So, last March, I blogged about the Carnegie Preview at the SLSO, and this year, I am chuffed to get to do it again. In the effort to spread the love and get back into regular posting on this blog, I chose to write about it here at Gateway Groupies instead of my poetry blog.
So we parked on Olive and were granted a spectacular display of midtown hoosier as a middle-aged Boomhauer look-alike was harangued and threatened with the four-pronged cane of an elderly Vietnam War veteran, much to the frustration of the city police officer who was trying to break them apart without laughing. And if you ever feel the need to rob a vacant apartment building, midtown is your neighborhood. Alarms, strobe lights and whatnot lit up the building next to Powell Hall when we arrived, and they were still going strong when we left. Don't get me wrong, I love me some midtown, but damn. Why does the cultural center of the city have to feature the county-dwellers' every urban nightmare?
But on with the show.
Recent business traveling (one of many reasons for my frequent blog silence) has widened my cultural experience somewhat. One of my trips included a surprise opportunity to see Lyric Opera of Chicago's performance of Tosca. Our host was adamant that we would be wowed by the building. It was cool, but it was no Powell Symphony Hall.
The opera itself was magnificent, but I was unaffected by the architecture. Nothing compares to a palace of stunning opulence that still makes you feel you're at home. For better or worse, Powell Hall lacks the desire, and maybe even the ability, to intimidate its patrons.
Having no Icelandic sopranos or psychedelic mushroom trips to boast, I was apprehensive about how this year's Carnegie preview would compare to last year's. The program notes claimed the first piece, Igor Stravinsky's Le Chant du rossignol fit the Chinese festival theme, but it was too subtle for me. I think I'm destined to ignore (to my own detriment) the first piece in any symphony performance because it takes me too long to adjust the volume of my inner monologue so I can hear the damned music.
Besides the persistent whining of my brain, I was also distracted by my extreme eagerness to get on to the second piece, the Water Concerto. The Academy Award winning composer, Tan Dun, scored not only Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but also one of my favorite movies of all time, Hero. The stage hands began hauling out the goods as soon as the applause for the Stravinsky ended. Dale Fisher and Eddie Silva mentioned that some violins had gotten spattered with water earlier in the day, so tall Plexiglas screens were brought in to surround the stations of percussionist Colin Currie and those of his two accompanists. The front row had ponchos drawn up around them and Wet Floor signs banked both sides of the floor in front of the stage. But all Gallagher jokes were abandoned once the show started.
As far as my best Google fu can tell, the instruments Colin Currie and his associates struck, bowed and wobbled above and in their giant bowls of water were called waterphones. Outside the water, they echoed with a high-pitched, tinny sound, but when half submerged in the bowl, they made decent replicas of whale songs, rendered hilarious to me, since I'd just been party to a conversation about an amateur-ichthyologist friend's irrational hatred of Orcas.
The music was amazing, but it was pretty much downhill from there in terms of my ability to intellectualize what was happening. The rhythmic water clapping, the upside-down floating salad bowls, and the colander rain shower denouement were all delightful and they turned me into a slack-jawed six year old watching the best episode of Spongebob Squarepants EVER. I'm not a huge proponent of the standing ovation, but this time I was more than happy to join in St. Louis' tradition of exuberant enthusiasm for anyone who doesn't throw things at them.
How Colin Currie had the energy (and lack of prune hands) to turn from the water bowls to a mammoth marimba for the next piece is beyond my comprehension. Composer Bright Sheng's Colors of Crimson proved to be 20 minutes of frenzied complexity on the marimba, and perhaps it was the bolted Bailey's and coffee during the intermission, but it seemed like he was spotlit and the only one on stage. I was so happy for Currie at the end when the composer came out to hug him, I teared up a little. But that was probably the Bailey's, too.
The final piece of the evening, Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin Suite, op. 19, was a fun, sassy performance that would have been much more enjoyable had I not spoiled it for myself by reading about the ballet for which Bartók originally wrote the music. Since this monstrous barbarity occurred earlier in the week, I had zero patience for multiple male on female violence, fantastical or otherwise. I did cheerfully hoot for the bassoon and oboe players who got a hug from conductor David Robertson during the ovation.
Overall, the Carnegie is once again damned fortunate to get a visit from the SLSO. And on the walk back to our car, it seemed like the neon lights of Grand Avenue were brighter, the sidewalk cleaner, and the Saxophone busker a little nattier, as all of midtown recognized the genius our itty bitty city can generate.
