Charles Noble, the assistant principal violist with the Oregon Symphony posted a nice, critical review of their season which ended last week. His observations sparked a thorough debate on the season and the programmatic choices. Music Director Carlos Kalmar even responds, and Noble is kind enough to post Kalmar’s thoughts in their entirety.
What I like most about the back and forth is that music, like all art, is entirely subjective. Noble wonder’s whether it was smart to drop Messiaen’s L’Ascension after Orff’s Carmina Burana. Kalmar explains way. Having heard L’Ascension last season with the SSO, I support Noble’s position. Messiaen’s music shouldn’t be taken lightly. Understanding it, let alone just appreciating it as good music, requires a lot of work.
Just this morning, after penning my thoughts of the SSO’s recent concert, I had a conversation with another person who was in attendance Thursday night. Our conversation wasn’t unlike Kalmar and Noble’s friendly exchange. We both had preconceptions about the Genesis Suite,. When the concert finished, he thought the piece worked better as a recording, i thought a live performance, with the elements Schwarz added, did the work more justice than a one dimensional recording.
One of the reasons I like reading Classics Today, Grammophone, and BBC Music Magazine is because the reviews are so different. Rarely is an album universally received across all three publications. One critic thinks John Barbiroli’s Mahler Symphony No.5 is sluggish another thinks its dramatic. Davis’s LSO Live recording of Bruckner’s Symphony No.9 is both the best and worst recoding of the work.
Music and really all art is like that. Every listener who takes the time to immerse him/herself in the music will be affected differently.
