Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Last night GH and I attended the opening night of a new season of music by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The highlight of the evening for me was Haydn's Symphony No. 73 in D Major (The Hunt), played with thrilling color and dancing rhythm. The disappointment was Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major, with Gil Shaham. The first two movements were too slow, and lost the drama of the work. Shaham was clear and delicate in the quieter passages but did not bring out the architecture of the concerto. The evening began with Mendelssohn's Fair Melusina Overture . The program note explains: In medieval folklore, Melusina was a beautiful girl cursed to take the form of a mermaid one day each week. She married the knight Reymund, and forbade him from ever seeing her on Saturdays. He betrayed her one fateful day, spying on her in the bath, and she disappeared forever from sight of humans, although the sound of her wailing remained. The music went from a rolling "water" the...

Heard Mendelssohn's Elijah last night with KM, and did not like it very much. The music was not particularly exciting nor memorable, with the exception of the Chorus at the end of Part I: "Thanks be to God, He laveth the thirsty land." After channeling Bach in his St. Paul , Mendelssohn turned to Handel when writing Elijah . The oratorio is, however, no Messiah . Perhaps the fault lay with the New York Philharmonic. I don't know. Of the five adult soloists, Gerald Finlay as Elijah stood out with his rich bass-baritone. We left at the intermission. Tomorrow night, ghazals at Carnegie Hall. I am really looking forward to that.

To put it in monetary terms, the first movement of Mendelssohn's Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64, as played by Anne-Sophie Mutter with the NYP last night, was worth the price of the ticket. And more. It was piercing and sensitive. It was vigorous and delicate. Its softest note does not lose its expressiveness; its loudest chord does not lose its complexity. The other two movements were very fine, but the first was divine.  I like too Overture to Ruy Blas , Op. 95, that opened the concert. Mendelssohn declared the Victor Hugo's play "beneath contempt," but did not want to disappoint the Leipzig Theatrical Pension Fund, the worthy organization that asked him for an overture to their performance of Hugo. James M. Keller's program note describes the piece:  In the span of seven minutes, this angry, fiery work perfectly evokes the play's brooding atmosphere, with a stentorian motif of sustained chords for woodwinds and brass regularly punctuati...

Today is the bicentennial of Mendelssohn's birth. Last night I attended the talk "Felix Mendelssohn and the Leipzig Tradition," a part of New York Philharmonic's Insights Series curated by James M. Keller.  Leipzig at the time of Mendelssohn's arrival from Berlin was a busy commercial center of population 45 000. It boasted a long musical tradition centered around St. Thomas Church, and the Gewandhausorchester. As Kapelmeister of the Gewandhause, Mendelssohn started a series of concerts that focused on important composers of the past. The practice was innovative since concerts then usually presented new works. Keller pointed to the music conservatism in the canonization of certain composers. For Mendelssohn, the three gods were Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.  Mendelssohn would found the Conservatory, as a kind of third pillar of the scene, or as Masur describes it, as part of the music oikos . The motto of the Conservatory could be translated as "Joy is a very s...