Dani Howard , which was a BBC co-commission, receiving its first performance.

The Mazzoli, written in 2020, is, of course, concerned with the Orpheus story, which, as Mazzoli said in an interview for the Chicago Symphony, where she was composer-in-residence, “has been told a million times.” The present work was based on material from her earlier (2019) ballet about the Orpheus story, Orpheus Alive. Mazzoli said that Oprheus Undone “focuses on a very specific, small moment of the story, right when Eurydice has died and gone to the underworld, and has left Orpheus.” Steve Smith, in his program note for the Proms concert, speculates that there, in fact, might be more it: he thinks that the piece is concerned with “how, in times of trauma, time comes unstuck; sped up to a frenetic pace and slowed to near stasis seemingly at once.” The beginning of the first part of the piece, entitled ‘Behold the Machine, O Death,’ is marked by a regularly repeating wood block beats against which are strands of other music suggesting varying other tempos. The beats of the wood block disappear and periodically recur, but the pulse it marked seems constant in various ways, playing out against the opposing pulses, suggesting the variability of the perception of time. The second section, entitled ‘We of Violence, We Endure,’ suggest the pondering of an event in its aftermath, and is marked by piano figuration, wandering and eventually melting into the greater orchestral texture, which then fades away. All of this is very effective and moving and was performed with enormous understanding and commitment by the orchestra, conducted by Bloch.

Three, Four, AND… by Dani Howard, who was during the time of its composition the NYO’s resident artist, was written with a fair amount of input and interaction with the orchestra’s members, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of NYO Inspire. Howard wrote a tune called As One, which members were encourage to make their version of and record and upload. During the orchestra’s spring residency members made suggestions as to things they would like to see included in this piece, which was composed specifically for the Proms concert. The original tune and those requests were incorporated into the final work. Three, Four, AND… is an ebulliently optimistic work, offering a kaleidoscopic array of different very effective orchestral textures, some including unusual sound effects, expertly shaped to reveal the next cohort of musicians, leading to the concluding climax. The orchestra was conducted in this work by Jackson.

The concert concluded with a masterful performance of the Mahler First Symphony and a really staggeringly wonderful encore (which can be found at about 2:11:36 in the recording of the concert). It would be hard to oversell the many awesome qualities of the concert, which was brimming with playing that was as accurate and precise as one could ever hope for and at the same time so full of commitment and enthusiasm. The recording of this concert can be found for a limited time at ttps://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021r1f.