Sibelius and more

The featured work at last night's Seattle Symphony was the Sibelius Symphony No. 1.  A well-known concert standard, but I don't think I'd ever heard it before, at least in a live performance rather than as simply background music on the radio.  

The work was composed in 1899, and -- to my ears, at least -- felt like a bridge between the late Nineteenth Century romantic work of composers like Brahms, Mahler, and Bruckner, and the far less obviously structured pieces of the Twentieth.  The symphony begins, strikingly, with a haunting clarinet solo, and large stretches of the piece are highly melodic.  Other parts, while not atonal, impressed me as loud and dramatic, with rapidly changing dynamics.  Pointing toward later works like those of Stravinsky.

The concert began with a contemporary work -- the composer was present, and took a bow at the conclusion -- entitled, in all caps, "TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY."  The composition was inspired by the composer's emotions during the pandemic lockdown.  It was more melodic and less anarchic than you might expect.  But its fifteen minutes felt -- again, to me -- much longer.  As with the pandemic, one longed for the end.

Yeah, that's me.  I know what I like, and I like what I know.

The wildest applause came for perhaps the most familiar piece, Rachmaninov's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini," and for the pianist Garrick Ohlsson.  Rachmaninov always demands a lot from the pianist, and Ohlsson delivered.  After concluding the pyrotechnics of the Rachmaninov, he wooed his audience with a gentle encore, Chopin's "Nocturne in E flat."  

Intermission and the Sibelius symphony followed the Rachmaninov, but as I left Benaroya Hall and walked to the light rail station, it was the basic Paganini theme that kept running through my head, and that I had trouble not humming out loud.

Large enthusiastic audience.  Once again, I was surprised at the number of young people in attendance -- singles, couples, and larger groups of high school and college aged attendees.  Also, a surprising number of younger children -- middle school and younger, accompanied by their parents.  An encouraging sign in the Seattle world of 2022.