The Fall Music Season

When the days get dark, we head inside for entertainment, though when I look back at the events we’ve attended recently, most of them took place in the afternoon!

We attended an afternoon concert of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra recently. We were struck, a few years ago, by the magic that Eunice Kim summoned  to a performance of Mendelsohn’s Violin Concerto, and she worked her magic again on Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto No. 3. She retains the knack for bringing out the heavily romantic aspects of the music fully, yet selflessly. 

The orchestra’s woodwind “dectet” (is that a word?) had primed us by opening the “set” with a crisp, frothy appetizer by Jean Françaix, “Seven Dances after the Ballet Les malheurs de Sophie,” in the vein of Poulenc or Stravinsky in his pesky neo-classical phase.  

We left at intermission, fearing that even the most charming of Beethoven’s symphonies—his first—would have sounded lead-footed in comparison to Saint-Saëns’s richer offering. But we picked up a bit of a heavier Central European vibe while having lunch at Moscow on the Hill.

A few days later, we spent the better part of an afternoon in the Ordway’s bigger theater listening to the Minnesota Opera perform Mozart’s delightful Cosi Fan Tutti. I first heard this opera performed by the same company back in 1976 when it was in its infancy. It was a snowy night; my mom had driven into town to see the opera with us, and she spent the night on the couch in our tiny apartment.

I liked the opera then, and I liked it even more a half-century later, the second time around.

Cosi Fan Tutti once had a spotty or questionable reputation, on the order of: “not quite up to Mozart’s best, somewhat trashy, but after all, it is Mozart.” Some found the plot to be “immoral,” though it strikes me that Don Giovanni is hardly a model citizen. In any case, I loved the entire performance, and I was pleased to read later than some experts share that view.  “The most perfect ensemble opera ever written,” Matthew Boyden writes glowingly in The Rough Guide to Opera. And scholar Arthur Hutchen’s confesses, in his biography of Mozart, “For reasons I cannot explain and do not think worth discovering, despite the glories of other Mozart operas, I personally derive the greatest pleasure from Cosi fan Tutti…”

The big issue, when attending a classic opera these days, is whether the “updated” production will add something to the experience, or simply muck up the thing. In this case, the opera took place in a modern office setting, seemingly furnished by IKEA. In the first scene the two male protagonists—or perhaps I should call them “bros”—are drinking beer and playing video games. You get the idea.

The producers added a final twist to the show, giving viewers the opportunity to vote for a given outcome: do the two pairs of lovers remain together, or switch partners, or break up? The tally would determine how the cast wrapped up the “drama.”

It sounds dumb, but I was interested to read in an essay by Florence Badol-Bertrand that Mozart seemed “barely interested” in how the opera turned out. “At the end of the opera,’ she writes, “contrary to the conventions of the period, we are not exactly sure about how the couples are ‘redistributed.’”

We were sitting in the last row of the balcony, under the overhang of the second balcony, and from that distance I couldn’t tell for sure what happened at the end, either. Nor was it easy to discern, during the love scenes, the extent to which the two couples were playing a “part” in the grand ruse and the degree to which they were getting carried away by genuine emotion in an amorous situation. The ambiguity, or complexity, of the narrative made it possible to sit back, relax, enjoy the hijinks, and more especially, enjoy the music.

A few days later we met some friends down at the Dakota for tenor giant Joshua Redman’s eight o’clock show. The club’s habit of cramming the tables into long tight rows doesn’t sit well with me, but we’d reserve one that’s nestled up against the wall in front of the bar. It had the added virtue of obscuring our view of the huge TV sets on the wall behind the bandstand.

It was a pleasant scene, and the performance was decently long. But the band focused its attention on high-energy tunes from Redman’s most recent album, Words Fall Short. With all due respect, the music fell a little short, too. The tunes themselves weren’t that distinctive, and their somewhat arbitrary modal progressions seemed to thwart Redman’s attempts to stretch out lyrically. Pianist Paul Cornish went wild on several numbers, bashing away in a post-Don Pullen mode, and Redman gave it his fiery best, but the most engaging solos were provided by bassist Paul Norris. Hmmm. (The last time we heard Redman live he was exploring standards with Brad Mehldau. It was a musical feast.)

The following week we paid a visit one afternoon to an obscure (to us, not to God) church in St. Paul to hear a recently resurrected Mass by baroque composer Domenico Belli. What? You’ve never heard of him? Neither had we. But Consortium Carissimi always puts on a good show, and in this case they were featuring two quartets of vocalists, one of which included local star Clara Osowski. It was a lovely forty-minute Mass, although the experience was marred somewhat for Hilary by the fact that she was following the text in the program.

The fear of death doth trouble me, sinning daily, and not repenting: for that in hell there is no redemption, have mercy upon me O God, and save me.

And so on. Relentlessly. Heavy stuff. Then again, the piece was a funeral elegy. Officium DEFUNCTORUM. We’d been warned.

When it was over, the musicians headed to the basement while Garrick Comeaux, the group’s founder and artistic director, came forward to apologize for the brevity of the performance. He’d discovered the manuscript in an archive in Brescia, not far from Milan.

“I never know how long a piece is going to be until I have it worked up,” he told us. “Do you want us to do part of it again?”

A man in the front row suggested the final aria. Comeaux sent someone down to summon the musicians from the basement, and we were treated to a reprise of the concert’s last twenty minutes, during which all eight of the vocalists have a part to play.